Syria Archive

In his defiant speech to Syria’s parliament earlier this month, President Bashar al-Assad, as he always has, cast all of Syria’s rebels as terrorists. “Just like we liberated Palmyra and many other areas before it, we are going to liberate each and every inch of Syria from their hands,” he said. The speech struck a decidedly different chord from Assad’s last national address, in July 2015, when he admitted that his army was tired, running out of soldiers, and had given up territory. A little over a month after that speech, Russia intervened in Syria, propping up Assad through airstrikes […]

When the United Nations Security Council tries to micromanage a conflict, as some of its members are poised to do with regard to Syria’s civil war, it is a pretty good bet that the situation will very soon get worse. The council offers a useful, if often malfunctioning, mechanism for creating diplomatic frameworks to handle crises. When it is united, it can bring pressure to bear on warring parties. Yet when the council gets into the operational details of conflict management, such as how to protect specific cities from attack or to deliver aid, it is liable to wade out […]

Only hours after the chief representative of the Syrian rebels at the Geneva peace talks announced his resignation Sunday, citing the “stubbornness of the regime and its continued bombardments and aggression toward the Syrian people,” a new wave of air assaults battered the rebel-held city of Idlib, killing dozens of civilians. The respected Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Russian planes might have conducted the bombings, which struck close to a hospital. Moscow rejected the accusation, but the overwhelming evidence, regardless of the specifics in Idlib, underscores the fundamental deception at the core of Russia’s involvement in Syria, and the […]