Bashar al-Assad

Maysr al-Jabouri, a leading Iraqi jihadist widely known by the alias “Abu Maria al-Qahtani,” was killed on Thursday by a suicide bomber.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Saudi Arabia on Friday for meetings with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and an address to the League of Arab States, holding its summit this weekend.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad during a visit to Moscow this week wholeheartedly supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, offering his government’s official recognition of the phony “independent republics” Russia carved out of eastern Ukraine, and said he would like more Russian forces stationed permanently in Syria.

Authorities in Turkey are struggling to house the thousands of people left destitute after a series of massive earthquakes in the country last week, rushing to build tents and transfer earthquake victims to shelters a week later.

Syrian Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad’s address to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday was a funhouse-mirror view of the world from the vantage point of a brutal dictatorship.

Pro-Beijing action movie legend Jackie Chan angered Syrians and human rights activists this weekend by producing a movie that reportedly filmed scenes in Hajar al-Aswad, a town leveled by dictator Bashar Assad and occupied by Islamic State forces during the Syrian civil war.

A federal judge sentenced a former University of Alabama student to seven and a half years in prison after she instructed an undercover FBI employee about how to secretly send funds to terrorist organization al-Qaeda, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.

The regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which remains in power almost exclusively thanks to Russian intervention during a decade-long civil war, expressed “support” for Vladimir Putin’s decision on Monday to recognize Russian proxy groups in Ukraine as sovereign “states.”

The United Nations covered up the murder of two aid workers by the Assad regime in Syria in 2016, the Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.

U.S. Special Forces operators were involved in an action that resulted in the deaths of 13 people, including women and children, during an airborne counterterrorism raid in northwestern Syria across the early hours of Thursday morning.

A German court has convicted a former Syrian secret police officer for overseeing the abuse of detainees at a jail near Damascus.

Saudi outlets reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources within Syria, that the nation’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had expelled Iranian Quds Force Commander Mustafa Javad Ghaffari from the country after the terror chief attempted to create a black market in Syria and needlessly inflamed tensions with the country’s neighbors.

Gregg Roman, chief operations officer of the Middle East Forum, said President Joe Biden’s foreign policy and military “disaster” in Afghanistan led to Russia’s provision of S-300 and Pantsir anti-missile systems to Syria for use against Israel’s military.

Christian political leaders in Syria told the Kurdish outlet Rudaw on Monday that the Christian population of that country had dropped from about ten percent of Syrians in 2011, the start of the Syrian Civil War, to three percent of the country in 2021.

The government of Iraq condemned President Joe Biden on Monday for bombing sites within the country, and within Syria, to allegedly combat the threat of Iran-backed militias in the area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a non-governmental organization, revealed this week that it had confirmed the deaths of nearly 500,000 people during the decade-long Syrian civil war.

As expected, the regime of dictator Bashar Assad declared him the winner of Syria’s sham “election” on Thursday with over 95 percent of the vote.

Syria is holding its “presidential election” on Wednesday, a farcical exercise denounced by international observers but touted by incumbent “President” Bashar Assad as a glorious exercise of popular will.

The Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Parties in Syria, an organ of the Russian Defense Ministry, said Sunday it has “received information that militants from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group are plotting a provocation with the use of toxic agents in the western areas of the Idlib governorate.”

Russian state media outlet Sputnik reported on Friday that the Syrian government is vocally denying reports, circulated in Mideast and Russian media, that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had traveled to Moscow for treatment for a Chinese coronavirus infection.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus along with his wife, Asma, the Syrian president’s office announced Monday.

The U.S. military used two F-15E Strike Eagles in its airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in eastern Syria, the Pentagon said in a briefing detailing the firepower the attack.

A former member of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s secret police was convicted by a German court of facilitating the torture of prisoners.

A militia loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad attacked the Kurdish Asayesh security forces in Hasaka, in the northeast of the country, on Sunday, breaking a longstanding, tense lull in hostilities between the two sides.

Less than a month away from the presumed inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Americans are departing a year in which their presidential election largely eclipsed campaigns around the world.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told visiting Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad on Tuesday that Tehran will support its “strategic ally” in Damascus until “final victory” is achieved in the long-running Syrian civil war.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad accused Turkey in an interview this week of direct “involvement” in the alleged smuggling of Syrian oil by the Islamic State using “the umbrella of the American Air Forces.”

Syrian President Bashar Assad told a Russian television interviewer on Sunday that he was not “bothered” by reports that U.S. President Donald Trump considered ordering his assassination in April 2017.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would have rather killed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and longtime ally, Rami Makhlouf, has spoken out against him recently amid a feud over finances.

Syrian authorities on Wednesday said they had found a large number of foreign-made weapons and ammunition, “including U.S.-made shells and Israeli-made mines left behind by terrorists,” in the southern part of the war-ravaged country.

Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reverted to a years-old explanation for his military’s invasion of Syria on Tuesday, insisting that Turkish forces will be in the country “until the people are free.”

China’s state newspaper China Daily – typically one of the least belligerent in the stable of Communist Party-run outlets – published a column Thursday claiming that America had a history of “bacteriological warfare” to imply the possibility the Chinese coronavirus pandemic was created by the U.S. military.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported on Monday that Syrian opposition groups are blaming Iranian militia forces for spreading the Wuhan virus through Syria. The opposition accused the Syrian government of concealing both the extent of the virus outbreak and the role played by Iranian forces in spreading it.

The Syrian regime on Sunday confirmed its first officially-recognized case of coronavirus infection. According to Health Minister Nizar Yazigi, the patient is “a person coming from abroad.”

Aid agencies in war-torn northwestern Syria are moving to contain the outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus across the region amid growing fears that the large numbers of people and the ravaged health infrastructure make prevention an effectively impossible task.