"It is the most monstrous thing they can do to the Syrian people”. Fadwa Mahmoud, mother, wife and comrade to forcibly disappeared leftist activists, tells us her story of pain and perseverance on the second anniversary of her family's abduction by the Syrian security forces.
Much has been made in the media of the women jihadists of IS, but this kind of violence by women is not unprecedented and is comparable to the Algerian experience of the 1990s.
Turkey is notably reluctant to join a military campaign against ISIS. In fact, Ankara's ambiguity towards the radical Islamist group has deep political as well as historical roots.
After many decades of strict control over historical narratives under the Baathist regime, the uprising broke this hegemony allowing Syrians to reexamine their inherited history.
In a country where sectarian issues were ruthlessly suppressed for many decades, and where “instigating sectarian tensions” was a blanket accusation against all political dissidents, every intellectual suddenly has an opinion. The growing corpus of analysis and debate over the issue is startling.
An introduction to the colourful depth and diversity of the uprising's cultural production; a confirmation of multiple and overlapping local narratives that defy geopolitical interest and progaganda. Giving expression to such creativity is one of our motives for, 'Looking inside the uprising'.
Why does the media, despite the incredible amount of mediated content created by Syrians since the uprising, increasingly fail to give a voice to Syrian civil society? Meet our new partners 'SyriaUntold' - the group that brings the light back onto Syrian stories, and puts them in their natural con
The fragility of Arab national identity makes it difficult to resist the Islamic State. This makes the Kurdish experience relevant to the prospects of war against the movement.
Lebanese nationalism has historically been exclusionary - as are all nationalisms - and isolationist, in that it accentuates differences between the Lebanese and other Levantines or other Arabs while downplaying shared attributes and characteristics.
To defeat IS you have not only to beat it militarily, but to undercut the financial and ideological underpinnings upon which it rests, and replace it with something that ensures that it cannot manifest again in future times.
Barack Obama's new strategy against the Islamic State commits the United States to further long-term conflict. It involves a great forgetting of the recent war in Iraq.
