Middle East

By Jennifer Bell A former child soldier for ISIS has told Al Arabiya how he was kidnapped and recruited into the terrorist organization, revealing he was forced to convert to Islam and watch videos of brutal murders to train him…

ANCESTRAL CULTURE         by Pardis Mahdavi As the days grow longer and the flowers start to bloom, my 5-year-old gets excited and exclaims, “Nowruz is coming.” Nowruz – or “new day” in English – is the Iranian…

By Vijay Prashad and E. Ahmet Tonak Significant developments are underway in Turkey. Most ominously, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has moved toward the banning of one of the country’s main…

The Pope’s decision to visit Mesopotamia must be carefully considered, given the complexity of the geopolitical issues of the Near and Middle East. The Pope went to a place that is the scene of a geopolitical clash, where there are…

On 13 March 2011 in Dara’a, in the south of Syria, 15 teenage boys were arrested by Syrian security police for having written hostile graffiti against President Bashar Al-Assad on a school wall. The arrests led to non-violent protests in…

The spotlight is elsewhere, but people are still dying in Syria and a whole generation of children does not know what it means to live in peace. On the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, we listen to…

As the crisis in Syria moves into its second decade, a survey commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross highlights the heavy price paid by young Syrians. 1,400 Syrians between the ages of 18-25 were surveyed in Syria,…

On February 26, the Biden administration released a CIA report in which the intelligence agency concluded, in 2018, that Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), approved the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that year. By Edu Montesanti Never released by former President Donald Trump, the document…

On March 3, the prosecutor Fatou Bensouda formalized the opening of the investigation of the International Criminal Court on the “situation in Palestine”. The investigation will focus on crimes under international law committed since June 13 2014 in the occupied…

Condemn the Biden administration’s bombing of Syria and tell Biden to immediately de-escalate. We need peace in the Middle East! Dear President Biden, We vigorously oppose your February 25 bombing of Syria. Syria is a sovereign nation. The militia you…