Geography Archives: Syria

In testimony before the United Nations Security Council, former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson stated that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. The U.S., in the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

Judging by the minimal impact of the news, there will likely be few consequences for those who suppressed information and misled the world, nor for those who called for war on the basis of it, their assertions proving, once again, disastrously wrong.

Western radicals must take a consistent anti-imperialist position despite the internal contradictions or problems that exist within a state in the Global South.

Erdogan’s government is preparing to enter Syria for a major military operation against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is made up largely of Kurdish factions who set up this armed force to defend the mainly Kurdish enclave in northern Syria.

Those with responsibility for the strategic direction of universities have a clear choice in this matter. They can embrace the funding and accolades that come from saying things the Government and other funders want to hear; or they can do what most ordinary people think universities are supposed to do.

Top media outlets turn to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) for figures on deaths and detentions, never noting the group’s seamless connection to Syria’s opposition, the support it receives from states that waged war on the country, or its open lobbying for US military intervention.

War laboratories in the United States have succeeded in applying pre-designed aggression formats against countries that do not align with their imperial policies. These obviously adapt to cultural, religious, social, historical and even geographical features.

The October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovanni titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets”. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth.

In Syria, the battle for the province of Idlib has begun. Over the course of the past few years, the remnants of the hardened fighters have retreated to this region on the Syria-Turkish border, where they have been under the overall command of an al-Qaeda inspired group.

Certain chlorinated organic residues that were found do not come under the Chemical Warfare Convention, the interim report said.

Agreement between the two NATO allies highlights wrongheaded analysts in corporate and alternative media in the West who have played up ‘U.S.-Turkey conflict’ over Syria and falsely argued that Russia is backing Turkey’s anti-Kurdish violations of Syrian sovereignty.

We are motivated by the conviction that the chief responsibility of anti-war and anti-imperialist activists living in imperialist countries is to oppose the imperialist policies of their own governments. “A Call to Defend Rojava” betrays this principle.

Syria enters its eighth year of a bloody and unforgiving war. The death toll is catastrophic. After the number reached 200,000, the United Nations stopped keeping count.

In the wake of the most recent USA airstrike in Syria, Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former president of the American Society of International Law and U.S. State Department Director of Policy Planning between 2009 and 2011, took to Twitter to think through some of the legal and moral arguments justifying the use of force.

Though Western governments have influenced the outcome of OPCW investigations in the past, this time they appear to be discrediting the results of the investigation before it even begins.

During a Barcelona concert on April 13, Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.”

The evidence — or lack thereof — of chemical weapons use by Syria is eerily similar to the events that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was justified using baseless humanitarian accusations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

While gaining control of key resources for partitioning Syria and destabilizing the government in Damascus, the U.S.’ main goal in occupying the oil and water rich northeastern Syria is aimed not at Syria but at Iran.

The reason for the swift fall of Afrin was not because fighters fled, as rumored in racist anti-Kurdish circles, but because an the army of takfiris (Turkish mercenaries) advancing under the cover of Turkish bombers and some 37,000 ground troops.