Rami Makhlouf, former backer of Assad regime, also barred from doing business with state
One of Syria’s wealthiest businessmen has said that the government of his cousin Bashar al-Assad has ordered the seizure of his assets and barred him from doing business with the state for five years, escalating a dispute deeply mixed in family affairs.
Related: Could Assad row with cousin tear down Syrian regime?
Continue reading...Power struggle between Bashar al-Assad and first cousin sparks rare family fissure and leaves public aghast
A defiant tyrant and his ruthless wife square up against the family oligarch, with the spoils of a nation at stake. It could be standard Ramadan television fare, but not this year. Instead, all the intrigue of Syria’s ruling family has been laid out in a spectacular real-life drama that has gripped the country and the region.
Leading the cast is the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, and Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, but star billing has so far been taken by the president’s first cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who last week took to Facebook to do the unthinkable: air the normally inscrutable family’s dirty laundry.
Continue reading...Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of the Syrian leader, has accused him of arresting his employees
Syria’s richest man and first cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, who is accused by the US and EU of bankrolling the regime, has exacerbated a spectacular falling out with the Syrian leader, accusing him of sending security forces to arrest his employees and take over his businesses.
Rami Makhlouf on Sunday released a second Facebook video –two days after an earlier shock appearance – which lifted the lid on his split with Assad and laid bare the workings of the ruling family’s normally inscrutable inner sanctum.
Continue reading...Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib accused of roles in Assad regime’s torture apparatus
Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib thought they had escaped Syria’s civil war when they fled to Germany and applied for political asylum. But unlike most of those seeking refuge, they had once been part of the state’s machinery of oppression.
When the conflict began, both men were members of the notoriously vicious intelligence service, which arrested, tortured and killed protesters and opposition figures. But both defected from the regime, and they seemed to have thought that would protect them from their past.
Continue reading...For the first time, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog has directly accused Syria’s leadership of ordering illegal attacks on its people
There is a temptation, to which some European governments and politicians are prey, to imagine that Syria’s civil war is over. It would, after all, be politically convenient if the millions of refugees languishing in Turkey and Jordan were to go home, rather than serve as a constant reminder of the EU’s chronic fear of migrants.
An end to the war would remove a prime cause of instability in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean region. Russia and Iran would have less excuse to play games of geopolitical chance with civilian lives. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s irascible president, would have less to complain about.
Continue reading...Report by UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use is hailed by rights groups
The UN-aligned body that oversees chemical weapons use has for the first time blamed the Syrian regime for using sarin gas on the battlefield in a report hailed by rights groups as a landmark moment with implications for war crimes investigations.
The report, released on Wednesday by the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), accuses the Syrian Air Force of twice using sarin to attack the town of Ltamenah in late March 2017. It also found that regime aircraft had bombed the same town with chlorine gas in the same week.
Continue reading...Watchdog to release first report blaming president for attacks during the conflict
The UN’s chemical weapons watchdog is expected to release its first report explicitly blaming Bashar al-Assad for sarin and chlorine gas attacks on civilians in Syria as efforts to establish accountability for the use of chemical agents in the nine-year-old conflict gain momentum.
Observers anticipate that public and classified versions of a report by a new unit at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will be published on Wednesday, close to the anniversaries of a major chlorine attack on the then rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma that killed at least 85 people in 2018 as well as a deadly sarin attack on Khan Sheikhun in 2017 which killed at least 89. The report is believed to focus on 2017 attacks on the village of al-Lataminah.
Continue reading...Russian and Turkish leaders will try to hammer out yet another deal to stabilise Idlib
A summit between the leaders of Turkey and Russia on Thursday may be the last chance to work out a deal that avoids further calamity in north-west Syria.
Faced with increasing military losses in Idlib province and a potential wave of people fleeing the fighting, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is eager for a ceasefire – and Vladimir Putin is ready to bargain.
Continue reading...The country was also blamed for indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas without ‘a specific military objective’
A UN investigation into atrocities committed in Syria has for the first time accused Russia of direct involvement in war crimes for indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.
The latest report from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria focuses on events of July 2019 to January this year, and in particular attacks by “pro-government forces” on civilian targets like medical facilities, driving 700,000 civilians from their homes.
Continue reading...The White Helmets civil defence service has released footage showing a rescue operation after airstrikes by the Syrian regime and Russian forces on Tuesday. Eight school facilities were bombed in Idlib province, Syria, in a single day, killing more than 20 people as the battle for control of the country’s last opposition stronghold intensified
Continue reading...Six schools and two nurseries reported targets of airstrikes by Assad regime and Russia
Eight school facilities have been bombed in Idlib province, in Syria, in a single day as the battle for control of the country’s last opposition stronghold intensifies.
The attacks came despite warnings that the violence has already led to the worst humanitarian crisis in the Syrian war to date.
Continue reading...Outsiders can be forgiven for being tired of the Syrian conflict. After all, the violence has lasted for nearly a decade and the worst chapters – for outsiders, at least – have come and gone: Islamic State (Isis) seized almost half the country, in addition to one-third of Iraq and launched a global network of terror in 2014. But the world has now caught its breath and the threat has all but ended. Refugees, too, flooded Europe some years ago but the influx has been contained.
