BEIRUT: Daesh has released two women and four children among 27 surviving Druze hostages it seized during a deadly July attack on the minority community’s heartland in southern Syria.
State television broadcast footage of the six arriving in the city of Sweida on Saturday, joyful at being reunited with their families but haggard after their three-month ordeal.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said their release was the first part of a deal that would see at least 60 Daesh prisoners released in exchange and a $27 million ransom paid.
The militants abducted around 30 people — mostly women and children — from Sweida province in late July during the deadliest attack on Syria’s Druze community of the seven-year civil war.
As negotiations for their release dragged on, families led a series of protests outside government offices in Sweida to demand more be done.
“I cannot describe my joy,” Rasmia Abu Amar told state television after being reunited with her husband.
“But it is incomplete — my son has not yet been released,” she said, her hair covered by a white headscarf.
A second woman appeared with her four children, their clothes still dirty from their long captivity and her sons with their heads shaved.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that the six were freed on Friday night and that further hostage releases were expected “in the next few days or hours.”
He said that in return for the release of all of the hostages, the Syrian government had agreed to free 60 Daesh prisoners and pay a ransom of $27 million.
“Nine IS women prisoners held by the regime have already been handed over to the group along with seven children,” Abdel Rahman said, referring to another acronym for Daesh.
During the coordinated assaults on July 25 Daesh carried out suicide bombings, shootings and stabbings that left more than 250 people dead, most of them civilians.
Sweida province is the heartland of the country’s Druze minority, which made up around three percent of Syria’s pre-war population — or around 700,000 people.
The militants executed a 19-year-old male student among the hostages in August and then a 25-year-old woman in early October. Daesh said a 65-year-old woman being held by the group also died from illness.
Negotiations between regime ally Russia and the militants for the release of the hostages had stalled. But the latest round of talks appeared to have paid off — albeit it with a stiff price.
The Observatory said Daesh had also demanded the halting of an offensive against them in Sweida.
Government forces have battled its fighters in the volcanic plateau of Tulul Al-Safa in the east of the province since the July attack.
Abdel Rahman said the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led alliance that controls swathes of the north and northeast with the support of a US-led coalition, “should also release some IS detainees” but he did not specify the number.
There was no immediate comment from the SDF, which has been taking heavy casualties fighting Daesh in its last pocket of control in eastern Syria, around the Euphrates valley town of Hajjin.
On September 10, the group launched a major assault on the pocket where they estimate some 3,000 militants are holed up.
The battle has killed 414 militants and 227 SDF fighters in total since then, the Observatory says.
On Saturday, coalition air strikes killed 28 Daesh fighters in and around Hajjin, while another seven militants were killed in clashes with the SDF, the monitor said.
Coalition air strikes on Daesh targets in another part of the eastern pocket killed at least 41 civilians, 10 of them children, on Thursday and Friday, it added.
A coalition spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
Syria’s grinding civil war has claimed more than 360,000 lives since it erupted with the the bloody repression of anti-government protests in 2011.
A caliphate which the militants proclaimed across large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014 has crumbled in the face of multiple offensives against them but they remain a potent force.
Daesh frees 6 Druze in exchange for $27m, 60 fighters
Daesh frees 6 Druze in exchange for $27m, 60 fighters
- Daesh abducted around 30 people — mostly women and children — from Sweida province in late July during the deadliest attack on Syria’s Druze community of the seven-year civil war
- Sweida province is the heartland of the country’s Druze minority, which made up around three percent of Syria’s pre-war population — or around 700,000 people
Sudan government rejects UN-backed famine declaration
- War between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces had created famine conditions
- Both the Sudanese army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) review, which UN agencies use, said last week that the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces had created famine conditions for 638,000 people, with a further 8.1 million on the brink of mass starvation.
The army-aligned government “categorically rejects the IPC’s description of the situation in Sudan as a famine,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The statement called the report “essentially speculative” and accused the IPC of procedural and transparency failings.
They said the team did not have access to updated field data and had not consulted with the government’s technical team on the final version before publication.
The IPC did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
The Sudanese government, loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, has been based in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan since the capital Khartoum became a warzone in April 2023.
It has repeatedly been accused of stonewalling international efforts to assess the food security situation in the war-torn country.
The authorities have also been accused of creating bureaucratic hurdles to humanitarian work and blocking visas for foreign teams.
The International Rescue Committee said the army was “leveraging its status as the internationally recognized government (and blocking) the UN and other agencies from reaching RSF-controlled areas.”
Both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.
The war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted over 12 million people, including millions who face dire food insecurity in army-controlled areas.
Across the country, more than 24.6 million people — around half the population — face high levels of acute food insecurity.
Egypt tests new extension of the Suez Canal
- Two ships used the new extension on Saturday, a statement from the Suez Canal Authority said
- The new extension is set to boost the canal’s capacity by six to eight vessels a day
CAIRO: Egypt has tested a new 10-kilometer extension to the Suez Canal as it tries to minimize the impact of currents on shipping and increase the key waterway’s capacity.
Two ships used the new extension on Saturday, a statement from the Suez Canal Authority said.
Authority chief Osama Rabie said the development in the canal’s southern region will “enhance navigational safety and reduce the effects of water and air currents on passing ships.”
Vessels navigating the waterway have at times run aground, mostly because of strong winds and sandstorms.
In 2021, giant container ship Ever Given became wedged diagonally in the canal, blocking trade for nearly a week and resulting in delays that cost billions of dollars.
