Bashar Al Assad

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

The world body’s leader on disarmament? Syria, of course.

The strike on Syria.

UK and France join U.S.-led effort.

In foreign affairs, there’s a lot to be said for unpredictability. Puzzlement can induce one’s enemies to hold back or make stupid decisions. Henry Kissinger famously portrayed Nixon as acting “somewhat crazy” to keep the Soviets guessing—even to the point of dramatically elevating the readiness…

The U.S. must bring hellish consequences on the dictator of Damascus.

Michael Anton, the spokesman for the National Security Council and an important intellectual force in the Trump administration, is leaving the White House. Eliana Johnson of Politico first reported Anton’s departure on Sunday, on the eve of John Bolton’s first day as national security adviser.…

In July the Obama administration and its European and Russian partners met with Iran in Vienna to sign the so-called nuclear deal. The general idea was to at least delay nuclear proliferation in an already volatile part of the world. No doubt the White House was hoping for much more—that the…

Since the terrorist attacks in Paris Friday that killed more than 120 people and injured hundreds more, world leaders from President Barack Obama to newly elected Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and from U.K. prime minister David Cameron to German chancellor Angela Merkel, have expressed…

Last week, the Obama White House moved to ensure Hezbollah’s ability to point 100,000 missiles at Israel. That’s not how they would describe it, of course. But it was the Obama administration—as U.S. officials are quietly letting on—and not Russia that invited Iran to participate in talks in Vienna…

Last week an Obama administration official bragged that the White House’s Syria policy is working out just as planned. Special envoy for Syria Michael Ratney said that the “Russians wouldn’t have to help [Bashar al-]Assad if we didn’t weaken him.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Obama administration's Syria policy, and what Russia is doing there.

In his testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former CIA director (ret.) General David Petraeus argued that the Obama administration can and should be doing more in Syria. Petraeus proposed “the establishment of enclaves in Syria protected by coalition air power where a moderate Sunni force could be…

Weekend remarks concerning Russia's current activities in Syria by Gen. Philip Breedlove, commander of U.S. European Command and NATO's supreme allied commander, are far from reassuring. Speaking to reporters after NATO's Military Committee Conference in Istanbul on Saturday, Breedlove…

Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt argued that Syria may be “the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people…

Kentucky senator Rand Paul says the "hawks" in the Republican party helped create and grow the Islamic State terrorist group. Paul, who is running for president, appeared Wednesday morning on MSNBC, where host Joe Scarborough asked him about fellow senator Lindsey Graham's own likely White House…

The first use of poison gas in war occurred on April 22, 1915 and the one hundredth anniversary of that grim event was widely noted and commented upon.  Including here.

Last week, the Israeli Air Force struck a cache of long-range missiles belonging to Hezbollah and put the Shia militia on notice. As air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel explained, "Our ability today to attack targets on a large scale and with high precision is about 15 times greater than what…

Bashar al-Assad told Charlie Rose that some Americans are sugarcoating ISIS. Moreover, the Syrian dictator claimed, ISIS has expanded since the beginning of the strikes."

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Secretary of State John Kerry's Syrian mess.

Last week, Senator Ted Cruz helped unmask an organization ostensibly founded to protect a Middle East minority. When the Texas legislator, the keynote speaker, asked the gala dinner audience comprising mostly Middle Eastern Christians at the In Defense of Christians conference in Washington to…

David Remnick, an Obama biographer and the editor of the New Yorker, said this morning on national TV that President Obama is disappointed in the world:

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited an IDF base on the Golan Heights that treats wounded Syrian civilians who safely made their way across the border. Netanyahu visited the wounded and then later, surrounded by IDF doctors, nurses and soldiers, addressed the press in this…

Tuesday, during the State of the Union Address, President Obama boasted that “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.”  The assertion was premature. In early January, Syria’s Bashar Assad regime indeed started the process of…

The memoir of former defense secretary Robert M. Gates has landed with a bang. Gates has harsh words for President Barack Obama’s wartime decision-making and quotes Hillary Clinton saying that her opposition to the surge in 2007 was political. There is more than enough to outrage partisans—and even…

It’s not been a good week for Secretary of State John Kerry. Savaged in a Jackson Diehl column for his vision of a “Middle East dream world,” Kerry went from one miscue to another.

