Syrians lined up today to vote in what was billed by government and allied media outlets as the first multi-candidate election under the Assad family rule. In the run up to the June 3 polls the regime of Bashar al-Assad undertook a savvy public relations campaign to present the incumbent as the sole guarantor of […]
When President Obama took to the stage to address West Point’s Class of 2014 on Wednesday morning, the leader of the free world sought to lay out a vision for a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan American foreign policy. In doing so, he also looked to address his domestic and international critics — those who have pointed […]
Merely a day after the Syrian civil war entered its fourth year the Assad regime scored a major victory against rebels in the town of Yabroud. Located in the Qalamoun region, a mountainous area near the Lebanese border, Yabroud had served as a crucial gateway for the transit of rebel supplies and fighters into the […]
There usually is. The Egyptian military, mirroring, it says, the will of the Egyptian people, has thrown Morsi’s band of Islamists out of office and set in motion the kind of parliamentary and electoral process that millions of neighboring Syrians want to see materialize in their own country. Instead, the Syrian people remain trapped […]
Next month, March 2013, will mark the second anniversary of the Syrian uprising. This bloody conflict, as I have repeatedly written, has been characterized by the bombing of bread lines, town-wide massacres and burgeoning sectarian attacks. The enormity of the death toll, 70,000 and counting, should elicit shock to even the casual follower of international […]
For the first part of this yearly roundup, check here The Anatomy of the Syrian Conflict (Part 1) For my in-depth map of developments during the month of November, a crucial point at which the Free Syrian Army switched to attacking regime soft points in Aleppo and Deir ez Zour governorates in order to […]
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 […]
That perfect moment of the triumph of the people happened again in Syria. The rebels captured another border crossing between Syria and Turkey, lowering the Syrian flag and raising their own banner. It is a symbolic moment of victory – and in a bloody civil war abundant with various factions and no real positive […]
September 6, 2012 by H.A. Unver http://fikraforum.org/?p=2644 On August 20, a car bomb went off in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, killing nine civilians, including four children. The Turkish government blamed the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group on the U.S. Department of State’s foreign terrorist organizations list, for […]
It essentially was an accident. Saddam Hussein had been whipped in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraq’s Kurds and Shia to rise up. They did — but Bush was all talk; there was no U.S. military help and they were slaughtered. So as Kurdish refugees clung to the freezing […]
There were many dangers faced by reporters during the four-year Bosnia war. Gunfire. Freezing. Food poisoning. Checkpoints manned by drugged out crazies. Yet one fear stood out, and it was usually away from the fighting. That was going to Zenica, a city in the central part of the area controlled by the Bosnian government. The […]