Syria

Syria’s new president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is desperate to stay on the sidelines of the Iran-Israel war. Most middle eastern states have strongly condemned Israel for its surprise attack on Iran, but the Syrian government has been conspicuously silent. Since coming to power in December 2024, Al-Sharaa’s forces have confronted Iran-backed militias in many regions of Syria, and moved to curtail Tehran’s soft power by expelling Iranian clerics and closing Shia religious centres. The rag-tag collection of Sunni-Islamists, who now form a large part of the Syrian army, have a long list of scores to settle with the Shiites and their main patron. But, simultaneously, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes

Some people went mad when Ahmed al-Sharaa (you might know him as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the now de facto leader of Syria) refrained from shaking the hand of Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, when she visited Damascus this week. Not shaking hands with a woman! Al-Sharaa is the same jihadist he always was! Another story which fixates westerners: the bars in Damascus – the centrepieces of the Assad regime’s propaganda tours, where journalists and vloggers were made pleasantly drunk within earshot of concentration camps – do they still serve their favourite poison? If they don’t, my oh my, it’s a terrible

The liberation of Syria’s notorious Sednaya jail close to Damascus a week ago has resulted in a wave of belated outrage in much western media toward the former dictator and his methods. For Syria watchers, there is something rather surreal about this late discovery of the methods of Assad’s regime. Some of the precise numbers remain disputed. There is, as yet, no independent verification of the statement by Mouaz Mustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, that the mass grave at al-Qutayfah contains the remains of at least 100,000 people. The task of piecing together the precise dimensions of the Assad regime’s crimes against the Syrian people, and crucially

In a waiting room in Beirut’s Adlieh district, with harsh fluorescent lighting glaring down on us, the handcuffed prisoners, we took turns to rotate between the floor and the splintered wood of a short bench. On the wall, someone had scrawled a life-sized drawing of an AK-47, its muzzle inscribed with the words ‘Pew! Pew!’ Royal blue fingerprints, remnants of the admission process, smudged the plasterboard. Names and dates were scratched into the walls, a record of how long people had been held – days, weeks or months. This was my introduction to Lebanon’s detention centres. In August, I was bundled into the back of a pickup while working with a charity supporting Syrian

In hindsight, did the US, UK and France fail to seize the chance to topple President Bashar al-Assad in 2013? This is the question that convinced Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to attack his colleague, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary and former Labour leader. Miliband orchestrated the vote that threw out the proposal by David Cameron’s government to join the US and France in airstrikes against Damascus in retaliation for chemical atrocities on the Syrian people. Streeting concluded that if Labour in opposition had supported the vote for airstrikes, Assad’s regime would have fallen, thus bringing relief and liberation for the Syrian population. Speaking on BBC’s Question Time on Thursday,

There were two scenes from Syria last night screened by the BBC and Channel 4 News that should give the Panglossian optimists hailing the birth of a ‘new Syria’ a pause for thought. In one, filmed at the Assad family mausoleum in Qardaha, near the port of Latakia, armed members of the Islamist HTS who now control most of the country were joyfully burning the coffins of Hafez al-Assad, the ruthless dictator who ruled Syria from 1970 until his death in 2000, and that of his elder son and heir apparent Bassil, whose death in a car crash in 1994 opened the way for the second Assad son Bashar’s rise

A momentous fortnight in the Levant. Following a negotiated ceasefire agreed in between Israel and Hezbollah bringing a fragile possibility of peace to Lebanon, opposition forces in Syria drove the dictator Bashar al Assad into exile. They ended 54 years of autocratic rule by the Assad family and 14 years of acute suffering for the Syrian people since the uprising of the so–called ‘Arab spring’. Syrian Army soldiers not only abandoned their posts but also dumped their uniforms – though apparently not their guns – and thousands fled across the border to Iraq to avoid retribution. Around the world in countries that have given refuge to Syrian refugees in recent

The late Henry Kissinger said of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s that it was a shame that both sides couldn’t lose. Much the same is true of the current situation in Syria, where the long established regime of the brutal but secular Assad dynasty looks increasingly likely to fall to a sudden Islamist rebel offensive. Syria has been convulsed by a vicious and multi-sided conflict since 2012 when riots against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad turned into a full-scale civil war. Assad, a London trained ophthalmologist, had reluctantly become the heir apparent to his iron-fisted father Hafez al-Assad (the surname means ‘the lion’) after the death of his more