A large grave was found in the Sinjar region.

My days as apologist for Donald Trump’s backsliding on his electoral campaign promise of a new direction in foreign policy are over. From being the solution, he has become an integral part of the problem. And with his bigger than life ego, petulance and...

What can we learn from the battle of Mosul, now projected at over seven months? That the USA (other than endless war) has no idea what it is doing, what it is up against, and what victory would even look like against ISIS. ISIS took the Mosul region in six days with a...

So how the hell did it all start? Last week I tried to describe the 1948 war, starting from the shooting at a Jewish bus on the morrow of the UN partition resolution. Some readers dispute the timing. They insist that the war started on May 15, on the morrow of the...

It says something about the complexity of language (and me perhaps) that I took so long to realize that Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, which I found off-putting from the start, consists of the same words as the name of the pre-World War II...

Militants have been hanging corpses from utility poles as a warning to civilians trying to flee Mosul.

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Human whats? In the Middle East and elsewhere, the Trump administration has begun to signal that human rights aren’t exactly on its agenda. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken the lead in this process in a round of...

As I write this, two key questions remain unanswered, and a third mostly unasked, about a deadly daybreak attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a northwest Syrian city of (pre-war) 50,000. Hundreds were wounded and as many as 100 killed, apparently chemical weaponry...

President Donald Trump has launched an attack on a Syrian air base in retaliation for the alleged sarin gas attack supposedly carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s government on Islamist rebels in Idlib. The irony is this contradicts every statement he ever made about...

Militants shot down a military helicopter over Mosul on Thursday. The first since operations to recapture Mosul began.