Syria’s Rukban camp for internally displaced people (IDPs), located in the eastern desert of Homs province, is a contender for the most inhospitable location imaginable for civilians living through the ongoing civil war.
The fight to clear ISIS from its Syrian territory is nearly over. The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have declared they are in the process of eliminating the last remaining pockets of ISIS resistance south of the town of Baghuz, having retaken Baghuz itself from the extremist organization on Tuesday.
We often read articles in the media of the successes of refugees and asylum seekers integrating into their new countries: a young woman receiving perfect marks and graduating first of her class at university, or an enterprising young man opening a restaurant featuring recipes from his hometown.
Residential heating fuel is a basic necessity to live through the winter in Syria, and in eight years of conflict, difficulty in sourcing fuel has emerged as one of the war’s more dire, if less visible, impacts on ordinary citizens.
In the eastern desert province of Deir al-Zour, residents drink contaminated water straight from the Euphrates River and lack treatment options when they fall ill.
A number of Syrian news outlets have reported that the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration (AA) is negotiating with Damascus over the future of the resource-rich quarter of the country under AA control. Are negotiations actually underway, and, if so, what do they mean for a possible political settlement to the civil war?
Al-Suwayda residents have buried their political differences in favor of maintaining social cohesion and stability, and as a result, the province has witnessed only rare instances of armed combat over the past seven years. But the Syrian civil war has found its way into the area by other means.
The Syrian civil war is among the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century to date. A UN report in 2016, the last year the organization officially tracked casualties in Syria, estimated that 400,000 people had been killed in the ongoing fighting.
In September 2017, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) began a campaign to recapture large parts of Syria’s eastern Deir al-Zour province from ISIS. Around the same time, the SDF announced the creation of the Deir al-Zour Civil Council (DZCC) to administer the oil-rich desert province in the post-ISIS phase.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured Tabqah , located west of al-Raqqa city, from ISIS in May 2017. Since that time, the SDF-affiliated Tabqah Civil Council (TCC) has begun the arduous task of restoring some semblance of normal life to a city all but destroyed by the six-year civil war.