Bashar al-Assad government

News reports emerged last week that Israel had struck Syrian positions in Hama; it is already well-known that Israel has been periodically hitting alleged Hezbollah arms shipments to Lebanon since the start of the Syrian war. "In the last five years, [Israel] has targeted arms convoys to Hezbollah at least 100 times," retired Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel said just last month.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven and other allies in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL) will meet in Italy on April 11 to design a joint common strategy after Washignton directly engaged Syrian government forces for the first time during the latter's six-year civil war.

Nearly 180,000 Syrians have been born in Turkey over the last five years, according to Turkey's Health Ministry.

A total of 177,568 Syrians mothers - refugees of the country's bloody civil war - gave birth in Turkey between April 2011 and September 2016, according to the ministry's figures.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations' special envoy for Syria, said on Jan. 25 that the conference on Syria's future, which had been planned for Jan. 25 but failed to go ahead, could meet on Jan. 29. He was speaking after a telephone conversation earlier in the day between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to meet Turkish President Tayyip Erdo?an and Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu in Istanbul tomorrow, Jan. 23, to discuss a wide range of regional issues, with a heavy focus on the Syrian civil war and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Turkish jets have shot down an "aerial vehicle" near the Syrian border, the Turkish military said in a written statement on Oct. 16, in the latest sign of the tensions on Turkey's southern borders.
The target was an unmanned aerial vehicle that was shot down in Turkish airspace before falling onto Turkish soil, according to military sources.

It was actually first written in the Geneva settlement on Syria that the incumbent Bashar al-Assad government is a party in efforts to end the four-year-long civil war there and perhaps establish a ?new Syria.?

His name did not appear in agency bulletins. He is also somebody?s son, like the 3-year old Syrian toddler Aylan al-Kurdi whose dead body was swept by the waves of the Aegean Sea to Turkey?s Bodrum shores as the boat carrying them to Greek island of Kos sunk early September 2. 

Away from the front lines, another Syria still lives, featuring wedding parties and people strolling the streets - even if the reminders of death and fighting are never very far away.

Turkey remains distant on a United Nations plan to establish buffer zones inside Syria that would be backed with a cease-fire in some particular regions, according to sources who commented on an Ankara meeting between Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, and Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlio?lu.