BEIRUT: Arriving in Lebanon after last week’s deadly Beirut blast, US envoy David Hale bypassed politicians to head straight to a hard-hit neighborhood where young volunteers are helping people abandoned by their state.
At the volunteer hub dubbed the “Base Camp,” there is a “focus on getting things done,” Hale told a press conference after his tour.
He contrasted the hive of activity to the “dysfunctional governance and empty promises” of Lebanon’s political leaders, who face public outrage over the explosion of a vast stock of ammonium nitrate stored for years at Beirut’s port.
Volunteer efforts “could not only be tapped to rebuild Beirut but (also) to undertake necessary reforms that will bring the kind of transformation that is necessary for Lebanon,” Hale said.
In the wake of the August 4 explosion of a the huge chemical store that laid waste to whole Beirut neighborhoods, students and young professionals have ditched classes and day jobs to save lives, provide emergency support and start to rebuild.
Hale’s visit to the volunteer hub in the blast-hit Gemmayzeh district came days after French President Emmanuel Macron took a tour of the same street last Thursday, as well as meeting Lebanese leaders.
But while Macron was welcomed as a savior, it was clear that the heroes of the moment were the volunteers.
“I don’t know why (Hale) would do that second step and go to meet politicians,” said Wassim Bou Malham, 33, who leads a database management team at the Base Camp.
“The aid is happening here, the data collection is happening here, the cleaning is happening here, the reconstruction is happening here,” he told AFP.
Wearing face masks and neon vests, volunteers sounded like international experts as they explained how they were cleaning up their government’s mess.
In fluent English, they described 3D mapping operations, data collection and relief efforts organized since the cataclysmic blast.
Bou Malham, who spoke with Hale during the tour, is not a data expert but picked up useful experience managing client databases for two of Beirut’s biggest nightclubs.
After the blast tore through the city, wounding 6,500 people and displacing 300,000 from their homes, his skills became vital for the aid effort.
The digitised database developed by Bou Malham and his team of volunteers is now critical for sorting and delivering aid to thousands of blast survivors.
“We haven’t seen any government official or representative actually come in here and ask us if we need anything,” he said.
“It’s so funny that David Hale is the first.”
It is not only in the Base Camp that the state has been thin on the ground.
In the first hours after the explosion, civil defense teams were vastly outnumbered by young volunteers flooding the streets to help.
By the next day, the latter had set up a camp where they offered food, medicine, temporary shelter and repair services to thousands of blast victims, in partnership with several non-governmental groups.
Operations have continued to expand since.
A Base Camp relief hotline received more than 200 calls in the first two hours. Volunteers have assessed the damage to around 1,200 homes and installed at least 600 wooden doors.
“The work is going to speak for itself,” said Bushra, a 37-year-old volunteer.
Simmering anger against Lebanon’s leaders has flared since the blast, which appears to have been caused by years of state corruption and negligence.
With 171 people dead, it is widely seen as the most tragic manifestation yet of the rot at the core of the country’s political system.
Western donors too are fed up with Lebanon’s barons, who have for years resisted reforms demanded by the international community.
In a joint statement released after an international donor conference organized by France in the wake of the disaster, world leaders called for aid to be delivered directly to the Lebanese people.
USAID acting administrator, John Barsa, said at the time that American help “is absolutely not going to the government.”
USAID “will increase its financial support to civil society groups in Lebanon by 30 percent to $6.627 million,” Barsa said in a press briefing on Thursday.
At the volunteer camp in Gemmayzeh, it was clear that funding would be put to good use.
Ziad Al-Zein, arrives before volunteers start their shifts at 9:00 am to ensure the camp is clean and secure.
The 33-year-old was among the first groups of volunteers clearing debris in Gemmayzeh.
“We are not speacialists in crisis management or catastophe management. We are learning things as we go,” he said.
“There is no state,” he added. “We will not abandon our fellow Lebanese in these conditions.”
Streets before suits: US envoy vists Beirut’s ‘real’ rescue hub
https://arab.news/9mj8e
Streets before suits: US envoy vists Beirut’s ‘real’ rescue hub
- Hale’s visit to the volunteer hub in the Gemmayzeh district came days after Macron took a tour of the same street last week
- Students and young professionals have ditched classes and day jobs to save lives and provide emergency support
Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria
Swathes of northern Syria are controlled by a Kurdish-led administration whose de facto army, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), spearheaded the fight that helped defeat the Daesh group in the country in 2019 with US backing.
Turkiye accuses the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), of being affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which both Washington and Ankara consider a terrorist group.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that seven pro-Turkish fighters were killed in clashes Monday in the northeastern Manbij region, in Aleppo province.
