My column* this week in The National discusses the carnage in the Syrian coastal area of Banias over the weekend committed by pro-regime militias, probably led by a Turkish man called Mihraç Ural. Ural is known for activists in the area. He leads a militia, called the Syrian...

Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the leader of Al Qaeda franchise in Iraq, dropped a bombshell Monday by announcing that Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq were to be united under a new name “Islamic State in Iraq and Sham [Levant] (ISIS)” – which can also be called Al...

    Last week, Moaz Al-Khatib recorded a video in which he addressed Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in relation to the party’s involvement in Syria. Al-Khatib's speech was moving and powerful. But Al-Khatib seemed convinced that Nasrallah was a virtuous person who could...

In this video, Syria’s Sunni cleric Sheikh Saeed Ramadan Al Bouti gives his last religious seminar in a mosque in Damascus. At 20:10 , a bomb goes off .  In the beginning of his lecture, he says this lesson marks the 200 th lesson in a series about...