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,...

  For much of the last several months, news of the Syrian opposition has been vastly overshadowed by debate in the United States regarding a possible military response to the August 21 chemical weapons attacks in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, which there is strong...