An overnight explosion reported in Syria’s Mediterranean port city of Latakia, which Syrian opposition sources linked to action by the Israeli Air Force (IAF), has refocused attention not just on Jerusalem’s oft-reiterated commitment to stem the flow of advanced weapons through Syria but on Russia’s increasingly open efforts to arm the Bashar al-Assad regime....

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The BBC yesterday provided an overview of today’s Geneva 2 opening session – being held in Montreux, Switzerland, with the aim of dampening the violence in Syria’s almost three-year war – describing “extraordinarily ill-tempered scenes and some very direct language.” At a fractious evening news conference, during which there were repeated calls...

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The rollout to the Geneva 2 conference stumbled over the weekend and into yesterday, marked by a series of diplomatic missteps regarding the conference’s composition and violence in Lebanon that underscored the degree to which instability in the region may deepen regardless of the talks’ outcome. A car bomb detonated...

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The Washington Post reported earlier this week that images smuggled out of a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria show “disturbing images of emaciated children and elderly people” and indicate that there are thousands of residents in the Yarmouk camp at risk of starvation, the result of a siege being maintained by Syria’s...

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The United Nations announced Tuesday that it was ceasing to update the death toll in Syria’s nearly three-year war because it can no longer reliably keep track of those killed by the conflict. The Associated Press noted that the last official figures, which were current as of July 2013, estimated that at...

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A study released last week by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Center in Tel Aviv, which culled open source materials including jihadist web sites, has assessed that Shiite foreign fighters in Syria may outnumber Sunni jihadists battling in that country’s nearly three year war. The evaluation, which was conveyed last week by...

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The Lebanese military announced today that it had fired on Syrian aircraft violating Beirut’s airspace, a move that analysts speculated was designed in part as a public response to efforts – driven by both sides of the almost three-year Syrian conflict – to expand that war into Lebanese territory: The move suggests...

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The Syrian army’s ongoing assault on Aleppo – which over the course of a week has killed nearly 500 people, among them scores of children – has drawn attention to a relatively new and cheap improvised explosive device being deployed by forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Telegraph described...

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Forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria today announced that they had pushed opposition fighters out of Qara, a mountain town that both sits on the road between Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and that has for years served as a key transit point for rebels. If...

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The last few months have seen Israel seek to engage the United Nations in general, and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in particular, on the hope that active participation in the global body and its forums may alleviate what both Israeli and American diplomats have criticized as a...

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