Since the Assad regime fell in December 2025, Europe’s 1.4 million Syrian refugees have been navigating the legal, emotional and security challenges of going back to a country they thought they may never see again.
Category: Syria Crisis
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the language of authority has changed in Syria. Yet these new titles (“Emir,” “Branch Emir” or “Sheikh of the group”) do little for the core demands for which Syrians rose up: freedom, dignity and justice.
In Frankfurt, a recent trial opened the door to holding accountable those who thought themselves safe from the law by sneaking out of Syria. Meanwhile, back in Damascus, justice that is geographically closer to the crimes seems impossible to hope for.
👋 Alò!* Welcome to Friday, where the EU imposes new sanctions on Russia, Donald Trump struggles to tamp down the Jeffrey Epstein uproar, and a famed Austrian daredevil dies in a paragliding accident. We also feature an article on the rise of the “Instagram Sheikhs” — a diverse group of digital-savvy Muslims who fuse Islamic […]
With Israel and Iran’s shadow war spilling into Syria, the new government in Damascus has warned that “foreign actors” aim to plunge the country into a cycle of instability and chaos.
👋 ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ* Welcome to Thursday, where Iran’s nuclear sites are reported to be “severely damaged,” Gaza mediators are intensifying ceasefire efforts, and our daily quiz question is related to a very old discovery from a Polish cave. Meanwhile, Inma Mora Sánchez for Ethic outlines the issues surrounding women’s self-esteem, from the housewives’ awakening of the […]
The meeting between Trump and Sharaa marked a pivotal moment not only for Syria but for the broader U.S. worldview. But the future of Syria is still very much up for grabs, as events since the historic handshake are already showing.
Donald Trump surprised everyone by meeting Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian president, a former jihadist. It’s all about Trump’s gut and what Saudi Crown Prince MBS has planned for the region’s future.
Journalists Daham Al-Assad and Guillaume Perrier visited French jihadist Omar Diaby, also known as “Omsen,” in Harem, Syria, where he resides with a small community of foreign-born jihadists (muhajireen), and condemns the action of Syria’s current leader who broke with his radical roots.
Concerned about Islamic State sleeper cells in Syria, neighboring Jordan is cautiously hoping the country’s interim president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, will support international efforts to combat ISIS.
In Syria, LGBTQ+ individuals are being stripped of their freedom, dignity and right to defend themselves. Only a few voices and organizations working in secrecy attempt to shed light on the violations against them in an environment that is increasingly hostile toward anyone who dares to advocate for marginalized groups.
For years, “Caesar,” who leaked photos providing evidence of the torture and killing of civilians by President Bashar al-Assad’s government, seemed like a legend or a symbol who transcended reality for Syrians. Now Assad is gone, and we know who Caesar is. So why are some now accusing Caesar of being responsible for starving Syrians and worsening their economic crisis?
The production of wheat, a staple food in Syria, fell dramatically this year due to the effects of climate change. The poor harvest has left wheat farmers, already suffering from decades of conflict, struggling to rebuild their lives.
Ten years after the popular Syrian uprising against the Assad regime, we see the wider impact of both the moral and a strategic error committed by Western democracies to not intervene.
The economic crisis in neighboring Lebanon, coupled with COVID-19 travel restrictions, are causing the already war-ravished nation to drown in even greater misery.
The camera pans across families waiting around with their luggage and children. Men stand with rifles slung over their shoulders, ready to board the evacuation buses north. Migrating birds pass overhead. “Where are they going, do you know?” asks a voice, from the man holding the camera. “Every year, they go to their homes and […]
Turkey has forced the Syrian Kurds into an astonishing trap, leaving hundreds of thousands with little choice but to flee.
A group in East Amman gives men from Syria and other conflict zones an opportunity to open up and talk through the many ways they struggle.
Strict integration protocols can have the opposite effect on asylum seekers, compounding their sense of otherness, a Syrian man now living in Austria argues.
We should not be proud of of the insufficient response against the Damascus regime, but total inaction would be even worse.
From Saudi Arabia to Iran, Moscow to Washington and beyond, the rising global tensions over the Syrian war could explode in unpredictable ways.
