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Once controlled by the highly centralized government of Bashar al-Assad, Syria is now fragmented into sections practically controlled by various groups:
Fighting in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, has been at a stalemate for months, with government troops holding the west, and the rebels largely controlling the east. The divide not only separates the combatants, but also families, some of whom continue to make the dangerous crossing.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a 22-year-old man from a prominent Sunni family. He fled his home in Damascus more than a year ago.
On Tuesday, after 10 months of fighting, Syrian rebels captured Minnagh Air Base – one of northern Syria’s largest. Of those rebel forces, Islamist groups were among the most effective on the battlefield, raising their profile on the front lines.
According to the United Nations, the conflict in Syria has produced the gravest refugee crisis in the world since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
These days in Ersal are tense. This pro-rebellion village, in Lebanon’s northeast Bekaa Valley, has been under pressure since the Syrian army, working with Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, seized the neighboring Syrian city of Qusayr in early June.
Over the weekend, fighting broke out in the Jabal al-Akrad Mountains surrounding Latakia City. Fighting started at dawn in the village of Salma, with rebels attacking Alawite villages.
Srdja Popovic is something of a hero to Arab revolutions. He was a founder and leader of the Otpor student movement that brought down the regime of Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Syria’s economy has been crippled by war. More than two years of unrest, violence and international sanctions have depleted the regime’s foreign reserves and led to soaring inflation. But the government hasn’t gone bankrupt.
When Syria Conflict Monitor (SCM) began in January 2012, the goal was to catalog the thousands of Free Syrian Army (FSA) videos used for recruitment purposes that were being downloaded to the Internet. .
This month’s strike on Krak des Chevaliers, the 12th-century Crusader castle, put UNESCO, historians and antiquities experts on edge.
For weeks fighting has raged in the rebel stronghold of Khaldiyeh, a neighborhood in the city of Homs. Experts have cited Homs’ strategic importance (and Khaldiyeh’s position as the city’s last major rebel stronghold) in calling the now hand-to-hand battle between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and regime forces “decisive.”.
While the revolt turned civil war rages across Syria, a group of activists are working to broadcast a new kind of revolution on the country’s FM airwaves – Radio al-Kul.
One of the longest-running debates surrounding the Syrian war is that of the international community’s ethical responsibility to Syria’s civilians – in short, does the long-running violence require the world to intervene?
Every Saturday, a group of women in Salamia, a city in western Syria, meet to discuss the events of the past week in relation to the two-year uprising against President Bashar Al-Assad.
RAS AL AYN, Syria / Like many of his countrymen, Abu Zechariah, a now-penniless farmer, spends his days trying to eke out a living. As war makes crop farming here all but impossible, he’s been forced to harvest another kind of crop — oil.
On Monday the U.S. Congress agreed to move ahead with a shipment of weapons to Syrian rebels. The deal comes after weeks of gridlock on Capitol Hill as lawmakers debated direct intervention in Syria.
*Laurent** Van der Stockt is a photographer who has covered conflict from Bosnia to Iraq to the Arab Spring. When it became nearly impossible for foreign journalists to legally enter Damascus, Van der Stockt, on assignment for French newspaper Le Monde, went to the city’s front lines.*.
On Wednesday, stray bullets from Syria struck homes and the police station in the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar, killing two people, including a teenage boy.
Sectarian tension is on the rise in Syria and its neighboring countries, fueled by a civil war that has hardened religious lines – most prominently, a violent Sunni-Shiite divide. .
Over the weekend, opposition Free Syrian Army fighters clashed with al-Qaeda backed extremist rebels in the Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo, where a single checkpoint links the rebel-occupied territory of the city’s east with the government-held areas to the west.
On July 8, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called for a Ramadan ceasefire in Syria. Shorty after, both Iran and Turkey called for a stop to fighting for the month-long Muslim holiday. Neither the opposition or Syrian regime observed the calls. .
TRIPOLI, Lebanon / Nour and his fellow Syrians have been playing soccer, the universal sport, as long as they can remember. They never imagined they would be exiled to a sandy field in Lebanon, scoring goals to the sound of gunfire. .
As part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Rania Abouzeid, whose extensive reporting from Syria has appeared in TIME, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy and on television with the CBC documentary “Syria: Behind Rebel Lines.”.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict.
On June 23, Father Francois Murad, 49, “died when he was shot inside his church” in the Christian village of al-Ghassanieh, near Jebel Akrad in Latakia province.
On Saturday, Saudi-backed Ahmed Jarba was named leader of the Syrian opposition, defeating candidates allied with Qatar.
QALAAT AL-MADIQ, HAMA PROVINCE / Just a few years ago, Syrian students in this Sunni town had to pledge allegiance to Baath party principles and express loyalty to Bashar al-Assad.
Syria Deeply interviews Ghassan Hitto*, outgoing Prime Minister of the Syrian National Coalition’s interim government, during the Coalition’s weekend General Assembly Meeting. *.
Assad regime troops have reportedly been bombarding residential areas of the strategically-located city of Homs since the beginning of June.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon / On a blistering summer night, three generations of a Syrian refugee family are watching the sunset through a bullet-pocked balcony door.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a 27-year-old Syrian field officer for an international aid organization who wished to be identified only as “Kadar” *(not her real name**).*.
On August 13, 2012, Austin Tice, a 31-year-old American journalist writing for McClatchy newswires, the Washington Post and other publications vanished without a trace from the Damascus suburb where he’d been living and working.
Young, rapidly radicalizing Muslims in Europe are flocking to Syria to take up arms with extremist Islamist groups, and French security officials say there are more European jihadis now fighting in Syria than fought in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Nawar Nemeh is a 17-year-old rising senior at San Diego High School in California. Until age 16, he lived in Damascus, fleeing to the U.S. with his family after the war began. At his private school in the Syrian capital, Nemeh watched as the facets of regular teenage life – curfews, social studies lessons and playground dynamics – were transformed by conflict. .
GAZIANTEP, Turkey / Sitting in the salon of a modest house on the outskirts of this southern Turkish city, a group of Syrian refugees congregate around freshly prepared meze. Jokes are exchanged. Mahmud al-Hosseini sits cross-legged, anxiously rubbing his wrists together.
Dr. Greg Elder is deputy director of operations at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders France. The organization currently operates five field hospitals in Syria. An emergency room doctor by training, Elder has made two trips into Syria, the last one six months ago in the vicinity of Aleppo. Based in Paris, he helps oversee operations for MSF’s Syria team, designing and evaluating programs and supporting teams in the field. .
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week Syria Deeply monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon / At a bustling petrol station in this northern coastal city, almost all of the workers are Syrian—some children. For refugee families that arrived from across the border with nothing, this is not child labor, but financial salvation.
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