Last December, the former al Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Shara, made history as he led a loose coalition of rebels into downtown Damascus. The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, promptly fled in a helicopter. In January, al-Shara appointed himself the country’s new president. Lately, he’s been having earnest sit downs with David …
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In the fall of 2012, as I was planning out a reporting trip into Syria, one of the story ideas I hoped to sell on to editors back home involved retracing the itinerary of Austin Tice, a fellow freelancer who had disappeared somewhere in Syria about eight weeks earlier. One …
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In 2013, I met a 12-year-old Syrian girl who had been shot in the back by a government sniper near Aleppo. Her name was Maysaa, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. “Am I a terrorist? Are all of the children they kill terrorists?” she asked, recuperating in an …
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“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” President Joe Biden said in a speech from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The president’s remarks on Sunday followed the news that President Bashar al-Assad’s government had fallen to rebel forces who united from across the nation against the brutal …
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An Islamic militant group has made rapid advances across northwest Syria, seizing territory from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in a dramatic evolution of a thirteen-year-old conflict that had appeared to be frozen. The swift gains by the fighting group Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, also known as HTS, began with …
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