SDF fighters had infiltrated the city of the same name after it was retaken by Ankara-backed groups earlier this month, the monitor said.
Six other pro-Turkish fighters and three members of the SDF were killed the day before in the same part of Aleppo province, it said.
The SDF said Monday that it had carried out attacks elsewhere in the province that destroyed “two radars, a jamming system and a tank of the Turkish occupation” near a strategic bridge over the Euphrates.
According to the Observatory, 13 members of the pro-Turkiye factions and two members of the SDF “were killed as a result of flaring battles” near the bridge and the Tishreen Dam.
The Britain-based Observatory said clashes in the area had been going on for around three weeks “as both sides seek to advance.”
Turkiye has staged multiple operations in SDF areas since 2016, and Ankara-backed groups have captured several Kurdish-held towns in northern Syria in recent weeks.
The fighting has continued since rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad from power on December 8.
New Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose HTS group has long had ties with Turkiye, told Al Arabiya TV on Sunday that the Kurdish-led forces should be integrated into the national army.
“Weapons must be in the hands of the state alone. Whoever is armed and qualified to join the defense ministry, we will welcome them,” he said.
“Under these terms and conditions, we will open a negotiations dialogue with the SDF... to perhaps find an appropriate solution.”
WHO demands Israel release Gaza hospital director
- Assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients
- Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced Israeli attacks and both are damaged
GENEVA: The WHO chief called Monday for the immediate release of Hossam Abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who is being held by Israel’s military following a major raid on the facility.
The Friday-Saturday assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients, the World Health Organization said.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is out of service following the raid, forced patient and staff evacuation and the detention of its director. His whereabouts are unknown. We call for his immediate release.”
Israel’s military said Sunday that its forces had killed approximately 20 Palestinian militants and apprehended “240 terrorists” in the raid, calling it one of its “largest operations” conducted in the territory.
The military also said had detained Abu Safiyeh, suspecting him of being a Hamas militant. When asked if he had been transferred to Israeli territory for further questioning, the military did not offer an immediate comment.
Tedros said the patients in critical condition at Kamal Adwan had been moved to the Indonesian Hospital, “which is itself out of function.”
“Amid ongoing chaos in northern Gaza, WHO and partners today delivered basic medical and hygiene supplies, food and water to Indonesian Hospital and transferred 10 critical patients to Al-Shifa Hospital,” he said.
“We urge Israel to ensure their health care needs and rights are upheld.”
He said seven patients along with 15 caregivers and health workers remained at the “severely damaged” Indonesian Hospital, “which has no ability to provide care.”
“Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced attacks today and both are damaged,” Tedros added.
“We repeat: stop attacks on hospitals. People in Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid.”
Since October 6 this year, Israeli operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments
- Kyiv moves to build ties with the new leadership in Damascus
DAMASCUS: Syria hopes for “strategic partnerships” with Ukraine, its new foreign minister told his Ukrainian counterpart on Monday, as Kyiv moves to build ties with the new Islamist rulers in Damascus amid waning Russian influence.
Russia was a staunch ally of ousted President Bashar Assad and has given him political asylum. Moscow has said it is in contact with the new administration in Damascus, including over the fate of Russian military facilities in Syria.
“There will be strategic partnerships between us and Ukraine on the political, economic and social levels, and scientific partnerships,” Syria’s newly appointed foreign minister, Asaad Hassan Al-Shibani, told Ukraine’s Andrii Sybiha.
“Certainly the Syrian people and the Ukrainian people have the same experience and the same suffering that we endured over 14 years,” he added, apparently drawing a parallel between Syria’s brutal 2011-24 civil war and Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory culminating in its full-scale 2022 invasion.
Sybiha, who also met Syria’s new de facto ruler Ahmed Al-Sharaa in Damascus on Monday, said Ukraine would send more food aid shipments to Syria after the expected arrival of 20 shipments of flour on Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last Friday the
dispatch
of Ukraine’s first batch of food aid to Syria comprising 500 metric tons of wheat flour as part of Kyiv’s humanitarian “Grain from Ukraine” initiative in cooperation with the United Nations World Food Programme.
RUSSIAN INFLUENCE SQUEEZED
Ukraine, a global producer and exporter of grain and oilseeds, traditionally exports wheat and corn to countries in the Middle East, but not to Syria, which in the Assad era imported food from Russia.
Russian wheat supplies to Syria have been
suspended
because of uncertainty about the new government in Damascus and payment delays, Russian and Syrian sources told Reuters in early December. Russia had supplied wheat to Syria using complex financial and logistical arrangements to circumvent Western sanctions imposed on both Moscow and Damascus.
