Syria

It is not uncommon for new leaders of new nations to flex their muscles. And in spite of its millennia of history as a nation, this is precisely where Egypt now finds itself. It has hosted its first free and fair democratic elections, and, for the first time, has a civilian occupying the Presidency. In this new nation, reborn for the umpteenth time, Mohamed Mursi is busy showing off the Brotherhood’s sinews. He landed in Tehran today, a move the Ahmadinejad government had touted as a diplomatic coup. No Egyptian leader has visited the country in more than three decades, and relations have been little more than frosty at the

David Cameron made separate phone calls to President Obama and President Hollande this evening to discuss the situation in Syria. In his conversation with Hollande, the Prime Minister discussed how to ‘build on the non-lethal support recently announced by the UK and agreed that France and the UK would work more closely to identify how they could bolster the opposition and help a potential transitional Syrian government after the inevitable fall of Assad,’ a Downing Street spokesperson said. What will that inevitable fall from power look like? In this week’s Spectator, Douglas Murray argues that the International Criminal Court has changed the way dictators let go of power. In the

The British state’s curious relationship with radical Islam appears to have gone full circle. I’ve just found a picture on an internet forum affiliated with al-Qaeda showing Abu Baseer al-Tartusi carrying a rifle in Syria. Al-Tartusi is a little known cleric who was granted political asylum in London and who gave Islamic lectures in Tower Hamlets until relatively recently. Now he is in Syria, leading a group of jihadists in the war against Bashar al-Assad. A pair of British and Dutch journalists were recently kidnapped and then released by jihadists operating near Idlib. Although blindfolded throughout their detention, they reported that some of their captors had British accents. It was

The same problem keeps occurring for the megaphones of Iranian propaganda in the West: they keep being let down by their own side.  Every time another op-ed appears in the Guardian or Nation arguing that Iran isn’t seeking a nuclear device (and even if was it would never use it, and even though it doesn’t want a nuke and wouldn’t use it if it did, it does still at least have the ‘right’ to one) another Iranian official or one of their proxies lets slip the truth. The latest person to let the side down is the Hezbollah MP Walid Sakariya.  The MP for the Iranian Revolutionary government’s party in

This is the end of diplomacy in Syria. Kofi Annan announced yesterday that he will step down as international peace envoy for Syria at the end of this month, highlighting the impotence of United Nations efforts in the country. This effectively closes the main diplomatic avenue by which Western powers have been able to raise their concerns with the regime, signalling the success of Russian and Chinese obstructionism. Since Annan embarked on his mission in February, Russia and China have used their veto powers in the UN Security Council on three separate occasions to thwart draft proposals put forward by Western and Arab governments to pressure the Assad regime. Instead,

Revolutions don’t succeed until the capital starts wavering. Bashar al-Assad knows this and has, so far, managed to assert his authority over Damascus and Syria’s second city, Aleppo. That much was true until earlier this week when rebels launched a massive assault on both cities, coinciding with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Buoyed by a suicide bombing which killed four members of Assad’s inner circle last week, we are now into the heaviest period of fighting inside Syria’s main cities. Assad has managed to maintain some calm in Damascus, but parts of Aleppo have now fallen into rebel control. Khaled Habous, head of the Damascus military

It’s hard to know how the conflict in Syria could be classed as anything other than a civil war. Yesterday, the International Committee of the Red Cross finally agreed and branded it such. Their announcement follows the Tremseh massacre last week and some of the heaviest fighting in Damascus since the conflict began – a development invested with huge significance because of the premium Assad has placed on maintaining calm in the capital. It all reflects the gains being made by the Free Syrian Army. So far, the Red Cross has only regarded Homs, Hama, and Idlib as active war zones but this overlooks gains being made by the FSA

There was an air of inevitability about yesterday’s massacre in the Syrian village of Tremseh which left 200 civilians dead. Observers of the Syrian uprising could foretell this grim event after Bashar al-Assad suffered two significant diplomatic setbacks over the last week. First, one of Assad’s closest friends and the highest ranking Sunni member of his government, General Manaf Tlass, fled to Turkey last week. News of his defection roared through Damascus. He was followed by Nawaf al-Fares, a senior member of the Baath party and accomplished diplomat who has served both Assad père and fils, who announced his defection on Wednesday. The Tremseh massacre follows a similar incident in

Are sanctions among the most pointless tools in contemporary diplomacy? That certainly seems to be the case in Syria where sanctions have been in place against the Assad regime ever since he launched a brutal crackdown against his own people 16 months ago. Last week, Wikileaks began releasing a massive tranche of emails from Assad’s inner circle which will make uncomfortable reading for many companies in the West. They reveal that in May 2011 a subsidiary of Finmeccanica, the Italian defence manufacturer, sold over £30 million worth of equipment to the Syrian government just when an EU trade embargo was being placed on the regime. As recently as February of

More than a week on from the massacre at Houla, another hundred or so men, women and children have been slaughtered in Hama, Syria. They were apparently stabbed to death and some of their bodies then burned. David Cameron has responded to this by describing the killings as ‘brutal and sickening’. William Hague had previously described the Houla massacre as ‘deeply disturbing.’ So what is Britain going to do about it? The Prime Minister has a suggestion: ‘I think that lots of different countries in the world — countries that sit around the UN Security Council table — have got to sit down today and discuss this issue.’ He goes