RAQQA, Syria: Across the ruins of Raqqa, the streets are cloaked in grey, the color of bare cement and rubble left behind by the bombing campaign that finally drove out Daesh militants. Among the people of this Syrian city, the fear, anger and desperation are palpable.
Six months after Daesh’s ouster, residents feel they have been abandoned as the world moves on. They are trying to rebuild their lives, but they say they fear everyone around them: the Kurdish-led militia that administers the majority Arab city; the Syrian government, which has forces nearby; criminal gangs who kidnap or rob whoever shows signs of having money; and Daesh militants who may still be hiding among the people.
“Daesh is still among us,” said a businessman. To give an example, he said, a man lobbed a hand grenade at a recent funeral when mourners played music, something extremists view as sacrilegious.
The Associated Press spoke to over a dozen residents on a recent visit, most of who spoke of their woes on condition of anonymity because they feared for their safety. The businessman asked to be identified by the diminutive of his first name, Abdu.
After fleeing Raqqa during the coalition-led assault on the city last year, Abdu returned once the militants were driven out in October. He found his restaurant and his home next to it destroyed. He was angry, but practical. His life has been on hold for too long and he wanted to get on with his business. So he hired workers and started to rebuild.
But local gangs had eyed him. He was kidnapped and held for $10,000 ransom, until his tribe intervened and rescued him without paying, he said.
He, like many others, lamented the loss of security, which he said was one prize feature of living under Daesh. He faulted the Kurdish-led forces for hastily recruiting local Arabs to boost their ranks and appease the local Arab tribes.
“We end up with thieves or former Daesh in the force,” he said.
For three years, Raqqa was the de facto capital of the Daesh group’s “caliphate” stretching across much of Iraq and Syria. In the campaign of the US-led coalition and Iraqi and Syrian partners, the group has been uprooted from almost that entire territory.
UN officials say Raqqa has been left the most devastated city in all of Syria’s seven-year-old war, a conflict that has also seen Syrian government forces backed by Russian and Iranian forces battling rebels. All of Raqqa suffered intense airstrikes by the US-led coalition and the whole population of at least 350,000 had to flee. The infrastructure was destroyed, as were 65 percent of civilian homes, said Leila Mustafa, a member of the US-backed Raqqa Civil Council that now runs the city.
A prominent Arab tribesman escorted the AP to see a building he owned that was gutted by airstrikes. He angrily complained that coalition bombing was indiscriminate. Like many, he said there should be compensation but didn’t expect any would be given.
“I wish I even found the bone of an Daesh member in there! But nothing. No reason,” he said. “Now, who will pay for this?” He refused to give his name, fearing his criticism would undermine his chances of ever getting money to rebuild.
Nothing is unaffected by the bombardment. Mosques, schools, squares and buildings have all taken hits, some repeatedly. Trees on the street are burned. Insects and dust saturate the air.
The stench of death rises from crushed buildings and remains long after the bodies are removed. Civil workers say they have pulled nearly 500 bodies from under the rubble in the past three months, working with just one bulldozer.
Some streets have been cleared of wreckage, giving way to a scene even more haunting because of how organized it is. Scrap metal and debris are neatly stacked in heaps at the foot of destroyed buildings. Row after row of buildings reduced to concrete skeletons run like a pattern through the city. Large chunks of cement dangle from twisted rebar above sidewalks like cryptic decorations. At least 8,000 explosives riddle the city center.
Major overpasses have been hit, as well as bridges across the Euphrates River, which cuts through the city. Residents and their cars cross on small barges.
Yet the buzz of activity is startling. Nearly 100,000 residents have returned, according to UN accounts. Mustafa said it was likely much higher.
Women in colorful scarves punctuated the grey monotone in the markets. A market for scrap metal has sprung up at one end of the city. Meat grills lined some streets, and warehouses were full of soft drinks, water, grains and other stock. Bulldozers drilled into the wreckage of buildings.
Workers from nearby provinces have come looking for opportunities. The driver of a truck full of mattresses with job hunters sitting on top said they came from the northwestern city of Aleppo.
“They can’t do it all alone,” a construction worker from the neighboring province of Deir Ezzor said at the site of a destroyed bridge.
Those with money rebuild. Painters added some color to the facade of a former car dealership. Its owner, who asked only to be identified as Ismail, said Daesh had used its back rooms as a prison.
When he came back to Raqqa, he heard of masked gangsters who rob returnees. But it has not stopped him. He is turning his dealership into an Internet cafe, much needed in a city that has no phone lines and relies heavily on personal generators for electricity.
He said he paid $600 to clean the wreckage from his street. “I want to make it feel safe,” he said.
Mustafa, the council member, said most of the restoration work was self-financed, with some US money, though she would not say how much. On Thursday, with American officials attending, she inaugurated a new pre-fab bridge to connect the city to neighboring villages. One US official said installing the bridge cost $7,000.
The city is getting “very limited” support — “no match to the size of the needs,” she said. Infrastructure was totally destroyed, as were 65 percent of civilian buildings, and mines and rubble still need to be cleared, she said. She could not say the total cost for rebuilding since it is constantly being reevaluated.
