United Nations officials confirmed an outbreak of polio among children in Syria on Tuesday, lending urgency to plans for vaccination campaigns there and in nearby countries to try to halt the spread of the disease. Tests confirmed polio in 10 out of 22 children in Deir...

  A spike in the trafficking of the illegal drug Captagon, popular in the Middle East, is connected to Syria's brutal civil war   Fifteen days into his job as  Lebanon ’s top drug-enforcement official, Colonel Ghassan Chams Eddine got a tip-off that something...

  Iraq is going to break up.  It is already happening, but no one wants to acknowledge it because no one wants to be perceived as being responsible for the disintegration of a major Middle Eastern country .   There is not much about the...

Syria has never had a large Shiite population, but in recent years there has been an increase in conversions to Shiism within Syria’s Sunni, Ismaili, and Alawite populations. The geographical proximity of Iran to Syria has always led to a certain degree of Iranian influence there,...