The new extension is set to boost the canal’s capacity by six to eight vessels a day, Rabie said, and it will open after new navigational maps are issued.
In 2015, Egypt undertook an $8-billion expansion to the waterway, followed by several smaller development projects.
The Suez Canal has long been a vital source of foreign currency for Egypt that has been undergoing its worst ever economic crisis.
According to the International Monetary Fund, revenue from the canal has been slashed by up to 70 percent since last year because of attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on shipping in the Red Sea.
Before the attacks pushed companies to change routes, the vital passage accounted for around 10 percent of global maritime trade.
Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
- Israeli forces instruct Beit Hanoun residents to leave, causing new displacements
- Palestinian officials say evacuations worsen Gaza’s humanitarian conditions
CAIRO: Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town on Sunday, pointing to Palestinian militant rocket fire from the area, residents said.
The instruction to residents to leave caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected, the residents said.
Israel says its almost three-month-old campaign in northern Gaza is aimed at Hamas militants and preventing them from regrouping. Its instructions to civilians to evacuate are meant to keep them out of harm’s way, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and that evacuations worsen humanitarian conditions of the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
The Israeli military announced its new push into the Beit Hanoun area on Saturday.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the town, and it was unable to send teams into the area because of the raid.
On Friday, Israeli forces stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The military said it was being used by militants, which Hamas denies.
The raid on the hospital, one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza, put the last major health facility in the area out of service, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a post on X.
Some patients were evacuated from Kamal Adwan to the Indonesian Hospital, which is not in service, and medics were prevented from joining them there, the Health Ministry said. Other patients and staff were taken to other medical facilities.
On Sunday, health officials said an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of the Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City near the X-ray division.
Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 16 people on Sunday. One of those strikes killed seven people and wounded others at Al-WAFA Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said in a statement.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Nearly 300 arrested in Syria crackdown on Assad loyalists: monitor
- The new authorities in Syria have intensified efforts to consolidate control
- The arrests were reportedly taking place ‘with the cooperation of local populations’
BEIRUT: Syria’s new authorities have arrested nearly 300 people, including informants, pro-regime fighters and former soldiers, in a crackdown on loyalists to ousted former president Bashar Assad, a monitor said Sunday.
Since militants led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) group toppled Assad three weeks ago, ending more than five decades of family rule, the new authorities in Syria have intensified efforts to consolidate control.
The security forces of the new administration launched a large-scale operation on Thursday against Assad’s militias.
“In less than a week, nearly 300 people have been detained in Damascus and its suburbs, as well as in Homs, Hama, Tartus, Latakia and even Deir Ezzor,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
The official Syrian news agency SANA also reported arrests this week targeting “Assad militia members” in Hama and Latakia provinces, where weapons and ammunition were seized. It did not provide any figures.
Among those arrested, according to the Observatory, were former regime informants, pro-Iranian fighters and lower-ranking military officers accused of killings and torture, Abdel Rahman said.
The Observatory, which is based in Britain, relies on a network of sources across Syria.
Abdel Rahman said that “the campaign is ongoing, but no prominent figures have been arrested” except for General Mohammed Kanjo Hassan, the former head of military justice under Assad, who reportedly oversaw thousands of death sentences following summary trials at Saydnaya prison.
Referring to social media videos showing armed men abusing detainees and even carrying out summary executions, Abdel Rahman said: “Some individuals, including informants, were immediately executed after being detained.”
AFP could not independently verify the authenticity of the images.
The arrests were reportedly taking place “with the cooperation of local populations,” Abdel Rahman added.
The HTS led a coalition of former Islamist militant groups that entered Damascus on December 8 after a rapid offensive, forcing Assad to flee to Russia.
Anas Khattab, the new head of General Intelligence, has pledged to overhaul the security apparatus, denouncing “the injustice and tyranny of the former regime, whose agencies sowed corruption and inflicted suffering on the people.”
Syria’s new intel chief vows reforms to end abuses
- Prisons were emptied after Assad’s fall as officials, agents of the deposed regime fled
- Most of these installations are now guarded by fighters of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group
DAMASCUS: The new head of Syria’s intelligence services announced on Saturday a plan to dissolve the institutions that were so feared under the rule of ousted dictator Bashar Assad.
“The security establishment will be reformed after dissolving all services and restructuring them in a way that honors our people,” Anas Khattab said, two days after being appointed to his post by the country’s new leadership that overthrew Assad in early December.
In a statement carried by the official Sana news agency, he stressed the suffering of Syrians “under the oppression and tyranny of the old regime, through its various security apparatuses that sowed corruption and inflicted torture on the people.”
Prisons were emptied after Assad’s fall as officials and agents of the deposed regime fled.
Most of these installations are now guarded by fighters of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group that led the armed coalition that seized power in Damascus.
Numerous Syrians have rushed to former detention centers in the hope of finding traces of relatives and friends who went missing during the 13 years of a devastating civil war that left more than a half million dead.
“The security services of the old regime were many and varied, with different names and affiliations, but all had in common that they had been imposed on the oppressed people for more than five decades,” Khattab continued.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), more than 100,000 people died in Syrian prisons and detention centers during the conflict.
On Thursday, a general who ran military justice under the former regime was arrested in the west of country, accused of being responsible for sentencing to death thousands of people held in the notorious Saydnaya prison.
And in Europe, several former senior Syrian intelligence officers accused of torture and other abuses have been convicted and jailed since 2022.
