English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For October 06/2023
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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Bible Quotations For today
Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you
Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 04/24-32: “and put on the new man, who in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth. Therefore putting away falsehood, speak truth each one with his neighbor. For we are members of one another. 4:26 “Be angry, and don’t sin.”* Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath, neither give place to the devil. 4:28 Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need. Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for building up as the need may be, that it may give grace to those who hear. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you’

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 05-06/2023
The Fate Of Those Who Lack Faith and Worship Perishable Earthly Riches/Elias Bejjani/October 06/2023
What are Le Drian's conditions to resume his presidential mission in Lebanon?
Opposition to propose plan for resolving Syrian refugee crisis
Army chief hits back at Bassil: Only the army is confronting refugee influxes
Reports: Arab League official in Paris for talks on Lebanon
US embassy attacker had also shot at embassies in Beirut
A major dispute between Lebanese and Syrians in the Doura area and its expansion to Rmeil and Doha Aramoun
LGBTQ Lebanese under attack as activists decry eroding freedoms
28th European Film Festival closes with award ceremony, 'Riverbed' Avant-premiere
The opposition's plan: Distributing Syrian refugees across Arab nations and reevaluating the UNHCR's role
Depositor rights issue keeps Lebanon's IMF deal on hold
Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Boukhari meets MP Karameh
MP Nadim Gemayel discusses Syrian displacement and Hezbollah
ATFL's Ambassador Edward Gabriel on Navigating Through Economic, Political, and Refugee Crises
Health crisis in Lebanon is ‘catastrophic,’ head of parliamentary committee warns
Fearing ostracism, many nonbelievers hide their views in Lebanon, Middle East
Syrian Refugees, Palestinian Camps and the Fading Country/Charles Elias Chartouni/October 05/2023
How diverse Lebanon can have a more inclusive government/Khaled Abou Zahr/Arab News/October 05/2023

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 05-06/2023
Drone attack kills 100 at Syria military academy as Turkey hits northeast
Syria's health minister raises casualty tolls in Homs drone strikes to 80 killed and 240 wounded
Syrian special forces conduct parachute drills with Russian aircraft
At least 9 dead in Turkish strikes on northeast Syria
U.S.-led forces reportedly down drone in Syria as Turkey strikes area
Azerbaijan detains former Karabakh separatist president Harutyunyan
Israeli arms quietly helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh, to the dismay of region's Armenians
Israeli troops kill two Palestinian gunmen in West Bank
Israel is perennially swept up in religious conflict. Yet many of its citizens are secular
Russia launches more drone attacks as Zelensky attends European forum
Russia kills 49 in attack in northeast Ukraine, Ukrainian officials say
Putin will bankrupt Russia before he admits defeat in Ukraine
Russian strike on cafe kills 49 people as Ukraine's president urges stronger Western support
Ukraine hit Russia's most treasured air-defense system on its own soil, reports say
Russian Intelligence Investigating Claims of Plot to ‘Remove’ Putin: Report
Putin's plan for winning the war in Ukraine could be starting to become reality

Titles For The Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 05-06/2023
A New Threat of War in Europe Has Putin’s Fingerprints All Over It/Shannon Vavra/ The Daily Beast./October 05/ 2023
The International Day of Persecuting Palestinian Journalists/Bassam Tawil/Gatestone Institute./October 05/2023
Syria’s Druze Have Run Out of Patience With Assad/Makram Rabah/New Lines Magazine/October 05/2023
High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington ...The trail that leads from Tehran to D.C. passes directly through the offices of Robert Malley and the International Crisis Group/Lee Smith/The Tablet/October 05/2023
The Persecution Of Armenian Christians Is Not Just A Religious Freedom Issue/Joel Veldkamp/First Things/October 05/2023
Syrian government must address the people’s grievances/Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/October 05/2023

Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 05-06/2023
The Fate Of Those Who Lack Faith and Worship Perishable Earthly Riches
Elias Bejjani/October 06/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/43601/elias-bejjani-who-are-you-are-you-yourself/

Matthew 6/24 “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon”.
Many people do not recognize consciously who they really are, and willingly with a vicious mind hide behind fake faces, or let us say they put on deceiving masks. Why do they so? It is definitely because they hate themselves, and are mostly burdened with devastating sickening inferiority complexes.
These chameleon like-people do not trust or respect themselves, have no sense of gratitude whatsoever, lack faith in God and worship Perishable Earthly Riches.
In general we know that the majority of these faithless were initially poor, but suddenly became rich. Instead of investing their – God graces riches in helping others and making them happy, especially their own family members. They alienate themselves from every thing that is related to human feelings, forget what is true love, and deny that Almighty God is love.
They still fall into temptation, live in castles of hatred, ruminate on grudges and contemplate revenge. Not only that, but they venomously and destructively envy everyone who is happy, respected and decent. They go astray and misuse their riches and influence to inflict pain and misery on others.
These faithless people become mere sadists who satanically enjoy pain, misery and the suffering of others, especially inflicting them on their own family members who refuse to succumb to their twisted mindset and become evil like them. No matter where we are, when we look around, it is very easy to identify many people who possess this evil nature.
The Question is, how will they end?
Definitely, they will end up paying for all their destructive and vicious acts, if not on this earth, then definitely on God’s Day Of Judgment. May Almighty God safeguard us from such evil people.

What are Le Drian's conditions to resume his presidential mission in Lebanon?
Naharnet/October 05/2023
French presidential envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian would only return to Lebanon if Lebanese parties agree to discuss a third option, political sources said. The sources revealed to al-Liwaa newspaper, in remarks published Thursday, that Le Drian wants the political parties to waive their conditions and counter-conditions, in order to break the presidential impasse. If the Lebanese parties refuse to resort to a third candidate without conditions, Le Diran might suspend his mission. While both Hezbollah and the opposition haven't vetoed the name of Army chief Gen. Joseph Aoun, Hezbollah and its allies have long expressed their ongoing support to Marada leader Suleiman Franjieh and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has said he doesn't know what is Aoun's economic and political vision for the country. The divided Parliament has failed for 12 times to elect a new president, with neither of the two main blocs -- Hezbollah and its opponents -- having the 86 votes required to elect one in a first round of voting. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri hasn't called for an electoral session since June 14. He instead called for a dialogue before going to "open-ended sessions to elect a president." The opposition refused to engage in dialogue to agree on a head of state before proceeding with a vote, preferring to rely on the democratic process. Both sides have put forward their own candidate -- former minister Franjieh and economist Jihad Azour -- but Le Drian said last week that neither man had any chance of breaking the deadlock. "Neither side can prevail. Neither solution can work," Le Drian said. "It is important that political actors put an end to this unbearable crisis for the Lebanese and try to find a compromise solution through a third way," he added, as he warned that France and its allies the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt, are losing patience after almost a year of deadlock and are now reviewing their financial aid.

Opposition to propose plan for resolving Syrian refugee crisis

Naharnet/October 05/2023
The Lebanese opposition has prepared a plan for resolving the Syrian refugee crisis that is based on two steps: distributing the refugees on Arab countries and halting the work of UNHCR (U.N. refugee agency) in Lebanon, media reports said. UNHCR is “not only spending money to consolidate the presence of 850,000 refugees registered on its lists, but also on 900,000 unregistered (Syrian) migrants,” the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper reported on Thursday, quoting opposition sources. A prominent opposition source told the daily that “the plan is related to gradual steps and coordination among the opposition components to unify the stance over the practical steps that should be taken, starting by confronting the U.N. refugee agency, which is financing the unregistered refugee influx, a move that encourages the Syrians who are still in their country to come to Lebanon.”“In addition to the fixed salaries and other services that the agency is offering to registered refugees, it is also providing monthly financial assistance to the new migrants. So if the new migrant will receive 10 dollars per day without doing any work, they will not obtain the same amount weekly in Syria even if they work,” the newspaper said. “According to the opposition’s plan, UNHCR has become the target, seeing as if it stops spending money on refugees, they will automatically leave Lebanon and any new migrant will refrain from coming to Lebanon,” the daily added. The plan entails working with the government, the Arab League and the international community in order to “distribute the refugees in Lebanon on the Arab countries, with each country hosting at least 40,000 refugees,” Nidaa al-Watan said. The plan will also call on the government to tightly seal the border with Syria. Asked about Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s suggestion that Lebanese authorities allow Syrian refugees to travel by sea to Europe, the opposition sources described the idea as “illogical.”

Army chief hits back at Bassil: Only the army is confronting refugee influxes
Naharnet/October 05/2023
Army Commander General Joseph Aoun on Thursday snapped back anew at Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil over the latter’s criticism of the military’s handling of the Syrian refugee crisis. “Today the army is facing various and increasing challenges on the various levels, whether inside the country or along the border. And despite the economic crisis and its repercussions, army personnel are carrying out their duties with all due enthusiasm and conviction and to the fullest, in all the missions assigned to them on land, at sea and in the air,” Aoun said. “Perhaps the Syrian refugee crisis is the main challenge that the army is currently facing, whether through infiltration through the land border or the illegal migration by sea,” the army chief added. “The refugee influxes notably increased over the past months and we have repeatedly warned of them and asked all parties to shoulder their responsibilities,” Aoun went on to say. “Only the army is currently confronting this challenge, despite the geographic, logistic and personnel complications, and it is facing suspicious campaigns against it on daily basis,” the commander lamented, in an apparent reference to Bassil’s recent statements.

Reports: Arab League official in Paris for talks on Lebanon
Naharnet/October 05/2023
A senior Arab League official has arrived in the French capital Paris to discuss the Lebanese file, diplomatic sources in Paris said. The Arab official “might meet over the coming hours with French and Saudi officials involved in the Lebanese file in an attempt to remove the obstacles that are still preventing Lebanese consensus over a presidential candidate,” Asharq newspaper quoted the sources as saying.

US embassy attacker had also shot at embassies in Beirut
Naharnet/October 05/2023
The man who opened fire at the U.S. embassy in Awkar following a dispute with a guard had also shot at a compound containing foreign embassies in Beirut, the Internal Security Forces said on Thursday. “Following further interrogation, he also confessed to shooting at the embassies compound in the Zokak al-Blat area on the night of August 25, 2023, justifying what he did by saying that he had a verbal clash with a convoy that was passing several days earlier on the Ring highway after which the convoy continued its journey and entered the aforementioned compound,” an ISF statement said.
The confession was confirmed after “comparing the confiscated weapon to the previously-seized empty bullet cartridges found at the site of the shooting near the compound,” the ISF added. The man, a 26-year-old delivery driver, had earlier told interrogators that he fired nine gunshots at the U.S. embassy in Awkar because the guards had insulted him two months earlier, when he came to deliver an order. The man had also visited Poland in 2021 in a bid to obtain asylum. “During his presence there, a dispute erupted between him and a Polish officer, who beat him up and insulted him, before he was deported to Lebanon,” an ISF statement issued last month said. “Upon his return, he requested a new passport from the General Directorate of General Security, and after it refrained from granting him a passport according to his testimony, he opened fire on the building of the General Directorate of General Security in Adliyeh three times -- on Nov. 5, 2022, Nov. 28, 2022 and Dec. 9, 2022,” the statement said. The man’s September 20 attack on the U.S. embassy coincided with the 39th anniversary of the 1984 suicide bomb attack on the U.S. embassy compound in Awkar which killed 14 people and the attacker.

A major dispute between Lebanese and Syrians in the Doura area and its expansion to Rmeil and Doha Aramoun
Beirut - “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”/ October 5, 2023
A major dispute occurred between Lebanese and Syrian youth in the Doura area, on the night of Thursday-Friday, against the backdrop of a traffic accident that involved a clash of sharp objects, and there was talk of a weapon appearing during the quarrel. Many Syrians took refuge in their workplace and barricaded themselves inside, while about 200 Lebanese youth gathered in the street and lit a fire in front of the entrance to the factory and insisted on the Syrians leaving the building and the area. The quarrel expanded to Doura Roundabout, where angry young men stormed Syrian shops, and the problem also extended to the Rmeil and Achrafieh areas. Eyewitnesses spoke of burning motorcycles of displaced people in the Doha Aramoun area. Army units came to the session and arrested the perpetrators of the problem and those involved in it.

