1999   The telephone rang. Thanks to the caller ID service newly introduced to Syria’s telecommunications system, we could see it was a foreign number. When I answered, I heard my aunt’s voice, panting as though she were about to have a nervous breakdown. “I read his name in the paper! I swear to God Almighty! It was written wrong, but it was his name….

[Editor’s note: All events, dates, and places mentioned in this text are real; the names used for people, however, are pseudonyms.]   Near the border strip separating the Syrian village of al-Rafid from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, refugees displaced from the towns and villages of southern Syria’s Daraa Province set up hundreds of tents in the summer of 2018. By the thousands, they were fleeing…

The only day I’ve ever celebrated since your disappearance has been your birthday. I spend it, alone, with you. For weeks leading up to your birthday, Sammour, I have been thinking of how often a love of experience brought us together; a wish to take a risk; to adventure and seize new beginnings. Beginnings are always difficult, and experiences can be tragic. You and I…

After the Assad regime and its allies recaptured the south Syrian province of Daraa from opposition hands last summer, large numbers of rebel fighters and civilian activists chose to enter into so-called “reconciliation” agreements with their victorious foes. These agreements involved military surrender in exchange for the right to remain in their hometowns, as opposed to being relocated to the northern region of Idlib, as…

To walk the streets of south Lebanon is to smell the Palestinian orchards nearby, and to sense the weight of the long years of occupation and war, and on top of them the thousands of stories told by the lives of Syrians who have taken refuge on the same land. The population of south Lebanon predominantly hails from the Shia Muslim community, with smaller numbers…

When the self-styled “anti-imperial” left adopts the language and logic of Bush’s War on Terror, something has gone badly wrong, analytically and morally, argues Michael Degerald.

Just as Oedipus, an immigrant of Phoenician descent, had to solve the Sphinx’s riddle to save his besieged people, so Syrians today—and, in fact, all of us—face a new set of perplexing, life-or-death questions.

One March morning in 2018, Muhammad Abu Ahmad left his shelter after hearing of a “humanitarian truce” declared by Russia for a few hours. Like others, he assumed the truce would lighten the bombardment on Eastern Ghouta that day. A brown-skinned man in his thirties, Muhammad hailed from Ghouta’s Kafr Batna town. Anemia had sunk his small, tired eyes in two dark patches. He had…

When discussing the fable known as the “October War of Liberation,” the Syrian regime, in its rhetoric and propaganda, invariably leaves out a matter of utmost importance; namely that its “valiant army” (as it calls it) failed to liberate most of the Syrian territory occupied by Israel during the June 1967 War. After the October 1973 war, six villages inhabited by Syrians, located in the far…

Aside from all the lives it’s extinguished, the Assad regime has destroyed or damaged multiple UNESCO World Heritage sites across Syria. Why do archaeologists and professed heritage-lovers continue to laud it as a defender of civilization?