Syria Watch Thread

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Time_Traveller
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Syria Watch Thread

Post by Time_Traveller »

This is a thread for news within Syria. (Similar to Belarus Watch and China Watch)

‘Mob boss’ Assad’s dynasty tightens grip over husk of Syria
Wed 26 May 2021

Tyrant, war criminal, mob boss or, to his loyalists, their shrewd saviour: views about Bashar al-Assad rarely fall in between. As the Syrian leader faces a presidential poll on Wednesday – the result a foregone conclusion – a truer test of the authority he wields across a broken country has taken shape away from the political banners and faux campaigning.

In battered towns and villages, ravaged by a decade of savagery, the now veteran president has been clawing back losses, consolidating himself as the only figure who could plot a course from the ruins of the region’s most devastating modern conflict. Slowly, over the past year, Assad and his extended family have been shoring up their influence. Seldom seen during much of the crisis, he has become a fixture in what remains of Syria’s industrial heartland, visiting factories, pressing employees on their hardships, and hosting delegations with an ease few observed at the height of the fighting.

Syria’s allies Russia and Iran may have done the heavy lifting to save the regime from defeat on the battlefields but a more traditional structure, the house of Assad, has been just as integral in holding the country together from within. The husk of Syria is, in many ways, more under the Assad family’s control than at the war’s outset. Power structures established over four decades have anchored dynasty and dictatorship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... s-to-polls
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caltrek
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Re: Syria Watch Thread

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Deadly Fighting Rages on Between ISIL, Kurdish Forces

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/2 ... urd-forces

Introduction:
(Al Jazeera) Fighting raged for a third day on Saturday between ISIL (ISIS) and Kurdish forces in Syria after attackers stormed a prison housing members of the armed group in violence that has killed more than 70 people so far.

The assault on the Ghwayran prison in the northern city of Hasakeh is one of ISIL’s most significant since its “caliphate” was declared defeated in Syria nearly three years ago.

“At least 28 members of the Kurdish security forces, five civilians and 45 members of IS have been killed,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the UK-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

ISIL launched the attack on Thursday against the prison housing about 3,500 suspected members of the armed group, including some of its leaders, said the Syrian Observatory.

The assailants “seized weapons they found” in the detention centre and freed several fellow fighters, said the monitor, which relies on sources inside war-torn Syria for its information.
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weatheriscool
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Re: Syria Watch Thread

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Drone attack kills 80 and wounds 240 at a packed Syrian military graduation ceremony, official says
Source: AP

By KAREEM CHEHAYEB and ALBERT AJI
Updated 3:46 PM CDT, October 5, 2023
BEIRUT (AP) — A drone attack hit a crowded military graduation ceremony Thursday in the Syrian city of Homs, killing 80 people and wounding 240, the health minister said, in one of the deadliest recent attacks on an army that’s been fighting a civil war for more than a decade.

The strike killed civilians, including six children, as well as military personnel, and there were concerns the death toll could rise as many of the wounded were in serious condition, Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash said.

Syria’s military said in an earlier statement that drones laden with explosives targeted the ceremony packed with young officers and their families as it was wrapping up. Without naming any particular group, the military accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” of the attack and said “it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations, wherever they exist.”

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack as Syria endures its 13th year of conflict.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/northwestern ... ba14fc7ac4
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