UN says Syria’s new authorities are sending ‘constructive’ signals
Syria’s new interim authorities have asked the United Nations refugee agency to remain in the country and indicated a willingness to protect them, UNHCR said Friday.
“The needs are absolutely huge,” Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, told reporters. The agency had had “some contact with the interim authorities”, he said, adding: “the initial signals that they are sending us are constructive”.
The authorities told us “they want us to stay in Syria, that they appreciate the work that we have been doing now for many years, that they need us to continue doing that work,” said Vargas Llosa.
He said the interim authorities had also indicated “they will provide us the necessary security to carry out those activities”.
Key events
News agency AFP has spoken to some of those who are out celebrating today in Syria, here’s a selection of what they heard:
Nour Thi al-Ghina, 38 years old, in Damascus:
We are gathering because we’re happy Syria has been freed, we’re happy to have been liberated from the prison in which we lived.
This is the first time we have converged in such big numbers and the first time we are seeing such an event. We never expected this to happen.”
Amani Zanhur, a 42-year-old professor of computer engineering:
“There can be nothing worse than what was. We cannot fear the situation.”
Amina Maarawi, 42:
“Let’s not discuss details that might separate us now and focus only on what brings us together: our hatred for Bashar al-Assad.”
Mohammed al-Saad, 32, a member of HTS who had travelled with colleagues from Idlib province to help set up the new government:
“We’ve been waiting 13 years for this. We’ve come to get work started.”
Ukraine’s agriculture minister, Vitaliy Koval, has told Reuters that Kyiv is willing and ready to supply grain to Syria.
Russian and Syrian sources said earlier that Russian wheat supplies to Syria had been suspended amid payment delays and uncertainty over how relations between Damascus and Moscow would play out following the ousting of the Assad regime.
Ukraine’s exports were buffeted by Russia’s February 2022 invasion, which severely reduced shipments via the Black Sea. Ukraine has since broken a de facto sea blockade and revived exports from its southern ports of Odesa.
Antony Blinken has stopped in Iraq as he seeks to rally support across the Middle East for a peaceful political transition in Syria.
Blinken said he told the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, of “our commitment to working with Iraq on security and always working for Iraq’s sovereignty, to make sure that that is strengthened and preserved”.
He added: “I think this is a moment as well for Iraq to reinforce its own sovereignty as well as its stability, security and success going forward.”
The United States maintains about 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 more in Syria as part of a campaign to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State.
Iraq’s government has urged respect for the “free will” of all Syrians and the country’s territorial integrity after Assad’s fall.
The deposed Syrian leader hailed from a rival faction of the Baath party of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, ousted in a 2003 US-led invasion.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has launched two new telephone hotlines in hopes of helping Syrians reunite with loved ones who have been missing for years.
Since Syria’s civil war began more than 13 years ago, the ICRC said it has received around 35,000 reports of missing people.
Stephan Sakalian, the head of ICRC’s Syria delegation, told reporters that one hotline would cater to prisoners and the other was for those seeking their missing loved ones.
“We can provide them with mental health and psychosocial support … we can even help them financially if they need to be reunited,” he told a press briefing, according to Reuters.
In recent days, incredible stories have emerged of prisoners, frail and emaciated, being freed and greeted by weeping family members who had no idea they were still alive.
Sakalian, however, sought to temper expectations. “Let’s make no mistake: giving answers to people will take weeks, months and maybe years, given the amount of information to process,” he said. “The work is tremendous.”
Soon after the Assad regime was toppled, some conservative and far-right politicians in Germany were quick to suggest that Syrians could now return home.
But the prospect has left German hospitals and other employers fearful of worker shortages.
A study published Friday by Germany’s Institute for Employment Research has backed this concern, noting that around 287,000 Syrian nationals are employed in Germany.
Large-scale returns “could have noticeable regional and sector-specific effects – especially in those sectors, fields of activity and regions that are already suffering from a shortage of labour,” Yuliya Kosyakova, a researcher with the institute, told AFP.
Health care providers have warned that more than 5,000 Syrian doctors work in German medical facilities, often in rural areas, and that they and other staff would be hard to replace.
With many Syrians also employed as care workers, their departure would be a “serious blow for elderly care”, the director of the Nursing employers’ association, Isabell Halletz, told news channel NTV.
Here are the latest photos from across Syria as people celebrate the fall of the Assad regime:
Syrians converged on a landmark Damascus mosque for Friday prayers, waving opposition flags and chanting – all scenes that would have been unimaginable during the Assad regime.
At the capital’s famed Umayyad Mosque, men, women and children gathered to celebrate on the first Friday prayers since Assad’s ouster, later streaming into the city streets and squares, AFP reported.
The scenes were reminiscent of the early days of the 2011 uprising, when pro-democracy protesters in Syrian cities would take to the streets after Friday prayers – but never in Damascus, long a stronghold of the Assad clan.
On Friday, exhilarated crowds chanted “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one!”
Some held the Syrian independence flag, used by the opposition since the uprising began, while dozens of street vendors milled around the mosque, seeking to sell the three-star flags.
Syria’s new interim authorities have asked the United Nations refugee agency to remain in the country and indicated a willingness to protect them, UNHCR said Friday.
“The needs are absolutely huge,” Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, told reporters. The agency had had “some contact with the interim authorities”, he said, adding: “the initial signals that they are sending us are constructive”.
The authorities told us “they want us to stay in Syria, that they appreciate the work that we have been doing now for many years, that they need us to continue doing that work,” said Vargas Llosa.
He said the interim authorities had also indicated “they will provide us the necessary security to carry out those activities”.
Around 700 political prisoners held in the prison inside the Mezzeh airbase were released earlier this week following the ousting of the Assad regime.
