Iraqi intelligence chief Hamid al-Shatri met on Thursday in Damascus with Ahmad al-Sharaa, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the Syrian insurgent group that overthrew ousted president Bashar Assad on December 8.

The U.S. and Turkey risk a confrontation if Turkey or its jihadist proxies attack the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), America’s ally fighting ISIS. Defeating ISIS is still a work in progress; the Kurds are guarding thousands of ISIS prisoners in northeast Syria.

In the past week, the Pentagon has acknowledged that its footprint in Iraq and Syria is bigger than it has claimed for years

The Turkish military killed 21 Kurdish militants in northern Syria and Iraq, the defence ministry said on Wednesday.

Lebanon said on Thursday it was looking forward to having the best neighbourly relations with Syria, in its first official message to the new administration in Damascus.

After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, different resistance groups began to fight with one another. The state structure failed and eventually, the Taliban took control of the country in the mid-1990s.

BAGHDAD: An Iraqi delegation met with Syria's new rulers in Damascus on Thursday, an Iraqi government spokesman said, the latest diplomatic outreach more than t

While the victory against Bashar Assad’s forces is a triumph, the jihadist-turned-statesman who is now in charge has a lengthy to-do list.

The number of US troops in Syria has regularly surged higher than the Pentagon has publicly disclosed since at least 2020, and in recent months increased to more than double the roughly 900 troops the US has long said are in Syria,

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Kurdish militants in Syria will either lay down their weapons or "be buried", amid hostilities between Turkey-backed Syrian fighters and the militants since the fall of Bashar al-Assad this month.

The Arab Spring hit Syria in 2011 as demonstrations broke out against Assad, who responded violently, yielding a multi-sided civil war. Although Syria was never a serious American security interest, the Obama administration leaped into the fray, assuming that it could micro-manage a brutal, multi-sided civil war.