On Friday July 9 the UN Security Council unanimously agreed to a conditional one-year extension of the Turkey/Syria border crossing at Bab al Hawa. As part of the agreement, the UN Secretary General needs to report regularly on what is happening with the aid going into the Al Qaeda dominated...
Alawites to the grave; Christians to Beirut.-- War slogan of anti-Assad militants
As this article was written, Syria experienced the worst days of violence since Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly the al-Nusra Front of al-Qaeda—took power from President Bashar al-Assad.
Friday, March 7, 2025, is the date it may be said a...
It may be no surprise that the “mainstream” corporate news media have turned into advertising agencies for U.S. government policy. But it still surprises that what the CIA called a compatible left—those on the left it deemed compatible with maintaining imperialist rule—celebrates another successful U.S. “regime change,” this time,...
Public relations machine transformed hard-line jihadists—whom Hillary Clinton famously called “hard men with guns”—into valiant freedom fighters in the eyes of the U.S.-UK public
Imagine if an armed rebellion took place in the United States against the federal, state and local governments.
Given 21st century...
Issa Touma, photographer from Aleppo, has portrayed the Syrian people before, during and after the war. But it was only when he moved to Sweden that he understood why the Western world’s image of Syria was so distorted. Despite great difficulties in Syria, he feels hopeful for the future.
I...
In late June, Syrians experienced the worst attack on a Christian church since 1860
On June 29, 2025, I attended a church service at St. Moses the Black Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. St. Moses is an Antiochian church, also known as the Church of St. Peter, and harkens...
U.S. media accounts of the fall of the Assad dynasty in Syria failed to disclose that the U.S. had engaged in a thirteen-year-long operation that started with the Arab Spring and continued with the launching of Operation Timber Sycamore by the Obama administration, the largest covert operation...
Will Congress ever hold the CIA to account for this and other crimes by ordering a Church Committee-type investigation?
In August 2017, The New York Times reported on the Trump administration’s shutting down what it termed “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA”—the $1...
At the end of November, groups aligned with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the “Levant Liberation Committee” and previously known as the Al-Nusra Front, launched significant attacks on the Syrian government in the Idlib and Aleppo regions, taking part of the city of Aleppo. The Syrian Arab Army has mobilized to push back against HTS...
In the past few months, Grayzone journalist Aaron Maté has interviewed two former ambassadors to Syria: former UK Ambassador Peter Ford and former U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Ford. The two ambassadors have a common surname but very different perspectives...
