The Mosaic Rooms are delighted to host an evening with Charles Glass who will be in conversation with Martin Woollacott, to discuss the launch his new book ‘Syria Burning‘, published by OR Books.

Since its onset during the Arab Spring in 2011, the Syrian civil war has claimed in excess of 200,000 lives, with an estimated 8 million Syrians –  more than a third of the country’s population – forced to flee their homes. A stalemate now exists in the country with the government of Bashar al-Assad maintaining its grip on most of the cities in the west, while large swathes of the countryside in the north and east are under the control of the Islamic fundamentalist groups ISIS and the Nusra Front. The Caliphate announced by ISIS in the summer of 2014 occupies some 35% of the country, as well as a vast territory across the border in Iraq.

The nuances of this conflict have never been well-understood in the West, least of all, it seems, by governments in the US and Europe, who anticipating Assad’s sudden departure, made it a condition of any negotiated settlement. The consequences of that miscalculation, Charles Glass contends in this illuminating and concise survey, have contributed greatly to the unfolding disaster that we witness today. Syria Burning melds together reportage, analysis and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict, situating it clearly in the overall crisis of the region.

Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, he has reported extensively from the Middle East, and travelled frequently in Syria, over several decades. Glass has served as correspondent for Newsweek magazine and The Observer. For more than thirty years, he has been a regular contributor and columnist in newspapers and magazines in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Martin Woollacott is a former foreign editor and international affairs columnist at The Guardian, is now a leader writer on the paper. He was a correspondent in Vietnam from 1970 to 1975, and later worked in South Asia and the Middle East. He covered the Indian emergency, the Iranian revolution, and Iraqi Kurdistan during the first Gulf war, among other stories. He has written one book (After Suez: Adrift in the American Century, IB Tauris, 2006)

FREE, rsvp@mosaicrooms.org