While the desperate flight of Syrians from their country's war was dominating news bulletins this summer, yet another diplomatic push to end the four-year-old conflict was quietly running into the sand. That largely unnoticed failure has reinforced the view amongst Syria experts...

 One little boy in a red T-shirt, lying face down, drowned, on a Turkish beach, is a tragedy. More than 200,000 dead in Syria, 4 million fleeing refugees and 7.6 million displaced from their homes are statistics. But they represent a collective failure of massive proportions. For four...

Libya's official government is struggling to woo oil majors in a bid to control oil revenue and force a rival Tripoli government into a U.N. peace deal because foreign clients are wary of breaking with the established state energy firm in the capital. The battle over Libya's oil resources...

International diplomacy efforts to find a political solution in Syria have yet to bear fruit as the civil war in the country entered its fifth year in March 2015. In an attempt to find common ground with other countries pursuing contrary policies, and as one of the leading actors in this...

The first visit of a top Syrian official to a Gulf Arab state in more than four years is the strongest sign yet of a new diplomatic push to end the Syrian war, but there are still huge hurdles to face before any peace process can begin. Diplomacy has so far been a total failure...

US Secretary of State John Kerry sought to assure Middle East allies that the Iran nuclear deal would make them safer, as he began a regional tour in the Egyptian capital on Sunday. Kerry met his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry to patch up troubled relations between the two countries with a...

By Hassan Hassan ( The National )- Consider two heart-wrenching scenes that recently emerged from Syria. The first one is of children lining up behind 25 soldiers in the historic city of Palmyra, pointing pistols at the soldiers’ heads. The second is of a child killed in his Aleppo home by a...

(By Abdullah al-Ghadawi; Translation by Yusra Ahmed) A prominent figure in the Syrian National Coalition found that a hidden decisions to divide Syria has been taken by external countries, as it seems to be one of the best option to resolve the Syrian crisis amid the current situation and lack...

  By Labib Al Nahhas Labib Al Nahhas is head of foreign political relations for Ahrar al-Sham. (Washington Post)- As has become obvious, the Obama administration’s response to the Syrian conflict is an abject failure. No clear strategy has been determined; the administration’s “red...

Momentum that has swept Syrian rebels to a series of swift victories over President Bashar Assad appears to have slowed in two major attacks aimed at capturing the cities of Aleppo in the north and Deraa in the south. The reasons include a determined military effort by the government and its...

(Reuters)-   The latest series of WikiLeaks cables have once again embarrassed the Saudi government and forced it on to the diplomatic defensive. The cables, over half a million documents said to have come from the Saudi Foreign Ministry, contain titillating details about how Riyadh...

 By Menekse Toyay  The military agreement signed by Turkey and Qatar in December, whose details became public this month, has symbolic and material implications for security in the Gulf region. Some experts say the impetus behind the agreement were the conflicts in Iraq, Syria,...

The United States and its allies are weighing the possibility that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, under growing military pressure, may soon narrow his focus on defense of more limited areas of the country, the top U.S. general said on Wednesday. Losses in the north, east and south have put...

Steady advances by insurgents on key fronts in Syria mean President Bashar al-Assad is under more military pressure than at any point in the four-year-old war. Losses in the north, east and south to groups including al Qaeda's Syrian arm and Islamic State may test Assad's hold...

Almost a year after Islamic State's shock capture of Mosul, Iraq's second city, the black flags of the jihadis have been raised over Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province to the west of Baghdad, seat of Iraq’s increasingly theoretical central government. Nobody talks of Mosul or recapturing it...

When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi dispatched fighter jets this year against Islamic State targets in Libya in retaliation for the beheading of 21 Copts, he sent a powerful message to his country's Christian minority. Copts have long complained of discrimination under...

When Lebanon's Hezbollah first joined Syria's war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, its role was a closely guarded secret. Today, as Hezbollah plants its flag in land won from rebels north of Damascus, its role could hardly be more public. And for Syria's increasingly embattled...

While hosting the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Washington and at Camp David this week, President Barack Obama faces a hard sell: assuring the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia that the United States has an Iran policy that encompasses their...

The long-planned spring battle of Qalamoun - between Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces on one hand, and Syrian rebels on the other hand - started last weekend. Though the Assad regime and Hezbollah are striving for a victory to regain momentum, it will be a lengthy and...

The Saudi king's absence from a regional summit to be hosted by President Barack Obama shows how Gulf states, displeased by what they see as U.S. indifference to Iranian meddling in the Arab world, may hesitate to bless any nuclear deal with Tehran. Analysts and diplomats in...