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This paper uses a 1,445,000-word corpus to examine Syria-Israel relations in the speeches and interviews of Syrian President Basher Al-Assad from 2000 to 2016. Van Dijk’s (2009) notions of manipulation and polarization are employed to highlight the discursive strategies that Al-Assad uses to legitimize his points of view regarding a range of regional issues. Examining how Al-Assad constructed Israel* in his speeches revealed recurrent thematic categories, such as conflict, occupation, negotiation, and criminality/violence. The analysis suggests that Al-Assad used Israel to build solidarity with his people portraying himself as a man of values who does his best to resist the occupier and liberate the occupied Arab lands.

Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative.

This article examines how Bashar al-Assad's authoritarian regime has used public education to legitimize itself and ground its authority. The Assad regime has always used education as propaganda. Since the start of Syria's civil war, however, the Assad regime has begun to use textbooks to attack its challengers, display its power, and deny accusations of human rights violations. Because they are compulsory readings in most of Syria's schools, and are also freely available on the website of Assad's Ministry of Education, state-sanctioned textbooks reach millions of Syrian citizens and most of the Syrian diaspora. This article investigates the claims to legitimacy in Assad's textbooks and explores how Assad uses education as part of a systematic process of maintaining control of the country, a process that also includes brute force and unforgiving military power.

The conflict in Syria between the government of Bashar al-Assad and various other forces, which started in the spring of 2011, continues to cause displacement within the country and across the region. By the end of 2014, an estimated 7.6 million people were internally displaced and 3.7 million Syrians had fled the country since the conflict began (OCHA 2014; UNHCR 2015a). The refugee situation caused by the Syrian conflict is dire, and it has placed enormous strain on neighboring countries. Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey host massive numbers of Syrian refugees, and Syrians have been seeking protection beyond these countries in increasing numbers since 2011.

Since those first few weeks, international flights have returned to Damascus, with visas on arrival for some nationalities, and Beethoven has been heard in the Opera House. Refugee camps that had been full for more than a decade have all but emptied out, and 680,000 refugees have returned home from abroad. In trying to tell the stories of the Alawites, members of a sect of Shiite Islam that makes up 10 percent of the Syrian population, and whose numbers include the Assad family, I was reminded time and again of just how complicated it is to differentiate those who were accomplices in a dictator's violence from those who weren't. At least we were able to take my father's body from the hospital and bury him,\" Nour told me.

La abrupta caída del régimen de Bashar al-Assad, que contaba con apoyo ruso e iraní, y la llegada al poder del ex-yihadista Abu Mohammad al-Julani abren una serie de interrogantes sobre la ideología del líder de facto del país y del movimiento Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Algunas claves pueden obtenerse de la administración islamista rebelde del reducto opositor de Idlib, pero gobernar Siria desde Damasco tiene otras dimensiones y requiere de otras capacidades y compromisos.

[...]former opposition areas in northwest Syria had benefited from investment and capacity-building efforts by international and local humanitarian organisations and diaspora to serve the 5·6 million people in the area. 8 Locally established initiatives included the formation of health quasi-governmental bodies to meet some health-care needs. 8 However, this cross-border humanitarian response was marred by underfunding, weak governance, poor distribution of services, and overburdened health services. 9 In northeast Syria, the situation for an estimated 3–4 million people in the area remains precarious with health needs met by a combination of local health authorities from the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria and regional and international organisations. Primary and community health care must be the backbone of the health system to support equitable population coverage, 10 particularly in rural areas and for the most vulnerable populations, including children, people living with disabilities, internally displaced people, returnees, and released detainees. 11,12 Investment is needed in health-care workforce production, distribution, and training, including recognition of graduates from unaccredited universities and their equitable disbursement. Immunisation strategies should take into account the continued mobility of the population for both internally displaced people and returnees. 19 Additionally, addressing relevant infrastructure, such as water and sanitation, electricity, and shelter, is key to disease prevention. 20 To address these public health priorities, the reformed health system must prioritise equity and governance, ensuring care is based on needs, not on top-down political decisions—a shift away from the “punishment by neglect” approach implemented by the former Assad regime. 21 There must also be a transitional justice process that includes all sectors and professionals (including employees previously dismissed by the Assad regime for political reasons), and the development of a human resources plan (in coordination with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour) to ensure equitable distribution of resources and personnel.