The now-empty cells – cramped, peeling and covered in etchings – stand as a stark testament to the conditions suffered by former inmates. My colleagues have put together this photo essay:
The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is wrapping up a visit to Turkey as part of a broader effort to rally support across the Middle East for a peaceful political transition in Syria. The US administration is worried that a power vacuum in Syria could worsen tensions in the region, already heightened by multiple conflicts, and create conditions for the Islamic State group to regain territory and influence.
Blinken said Friday that there’s broad agreement on what both Turkey and the US would like to see in Syria following concerns about the two NATO allies’ competing interests in Syria, as Turkey targets a US-backed Kurdish group seen as key to containing the extremists.
Blinken also said he saw “encouraging signs” of progress toward a ceasefire in Gaza and urged Turkey to use its influence to encourage Hamas to accept. “What we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks are more encouraging signs that (a ceasefire) is possible,” Blinken told reporters. More than 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,454 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said Friday.
G7 leaders are set to gather virtually on Friday afternoon to discuss Syria. The leaders have said they are prepared to support a transition to an “inclusive and non-sectarian” government, and emphasised “the importance of holding the Assad regime accountable for its crimes.”
The European Commission said it would launch an “air bridge” operation aimed at delivering an initial 50 tonnes of health supplies to Syria via neighbouring Turkey in the coming days. A further 46 tonnes of relief supplies will be trucked from a stockpile in Denmark for distribution in Syria by Unicef and the World Health Organization.
Russia has also reportedly established direct contact with the political committee of Syria’s Islamist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, according to the Interfax news agency, which quoted Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Bogdanov. In comments to reporters, Bogdanov reportedly said Moscow aims to maintain its military bases in Syria.
Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has ordered the military to “prepare to remain” throughout the winter in the UN-patrolled buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian forces on the strategic Golan Heights. Israel seized the demilitarised zone on Sunday, hours after Syrian rebels ousted Bashar al-Assad.
In the US, a former Syrian military official who oversaw a prison where alleged human rights abuses took place has been charged by a federal grand jury with several counts of torture and conspiracy to commit a crime. Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, who oversaw Syria’s infamous Adra Prison from 2005 to 2008 under recently ousted President Bashar Assad, was arrested in July on visa fraud charges.
Bashar al-Assad was whisked away without a last message to his people, the aircraft’s transponder deliberately switched off to avoid detection as it departed from an airbase in Syria.
The operation was carried out with such secrecy that even the dictator’s brother reportedly was not informed.
A decade earlier, it was Russian military power that saved Bashar al-Assad’s rule by intervening on his side during what appeared to be a losing civil war he violently attempted to suppress. Now, as rebel troops closed in on Damascus, Moscow provided Assad with a personal escape route. More on Assad’s escape here:
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Syria is urgently calling on officials across the country to prevent the destruction of crucial records such as arrest logs, lists of detainees and court and hospital records, citing the tens of thousands of people reported missing during the war.
In a statement Stephan Sakalian, the head of the ICRC in Syria said:
In the past 13 years, the ICRC has registered 35,000 cases of people who have gone missing in Syria.
Behind every such case, there is a family and excruciating pain that only gets worse as years go by … This week, as prisons opened and detainees were released, these families lived through an emotionally trying moment—a moment filled with hope but also with anguish, anger, and frustration.
On Tuesday, my team and I went to Sednaya prison for the first time. We saw hundreds of people waiting outside. I spoke to an elderly woman who stood there since 7 am, desperate for any scrap of information about her son missing for over ten years.
Inside the prison, we saw piles of damaged documents scattered throughout different rooms. These records may contain crucial information that could help families find long-awaited answers.”
Mohammad al-Bashir, head of the interim government in Syria, has spoken to worshippers during the first Friday prayers since the ousting of the Assad regime.
More than 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,454 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Friday.
The European Commission on Friday announced the launch of an “air bridge” operation aimed at delivering an initial 50 tonnes of health supplies to Syria via neighbouring Turkey, AFP reported.
The items from EU stockpiles in Dubai will be flown to Adana, Turkey for distribution in Syria “in the coming days,” according to a commission statement.
A further 46 tonnes of relief supplies will be trucked from a stockpile in Denmark to Adana for distribution in Syria by Unicef and the World Health Organization.
The king of Bahrain, King Hamad, has told Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani that Bahrain is ready to cooperate with the new authorities, the official BNA news agency reported Friday.
It said that in a letter addressed to Jolani using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the monarch said Bahrain, the current Arab summit president, was ready to “continue consultations and coordination with Syria”.
A Dutch court has rejected a bid by 10 pro-Palestinian NGOs to stop the Netherlands from exporting weapons to Israel and trading with Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, Reuters reports.
The Hague district court sided with the Dutch state’s assertion that it continually assesses the risk of arms and dual-use goods exported to Israel to prevent violations of international law. “The interim relief court finds that there is no reason to impose a total ban on the export of military and dual-use goods on the state,” the court said in a statement.
The plaintiffs, citing high civilian casualties in Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, had argued that the Dutch state, as a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention, has a duty to take all reasonable measures at its disposal to prevent genocide.
The NGOs cited a January order to Israel by the International Court of Justice to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Israel has said the accusations of genocide in its Gaza campaign are baseless.
Friday’s ruling appears to contradict the finding of an earlier, separate case, which saw a Dutch court order the government to block all exports of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel over concerns they could be used to violate international law during the war in Gaza. The government has appealed that ruling.
US Secretary of State makes unannounced visit to Iraq for talks on Syria
Red Cross opens hotlines to reunite Syrian families
Thousands of Syrians gather at famed Damascus mosque
UN says Syria’s new authorities are sending ‘constructive’ signals
It’s almost 4pm in Damascus. Here’s a quick summary of today’s developments:
EU to deliver aid to Syria via Turkey
