The Latest - Syria
Syria Scours More Trade Routes in Search for Grain
Syria is casting a wide net in a frantic bid to secure grain for its population as a sanctions-induced trade finance freeze scuppers big deals and forces the country to meet its needs with smaller deals, sources say. more...
Bush: The Authoritarian Regimes of the Arab World Will Fall
President George W. Bush predicted Tuesday that the remaining authoritarian regimes in North Africa and the Middle East are unsustainable and will give way to movements driven by the quest for freedom and human rights. more...
Syrian Exiles Lead Call to Arm the Opposition
Five years after being jailed, beaten, and tortured by government forces as a student in Damascus, Ahed al-Hendi is a Syrian dissident in the U.S. calling for Washington to arm the opposition fighting President Bashar al-Assad and his forces. more...
Syrian Uprising Shifts Toward Suicide Bombings. Al Qaeda’s Handiwork?
"The only Al Qaeda cells that operate in Syria are those manipulated by Assad's security apparatuses," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a US-based Syrian opposition activist in an online newsletter emailed today. more...
Syrian Opposition Activists Ask Kosovo for Advice
Ammar Abdulhamid, an exiled anti-Assad activist, said that seeing a new country "emerging out of the nightmare and emerging as a state" could be inspiring for Syrian dissidents. more...
Syrians Fall Victim to ‘Dual Logic’ of Sectarianism and Realpolitik
The task admittedly more complex than in Libya, but “from a purely moral point of view, Western inaction is a display of hypocrisy that is bound to undermine future attempts to invoke universal principles in the name of policy,”... more...
UN Mission in Syria Faces Criticism
For some anti-Assad activists, those aren’t enough to successfully overturn the regime. Ammar Abdulhamid, a Damascus-born activist serving as a fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. more...
US Sets New Sanctions Against Technology for Syria and Iran
The White House said that the restrictions were primarily aimed at entities based inside the two countries, but that American technology companies had been consulted and understood that compliance would now be part of their standard due diligence in international contracts. more...
Syria’s Revolution: An Interview with Ammar Abdulhamid
Ammar Abdulhamid has been the most articulate and credible voice of the Syrian opposition and the movement to overthrow the current regime. Barry Rubin interviewed him to get a clearer view on what’s going on in Syria and on what the future prospects are for the bloody conflict. more...
Obama, Annan, Assad and Mass Murder
Jonathan Schanzer and Claudia Rossett, writing in the New Republic say we should have smelled a rat as soon as Annan was dispatched. They remind us that, in addition to the Rwanda and Srebrenica mass murders, Annan was been behind the monstrously corrupt oil-for-food program. more...
Is Kofi Annan’s Peace Plan for Syria Naive?
Assad will never relent: "Annan set about his work admirably," says Jonathan Schanzer at The New Republic, but his naive "plan creates more problems than it solves." By failing to demand Assad's ouster, and merely calling for a "dialogue between Assad and the opposition. more...
Syrian Ceasefire Lasts Just Six Hours Before Civilian is Shot Dead and Roadside Bomb Kills Officer
Ammar Abdulhamid, an influential Syrian human rights activist, told Fox News that given Assad’s habit of breaking promises 'there was no reason for anyone to be surprised by the turn of events.' more...
Many Skeptical Syria Cease-Fire Will Hold
"We wanted to give them a little time despite the fact that so many people are dying on the ground and in the streets that it is necessary to give the international community some time to find out if diplomacy is not going to work," more...
Syrian Opposition Groups Says Annan Pan ‘Doomed,’ Offers Alternative
Detailing the opposition's alternative plan exclusively to Fox News, Ammar Abdulhamid, an influential Syrian human rights activist, said Annan’s initiative clearly had “failed.” more...
The Hunt for ‘Plan B’ - Planning for ‘the Day After’ in Syria
Syrian activist Ammar Abdulhamid, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, is trying to bridge the gap between the exiles and those Syrians on the ground. more...
Splits in ‘Friends of Syria’ Group May Help Embattled Leader Assad
But Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar appear to have stepped out in front of Obama administration by pushing for "robust action." more...
Bush Institute Unveils Freedom Collection
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a contributor to the collection, participated via video teleconference and several others who have told their stories for the collection were in the audience, including a U.S.-based Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid. more...
Syria Is Obama’s Srebrenica
But as my able colleague Tony Badran reported in his blog in www.nowlebanon.com (confirming what I picked up during my recent visit to Turkey a few days ago), Secretary Clinton caught her Turkish counterpart off guard during their meeting in Washington last month. more...
Countries Debate Whether to Arm Syrian Opposition
Tony Badran, a research fellow at the D.C.-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told Fox News that the U.S. was "adamantly against any hint of incorporating a military component to the policy." more...
US Policy on Syria: A Bad Joke Told at the Syrian People’s Expense
First Obama outsourced to Turkey the job of overseeing the formation of the opposition. The result was the Syrian National Council, which is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the Muslim Brotherhood likes to remind us... more...
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