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...
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...
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...
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...
On March 4, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, made a surprise visit to U.S. troops stationed in northeast Syria to the chagrin of the Syrian government, which said the visit was “illegal" and a “flagrant violation of the country’s sovereignty.”
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
