Israel acknowledged pushing into a buffer zone inside Syria following the overthrow of President Bashar Assad. But it remained unclear if its soldiers had gone beyond that area, which was established more than 50 years ago. Israel denied it is advancing on the Syrian capital of Damascus.

The Biden administration said Tuesday it will recognize and support a new Syrian government that renounces terrorism, destroys chemical weapons stocks and protects the rights of minorities and women.

The lower house of the Russian parliament gave initial approval Tuesday to a long-discussed bill that would set the stage for Moscow to remove the designation of the Taliban in Afghanistan as a terrorist group.

The dramatic fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad instantly intensified the debate across Europe and the Middle East over the world’s largest pool of refugees.

Of all the foreign upheavals that the Biden administration has had to confront and manage in recent years, Syria was not on anyone’s list of likely crises.

Massive U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Syria are meant partly as a message to the group and a move to ensure that the insurgents don’t try to take advantage of the chaos following the overthrow of President Bashar Assad’s government.

Tens of thousands came to Saydnaya Prison from all over Syria after the fall of former President Bashar Assad to search for their loved ones. Insurgents freed dozens of people from Saydnaya on Sunday when Damascus fell. But since then, almost no one has been found.

For the first time in 50 years, the question of how Syria will be governed is wide open. The end of the Assad family’s rule is for many Syrians a moment of mixed joy and fear, of the total unknown.

U.S. prosecutors are accusing two senior Syrian officials of overseeing a notorious torture center that abused peaceful protesters, including a 26-year-old American woman who was later believed to have been executed.

The State Department said Monday it is not actively reviewing the “foreign terrorist organization” designation of the main Syrian rebel group that overthrew Bashar Assad’s government this weekend.

Rapturous celebrations in the streets of the capital were tempered by trepidation over whether the city’s new rebel caretakers could deliver a better future.

The U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator is in Beirut in hopes of collecting information on the whereabouts of Austin Tice, an American journalist missing in Syria for 12 years, the State Department said Monday.

The dramatic downfall of Syrian President Bashar Assad presents possible danger, and an opening, for neighboring Israel.

A proposed pilot program that would have provided public funding for private school education to U.S. military families in Bahrain is gone in the final version of this year’s defense bill.

While Putin gives asylum to Assad in Moscow, Russia is facing the loss of its naval base in Syria — its only hub on the Mediterranean Sea — and an airfield used to supply its operations in Africa.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to take to the witness stand Tuesday for the first time in his trial on corruption allegations, a pivotal point in the drawn-out proceedings that comes as the leader wages war in Gaza and faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes charges.

Israel said it carried out strikes against chemical weapons and missile-storage sites in Syria, describing the move as a preventive measure to ensure the safety of citizens after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria’s prime minister said Monday that most cabinet ministers were back at work after rebels overthrew President Bashar Assad, but some state workers failed to return to their jobs, and a United Nations official said the country’s public sector had come “to a complete and abrupt halt.”

Tens of thousands of people held in Syria’s notorious prisons have been freed in the 10 days since the insurgents began their lightning advance across the country that ended with the toppling of President Bashar Assad.