Open Dialogue Research Journal
As of August 2026, Syria’s government under President Ahmed Al-Sharaa appears considerably stronger than it did after Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024. Damascus controls most major cities, has recovered important oil and gas fields, secured sanctions relief, joined the international coalition against “Islamic State” and established working relationships with […]
Syria’s war has changed shape, but it has not disappeared. The country is no longer living through the same battlefield map that defined the Assad years, yet the forces that once tore it apart are still active beneath the surface: armed fragmentation, sectarian fear, economic despair, foreign rivalry, and the […]
They’re not the same thing, unlike what many might think, and the difference is important. Reports indicate that Russia has withdrawn from three bases in Northeastern Mali, which the local Tuareg call Azawad, after the offensive by “Azawad Liberation Front” (FLA) Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-affiliated “Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin” (JNIM) radical […]
If it wasn’t for the Africa Corps’ valiant defense of their positions throughout the country, Mali probably would have already fallen, but it now has a fighting chance to survive and foil this Western power play. Russia’s Africa Corps played an indispensable role in helping Mali thwart last weekend’s terrorist […]
The solutions are difficult to implement during the crisis, however, but hopefully that’ll happen after (if?) it passes. Saturday’s coordinated attacks across Mali by terrorist-designated Tuareg rebels in the rural north and Islamic terrorists in the urban areas, which were described as “unprecedented” by Al Jazeera and Le Monde, caught the government by surprise. This […]
The growing Israeli-Turkish rivalry might soon expand to Jordan. Turkiye, Syria, and Jordan signed a trilateral MoU in early April on transport cooperation that followed their meeting more than half a year prior last September where they first committed to reviving the Hejaz Railway. This late-Ottoman project connected Istanbul with Medina and Mecca but […]
The Druze seem to be fine with this since they’d prefer being Israel’s junior partner over the risk of being slaughtered by their non-Druze “compatriots” like what happened to the Alawites last spring. Israel announced on Friday that it bombed Syrian military positions “in response to the events yesterday, in which Druze […]
They’re all connected to its role in jointly building the “New Syria”. Syrian President Ahmed “Jolani” al-Sharaa’s second trip to Moscow in several months was widely interpreted as having to do with the future of Russia’s air and naval bases there. That may be true, especially since they play a practically irreplaceable logistical role […]
After months of skirmishes and mutual accusations, the militants, formally structured into the Syrian armed forces and the Kurdish militia in the northeast of the country (Rojava region by the Kurdish definition), known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, turned to intense fighting that happened last weekend. Pretty quickly, the Kurds […]
Part I Regional backers (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) moved quickly to lobby for sanctions relief, portraying the new Syrian authorities as pragmatic partners. Washington, however, adopted a more transactional approach. Rather than offering relief as a reward for regime change, the United States sought to make Damascus “earn” normalization. […]
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