Daily News Channel
Tall, dignified Shukri el-Kuwatly had been called the George Washington of his country, but as Syria's first elected President, ailing, aging El Kuwatly acted more like a traditional, feckless Arab politician. He failed to stamp out corruption, stood indolently by while food prices soared
Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has yet to answer his people’s demands to step down, but echoes of that call are reverberating around the region.
The last time Syrians took on their ruling Ba’athist regime it was 1982. The protesters then were Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Once upon a time, Syria erected a formidable barrier of fear that kept its citizens in check for decades. Today, however, authoritarian Baathist rule isn’t looking all that insurmountable anymore
Syria long has been accused of stirring trouble in the territories of its neighbors by exporting unwanted people across porous borders — Kurdish separatists into Turkey, Sunni insurgents into Iraq and Palestinian militants and Al-Qaeda sympathizers into Lebanon.
It’s not as if President Bashar al-Assad didn’t have time to go through a few revisions of his much anticipated, much delayed speech before he finally delivered it to Syria’s pliant parliamentarians on Wednesday. It fell well short of the expectations of many, but the MPs gushed over their 45-year-old leader, rising to their feet several times to cheer and chant “with our souls and with our blood we will sacrifice for you Bashar!” and “God, Syria, Bashar — only!” At least a dozen stood to shout their support during his speech, or spout sycophantic poetry — though some of the TV shots seemed to have been set up to capture these ostensibly spontaneous events before they happened.
In his 11 years in power, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, has cultivated an everyman image of himself, in stark contrast to the formal, distant mien of his late father and predecessor Hafez. The late president was feared more than he was loved.
The accounts of Syria’s “Friday of Dignity” are startling — with episodes full of surprising dissent and immediate repression. In Damascus’ famed Umayyad mosque, a confrontation reportedly broke out during the imam’s sermon just as the cleric blamed Facebook and foreign meddling for the country’s week of unrest
Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population. India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt
The Iraqi government, seeking the handover of two suspects in last week’s bombings, on Tuesday summoned home its ambassador to Syria. Hours later, Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported.that Syria had decided to pull its ambassador from Iraq.