Bashar al-Assad left his country so secretively that some of his aides remained in the palace hours after he had left, waiting for a speech that never came, the insider said. After midnight, word came that the president was gone, and they fled in a panic, leaving the palace gates wide open for the rebels who would storm in a few hours later.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/world/middleeast/assad-regime-syria-final-days.html
After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the country tries to discern the fate of people the regime locked away.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/searching-for-loved-ones-in-a-newly-liberated-syrian-prison
For years, as reports of atrocities filtered out, Bashar al-Assad remained in power, propped up by Russian and Iranian allies. As I entered one hallway, a woman in a robe began shouting, “Now you come to look. Why didn’t you come before? Why didn’t you believe us? Why didn’t you hear us when we said they were killing us!” After a moment, she moved on, but a nearby man began shouting, too. He wanted revenge, nothing less or more. He would get a weapon and kill the Alawites—Assad’s sect, which some members of Syria’s Sunni majority see as complicit in his repression. The man vowed to kill every man, every woman, and every child he saw.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/searching-for-loved-ones-in-a-newly-liberated-syrian-prison
Bashar al-Assad has propped up his regime by exploiting the Middle East’s love of an amphetamine called captagon.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/how-syria-became-the-middle-easts-drug-dealer
Shortly after the air strike, several figures connected to the captagon trade in southern Syria received texts from an unknown number: “We know who you are, your movements are monitored, your meetings are hacked. You contribute to destroying the minds of our people, and for their sake we will not have mercy on any of you. The Jordanians will soar like eagles to hunt you down, one criminal after another. Marai al-Ramthan was the first but not the last.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/how-syria-became-the-middle-easts-drug-dealer
Syria, with Russian support, used many of the brutal tactics now seen in Ukraine — and its dictator stayed in power. That conflict offers lessons for Russia’s leader, analysts say.
“Creating a humanitarian catastrophe is part of the war strategy, not a secondary effect, because this is how you shift the burden on to the other side,” he said.
Can Russia’s conduct in Syria and Libya predict what’s in store for Ukraine?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/reexamining-putins-military-interventions-in-the-middle-east
So it got to a point where people in Idlib had to put their clinics literally underground. I saw hospitals that were underground because the Russians would target anything that looked like a humanitarian center or a hospital.
Powerful associates of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, are making and selling captagon, an illegal amphetamine, creating a new narcostate on the Mediterranean.
“The idea of going to the Syrian government to ask about cooperation is just absurd,” said Joel Rayburn, the U.S. special envoy for Syria during the Trump administration. “It is literally the Syrian government that is exporting the drugs. It is not like they are looking the other way while drug cartels do their thing. They are the drug cartel.”
The Times cited an institutional failure and determined the “Caliphate” team gave too much credence to the claims of a supposed former terrorist.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/business/media/new-york-times-caliphate-podcast.html
After an internal review that took more than two months, The New York Times has determined that “Caliphate,” its award-winning 2018 podcast, did not meet the standards for Times journalism.
Bombs killed thousands of civilians in Raqqa, and the city was decimated. U.S. lawyers insist that war crimes weren’t committed, but it’s time to look honestly at the devastation that accompanies “targeted” air strikes.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/americas-war-on-syrian-civilians
The long read: In November 2019, James Le Mesurier, the British co-founder of the Syrian rescue group, fell to his death in Istanbul. What led an internationally celebrated humanitarian to take his own life?
via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/oct/27/syria-disinformation-war-white-helmets-mayday-rescue-james-le-mesurier
The disinformation campaign quickly grew, its aim to sow doubt about the White Helmets and the footage they collected. As the war progressed, north-western Syria became a magnet for extremists bent on using the chaos to launch a global jihad. Propagandists exploited the confusion on the ground. Soon, claims appeared online that the White Helmets had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda, which had supposedly seized on the group as a way to obtain foreign funds. There were also accusations that the group had been created by governments determined to remove Assad from power, and that the White Helmets volunteers were “crisis actors” staging scenes to discredit Russia and Syria.