Bashar al-Assad

With America’s most senior general calling for the military offensive against Islamic State to be broadened, some are asking if our enemy’s enemy – Syria’s President Assad – should now be our friend.

In his last article before he was kidnapped, James Foley reported on the “increasingly violent” Syrian opposition, which had been “deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups”.

The west’s actions in Iraq have a dual agenda, says International Editor Lindsey Hilsum: one, to protect the people threatened by the Islamic State, the other to safeguard American interests.

Another young British Muslim has reportedly been killed fighting with the Islamic State in Syria, after an apparently normal life in the UK.

The head of the global chemical weapons watchdog tells Channel 4 News it is an “open question” if hidden chemical weapons remain in Syria, two days after the last shipment was supposed to have left.

The scale of the crisis in Iraq has led many to wonder what was once unpalatable: would the country be more stable if Saddam Hussein had remained in power?

Rebels begin withdrawing from the city of Homs – a central battleground in the Syrian civil war, once known as the “capital of the revolution” – in a major symbolic victory for Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad makes a rare public appearance as he visits a recently recaptured Christian town. State television reported that presidential elections will take place on 3 June.

The British government says Syrian presidential elections, to take place in June, will have “no value or credibility”.

Homs was once the centre of the revolution. In two years, suburbs were turned to rubble, and it appears to have fallen back under government control. Lindsey Hilsum reports from the iconic city.

With the eyes of the world on Ukraine, an escalated campaign of barrel bombings by the regime of Bashar al-Assad has led to the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children in Syria.