-OpEd- Tensions are reaching a bursting point over Syria! Just as Saddam Hussein’s (hypothetical) possession of weapons of mass destruction led U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, the (alleged) use of lethal gases on Douma, a district in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta controlled by Islamists, now allows Donald Trump to announce harsh reprisals. Once […]
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Syria, How Did It Come To This?
-Analysis- PARIS — The Syrian population continues to endure various armed conflicts. Despite all the attention this war gets from international, political and humanitarian organizations, it is now more than seven years since it began — and Syria is suffering from three open wounds. On April 9, at dawn, the Tayfur air base, located between […]
-OpEd- TURIN — Fifty years ago, in January 1968, the reformist leader Alexander Dubcek rose to power in Czechoslovakia. His ascent began a brief era known as the Prague Spring, which ended when peaceful protests against the presence of Soviet troops in the country were violently put down by Russian tanks as the West passively […]
FORT POLK — In training exercises in a mock Afghan village constructed here on a base amid swampland, the U.S. Army is applying the military lesson of the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq: Help your partners beat the enemy, but don’t try to do the fighting yourself. Letting others fight the battle hasn’t been the American way in modern times, to our immense national frustration. The U.S. military became bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, much as it had a generation earlier in Vietnam, by trying to reshape societies with U.S. firepower. For the military, the […]
The route from Turkey to Greece was once crowded with Syrian asylum seekers fleeing to Europe. But some are now moving in the opposite direction because of a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment
Tens of thousands of people remain in detention or have ‘disappeared’ in Syria, devastating countless families. Activists say the issue has largely been avoided in negotiations aimed at bringing an end to the Syrian conflict.
In Lebanon, the country with the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, a cemetery for Syrian refugees is running out of burial plots.
The minority Yazidi people were killed and taken captive by the Islamic State. Once held as sex slaves and child soldiers, several survivors tell of the psychopathic madness of the jihadists.
Russia, Iran and U.S. are all looking beyond the defeat of ISIS in Syria. But the little game the great powers are playing is becoming increasingly risky.
-Analysis- For the longest time, Donald Trump has disparaged U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, mocked his rival’s strategy in Syria, and unequivocally stated that America’s enemy in the country was terror group ISIS, not President Bashar al-Assad. Then on Friday, with little warning, Trump, as U.S. president, launched airstrikes against Syria, the first […]
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Trump TV Changes Channels On Syria
We all know Donald Trump is sensitive to what he sees on TV. But rather than displaying thin skin about comedy sketches aimed at him, the American president has now joined the wider world in reacting to this week’s images of a brutal chemical attack in Syria. And in this case, it may shape the […]
Well that was quite a first weekend. After Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday, an estimated two million people took to the streets worldwide to protest against the controversial new president, who continued his open warfare with the American press — and some would say, with the truth itself. Now, he faces a first work week […]
‘We wondered how we should react until they told us they’d been wounded by the regime forces and had nowhere else to go …’
In Iraq, near Mosul, ISIS was running a sophisticated operation to make guns and explosives. A new report has found much of the material used came from facilities in Turkey.
Before it became the Syrian rebellion stronghold, Aleppo was the heart of ancient civilizations.
After the fall of Aleppo, various alliances of convenience will be put to the test, as the scenario suddenly gets more complicated for both Damascus and Moscow.
Mohamad Katoub, a former doctor who escaped from eastern Ghouta, always felt that Syria’s daily toll of deaths and casualties are more than just numbers – until he saw the power those statistics had. Here, he explains why he changed his mind.
The United States intervened militarily in Syria under the premise of the ‘war on terror’ and the fight against ISIS, but their presence is actually helping the Syrian government.
-OpEd- NEW YORK — I’m almost certain I saw Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan today. I wanted to walk over and call him a war criminal and a monster, and tell everyone around us that he was the man butchering unarmed civilians in Aleppo. But after half an hour of stalking him through the fiction and film stacks, I still couldn’t determine if it was really him. I pulled up a Wikipedia page with his photo as a reference. I read that during his university days Lavrov was active in drama. This was quite […]