Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover
The Nation | 9th April 2025
The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend – a friend – threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching. The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle fatigues from his years leading Sunni Muslim fundamentalists against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With a…
Read more →
Beirut Gets a Reprieve—but for How Long?
The Nation
If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this. Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil…
Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously
The New York Review of Books
After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite…
The expendables
Times Literary Supplement
Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be “another Iranian student” approaching the…
