It was a decision that appalled and angered Syrian opposition groups and international medical organizations. On May 28 Syria was appointed to the World Health Organization's Executive Board.
The dictator's choice of voting location sent "a message telling the opposition that we are celebrating through your demise," one Syrian analyst tells NPR.
Denmark says security in Syria has improved enough for some refugees to go back. "The words 'to send us back to Syria' means to destroy our lives," says a Syrian whose residence permit was revoked.
The case of a woman who reportedly married ISIS fighters and is now stuck in Turkey with her young children has become the subject of a diplomatic dispute between Australia and New Zealand.
The conflict has not only pitted the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad against a band of rebels, but drawn the U.S., Iran, Russia and Turkey, among others, into a complex proxy war.
The couple received PCR tests after experiencing minor symptoms consistent with the virus, according to an official statement. Both are in "good health and in a stable condition," it said.
Eyad al-Gharib was convicted for sending protesters to a prison where they were tortured, in the first criminal trial against Syrians who served in President Bashar Assad's government.
The traveler tells the story of his two months held in Syria's notorious prisons, and how his family got a Lebanese official to help secure his release.
That's the situation in Syria, where bread shortages are now widespread — and the queues for daily rations stretch on and on. The same goes for gasoline.
He was only 10 when the soldiers took away his father. Eventually the family fled to Jordan. But where would they go next? Their saga inspired a Pulitzer-winning graphic series in The New York Times.
After NPR reported claims of civilian deaths in the operation against the ISIS chief, Central Command says the men showed "hostile intent," but it found no weapons or signs they fired at U.S. forces.
Dr. Omar Ibrahim went from Aleppo to Idlib province in Syria to continue treating injuries from shelling. Now, after six years of doing surgery in a war zone, he is starting a new chapter in his life.
The Saleh family lost four young children in a fire that broke out in their tent in June, when the parents were working in farm fields. Syrian refugees make up about 70% of Jordan's farm workers.
Oscar-nominated documentary maker Feras Fayyad delivered the first witness testimony in a crimes against humanity trial against a former Syrian government official in Germany.
"Hydroxychloroquine is included in the [Syrian] national case management guidelines for COVID-19," though there's no evidence that it's effective, a World Health Organization representative tells NPR.
In a first, Syrian witnesses and plaintiffs, some of whom survived torture in a Damascus prison, will see a former high-ranking Syrian official in court on charges of crimes against humanity.
Dozens of Kurdish families fled to the northeast Syrian village of Tal Tamr last fall, escaping a Turkish invasion. U.S. forces help provide some security, but the families face an uncertain future.
When Rumi wandered onto a military base in Syria, 1st Lt. Shelby Koontz took her in. She didn't want to abandon Rumi when her deployment ended, so Koontz used social media to find her a forever home.
"We're scared of coronavirus and we don't know what God has written for us," says an aid worker. "The precautions being taken here are very little and very weak."
"It is a very, very sad thing when my son says to me, 'Mum, I don't want to die,'" says Etab Hadithi, a 41-year-old mother of two. "We are all suffering ... from a dangerous life."
The military is conducting a credibility assessment of claims of civilian casualties during the U.S. operation against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Turkey and Russia agreed to the cease-fire after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met on Thursday in Moscow.
New images show the scale of the destruction in the rebel stronghold of Idlib, where the United Nations says nearly a million people have been displaced in the last three months.
