World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

Military and political analysts said winning the war in Ukraine has become an all-encompassing goal for Mr. Vladimir Putin. That outcome, they said, would justify to the Russian leader the conflict’s tremendous human and economic losses, safeguard Russia’s statehood and global stature and…

Nouri al-Maliki claims to be “shocked” by the developments in Syria. However, “shock” is not the right word. Instead, it reflects ideological self-delusion—a sentiment shared by many, including intellectuals, media figures, militias, and large segments of the public. They have crafted and believed…

The extraordinary accelerating shifts that have unfolded in the Middle East in recent months suggest that the region can expect even more in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. The scale and depth of these changes witnessed in several "Sykes-Picot" countries, so to speak, mean that their…

I arrived late at night for my first-ever dispatch from Damascus. It was pitch black and quiet as could be. Early in the morning, I stepped out of the hotel and was taken aback by the sheer number of people on the sidewalk. With this image, which remains etched in my memory, the Syrian people left…

Syria has witnessed two major events, not just one: the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the rise of the Islamist group “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham” to power. The fall of al-Assad is part of a series of collapses of the fascist regimes of the 1960s, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s…

From the very moment Syrian opposition armed forces entered the capital, Damascus, and overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Tel Aviv intensified its military operations against the Syrian state by land, air, and sea, in what looked like a full-scale war. This dramatic escalation has sparked…

Though not a satirical journal, the American magazine Foreign Policy has been publishing an essay by Muhammad-Javad Zarif every few years starting when he was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. The latest contribution came on December 2 with Zarif presented as “Vice President of Islamic…

It might be useful to rearrange the achievements and fears of the Syrian earthquake. 1. “Forever” is no more. Now, we have the freedom of free people, their choices, and their pursuits. The nightmare went on for 54 of Syria's 78 years of independence. 2. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps…

What is happening today in the Middle East and its zones of intense conflict can only be described as seismic shifts, reshaping the contours of power and rewriting the rules of engagement. Systems and organizations have either fallen or been scaled back, while other nations find themselves facing a…

Bashar al-Assad has fallen, and with him, a grand destructive project has collapsed. We must always keep this in mind when discussing Syria and its future, what it should look like, how we should deal with it, and what we should expect from it. The fall of Assad is not like the fall of Saddam…

Assad's regime has fallen. Syria’s eternal leader, who left the country brimming with prisons, death, and exile, has been toppled. The Syrians have turned the page on the worst chapter in their country’s modern history. This moment can only be one of overwhelming joy for every mother who lost her…