They told me I had cancer in my tongue. Just like that. I don’t know how. Neither did they. I toured Aleppo’s hospitals one after another: al-Razi; Salloum; al-Jamia; al-Salam. After various high-tech tests were conducted with laryngoscopes, X-rays, and other equipment, they also found a second lump in my throat. “He who seeks the Lord will find him”: this seems to be the oncologist’s…

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

The mourning over the loss of Abd al-Basit Sarout, the larger-than-life Syrian opposition figure killed fighting Assad regime forces earlier this month, has encompassed at least three distinct forms of grief, in isolation or combined. First, there is the straightforward sorrow for the death of a 27-year-old killed fending off the advance of the regime in the countryside north of Hama, after eight years of…

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

Like many genocidal regimes before it, the Assad regime is now formally engaged in a pseudo-academic re-writing of history. A genocide researcher outlines how a credible and rigorous study of the Syrian conflict might instead be approached.

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week. 

An essential new book by the only international journalist to have lived full-time in Damascus post-2011 shows the Assad regime’s criminality to be even worse than previously understood.

It isn’t true that victory for the Assad regime is an inescapable certainty. It has never been true since the start of the revolution. The evidence for this is the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who held fast in the face of death for many months in 2011; as well as hundreds of subsequent military battles, such as the battle for Daraa City last summer,…

Iran has little incentive to help the Assad regime resolve its acute oil crisis, while any help from Moscow will come at a steep price, argues Salam Alsaadi.