Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed slain head Nasrallah

Update Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed slain head Nasrallah
Lebanon’s Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem speaks during a rally supporting Palestinians in Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Beirut, Lebanon. (File/Reuters)
Short Url
Updated 29 October 2024
Follow

Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed slain head Nasrallah

Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed slain head Nasrallah
  • Qassem one of Hezbollah’s leading spokesmen

BEIRUT: Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said on Tuesday it had elected deputy head Naim Qassem to succeed Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air attack on Beirut’s southern suburb over a month ago.
The group said in a written statement that its Shoura Council had elected Qassem, 71, in accordance with its established mechanism for choosing a secretary general.
He was appointed as Hezbollah’s deputy chief in 1991 by the armed group’s then-secretary general Abbas Al-Musawi, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter attack the following year.
Qassem remained in his role when Nasrallah became leader, and has long been one of Hezbollah’s leading spokesmen, conducting interviews with foreign media, including as cross-border hostilities with Israel raged over the last year.
Nasrallah was killed on Sept. 27, and senior Hezbollah figure Hashem Safieddine — considered the most likely successor — was killed in Israeli strikes a week later.
Since Nasrallah’s killing, Qassem has given three televised addresses, including one on Oct. 8 in which he said the armed group supported efforts to reach a ceasefire for Lebanon.
He is considered by many in Lebanon to lack the charisma and gravitas of Nasrallah.
The Israeli government’s official Arabic account on X posted, “His tenure in this position may be the shortest in the history of this terrorist organization if he follows in the footsteps of his predecessors Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine.”
“There is no solution in Lebanon except to dismantle this organization as a military force,” it wrote.


Relatives of Syria’s disappeared seek closure in Damascus morgues

Relatives of Syria’s disappeared seek closure in Damascus morgues
Updated 17 sec ago
Follow

Relatives of Syria’s disappeared seek closure in Damascus morgues

Relatives of Syria’s disappeared seek closure in Damascus morgues
No such closure was within reach for Yasmine Shabib, 37, who still could not locate her brother or father, both arrested in 2013
Having failed to locate her son, a mother comes out, her hand bloodstained from the bodies she inspected

DAMASCUS: In the corridors of Damascus’s main hospitals, thousands of families have gathered for the foreboding mission of trying to find the bodies of loved ones captured years ago by the Syrian authorities.
“Where are our children?” women cried out as they grasped at the walls, desperate for closure after their years-long ordeal.
But no such closure was within reach for Yasmine Shabib, 37, who still could not locate her brother or father, both arrested in 2013.
Having traveled for more than four hours from the northwestern city of Idlib, the victorious militants’ wartime base, she had little hope of finding them alive.
But at very least, she hoped she would not leave without their bodies.
“Just open the prison vaults for us, we will search ourselves among the corpses,” she said in tears.
“They buried the people everywhere, not just in Saydnaya. There are Saydnayas everywhere under our feet in Syria,” she added, referring to Syria’s most notoriously brutal prison, dubbed a “slaughterhouse” by human rights groups.
Outside the hospital, voices echo.
“Does anyone recognize body number nine?” a doctor calls out to a group of families as a phone is passed around between them, the picture of a corpse lighting up the screen.
Every once in a while, someone recognizes a loved one, and the body is summarily brought out of the morgue to be taken to another mortuary freezer, where the family can finally confirm whether it is one of their own.
Having failed to locate her son, a mother comes out, her hand bloodstained from the bodies she inspected.
“Their blood is still fresh,” she said trying to catch her breath.
Pathologist Yasser Al-Qassem confirms: “We still don’t know the dates or causes of death for the bodies arriving from Harasta,” a suburb of Damascus where another morgue is located.
“But one thing is certain, these deaths are recent.”
As soon as he heard that Bashar Assad had fled, Nabil Hariri rushed to Damascus from his southern hometown Daraa to search for his brother.
Arrested in 2014 when he was just 13, Hariri had had no news of his brother since.
“When you’re drowning, you cling to anything,” Hariri, 39, told AFP.
“So we search everywhere.”
He was among the thousands of desperate relatives who gathered outside Saydnaya on Tuesday, hoping that his brother was among the thousands of prisoners freed after Assad’s fall.
“I didn’t find my brother there,” he said.
At dawn on Wednesday, there was a brief resurgence of hope when he heard that 35 bodies were arriving from Harasta. The hospital morgue there was used as a staging post for the bodies of prisoners who died of maltreatment, hunger or illness before they were buried in mass graves.
But that hope was swiftly dashed.
“In all the photos, the bodies were old,” he said. “My brother is young.”
Syria’s new militant authorities announced that they had found bodies in the Harasta morgue.
After opening the white body bags, militant official Mohammed Al-Hajj took video that he later showed to AFP.
The footage showed bodies bearing signs of torture — one without an eye, another without any teeth, a third covered in dried blood.
Another body bag simply contained bones, while yet another held the remains of a flayed corpse, its ribcage poking out from the flesh.
Harasta “is one of the main centers where bodies from Saydnaya or Tishrin,” another notorious prison, “were gathered before being buried in mass graves,” said Diab Seria, a member of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison.
Khaled Hamza found no traces of his son at Harasta, Saydnaya or the Damascus hospital.
But he has no intention of giving up, having stumbled across documents at the prison containing information about the detainees, which he then gathered and handed over to the new police authorities.
“We are millions searching for our children,” the taxi driver said. “We ask just one thing: are they alive or dead?“

