Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
How regional and global powers, internal colonialism and Salafi-jihadist subterfuge converged to short-circuit the Syrian struggle against despotism
Syria is a country of only 71,498 square miles in area, with a population of less than 24 million, and yet two global superpowers (the United (...)
Yesterday, 25 August, the revolution flag flew high in villages, towns and cities across Syria. In Sweida, Dera’a, Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa, Hasakeh and Deir Al Zour, thousands were on the streets reviving the chants of the revolution.
Protests erupted in the south of the country a few days ago, (...)
On February 6, 2023, Syria experienced a devastating earthquake that resulted in the loss of approximately 6,000 lives and left over 12,000 injured. This catastrophe compounded the vulnerability already faced by the Syrian population and led to significant destruction and material damage. (...)
Syria, the Arab League, and the counter-revolutionary process
After enforcing the suspension and isolation of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship for the last twelve years, the Arab League voted to welcome it back to membership on May 7, 2023. Then, on May 19, Assad was included in the League’s (...)
The 6 February 2023 earthquake in Syria killed at least 6,200 people and injured nearly 15,000, mostly in areas outside the control of the Syrian regime. It mainly affected the governorates of Idlib, Aleppo, Latakia (and to a lesser extent Hama).
At least 8.8 million people were affected by (...)
Damascus is putting politics above its people as it hinders the international aid response.
It didn’t take long for Syria’s Assad regime to seek political and economic benefit from the devastation of an earthquake. As emergency services were reaching victims of the 7.8-magnitude tremor on (...)
Up to recently, it had seemed that many people in the west think that the Russian War in Ukraine is qualitatively different from the one it has been leading for six years and a half in Syria. While one witnesses international outrage at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and European countries (...)
A leading Syrian intellectual takes on the famous linguist, arguing that Americentrism blinds the latter from the reality of the revolution
Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: (...)
After the gradual lifting on subsidies for oil derivatives, in 2020 and particularly 2021, Damascus took a next important step, on 1 February 2022. It announced the exclusion of approximately 600,000 families from its subsidy programme; something like three million people in total (based on an (...)
For decades, the Assads have tried projecting an image of themselves as “secular” bulwarks against religious extremism. All the while, they’ve been shoring up the powers of loyalist religious institutions and stoking sectarian divisions as a tool for control, argues Joseph Daher.
“I also (...)
Yasser Munif on the lessons of the Syrian revolution and beyond
Harald Etzbach spoke with Yasser Munif about the theoretical and methodological approaches of his book The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death, the limitations of geopolitical thinking, (...)
The disappearance of Razan Zaitouneh and her colleagues has been one of the greatest mysteries of the Syrian war — until today. DW’s investigative unit hunted clues across six countries to track down the perpetrators.
By the summer of 2013, documenting human rights abuses had become taboo (...)
It’s difficult to recollect the euphoria of the early days of the 2011 uprising in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Reflecting on that time, Syrians speak of the breaking of the “fear barrier”—the suffocating authoritarianism and repression that had silenced them for decades. At (...)
[The following Open Letter was a collaborative effort of a group of Syrian writers and intellectuals and others who stand in solidarity with them. It is signed by activists, writers, artists, and academics from Syria and 34 other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North (...)
Latest deadly skirmish highlights the deteriorating security situation in the Kurdish region where Peshmerga forces set up new bases to keep the PKK at bay.
Sidekan, Kurdish Region, Iraq – Mounting tensions between rival Kurdish groups boiled over when clashes broke out between the (...)
A couple of years ago, I saw a discussion on Facebook of the impact of migration on Arab families. The mainly male writers were arguing that leaving the protection of the homeland has destroyed the fabric of Syrian families and society in the diaspora. They believed it had led Syrian women (...)
Suspiciously low case numbers, lenient containment measures and lack of trust in government institutions: how the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the ineptitude of local authorities in Syria.
The virus had already spread within neighboring Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. But in Syria, the (...)
Rateb Shabo, a Syrian leftist political activist, was jailed for 16 years in the 1980s and 1990s—including three years in the government’s notorious Tadmur Military Prison—for his membership in the opposition Labor Communist Party . His recent book, The Story of the Labor Communist Party of (...)
South Korea held its 21st general election to elect MPs on April 15. The final result was pretty decisive: the ruling Together Democratic Party (TDP) won an absolute majority of 163 seats on the constituency ballot, plus another 17 seats on the party list ballot, for a total of 180 seats in (...)
More than 9 years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the situation is more than catastrophic for the popular classes in the country. It is facing a deep humanitarian crisis with 11.7 million persons in need of humanitarian assistance, while more than 5.6 million Syrians are living as (...)
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