Also, expert warnings about a resurgence of violence or extremism did not materialise and the return of state control seems to be the steady trajectory of the conflict despite persistent problems. Most of the country is currently under the control of either the regime, Turkey or the United States-backed Kurdish forces in eastern Syria. Even in the Kurdish zone, many would concede that it might be just a matter of time before these areas are recaptured by Damascus, even without much fighting, if and when the US eventually ends its presence there.
Continue reading...A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in northern Syria after the government’s attempt to take back the opposition-held city of Idlib. Bethan McKernan describes how the fighting and freezing conditions have caused hundreds of thousands of displaced people to flee for their lives. Also today: Justin McCurry on the evacuation of the coronavirus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship
At the Syria-Turkey border, thousands of refugees are fleeing for their lives, having left the opposition-held city of Idlib, which is under assault from government forces back by Russia. More than 900,000 men, women and children have made the journey north in appalling conditions, the largest exodus of people in the country’s long civil war.
The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Bethan McKernan, has been following the story and tells Rachel Humphreys that the humanitarian crisis is worsening – as the world watches on.
Continue reading...The UN has estimated that 170,000 of the 900,000 civilians forced from their homes in a recent wave of displacement in north-west Syria are living out in the open. Laith, an activist who is part of the White Helmets volunteer group, has called for the international community to 'stand with [those] who left their homes and be with them in the camps'. The massive displacement follows an escalation of Russian-supported offensives by the Assad regime to the destroy the last rebel bastions in Idlib and Aleppo provinces
Continue reading...Vast numbers of people are caught between regime bombings and closed Turkish border
Hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, are stranded with little food or shelter in sub-zero temperatures in north-western Syria, forced from their homes by a Russian-backed military offensive that has often targeted hospitals and other civilian infrastructure.
The assault on Idlib, the last stronghold of the Syrian opposition, has created one of the greatest humanitarian crises of a long and brutal war. It has displaced more than 800,000 people since December, the United Nations said, 143,000 of them in the last three days alone.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of civilians are fleeing a renewed assault by the Syrian regime, in desperate circumstances. Is anyone paying attention?
After the torture and massacre of civilians, after the targeted attacks upon rescuers, doctors and schools, after the barrel bombs and chemical weapons, it should be hard to believe that there could be a new wave of misery for Syria unleashed by Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers. Yet here it is. The assault on Idlib, the last rebel-held enclave, is the largest-scale humanitarian catastrophe of a war now in its ninth year. The United Nations has warned that 832,000 people, most of them children, have been displaced in less than three months; 100,000 people have fled in the past week. Many had already fled the Syrian regime’s murderous assaults before, in some cases three or four times; the province’s population has swelled from 1 million to 3 million since the war broke out. They face sub-zero temperatures, and many don’t even have tents in which to shelter. Doctors report children dying of exposure.
Conditions are likely to worsen. The frontlines are approaching Idlib city, probably sending further waves of families towards the closed Turkish border. Fighting has claimed the lives of both Turkish and Syrian troops, prompting the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to move in reinforcements and threaten: “In the event of the tiniest harm to our soldiers … we will hit regime forces in Idlib and anywhere else.”
Continue reading...Children and rescue workers among those killed after market and industrial zone hit
At least 18 civilians have been killed in airstrikes as an offensive by Bashar al-Assad’s forces presses ahead, burying a supposed ceasefire in Syria’s last opposition-held province.
Airstrikes carried out by the Syrian air force and its Russian allies hit a market and industrial zone in Idlib city in a ferocious attack on Wednesday, destroying several buildings and setting cars on fire, leaving the torched corpses of motorists trapped inside.
Continue reading...Displacement follows two weeks of air and ground assaults on rebel stronghold
More than 235,000 civilians have fled their homes in opposition-held areas of north-west Syria in the past two weeks, the UN has said, after attacks by Syrian government forces intensified.
Syrian troops and their foreign backers are targeting the towns of Maaret al-Numan and Saraqeb in Idlib province, which sit on a highway connecting Aleppo with the capital, Damascus.
Continue reading...Up to 30,000 leave area of Idlib province as government forces push to reopen road from Damascus to Aleppo
A mass exodus of civilians from the last rebel-held stronghold in Syria has begun as thousands of people flee towards the Turkish border in the face of a fierce new military assault by Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies.
As many as 30,000 people have left the area around the town of Maarat al-Numan after four days of airstrikes and heavy shelling paved the way for Syrian government troops to push deeper into north-western Idlib province.
Continue reading...Whistleblower claims OPCW’s findings misrepresented some facts over 2018 chlorine attack
The head of the world’s chemical weapons watchdog has defended its conclusion that chlorine was used in an attack in Syria in April 2018, after a whistleblower alleged the report misrepresented some of the facts amid Russian claims that the watchdog is being politicised by the west.
WikiLeaks at the weekend published an email from a member of the fact-finding team that investigated the attack which accused the body of altering the original findings of investigators to make evidence of a chemical attack seem more conclusive.
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