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....

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...

Two Los Angeles gang members appear to have joined the flow of foreigners flocking to fight in Syria – in this instance, on the side of President Bashar al-Assad. In a video posted online, the two men boast that they are on the front lines and fire their guns in the direction of what...