Did President Obama just save Bashar al-Assad? Gary Schmitt writes:

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:

The New York Times reported on September 5 that the United States is widening plans for proposed strikes on Syria to punish the Assad government for its alleged chemical weapons attacks.  The plans now reportedly include the use of aircraft in addition to cruise missiles:

In an interview with CBS this morning, Syrian strongman Bashar Assad warned that the U.S. should "expect every action" and hinted at another 9/11-type attack on America:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the deliberation in congress over President Obama's proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force against Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry said that after U.S. strikes against Syria, dictator Bashar al-Assad will be able to "stand up and, no doubt, he'll try to claim that somehow this is, you know, something positive for him."

CNN’s The Lead reports that former CIA director, General Michael Hayden points out that in contemplating a military operation against Syria of the sort that would be "just muscular enough not to be mocked,"

Mugged by Middle East reality, President Obama and Secretary Kerry seem finally to have awakened to the necessity to act—unilaterally and un-apologetically. That's heartening. Still, do they understand that the American action has to be decisive? After all, as the late Mike Scully put it, liberals…

In an interview with PBS, President Obama says no decision has yet been made on Syria:

The man who bears the ultimate responsibility for the gassing of his countrymen in Syria has been told by the White House that the bell does not toll for him.  The Americans are coming and people will die.  But he will not be one of them.  Not this time, anyway.   

Secretary of State Kerry used estimably strong language Monday in a speech on events in Syria:

Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing for the New York Times:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on President Obama's foreign policy is viewed in the Middle East.

Christopher J. Griffin and Evan Moore of the Foreign Policy Initiative writes:

At 5:09 pm on August 21, Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted this:

With the images of slaughter coming out of Syria and fresh evidence that the Assad regime may be using chemical weapons on its own citizens, it’s worth revisiting the case for intervention in Libya that Barack Obama made on March 28, 2011. At the time he spoke, Amnesty International reported that…

Along with the usual tools employed by dictators, tyrants, and strongmen – torture, mass murder, slaughter of civilians by poison gas, etc. – Syria's Bashar al-Assad has gone digital and modern as Nabih Bulos of the Los Angeles Times reports:

This week the EU took a stance that it heralded as pro-peace, pro-"peace process," and anti-settlement. Henceforth, new guidelines require all 28 member nations to refuse any grants, scholarships, prizes, or funding to entities in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Or any part of Jerusalem that…

For the second time in two years, an Egyptian autocrat has been deposed. In Syria, another embattled tyrant – this one robustly supported by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia – looks like he might hang on. Across the Muslim world, the political future hangs in the balance.

As if there isn't already enough on the agenda for the G-8 Summit, now Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is threatening Europe by hinting at a terror campaign on the continent. If the Europeans arm the Syrian rebels, Assad told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "then Europe's backyard…

After a three-week siege, the combined forces of Hezbollah and the Assad regime have taken the important crossroads town of Qusayr, which is just south of the even more important city of Homs in east-central Syria. “Whoever controls Qusayr controls the center of the country, and whoever controls…

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes released the following statement on Syrian use of chemical weapons, resulting in 100-150 deaths: 

A news report published today says that North Korean officers are in Syria helping Bashar al-Assad wage war against his own people.

