Former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been sentenced to death in absentia for crimes committed during the country's nearly 14-year civil war. A court in Damascus found him guilty of premeditated murder, torture, arbitrary arrests and crimes against humanity, including the killing of children
While the new Syrian government is building relations with the world and putting the country back on the diplomatic map, millions of citizens are still struggling for basic existence. A year after the fall of the dictatorship, the promises of a better life have not yet reached the majority of the population
The political decline of Syria as a key Iranian ally is shaking the Islamic Republic. While economic crises and political corruption erode confidence in the authorities, analysts point to the possibility that Tehran's fate is tied to the changes taking place in the region.
Who in the West will care about the state of democracy or women's rights in Syria when there is already talk of removing this country from the list of countries at risk to prevent the influx of new refugees
In eleven days of November and December 2024, armed opposition units managed to achieve more than in all 14 years of the civil war
Russia announced that Bashar al-Assad resigned and then left the country. This ended the speculation about his supposed death
Two Syrian sources said it is very likely that Assad may have been killed in a plane crash, Reuters reported
The rebels in Syria are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist militant group whose members are mostly Salafists, members of an ultra-radical sect within Sunni Islam. The goal of HTS is to establish a state in Syria based on Islamic law
The Syrian crisis remains a kind of bleeding wound in the Middle East. Syria, which was artificially created by the French after the First World War on parts of the Ottoman Empire, today has split into three hostile enclaves: Arab-Sunni, Arab-Alawite and Kurdish. Bashar al-Assad, with the military support of Iran and the Russian Federation, controls two-thirds of the country's territory, where only a third of its pre-war population lives. Most Syrians were not with Assad. About eight million live in neighboring countries in refugee camps, four to five million in territories occupied by Turkey and four million in the northeast of the country, in the Kurdish region of Rojava and the Euphrates basin.
"We are in a third world war whose beginning we cannot define exactly, future historians will debate when exactly it began. It is a process that develops quietly and gradually, extending from one battlefield to another, far from each other, and yet the impotence of politics and the strength of the economy, which has assumed primacy, are evident in all." — Günther Grass, "Vreme", November 13, 2014.
