AMMAN: Russian and Syrian jets resumed intensive strikes in Idlib and Hama on Sunday, residents and rescuers said, as Damascus stepped up its assault on the rebels’ last major stronghold after a Russian-Iranian-Turkish summit failed to agree a cease-fire.
They said Syrian army helicopters dropped barrel bombs — typically filled with high explosives and shrapnel — on Al-Habeet and Abdin villages in southern Idlib and a string of other hamlets and villages in the area.
The Syrian army denies using barrel bombs. However, United Nations investigators have extensively documented their use by the army.
Russian jets were believed to have hit the nearby towns of Latamneh and Kafr Zeita in northern Hama in a succession of raids, an organization which monitors air strikes in Syria and a rebel source said.
Damascus, backed by allies Russia and Iran, has been preparing a major assault to recover Idlib and adjacent areas of the northwest. The province is Syria’s last major stronghold of active opposition to the rule of President Bashar Assad.
Russian and Syrian warplanes have resumed their bombing campaign a day after a summit of the presidents of Turkey, Iran and Russia on Friday failed to agree on a cease-fire that would forestall the offensive.
Turkey and Western powers have warned of a bloodbath if a major Russian-backed bombing campaign is launched in the heavily populated northwestern province that borders Turkey.
The United Nations also said it feared a full-scale offensive could cause a humanitarian catastrophe involving tens of thousands of civilians.
So far the aerial strikes have not hit a major city in the province where over three million civilians, many displaced from other areas, have found refuge in the course of the conflict.
Russia says it avoids civilians and only targets radical Al-Qaeda-inspired groups but opposition sources and residents say most of the casualties in the last few days were civilians.
The opposition accuse Russia and its allies of striking at hospitals and civil defense centers to force rebels to surrender in a repeat of earlier, large-scale military offensives.
A US-based medical charity that operates in the provinces said three hospitals and two civil defense centers were bombed in the last two days, “leaving thousands with no access to medical care.”
“It is distressing to see a rise in attacks on medical facilities...There are over three million civilians in this crowded area of Syria who are in a life-threatening situation,” Ghanem Tayara, head of Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM) said in a statement.
Syria and Russia resume Idlib air strikes
Syria and Russia resume Idlib air strikes
- Turkey and Western powers have warned of a bloodbath if a major Russian-backed bombing campaign was launched
- Russia says it avoids civilians and only targets radical Al-Qaeda-inspired groups
Iran’s supreme leader says Syrian youth will resist incoming government
- Iran had provided crucial support to Assad throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war
- Iran’s supreme leader accused the United States and Israel of plotting against Assad’s government
Iran had provided crucial support to Assad throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, which erupted after he launched a violent crackdown on a popular uprising against his family’s decades-long rule. Syria had long served as a key conduit for Iranian aid to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an address on Sunday that the “young Syrian has nothing to lose” and suffers from insecurity following Assad’s fall.
“What can he do? He should stand with strong will against those who designed and those who implemented the insecurity,” Khamenei said. “God willing, he will overcome them.”
He accused the United States and Israel of plotting against Assad’s government in order to seize resources, saying: “Now they feel victory, the Americans, the Zionist regime and those who accompanied them.”
Iran and its militant allies in the region have suffered a series of major setbacks over the past year, with Israel battering Hamas in Gaza and landing heavy blows on Hezbollah before they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon last month.
Khamenei denied that such groups were proxies of Iran, saying they fought because of their own beliefs and that the Islamic Republic did not depend on them. “If one day we plan to take action, we do not need proxy force,” he said.
Four killed in helicopter crash at Turkish hospital
- Footage from the site showed debris from the crash scattered around the area outside the hospital building
ANKARA: Four people were killed in southwest Turkiye on Sunday when an ambulance helicopter collided with a hospital building and crashed into the ground.
The helicopter was taking off from the Mugla Training and Research Hospital, carrying two pilots, a doctor and another medical worker, the health ministry said in a statement.
Mugla’s regional governor, Idris Akbiyik, told reporters the helicopter first hit the fourth floor of the hospital building before crashing into the ground. No one inside the building or on the ground was hurt. The cause of the accident, which took place during heavy fog, was being investigated.
Footage from the site showed debris from the crash scattered around the area outside the hospital building, with several ambulances and emergency teams at the scene.
