The clashes between tribal militants and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Deir ez-Zor in August 2023 were not unexpected to those closely monitoring the situation in the region, as it had been rapidly deteriorating. However, what Deir ez-Zor experienced, and continues to experience, cannot be simply reduced to a tribal rebellion that flared up briefly and resurfaced a year later with overt support from…

A boy my dad used to call “son” stormed our door in the middle of the night, yelling for “the Kurds’ house” to come out so he could murder us.

After Denmark’s recent steps to deport Syrian refugees, calls for similar measures are now on the rise in Germany; Syrians’ largest European haven. Is Europe steadily abandoning its human rights obligations?

The prevailing Western discourses about Syria are fundamentally flawed, and should be discarded in favor of “new, emancipatory” alternatives, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh.

Syrian writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh talks revolution, Europe’s Syrian diaspora, and being “tragically hopeful” with Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad on the occasion of ten years since the Syrian uprising.

A new book by Yasser Munif conceives of the Syrian revolution and later war as nothing less than a battle for life itself against a vast state-operated machinery of death.

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

Like many genocidal regimes before it, the Assad regime is now formally engaged in a pseudo-academic re-writing of history. A genocide researcher outlines how a credible and rigorous study of the Syrian conflict might instead be approached.

An essential new book by the only international journalist to have lived full-time in Damascus post-2011 shows the Assad regime’s criminality to be even worse than previously understood.

A close examination of eight years of US policy in Syria shows Washington’s objective has never been regime change, but rather “a modified form of regime preservation,” writes Dr. Michael Karadjis in a comprehensive review of the record.

A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

The Assad regime’s “Terrorism Financing Commission” recently accused Turkey’s president, Lebanon’s prime minister, and a host of other politicians, judges, academics, and ordinary citizens of supporting jihadism. The laughable charges better describe Assad’s own record, writes James Snell.

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?

The “Syrian Democratic Council”—ostensibly a vehicle for Kurdish-Arab coexistence in former ISIS territories—is increasingly looking to normalize ties with the Assad regime, spelling disaster for the displaced residents of Raqqa and elsewhere, with no apparent opposition from its Western sponsors.

How a late French thinker gave us a framework with which to view Syrians as complex individuals, rather than central-casting actors in our grand-narrative fantasies.

Animals have not fared well at militants’ hands in Syria over the past seven years, though civilians have been kinder. Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör traces the shifting role and symbolism of animals in Syria’s recent history.

Rania Abouzeid’s forthcoming book, No Turning Back: Life, Loss and Hope in Wartime Syria, succeeds in humanizing the individual participants in Syria’s agony—victims as well as villains.

The recent chest-thumping by a top US Army officer about slaying ISIS fighters with shovels inadvertently captures the pitfalls of Washington’s policy in the Fertile Crescent, writes James Snell.