The presidential election in Turkey is now less than a month away. Opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu is hoping to unseat Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polls show the 74-year-old is expected to win a majority of votes in the first round on May 14. In a video that has gone viral, Kilicdaroglu announced he was an Alevi, a member of Turkey's main religious minority. Alevis are Muslims but are considered heretics by some Sunni hardliners. We take a closer look.

In Yemen, more than 900 prisoners were released this past week as momentum builds to end the nine-year conflict there. This is linked to the fact that the leadership in Saudi Arabia and Iran are talking to each other again. The two powers broke off relations seven years ago, impacting politics and conflict across the region. So now that diplomatic ties have been restored, what might change? We take a closer look and speak to Julien Barnes-Dacey, the Middle East Programme Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Lebanon's economic meltdown has plunged most of the population into poverty. It's now also threatening the country's security. As the currency has plummeted to new lows in recent months, salaries too have fallen, as prices rise. To make ends meet, soldiers are being forced to take on second jobs, or even desert their ranks. Our Beirut correspondents went to meet two of them.

Is Bashar al-Assad's isolation on the world stage coming to an end? The Syrian dictator has been shunned by the international community since 2011, when his regime brutally crushed anti-government protests, triggering the civil war in Syria. But in recent months, a growing number of countries have been coordinating with Assad's government. Saudi Arabia is expected to invite Assad to the Arab League summit next month, 12 years after Syria was suspended from the organisation. Our Foreign Affairs Commentator Douglas Herbert tells us more.

Following weeks of mass protests and a day of nationwide turmoil, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yielded to pressure and agreed to postpone his controversial judicial reforms as of March 27th. This decision was a significant reversal for his government, which had fired the defense minister just a day earlier in response to his demands for a delay in the divisive law.

The two sides in Yemen's conflict have agreed to free nearly 900 people in a prisoner exchange. That deal comes less than two weeks after Saudi Arabia and Iran re-established diplomatic ties after years of hostility. The two regional powers have backed opposing sides in Yemen's war, and their rapprochement has galvanised efforts to end the conflict. We take a closer look.

Twenty years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the shadow of the war still looms large. As well as the destabilisation of Iraq and the wider region, the conflict also created a power vacuum that enabled the rise of the Islamic State group. In this special edition, we speak to Samuel Helfont, assistant professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College programme at the California-based Naval Postgraduate School and the author of several books on Iraq.

This week marks one month since the ground shook under southern Turkey and northern Syria. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake and subsequent aftershocks killed over 50,000 people, making it one of the deadliest quakes worldwide in the past century. Entire cities were flattened and millions of people were made homeless. But Turkey is nonetheless scheduled to go to the polls in two months' time. To discuss the political fallout of the quake and its potential impact on the election, we speak to our Ankara correspondent Jasper Mortimer.

Iraq's government is going after what it calls "decadent content" on social media. Users of TikTok, Instagram and other platforms who are found to breach "morals and traditions" can now be jailed. The campaign was announced in January and so far, a dozen people have been arrested. Our correspondent Marie-Charlotte Roupie reports.

Protesters smashed windows of banks in the Lebanese capital Beirut this past week as the currency hit a new low against the dollar. The Lebanese lira has lost about 97 percent of its value, and more than 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line. Millions of people are struggling to make ends meet amid the financial turmoil. FRANCE 24's Beirut correspondents Rawad Taha and Serge Berberi met two such families in the once-wealthy neighbourhood of Ashrafieh.