Syria Archive

Attacks earlier this month in Jakarta by Indonesia’s Islamic State affiliate and a claim of allegiance to the jihadi group from a militant collective in the Philippines seem to show the Islamic State’s ascendency in yet another region outside its core operating base in Syria and Iraq. Confounding efforts to contain its global expansion, the Islamic State appears to have an increasing number of territories, or wilayat, and organizations nominally under its authority, amid an uptick in attacks against Western interests carried out at its behest. On this basis, it’s tempting to conclude that the Islamic State’s reach and successful […]

“You’ve got to fake it till you make it!” Long the refrain of aspiring actors and entrepreneurs who have to pretend to be famous or rich well before they are either, this might also be a good motto for international peacemakers grappling with the Syrian war. This week, diplomats and United Nations officials are supposed to gather in Geneva for talks between the Syrian government and a cluster of opposition groups. It is still not absolutely clear when the conclave will begin. It was meant to start today. Now it looks like it might be Wednesday or later. The meeting […]

Earlier this month, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released its first-ever Arab Policy Paper, which coincided with President Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran last week. Xi’s trip was the first visit to the region by a Chinese head of state since former President Hu Jintao went to Saudi Arabia in 2009. Five years before that visit, Hu established the China-Arab Cooperation Forum (CACF), a multilateral platform to institutionalize the relationship between Beijing and the 22 members of the Arab League. Since its formation, the CACF has largely fulfilled its mission, with the forum meeting 12 times […]

Syria diplomacy is back. International alarm over the self-proclaimed Islamic State has given new urgency to a political settlement that would bring some stability to Syria after nearly five years of civil war, as well as align the country’s warring parties and interested world powers against the jihadi group. The International Syria Support Group, which includes the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, has invested in a diplomatic process that made seeming progress in Vienna in November. In a joint statement subsequently endorsed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, the group called for U.N.-supervised negotiations later […]

What was your favorite diplomatic breakthrough of 2015? There were quite a few to choose from. For arms control experts, there was the nuclear deal with Iran. For trade specialists, there was the Trans-Pacific Partnership. For environmentalists, there was the COP21 Paris climate change agreement. Add in a few other noteworthy bargains, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and 2015 was a bonanza year for international cooperation, at least in terms of pumping out diplomatic verbiage. But the biggest diplomatic achievement of the past 12 months may have been the simple fact that Russia and the West avoided a return […]