Category Archives: Bashar al-Assad

Survivors pulled from rubble 100 hours after quake as toll passes 23,000

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Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless in often sub-zero winter conditions

A second convoy of aid trucks has crossed into stricken north-western Syria from Turkey, as rescuers continued to pull survivors – including a newborn baby – from the rubble 100 hours after an earthquake that has killed more than 23,000 people.

Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in often sub-zero winter conditions after 7.8- and 7.6-magnitude quakes struck within hours of each other on Monday. Dozens of countries have pledged help and sent emergency teams.

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Syrian regime found responsible for Douma chemical attack

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Watchdog report follows years-long investigation into strike that killed 43 civilians in Damascus suburb

Investigators from the global chemical weapons agency have found the Syrian regime responsible for a poison gas attack that killed 43 people in a suburb of Damascus in 2018, leaving victims choking to death in the basement of a home.

In a report nearly five in the making, the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found the canisters carrying poison gas had been dropped by a Syrian air force helicopter over Douma – then one of the last opposition strongholds near the Syrian capital.

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Protester killed in raid on Syrian government building in Sweida

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Police officer also dies during clashes amid claims security forces fired live ammunition on protesters

A protester and a police officer have been killed during an anti-government demonstration in Syria’s Druze-majority Sweida province.

Seven people were wounded during the incident on Sunday, at a rare protest in the country where President Bashar al-Assad stamped out a pro-democracy uprising over a decade ago. Assad survived the resulting civil war but the conflict has plunged Syria into poverty, coupled with a food security and energy crisis.

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Syrian amnesties freed less than 6% of detainees, report reveals

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Freeing of prisoners hailed as acts of benevolence by Assad regime still leave estimated 136,000 people in jail

Prisoner amnesties decreed by the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, during the country’s 10-year war have freed less than 6% of detainees, with an estimated 136,000 people remaining in state prisons, a report has revealed.

The amnesties, which were hailed as acts of benevolence by officials and Assad, have put barely a dent in the huge numbers still held in the regime’s infamous prison systems, some for years after their sentences had expired.

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Question of what now for Syria remains as vexed as ever

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Analysis: while diplomatic efforts continue over Ukraine, Syria risks becoming entrenched as the conflict that was

Before Ukraine there was Syria, a war so vicious and consuming that it was once considered to be the most consequential conflict of the last 50 years.

With more than half a million killed when the counting stopped seven years ago, nearly two-thirds of the country’s prewar population displaced or in exile, and its economy and social fabric in ruins, Syria is a shattered husk, its spoils eagerly eyed by the three leaders who gathered in Tehran on Tuesday.

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Syria’s barrel bomb experts in Russia to help with potential Ukraine campaign

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Over 50 specialists skilled in delivering crude explosive working with Putin’s forces

Technicians linked to the Syrian military’s infamous barrel bombs that have wreaked devastation across much of the country have been deployed to Russia to help potentially prepare for a similar campaign in the Ukraine war, European officials believe.

Intelligence officers say more than 50 specialists, all with vast experience in making and delivering the crude explosive, have been in Russia for several weeks working alongside officials from Vladimir Putin’s military.

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Massacre in Tadamon: how two academics hunted down a Syrian war criminal

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After a rookie militiaman secretly watched a video of 41 people being brutally killed, he knew he had to get the horrific images to the outside world

• Warning: this report contains images readers may find upsetting

On a spring morning three years ago, a new recruit to a loyalist Syrian militia was handed a laptop belonging to one of Bashar al-Assad’s most feared security wings. He opened the screen and curiously clicked on a video file, a brave move given the consequences if anyone had caught him prying.

The footage was unsteady at first, before it closed in on a freshly dug pit in the ground between the bullet-pocked shells of two buildings. An intelligence officer he knew was knelt near the hole’s edge in military fatigues and a fishing hat, brandishing an assault rifle and barking orders.

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Syria’s $1.5bn seizure of protesters’ property ‘akin to scare tactic’

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Human rights group accuses Assad regime of profiting from detainees forced to sign away their rights, some while blindfolded

More than $1.5bn (£1.2bn) worth of personal property including cars, olive groves, shops, houses, electronics and jewellery has been seized by the Syrian government from citizens accused of joining anti-government protests, according to a rights group.

The Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) estimates that almost 40% of those detained after the Syrian uprising of 2011 were subject to property seizures.

It alleges the Syrian regime has attempted to circumvent international sanctions through this revenue, while ensuring that former detainees in exile have nothing to return to as the country struggles to rebuild.

“The regime did this, they took everything so that we don’t go back,” said Hassan Al Haj, remembering his family’s land in a village near Aleppo. “We used to have lands with olive and pistachio trees. I’d built a house there but never moved in. The government seized it before I was able to.”

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Syria using maze of shell companies to avoid sanctions on Assad regime’s elite

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Exclusive: documents seen by the Guardian prove Assad minister’s boast that evading financial sanctions has ‘become a Syrian craft’

The Syrian regime is setting up shell companies in a systematic attempt to avoid sanctions, according to official documents obtained by the Guardian.

The documents, not publicly available, detail at least three companies established in Syria on the same day with the explicit purpose of operating as a shell to buy shares and manage other companies.

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Syrians join Russian ranks in Ukraine as Putin calls in Assad’s debt

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Analysis: Safe in his palace, Syrian leader appears to have given Moscow carte blanche to airlift his army

After 11 years of war, the destruction of towns, cities and much of the Syrian military, Bashar al-Assad’s army has launched a recruitment drive. But the recruits are not fresh from bootcamps and will not fight on the home front. They are the vanguard of what could be the biggest state-backed mercenary force in the world. Within days, Syrian troops could be deployed to reinforce the stalled Russian frontlines in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin is about to extract a lethal price for Moscow’s rescue of the Syrian leader.

The first Syrian troops to join Putin’s ranks – an advance force of 150 – arrived in Russia on Thursday, European intelligence officials claim. Ukrainian military intelligence, echoing a claim by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, believes 40,000 Syrians have signed up to fight – a figure that would represent a sizeable chunk of the battle-ready capacity of the country’s entire military.

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Russia’s ‘warning’ of Ukraine’s biological weapons sounds just like Syria

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Analysis: Putin used the same false justification for brutal bombings in Syria, in the glare of western media

When a Russian spokesperson took to a podium in Moscow on Wednesday and warned of a “biological weapons programme” in Ukraine, fighters on another battlefield – Syria – understood what she meant.

The anti-Assad opposition groups that still held northern Syria had heard it all before. From 2015, when Russia took a prominent stake in the conflict, and throughout the gruesome years that followed, claims that they, instead of the Assad regime, had used chemical weapons were a ready-made slur that put them on notice of an imminent assault. The allegations were made by Moscow, whenever ground forces it was supporting wanted to clear a town or city. Brutal, indiscriminate bombardment followed. So did impunity.

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Islamic State leader killed during raid by US special forces in Syria

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Joe Biden says military has removed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi from the battlefield

Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of Islamic State and one of the world’s most wanted men, has been killed during an overnight raid by US special forces in north-west Syria.

The pre-dawn attack on a house in the village of Atme, just south of the Turkish border, led to up to 13 casualties, among them women and children. It also resulted in the destruction of a US helicopter, which had been used to carry special forces troops from Erbil in Iraq.

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Syrian survivors cling to hope Raslan case will mark end of regime’s impunity

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Analysis: sentencing of former colonel to life by German court may not be last chink in Assad’s armour

It was a moment thought nearly impossible after a decade of impunity: a senior Syrian intelligence officer jailed for life for helping direct the horrors of one of modern history’s most brutal wars.

But as Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Bashar al-Assad’s forces, bowed to his fate, survivors of the barbarous regime of torture that he helped run finally had something to cling to.

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Jailing of Syrian intelligence officer ‘step towards justice’ say former detainees

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Anwar Raslan’s conviction in Germany sends signal that Assad regime systematically uses torture, say detention system survivors

For survivors of Syria’s brutal detention system, the landmark conviction of a former Syrian intelligence official for crimes against humanity represents a vital step towards justice.

