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By Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
Soldiers at the normally dour border crossing between Lebanon and Syria were dabka circle dancing and passing out candy. The streets of the Syrian capital were lined with tents stocked with tea and shawarma sandwiches. Billboards Proclaimed: We Believe in Freedom, We Believe in History, We Believe in You. Syrian state television […]
By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut
Are you having trouble understanding what’s going on in Lebanon? Last summer there was war with Israel. All winter and spring the country has been in a political crisis between the government and Hizballah. And now all of a sudden there is some mystery jihadi group staging an uprising in a Palestinian […]
On Friday night, I held a screening of All the Presidents Men — the Watergate movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford — for a group of Syrian and Palestinian writers whom I’ve been training to be journalists here in Damascus. As expected, they all got a few giggles out of the impossibly ideal conditions […]
Last week in Damascus, I accompanied a teenage Iraqi friend — the sister-in-law of a former translator of mine — as she enrolled in a private school for girls in the Old City. The occasion should have been cause for celebration. Zamzam and her family are refugees from Baghdad, where for over a year it’s […]
US Ambassador Feltman with with Lebanese-American Evacuees Last Summer
I went up to the American embassy yesterday to add more pages to my passport, and absent-minded as I am, was surprised to find it closed for Washington’s Birthday. Of course, it’s appropriate that State Department facilities abroad honor our first president, but all these holidays make […]