But such research was conducted while Assad was still in power, and it has only been several weeks since Assad fell. As a result, it’s unclear how many Syrians will decide to go back. After all, the current government is transitional, and the country is not fully unified.

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.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested Friday that his county’s military might not withdraw all of its forces from Lebanon by this weekend’s deadline set in its ceasefire with Hezbollah

Turkish authorities are investigating a fire at a 12-story hotel at a popular ski resort in northwestern Turkey that killed 76 people, including children.

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,

Israel is letting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians return to heavily destroyed northern Gaza as part of a fragile ceasefire

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.”

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 .

BY Kelsey Norman, Rice University and Ana Martín Gil, Rice University(THE CONVERSATION) For more than a decade, Syrians have been the world's largest refugee population.More than 6 million Syrians have fled the country since 2011,

Competition between the world’s great powers has intensified considerably since Donald Trump's first term in office. How the new U.S. president deals with these tensions will define the global order of the future.