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A week that ended with an Iranian nuclear deal – one that could reshape the geopolitical contours of the Middle East – was punctuated by a devastating attack on Iran’s embassy in Beirut.
ARSAL, Lebanon — Thousands of Syrians refugees have been driven from town to town before ending up in Arsal, a dusty, rebel-friendly border town in Lebanon. For civilians, prospects for return are dim. For fighters on the mend, the goal is to rejoin the battle against President Bashar al Assad.
ALEPPO — Um Walid, a widow in her 50s, was finally able to set up a brief meeting for this journalist with her son, Walid, at their family home at the edge of a liberated area of Aleppo.Her son is a member of the shabiha, a pro-Assad fighter who aids the regime whenever needed.
HATAY, Turkey—Along this porous frontier, Syria’s conflict is increasingly migrating onto Turkish soil, reshaping communities and feeding fears that Ankara’s support for rebel groups could backfire, igniting fresh violence on this side of the border.
This week, the Wall Street Journal launched Borderlands, an interactive multimedia platform using video and text to track uprooted Syrians now living on or near the Turkish border.
BIR HASSAN, BEIRUT — Hezbollah members and leaders say their resolve to fight in Syria has deepened, after a double suicide attack on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. The attack killed 25 people on Tuesday. .
ALEPPO — Doctors in the country warn that the current polio vaccine campaign, triggered by the discovery of cases in Aleppo province, is still not reaching children in opposition-controlled areas here.
Yesterday, Abdelqader Saleh, the leader of Aleppo’s prominent, moderate Liwa al-Tawhid Brigade, was killed in a government attack on a base near the city.
HAMA – A wedding was once a magical day most Syrian girls dream of, but in wartime, many young women are settling for a ceremony that is a far cry from their imagined night, if they are able to wed at all.
Dr. Annie Sparrow is a critical care pediatrician and an assistant professor in global health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Her interest in refugees, human rights and public health has taken her to Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur and beyond.
This week saw Hezbollah doubling down in Syria, with leader Hasan Nasrallah pledging to keep up the fight to secure the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. It’s apparently serving him well, giving regime forces a boost in a bid to take back rebel-held parts of Damascus and Aleppo.
HOMS — A third winter is coming to besieged neighborhoods of Homs, which already suffer from daily bombardments and malnutrition.
DEIR EZZOR— On a pitch-black night, we wait in our taxi on the embankment. A fighter informs us there are wounded on the bridge, and that his comrades are trying to reach them. The official name of this deadly crossing — Siyahseyah Bridge — has been discarded; it is now called the bridge of death.
Samar reaches for her phone and dials the number she has now memorized by heart. She waits, then gets the voice mail asking her to leave a message.
ALEPPO/GAZIANTEP — Every morning, Ibrahim takes his lunch box, leaves his modest apartment, and heads for work. Back in Aleppo, the 38-year-old was a lawyer of repute; here in Turkey, he is a laborer, struggling to keep his family out of the camps. .
MANBIJ — Nine-year-old Mohammed begins each day at 6 a.m. with a trip to the local landfill in his northern Syrian town. There, he spends hours scavenging for combustible garbage, finally tethering up his bundle and trekking back home.
In Aleppo, where residents must dodge daily mortars and bullets, there is another, more mundane killer on the rise: death by electric shock.
ALEPPO—On the border between Syria and Turkey, dozens of Syrians wait for the right moment to cross through one of the illegal passageways. They navigate their way through rough terrain and hop through barbed wire, careful to move stealthily and avoid being caught.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and an English teacher in eastern Ghouta, which is under a regime-imposed siege that prevents any goods or people from entering or exiting.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) suffered two blows over the past week: the loss of the key northern town of Safira to regime forces, and the subsequent resignation of a respected commander, Colonel Abdel Jabbar Okaidi. .
HOMS - I still remember April 18, 2011, when it seemed all of Homs turned out for the funeral of 12 people.
On the outskirts of Ghazeh, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, tucked between apple orchards and cabbage farms, over 2,000 Syrian refugees have made three plots of farmland their home.
When Syri-Arts started in Beirut three months ago, its chairwoman, Nora Jumblatt, didn’t think she’d get such a big response.
HOMS - Five hundred and ten days have passed since the siege began in Homs, taking a toll on civilians and fighters alike.Homs, dubbed “the capital of the revolution” by activists for its early role in the revolt, has since been two-thirds destroyed by air raids and shelling.
Plans for high-level Syrian peace talks have stumbled this week, with the U.S.-backed Syrian National Council undecided on whether to attend and how to engage the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
ZAATARI CAMP, JORDAN - Amani turned 22 today. Two months ago she fled from the civil war in Syria and left her house in the capital of Damascus.
BEIRUT—Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) set fire to an Armenian church in Tal Abyad on Syria’s northern border with Turkey before dawn on Tuesday, activists and a human rights watchdog said.
In early October, the United Nations High Committee on Refugees (UNHCR) opened a new camp in northern Iraq, Darashakran, to deal with spillover from packed Domiz refugee camp. The influx comes after the border between Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria was opened to a flood of refugees in August. .
Fatima, a 27-year-old autistic woman shot dead by an army sniper in Aleppo, might have been just one more anonymous victim killed in the no man’s zone that separates the rebel and regime-held sides of this city.
Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that 22 people are suspected of having polio, most of them under age two and living in eastern Deir al-Zor province.
Syrian-American Samer Attar is an orthopedic surgeon on staff at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. In August, he spent two weeks working at a field hospital in Aleppo on a trip facilitated by the Syrian American Medical Society. ”.
Omar, 21, dropped out of university to join the Syrian revolution in March 2011 and has taken photos on the battlefield ever since.
On Monday, a suicide bomber from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) drove a car laden with 1.5 tons of explosives into a Syrian military checkpoint at the busy eastern entrance to the government-controlled city of Hama.
In a supposedly “liberated” area of Syria, a group of opposition journalists is still being forced to operate in secret.
Students from Syria’s rebel-held areas are in limbo in their quest for higher education. The majority, fearing arrest and perilous commutes to campuses in neighboring cities, refuse to enter state-sponsored universities.
Opposition activists in Moadamiyaa, a small town in rural Damascus, are asking the world to save them from what they call “the hell of Assad’s killing machine.”.
The long-awaited peace talks on Syria, known as Geneva II, now have a date: November 23, according to the head of the Arab League.
Al-Qaida-linked groups including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Jabhat al-Nusra have consolidated their power in Syria in recent weeks, particularly in the country’s north.
This week, the Turkish army shelled points held by extremist rebel groups across the Syrian border. It was a shift for the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
American photographers Robert Fogarty and Ben Reece traveled to Jordan in September with the global humanitarian organization CARE, giving Syrian refugees felt-tip markers with which to write messages to world leaders on their arms and hands.
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