For over a week now, the Syrian town of Qusayr in Homs Province has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the two-year conflict. The struggle for Qusayr, says besieged President Bashar al-Assad, “is the main battle” in all of Syria. Lying adjacent to a highway linking Homs to the north and Damascus…

Caroline Alexander, at Bloomberg, delivers some bad news about Syria and its civil war:

There was one moment in President Obama’s world-weary press conference last Tuesday when he seemed genuinely interested and engaged. At the very end, when Obama had already begun to depart the podium, a reporter shouted a question about the previously obscure but now famously gay NBA center, Jason…

Israel’s air campaign this past weekend, its two strikes Friday and Sunday on Syrian targets, shows where the Obama administration has gotten Syria wrong. Over the last few weeks, the White House has framed its Syria policy, or its lack of one, in terms of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal…

Last week the White House celebrated the first anniversary of its Atrocities Prevention Board. At the time, Elie Wiesel asked at the inaugural ceremony whether or not we’d learned anything from the fact that “the greatest tragedy in history,” the Holocaust, “could have been prevented had the…

Today's New York Times carries a story about the President's "red line" on the Syrian use of chemical weapons: how that line appeared and how it disappeared.

Jonathan Spyer explains how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have the upper hand right now in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance,” Spyer writes in the Jerusalem Post. “The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an…

The Obama administration now believes that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons. Today the White House released a letter explaining that the American “intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the new revelations about the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.

Chemical weapons have been used by the Assad regime in Syria, according to an Israeli official. The Associated Press reports:

Yesterday Syrian president Bashar al-Assad commemorated Syria’s independence day with a television interview where he described the Syrian civil war as a colonial plot. Western powers, said Assad, “never accepted the idea of other nations having their independence. They want those nations to submit…

Today NOW Lebanon publishes an article, with charts and graphics, explaining how the war in Syria pitting Sunni-majority rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite regime has spread to Lebanon, affecting the delicate sectarian balance there. The fighting in Lebanon so far has been contained…

It’s still unclear whether chemical weapons were used earlier this week in attacks in Syria's Aleppo province, and if so who’s responsible—Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s troops or rebel forces. The U.N. is opening an investigation, as is the White House.

John Kerry is traveling to the Middle East and Europe later this month to unveil his new plan to get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down. "I believe there are additional things that can be done to change his current perception," the new secretary of state said this week. "My goal is to…

In a statement, President Obama announces that he's "approved an additional $155 million in humanitarian aid for people in Syria." The Syrian regime, as Obama states, "has waged a brutal war against the Syrian people—murdering innocent men, women and children, in their homes, in bread lines, and at…

In December, the Obama administration acted on intelligence showing that Bashar al-Assad was preparing to use chemical weapons against his own people. Obama publicly warned the Syrian president and, according to the New York Times, “private messages sent to Assad and his military commanders through…

John Kerry, who is expected to be nominated as secretary of state later this afternoon, has made frequent visits to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

The State Department announced today that it had increased aid to help with humanitarian situation in Syria. Today's announcement stated that an additional $14 million of aid would be given, pushing the grand total of aid to Syria to $210 million.

The New York Times reports that Syria has fired scud missiles at rebel fighters:

Two technology firms that monitor global Internet traffic report that Syria has been cut off from the Internet. Regular landline phone and cell phones services have been affected as well, Syrian opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid told me. “Therefore, the possibility of accidental damage can be…

Yesterday a car bomb in Beirut killed a senior Lebanese security chief along with seven others, while wounding hundreds in Ashrafiyeh, a busy neighborhood in Christian-majority East Beirut. The target, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, was close to former prime minister Saad Hariri and his late father,…

After almost a week of exchanging fire with Syrian troops across its southern border, Turkey finds itself embroiled on another, albeit related, international front. Wednesday the Turkish air force scrambled two jets to intercept a Syrian passenger jet flying from Moscow to Damascus. The plane, said…

Later this morning, in remarks at the Virginia Military Institute, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will say: 

Aleppo, Syria

In Beirut last week, former Lebanese MP and cabinet member Michel Samaha was arrested and later confessed to “planning terrorist attacks in Lebanon at Syrian orders.” A longtime ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Samaha was apparently acting under the direction of Damascus to stir sectarian…

