The Guardian , March 2021. This is an edited extract from The Book Collectors of Darayya published by Picador. The long read: In a town under siege from Assad’s regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war
Open Letter 26th November, 2019 from
29 members of the European council on foreign relations (ECFR) Members They urge European governments to immediately begin a programme of managed repatriation of ISIS foreign fighters in Syria.
"Orient XXI is neither a daily news website nor an academic organ reserved for specialists. We want it to be ‘in-between’, aimed at a large and varied public interested in the region for many different reasons – at students as much as people with relatives or friends on the other shore, at men and women involved on a daily basis in the countless economic, cultural, and interpersonal networks linking North and South."
Newsweek, 27 Aug, 2018, The U.S. has twice attacked Syrian in response to reports of chemical weapons attacks, but Russia says the events were staged.
"The United States keeps building up the cruise missile carriers group in the Middle East as part of preparations for another provocation in Idlib Province to be presented as an alleged use of chemical weapons," Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson General Igor Konashenkov told media outlets, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.
Pointing a finger toward alleged Western backing for the jihadi coalition that dominates Idlib, Konashenkov said "these preparations are fresh confirmation of U.S. intentions to use as a pretext a likely simulation of the government forces’ chemical attack, which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants are plotting with active support from British secret services."
The Guardian recently published an article claiming that critical discussion of the White Helmets in Syria has been ‘propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government’. Many readers were dismayed at this crude defence of a - presumably - pro-imperialist perspective, and at the…
Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses. I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip preside
Reuters March 13: Russia said on Tuesday it had information that the United States planned to bomb the government quarter in Damascus on an invented pretext, and said it would respond militarily if it felt Russian lives were threatened by such an attack.
Media Availability by Secretary Mattis at the Pentagon
Press Operations
Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis
Feb. 2, 2018
Q: Is there evidence of chlorine gas weapons used -- evidence of chlorine gas weapons?
SEC. MATTIS: I think that's, yes --
Q: No, I know, I heard you.
SEC. MATTIS: I think it's been used repeatedly. And that's, as you know, a somewhat separate category, which is why I broke out the sarin as another -- yeah.
Q: So there's credible evidence out there that both sarin and chlorine --
SEC. MATTIS: No, I have not got the evidence, not specifically. I don't have the evidence.
What I'm saying is that other -- that groups on the ground, NGOs, fighters on the ground have said that sarin has been used. So we are looking for evidence. I don't have evidence, credible or uncredible.
Juri von Bonsdorff i Hbl 3.12.2017: "Det är frestande att utropa historiska skeenden precis när man tycker att man genomlever dem. I fallet Flynn kan det mycket väl hända att vi erfarit en brytningspunkt som markerar början på slutet för president Donald Trump. Men sanningen är den att vi inte vet den slutgiltiga betydelsen av åtalet mot Michael Flynn och hans erkännande av skuld. Men vi vet en del och vi kan dra vissa slutsatser."
A weekly review of world politics by one of the world’s sharpest and most outspoken political analysts. Tariq Ali is the author of numerous books, both ficti... Tariq Ali and Patrick Coburn talk about ISIS in Sept 2014; ca 30 min.
The United States attempts to secure its national security interests in Syria and Iraq by sustaining conflict rather than pursuing political solutions, says professor Sabah Alnasseri