Syria

  Dark, heavy storm clouds continue to linger over the heads of many bankers worldwide, troubled by the subprime market crisis, fraud, financial havens and the plunging dollar. Lebanese banks …

Syria’s current economic performance is strong, as the country benefits from growth in exports and inflows of private investment, which helped the economy to grow at a rate of 6.2% …

For someone who has always abjured the political fray, the much beloved Lebanese diva, Fairouz, recently found herself inadvertently embroiled in the poisonous rift between Lebanon and Syria. It is …

Until recently, Syria bucked the age-old political dictum that regimes under intense external pressure halt domestic reforms until the coast is clear. The country’s 10th Five Year Plan, approved a …

Strike Damascus, bomb Tehran,” say the hawks in Washington. “No,” argue others. “Open negotiations with Damascus, bring Syria out of the cold, into the fold, and help distance Damascus from …

Damascus has taken yet another step to unpeg its currency from the US dollar by delinking the Syrian pound (SYP) from the greenback and replacing it as a foreign exchange …

If you are keeping score at home, September was a bad month for the “Axis of Evil,” especially for its junior member in Damascus. In the middle of the month, …

I hadn’t been to Gaza since January. The kidnapping of theBBC’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston on March 12 had madethe strip a no-go zone, and during the vicious rounds offactional …

Now that Paul Wolfowitz has been driven from his position at the World Bank, insiders here in Washington concur thatAmerica’s neocon moment in the Middle East is officially over. So …

The latest conspiracy theory to grip the Middle East is theShiite Crescent – an emerging Iranian-backed Shiite alliance stretching westward from Iran to Lebanon that threatensAmerica’s Sunni allies in the …