The Syrian war is ending Assad has won on September 8, 2017A message came through from Syria on my mobile phone last week. “General Khadour kept his promise,” it read. I knew what it meant. Five years ago, I met Mohamed Khadour, who was commanding a few Syrian soldiers in a small suburb of Aleppo, under fire from Islamist fighters in the east of the city. […]
When did protest against the Assad government turn to war in Syria? on September 2, 2017WHEN Nikolaos van Dam was a young diplomat in Damascus, he knew Syria better than many Syrians. A fluent speaker of Arabic, this Dutch scholar’s first book on Syria’s modern history was so well researched that even members of the Baath party would reportedly turn to its pages to understand the history of their institution […]
We need to talk about the Spanish-Catalan rows after Barcelona on August 25, 2017 Unless you were a Catalan – or a Spaniard – you might have missed the signs of grave political division behind the Barcelona massacre. International reporting almost willfully dodged the tricky bits of the story. We were invited to gape at the horror, fear and sorrow created by Islamist murderers – without contemplating for […]