LONDON: Daesh fighters began evacuating their final stronghold in southern Damascus on Sunday, a monitor said, bringing Syria’s government closer than ever to flushing out the last threat to the capital.
After weeks of combat and heavy casualties, an apparent deal was reached for remaining Daesh fighters to leave Yarmuk and the adjacent district of Tadamun, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Daesh militants burned their headquarters in Yarmuk before boarding buses with their relatives to leave the area, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.
“The six buses left at dawn, heading east for the Syrian desert,” he added.
Abdel Rahman could not specify how many had left, but said a majority were relatives of militants and not armed. More than two dozen buses remained in Yarmuk for additional evacuations, he said.
Syrian state media and a Palestinian official have denied a deal was reached or that evacuations were taking place.
Yarmuk in particular has been devastated by Syria’s conflict, suffering a crippling government siege since 2012 and ruined by years of fighting.
It was once home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees, as well as Syrians, but just a few hundred remain.
Meanwhile, the State Department unit overseeing the fight against the Daesh will stay in business for at least six more months, reserving an administration plan for the unit’s imminent downgrade even as President Donald Trump presses ahead with a speedy US exit from Syria.
A plan initiated by Rex Tillerson before he was fired as secretary of state in March would have folded the office of the special envoy to the global coalition into the department’s counterterrorism bureau as early as spring, officials said. Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, canceled the plan this month, and the office will stay an independent entity until at least December, when there will be a new review, said the officials, who weren’t authorized to discuss the plan publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The office reports directly to the secretary of state and the president, and the planned shift would have undercut its status and the priority of its mission. It could have led to staffing and budget cuts as well as the departure of the special envoy, Brett McGurk. He is now expected to remain in his job at least through the end of the year.
Still, the officials said Trump’s intent to reduce the US military and civilian stabilization presence in Syria has not changed and is, in fact, accelerating. The State Department has ended all funding for stabilization programs in Syria’s northwest. Daesh militants have been almost entirely eliminated from the region, which is controlled by a hodgepodge of other extremist groups and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government forces.
At least some of the US money for those projects is expected to be redirected Syria’s northeast where Daesh fighters remain, the officials said.
The conflicting moves of retaining McGurk’s office while pulling out of the northwest illustrate how the administration is being pulled in different directions by Trump’s two competing interests: extricating the US from messy Mideast conflicts and delivering a permanent defeat to Daesh.
Trump has said the United States will be withdrawing from Syria “like very soon.” In late March, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies tried to dissuade him from pulling troops out immediately, warning there was a risk Daesh would manage to regroup. Trump relented slightly, but told aides they could have only five months or six months to finish off Daesh and get out.
The US announced in September 2014 that it was forming a coalition of nations to defeat the nascent extremist group that had taken over vast swathes of Iraq and Syria. Days later, President Barack Obama named retired Marine Gen. John Allen the first special presidential envoy for the coalition. McGurk, his deputy, replaced him in 2015.
Almost four years later, Daesh no longer controls territory in Iraq, though US officials say its ideology remains a threat there. The final vestiges of the self-proclaimed caliphate are in Syria, where civil war has made it far trickier to wrest the militants from the few pockets of territory they still control.
Yet, as Trump’s administration eyes an exit as soon as Daesh is vanquished, the broader situation in Syria is not getting any better as far as American interests are concerned.
Assad’s forces are making inroads against the opposition and now control roads between Syria’s three main cities for the first time since the war broke out in 2011. Moscow is solidifying its influence, even hosting Assad for a surprise visit Thursday to Russia, where he met with President Vladimir Putin. And an outbreak of direct fighting between Israel and Iranian forces based in Syria has catalyzed concerns about Tehran’s involvement in Syria and the potential for a broader regional conflict.
“Hopefully, Syria will start to stabilize,” Trump said last week as he met with NATO’s secretary-general at the White House. “You see what’s been happening. It’s been a horror show.”
Nevertheless, there are no signs that Trump is backing away from his determination to limit US involvement to the narrow task of defeating Daesh, leaving to others the longer-term challenges of stabilizing the country, restoring basic services and resolving the civil war.
A $200-million pledge that Tillerson made in February for stabilization programs in Syria remains on hold on Trump’s orders and is under review. Tillerson, who had advocated for maintaining the US presence, was fired shortly after he made the pledge at a conference in Kuwait.
Then the administration this month decided to halt funding US military and reconstruction programs in the Syrian northwest, the officials said. Pending the results of the overall review, the canceled money is expected to be shifted to programs in northeast Syria, where US troops are still battling Daesh, and civilian teams from the State Department and US Agency for International Development are working in newly liberated areas.
