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,...

Syria’s army and rebels have agreed local truces in key flashpoints around Damascus, despite regime and opposition representatives failing to make any progress in Geneva peace talks. In the southern suburb of Babila, AFP journalists Monday saw rebels and soldiers – all...

    A series of local truce deals in and around Damascus between the Syrian regime and rebel forces are being used for short-term political gain and are likely to be short-lived, opposition sources predict. The truces, struck in the key rebel-held areas of Yarmouk,...

  They arrived with bulldozers and ordered him to leave. When the Syrian restaurant owner asked why, he was threatened with detention. The security forces that had arrived unannounced that morning denied him permission to remove anything from the shop his...