Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud is a retired Saudi Arabian diplomat, military officer, and government official who served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is a member of the House of Saud. From 2005 to 2015 he served as secretary general of the National Security Council, and was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. From 2014 to 2015 he was King Abdullah's special envoy.
Al Arabiya is a Saudi state-owned international Arabic news television channel. It is based in Riyadh and is a subsidiary of MBC Group.
Saud bin Faisal Al Saud, also known as Saud Al Faisal, was a Saudi Arabian statesman and diplomat who served as the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia from 1975 to 2015. A member of the Saudi royal family, he was the longest-serving foreign minister in world history.
Walid Mohi Edine al Muallem was a Syrian diplomat and Ba'ath Party member who served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2020 and as deputy prime minister from 2012 to 2020.
Fawas Akhras is a Syrian–English cardiologist known for being the father-in-law of Bashar al-Assad and chairman of the British Syrian Society.
Al Akhbar is a daily Arabic language newspaper published in a semi tabloid format in Beirut. The newspaper's writers have included Ibrahim Al Amine, As'ad AbuKhalil, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Sharmine Narwani, Pierre Abi Saab, and Amer Mohsen. Until 2015, it also had an English version published on the Internet.
Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun was the Grand Mufti of Syria from 2005 to 2021, after which the post was abolished.
The Barack Obama administration's involvement in the Middle East was greatly varied between the region's various countries. Some nations, such as Libya and Syria, were the subject of offensive action at the hands of the Obama administration, while nations such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia received arms deliveries. Notable achievements of the administration include inhibiting the Iranian nuclear program, while his handling of certain situations, such as the Syrian civil war, were highly criticized.
Arab News is an English-language daily newspaper published in Saudi Arabia. It is published from Riyadh. The target audiences of the paper, which is published in broadsheet format, are businessmen, executives and diplomats.
International reactions to the Syrian civil war ranged from support for the government to calls for the government to dissolve. The Arab League, United Nations and Western governments in 2011 quickly condemned the Syrian government's response to the protests which later evolved into the Syrian civil war as overly heavy-handed and violent. Many Middle Eastern governments initially expressed support for the government and its "security measures", but as the death toll mounted, especially in Hama, they switched to a more balanced approach, criticizing violence from both government and protesters. Russia and China vetoed two attempts at United Nations Security Council sanctions against the Syrian government.
Brown Lloyd James is a public relations firm with offices in New York, Washington, D.C., London, and Doha.
The Syrian peace process is the ensemble of initiatives and plans to resolve the Syrian civil war, which has been ongoing in Syria since 2011 and has spilled beyond its borders. The peace process has been moderated by the Arab League, the UN Special Envoy on Syria, Russia and Western powers. The negotiating parties to end the conflict are typically representatives of the Syrian Ba'athist government and Syrian opposition, while the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria is usually excluded at the insistence of Turkey. Radical Salafist forces including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have not engaged in any contacts on peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Al Eqtisadiah is a Saudi daily business newspaper, published by Saudi Research and Publishing Company. It has been in circulation since 1962.
The 10 May 2012 Damascus bombings were carried out using a pair of car bombs allegedly detonated by suicide bombers outside a military intelligence complex in Damascus, Syria. Combined, the perpetrators detonated more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb) of explosives, tearing the facade off a 10-story building. With 55 people confirmed dead and almost 400 others injured, the attack was the deadliest bombing to date in the Syrian Civil War, though later outpaced by other events.
The Al-Qubeir massacre, also known as the Hama massacre, occurred in the small village of Al-Qubeir near Hama, Syria, on 6 June 2012 during the country's ongoing civil conflict. Al-Qubeir is described as a Sunni farming settlement surrounded by Alawite villages in the central province of Hama. According to preliminary evidence, troops had surrounded the village which was followed by pro-government Shabiha militia entering the village and killing civilians with "barbarity," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council.
On 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing what it called the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures and ministries and from companies including Finmeccanica and Brown Lloyd James dating from August 2006 to March 2012. The emails were hacked by Anonymous before being given to WikiLeaks for release.
Foreign involvement in the Syrian civil war refers to political, military and operational support to parties involved in the ongoing conflict in Syria that began in March 2011, as well as active foreign involvement. Most parties involved in the war in Syria receive various types of support from foreign countries and entities based outside Syria. The ongoing conflict in Syria is widely described as a series of overlapping proxy wars between the regional and world powers, primarily between the United States and Russia as well as between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia–Syria relations refer to bilateral and economic relations between Saudi Arabia and the Syrian Arab Republic. Diplomatic ties between these two countries of the Middle East have long been strained by the major events in the region. Saudi Arabia has an embassy in Damascus, and Syria has an embassy in Riyadh. Both countries are members of the Arab League and share close cultural ties.
The Vienna peace talks for Syria, as of 14 November 2015 known as the talks of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), were negotiations of foreign powers that began in Vienna, Austria in October 2015 at the level of foreign ministers, to resolve the conflict in Syria, after unsuccessful previous Syrian peace initiatives.
Pranay Gupte is an American journalist of Indian origin, writer of biographical and non-fiction books, documentary film producer, and television and radio commentator. He worked for many years as a New York Times staff reporter and international correspondent in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and later as a global affairs columnist for Newsweek. In 1991, he founded The Earth Times, a newspaper that focused on environmental affairs, economic development, and issues relating to population and family planning. He has written many books, including Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi, which appeared in 1992 and in a second edition in 2009.
