chemical weapons
Strolling the Champs-Élysées with 120,000 Syrian Refugees
On August 21, Mohamed watched rockets fly over his village outside Damascus. Rumors spread that the rockets had been loaded with sarin nerve gas. When he returned home, two of his children were dead. Mohamed left Syria, and five days later, I met him...
A Munitions Expert Weighs in on Last Month's Chemical Attacks in Damascus
Independent munitions expert Eliot Higgins, a.k.a. "Brown Moses," has put forward a particularly convincing case linking the regime to the sarin gas attacks, which corroborates firmly with the information gathered by NGOs and the intelligence agencies...
Vladimir Putin Is Charming the Pants Off the G20
The Russian leader keeps showing up Barack Obama on Syria. There are many theories as to why the wave of opinion is pushing back against American intervention in the Middle East, but maybe it's that Putin is just cooler than Obama.
Are Chemical Weapons Actually Useful in a War?
Bashar Assad gave the US an excuse to enter the war when he used chemical weapons against the Syrian rebels trying to overthrow him, but in this day and age such weapons aren't very effective ways of killing people.
More and More Journalists Are Being Kidnapped in Syria
Journalists who are justifiably worried about being kidnapped by the rebels or the regime are being forced to reconsider the way they cover the ongoing civil war, even as they feel a duty to continue reporting on it.
Is the Syrian Regime Responsible for the Worst Chemical Attack in Decades?
Yesterday harrowing videos began to spread across social media showing that chemical agents had been used in a number of towns in East Ghouta, a district on the outskirts of Damascus.
World Peace Update
Compared to last week's French air strikes against Islamist rebels in Mali, this week—world violence-wise—has been a bit of a wash out. If it weren't for some pissed off Egyptians, Turks, and the never-ending slaughter in Syria, things would have been...
World Peace Update
Last week's World Peace Update looked at the riots engulfing Slovenia, the trigger-happy Tunisian policemen who tried to blind the citizens of Siliana, and the looming possibility of Bashar al-Assad gassing what remains of his population to death with...
World Peace Update
This week's World Peace Update doesn't veer too far from its default distress curve on the bruised and bloodied axes of planetary suffering: some Slovenians got really angry with their government, a group of Tunisian protesters were blinded, and the...