Tom Rollins

Author

Tom Rollins

Editor-in-Chief

Tom Rollins worked as Editor-in-Chief at Syria Direct up until 2019. He previously worked as an independent journalist in Egypt and Lebanon, and has written for Al Jazeera English, IRIN and Mada Masr. His work focused on human rights, reconstruction and Palestinian refugees from Syria.

ARTICLES

As anti-refugee rhetoric escalates further, Lebanon ‘slowly moving’ towards talk of forcibly returning Syrian refugees

April 25

In Lebanon, talk of pushing Syrian refugees to go home isn’t new. However, there are now growing concerns that that tone has now shifted even harder

Thousands leave Rukban camp in largest convoy to date as Russian, Syrian pressure mounts

April 23

Monday saw the latest convoy to leave Rukban camp, an isolated informal camp settlement of mud homes housing up to 40,000 displaced Syrians on the Syrian-Jordanian border.

Syrians in former opposition pockets still using smugglers, corrupt security officials to transport themselves north amid ‘false promises’ of reconciliation

April 11

Residents of formerly opposition-held areas are paying smugglers thousands of dollars to transport them to the country’s last rebel stronghold.

New legal initiative launches for ‘invisible’ families of Syria’s countless detained and disappeared

March 28

The stories are often similar, repeated tens of thousands of times over: uniforms bursting through the door, loved ones taken away. Then, the silence.

‘When things happen in the dark, there’s a higher risk that abuses occur’: HRW’s Nadim Houry on post-IS transitional justice

March 25

Seemingly endless lines of Islamic State fighters streamed out of the group's last pocket, Baghouz, last weekend as US-backed fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces rendered t...

Final IS territory reduced to ragged strip of Euphrates river bank as SDF closes in

March 19

Backed by warplanes from the US-led anti-IS coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) advanced on a long-besieged pocket of territory held by fighters from the Islamic State (...

Turkey attempts to salvage Sochi agreement as bombing devastates Idlib

March 13

Explosion after explosion rocked the southern Idlib city, where shelling has become an almost daily feature of life.

Displaced months ago, ‘undocumented’ Palestinians in Syria’s rebel-held northwest hope for end to civil status limbo

March 04

Residents threw their bags onto the roofs of the evacuation buses, years-old rubble tumbling from their apartment blocks into the streets outside.

As IS defeat in Deir e-Zor nears, concern turns to tribal tensions, sleeper cells

February 14

Men thought to be IS fighters leave Baghouz Fawqani with their families on Wednesday. Photo by Fadel Senna/AFP. AMMAN: The murky outline of one corpse, maybe more, lies in the mi...

‘War continued through other means’: How reconstruction risks perpetuating violence in a post-war Syria

February 12

"Down with gangster rule." Graffiti in downtown Beirut, February 2. Photo by Tom Rollins for Syria Direct. When the reconstruction of downtown Beirut first began in the 1990s, on...