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 […]
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 […]
Since June 2020, Sirte has become a major focus of the Libyan conflict. With its central geographical and social location, the city has become the dividing line between the General Command of Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), supported by Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, on the one hand and the Turkish-supported Government […]
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 […]
Epidemics, like the many plagues that have struck Europe (for example in 1347 at the start of the Hundred Years War and during the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648), have never ended a war in history, even though sometimes they have played a long-term role by weakening empires or exhausting the fighters. There are two […]
Did Khalifa Haftar genuinely believe that he would easily take control of Tripoli, and that he and his troops would be welcomed as liberators of the city? Did political leaders in Europe and the Middle East decide to take him at his word, hoping that a quick demonstration of military force would eventually put […]
