World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Arab-international pressure on Lebanese politicians, both those in government and the opposition, allowed for the election of a president after the seat had been vacant for 26 months. Through an Arab-international consensus, the opportunity presented by the shifts that swept the region,…

I was at the Damascus residence of Iraqi politician and publisher Fakhri Karim. A visitor, who appeared weighed down with disappointment, arrived. I tried to persuade him to return to journalism after a long break. My friends warned me that he was a difficult person to deal with. But I viewed him…

Last month, Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. …

Two years into the conflict that has been raging in the country, the war in Sudan has suddenly caught the eye of Western media. In Britain, “The Times” called it the "forgotten war." Oh God! Now, it is too little too late. Indeed, According to international aid organizations, Only after 150,000…

As they prepare to leave office, some members of the Biden administration are penning op-eds and making speeches to advise the incoming Trump team on a range of issues. The gist of their message is simple: Do what we tried to do but failed! One such issue is the perennial headache that Tehran has…

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was among the first actors to engage with the shift in Syria positively. The country’s new circumstances were discussed during the GCC’s Kuwait Summit on the first of December. The Summit’s Final Statement stressed the need to respect Syria’s sovereignty,…

Circumstances of history beyond the scope of this column have suppressed Syrian patriotism and placed the term between scare marks. The Baath’s notorious lexicon rendered Syria, “the beating heart of Arabism," nothing more than a “qutr” (segment). "More” and “less” were made interchangeable, which…

Syria has been addressed hysterically, by both those supporters and the opponents, since Assad fled the country. Those in awe of what is happening have become hypersensitive to comments and criticism, while some criticism, finger-pointing, and escalation have been shockingly hysterical. That is…

Syria has liberated itself from the Assad regime. Israel’s ferocious military campaign against Hezbollah has effectively liberated Lebanon, too. Unlike Syria, however, Lebanon hasn’t yet internalized its emancipation. Regrettably, if political elites in Beirut do not seize the moment, this fleeting…

A theory that genuine revolutions are those that change society, not the regime, has been ubiquitous in discussions of Syrian affairs. Nonetheless, this claim is more of a slogan than a theory- it says everything and nothing. That revolutions are assessed by the extent to which they change social…

I am not a fan of the excessive use of the term “minorities,” let alone exploiting it to reshape nations based on external interests. However, political history, across the globe, has taught us the dangers of downplaying or ignoring the concerns of small or marginalized groups - whether based…

January has painful connotations in Tehran. Iran cannot forget what happened on the third of that month in 2020. A man far away crossed what it considered a red line. Qasem Soleimani was killed near Baghdad Airport. The commander of the Quds Force, the architect of the "proxies strategy" and the…