Israeli strikes kill 17 Palestinians in Gaza, orders hospital to evacuate
- Eight people, including children, were killed in the Musa Bin Nusayr School that sheltered displaced families in Gaza City
- Palestinians have accused Israel of carrying out acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ to create a buffer zone
CAIRO: Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians, eight of them at a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, medics said, as the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of a hospital in the north.
Palestinian medics said eight people, including children, were killed in the Musa Bin Nusayr School that sheltered displaced families in Gaza City.
The Israeli military said in a statement the strike targeted Hamas militants operating from a command center embedded inside the school. It said Hamas militants used the place to plan and execute attacks against Israeli forces.
Also in Gaza City, medics said four Palestinians were killed when an airstrike hit a car.
At least five other Palestinians were killed in two separate airstrikes in Rafah and Khan Younis south of the enclave.
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, where the army has operated since October, Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the army ordered staff to evacuate the hospital and move patients and injured people toward another hospital in the area.
Abu Safiya said the mission was “next to impossible” because staff did not have ambulances to move the patients.
The Israeli army has operated in the two towns of north Gaza, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, as well as the nearby Jabalia camp for nearly three months.
Palestinians have accused Israel of carrying out acts of “ethnic cleansing” to depopulate those areas to create a buffer zone.
Israel denies this and says the campaign in the area aimed to fight Hamas militants and prevent them from regrouping. It said its forces have killed hundreds of militants and dismantled military infrastructure since that operation began.
Armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they killed many Israeli soldiers in ambushes during the same period.
Mediators have yet to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas.
Sources close to the discussions said on Thursday that Qatar and Egypt had been able to resolve some differences between the warring parties but sticking points remained.
Israel began its assault on Gaza after Hamas-led fighters attacked Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel says about 100 hostages are still being held, but it is unclear how many are alive.
Authorities in Gaza say Israel’s campaign has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and displaced most of the population of 2.3 million. Much of the coastal enclave is in ruins.
As flooding becomes a yearly disaster in South Sudan, thousands survive on the edge of a canal
- More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency
- Latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda
AYOD, South Sudan: Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity.”
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow toward Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: “We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good,” the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country’s ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn’t poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”
Syrian Kurdish groups on the back foot as power balance shifts
- Syrian Kurds established autonomy early in civil war, Turkiye views their main group as national security threat
- Syrian Kurdish leader asks Trump to prevent Turkish incursion
QAMISHLI: With hostile Turkish-backed groups mobilizing against them in Syria’s north, and Damascus ruled by a group friendly to Ankara, Syria’s main Kurdish factions are on the back foot as they seek to preserve political gains carved out during 13 years of war.
Part of a stateless ethnic group straddling Iraq, Iran, Turkiye, Armenia and Syria, Kurds have so far been among the few winners of the Syrian conflict, controlling nearly a quarter of the country and leading a powerful armed group that is a key US ally in countering Islamic State.
But the power balance has tilted against them since the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) swept into Damascus this month, toppling President Bashar Assad, two analysts and a senior Western diplomat told Reuters.
The seismic change in Syria is expected to yield deeper Turkish sway just as a change of US administration is raising questions over how long Washington will keep backing the country’s Kurdish-led forces.
For Turkiye, the Kurdish factions represent a national security threat. Ankara views them as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is deemed a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and other powers.
The Syrian Kurdish groups “are in deep, deep trouble,” said Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, a US-based think tank.
“The balance has shifted fundamentally in Syria to the advantage of Turkiye-backed or Turkiye-aligned factions, and Turkiye seems determined to exploit this to the fullest.”
The shift has been reflected in renewed fighting for control of the north, where Turkiye-backed armed groups known as the Syrian National Army (SNA) have made military advances against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Fanar Al-Kait, a senior official in the Kurdish-led regional administration, told Reuters that the ouster of Assad, whose Arab nationalist Baath Party oppressed Kurds for decades, presented a chance to stitch the fragmented country back together.
He said the administration is ready for dialogue with Turkiye, but the conflict in the north showed Ankara had “very bad intentions.”
“This will certainly push the region toward ... a new conflict,” he added.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday he expected foreign states would withdraw support for Kurdish fighters following Assad’s toppling, as Ankara seeks to isolate the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish militia that spearheaded the SDF alliance.
Responding to questions from Reuters, a Turkish official said the root cause of the conflict is “not Turkiye’s view toward the region; it is that the PKK/YPG is a terrorist organization.”
“The PKK/YPG elements must lay down their arms and leave Syria,” the official said.
