After 18 months of threats, Turkey's president warned Tuesday that his troops could attack Kurdish-held areas of northeast Syria "very soon". Why would Turkey lead such a cross-border incursion, what do Syria's Kurds want, and how is the United States -- an ally of both sides -- trying to...

Murdered children are no longer news. International media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, where child deaths reached an all-time high last year, is sporadic at best. In Yemen it is estimated that at least 85,000 under-fives have died of starvation since 2015, a figure that numbs the mind....

The Syrian war was largely over by the end of 2018, but the country remains a bleeding hotspot that can threaten Israeli and American interests. There is one way to minimize the risks of further instability, give hope to war-weary Syrians and meet big-power strategic objectives: forging an...

Saudi Arabia is putting renewed pressure on its ties with tribal groups in Syria as it continues to support those trying to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In a visit in late June to Syrian territories controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance fighting against the...

Britain and France have reportedly agreed to send additional troops to Syria at the request of Donald Trump‘s administration. Although the number of special forces troops operating in Syria has never been made public, both countries are preparing to send an additional 10-15 per cent of...

The noose strangling the flow of oil to Syria tightened a notch last week, when British Royal Marines boarded a tanker carrying Iranian crude into the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar. With Syria’s Iranian supplies halted, the flow will have to come from somewhere else, and the...

Were the Israelis and Russians to come to blows, or if Moscow were to seriously threaten military force against Israel, could the United States risk a grave loss of prestige by not intervening to back its longtime ally? Could Russia—whose Syrian intervention is a proud symbol of its reborn...

 When top national security officials from Russia, Israel and the U.S. gather for a rare summit starting Monday, the focus will be on the country not in the room: Iran. Amid rising regional tensions, the meeting is a critical opportunity to hash out how they view the future of Iran’s...

Two years ago, almost to the day, a convoy of 20 vehicles drove toward a stretch of desert in southern Syria, near the Jordanian border. This terrain was unremarkable but for the fact that it encircled a military base known as al-Tanf where 200 American soldiers, most of them Marines...

After a month of bombing and shelling in the last remaining opposition stronghold in Syria, Turkey and Russia this week agreed another ceasefire to cover Idlib and northern Hama, where relations between Moscow and Ankara have been tested once again. "At Russia’s initiative, with the...

After losing her husband, a son and her home to Syria's eight-year war, Yusra al-Shomali and her daughters found refuge in rebel-held territory near the Turkish border. But as a Syrian army offensive intensifies, their safety may be put at risk. Shomali's experience of fear, siege, hunger,...

Iraqi farmer Shaker Salih says he feared Islamic State, but feared its defeat even more. His problem is persuading people to believe that he did not support the jihadists. When Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from his home town in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, Salih left with the...

Children of foreign Isis fighters being held in Syrian camps are “among the world’s most vulnerable” and should be returned to their countries of origin, according to the United Nations. Some 29,000 foreign children are currently languishing in squalid camps in Syria, while the countries...

A Syrian government offensive to capture the northern province of Idlib has killed dozens of civilians and forced more than 200,000 people to flee over the past month, leading to fears of a major humanitarian crisis in the last rebel-held bastion. The Syrian army, backed by its ally Russia,...

A Syrian political dissident has been on a hunger strike in Istanbul, Turkey for 11 days after Canada failed to follow through on his application for asylum for himself and his family, who he has not seen in years. Ammar al-Sheikh Haidar, the brother of Ali Haidar, Syria’s former minister...

Syrian security officers hung Muhannad Ghabbash from his wrists for hours, beat him bloody, shocked him with electricity and stuck a gun in his mouth. Mr. Ghabbash, a law student from Aleppo, repeatedly confessed his actual offense: organizing peaceful antigovernment protests. But the...

After eight months of relative calm, Syria's northwestern province of Idlib is once again a theater for bloody military operations: heavy bombardment, airstrikes and waves of civilian displacement as Syrian government troops, backed by Russia, push their way into the rebel-held enclave in a...

Many of them were barely school age when their parents took them to the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of others were born there. The children of the group’s followers are the most vulnerable of the Islamic State’s human leftovers — the remainders of the...

A Russian-backed Syrian government offensive in the rebel-held northwest has killed dozens of people and forced more than 150,000 to flee, the biggest escalation in the war between President Bashar al-Assad and his enemies since last summer. Government barrel-bombing and Russian air strikes...

When Hassan Ahmed al-Aoul looks from his balcony in the historic Syrian city of Aleppo, little meets his gaze but ruins - great mounds of rubble where his neighbors’ houses used to stand near an old frontline. He fled the area at the start of the fighting in 2012 and returned years later...