PARIS — In Suwayda, little remains as it was when residents of the Druze-majority southern province celebrated the end of the Assad regime last December. A year of false starts, bloodshed, shifting ...

PARIS — In the new Syria, Ahmad al-Hayes’s star is rising. At the beginning of May, after being promoted to the rank of brigadier general, the once-leader of the Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sharqiya ...

NEW YORK — As the sun sets on a Friday evening, preparations for Shabbat are in full swing in South Brooklyn. Local businesses—a modest kosher restaurant, a Levantine pastry shop, a Judaica ...

DAMASCUS — A few weeks after Assad fell on December 8, 2024, Khalil al-Ahmad (a pseudonym) traveled from Syria’s northeastern Raqqa city to Damascus for the first time in his life. He had been wanted ...

DAMASCUS — On August 13, the Syrian government’s Citizen Service Center announced that passports scheduled to be issued two days later would be delayed until September 17. It was the second time this ...

BANIYAS — On the morning of March 7, the thick scent of incense wafted through the sea air at the Sheikh Hilal Cemetery in Syria’s seaside city of Baniyas. Seagulls flew overhead as dozens of mourners ...

AMMAN — “Sorry, I don’t have time. I work from seven in the morning to 10 at night.” This was the message Syria Direct received from a Syrian officer who had ...

DAMASCUS — Shivering in the snow, encircled by government forces and cut off from electricity, internet and stable water access, residents of Kurdish-majority Kobani (Ain al-Arab) say their city is ...

PARIS — Year by year, the soil of Muhammad Abu Jumaa’s land on the outskirts of Raqqa’s al-Mansoura village grows more saline. At one of his farms, five of 20 dunams are now unusable land, locally ...

DARAA/HASAKAH/PARIS — “I won’t plant a single dunam next year—it’s a losing business,” farmer Farhad Ahmad Sinjar said. For the past two years, he has watched his land produce less and less, parched ...

PARIS — The land is dry, and the water does not come. For Abu Said in Inkhil, northern Daraa, it is an expensive problem. Without public water for more than a month, he has spent half his monthly ...

PARIS — Every day, Muhammad Hassan devotes the last three hours of work at his small grocery store in the Reef Dimashq city of Douma to sorting banknotes. He arranges Syrian pounds (SYP) by value and ...