"ON BOTH sides of the fragile border that divides Syria and Iraq runs Al-Hamad, the great Syrian desert, a large semi-arid plain. It runs from the outskirts of Baghdad through the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi into Syria, where it proceeds beneath the historical territory of the Kurds to the Syrian cities of Deir ez Zur and Raqqa. Across the desert, and along the Euphrates river, run pipelines that draw gas and oil from the depths to the cities that ring it. Otherwise the desert is quiet, and empty."
"Looking back to the "first" Arab Awakening, which began in the mid-19th century, can be illuminating. That awakening took the form of an intellectual revolution in which a wide array of Arab thinkers started questioning the control of distant Ottoman despots over their nations and criticizing their own limited contact with the outside world. Their calls for intellectual, economic, and political change laid the groundwork for a new Arab world, eventually resulting in a wave of independence struggles in the 1940s and 1950s."
"It is important to note two critical things about this ranking. The first is that it focuses on change in coverage of conflict, not the raw volume of that coverage itself. It is obviously not news that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are all still undergoing intense conflict -- the policymaking question is whether they are getting any better (at least in the eyes of the news media). Thus, Syria, which ranks No. 2 out of all countries in terms of total raw volume of conflict, actually had the greatest decrease in coverage of that conflict in 2013 (despite a major chemical weapons attack in August 2013) and thus is green in the map above. The second thing to keep in mind is that this ranking combines all forms of conflict, both domestic and foreign. France's significant increase in conflict comes from a combination of domestic strife from increasing immigrant unrest, anti-Semitism, class wars, and societal fractionalization -- but also its foreign military interventions in Africa, from Mali to Central African Republic."
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