Syria

Chapter 1: Why are Russian troops in Syria? Putin has always been in Syria’s civil war. Long before Bashar al-Assad’s troops fired the first shots that set off the Syrian rebellion, Russia was stocking the armories that assured the Assad family’s minority Alawite sect’s grip on power. When Syrian blood flowed through the streets of […]

Ashes of Hama by Raphael Lefevre provides a chronological description of the progression of the Syrian Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood). The book discusses the establishment of the Brotherhood and its evolution in Syrian politics. Lefevre does a fascinating job analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood institutionally and organizationally, provoking the reader to move beyond stereotypes about the Syrian […]

BY ORGA CADET This week, more than 150 heads of state will convene at the UN’s headquarters in New York for the 70th session of the General Assembly. The theme? “The United Nations at 70: the road ahead for peace, security and human rights.” One of the session’s objectives is to “draw lessons from the […]

Introduction The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) is a product of Iraq’s and Syria’s sectarian polarization, political dysfunction, and the alienation of the local Sunni population from the Iraqi and Syrian regimes. The US-led anti-ISIS coalition was triggered by the jihadists’ capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014.[i] While dramatic, […]

As civil strife and conflict have curtailed the reach of Baghdad and Damascus, a popular notion has emerged suggesting that the artificial colonial-era boundaries of Iraq and Syria are collapsing. The popular and mistaken refrain is that the Sykes-Picot Agreement is unravelling. This has engendered a number of misguided suggestions that the borders of the […]

“Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone.” Those are the words of Hisham Melham, Washington bureau chief of Dubai-based media outlet Al-Arabiya. In a 2,000-word piece for Politico, Melham argues that Arab civilization has collapsed, and that it won’t be revived in his lifetime. Is this gloomy outlook overwrought, or simply […]

Srdja Popovic was a founder of the Serbian nonviolent resistance group Otpor! that led the successful campaign to unseat Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000. Popovic later served a term as a member of the Serbian National Assembly 2000-2003. In 2003, Popovic and other ex-Otpor! activists started the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and […]

In Ayn al-Hilwe, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, you frequently hear a new term: “Death Convoys” (Qawafel al-Mawt). It refers to the extremely dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean that Palestinian refugees are resorting to after fleeing Syria and failing to find refuge in neighboring countries. In the Lampedusa tragedy in October 2013, dozens if not […]

Before the escalation of the Syrian conflict, general immunization rates for Syrian children were more than 90% [1]. Today, less than 70% of Syrian children are immunized [2]. This deterioration has manifested itself in at least 13 cases of polio as of November 2013 [3], a striking number for a debilitating disease eradicated in Syria more than a […]

This post is the first in a series of posts summarizing events that took place at the 2013 Harvard Arab Weekend, the largest pan-Arab conference in North America. For more information about this event, please visit http://harvardarabweekend.org/ On November 9, three practitioners and academics came together at the Harvard Arab Weekend to discuss Syria’s daunting […]

BY DAN MCCONNELL As President Obama made the case for military action in Syria Sunday, he was clear that such actions would be proportional in scope, reiterating, “What we are envisioning is something limited.” Now that the President has placed the onus for a decision on the legislature, it is at least as important for […]