Syrian President Bashar Assad said Damascus is negotiating with regime ally Moscow to buy the latest Russian anti-missile system to repel Israeli and American attacks. "It's natural that we should have such systems," he said, quoted by Syria's official SANA agency on Thursday, the same day...

( Al-Arabiya )- The UN refugee agency on Thursday chose as a goodwill ambassador a Syrian teenage girl who helped save a boat carrying fellow refugees and later became an Olympic swimmer. Yusra Mardini joined other notables like actress Cate Blanchett and author Khaled Hosseini in the unpaid...

Brazil was hit hardest on Thursday by FIFA for homophobic chanting by its supporters during World Cup qualifying, with Argentina and Mexico also fined. Nine football associations were punished in all by FIFA's Disciplinary Committee "for incidents involving, among others, unsporting and...

Student protesters clashed with police in Paris on Thursday in a demonstration against both presidential candidates in France's upcoming runoff election. Black-clad demonstrators who had broken off from the march of around 1,000 students hurled bottles at police who responded with tear gas....

Air strikes on two hospitals in rebel-held northwestern Syria on Thursday left 19 people dead including two babies in incubators, a monitor said. They were among 19 people killed as a result of strikes across rebel-held Idlib province on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights...

Twenty-five people were detained in Turkey and more than 200 police officers temporarily suspended for suspected links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen according to reports Thursday, as part of a massive sweep on the network of the alleged coup plotter. Gaziantep governor's office in...

The Kremlin criticized Israeli air strikes on targets inside Syria on Thursday, saying Israel and other countries should avoid any action that heightens tension in the region. Israel struck an arms supply hub operated by the Lebanese group Hezbollah near Damascus airport on Thursday, Syrian...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- The Criminal Investigation directorate in coastal Tartus city has arrested a female member of an abduction gang connected to security officers in Latakia and Tartus, where many people were victims of its crimes. The security forces and criminal section in Tartus and Latakia...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- The regime and Iran’s plans to change the demography of Homs provincehave been succeeded as the people of al-Waer neighborhood keep heading the northern Syria in weekly batches. The opposition has not yet instituted any plans to accommodate these newly displaced persons...

A top aide of far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen raised doubts Thursday about a French intelligence report accusing Syria's leadership of a toxic gas attack, a position directly opposed by her centrist rival Emmanuel Macron. A declassified report published Wednesday showed that...

Libya's U.N-backed government has no clear plan to help prevent more migrants reaching Europe's shores this summer, European Union officials said Thursday, citing confused requests for equipment to patrol its shores. Libya's newly trained coastguards lack a strategy on where to deploy or how...

Iraqi paramilitary units captured the northern province of Hatra on Thursday, cutting off several desert tracks used by Islamic State to move between Iraq and Syria, the military. The operations in Hatra are carried out by Popular Mobilisation, a coalition of mostly Iranian-trained militias...

The Palestinian Authority told Israel Thursday it will no longer pay for the electricity Israel supplies to Gaza, Israeli officials said, a move that could lead to a complete power shutdown in the territory whose two million people already endure blackouts for much of the day. The decision...

 Britain would find it difficult to refuse a request for military assistance in Syria from the United States if President Donald Trump decided to take action against Syrian President Bashar Assad over chemical weapons use, foreign minister Boris Johnson said. The United States accused...

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Turkey Thursday it must fully respect legal due process as Ankara continues to make mass arrests after last July's failed coup. "Turkey has the right to protect itself and to prosecute those who were behind the failed coup attempt but that has to take place...

( Al-Monitor )- At the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, Syrian artists are using their paintbrushes to break up the monotony of the desert. They splash the container houses of Syrian refugees with flowers and trees that the desert climate does not support, with the hope of alleviating a little...

( The New Arab )- Civilian deaths in Syria from Russian air strikes are at their highest since the fall of rebel-held Aleppo to regime forces in December according to one monitoring group.  According to the UK-based Airwars - which specialises in monitoring and assessing civilian...

U.S. President Donald Trump told the leaders of Canada and Mexico on Wednesday that he will not terminate the NAFTA treaty at this stage, but will move quickly to begin renegotiating it with them, a White House statement said. The announcement came after White House officials disclosed that...

President Donald Trump has given the military the authority to reset a confusing system of troop limits in Iraq and Syria that critics said allowed the White House to micro-manage battlefield decisions and ultimately obscured the real number of U.S. forces. The Pentagon, which confirmed the...

Syrian rebel and intelligence sources said Israel struck an arms supply hub on Thursday operated by the Lebanese Hezbollah group near Damascus airport where weapons from Tehran are regularly sent by commercial and military cargo planes. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is backed in the...