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 […]
Photo by Newsha Tavakolian
The only Valentine I received yesterday from a member of the female persuasion was a telephone call from a 13 year-old Shia girl from south Beirut named Fatima.
I’d met Fatima and her family last summer during the war with Israel when they were living as refugees with some twenty other people in […]
Here’s at least one good thing that happened in the midst of yesterday’s sectarian madness in Beirut. The Lebanese army got involved. When the quarrel between Sunni students and Shia students that broke out at Beirut Arab University turned into full-scale street fighting, the Lebanese army began sealing off surrounding neighborhoods. They made arrests. They […]
For the moment there’s lots of ink being spilled in local newspapers about the possibility that Iran and Saudi Arabia might be able to broker some kind of deal between Lebanon’s government and opposition. More power to them. Though it’s unlikely that Lebanon’s internal problems can be settled for good without a full scale regional […]
The one-day general strike enforced today by Lebanon’s Hizballah-led opposition turned out to be much more aggressive and effective than expected. Not that the majority of Lebanese necessarily wanted to stay away from work. They just didn’t have a choice. Opposition activists cut the country’s major highways and the main roads into Beirut with an […]
Dear Friends,
So I’ve spent more than a month in Northern Iraq, during which time I’ve had nothing published. One of the more historic events I’ve ever witnessed — the Iraqi elections — has come and gone and I don’t have a printed word to show for it. Time magazine takes my stories, edits them, fact […]