Those who sign up will be shipped off to villages with names like Tikrit and Fallujah, where they’ll don dishdashas and head scarves and live in crowded huts surrounded by rumbling tanks and the crackle of machine guns. Their neighbors will be Shiites and Sunnis, soldiers and insurgents.

WASHINGTON – After starting the 110th Congress with a big antiwar mandate, Democrats are scrambling to find a way forward on an issue that is driving wedges deep into their new majority.

The Center for Democracy in the Middle East (formerly the Kurdish American Committee for Democracy in Syria) has had early success in its efforts to create alliances between political parties in order to advocate for democratic governance in Syria.