21 November 2018
A previously-unknown Syrian businessman has amassed a fortune during the war. With warm ties to the regime, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf, he may have a prominent political future too.
Reconstruction
Jimmy Carter’s proposal to rehabilitate Assad and ignore Syrians’ demands for justice isn't just morally bankrupt in the extreme, it also would fail to produce even the “ugly peace” of his imagination.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to journalist Gareth Browne about his week in Syria last month observing a “crazy club” of pro-Assad British parliamentarians and priests.
Having expelled whole communities en masse from numerous Syrian cities and towns, a new law now allows the Assad regime to confiscate their properties, rendering their displacement permanent and radically transforming the country’s demography.
Twenty-five years after returning to post-war Lebanon, our writer reflects on the disappointed hopes of a generation, and how the country “somehow feels worse now than it did then.”
Feras Fayyad talks to Al-Jumhuriya about his award-winning documentary, the destruction of Aleppo, the daily abuse he receives from Putin fans, and film as a tool for achieving justice.
A leading French Arabist and author talks Syria’s revolution(s), reconstruction, and the illusion of “stability” under dictatorships.
Displaced Damascenes fear “reconstruction” is a fig leaf for the permanent transformation of their former home neighborhoods—and their exclusion therefrom.
Al-Jumhuriya joins a rare guided tour of Beirut's restored Barakat building, an aristocratic villa-turned-sniper-nest, which has finally opened to the public—but only temporarily.
The former US ambassador to Syria talks Raqqa, Russia, reconstruction, and more in this half-hour Al-Jumhuriya podcast.
Beyond recent military cooperation between Beirut and Damascus, a deeper realignment is in motion.