[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 9 July, 2018] The early hours of Sunday morning witnessed intense bombardment carried out by Russian and Syrian regime fighter jets on the south Syrian town of Umm al-Mayadhin, in the countryside east of the provincial capital of Daraa, as well as on various neighborhoods within the city of Daraa itself. Shortly afterwards, regime forces…

[Editor’s note: The below article was produced as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s 2017 Fellowship for Young Writers. It was originally published in Arabic on 6 July, 2018.] In the city of Qudsaya, about ten kilometers from Damascus and 45 minutes from the center of the capital, there is a walled area of approximately 5,000 square meters. Today, around 140 children are confined within its perimeter. They…

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 29 June, 2018.] A war of this scale in Syria’s southern Hawran region—the volcanic plateau extending from the edge of Damascus through Quneitra, Suwayda, and Daraa Provinces into northwest Jordan—was not expected by many. The ongoing talk since mid-February about an imminent battle in Daraa had been vague, with international and regional guarantors long determined…

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 25 June, 2018] Russian fighter jets commenced military operations in southern Syria’s Daraa Province Saturday evening, carrying out a series of air strikes on the city of Busr al-Harir in the eastern countryside of the province, heralding a new phase of escalation initiated by the Bashar al-Assad regime in the area last Tuesday. On Monday,…

Seeing Beirut slide into war in 2006 transformed the late TV presenter, moving him to humanize peoples—in the Middle East and beyond—whose voices were rarely heard in the US mainstream.

For years, the Syrian regime’s allies in Lebanon have spread crackpot conspiracy theories about plots to prevent the country’s more than 1 million refugees returning. Now they belatedly realize Assad’s own actions may turn their scarecrow into reality.

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 28 May, 2018] Last Wednesday, the Russian defense ministry announced the finalization of the stationing of military “observation posts“ around the outside of northern Syria’s Idlib Province, in accordance with understandings reached during negotiations in the Kazakhstani capital of Astana, where it was agreed to erect seven Iranian posts and ten Russian ones within the…

[Editor’s note: The below article was produced as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s 2017 Fellowship for Young Writers. It was originally published in Arabic on 24 May, 2018.] The car we were in made its way towards Aleppo, after a twenty day wait in the city of Raqqa. As soon as we crossed the checkpoint on the bridge, we were received by a seemingly stray raincloud. It…

From colonial France’s bombing of Syria in the 1920s to Assad’s massacres today, international law has always been stacked against non-state actors, protecting even the bloodiest regimes and denying their victims justice.

[Editor’s note: This article was first published in Arabic on 21 May, 2018] There is no reason why one shouldn’t be able to imagine Syrians, or Palestinians, or Kurds, expressing solidarity with the victims of a political or natural catastrophe in Western countries. Yet the direction of solidarity seems almost always to be the contrary; it is those in affluent, powerful, Western nations who express…