News

Friday, November 8, 2019

Indigenous Peoples and Borders Symposium at Columbia 11-12 November will be live streamed here.

David L. Phillips interviewed on WorldAffairs
Tuesday, November 5, 2019

The withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria has had grave repercussions for the security and stability of the entire region. The Turkish military has invaded northern Syria, killing dozens of Kurdish civilians and forcing over 200,000 Kurds to flee. In the absence of US troops, Russian and Syrian troops have rushed in to fill the power vacuum. Meanwhile, hundreds of ISIS fighters have escaped detention.

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Trump's peripatetic Syria policy zigzagged again over the weekend. After announcing that the U.S. would withdraw from Northern Syria, Trump changed course, announcing: "We've secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we're going to be protecting it, and we'll be deciding what we're going to do with it in the future."
 

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan protected Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - and U.S. President Donald Trump should have known.

In his national address announcing that U.S. Special Forces killed Baghdadi, Trump commended Turkey while turning a blind eye to Turkey’s collusion with ISIS.

While Trump thanked “the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us,” he downplayed the importance of intelligence provided by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But the SDF’s information was critical to the mission.

Institute for the Study of Human Rights honors 2019 Native American Heritage Month at Columbia University
Thursday, October 31, 2019
The Institute for the Study of Human Rights is pleased to announce that, through its Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program, it is launching the electronic edition of its recent publication, Global Indigenous Youth: Through Their Eyes, in honor of Native American Heritage Month. The electronic version of the whole book and, also, its chapters individually, has been posted on Columbia University’s Academic Commons.