#syria

#syria

Hundreds of people from the Alawite religious minority, to which ousted President Bashar al-Assad belonged, were killed in the massacres in March. The violence erupted after attacks on the new government's security forces by armed groups aligned with the deposed autocrat. Counterattacks soon spiralled out of control to target civilians in the coastal regions that host the Alawite population. Seven of the defendants in the court on Tuesday were al-Assad loyalists, while the other seven were members of the new government's security forces.

Al-Mustafa said a political cooperation declaration signed by Damascus with the international coalition confirms Syria's role in combating terrorism and supporting regional stability. The agreement is political and until now contains no military components, he wrote in a post on X. The agreement makes Syria the 90th country to join the coalition, which aims to prevent foreign fighters from joining ISIL's ranks and eliminating the remaining elements of the group from across the Middle East.

Some commentators described the murders as motivated by sectarian hatred and blamed the new Syrian government. Others blamed remnants of the Assad regime, who want to inflame community tensions. But further investigation later found that one of the dead men was known to be associated with an Assad-affiliated militia responsible for the deaths of as many as 700 people during the country's 14-year civil war.

Al-Sharaa's trip, planned for November 10, will be first-ever visit by a Syrian president to the White House. United States President Donald Trump is to host Syria's interim leader for talks this month in what would mark the first visit by a Syrian president to the US capital. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said in a speech on Sunday that the visit will help open a new chapter in relations between Damascus and Washington.

"First of all, quotas are so important," she said in conversation with Hala Gorani, a contributing correspondent at NBC News. "If you don't have quotas, women always will be excluded. So we need to put quotas in from the beginning." She estimated that her industry is 70% female, and most of her new appointees are women, not because of their gender but because they're highly qualified.

As Syria turns the page after Bashar al-Assad's fall, the transitional government promises justice, truth, and rule of law.

For more than 11 years, I told myself it was too early to grieve. My father, Ali Mustafa, was arrested by Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria on 2 July 2013 and disappeared. Since that day, we have had no word, no trace, nothing. Every morning since he was taken I made my first thought after waking up: He is alive. Every night I went to sleep repeating it.

This week at the United Nations General Assembly, Syria's new interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa came with a message: Syria is back after being isolated for about six decades.

The former head of Syria's al-Nusra Front had a $10m bounty on his head for organising multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians. This week, however, after toppling the dictator Bashar al-Assad in a lightning offensive last December, he is being feted in New York as he meets with world leaders in the first visit to the United Nations general assembly by a Syrian head of state since 1967.

Not every Syrian will be going to a voting booth, nor will there be political parties or campaign posters. Instead, votes will be cast by various committees, which is why the country's first election after dictatorship is being described as "indirect." "The reality in Syria does not permit the holding of traditional elections, given the presence of millions of internally and externally displaced persons, the absence of official documents, the fragility of the legal structure,"

The United States has ended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Syria, warning Syrian migrants they now face arrest and deportation if they do not leave the country within 60 days. The action on Friday came as part of US President Donald Trump's broad effort to strip legal status from migrants. It will terminate TPS for more than 6,000 Syrians who have had access to the legal status since 2012, according to a Federal Register notice posted Friday.

Desperate families flocked to former detention centres, prisons, morgues, and mass grave sites to try to find their missing relatives after al-Assad's removal, and investigators gained unprecedented access to government documents, witness accounts and human remains. A limited number of detainees were released alive, while the fate of tens of thousands remained unknown, rendering them forcibly disappeared. This revealed a major tragedy that affected Syrian society as a whole.

Back in 2015, with his native Syria in the full throes of civil war, Maso had little choice but to leave if he wanted to pursue a career in swimming. Hailing from Aleppo, a major battleground in the war, he was going for months on end without training. "It always had to depend on how safe the situation was and what the priorities were," he said. And so, together with older brother, Mo, he took the long and arduous journey to Europe via Turkey.

Iraqi and Lebanese intelligence agencies coordinated to discover and destroy one of Lebanon's largest drug factories making the highly addictive amphetamine Captagon.

The Syrian government is evacuating hundreds of Bedouin families trapped inside the southern city of Suwayda, where a fragile ceasefire is holding after Druze and Bedouin fighters fought for a week.