The ousting of Assad by Al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, has thrown the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria — the Hmeimim air base in Latakia and the Tartous naval facility — into question.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the status of Russia’s military bases would be the subject of negotiations with the new leadership in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa said this month that Syria’s relations with Russia should serve common interests. In an interview published on Sunday, he said Syria
shared
strategic interests with Russia, striking a conciliatory tone, though he did not elaborate.
In Gaza’s crowded tent camps, women wrestle with a life stripped of privacy
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza City: For Gaza’s women, the hardships of life in the territory’s sprawling tent camps are compounded by the daily humiliation of never having privacy.
Women struggle to dress modestly while crowded into tents with extended family members, including men, and with strangers only steps away in neighboring tents. Access to menstrual products is limited, so they cut up sheets or old clothes to use as pads. Makeshift toilets usually consist of only a hole in the sand surrounded by sheets dangling from a line, and these must be shared with dozens of other people.
Alaa Hamami has dealt with the modesty issue by constantly wearing her prayer shawl, a black cloth that covers her head and upper body.
“Our whole lives have become prayer clothes, even to the market we wear it,” said the young mother of three. “Dignity is gone.”
Normally, she would wear the shawl only when performing her daily Muslim prayers. But with so many men around, she keeps it on all the time, even when sleeping — just in case an Israeli strike hits nearby in the night and she has to flee quickly, she said.
Israel’s 14-month-old campaign in Gaza has driven more than 90 percent of its 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of them are now living in squalid camps of tents packed close together over large areas.
Sewage runs into the streets, and food and water are hard to obtain. Winter is setting in. Families often wear the same clothes for weeks because they left clothing and many other belongings behind as they fled.
Everyone in the camps searches daily for food, clean water and firewood. Women feel constantly exposed.
Gaza has always been a conservative society. Most women wear the hijab, or head scarf, in the presence of men who are not immediate family. Matters of women’s health — pregnancy, menstruation and contraception — tend not to be discussed publicly.
“Before we had a roof. Here it does not exist,” said Hamami, whose prayer shawl is torn and smudged with ash from cooking fires. “Here our entire lives have become exposed to the public. There is no privacy for women.”
Even simple needs are hard to meet
Wafaa Nasrallah, a displaced mother of two, says life in the camps makes even the simplest needs difficult, like getting period pads, which she cannot afford. She tried using pieces of cloth and even diapers, which have also increased in price.
For a bathroom, she has a hole in the ground, surrounded by blankets propped up by sticks.
The UN says more than 690,000 women and girls in Gaza require menstrual hygiene products, as well as clean water and toilets. Aid workers have been unable to meet demand, with supplies piling up at crossings from Israel. Stocks of hygiene kits have run out, and prices are exorbitant. Many women have to choose between buying pads and buying food and water.
Doaa Hellis, a mother of three living in a camp, said she has torn up her old clothes to use for menstrual pads. “Wherever we find fabric, we tear it up and use it.”
A packet of pads costs 45 shekels ($12), “and there is not even five shekels in the whole tent,” she said.
Anera, a rights group active in Gaza, says some women use birth control pills to halt their periods. Others have experienced disruptions in their cycles because of the stress and trauma of repeated displacement.
The terrible conditions pose real risks to women’s health, said Amal Seyam, the director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza, which provides supplies for women and surveys them about their experiences.
She said some women have not changed clothes for 40 days. That and improvised cloth pads “will certainly create” skin diseases, diseases related to reproductive health and psychological conditions, she said.
“Imagine what a woman in Gaza feels like, if she’s unable to control conditions related to hygiene and menstrual cycles,” Seyam said.
‘Everything is destroyed’
Hellis remembered a time not so long ago, when being a woman felt more like a joy and less like a burden.
“Women are now deprived of everything, no clothes, no bathroom. Their psychology is completely destroyed,” she said.
Seyam said the center has tracked cases where girls have been married younger, before the age of 18, to escape the suffocating environment of their family’s tents. The war will “continue to cause a humanitarian disaster in every sense of the word. And women always pay the biggest price,” she said.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, over half of them women and children, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Its count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
Israel launched its assault in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on southern Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted around 250 others.
With large swaths of Gaza’s cities and towns leveled, women wrestle with reduced lives in their tents.
Hamami can walk the length of her small tent in a few strides. She shares it with 13 other people from her extended family. During the war, she gave birth to a son, Ahmed, who is now 8 months old. Between caring for him and her two other children, washing her family’s laundry, cooking and waiting in line for water, she says there’s no time to care for herself.
She has a few objects that remind her of what her life once was, including a powder compact she brought with her when she fled her home in the Shati camp of Gaza City. The makeup is now caked and crumbling. She managed to keep hold of a small mirror through four different displacements over the past year. It’s broken into two shards that she holds together every so often to catch a glimpse of her reflection.
