A series of rebel advances around Aleppo has set Bashar al-Assad's government back on its heels a bit, resulting in what appears to be a Russian air campaign against Aleppo using restricted incendiary weapons. Rebel forces are also closing in on Manbij, the last major Syria-Turkey border town still in ISIS's hands. At the same … Continue reading Assad’s losses lead to Russian war crimes?

I know it's periodically fashionable to argue that liberals who are skeptical of the Bomb Bomb Assad plan are The Real Racists, but look: nobody is deriving pleasure from the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of Syrians except maybe Bashar al-Assad himself (and even that I think is unfair; Assad would probably kill … Continue reading Show your work

I took a much-needed break from this blog back there in February and March, and while I'm back to regular posting these days, there are still some places I haven't fully caught up on to the point where I feel comfortable writing about them. So this series is going to continue until I've worked through … Continue reading Catching up: Egypt

On Saturday, the Houthis and the Yemeni government agreed to exchange 194 prisoners in the still-hotly contested city of Taiz. That's not much weighed against the overall toll of the civil war, but it is the first positive sign to come out of the ongoing UN-sponsored ceasefire talks in Kuwait (apart from a downturn in … Continue reading Yemen: a glimmer of hope?

The latest step in Myanmar's campaign to erase the Rohingya people from the planet involves literally erasing them from the lexicon: Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has told the UN special rapporteur on human rights that the government will avoid using the term “Rohingya” to describe a persecuted Muslim minority in the country’s north-west. … Continue reading Aung San Suu Kyi’s Rohingya ethnic cleansing program continues apace

People use the sentence "I am not a lawyer" so often that it has its own acronym, IANAL, for people who spend way too much time online. I myself am not a lawyer, which is not to say I don't realize that the law is important or that I don't understand legal issues (well, at … Continue reading Dumb and probably illegal to boot

Today in the UN's World Refugee Day, and it's not one for celebrating: The number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people around the world has topped 65 million, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees said Monday. As of December 2015, there were 65.3 million displaced people, according to a report from the refugee … Continue reading Happy Refugee Day, now here are some more refugees

I don't usually worry about historical births and deaths around here--for one thing, most of the people I would cover reckoned time according to the Islamic calendar, so noting when they were born and/or died according to our calendar would be somewhat ahistorical. But today I feel like making an exception. The Mughal Emperor Shah … Continue reading Today in South Asian history: a monumental passing (1631)

51 people in the US State Department who apparently call themselves "diplomats" have decided that enough's enough with this diplomacy shit: More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President … Continue reading Diplomats Against Diplomacy

Don't look now, but oil prices are starting to rise again. After bottoming out around $26/barrel in late-January, they've come back up into the $50/barrel neighborhood in recent days. There are several reasons, but they all come back to basic economics: supply is down and demand is up. The latter is relatively simple: cheap oil … Continue reading Oil price ping-pong