Syria News Wire

If you love reading Arab blogs, you need to be reading Toot. It’s not an aggregator (like Syria Planet, which simply lists every single blogpost), instead Toot handpicks its favourite Arab blogposts every day.
Membership of this exclusive club isn’t easy to achieve. And that’s all the better for the readers. Every post they recommend is [...]

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This is very very exciting news if you’re in Boston or London.
Damascus, the play by Scottish playwright David Greig is showing at the Briggs Opera House in New Hampshire. Now, as is well known, I have never been to America. But Google Maps tells me that it’s only about 100km from Boston. Well worth the journey.
In fact, it [...]

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I’ve been on a Beirut-reading binge: I’ve just finished three new books set in Beirut over the past few years, and all three have astonishingly similar endings.
Sabra Zoo
If you know me at all, you’ll know that I’ve been raving about Sabra Zoo since I got my hands on an advance copy last month. Here’s what [...]

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Current TV (Al Gore’s open-access channel) heads to Souq Al-Hamidiyeh in Damascus to take a humourous look at why Arab men hold hands.

The trouble is, it neither answers the question, nor delivers any humour. Cue lots of slow-motion shots of men walking through the souq arm-in-arm.

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…from the streets of the Old City, Damascus.

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The American University in Washington has agreed to start sending students to Damascus to study Arabic.
It is the latest sign in the thaw between the two countries. Educational ties suffered a severe blow a year ago, when American helicopters invaded eastern Syria, killing a number of civilians. The Syrian government ordered the American Cultural Centre [...]

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Angelina Jolie is continuing her global shopping trip to create the visually perfect family. Her latest stop: Syria.
Although, perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Jolie has made two visits to the country, to raise awareness of the Iraqi refugee problem. Her most recent trip was last month, when she came with her husband Brad Pitt. On [...]

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Syria’s eloquent Ambassador to the US, Imad Moustapha has taken offence to an article which I called “the best in a decade“.
In a letter to the author of the National Geographic story, Moustapha has issued a detailed critique of a list of points which he calls inaccurate. Josh Landis at Syria Comment has republished the [...]

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“This place is absolutely crawling with Muslims”.

Rachid Bouchareb follows up his influential tale of France’s hidden Algerian war veterans with a story about London after the July 2005 bombings.
It is essentially a culture-clash story – London as seen from the eyes of a foreigner. Bouchareb – himself not from London – uses two characters, one [...]

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Comedy in tragedy. Elia Suleiman’s story of a Palestinian family – from the 1948 nakba to the outbreak of the second intifada has just premiered in London’s Leicester Square to an audience of hundreds.
Resembling a beautifully shot BBC period drama, The Time That Remains starts with Nazareth’s Israeli-imposed surrender. The Suleiman family is torn apart, [...]

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