“Previously, I had a wardrobe that contained everything I could wish for,” she said. “We used to go out for a walk every day, go to wedding parties, go to parks, to malls, to buy everything we wanted.”
Women “lost their being and everything in this war,” she said. “Women used to take care of themselves before the war. Now everything is destroyed.”
Now Syria’s long-ruling Baath party is collapsing, too
- Many members of the party’s leadership have gone into hiding and some have fled the country
- Calls are on the rise to officially dissolve the Arab Socialist Baath Party that had ruled Syria since 1963
DAMASCUS: A few days after insurgents in Syria overthrew President Bashar Assad, his ruling Baath party announced it was freezing its activities, marking a stunning change in fortunes for the political group that had ruled for more than six decades.
Many members of the party’s leadership have gone into hiding and some have fled the country. In a symbolic move, Syria’s new rulers have turned the former party headquarters in Damascus into a center where former members of the army and security forces line up to register their names and hand over their weapons.
Calls are on the rise to officially dissolve the Arab Socialist Baath Party that had ruled Syria since 1963.
Many Syrians — including former party members — say its rule damaged relations with other Arab countries and aided in the spread of corruption that brought the war-torn nation to its knees.
“The party should not only be dissolved, it should go to hell,” said Mohammed Hussein Ali, 64, who worked for a state oil company and was a party member for decades until he quit at the start of Syria’s anti-government uprising in 2011 that turned into civil war. He never left the country and said he is happy the Baath rule is over.
An official with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, or HTS, the group that led the insurgent offensive that overthrew Assad, said no official decision has been made on what to do with the Baath party.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, noted that HTS leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa has said that officials who committed crimes against the Syrian people over the past decades will be brought to justice and hinted that they include party members.
The Baath party, whose aim was to unify Arab states in one nation, was founded by two Syrian Arab nationalists, Michel Aflaq and Salaheddine Bitar, in 1947 and at one point ruled two Arab countries, Iraq and Syria.
A rivalry developed between the Syrian branch under Assad and his late father, Hafez, and the one in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who was removed from power by a US-led invasion in 2003.
In Syria, the Baath party became inextricably associated with the Assad family, which took power in 1970. For decades, the family used the party and its pan-Arab ideology to control the country. Many senior military jobs were held by members of the family’s minority Alawite sect, and party membership was used as a cover to give it a nationalist rather than a sectarian nature.
A former soldier and decades-long Baath party member who came to party headquarters to cut his military ties, Abdul-Rahman Ali, said he had no idea it was founded by Aflaq and Bitar. He had always thought that Hafez Assad was the founder.
“I am happy. We have been liberated from fear,” said Ali, 43. “Even the walls had ears. We didn’t dare express opinions with anyone.” He was referring to the dreaded security and intelligence agencies that detained and tortured people who expressed criticism of Assad or government officials.
Many Syrians were required to join the Baath Vanguards, the party’s youth branch, while in elementary school, where Arab nationalist and socialist ideology was emphasized.
It was difficult for people who were not party members to get government jobs or join the army or the security and intelligence services.
In 2012, a year after Syria’s uprising began, a paragraph of the constitution stating that the Baath party was the leader of the nation and society was abolished, in a move aimed to appease the public’s demand for political reforms. In practice, however, the party remained in control, with members holding majority seats in parliament and government.
Another former soldier, who gave only his first name, Ghadir, out of fear of reprisals as a member of the Alawite sect, said he came from a poor family and joined the party so he could enter the military for a stable income.
“You could not take any job if you were not a Baathist,” he said.
While few are mourning the party’s fall in Syria, some are concerned that the Sunni majority that now controls the country could carry out a purge similar to the one in Iraq after Saddam’s fall.
A de-Baathification committee was formed in Iraq and its main job was purging Saddam loyalists from government and military institutions. The Sunni minority considered it a means of sectarian score-settling by Iraq’s Shiite majority. The Sunni resentment and disenfranchisement that followed helped to drive the rise of extremist groups in the country including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq.
In Syria, a Baath party statement issued three days after Assad’s fall called on all members to hand their weapons and public cars to the new authorities.
On Dec. 24, party member and former army colonel Mohammed Merhi was among hundreds who lined up at the former party headquarters and handed over weapons.
Merhi said the Baath party should be given another opportunity because its principles are good but were exploited over decades. But he said he might want to join another party if Syria becomes a multiparty democracy in the future.
He handed over his Soviet Makarov pistol and received a document saying he can now move freely in the country after reconciling with the new authorities.
“I want to become again a normal Syrian citizen and work to build a new Syria,” he said.
