The Syrian people have found themselves saturated to the point of despair with international pronouncements and strategic stances that descend upon them from every corner. The United States warns, Turkey threatens, France alerts, China invites, and Russia hints.
It has increasingly become a question of when - not if - the violence in Syria will lead to sectarian fighting in Lebanon. This reflects a commonly held belief that conflict in Lebanon is shaped from outside its borders; a belief that risks ignoring the ways in which Lebanon can be responsible for
On 1 September, Lakhdar Brahimi took over from Kofi Annan as UN-Arab League envoy to Syria. His task is not an enviable one, even for such a capable operator. But the new envoy has a few options for ending the Syrian civil war through diplomatic action.
Could the neglected strength of the mainstream Muslim community – a vestige of the Ottoman self-governing ethno-religious millet system – hold Syria together as it did nearly 100 years ago and prevent its dismemberment into a number of mini-states?
The former Information Minister has been apprehended trying to smuggle explosives into Lebanon. Away from the media focus on street clashes, subtler political trends threaten Lebanon's years of building a fragile peace.
Many opposition communities embraced and sponsored the fighters, who represented at that time the local defenders of these communities. But then their goals seemed to change.
To Orwa Nyrabia and thousands of Syrians who are detained along with our hearts in the cells of the tyrant.
The middle-east’s power-balance is in flux amid state tensions and political conflicts. In a two-part article, Bill Park - who was recently in Ankara and Erbil - examines the impact of these changes on Turkey and its neighbours, especially the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq. In
The brutal response of Syria's authorities to an eruption of protest in early 2011 propelled the country into conflict. It was the latest and most catastrophic of a series of misjudgments by Bashar al-Assad's regime over the decade of his rule, says Carsten Wieland.
The civil war in Syria and unrest in Lebanon may have deeper roots than meets the eye. In fact, they may very well be the tragic result of centuries of colonisation and secularisation, as recently emphasised by Walid Jumblatt.
The destructive potential of Syria's conflict is creating alarm in Washington and a bare margin of hope for diplomatic progress.
