BEIRUT: Thousands of people fled the central Syrian city of Homs, the country’s third largest, as insurgents seized two towns on the outskirts Friday, positioning themselves for an assault on a potentially major prize in their march against President Bashar Assad.
The move, reported by pro-government media and an opposition war monitor, was the latest in the stunning advances by opposition fighters over the past week that have so far met little resistance from Assad’s forces. A day earlier, fighters captured the central city of Hama, Syria’s fourth largest, after the army said it withdrew to avoid fighting inside the city and spare the lives of civilians.
The insurgents, led by the jihadi Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group, or HTS, have vowed to march to Homs and the capital, Damascus, Assad’s seat of power. Videos circulating online showed a highway jammed with cars full of people fleeing Homs, a city with a large population belonging to Assad’s Alawite sect, seen as his core supporters.
If Assad’s military loses Homs, it could be a crippling blow. The city, parts of which were controlled by insurgents until 2014, stands at an important intersection between Damascus and Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, where Assad enjoys wide support. Homs province is Syria’s largest in size and borders Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.
Pressure on the government intensified from multiple directions.
Opposition protesters stormed security posts and army positions in the southern province of Sweida, opposition activists said. US-backed Kurdish forces who control eastern and northeastern Syria began to encroach on government-held territory.
Offensive leaves Assad reliant on Russia
After years of largely being bottled up in a northwest corner of the country, the insurgents burst out a week ago, captured the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and have kept advancing since. Government troops have repeatedly fallen back.
The sudden offensive has flipped the tables on a long-entrenched stalemate in Syria’s nearly 14-year-old civil war. Along with HTS, the fighters include forces of an umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army. Turkiye has denied backing the offensive, though experts say insurgents would not have launched it without the country’s consent.
HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammad Al-Golani, told CNN in an exclusive interview Thursday from Syria that Assad’s government was on the path to falling, propped up only by Russia and Iran.
“The seeds of the regime’s defeat have always been within it,” he said. “But the truth remains, this regime is dead.”
A key question about Assad’s ability to fight back is how much top ally Russia — whose troops back Assad’s forces — will throw support his way at a time when it is tied up in the war in Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he planned to discuss the developments in Syria with his Turkish and Iranian counterparts at a meeting Friday in the Qatari capital, Doha.
In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he said international actors were backing the insurgents’ advances and that he would discuss “the way to cut the channels of financing and arming them.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s embassy in Syria issued a notice reminding Russian citizens that they may use commercial flights to leave the country “in view of the difficult military-political situation.”
The foreign ministers of Iran, Iraq and Syria — three close allies — gathered Friday in Baghdad to consult on the rapidly changing war. Syrian Foreign Minister Bassam Sabbagh said the current developments may pose “a serious threat to the security of the region as a whole.”
Assad opponents move in center, south and east
The insurgent fighters on Friday took over the central towns of Rastan and Talbiseh, putting them 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Homs, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor.
“The battle of Homs is the mother of all battles and will decide who will rule Syria,” said Rami Abdurrahman, the Observatory’s chief.
Pro-government Sham FM said the insurgents entered Rastan and Talbiseh without facing any resistance. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military.
The Observatory said Syrian troops had left Homs. But the military denied that in comments reported by the state news agency SANA, saying troops were reinforcing their positions in the city and were “ready to repel” any assault.
In eastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces coalition said it had moved into the government-held half of the city of Deir Ezzor, apparently without resistance. One of the main cities in the east, Deir Ezzor had long been split between the government on the western side of the Euphrates River and the SDF on the eastern side.
The SDF also said it took control of further parts of the border with Iraq. That appeared to bring it closer to the government-held Boukamal border crossing. The crossing is a vital for the government because it is the gateway to the corridor to Iran, a supply line for Iran-backed fighters, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
At the same time, insurgents seized Syria’s sole crossing to Jordan, according to opposition activists. Jordan announced it was closing its side of the crossing. Lebanon also closed all but one of its border crossings with Syria.
Worsening economy could hurt Assad’s war effort
The opposition assault has struck a blow to Syria’s already decrepit economy. On Friday, the US dollar was selling on Syria’s parallel market for about 18,000 pounds, a 25 percent drop from a week ago. When Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011, a dollar was valued at 47 pounds.
The drop further undermines the purchasing power of Syrians at a time when the UN has warned that 90 percent of the population is below the poverty line.