“We initially hoped for a trial at the international criminal court, but nevertheless this is an important step,” said Hussein Ghrer, one of 24 former detainees of Branch 251, a military intelligence unit with its own prison in Damascus, who testified against Anwar Raslan.

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German court jails former Syrian intelligence officer for life

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Anwar Raslan found to have overseen murder of at least 27 people and torture of at least 4,000 at Damascus prison

A German court has sentenced a Syrian former intelligence officer to life in prison in a case the UN rights chief said could lead to accountability for other perpetrators of the war’s “unspeakable crimes”.

Anwar Raslan, a former colonel loyal to the regime who later defected and gained asylum in Germany, was deemed by the judge at Koblenz higher regional court to have verifiably overseen the murder of at least 27 and torture of at least 4,000 prisoners at a detention facility in Damascus.

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German court expected to accuse Assad regime in Syria of torture

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Ex-Syrian intelligence official Anwar Raslan is charged with crimes against humanity, rape and murder

A German court is expected to issue a verdict against a former Syrian intelligence official accused of overseeing the murder of 58 people and the torture of thousands of others, in a landmark case expected to declare the actions of the Assad regime over the last decade a crime against humanity for the first time.

The verdict against Anwar Raslan, a former colonel loyal to the regime who later defected and fled Syria, is both a highly symbolic moment for the Syrian opposition in exile and a potential risk for those seeking to bring more war criminals to justice in the future, some of whom say a harsh sentence could discourage other defectors from talking openly to authorities.

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Life, death and limbo in the Calais ‘Jungle’ – five years after its demolition

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The refugee camp became notorious in 2015, as 1 million people fled war and danger to come to Europe. Years after it was demolished, 2,000 migrants are still waiting there, at the centre of a political storm

A small group of Ethiopian and Eritrean men stand shoeless and shivering in Calais. A few hours earlier, they almost drowned in the Channel, trying to cross to the UK. They got into difficulty when the motor on their boat failed. Their jeans are stiff and sodden with sand and seawater.

“We called the French coastguard to rescue us but they told us to call the English coastguard,” says one man. “Eventually, the French rescued us and brought us back to Calais.

Migrants and police at the ‘Old Lidl’ site in Calais. The police clear the site regularly, evicting anyone living there and seizing remaining belongings.

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Assad regime ‘siphons millions in aid’ by manipulating Syria’s currency

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Government pocketed half of donations in 2020 as central bank forced UN agencies to use lower exchange rate


The Syrian government is siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid by forcing UN agencies to use a lower exchange rate, according to new research.

The Central Bank of Syria, which is sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, in effect made $60m (£44m) in 2020 by pocketing $0.51 of every aid dollar sent to Syria, making UN contracts one of the biggest money-making avenues for President Bashar al-Assad and his government, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Operations & Policy Center thinktank and the Center for Operational Analysis and Research found.

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Assad the outcast being sold to the west as key to peace in Middle East

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After 10 years of bloodshed, foreign allies are seeking to rehabilitate the Syrian leader

For almost a decade he was a pariah who struggled to get a meeting abroad or even to assert himself on his visitors. Largely alone in his palace, save for trusted aides, Bashar al-Assad presided over a broken state whose few friends demanded a humiliating price for their protection, and weren’t afraid to show it.

During regular trips to Syria, Vladimir Putin arranged meetings at Russian bases, forcing Assad to trail behind him at functions. Iran too readily imposed its will, often dictating military terms, or sidelining the Syrian leader on decisions that shaped the course of his country.

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‘Parents are dressing up their children to be buried’: Syria’s war on young escalates

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Mural artist Hussein Sabbagh, 13, one of 27 children killed in government attacks in north-west Syria in two months

Amid the rubble of bombed homes in Binnish, a town in north-west Syria, a brightly painted mural stands out. The image shows an intact house, with love hearts streaming from the windows. Overhead, however, the dark silhouettes of birds are accompanied by helicopters, warplanes and missiles, and the garden’s red and yellow flowers look like flames.

Related: Syria: Assad shells former opposition stronghold Deraa

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