This piece is part of " Obama and the Middle East: Act Two ," a series of policy proposals for the president's second term by Washington Institute fellows. The Assad regime's brutal suppression of the Syrian uprising has spurred a humanitarian disaster, with the United Nations now...

A British doctor who left his home, family and job in the UK to help civilians wounded by the conflict in  Syria  has died after the makeshift hospital he was working in was shelled. Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, 26, was working as a volunteer in the north-western city of Idlib with the...

  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,...

For analysts familiar with the politics of Syria, the country’s descent into chaos amounts to an all-too-predictable pattern. It also parallels what  Rami Makhlouf , a major regime figure and first cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, bluntly announced in an interview with...