Charles Lister

When the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces captured the village of al-Baghouz in late-March 2019, ISIS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” came to an end. The largest multinational military coalition in modern history spent four-and-a-half years methodically defeating ISIS’s control of an expanse…

Syria has been at the center of the world’s counter-terrorism efforts in recent years. The shocking expansion of ISIS in mid-2014 unified the international community’s attention on Syria in a way that the earlier uprising against the Assad regime had not. In a matter of weeks, the largest…

More than 300,000 civilians have been displaced in the last four weeks, since the Syrian regime and Russia resumed their brutal offensive on Idlib. Earlier in 2019, a five-month offensive saw hundreds of thousands displaced and more than 1,000 civilians killed. As many as 3.5 million civilians…

For the last eight years, the situation in Syria has been repeatedly described as chaotic and complicated, but that chaos and complexity has worsened significantly in recent weeks. Following President Trump’s phone call with Turkish President Erdogan and Turkey’s subsequent incursion into northeast…

Since the beginning of 2018 until today, the Syrian regime has expanded its control of territory across the country from approximately 52% to 62%. That 10% of territory gained was a crucially important, encompassing opposition-held areas in Syria’s southwest, rural Homs and eastern Ghouta, as well…

According to several anonymous American intelligence officials, Osama Bin Laden’s favorite son, Hamza, has been killed. Information on when (sometime in the past two years), how (possibly an airstrike), where (likely in Afghanistan) and by whom (involving America) remains unclear. According to some…