DAKAR: Hussein Hachem hugged his injured daughter as she arrived in Senegal on a flight repatriating citizens escaping the escalating conflict in Lebanon. His 14-year-old son was not with her — killed, he said, when their home was bombed.
As Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs in a broadening offensive against Hezbollah, Hachem’s daughter Mariam, 11, who had suffered a broken foot, was among 117 Senegalese flown to Dakar on a government-organized flight.
“I lost everything. I lost my son. I lost my house. All my dreams,” he said, speaking amid emotional scenes outside the Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport, where families were reunited with loved ones late on Saturday.
“We have a 14-and-a-half-year-old son who just disappeared like that. Ten minutes before, I was talking to him. ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Dad, you’re going to come get me?’ I told him ‘yes’ ... Ten minutes later, they called me: ‘there’s no more house, no more son’.”
Senegal has a significant Lebanese diaspora community, and has historical ties to both Lebanon and Palestine.
“The Senegalese government, of course, is condemning the Israeli army’s bombardment in Lebanon, the bombardment of civilians... the destruction of infrastructure,” the country’s foreign minister, Yassine Fall, said in an interview with Reuters on Saturday evening.
She said there had been about 1,000 Senegalese nationals in Lebanon but that some had left by their own means before the repatriation flight.
Fall also highlighted her country’s longstanding relationship with the Palestinian people, dating back to 1975 when Senegal chaired the United Nations Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
“We are very, very disappointed to see the world watching a genocide happen under our eyes, children being killed, children being shot in the head, hospitals being bombarded, sick people not being able to be evacuated, people in refugee camps that are not fighting, that are civilians, being maimed and killed,” she said in reference to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
“So Senegal, with other countries, we are really side by side condemning this and calling it what it is: it is a genocide.”
Israel has strongly rejected accusations of genocide, including in a case brought by South Africa at the World Court.
It says it is acting in self-defense after an Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Palestinian Hamas militants. The Hamas attack killed 1,200 people with about 250 also taken as hostage, according to Israeli tallies, and triggered a conflict that has since spread from Gaza to Lebanon.
Earlier on Saturday, demonstrators marched through Dakar to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon and call for a ceasefire in the widening Middle East conflict. (Reporting by Portia Crowe and Ngouda Dione; Editing by Alex Richardson)
'Everything is lost' says father, as Senegal repatriates citizens escaping Lebanon
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'Everything is lost' says father, as Senegal repatriates citizens escaping Lebanon
- Hachem’s daughter Mariam, 11, who had suffered a broken foot, was among 117 Senegalese flown to Dakar on a government-organized flight
Syria authorities say torched 1 million captagon pills
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities torched a large stockpile of drugs on Wednesday, two security officials told AFP, including one million pills of captagon, whose industrial-scale production flourished under ousted president Bashar Assad.
Captagon is a banned amphetamine-like stimulant that became Syria’s largest export during the country’s more than 13-year civil war, effectively turning it into a narco state under Assad.
“We found a large quantity of captagon, around one million pills,” said a balaclava-wearing member of the security forces, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Osama, and whose khaki uniform bore a “public security” patch.
An AFP journalist saw forces pour fuel over and set fire to a cache of cannabis, the painkiller tramadol, and around 50 bags of pink and yellow captagon pills in a security compound formerly belonging to Assad’s forces in the capital’s Kafr Sousa district.
Captagon has flooded the black market across the region in recent years, with oil-rich Saudi Arabia a major destination.
“The security forces of the new government discovered a drug warehouse as they were inspecting the security quarter,” said another member of the security forces, who identified himself as Hamza.
Authorities destroyed the stocks of alcohol, cannabis, captagon and hashish in order to “protect Syrian society” and “cut off smuggling routes used by Assad family businesses,” he added.
Syria’s new Islamist rulers have yet to spell out their policy on alcohol, which has long been widely available in the country.
Since an Islamist-led rebel alliance toppled Assad on December 8 after a lightning offensive, Syria’s new authorities have said massive quantities of captagon have been found in former government sites around the country, including security branches.
AFP journalists in Syria have seen fighters from Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) set fire to what they said were stashes of captagon found at facilities once operated by Assad’s forces.
Security force member Hamza confirmed Wednesday that “this is not the first initiative of its kind — the security services, in a number of locations, have found other warehouses... and drug manufacturing sites and destroyed them in the appropriate manner.”
Maher Assad, a military commander and the brother of Bashar Assad, is widely accused of being the power behind the lucrative captagon trade.
Experts believe Syria’s former leader used the threat of drug-fueled unrest to put pressure on Arab governments.
A Saudi delegation met Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa in Damascus on Sunday, a source close to the government told AFP, to discuss the “Syria situation and captagon.”
Jordan in recent years has also cracked down on the smuggling of weapons and drugs including captagon along its 375-kilometer (230-mile) border with Syria.
Jordan says 18,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall
AMMAN: About 18,000 Syrians have crossed into their country from Jordan since the government of Bashar Assad was toppled earlier this month, Jordanian authorities said on Thursday.
Interior Minister Mazen Al-Faraya told state TV channel Al-Mamlaka that “around 18,000 Syrians have returned to their country between the fall of the regime of Bashar Assad on December 8, 2024 until Thursday.”
He said the returnees included 2,300 refugees registered with the United Nations.
Amman says it has hosted about 1.3 million Syrians who fled their country since civil war broke out in 2011, with 650,000 formally registered with the United Nations.
Lebanon hopes for neighborly relations in first message to new Syria government
- Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah played a major part propping up Syria’s ousted President Bashar Assad through years of war
- Syria’s new Islamist de-facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa is seeking to establish relations with Arab and Western leaders
DUBAI: Lebanon said on Thursday it was looking forward to having the best neighborly relations with Syria, in its first official message to the new administration in Damascus.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib passed the message to his Syrian counterpart, Asaad Hassan Al-Shibani, in a phone call, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said on X.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah played a major part propping up Syria’s ousted President Bashar Assad through years of war, before bringing its fighters back to Lebanon over the last year to fight in a bruising war with Israel – a redeployment which weakened Syrian government lines.
Under Assad, Hezbollah used Syria to bring in weapons and other military equipment from Iran, through Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon. But on Dec. 6, anti-Assad fighters seized the border with Iraq and cut off that route, and two days later, Islamist militants captured the capital Damascus.
Syria’s new Islamist de-facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa is seeking to establish relations with Arab and Western leaders after toppling Assad.
Iraqi intelligence chief discusses border security with new Syrian administration
BAGHDAD: An Iraqi delegation met with Syria’s new rulers in Damascus on Thursday, an Iraqi government spokesman said, the latest diplomatic outreach more than two weeks after the fall of Bashar Assad’s rule.
The delegation, led by Iraqi intelligence chief Hamid Al-Shatri, “met with the new Syrian administration,” government spokesman Bassem Al-Awadi told state media, adding that the parties discussed “the developments in the Syrian arena, and security and stability needs on the two countries’ shared border.”
