Author: M Barbu

Earlier this month, six boats carrying Syrian and Lebanese migrants set sail from northern Lebanon and attempted to dock in Cyprus. That might not sound like much, yet it is six times more than the total number of migrant vessels that have embarked for Cyprus from Lebanon over the last year. A fast boat can cover the 185km between Tripoli and Cape Greco, a rocky outcrop in the southeast of the island, in six hours. And with Lebanon’s government in shambles, these calm, largely unpoliced waters are a smuggler’s dream.

While Turkish-Western relations have been overshadowed by clouds of differences over the past few years, Greek media recently reported that the US eyes relocating its forces from Turkey’s Incirlik airbase to another base in one of the Greek islands. Washington Examiner news website, quoting Senator of Wisconsin who chairs Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee Ron Johnson, reported that the UN navy is building a base in Crete island in the Souda Bay south of the country.

Reliable sources have informed SOHR that Turkish forces and their proxy factions withdrew part of their heavy weapons from the frontlines with SDF in rural Tel Abyad and Ain Issa, north of Raqqa.

At stake are agreements on oil concessions and control of the ports that are still pending.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anger at the intention of the President of the Presidency Council of the Libyan Government of National Accord, Fayez al-Sarraj, to step down from his post at the end of next October indicates that Sarraj did not complete everything that was asked of him by the Turks in exchange for their intervention to repel the Libyan National Army’s attack on the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Foreign fighters have played a major role in Syria’s ongoing conflict, with a presence in the country that numbered in the tens of thousands at its peak. One of the most mythologized sources of foreign recruits has been Chechnya, the once-separatist province of Russia’s North Caucasus that was reconquered by the Russian army in the early 2000s. Several thousand Chechen fighters traveled to Syria to fight in various opposition and Islamist factions, where their battlefield prowess made them a prized commodity among Syrian rebel militants.