The Turkish military killed 21 Kurdish militants in northern Syria and Iraq, the defence ministry said on Wednesday.

In the past week, the Pentagon has acknowledged that its footprint in Iraq and Syria is bigger than it has claimed for years

While the victory against Bashar Assad’s forces is a triumph, the jihadist-turned-statesman who is now in charge has a lengthy to-do list.

Lebanon said on Thursday it was looking forward to having the best neighbourly relations with Syria, in its first official message to the new administration in Damascus.

The Arab Spring hit Syria in 2011 as demonstrations broke out against Assad, who responded violently, yielding a multi-sided civil war. Although Syria was never a serious American security interest, the Obama administration leaped into the fray, assuming that it could micro-manage a brutal, multi-sided civil war.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Friday and met with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to discuss Syria's political transition, calling for a non-sectarian administration following the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

The number of US troops in Syria has regularly surged higher than the Pentagon has publicly disclosed since at least 2020, and in recent months increased to more than double the roughly 900 troops the US has long said are in Syria,

The announcement comes after Kurdish groups said they had launched a counteroffensive against Turkish forces that entered Syria and taken territory

Blinken said he spoke to Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani about the situation in Syria after the Assad regime's fall.

The camps are run by the SDF. The United States backs the SDF, providing it with weapons and training, in an effort to combat the Islamic State. The Pentagon disclosed this month that there are about 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, as part of an effort to contain regrouping Islamic State remnants.

After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, different resistance groups began to fight with one another. The state structure failed and eventually, the Taliban took control of the country in the mid-1990s.