By Salam al-Saadi (Damascus, Syria) – Rami is a member of Syria’s sprawling government bureaucracy who feels stuck in the rut of his government job. Four years after the 29-year-old was hired at the Ministry of Finance in Damascus, he found himself under financial strain and bureaucratic constraints.

Malath al-Zoubi (Beirut, Lebanon) - Maher, 25, sits next to his 22-year-old fiancée, Nour, in a small room in a home in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. They are both Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Nour’s father sits across from the young couple next to two other men. The men were brought in as witnesses by the cleric mediating the session, […]

(Raqqa, Syria) – In late November dozens of volunteers wearing blue suits and white helmets roamed the streets of the city with cleaning supplies, distributing garbage bags in a scene that appeared strange after months of no sanitation services. They began volunteering with the Local Council of Raqqa City after it launched a clean-up campaign at the end of November, […]

By Vyan Mohammad (Qamishli, Syria) - A day after Seebar didn’t show up for work, his colleagues learned of his death at the Qamishli National Hospital. According to his friend and colleague Housheen, Seebar had suffered from an upset stomach, nausea and severe headaches.

Hazzaa Adnan al-Hazzaa (Kfar Nabel, Syria) - Mohammad al-Salim, a French literature student from Kfar Nabel at the University of Aleppo, is critical of much of what the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been doing in the various areas that have been wrested out of Baath regime control.

By Hazzaa Adnan al-Hazzaa (Kfar Nabel, Syria) - The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, did not interfere in the public affairs of Kfar Nabel before December 2013, when it took control of the city of 30,000 people with practically no resistance. During their time in Kfar Nabel, ISIS raided several media and development organizations, including […]

(Raqqa, Syria) - Um Mar’ey, a woman in her forties, stands amid scattered tents after washing her children’s clothes in water warmed by wood fire. “We don’t have any blankets or covers. God only knows how we get through our days,” she says as she dries her shivering hands with an old rag.

(Raqqa, Syria) - New Islamist regulations in Raqqa are felt by students every day on a bus that transports them from Raqqa city to the private Ittihad University in the city’s suburbs. The male students sit in the front of the bus, while the girls sit in the back, because the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has prohibited […]

A prominent development in the ongoing Syria conflict is the ascent of radical Islamists, both Syrian and foreign, who advocate a puritanical form of Islam and who are ready to use violence to impose and spread their views. Jihadist groups, such Al-Jabha al-Islamiyya and the Mujahideen Army, are currently waging a war of attrition against the Islamic State in Syria […]

(Damascus, Syria) - The outrageous inflation of prices in Syria has driven the poorest and richest members of Syrian society to shop at second-hand stores. Each has their own reasons for resorting to used clothes: the poor are searching for affordable prices while the rich are on the lookout for brand names. “The crazy inflation is burning a hole in […]