Lebanon’s prime minister-designate said Thursday that a government that could restart talks with the International Monetary Fund was the main way to halt the country’s rapid economic collapse, adding there was still opportunity to form such a Cabinet. Saad Hariri spoke a day after...

Daraa was an impoverished, neglected provincial city in the farmlands of Syria’s south, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim backwater far from the more cosmopolitan cities of the country’s heartland. But in March 2011 it became the first to explode against the rule of President Bashar...

Former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s Baath Party regime was the first to recognize, and offer legitimacy to, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran. But Assad was careful to never let Iran expand its influence in Syria as it later did in Lebanon through Hezbollah....

Amid sharp economic decline, Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree on Tuesday granting hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and soldiers a one-time financial stimulus, equivalent to an average monthly salary. The stimulus — the third since October — comes as the...