LGBTQ Lebanese under attack as activists decry eroding freedoms
Agence France Presse/October 05/2023
Lebanon's LGBTQ community has been reeling from months of snowballing hostility, as activists in one of the Middle East's more liberal countries worry about deteriorating personal and political freedoms. Rights advocates and LGBTQ community members told AFP they have been harassed and even received death threats in recent months as controversy has raged over everything from rainbow imagery to family values and the "Barbie" movie. "What we have been witnessing is a kind of incitement to violence" against the LGBTQ community, said political scientist and rights activist Rita Chemaly.
Many of Lebanon's rival sectarian politicians have spearheaded the anti-LGBTQ campaign, which gained momentum after a legislative proposal to decriminalize homosexuality. "It's not a simple issue of one community that is being harassed and intimidated," Chemaly warned. "We're now losing the battle for individual freedoms in Lebanon," such as freedom of expression and assembly, she said. Over the weekend, a group of men attacked a civil society march in defense of freedoms, yelling homophobic insults and assaulting demonstrators. The protest was not billed as an LGBTQ event.
Rights group Amnesty International decried "security forces' abject failure to protect protesters" and urged an investigation to discourage similar incidents, noting that "none of the aggressors have been arrested". "There is no state," Chemaly said. "The impunity and the lack of accountability has led to the attacks that we're witnessing," she added. While Lebanon has never been a safe haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer people, the community has long been visible and outspoken, defying crackdowns on its bars, nightclubs and community centers, mainly in the capital Beirut. But in recent years, fledgling Pride events have been shut down, activists hounded, and in 2022 the interior ministry instructed security forces to clamp down on events "promoting sexual perversion."
'In danger'
One gay man told AFP he had been verbally harassed in recent weeks.
He said he felt "in danger and it's getting worse day after day", requesting anonymity due to safety fears. In July, a group of lawmakers submitted a proposal to repeal a vaguely worded law that punishes "unnatural" sexual relations by up to one year in prison. But hostility surged, and two counter-proposals doubling down on criminalization were floated, in a country where society and power is divided among myriad conservative religious communities that often unite around social issues. Opponents allege that the proposal was to change "the core of the family, which is totally wrong," said rights activist Chemaly. "It's just a law to decriminalize homosexuality," she said, calling the legislation a weapon that has been used "to intimidate the (LGBTQ) community members". Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stepped up fierce verbal diatribes against LGBTQ people in recent months, preaching that they should be killed.
In August, members of a hardline Christian group surrounded a bar hosting a drag show in Beirut, assaulting people outside and yelling insults including, "you are going to burn in hell," witnesses said. Over the weekend a beachside restaurant in the southern city of Tyre was attacked, in an incident that appears to have had homophobic pretexts.
'Dodge responsibility'
Another gay man and activist, who had been threatened with prosecution over same-sex images and messages on his mobile phone, said he was living "in a country that really dehumanizes me -- it denies my very existence". Despite the bleak outlook, he expressed some optimism. "This is the first time that we're having this discussion" about the law, which is "a huge thing", he said, also requesting anonymity. Lawmaker Mark Daou said the existing legislation was "in direct contradiction with several international agreements against discrimination and biases that Lebanon is party to."While he is among those pushing to repeal it despite heavy pressure, he said that doing so now inadvertently gave "excuses to those who want to dodge the responsibility for what's happening in the country." Lebanon has been enduring a crushing economic crisis since late 2019 that has pushed much of the population into poverty.
The country has been without a president for almost a year, the government is operating in a caretaker capacity and political deadlock has paralyzed Lebanon's parliament and institutions. Bertho Makso from civil society group Proud Lebanon said, "it's a dark tunnel, but we always have to see the light.""What we want is simply to have people treated with dignity and respect, and not to be treated as criminals," he said. His group has been part of the years-long push to abolish the law -- but he said it wasn't just chasing rainbows. "LGBTQ rights are not given as a gift," he said.
"You need to fight for it."

28th European Film Festival closes with award ceremony, 'Riverbed' Avant-premiere
Naharnet/October 05/2023
The 28th edition of the European Film Festival in Lebanon has closed at Galaxy Grand Cinemas with the short film competition award ceremony, followed by the Avant-premiere of Lebanese feature film “Riverbed”. Ambassador of the European Union to Lebanon, Sandra De Waele, awarded the Best Short Film Prize equally to three short films selected by an international jury, in the presence of Ambassador of Poland, Przemysław Niesiołowski, Director of Goethe- Institut Libanon, Anne Eberhard, and Cinema project manager at Institut français du Liban, Leïlah Gruas-Girling:
- Crow Man, directed by Yohann Abdelnour, won the Institut français du Liban Award, for succeeding in tackling a universal topic in a masterful and well-executed animation, editing and sound design. - Talk to Me, directed by Ribal Chedid, won the award offered by the Embassy of Poland in Lebanon. The engaging story, set in a “huis-clos”, tackles multiple subjects in a consistent narrative, carried by a strong performance by the lead cast.
- 2019, directed by Aya Debs, Shahnaz Amro, Hasan Ali, Nidal Alkadi and Yousef Tellayh, won the Award by Goethe-Institut Libanon. This collective work by five students enrolled in Marsam Al Hakaya, an independent educational initiative in the art of animation, was found to be an original representation of Lebanese struggles through the imagination of a child. The newly-introduced Audience Award was given to Crow Man, by Yohann Abdelnour. The jury was composed of: Vesna Chamoun (Cultural Program Coordinator at Goethe-Institut Libanon), Leïlah Gruas-Girling (Cinema project manager at Institut français du Liban), Adriana Łada-Lis (Cultural Officer at the Embassy of Poland in Lebanon), Jim Quilty (Film and Arts Writer) and Laure Stemmann from the Metropolis Cinema Association. The European Union through the awards supports the talent of emerging filmmakers from Lebanon. This year 39 winners will have the opportunity to attend an international film festival in France thanks to l'Institut français du Liban, a study visit on the occasion of a film festival in Poland through support by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Lebanon, and an international film festival in Germany in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Libanon.
The awards ceremony was followed by the Avant-premiere of Lebanese feature film “Riverbed” in the presence of the film’s team including director Bassem Breche, producer Jana Wehbe, and main cast Carol Abboud and Omaya Malaeb. “Riverbed” won multiple awards in its international festival run, such as Best Performance Award, Special Mention Best Arab Film Award and Special Jury Award at the Cairo International Film Festival 2022, and the Special Jury Award at Festival du Cinéma Méditerranéen de Tétouan 2023. The film will be released in Lebanese cinemas starting October 5.
The Festival continues its regional run throughout the month of October and will have multiple film screenings in Hermel (6 October), Jounieh (11-13 October), Saida (12-14 October), Zahle (13 October), Tripoli (14 October) and Bekaa (15 October). All regional screenings are by free entrance.

The opposition's plan: Distributing Syrian refugees across Arab nations and reevaluating the UNHCR's role
LBCI/October 05/2023
The absence of the caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati from addressing one of the most critical issues threatens the Lebanese entity. Mikati held a meeting with the United Nations Special Coordinator in Lebanon, Joanna Wronecka, on Wednesday. This article was originally published in and translated from the Lebanese newspaper Nidaa Al-Watan. However, the news release about the meeting did not mention the refugee issue. Meanwhile, the Interior and Municipalities Minister, Bassam Mawlawi, made significant statements following his chairmanship of an extensive meeting with governors and mayors.
Has Mikati resigned from his responsibilities regarding the refugee issue, or has he simply accepted the impossibility of progressing on this issue? Turning to the opposition's broad plan, a prominent source within the opposition revealed that the plan revolves around a gradual series of steps coordinated among various opposition factions to unify their stance on practical measures that need to be taken. These steps begin with confronting the UNHCR, which funds unregistered refugees, thus encouraging Syrians who are still in their home country to come to Lebanon. In addition to providing fixed salaries and other services to registered refugees, the UNHCR also offers monthly financial assistance to new arrivals. If a new refugee receives $10 a day without performing any work, they would not earn the same amount in a week in Syria, even if they worked. According to the opposition's plan, the UNHCR becomes the target, and if it ceases its financial support for refugees, they will leave Lebanon automatically, and any new refugee will refrain from coming to Lebanon. Moreover, the opposition's plan calls for working with the government, the Arab League, and the international community to distribute refugees in Lebanon to Arab countries, with each nation hosting a minimum of 40,000 refugees. This initiative is presented under "Understand Lebanon's Situation and Capabilities." The plan will also emphasize stricter border control with Syria. The source described the proposal made by Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah regarding the maritime deportation of refugees as "unreasonable."

Depositor rights issue keeps Lebanon's IMF deal on hold

LBCI/October 05/2023
The complex issue of depositors' rights in Lebanese banks is at the forefront of challenges hindering the final agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Amid significant discrepancies, bordering on contradictions, in the stances of involved parties, both domestically and internationally, this issue has become the most formidable obstacle in light of the conditions introduced by the IMF team in the initial agreement, according to financial and ministerial sources. This article was originally published in, translated from the Lebanese newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. As a telling sign of the lack of progress following the signing of the initial agreement last spring, Lebanon's suspended deal with the IMF will not feature on the agenda of this year's annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. These meetings are scheduled from October 9 to October 15 in Marrakech, Morocco. Earlier indications had leaned toward Lebanon's file being discussed during the autumn 2022 meetings. According to an involved official in the Lebanese financial sector, it is now doubtful that the file will be brought up in any future joint or standalone meetings of the Board of Governors and its management. The Lebanese side has to fulfill its executive and legislative commitments to forge the final agreement bolstered by a financing program. These commitments are outlined in the initial agreement reached last spring by the working teams of Lebanon and the IMF. In summary, a financial official speaking to "Al-Sharq Al-Awsat" suggests there is little chance of a significant shift in parliamentary stances regarding the depositors' issue, encompassing the rights of over two million accounts in the banking system. Additionally, government authorities supporting the IMF's proposals, prioritizing approval of the Cabinet's strategy for bank restructuring to address the significant losses incurred by the sector while safeguarding small depositors and minimizing the use of public resources, appear to be losing enthusiasm.

Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Boukhari meets MP Karameh

LBCI/October 05/2023
Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Walid bin Abdallah Boukhari received on Thursday at his office in the embassy, Faisal Karameh, the head of the "Karama Movement" and a member of the Lebanese Parliament. During the meeting, they reviewed the bilateral relations between the two sisterly countries, ways to enhance them, and the latest developments in Lebanon, especially the presidential file and the necessity of its completion. They also discussed several issues and files of mutual interest.

MP Nadim Gemayel discusses Syrian displacement and Hezbollah
LBCI/October 05/2023
During an honorary dinner in Houston, MP Nadim Gemayel expressed his deep concern for the Lebanese expatriates who have left Lebanon and are now scattered across the United States and other countries, contributing their expertise in various fields of science, industry, culture, and intellect. Lebanon faces significant struggles on its home soil. He emphasized that this concern goes beyond the presidential vacuum and extends to the void in all state institutions, hoping the challenges ahead will not be even more significant. Gemayel stated, "I am certain that every Lebanese who left Lebanon decades ago remains connected to their homeland, which will prosper once again, no matter how long it takes. If you genuinely care about Lebanon, and I am sure you do, the political and economic situation in Lebanon is dire, unlike anything we have seen before, despite the harsh wars Lebanon has endured on its soil. So, as much as you may dislike Lebanese politics, I urge you to hold onto your Lebanese identity. Supporting your people and friends in your homeland is more important than all the wealth in the world, whether from the IMF or the World Bank."He added, "It seems that after the French initiative, which appears to have stalled, and after the renewed old Qatari initiative, a new element has entered the equation of the Lebanese presidency, namely the issue of gas and oil in our waters."Regarding the issue of Syrian refugees, Gemayel said, "The Syrian refugee issue is lost among officials. The decision to secure the borders must be made, whether related to Syrian refugees or smuggling operations from Lebanon to Syria. However, such a decision has not been realized because those with the power to make it fear confronting Hezbollah, which is the main problem. Since 2011, we have been calling to protect our borders with Syria to preserve our economy and money. At that time, we accused Hezbollah of being traitors and acting in Israel's interest by calling for protecting our borders."