Syria’s economy has been hammered for years by the war, Western sanctions, corruption and an economic meltdown in neighboring Lebanon, Syria’s main gate to the outside world.
Damascus residents told The Associated Press that people are rushing to markets to buy food, fearing further escalation.
The worsening economy could be undermining the ability of Syria’s military to fight, as the value of soldiers’ salaries melts away while the insurgents are flush with cash.
Syria’s military has not appeared to put up a cohesive counteroffensive against the opposition advances. SANA on Friday quoted an unnamed military official as saying the Syrian and Russian air forces were striking insurgents in Hama province, killing dozens of fighters.
Syria’s defense minister said in a televised statement late Thursday that government forces withdrew from Hama as “a temporary tactical measure” and vowed to gain back lost areas.
“We are in a good position on the ground,” Gen. Ali Mahmoud Abbas said, saying troops remained “at the gates of Hama.” He spoke before the opposition advanced further south toward Homs.
He said the insurgents, whom he described as “takfiri” or Muslim extremists, are backed by foreign countries. He did not name the countries but appeared to be referring to Turkiye and the United States.
Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive
https://arab.news/62paf
Thousands flee Homs as Syrian militants push on lightning offensive
- Militants have captured two major cities so far and are now thrusting toward Homs
- Seizing Homs would cut off Damascus from the coast, a longtime redoubt of Bashar Assad
Russia in contact with Syrian rebels, hopes to keep military bases, Interfax reports
MOSCOW Russia has established direct contact with the political committee of Syria’s Islamist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov as saying on Thursday.
Interfax reported that Bogdanov, speaking to journalists, also said Moscow aimed to maintain its military bases in Syria.
Bogdanov said contacts with HTS, the most powerful force in the country after the overthrow of President Bashar Assad, were “proceeding in constructive fashion.”
Russia, he said, hoped the group would fulfil its pledges to “guard against all excesses,” maintain order and ensure the safety of diplomats and other foreigners.
Bogdanov said Russia hoped to maintain its two bases in Syria — a naval base in Tartous and the Khmeimim Air Base near the port city of Latakia — to keep up efforts against international terrorism.
“The bases are still there, where they were on Syrian territory. No other decisions have been made for the moment,” he was quoted as saying.
“They were there at the Syrians’ request with the aim of fighting terrorists from the Islamic State. I am proceeding on the basis of the notion that everyone agrees that the fight against terrorism, and what remains of IS, is not over.”
Maintaining that fight, he said, “requires collective efforts and in this connection, our presence and the Khmeimim base played an important role in the context of the overall fight against international terrorism.”
Another Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Vershinin, and the UN’s special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, called for measures to destabilize the situation in and around Syria, according to a statement on the foreign ministry’s website.
The statement said the two diplomats discussed by telephone finding a political settlement in a way to be determined by the Syrian people and ensuring Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Syria’s rebel victors expose ousted government’s drug trade
DAMASCUS: The dramatic collapse of Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime has thrown light into the dark corners of his rule, including the industrial-scale export of the banned drug captagon.
Victorious Islamist-led fighters have seized military bases and distribution hubs for the amphetamine-type stimulant, which has flooded the black market across the Middle East.
Led by the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) group, the rebels say they found a vast haul of drugs and vowed to destroy them.
On Wednesday, HTS fighters allowed AFP journalists into a warehouse at a quarry on the outskirts of Damascus, where captagon pills were concealed inside electrical components for export.
“After we entered and did a sweep, and we found that this is a factory for Maher Assad and his partner Amer Khiti,” said black-masked fighter Abu Malek Al-Shami.
Maher Assad was a military commander and the deposed strongman’s brother, now presumed on the run. He is widely accused of being the power behind the lucrative captagon trade.
Syrian politician Khiti was placed under sanction in 2023 by the British government, which said he “controls multiple businesses in Syria which facilitate the production and smuggling of drugs.”
In a cavernous garage beneath the warehouse and loading bays, thousands of dusty beige captagon pills were packed into the copper coils of brand new household voltage stabilizers.
“We found a large number of devices that were stuffed with packages of captagon pills meant to be smuggled out of the country. It’s a huge quantity. It’s impossible to tell,” Shami said.
Above, in the warehouse, crates of cardboard boxes stood ready to allow the traffickers to disguise their cargo as pallet-loads of standard goods, alongside sacks and sacks of caustic soda.
