News

Caught between the Suwayda crisis to the east and Israeli incursions to the west, Daraa grapples with new security, economic ...
Violent evictions from the informal Alawite neighborhood of al-Somoriyeh are part of a deeper story: longstanding property disputes with the neighboring town of Moadamiyat al-Sham, whose residents ...
PARIS — Last week, when Muhammad Abdulhalim (a pseudonym) returned to Syria’s southern Daraa province with his wife and children after 13 years in Jordan, a piece of the Zaatari refugee camp came with ...
IDLIB — Taher al-Amin, 53, wants his job back. When Assad fell last December, this goal seemed possible for the first time in years—not only for him, but for thousands of former government employees ...
PARIS — In the new Syria, Ahmad al-Hayes’s star is rising. At the beginning of May, after being promoted to the rank of brigadier general, the once-leader of the Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sharqiya ...
PARIS, IDLIB — The land, 60 dunums in al-Judayda, a Christian village in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, was everything to Julian’s family. From season to season, it sustained them, until Hayat ...
AMMAN — “Sorry, I don’t have time. I work from seven in the morning to 10 at night.” This was the message Syria Direct received from a Syrian officer who had ...
DARAA/HASAKAH/PARIS — “I won’t plant a single dunam next year—it’s a losing business,” farmer Farhad Ahmad Sinjar said. For the past two years, he has watched his land produce less and less, parched ...
PARIS — Abu Qassem had a choice to make. He could either see his son drafted into the Syrian army, or sacrifice his olive trees—an inheritance from his own father—to fund a way out. To “save his life ...
PARIS — The United States-led international coalition appointed Captain Muhammad Farid al-Qassem as the new commander of the coalition-backed opposition Maghawir al-Thawra faction operating in ...
PARIS — Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri has taken center stage in Suwayda since Assad fell last year, as the top figure in the southern province or the primary representative of his ...
PARIS — Twelve years after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, official opposition institutions remain dependent, not only politically and militarily, but in the provision of services. The Syrian ...