Blinken heads back to Middle East to press hostage deal
Blinken heads back to Middle East to press hostage deal/node/2454071/middle-east
Blinken heads back to Middle East to press hostage deal
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken walks to board a plane, en route to Saudi Arabia, as part of his fifth urgent trip to the Middle East since the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza erupted in October, at Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland, US, February 4, 2024. (REUTERS)
Blinken heads back to Middle East to press hostage deal
Blinken, speaking Monday after meeting in Washington with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said there was “real hope” for success of the “good, strong proposal”
Updated 05 February 2024
AFP
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed Sunday on a new crisis tour of the Middle East as he seeks to push forward a proposal to halt the devastating conflict in return for the release of hostages.
Blinken’s fifth trip to the region since the October 7 Hamas attack inside Israel comes days after the United States carried out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-linked targets in Iraq and Syria, the latest escalation of the conflict that President Joe Biden had initially sought to avoid.
The trip also comes as the Biden administration gradually shows more frustration with Israel, with sanctions imposed Thursday on extremist settlers, although the United States has brushed aside international calls on Israel to end its military campaign.
The proposal under discussion — drafted during talks a week ago in Paris involving the CIA chief and Israeli, Qatari and Egyptian officials — would pause fighting for an initial six weeks as Hamas frees hostages seized on October 7 in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, according to a Hamas source.
Blinken on his trip will visit Israel as well as Egypt and Qatar, the key go-between with Hamas which controls the Gaza Strip and maintains an office in Doha.
Blinken, speaking Monday after meeting in Washington with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said there was “real hope” for success of the “good, strong proposal.”
Qatar has also voiced optimism, although Hamas has said that there is no agreement and there is also division in Israel with hawks opposing perceived concessions to Hamas.
Hundreds rallied Saturday night in Tel Aviv to demand swift action to free the hostages as well as early elections as they denounced the inability of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government to win their freedom.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, acknowledged on Sunday the debate within Israel but said, in reference to the deal, that the “ball is in Hamas’s court at this time.”
Sullivan, speaking to “Face the Nation” on CBS, said Blinken would press Israel to allow more food, water, medicine and shelter in Gaza, which has been left in rubble by nearly four months of bombardment.
“This will be a top priority of his when he sees the Israeli government — that the needs of the Palestinian people are something that are going to be front and center in the US approach,” said Sullivan.
Nations and aid groups have warned of a risk of famine in Gaza with severe shortages of food and drinking water due to the Israeli campaign.
Blinken is expected to begin his trip on Monday in Saudi Arabia, which before the October 7 attack had been mulling steps to establish relations with Israel, a potentially historic step for the country that is the guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites.
After talks during his last trip in January with the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Blinken said he still saw a “clear interest” in pursuing normalization.
But criticism against Israel has been rising in the Arab world over the offensive in Gaza which has killed 27,200 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Israel launched the campaign after Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel on October 7 and killed around 1,160 people, mostly civilians, in the deadliest attack in the country’s history.
Militants also seized 250 hostages. A November truce that broke down over a week saw the release of 105 of the hostages. Israel says around 132 remain, including the bodies of at least 28 dead hostages.
What Assad’s overthrow revealed about Syrian regime’s Captagon empire
Scale of illicit trade revealed as victorious rebels and journalists gain access to manufacturing and storage sites
Expert says there were signs of decentralization of Captagon production even before the Assad regime’s overthrow
Updated 5 sec ago
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: For more than a decade, the illegal drug Captagon has been mass produced in Syria, in laboratories either run by or with the blessing of a regime hard hit by Western sanctions and desperate to generate revenue.
The scale of the trade, targeted mainly at young people in the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, was revealed last year in an Arab News expose produced in collaboration with the New Lines Institute.
A cheaply made form of amphetamine, Captagon has been flooding into countries of the Middle East for more than a decade, causing social harm on an unprecedented scale.
Embossed with its distinctive twin half moons logo, which gives the drug its Arabic street name, “Abu Hilalain,” or Father of the Two Crescents, the pills are easy to make, readily available, and relatively cheap to buy.