ATFL's Ambassador Edward Gabriel on Navigating Through Economic, Political, and Refugee Crises
LBCI/October 05/2023
LBCI reporter Rawad Taha recently sat down with Ambassador Edward Gabriel, President of the American Task Force on Lebanon, to explore several focal points, including U.S. support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), Lebanon’s teetering economy, and the ongoing political deadlock surrounding the presidency.
Steadfast Support for the Lebanese Armed Forces
Ambassador Gabriel highlighted the U.S. administration's steadfast support for the LAF, illuminated by the recent release of an additional $3 million, reflecting bipartisan backing from both Republican and Democrat quarters. While the progress and advancement of the LAF were commended, the ambassador also expressed concern regarding General Joseph Aoun’s hindered ability to articulate these strides directly to U.S. policymakers, attributed to his necessary presence in Lebanon amidst the vacancy of a Chief of Staff. The ambassador voiced a hope that the Lebanese government would swiftly approve a nominee to facilitate uninhibited dialogue.
Navigating Economic Struggles Without an IMF Agreement
Emphasizing the criticality of Lebanon forging an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to establish international legitimacy and herald a substantive economic turnaround, Ambassador Gabriel outlined the nuanced facets of the IMF package and underscored the necessity for productive government-parliamentarian engagements. The intricacies of the IMF package, particularly in areas such as depositor questions and securing parliamentary approval, were highlighted as vital elements of a sustainable resolution.
A Unified Front for Lebanon's Presidential Quagmire
Addressing the presidential stalemate, Gabriel noted a discernible shift toward recognizing the need for a president who can address the comprehensive needs and concerns of all of Lebanon’s citizens and their political representatives. He revealed a cautiously optimistic outlook informed by the newly solidified unified position of the quintet nations (the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and France), which aims to facilitate a compromise, with Qatar potentially taking the lead in these efforts.
The New Interim Leadership at the Lebanese Central Bank
Conversations with the acting central bank Governor revealed a stern resolve to safeguard the central bank’s resources, precariously positioned at a critical $7 billion, from government access without a substantiated reform agenda and proficient management of Lebanon’s services and affairs. Ambassador Gabriel emphasized the imperative of a balanced budget and engaged in discussions about the lira and ensuring the transparency and digitization of exchange rates, stressing that the government must exhibit fiscal discipline to prudently address the needs of the Lebanese populace without unduly taxing the central bank. Navigating the Syrian Refugee Crisis: The International Responsibility
In light of the unsustainable burden placed upon Lebanon, which hosts the largest per capita number of Syrian refugees globally, Ambassador Gabriel threw a sharp focus on the palpable crisis. This crisis extends its impact globally, necessitating an international response that tackles both proximal and root issues. He underscored the pivotal role of the U.S., Europe, and particularly, Gulf partners in crafting an effective strategy. With certain Gulf nations progressing towards normalizing relations with Syria, they are uniquely positioned to influence policies that could steer Syria towards stability and enable the safe return of refugees. Gabriel emphasized, "It's a worldwide problem that the international community and the United States must take on," signaling a collective responsibility that stretches across continents. Particularly, Europe could experience significant impacts and, therefore, should bear a portion of the responsibility in formulating and enacting policies that protect refugees while alleviating Lebanon’s burdens.

Health crisis in Lebanon is ‘catastrophic,’ head of parliamentary committee warns
Arab News/October 05/2023
BEIRUT: “Funds allocated for purchasing medications for cancer, (other) chronic diseases and kidney dialysis are nearly depleted,” Bilal Abdullah, the head of Lebanon’s Parliamentary Health Committee said on Thursday as he warned that the health situation in the country “is catastrophic.”
His comments came as concerns grow about the rates of non-communicable chronic diseases in a country mired in a long-running financial crisis and political paralysis. Cancer and heart and vascular diseases are among the leading causes of death in Lebanon, and Firas Abiad, the caretaker health minister, said that failure to provide early treatment of such conditions ultimately results in higher health care costs, which in turn increases mortality rates among people who lack the financial resources to afford treatment. Abdullah warned that all government decisions currently being made in Lebanon “fall into the category of temporary solutions until the political situation is resolved and the economy recovers.” As a result of the financial crisis, which began in 2019 and has resulted in the nation’s currency losing more than 90 percent of its value, many people have been pushed into poverty and are struggling to feed their families. A number of state-funded subsidies on everyday goods and services have already been removed and in the latest attempt to save money, Lebanese authorities are planning to remove subsidies on bread within two or three months, economic expert Louis Hobeika told Arab News. Lebanon obtained a $150-million loan from the World Bank to subsidize wheat but this support will end in February next year. The cost of the current state subsidy on bread is between $15 million and $20 million a month, according to Hobeika, and the subsidies on many staple goods and services are being reduced month by month.
Meanwhile, for almost a year politicians have been unable to agree on the appointment a new president, and so the office has remained vacant since Michel Aoun’s term ended on Oct. 31, 2022, with little sign of the situation being resolved any time soon. In the absence of any agreement between political factions on a plan to introduce reforms that might address the financial crisis and economic collapse, Lebanon’s caretaker government, headed by Najib Mikati, continues to follow seemingly random policies related to budgeting and expenditure.
In the process, it has been tapping into the nation’s diminishing financial reserves, in particular depositors’ funds held in the country’s central bank, and cash from whatever loans the government has been able to obtain. Reformist MP Mark Daou said that Mikati’s government has spent millions of dollars without disclosing what happened to the funds, in violation of the principle of financial transparency. In 2020, the government approved an amendment to a loan agreement with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, worth $120 million, to help enhance the health care system.
In 2021, the Ministry of Finance received $1.135 billion from the International Monetary Fund in Special Drawing Rights. Provided by the International Monetary Fund, SDRs effectively offer a line of credit that IMF member nations can cash in. They are designed to help bolster national cash reserves and reinforce the global economy. Hobeika said legislators should have been actively monitoring the spending process since 2021, not starting to think about it two years later. “There is a lack of responsibility in oversight,” he said. “Before describing the spending as illegal, legislators should have monitored how the funds were spent. “Had there been parliamentary supervision, the spending process would have slowed and the money would have supported Lebanon for two additional years.”Remaining funds might be depleted soon, he added, and no additional revenue has been added to the Lebanese treasury in the past two years. Meanwhile, electricity bills are no longer subsidized and have risen significantly, Hobeika said, and water authorities have doubled their annual fees. Despite this there are shortages of both. Hobeika said that the increased fees and taxes might fuel public frustration and anger, as they are paying more of what little money they have amid the financial crisis to companies that are rationing electricity and water supplies. In response to the allegations of a lack of transparency about government spending, a Ministry of Finance source said: “The SDR funds were spent on urgent matters, most notably supporting medications for cancer, some (other) chronic diseases, and kidney dialysis, as well as purchasing wheat, supporting electricity, and repaying state debts.”

Fearing ostracism, many nonbelievers hide their views in Lebanon, Middle East
Associated Press/October 05/2023
The role of sectarian divisions in fueling conflicts in Lebanon is one reason Talar Demirdjian distanced herself from religion. "People either go very into their religion or their sects, or the other side." A Lebanese Armenian of Christian heritage, Demirdjian said about religion, "I don't even think about it enough to tick a label." For some, like Ahmad, religious disbelief hasn't caused tensions. But the 33-year-old Lebanese, who comes from a Shiite Muslim family and now lives in Qatar, wanted his last name withheld because of the sensitivity of the subject. "We have an unspoken agreement: I don't criticize religion and you don't criticize my lack of religion," he said. He's religiously unaffiliated, and says he cannot believe "in something that I cannot touch or cannot see."There's the Tunisian woman who fasts during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, though not for God. The Iraqi woman who, until recently, wore a hijab. And a man whose Egyptian identity card still identifies him as "Muslim." Such are the ways that some of the religiously unaffiliated, or "nones" — people who are agnostics, atheists or nothing in particular — negotiate their existence in the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA, where religion is often ingrained in life's very fabric. Aware that rejecting religion can have repercussions, many conceal that part of themselves. Declaring disbelief may spur social stigma, ostracism by loved ones or even unleash the wrath of authorities, especially if going public is coupled with real or perceived attacks on religion or God. "I have a double life all the time," said the 27-year-old Tunisian woman. "It's better than having conflict every day."Many nonbelievers seek community, ideas or pockets of digital defiance on the internet even though online spaces can come with risks.Most of those interviewed by The Associated Press spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions and because some of their families don't know how they religiously identify. "The Middle East is the birthplace of the three heavenly religions and there's no doubt that the region's culture has long been intertwined with religion," said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a political science professor at Cairo University. "Religion has also been a source of legitimacy for rulers, a source for knowledge and behavioral norms."Many in Arab countries, he said, associate lack of religion with immorality. "To them, you cannot talk about the rights of someone who is a danger to society." Bans on blasphemy appear in different parts of the world. But, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, they have been most common in the MENA region as of 2019. The Tunisian woman said she fasts to avoid being found out by her family. She pretends to sleep to skip gatherings, where relatives may take aim at her suspected disbelief. From an early age, she rejected how Islam was practiced in her home. She said her father would sometimes force her to pray. Resisting traditional interpretations of such things as gender roles, she turned to progressive Muslim readings. She now sees herself as nothing in particular and open to different spiritual paths."You're socially perceived like you are public enemy," she said. "People hate you without knowing you."Hany Elmihy hoped conditions could change. The 57-year-old Egyptian agnostic and some other nonbelievers saw a window for visibility following the "Arab Spring" uprisings. Elmihy said he founded a Facebook group for Egyptians without religion in 2011, while similar ones formed in other Arab countries. Mass protests demanding political change had just unseated an Egyptian president then, highlighting the power of social media for dissent. "It's not the revolution that turned some into atheists or irreligious; the revolution gave them the freedom and courage to speak up," Elmihy said. Elmihy said he was insulted, threatened, and attacked by unknown assailants. Seeking recognition, he tried to change the "Muslim" designation listed on his identity card to state he adheres to no religion. He failed. After the post-revolt euphoria fizzled out, he left Egypt in 2015 and now lives in Norway. "Society scared me the most," Elmihy said. "I felt isolated." He views his earlier advocacy with mixed feelings, but says "it was important to let the society know that the religiously unaffiliated exist."
Some took note. Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said Egypt's youth ministry announced plans in 2014 to combat atheism in collaboration with religious bodies. Local press also reported on anti-atheism efforts by some Islamic and Christian institutions. "We believe that those who don't belong to religion are committing a sin but it's not our responsibility to hold them accountable," said Abbas Shouman, an official with Al-Azhar, the Cairo-based seat of Sunni Muslim learning. The role of religious authorities, he said "is only to explain, clarify, spread the right education and respond to suspicions."Shouman rejects attacks on religion, saying nonbelievers "have the right to defend their beliefs as they wish but not to go after others' beliefs and affiliations."
Atheism is not criminalized in Egypt, Ibrahim said. Last year, Ibrahim's EIPR said an Egyptian court upheld a three-year-prison sentence and a fine against a blogger charged with contempt of religion and misusing social media. The organization, whose lawyer appealed the earlier verdict, has said the man was accused of managing a Facebook page for Egyptian atheists that allegedly criticizes religions. In May, Iran hanged two men convicted of blasphemy, carrying out rare death sentences for the crime. The men were accused of involvement in a Telegram channel called "Critique of Superstition and Religion," according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The Mizan news agency of Iran's judiciary described the two as having insulted Prophet Muhammad and promoted atheism. In Saudi Arabia, a court has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes on accusations of expressing atheism online; a media report said in 2016 that religious police found tweets denying the existence of God and ridiculing Quranic verses. For one Iraqi woman, questions started when a childhood dream to one day become an imam like her grandfather was quashed because she is a girl. Iraq's turmoil fueled her disbelief. The 24-year-old's generation witnessed the U.S.-led invasion, militancy, sectarian violence, the brutal reign of the Islamic State and increasing clout of militias. She's worn the Islamic headscarf before and, for a while, after she became agnostic. When militants proliferated where she lived, she donned it to stay out of danger; at other times, it was to socially fit in. She removed it around 2020. "I don't tell people that I am agnostic," she said. "It'd be an act of stupidity to do so in such a society."

Syrian Refugees, Palestinian Camps and the Fading Country
Charles Elias Chartouni/October 05/2023
What’s flabbergasting in our country is
the uncontroversial taboo which relates to the status of Syrian refugees and Palestinian camps, since these issues are of an extraterritorial nature that prohibits public conversation.The Syrian refugees status belongs to the Alawite regime and its Shiite allies who engineered, in the first place, their displacement, took over their land, and worked diligently on demographic replacement scenarios within their zones of influence. They claim to have a singlehanded say over their whereabouts within Lebanese territories, manipulate them to their ends, while opening the floodgates to newcomers in order to further the de-stabilization of Lebanon, blackmail the international community, fuel Christian migration, and erode whatever is left from Lebanon’s national existence. Paradoxically enough, the ongoing coup d’état is whetting the appetite of their power rivals and nemeses, the Turkish Islamist regime and Islamist terrorism, and ushering the new wave of destabilization and bedlam in a region that lost its normative compasses and “gravitational constants”.
You add to this bleak picture the institutionalized mayhem of the Palestinian camps who have been, for a long time,the breeding grounds of political terrorism and open ended civil and proxy wars. Whereas Palestinian civilians, were willingly or unwillingly, instrumentalized by the colliding power politics, under the fallacy of struggle against Israel. Hezbollah, Shiite militancy and Iranian power politics have inherited this conflict-laden legacy as an entry gate to Palestinian inner politics, be it in Lebanon, Syria or the Palestinian Territories, and are leveraging their combustible charge to erode Lebanese statehood, control the Palestinian scenery, and engage Israel obliquely or frontally: Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian Territories are subsidiary to Iranian power politics. The two political variables are vehicles and surrogate political platforms manipulated erratically by power players, in an open field of mutant actors and belligerent power politics.  If we fail to perceive the manufactured refugee crises at both ends (Palestinian and Syrian), we inevitably fail to find the proper venues to address them as inherent to the reconstruction of Lebanese Statehood, and recasting the matrices of civil concord in an unraveling country. The international NGO’S take on these issues, far from being motivated by pure humanitarian concerns, reflects the ideological subtexts of wokism, victimization pathos and financial outlays.These issues are political by definition and cannot be dealt with unilaterally, since their destructive effects are corroding whatever is left from Lebanon’s national stature and civil peace. If Lebanon fails to oversee a working political transition, put an end to its protracted and cyclical political voids, muster its political resolve and engage the international political community on this very basis, the disastrous political consequences are not far looming in the horizon, and the gates of hell are wide opened.

How diverse Lebanon can have a more inclusive government
Khaled Abou Zahr/Arab News/October 05/2023
Following a long stalemate, the Lebanese file was in June passed on from French President Emmanuel Macron to former Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. His current mission is still to help Lebanon elect a president. But is this the right mission for the countries that are looking to help Lebanon? Should there not be a more impactful way to help Lebanon once and for all?
To start with, this mission reveals how much the confessional system is hurtful for Lebanon. Indeed, the election or selection of any of the three key roles of the state — president, prime minister and parliament speaker — never seem to be related to all the people’s affairs, but rather limited to each concerned community. Let me explain. Currently, with each position being reserved for a single community, the election by the parliament of a new president is, for example, viewed through the lens of the Christian/Maronite community. Just like the continued failure to name a prime minister is seen through the lens of the Sunni community. And the speaker of parliament, which is the only one of these positions that is currently filled, indicating where the power in the country lies, seems to be a Shiite affair. In all logic, this raises the question of an absence of a Druze head of state. What about the aspirations and fears of this community, which has given its blood and made sacrifices? Unfortunately, in today’s Lebanon, the Druze would probably only have an “acting representative” or another empty seat. A federal council including all confessions would have representatives serving the country and not their respective communities
There is hence no country, just confessional minorities. I understand why some Maronites have fear because Michel Aoun was their last president. This fear can be applied to Sunnis and the prime minister. We can clearly see now how this system does not work and how it invites shady deal-making at the expense of the people, thanks to the exploitation of this exact fear. Any centralized system, such as a direct presidential election regardless of confession, would make these fears explode into potential civil war.
This is exactly why a system that has a centralized head of state for each community does not work. A federal system would solve many of these issues. But it would not be a magic wand. There are examples of federal systems that are dysfunctional. The clearest example that comes to mind is Belgium. It is a European federal constitutional monarchy in which the king is the head of state and the prime minister is the head of government in a multiparty system. Decision-making powers are not centralized but divided between three levels of government: the federal government, three language-based communities (Flemish, French and German-speaking) and three regions (Flanders, Brussels-Capital and Wallonia).
Unfortunately, Belgium has become known for its political instability. In 2020, it finally formed a government after 652 days of caretaker and minority governments, following the collapse of the previous administration in December 2018 due to interparty tensions over migration. So, it is not only Lebanon that suffers from this disease. This marked a new record for Belgium’s longest post-election period without a government, surpassing the previous record of 541 days after the June 2010 elections, which ended with the swearing-in of Elio Di Rupo as prime minister after a similarly complex negotiation period.
The advantage is that, while there were problems at the federal level, people’s lives were unaffected because what mattered to them was decided at the local level. Unfortunately, and here lies the risk, we are noticing today a growing demand for Flemish independence ahead of federal elections next year. Questions over migration and general policies are pushing this demand. This would strengthen the bonds between communities instead of pitting them against each other. This is why I once again use the example of Switzerland as a model for Lebanon, with its federal council when it comes to state-linked affairs. This is the best example Lebanon should follow. The Swiss Federal Council is Switzerland’s highest executive authority and serves as the collective head of state and government. This council has seven members, each representing a different political party, and it works on a consensus-based decision-making system. By overseeing the administration, proposing legislation and representing Switzerland in international affairs, it plays a significant role in the country’s political landscape. The Federal Assembly, which is the country’s bicameral legislature, chooses the members of the Federal Council, who each serve for four years. For more than a century, this unique and balanced governance system has been a hallmark of Swiss political stability. It has helped Switzerland become known as a model of direct democracy and federalism.
In Lebanon, adopting a similar system would be a positive power-sharing solution. It could pave the way for more effective governance. A federal council including all confessions would have representatives serving the country and not their respective communities. Moreover, a member of the Druze community could be added alongside the representatives of all the other communities. Just as Switzerland’s system ensures that the various linguistic, cultural and religious groups within the country are represented in the Federal Council, Lebanon could have a more inclusive government that reflects the nation’s multifaceted identity. This would strengthen the bonds between communities instead of pitting them against each other. There is no doubt that, despite the current political vacuum and the failure to nominate the heads of state, the Lebanese people are in a de facto decentralized system. They have their own solutions, from banking and cryptocurrencies to having generators for electricity. Therefore, countries looking to help Lebanon should support the transformation toward a new political system and not a temporary solution to keep an archaic one alive. This needs to be done before secession becomes the only solution.
*Khaled Abou Zahr is the founder of Barbicane, a space-focused investment syndication platform. He is CEO of EurabiaMedia and editor of Al-Watan Al-Arabi.

Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 05-06/2023
Drone attack kills 100 at Syria military academy as Turkey hits northeast
AFP/October 05, 2023
BEIRUT: An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed more than 100 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming “terrorist organizations” for the deadly drone strike in government-held Homs.
Separately, Turkish air raids in the war-torn country’s Kurdish-held northeast killed at least nine people, according to Kurdish forces, after Ankara had threatened raids in retaliation for a bomb attack. In the central Syrian city of Homs, “armed terrorist organizations” targeted “the graduation ceremony for officers of the military academy,” an army statement carried by official news agency SANA said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, reported “more than 100 dead, around half of them military graduates, and including 14 civilians,” revising up a previous toll. It said at least 125 others were wounded. Health Minister Hassan Al-Ghobash told state television the “preliminary” toll was 80 dead “including six women and six children” and around 240 wounded. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The attack was carried out with “explosive-laden drones,” according to the military statement, vowing to “respond with full force.” The government declared three days of mourning starting Friday. Later Thursday in the rebel-held Idlib region, residents reported wide and heavy regime bombardment. The Observatory said four civilians were killed and others wounded in the assault on several towns in the opposition bastion in the country’s northwest. Swathes of Idlib province are controlled by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, led by the former local Al-Qaeda branch. The jihadist group has used drones to attack government-held areas in the past. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “is deeply concerned about the drone attack,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The UN chief “is also deeply concerned about reports of retaliatory shelling” in northwest Syria, Dujarric added.
Overnight, Syrian army shelling killed an elderly woman and four of her children in a rebel-held area of Aleppo province, rescue workers and the Observatory said. The Turkish strikes on Hasakah province in northeast Syria “killed six members of the internal security” agency, a statement from the Kurdish force’s media center said. A worker at a site in the province was also killed, according to Farhad Shami, spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto army. The Kurdish authorities’ statement also said “two civilians” were killed in a strike on a motorcycle. Turkiye regularly strikes targets in Syrian Kurds’ semi-autonomous region. On Wednesday, Ankara warned of more intense cross-border air raids, after concluding that militants who staged a weekend attack in the Turkish capital came from Syria. The US-backed SDF led the battle that dislodged Daesh group fighters from their last scraps of Syrian territory in 2019. Turkiye views the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) that dominate the SDF as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies. Turkiye has launched strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq since Sunday’s attack in Ankara, which wounded two Turkish security officers outside the interior ministry and was claimed by the Kurdish group. AFP correspondents in Syria’s northeast saw on Thursday smoke rising from oil sites near Qahtaniyeh, close to the Turkish border.
Two power stations in the area were also hit, as well as the vicinity of a dam. The SDF’s Shami said the strikes had targeted military and civilian sites. “There has been a clear escalation since the Turkish threats,” he said. In the market of the city of Qamishli in Hasakah province, vendors were worried. “The situation is worsening every day. Turkiye doesn’t let us breathe,” said Hassan Al-Ahmad, a 35-year-old fabric merchant. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi denied Wednesday that the Ankara assailants had “passed through our region.” “Turkiye is looking for pretexts to legitimize its ongoing attacks on our region,” he said. The Kurdish administration urged “the international community” to “take a stand capable of dissuading” Turkiye from its attacks. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the United States “remains concerned about the military escalation in northern Syria.”
The United States, Russia and Turkiye all have troops in the country. Between 2016 and 2019, Turkiye carried out three major operations in northern Syria against Kurdish forces. The conflict in Syria has killed more than half a million people since it began in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, spiralling into a complex battlefield involving foreign armies, militias and extremists.

Syria's health minister raises casualty tolls in Homs drone strikes to 80 killed and 240 wounded
BEIRUT (AP)/October 5, 2023
Syria's health minister has raised the casualty tolls from a drone attack on Thursday that hit a packed military graduation ceremony in the central city of Homs to 80 killed and 240 wounded. It was one of the deadliest attacks on the Syrian army in recent years, with the country’s conflict now in its thirteenth year. Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash said that civilians, including six children, and military personnel were among those killed. There were concerns the death toll could rise further as many of the wounded were in serious condition. In an earlier statement, Syria’s military said that drones laden with explosives targeted the ceremony packed with young officers and their families as it was wrapping up in Homs. It accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” of the attack, without naming any particular group. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “expressed deep concern” at the drone attack in Homs as well as “reports of retaliatory shelling” in northwest Syria, his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. The military has not provided any casualty numbers but Syria's state television said the government announced a three-day state of mourning, starting on Friday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, and the pro-government Sham FM radio station earlier reported the strikes. The military accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” of the attack, without naming any particular group, and said that women and children were among those critically wounded. The Syrian military said “it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations, wherever they exist.”Syria's crisis started with peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad’s government in March 2011, but quickly morphed into a full-blown civil war following the government’s brutal crackdown on the protesters. The tide turned in Assad’s favor against rebel groups in 2015, when Russia provided key military backing to Syria, as well as Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
So far, the war has killed half a million people, wounded hundreds of thousands and left many parts of the country destroyed. It has displaced half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million, including more than 5 million who are refugees outside Syria. While most Arab governments have restored ties with the government Damascus, Syria remains divided, with a northwest enclave under the control of al-Qaida-linked militants from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group and Turkish-backed opposition fighters. The country’s northeast is under control of U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Following the drone attack, the Syrian government forces shelled villages in Idlib province, in the rebel-held northwest. There were no immediate reports of casualties there. The Syrian army shelled another village in the region earlier on Thursday, killing at least five civilians, activists and emergency workers said. The shelling hit a family house on the outskirts of the the village of Kafr Nouran in western Aleppo province, according to opposition-held northwestern Syria’s civil defense organization known as the White Helmets. The dead were an older woman and four of her children, according to the Observatory. Nine other members of the family were wounded, it said. Northwestern Syria is mostly held by al-Qaida linked fighters as well as Turkish-backed opposition forces. The vast majority of around 4.1 million people residing in the enclave live in poverty, relying on humanitarian aid to survive. Many of them are Syrians, internally displaced by the war from other parts of the country. Meanwhile, local authorities in northeastern Syria, which is under U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Turkish drone attacks struck in Hassakeh and Qamishli provinces on Thursday, hitting oil production facilities, electrical substations and a dam. A statement from the local Kurdish authorities said six members of their security forces and two civilians were killed. Turkey didn't immediately comment on the strikes but Ankara says the main Syrian Kurdish militia is allied with Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has led an insurgency against Turkey since 1984 that has killed tens of thousands of people. Ankara has declared the PKK a terrorist group. Syrian Kurdish forces were a major U.S. ally in the war against the militant Islamic State group, which was defeated in Syria in March 2019.

Syrian special forces conduct parachute drills with Russian aircraft
MOSCOW (Reuters)/October 5, 2023
Syrian special forces troops performed more than 1,500 parachute jumps over the Mediterranean Sea and the Aleppo and Latakia provinces as part of training drills conducted using Russian military aircraft, Russia's defence ministry said on Thursday. Video footage published by the ministry showed groups of Syrian troops leaping out of Russian planes and helicopters, including what the ministry said was the Syrian Arab Army's first mass landing from an IL-76 aircraft conducted at night. "Servicemen of the Russian group of troops in Syria ensured the execution of a comprehensive exercise of Syrian special forces units," the defence ministry said. Russia is one of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's main allies. Moscow's intervention alongside Iran helped turn the tide in favour of Assad in the country's over decade-old conflict.

At least 9 dead in Turkish strikes on northeast Syria
Agence France Presse/October 5, 2023
Turkish strikes Thursday on military and infrastructure targets in Kurdish-held northeastern Syria killed at least nine people, Kurdish security forces said, after Ankara had threatened raids in retaliation for a bomb attack. While Turkey regularly carries out drone attacks in Syrian Kurds' semi-autonomous region, Ankara on Wednesday warned of more intense cross-border air raids, after concluding that militants who staged a weekend attack in the Turkish capital came from Syria. Thursday's strikes on Hasakeh province "killed six members of the internal security" forces, a statement from the Kurdish force's media centre said. Earlier, Farhad Shami, spokesman for the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds' de facto army, had said the strike killed six workers at a brick factory. He said another worker at a separate site in the province was also killed. The statement from the Kurdish internal security forces also said "two civilians" were killed in a strike on a motorcycle. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with a network of sources on the ground, had reported earlier that a strike in the Hasakeh area hit a car, killing two people. The US-backed SDF led the battle that dislodged Islamic State group fighters from their last scraps of Syrian territory in 2019. Turkey views the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) that dominate the SDF as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is listed as a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies. Since Sunday, Turkey has launched strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq, after two security officers were wounded in the Ankara attack, which was claimed by the PKK.
'Clear escalation' -
"There has been a clear escalation since the Turkish threats," Shami said, reporting intensive overflights of Kurdish-held areas of northeast Syria. He said the strikes had targeted military and civilian sites including oil infrastructure. AFP correspondents saw black smoke rising from oil sites near Qahtaniyeh, close to the Turkish border. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had alleged the perpetrators of Sunday' attack outside the interior ministry in Ankara had been trained in Syria and warned of reprisals against Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria. "It has become clear that the two terrorists came from Syria and were trained there," Fidan said in televised comments. "From now on, all infrastructure, large facilities and energy facilities belonging to (armed Kurdish groups) in Iraq and Syria are legitimate targets for our security forces," he added. "I recommend that third parties stay away from these facilities."In the market of the city of Qamishli in Hasakeh province, vendors were anxiously following the escalation on their mobile phones and televisions. Hassan al-Ahmad, a 35-year-old fabric merchant, said there were fewer people out than usual. "The situation is worsening every day. Turkey doesn't let us breathe," he said. "We just want our children to live in peace," he added.
'Take a stand'
The Kurdish administration called on "the international community, the international coalition" and Russia to "take a stand capable of dissuading" Turkey from its attacks. The United States, Russia and Turkey all have troops in areas of the war-torn country. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi denied Wednesday that the Ankara assailants had "passed through our region". "Turkey is looking for pretexts to legitimise its ongoing attacks on our region and to launch a new military aggression," he said. "The threat to target the region's infrastructure, economic resources and populated cities is a war crime," he added. Between 2016 and 2019, Turkey carried out three major operations in northern Syria against Kurdish forces. Kurdish forces led the anti-IS offensive and are still supported by the United States. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the United States "remains concerned about the military escalation in northern Syria". "In particular, we're concerned about the impact on civilian populations and the effectiveness that it could place on the efforts that have been ongoing to defeat" IS, he added.

U.S.-led forces reportedly down drone in Syria as Turkey strikes area

ANKARA (Reuters)/October 5, 2023
U.S.-led forces were reported to have shot down a drone over northern Syria on Thursday as U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish forces said Turkish attacks had killed eight people in an escalation prompted by a bomb attack in Ankara claimed by Kurdish militants. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a local security source said the U.S.-led coalition had shot down a Turkish drone near a base in northeastern Syria. A Turkish defence ministry official said the drone shot down by the coalition did not belong to the Turkish armed forces, without saying whose property it was. The coalition did not immediately respond to a request for comment. U.S. support for Kurdish forces in northern Syria has long caused tension with NATO ally Turkey, which views them as a wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - the group which claimed Sunday's attack in Ankara near government buildings.
Ankara said on Wednesday the two attackers had come from Syria. The bombing killed both attackers and wounded two police officers. The Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led force backed by the United States, denied the bombers had passed through its territory. A Turkish defence ministry official said on Thursday a ground operation into Syria was one option Turkey could consider. Turkey has mounted several previous incursions into northern Syria against the Syrian Kurdish YPG group.
"Our only goal is to eliminate the terrorist organisations that pose a threat to Turkey. A ground operation is one of the options to eliminate this threat, but it is not the only option for us," the official said. Security forces in northeastern Syria said Turkey had launched a series of attacks on Thursday with more than 15 drones entering the region's airspace and hitting targets including infrastructure and gas and oil stations. In a statement, the security forces said Turkish attacks killed six members of the internal security forces in northeastern Syria, and two civilians in two separate strikes. Turkey has redoubled its operations targeting the outlawed PKK, by carrying out air strikes in northern Iraq. Turkish officials said any infrastructure and energy facilities in Iraq and Syria controlled by the PKK, as well as People's Protection Units (YPG), were legitimate military targets. "The PKK and the YPG are the same terrorist organisation, they are our legitimate target everywhere. Turkey conducted operations whenever and wherever necessary in the past, and these operations will continue if needed again," the defence ministry official said. "These operations are being conducted under self-defence rights arising from international law to eliminate terrorist attacks on Turkish territory and to ensure border security." The YPG is also the spearhead of the main ally of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State. Support for the YPG by the United States and other allies, including France, has strained ties with Ankara. Turkey has warned forces of third countries to stay away from facilities controlled by the PKK and YPG. "We are calling on all parties, our friendly and allied countries in particular, to stay away from those terrorists. This is just a reminder. It is up to them to take necessary precautions," the official said, without naming any country.

Azerbaijan detains former Karabakh separatist president Harutyunyan
Agence France Presse/October 5, 2023
Azerbaijan confirmed Thursday it had detained an ex-president of its recently captured separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which agreed to reintegrate with Azerbaijan in the wake of Baku's lighting offensive last month. On Wednesday, Armenia's foreign ministry "strongly condemned" Azerbaijan for arresting several separatist leaders from Karabakh. Azerbaijan's prosecutor general and security service said in a joint statement that Arayik Harutyunyan was detained Tuesday on "suspicion of waging an aggressive war" against Azerbaijan and alleged war crimes. The 49-year-old headed the separatist government during the 2020 armed conflict between Baku and Yerevan for control of the mountainous enclave and stepped down in early September, shortly before Baku's offensive. Several senior representatives of Karabakh's former authorities and military command have been detained, including Ruben Vardanyan -- a reported billionaire who headed the region’s separatist government between November 2022 and February. Armenian foreign affairs ministry has said the country "will take all possible steps to protect the rights of the illegally arrested representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh, including in international courts."Separatist authorities in the breakaway region agreed to disarm, dissolve their government and reintegrate with Azerbaijan following Baku's one-day military operation in late September. The central government in Baku is holding "re-integration" talks with separatist leaders, but Azerbaijan's Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev has said criminal investigations had been initiated into crimes committed by 300 separatist officials. The United Nations human rights office has urged Baku to afford the detainees "full respect and protection".

Israeli arms quietly helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh, to the dismay of region's Armenians
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)/October 5, 2023
Israel has quietly helped fuel Azerbaijan’s campaign to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, supplying powerful weapons to Azerbaijan ahead of its lightening offensive last month that brought the ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control, officials and experts say.
Just weeks before Azerbaijan launched its 24-hour assault on Sept. 19, Azerbaijani military cargo planes repeatedly flew between a southern Israeli airbase and an airfield near Nagorno-Karabakh, according to flight tracking data and Armenian diplomats, even as Western governments were urging peace talks.
The flights rattled Armenian officials in Yerevan, long wary of the strategic alliance between Israel and Azerbaijan, and shined a light on Israel’s national interests in the restive region south of the Caucasus Mountains. “For us, it is a major concern that Israeli weapons have been firing at our people,” Arman Akopian, Armenia’s ambassador to Israel, told The Associated Press. In a flurry of diplomatic exchanges, Akopian said he expressed alarm to Israeli politicians and lawmakers in recent weeks over Israeli weapons shipments. “I don’t see why Israel should not be in the position to express at least some concern about the fate of people being expelled from their homeland," he told AP. Azerbaijan's September blitz involving heavy artillery, rocket launchers and drones — largely supplied by Israel and Turkey, according to experts — forced Armenian separatist authorities to lay down their weapons and sit down for talks on the future of the separatist region. The Azerbaijani offensive killed over 200 Armenians in the enclave, the vast majority of them fighters, and some 200 Azerbaijani troops, according to officials. There are ramifications beyond the volatile enclave of 4,400 square kilometers (1,700 square miles). The fighting prompted over 100,000 people — more than 80% of the enclave's ethnic Armenian residents — to flee in the last two weeks. Azerbaijan has pledged to respect the rights of ethnic Armenians. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has termed the exodus “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing.” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the accusation, saying the departures are a “personal and individual decision and (have) nothing to do with forced relocation.”Israel’s foreign and defense ministries declined to comment on the use of Israeli weapons in Nagorno-Karabakh or on Armenian concerns about its military partnership with Azerbaijan. In July, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, where he praised the countries' military cooperation and joint “fight against terrorism. Israel has a big stake in Azerbaijan, which serves as a critical source of oil and is a staunch ally against Israel’s archenemy Iran. It is also a lucrative customer of sophisticated arms. “There’s no doubt about our position in support of Azerbaijan’s defense,” said Arkady Mil-man, Israel's former ambassador to Azerbaijan and current senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “We have a strategic partnership to contain Iran.” Although once resource-poor Israel now has plenty of natural gas off its Mediterranean coast, Azerbaijan still supplies at least 40% of Israel's oil needs, keeping cars and trucks on its roads. Israel turned to Baku’s offshore deposits in the late 1990s, creating an oil pipeline through the Turkish transport hub of Ceyan that isolated Iran, which at the time capitalized on oil flowing through its pipelines from Kazakhstan to world markets.
Azerbaijan has long been suspicious of Iran, its fellow Shiite Muslim neighbor on the Caspian Sea, and chafed at its support for Armenia, which is Christian. Iran has accused Azerbaijan of hosting a base for Israeli intelligence operations against it — a claim that Azerbaijan and Israel deny.
“It's clear to us that Israel has an interest in keeping a military presence in Azerbaijan, using its territory to observe Iran,” Armenian diplomat Tigran Balayan said. Few have benefited more from the two countries' close relations than Israeli military contractors. Experts estimate Israel supplied Azerbaijan with nearly 70% of its arsenal between 2016 and 2020 — giving Azerbaijan an edge against Armenia and boosting Israel’s large defense industry. “Israeli arms have played a very significant role in allowing the Azerbaijani army to reach its objectives,” said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms sales. Israeli long-range missiles and exploding drones known as loitering munitions have made up for Azerbaijan’s small air force, Wezeman said, even at times striking deep within Armenia itself. Meanwhile, Israeli Barak-8 surface-to-air missiles have protected Azerbaijan’s airspace in shooting down missiles and drones, he added. Just ahead of last month's offensive, the Azerbaijani defense ministry announced the army conducted a missile test of Barak-8. Its developer, Israel Aerospace Industries, declined to comment on Azerbaijan's use of its air defense system and combat drones. But Azerbaijan has raved about the success of Israeli drones in slicing through the Armenian defenses and tipping the balance in the bloody six-week war in 2020. Its defense minister in 2016 called a combat drone manufactured by Israel’s Aeronautics Group “a nightmare for the Armenian army," which backed the region's separatists during Azerbaijan’s conflict with Nagorno-Karabakh that year. President Ilham Aliyev in 2021 — a year of deadly Azerbaijan-Armenian border clashes — was captured on camera smiling as he stroked the small Israeli suicide drone “Harop” during an arms showcase.
Israel has deployed similar suicide drones during deadly army raids against Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank. “We’re glad for this cooperation, it was quite supportive and quite beneficial for defense,” Azerbaijani’s ambassador to Israel, Mukhtar Mammadov told the AP, speaking generally about Israel's support for the Azerbaijani military. “We’re not hiding it.”At a crucial moment in early September — as diplomats scrambled to avert an escalation — flight tracking data shows that Azerbaijani cargo planes began to stream into Ovda, a military base in southern Israel with a 3,000-meter-long airstrip, known as the only airport in Israel that handles the export of explosives.
The AP identified at least six flights operated by Azerbaijan's Silk Way Airlines landing at Ovda airport between Sept. 1 and Sept. 17 from Baku, according to aviation-tracking website FlightRadar24.com. Azerbaijan launched its offensive two days later. During those six days, the Russian-made Ilyushin Il-76 military transport lingered on Ovda's tarmac for several hours before departing for either Baku or Ganja, the country’s second-largest city, just north of Nagorno-Karabakh. In March, an investigation by the Haaretz newspaper said it had counted 92 Azerbaijani military cargo flights to Ovda airport from 2016-2020. Sudden surges of flights coincided with upticks of fighting in Nagorno-Karabkh, it found. “During the 2020 war, we saw flights every other day and now, again, we see this intensity of flights leading up to the current conflict,” said Akopian, the Armenian ambassador. “It is clear to us what’s happening.”
Israel's defense ministry declined to comment on the flights. The Azerbaijani ambassador, Mammadov, said he was aware of the reports but declined to comment. The decision to support an autocratic government against an ethnic and religious minority has fueled a debate in Israel about the country's permissive arms export policies. Of the top 10 arms manufactures globally, only Israel and Russia lack legal restrictions on weapons exports based on human rights concerns. “If anyone can identify with (Nagorno-Karabakh) Armenians' continuing fear of ethnic cleansing it is the Jewish people," said Avidan Freedman, founder of the Israeli advocacy group Yanshoof, which seeks to stop Israeli arm sales to human rights violators. “We're not interested in becoming accomplices."

Israeli troops kill two Palestinian gunmen in West Bank
TULKARM, West Bank (Reuters)/October 5, 2023
Israeli troops killed two Palestinian gunmen during clashes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, in which five soldiers were also wounded, sources on both sides said. The two Palestinians were in a car from which shots were fired at an Israeli vehicle near the town of Tulkarm, the military said. Following a pursuit, soldiers shot both of the Palestinians in a gunfight and recovered an assault rifle from their car, it said. The Hamas Islamist militant group claimed the slain Palestinians, aged 23 and 27, as its members. Hamas and another armed faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had inflicted Israeli casualties in gun and bomb ambushes in a separate clash within Tulkarm. The army said five Israeli soldiers were wounded in that incident, as they detained a Palestinian militant. Islamic Jihad said one of its members was in Israeli custody. The West Bank, among territories where Palestinians seek statehood, has seen a surge of violence in recent months amid an almost decade-old impasse in U.S.-sponsored peacemaking efforts.

Israel is perennially swept up in religious conflict. Yet many of its citizens are secular

MEVASSERET ZION, Israel (AP)/October 5, 2023
Israel is a nation perennially swept up in religious fervor and conflict. And yet, strikingly, a large portion of its population is secular, and even its insular ultra-Orthodox community loses a steady stream of members who tire of its strict religious rules. The country is home to about 7 million Jews, almost half of the global Jewish population. But Jewish identity is a complex blend of religious and ethnonational identity; most Israeli Jews are not diligent observers of Judaism. An Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics survey published in 2021 found that among Israeli Jews over the age of 20, about 45% identified as secular or not religious, while 33% said they practiced “traditional” religious worship. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredim in Hebrew, made up 10%. For Naor Narkis and many other secular Israelis, their Jewish identity is cultural — defined by the Hebrew tongue and historical experience — rather than governed by traditional religious worship. Narkis, a Tel Aviv native, founded Enlightened Israel after last year’s parliamentary elections when ultra-Orthodox and religious ultranationalists helped bring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back into offic e. Narkis says the organization aims to champion liberal values and educate ultra-Orthodox Israelis about them, and advocates for a clear separation of religion and state, including allowing public transit on the Sabbath. “I don’t think there’s a big difference between a secular Jew living in Tel Aviv and a person living in New York whose parents are Christian but isn’t religious,” Narkis said. “What defines us is our language, and our heritage, but doesn’t involve faith in a god.” He cited Ahad Ha’Am, a pioneer of modern Hebrew literature in the late 19th century, who depicted Jewish identity as a cultural heritage rather than religion. Narkis' group gives out free smartphones to Haredim who want them — since January, it's distributed 3,000 smartphones. The ultra-Orthodox adhere to a strict interpretation of Jewish law and a code of conduct that governs everything from what to eat to which socks to wear. The community often eschews smartphones and the internet, which they see as a gateway to inappropriate ideas. Yet each year, around 4,000 people in Israel — one of every seven students graduating from the Haredi education system — leave the ultra-Orthodox community, according to Out for Change, an organization that helps former Haredi Israelis integrate into society and the workforce. That figure is growing each year, even as the ultra-Orthodox birthrate is 6.5 children per woman. Among those who chose to leave is Tamar Shabtai. For the first two decades of her life, she followed the rules. She kept the Sabbath, ate kosher food and dressed strictly modest, as her ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem expected. But in the past eight years, Shabtai, 29, has left that behind. Although she only lives three miles from her ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, she likened the experience of leaving the community to “immigrating to another country.” “Community life is really the most important element there,” Shabtai said of the ultra-Orthodox world. “Anyone who doesn’t fit this framework won’t do well really. Either one feels all the time that they don’t belong and has to fight for their place. Or one chooses to leave — and then there are other prices for leaving the familiar community and starting all over again.”Those who exit the ultra-Orthodox community face major challenges. Families and communities often shun those who chart a different course. Many Haredi schools don’t teach subjects such as English or mathematics, making joining the modern workforce a challenge. Haredi men and women who qualified for government subsidized training programs for tech jobs suddenly find themselves ineligible once they leave the community. Jerusalem is about a third ultra-Orthodox. Dotted around downtown are several groups that offer social networking events for ex-Haredim. Out for Change provides that, as well as resources, classes, workshops and counseling to help people navigate their brave new world. “Until now the state looked at them from the Haredi narrative — dropouts, weaklings — and that even if we try to help them, it’s through the welfare prism,” said Nadav Rosenblatt, Out for Change’s director. “They could have stayed Haredim but chose to leave. They come with motivation, they have aspirations to integrate in the workforce and higher education.”Shabtai's departure was a gradual process. It began when she started post-secondary education outside the ultra-Orthodox community, where she encountered Israelis of many varieties. She is the sixth of eight siblings; two others are no longer ultra-Orthodox. Shabtai said she lost childhood friendships when she chose to leave, and that decision has strained relations with her parents. Visiting her parents’ home in pants, rather than a long skirt as is customary among Orthodox women, does not bother them, she said, “but Shabbat is something that is painful to them.” “If I come it’s only once in a while, and then I go home with a car — I park it outside the neighborhood,” she said. “It hurts, both for them and for me.”Some ex-Haredim maintain religious lifestyles outside the strictures of the community, some preserve some traditional practices common among many Israeli Jews, while others adopt a secular outlook. Among the handfuls of former Haredi Jews, most still maintain some kind of religious lifestyle, according to an Out for Change poll. Only 21% of those surveyed identified as secular; 45% said they are still religiously observant — just not ultra-Orthodox. “The reasons for leaving, contrary to what many people think, are in most cases social and not theological,” said Gilad Malach, a researcher focusing on the ultra-Orthodox community at the Israel Democracy Institute. Many of those giving up Haredi life cite social pressure that doesn’t allow individual expression, he said. On the inside of Shabtai’s right wrist she has a small tattoo with the Hebrew words for “I don’t know.” Not only are tattoos taboo according to Jewish custom, but the uncertainty contained in that phrase would be discouraged as well.
“What isn’t there to know?" she said. “There is God, there are rules, there’s nothing not to know.”

Russia launches more drone attacks as Zelensky attends European forum
Associated Press/October 5, 2023
Russia targeted Ukraine with drones in another massive attack early Thursday as President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Spain to rally support from Western allies at a summit of some 50 European leaders. Ukraine's air force said that the country's air defenses intercepted 24 out of 29 Iranian-made drones that Russia launched at the southern Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kirovohrad regions. Andriy Raykovych, the head of the Kirovohrad regional administration, said that an infrastructure facility in the region was struck and emergency services were deployed to put out a fire. He said there were no casualties. The attack came as Zelensky arrived in Granada in southern Spain to attend a summit of the European Political Community, which was formed in the wake of Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "The key for us, especially before winter, is to strengthen air defense, and there is already a basis for new agreements with partners," he said in a statement posted on his Telegram channel. Last winter, Russia targeted Ukraine's energy system and other vital infrastructure in a steady barrage of missile and drone attacks, triggering continuous power outages across the country. Ukraine's power system has shown a high degree of resilience and flexibility, helping alleviate the damage, but there have been concerns that Russia will again ramp up its strikes on power facilities as winter draws nearer. Zelensky noted the Granada summit will also focus on "joint work for global food security and protection of freedom of navigation" in the Black Sea, where the Russian military has targeted Ukrainian ports after Moscow's withdrawal from a United Nations-sponsored grain deal designed to ensure safe grain exports from the invaded country's ports.
The U.K. Foreign office cited intelligence suggesting that Russia may lay sea mines in the approach to Ukrainian ports to target civilian shipping and blame it on Ukraine. "Russia almost certainly wants to avoid openly sinking civilian ships, instead falsely laying blame on Ukraine for any attacks against civilian vessels in the Black Sea," it said, adding that the U.K. was working with Ukraine to help improve the safety of shipping. In other Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past day, two civilians were killed in the shelling of the southern city of Kherson and another one died after a Russian strike on the city of Krasnohorivka in the eastern Donetsk region. At least eight people were wounded by the Russian shelling, according to Ukraine's presidential office. A Russian strike on a hospital in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region ravaged the building and injured two medical workers, according to the regional administration chief, Oleksandr Prokudin. Ukraine, in its turn, has struck back at Russia with regular drone attacks across the border. Roman Starovoit, the governor of Russia's Kursk region that borders Ukraine, said Ukrainian drones attacked infrastructure facilities in several areas, resulting in power cuts. Starovoit also said that Ukrainian forces fired artillery at the border town of Rylsk, injuring a local resident and damaging several houses.

Russia kills 49 in attack in northeast Ukraine, Ukrainian officials say
Reuters/October 05, 2023
KYIV: A Russian attack killed at least 49 people, including a six-year-old boy, as they gathered in a cafe for a memorial service in a village in northeastern Ukraine on Thursday, the country's interior minister said. A cafe and a shop were struck early in the afternoon in the village of Hroza in the Kharkiv region, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said, adding that many civilians had been there at the time. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that residents of the small village of about 330 people had been holding a memorial service in the cafe that was hit. "From every family, from every household, there were people present at this commemoration. This is a terrible tragedy," Klymenko told Ukrainian television. Seven people were also in hospital after the attack, which appeared to be the most devastating Russian strike on a residential area in weeks. Officials posted footage of rescue workers clambering through smoldering rubble. Some photos showed bodies lying alongside slabs of concrete and twisted metal, and others showed rescue workers carrying away covered bodies. Klymenko said it was not immediately clear whether Russian forces, who invaded Ukraine 19 months ago, had shelled the village or had fired a missile. He said the strike was clearly very targeted and that Ukrainian security services had launched an investigation into the matter. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was attending a summit with European leaders in Spain, said that "the Russian terror should be stopped". "Now we are talking with European leaders, in particular, about strengthening our air defence, about strengthening our soldiers, about giving our country protection from terror," he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Russia has frequently carried out air strikes since the start of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive in the south and east that it says is gradually making progress. Moscow did not immediately comment on the events in Hroza. Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians, many have been killed in attacks that have hit residential areas as well as energy, defence, port, grain and other facilities.

Putin will bankrupt Russia before he admits defeat in Ukraine
Robert Clark/The Telegraph/October 5, 2023
While Ukrainian breakthroughs in the Russian lines are causing turmoil in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin is turning his attention to the economic war at home. As high rates of attrition continue to destroy men and equipment, the Russian government has said that it intends to cobble together a staggering £90 billion for the defence budget next year – a threefold increase on 2021. With Western sanctions biting deep into the Russian economy, Putin is short on options for raising the money. Increased taxes at home and one-off levies on foreign companies still foolish enough to be doing business in Russia are expected to come into force shortly. These measures are likely to include a threefold tax hike on alcohol and tobacco alongside rising prices for utilities, and £6.5 billion worth of “social contributions” that were offset for many Russian companies from 2022. Western companies, meanwhile, will contribute around £1 billion in taxes from their Russian operations. This figure is likely to fall as they come under increasing pressure to leave; those that remain will face a “voluntary donation” of 15 per cent of the value of their business interests in the country. It is an indicator of serious stress in its finances that Moscow is resorting to such desperate measures. Obtaining accurate, verifiable data on the Russian economy has proved extremely challenging for understandable reasons; official data is laced with optimistic assertions and outright deceit, inflating official numbers to imply all is well. There is no hiding the fact that Putin is running short of funds, however, or that his illegal war in Ukraine is beginning to seriously weaken his government. While Xi Jinping’s China has provided assistance in keeping Russia on its feet, even a totally co-opted Moscow can only rely on Beijing’s largesse for so long. That “friendship without limits” is now beginning to endure serious stress-testing as Putin’s war grinds on without success, and his demands for funds to replace mounting losses continue. It is indicative of the diminishing range of options available to Putin that he is now beginning to turn the screws on his own people. The war has moved a long way since the first tanks rolled south from Belarus and west from Rostock. What was supposed to be a quick and easy victory has turned into a war of attrition. Now, as its people hunker down for a long winter, Moscow is having the war brought directly to it as Ukraine steps up its cross-border attacks on Russian military infrastructure and population centres. The domestic mood is unlikely to be helped by a series of punitive tax-rises aimed at funding a military that has dramatically underperformed on the battlefield. Even if the Kremlin does manage to upscale its defence budget next year, the Russian defence industry is in no fit state to rapidly increase production at the scale needed to launch Moscow’s own counter-offensive next year, as too many vital resources are virtually unattainable to a blacklisted Moscow. Putin, meanwhile, has shown that he is quite happy to shatter his country – devastating its population, its armed forces, and bankrupting its economy – in pursuit of a victory that will not come. He must know that at some point, the population will turn on him.

