Category: Syria

Syrian businessman Saeed Nahhas had already fled the country by the time his two workshops were engulfed by the civil war. Government shelling destroyed one that made packaging machines, and four months later rebels looted another that produced plastic bags and zippers. Nahhas was living in the Turkish province of Gaziantep near the Syrian border when he lost the two facilities. He decided to stay there and set up a new workshop while waiting for the conflict to end. “It’s a tragedy,” said Nahhas, 46. “And the longer the conflict drags on, the harder it will be for people to return and set up their businesses again.” As well as leaving more than 125,000 people dead since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began March 2011, the fighting has wiped out more than half of Syria ’s manufacturing output by crippling the network of small […]

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Islamist fighters ran the top Western-backed rebel commander in Syria out of his headquarters, and he fled the country, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The Islamists also took over key warehouses holding U.S. military gear for moderate fighters in northern Syria over the weekend. The takeover and flight of Gen. Salim Idris of the Free Syrian Army shocked the U.S., which along with Britain immediately froze delivery of nonlethal military aid to rebels in northern Syria. The turn of events was the strongest sign yet that the U.S.-allied FSA is collapsing under the pressure of Islamist domination of the rebel side of the war. It also weakened the Obama administration’s hand as it struggles to organize a peace conference next month bringing together rebels and the regime. The Islamic Front is a recently formed alliance of the largest Islamist rebel groups that excludes the two main al Qaeda-linked rebel groups—the […]

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Just a month before a peace conference that will seek an end to the grinding civil war in Syria, the Obama administration’s decision to suspend the delivery of nonlethal aid to the moderate opposition demonstrated again the frustrations of trying to cultivate a viable alternative to President Bashar al-Assad. The administration acted after warehouses of American-supplied equipment were seized Friday by the Islamic Front, a coalition of Islamist fighters who have broken with the moderate, American-backed opposition, but who also battle Al Qaeda. Administration officials said that the suspension, confirmed on Wednesday, was temporary and that the nonlethal aid, which is supplied by the State Department, could flow again. But with rebels feuding with one another instead of concentrating on fighting Mr. Assad, and with the United States still groping for a reliable partner in Syria, the odds of any peace conference breaking the cycle of bloodshed […]

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The United States has suspended all non-lethal assistance into northern Syria after Islamic Front forces seized headquarters and warehouses belonging to the opposition’s Supreme Military Council (SMC), a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Ankara said. Fighters from the Islamic Front, a union of six major rebel groups, took control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) bases at the Bab al-Hawa crossing on Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey late on Friday. Turkey shut its side of the border crossing, in Hatay province, due to a reported increase in clashes on the Syrian side, customs sources told Reuters. There was no immediate confirmation from Turkish officials. Infighting among Syrian rebels has weakened their efforts to bring down President Bashar al-Assad in the conflict which began as peaceful protests against his rule in March 2011 and has descended into civil war. It was unclear why the Islamic Front had seized […]

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When the rains started at the beginning of November, creating streams of mud, Amoud Mohamed found herself fighting to keep her tent dry. “During the rain the tent was moving, at night we couldn’t sleep because of the rain and the wind,” she told DW, pointing to a pile of rugs at the entrance of the tent she shares with her family. “The water came in here under the floor. We must manage for the whole winter – we can’t go back to Syria.” Amoud and her family of eight are originally from Qamishli in northern Syria. The matriarch of the family, she is a thin woman with strong features. A few weeks later we stood with Amoud’s family in the mud where tire tracks had created sunken puddles, surrounding the tents in Arbat, Sulaymaniyah governorate, in northern Iraq, where just under 3,000 refugees live. Arbat is one of […]

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The United Nations official in charge of coordinating the disposal of Syria ’s chemical weapons arsenal provided new details on Wednesday about the plan to eliminate them, saying the most dangerous materials would be sealed by trained Syrians and sent overland to the country’s Mediterranean port of Latakia, where ships would take them to a second, unspecified foreign port. From there, the official said, the chemicals would be transferred to a specially equipped naval vessel offered by the United States, which is capable of safely neutralizing the chemicals at sea. The official, Sigrid Kaag, acknowledged that the overland routes in Syria were dangerous because of the civil war, but that the Syrian authorities were taking steps to secure them and had designated Latakia as the departure point for the chemicals. Under a timetable established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is collaborating with the United […]

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An estimated 250,000 people in besieged communities in Syria remain beyond the reach of aid, the U.N, humanitarian chief said Tuesday in a closed-door Security Council briefing that one member called “chilling.” Deep divisions in the council have kept it from taking more action on the 2 1/2-year-old civil war that activists say has killed more than 120,000 people. Valerie Amos’ task has been to tell the world body about the worsening conditions for millions of civilians in Syria – and how difficult it is to reach them. Amos was able to report “modest progress” in such basics as getting 50 more long-demanded visas for aid workers and opening three humanitarian hubs inside Syria, “only two of which are helpful to us.” But “We have not seen any progress” in the major issues of protecting civilians and demilitarizing schools and hospitals, Amos said. Last month, […]

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The top emergency relief official at the United Nations expressed new alarm on Tuesday at the humanitarian crisis caused by Syria’s civil war, telling the Security Council that despite some modest progress, both the government and insurgent sides were still impeding urgent deliveries of food and medicine to millions of desperate civilians. Speaking to reporters after a closed briefing for Security Council diplomats, the official — Valerie Amos, the under secretary general and emergency relief coordinator — said that the Syrian authorities had been permitting aid convoys from Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, but had refused to allow any from Turkey, which the Syrian government has accused of abetting the insurgency. Ms. Amos said that nine aid convoys had entered Syria over the past month, three times as many as in earlier months, but “this is still far too few to meet the needs of the millions […]

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