When Islamic terror groups arrived in their Syrian hometown of Al-Hasakah, Assyrian Christians were systematically victimized. The lucky managed to flee.
country: Syria
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“We were exposed to hunger, electrocution, beating and insults. We got sick, we got lice and scabies, and were often strip searched, which was the worst part.”
Led by new Saudi King Salman, an alliance of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey is aiding rebels, including jihadists, in new victories against Syrian President Assad’s regime.
War has compromised the mental health of millions of Syrians. The problem is also transcending borders, following people as they seek safety abroad.
By satellite phone and email, people living in ISIS-controlled Raqqa, Syria, say fighters have stolen their houses, killed family members and even forced them to pay rent on properties they already own.
A growing number of Syrians have been trying to escape to Europe over the past year, some meeting their tragic ends after paying smugglers to cross the Mediterranean in overcrowded boats.
Syria Deeply met with some young Syrians who have recently made it to Europe to seek asylum. With so much at stake, no two viewpoints are quite the same.
Kurdish fighters and the forces loyal to the Syrian regime have settled into a delicate coexistence against jihadists in this city marked by chaos and competing interests.
To gauge the ways the civil war has affected all of Syria, a look at seven cities on the fourth anniversary of the first uprising against the regime. A chronicle of death and life going on.
What was once a simple and relatively quick commute through Aleppo now takes up to 12 hours, as battered roads, endless checkpoints and ISIS violence take their toll. A bus driver’s view.
Countless displaced by the war in Syria include those forced to move from one part of the country to another. Misery tends to follow.
Khaled walked into an ISIS recruiting office and volunteered to fight — for $30 a month. Now he’s a refugee in Turkey. Here’s how he got from there to here.
Syria’s tangled web grows even more intricate. Hezbollah is key to Assad’s strategy, moderate rebels avoid ISIS and al-Nusra at all cost, and Israel helps the Free Syrian Army.
Once a backer of the Free Syrian Army, a harsh reality caught up with this father of three near Aleppo.
Despite lacking basic amenities, residents of a small Syrian village persist in their quest for education. But to keep the children warm in shelled-out buildings, they must bring wood to school.
ISIS imposes harsh morality codes on women and girls in Raqqa, Syria. Now females under 45 are not allowed to leave, and one mother of a teenaged daughter says she knows why.
DAMASCUS — Maher knows more about trash than a nine-year-old should know. “Some of it stinks more than others,” he says, chuckling at his own remarks. “At first I used to feel like I was about to faint before I finished my job, but I got used to it.” It’s not unusual in different areas in and around Damascus to see children and sometimes older men or women climbing into garbage cans, foraging for scraps of food. Passersby often turn their faces away from the scene. The young children who collect goods from the garbage can are often insulted or […]
SARAQEB — Zaytoun and Zaytouna relies on games, stories and illustrations to make life in Syria’s war zone a bit more bearable for kids. Launched in July 2013, the four-page magazine started as a modest project with a team of three people using a small printer and circulating it to a limited number of children. Today, says magazine director Sumar Kanjo, the team includes over 10 writers and 10 illustrators, and Zaytoun and Zaytouna has become a cultural pillar in Saraqeb and other areas under opposition control. In addition to the paper edition, the magazine is launching a website and […]
Damascus regime’s counter-insurrection chief has become a cult hero for his battlefield prowess. But Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to stand for long for worship of anyone else but himself.
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Syria, Making Love And War
As Syria’s civil war rages on, soldiers and supporters manage to finding coves of intimacy amidst the violence around them.
AL-HALBOUNI — Adel, a teenager, worked with his father at their small shop near al-Halbouni, not far from Damascus. By age 17, he had dropped out of school to support his family, as their financial situation grew desperate after years of war. Adel wasn’t a supporter of Syria’s government, but that didn’t prevent him from being forced to fight on its behalf. He was arrested at one of the army checkpoints in the town of Qudsaiya in the Damascus countryside, then sent off to battle. “We were on our way to work,” Adel’s father recounts. “We got stopped at a […]
Amid the mayhem of civil war, huge money is to be made from stealing and selling archeological treasures from Iraq and Syria. ISIS ambitions are fueling an already huge black market.
KOBANI — Sardar is a 26-year-old fighter in the ranks of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known by its Kurdish acronym, the YPG. A former blacksmith, he has taken up arms for the past five years, since he first became involved with the militant group. In his eyes, it is the core of a Kurdish army that will someday represent the future state of Kurdistan. His priority now is to defend the city of Ain al-Arab, also known by its Kurdish name Kobani. The city has been under attack by ISIS since September. “Compared with the weapons used by ISIS, […]
The ISIS terror group believes that if it is Allah’s will, the organization will take over much of the world. But at the moment, Allah doesn’t seem to be on their side.
REYHANLI — At the beginning of this year, Jamal Maarouf was regarded as the new white knight of the Syrian insurrection. Over the course of just a few days in January, Maarouf and his men drove ISIS jihadists out of northern Syria’s Idlib province. Armed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, the leader of […]
RAQQA — Ever since ISIS captured the Syrian city of Raqqa in early 2014, residents have been consumed by fear and caution. The terrorist group has banned a dangerously long list of goods and behaviors, all of which carry a heavy punishment if violated. Most noticeably, ISIS has forbidden women from leaving their homes without the supervision of a male relative, and they must wear what is deemed proper attire, dubbed “the shield” — a long, loose dress that covers them from head to toe. Smoking is banned, while it is also illegal to sell tobacco, recordings of secular music, […]
Radical Islamists zero in on young people in the West who are lonely and disaffected by modern life.
A Syrian activist from the northern countryside talks about keeping alive the anti-regime, non-Islamist revolution amid the constant threat of shelling and the spectre of ISIS.
A Syrian refugee living in a tent near the border with Turkey has lost his home, but he is preserving the family business of creating beautiful works of traditional mosaic art.
U.S.-led airstrikes aimed at ISIS are being met with resistance in Syria. Some ask why it took the death of U.S. journalist James Foley for Washington to intervene.
A steady stream of Syrians are joining the National Defense Force, a loyalist reserve force set up in 2012 by President Bashar al-Assad. For many it’s the only way to make a living.
On the Turkish border, at a refugee camp where Kurds from the Syrian town of Kobani are taking refuge, the displaced wonder why Turkey and the West aren’t arming them against ISIS.
One slipped away, the other killed his way out of ISIS after witnessing too much brutality from the jihadist group. But as they tell their dramatic stories, sharp differences emerge.
Many local journalists fled Deir Ezzor when ISIS arrived – and the ones who stayed behind are forced to abide by the extremist group’s draconian list of 11 rules.
With no electricity or gas, enterprising locals in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have begun extracting fuel products by melting plastic scavenged from destroyed buildings.
In Tartus, on Syria’s western coast, residents in relative calm. But even here, a new sectarian melting pot and a flagging war economy are beginning to take their toll.
Boys in the eastern city of Raqqa are forced into military training, and say their ISIS instructors show them how to decapitate blond-haired, blue-eyed dolls with kitchen knives.
A year after a chemical attack killed nearly 1,000 civilians in the Syrian rebel stronghold of eastern Ghouta, new fears that the Islamist radical group is building its own chemical stockpile.
More than two million Syrian children have lost all access to education. In western Syria, one principal is looking to change things.
Sectarian differences have long created problems for some marriages among Shia, Sunni and others. But with the death and hatred of war, romantic tragedies abound.