Hayan Hadid was 18 when soldiers arrested him in his pyjamas and took him for execution in Syria's Hama in 1982, during one of the darkest chapters of the Assad clan's rule."I've never really talked about that,

Since Islamist rebels overthrew the Assad dictatorship in Syria, Egypt, with parallels in its own recent history, has watched warily.

Books recounting torture in Syrian prisons or texts on radical Islamic theology now sit openly in Damascus bookstores, no longer traded in secret after iron-fisted ruler Bashar al-Assad's ouster. Mustafa al-Kani,

DAMASCUS—Books recounting torture in Syrian prisons or texts on radical Islamic theology now sit openly in Damascus bookstores, no longer traded in secret

This insight led to watching with folded arms as the regime of Bashar al-Assad massacred peaceful protesters and depopulated ... as a suspected member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Musa will never be charged with any offence, and only finds out ...

A few days after the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled into exile, in December, an elderly woman sat on the sidewalk outside a morgue in Damascus. Her head wrapped in a scarf, she rocked back and forth and clasped her hands, wailing about what she had lost to Assad’s regime. “Help me,” she called. “They took my sons. Where are they?”

Islamist-led rebels captured the northern city in a lightning offensive, going on to take Damascus and toppling Assad, ending more than half a century of his family's oppressive rule.

Israel, which is already facing the looming threat of an Iran-Israel, must now deal with the emerging challenge from Turkey after the fall of Syria's Assad.

Leiter, who officially began his role on Friday, described normalization with Saudi Arabia as part of a broader realignment in the MidEast.

Built on a hill 30 kilometers from Damascus, the Saidnaya prison has instilled terror in generations of Syrians: a place of damnation where men are "neither alive nor dead," in the words of the poet Faraj Bayrakdar, arrested for "communist activities" and who survived 14 years of detention in various prisons across the country.

The Sunni rebels view Iran as their enemy and, of course, will not cooperate with it. As a result, the Shia crescent has been severed. Iran no longer has territorial continuity to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea. It cannot send convoys of weapons from its territory through Iraq to Syria and Hezbollah.

Yes, focus on the big picture. Don’t limit yourself to a part of it, because the region is indeed changing. Actions, not words, are behind these shifts. Prince Faisal bin Farhan’s visit to Beirut last week was the first by a Saudi Foreign Minister in fifteen years.