Despite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad being welcomed back onto the international stage, all is not well at home. His country is broken into three parts, which, at best, are in a state of uneasy coexistence and at worst are stuck in a low-intensity active conflict. In the country’s northwestern Idlib …

The Biden administration will soon submit an interagency strategy to Congress on combating Syria’s illicit Captagon drug trade, which comes hot on the heels of the diplomatic rapprochement between Damascus and Arab states. The administration will unveil this strategy in the coming weeks, said US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State …

To most Syria observers, the accelerated Saudi-led drive to rehabilitate the Assad regime is not a surprise. After all, the Saudis and the other allied Arab regimes in the region did not have essential contradictions with the Syrian regime in 2011, when the anti-Assad uprising broke out. The involvement of …

Washington Needs an Endgame in Ukraine Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a moment of clarity for the United States and its allies. An urgent mission was before them: to assist Ukraine as it countered Russian aggression and to punish Moscow for its transgressions. While the Western response …

Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “used the Islamic concept of ‘Taqiyya’ to describe the regime’s decision to accept the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with the West. Taqiyya means the permissibility to deny or conceal one’s real beliefs to secure a worthy goal.” — iranintl.com, May 20, 2023. “Khamenei’s emphasis …

Building the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline from Russia to China is a rational decision that would have made sense even before the war, but the project will never be able to replace Russia’s decimated gas trade with Europe.Before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia sold over 150 billion cubic …

In his recently published bestseller “The End of Regime,” author and journalist Alexander Baunov analyzed the democratization of various autocratic systems. In this article for Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, he looks at German-Russian relations and asks what lessons from German history might be important in the future.It may be commonplace—on both …

At a gathering in Riyadh of the global alliance to defeat IS, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked partners to repatriate their detained citizens and announced new funding for stabilization work in Iraq and Syria. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged countries to take responsibility for their citizens …

Officials in northeast Syria tell Al-Monitor that women in Islamic State internment camps are forcing young boys to impregnate women as part of an alleged IS campaign to “go forth and multiply.” Sitting on a classroom chair, his fingers drumming nervously on a tablet, a young boy slowly raises his …

US troops conducted a total of 38 missions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria during May, according to US Central Command. 21 of those missions took place in Iraq, and 17 were conducted in Syria, all with partner forces, Task & Purpose reported. 31 suspected ISIS operatives were detained, and …