The Obama administration portrayed its historic decision to allow U.N. condemnation of Israeli settlement-building as a way to finally and emphatically demand a stop to the activity. But the move may backfire by hardening positions, both in the right-wing Israeli government and in the incoming...
Mustafa Sello strode up to the soldiers loitering by the green buses near southern Aleppo’s Ramousseh crossing, where they waited to evacuate the last residents out of the city’s eastern districts. “Please, sir, do you know where I can find my mother? An officer told me she would be here,” Sello...
An off-duty Turkish police officer who shouted, “Don’t forget Syria and Aleppo!” shot and killed Russia’s ambassador to Turkey on Monday as he delivered a speech in the capital, Ankara — a bloody episode that was captured on video and posted on social media. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a...
One convoy approached from the right, the other from the left. The buses rolled to a halt at the midpoint of the Ramousseh bridge, where a group of ambulances, aid workers and uniformed soldiers had been waiting for hours. Minutes passed with both convoys frozen in place, all part of the intricately...
At the edge of this shabby industrial town just east of Aleppo, a crowd milled about in front of a former cotton factory that was being used as a shelter. A mountain of chopped lettuce was heaped on a table, along with stacks of bread and vats of oil. A uniformed soldier handed out falafel sandwiches...
It speaks volumes about the plight of rabble-rousers in China today that Ai Weiwei, the country’s most famous dissident artist, has decided that working there is too dangerous — so he wants to go to Syria. Ai, who received his passport back from Chinese authorities last year, is turning his attention...
The ablution fountains, where worshipers would wash before prayers, had long run dry and still stood in the center of the Ummayad Mosque of Aleppo, the fountains’ domed tops leaking shafts of light from the pinpricks caused by bullet holes. Around the fountains lay small chunks of masonry and...
The Starliner bus, its white paint speckled with grime, emerged from the bedlam of eastern Aleppo Friday, making its way toward the dilapidated Ramouseh bridge. It was empty — the residents who’d boarded it earlier in the day to escape the city’s horrors had instead been turned back before reaching...
Here in the desert hills of the West Bank, near the Palestinians’ principal city of Ramallah, a group of Orthodox Jews has built the town of Beit El, a place that most of the world considers an illegal settlement constructed on occupied Palestinian land. For decades, U.S. policy has opposed such...
It was a day, said Syrian President Bashar Assad, on which history was written. Even his staunchest opponents would find it hard to disagree, as the years-long siege of Aleppo appeared to end and the rebels who had clung to an ever-shrinking patch of Syria’s largest city began to evacuate. The...
Caught between rebels and government forces, the Syrian city of Aleppo has largely been cut off from the rest of the world in recent months. But this week, as Syrian forces advanced on rebel-held areas, residents took to social media to send pleas and heartbreaking farewells to a global audience....
The evacuation of Syrian rebels bunkered in their last remaining holdouts in the beleaguered city of Aleppo has been delayed, rebels and activists said Wednesday, as an 11th-hour cease-fire forged by Russia and Turkey broke down after only a few hours of calm. The agreement, which called for a...
A group called the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, also known by its Turkish acronym TAK, claimed responsibility for the bombing of a football stadium in Istanbul on Saturday that killed 44 people. A car carrying about 900 pounds of explosives detonated near police officers guarding the stadium shortly...
A years-long siege that had reduced much of Syria’s largest city to rubble came to an apparent end Tuesday when the last remaining rebels, boxed into a shrinking urban stronghold, agreed to leave Aleppo and hand it over to government forces. The collapse of the rebel forces in Aleppo, announced...
In a significant break with past policy, U.S.-led forces in Iraq have started arming and training hundreds of fighters belonging to Shiite militias historically known for having ties to Iran. The sectarian militias are being trained for the operation to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul. While Mosul’s...
In the rubble outside Egypt’s main Coptic Christian church late Sunday, a crowd held a candlelight vigil for the 25 worshipers killed in a bombing at St. Mark’s Cathedral earlier in the day. The explosion in a chapel adjacent to the cathedral left pews overturned, the floor bloody, strewn with...
A hard-line offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, took responsibility for a double bombing in Istanbul that killed 38 people, most of them police officers, and wounded 155 others. The Turkish government declared a national day of mourning on Sunday, hours after the bombings near a soccer...
When the Syrian army, backed by relentless Russian airstrikes, beat back Islamic State from the ancient city of Palmyra early this year, it marked the first in a string of significant defeats against the extremist group in the country. But that victory appeared to have been short-lived. On Sunday,...
Turkey’s ruling party on Saturday proposed constitutional changes that would substantially increase presidential power, a move that comes months after a failed coup. The proposal, introduced by the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came the same day two bombs exploded outside a soccer stadium...
The Pentagon plans to send 200 more troops into northern Syria to support rebel militias now holding positions about 15 miles from Islamic State’s self-declared capital of Raqqah, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Saturday. Carter told a security conference in Manama, Bahrain, that the new troops...
