Late last month, Israeli military planes carried out a strike on the outskirts of Damascus, targeting a convoy transporting anti-aircraft weapons bound for Hezbollah. The strike was the latest indication that Lebanon’s Party of God is not only directly involved in the violence in Syria, but will leverage the chaos there to bolster its More »

Remember in May 2011 when U.S. President Barack Obama told the government of Bahrain “you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail?” The people of Bahrain do, but many doubted a real dialogue would be possible. Since President Obama’s call for talks, there has been no real political More »

The recent second anniversary of the Egyptian revolution that toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak was marred by renewed violence between protesters and security forces of the country’s new government under President Mohamed Morsi. Disillusioned with the direction taken by Egypt’s new Islamist leader, activists took to the streets again reportedly only to see a replay More »

The United Nations says an international donor conference has raised about $500 million for humanitarian relief efforts inside war-ravaged Syria. Most of those funds are likely to go to aid agencies operating out of Damascus under official Syrian government supervision. But some relief workers say unofficial methods are better for reaching many Syrians in need More »

The French military’s current campaign to dislodge jihadist militants from northern Mali and the recent high-profile attack against a natural gas facility in Algeria are both directly linked to the foreign intervention in Libya that overthrew the Gadhafi regime. There is also a strong connection between these events and foreign powers’ decision not to intervene in Mali More »

The spate of violent incidents in Cairo and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez in the last week of January has highlighted the increasingly fractured state of Egyptian society and exposed the failings of key institutions, in particular the presidency, the judiciary and the forces of law and order. The president, Mohamed Morsi, More »

One of the primary demands of the 2011 Egyptian revolution was to end the three decades of emergency rule under President Hosni Mubarak. But two years later, President Mohamed Morsi has declared a state of emergency in three canal cities: Port Said, Suez, and Ismailya. The decision came three days after violence erupted on the More »

Kenan Rahmani is a law student at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. state of Indiana. He shared with us that he has traveled to Syria to assist an activist network with  English-language media relations. He says he recently returned again to Syria with a small group of expatriates from the Syrian More »

With the second anniversary of the Egyptian January 25 uprising having sparked renewed violence and the country having been once again pushed to the brink, there is a strong sense now that the hopes of Tahrir Square have been seriously tarnished. There’s some reason for this: There have been too many broken promises. Women, who More »

Yisser Bittar, a Syrian-American, tells us that since she was a little girl she used to travel to Homs every year to visit relatives. Due to the civil war and intense fighting in the city, she was unable to visit last year, but says that she and six other Syrian-Americans managed in December to More »

On January 20, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry announced that it will evacuate approximately one hundred Russian citizens from Syria, mostly women and children. However, the ministry downplayed the importance of the evacuation, with those leaving representing a mere fraction of the many thousands of Russian citizens residing in Syria. Indeed, the hopes that More »

One hundred years after the Levant embarked on a journey to build modern political societies, our experiment has failed and we are now back to square one.  Lebanon collapsed in the 1970s, Iraq disintegrated in the 1990s and 2000s, and Syria is in the process of tearing itself apart. Unlike Egypt, Tunisia, and several More »

An intrinsic component of Syria’s ongoing civil war, the control and distribution of food is becoming a multi-faceted strategic tool used not only to punish foes but also to build patronage. Just as shipments of arms and other military equipment can sway the results of a conflict, the supply of food can be just More »

The past week marked the second anniversary of the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, an event that in many ways turned unrest in Tunisia from a purely national affair to what the media dubbed the Arab Spring. That Arab Spring was seen as a broad rising of the Arab masses against aging More »

Children building snowmen and palm trees sprinkled with snowflakes were just some of the many pictures that filtered through my Facebook news feed last week when Jerusalem experienced its heaviest snowfall in more than 20 years. As I clicked on photo after photo of the snow-covered holy city and its surrounding white-laced hilltops, I was More »

Rund, by her own account, is a citizen journalist in Izraa, Syria. In this installment of her regular posts she shares the story of a family’s daring escape from Syria into neighboring Jordan. Middle East Voices’ “Syria Witness” series features personal accounts by citizen-journalists inside Syria about the grim challenges of survival in a war More »

Amnesty International has welcomed news the United Nations is being called upon to take action on crimes committed in the Syrian conflict. The call came in a petition submitted to the U.N. Security Council by Switzerland. The document has the support of dozens of countries. VOA’s Susan Yackee spoke about Amnesty’s position with its representative More »

At the dawn of the New Year President Bashar al-Assad and his regime remain committed to pursuing a corrosively destructive sectarian survival strategy, one enjoying a critical assist from an increasingly radicalized and politically directionless armed opposition.  Left to their own devices – as both the West and Russia seemed inclined to leave them – More »

Israel did not bomb Iran last year. Why should it happen this year? Because it did not happen last year. The Iranians are proceeding apace with their nuclear program. The Americans are determined to stop them. Sanctions are biting, but the diplomatic process produced nothing visible in 2012. Knowledgeable observers believe there is no “zone More »