Syria’s transitional government has vowed to dissolve and restructure all security agencies of the toppled dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime accused of mass killings and abuses. Al-Assad, who ruled Syria for more than two decades, fled the country earlier this month as Islamist-led rebels advanced on the capital Damascus during a lighting sweep. The interim government,…
The U.S. military has said that it killed two fighters from the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria and wounded another. “The terrorists were moving a truckload of weapons which were destroyed during the strike,” the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a press release on Monday. “This strike occurred in an area formerly controlled…
The Iranian embassy in Damascus will remain closed for the time being following the political upheaval in Syria, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Tehran on Tuesday. “A reopening of the Iranian embassy in Syria is not imminent, as this initially requires political and security-related preparations,” Esmail Baghaei said, according to the news agency ISNA….
European Union foreign ministers plan to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss recent developments in Syria and Georgia also wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as the political situation in Belarus. Ministers are set to adopt the 15th round of new sanctions on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in…
The UN Security Council is to convene for an emergency session on Monday after Syrian rebels declared President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster and seized control of Damascus on Sunday. The meeting, requested by Russia, will take place behind closed doors, diplomatic sources told dpa. Syrians were facing a new political reality on Sunday after rebels took…
A photographer working for dpa, Anas Alkharboutli, has been killed during the latest fighting in Syria. The 32-year-old photojournalist was killed in an airstrike while working near the Syrian city of Hama, other reporters who witnessed the incident confirmed. Alkharboutli had been reporting on the advance of the rebel alliance Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Alkharboutli…
The U.S. Department of Defense announced that the U.S. military attacked positions of Iranian-allied militias in Yemen and Syria. Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said on Tuesday that Airstrikes were carried out on several Houthi rebel weapons caches in Yemen over the weekend. ‘‘These facilities housed a variety of advanced conventional weapons used by the Iran-backed…
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi has visited the Jdeidet Yabous crossing on the border between Syria and Lebanon, Syria’s local media reported. “I was at the Syrian/Lebanese border, where a quarter of a million people have crossed since Sep. 23, when Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon escalated,” Grandi said on the social media…
An Israeli drone attack targeted and destroyed a weapons depot in the coastal Syrian city of Jableh before daybreak Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. The attack carried out via drones and warplane missiles leveled the depot and caused massive explosions heard from long distances, said the UK-based watchdog group. It added that…
Since the beginning of Israel’s massive aerial campaign on Lebanon which was launched last week, some 1,000 people have fled the country to neighbouring Syria. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Monday. Some 60 per cent of them are believed to be Syrian refugees that previously fled to Lebanon amid the civil war that…
