The Syrian catastrophe has not reached bottom but continues to spiral into an ever-greater disaster. Every week brings new horrors and deeper damage to Syria itself and its entire region. This week a United Nations report on the conflict abandoned any attempt at diplomatic phrasing and accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of “inhuman actions” and “extermination.” As former U.S. officials Nicholas Burns and James Jeffrey wrote, “The cancer of this war has metastasized into neighboring countries and the heart of Europe. It could destabilize the Middle East for a generation.” Only extremists gain from that. But tragically, [...]
Thanks in large part to Russia’s intervention, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has registered a series of important victories against its armed opposition and now seems to be encircling Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city. While the civil war is far from over, the conflict’s current trajectory suggests a regime military victory in the western half of the country. But the United States and other so-called Friends of Syria would do well to consider the implications of what it means to watch from the sidelines while the Russian air force obliterates the Syrian rebels. Set aside the moral stain of [...]
Attacks earlier this month in Jakarta by Indonesia’s Islamic State affiliate and a claim of allegiance to the jihadi group from a militant collective in the Philippines seem to show the Islamic State’s ascendency in yet another region outside its core operating base in Syria and Iraq. Confounding efforts to contain its global expansion, the Islamic State appears to have an increasing number of territories, or wilayat, and organizations nominally under its authority, amid an uptick in attacks against Western interests carried out at its behest. On this basis, it’s tempting to conclude that the Islamic State’s reach and successful [...]
