While the immediate threat of open war between Iran and Israel has receded in the wake of this month’s unprecedented escalation, the risk of renewed conflict lingers. Syria—fertile ground for another spark—remains a place to watch.
Communities and local armed groups in Syria’s southern Suwayda and Daraa provinces are taking the fight against drug traffickers and smugglers into their own hands. With Damascus and Hezbollah profiting from the trade, they face an uphill battle.
In Syria’s southern Suwayda province, suspected Jordanian airstrikes hunt drug traffickers and kill civilians. Regime-linked gangs operate with impunity and smugglers ferry drugs over the border. Local armed groups fight back. How did we get here?
Thirteen years after the Syrian revolution, displacement camps in Idlib’s Atma look increasingly like towns, tents replaced by cement buildings. Has the dream of return been lost?
Residents of SDF-controlled northeastern Syria say the US military presence there brings a sense of relative stability, one that any withdrawal—as Washington was recently reported to be considering—would shatter.
After each blow to the Islamic State in southern Syria inflicted by former opposition factions, the group simply reshuffles its ranks and reactivates its cells. How does IS regenerate itself, what is its future in the south and what is the regime’s relationship with it?
One year after the February 6 earthquake, tens of thousands of Syrian survivors are still homeless, without enough support to repair and rebuild their homes. Aid workers stress the importance of early recovery to facilitate returns and provide livelihoods.
When Suwayda’s protest movement began in August 2023, it met with echoes on the Syrian coast, where “a chorus of individual voices” openly criticized the regime from a region considered Assad’s base. But while Suwayda’s uprising continues, the voice of the coast has waned. Why?
Escalating Jordanian military operations along—and across—its northern border with Syria signal a retreat from Amman’s “soft diplomacy” policy towards Damascus, accompanied by a growing sense of Iranian efforts to spread chaos within the country’s territory.
Millions of Syrians face hunger with the suspension of all in-kind WFP food aid this month, in part due to major cuts to US funding. US aid cuts of up to 50 percent are expected across all humanitarian sectors in 2024, senior humanitarian sources said.
