Kurdish militants in Turkey have issued a new call to arms to defend a border town in northern Syria from advancing Islamic State (IS) fighters, and the Turkish authorities and United Nations prepared for a surge in refugees. About 70,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey since Friday as IS militants seized dozens of villages close to the border and advanced on the frontier town of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish. Carol Batchelor, the United Nations refugee agency's (UNHCR) representative...

Syrian artillery pounded rebel-held areas of Homs on Monday as President Bashar al-Assad's government announced that voters had overwhelmingly approved a new constitution in a referendum derided as a sham by his critics at home and abroad. The outside world has proved powerless to halt the killing in Syria, where repression of initially peaceful protests has spawned an armed insurrection by army deserters and others. However, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered the besieged Baba Amro district...

Inside a filthy detention center in Damascus, eight or nine interrogators repeatedly bludgeoned a skinny teenager whose hands were bound and who bore a bullet wound on the left side of his chest. They struck his head, back, feet and genitals until he was left on the floor of a cell, bleeding from his ears and crying out for his mother and father to help him. Ibrahim Jamal al-Jahamani, a fellow prisoner who said he witnessed the brutal scene in Syria in May, heard the interrogators demand that...

Syrian troops backed by tanks and firing heavy machine guns swept into a village near the Turkish border Saturday, cutting food supplies for nearly 2,000 refugees who have so far refused to leave their country. Many of those men, women and children will have no choice but to flee across the frontier if troops descend on them. The Local Coordination Committees, a group that documents anti-government protests, said troops backed by six tanks and several armored personnel carriers, entered...