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.

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 quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.

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.

[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…

Assad was never going to save Syria’s Kurds from the Turkish army. That the Kurds sought a devil’s bargain with him anyway was a mistake in more than one way, argues James Snell.

The former US ambassador to Syria talks Raqqa, Russia, reconstruction, and more in this half-hour Al-Jumhuriya podcast.

By ceding terrain to the extremist forces of Iran and the Assad regime, ISIS seeks to turn military defeat into political gain.