FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was  a world in which  “ the tide of war is receding ” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces....

Friends of mine who just came from Damascus described how the city transformed into a ghost city, and how depressing it is to walk in its up-scaled residential areas such as Abu Romana , Al Malki, which have become dark and empty of its people . Even though these areas...

Firefights and shelling on Sunday shattered a weeks-old truce at the Yarmuk Palestinian camp in Damascus, but a ceasefire allowed residents to return to another besieged area near Syria’s capital. Syria’s three-year conflict is estimated to have killed more than 140,000 people,...

Syrian troops seized control Monday of a village near the strategic rebel bastion of Yabrud as they pushed closer to the town near the border with Lebanon, state television said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, meanwhile, said the army, backed by Lebanon’s...