Syria

by John Massaro THE JORDANIANS CALL IT the King Hussein Bridge, the Israelis the Allenby Bridge. At the bus station in Amman they compromise, and if you want to visit what the Jordanians and the rest of the world call the West Bank, but the Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria, you go to the counter marked…

Ancient building carved directly into the cliff face in Petra, Jordan by John Massaro THE ANCIENT CITY of Petra is Jordan’s crowning glory. In the fourth century B.C. an obscure tribe, the Nabataeans, and after them the Romans, carved temples, palaces and tombs from the indigenous pink sandstone;…

by John Massaro SHEM WAS A frail, unattractive man who worked in the quiet [Syrian] government tourist office on Port Said Boulevard. I asked him if Zebdani, a resort town in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains – just a few miles from the Lebanese border – was worth a visit. He said it definitely was,…

by John Massaro THERE SEEMED TO BE only one hotel in Baniyas, the Hotel Baniyas. Please, oh God, please have a room, I prayed. They did. I showered, took a nap, woke up, read for an hour and went to the market to buy a melon for tomorrow’s breakfast. Seeing me return with one, the manager brought a knife…

by John Massaro “NUSAYBIN Hudut Kapisi,” the fresh Turkish exit stamp in my passport read. Straight ahead was El Qamishliye, Syria, a remote, sleepy frontier town near the desolate point where Turkey, Syria and Iraq meet. It was 1984 and I was not feeling confident. What was Syria going…

AMBASSADOR JOHN BOLTON, who is part-Jewish and an extreme warmongering Zionist, took a trip to Israel over the weekend and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only to announce Sunday that the US will not be pulling out of Syria until certain “objectives” are achieved.…

Israel is Bad for America A New York Times Columnist explains why by Philip Giraldi AMERICAN JOURNALISM has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and out-and-out lies. The public, though poorly informed on most issues as a result, has generally figured out that it is being…

by Karl Radl WHEN THE NEWS that US President Donald Trump was pulling out US military forces from the Syrian civil war — which is now all but decided with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad the last man standing despite the many and varied efforts of his Islamist and Israeli enemies — (1) I knew…

THE SYRIAN ARMY, backed by the wider coalition of government forces, has made sweeping gains in Damascus in recent months, liberating the entire East Ghouta region via operation Damascus Steel, and recovering chunks of territory in south Damascus, where the Daesh* terror organization maintains…