After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria , a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad . Central to the mooted plan is a renewed...

The brutal war in Syria could grind on for a decade as Iran and Russia prop up President Bashar al-Assad's regime and jihadist groups flood the battlefield, experts warned Thursday. Assad has chosen a deliberate "Machiavellian strategy" of standing by while militant groups such as...

 "The good times are over," a Doha-based diplomat told me glumly last week, as if foretelling the political earthquake about to hit Qatar. On March 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain announced in a joint statement that they were withdrawing their ambassadors...

   Two developments took place in the past month that point to remarkable changes within Syria's Islamist landscape. In early February, al Qaeda's central leadership disavowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) -- a favor ISIS repaid a few weeks later, when it...

The Assad regime continued the burial of the Geneva “peace” process on Saturday, two weeks after talks with the opposition in Switzerland ended in stalemate. Bashar al-Jaafari, Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations and a participant at Geneva, told the Syrian-American Forum...

Iran is boosting its support for President Bashar al-Assad, sending top military advisers to Damascus to gather intelligence and train Syrian troops, sources with knowledge of the movements have said. The increase in assistance from Syria's long standing ally reportedly coincided...

For Ukraine’s Muslims, the ongoing political crisis should not directly affect their 500,000 member community, according to the country’s grand mufti. However, according to observers, a Russia-leaning swing in politics could be “totally suicidal” for Ukrainian Muslims. The crisis in...

The complaining by Saudi officials over the past months seems to have paid off. The Obama administration is moving to patch up differences between the two countries. A little over a month before the one-day summit between the U.S. President and Saudi King Abdullah, there is optimism....

It was less than 20 years ago, when Hussam Zayade climbed with his friends the old walls of Daraya’s Ottoman era mosque in Syria. “We read the old scriptures on the inner dome, as if we were archaeologists, looking for a discovery,” he recalls. The Goddess of Love, the Roman ruins, the...