Damascus

About 10 Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters entered the Syrian town of Kobane through the border crossing with Turkey on Oct. 30, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
   
The monitoring group said the remaining peshmerga fighters were expected to enter the town - known as Ayn al-Arab in Arabic - "within hours".

Everything would have come up roses between Ankara and Tehran. Certain things did come up roses. Trade, of both the conventional and shady varieties, actually did prosper. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while he was still the prime minister, said he felt that Tehran was his second home.

Damascus has provided military support to Kurdish forces to help them battle Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Syrian media has reported, in a move that would mean President Bashar al-Assad and his Western enemies could be backing the same forces against Islamist militants.
   

Syria's air force has destroyed two fighter jets operated by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in the north of the country, Information Minister Omran Zoabi said in remarks published on Syria's state news agency SANA late on Oct. 21.
   

Mr. Davutoğlu once claimed that he knows Syria and the Middle East polity too well as evinced by the fact, in his words, that 'he traveled to Damascus 62 times and knows the city street by street'

Croatian media reports say that two oil and gas fields owned by INA, 250 kilometres from Damascus in Syria, have been occupied by Islamic State fighters.

The two fields, Mazrur and Jazal, are a part of a 4,500-square-kilometre oil-gas bloc that had been under the management of the Syrian state company Hayan Petroleum Company.

He has designed and introduced to Romania an innovative emergency intervention system, which today is given as an example in other countries and is also used by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a case study.

Syrian government air raids on a rebel-held area near Damascus killed 42 people, including seven children, a monitoring group said Friday, giving an updated toll.

In the old town of Damascus there are coffee shops where men gather over coffee, cigarettes and shisha. One feature that those coffee shops boast is the old tradition of storytelling, or “hakawati,” which may or may not be still alive.

The world must confront "terrorist groups" in Syria and beyond but the war-ravaged country also requires a political solution, the U.N.'s new envoy on the conflict said in Damascus on Sept. 11.