...Ted Galen Carpenter Western news media outlets have paid considerable attention to the civil war in Syria, but much of the coverage is simplistic and melodramatic. Too many accounts portray the conflict as a Manichean struggle between the evil, brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad and noble freedom...

... in the Middle East peace process, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations, but some find similarities between the two tracks. The sudden death of the Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000 ended for the time being the prospects for renewed peace negotiations...

... that has weakened the insurgency. Finally, it assesses the role that Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah intervention has had in bolstering the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Syria's jihadist revolt has limited but important parallels to the failed 1982 Muslim Brotherhood insurrection. Even with the regime's...

... Social- ist Baath Party seized power in a coup on 8 March 1963 with Sunni Muslim Amin Hafiz as head of the state. Power struggles within the ruling Baath Party paved the road for the military wing of the party led by generals Salah Jadid and Hafez Assad to seize power in a coup on 23 February...

..., success in the midst of a vicious sectarian civil war. Syrian Civil War Turkey ISIS PYD Assad Obama Doctrine PKK Copyright 2017 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc. 2017 Spyridon Plakoudas is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Macedonia. He previously taught at Panteion...

... supported the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the latter backed the military coup in Egypt. Turkey needed the support of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies against these two rival blocs. However, Erdogan's populist discourse and tendency toward Islamist authoritarianism further deteriorated...

... parliamentarians have been active in foreign policy. First, they used the new concept of “responsibility to protect” (R2P) in 2011 over Libya. Then, in the case of Syria, their main focus was on reacting to the 2013 use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Later still, after several Daesh terrorist...

... is widely recognized. Iran hypocritically blames Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy for its repression of its Shiite majority but rejects any attempt to isolate its Shiite allies in Lebanon or blame Syria’s Bashar Assad for launching broad military war against the country’s own populace. Iran was abetted...

... rocked by jihadist violence that, like the 1982 Syrian Muslim Broth- erhood revolt against Hafez al-­Assad’s regime, ended in failure.17 Regime countermeasures, extreme violence employed by jihadists, and internal frac- turing congealed to blunt Islamist dynamism. This does not mean, however...

... to jihad- ists and other extremist groups fighting the Bashar Al-­Assad regime. On the other, the kingdom has strongly urged the Obama administration to take mili- tary action against Assad and provide military assistance to the rebels. In December 2013, Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz Al-­Saud...

... territory between the Syrian government forces of President Bashar al- Assad and dissident Syrian rebels seeking to overthrow the government in Damas- cus and/or establish their own independent state.28 The desire for strategic and political control in Syria is the epicenter of the geopolitical...

.... Baghdadi expanded the network into Syria in 2012 when the Bashar al-­Assad regime’s repressive measures transformed a nonviolent pro- test movement into an armed insurgency. Legitimizing Baghdadi’s caliphate ambitions is his reputation as a religious scholar with a doctorate in Islamic studies. Some...

... on the Bashar Assad regime.37 Earlier EU foreign policy approaches had failed and undermined soft power and/or normative power approaches, since their top-­down, prescriptive, and deadline approaches and their advocacy of a wholesale Western model of democracy did not work in this region. In addition...

... their willingness to engage with all regional and international actors with influence over the Syrian parties. In short, the EU is willing to engage Iran with respect to the Syrian crisis. Still, it is EU policy that President Bashar al-­Assad should step down. While Tehran does not advocate that Assad...

... invasion of Iraq. There was substantial U.S. pressure to secure Bashar al- Assad’s assent to joining the effort, but finally he refused. He believed that a U.S. invasion followed by an occupation would lead to anti-American senti- ment. Despite strong opposition to Saddam and his regime in Iraq, Iraqis...

.... In the case of Syria, the issues are more straightforward than those in the Israel-Palestinian negotiations—they revolve around a relatively small piece of territory, a plateau known as the Golan Heights, which Israel took from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The issue for President Hafez al-Assad...

... to Isra- el’s right to exist [and] the Assad regime retains control in Syria.”13 Though many regional analysts disagree, it is entirely possible that the war of 2006 was orchestrated — or at the very least encouraged — by Iran. The date of the Hezbollah kidnappings of two Israeli soldiers...

... travel- ing to fight are varied: some want to be part of the new caliphate. For some the idea of the ummah, an Islamic nation called for by the caliphate, has a clear anticolonial tinge and thus ideological appeal.14 Once IS began to attack Kurds and slaughter Yazidis instead of Bashar al-­Assad’s...

... that country being by most measures one of the most secular nations in the Middle East. The Assad family, whose rule extends back four decades through the tenure of the current president, Bashar, and his father, Hafez, belongs to the minority Alawite sect, generally considered a branch of Shi- ism...

... inside Syrian terri- tory to destroy an alleged “rat line” of smugglers, which ultimately proved to be smuggling petroleum products. Despite this operation, which resulted in the deaths of several dozen Syrian military troops, Syrian president Bashar Assad has continued to be receptive to both...