Captagon trade in Middle East topped $5bn in 2021

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Produced mainly in Syria and consumed almost exclusively in the Middle East, the drug poses an increasing health and security risk to the region, according to New Lines…

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10 years of the Syrian conflict: a time to act and not merely to remember

Monday, April 12, 2021

Samer Jabbour, Jennifer Leaning, Iman Nuwayhid and others The health needs in Syria after 10 years of conflict are vast, ranking third after food and protection needs.22 There…

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Turkey at the Crossroads?

Friday, February 26, 2021

Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…

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Syria alone

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Patrick Cockburn Suha Ahmad​ lives on the outskirts of the port city of Tartus in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government…

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The Syrian Mercenaries Fighting Foreign Wars for Russia and Turkey

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Elizabeth Tsurkov “They sent us directly to the front lines. The situation is terrible. Terrible. There is fighting every day. We are charged with storming. There is no…

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With love and fury: the Syrian writers proving there’s more than one war story: Book Review

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Robin Yassin-Kassab “Syrians. I hated the deceptive simplicity of that word. We were twenty-three million people. Soldiers and fighters. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The torturer and the victim. How…

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Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic, the U.S. War Machine Presses On

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Jeff Mackler That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and “coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both Democrats and…

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The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below

Friday, July 10, 2020

12 Webinars, June 20-August 5, 2020 Syria has been the focus of much regional and global attention following the massive eruption of popular revolt in mid-March 2011. The…

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How Economic Misery Helped Fuel the Syrian War: Book review

Friday, May 15, 2020

Louis Proyect Ever since the civil war began in Syria in early 2011, the left has largely ignored the social and economic circumstances that led to a conflict…

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Covid-19 and popular struggles of Syria

Saturday, May 9, 2020

I speak with Yasser Munif. He is a Sociology Assistant Professor in the institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College where he teaches courses about social movements, the…

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Turkey’s Failed Gamble in Syria

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Conn Hallinan Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s latest gamble in Syria’s civil war appears to have come up snake eyes. Instead of halting the Damascus government’s siege of…

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Backdrop & Reverberations of Soleimani’s Assassination (Part 2: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen)

Thursday, February 13, 2020

[On 3 January 2020, the United States assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Corps Guard (IRGC). The event was an escalation by the Trump Administration…

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The Embalming of Syria

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Edward Hunt The Syrian civil war, which has been raging since 2011, is one of the worst tragedies of the early twenty-first century. Approximately half a million people…

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When You Follow the Gun Trail, You Can End Up in Expected Places

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Robert Fisk I’ve always wanted to find out where the guns came from. Who were the ‘willing accomplices’ to the wars I witnessed? In 1996, I traced to…

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“Turkey Is Reviving Islamic State in Rojava”

Sunday, November 17, 2019

An interview with Rosa Burç and Kerem Schamberger The death of Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi isn’t the end of the Syrian bloodbath — even in…

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The Democrats Helped Cultivate the Barbarism of ISIS

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Jonathan Cook There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria….

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Up In Smoke: The Neocon Assault on Syria Is Finally Over

Saturday, October 26, 2019

David Stockman By a vote of 354-60 last week the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance,…

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No to the invasion and occupation of northeastern Syria by the Turkish army

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists condemn Turkeys invasion of Northeastern Syria and its deadly assault on the Kurds. Last week, after U.S. president Trump…

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Erdoğan gets green light

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Esen Uslu The months-long bargaining for a tit-for-tat deal with Turkey has eventually reached its culmination, with Donald Trump withdrawing his token forces from the Turkish-Syrian border area….

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Erdogan: Main enemy is at home … and abroad

Saturday, September 7, 2019

Esen Uslu. As the temperature rose to an unprecedented high at the beginning of August, the Turkish army was poised to invade Rojava in Syria. While this was…

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The Fighting Dramatically Escalates As Both Sides Prepare For “The Final War” Between Israel And Iran

Sunday, September 1, 2019

Michael Snyder Are we about to see World War 3 erupt in the Middle East?  Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian…

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Syria: “More Tribal, More Sectarian, More Crony Capitalist Than Ever” An Interview with Joseph Daher

Monday, August 26, 2019

Bashar al-Assad has started confiscating the homes of Syrians who fled during the Civil War. For decades, his clan has purged the state of all but the most…

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Turkey’s arms industry is on a war footing – High-risk foreign adventures

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Esen Uslu. In the aftermath of the defeat of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the Istanbul mayoral elections, the survival instincts of his…

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Syria: Donor Conditionality, Sanctions, and the Question of Justice

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Omar Dahi. The question of donor conditionality and how it could be used to influence behavior and promote respect for human rights and political inclusion has increasingly gained…

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Syria: The Evidence We Were Never Meant to See About the Douma Gas Attack

Monday, May 27, 2019

Robert Fisk. We like to take the Big Boys on trust. No longer do we believe in our meretricious little leaders with their easy lies and twitters: the…

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Don’t believe the hype, Isis has not yet been defeated

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Robert Fisk. After all the headlines about the supposed defeat of Isis, anyone who doesn’t believe a word of it may seem a bit of a spoilsport. But whenever…

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Voices above the chaos: female war poets from the Middle East

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Ed Vulliamy. The Syrian city of Aleppo crumbles into rubble, assailed by Russian bombs, government artillery and chemical weapons. In the heat of battle, Turkish troops and Kurdish…

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Book Review: Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Charles R Larson. Syria’s gut-wrenching civil war serves as the background to Khaled Khalifa’s award-winning new novel, Death Is Hard Work, though incidents in the story often appear…

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We Crossed A Bridge and it Trembled: Book Review

Friday, March 1, 2019

Wendy Pearlman: We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, Custom House, 2017. Everyone talks about Syrians, but very few are actually talk to them. Perhaps that’s…

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Three Years Later: The Evolution of Russia’s Military Intervention in Syria

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Joseph Daher. As it draws closer to the eve of September 30—when three years earlier Russian military intervention in Syria first began—it is telling that Russia’s influence in…

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