This week: Dennis Rodman hangs out in North Korea, Hugo Chavez dies, America plays out its fiscal drama, and Bashar al-Assad follows in his father’s footsteps.
The year 2012 was for Beijing a year to display its dragon-like qualities of authority, dignity, and honor. The dragon is also the symbol of the emperor, so it may have been auspicious for a new leader to be chosen during November’s meeting of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. While […]
How does one describe the immense changes in the Syrian conflict this year? Well, a group of rag tag defectors and civilians, beaten so badly in 2011, have transformed into a viable insurgency which has effectively freed anywhere from 40 to 75 percent of the country. Secular and Salafist-leaning rebel groups do the bulk of […]
It was only two months since the fighting ignited in Bosnia. Scary, but not yet out of control. But food was already getting tight so the spring air – and rumors of bread available – brought the citizens of Sarajevo out to the market for a hastily formed bread line. That was May 27, […]
Shifting red lines in Syria undermines the tough rhetoric toward Tehran Many observers have connected the civil war raging in Syria to the broader U.S. standoff with Iran. Critics of the Obama administration’s extremely cautious approach on Syria argue that pushing more forcefully for the demise of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Tehran’s main ally in the […]
Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East and the region’s capital for assassinations and attempted political slayings. The latest of which in this bloody saga targeted Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces. Hassan, who was tapped to become the Head of the ISF at the […]
A large part of advocating for human rights comes involves bearing witness. While we will never be able to prevent all the atrocities in the world, the hope is that by bringing these realities to light we can gather the political will to make them stop. In this regard, the media plays a huge role […]
Syria appears to be reaching a boiling point. A series of significant events and trends have emerged in the past month. Heavy fighting has erupted in Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, the largest city — both places of privilege and, until now, stability in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. High-level officials have begun to defect. These have […]
As Russia vetoed a Western-backed UN resolution imposing non-military sanctions on Syria as “unilateral” and directed only against the regime, it once again demonstrated that its position on the Syrian crisis remains unchanged, emphasizing its split with the West. The repetitive pattern of the Kremlin’s refusal to pressure regime change is often explained by […]
Googoosha: When Totalitarianism isn’t Enough I first discovered Googoosha through The Daily Beast. At first, it was impossible not to laugh; after all, one of the world’s worst dictators having daughter aspiring to be a pop diva is a bit hard to believe. Perhaps as a music lover and, I guess, a former radio DJ, I […]
By Majid Rafizadeh The world may have been able to pretend that it was not aware of the genocides taking place in Germany or in Rwanda in the 1990s. However, considering all the communication technology that exists today–international news outlets, social media, YouTube, etc.–in the future we won’t be able to claim that we didn’t […]
The following piece was originally published in YOUR MIDDLE EAST. Reprinted with Permission by Eliot Benman I was standing in the kitchen of an old Damascene house in the Christian quarter of Bab Touma when a figure burst through the door, brandishing a gun and crying “Kill the Islamists, kill the Islamists!” He pointed the gun […]
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