Hamza, a young doctor, had watched colleagues, friends, and patients die under the rubble of another hospital destroyed by a Russian air strike. Since 2011, through the early student protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the unremitting bombings of Aleppo's civilians in 2016, Waad al-Kateab unflinchingly held a camera to her own life story and events, both hopeful and shocking, as they unfolded. [...]named because it is intimately narrated by Waad to her baby, For Sama shows heartbreaking scenes that might otherwise stay hidden: of children bringing dying younger siblings to the hospital's care; mothers refusing to be parted from their toddlers' dead bodies; a pregnant woman injured near term whose apparently stillborn baby draws first breath; the undulating trails of blood lost by too many of the hundreds of patients Hamza and his colleagues treated day and night, in the midst of shelling, smoke, and chemical attacks.

Getting humanitarian aid to hard-to-reach survivors in the rebel held north east of Syria has become a priority, the World Health Organization and United Nations have said, as the toll from the recent earthquakes mounts across Turkey and Syria. There are fears, however, that the poor shelter in affected regions in both Turkey and Syria will lead to food and waterborne illness such as typhoid, paratyphoid, cholera, and norovirus.4 On 13 February UN Secretary General António Guterres said that he welcomed the decision of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to open the two additional crossing points of Bab Al-Salam and Al Ra’ee—in addition to the existing Bab al-Hawa border aid crossing—from Turkey to north west Syria for an initial period of three months to allow for the timely delivery of humanitarian aid. “Particularly in Syria, where this emergency has come on top of 12 years of humanitarian crisis because of civil war, the scale of need is vast,” she added. 1 https://who.canto.global/s/NNMAC?viewIndex=0&column=video&id=a5efh87u252977s3lhq8tbhg73 2 https://www.msf.org/cholera-spreads-across-syria-putting-vulnerable-people-serious-risk 3 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/doctor-says-bodies-everywhere-collapsed-iskenderun-hospital-2023-02-07/ 4 https://www.cnnturk.com/saglik/depremin-4-ile-30uncu-gunleri-arasina-dikkat-bulasici-hastaliklarda-ilk-dalga-ortaya-cikabilir?page=1

Foremost was his repeated usage of chemical weapons against civilian populations. 2 Investigations led by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found over 300 instances of such attacks by pro-regime forces, with a single sarin attack in 2013 alone killing over 1400 people. 2,3 These assaults, combined with the devastating nature of the conflict (which sparked from widespread discontent and protests over Assad's policies that were met with severe repression), have led to over 600 000 deaths, with over 500 000 of these being named and documented by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 4 This number does not account for the tens of thousands of people trapped in detention facilities under inhumane conditions, or the millions of refugees displaced as a consequence. Physicians for Human Rights meticulously documented hundreds of attacks on medical facilities and the killing of health-care workers by various parties during the war—pro-regime forces were found to be responsible for 88% of such attacks on health-care facilities in a 2015 estimate. 5,6 The same estimate found that at least 610 medical personnel had been killed, with 139 of these deaths being as a consequence of torture or execution, and 97% of these killings were attributed to government forces. 6 Instead of safeguarding public health, Assad's Government weaponised it, transforming hospitals into instruments of coercion and turning medical care into a battleground resource. Health-care workers often reported their provision of medical care to those deemed as opponents of the Assad regime being criminalised, and they were then branded as so-called enemies of the state. 7 In stark contrast to the compassion and integrity expected of a physician, Assad's rhetoric often dehumanised opposition forces, likening them to pathogens to be eradicated.