Foreign policy and intelligence analysts are scrambling to untangle reports emerging overnight Wednesday from Syria, backed by photo and video evidence, that the Bashar al-Assad regime used chemical weapons to kill hundreds and maybe thousands of Syrian civilians in the East Ghouta region outside Damascus. Foreign Policy’s blog The Cable catalogs...

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Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah last week gave a fiery speech promising to double the number of troops that the Iran-backed terror group has fighting in Syria on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Tuesday slammed the speech: “At the same time that...

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Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have poured into northern Iraq this week, after the Kurdish Regional Government that controls the area opened up a temporary bridge. Previously, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees had registered 155,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq. The agency says the latest “exodus” is “among...

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Hezbollah has been under increasingly vocal criticism by Lebanese officials for entangling the country in the Syrian war. The leader of one of Lebanon’s largest Christian political parties declared that the Iran-backed terror group was plunging the country “into fire.” A top Hezbollah commander was reportedly killed last week during a battle in Syria outside of...

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Rumors have been circulating all day that Hossam Ali Nisr, a top Hezbollah commander, was killed in Damascus. If confirmed, the incident will be read both as a substantive loss to the Iran-backed terror group and as confirmation of Hezbollah’s deep involvement in the Syrian conflict. Some Lebanese news outlets...

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Senior Hezbollah member Nabil Qaouk bragged today that the Iran-backed terror group is capable of saturation bombing Israeli population centers, bragging that Israeli cities were being targeted with tens of thousands of missiles. Last week a car bomb ripped through the Dahiyeh district in southern Beirut. The area is a...

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Missiles supplied by Saudi Arabia are playing a key role in efforts by Syrian rebels to halt months of advances by the Bashar al-Assad regime. The West, fearing that the opposition has become increasingly controlled by Islamist elements, has been reluctant to send advanced weapons to the rebels. The Saudis have taken...

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CNN reports that the death toll from a car bomb that struck a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut yesterday has risen to 22. Over 200 people were injured. The Dahiyeh district was targeted by another car bomb last July that wounded roughly 50 people. A statement issued yesterday by a previously unknown...

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The bloody war in Syria which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and driven an estimated 3 million residents out of the country into refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. There have been periodic predictions that the regime is on the verge of collapse. Bluntly put, the end...

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Much of the spillover from the Syrian conflict has been in the form of hardening sectarian tensions, with countries such as Lebanon and Iraq splitting along Sunni and Shiite lines. The brute strain of managing refugees, meanwhile, has destabilized countries such as Jordan and to a lesser extent Turkey. Inside...

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