Dutchwoman gets 10 years for enslaving Yazidi

Dutchwoman gets 10 years for enslaving Yazidi
Updated 9 min 45 sec ago
Follow

Dutchwoman gets 10 years for enslaving Yazidi

Dutchwoman gets 10 years for enslaving Yazidi
  • The court in The Hague convicted the 33-year-old from Hengelo in eastern Netherlands
  • Hasna A. made the Yazidi woman do household chores for her and look after her son, the court ruled

THE HAGUE: A Dutch court Wednesday sentenced a woman to 10 years prison for keeping a woman from the Yazidi minority as a slave after joining the Daesh group in Syria.
The court in The Hague convicted the 33-year-old from Hengelo in eastern Netherlands, identified as Hasna A, for “enslavement, membership of a terrorist organization, promoting terrorist crimes, and endangering her young son.”
She traveled to Syria in 2015 with her son, aged four at the time, the court said. She married an Daesh fighter and had children with him.
Between May to October 2015, she lived with another Daesh fighter, who kept a Yazidi woman as a slave.
Hasna A. made the Yazidi woman do household chores for her and look after her son, the court ruled.
In 2014, Daesh swept across swathes of Iraq, carrying out horrific violence against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, whose non-Muslim faith the extremists considered heretical.
The jihadists massacred thousands of men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.
Hasna A enslaved the Yazidi woman knowing that her actions contributed to the “widespread and systematic attack on the Yazidi community,” the court said.
“The court holds this against the suspect very seriously. Crimes against humanity such as these are among the most serious international crimes there are,” judges said.
According to public broadcaster NOS, Hasna A was repatriated in November 2022 to the Netherlands from a Syrian prison camp with 11 other Dutch women and their 28 children.
The women were arrested upon arrival in the Netherlands.


Syria’s territorial integrity must be respected: Spain PM

Syria’s territorial integrity must be respected: Spain PM
Updated 28 min 51 sec ago
Follow

Syria’s territorial integrity must be respected: Spain PM

Syria’s territorial integrity must be respected: Spain PM
  • During his meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, Sanchez “stressed the need for a peaceful and stable Syria, for the benefit of the Syrian people”
  • Sanchez and Mikati also discussed the situation in Lebanon

MADRID: Syria’s territorial integrity must be preserved following Bashar Assad’s ouster in an Islamist-led militant offensive, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Wednesday during talks in Madrid with his Lebanese counterpart.
During his meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, Sanchez “stressed the need for a peaceful and stable Syria, for the benefit of the Syrian people and all countries in the region, especially Lebanon,” the Spanish government said in a statement after the closed-door meeting.
“He also called for an orderly political transition for the Syrian people while maintaining the territorial integrity of the country and avoiding further escalation in the region,” it added.
Sanchez and Mikati also discussed the situation in Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire agreement at the end of November after two months of all-out war.
The priority is for this agreement to become a “permanent ceasefire” and “pave the way for the full application” of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which stipulates that southern Lebanon must be free of arms that do not belong to the Lebanese state, the Spanish government statement said.
Adopted in August 2006, the resolution was key to ending the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and paving the way for long-term stability along the border.
“We confirm Lebanon’s commitment” to this resolution, Mikati wrote on social network X, stressing the need for Israel to “respect the ceasefire decision and withdraw from the cities of southern Lebanon.”


Berlin urges Israel, Turkiye not to jeopardize Syria transition

Berlin urges Israel, Turkiye not to jeopardize Syria transition
Updated 11 December 2024
Follow

Berlin urges Israel, Turkiye not to jeopardize Syria transition

Berlin urges Israel, Turkiye not to jeopardize Syria transition
  • Annalena Baerbock says internal Syrian dialogue process must not be 'torpedoed from the outside'
  • Since Assad’s downfall Israel has bombed Syrian weapons depots and naval vessels

