Syria

AFP reports: The international community is not doing enough to help resolve the Syrian crisis, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Tuesday as he urged an orderly transition to democracy. “The international community as whole has so far performed poorly in providing an effective response to the crisis at hand,” Gul said in a public address [...]

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Layla Al-Zubaidi writes: ‘Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut [...]

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The Washington Post reports: After three decades of persecution that virtually eradicated its presence, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has resurrected itself to become the dominant group in the fragmented opposition movement pursuing a 14-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Exiled Brotherhood members and their supporters hold the biggest number of seats in the Syrian National [...]

The New York Times reports: More than a year into the Syrian uprising, protesters and fighters say, disparate opposition cells inside the country still scramble on their own for money and weapons, creating a risk that different factions will form conflicting loyalties to whoever ends up financing or arming them. Those who have taken up [...]

Jane Kinninmont writes: Middle Eastern rulers are well acquainted with the arts of cosmetic reform. But Syria’s electoral charade is only likely to anger the opposition. On Tuesday, the UN peace envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, gave a sobering press conference saying that torture in Syria was worsening, that the government still appeared to be [...]

The New York Times reports: Emad ad-Din al-Rashid, a former assistant dean at the Islamic law college of Damascus University, opened his MacBook Air laptop and flipped through spreadsheets detailing the unmet needs of seemingly every besieged neighborhood across Syria. From his spare office in a fifth-floor walk-up on a drab Istanbul street, Mr. Rashid [...]

Brian Whitaker writes: The Assad regime issued an emphatic denial this morning that it is planning to invite the Dalai Lama for an official visit to Syria. On the face of it, the idea of Assad hobnobbing with the Tibetan Buddhist leader is preposterous – not least because it would infuriate the Chinese government which [...]

Matthieu Aikins writes: Last fall, “Kardokh,” a 25-year-old dissident and computer expert in the Syrian capital of Damascus, met with British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister. (Kardokh is his online pseudonym, used at his request.) McAllister, who’s made award-winning films in conflict zones like Yemen and Iraq, explained that he was shooting a documentary for [...]

The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to feed their families in the parts of Syria hardest hit by violence, activists and aid workers say, with access to food cut off by ruined infrastructure, rocketing prices and, say some, security forces who steal and spoil food supplies. Last month, the World [...]