Twenty years ago, he would have become a militant anarchist, and you’d have found him throwing a bomb in a…
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Tag Archives: The National
Syria’s many new friends are a self-interested bunch
Last week France hosted the third conference of the Group of Friends of the Syrian People, a collection of 107…
Continue reading →Colonial threads combine to strangle a sectarian Syria
Twenty-five years ago, I travelled by land through what geographers called Greater Syria to write a book. I began in…
Continue reading →Toulouse attacks harm Palestinians in their own name
It started in France in 1894, when a Viennese journalist covered the Paris treason trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. “In…
Continue reading →As a civil war develops in Syria, reporters should not take sides
Nigeria buried the remains this week of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, who died last November in Britain, in his village of Nweni.…
Continue reading →Aleppo betrayed by attacks that are foreign to its nature
Aleppo is a town of eminent consequence, and in all ages its fame has flown high. The kings who have…
Continue reading →Decades of foreign bumbling push Syrians towards war
Syria’s leading poet Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, better known by his nom de plume Adonis, spoke for many in his…
Continue reading →Prison for denying genocide, prison for saying it took place
The Armenian village of Kassab, amid the apple orchards of northern Syria, boasts three churches. Each serves a branch of…
Continue reading →History has not been kind to Syria’s desire for change
A dog in Lebanon, an old joke goes, was so hungry, mangy and tired of civil war that he escaped…
Continue reading →They eat pizza now in Kabul but the war is far from over
During Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, unreconstructed optimists believed that life was always returning to normal. Their proof was that restaurants…
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