Syria with One Eye
Since the beginning of Syria’s civilian uprising in 2011, the Syrian poet Rasha Omran has been a fearless critic of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the failure of Arab intellectuals to denounce its crimes. She lives in exile in Egypt, where she has continually spoken out against the war and in support of democratic reform. In her article “The Sect as Homeland,” Omran, who belongs to Syria’s ruling Alawi sect, described how the peaceful uprising was transformed into a violent conflict:
The regime mobilized to counter the challenge by besieging the revolution in specific areas and alienating it from others—stock divide-and-rule methods.… Seguir leyendo »