Category Archives: Syria

‘There is no future’: the refugees who became pawns in Erdoğan’s game

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First the asylum seekers were used to further Turkey’s regional ambitions, now they are made to suffer in quarantine camps

At the beginning of March, thousands of refugees gathered in the shadow of the Pazarkule border gate in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he would “open the gate” to Europe.

The move was a reaction to the killing of 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib province on 28 February and designed to exert pressure on the EU and Nato to support its military operation in northern Syria.

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Syria’s richest man inflames rare public dispute with Assad

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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.

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Fuel truck bomb kills more than 40 in northern Syria

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The blast in a market in Afrin came as people went shopping in preparartion of breaking the Ramadan fast, says US and Syrian Observatory

A fuel truck bomb in a market in northern Syria killed at least 46 people including Turkish-backed rebel fighters, according to US officials and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The blast on Tuesday in Afrin, a city controlled by Ankara’s proxies, came as people went shopping in preparation to break the Ramadan fast, according to the US state department, which condemned the attack as a “cowardly act of evil”.

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Sydney man charged after allegedly fighting for al-Qaida-linked Syrian terrorist group

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Police allege the 44-year-old travelled to Syria in 2012 and 2013 to fight ‘for months at a time’

A Sydney man has been charged after allegedly fighting for an al-Qaida-linked Syrian terrorist group “for months at a time” in 2012 and 2013.

The 44-year-old was due to face Parramatta bail court on Saturday after tactical police arrested him in a car park in Mount Lewis on Friday.

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Makeshift oil refineries a necessary evil for locals in north-west Syria

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Toxic fumes and repiratory disease among hazards facing people reliant on informal processing plants for work and fuel, study finds

Black pools, long trenches and charred earth have become common sights in the fields of north-west Syria, signs of an informal oil economy that has developed during the war.

Despite damaging both the environment and health, up to 5,000 backyard oil refineries, crucial to the livelihoods of besieged Syrians, have cropped up in recent years, identified through satellite imagery in a report by open source investigators Bellingcat.

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Two Syrian defectors to go on trial in Germany for war crimes

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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.

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US and Russia blocking UN plans for a global ceasefire amid crisis

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Resolution strongly supported by dozens of countries, human rights groups and charities

The Trump administration and Russia are blocking efforts to win binding UN security council backing for a global ceasefire to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 150,000 lives worldwide.

Related: Coronavirus world map: which countries have the most cases and deaths?

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The Observer view on the smoking gun that should force Assad to face justice

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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.

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‘After war we now have this’: Syrians grapple with poverty and coronavirus

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Collapse of economy leaves country unable to cope with prospect of a major outbreak

Kareem Zukari has endured a lot during the nine years of Syria’s war. There have been missiles and bullets, loved ones killed, and the fear of being conscripted into the army or tortured in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons. But no matter how bad things got, there was always food.

“Now there is so much poverty,” the 25-year-old from the Damascus neighbourhood of Barzeh said. “There are families living on $200 [£160] a month, but I don’t call that living. It’s barely managing to eat. And now with the coronavirus some businessmen are capitalising on the panic and raising prices.” He asked that his real name not be used for fear of repercussions.

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Syrian regime blamed for sarin gas attacks in landmark report

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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.

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UN inquiry stops short of directly blaming Russia over Idlib attacks

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Report says ‘government of Syria and/or its allies’ carried out strikes on hospitals and school

A UN investigation has stopped short of directly calling Russia a perpetrator in attacks on hospitals and other humanitarian infrastructure in rebel-held areas of Syria, a move greeted with disappointment from rights groups.

A summary of a 185-page internal report submitted to the UN security council on Monday said that in five of seven cases studied – among them four medical sites, a school and a children’s centre – “the government of Syria and/or its allies had carried out the airstrike”, but it did not explicitly name Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s most important military and political ally.

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OPCW report set to blame Syria chemical attacks on Bashar al-Assad

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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.