Earlier this month, 48 Iranian Shiite “pilgrims” were abducted in Damascus. The Free Syrian Army claims they were members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have been dispatched to Syria to protect one of Tehran’s vital interests, Bashar al-Assad’s regime. It’s not the first time that…

On Wednesday, July 18, a bomb killed at least three top officials from Bashar al Assad’s crumbling regime. Among them was Assef Shawkat, the deputy defense minister and former head of Syrian military intelligence. Different accounts of how Shawkat and the others were killed have been offered to the…

In Damascus this morning a bomb at the National Security building killed several members of Bashar al-Assad’s “crisis cell” —a group of key regime figures tasked to put down the 16-month uprising against the Assad regime. Interior minister Mohammed al-Shaar and head of national security General…

Advocates of robust American action in Syria to help remove Bashar al-Assad from power have typically made two arguments. One is the humanitarian case, urging the Obama administration to prevent further bloodshed in what is now turning into a campaign of sectarian cleansing against Syria’s Sunni…

Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham released the following statement on Syria:

The Syrian regime has reportedly perpetrated another episode of sectarian cleansing. Yesterday, the army and paramilitary gangs loyal to president Bashar al-Assad killed more than 200 people in the Sunni village of Tremseh, in Hama province.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in the Wall Street Journal: 

The latest military developments in Syria are now generally understood as ushering in a new phase in the Syrian conflict. What’s less observed is that the minority Alawite regime’s mass killings of Sunnis and the intense fighting around the cities of Homs and Hama also seem to replicate significant…

Human Rights Watch has just released an 81-page report detailing the Syrian regime’s systematic use of torture against opposition figures. “‘Torture Archipelago: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Syria’s Underground Prisons since March 2011’ is based on more than 200…

At the end of an interesting op-ed, Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevy relates an interesting and revealing anecdote about Senator John Kerry, who is believed to be in the running for the secretary of state position should Barack Obama be reelected.

The Associated Press reports that, when it comes to Syria, the Arab League is uniting around the opposition:

The prominence of Russian-made helicopters in Bashar al-Assad’s brutal and desperate efforts to hang on to power puts the Syrian war in a new light. It’s getting difficult to categorize the conflict simply as a humanitarian crisis or a “teacup war” of secondary significance. Rather, Syria’s civil…

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is helping to coordinate logistics for the Free Syrian Army, but not providing arms. “U.S. intelligence operatives and diplomats have stepped up their contacts with Syrian rebels in part to help organize their burgeoning military operations…

While the Obama administration and its allies at the New York Times are waiting for Russia to intervene and get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down, the children of Kafranbel show a clearer sense of strategic reality:

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the Syrian regime's latest atrocities "horrific." He also said that "it is far part time for the United States ... to put an end to the Assad regime."

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed on Friday that al Qaeda has a "presence in Syria."

Bashar al-Assad’s security forces have brazenly slaughtered more than 10,000 Syrian civilians, and injured or detained tens of thousands more, since the anti-regime protests began in March 2011. Despite these facts, America’s policy towards Syria—a terror-sponsoring government that is Iran’s…

Yesterday the Washington Post inexplicably published a piece about the Vogue profile of Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad—a profile published in March 2011. It’s inexplicable because it’s old news: Vogue removed the story, titled “A Rose in the Desert,” from its website long ago—and the fact that the…

Yesterday, the White House’s Atrocities Prevention Board held its first meeting. Chaired by NSC staffer Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the board will “coordinate action across the entire government on stopping genocide and liaise with the NGO…

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated President Obama’s August 2011 demand that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad step down. However, neither explained how this…

Here's video from Homs, documenting yet more violations of the Kofi Annan-brokered Syrian ceasefire that the Obama administration is celebrating:

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan sought a ceasefire in Syria between forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. The Obama administration insists that the ceasefire is holding. "What we saw in the last day or so was a very fragile truce emerge, a very fragile first step," State…

In a grim footnote to the ongoing human tragedy in Syria, the country's cultural heritage as well as its civilian population is now in peril. Syria, a center of civilization in the ancient and medieval eras, boasts some of the finest archaeological sites in the near east, notably the old cities of…

The United Nations reports that over 9,000 have been killed in Syria during the anti-regime uprising that has been going on for the last year. So far, however, President Obama has taken a hands-off approach, relying exclusively on diplomacy and sanctions.

