Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Digging deep into the structure of pre-civil war Syrian society, one can observe an unfortunate peculiarity. Within the fabric of each neighbourhood, including mine of Al-Muhajirin on Mount Qasioun, lies an intricate network of intelligence officers.
They come in the form of siblings, (…)
How regional and global powers, internal colonialism and Salafi-jihadist subterfuge converged to short-circuit the Syrian struggle against despotism
Syria is a country of only 71,498 square miles in area, with a population of less than 24 million, and yet two global superpowers (the United (…)
Rateb Shabo, a Syrian leftist political activist, was jailed for 16 years in the 1980s and 1990s—including three years in the government’s notorious Tadmur Military Prison—for his membership in the opposition Labor Communist Party . His recent book, The Story of the Labor Communist Party of (…)
South Korea held its 21st general election to elect MPs on April 15. The final result was pretty decisive: the ruling Together Democratic Party (TDP) won an absolute majority of 163 seats on the constituency ballot, plus another 17 seats on the party list ballot, for a total of 180 seats in the (…)
More than 9 years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the situation is more than catastrophic for the popular classes in the country. It is facing a deep humanitarian crisis with 11.7 million persons in need of humanitarian assistance, while more than 5.6 million Syrians are living as (…)
• While the defeat of the Syrian uprising owes much to regime violence, repression, and foreign intervention, the opposition also bears responsibility for many unforced errors.
• Syria’s mainstream opposition never put forward a compelling definition of Syrian citizenship that could allay the (…)
SyriaUntold this year published a series of testimonies reflecting on the issue of sectarianism in Syrian society and its links with popular oral culture. The contributions were written by Syrian men and women from different ethnic and religious background.
Introducing this series on the (…)
Syrian secularists, and moreover the concept of secularism, are under attack online and on the ground. Joseph Daher takes a critical look at recent efforts to discredit the contribution of Syrian secularists to the 2011 revolution and offers historic perspective on the meaning of secularism and (…)
Remembering the real causes of the eruption the popular uprising in Syria, which is increasingly turning into an international war.
Boustan Al Kaser, Aleppo 2013 Doha Hassan, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
More than seven years after the beginning of the popular uprising in Syria, which (…)
This article by Ahmed Khalil forms part of a special series focused on Oral Culture and Identity in Syria. It is the outcome of an ongoing partnership between SyriaUntold and openDemocracy’s North Africa West Asia in a bid to untangle the roots of sectarian, ethnic and other divides in Syria. (…)
Since the rise to power of Hafez al-Asad in 1970, the Syrian regime started a process of winning the favors and support of the private sector by implementing various economic liberalization measures directly. This was accompanied with increased connection and collaboration between sectors of the (…)
Katty Alhayek (KA): Recently, you published an article titled “Militias and crony capitalism to hamper Syria reconstruction,” how do you define “crony capitalism” in this context and what challenges it poses to future reconstruction efforts in Syria?
Joseph Daher (JD): Crony capitalism can be (…)
Reconstruction is a main project of the regime and crony capitalists, linked with a plan to consolidate their political and economic power, while rewarding foreign allies for their assistance with a share of the market.
For the first time since 2011, the Damascus International Trade Fair was (…)
On 10 August, 2013, Syrian security forces arrested Syrian journalist and Marxist dissident Jihad Asa’ad Muhammad near Athawra Street in central Damascus. News of his arrest was confirmed by his sister Lina, a fellow Marxist and anti-regime activist forced into hiding. Jihad had been among the (…)
Omar Aziz (fondly known by friends as Abu Kamel) was born in Damascus. He returned to Syria from exile in Saudi Arabia and the United States in the early days of the Syrian revolution. An intellectual, economist, anarchist, husband and father, at the age of 63, he committed himself to the (…)
The revelation in the leaked Panama Papers that Mossack Fonseca and Swiss bank HSBC serviced the companies of corrupt Syrian billionaire Rami Makhlouf (first cousin of dictator Bashar al-Assad) long after the US imposed sanctions on him is a reminder of why Syrians revolted against the regime in (…)
In 2011, the Syrian people joined their sisters and brothers throughout the Middle East in a popular revolution for liberation from dictatorship. They aimed to establish democracy and equality. The regime of Bashar al-Assad responded by bombing its own people and dividing them along ethnic and (…)
With the U.S. and Russia celebrating a “ceasefire” that helped the Assad dictatorship tighten its grip, Ashley Smith unravels the tangled roots of the catastrophe in Syria.
THE U.S. and Russia celebrated the success of last weekend’s “cessation of hostilities” in Syria, purportedly organized (…)
There is something deeply atavistic about the course that the Syrian conflict has taken. Its latest developments, in particular, take us back to a time prior to the formation of the contemporary Syrian entity at the end of the First World War – indeed back to the nineteenth century or earlier. (…)
Syria’s current borders were drawn up by imperial map makers a hundred years ago in the midst of World War I as part of a secret accord between France and Britain to divide the Mideast spoils of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. As the colonial state gave way to the post-independence state, power was (…)
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