Amid the end of the nearly 14 years of civil war in Syria, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is set to rekindle a new war in northern Syria against America’s main ally, the Syrian Kurds.

Years of strife ruined the energy sector, battered the currency and strangled growth. The West must ease financial controls to help the economy, experts say.

Will he walk the walk and not just talk the talk? And if he doesn’t win in the elections, will he peacefully stand aside for whoever does win?” one analyst said.

"I believe there will be violent fighting, the end of which we do not know," a top Syrian Democratic Council official told Newsweek.

The Pentagon announced the US currently has “approximately 2,000” troops in Syria, more than double the previously disclosed number of 900, a Defense Department spokesperson said at a press briefing on Thursday.

President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a mass deportation operation targeting millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and with temporary protections once he takes office on Jan. 20, a challenging initiative that could split apart families and affect U.S. businesses.

A senior delegation of U.S. diplomats arrived in Syria to meet with the new de facto rulers, looking to understand more about how they intend to govern.

During the course of Syria’s brutal civil war, Assad used chemical weapons more than 300 times against his own citizens, causing thousands of casualties. The worst such attack was a barrage of sarin-filled rockets launched against the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013 that killed an estimated 1,

“CENTCOM forces conducted the deliberate strikes to disrupt and degrade Houthi operations, such as attacks against U.S. Navy warships and merchant vessels in the Southern Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden,” CENTCOM said.

In a recent twist that feels straight out of a political drama, the Pentagon has revealed that the number of U.S. troops in Syria is more than double what was