Last month marked 10 years since the beginning of the Syrian uprising when peaceful protesters, galvanised by the Arab Spring, went out on to the streets demanding freedom from an authoritarian regime and were met with bullets. President Bashar al-Assad vowed to crush dissent. In doing...

In December 2010, protests erupted in Tunisia, triggering similar demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa, including in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Ten years since the start of the Arab Spring, photographers who captured the years of uprising reflect on what they saw and what...

 It’s nearly dawn and Zainab Amjad has been up all night working on an oil rig in southern Iraq. She lowers a sensor into the black depths of a well until sonar waves detect the presence of the crude that fuels her country's economy. Elsewhere in the oil-rich province of Basra,...

Five years ago, Tareq Alaows crossed the Mediterranean in a flimsy rubber dinghy and trekked north through the Balkans toward Germany, fleeing the civil war in his homeland of Syria to seek a safe haven. Since then, the 31-year-old has learned fluent German, found a steady job — and has...

Syrian refugee Fatima Hussein Al Ahmad, a mother of four, lives on a farm with 50 other workers in Sahba, Jordan. COVID-19 travel restrictions meant that didn’t work for two months in 2020, and feeding her family became a daily struggle.  Al Ahmad and her husband pick peaches and...

Filled with great hope, Moroccan women stranded in refugee camps in Syria, especially at the northeastern al-Hol camp, are patiently waiting for their travel visas to get approved so they can return home. Al-Hol camp, located some 45 kilometers east of Hasakeh, is sheltering around...

Houssam puts the diesel stove in the corner of the house as if it were an unnecessary piece of his home furniture. He has long waited to get his annual share of diesel that does not exceed 100 liters, but like any other person from Idlib or Damascus, he does not have money to buy it despite the...

The sexual exploitation of women in Syria is nothing new — but it has increased as predators take advantage of social media and the ongoing conflict to pursue their victims. A number of initiatives are fighting back. Like most girls her age, 19-year-old Nour* was blinded by love for her...

A six-year-old Syrian girl, who lost her left leg three years ago in an airstrike by the Bashar al-Assad regime in Idlib, hopes to get a prosthetic leg and be able to walk again. Esra Salih and her family left their home in the village of Harbil in the north of Aleppo province in 2015 and...

Inside a dusty and dark workshop on the banks of the Jaghjagh river in northeast Syria, Misak Antranik Petros uses an ancient pottery wheel to throw different shapes from clay. The 85-year-old Syrian potter of Armenian origin said his family has practised the craft for more than 450 years....

Evacuated Syrian civilians from the city of Aleppo long to return to their peaceful life before being forced to leave their homes due to besieging regime forces four years ago. The Bashar al-Assad regime imposed a blockade on approximately 300,000 civilians in the eastern districts of the...

To dodge skyrocketing prices for animal fodder in Syria's last major rebel bastion, farmer Ayman Ibrahim has turned to an aquatic fern used as a fertiliser in Asian rice paddies. Azolla, which looks more like a pond weed than a fern, is regarded as an invasive plant in much of the world but...

Dr. Adnan Jasem had every reason to leave war-torn Syria after surviving a bomb blast that broke his legs four years ago and receiving job offers from abroad. Still, Jasem stayed, committed to treating the people in his homeland. It was no surprise that he would be on the front lines...

Anwar al-Bunni had only been in Germany a couple of months when he walked into a shop and found himself face to face with the man he believes had interrogated and jailed him nearly a decade earlier. Both men were buying groceries in a Turkish shop near the gates of Marienfelde, the Berlin...

Strolling through the alleyways of war-torn Syria's capital, Rania Kataf snaps photos of the city's famed houses, capturing their nooks and crannies for posterity. After seeing how vulnerable they had become during the country's devastating civil war, the 35-year-old began creating a...

In 2014, the remaining staff of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, fled their beloved gene bank in Tel Hadia, 20 miles south of Aleppo. Syria’s civil war, which had broken out three years earlier, had finally made the staffing of the facility...

Turkish Red Crescent extended a helping hand to 18-year-old Abdullah Abu al-Homsi, who suffers from a physical and mental disability following an attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. In an interview with Anadolu Agency on the occasion of the International Day for People with...

Mohammed Mostafa al-Mohammed started studying medicine in rebel-held northern Syria to help the victims of war, but instead he has graduated into a world battling the novel coronavirus pandemic. The 29-year-old graduate from an opposition-backed university had expected to be tending to the...

They may be scarred, but nothing, not even torture, bombing or exile, could break them. As the Arab Spring revolts swept through the Middle East and North Africa region like a wildfire, thousands of young Syrians joined protests in March 2011 demanding change in a nation ruled by the family...

When Syrian authorities said they would allow returns to the war-ravaged Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in southern Damascus, Issa al-Loubani rushed to sign up and quickly started repairing his home. Hundreds of former residents have already requested permission to go back to the...