Posts Tagged: Syria

BCLS: Outlook Middle East …

September 23, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in World.

After two costly wars, and billions of dollars spent, peace in the region is as elusive as ever.

BCLS experts untangle the Arab Spring

September 26, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in Politics, World.

Supporters of Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi celebrate at the end of the second day of voting in Egypt's constitutional referendum in the Shubra district on January 15, 2024 in Cairo, Egypt.

The panelists discussed more than the ramifications of the Arab Spring, reaching back to the myriad of factors that prompted social unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in 2011.

VIDEO: Prof. Ben-Meir on Iraq, ISIS, and Obama

September 25, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in Politics, World.

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Syrian Kurds raise their hands up during the funeral on August 27, 2024 of three Kurdish militia fighters from the Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People (YPG) who were reportedly killed in an attack on their checkpoint by militants from the radical Islamist group Jabhat Al-Nusra in the Kurdish town of Derik, known in Arabic as al-Malikiyah, in Syria's northeastern Hasakeh governorate, on the border with Turkey and Iraq.

Professor Alon Ben-Meir, a senior fellow at the NYU Center for Global Affairs, shared his thoughts on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the fate of political Islam and how to curb the spread of ISIS in Iraq during the 2014 BCLS.

VIDEO: Challenges in the Middle East

September 25, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in Politics, World.

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A soldier with the Kurdish peshmerga pauses at an outpost on the edges of the contested city of Kirkuk on July 3, 2024 in Kirkuk, Iraq. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Blouin News sat down with Ambassador L. Paul Bremer to talk Iraq, Syria and more.

Outlook Middle East: Kurdistan more united than ever?

September 23, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in World.

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A soldier with the Kurdish peshmerga holds a Kurdish flag at an outpost on the edges of the contested city of Kirkuk on July 3, 2024 in Kirkuk, Iraq.

It was in Iraq, however, that Kurdish groups took front and center this summer, as the war in Syria bled across its borders.

VIDEO: United Kurdistan may be looking likelier

September 24, 2024 by Lara Vergnaud in World.

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A Kurdish woman flashes a victory sign on September 22, 2013, during a demonstration at Sisli district in Istanbul.

On the sidelines, in Syria’s so-called “Western Kurdistan,” the country’s Kurdish minority is clashing with Islamist rebels in its struggle for independence and territory.

VIDEO: Is the chemical weapons frenzy good for Assad?

September 24, 2024 by Matt Taylor in Politics.

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Syria's President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with China's state television CCTV, in Damascus, in this handout photograph distributed by Syria's national news agency SANA on September 23, 2013. REUTERS/SANA/Handout via Reuters

Far from the worst-case-scenario for a man whose days appeared to be numbered as recently as this spring.

Turkey’s soft-power catastrophe

September 24, 2024 by Lora Moftah in World.

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reviews a guard of honour during a welcoming ceremony for the Romanian Prime Minister, ahead of talks in Ankara, on September 19, 2013. Ponta is on an official visit to Turkey.

The greatest problems derive from the AKP’s floundering response to recent political upheavals across the Arab world

Putin, Obama and Snowden

September 23, 2024 by Matt Taylor in Politics.

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Demonstrators hold banners during a protest rally against internet surveillance in Berlin September 7, 2013. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

There appears to be a set of shared international norms in play, even in autocratic states like Russia, including that surveillance is something that should be done in the context of law.