Afghanistan

• Wall Street Journal: Taliban's Spread Into Northeast Sparks Fears (Yaroslav Trofimov, September 6)
• "Barely a year after coalition forces withdrew from the province, Badakhshan has turned into one of the country's most violent areas, with the Taliban overrunning key roads and moving closer to Faizabad, the provincial capital built along a fast-flowing river hedged in by cliffs."
  

Egypt

• The Guardian: Egyptian activists fear crackdown on Islamists will widen to other dissidents (Patrick Kingsley, September 8)

• "Egyptian activists fear the country's new army-backed regime will follow a crackdown on Islamist allies of the former president, Mohamed Morsi, with a wider campaign against those opposed to both Morsi and the military."
  
• Washington Post: Syrian Islamists protest U.S. strikes; Americans exit embassy in Beirut (Liz Sly, September 6)
• "The leading hard-line Islamist group in northern Syria issued a statement on its Facebook page cautioning its followers against supporting U.S. intervention, saying it would only serve American interests and not the cause of those seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad."
  

Iran

• BBC: Why Iran's watchdogs hold no fear for Supreme Leader (Siavash Ardalan, September 3)
• "Iran's Assembly of Experts - ostensibly one of the most powerful institutions in the Islamic Republic - is holding its biannual session in Tehran."
  

• Washington Post: Two years after Libya’s revolution, government struggles to control hundreds of armed militias (Kevin SUllivan, September 7)
• "Even minor disputes escalate into frequent gun violence on the streets. Kidnappings and armed robberies are increasing, and government officials and others have been assassinated with guns and bombs. Militants and arms smugglers easily cross poorly protected borders shared with Niger and Chad."
  

Syria

• LA Times: Pentagon adjusts plans for more intense attacks on Syria (David S. Cloud, September 7)
• "The planning for intense attacks over a three-day period reflects the growing belief in the White House and the Pentagon that the United States needs more firepower to inflict even minimal damage on Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces, which have been widely dispersed over the last two weeks, the officials said."
  
• The Guardian: American threats widen fault lines among Syria's rebels (Martin Chulov, September 8)
• "While Syria's mainstream rebels are enthusiastically welcoming talk of an American attack as a chance to break the stalemate, the jihadist groups among them see things through a very different prism, in which my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend."
  
• Wall Street Journal: Putin Vows Continued Aid to Assad (Paul Sonne & Andrey Ostroukh, September 6)
• "Will we continue to help Syria? We will," Mr. Putin said after a 20-minute meeting with President Barack Obama at a summit here of the Group of 20. "We're helping them now. We are supplying arms, cooperating in the economic sphere."
  
• New York Times: Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West (C.J Chivers, September 5)
• "In the more than two years this civil war has carried on, a large part of the Syrian opposition has formed a loose command structure that has found support from several Arab nations, and, to a more limited degree, the West. Other elements of the opposition have assumed an extremist cast, and openly allied with Al Qaeda."
  
• BBC: Nervousness grips Damascus once again (Jeremy Bowen, September 8)
• "Once again, Damascenes are asking whether a toxic cloud might poison them if an American missile hits a chemical weapons site, or whether the armed rebels in the suburbs would use an American attack to try to push closer to the regime's centres of power."