By Steven Simon, Joshua Landis & Aiman Mansour Published: Haaretz 29 November 2020 The U.S. and Israel have two problems with Iran: its regional meddling and its nuclear aspirations. Their current approach, which devolves to bumping off senior officials, imposing extraterritorial sanctions, and abandoning negotiated agreements isn’t working, and seems unlikely to work in the future. To deal with Iran’s regional activism, the U.S. assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil; to deal with the nuclear challenge, Israel apparently killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an important Ira ..read more

Jamil Mardam with Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince (later king) Faisal By Meir Zamir First published in Haaretz newspaper on November 13, 2020 In the summer of 1945, no one was more hated by French officials in Syria and Lebanon than Jamil Mardam. Intelligence information obtained by France revealed that Mardam, the prime minister of Syria under the French mandate there, had been recruited by Brig. Iltyd Clayton, head of MI6 in the Middle East, and by Nuri Sa’id, the Iraqi prime minister. Mardam had also reportedly agreed to a plan whereby Syria, after the expulsion of France from its ma ..read more

By Kevin Amirehsani With the U.S. presidential election just one week away, the Democrats’ sights are set on taking back the Oval Office. Should they win, they would be wise to quickly pivot to crafting a forward-looking Syria policy. A Biden administration could offer hope for a new approach, one that addresses the Damascus-Tehran alliance while reducing the scope of regional conflicts and maintaining historic relationships with our Gulf allies. Most observers might agree that the prospects for peace in the Levant are intrinsically tied to the tensions between Iran and its regional proxies a ..read more

I wrote this post on 5 August 2011, but never finished or posted it. I have just found it in my “drafts” and thought it worth publishing as a retrospective of the deep disagreement among analysts over US policy toward Syria during the first year of the Syrian Uprising.  (Joshua 14 Oct. 2020) Should the US Hasten Assad’s Downfall Despite Syria’s Absence of Opposition Leaders? By Joshua Landis Syria Comment, August 5, 2011 Rami Nakhle in Lebanon The Lack of a united leadership Syria’s opposition does not have leaders. Rami Nakhle, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, the mos ..read more

This interview with Dr. Nikolaos Van Dam was originally published on October 8, 2020 by the Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies. Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies hosts today, Dr. Nikolaos Van Dam (1945), Excellency of the Dutch Ambassador, who served in 2015-2016 as a special envoy of his country to Syria, after many years of diplomatic work in Lebanon, Jordan, the occupied Palestinian territories, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Germany and Indonesia. The author of “The Netherlands and the Arab World .. From the Medieval until the Twentieth Century” studied political sci ..read more

Competing with Assad over who can hurt Syrian peasants more is a losing game for Washington. By Joshua Landis and Steven Simon August 17, 2020 Last December, U.S. President Donald Trump adopted extraordinarily tough and wide-ranging new sanctions against the Syrian government and its supporters. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other senior officials have been subject to U.S. sanctions since 2011, but the new measures, which took effect in mid-June, are sweeping: they apply to anyone, Syrian or non-Syrian, who aids or does business with the Assad regime or with a ..read more

By Christopher Solomon On July 24, 1920, French troops defeated Syrian forces at the Battle of Maysalun. One hundred years later, Paris and Damascus continue to struggle to chart the bilateral relations after decades of discord. It was a hundred years ago, on July 24, 1920, that French forces faced the Syrians on the battlefield of Maysalun. Franco-Syrian relations have a long and turbulent history. Some of the early origins of this relationship can be traced to the French military officer, François de Tott, who advised the Ottoman Empire in the 1760s, or Napoleon’s failed military expeditions ..read more

By Abdulmesih BarAbraham In early May, Al-Monitor reported that the Kurdish National Council (KNC) and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in northeastern Syria began US-sponsored reconciliation talks in the hope they could join the UN-sponsored peace process related to Syria. The KNC is Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) affiliated body and was formed under the party leader, Masoud Barzani’s, sponsorship. The backing of US is seen as an effort to appease Turkey’s national security concerns with regards PYD’s role in Syria. According to recent reports in the Kurdish media this talks ..read more

14 June 2020 This article was first published by The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. It is republished on Syria Comment with a few edits and with the permission of its author. Dr. Aiman Mansour is an expert on inter-Arab politics, Hezbollah and regional strategy. He served for 13 years in the National Security Council / Prime Minister’s Office in various posts, the last being head of the Middle East and Africa Division (2015-2019). Ph.D. in political science from Haifa University. Some Israelis believe that crippling Lebanon economically will weaken Hezbollah and help I ..read more

May 27, 2020 for Syria Comment BOB BOWKER is a former Australian ambassador Egypt (2005-08), Jordan (1989-92), and also served in Saudi Arabia (1974-76) and Syria (1979-81). He is the author of: Australia, Menzies and Suez: Australian Policy-Making on the Middle East Before, During and After the Suez Crisis. Meir Zamir has done us a great service in his presentation of archival evidence of French intelligence reports and French perceptions of the British role in regard to the outbreak of war in Palestine in 1948. To the extent that such reports affected the responses of Ben Gurion to the em ..read more