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...
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,...
Part of a pattern of media omissions and deception in its coverage of Syria On December 8, 2024, Syria’s long-standing ruler Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia after being deposed by Sunni militia forces in what New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman called the “biggest…most game-changing event in the Middle...
How do you sell the idea of a moderate rebellion without alienating the extremists who will do the actual fighting? When foreign powers started supporting armed groups to overthrow the Ba’athist government in Syria after 2011, they were unsure about who could, or should, take...
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...
How Her Visit to War-Torn Syria Led a Dutch Socialist Reporter to Lose Her Faith in the West The picture below is a frame from a smug Western documentary on the Syrian War. I wrote the caption in 2020, after viewing the documentary, which was a piece of propaganda filled...
Framed as sectarian war, the Syrian genocide and assaults on Gaza and Yemen are part of a long-standing UK-U.S.-Israeli-Western strategy to dominate the region via the erasure of the Axis of Resistance. Syria’s massacres can be defined by nothing less than genocide, having exceeded the slaughter of more than 10,000 dead...
Dirty war in Syria continues as media attention focuses elsewhere The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Israel secretly coordinates with the U.S, on many of the airstrikes it carries out in eastern Syria near the al-Tanf military base, a U.S. outpost near the Syria-Jordan border. Since 2017, the Israeli Air...
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...
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...