Syria Archive

The harrowing image last month of a Turkish police officer standing over the Russian ambassador he just shot, while blaming Moscow for the devastation in Syria, captures a key foreign policy challenge for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump: How can he attempt to stabilize the Middle East by bringing conflicts to a close, rather than letting Russia and Iran lead the region into further cycles of repression and violence under the rubric of fighting terrorism? Trump’s current defense priority—“to crush and destroy” the so-called Islamic State—plays right into Russian and Iranian machinations, with their selective definitions of terrorism and scorched-earth tactics. […]

The battlefield defeat of the self-styled Islamic State in eastern Syria and western Iraq is far from certain but increasingly likely. Iraqi government forces, in conjunction with Shiite and Kurdish militias, are slowly liberating Mosul, the largest city the Islamic State has conquered. While the Syrian government is less concerned with the group than with other rebel forces it faces, a Kurdish-Arab militia alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces is pushing toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s most important stronghold after Mosul. In parallel, a global coalition led by the United States is undercutting the group’s economic base. The extremists still […]

If there is only one certainty about the Syrian civil war, it is that any ultimate resolution of the conflict at this point will be horribly unsatisfying, politically and morally. The current tenuous cease-fire and peace process negotiated and overseen by Russia, Turkey and Iran is just that on both counts. But despite all its many flaws, it—or any other arrangement that effectively silences the guns and opens at least the possibility of a lasting political accommodation—represents a lesser evil than continued fighting. The deal’s flaws are immediately obvious. To begin with, it is the result of a military onslaught […]

The fall of rebel-held eastern Aleppo in Syria last month was a stunning personal blow for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had openly backed Syrian rebel groups after the civil war began in 2011. Losing the rebels’ self-styled “capital of the revolution” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies is an insurmountable setback for years of Turkish regime-change efforts in Syria. But there is a silver lining for Turkey. After Aleppo, Ankara can focus all its diplomatic, military and political efforts on pursuing its more immediate national security interests in northern Syria: fighting the so-called Islamic State […]

The drama and disruptions of the year just ended fill some with dread for the new year. Will the challenges of domestic polarization and a tilt in international influence toward the nondemocratic powers of the East only worsen? Without sounding too naïve, it’s possible to imagine outcomes that are not the worst-case scenarios for three of the world’s enduring problems: the European refugee crisis, the Syrian civil war and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The past year has been full of tumult, domestically in the U.S. and several major Western powers, as well as on the international stage. The election of Donald […]