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With negotiations between the Kurdish-dominated SDF and Damascus stalled, clashes and tribal calls for mobilisation raise the prospect of widening violence

Tensions are simmering in Syria’s northeast as negotiations between Damascus and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stall, with low-level clashes and tribal calls for mobilisation raising the prospect of more bloodshed in post-Assad Syria.

Annexing the West Bank is the culmination of a decades-long Israeli project: the steady dispossession, erasure, and replacement of Palestinians

Israel has crossed a line the world once swore must never be crossed, with maps being drawn up by Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, to annex the West Bank and bring the occupied Palestinian territory under Israeli sovereignty.

For nearly two years, Western media has normalised Israeli war crimes and dehumanised Palestinians amid Gaza’s ongoing genocide, argues Assal Rad.

Language is not neutral; it shapes the way we perceive global events with profound implications for public opinion. In the context of the Gaza genocide, the discourse deployed by Western media is far from objective. It often contributes to the dehumanisation of Palestinians while reinforcing pro-Israel narratives. This bias is not just about what is reported, and what is not, but also about how the story is told.

This past July, a cleric from Gaza with 1 million followers on TikTok launched a fundraising campaign on US-based crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. The stated goal: to raise 500,000 euros “for humanitarian needs and aid to civilians in Gaza.”

But behind the scenes, a covert team sought to uncover his true goals and quickly tracked down his connections to a cleric named Al-Sharif, a member of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Preachers’ Forum. Using facial recognition software, the team tracked down footage on social media showing the recruiter calling on Gazan youth to become “Soldiers of the next October 7.” The evidence was handed over to GoFundMe. The result: the fundraising campaign was frozen within 36 hours.

The Syrian leader is heading a neo-Jihadism that is more insidious and dangerous than all other forms of political Islamism and Salafi-Jihadism the world has known so far.

Syria’s interim self-appointed president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who served for two decades as a militant in the al-Qaeda terrorist organization under the alias Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, told the press recently that he does not see himself as an extension of political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood or classical Salafi-jihadists like ISIS and al-Qaeda. To those who are blind to the many shades of jihadism, these statements might seem to signal that al-Jolani is abandoning his jihadist beliefs or that Syria is entering a post-Islamist era. In reality, these statements are a declaration of the evolution of an even more volatile and dangerous hybrid ideology: neo-Jihadism.

The worst drought in decades is gripping much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, drying out rivers and lakes, shriveling crops and leading to dayslong tap water cutoffs in major cities.

The situation is particularly dire in Syria, where experts say rainfall has been declining for decades and where the fledgling government is trying to stitch the country back together following a 14-year civil war that left millions impoverished and reliant on foreign aid.