Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who suffered a stroke last year, will run for a fourth term in an election in April, Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said on Saturday. The 76-year-old leader, who has ruled the North African nation since 1999, has not yet announced his own...
An Islamist official in Libya's government and 10 other passengers and crew were killed when a military plane carrying medical patients crashed near Tunisia's capital early on Friday, officials said. The Libyan Antonov aircraft went down after the pilot tried to land in farmland...
When he was agitating for revolution, urging fellow Syrians to rise up against President Bashar al-Assad, Abdullah dreaded the midnight knock at the door from the secret police. Now that the uprising has succeeded in his home town near Aleppo, pro-democracy activists are living in fear...
Rachid Wahbi came to Syria from a Spanish slum, rushing toward death. And he didn’t plan to die alone. Facing a camera hours before the end, the bearded, 33-year-old cabdriver wore a black headdress and a black flak vest and held an AK-47 rifle. He spoke in hesitant classical...
The Damascus neighborhood known as Mezze 86 is a dense, dilapidated warren of narrow hillside streets adorned with posters bearing the face of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The presidential palace is nearby, and the area is crawling...
As the Syrian civil war got under way, a former electrician who calls himself Sheikh Omar built up a brigade of rebel fighters. In two years of struggle against President Bashar al-Assad, they came to number 2,000 men, he said, here in the northern city of Aleppo. Then, virtually overnight,...
Alma Abdulrahman is lying gaunt and unable to move anything below her diaphragm in a hospital bed in Amman. Some bedsores have become so deep she's having surgery tomorrow. Screws hold together her upper vertebrae, and cigarette burns pock her right shoulder. Her voice fades...
Children’s participation in the conflict has grown in frequency and in method of involvement. “Ibrahim," who says he is 18, but looks much younger, smiles as he passes me his battered cell phone, insisting that I watch yet another video. The grainy footage shows a young Syrian...
Awakened by the sound of gunfire, Ahmad could hear the armed men knocking on his brother's door, shouting insults and calling the family "dogs". Ahmad's sister-in-law said the gunmen told her husband to "bow to your god, Bashar" -- the Syrian president. She and her husband and...
Human Rights Watch revealed that Regime's security branches in Raqqa city hold documents and potential physical evidence indicating that detainees were arbitrarily detained and tortured there while the city was under government control. Human Rights Watch researchers visited...
The BBC has seen video and eyewitness testimony that appears to corroborate allegations of chemical weapons' use in the Syrian town of Saraqeb. So what do we know about the alleged instances of chemical weapons use in the conflict so far? Syria's chemical weapons stocks, and the...
