The risk of premature withdrawal from Iraq is that the Iraqi Security Forces will lose critical operational and tactical support, and Daesh will seize the opportunity to reconstitute and once again terrorize the Iraqi people and state,” Dana Stroul, research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Pentagon official,

Sunni Muslims overwhelmingly perceived Assad’s totalitarian repression in sectarian terms. The assertion of Alawite power in 1966 provoked the Sunnis’ religious anxieties, as reflected in their outraged response to a 1967 article that condemned Islam as “a mummy in the museum of history.” The reaction included large protests, the arrest of

No one knows how many unarmed Alawites were killed in Syria between March 6 and 10, 2025, but Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma estimates more than three thousand. While Alawites constitute but a small religious community, perhaps 10 percent of Syria’s 15 million resident population, they suffer from a position of unique prominence and

. He reflects on the necessity of moving beyond the colonial legacy in anthropology by fostering genuine dialogue and mutual understanding between the anthropologist and the subjects of study. (22) Thus, while Westermarck’s contribution is undeniable, it must today be reinterpreted in light of contemporary demands: those of equitable representati

This ambivalence in the perception of Amazigh/Berber culture – sometimes primitive, sometimes simply different – revealed a structuring tension in colonial anthropology. Westermarck was a scholar of his time, and as such, he reproduced certain Eurocentric categories in spite of himself. As Talal Asad (14) points out, “The colonial discourse w