US anti-Daesh office gets reprieve as Syria pullout accelerates
US anti-Daesh office gets reprieve as Syria pullout accelerates
- Daesh fighters begin evacuating their final stronghold in southern Damascus
- US State Department says anti-Daesh office in Syria will stay in business for at least six more months
Lebanese caretaker PM says country to begin disarming south Litani to ensure state presence
- Najib Mikati: ‘We are in a new phase – in this new phase, we will start with south Lebanon and south Litani’
DUBAI: Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Friday that the state will begin disarming southern Lebanon, particularly the south Litani region, to establish its presence across the country.
“We are in a new phase – in this new phase, we will start with south Lebanon and south Litani specifically in order to pull weapons so that the state can be present across Lebanese territory,” Mikati said.
Tanker hit by Yemen militia that threatened Red Sea spill has been salvaged
- The Sounion had been a disaster in waiting in the waterway, with 1 million barrels of crude oil aboard
- The Houthis have targeted some 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the war in Gaza started
DUBAI: An oil tanker that burned for weeks in the Red Sea and threatened a massive oil spill has been “successfully” salvaged, a security firm said Friday.
The Sounion had been a disaster in waiting in the waterway, with 1 million barrels of crude oil aboard that had been struck and later sabotaged with explosives by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militia. It took months for salvagers to tow the vessel away, extinguish the fires and offload the remaining crude oil.
The Houthis initially attacked the Greek-flagged Sounion tanker on Aug. 21 with small arms fire, projectiles and a drone boat. A French destroyer operating as part of Operation Aspides rescued its crew of 25 Filipinos and Russians, as well as four private security personnel, after they abandoned the vessel and took them to nearby Djibouti.
The Houthis later released footage showing they planted explosives on board the Sounion and ignited them in a propaganda video, something the militia have done before in their campaign.
The Houthis have targeted some 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the war in Gaza started in October 2023. They seized one vessel and sank two in the campaign that has also killed four sailors. Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a US-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have included Western military vessels as well.
The Houthis maintain that they target ships linked to Israel, the US or the UK to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.
Lancet study estimates Gaza death toll 40% higher than recorded
- The number of dead in Gaza has become a matter of bitter debate since Israel launched its military offensive
- The study’s best death toll estimate was 64,260, which would mean the health ministry had under-reported the number of deaths
PARIS: Research published in The Lancet medical journal on Friday estimates that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the Israel-Hamas war was around 40 percent higher than recorded by the Palestinian territory’s health ministry.
The number of dead in Gaza has become a matter of bitter debate since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas in response to the Palestinian militant group’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack.
Up to June 30 last year, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reported a death toll of 37,877 in the war.
However the new peer-reviewed study used data from the ministry, an online survey and social media obituaries to estimate that there were between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza by that time.
The study’s best death toll estimate was 64,260, which would mean the health ministry had under-reported the number of deaths to that point by 41 percent.
That toll represented 2.9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, “or approximately one in 35 inhabitants,” the study said.
The UK-led group of researchers estimated that 59 percent of the deaths were women, children and the elderly.
The toll was only for deaths from traumatic injuries, so did not include deaths from a lack of health care or food, or the thousands of missing believed to be buried under rubble.
AFP is unable to independently verify the death toll.
On Thursday, Gaza’s health ministry said that 46,006 people had died over the full 15 months of war.
In Israel, the 2023 attack by Hamas resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the Gaza health ministry’s figures, but the United Nations have said they are reliable.
The researchers used a statistical method called “capture-recapture” that has previously been used to estimate the death toll in conflicts around the world.
The analysis used data from three different lists, the first provided by the Gaza health ministry of the bodies identified in hospitals or morgues.
The second list was from an online survey launched by the health ministry in which Palestinians reported the deaths of relatives.
The third was sourced from obituaries posted on social media platforms such as X, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, when the identity of the deceased could be verified.
“We only kept in the analysis those who were confirmed dead by their relatives or confirmed dead by the morgues and the hospital,” lead study author Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said.
The researchers scoured the lists, searching for duplicates.
“Then we looked at the overlaps between the three lists, and based on the overlaps, you can come up with a total estimation of the population that was killed,” Jamaluddine said.
Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.
Ball said the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.
Kevin McConway, a professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said there was “inevitably a lot of uncertainty” when making estimates from incomplete data.
But he said it was “admirable” that the researchers had used three other statistical analysis approaches to check their estimates.
“Overall, I find these estimates reasonably compelling, he added.
The researchers cautioned that the hospital lists do not always provide the cause of death, so it was possible that people with non-traumatic health problems — such as a heart attack — could have been included, potentially leading to an overestimate.
