Assad

LONDON — As the last rebel strongholds fell in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Tuesday amid widespread reports of atrocities by pro-government forces, Britain’s Parliament was back in a familiar place: debating, but not acting. Debating is what Parliament was doing in the summer of 2013, when then-Prime Minister David Cameron was pushing […]

The brutal Syrian civil war has produced a series of stark images that bombard the western world on a daily basis.  Pictures of injured children haunt us and galvanize many to ask what can be done to stop the madness.  Video emerges on social media of dirty urban combat amongst skeleton-like remains of destroyed buildings. My […]

With the fall of Aleppo to regime forces in Syria signaling a turning point in the war, some more hawkish members of the media are in a full blown panic.  In a last ditch attempt to demonize the Syrian government and push for regime change, the Daily Beast has published a somewhat bizarre account of […]

While attending a conference hosted in Damascus by the British Syrian Society I met an interesting Syrian member of parliament from Aleppo named Fares Shehabi.  He was quite a firebrand on stage, yelling in genuine outrage at western journalists as he pointed to pictures of Al Qaeda commanders in Aleppo running al-Nusra operations centers.  “Would […]

You thought you would never see the day, a SOFREP article about Lindsay Lohan.  Believe me, I never thought I would be writing one.  While celebrity gossip is not exactly our purview, once in a while you catch of whiff of something that just doesn’t quite smell right.  Case in point: Lindsay Lohan becoming a staunch […]

First and foremost, no one really knows how American foreign policy is going to change over the next 12 months as the Trump administration enters the White House.  Staff members are still being selected, still have to be approved by Congress, and the Trump transition team is still figuring things out, sometimes as they learn […]

Eight hospitals bombed in the past week, five of them within the last 48 hours. Food stores running out of supplies. Scores of people killed in a single day. By Wednesday night, it was clear that the escalation feared for weeks in rebel-held parts of northern Syria was underway, as Russian and Syrian government warplanes carried out […]

Green Berets Matthew Lewellen, Kevin McEnroe, and James Moriarty approached the Prince Faisal Airbase in Jordan in their vehicle along with one Jordanian military officer. They were assigned the IA mission, meaning inter-agency, as a part of the CIA’s Timber Sycamore covert operation to train and arm so-called moderate Syrian rebels. At the gate there […]

BEIRUT — With waves of air attacks and missile strikes, Russian forces launched a major new offensive Tuesday against rebel-held areas in Syria, as activists reported the first airstrikes in nearly a month on the battered and besieged eastern districts of Aleppo. A Russian carrier group off Syria — ordered to the Mediterranean Sea by Russian […]

Austin Tice, a former Marine Corps officer turned freelance journalist has now been missing in Syria since August of 2012.  Abducted from the neighborhood of Darayya in Damascus, a hotspot in the Syrian uprising, little has been heard about Tice aside from a YouTube video released in September, 2012.  The video shows a restrained Tice surrounded by […]

I set out in the morning to go about the time consuming process of obtaining the necessary permissions from the Syrian government to travel to a neighborhood in Damascus to do some reporting.  Katsia, located on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, had been under siege by Al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army until a month […]

Note: This is part of a series. You can read part one here. “Mr. President, I would like to ask you about your future vision of Syria.” President Assad looked at me, nodding his head for me to continue. “It seems that the institutions of Syria have been so damaged and the social fabric of […]