In 2007, shortly after becoming Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi traveled to Syria to meet with dictator Bashar al-Assad, to show that the U.S. was capable of using diplomacy and not merely war as a tool of foreign policy in the Middle East.
Incoming rocket sirens blared across the Israeli Golan Heights in the predawn hours of Wednesday morning, sending residents of the area scrambling to bomb shelters in what was later determined to have been a false alarm, the army said.
The forces of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad pushed hard into the southern region of the country over the past two weeks and captured most of Deraa, the province where the uprising against Assad’s regime began seven years ago. Besieged rebel forces are reportedly negotiating terms of surrender with Assad’s Russian allies.
TEL AVIV – Tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing a major offensive in the country’s south have pitched tents on the border with Israel over recent days, with the IDF responding by sending several tons of medical supplies and food over the border and even bringing in six wounded refugees – including four children – into Israeli territory to receive treatment in a local hospital.
Iranian Member of Parliament Behrouz Bonyadi criticized Tehran’s allies Russia and Syria in unusually harsh terms during a speech on Wednesday, essentially agreeing with the Iranian protest movement that the nation has spent too many resources in propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Russia bombed rebel-held parts of southern Syria late Saturday for the first time since brokering a ceasefire there nearly a year ago, a monitor group said, as allied regime troops prepare a ground assault.
Dictator Bashar Assad ramped up his assault against rebel positions in southwestern Syria on Friday, deploying his infamous “barrel bombs” despite warnings from the United States that he is violating a “deconfliction zone,” jeopardizing civilian lives, and threatening the security of neighboring Israel.
A Syrian human rights monitoring group reported on Thursday that the Hezbollah terror group’s leadership has refused to accede to a Russian request that its forces vacate a number of locations in southwest Syria near the Lebanese border.
Syrian President Bashar Assad on Wednesday said Iran’s presence in Syria and its relations with Damascus are not negotiable and repeated the claim that Iran has no fixed bases in Syria.
Syrian President Bashar Assad denied Russia coordinated or even knew in advance about reported Israeli strikes inside his country and downplayed Moscow’s role in determining Iran’s presence there, in an interview published Sunday.
Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday denied the presence in his country of any Iranian troops.
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad gave an interview to Russia’s RT television on Thursday in which he said the United States is “losing its cards” on the civil war battlefield and must withdraw all forces from his country or risk a conflict with the Syrian military and Russian forces.
MOSCOW — The Kremlin said Syrian President Bashar Assad met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his summer residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Recep Akdag said on Tuesday that it is “completely inconceivable to return Afrin back to the control of the Syrian regime” after Turkey invaded the northern border region in January.
An Israeli minister on Monday threatened that the Jewish state could kill Syrian President Bashar Assad if his regime doesn’t prevent Iranian forces from launching attacks against Israel from his territory.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani expressed in a letter to Syrian President Bashar Assad on Saturday his country’s willingness to aid in the post-civil war reconstruction of Syria, Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported.
TEL AVIV – If the U.S. really wants to stop the massacres in Syria, it needs to target President Bashar Assad’s palace in Damascus, an article published in Saudi’s government daily said.
Building on his recapture of the Eastern Ghouta suburb after a long and bloody siege that ended with an alleged chemical weapons attack, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad on Tuesday began the final battle for control of Damascus with artillery strikes on the last rebel positions near the city.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters in San Francisco on Sunday that President Donald Trump had behaved as if he were “above the law” in ordering precision strikes on Friday targeting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons infrastructure.
TEL AVIV – Satellite images from Saturday’s U.S.-led joint military operation in Syria show extensive damage to three chemical weapons facilities in the wartorn country.
TEL AVIV — A “violent explosion” was heard in the southern section of Aleppo, Syria in an area where Iranian forces were present, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on Friday that Russian experts have “found no traces of chemical weapons” at the site of the attack in Douma, Syria. He accused foreign intelligence services of faking the attack to justify action against Syria and discredit Russia.
BEIRUT — The most powerful Syrian rebel faction on the fringes of Damascus began abandoning its stronghold in the once rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta on Monday, opening the way for government forces to secure full control of the area, after seven years of revolt.
President Donald Trump appeared to have caught the State Department and Pentagon by surprise when he teased the imminent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria on Thursday. Few would dispute the president’s claims of tremendous progress against the Islamic State since his inauguration, but ISIS has not been completely destroyed, and the United States has other security concerns in the war-torn country.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert had some fun at the expense of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad during a press briefing on Thursday. Nauert needled the Syrian strongman for behaving like an ordinary head of state, even as his brutal operation in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta grinds to its bloody conclusion.
The Syrian government has reportedly begun a land invasion of the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, following a brutally intense two-week campaign of airstrikes and artillery bombardments that killed hundreds of people.
Polygraph.info, a website produced by U.S. government-funded Voice of America News and Radio Free Europe, has published leaked audio recordings it claims to be of Russian mercenaries complaining about their humiliating defeat at the hands of American forces in Syria.
The U.N. Security Council unanimously voted in favor of a ceasefire resolution for Syria on Saturday, but the bombing of the Eastern Ghouta suburb near Damascus continued, with at least 24 more deaths after the resolution was passed.
Fresh regime air strikes and heavy clashes shook Syria’s rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta on Sunday, despite a UN demand for a ceasefire to end one of the most ferocious assaults of Syria’s civil war.
Not only is the Trump administration tough on Russia, but its toughness is also a function of a hard-headed strategy to diminish Russian power in Syria and throughout the Middle East.
TEL AVIV – The nuclear deal gives Iran “a highway to a nuclear arsenal” and has only served to bolster the Islamic Republic’s aggression across the region, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday to U.S. Jewish leaders in Israel.
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s bloody efforts to stamp out the remaining rebel enclaves near Damascus resulted in what observers are describing as the wholesale massacre of civilians on Monday and Tuesday, with a bombing campaign that deliberately targeted seven hospitals and killed over a hundred people, including at least 20 children.
TEL AVIV – There are 10 Iranian military bases in Syria, two of which are close to the border with Israel, that are training militias from the Assad regime for a future war with Israel, an analyst for an American think tank said in an article published Monday.
HAMOURIA, Syria — A heavy bombardment killed at least 100 civilians, 20 of them children, in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta on Monday, as regime forces appeared to be preparing for an imminent ground assault.
TEL AVIV – Wielding a fragment of an Iranian drone downed in Israel last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday warned Tehran not to “test Israel’s resolve.”
TEL AVIV – Israel fears there may be a chemical spillover into its territory from neighboring Syria, a classified cable from the Foreign Ministry says, adding that there would be a harsh response if such a scenario were to occur.
Israel views Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime as the weak link in the Iranian-Shi’a axis, and Assad should keep that in mind when weighing whether or not to let Iran set up military bases in his country or transfer precision missiles to Hezbollah, National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Monday.
TEL AVIV – Syrians who are being persecuted by the Assad regime have expressed support for Saturday’s airstrikes by Israel in the embattled country, social media posts in the days since have shown.
Turkey’s “Operation Olive Branch” military incursion into Syria has been conducted in concert with the Free Syrian Army, which has helped Turkish forces take control of several villages in the Afrin region.
Speaking at a conference on chemical weapons in Paris on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said there is reason to believe Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has resumed using chemical weapons against his own people. He said Russia was to blame for failing to confiscate all of Assad’s weapons of mass destruction as promised.
