Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, appealed on Sunday for calm and for unity as he moved to reassure the nation after days of clashes that a monitoring group said had killed hundreds of people. “We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said from a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online….
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, has reported attacks on Alawite civilians, frequently by unknown gunmen. The country’s new rulers have pledged to bring all armed groups under the state’s control, but the security situation remains unstable, with some Syrians seeking vengeance. Who are the Assad loyalists taking up arms? There…
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, the country’s new leader has hosted a national unity conference and welcomed foreign dignitaries as crowds gather at cafes, speaking out freely for the first time in decades. But 400 miles away in northeastern Syria, a region beyond the control of the Damascus government, battles that have been going on…
Israel has conducted new airstrikes on Syria’s coast and ground raids in the country’s south, part of a wave of attacks that Israel says is necessary for its security that has raised tensions with Syria’s new government. The strikes appeared to be the latest attempt to keep weapons from the Assad regime out of the…
Syrian security forces were deployed across a predominately Druse town on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, early Sunday, two days after a gunfight between government officers and armed men from a local neighborhood left one person dead and several others wounded. A tense calm has returned to the town, Jaramana, after the deadly clash…
Sharief al-Homsi shivered, clutched his arms and pretended to go through Syrian regime withdrawal. Standing before an audience in Damascus, he was telling a joke that would have been unthinkable until just a few weeks before, when President Bashar al-Assad was suddenly ousted after more than five decades of his family’s oppressive rule. “We need…
It was billed as the first step in establishing a representative government as Syria emerged from decades of a brutal, one-family dictatorship. But for some in Syria, the highly anticipated “national dialogue” that ended on Tuesday night fell far short of those promises. Instead, the two-day conference only added to concerns about the openness of…
The Israeli military said it had struck sites in southern Syria on Tuesday, just hours after the new Syrian leadership demanded that Israel withdraw from territory it has seized since the fall of the Assad regime. The attacks were aimed at “military targets in southern Syria, including headquarters and sites containing weapons,” the Israeli military…
As the commander of a rebel group allied with Al Qaeda during Syria’s long civil war, the man known by his nom du guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, welcomed foreign jihadists, dispatched suicide bombers to blow up military posts and vowed to create an Islamic state. A decade ago, he told a journalist that Muslims should…
Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, is expected to discuss the future of Syria-Turkey relations on Tuesday during a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The meeting in the Turkish capital, Ankara, will be Mr. Erdogan’s first with Mr. al-Shara, the rebel leader who led the opposition offensive that toppled Syria’s former autocratic leader,…