Fatma Emin's life changed forever when her husband died in the Syrian war, killed by ISIS in a land mine attack. It triggered a series of events that would bring her to Jinwar, a village built and inhabited by women -- a refuge for Syrian women and their children fleeing a rigid family...

When the little known Islamist group National Thowfeek Jamaath launched a series of suicide-bombing attacks targeting churches and hotels on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, triggering one of the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11, many counter-terrorism experts suspected the guidance of an unseen...

Their images are by now well known: the thousands of women and children who emerged from ISIS’s last stronghold, now housed in the al Hol detention camp in Northwest Syria. According to Kurdish forces, these are the wives and children of foreign fighters, and their future hangs in the balance....

he Trump administration on Friday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the father of Hoda Muthana, the American-born woman who fled Alabama in 2014 to marry an Islamic State fighter in Syria.  Hoda's father, Ahmed Ali Muthana – a former diplomat at the United Nations for...

Germany has stopped processing some applications for asylum by Syrian refugees, pending a new assessment of the security situation in the war-torn country, according to a report on Saturday. German media group Funke, quoting the interior ministry, said decisions on some asylum applications...

Africa has a long history of strongmen who have spent decades in power. But since the 2011 Arab Spring, no less than 10 of them have been toppled, with two – Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir – forced out in April. January 2011: Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and the...

Because of the shortage of gasoline and the almost total inability to provide solutions, Assad’s regime is under increasing pressure at a time when there is talk of an international and regional desire for a political solution in accordance with the Security Council resolutions. Analysts...

The revelation that a New Zealand nurse has been detained in Syria for five years has prompted tensions between the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the New Zealand government, with the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, criticising the aid agency for releasing details of the...

A Tajik man who joined Islamic State said many foreigners who enlisted in its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria were jailed or killed for trying to leave. The 28-year-old, who once drove a taxi in Moscow, said he handed himself over to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a...

On March 31, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, pledged to bring home all the children of Chechens who fought for ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Kadyrov is known to be a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The announcement echoed the Russian Foreign Ministry’s very public critique of...

In March, President Donald Trump's administration lavished praise on the Kingdom of Morocco for taking back eight Moroccans who had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State terror organization.  "Repatriating foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin is the best...

Could Israeli air strikes in Syria trigger war between Israel and Russia?   Israel remains determined to continue pounding Iranian forces in Syria in a bid to keep Tehran’s forces away from Israel’s northern border. At the same time, Russia has thousands of troops in Syria that could...

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria last December, claiming that the extremist group Islamic State had been defeated. Beijing sees the situation in Syria as an opportunity to benefit economically, expand its influence in the Middle East and even...

From the Australian children begging to return, to the broken bodies of Kurdish soldiers and the broken politics of Syria, IS's vengeful ideology is still blighting the lives of thousands. The small Australian enclave in al-Hawl camp in northern Syria lies on the edge of a giant sea...

The U.S.-led coalition says its Syrian allies have successfully dealt with an “incident” at a detention center in northeastern Syria which activists described as an attempted prison break by Islamic State militants. Col. Scott Rawlinson, coalition spokesman, said Saturday all detainees were...

Hoda Muthana is pushing a stroller in the middle of a conflict zone here and if there's a textbook example of extremism, this probably isn't it.  That's partly because of what is in Muthana's arms: Adam, her 18-month-old son. He’s a cute kid. Bright brown eyes, like his mom. His tiny...

They climbed along a jagged pathway on the edge of Mount Baghouz, a monolithic cliff overlooking the last patch of land held by the Islamic State, carrying with them whatever they could hold. Men, women and children arrived by the thousands in recent weeks, surrendering to the Syrian...

After years of aerial bombardment by coalition forces and intense ground battles fought by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria (ISIS) has been ousted from every inch of territory in Syria. Although analysts are right to caution that this does not mean the...

The women here are sick, tired, afraid and worried. Others are injured, utterly at their wits' end or in mourning. All they have is the children they are with, and all they want is the children they are not with. When you ask a woman how many children she has, it’s always minus one or...

The bubble under which President Trump has situated himself came to light during a Thursday discussion with A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. Following up on a conversation with Trump from last year, Sulzberger pressed the president on worldwide threats to journalists and...