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Syria has long presented a difficult problem for American policymakers. Actively supportive of groups such as Hezbollah, it has occupied Lebanon for more than 20 years. Damascus remains intransigent on Israel's complete withdrawal from the disputed Golan Heights as the sine qua non for peace with that state. It is often mentioned in the same breath as members of the infamous \"axis of evil.\" Syria occupies an important strategic position in the Middle East -one made even more significant as America considers long-term involvement in the reconstruction of Iraq. As the policy challenges posed by Syria's problematic behavior have grown more pressing in the recent security environment, the United States has had difficulty formulating a coherent and effective policy toward Damascus. The death of long-time dictator Hafiz al Assad has forced renewed debate on its place in the region. The transition from Assad to his son Bashar has thrown Western consensus on how to deal with the Syrian leadership further into doubt. Inheriting Syria fills this void with a detailed analytic portrait of the Syrian regime under Bashar's leadership. It draws implications for U.S. policy, offering a bold new strategy for achieving American objectives, largely via a strategy of \"coordinated engagement\" employing both sticks and carrots. This strategy would be independent of the Arab-Israeli peace process, thus a historical departure for the United States. The author's long service in the foreign policy establishment has uniquely positioned him to provide valuable insights into this mysterious yet important country. This book will be of high interest to those concerned about the Middle East, the war on terror, and the future of American foreign policy. Written for a general audience as well as the policymaking and academic communities,heriting Syria is isan important resource for all who seek deeper understanding of this enigmatic nation and its leadership.

This paper contributes to the debate about the creative (re)turn to geography through the lens of poetry. In considering the potentialities and limitations of geopoetics, I explore three issues in particular: evaluation of the poetic creative moment; poetry as a means of expressing an embodied, affective geopolitics; and the limitations involved in this particular creative move as a means of empathetic, passionate storytelling. The paper highlights the ambivalences and complexities of using poetry as a creative literary form of geographical world-writing.

The Middle East holds a critical strategic position in global politics, economy, and military affairs, serving as a pivotal hub for the advancement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through both land and sea routes. Since the proposal of BRI, China’s cooperation with Middle Eastern countries has steadily deepened. Consequently, examining the evolution of China’s interaction with Middle Eastern nations over the past decade is of paramount significance for future development. This study utilizes the GDELT database to construct formulas for measuring event impact and bilateral relationship intensity. It analyzes the temporal development and spatial patterns of China’s interaction with Middle Eastern countries while also examining the types of interactive relationships between China and individual countries in the Middle East under the principle of reciprocity. The findings indicate that the overall interaction between China and Middle Eastern countries remains stable. Cooperative relationships have transitioned from a \"single cooperation\" approach to a \"dual cooperation\" model involving Iran and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the development trajectory has shifted from an imbalanced \"north-high, south-low\" pattern towards equilibrium, resulting in a general decline in conflict relations and a decrease in inter-country disparities. The prevalent type of interaction between countries is characterized by balance.

ObjectivesTo provide an overview of the holistic impact of the armed conflict on medical education and health professionals’ training (MEHPT) in Syria.SettingSyria is a country which underwent an armed conflict for 10 years and suffered from the weaponisation of health.MethodsA mixed-methods systematic review including quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods and textual literature between 2011 and 2021 including papers on the Syrian MEHPT undergraduate and postgraduate education and training personnel (including medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals). The electronic search was conducted in October 2018 in Embase, Global Health, Medline, PsycINFO, Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL and grey literature. And an update to the search was conducted in August 2021 in PubMed, Google Scholar and Trip database.OutcomesThe impact of conflict on the MEHPT system, personnel, experiences, challenges and channels of support.ResultsOf the 5710 citations screened, 70 met the inclusion criteria (34 quantitative, 3 qualitative, 1 mixed-method, and 32 reports and opinion papers). The two major cross-cutting themes were attacks on MEHPT and innovations (present in 41% and 44% of the papers, respectively), followed by challenges facing the MEHPT sector and attitudes and knowledge of trainees and students, and lastly health system and policy issues, and narrating experiences.ConclusionConflict in Syria has politicised all aspects of MEHPT. Influenced by political control, the MEHPT system has been divided into two distinguished geopolitical contexts; government-controlled areas (GCAs) and non-GCAs (NGCAs), each having its characteristics and level of war impact. International and regional academic institutes collaboration and coordination efforts are needed to formulate educational platforms using innovative approaches (such as online/blended/store-and-forward/peer-training/online tutoring) to strengthen and build the capacity of the health workforce in conflict-affected areas.

This article examines the role of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS's) beheading videos in the United Kingdom and the United States. These videos are highly illustrative demonstrations of the importance of visual imagery and visual media in contemporary warfare. By functioning as evidence in a political discourse constituting ISIS as an imminent, exceptional threat to the West, the videos have played an important role in the re-framing of the conflict in Iraq and Syria from a humanitarian crisis requiring a humanitarian response to a national security issue requiring a military response and intensified counterterrorism efforts. However, this article seeks to problematize the role and status of ISIS's beheadings in American and British security discourses by highlighting the depoliticizing aspects of reducing a complicated conflict to a fragmented visual icon. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for further attention to how the visibility of war, and the constitution of boundaries between which acts of violence are rendered visible and which are not, shape the political terrain in which decisions about war and peace are produced and legitimized.

