With the Ukraine crisis, any fleeting hope that the U.S. and Russia could soon broker a political settlement in Syria has vanished. The United States needs an alternate strategy for strengthening Syrian moderates who can resist both the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime and al-Qaeda...

 After three years of war in Syria, one of the things we have learnt is that al-Qaeda’s followers don’t really want to live in the seventh century. Their favoured social medium is Twitter, and they often use the modern vernacular when they tweet. Here is what one jihadist wrote...

As the Syrian revolution enters its fourth year, the question remains as to whether Bashar al-Assad’s regime will exit power or whether it will finally be able to eliminate the opposition and subjugate the majority revolting against it? The enormous number of daily battles...

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was  a world in which  “ the tide of war is receding ” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces....