Orientul Mijlociu

The United States and its Syrian Kurdish allies control up to 90 percent of Syria’s oil-producing lands, depriving the war-torn country of its much-needed source of fuel and hard currency income. While Iran sends emergency fuel supplies to Syria to help deal with shortages, its ships have been regularly attacked by Israeli saboteurs en route.

The Syrian Arab News Agency has reported that 55 vehicles including tankers loaded with oil and escort vehicles have made their way out of Syria into Iraq via the al-Waleed border crossing over the past 24 hours.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said Syrian civilians living under a government siege in the southwestern city are suffering from shortages of fuel, food and medicine.

The United Nations’ special envoy for Syria on Thursday expressed concern over the “alarming situation” in Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, where thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes in recent weeks.

Ankara believes it has reaped strategic benefits from military involvement in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet it has paid a price as well, discomfiting both allies and adversaries. Now, Turkey hopes to rebuild ties so as to consolidate its new gains.

At least 76 people have been detained in connection with the rampage.

Millions of Syrians who found shelter in Turkey from the violence that has raged in their country since the start of the civil war there in 2011 are now facing growing hostility from their Turkish hosts amid a sharp economic downturn exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The brewing resentment toward an estimated 3.7 million Syrian refugees turned violent in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Wednesday night as hundreds of locals chanting slurs swarmed to the working-class suburb of Altindag and embarked on a vandalism spree, overturning cars, shattering windows and looting shops said to be owned by Syrians.

An explosion at the Latakia port in Syria on Tuesday left an unidentified ship on fire, according to local reports, with some suggesting that the affected vessel had been used to transfer Iranian oil to Syria in the past.

Smoke was seen billowing from a ship moored at Latakia port and identified by the TankerTrackers.com monitoring website as the Wisdom, a Panama-flagged, Beirut-registered vessel, which was previously targeted by a mysterious explosion this year.

Security forces affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forced gas stations to close in areas controlled by Turkish-backed factions and set up a temporary checkpoint there.

Well-informed sources told Al-Monitor that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s security apparatus has shut down several gas stations near the Ghazawiya crossing in the western countryside of Aleppo. The crossing separates the HTS-controlled areas in Idlib and the western countryside of Aleppo from and the areas controlled by the Sham Legion, a faction affiliated with the Free Syrian Army.

CIA Director William Burns met with the new Israeli prime minister on Wednesday as talks to revive the landmark nuclear deal remained deadlocked.

CIA Director William Burns and Israeli Prime Naftali Bennett met in Tel Aviv on Wednesday to discuss Iran amid increased tensions over the faltering nuclear deal talks and a series of maritime incidents blamed on the Islamic Republic.

Regime shelling has killed four children in Syria’s last major rebel bastion in the northwest of the country, a Britain-based war monitor said Sunday.

The artillery fire late on Saturday hit a residential area in the south of the jihadist-dominated bastion of Idlib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.