BERLIN: Germany’s foreign minister on Wednesday urged Israel and Turkiye not to jeopardize a peaceful transition in Syria after the ousting of president Bashar Assad in an Islamist-led rebel offensive.
“We must not allow the internal Syrian dialogue process to be torpedoed from the outside,” Annalena Baerbock told a Berlin press conference.
“Neighbours such as the Turkish and Israeli governments, which are asserting their security interests, must not jeopardize the process.”
Since Assad’s downfall, Israel has launched strikes on military sites in Syria ranging from weapons depots to naval vessels, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
Israel has also sent troops into a UN-patrolled buffer zone east of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
Turkiye meanwhile is worried Kurdish separatists could take advantage of Assad’s ouster to extend their influence in Syria, where they have dominated a large northeastern area since 2012.
Ankara sees the Kurdish forces, notably the militant group YPG, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since the 1980s.
Since Assad fled, Turkish-backed groups have launched offensives in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led force in the northeast of the country said Wednesday it had reached a US-brokered ceasefire with the Turkish-backed fighters in Manbij, an Arab-majority city that has seen fierce clashes.
Baerbock said Syria’s “new chapter” was still being written, adding that “the outcome of the revolution is not certain, nor have the people won the transition to a free and peaceful Syria.”
“We must now seek to promote positive developments in Syria and prevent negative influences,” she said. “In very specific terms, this means that a Syrian-led dialogue process is needed, which we as Europeans and as Germans will support.”
“Syria must not be allowed to become a pawn in the hands of foreign powers or forces again,” she added.
During Assad’s rule, Syria was a key ally of Iran. Assad was also backed by Russia, and Moscow’s intervention in Syria in 2015 turned the tide of the country’s civil war and is credited with saving his regime.


Syrians head home from Turkiye to ‘a better life’ after rebellion

Syrians head home from Turkiye to ‘a better life’ after rebellion
Updated 11 December 2024
Follow

Syrians head home from Turkiye to ‘a better life’ after rebellion

Syrians head home from Turkiye to ‘a better life’ after rebellion
  • Mustafa fled Syria in 2012, a year after the conflict there began, to escape conscription into Assad’s army
  • The civil war that grew out of a 2011 uprising against Assad killed hundreds of thousands of people and drove millions abroad

CILVEGOZU, Turkiye: Syrians lined up at the Turkish border on Wednesday to head home after militants ousted President Bashar Assad, speaking of their expectations for a better life following what was for many a decade of hardship in Turkiye.
“We have no one here. We are going back to Latakia, where we have family,” said Mustafa as he prepared to enter Syria with his wife and three sons at the Cilvegozu border gate in southern Turkiye. Dozens more Syrians were waiting to cross.
Mustafa fled Syria in 2012, a year after the conflict there began, to escape conscription into Assad’s army. For years he did unregistered jobs in Turkiye earning less than the minimum wage, he said.
“Now there’s a better Syria. God willing, we will have a better life there,” he said, expressing confidence in the new leadership in Syria as he watched over the family’s belongings, clothes packed into sacks and a television set.
The civil war that grew out of a 2011 uprising against Assad killed hundreds of thousands of people and drove millions abroad.
Turkiye, which hosts three million Syrians, has extended the opening hours of the Cilvegozu border gate near the Syrian city of Aleppo seized by militants at the end of November.
A second border gate was opened at nearby Yayladagi in Hatay on Tuesday.
Around 350-400 Syrians a day were already crossing back to militant-held areas of Syria this year before the opposition rebellion began two weeks ago. The numbers have almost doubled since, Ankara says, anticipating a surge now Assad has gone.
Turkiye has backed Syrian opposition forces for years but has said it had no involvement in the militant offensive which succeeded at the weekend in unseating Assad after 13 years of civil war.
Around 100 trucks were waiting to cross the border, carrying goods including dozens of used cars. Security forces helped manage the flow of people, while aid groups offered snacks to children and tea and soup to adults.

’OUR OWN PEOPLE’ ARE NOW IN CHARGE
Dua, mother of three children including a baby, is originally from Aleppo and has been living in Turkiye for nine years. She worked in textile workshops and packaging in Bursa but is now returning to Syria due to her husband’s deportation.
“I’m going back for my husband. He didn’t have an ID and was deported when I was eight months pregnant. I can’t manage on my own, so I need to return,” she said.
“My husband hasn’t even met our baby yet. I was born and raised in Aleppo, and I will raise my children there too.”
Elsewhere Haya was waiting to enter Syria with her husband and three children. They have lived in a nearby container camp since devastating earthquakes in February 2023 killed more than 50,000 people in Turkiye and Syria.
“We had good neighbors and good relations, but a container is not a home,” Haya said as she comforted her six-month-old baby and her daughter translated her comments from Arabic.
Syria’s new interim prime minister has said he aimed to bring back millions of Syrian refugees, protect all citizens and provide basic services but acknowledged it would be difficult because the country, long under sanctions, lacks foreign currency.
Mustafa voiced confidence in the new leadership after Assad was ousted by militants led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate which has since downplayed its jihadist roots.
“Those who have taken power are no strangers. They didn’t come from the United States or Russia. They are our own people. We know them,” he said.