(Zaman Al Wasl)- Director and the former Speaker of the Syrian People's Assembly, Najdah Ismail Anzour, has attributed the sectarian tone in his film "The Blood of Palm" to pure chance.  His justification was that the actor who played the role of a cowardly soldier was by chance...

It has now been eight years since the Syrian security service threatened to cut off my hand but the psychological impact of that day still remains. My story is similar to many others I meet who have escaped the combination of tyranny and terrorism in Syria to seek out a new and safer life...

By Mozn Murshid  (Zaman al-Wasl)- “Syria is no longer a country for the poor,” says the 50-year-old woman on the phone. “Our country has oppressed us so much, professor.” Her words hurt me. For so long we heard this proverb since childhood, wherever I went I heard "Syria is...

The other day I saw a report of an airstrike hitting a medical facility in Idlib, killing a paramedic and an ambulance driver. Not a legitimate military target, but a medical facility. Then, shortly after, an airstrike hit again. Charles Lister from the Middle East Institute described it as a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- A very significant development has taken place in the last few hours where the congressional council approved one of the laws before it concerning the amendment of the Federal Aviation Administration Act and the development of its items, promising to achieve the...

Saudi Arabia confronts something of a dilemma. On the one hand, it really wants to put the squeeze on arch-rival Iran, and few things squeeze that country harder than the resumption of U.S. sanctions on its oil exports. Yet the mere prospect of taking that much oil off the market has helped to...

“Should [Iranians] begin to enrich, we’re fully prepared to respond to that as well. I’m certainly not going to share with you today precisely what our response will be. But we watch them talk. We’ve heard them say -- I hope that they’ll make a different decision, that they’ll choose a...

By Aruuke Uran Kyzy The writer currently works at TRT World Research Centre as an Associate Researcher. Her current areas of focus are Russian foreign policy, modern cultural colonization, Turkish-Iranian-Russian relations and political aspects of Russian colonialism in Central Asia and...