Broken pottery vessels in ransacked museums. Blown-up ruins in sandy villages. The crumbling dome of a mosque, open to the yawning blue sky overhead. These are the images of Syria’s destroyed cultural heritage that dominate the Western imagination. But what do these scenes of destruction actually mean, and can we really dismiss them as just […]
Tag: Syrian Civil War
Syria and the War on Terror: The Mask Finally Comes Off
The world watched with bated breath on December 8th, 2024, as rebel forces rolled into Damascus to oust then president Bashar Al-Assad. This ousting put an end to the reign of not only Bashar, but the Assad family, whose stranglehold on power in Syria began over five decades ago with Bashar’s father Hafez in 1971. […]
Where Will Universal Jurisdiction Go from Here?
In mid-January, Germany drew headlines when a Koblenz court found Syrian colonel Anwar Raslan guilty of torture, murder, and sexual violence. A few months before the conviction of Raslan, a French court determined that legal action against a member of Syrian state security, Abdulhamid C., could not proceed. A common theme unites the two cases: […]
The last stronghold of resistance: Idlib in War
Buried under the very important and drastic news of the ‘stock market crash’ and concerns over Bernie Sanders’ health lies the “insignificant” story of bloodshed and misery: the War for Idlib. In March 2011, when the Arab Spring spilled over into Syria, the Syrian people and the international community thought that change was underway. However, […]
Universal Jurisdiction, Universal Justice: Prosecuting Syrian War Crimes Abroad
In August 2013, a defector from the Syrian regime with the code name “Caesar” stunned the world by smuggling photos out of Syria illustrating abuses taking place at the hands of the Assad-led government. Tens of thousands of graphic photos illustrated “evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings, and disease in Syrian government detention facilities.” The […]
What Are We To Make of Trump’s Airstrike?
“No child of God should ever suffer such horror” said a sober Donald Trump, justifying his decision to launch a targeted airstrike just hours ago. But what are we to make of this action? After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that the now Commander-in-Chief masqueraded as an isolationist – keen on criticizing both […]
Underestimation Nation
On October 15th Fox News presented a poll that found 58% of Americans felt “things in the world are ‘going to hell in a handbasket.” [1] These findings tell us two things. First, we should probably question the quality of Fox News polls when a question legitimately uses the term “Hell in a handbasket” to […]