The truth is, you just can't tell who your real friends are these days

For the Russian President, those Chechens who resisted his firepower inside Russia are merely continuing their struggle inside a Russian ally further to the south

In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers

Exclusive: Ghouta will fall. That is the message. And when it falls, Idlib must surely be next. And then the Syrians must decide how to break the US-Kurdish hold on Raqqa 

The Arabs were regarded as exotic and educated peoples whose own culture was never erased from the streets of Portugal’s cities

How can we complain when we will not ourselves deal with the armed Islamist opposition to Assad (I am not at this point talking about Isis) or try to arrange our own ceasefire, even with Russian help? After all, we’ve been arming these people for years

Debts will have to be paid for the casualties of this war, and some soldiers are becoming rather too over-confident

Exclusive: While the Kurds try to persuade you of their potential loyalty to Syria and disclaim any connection to the rest of Kurdish Syria and the Iraqi Kurds – clearly a lie – they have to proclaim their belief (quite correctly) in their own form of self-government

Exclusive: In part three of his Inside Syria series, and the first Western media report from Afrin since the start of the Turkish offensive, Robert Fisk shows just how ‘surgical’ is the attack on ‘terrorists’ in Operation Olive Branch

Exclusive: I’m the first western reporter to reach this second battlefront in Syria – and it’s clear that the battle against Isis on the ground is far from over

To have Saudi officials now trying to dictate the make-up of another Lebanese government suggests that they want to take on the role played out for decades by pre-civil war Syria

He certainly did not anticipate what happened to him. Indeed, Hariri had scheduled meetings in Beirut on the following Monday – with the IMF, the World Bank and a series of discussions on water quality improvement; not exactly the action of a man who planned to resign his premiership

Let’s remember what the document actually said in 1917 – and consider what the Israeli ambassador to the UK said this week

For decades, we have been condemning the dictators of the Middle East for their drumhead courts and their mass hangings. But how can we condemn them now, when we are announcing, quite publicly, that we want our own citizens dead if they joined Isis

It would be Russia who does the rebuilding of Syria after the war and Saudi Arabia who paid for it. The two vast oil nations now seem to be set on a course of mutual collaboration. So much for Trump’s $300bn weapons deal with the king

It’s actually a rather droll room – dark, heavy panelling, dull, tall windows, a 1930s monster building – the doors and windows far taller than a man or woman. It lacks imagination. I can think of a few other modern day fuehrers who might feel at home here