Tag Archives: Syria

Mariagiulia Giuffré, Edge Hill University At least 27 people have drowned in the English Channel attempting to cross in a small boat. There were three children, seven women, one of whom was pregnant, and 17 men. Although a joint search and rescue operation was seemingly launched in the narrow maritime area between the UK and France (which is only 20 …

Liana Semchuk, University of Oxford The migrant crisis on Belarus’s western border has escalated rapidly in recent days, forcing Poland and Lithuania to declare a state of emergency and close the borders with their neighbour. With 15,000 Polish border security personnel on one side of the barbed wire fence and an estimated 4,000 migrants desperately trying to get through into …

It is hard to imagine what a partitioned Syria would look like. Reuters/Omar Sanadiki Anthony Billingsley, UNSW Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently raised, as part of a political solution to Syria’s ongoing violence, the possibility of partition. In doing so, he joined a significant body of opinion – especially among US neoconservatives – that promote the idea. Partitioning has …

Flag of Kurdistan on military uniform. Bumble Dee/Shutterstock.com John Broich, Case Western Reserve University Since U.S. troops left their region, roughly 180,000 Kurds of northeastern Syria have been displaced, and over 200 have been killed. Those Kurds, soldiers who’d battled the Islamic State and families, had hoped to secure a future Kurdistan state in areas now targeted by Turkish warplanes …

Popartic/Shutterstock Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) From independence until the advent of the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern states have suffered due to their constituting principle, a notion that can be traced back to the motivations and arrangements of former colonial powers. Independence may have satisfied the demands of the region’s inhabitants for autonomy, Arabness and …

The Investiture of Zimri Lim Fresco from the palace of Mari gives us an image of royal ideology in the ancient Middle East. Louvre Museum, CC BY-SA Javier Alvarez-Mon, Macquarie University and Yasmina Wicks, Macquarie University Inhabitants of the ancient city-states of the Middle East enjoyed a vibrant social and economic life centred on palace and temple institutions, supported by …

Tony Walker, La Trobe University The 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington carries with it two punctuation marks. The first are the attacks themselves on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. These shocked a country that was both psychologically and physically unprepared for such a brazen assault on American soil. The second …

Jacqueline L. Hazelton, US Naval War College How do you feel about drone strikes? Chances are you have an opinion – or at least a gut reaction. Years of debate on the issue show that many Americans have reservations. People are concerned that drone strikes devalue non-American lives, dangerously expand executive power, and drive terrorism and anti-Americanism. Yet do we …

Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham All the standard public relations ploys were in evidence for the recent meeting between Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad and Russian envoy Alexander Lavrentiev in Damascus. More than 230 officials from 30 federal executive bodies, five Russian regions, and the Russian defence ministry had trekked to the Syrian capital. There were 15 agreements and memorandums on …

Kerstin Bree Carlson, Roskilde University Denmark has decided to repatriate some Islamic State (IS) supporters from camps in Syria. As a result of the decision, three Danish women and their 14 children will return to Denmark, where it is expected that the mothers will be tried for terrorism. Meanwhile, the state has removed citizenship from three women who are dual …