When the tragedies keep piling up it's easy to think that they are all a series of disconnected events, happening in a void and without ...

There's something voyeuristic about the way people are talking about Aleppo. All of a sudden the city has become a hot topic, and people...

I remember arriving with my mother and brothers at Damascus airport sometime in the early nineties. It was a horribly depressing place. My m...

Once, before the bad days, I had the chance to visit Aleppo and I never took it, something that I now bitterly regret. Perhaps one day, when...

Sometimes I feel ragged and used up, like yesterday's newspaper. It's Monday. The time is 18:43. I'm sitting in a cafe because I...

I've had this blog for ten years. TEN years. People have lived and died in this time, and whole countries born or erased forever. I supp...

I've forgotten what it's like to blog. The clue should have come to me from the  name, a blog is a "weblog", and it's ...

Last week a Russian orchestra was playing a concert in Palmyra. In a grotesque pantomime, Putin sent his forces into Syria to prop up a clow...

As my plane flew to Syria, I remember that I was looking out of the window and saw the sky turning from blue to a reddish haze, before meldi...

There's a picture of a little boy on my Facebook timeline, he looks about thirteen. His mother has written her goodbye to him. How did h...

A few days ago I was having coffee with a Syrian friend and we were talking about how someone can like Syria but not like to spend too much ...

Switzerland joins Denmark in confiscating the assets of refugees . Why not? Go ahead, take everything. From Damascus to Berlin, the journey ...

I want to think of a future with you. I wish there was no silence between us. That we could just sit and talk like we did before all this. I...

I sometimes wonder if any of it was real. When was it? A lifetime ago? A hundred lifetimes ago? What difference does it make. All I have is ...

In my mind, 2011 will always be the year that my grandmother died, not the year of the revolution. After that, everything changed, and chang...

There are a lot of things people might go and teach to Syrian refugee children in Turkey, but philosophy isn't usually one of them. In s...

I think of the kind of upbringing I had, one that I doubt my children will ever know. There was always a confidence in knowing that you come...

It took a dead baby for the world to notice. Wait, I thought it took seventy refugees suffocating in a refrigerator with wheels for the worl...

The Pan-Arabists of the Middle East are celebrating the US-Iranian deal along with all the Progressives of the world. Every spin is being pu...

I can't write. My thoughts are scattered as my attention jumps from one story to another. I read into people's comments on social me...