Syria

"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.

American soldiers are helping secure oil fields in northeast Syria — not only from ISIS extremists, but from Syria and Russia as well. It's a relatively new mission for these troops.

"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.

As fighting escalates in northwest Syria, the U.N. estimates that thousands of Syrians are being displaced every day.

Fighting in northwest Syria has forced hundreds of thousands of people — many of them women and children — to seek shelter along the border.