This article was published at Ahval
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 October 2018
The Turkish government’s recent record in foreign policy is hardly a success story. It is therefore noteworthy that, so far, Ankara has handled the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a singular deftness. Whether Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can see this through is now the key question. Continue reading
Published at The International Business Times
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 18, 2017
Chelsea Manning (REUTERS/U.S. Army)
It might have been thought that a consistent opposition to treason was not all that difficult. But President Barack Obama’s surprise decision last night to commute the sentence of Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, showed how deeply political partisanship has penetrated into areas like national security, where ideally country would be put before party or ideology. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 9, 2015
Sharif as-Safouri, a Free Syrian Army commander kidnapped by Jabhat an-Nusra and made to “confess” to receiving support, including weapons, from Israel in an August 2014 video.
Last night The Daily Mail reported, after embedding with Israeli commandos, on Jerusalem’s ongoing effort to treat casualties of Syria’s horrific war. The Mail, however, put a spin on this story that not only reflected badly on the Jewish State, but feeds into a narrative cast by Iran and its allies to the effect that Israel is supporting Salafi militancy in Syria, specifically al-Qaeda, a propaganda campaign that has already had deadly consequences. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015
In 2012, Bernard Lewis published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, which included a chapter on the court case brought against him in France in the 1990s for refusing to agree that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitute genocide in the original sense of the term, as applied to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. The chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 5, 2015
Mother Agnes Mariam on RT. An agent of the regime, she dismissed Syria’s rebels as a foreign conspiracy.
Fouad Ajami once said Syria was the “first YouTube war“. An academic study called Syria “the most socially mediated civil conflict in history“. From the start of the Syrian war, the media and propaganda dimension has been of immense importance, impacting the course of the war on the ground and affecting the policy of foreign States who could make a decisive difference in the conflict. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 21, 2014
Abu Omar a-Shishani, while in Georgian military, now as I.S. leader in Syria/Iraq
The Syrian rebellion, on Oct. 5, took over areas of Tel al-Hara, near Nawa, a major town twenty miles north of Deraa City, which is a strategic gateway to the road networks that keep the Assad regime alive in Deraa Province. The videos (1/2/3) showed FSA-branded rebels like Liwa al-Furqan and Jabhat Thuwar as-Suriya (the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front) in control. Jabhat an-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, had an important presence, but it was not dominant. So this seemed like good news on its own terms.
Two days later the plot thickened when a further video was uploaded to YouTube, showing the rebels touring a captured regime intelligence station in Tel al-Hara: Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 22, 2014
In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea last month, The New York Times has reported on the tactics of subversion and provocation the Kremlin used to destabilise and ultimately conquer parts of Ukraine:
