Despite holding all required legal documents, our writer was detained at an Istanbul checkpoint and jailed for two weeks alongside dozens of other foreign nationals, all locked up for trivial paperwork issues, many suffering violent beatings and other indignities.
Thousands of children have been born in Syria in recent years to foreign jihadist fighters, and live now in legal limbo, deprived of civil rights and shunned by society, finds Mustafa Abu Shams in this award-nominated investigation.
The shameful scenes this week on the Greek-Turkish border, where at least two have died, underscore the need to offer long-term stability to Syrians’ lives, in contrast to the extreme temporariness of their current existence.
Lebanon’s Tripoli has been among the most welcoming cities to Syrian refugees, though tensions exist. In this special audiovisual report, Kareem Chehayeb profiles three members of Tripoli’s Syrian community, now caught between a Lebanon in crisis and a homeland still at war.
Too rarely does it occur to Westerners, worried about the erosion of their democracies, that refugees from Syria and elsewhere have valuable experience striving for civic values against authoritarian forces.
A newly-displaced resident of north Syria’s Ariha writes of her historic hometown, renowned since antiquity for its greenery, now reduced to empty piles of bloodstained rubble.
Syrians in Lebanon have greeted the country’s uprising with a complex blend of joy, envy, melancholy, and fear, write Dara Foi’Elle and Joey Ayoub.
A new book by Cambridge University's Andrew Arsan arguing Lebanon is "a microcosm of the contemporary world" successfully analyzes the country's ills, offering a helpful framework for Lebanese seeking change, writes Joey Ayoub.
Despite the presence of Hezbollah, over 100,000 Syrian refugees live in south Lebanon, often for economic reasons. While outwardly they may appear to have adapted to the environment, inwardly most live in great private fear, estranged not just from their homeland but themselves.
A young member of Syria's Türkmen minority, living as a refugee in Istanbul, writes of the fears sparked by the Turkish government's new crackdown on Syrians, and his broader disappointment at the breakdown of communal relations between Turks and Syrians, brought on by xenophobes left and right.
Over 40,000 displaced Syrians have contracted tropical diseases in just two months, as a result of sleeping in open fields with no clean water or sanitation; just one aspect of the staggering humanitarian crisis attending the largest wave of displacement since Rwanda in the 1990s.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