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Australian children remain trapped in al-Hawl camp as region braces for coronavirus

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Fresh calls for Australia to repatriate its citizens amid fears the camp is vulnerable to a Covid-19 outbreak

Forty-seven Australian children remain trapped in the abject al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria, as the region braces for a potential Covid-19 outbreak.

Syria has reported only a handful of cases, and there are none confirmed in the camp housing 68,000 women and children, most of them family of Islamic State fighters, but there has been little Covid-19 testing across the war-torn country.

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EU court rules three member states broke law over refugee quotas

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Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland failed to comply with 2015 programme, ECJ says

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke European law when they failed to give refuge to asylum seekers arriving in southern Europe, often having fled war in Syria and Iraq, the EU’s top court has ruled.

The three central European countries now face possible fines for refusing to take a share of refugees, after EU leaders forced through mandatory quotas to relocate up to 160,000 asylum seekers at the height of the 2015 migration crisis.

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UK charity failed to safeguard aid worker killed in Syria – report

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Alan Henning, from Greater Manchester, was beheaded by Isis militant Jihadi John in 2014

A British charity that employed the murdered aid worker Alan Henning failed to properly safeguard him and other other volunteers on convoys to war-torn Syria, a government report has found.

Henning, 47, was beheaded by the Islamic State militant known as Jihadi John after being held captive for nine months in Syria along with other western hostages in 2014.

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Planting hope: the Syrian refugee who developed virus-resistant super-seeds

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Plant virologist Dr Safaa Kumari discovered seeds that could safeguard food security in the region – and risked her life to rescue them from Aleppo

The call came as she sat in her hotel room. “They gave us 10 minutes to pack up and leave,” Dr Safaa Kumari was told down a crackling phone line. Armed fighters had just seized her house in Aleppo and her family were on the run.

Kumari was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, preparing to present a conference. She immediately began organising a sprint back to Syria. Hidden in her sister’s house was a small but very valuable bundle that she was prepared to risk her life to recover.

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Islamic State prisoners escape from Syrian jail after militants riot

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Unconfirmed reports of deaths as inmates overwhelm SDF guards in city of Hasakah

Several members of Islamic State have escaped from prison after militants sparked a riot and seized control of part of a large jail in north-east Syria, Kurdish and US military sources have said.

Prisoners broke down walls and tore off internal doors during the unrest on Sunday night at Ghouiran prison in the city of Hasakah, overwhelming guards from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Washington’s Kurdish-led ground partner in the fight against Isis.

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Why the ‘ignored war’ in Libya will come to haunt a blinkered west

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Europe seems unconcerned by the chaos smouldering on its doorstep, as the five-year-old conflict becomes world’s main theatre of drone combat

The most recent ally of Khalifa Haftar, the general who has been attacking the Libyan capital Tripoli since April last year, is Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

This union was formalised last week with the opening of a “Libyan embassy” in Damascus. The alarming partnership has been forged almost completely without comment. What happens with Libya no longer seems to concern anyone. It’s as though the whole conflict has ceased to exist.

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UK’s air war against Isis ends after five years

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RAF has launched no attacks in Syria or Iraq since September, but controversy continues over civilian casuality numbers

Britain’s five-year air war against Isis has quietly come to an end, with official figures revealing no bombs have been dropped since September – yet the MoD still acknowledges only one civilian casualty in the entire conflict.

The data shows that over a period longer than the first world war, 4,215 bombs and missiles were launched from Reaper drones or RAF jets in Syria and Iraq, and a wide discrepancy has emerged between UK and US estimates of the number of civilians killed.

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Hounded by war, can Idlib’s desperate civilians outrun final assault?

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Accustomed to being exiles in their own land, many Syrians are resigned to the next cruel twist fate may deliver them

In the midst of a winter storm last month, Mahdi al-Beij pitched his tent on the edge of a graveyard, hoping to have finally outrun a war that had hounded him and his clan throughout the province of Idlib for six insufferable years.

Floodwaters pooled nearby and a biting cold swept across the plains as the family settled in; accustomed to being exiles in their own land, but exhausted by their fifth move under fire and resigned to the next cruel twist fate may deliver them. Even if that meant being buried where they sheltered.

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