On Dec. 4, the New Lines Institute in Washington launched a unique interactive online tool designed to help researchers and global law enforcement agencies research, track, and understand the scale and complexities of the trade.
Just days after the launch of the project, the Syrian regime, which had been locked in a grinding civil war with armed opposition groups for almost 14 years, suddenly collapsed.
In the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 8, President Bashar Assad and his family fled to Moscow, where their Russian allies granted them asylum.
The ousted president, HTS leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani said, had caused the country to become “a major Captagon factory in the world, and today Syria is being cleansed of it.” (AFP)
Since then, multiple Captagon laboratories have been overrun in areas formerly controlled by the Syrian government, with raw materials, machinery, packaging and countless thousands of pills found abandoned in haste.
But no one should think for one moment that the collapse of the Assad regime means the end of the curse of Captagon, according to Caroline Rose, director of the Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio at the New Lines Institute.
“We are going to see a shift in the trade now that Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and a lot of communities in Syria have started to disassemble Captagon production sites and incinerate Captagon pills,” she told Arab News.
In his victory speech at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Monday, HTS leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani made a specific point of condemning the drug and Assad’s part in its production.
The ousted president, he said, had caused the country to become “a major Captagon factory in the world, and today Syria is being cleansed of it.”
It is “very clear that if you are a Captagon manufacturer who did not flee with the regime, you are now in trouble, Rose said.
“But I think what we’re going to see now is overspill, what people often call the ‘balloon effect.’ Production is being squeezed inside Syria, but we are going to see the emergence of larger-scale Captagon production facilities in a few countries where alarm bells have already been ringing.”
Authorities across the region have frequently reported seizures of the pills, intercepted at ports, airports, and border crossings, in an ongoing battle of wits with smugglers resorting to increasingly ingenious methods.
The New Lines Institute’s Captagon Trade Project, the product of years of research, is the first time that information about all reported global seizures of the drug, showing the sheer scale of the trade, can be accessed in one place.
And clues to the changing profile of the Captagon trade in the months leading up the regime’s collapse can be found in the project’s data, which reveal that production facilities have been popping up in countries including Iraq, Lebanon and Turkiye.
In Lebanon, the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, under intense pressure from Israel, “has an incentive to build up its own financial reserves, and Captagon is an easy way to do that,” Rose said.
A couple of Captagon labs were found earlier this year in Turkiye, a country where “we had not seen labs in a very long time.” Production facilities have even been found as far away as Europe, in Germany and the Netherlands.
In all these cases, it was certain that governments were not involved in the trade, according to Rose. “Syria was a very interesting and rare case where we did see the involvement of so many high-level officials in the regime, implicated in Captagon production and trafficking,” she said.
While Assad himself carefully distanced himself from the trade, his brother Maher was heavily implicated with production and smuggling efforts in his role as commander of the Fourth Armored Division, a military unit whose primary mission was to protect the Syrian regime from internal and external threats.
Authorities across the region have frequently reported seizures of the pills, intercepted at ports, airports. (AFP)
Quite where he is now remains uncertain.
“I have heard that Maher and his Fourth Division commanders made their way through Iraq to Iran and are now in Tehran,” Rose said.
“However, other reports say HTS has found and detained him. That’s not confirmed yet. But if Maher is still there, it’s likely that a lot of members of the regime’s Captagon organization are also still in Syria.”
Either way, there is now “an assumption that this is the end of Captagon, but it’s not. We need to keep in mind that over the past two years Captagon production had already started to trickle outside of Syria.
“For the longest time, regime-held Syria was the hub of Captagon production. Then we started to see labs being seized in southern and northern Iraq and even in Kuwait, which is interesting and makes sense. They were starting to build this bridge through Iraq to get closer to destination markets in the Gulf.”
At the same time, there were signs that the regime was cracking down on the Captagon trade — or, rather, pretending to — as revealed by the comprehensive seizure data in New Lines Institute’s online mapping tool.
“We saw the regime’s incentive to normalize relations with the Gulf states, and recognition that it needed to be seen to be cracking down on this trade, while quietly still reaping the economic benefits,” Rose said.
“For that reason, we think, in the past year we have seen the supply of Captagon — or, at least, what was seized — decrease dramatically, especially in Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were the two targets for normalization discussions for the regime.
