Salman Shaikh proposes a path forward for addressing the quickly escalating crisis in Syria.

Osama Suleiman, a Syrian immigrant to Britain and head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has taken on the task of counting the death toll in Syria through hours of videos shot by activists and journalists in the country.

Syria's civil war, at its core a sectarian conflict, is viewed through the eyes of a fearful Alawite minority.

The counterinsurgency in Syria yielded a destructive power that terrorized and forced Syria's propertied class into submission.

The history of civil wars — and of efforts to stop them — demonstrates what is likely to work and what is likely to fail.

In his latest exclusive dispatch from Deir el-Zour province, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad meets fighters who have left the Free Syrian Army for the discipline and ideology of global jihad.

The West may no longer be the main target for terrorist organizations; turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has given rise to an increased number of more locally-focused attacks in the last year.

He was an unpromising youth who gained power by accident. Today he's the Arab world's most notorious dictator. But who really is this man? The Financial Times' Roula Khalaf profiles Bashar al-Assad.

After a year of unrest and violence, Syria's political crisis is characterized by dilemmas and contradictions. Members of Congress continue to evaluate possible U.S. policy approaches towards the Syrian crisis, write Jeremy M. Sharp and Christopher M. Blanchard in this Congressional Research Service report.

NATO talks a big game when it comes to global security, but its ability to affect war and peace outside of Europe is limited, writes Joshua Foust for Need to Know on PBS.

Syria is trapped on a crumbling precipice, and however it might fall will entail significant risks for the United States and for the Syrian people, says this memo written by experts on Middle East at Brookings.

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and Chair of Mid-Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, says rather than military intervention, nonviolent resistance combined with targeted international sanctions will force the Syrian government to negotiate with the opposition for a transfer of power to a democratic majority.

There are no good solutions to the mess in Syria, says James Traub, a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation.

In an essay for the Middle East Policy journal, Dr. Joshua Landis examines the Syrian uprising of 2011 and predicts Assad's regime's prolonged survival despite its growing isolation and struggling economy.

Establishing "no-kill zones," using drones to protect civilians, and encouraging defection could halt the killing in Syria, says Anne-Marie Slaughter at the New York Times.