However there were other ways that the war’s toll could still be underestimated.
The study did not include missing people. The UN humanitarian agency OCHA has said that around 10,000 missing Gazans are thought to be buried under rubble.
There are also indirect ways that war can claim lives, such as a lack of health care, food, water, sanitation or the spread of disease. All have stricken Gaza since October 2023.
In a contentious, non-peer-reviewed letter published in The Lancet in July, another group of researchers used the rate of indirect deaths seen in other conflicts to suggest that 186,000 deaths could eventually be attributed to the Gaza war.
The new study suggested that this projection “might be inappropriate due to obvious differences in the pre-war burden of disease” in Gaza compared to conflicts in countries such as Burundi and East Timor.
Jamaluddine said she expected that “criticism is going to come from different sides” about the new research.
She spoke out against the “obsession” of arguing about death tolls, emphasizing that “we already know that there is a lot of high mortality.”
What AI-agents and blockchain in a ‘Post Web’ world means for tech-savvy Middle East
- Web3 redefined the internet with “read, write, own,” but Post Web takes it further, enabling users to “delegate” tasks through AI agents
- Post Web shifts from attention-driven platforms to intention-based systems, with AI agents handling tasks autonomously
RIYADH: As blockchain and cryptocurrency drive the internet toward decentralization, the shift from Web 3.0 to Post Web is underway. And with a young, tech-savvy population and substantial investments in advanced technologies, the Middle East is poised for early adoption.
Building on this vision of a self-organizing, user-centered internet, Outlier Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm and accelerator specializing in Web3 and blockchain ecosystems, has announced the launch of its “Post Web Thesis.”
As predicted in Outlier Ventures’ 2016 “Convergence Thesis,” advancements in AI are merging with Web3 infrastructure to simplify the latter’s complexity.
Intuitive interfaces and automation now manage tasks like signing transactions, handling fees and bridging chains, making digital property rights and Web3 applications — or decentralized apps — more accessible and scalable through delegation.
“AI agents can now serve users by acting on their intent with a blend of deterministic precision and adaptive flexibility through hyper-contextual experiences,” Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures CEO and founder, told Arab News.
“In essence, in the Post Web, users won’t just read, write and own — they will also have the ability to delegate.”
An AI agent, Burke says, is intelligent, autonomous software powered by AI to interpret intentions, gather context and execute tasks across decentralized networks, either independently or on behalf of users, with varying degrees of sovereignty.
Those agents will initially handle simple tasks, such as booking appointments, but can gain economic agency over time by interacting with distributed ledger technology such as blockchain, enabling users to perform tasks without a centralized authority.
Burke highlighted the Middle East and North Africa region as a prime candidate for early adoption of the Post Web, citing its young, tech-savvy population and significant investments in advanced technologies.
The region’s advantages could position it as a global hub for Post Web innovation and development, he said.
Opinion
This section contains relevant reference points, placed in (Opinion field)
Web3 defines the web’s “read-write-own” era. Its original goal was to create a decentralized internet using blockchain technology, giving users digital property rights and greater control over their data and assets.
Unlike Web 2.0’s reliance on centralized platforms, Web3, the latest evolution of the World Wide Web since Tim Berners-Lee’s creation in 1989, leverages blockchain technology to enable peer-to-peer interactions without intermediaries.
“Web3’s promise was to ‘unbundle’ the centralized platforms of the Web2 era, promoting greater control for users and peer-to-peer economic interactions,” Burke said.
“But a decade on we can see that mass adoption of its applications just isn’t going to be possible in its current form because, whilst it was a functional upgrade to the internet, Web3 ultimately still isn’t usable for the majority of the people.”
This sets the stage for the “Post Web Thesis,” which examines how the convergence of Web3 and AI could transform the internet.
Rather than operating within the constraints of the “attention economy,” this new paradigm envisions a shift toward an “intention economy” — one where user purpose and goals drive engagement and value creation.
“This shift will reimagine the web, moving from today’s human-centered interactions to a world where machines and autonomous agents act on our behalf through intent-based architectures,” said Burke.
This means that, in the near future, much of the consumer internet could be outsourced to intelligent agents that bypass search engines, price comparison websites and applications, instead accessing application programming interfaces and other agents directly to find information and compare services.
The Post Web’s intention economy seeks to prioritize users’ needs by seamlessly aligning their goals with counterparties through contextual, dynamic interfaces. This approach enables more valuable interactions while minimizing waste and reducing exploitation.
“This marks a profound shift toward an internet that organizes itself around solving real user needs, rather than mindlessly harvesting attention,” Burke said.
