This paper was published in Arabic on 9 December and translated into English. For several months, Sweida governorate has been witnessing daily protests against worsening living conditions, which have been further exacerbated by an acute shortage of fuel and prolonged power outages. These deteriorating conditions have imposed restrictions on movement, disrupted work in state institutions, […]
During a routine press conference on 12 August, Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, casually mentioned a brief discussion he had had with Faisal al-Miqdad, the Syrian Foreign Minister, on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in October 2021. A few days later, President Erdogan denied that Turkey had territorial claims in Syria and […]
The Russian intervention in September 2015 was a central turning point in the Syrian conflict. The resulting territorial regime gains, the ensuing stalemate, the deadlock in political negotiations and the inability to induce meaningful change in Syria frustrated Assad’s detractors and slowly deprioritised resolution of the conflict on the international agenda. However, as the […]
Introduction Regarding its worldwide consequences, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 is probably the most significant historical event since the US- and British-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In addition to its catastrophic humanitarian impact in eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine is already having a wide impact on the global […]
After the gradual lifting on subsidies for oil derivatives, in 2020 and particularly 2021, Damascus took a next important step, on 1 February 2022. It announced the exclusion of approximately 600,000 families from its subsidy programme; something like three million people in total (based on an average of 5-6 individuals per Syrian household). Six hundred […]
Introduction The leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has recently amplified its critique of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), and in particular of the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Abdi. The old guard in the PKK are also increasingly demonstrating a clear inclination towards co-existence with the […]
Introduction The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, met Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on 9 November 2021. A visit by the most senior Emirati official to Syria in a decade signals the consolidation of relations between Damascus and Abu Dhabi. From 2015, the UAE has shifted from supporting the Syrian opposition, […]
As part of its efforts to provide a nuanced understanding of the conflict’s dynamics and trends, the ‘Wartime and Post-Conflict in Syria’ (WPCS) team of the Middle East Directions Programme has collectively reflected on the mass of research on Syria produced in the past decade. For the purposes of this blog, we defined ‘research’ in […]
This paper was published in Arabic on 12 June and updated on 15 June 2020. Find it here. Introduction Since 6 June 2020, protests against deteriorating living conditions have been ongoing in the predominantly Druze city of Sweida. The political slogans chanted in the protests have reached the point of demanding the toppling of the […]
Since recapturing Eastern Ghouta, the Syrian regime has worked with its security agencies to govern its towns. Given the fragility of state institutions after nine years of war, the Covid-19 outbreak may be one of the biggest challenges the regime faces today, especially in areas recently retaken. As the pandemic spreads with 44 cases confirmed […]
