Twin car bombings targeted Sunni mosques in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Friday, killing at least 42 people. A video showing the explosions is embedded below (age-restricted; please observe a strong content warning). The attacks came eight days after a car bomb detonated in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold...

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The United Nations Security Council convened yesterday and called for “clarity” regarding the latest alleged chemical attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime. While some details of yesterday’s chemical attack near Damascus remain murky – different groups have so far have offered different estimates of the casualties – the evidence was...

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Two car bombings have recently ripped through the Hezbollah-dominated Dahiyeh district of southern Beirut, months after Sunni rebels in Syria began threatening to retaliate against the Iran-backed terror group for providing troops to the Bashar al-Assad regime. Lebanese officials had become increasingly vocal in demanding that Hezbollah untangle itself and Lebanon from the...

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Foreign policy and intelligence analysts are scrambling to untangle reports emerging overnight Wednesday from Syria, backed by photo and video evidence, that the Bashar al-Assad regime used chemical weapons to kill hundreds and maybe thousands of Syrian civilians in the East Ghouta region outside Damascus. Foreign Policy’s blog The Cable catalogs...

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Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have poured into northern Iraq this week, after the Kurdish Regional Government that controls the area opened up a temporary bridge. Previously, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees had registered 155,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq. The agency says the latest “exodus” is “among...

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Hezbollah has been under increasingly vocal criticism by Lebanese officials for entangling the country in the Syrian war. The leader of one of Lebanon’s largest Christian political parties declared that the Iran-backed terror group was plunging the country “into fire.” A top Hezbollah commander was reportedly killed last week during a battle in Syria outside of...

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Missiles supplied by Saudi Arabia are playing a key role in efforts by Syrian rebels to halt months of advances by the Bashar al-Assad regime. The West, fearing that the opposition has become increasingly controlled by Islamist elements, has been reluctant to send advanced weapons to the rebels. The Saudis have taken...

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The bloody war in Syria which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and driven an estimated 3 million residents out of the country into refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. There have been periodic predictions that the regime is on the verge of collapse. Bluntly put, the end...

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Much of the spillover from the Syrian conflict has been in the form of hardening sectarian tensions, with countries such as Lebanon and Iraq splitting along Sunni and Shiite lines. The brute strain of managing refugees, meanwhile, has destabilized countries such as Jordan and to a lesser extent Turkey. Inside...

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A series of setbacks are complicating attempts by rebels, who have seen their positions steadily erode in recent months, to regain momentum in the Syria’s protracted conflict. Over the weekend rebels launched an offensive against the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, part of a series of moves by opposition groups...

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