Jonathan Spyer is a journalist and Middle East analyst. He is director of research at the Middle East Forum and the author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict.
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Israeli leaders recently made clear that the IDF’s current military deployment into south-west Syria is not intended as a stop-gap measure until its northern neighbour stabilises. Rather, in a speech last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told IDF officer cadets that the force’s troops would stay on the formerly Syrian side of Mount Hermon, and
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‘Isis is taking huge advantage of the current situation in Syria,’ Ilham Ahmed told me, when we met in the north Syrian city of Hasakeh in mid January. ‘In the recent time, there have been many attacks on checkpoints of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces). They are most active in the al Badiya area. There’s
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The question now facing Israel is this: will the war in Gaza recommence? The ceasefire agreement was signed less than a month ago, and it is already looking shaky. The first phase of the deal has not yet been completed. Sixteen of the 33 Israeli hostages scheduled to be freed in this phase have been released, and
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US President Donald Trump has reiterated his call for Egypt and Jordan to accept residents of Gaza into their territory, as part of arrangements to end the current war with Israel. Further explaining his idea on Monday, the President said that he would ‘like to get [Gazans] living in an area where they can live
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Travelling from Syria’s Highway 42, which runs from Tabqa to the city of Homs, you can see the corpse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Getting to Homs and from there to Damascus requires driving across 300km of desert. Once, huge and imposing checkpoints festooned with the symbolism of the regime greeted travellers seeking to reach Syria’s
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When Hamas launched its war on Israel in October, 2023, it did so on the basis of a clear analysis of Israeli society, according to which it hoped to achieve its objectives. Given the nature and extent of the massacre of 7 October 2023, it was surely clear to the Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel’s
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The liberation of Syria’s notorious Sednaya jail close to Damascus a week ago has resulted in a wave of belated outrage in much western media toward the former dictator and his methods. For Syria watchers, there is something rather surreal about this late discovery of the methods of Assad’s regime. Some of the precise numbers
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In late February 2012 I was travelling through Syria’s Idleb province. I stayed for a few days in a town called Binnish, not far from the province’s capital. It was, at that time, under the tentative control of the newly hatched insurgency against the regime of Bashar Assad. The young host of the place I was
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The astonishing and abrupt fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus is a moment of historic importance for the Middle East, in which the shifting of tectonic plates can be plainly felt. But which plates in particular? And what are the immediate implications? Firstly, it is important just to contemplate the dimensions of what has just
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Syrian Sunni Islamist fighters are continuing to consolidate their gains in Syria’s Aleppo province. Almost the entirety of Aleppo city, sometimes called the capital of Syria’s north, is now in the hands of the Turkey-backed fighters. Russian and Assad regime airstrikes have begun in earnest on opposition-held parts of the country’s north west. The lightning
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Nothing is yet confirmed, but it appears that a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah is imminent. The fighting, which began on 8 October last year, has claimed thousands of lives and left the Israel-Lebanon border area decimated on both sides. But there is anger that Israel is rushing into an agreement that will not
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As the dust settles on the latest confrontation between Israel and Iran in the Middle East, the nature of the Israeli strikes against Tehran this weekend is becoming clear. It is a mark of the extent to which clashes between these two regional powers have become normalised over the last six months that the details, rather
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Two senior US officials are in the Middle East this week, with the joint mission of negotiating an end to the current war between Israel and a number of Iran-backed Islamist militias. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Israel on Tuesday. US Special Envoy on Lebanon Amos Hochstein was in Beirut on Monday. Are
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The killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a key milestone for Israel in its ongoing, grinding effort to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza. The details of the killing show the extent to which Hamas no longer has any depth of control over any part of Gaza. Earlier in the war, Sinwar would
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Israel’s overt ground intervention into Lebanon is now entering its third week. So far, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have advanced just a few kilometers in and established control in a number of locations across the border. The IDF itself has described its ground action on the border as consisting of ‘limited, localised and targeted
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Travelling through the Gaza border area on the morning of October 8, 2023, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. The scenes of destruction, the burnt buildings, and the smashed-up cars by the side of the road were, of course, profoundly shocking. But they were not, at least to me, unfathomable. Unlike most of
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Iran’s decision to launch 181 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night followed a similar pattern to the attacks of 14 April. Israeli and allied air defences appear to have performed extremely effectively. The damage to the military and civilian sites targeted is minor to non-existent. One Palestinian Arab man was killed in a village near Jericho, not from
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In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the IDF spokesman’s office issued a laconic statement, according to which Israeli forces have commenced ‘raids… based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon. These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in
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The assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah transcends the immediate confrontation between Israel and its Islamist enemies. Nasrallah was both a leader and a symbol of Iran’s bid for hegemony in the Arab world. His fighters advanced Iran’s cause in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond the region – into Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Israeli
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Israel has carried out its largest-scale operation against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon since the summer war of 2006. Wave after wave of Israeli aircraft struck at 1,600 targets across Lebanon yesterday with the aim of targeting Hezbollah weapons stores. Nearly 500 people were killed, according to figures issued by the Lebanese authorities. After nearly twelve months