The latest Islamic State video showing captured British war photographer John Cantlie signals a shift in the extremist group’s propaganda as it loses territory, analysts say. At the start of the video released this week Cantlie stands in front of what he describes as a damaged bridge across the...
An Egyptian Islamic extremist group claimed responsibility Friday for an explosion in Cairo that killed six police officers and wounded three more. The explosion targeted security forces on Al Haram Street, known as “Pyramids road,” the main route from downtown to the Giza pyramids, according to...
With Islamic State driven from its last urban stronghold in strife-ridden but energy-rich Libya, fresh turmoil is brewing over control of lucrative oil installations. And a polarizing military figure who once enjoyed close U.S. support — Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar — is at the heart of the unfolding...
Pro-government troops in Syria have swept into the Old City quarter of Aleppo, swiftly moving toward a complete takeover of the city from rebels who had once hoped to use it as a springboard to national power. Aid groups reported Wednesday that more than 31,000 people had been displaced by fighting...
A ship carrying more than 60 people capsized in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Yemen, but authorities said Wednesday at least 36 people had been rescued and the search for survivors was ongoing. The ship set sail Saturday from Al Mukalla, the coastal capital of Hadramout Province in southern...
Islamic State introduced a new spokesman Monday, exhorting its followers to rise up against its many enemies even as the group faces the prospect of losing vital territory in Iraq and Syria. The debut of Abi Al Hassan Muhajer came in a 24-minute speech posted on social media. Replete with verses...
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cemented his control over his political party, Fatah, on Sunday after 18 politicians loyal to him won spots on its powerful Central Committee. The vote capped a six-day conference of the party, which also saw a former West Bank security chief receive...
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani criticized U.S. lawmakers on Sunday for, in his view, undermining a landmark nuclear agreement but said Tehran had no intention of abandoning the deal. In a speech to parliament, Rouhani slammed a Senate vote last week to extend for 10 years a longstanding package...
He was a committed activist, as well as a “real funny guy,” according to his colleagues on the front lines in northern Syria. To his comrades in arms, he was a good fighter, one who said he feared cameras more than bullets. And to friends at home in Northern California, Michael Israel was “loving,”...
The sun had yet to rise over the northern Syrian village of Al Tokhar on July 19 when a U.S. airstrike obliterated much of the town, leveling adobe buildings and killing families as they slept. Soon grisly photos of bloody corpses and grieving survivors began appearing on social media, alerting...
In two of the Mideast’s most devastating urban conflicts – Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – civilians who were already facing deprivation and danger are confronting harsh new threats brought about by recent battlefield events, humanitarian groups and international organizations say. In Aleppo,...
They loiter on pedestrian bridges, puffing on pipes. They squat behind bushes and palm trees in leafy parks to get their fix. Even doctors and nurses are users. Iran’s drug problem has become a national epidemic, health ministry officials and local doctors say, drawing the poor as well as the affluent,...
A U.S. military investigation has found that “unintentional human errors” led to a coalition airstrike that mistakenly killed dozens of Syrian-backed troops this fall, but it did not recommend disciplining anyone for the deadly attack. The Sept. 17 air raid on a garrison in the eastern Syrian town...
Building on dramatic advances over the last two days, Syrian pro-government troops stormed opposition-held neighborhoods in northeastern Aleppo on Monday, signaling an imminent defeat for the rebels who have waged a more than four-year battle for the once-thriving commercial city. The new advances...
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ political party, Fatah, opens its first party congress in seven years on Tuesday amid swirling speculation about who will succeed the 81-year-old at the helm of the Palestinian Authority. Some 1,400 Fatah delegates will gather at Abbas’ presidential compound...
There may be little common ground among Syria's fractious opposition groups, but they have long agreed that the country's largest city, Aleppo, is vital to their plans to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad. With the city divided between the government and the opposition since 2012,...
Two days after a wave of wildfires spread throughout the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Haifa and forced tens of thousands to flee, residents returned to pick through the blackened debris of their homes while pondering what had started it all. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday had...
A U.S. service member was killed in an improvised explosive device blast Thursday in northern Syria, U.S. officials said. It marked the U.S. military’s first combat death in the country, where its forces are embedded with local militia battling Islamic State. The service member, whose name was...
Walid Moallem, Syria’s foreign minister, is known both for his ability to almost lazily parry a deluge of questions as well as his trademark languid pace of delivery. But in a recent meeting in Damascus with a roomful of journalists and analysts, he seemed even more relaxed than usual and began...
To lawyer Ceren Akkaya, a proposal by Turkey’s government that would defer sentencing or punishment in some sexual assault cases and which critics say would legitimize child marriages is a disaster waiting to happen. Akkaya said the proposal, which parliament is expected to vote on Tuesday, puts...
A pharmacist, woken by the sound of explosions, rushed out to help the wounded – only to be blocked by his wife and children, who feared he would die in another wave of attacks. A pediatrician worried about how he would reach the clinic in the morning. A doctor wondered if he would see a family...