Orientul Mijlociu

A devastating attack by jihadists has left a trail of destruction and loss in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province. On Saturday, militants belonging to the Ansar al-Tawhid group and the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) carried out a coordinated assault that claimed the lives of at least 11 soldiers. According to reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the attackers strategically detonated explosives placed in tunnels beneath army positions before launching a violent onslaught.

Clashes broke out Monday between two U.S.-backed groups in eastern Syria, leaving three gunmen dead and raising tensions in the region where hundreds of American troops are deployed, opposition activists said.

In 2018, as regime troops crushed the rebel-held city of Douma in Syria, the videos emerging from the ground were apocalyptic in nature. Fire rained down from above as heavy shelling forced the civilian population underground and into basements, where yellow-green chlorine gas dropped by helicopters suffocated victims in darkness.

Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report. If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings, which appear to continue, would be a crime against humanity.

The Iranian regime is advancing its ideology and increasing its influence in Shia mosques throughout the United States, while the Biden administration is sitting idly by, presumably still seeking to return to a disastrous nuclear deal, lift sanctions against Iran, and fund the regime to launch more terrorist attacks, further repress its own citizens, and pave the way for it legally to obtain an unlimited supply of nuclear weapons.

The Syrian tragedy started with peaceful efforts by a large segment of the population to secure more individual freedoms, a curb on corruption, and better economic opportunities.

All the current talk about normalization and reconstruction is a subterfuge to avoid the core geopolitical aspect of this tragedy created by conflicting visions of the future, not only of Syria but of the Middle East as a whole.

Recent days have seen a build-up of military forces in the rural areas of Deir-ez-Zor, according to Baladi News.

The official spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, Abdul Razzaq Khader, refuted claims on Wednesday about preparations for a military operation in Deir-ez-Zor.

Protests have emerged in Syria due to the deteriorating economic conditions in areas controlled by the government. The city of Aleppo has also seen an expansion of these protests on Thursday. Simultaneously, a car was targeted by a Turkish drone strike in the Kurdish-controlled northeastern region of Syria on Wednesday. The strike resulted in the death of the car’s driver and inflicted injuries upon an accompanying journalist.