Raqqa paid a “hefty price” for the war on terrorism, she said, but “international organizations and some countries didn’t live up to their responsibilities.”
US officials have led operations to clear land mines and restore basic services like water and electricity in the city. But those programs would likely have to be called off if President Donald Trump goes forward with plans to withdraw American troops within five or six months. In meeting with national security aides, he has railed against the trillions the US has spent in the Mideast, saying it brought no return.
Instead, Trump has asked Saudi Arabia to contribute $4 billion toward reconstruction and stabilization in Syria.
Despite the devastation, signs of Daesh remained around Raqqa.
The infamous Naim Square — Arabic for “Paradise” — where Daesh militants displayed hanged bodies or heads, was empty aside from a single chair in the street that marked a former checkpoint of the militants. On the other end were remains of a Daesh media center with broken chairs and a stand where the screen was once set to show Daesh videos to the public.
A juice shop and a supermarket were the only signs of life in the square, surrounded by destroyed buildings. Seals used by Daesh were still visible on the metal shutters of shops, numbering them for tax collection purposes.
Nahla Mustafa walked absent-mindedly nearby, pulling her seven-year old son Baseel behind.
Asked how she is, she immediately said, “Everything is lost,” and her eyes welled with tears. The war had impoverished her well-to-do family. Militants confiscated her husband’s clothing store. The three homes they owned were destroyed in coalition strikes and she had multiple miscarriages, which she blamed on fear from the bombing.
She now makes clothes for a living and asks around houses for odd jobs. Looking at her purse, she said, “I have 3,000 liras ($7) in here. What do I do with this?” Her husband works in a grocery store, earning the equivalent of $45 a month.
“I am tired and I am scared,” she said. “When will we be able to save to fix our homes — when (my husband) is 100?” Her son doesn’t go to school because she worries about land mines.
“What will become of his future? What is our fault in all of this?“
Syrians in Raqqa afraid, angry, frustrated as they rebuild
Syrians in Raqqa afraid, angry, frustrated as they rebuild
19 arrested after Turkiye hotel inferno disaster
ANKARA: Turkish authorities have arrested 19 people as part of an investigation into a fire at a ski resort hotel that killed 78 people, Anadolu state news agency reported Monday.
Those detained include a deputy mayor for the town responsible for the Kartalkaya resort, a deputy fire chief and the head of another establishment belonging to the hotel owner, the agency said.
The investigation into the January 21 disaster has focused on the hotel management and the actions of the emergency services and authorities in the town of Bolu.
On Friday, the owner of the Grand Karta hotel, his son-in-law, the hotel’s chief electrician and its head chef were arrested.
Survivors and experts have highlighted the absence of fire alarms and sprinklers, working smoke detectors and proper fire escape routes at the 12-story building that overlooked the ski slopes.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has said 238 people were staying in the Grand Karta hotel when the inferno tore through the building in the middle of the night.
Palestinians return to north Gaza after breakthrough on hostages
- Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages
- Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning
NUSEIRAT, Palestinian Territories: Masses of displaced Palestinians began streaming toward the north of the war-battered Gaza Strip on Monday after Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages.
The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire and paves the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under an agreement aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents.
Israel had been preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the terms of the truce, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said late Sunday they would be allowed to pass after the new deal was reached.
Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning, carrying what belongings they could, AFPTV images showed.
“It’s a great feeling when you go back home, back to your family, relatives and loved ones, and inspect your house — if it is still a house,” displaced Gazan Ibrahim Abu Hassera said.
Hamas called the return “a victory” for Palestinians that “signals the failure and defeat of the plans for occupation and displacement.”
Its ally Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, called it a “response to all those who dream of displacing our people.”
The comments came after US President Donald Trump floated an idea to “clean out” Gaza and resettle Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt, drawing condemnation from regional leaders.
President Mahmud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, issued a “strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.
Trump had floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”
The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land,” saying their forced displacement could “only be called ethnic cleansing.”
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”
Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage to the north until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage who it maintained should have been freed on Saturday.
But Netanyahu’s office later said a deal had been reached for the release of three hostages on Thursday, including Yehud, as well as another three on Saturday.
Hamas confirmed the agreement in its own statement Monday.
During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held by the Israelis.
The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday in the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.
“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” said Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase.
The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
EU to agree easing Syria sanctions
- Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership
- But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus
BRUSSELS: EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said she expected the bloc to agree Monday to begin easing sanctions on Syria after the ouster of Bashar Assad.
“It is a step for step approach,” Kallas said at the start of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss the move.
Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership after the end of the Assad family’s five-decade rule.
But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus.
The 27-nation EU imposed wide-ranging sanctions on the Assad government and Syria’s economy during its civil war.
Brussels says it is now willing to ease sanctions on the expectation the new authorities make good on commitments to form an inclusive transition.
“If they are doing the right steps, then we are willing to do the steps on our behalf as well,” Kallas said.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the EU could start by suspending sanctions on the energy, transport and banking sectors.
