• OPINION

  Philippine insurgency stems from lack of compromise

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 28/06/2017

  » A month ago, hardly anybody outside the Philippines had ever heard of Marawi. Now it's the latest front in the war against the Islamic State (IS). More evidence, if you needed it, that the terrorism associated with the IS will go on long after Mosul and Raqqa have been liberated and "Caliph Ibrahim" (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) has been killed or captured.

• OPINION

  A tale of two bombs -- in Manchester and Bangkok

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/05/2017

  » There were two bombs on Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber named Salman Abedi and claimed by the Islamic State (IS). The other was in Thailand, and injured 22 people at a military-linked hospital in Bangkok; nobody has claimed responsibility yet. But what happened afterwards was very different.

• OPINION

  Turkey is swiftly heading towards a regime of terror

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/11/2016

  » 'In Turkey, we are progressively putting behind bars all people who take the liberty of voicing even the slightest criticism of the government," wrote author Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's first Nobel Prize winner. "Freedom of thought no longer exists. We are distancing ourselves at high speed from a state of law and heading towards a regime of terror" that is driven by "the most ferocious hatred".

• OPINION

  China and its repression of the Uighurs

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/08/2018

  » Two weeks ago, Prof Gay McDougall, co-chair of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, alleged that up to a million people belonging to the Uighur and other Muslim minority groups in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang have been detained in concentration camps to be "re-educated" about religion.

• OPINION

  Silly buggers: Russia, US play chicken

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/06/2017

  » I don't remember which navy I was in when I first heard the term "silly buggers", but the meaning was clear. It included some sensible exercises like "man overboard" drills, but the heart and soul of the game was high-speed manoeuvres by ships travelling in close company. These sometimes got quite exciting, because ships don't have brakes.

• OPINION

  Reunification of Syria under Assad

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/01/2017

  » So far the end-game in Syria has played out in an entirely predictable way. All of Aleppo is back in the Syrian government's hands, that decisive victory for President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers has been followed by a ceasefire, and the Russians are now organising a peace conference in Astana, Kazakhstan for later this month.

• OPINION

  The rise of Islamic State: Is it over?

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 15/12/2017

  » Late last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the leaders of Iran, Turkey and Syria, allegedly to discuss a final peace settlement in the Syrian civil war. On Monday he was in Syria to announce a partial withdrawal of Russian troops from the country because they had inflicted a "total rout" on the jihadist militants of the Islamic State (IS). Is the war really over?

• OPINION

  Is the Islamic State really on the verge of being crushed?

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 08/09/2016

  » The word on the streets is that the Islamic State (IS or Isil to its many enemies) is going under. In January it lost control of the city of Ramadi in Iraq after a long siege; in June it also lost Fallujah. In March it lost Palmyra to Syrian government troops, and last month it lost Manbij in northern Syria to the US-backed Syrian Kurds after another long siege.

• OPINION

  Iran, Israel is a panto crisis, not a real war

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/04/2024

  » Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's "Supreme Leader", is embarrassed and humiliated by the complete failure of his drone and missile attack on Israel, but does US President Joe Biden have the empathy to feel sorry for his old adversary in his time of trouble?

• OPINION

  Democracy survives crucial test in Senegal

  Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/04/2024

  » The crisis in Senegal, the one country in West Africa that has never had a military coup, has passed. Few people outside Africa were paying close attention to it, but I'm sure you will be pleased to know that democracy has survived.

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