Caustic soda, or sodium hydroxide, is a key ingredient in the production of methamphetamine, another stimulant.
Assad fell at the weekend to a lightning HTS offensive, but the revenue from selling captagon propped up Assad’s government throughout Syria’s 13 years of civil war.
Captagon turned Syria into the world’s largest narco state. It became by far Syria’s biggest export, dwarfing all its legal exports put together, according to estimates drawn from official data by AFP during a 2022 investigation.
The warehouse haul was massive, but smaller and still impressive stashes of captagon have also turned up in military facilities associated with units under Maher Assad’s command.
Journalists from AFP this week found a bonfire of captagon pills on the grounds of the Mazzeh air base, now in the hands of HTS fighters who descended on the capital Damascus from the north.
Behind the smoldering heap, in a ransacked air force building, more captagon lay alongside other illicit exports, including off-brand Viagra impotence remedies and poorly-forged $100 bills.
“As we entered the area we found a huge quantity of captagon. So we destroyed it and burned it. It’s a huge amount, brother,” said an HTS fighter using the nom de guerre “Khattab.”
“We destroyed and burned it because it’s harmful to people. It harms nature and people and humans.”
Khattab also stressed that HTS, which has formed a transitional government to replace the collapsed administration, does not want to harm its neighbors by exporting the drug — a trade worth billions of dollars.
UN says 1.1 million newly displaced in Syria since offensive that toppled Assad
BEIRUT: The United Nations humanitarian agency said Thursday that more than a million people, mostly women and children, had been newly displaced in Syria since rebels launched an offensive ousting President Bashar Assad.
“As of 12 December, 1.1 million people have been newly displaced across the country since the start of the escalation of hostilities on 27 November. The majority are women and children,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement.
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill 58, hit flour trucks
- Around 30 people, most of them children, were wounded in the two strikes
GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said a series of Israeli air strikes on Thursday killed at least 58 people, including 12 guards securing aid trucks, while the military said it targeted militants planning to hijack the vehicles.
The latest bloodshed came despite growing optimism that negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal might finally succeed, with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying on Thursday that the regional “context” had changed in favor of an agreement.
Seven guards were killed in a strike in Rafah, in southern Gaza, while another attack left five guards dead in nearby Khan Yunis, agency spokesman Mahmud Basal said.
“The (Israeli) occupation once again targeted those securing the aid trucks,” Basal told AFP, though the military said it “does not strike humanitarian aid trucks.”
Basal added that around 30 people, most of them children, were wounded in the two strikes.
“The trucks carrying flour were on their way to UNRWA warehouses,” Basal noted, referring to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
Witnesses later told AFP that residents looted flour from the trucks after the strikes.
The military said its forces “conducted precise strikes” overnight on armed Hamas militants present in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.
“All of the terrorists that were eliminated were members of Hamas and planned to violently hijack humanitarian aid trucks and transfer them to Hamas in support of continuing terrorist activity,” a military statement said.
The United Nations and aid agencies have repeatedly warned about the acute humanitarian crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip, exacerbated by the war that has persisted for more than 14 months.
“Conditions for people across the Gaza Strip are appalling and apocalyptic,” UNRWA spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told journalists during a visit to Nuseirat in central Gaza.
She added that life-saving aid to “besieged areas in north Gaza governorate has been largely blocked” since the Israeli military launched a sweeping assault there in early October.
In southern Gaza, UNRWA said earlier this week it had successfully delivered enough food aid for 200,000 people.
But on Thursday it said “a serious incident” meant that only one truck out of a convoy of 70 traveling along Gaza’s southern border reached its destination.
The agency did not provide any details on the incident, but called on “all parties to ensure safe, unimpeded and uninterrupted” aid deliveries.
As diplomacy aimed at ending the war appeared to be gaining pace again, the violence continued.
The civil defense agency said Israeli air strikes on two homes, near Nuseirat refugee camp — which was again hit later in the evening — and Gaza City killed 21 people.
Fifteen people, at least six of them children, died “as a result of an Israeli bombing” of a building sheltering displaced people near Nuseirat, Bassal said.
Bassam Al-Habash, a relative of the dead in Nuseirat said: “These people are innocent, they are not wanted. They have nothing to do with the war.”
“They are civilians, and this is not a war between two armies, but a war armed with weapons, planes and Western support against a defenseless people who own nothing.”
