Syria’s Druze Maintain a Difficult Neutrality
Stratfor | 17th April 2018
The most rebellious community in Syria's modern history is a people called the Druze, most of whom live in a region called the Druze Mountain, Jabal al-Druze, about 70 miles south of Damascus. Members of this syncretic, semi-Shiite Muslim sect battled the country's successive overlords, notably the Ottoman Turks in World War I and the French mandate authorities in the 1920s and '30s. Syrian independence in 1946 did not dampen their enthusiasm for revolt, as they rose against nationalist regimes that they felt threatened their traditional ways of living. Yet when the biggest rebellion in the country's history broke out in March 2011, the Druze stayed out. The traditional leader of Lebanon's Druze, Walid Jumblatt, called on his Syrian brethren to "join the Syrian rebels who are marking in blood heroic battles against oppression on a daily basis." Jumblatt explained to me in 2012, "The Druze don't live in an…
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The Result of a Loyalist Victory in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta? More Violence
Stratfor
The jihadist revolution is dying in the eastern suburbs of the Syrian capital, Damascus. Syrian government forces, supported by aerial bombardment and heavy artillery barrages, have split the opposition-held territory of eastern Ghouta into two bastions and are eating away…
Think the War in Syria Is Winding Down? Think Again.
The Nation
The conflict, having long since fallen into the hands of foreigners, is flying along on its second wind. A country house in the hills west of Damascus symbolizes for me the futility of Syria’s war, seven years old this spring.…
“Rise and Kill First” Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel’s Assassination Program
The Intercept
In the mid-1960s, television comedy writer Sol Weinstein produced a series of satirical novels about agent Israel Bond of M 33 and 1/3, a barely disguised Mossad. “Loxfinger,” “Matzohball,” “On the Secret Service of His Majesty the Queen,” and “You…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.