“We have cause to believe that the flow of Captagon was actually halted by the regime. They were stepping on the hose to create the appearance that they had stopped Captagon production, in the hope that it would bring the Gulf states to the table.
While Assad himself carefully distanced himself from the trade, his brother Maher was heavily implicated. (AFP)
“In fact, as we’ve seen with the finds in Syria over the past few days, they seem to have been stockpiling the drug. Most likely later on they would have flooded the market.”
Sandwiched between Syria and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has long borne the brunt of smuggling attempts orchestrated by the Syrian military and Iran-backed militias operating in the south of Syria. It has, for many years, been a key battleground in the fight to stem the tide of the drug.
Over the past few months, however, there have been telltale signs of changes in the nature of attempts to smuggle Captagon through Jordan to Saudi Arabia and beyond. “Unusually, we’ve not seen any seizures in Jordan since early November,” Rose said.
“Typically, around this time of the year we would see an uptick in Captagon there, not only in smuggling incidents, but also in clashes along the border, because that’s when the wintry conditions start to set in, creating conditions that make it perfect for a smuggler to bypass surveillance systems.”
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, the most recent recorded seizure was on Dec. 7 at the Al-Wadiah border crossing with Yemen. The two before that were both on Nov. 30, at the checkpoint on the King Fahd Causeway to Bahrain and on the other side of the country at the Port of Duba on the Red Sea.
“One was about 200,000 pills, the other one 280,000, so nothing major,” Rose said. “What we’ve noticed is that the number of seizures is increasing, but the sizes of the consignments are dwindling.”
In other words, smugglers are making more frequent runs, but with smaller batches of pills, which implies smaller players smuggling overland, rather than major, connected players shipping in bulk via sea.
There is now “an assumption that this is the end of Captagon, but it’s not,” said Caroline Rose. (AFP)
Whatever HTS chief Al-Golani might say, or even intend, Syria is not yet free of Captagon, according to Rose. “I am positive that there are actors who are picking up a few thousand pills and peddling them on the street,” she said.
“This is still a very lucrative trade. Syria is not out of the woods economically, and there will be many people who will want to try to make a profit.”
Made for about $1 and typically sold for 15 times as much, Captagon is an exceptionally profitable product, which is estimated to have earned the Syrian regime more than $2 billion per year.
“And at the end of the day, old habits die hard,” Rose said.
“For a lot of these individuals, not necessarily high-level regime officials, this has been their way of life for years, and so it’s going to be very difficult for any new government in Syria to convince these criminal actors to give up this source of revenue.”
A palace in shock: Bashar Assad’s final moments in Syria
“His brother Maher,” who commanded the Syrian army’s feared Fourth Brigade, “heard about it by chance while he was with his soldiers defending Damascus
He decided to take a helicopter and leave, apparently to Baghdad,” added the former aide
Updated 14 December 2024
AFP
DAMASCUS: Hours before militant forces seized Damascus and toppled his government on Sunday, Syrian president Bashar Assad was already out of the country, telling hardly anyone, five former officials told AFP.
The night before, Assad had even asked his close adviser Buthaina Shaaban to prepare a speech — which the ousted leader never gave — before flying from Damascus airport to Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Syria, and from there out of the country.
Assad left even “without telling... his close confidants in advance,” a former aide told AFP, requesting anonymity for security reasons.
“From the Russian base, a plane took him to Moscow.”
“His brother Maher,” who commanded the Syrian army’s feared Fourth Brigade, “heard about it by chance while he was with his soldiers defending Damascus. He decided to take a helicopter and leave, apparently to Baghdad,” added the former aide.
Other top officials in Assad’s government and sources told AFP what happened in the final hours of the iron-fisted leader’s 24-year rule.
All spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
When Islamist-led militant forces launched their offensive in Syria’s north on November 27, Assad was in Moscow, where his wife Asma has been treated for cancer.
Two days later, when their son Hafez was defending his doctoral thesis at a Moscow university, the whole family were there, but not Bashar, according to a presidential palace official.
On November 30, when Assad returned from Moscow, Syria’s second city of Aleppo was no longer under his government’s control.
