Atlantic Council blogs

From Trench Coats to Tuxedos: How the Kremlin Deploys its Dirty Tricks Today

By Diane Francis

The same dirty tricks deployed by the KGB for decades are used in today’s Cold War 2.0, and have permeated geopolitics from Syria to Ukraine and the world’s capitals. But spies in trench coats been supplanted by Russians in tuxedos with huge bank accounts who use financial, social, and political weaponry to build tentacles that […]

Jihadists in Syria Stopped Fearing the United States When Trump Reached the White House

By Saleem al-Omar

The jihadist Abu Aisha opened his remarks on the United States with a verse from the Quran: “We will surely test you with fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient / Who, when disaster strikes them, say, ‘Indeed we belong to Allah and […]

This is How the World is Reacting to the US Strikes in Syria

On April 6, US President Donald J. Trump announced that the United States had carried out a missile strike on a Syrian air base in response to a chemical attack by the Syrian government, which killed nearly eighty civilians on April 4. Trump said the strike was in the “vital national security interest of the […]

Al-Azhar and Sisi’s Regime: Structural Roots of Disagreement

By Belal Abdallah

Tensions between Egypt’s religious leadership and its political leadership—represented by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, and Egypt’s President respectively—have reached a point where they can no longer be concealed. The underlying disagreement has become public, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has raised this issue in his public speeches, the most recent of […]

Assad Must Be Held Accountable for All Types of Terror

By Ashish Kumar Sen

US missile strikes cannot be a one-off response, said the Atlantic Council’s Frederic C. Hof US missile strikes on a Syrian air base from where a deadly chemical weapons attack is believed to have been launched send a clear message that the United States is now “directly engaged” in addressing the mass homicide perpetrated by […]

Al-Bab Residents Slowly Return after the City Is Liberated from ISIS

By Hasan Arfeh

On February 23, Turkish and rebel forces seized al-Bab in northern Syria from the Islamic State group (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) after three years under the terrorist group’s control. Like many Syrian cities, since 2011 it was treated unfairly by the media, which stereotyped it as one of ISIS’s strongest bases of support in Syria and […]

Frederic C. Hof’s Statement on US Military Strikes in Syria: This May Signal That the Free Ride for Mass Murder Is Over

By Frederic C. Hof

The American strike on Shayrat air base in Syria is an appropriate response to mass homicide by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was from Shayrat that aircrafts were launched on April 4, 2017 to deliver chemical munitions on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing several dozen defenseless civilians, including children. This American strike, which […]

Russia’s New Intermediate Range Missiles – Back to the 1970s

By Stefan Forss

It may be too late to save the INF Treaty, Brookings Senior Fellow, Ambassador Steven Pifer stated recently. “From bases in western Russia, nuclear-armed Russian SSC-8 GLCMs could target Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Rome, Athens, Ankara, and even Paris and London,”