Throughout the years, Lebanon’s demographics have experienced periodic influx. But particularly in the last two years, the demographic shift has been so overwhelming due to the flood of Syrian refugees in desperate need for shelter.
On Tuesday morning, almost 10 years after the U.S. government began using drones to target suspected militants in Pakistan—one of the tools of the War on Terror that the Obama administration has embraced and expanded since taking office in 2009—Congress heard from some of the policy’s innocent victims for the first time.
The warm waters of the Gulf look quiet from where I am sitting, but such tranquility hardly reflects the conflicts this region continues to generate. The euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring is long gone, but what remains is a region that is rich with resources and burdened with easily manipulated history that is in a state of reckless transition. No one can see what the future will look like, but the possibilities are ample, and possibly tragic.
On Oct 12, tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets of Eden in the South of the country, mostly demanding secession from the north. The date is significant, for it marks the 1967 independence of South Yemen, ending several decades of British colonialism. But for nearly five decades since then, Yemen is yet to find political stability, a semblance of economic prosperity, and, most importantly, settle the question of its national identity.
The use of chemical weapons in Syria, by whatever parties, followed by the Russian diplomatic initiative, has led to a US-Russian agreement on safeguarding and dismantling Syrian chemical weapons. This agreement may be an important turning point in the prolonged war in Syria.
In the diplomatic negotiations that are now quite unexpectedly blossoming between Iran and the United States, one has to say that the Iranians have shown the greater capacity for verbal formulas that catch popular imagination.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019