Free Republic

Horrifying pictures have emerged showing young victims of an alleged chemical attack on a rebel-held village in Syria. A rescuer is shown cradling a little boy in his arms after the child was killed during airstrikes on al-Shifuniyah in Syria's Eastern Ghouta. Medics say the youngster was poisoned to death in a gas attack as dictator Bashar al-Assad's forces continue their deadly assault on the region. Shocking photos also show children and babies gasping for air and using breathing apparatus at a make-shift hospital.

Russia's president Vladimir Putin has ordered a daily humanitarian pause in fighting in the Esstern Ghouta enclave in Syria. The rebel-held area has been under intense bombardment by the Syrian government, with Russian backing, for over a week. It has led to more than 540 deaths, according to monitoring groups.......

Syria's army and rebels were locked in talks Wednesday night to reach a 15-day ceasefire in the Eastern Ghouta region east of the capital, a monitor and a security source told AFP. These are the first known talks aiming for a truce in the region and are likely being brokered by Russian or Iranian mediators, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. If agreement is reached, "a ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta would begin at 6:00 am (0400 GMT) Thursday and will last 15 days," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said. A senior Syrian security source told AFP "talks are ongoing...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...