A profile of Eliot Higgins, whose blog, Brown Moses, has become required reading at intelligence agencies, human rights organizations, and news outlets around the world.

How the Assad regime tracked and killed Marie Colvin for reporting on war crimes in Syria.

In November 2019, James Le Mesurier, the British co-founder of the Syrian rescue group, fell to his death in Istanbul. What led an internationally celebrated humanitarian to take his own life?

The search for Syrian war criminals in Europe.

How COVID-19 is changing the American restaurant industry.

Iranian operative Qassem Suleimani has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he’s directing Bashar al-Assad’s war in Syria.

Amid the brutal civil war, a town fought off the regime and the fundamentalists—and dared to hold an election. Can its experiment in democracy survive?

How one immigration court in Texas has shut the door on those seeking refuge in America.

The Bashar al-Assad regime’s indiscriminate air strikes have terrorized civilians for years. Now a small band of activist-entrepreneurs is building a sensor network that listens for warplanes and warns people when and where the bombs will fall.

Rojava becomes the Spanish Civil War of modern times for a ragtag group of leftists revolutionaries.

The story of Tania Joya, the ex-wife of a jihadist from Texas.

The Syrian refugee said his name was Paul, and that he was 16 years old. The truth was much more complicated.

Life as a Syrian refugee in Germany.

One morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: “Who are you?” A soldier answered: “We’re the Syrian Arab Army. It’s O.K., you can come out. They’re all gone.” The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked brown and rotted. At the soldiers’ encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not crossed his threshold in four and a half years.

How Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of oppression.

A primer.

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

One refugee’s escape from Syria.

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash.

Why the war in Syria can only get worse.

The Piano Man of Yarmouk fled the ruins of Damascus to a life of criss-crossing Germany playing songs about his old neighborhood to huge crowds. Because of refugee law, he is paid nothing.

How ISIS trains the children it captures.

Can new, immersive film technology increase our empathy?

Syrian orphans become child laborers in Turkey.

Across the world, millions of displaced Syrians have been met with hesitation and hostility. Not in Canada.