Diplomats say the EU will only suspend the sanctions and not lift them definitively to maintain leverage over the Syrian leadership.
Syria’s new de facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, and the Islamist group he led Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, remain under EU sanctions.
Diplomats said there was still no discussion about lifting those designations, as with others on the Assad regime.
Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza
- Netanyahu’s office says another six hostages to be released in coming week after talks with Hamas
- Israel confirms Qatar’s announcement, says Gazans can now return home from 7 a.m. Monday
DOHA/JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Mediator Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement has been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Qatar’s statement said Hamas will hand over the civilian hostage, Arbel Yehoud, along with two other hostages before Friday. And on Monday, Israeli authorities will allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement said the hostage release — which will include soldier Agam Berger — will take place on Thursday, and confirmed that Palestinians can move north on Monday. Israel’s military said people can start crossing on foot at 7 a.m.
Under the ceasefire deal, Israel on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But Israel put that on hold because of Yehoud, who Israel said should have been released on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement.
Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas. Three would be released on Thursday and another three on Saturday, said a statement from his office.
The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents, paving the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under a deal aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict.
Israel had been preventing vast crowds of Palestinians from using a coastal road to return to northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the truce agreement by failing to release civilian women hostages.
“Hamas has backtracked and will carry out an additional phase of releasing hostages this Thursday,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
Trump’s plan meets mixed reactions
Palestinian leaders meanwhile slammed a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, vowing to resist any effort to forcibly displace residents of the war-battered territory.
Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out.
“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”
Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable.”
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.
Trump floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”
Tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’
The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land.”
“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the league said in a statement.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”
In Gaza, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.
Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage. She is among those slated for return on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Hamas said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.
Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said Monday that residents would be allowed to return on foot starting at 07 a.m. (0500 GMT) and by car at 9 a.m.
Staggered releases
During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday — the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.
Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase, demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday.
“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” he said.
The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives
- “I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” says Wafa Mustafa, whose father Ali was among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system
DAMASCUS: Wafa Mustafa had long dreamed of returning to Syria but the absence of her father tarnished her homecoming more than a decade after he disappeared in Bashar Assad’s jails.
Her father Ali, an activist, is among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system, and whose relatives have flocked home in search of answers after Assad’s toppling last month by Islamist-led rebels.
“From December 8 until today, I have not felt any joy,” said Mustafa, 35, who returned from Berlin.
“I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” she said. “I walk down the street and remember that I had passed by that same corner with my dad” years before.
Since reaching Damascus she has scoured defunct security service branches, prisons, morgues and hospitals, hoping to glean any information about her long-lost father.
“You can see the fatigue on people’s faces” everywhere, said Mustafa, who works as a communications manager for the Syria Campaign, a rights group.
In 2021, she was invited to testify at the United Nations about the fate of Syria’s disappeared.
The rebels who toppled Assad freed thousands of detainees nearly 14 years into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
Mustafa returned to Branch 215, one of Syria’s most notorious prisons run by military intelligence, where she herself had been detained simply for participating in pro-democracy protests in 2011.
She found documents there mentioning her father. “That’s already a start,” Mustafa said.
Now, she “wants the truth” and plans to continue searching for answers in Syria.
“I only dream of a grave, of having a place to go to in the morning to talk to my father,” she said. “Graves have become our biggest dream.”
In Damascus, Mustafa took part in a protest demanding justice for the disappeared and answers about their fate.
Youssef Sammawi, 29, was there too. He held up a picture of his cousin, whose arrest and beating in 2012 prompted Sammawi to flee for Germany.
A few years later, he identified his cousin’s corpse among the 55,000 images by a former military photographer codenamed “Caesar,” who defected and made the images public.
The photos taken between 2011 and 2013, authenticated by experts, show thousands of bodies tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
“The joy I felt gave way to pain when I returned home, without being able to see my cousin,” Sammawi said.
He said his uncle had also been arrested and then executed after he went to see his son in the hospital.
“When I returned, it was the first time I truly realized that they were no longer there,” he said with sadness in his voice.
“My relatives had gotten used to their absence, but not me,” he added. “We demand that justice be served, to alleviate our suffering.”
While Assad’s fall allowed many to end their exile and seek answers, others are hesitant.
Fadwa Mahmoud, 70, told AFP she has had no news of her son and her husband, both opponents of the Assad government arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport in 2012.
She fled to Germany a year later and co-founded the Families For Freedom human rights group.
She said she has no plans to return to Syria just yet.
“No one really knows what might happen, so I prefer to stay cautious,” she said.
Mahmoud said she was disappointed that Syria’s new authorities, who pledged justice for victims of atrocities under Assad’s rule, “are not yet taking these cases seriously.”
She said Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa “has yet to do anything for missing Syrians,” yet “met Austin Tice’s mother two hours” after she arrived in the Syrian capital.
Tice is an American journalist missing in Syria since 2012.
Sharaa “did not respond” to requests from relatives of missing Syrians to meet him, Mahmoud said.
“The revolution would not have succeeded without the sacrifices of our detainees,” she said.
