By Rasha Milhem
One lonely night recently, during a particularly hard time of the coronavirus quarantine, a high school friend and I reviewed our lives and recalled the 2000s with some nostalgia.
We are millennials, born in the early 1980s, when Israel invaded and occupied parts of Lebanon and conflict between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood Movement threatened to destabilise...
Beit Jabri is one of many remarkable family homes in the lanes of old Damascus that have opened their doors to the public: they may have become boutique hotels or more humble abodes for international students or backpackers. Others, like Beit Jabri, have become cafe-restaurants that offer the delights of the Damascene cuisine.
Sitting at one of the tables in...
Article by Rasha Milhem
22 April 2020
Above image: Church in Daraa, empty of its congregation for the Orthodox Easter Sunday service because of COVID-19 restrictions. (Ref: SANA, Christian denominations in Syria that follow Eastern calendar celebrate Easter)
Only international solidarity and cooperation among States can slow down and eventually defeat the common enemy
Professor Dr Alfred de Zayas
Syria’s Minister of Health, Nizar...
Posted by S. Dirgham, who accepts all responsibility for the technical glitches with the subtitles.
Translation of video interview by Rasha Milhem and Sarah Nachar.
This page is being posted on 17 April 2020 to celebrate Syria's 'Evacuation Day'. It is an especially significant day because April 2020 marks 100 years since the San Remo conference, a meeting of the prime...
Written by Jack Bettar
Spread across fertile mountains, between olive and pistachio groves, and across windswept limestone hills, sits an assortment of ancient ruins, some mysterious, but all precious not just to Syria’s history but to the history of humankind in general.
In the Aleppo and Idlib governorates (provinces), there can be found unique and rare insights into life more than...
Written by Chris Ray, this article was first published by Monthly Review Online, 10 January 2020
Sanctioning Syria
By Chris Ray
The United Nations was willing to pay for doors, windows and electrical wiring in Alaa Dahood’s apartment but not for repairs to her living room wall torn open by a mortar strike. That was deemed to be ‘reconstruction’—an aid category forbidden...
Written by Chris Ray, this article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Jan 25, 2020 as "Ode to Damascus".
It may seem like an unlikely holiday destination, but as peace returns to Syria, the struggling nation hopes tourists will too. By Chris Ray
Tourism in Damascus, Syria
Nour Neema at the Sah al-Naum hotel, which...
Written by Alex Ray and first published in Middle East Eye, 26 May 2019
The capital's green spaces symbolise how many are trying to revitalise the environment amid the blood of war.
By Alex Ray in Damascus
26 May 2019
Fareed Notafji sips the sweet, strong labourer’s tea as we sit in front of the guard shed at the SEA Environmental Garden in Damascus.
When...
Video, September 2019. Susan Dirgham. On the way to Beit Jabri.
In the introduction to her book 'Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City' (Thames & Hudson, 2001), Brigid Keenan begins,
My husband, a diplomat, was posted to Syria in 1993, and I went with him. Very soon, like Isabel, wife of the famous British Consul Richard Burton a hundred and...
