After two weeks of silence about the mass slaughter of Iranian protesters on 8 and 9 January, the partial restoration of internet services in the country is allowing the first plausible estimates of how bad it was to reach the international media. It was very bad. Even the lowest estimate, issued by the regime itself, […]
29 December 2024 Iran: End of the Line? By Gwynne Dyer Six months ago, at the end of Iran’s presidential election, I finished an article by speculating that the long-lived theocratic dictatorship in Iran may be a lot closer to its end than its beginning: “If you can plausibly say ‘This cannot go on forever’,
15 December 2024 Syria: Another Miracle, Please By Gwynne Dyer They’re still celebrating the miraculous fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, and the killing has stopped in Syria except for parts of the north, east and south. So what are the odds that the man whose fighters brought down the regime, Ahmed al-Sharaa, can
8 December 2024 Syria Gets Another Chance By Gwynne Dyer Take a moment, first, to celebrate the fall of a regime of surpassing evil even by the demanding standards of the Middle East. Father and son, the Assad regime oppressed and abused the Syrian people for 53 years, and now it is gone in a
28 August 2024 Walls and Deportations By Gwynne Dyer Fortress America and Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) are just starting to take shape; bare outlines of what they will have grown into ten years from now. But the trend is almost unstoppable, and it will be very ugly when it’s finished. Some sort of turning point
15 May 2023 Syria: The Rehabilitation of Assad By Gwynne Dyer There is no justice. Bashar al-Assad, the murderous Syrian dictator whose membership even the Arab League suspended twelve years ago, is off to Riyadh this week to celebrate his re-admission to the organisation. He will pay no price for his many crimes against humanity:
10 August 2020 Beirut has been living with car bombs and air raids on a sporadic but continuing basis for so long that it would probably make sense to rebuild this time with shatterproof glass. The torrent of broken glass falling from a thousand shattered buildings probably accounted for half the 158 dead found so
Last week the United States imposed new sanctions on Syria: a “sustained campaign of economic and political pressure” to end the nine-year war by forcing President Bashar al-Assad to UN-brokered peace talks where he would negotiate his departure from power. Assad’s wife was already cross about not being able to shop at Harrod’s or Bergdorf
Turkey has opened the floodgates, and soon Europe will be drowning in immigrants. “Hundreds of thousands have crossed,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed on television, “and soon it will reach millions.” And it must be true, because you can see it live on your medium of choice. Look at this clip of Greek frontier
Turkey has not won a war against Russia since the 1600s, although there have been at least half a dozen of them. You would think that even the most aggressive Turkish leader would try to avoid another one, but you would be wrong. President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey for the past seventeen