I am on my knees, hands behind my head, on a border-crossing between Turkey and Syria. A Turkish border guard stoops over me menacingly, the nozzle of his Kalashnikov pressing against my upper thigh as he barks something in an unfamiliar language. What does he want? My...

  Two rockets fired at Hezbollah-controlled southern Beirut bring  Syria 's escalating civil war deeper into the heart of Lebanon and closer to unrestrained regional conflict. The two-year-old conflict in  Syria  has already tumbled into Lebanon's Bekaa Valley,...

 More than 70 people were killed in a wave of bombings in markets in Shi'ite neighbourhoods across Baghdad on Monday in worsening sectarian violence in Iraq. No group claimed responsibility for the blasts. But Sunni Muslim Islamist insurgents and al-Qaeda' s Iraqi wing have...

,  Friday, May 24, 2013 Smoke and fire rises after explosives were dropped by a Syrian government warplane in Yabroud near Damascus, Syria, Monday May 20, 2013. The Syrian regime claims there is no civil war in the country but that the army is fighting foreign-backed terrorists...