“We still believe that humans will interact with the web, but rather than spending hours searching for the best insurance for example or flights for a holiday, time will be spent with much more enriching engagements that people enjoy doing social, gaming and immersive shopping.”
And as AI agents handle most transactional activities and routine tasks in the background, the traditional web will largely fade away, making room for the “Thin Web.”
Inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this streamlined web offers varying levels of immersion based on users’ personal and environmental contexts.
A simple example of how the Post Web will transform online experiences is booking a family holiday.
Traditional websites are often cluttered with ads for packages that do not fully meet a family’s needs, forcing users to make rushed or suboptimal decisions. Search engines, driven by optimization practices, frequently prioritize results based on rankings rather than quality.
“Paid advertisements and manipulation of organic rankings through search optimization often overwhelm users,” Burke said.
“While price comparison websites may seem like an alternative, these platforms also complicate matters. They typically prioritize results based on auction placements, and comparisons are rarely like-for-like.”
If a user is purchasing holiday insurance for a family with diverse ages and interests, a basic plan might not cover an advanced scuba diver, a beginner and another child who prefers surfing.
The more multidimensional and diverse the trip, the more complex and time-consuming the planning becomes.
In an intention economy, an AI agent compares policies across multiple dimensions, such as payout structures, activity-specific coverage and unique risk factors, Burke said.
“For example, they could recommend a product tailored to a family with an experienced scuba diver and novice scuba diver, factoring in skill level, diving conditions based on weather reports, and other nuances to ensure optimal coverage.”
In terms of cost-effectiveness, Burke says the Post Web eliminates inefficiencies in the consumer internet and “software as a service” sectors. It removes unnecessary intermediaries and aligns outcomes with user needs, resulting in faster, cheaper and better solutions.
DID YOUKNOW?
• In Outlier Ventures’ Post Web era, AI-driven agents will render search obsolete by acting directly on intent.
• The convergence of AI and blockchain will enable the agentic internet, where machines autonomously transact and collaborate.
• AI and Web3 could push organizations toward superfluidity, reducing friction and linking ideas and resources to fuel growth.
By enabling sellers to reach users without relying on interruptive advertising, it reduces costs for both buyers and sellers.
AI agents optimize the technology stack — compute, storage and networking — and replace inefficient centralized cloud systems. This benefits users and sellers but is a major loss for platforms profiting from the attention economy.
In addition to being a more cost-effective solution, the Post Web will lead to what Burke calls a “Supercycle.”
Burke believes these technologies will drive widespread adoption, bringing billions of users and real-world assets on-chain. This presents a valuable investment opportunity in digital assets, which will become crucial for powering the internet and its virtual supply chains.
Since these assets will reflect real-world supply and demand, they can be analyzed like traditional commodities, paving the way for billions in institutional and retail investments through exchange-traded funds and stock market indexes.
“It’s important to see the transition into the Post Web as a vision that will evolve and adapt over time,” he said.
“Web3 was first introduced 10 years ago and while we are sharing our vision for the Post Web now, we see this as an evolution that will evolve over the next 10 years.
“During this time the web as we know it will continue to evolve as AI agents manage more and more tasks on users’ behalf, and the most relevant technologies will converge into the Post Web, but others will become obsolete such as the app store and search.”
EU medical aid crosses into Syria from Turkiye
ISTANBUL: Some 55 tonnes of EU-funded medical supplies entered northwestern Syria from Turkiye on Thursday, a UN health official said.
Part of an EU air bridge to Syria, the supplies crossed Turkiye’s southern Cilvegozu border post and were taken to a warehouse in the northwestern city of Idlib, Mrinalini Santhanam of the World Health Organization said.
“There’s one more air bridge, and it is planned for February,” she said, adding that it was “still in the planning stages” with talks “to determine the volume and the scale.”
The supplies, distributed to Idlib and the Aleppo region health care centers, are part of an EU humanitarian bridge announced by Brussels on Dec. 13.
The aim is to support Syria’s battered healthcare system following the ouster of Bashar Assad on Dec. 8.
Included in the shipment were 8,000 emergency surgical kits, anesthetic supplies, IV fluids, sterilization materials, and medications to prevent disease outbreaks, the WHO said.
The civil war, which broke out in 2011, devastated Syria’s health care system, with “almost half of the hospitals (there) not functional,” WHO planning analyst Lorenzo Dal Monte said in late December.
He said the 50-tonne shipment from Dubai included “mainly trauma and surgical kits.”
Another five tonnes of supplies were brought in from another stockpile in Demark, including emergency health kits as well as winter clothing and water purification tablets, the WHO said.