Since 2019, the Italian Association for Non-Destructive Testing has been collaborating with the International Atomic Energy Agency in the sector of development and certification of Non Destructive Testing and during the interventions for recovery after natural and non-natural disasters. In this context Italian experts have had the opportunity to take part to many international technical cooperation missions, at national and regional level, giving training about methods for structural assessment of damaged buildings and on the use of non-destructive testing aimed to analyze the integrity of buildings affected by disasters. These missions have often taken place in complex environmental conditions, due to the geopolitical situation of the areas, like in Beirut or Damascus. However, in any case, the contribution of Italian technicians has been relevant, particularly with reference to the approach to the buildings classified as cultural heritage. It has to be underlined that our national history and culture eases the knowledge transfer to different geographical contexts, and that Italian skills in this specific sector are relevant, as well as appreciated worldwide.

Cholera is an ancient disease that persists as an issue of public health in many conflict-affected countries worldwide. Cholera is a diarrheal infection caused by ingested water or food contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. On 10 September 2022, the Ministry of Health in Syria declared a cholera outbreak. Poor water and sanitation systems, disease surveillance breakdown, the collapse of the health system, and deteriorated socioeconomic conditions are potential risk factors for the outbreak's spread. Identifying the context-related factors associated with the spread of disease is a core to developing practical response mechanisms. In this study, we suggested a multisectoral approach that addresses context-specific elements contributing to the cholera outbreak spread in Syria; public health determinants, geopolitics, risk factors, and pandemic fatigue.

With the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the geo-economic interactions between China and countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road counties (MSRCs) continue to increase, and analyzing the geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs is extremely important for a scientific understanding of bilateral geo-economic cooperation. Differently from the traditional logic of geo-economic competition and cooperation, we constructed a new framework based on the dominant factors of geo-economic relations and used an extreme random forest regression model to classify the geo-economic relation types between China and MSRCs from 2006 to 2017. The results show that the unbalanced development of investment and trade between China and MSRCs hindered the enhancement of the intensity of bilateral geo-economic linkage from 2006 to 2017. The “Matthew effect” of China’s geo-economic flow linkage with MSRCs is significant. There are obvious differences in the dominant factors affecting the types of geo-economic relations between China and MSRCs, and the distribution of the importance of the indices of the types of geo-economic relations in each country is disordered. Geopolitics, markets, and resources have played important roles in the geo-economic linkages between China and MSRCs. There are five types of geo-economic relations between China and the MSRCs: market-oriented type, resource-oriented type, market-resource-oriented type, market-geopolitics-oriented type, and resource-geopolitics-oriented type, of which the market-oriented type is the most important type of geo-economic relations. In the future, China should focus on regional powers along the Maritime Silk Road for bilateral geo-economic cooperation, actively promote the balanced development of bilateral geo-economic elements flows, strengthen geopolitical cooperation with MSRCs, and formulate cooperation plans according to the types of geo-economic relations.

This study provides a detailed overview of Syria’s health system from 2000 to 2024 by synthesizing existing literature and data. Its goal is to inform the health sector recovery plan following recent political changes in Syria, detailing the health system’s characteristics and evolution on the basis of the WHO’s conceptual framework. A scoping review was conducted following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. Data sources included PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, Google Scholar, grey literature and government reports. The analysis identified service delivery, financing, and governance as the most frequently discussed aspects of the health system. It revealed a distorted health system that retained aspects of the Semashko model whilst also incorporating elements of liberalization from the 2003 modernization program. The study underscores major challenges, including the politicization of healthcare, workforce shortages, fragmented financing, and disparities in access to healthcare services. The findings indicate that the Syrian health system has been characterized by centralized governance, inconsistent financing strategies, a fragmented health information system, and a growing dependence on the private sector. The post-conflict recovery phase offers a chance to rebuild a more equitable and resilient health system. Policymakers are urged to consider necessary reforms to the health system recovery plan in Syria.

Disaster relief cooperation has emerged as an active area of status-seeking by major powers. In recent decades, India and China have increasingly leveraged their disaster management capabilities to project their power globally. Disaster relief cooperation can be viewed through the lenses of the logics of both appropriateness and consequences. As “non-Western” powers, they have conventionally been known to contest disaster relief norms perceived by them as Western. Simultaneously, they have varied status-seeking approaches, guided by distinct geopolitical equations and involving different actors. Against this background, the article analyses the patterns and drivers of India and China’s status-seeking behaviour through disaster relief cooperation using the frameworks of the logics of appropriateness and consequences, in the case of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes. It delineates the actors and capabilities involved in their overseas disaster relief activities as well as their implications. It also investigates the strategic and normative imperatives, and geopolitical considerations of their disaster relief cooperation. The article argues that the status-seeking behaviour of India and China through disaster relief cooperation with Turkey and Syria is guided by an interplay between the logic of appropriateness and the logic of consequences, based on their motivations, capacities, and distinct contexts of the recipient countries.