Reuters reports that "Iran is providing a broad array of assistance to Syrian President Bashar Assad to help him suppress anti-government protests, from high-tech surveillance technology to guns and ammunition, U.S. and European security officials say."

In an article today in NOW Lebanon, Tony Badran reports that Hillary Clinton “dismissed a number of forward leaning options on Syria” proposed by Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to the White House. “What this means,” writes Badran, “is that Washington, which at one point subcontracted its…

Journalist Nir Rosen defended himself against accusations over the weekend that he’d collaborated with Syrian security services. Rosen, who spent four months in Syria reporting for Al Jazeera International’s English-language website, was implicated in emails published by Al Arabiya. Along with the…

Robert Kagan: "America has made the world freer, safer and wealthier."

Working to suppress the protesters in Syria, the army there, the New York Times reports, is "gathering confidence":

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change. The hope was that longstanding frustration with international isolation and relative deprivation would inspire some unspecified Baathist general to assassinate…

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey testified today on Syria. It seems that a large part of the administration’s thinking concerning military intervention touches on the regime’s air defenses.

Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham issued a joint statement today urging the Obama administration to act on Syria. “[I]f requested by the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army, the United States should help organize an international effort to protect civilian…

Maybe the murder of an American journalist in Syria last week will focus the American president’s mind. Marie Colvin was killed, along with a French photojournalist, when troops loyal to -President Bashar al-Assad shelled the opposition’s makeshift press center in Homs. This city on the western…

A number of recent articles make the case that the administration’s Syria policy is incoherent. Elliott Abrams says it’s worse than that: The White House’s position on Syria is duplicitous. Abrams looks at a series of recent interviews Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given to the press about…

In Now Lebanon, Hussain Abdul Hussain writes about “the new Arab thinking.” It was not born overnight, explains the Washington-based Arab media correspondent:

The Guardian has a fascinating piece on "The Arab world's first ladies of oppression," and how the wives of Arab dictators have served as objects of scorn in the Arab spring: 

The Obama administration keeps spinning its wheels on Syria. Because the White House sees no clear American interest in toppling Bashar al-Assad, it has tasked out Syria policy to others, first Turkey then the Arab League, and pleads for an international chorus condemning the Syrian regime at the…

At the Herzliya security conference outside Tel Aviv yesterday, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy suggested that we "Look at Syria and see it as the Achilles heel of Iran." There is "enormous opportunity" in Syria, said Levy. "We should have a main interest in ensuring that the Iranian interest is…

Berlin

Last week the Obama administration’s point man on Syria, Frederic Hof, went to Capitol Hill to apprise the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East of recent developments. Nine months into the uprising against a regime that has already killed 5,000 protesters, Bashar al-Assad, said…

This morning, the White House released a statement regarding further atrocities committed by the Syrian regime.

Yesterday, a rocket fired from southern Lebanon missed its target in Israel. Instead it wounded a Lebanese woman, hinting at a possible pattern of things to come. While Hezbollah contends that its weapons are to protect Lebanon from Israel, the reality is that the arms used to defend the…

Tonight, ABC News will broadcast Barbara Walters’s interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The network hasn’t released the full transcript yet, but so far press releases suggest that the big news is that Assad is denying any responsibility for the almost 4,000 Syrians killed since the…

The “realist” case for Bashar al-Assad—and before him, for his father, Hafez—was that he was supposedly a pillar of stability. The Assads, we were told, were all that stood between Syria and chaos. If that was ever true, it definitely is not true now. Assad’s heavy-handed attempt to repress a…

