Middle East, Syria | featured news

A Gulf plan to funnel millions of dollars a month to Syrian rebels - payments earmarked for salaries for the fighters - could amount to a blank check for the opposition to build up an arsenal against President Bashar Assad's forces, analysts say....

Syrian opposition leaders appealed to international supporters Sunday for “the means to defend themselves” against the regime of President Bashir al-Assad, and said that their liberation struggle was “moving into a new phase.”

Syria says the year-long revolt to topple President Bashar al-Assad is now over, but it will keep its forces in cities to "maintain security" until it is safe to withdraw in keeping with a U.N.-backed peace deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to work out a unified strategy on the crisis in Syria in talks with Saudi officials on Friday as violence continued in the north of the country.

Mazen Hajisa has a secret. Amid the olive groves of Turkey just a stone's throw away from the Syrian border, he has hidden away several Styrofoam boxes. Their contents are deadly: a dozen unexploded antipersonnel mines.

Syria has accepted a U.N.-sponsored peace plan, international envoy Kofi Annan said on Tuesday, as troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad raided rebel forces who have taken refuge across the border in Lebanon.

Syrian forces pounded the central city of Homs with mortar fire while troops backed by heavy armor stormed rebellious towns across the country on Saturday, leaving six civilians and four soldiers dead, opposition activists said.

In Syria, a rescue operation to retrieve corpses of a massacred family turns up a child who survived. Arwa Damon reports.

Emboldened by faltering diplomacy and a Russian pledge to keep supplying weapons, Syria’s armed forces assaulted insurgent enclaves in the northern part of the country on Tuesday, invading the city of Idlib in an expanded campaign to crush the year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

President Bashar al-Assad told U.N./Arab League envoy Kofi Annan on Saturday that no political solution was possible in Syria while "terrorist" groups were destabilizing the country.