Another strike late on Thursday killed at least 25 people and wounded 50 others in the Nuseirat refugee camp, the civil defense said.
In the latest diplomatic effort to secure an end to the violence, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Wednesday calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
The non-binding resolution was rejected by the United States, Israel’s main military backer.
However, in recent days, there have been indications that previously stalled ceasefire negotiations could be revived.
Families of the 96 hostages still in Gaza since the Hamas attack that triggered the war, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead, are pressing for their release.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who visited Israel on Thursday and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he “got the sense” that the Israeli leader was “ready to do a deal.”
He also said that the Hamas approach to negotiations had changed, attributing it to the overthrow of their ally Bashar Assad in Syria and the ceasefire that went into effect in the war between Israel and another ally, Lebanese group Hezbollah.
Militants abducted 251 hostages during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which killed 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
This count includes hostages who died or were killed while held in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 44,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
NASA honors Algerian parks with Martian namesakes
- “Our planet is fragile, and it’s a signal to the world that we really need to take care of our national parks, whether they are in Algeria or elsewhere,” Melikechi said
- “The first one that came to my mind was the Tassili n’Ajjer,” he said of the UNESCO-listed vast plateau in the Sahara Desert
ALGIERS: NASA’s mapping of Mars now bears the names of three iconic Algerian national parks, Algerian physicist Noureddine Melikechi, a member of the US space agency’s largest Mars probe mission, has told AFP.
The Tassili n’Ajjer, Ghoufi and Djurdjura national parks have found their Martian namesakes after a proposition by Melikechi, which he sought as both a tribute to his native Algeria and a call to protect Earth.
“Our planet is fragile, and it’s a signal to the world that we really need to take care of our national parks, whether they are in Algeria or elsewhere,” the US-based scientist told AFP in a recent interview.
He said the visual resemblance between some of the Martian landscapes and the ones after which they were labelled was also a key reason for the naming.
“The first one that came to my mind was the Tassili n’Ajjer,” he said of the UNESCO-listed vast plateau in the Sahara Desert with prehistoric art dating back at least 12,000 years.
“Every time I see pictures of Mars, they remind me of Tassili n’Ajjer, and now every time I see Tassili n’Ajjer, it reminds me of Mars,” added Melikechi, who left Algeria in 1990 for the United States, where he now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
The ancient art found in Tassili n’Ajjer depicts figures that can seem otherworldly, he said.
Some of the paintings show single-eyed and horned giants, among others which French archaeologist Henri Lhote dubbed as “great Martian” deities in his 1958 book, “The Search for the Tassili Frescoes.”
“Those paintings are a signature... a book of how people used to live,” said Melikechi.
“You see animals, but also figures that look like they came from somewhere else.”
Melikechi’s second pick was the Ghoufi canyon in eastern Algeria, whose rocky desert landscape was the site of an ancient settlement off the Aures Mountains.
Now a UNESCO-listed site and a tourist attraction, it has cliffside dwellings carved in the mountain, a testament to human resilience in a place where survival can be adverse.
“Ghoufi gives you a sense that life can be hard, but you can manage to keep at it as you go,” Melikechi said.
“You can see that through those homes.”
The third site, Djurdjura, is a snowy mountain range some 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) east of the capital Algiers.
Comapred to Tassili or Ghoufi, it bears the least resemblance to Mars.
Melikechi said its pick stemmed of Djurdjura’s “reminder of the richness of natural habitats.”
He said the naming process came after Perseverence, NASA’s Mars rover exploring the Red Planet, made it into uncharted territory.
That area was then split into small quadrants, each needing a name.
“We were asked to propose names for specific quadrants,” he said.
“I suggested these three national parks, while others proposed names from parks worldwide. A team then reviewed and selected the final names.”
The announcement, made by NASA earlier this month, sparked celebrations among Algerians.
Algerian Culture Minister Zouhir Ballalou hailed it as a “historic and global recognition” of the North African country’s landscapes.
Melikechi said he hopes that it will attract more visitors as Algeria has been striving to promote tourism, especially in the Sahara region, with authorities promising to facilitate tourist visas.
Official figures said some 2.5 million tourists visited the country last year — its highest number of visitors in two decades.
“These places are a treasure that we as humans have inherited,” Melikechi said.
“We need to make sure they are preserved.”
