On Tuesday, UNHCR convened a gathering in Geneva with the aim of pressing wealthy countries to provide $7.2 billion in financial assistance for Syrian refugees and to offer asylum or resettlement for 130,000 of the 3.2 million registered refugees now living in Jordan, Lebanon, Tu

The dismissal on technical grounds of the case against ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for failing to prevent or halt violence against protesters during the 2011 uprising was expected but condemned by Egyptians and Egyptian organisations across the political spectrum, and

The Monday resignation of US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel followed President Barack Obama’s curious clarification of his stance on Syrian President Bashar Assad. Addressing media on November 16, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, Obama dismissed t

Pundits who dismiss the contention that Palestinians have launched their third Intifada in 27 years were proven wrong on Tuesday when two men armed with meat cleavers and a pistol killed five people and wounded eight in a Jerusalem synagogue. The two attackers were shot dead at

US mid-term congressional elections have rendered President Barack Obama a “lame duck”, a weak executive without enough political clout to carry out his domestic or foreign policy agendas. He will face a legislature controlled by the opposition Republican Party when

The US is fighting a “phoney war” against Daesh in Iraq and Syria because it is using minimal force against an enemy that has taken over about 30 per cent of the territory of Syria and 40 per cent of Iraq. Daesh (known as the Islamic State) troops are entrenched in c

An Iraqi friend I met in London over dinner remarked: “My country is gone, finished… and Syria is gone as well.” The toxic combination of Bush wars, terrible policies adopted by the international community and the rise of radical fundamentalism have doomed the

Since the summer of 2011, the military policy on Syria of the US and the West has been based on the imaginary rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), and since December of that year, US and Western political strategies have relied on the divided and dysfunctional exiled opposition. 

As the Islamic State continued to advance on the ground in Iraq and to hold its own in Syria, US President Barack Obama addressed senior allied military commanders in a bid to formulate a strategy for rolling back IS fighters. Yet, talk is no substitute for serious action and bo