Lebanon’s hashish heartland of the Bekaa Valley is increasingly embroiled in the civil war raging across the border in Syria, with a wave of sectarian clashes and abductions.
Turkey sees in the battle for Qusayr a strategy to create an Alawite mini-state within Syria, purged of Sunni Muslims, to which the ruling elite can withdraw for a last stand.
Turkey will build a 2.5-kilometer wall along the Cilvegözü post on the border with Syria, near where a twin bomb attack killed 51 and wounded more than 100 earlier this month.
Israeli missiles struck a research center near Damascus, as massacres of Sunni families by pro-government militias are reported from Syria’s coastal Alawite stronghold.
An alliance between the Free Syrian Army and the People’s Protection Committees (YPG), the country’s main Kurdish militia, broke down amid internecine clashes in Aleppo.
Israel's claim that Syria has used chemical weapons comes as rebel militias have assumed positions near the line of control in the Golan Heights.
As the Friends of Syria summit opened in Istanbul, US Secretary of State John Kerry announced $100 million in new “non-lethal” aid to the Syrian opposition.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “emir” of al-Qaeda in Iraq, announced a merger with Syria’s Nusra Front to form a new organization, the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.”
Opposition activists from Syrian President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect publicly broke ranks with the regime at a meeting in Cairo, and urged their fellow Alawites in the army to rebel.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced that the UN will initiate a probe into the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria following an attack on a village near Aleppo.
In a new massacre near Homs—one of several in Syria over the past weeks—the regime blames the Nusra Front rebels, while the opposition blames the pro-regime Shabiha militia.
The Martyrs of Yarmouk militant group seized UN peacekeepers on Syria's line of control with the Golan Heights, as international Shi'ite militants converge in Damascus.
