Ghassan Charbel

From faraway Moscow, he looks into Damascus—the city whose keys and destinies of its people he once held. It is only natural that he rubs his eyes in disbelief. The scene is difficult to comprehend, let alone endure. He knows this place line by line. It is the chair his father sat on fifty-four…

Rarely does local, regional and international attention shift to one man. This only happens at major turning points. It is no simple feat for a man in his 40s to arrive at the Umayyad Mosque square in Damascus to end over half a century of the Assad family’s rule in Syria. The Syrian Baath was…

The long night in Damascus was nothing short of seismic. Opponents could not have predicted the rapid collapse of the Syrian regime. The army was not prepared to fight the opposition advance that was gaining momentum. Iran was helpless, Russia did not want to get involved and Hezbollah is exhausted…

It is as if this difficult part of the world is destined to live with constant bloodshed. Countries break apart, wars are never really resolved, and peace is only really just a truce. We have witnessed the horrors in Gaza and later, Lebanon. The barbarity of the Israeli attacks demonstrated that…

Fate had it that I was in Damascus the day of President Rafik Hariri's assassination on February 14, 2005. That night, I felt that a violent earthquake had struck Lebanese-Syrian relations. Earthquakes need wise men, not strong men. On my way back the next day, I stopped by the town of Chtoura to…

A home is meant to protect you and your children. It is meant to protect you from rain, storms and fears. It is meant to harbor dreams and safeguard memories. Homes are meant to be there when children go to school and return. Home is your nation inside the nation. But you have grown too…

The world has been living on the time of Donald Trump ever since the results of the US presidential elections were announced. We have never seen anything like this before. The world did not hold its breath when Russia handed the keys of the Kremlin to a mysterious man with a past in the KGB called…

This is the mother of all battles. It is more important than the football World Cup final, boxing finals and Taylor Swift’s tours. A few American swing states will determine the fate of the world for the next four years. They will determine security and the economy, and the fate of maps that are in…

Amos Hochstein, the American envoy to Lebanon, is in a race against time. A handful of days separate the world from the US presidential elections. The US and the whole world are awaiting the name of the new master of the White House. The world reads about the weakening of the West and reduced…

“This is the most dangerous of regional wars. Its outcomes will shape roles, locations, maps and capitals. Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of Yahya Sinwar’s ‘flood’ to launch a complete coup against the Iranian revolt that took place decades ago. Netanyahu enjoys American support and western…