The following week, the militants took Hama and Homs in quick succession, before eventually reaching the capital.
Another palace official said he did not see Assad the day before Damascus fell last Sunday.
“On Saturday Assad didn’t meet with us. We knew he was there, but did not have a meeting with him,” said the top official.
“We were at the palace, there was no explanation, and it caused great confusion at the senior levels and on the ground,” he said.
“Actually, we had not seen him since the fall of Aleppo, which was very strange.”
During that fateful week, Assad called a meeting of the heads of Syria’s intelligence services to reassure them.
But the longtime leader did not show up, and “Aleppo’s fall shocked us,” said the same top palace official.
Hama was next to fall into militant hands.
“On Thursday, I spoke at 11:30 am with troops in Hama who assured me the city was under lockdown and not even a mouse could make it in,” an army colonel told AFP.
“Two hours later they received the order not to fight, and to redeploy in Homs to the south,” added the officer of the next strategic city sought by the militants on their way to Damascus.
“The soldiers were helpless, changing clothes, throwing away their weapons and trying to head home. Who gave the order? We don’t know.”
The governor of Homs told a journalist that he had asked the army to resist. But no government forces defended the city.
On Saturday morning, someone in the halls of power in Damascus brought up the idea of Assad making a speech.
“We started to set up the equipment. Everything was ready,” said the first palace official.
“Later on we were surprised to learn that the speech had been postponed, maybe to Sunday morning.”
According to him, top officials and aides were unaware that while this was happening, the Syrian army had already begun destroying its archives by setting them on fire.
Still on Saturday, at around 9:00 p.m. (1800 GMT), “the president calls his political adviser Buthaina Shaaban to ask her to prepare a speech for him, and to present it to the political committee which is meant to meet on Sunday morning,” said a senior official close to Assad.
“At 10:00 p.m. she calls him back, but he no longer picks up the phone.”
That evening, Assad’s media director Kamel Sakr told journalists: “The president is going to deliver a statement very soon.”
But then Sakr, too, stopped answering his phone, as did interior minister Mohammed Al-Rahmoun.
The palace official said he stayed in his office until 2:30 am on Sunday. Within less than four hours, the militants were to announce that Assad was gone.
“We were ready to receive a statement or a message from Assad at any moment,” said the top palace official.
“We could have never imagined such a scenario. We didn’t even know whether the president was still at the palace.”
At around midnight, the palace official had been told that Assad needed a cameraman for Sunday morning.
“That reassured us that he was in fact still there,” he said.
But just before 2:00 am, an intelligence officer called to say all government officials and forces had left their offices and positions.
“I was shocked. It was just the two of us in the office. The palace was almost empty, and we were totally confused,” said the official.
At 2:30 am he left the palace.
In the city center, “arriving at Umayyad Square, there were plenty of soldiers fleeing, looking for transportation,” he said.
“There were thousands of them, coming from the security compound, the defense ministry and other security branches. We found out that their superiors had ordered them to flee.”
The official said it was a “frightening” scene.
“Tens of thousands of cars leaving Damascus, and even more people marching on the road on foot. It was that moment I realized everything was lost and that Damascus had fallen.”
“An Israeli enemy drone strike... killed one person” in Marjayoun, the ministry said
Updated 14 December 2024
AFP
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli drone strike in the south killed one person on Saturday, the latest deadly raid despite a more than two-week ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
“An Israeli enemy drone strike... killed one person” in Marjayoun district, the health ministry said in a statement. The official National News Agency reported a car was targeted.
Top Arab, US diplomats meet to discuss Syria’s future
Syria’s northern neighbor Turkiye has for years supported Syrian opposition forces looking to oust Assad and is poised to play an influential role in Damascus
Arab diplomats attending the talks said they were seeking assurances from Turkiye that it supports an inclusive political process that prevents partition of Syria
Updated 14 December 2024
Reuters
AQABA, Jordan: Top diplomats from the United States, Turkiye, the European Union and Arab nations met in Jordan on Saturday for talks on Syria as regional and global powers scramble for influence over whatever government replaces ousted President Bashar Assad.
Outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration has begun engaging with the victorious opposition groups including Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which led a lightning assault that ended in the capture of Damascus on Sunday.
Biden sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region this week to seek support for principles that Washington hopes will guide Syria’s political transition, such as respect for minorities.
Meanwhile, Syria’s northern neighbor Turkiye has for years supported Syrian opposition forces looking to oust Assad and is poised to play an influential role in Damascus.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Friday that his country’s embassy in the Syrian capital would resume work on Saturday, after Turkiye’s intelligence chief visited this week.
Turkey's Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, left, speaks with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a meeting with the foreign ministers of the Arab Contact Group on Syria in Jordan's southern Red Sea coastal city of Aqaba, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)
Syria’s neighbor Jordan was hosting Saturday’s gathering in Aqaba. Russia and Iran, who were Assad’s key supporters, were not invited.
Blinken, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pederson and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Fidan and foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar met around a circular table at a Jordanian government guesthouse. There was no Syrian representative at the table.
The Arab diplomats earlier met separately.
Blinken, meeting Pederson at his hotel earlier on Saturday, said it was a time of “both opportunity but also real challenge” for Syria.
Arab diplomats attending the talks said they were seeking assurances from Turkiye that it supports an inclusive political process that prevents partition of Syria on sectarian lines.
Iraq's Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Qatar's Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attend a meeting with the foreign ministers of the Arab Contact Group on Syria in Jordan's southern Red Sea coastal city of Aqaba on December 14, 2024. (REUTERS)
Turkiye and the United States, both NATO members, have conflicting interests when it comes to some of the groups. Turkiye-backed groups in northern Syria have clashed with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The SDF, which controls some of Syria’s largest oil fields, is the main ally in a US coalition against Daesh militants. It is spearheaded by YPG militia, a group that Ankara sees as an extension of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who have fought the Turkish state for 40 years and who it outlaws.
Blinken told Turkish officials during a visit to Ankara on Thursday and Friday that Daesh must not be able to regroup, and the SDF must not be distracted from its role of securing camps holding Daesh fighters, according to a US official with the US delegation. Turkish leaders agreed, the official said.
Fidan told Turkish TV later on Friday that the elimination of the YPG was Turkiye’s “strategic target” and urged the group’s commanders to leave Syria.
At least 18 killed in Israeli Gaza strikes, Palestinian medics say
Casualties were being carried by foot, on rickshaws and private cars from the site of the attack to the hospital
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 44,930 people have been killed in more than 14 months of war
Updated 14 December 2024
Reuters AFP
CAIRO: At least 18 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Saturday, medics said, while the Israeli military said it targeted gunmen operating from shelters and aid storages.
At least 10 people were killed in an airstrike near the municipality building in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip where people gathered to receive aid, medics said.
Casualties were being carried by foot, on rickshaws and private cars from the site of the attack to the hospital, medics said. The strike killed the head of the Hamas-run administrative committee in central Gaza, a Hamas source said.
The Israeli military was looking into the report, a spokesperson said. Earlier, Israeli aircraft struck militants and weapon caches near an aid warehouse, the military said, after gunmen had fired rockets into Israel from there.
Meanwhile, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 44,930 people have been killed in more than 14 months of war. The toll includes 55 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 106,624 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began.
A separate strike in Gaza City on a former shelter housing displaced people targeted Hamas fighters, the military said. At least seven people were killed in that attack, Palestinian medics said, including a woman and her baby.
It was unclear whether any of the other people killed were fighters. The military said it had taken precautions to reduce risk of harm to civilians.
A separate strike in Gaza City killed a local journalist, medics said. The military was looking into the report, a spokesperson said.
The war in Gaza began when the Palestinian militant group Hamas stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200, mostly civilians, people and taking more than 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel then launched an air, sea and land offensive that has killed at least 44,000 people, mostly civilians, according to authorities in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, displaced nearly the entire population and left much of the enclave in ruins.
A fresh bid by Egypt, Qatar and the United States to reach a truce has gained momentum in recent weeks.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Saturday discussed with visiting US officials efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and a hostages-for prisoners deal in the Palestinian enclave, El-Sisi’s office said.
