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...

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...

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...