[Editor’s note: This article is part of Al-Jumhuriya’s “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” series. It was also published in Arabic on 22 November, 2018.] There is an astonishing picture of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, and Bülent Ersoy, a famous trans singer, having dinner together. Erdoğan’s wife Emine Erdoğan and another singer, Sibel Can, are sharing the same table. Everyone is smiling; everyone seems…

How do you kill a man in Turkey and get out of prison? Do business with both Islamic State jihadists and the Kurds? Assist Iranian projects in the heart of Damascus, and get defended by pro-Saudi media figures? Openly help the Assad regime evade international sanctions, without those sanctions touching you in turn? Be the man of both Iran and Russia, and the face of either…

[Editor’s note: This article is part of Al-Jumhuriya’s “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” series. It was originally published in Arabic on 15 November, 2018.] To my mother, in spite of everything. 1. I lived my childhood with a feeling of total solitude that I lacked the luxury of even understanding. When I then became a young man, and understood the reason for this solitude, I became…

On October 20th of this year, a young Syrian woman named Rasha Bassis was murdered by her brother over her alleged relationship with a Turkish officer in the northern border region of Jarabulus. The brother, Bashar, emptied three ammunition magazines into the body of his sister, after amusing himself by humiliating and torturing her for a while. The entire time, he was documenting his actions…

[Editor’s note: This article is part of Al-Jumhuriya’s new “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” series. It was originally published in Arabic on 8 November, 2018] Sophie Bessis is a historian who also represents a current of universalist feminists, one which may be seen as antiquated next to a modern feminist wave that exalts and celebrates the culturalist. Have we asked enough questions about the position and…

The recent videos coming out of the Rukban camp for internally displaced Syrians at the extreme northeastern tip of the Jordanian-Syrian border send shivers down the spine. Past days have seen torrential rain and hailstorms flooding the bare passages between worn-out tents and mud-brick huts; gale-strength sandstorms turning the air into a reddish-yellow soup, toying with the tattered rags of tents, tossing the rubble of…

The departing UN special envoy to Syria was not merely feckless or naïve about the Assad regime; he was an active facilitator of its survival strategy.

Ever since Turkey and Russia reached an agreement in the city of Sochi last month on averting a military offensive in Syria’s Idlib, Moscow has noticeably made less mention of the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militant group (formerly the official Syrian al-Qaeda franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra). It would seem that, for the sake of facilitating the deal’s smooth implementation—which involves the creation of a demilitarized buffer…

The disappearance and possible murder of the Saudi Arabian writer has struck such a nerve because, for a change, Westerners are able to see themselves in the victim’s shoes.

Earlier this year, between the summer and fall, I spent several months in Turkey following up on the case of the “Douma Four” activists—Samira al-Khalil (my wife), Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamade, and Nazem Hammadi—who were abducted and disappeared in Douma, east of Damascus, in December 2013. My aim was to interview as many as possible of the people forcibly displaced from Douma and Eastern Ghouta…