By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russia is not going to yield its sphere of influence in Syria to Donald Trump or anyone else. Russia has all but won the Syrian War as we speak. There is no longer any feasible pathway for the rebels to take the capital of Damascus. The […]
Sharpening Contradictions: ISIL Strikes Egyptian Christians on Palm Sunday
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) claimed responsibility Sunday for two suicide bombings at Christian churches in Lower Egypt on Palm Sunday, which left over 40 dead and over 100 wounded. The death toll would have been higher except that an Egyptian policeman stopped the suicide bomber in Alexandria […]
Al-Sadr: Russia, America and al-Assad should all get out of Syria!
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Saturday issued a broadside demanding that Russia and the United States withdraw from Syria and that strongman Bashar al-Assad resign as president. Al-Sadr’s stand against al-Assad is unusual among Shiite movements. The Lebanese Shiite militia, Hizbullah, has entered Syria to […]
Russia: US attack on our Sovereign ally Illegal
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday slammed the Trump administration for its strike on Syria, calling it “illegal” and based on faulty intelligence. The Russians reaffirmed that they will cease sharing their Syria flight information with the Americans. The information sharing had been done to avoid […]
Trump intervenes in the Great Mideast Civil War in Syria
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Syrian Civil War has a domestic, a regional and an international dimension. Domestically, it has become a fight between some largely rural Sunni Arabs (though some are urban as in Ghouta), mostly now of a fundamentalist cast, on the one hand; and on the other […]
Washington’s Supreme Hypocrisy on Chemical Weapons and Civilian Deaths
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army in Idlib is an atrocity and the pictures of dead children tug at the heart. But the outrage of American politicians inside the beltway about it draws on the myths of American exceptionalism and Alzheimer’s of the […]
ISIL: Imbecilic Buffoon Trump leading America to Extinction
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Disturbing signs emerged Tuesday that Donald J. Trump’s odd self-presentation and erratic pronouncements could be a serious security threat to . . . all Americans. That is, if the US appears to be led by an incompetent it will encourage attacks. Al-Hayat reports that a spokesman […]
Trump, al-Sisi and Tightening up the Pressure Cooker
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – President Trump met Monday with Egyptian field marshal/ president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Trump effused, “We agree on so many things. I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job […]
Has Trump deferred to Russia in Syria?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Elizabeth Palmer reported from Ankara last Thursday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had difficult and inconclusive discussions with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan concerning Syria. After the meeting he said publicly, that the “longer-term status of President (Bashar) Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” […]
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