Syria

  The Halabja poison gas attack took place on Mar. 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran-Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. Credit: Sayeed Janbozorgi/GFDL license UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2012 (IPS) – The beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accused of readying …

News outlets in the West and the Gulf have lauded the U.S. elections as further proof of the vitality of "the most powerful democracy in the world". By contrast, as the year began, these same outlets described the referendum and the legislative elections in Syria as "farces" and called for the overthrow of the "dictatorship". Which is which exactly? Let’s …

  Following the re-election of Barack Obama in last week’s US presidential poll, Washington and its allies have stepped up their war drive against Syria. In the most serious escalation of the 20-month conflict in the Middle East country, the Israeli armed forces fired a missile into Syrian territory Sunday.   The strike, by an advanced Tammuz guided missile, is …

During a recent Round Table in Ankara, Admiral James Winnfeld, Vice-Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that Washington would reveal its intentions toward Syria once the 6 November presidential elections were over. He made it plainly understood to his Turkish counterparts that a peace plan had already been negotiated with Moscow, that Bashar al-Assad would remain in …

With the blessing of the US and its other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partners, as well as its own national legislature if not the entire Turkish population, some of whom have been holding mass rallies in opposition to Ankara's war policy vis-a-vis Syria, the Turkish government has resorted to a double hypocrisy. On the one hand, it has exploited …