The Syrian opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is gathering steam. Syrian soldiers, as Max Boot writes in this week's issue, "are defecting to the Free Syrian Army, which in recent days has reportedly attacked an intelligence headquarters outside of Damascus and a Baath party…

Bashar al-Assad is finished. The Arab League has condemned him, as have former allies Qatar and Turkey. One time Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal says Assad’s exit is inevitable. Perhaps most significantly, King Abdullah II of Jordan felt sufficiently confident of Assad’s fall to call for…

It’s been a lousy week for Bashar al-Assad. First came news that Syria was to be suspended from the Arab League despite the complicating fact that Assad still technically holds the presidency of the Arab League Council, the chief decision-making body of the organization. Then, last night, King…

It’s been a lousy week for Bashar al-Assad. First came news that Syria was to be suspended from the Arab League despite the complicating fact that Assad still technically holds the presidency of the Arab League Council, the chief decision-making body of the organization. Then, last night, King…

CNN reports that a new anti-Assad coalition is forming: 

On Sunday, the grand mufti of Syria warned the West that the Assad regime is prepared to play hardball in the event of foreign intervention.  “I say to all of Europe, I say to America, we will set up suicide bombers who are now in your countries, if you bomb Syria or Lebanon,” Ahmad Badreddine…

From Jamie Weinstein's interview with the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford: 

It is true that the Christians of the Middle East are a persecuted minority—like all regional minorities, from the Shiites to the Druze and from the Kurds to the Jews. And the Christians are already suffering at the hands of Sunni extremists in Iraq and Egypt. But still, it is impossible to feel…

We previously noted that a petition against the Bashar al-Assad regime's repressive action has been circulating Syria, signed by a leading group of sheikhs. We've obtained the full text and translated, and are here publishing the petition:

Earlier today, Syrian security forces arrested the brother of a Syrian opposition leader in exile, Radwan Ziadeh, who is now a George Washington University visiting scholar. Thirty-seven-year-old Yassin Ziadeh was at a demonstration after prayers (for the eid al-fitr holiday), Radwan told me on the…

On Saturday, August 27, during special night-time prayers held during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Syrian soldiers and club-wielding gangs encircled the large Al-Rifa’i Mosque in Damascus and then attacked it, killing two people and wounding 12, according to the Local Coordinating…

Bloomberg reports that Syria has been aiding Qaddafi's propaganda machine:

With Muammar Qaddafi surrounded in Tripoli, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may be starting to fear more for his future. Perhaps he’s thinking that the international coalition that brought down the Libyan leader may now turn its attention to him—but now with a victory, once thought uncertain,…

According to the New York Times, Syria strongman Bashar al-Assad is defiant, promising to continue to crackdown on protestors: 

In a letter being circulated by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, conservative foreign policy experts, including Bill Kristol and Lee Smith, urge President Obama take a series of actions that will hasten the fall of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. The letter follows President Obama's…

President Obama’s statement demanding Bashar al-Assad step down as president of Syria was quickly followed by similar condemnations coming from the French, Germans, British, the EU, and Canadians. “To have them all fall in line is a hell of an accomplishment, especially in summertime,” Syria…

President Obama has just called upon Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to step down. "We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way," the president said in a statement. "He has not led.  For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for…

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jay Solomon and Nour Malas report on the Syrian regime’s dirty work in the United States, spying on and intimidating dissidents. (Indeed, Syria has been engaged in subterfuge for the last few months.) Sometimes Bahar al-Assad’s henchmen made good on their threats.

