Orientul Mijlociu

As for voter turnout, we now know that the regime has set the stage for an “historic event”. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Gen. Hussein Salami says the “Supreme Guide” has ordered “an epoch-making turnout” that his force will help assemble.

[I]t is clear that the “Supreme Guide” will not tolerate the slightest deviation from the course he has set: a revolution that he claims is moving from strength to strength. “Today we are stronger and America is weaker,” he said recently. One of his ideological gurus, Dr. Hassan Abbasi, aka “Dr. Kissinger of Islam”, goes further: “America is the sunset power,” he says. “We are the sunrise power!”

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

On April 2, 2021, as part of its Frontline documentary series, the U.S.-based PBS television network published an article discussing an interview with Abu Muhammad Al-Joulani, leader of Syrian jihadi group Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). The article, titled “Syrian Militant and Former Al Qaeda Leader Seeks Wider Acceptance in First Interview with U.S. Journalist,” describes the interview with Al-Joulani, which was conducted by PBS correspondent Martin Smith in February 2021 in Idlib, Syria.[1]

The article includes two brief video clips in which Al-Joulani answers questions about the HTS designation as a terrorist organization and the group’s treatment of its rivals. In the clips, Al-Joulani responds in Arabic to questions Smith poses in English, asserting that HTS does not pose a threat to the U.S. or Europe and that the group’s terrorist designation was a political decision. He denies that HTS tortures prisoners, and invites international humanitarian organizations to inspect HTS prisons.

The talk of Syrians offering their bodies for sale in order to secure their livelihood is no longer just a rumor as a local radio station received a call from a number of people confirming that they are in fact selling their kidneys and urging buyers to hurry and take advantage of the opportunity and the low prices.

Syrians in the Netherlands are anxiously awaiting the formation of the new government, despite the fact that one of the major parties supporting them obtained good results in the parliamentary elections last month. Syrians fear that the largest party in the Netherlands wants to suggest amending the naturalization law in the country after the formation of the government.

Danish Minister of Immigration and Integration, Mattias Tesfaye, created a crisis in Denmark when he canceled the resident status from a host of Syrian refugees, which would blow up their future.

The case of the Syrian student Aya Abu Zahr has gone viral on social media in Denmark after receiving an official letter that freezes her residency and demands that she leave the country, only three months before graduating from high school.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights revealed that the Turkish intelligence had instructed the leaders of the so-called “National Army” mercenaries to prepare for the possibility of sending them to Ukraine in the event of an escalation of tension between Russia and Ukraine.

In the context of Washington’s investment in terrorism and prolonging the war of aggression waged against Syria, the US occupation forces transferred a new batch of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists from their base in the city of Shaddadi to the eastern countryside of Deir-ez-Zor.

The gray zone is the space between peace and war involving coercive actions that fall outside normal geopolitical competition between states but do not reach the level of armed conflict…. They usually seek to avoid a significant military response, though are often designed to intimidate and deter a target state by threatening further escalation.

[B]ut do liberal democracies in the 21st Century have the political will to do the dirty work that is necessary to win?

Western nations have multiple pre-emptive and reactive options to respond to gray zone actions directed against them or their allies, most effectively involving multilateral coordination. The objective should be to frustrate or deter, avoiding escalation that might lead to all-out conflict. Broadly, options fall into four categories: diplomatic, informational, economic and military.