Abdulhamid sells ice cream to passersby at Domiz, Iraq's biggest camp for refugees fleeing violence in Syria, while Sidra reads an Arabic copy of "The Fox and The Crow" in class.   Little but luck appears to have separated the youths' fates -- they both arrived with their families...

A loud explosion was heard near a military site in the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, opposition groups and state media said, but the cause of the blast was unclear. Explosions in Latakia, part of President Bashar al-Assad's stronghold on the Mediterranean coast, have been...

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,...

Abdul Basit Haroun says he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria, which he delivers on chartered flights to neighbouring countries and then smuggles over the border. After fleeing Libya in his 20s, Haroun established himself as a property developer in...