Media
- Foreign Policy: Breaking The Arab News (Sultan al Qassemi, 2 August)
“While civil war rages on the Syrian battlefield between regime loyalists and myriad rebel factions, another battle is taking place in the media world. Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, the two Gulf-based channels that dominate the Arabic news business, have moved to counter Syrian regime propaganda, but have ended up distorting the news almost as badly as their opponents”
Egypt
- BBC: US defence chief Leon Panetta visits Egypt (Joan Soley, 31 July)
- Reuters: Islamists kill 15 Egyptians, Israel strikes attackers (Shaimaa Fayed, 5 August)
- The Guardian: Egypt swears in first post-revolution cabinet with plenty of old guard (Abdel-Rahman Hussein, 2 August)
“Of major concern to the US is the Muslim Brotherhood's public hostility to Israel. The Israeli government is worried that the Islamist group will want to tear up the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979, as the first Arab country to do so.”
“The attack was the first major security emergency for Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, who summoned his military council. Egyptian state television and Israeli military officials said an Islamist militant group was behind the assault.”
“The first post-transitional Egyptian cabinet was officially sworn in Thursday amid criticism it contained too many old regime figures and further underlined the power the military still wields in post-revolution Egypt.”
Israel
- Haaretz: Thousands of Israelis take part in separate social protest rallies in Tel Aviv (Ilan Lior, Gili Cohen and Or Kashti, 4 August)
"This isn't only a young people's campaign," said students' union chairman and social activist Itzik Shmuli at a news conference yesterday. "It's the campaign of everyone who bears the economic, social and defense burden - everyone who cares how this country will look in a few years."
Syria
- The Guardian: Al-Qaida turns tide for rebels in battle for eastern Syria (Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, 30 July)
- Agence Global: The Kurds Stir the Regional Pot (Patrick Seal, 31 July)
- The Guardian: ">Syria's video activists give revolution the upper hand in media war (Luke Harding, 1 August)
- Foreign Policy: Kofi Annan's bitter resignation and the collapse of Obama's Syria policy (Wil Inboden, 3 August)
“They call themselves the ghuraba'a, or "strangers", after a famous jihadi poem celebrating Osama bin Laden's time with his followers in the Afghan mountains, and they are one of a number of jihadi organisations establishing a foothold in the east of the country now that the conflict in Syria has stretched well into its second bloody year.”
“these events have fired the ambitions of some Kurdish militants who imagine that a Kurdish Regional Government might now come to birth in northern Syria, on the model of the one in northern Iraq.”
“Across Syria hundreds of video activists – most of them young, male, and technologically savvy – have joined the revolution against the Syrian government. "The regime is fighting the people in two ways. One is with the army. The other is with the media," Yahya Abdulrahman, a physics student from Aleppo University explained.”
"The policy seems to have thus far consisted of a combination of sternly-worded denunciations, persistent outsourcing of international legitimacy to Russia and China, and belated, unenthusiastic, and possibly ineffective provisions of non-lethal aid to some Syria rebels for communications and logistics."
Yemen
- BBC: Yemenis question US strategy in fight with al-Qaeda (Natalia Antelava, 3 August)
"Khaled, a young tribesman from Marib province, ...is adamant that killing people without trial or solid evidence is wrong. "We were against Osama Bin Laden because he killed people without putting them on trial, and now they [the Americans] are doing the same here," he says."
