Articles posted by David Arnold
David Arnold coordinates the Syria Witness project at Middle East Voices and reports on Middle East and North Africa affairs for both Voice of America and MEV. The Syria Witness project publishes on-the-ground citizen reporting, giving Syrians the opportunity to offer to a global audience their first-person narratives of life on the streets of their war-torn country.
Among the Arab Spring uprisings of last year, only the one in Yemen produced a negotiated regime change. The conflict in Syria has entered its 19th month. Some uprising have produces some change; others less. Autocrats in three countries chose exile, were jailed or killed, but President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen agreed to More »
Our source for this post, Mousab Alhamadee, by his own account, is a school teacher and an activist serving as an international media spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees of Syria. He purportedly works under the protection of the Free Syrian Army in the mountains near Hama. He also says he is a former translator More »
Our source for this post, Rund al-Huriya, by her own account, is a student and citizen journalist from Izraa who regularly commutes to Syria’s capital city of Damascus. She has written previously about struggles families face when their sons defect from the military as well as about the ingenuity of mothers coaching their small More »
Our source for this post, Mousab Alhamadee, by his own account is a school teacher and activist who serves as a spokesman to international media for the Local Coordination Committees of Syria. He purportedly works under the protection of the Free Syrian Army in the mountains near Hama. He says he is also a More »
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has welcomed more than 200,000 of its neighbors fleeing Syria’s long and devastating civil war. The kingdom manages services for these refugees through the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization, a government agency directly answerable to King Abdullah II. Providing aid to refugees is nothing new for Jordan; over the years More »
Our source for this post is Kareem Lailah, by his own account a blogger, editor-in-chief of what is reportedly the first underground opposition newspaper, Syrian Hurriyat, and an activist with the Local Coordination Committees in Syria. He writes here about what happened to a woman whose two sons were taken away by security forces. More »
Rund, a self-described citizen journalist, writes from Izraa about a family trying to cope with the disappearance of two of its male members nearly two months ago. Neighbors say that for relatives and friends, the uncertainty of the fate of those who disappear in the midst of the Syrian conflict is almost worse than More »
The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan organized a rally in Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom, to peacefully protest against government corruption. They also called for reforms by King Abdullah II and his government that would give Jordan’s voters a bigger say in who goes to parliament and how the prime minister is chosen. The More »
If the goal of the war being waged in Syria is to dislodge President Bashar al-Assad and his government, what is much less clear is the shape and make-up of the power structure which would replace that of the existing regime. Among those leading the anti-Assad campaign are predominantly moderate Sunni forces, but other More »
Abu Leila Halabi, by his own account a citizen journalist inside Syria, reports that in the battle for Aleppo, long-time Christian communities are caught in the middle of a political conflict that threatens to turn into a sectarian war. Among the Christian communities, Armenian leaders steadfastly insist they remain neutral in spite of being More »
The United States and other Friends of Syria have discussed putting money and weapons into the hands of brigades of Syrian revolutionaries fighting under the brand of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Their dilemma is that they don’t want any guns or ammo to get into the wrong hands: jihadists or other foreign fighters More »
Our source, Sami, by his own account, is a Sunni Muslim who lives in Qusayr, a farm town near the city of Homs. He grew up in Qusayr with his best friend, Fadi, who is a Christian. Given the existing sectarian divisions in Syria, their friendship and current separation, in many ways, illustrate the More »
Mohammed S. Dajani is head of the American Studies Graduate Program at al-Quds University in Jerusalem. As a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C., Dajani delivered an August 6 policy forum on “What Arabs Don’t Know About the United States.” His talk was based on a survey More »
A 14-minute movie trailer fueled angry mobs of demonstrators to attack the U.S. embassy in Cairo and, as some believe, may have triggered the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Tuesday night. The movie is said to have been More »
Our source for this post is Sami al-Rifaie who, by his own account, is an activist and citizen journalist in Qusayr where he says he has witnessed Syrian government helicopters dropping large barrel bombs with TNT and scrap metal on the town’s residential areas. Sami al-Rifaie is not his real name and his account, More »
For more than a year, the world has heard news of Syrian government tanks shelling their own cities, helicopter gunships strafing civilian populations in neighorhoods suspected of housing rebel forces and their sympathizers, and massacres in villages by rogue militias. Clandestine citizen reporters count more than 20,000 deaths of Syrian civilians as rebel forces wage More »
A group of Syrian activists has released a 120-page document intended to be a blueprint for a transitional government, should President Bashar al-Assad leave office. The document, The Day After: Supporting a Transitional Government in Syria, was made public in Berlin on Tuesday after six months of meetings involving 45 Syrians. Most of the people who helped More »
The escalation of violence in Syria stands in sharp contrast to the relative calm that followed a similar Arab Spring uprising in Yemen last year. In past months, Middle East observers have proposed that the transition from the 33-year rule of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh could be a model for the proposed departure More »
Reforms do not come easily in Yemen. Hundreds of Republican Guard officers protested in front of the Ministry of Defense in Sana’a on Friday because the transitional government is seeking to reduce the powers of their commander, Ahmed Saleh, the son of ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh. At least the news from Yemen is not the More »
Preoccupied with the need to send its most loyal battalions to retake urban neighborhoods in six major cities, the Syrian government has become vulnerable to the political ambitions of a sizeable population of ethnic Kurds who live in portions of three northeastern governates. As Syria’s armored divisions and MIG fighters engage Free Syrian Army units More »