The New York Times reports that Syria is using its navy to suppress protestors:

Beirut—Press reports over the last few days claim that the Obama administration is preparing to announce that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down. However, an official readout from the president’s conversation with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan this afternoon suggests…

In Foreign Policy, John Hannah suggests that Syria's neighbors are betting on Bashar al-Assad's demise:

Beirut—Kuwait and Bahrain are the most recent additions to the list of Gulf Cooperation Council states that have withdrawn their ambassadors to Syria. First Qatar yanked its diplomat, after a regime-led mob attacked Doha’s embassy in Damascus. Now, with the ruler in Damascus laying siege to Deir…

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has compiled a report on "Syria's Energy Sector." As FDD's Mark Dubowitz writes in the Hill: "This week, members of Congress are waking up from a debt-ceiling hangover to consider a bipartisan energy sanctions bill that would exert peaceful pressure on…

In his column for Tablet, Lee Smith asks, "The recent massacres in Oslo, Norway, and Hama, Syria, were both carried out by heartless sociopaths. Why does one of them—Syria’s Bashar al-Assad—continue to enjoy diplomatic relations with Washington?"

In the Wall Street Journal, Elliott Abrams writes: 

President Obama deserves some credit for using strong language to condemn the Syrian regime’s massacre of peaceful protestors over the weekend in Hama, Deraa, Idlib and other cities in the pre-Ramadan onslaught. With reports still coming in, the most conservative assessment estimates that 145 were…

Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs this afternoon that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad isn’t going to survive the 5-month long uprising against his regime. “He can’t win this,” said Feltman, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Near…

Al Jazeera reports:

After cracking down on protesters and killing 1,500 of its own citizens, Syria seems to be changing its tactics: 

“Sectarian violence in Syria raises fears,” screamed the headline of a Washington Post article on the murder Tuesday of 16 Syrians in the city of Homs, which lies 100 miles north of Damascus. Admitting that "confirming details" of what happened are hard to come by in a city under siege, the Post's…

Journalist and Arab media specialist Hussain Abdul Hussain links to a remarkable film about the Syrian uprising, Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries:

The AFP reports that the Syrian army is on the march: 

There’s no blast wall around the Syrian embassy in Washington. Nor is the wrought iron gate crowned with barbed wire. During a handful of peaceful protests outside the embassy in the Kalorama neighborhood in recent months, no one threw tomatoes or attempted to scale the fence. The embassy and its…

FPI provides "Five Steps to Hasten [Syrian strongman Bashar] Assad's Exit."

Yesterday, Claire Berlinski wrote about meeting a couple of Syrians from the city of Hama, which was leveled by Hafez al-Assad in 1982 and is now again threatened by Hafez’s scion, Bashar al-Assad. Today,  Berlinski explains why events in Syria matter to the U.S., from Ambassador Robert Ford’s trip…

Syrian protestors greet US ambassador Robert Ford with roses as his car entered Hama this afternoon during the midst of more Friday protests against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Ford wished to show his solidarity with the opposition, but is he also signaling a change in American policy?

Ohio congressman Steve Chabot, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, expressed his frustration with the Obama administration over its handling of Syria at a House hearing yesterday. "I continue to be extremely frustrated with the Administration’s Syria policy," Chabot said…

Today’s Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based pan-Arab daily, reports on the role of “Syrian embassies abroad in sabotaging and subverting any movement or activity aiming at expressing solidarity with the Syrian people, and at taking a stand condemning the regime's repressive actions.” In Berlin, the…

Bashar al-Assad’s speech today, promising reforms and evincing paranoia, has done little to quell the three-month-old uprising against him and his regime. “Liar, liar,” opposition forces chanted in Lattakia.

Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati has finally managed to form a cabinet. Since Saad Hariri’s “national unity” government was toppled in January, due to disagreements over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigating the assassination of Hariri’s father Rafiq, it is hardly surprising that…

Michael Weiss discovers a document that "suggest[s] that the [Syrian] regime fully orchestrated the 'Nakba Day' raids of Palestinian refugees into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on May 15."

With Syrian troops poised to take revenge for the clash that reportedly left 120 military and security personnel dead last week in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, the Obama administration still can’t figure out where it stands on Bashar al-Assad.

