Levant

After the fall of ISIS in 2019, many relatives of fighters who were detained or killed, including 10,000 families of foreign fighters, were housed in camps like Roj and al-Hol in territory controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Like any closed society, the foreigners’ annex in al-Hol has its own dynamic and life there is much more complicated than is often portrayed.

Turkish-US relations, while fraught with tension, must also align with a mutual interest in stability in the Middle East and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

With the impending U.S.-supported annexation of West Bank territory, Palestinians living in these designated areas stand to lose not only their long-held aspirations for an independent state, but further eradication of their presence — a “spacio-cide” — in support of an Israeli-envisaged demographic and political vision.

The fourth Brussels Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region concluded last week with a drop in donations for 2020 for those affected by the decade-long war, a result which is disappointing but not surprising.

This week’s briefing on recent news and upcoming events in the region featuring Dara Conduit, Marvin G. Weinbaum, Mark Heller, Syed Mohammad Ali, Gonul Tol, and Guled Ahmed.

As many as 17,000 people “disappeared” during the Lebanese civil war. From 1975 to 1990, Lebanese factions, Palestinian militias, and the Syrian and Israeli militaries waged war in Lebanon. In that time, they and associated actors — be they Syrian security services, or armed Lebanese gangs using the war to turn a profit — “disappeared” people. Now, 30 years after the war ended, Lebanon has finally created a national commission for the disappeared, and in doing so, has taken a small step toward helping families grapple with the consequences of a conflict that has never, really, ended — certainly not for them.

Despite the mixed signals from Israeli and U.S. officials, some form of annexation in the coming weeks or months may be inevitable.

The state is teetering on the brink of collapse as salaries to the public sector dwindle into insignificance.

It is in Syria where ISIS’s future appears most secure, and its insurgency has demonstrated particular strength in territory controlled by the regime.

Leaders of Arab Gulf regimes now decry the attempt to implement the vision of the Israeli Right, which aims to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. But it is exactly the policies of the Arab Gulf regimes, through their normalization of ties with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, that directly contributed to the rise of the Israeli Right and made this annexation more likely.

On June 20 a bus carrying soldiers from the Eighth Brigade of the Fifth Corps, travelling from Latakia to Busra al-Sham, hit a roadside IED near the town of Kahil in eastern Daraa, leaving nine dead and 13 injured. The following day, the funeral for the nine soldiers who died in the IED attack quickly turned into the largest protest Daraa has seen since 2018, including both Eighth Brigade fighters and hundreds of civilians from several nearby areas.

While the regime and its allies have cast the current crisis as the result of Western sanctions, Syria’s economic troubles are largely due to the regime’s “Assad or we burn the country” policies.