Geography Archives: Syria

  • WaPo Syria Photo

    U.S. isn’t leaving Syria—but media lost it when possibility was raised

    At a rally in Cleveland last week, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. will get out of Syria “very soon.” It is now clear that the 4,000 U.S. troops currently occupying Syria (Washington Post, 10/31/17) will in fact stay in Syria (Independent, 4/4/18), even though keeping troops in another country in defiance of that […]

  • Aijaz Ahmad

    Aijaz Ahmad on Syria, U.S. and Palestine

    A rational solution is possible for Syria, if the US wants to be rational. But with Kushner in the White House Palestine faces a grim future.

  • Syrian Civil War collage

    Fake news by design

    In the last decades, Western mainstream media have produced biased news and facilitated a selective discourse of shaming accompanied by devastating military interventions.

  • Free Syrian Army militants clean their weapons and check ammunition at their base on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria. (Khalil Hamra/AP)

    Pentagon falsifies paperwork to keep Syrian rebels armed with quasi-covert program

    On July 19, the Trump administration announced that it would end the CIA’s covert program aimed at arming and training terrorist-linked “moderate rebels” in Syria, sparking hope among some Trump supporters that he was finally enacting the anti-interventionist rhetoric of his campaign.

  • U.S. Bombing in Syria

    The left alliance with U.S. imperialism

    I don’t expect any of those who supported this barbarism on the left to change position, they are much too invested and beyond the politics—the moral implications of their collaboration is quite obvious. That is why they would never bring themselves to admit that they were wrong.

  • Saudi piloted U.S. warplanes bomb Yemen’s cities

    ‘Our city is in ruins’: Crushing wars are raging on in Syria and Iraq with no end in sight

    On 10 July 2017, Iraqi’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in the city of Mosul to declare it liberated from the Islamic State. What did al-Abadi see when he looked across the expanse of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities? He would have seen not only the violence visited by ISIS upon this historic city – including destroying a large part of its Great Mosque of al-Nuri – but also the destruction of the city by this current onslaught that has lasted nine months.

  • Seymour Hersh

    Trump ignored intel before bombing Syria

    When the US bombed a Syrian military airfield in April, the White House said US intelligence had confirmed the Assad regime used chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhun.… Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas.

  • In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, the guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea, Friday, April 7, 2017. (Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AP).

    Trump‘s red line

    President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he decided to attack Syria after he saw pictures of dying children. Seymour M. Hersh investigated the case of the alleged Sarin gas attack.

  • White Phosphorus in Syria, Iraq: Nothing will Change' Unless Wester Govts Do

    White phosphorus in Syria, Iraq

    Photographs and video clips posted online on June 8 show blinding spots of light over the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. The pictures, distributed by the Amaq News Agency, which is linked to Daesh, and activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, show puffs of white light and smoke, which are signs of white phosphorous.

  • White Helmets workers posing with the bodies of dead Syrian soldiers

    U.S.-funded White Helmets assist in public execution in rebel-held Syria for at least the second time

    In a new video Syria Civil Defense members—popularly know as the “White Helmets,” the Nobel Prize-nominated group that has received at least $23 million in funding from USAID (a wing of the State Department)—are shown assisting in a public execution in a rebel-held town in Syria. It is at least the second such execution video featuring members of the Nobel Prize-nominated group, which operates exclusively within the armed Syrian opposition and works closely with al-Qaeda’s local affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and even ISIS.

  • ISIS propaganda photo of execution

    The erasure of Syrian voices in Western media

    “There were always two parallel streams in the Syrian uprising at the beginning. The civil activists who wanted democratic reform and change in the form of a secular state, and the conservative stream, which was markedly more Islamist and sectarian in its tone and demands.… the former was mostly urban, the latter rural.… As the uprising went on and the violence intensified, the civil movement became increasingly silenced and weak, while the Islamist movement became quickly more militant and radicalized”

  • Aftermath of the US missile attack on a Syrian military airbase © Mikhail Voskresenskiy / Sputnik

    Russia-Baiting Pushed Trump to Attack Syria—and Increases the Risk of Nuclear Annihilation

    The anti-Russia bandwagon has gained so much momentum that a national frenzy is boosting the odds of unfathomable catastrophe. Vast efforts to portray Donald Trump as Vladimir Putin’s flunky have given Trump huge incentives to prove otherwise. Last Thursday, he began the process in a big way by ordering a missile attack on Russia’s close […]

  • Rania Khalek Interviewed by Chris Hedges

    The Much-Maligned Views of Rania Khalek on Syria

    The people that have written about Rania [Khalek] publicly range from truly creepy stalkers to left academics who fired off a quick set of libels and then expressed dismay at the responses to them. But other than people talking about her, it is in fact rather difficult to find any sources for these “views” of hers that apparently disqualify her to speak or publish on any topic.

  • Syria, March 31, 2013

    Controlling the Narrative on Syria

    Since 2011, the torrent of ill-informed, inaccurate and often entirely dishonest analysis of events in Syria has been unremitting. I have written previously about the dangers of using simplistic explanations to make sense of the conflict, a problem that has surfaced repeatedly over the past five years. However, there is a greater problem at large.

  • May chce twardego Brexitu. Trump nie chce silnego dolara

    The Election of Donald Trump

    1. The recent election of Donald Trump after Brexit, the rise of fascist votes in Europe, but also and much better, the electoral victory of SYRIZA and the rise of Podemos are all manifestations of the depth of the crisis of the system of globalized neoliberalism. This system, which I have always considered unsustainable, is imploding before our eyes at its very heart. All attempts to save the system — to avoid the worst — by minor adjustments are doomed to failure.

  • Spanish Recollections: the 80th Anniversary of the International Brigades

    In one hurrying day, eighty years ago, in Albacete, a center of Spain’s La Mancha region, a few officers somehow created quarters for five hundred men arriving the following day, then five hundred more, and more.  Soon three or four thousand, somehow organized in units despite a mad variety of languages, were issued a motley […]

  • Turkey: A War of Two Coups

    On the night of 15-16 July, Turkey went through a cataclysm that stunned the world: a huge section of the armed forces of the country (TSK in its Turkish acronym) attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, came very close to its objective, but was ultimately defeated.  Official […]

  • Who Is to Blame?

    Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often.  It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore?  How come he died, and what’s the reason for?”  Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to […]

  • We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of “Sumud”

    At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016.  Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors.  We […]

  • For a “Third Reconstruction”: An Interview with Bill Fletcher, Jr.

    As the 2016 electoral game here ratchets up to nasty polemics, the US media is mainly focused on the carnival atmosphere of the Republican Party candidates.  (The Democratic Party infighting is only now beginning to boil over.)  Meanwhile, the Obama administration, free from scrutiny, continues its airstrikes in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and […]