By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – France24 Arabic reports that the Syrian government agreed Thursday to allow humanitarian aid into Madaya and two other besieged towns near the Lebanese border northwest of Damascus. The step was praised by the United Nations. The siege of Madaya, pop 40,000, has been going on for […]
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Syria
How Realistic is the Big 5 Peace Plan for Syria?
By Baher Kamal | (IPS) | – – MADRID (IPS) – The “big five” – i.e., the most military powerful states on earth (US, UK, France, Russia and China) have just agreed that it would be about time to end the Syrian five-year long human tragedy. Before reaching such a conclusion, they waited until 300,000 […]
Syrian Peace Groups: This is not a Civil War, it is a Set of Foreign Invasions
By Mairead Maguire | (Inter Press Service) |- – BELFAST (IPS) – In November 2015 I visited Syria together with an International Peace delegation. This was my third visit to Syria in the last three years. As on previous occasions I was moved by the spirit of resilience and courage of the people of Syria. […]
How his Syria Intervention brought Putin in from the Cold in 2015
By Carl Schreck | ( RFE/ RL | – – In December 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama fielded a question about Russia while addressing a group of American business leaders in Washington. President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine and “backward-looking” policies, Obama said, are “isolating Russia completely internationally.” If it was Russian expansionism last year […]
What It Takes To Defeat ISIL’s Ideology
By Charles Recknagel | RFE/RL Daniel Koehler is among a handful of people in the West who work with Islamist militants returning from Syria in an effort to reintegrate them into normal life. A native of Germany, he works with such former fighters and their families in countries across Europe and in North America and […]
The Regime Strikes Back: Syrian Gov’t advances, Bolstered by Russia
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russia’s aerial intervention in Syria is apparently yielding some modest battlefield advances for the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad. Russia is also resupplying the Syrian Arab Army, training it in tactics, and giving it strategic advice. The big news is that Russia airstrikes on the secret […]
Did Obama Really “Surrender the Middle East to Putin?”
By Brian Glyn Williams | (Informed Comment) | – – A perusal of the “writing on the hall” commentary of the Right Wing in the last two months–since a small Russian force of 2,000 was inserted into the remaining Syrian government-controlled portions of Syria on September 30th–leads to one inevitable conclusion. Namely, that Obama’s “inactivity, […]
Is its Syria Adventure destabilizing Turkey?
By Nadir Firat | (Informed Comment) | – – Riza Saka, a lawyer turned TV pundit, declared that “Turkey has nothing to fear” from the shooting down of the Russian SU-24 plane. In one of the most popular political debate shows on Turkish TV, he declared this suggesting that Russia has much to lose if […]
5 Questions For Syria Hawks
David M. Faris | (Informed Comment) | – – Last month’s horrific attacks in Paris and last week’s massacre in California – which was at most loosely connected to Daesh (ISIS/ISIL)– have renewed calls for more robust U.S. intervention in Syria. The momentum toward escalation is hardly limited to the political right: Opinion polling suggests […]