Syrians have been the world’s largest refugee population. More than 6 million Syrians have fled the country since 2011, when an uprising against the regime of Bashar Assad transformed into a 13-year civil war.

Geopolitics abhors a power vacuum. One country’s loss is another’s gain, and the space left by Iran is being occupied, for now, by Turkey. This should come as no surprise: the history of the Middle East between the 16th and 18th centuries was that of struggle between the Ottoman and Persian empires, and it seems to be reviving in the 21st century.

He had been dreaming of going back home ever since arriving in Turkey in the summer of 2014. To soothe his panic attacks in his exile, he would walk Gaziantep’s old streets, which resembled Aleppo’s,

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called Thursday for cooperation between Syria's new authorities, host countries and donors to secure the return of 6.2 million Syrian refugees to their country.

Exile Coffee and Wine sits on a busy downtown street. The coffee bar and seating area occupy the first and second floor of a corner building that in its former life housed an online betting shop, and before that a fish market. Keating says it needed “a lot of work.”

It already appears evident that the days of Russia serving as its leading arms supplier have come to an ignominious end.

The United Nations refugee chief says some 200,000 refugees have returned to Syria from neighboring countries since the government of Bashar Assad was overthrown last month.

(AP) — Hamas announced Friday the names of the next four hostages it plans to release this weekend as part of a fragile ceasefire deal with Israel that has paused the war in Gaza. There was no immediate confirmation of the names from Israel.

Under the terms of the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal , fighting will be halted in Gaza for at least six weeks. Dozens of Israeli hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners will be freed, while more aid flows in .

One of the Israeli hostages freed on the first day of the Gaza ceasefire said Monday in her first comments since being released that she has “returned to life.”

The rebel offensive benefited from careful preparation and the support of Turkey, which occupies territory in Syria’s north and provided the only safe access route to Idlib, where HTS was based. Even so,

The ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas stretched into a fifth day on Thursday. Humanitarian aid groups are working to surge food and supplies to the war-ravaged territory as Palestinians scour through mountains of rubble looking for bodies of those killed by Israeli bombardments during the 15-month war.