With the sun of 2024 having scattered the last of its rays on Earth, it feels like freedom, independence and justice will soon be engulfed by darkness in Pakistan. Today, we find ourselves mired in a troubling quagmire of lawlessness and a hogtied judicial system. On Dec. 21, military courts in Pakistan sentenced 25 civilians [...]
On December 15, Israel announced the closure of its embassy in Ireland. Israel blamed extreme anti-Israel policies brought forth by the Irish government. The last straw may have been Ireland’s decision to join with South Africa in the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that accuses Israel of genocide. Ireland has asked the [...]
“I never wanted to study midwifery,” a 20-year-old woman from Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar told me. “But after the university ban, I couldn’t continue to study computer science – the major which was my dream and what I had worked so hard for.” December 20 marked the second anniversary of the Taliban’s ban on [...]
As the global community marked International Human Rights Day earlier this month, millions of Afghan women and girls remained trapped in their homes, cast out of their schools, work and public life by repressive Taliban policy. Last year, in response to these then-already-ongoing human rights violations, the US government announced new sanctions against Taliban officials [...]
Though the fall of Syria’s Assad would appear gainful for Israel prima facie, a potential nuclear threat from Iran not only remains, but is plausibly greater than before. One reason for such a counter-intuitive suggestion is that Tehran is now more likely to feel “cornered” in certain crisis circumstances (both foreseeable and unforeseeable) and to [...]
Note: This is part two of a three-part series on the proposed handover of the Chagos Archipelago from the UK to Mauritius. Part one — Why the Proposed UK-Mauritius Handover Would Be a Strategic Blow to Western Security — can be found here. Part three — How the Proposed UK-Mauritius Handover Could be Halted by [...]
My grandfather told me once I was meant to be the heiress of a family-owned winery. Inside the courthouse gates, the ghosts of unfinished stories sit beside me in the cold, marble-columned silence. My grandfather’s voice echoes in my mind, recounting a spiel riddled with missing pieces about a winery that was never mine — [...]
The lightning-fast overthrow of Bashar al-Assad by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in late 2024 has dramatically changed the regional balance of power in Syria. After years of military dominance patronized by Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, the regime of Assad crumbled due to a combination of internal decay, declining morale among his forces, and strategic miscalculations. [...]
The sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria marks a turning point for the country, but the path forward will require a carefully managed political transition, accountability for war crimes, and implementation of UN Resolution 2254 to ensure a stable and representative government. The end of an era The fall of Bashar al-Assad was [...]
As the dust settles after the fall of the Assad regime, a significant chapter is closing in the tragic narrative of the Syrian conflict. The civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the brutal crackdown on peaceful student protests in Daraa, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions. Yet, with the regime’s [...]