SDF commander Mazloum Abdi, in a Reuters interview on Thursday, acknowledged the presence of PKK fighters in Syria for the first time, saying they had helped battle Islamic State and would return home in the event a total ceasefire was agreed with Turkiye. He denied any organizational ties with the PKK.
Feminism and Islamism
Meanwhile, in Damascus, the new leadership is showing warmth toward Ankara and indicating it wants to bring all Syria back under central authority — a potential challenge to the decentralization Kurds favor.
While Turkiye provides direct backing to the SNA, it along with other states deems HTS a terrorist group because of its Al-Qaeda past.
Despite this, Ankara is believed to have significant sway over the group. A senior Western diplomat said: “The Turks can clearly influence them more than anyone else.”
HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa told a Turkish newspaper that Assad’s ouster was “not only the victory of the Syrian people, but also the Turkish people.”
The Turkish official said HTS was not and never had been under Ankara’s control, calling it a structure “we were communicating with due to circumstances” and adding many Western states were also doing so.
Syrian Kurdish groups led by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the affiliated YPG militia took control of much of the north after the uprising against Assad began in 2011. They established their own administration, while insisting their aim was autonomy, not independence.
Their politics, emphasising socialism and feminism, differ starkly from HTS’ Islamism.
Their area grew as US-led forces partnered with the SDF in the campaign against Islamic State, capturing Arab-majority areas.
The Turkiye-backed SNA groups stepped up their campaign against the SDF as Assad was being toppled, seizing the city of Manbij on Dec. 9
Washington brokered a ceasefire, but the SDF has said Turkiye and its allies have not abided by it, and a Turkish defense ministry official said there was no such deal.
US support for the SDF has been a point of tension with its NATO ally, Turkiye. Washington views the SDF as a key partner in countering Islamic State, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned will try to use this period to re-establish capabilities in Syria. The SDF is still guarding tens of thousands of detainees linked to the militant group.
Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler said last weekend that Turkiye saw no sign of a Daesh resurgence in Syria. On Friday, Turkiye’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, told his German counterpart during talks in Ankara that alternatives needed to be found for the management of camps and prisons where the detainees are being held.
Separately, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf said on Friday that Washington was working with Ankara and the SDF to find “a managed transition in terms of SDF’s role in that part of the country.”
President Joe Biden’s administration has said that US troops will stay on in Syria, but President-elect Donald Trump could remove them when he takes office on Jan. 20.
Letter to Trump
During his first administration, Trump attempted to pull out of Syria but faced pressure at home and from US allies.
In a Dec. 17 letter to Trump, reviewed by Reuters, top Syrian Kurdish official Ilham Ahmed said Turkiye was preparing to invade the northeast before he takes office.
Turkiye’s plan “threatens to undo years of progress in securing stability and fighting terrorism,” she wrote. “We believe you have the power to prevent this catastrophe.”
Asked for comment, Trump-Vance transition spokesman Brian Hughes said: “We continue to monitor the situation in Syria. President Trump is committed to diminishing threats to peace and stability in the Middle East and to protecting Americans here at home.”
Trump said on Dec. 16 that Turkiye will “hold the key” to what happens in Syria but has not announced his plans for US forces stationed there.
“The Kurds are in an unenviable position,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “Once Damascus consolidates its power, it will move on the region. The US can’t remain there forever.”
HTS leader Sharaa told British broadcaster the BBC that Kurds were “part of our people” and “there should be no division of Syria,” adding arms should be entirely in the state’s hands.
Sharaa acknowledged one of Turkiye’s main concerns — the presence of non-Syrian Kurdish fighters in Syria — and said: “We do not accept that Syrian lands threaten and destabilize Turkiye or other places.”
He pledged to work through dialogue and negotiations to find “a peaceful formula to solve the problem,” saying he believed initial contacts had been established “between the Kurds in northeastern Syria or the SDF organization.”
Kait, the Kurdish official, said his administration wanted “a democratic Syria, a decentralized Syria, a Syria that represents all Syrians of all sects, religions and ethnicities,” describing these as red lines. The SDF would be “a nucleus of the coming Syrian army,” he added.
SDF commander Abdi, in his Reuters interview, confirmed that contact had been established with HTS to avoid clashes between their forces but said Ankara would try to drive a wedge between Damascus and the Kurdish-led administration.
Still, he said there was strong support from international parties, including the US-led coalition, for the SDF joining “the new political phase” in Damascus, calling it “a great opportunity.”
“We are preparing, after a total ceasefire between us and between Turkiye and the affiliated factions, to join this phase,” he said.
