By  Elizabeth Tsurkov (The Forward)- Israel’s bombing campaign against dozens of Iranian, Hezbollah and Syrian Army targets across Syria last night was the most extensive Israeli operation in Israel in over 40 years. Through these strikes, Israel is signaling to Tehran that it...

By Ali Eid No Syrian is free from bad memories. I still remember when my 8-year-old daughter came back from her school in Damascus 2010. She was sad and seemed offended by her teacher for not knowing who is the 'Immortal Leader', such a new term pushed her to ask ‘What does...

Saying there are "no words" to describe a horror is infuriating. But now not saying anything has become the new way to talk about the world's nastiest war. It is essentially the job of the United Nations to find the words -- to articulate the savagery being again unleashed on the people...

Almost anything is more interesting than the massacre of civilians in Syria. Just look at today’s front pages. The Guardian leads on the slaughter of unarmed residents in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, but for the rest it’s a mix of continuing scandals in international aid charities,...

Saudi Arabia is debunking age-old stereotypes one theatrical move at a time. The significance of this remark will not be lost on those following the reforms taking place at large, primarily in Saudi but also in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region as a whole. In...

By  Yasser Ashkar The Assad regime had a dialogue with itself in Sochi. The event had more of a carnival atmosphere than that of a serious peace talks while the lives of civilians in Syria and the future of millions of Syrian refugees still hung in the balance.    There was also...

By Naser Ali (Zaman Al Wasl)- Under the title "Unarmed Combatants, Houses with Concerns and Expectations", an investigation tells the stories of the lives of a group of women of officers and militia mercenaries who have been neglected and blackmailed by state officials and institutions...

Last year Russia brokered a series of cease-fires, or “de-escalation zones,” in Syria, including one with the United States covering the southwest corner of the country. The Kremlin claimed its aim was to wind down the country’s civil war and lay the groundwork for a peace deal between the...

On Aug. 21, 2013, a Damascus suburb called Ghouta was attacked with sarin gas, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. President Barack Obama had warned that the United States would take military action if President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used chemical weapons. The attack on...

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has spent the past six years fighting a brutal civil war that has killed at least 465,000 of his own people, leveled major Syrian cities like Aleppo, displaced millions of desperate civilians, and helped trigger the worst refugee crisis since World War II....

It's very easy to look at the current military situation in Syria and conclude that Assad has won, but such a denouement of the war is simplistic. Assad has not won, but rather, if "victory" can be claimed at all, Iran and Russia are winning on Assad's behalf.   This...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- Some German provinces require refugees who want to register their children to bring documents and identity papers either from Syria or from regime embassy in Berlin. Hence refugees have two options; either to leave their children without registration which affects their...

By Mariam Elba (The Intercept)- It shouldn't be surprising that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has become an idol among white nationalists in the United States. During the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally several weeks ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, Baked...

(VOA)- As convoys of the Lebanese army on Wednesday returned from a recent operation against Islamic State militants in the border region with Syria, cheering civilians showered them with rose petals and danced around them with Lebanese flags. It was a moment for Lebanon to celebrate...

(The New York Times)- From the end of the Cold War until 2010, Syria, led first by President Hafez al-Assad and then by his son Bashar, had a uniquely flexible geopolitical position in the Arab world: Syria was an avowed enemy of Israel but directly negotiated with it. Syria claimed to be the...

By Tim Ramadan ( The Guardian )- Around three months have passed since the Syrian Democratic Forces launched a military operation to wrest back control of Raqqa from Islamic State. These forces are backed directly by the US-led international coalition, and they have so far succeeded in...

( The Daily Mail )- The jihadist takeover of Syria's key Idlib province raises the prospect that the region could become the next target of the international participants in the country's complex war. The northern province is one of only two that have fallen from regime control since the war...

( The Washington Post )- What did the CIA’s covert assistance program for Syrian rebels accomplish? Bizarrely, the biggest consequence may be that it helped trigger the Russian military intervention in 2015 that rescued President Bashar al-Assad — achieving the opposite of what the program...

By Abdul Salam Haj Bakri (Zaman Al Wasl)- The National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces has not been content with all its shortcomings on different fronts over the past years and intervened in sports to create shortcomings there too.  The free...

( The Guardian )- The liberation of Mosul is complete. Islamic State is unlikely to again govern and control large swaths of territory in the near future. While the past three years of war have been brutal, there will be some justice and respite for those who have lost friends and family to...