One person was killed and three others were wounded on Wednesday afternoon when the wall of an old building collapsed in the Beirut region of Ashrafieh. Internal Security Forces announced on its account on the social media website Twitter that the wall of an old building collapsed on four Syrian workers during the demolition […]

Earlier this week, roughly 800 insurgents — many of them linked to the extremist al-Qaeda offshoot ISIS — took over the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, after 30,000 Iraqi troops fled.

Iraqi officials in Baghdad conceded that the fighters commandeered military arsenal, released hundreds of prisoners from jail, and seized up to $430 million from the city’s central bank.

  FOR YEARS, President Obama has been claiming credit for “ending wars,” when, in fact, he was pulling the United States out of wars that were far from over. Now the pretense is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.   On Monday, a loathsome offshoot of al-Qaeda, the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, captured […]

  Over a million Syrian refugees have arrived in Lebanon, fleeing the conflict in their country. Syrians now make up a quarter of the population of this tiny Mediterranean country. Many were forced to leave with only what they could carry, and are living in desperate poverty. Finding work is difficult, and many families are […]

  Sometimes I think that the greatest tragedy of this place is not what it has become, but what it could have been. The greatest rupture in the Middle East was the destruction of the train route from Alexandria to Istanbul – precisely where Israeli existence takes place, spatially and linguistically. “From Yaffa to Beirut,” […]

  Work has finally finished on Zaha Hadid’s new Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). The practice landed the 3,000 m² project more than eight years ago following an international competition. The long-awaited scheme, with its huge cantilever, was originally scheduled to complete in 2008 […]

  The government of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, fell overnight to the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, also called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Mosul’s panic-stricken Christians, along with many others, are now fleeing en masse to the rural Nineveh Plain, according to the Vatican publication Fides. The border […]

  Al Qaeda-inspired militants in Iraq vowed Thursday to march against Baghdad after seizing two key cities in the north of the country this week.    A spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said in audio posted on militant websites commonly used by the group that the fighters have old […]