Syria instigated violence on its border with Israel this past weekend when it dispatched Palestinian refugees to the Golan Heights to commemorate the 44 anniversary of the June 1967 war, what Gamal abd el-Nasser called the Naksa. Syrian authorities say that Israeli troops killed 23 on the border,…

Contrary to what the Obama administration might hope, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is no reformer. Even with the Syrian government’s murderous crackdown against its unarmed opposition, the White House is not getting the message. Yet Assad’s true colors should have been plainly obvious at least…

Sources from Israel's military now believe that the Syrian regime is likely to fall, according to Haaretz:

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is continuing his assault on protesters, following President Obama's sanctions (yesterday) and his major address on the Middle East (today). The AP reports:

After hundreds of deaths of protesters at the hands of Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria, the U.S. "will impose sanctions on Syrian President Bashar Assad for human rights abuses on Wednesday," Reuters reports. Although the report calls this a "dramatic escalation of US pressure on Damascus to…

Bloomberg reports that the Syrians are continuing to protest today against the Assad regime. According to the news report, this comes after "the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of anti-government activists." Bloomberg reports:

It’s Friday, so Syrians are out in the streets again protesting, as they have been on every Friday now for almost two months, braving the atrocities of a regime that has surrounded several Syrian cities with tanks and allegedly fired on its citizens with artillery.

A bipartisan group of senators joined together yesterday to discuss a proposed Senate resolution on Syria, which would condemn the rogue regime and urge the Obama administration to act decisively. The strongly worded resolution "expresses solidarity and support for the people of Syria as they seek…

Less than a month ago, Senator John Kerry defended the Syrian regime, expressing optimism that it would reform on its own. Kerry said, as Josh Rogin reports at Foreign Policy:

With the news of Osama bin Laden’s death sating much of the world’s appetite for reports from the Middle East, the Syrian regime has used what is essentially a media blackout to move against the opposition. As the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reports:

Since its onset in mid-January, the Arab Spring has caused serious problems for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even more than other Middle Eastern states threatened by mass dissent, Iran’s ruling regime has fostered bizarre conspiracy theories blaming its intellectual enemies, both foreign and…

Via Tom Gross: Here's gruesome (and extremely graphic) video from the massacre in Syria:

A Wall Street Journal editorial today makes the very valuable point that Syria is an enemy of the U.S. Given its role as a transit point for foreign fighters making their way into Iraq to kill American soldiers, its alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah, its alleged role in the assassination of…

Article 7 of the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines "crimes against humanity" as "murder" and other "inhumane acts" committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population." It would be hard to find a clearer case of such offenses…

With the popular uprising in Syria completing its first month, protests against Bashar al-Assad’s regime have spread to encompass most Syrian regions and cities, including now the capital, Damascus. On Friday, April 15, crowds from surrounding suburbs swarmed the city, heading downtown to…

In a move supposedly meant to placate protesters, Syria has abolished its 48-year-old ‘emergency’ rule law. But this isn’t a sign that the regime is totally giving in. (It seems instead that the regime just wants the world to think that it’s meeting the demands of the protesters, without actually…

Haaretz reports:

Reporters covering the ongoing popular revolt in Syria were recently introduced to a new term from the sociopolitical lexicon of the Levant—the shabbiha.

Beirut

It’s not on the front pages of the Western press, and it’s not leading the hour for the main Arab satellite networks like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, but the Syrian uprising continues apace, while the Assad regime’s countermeasures are becoming increasingly brutal.

Al Jazeera reports: 

Beirut

Reuters reports that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad has deployed his army to subdue protesters: 

Elliott Abrams, writing in the Washington Post, argues that the Syrian regime will be the next one to fall in the region:

The uprisings sweeping the Middle East have started to blow down some very dark doors​—​the doors that lead to the dungeons and prisons where Arab security services do their work.

Cairo

On February 7, I published a piece in the Guardian that answered the question, Will Syria be next? That is, would Syria be the next Arab country to witness a popular uprising after Tunisia and Egypt? My answer was, no. The ground was not ready due to the complexity of the Syrian situation, I…