Russian strike on cafe kills 49 people as Ukraine's president urges stronger Western support

KYIV, Ukraine (AP)/October 5, 2023
At least 49 civilians were killed Thursday in a Russian rocket strike on a village store in eastern Ukraine, one of the deadliest attacks in recent months that came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended a summit of around 50 European leaders in Spain to drum up support from the country's allies. Zelenskyy denounced the attack on the store and cafe in the village of Hroza as a “demonstrably brutal Russian crime” and “a completely deliberate act of terrorism.”He urged Western allies to help strengthen Ukraine's air defenses, saying that “Russian terror must be stopped.”
“Russia needs this and similar terrorist attacks for only one thing: to make its genocidal aggression the new norm for the whole world,” he said. “Now we are talking with European leaders, in particular, about strengthening our air defense, strengthening our soldiers, giving our country protection from terror. And we will respond to the terrorists.”Presidential chief of staff Andrii Yermak and Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said a 6-year-old boy was among the dead, adding that six other people were wounded. The attack came as Zelenskyy was in in Granada in southern Spain to attend a summit of the European Political Community, which was formed in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “The key for us, especially before winter, is to strengthen air defense, and there is already a basis for new agreements with partners,” he said in a statement posted on his Telegram channel. Last winter, Russia targeted Ukraine's energy system and other vital infrastructure in a steady barrage of missile and drone attacks, triggering continuous power outages across the country. Ukraine's power system has shown a high degree of resilience and flexibility, helping alleviate the damage, but there have been concerns that Russia will again ramp up its strikes on power facilities as winter draws nearer. Zelenskyy noted the Granada summit will also focus on “joint work for global food security and protection of freedom of navigation” in the Black Sea, where the Russian military has targeted Ukrainian ports after Moscow's withdrawal from a U.N.-sponsored grain deal designed to ensure safe grain exports from the invaded country’s ports. The U.K. Foreign Office cited intelligence suggesting that Russia may lay sea mines in the approach to Ukrainian ports to target civilian shipping and blame it on Ukraine.
“Russia almost certainly wants to avoid openly sinking civilian ships, instead falsely laying blame on Ukraine for any attacks against civilian vessels in the Black Sea,” it said, adding that the U.K. was working with Ukraine to help improve the safety of shipping.
Speaking in Granada, Zelenskyy emphasized the need to preserve the European unity in the face of Russian disinformation and to remain strong amid what he described as a “political storm” in the United States. Asked if he was worried that support for Ukraine could falter in the U.S. Congress, the Ukrainian president stressed that his visit to Washington last month made him confident of strong backing by both the Biden administration and Congress. Zelenskyy called for “additional air defense system for Ukraine, additional artillery and shells, additional long-range missiles and drones for our soldiers, as well as additional formats of support and security guarantees for nations threatened by Russia” to help protect Europe from potential aggression by Moscow. Earlier Thursday, Russia targeted Ukraine's southern regions with drones. Ukraine’s air force said that the country’s air defenses intercepted 24 out of 29 Iranian-made drones that Russia launched at the Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kirovohrad regions. Andriy Raykovych, head of the Kirovohrad regional administration, said that an infrastructure facility in the region was struck and emergency services were deployed to extinguish a fire. He said there were no casualties. In other Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past day, two civilians were killed in shelling of the southern city of Kherson and another one died after a Russian strike on the city of Krasnohorivka in the eastern Donetsk region. At least eight people were wounded by Russian shelling, according to Ukraine's presidential office. A Russian strike on a hospital in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region ravaged the building and wounded two medical workers, according to the regional administration chief, Oleksandr Prokudin. Ukraine, in turn, has struck back at Russia with regular drone attacks across the border. Roman Starovoit, the governor of Russia's Kursk region that borders Ukraine, said that Ukrainian drones attacked infrastructure facilities in several areas, resulting in power cuts. Starovoit also said that Ukrainian forces fired artillery at the border town of Rylsk, wounding a local resident and damaging several houses.

Ukraine hit Russia's most treasured air-defense system on its own soil, reports say

Sophia Ankel/Business Insider/October 5, 2023
Ukraine struck one of Russia's most treasured air-defense systems on Wednesday, reports said. Drones hit an S-400 Triumph inside near Belgorod, Russia, an intelligence source told the Kyiv Post. It would be the first time Ukrainian forces hit an S-400 system in Russia's own territory. Ukraine damaged one of Russia's most treasured air-defense system in a drone attack, according to multiple reports. Using multiple strike drones, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) damaged a Russian S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft system on Wednesday, The Kyiv Post reported on Wednesday, citing an intelligence source. The SBU source did not elaborate on the extent of damage done, though Reuters reported that the system's radar was affected. The attack occurred at night time inside mainland Russia, near the southwestern city of Belgorod, according to Ukrinform and Reuters. While Ukraine has previously destroyed a similar system in occupied Crimea, this would be the first time it struck an S-400 system in mainland Russia. Russia's Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday that it had downed 31 drones launched over the regions of Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk. However, it did not say whether an S-400 system was damaged. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. The reports come after Ukraine said that another such system was destroyed on September 14 in Yevpatoriya, a coastal city in the west of occupied Crimea that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The destruction was the result of a joint operation by the SBU and the Ukrainian Navy. Russia's S-400 mobile long-range surface-to-air system that includes truck-mounted radars, a mobile command post, and multiple missile launch platforms. It is designed to shoot down aircraft and missiles at long ranges and high altitudes. Both the BBC and Bloomberg cited Ukrainian sources suggesting the destroyed system in Crimea was worth as much as $1.2 billion, but other estimates are closer to $500 million.The SBU source told the Kyiv Post that given this is the second S-400 struck by Ukraine in the last month, "[we] advise the Russians to think about a new name for this complex," a dig at its "triumph" moniker.

Russian Intelligence Investigating Claims of Plot to ‘Remove’ Putin: Report

Dan Ladden-Hall/The Daily Beast./October 5, 2023
Authorities in Russia are looking into an alleged plot to “remove” President Vladimir Putin, according to a report, after receiving a tip about a suspicious conversation in a karaoke bar. According to the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, Russian security services have spent several days looking for an employee of an unspecified law enforcement agency who was accused of being involved. A New Threat of War in Europe Has Putin’s Fingerprints All Over It. Citing an anonymous source, the Telegram account claims Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs was alerted to a “secret conspiracy against the head of state” by a specialist in the presidential administrative directorate. The specialist had reportedly received an early morning call from a 37-year-old man named Mikhail Yurchenko, who told them “with alarm” about a concerning conversation he had in a karaoke club named Honey in the town of Chekhov, around 40 miles south of Moscow. At the club, Yurchenko reportedly had a long conversation “about the war and future life in Russia” with another man in the club. “At some point, according to Yurchenko, the interlocutor showed him a red service ID and stated that he had a task ‘to remove Vladimir Putin,’” VChK-OGPU reports.Yurchenko allegedly did not see the details on the man’s ID and was unable to remember his name. It is worth noting that counterfeit service ID cards are available to purchase in the Russian capital, though VChK-OGPU also notes that this particular karaoke bar is known to be popular with employees of various agencies. After being “haunted” by what he’d heard, Yurchenko decided to report the conversation. As a result of his tip, “operatives went to study the situation” at the karaoke club, according to the account. Putin is reported to be extremely paranoid about his safety, which has been more imperiled since his invasion of Ukraine last year. In May, a senior Ukrainian intelligence commander openly discussed his spies being used to try to kill Putin. The startling admission came just weeks after Moscow described a drone attack on the Kremlin as an “assassination attempt on the president of Russia” and a planned “terrorist attack.”A month earlier, a drone packed with explosives crashed in a village close to an industrial park outside of Moscow where, on the same day, Putin was rumored to have planned a visit. It’s not clear if it was a failed assassination plot as claimed by a Ukrainian activist, who said that Kyiv’s intelligence services had received intelligence about Putin’s visit in the week before the drone fell.

Putin's plan for winning the war in Ukraine could be starting to become reality
Tom Porter/Business Insider/October 5, 2023
As the right wing of the GOP tipped Congress into chaos over its opposition to committing more money to Ukraine, the Kremlin took a victory lap. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said the turmoil was a sign of things to come — that Western support for Ukraine will begin to collapse.
Analysts have long deduced that this is a crucial part of President Vladimir Putin's plan: to stay in the fight so long that the West gets tired of helping Ukraine. "Fatigue over this conflict — fatigue from the completely absurd sponsorship of the Kyiv regime — will grow in various countries, including the US," predicted Peskov. The US congressional dispute centers on a new multi-billion dollar aid package to Ukraine, the latest in a series of massive cash and weapons packages that have proven vital to Ukraine in its battle against Russia's invasion.
The isolationist far-right faction of the House GOP has opposed the package, even forcing out former House speaker Kevin McCarthy over the issue. The Pentagon has said it has billions of pre-approved aid still to give — but that will at some point run out. Meanwhile, the US is not the only nation showing Ukraine fatigue. Last week, a far-right party won the election in Slovakia after running on a pledge to end support for Ukraine, with which it shares a land border. In Germany, the far-right AfD party, whose leaders have long nurtured ties with Russia and opposed Ukraine aid, is surging in the polls.
Even if European support holds firm, The Wall Street Journal this week reported that Ukraine's European allies would struggle to make up any shortfall from US aid drying up. Several news stories this week conveyed variations on a single theme: Western allies saying they have already given most of what they are prepared to give. According to analysts, Putin has long bet on Western support for Ukraine weakening, as high fuel prices and inflation driven by the war continue to dent household budgets. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has projected that the conflict could last until 2025, the year after the US presidential election. Russia seems committed for the long haul. According to US intelligence officials cited in The New York Times this week, Putin is doing his best to amplify anti-Ukraine sentiment, gearing up a widespread disinformation campaign aimed at the US. George Beebe, former director of the CIA's Russia analysis unit, in an article for the Quincy Institute, described what could come next. US and European reluctance could feed each other, he said, in turn eroding morale in Ukraine and making it even harder to support its fight. "The combination could produce a tipping point at which the gradual erosion of Western support for Ukraine spills into an abrupt reduction or collapse," he wrote. Other analysts believe the Kremlin's victory lap may be premature. The majority of Americans, around six in ten, still back aid to Ukraine, though support is falling among Republicans, according to a new poll by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. Belgian think tank Bruegel in June found that popular support for Ukraine in the EU was holding firm, despite a slight dip. "Support for Ukraine has remained strong, suggesting that the public understands fully the wider implications for European security of the outcome of the war," said its researchers.But in a volatile and unpredictable geopolitical climate, it noted that Western leaders face tough challenges in maintaining the support that keeps Ukraine in the fight.

Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 05-06/2023
A New Threat of War in Europe Has Putin’s Fingerprints All Over It
Shannon Vavra/ The Daily Beast./October 5, 2023
The United States and NATO breathed a sigh of relief this week when the Serbian government said it would be pulling back troops after ordering a swift military buildup along its border with Kosovo. The National Security Council had referred to the buildup as “a very destabilizing development”—and news of the apparent de-escalation was “welcome,” the U.S. State Department said.
But according to officials and experts in Kosovo who spoke with The Daily Beast, only a symptom of the problem is gone. Beneath the surface, Serbian-Kosovar tensions threaten to bubble over still, with Russia stoking them behind the scenes through a vast and entrenched influence operation in Serbia.
Russian propaganda runs rampant in Serbia, spreading falsehoods and pro-Kremlin lines on territorial ambition, violence, the war in Ukraine, and NATO and the West. The sweeping Russian disinformation and propaganda operation is aimed at stoking violence and is partly aimed at propping up Serbia’s efforts to control Kosovo, Kosovo’s ambassador to the United States, Ilir Dugolli, told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview.
“We’ve seen different attempts from Russia… and echoed of course in Serbia, about instigating violence, about portraying this… dire situation of Serbs in the northern parts of Kosovo in particular and also in other areas… to incite violent attacks and overall instability,” Dugolli told The Daily Beast.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, after separatist ethnic Albanians fought against Serbian rule in the late 1990s, prompting a crackdown from Belgrade. A NATO bombing campaign in 1999 eventually forced Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo.
Putin’s Favorite Authoritarians in Hungary, Serbia, and France Had a Great Week
But Serbia and Russia, along with a handful of countries, have not recognized Kosovo’s independence. Serbia’s current president has vowed to never recognize Kosovo’s independence, and Russia has long harbored concerns about Kosovo, noting for years that it will categorically deny Kosovo’s independence.
In recent days, those long-standing tensions have spiraled into violence.
The alarming buildup at Serbia’s border with Kosovo came in quick succession after Serb gunmen stormed a village in northern Kosovo in armed vehicles, leading to a shootout, with one police officer and several gunmen killed late last month. Kosovo accused Serbia of being behind the attack, claiming Serbia sought to destabilize Kosovo.
Serbia boasts some ties with the West—it was identified as a candidate for the European Union in 2012. But Russia’s strong influence, combined with its control over the media and the information environment in Serbia, helps to spread narratives that further entrench pro-Russia and anti-Western sentiments that keep Belgrade in Russia’s orbit.
Many news outlets in Serbia are owned by oligarchs with links to Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who maintains close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2015, Russia established a hub for Russian state news agency Sputnik. Currently, Russia is in the process of deepening its channels for disinformation in Serbia: Russia’s state-funded RT said last year it would establish a local language version in Serbia, to be headed by the daughter of the editor of Sputnik.
Oozing Disinformation
The Russian narratives that have swept Serbia in recent years include anti-West and anti-NATO narratives that seek to solidify Serbian public opinion that Kosovo is not independent.
In Serbia, the focus is on reminding Serbs about NATO’s bombing campaign, and blaming the West for essentially pulling Kosovo away from Serbia, said Ruslan Stefanov, co-director and co-author of the Kremlin Playbook, a joint project of the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“In the case of Serbia, the No. 1 narrative of course is, ‘Don’t forget NATO… it helped Kosovo secede. It is a part of your country,’” Stefanov told The Daily Beast. “‘This is part of NATO’s expanded campaign.’”
In recent months, some of the most popular narratives on Russian and Serbian media in the country involve Kosovo, Goran Georgiev, an analyst with CSD, said.
“The topic of Kosovo is the main topic for Sputnik and RT and also for local media, the majority of which are pro-Russian,” Georgiev told The Daily Beast.
According to data from Similarweb CSD shared with The Daily Beast, the most popular sites by traffic in Serbia are Kurir.rs—boasting 60.7 million visits in August—followed by Blic.rs, Novosti.rs, sd.rs, and RTS.rs, many of which spread pro-Russia lines. On Facebook, Sputnik and RT have garnered the most interactions in the last 30 days, according to data from CrowdTangle.
The Serbian media space is filled with mischaracterization of facts and propaganda, with Alo and Kurir.rs accounting for over half of the news spreading disinformation, according to a watchdog report from CRTA, the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability. Večernje novosti and Informer, two dailies, are the next most egregious offenders, according to the analysis.
Sputnik in Serbia’s homepage has been brazen about Kosovo in recent days. One headline lamented that “The West’s action has never been more morbid: They do not know that the day of mourning for the Serbs lasts until freedom comes to Kosovo,” echoing a longstanding belief in Serbia that Kosovo is under a kind of “occupation.”
The piece claims the deadly attack in Kosovo represents a hatred in Kosovo towards Serbs’ lives. “Evil reigns in Kosovo,” the piece states.
In another piece, Sputnik trumped up comments from the president of the National Assembly of Serbia, Vladimir Orlić, blaming Kosovo for the soaring tensions. He “pointed out that the situation is extremely difficult” with Kosovo right now, the story noted, adding “it is solely the fault of Aljbin Kurti,” the prime minister of Kosovo.
The homepage of Kurir.rs has also paid homage to Serbia’s territorial ambition in Kosovo this week. On Wednesday, one piece focused on denying Kosovo’s independence, while noting optimism about Serbia’s effort to work with the likes of Russia and China on Kosovo and “defending” Serbia’s territory.
More broadly, narratives about territorial ambition in Serbia have closely followed Russian perspectives on violence and war. In the case of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Russian media and Serbian media have focused on spreading fake information about the war in Ukraine. Headlines such as “Ukraine started a war against Russia,” or “Ukrainian troops shelled the maternity hospital” cropped up in Serbia shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, according to Vox Ukraine and the Centre for International Crisis and Conflict Studies (CECRI).
The Most Sincere Form of Flattery
The military buildup and violent incidents in recent days have raised questions about whether further escalation in the Balkans is on the horizon, and who is to blame.
Concern has grown in Kosovo that Russian influence has played a part. Serbia is likely taking inspiration from Russia’s effort to seize Ukraine following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Kosovo’s ambassador to the United States said.
“With the war in Ukraine” there was “the realization of their aspirations against my country… would kind of be easier,” Dugolli told The Daily Beast.
Serbia “mimics Russia, and tries to mimic Russia in their hegemonic aspirations by threatening the existence of neighboring countries,” Dugolli added. “They have this sort of hegemonic mindset.”
Belgrade has long been conducting military buildups at its border with Kosovo. Last year, Serbia sent troops to the border. In 2021, too, Serbia sent warplanes.
Russia’s ambassador cheered on the escalation, Kosovo claimed at the UN. Russia’s ambassador had visited a Serbian garrison at the time while it was in a state of increased combat readiness.
From Kosovo’s perspective, the longstanding aim is to create an environment where escalation is so commonplace that when an eventual territorial grab in Kosovo comes, it will look like the status quo.
“What they’ve been doing for years now is… they’ve raised the army to the highest levels several times, they’ve amassed their army at the border,” Ambassador Dugolli said. “This is one part of their plan to try to normalize threat of force, to escalate.”
In parallel efforts, disinformation on the topic has festered in Serbia. In 2020, Twitter took down a network of thousands of trolls that promoted Serbia’s ruling party and applauded its policies on Kosovo.
One of the troll army’s tweets with the most engagement noted that: “Kosovo is not a state but is part of Serbia and no compromise can be found,” according to a Stanford analysis of Twitter’s release. (Twitter and X have deleted the post about the network.)
Russian outlets in Serbia through the years have promoted stories about Kosovo being at the heart of Serbian history to promote the push to take it back. And on the flip side, media outlets close to the Serbian government have run disinformation campaigns on Kosovo in attempts to make it look like Kosovo’s westward lean was in jeopardy.
While the status of Serbia-Kosovo tensions is grave now, Dugolli said he fears the worst is yet to come.
Not Now, Europe. Second War Threatens to Explode
They are “really looking for that good moment, where they would try to destabilize entirely, try to have territorial gains,” Dugolli added. “They want to have an incursion.”
For Putin, a Serbian-Kosovar conflict may serve as a gift as his war flags in Ukraine. A flashpoint between Serbia and Kosovo could distract NATO, which maintains a peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
Ensnaring the region could also serve a larger Russian goal of keeping Serbia and Kosovo at loggerheads to help Russia project power and control in the region.
“Looking at the Kremlin playbook… I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually caused by some desperation or sort of somebody somewhere along the line of chain of command saying, ‘Hey how about we cheer up our dear leader at some point and do something?’” Stefanov said.
Dugolli said the faltering war was likely a trigger for Serbia to take action.
“The fact that the war hasn’t gone as Russia was hoping and the leadership in Serbia were hoping as well, maybe that created an initiative… they’re trying to reposition themselves,” Dugolli said. “Russia would benefit from opening up another front.”
Russia’s interest in stirring tension between Serbia and Kosovo is rooted in broader territorial ambition as well, according to Kosovo’s president, Vjosa Osmani.
Osmani called the recent flashpoint a “Crimea-style annexation” attempt in an interview on CNN, in a reference to the Ukrainian peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
The president added she harbors concerns that Putin is pulling strings behind the scenes. The incident shows Serbia is working “to allow Putin to open a new front in the West, in the western Balkans,” Osmani said.
Russia has had fertile ground in Serbia to spread the Kremlin line for years—but Belgrade has taken on a particularly unshakeable role in channeling Russian influence in recent months. Just in the last year, the European Union banned Russian-controlled media operating in their countries since Russia invaded Ukraine. But Belgrade has not shut off the spout of Russian propaganda, allowing Serbia to serve as a key foothold for Russian influence in the region. “Serbia has allowed the free rein of Russian propaganda,” Stefanov said, leading to a cycle of amplification among politicians, the public, and Serbian media outlets citing Russian outlets. “These same lines are parroted by major political parties… which of course amplifies that.”
The Serbian media landscape’s reach is not just local. While a majority of the traffic to Kurir.rs in August came from Serbia, for instance, over 20 percent of traffic also came from Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Croatia, CSD’s Georgiev noted.
“The Serbian language is a gateway to informational influence in former Yugoslavia for Serbian political actors, as well as the Kremlin,” Georgiev said.
Heavy lifting for Russian influence operations in Serbia is not always necessary.
At times, the line between where Russian disinformation and Serbian disinformation end and where organic sentiment begins can be difficult to discern. In Serbia, the disinformation space is characterized by people looking for information that reinforces their deeply ingrained beliefs about the West and Kosovo they have held for years.
On Ukraine, only 12 percent of Serbs polled said that they believed it was necessary for Russia to withdraw in order to achieve peace, echoing a classic stance from Moscow, according to a poll conducted by Datapraxis and YouGov in coordination with the Open Society Foundations last year. As many as 63 percent of Serbs polled held the West responsible for the war in Ukraine, not Russia.
The Serb public buys into opposition to Kosovo’s independence as well: 52 percent of Serbs believe Serbia should not recognize Kosovo.
“There is a lot of authentic, natural behavior mixed in,” Georgiev said.
Through the years, Russia has made a point in Serbia to execute a classic influence operation that works to juice existing sentiments and tension.
“In the case of Serbia, when you have a population that has been so heavily exposed and really bombarded with ultra-nationalistic narratives, authoritarian narratives, highly emotional narratives from the bombing to today, society adopts that whole mentality,” Georgiev said. “This information breathes for itself.”

The International Day of Persecuting Palestinian Journalists

Bassam Tawil/Gatestone Institute./October 05/2023
The Palestinian Authority's crackdown on journalists and political activists is part of an ongoing effort to silence and intimidate its critics.
Palestinian leaders have repeatedly shown that they reject any form of criticism directed against them. The only criticism they accept is that which is directed against Israel. Palestinian leaders are not different than most of the Arab heads of state whose governments control the media, which serves as a mouthpiece for the Arab regimes.
The latest victim of the Palestinian Authority crackdown is Palestinian journalist Tariq al-Sarkaji, a resident of the West Bank city of Nablus.
In recent weeks, several other journalists were also arrested. They include Sami al-Sa'i, Mohammed Shawasha, Jarrah Khalaf, Hatem Hamdan, Akeel Awawdeh, Ahmed al-Bitawi, and Muath Washha.
The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms condemned the arrest of freelance journalist Jarrah Khalaf by the Palestinian Military Intelligence Service on September 4. The group said that Khalaf, 23, was summoned for an interview at the Military Intelligence headquarters in the city of Jenin. The next day, he was brought before the Jenin Prosecution Office and charged with "possession of weapons." This is a charge that the Palestinian Authority often uses to justify the arrest of journalists and political activists.
It is a sad truth that, three decades after the inception of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians still do not have a free and independent media.
An even sadder truth is that most international human rights organizations care nothing about the abuse perpetrated against Palestinian journalists by their own leaders.
The crackdown by the Palestinian Authority (PA) on journalists and political activists is part of an ongoing effort to silence and intimidate its critics. Pictured: Plain-clothed PA security officers beat a man in Ramallah on June 26, 2021, during a demonstration to protest the death of human rights and political activist Nizar Banat while in the custody of PA security forces. (Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
September 26 marked the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Journalists. As in previous years, anti-Israel organizations used the occasion to make false and libelous accusations against Israel, including the lie that Israelis intentionally target Palestinian journalists.
Israel, needless to say, does not target any journalist. Journalists who choose to cover a violent conflict can often find themselves caught in a crossfire. If journalists are killed or injured, that is not because the Israeli army ordered its soldiers to target them. It is because the journalists were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every journalist who steps into a war zone is aware of the risks involved.
Notably, while the anti-Israel groups continue to denounce Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has stepped up its crackdown on Palestinian journalists in the West Bank.
The same groups that have long been condemning Israel ignore the PA's assault on public freedoms, including against its own media, and the arrest and harassment of Palestinian journalists. These anti-Israel groups do not care about the wellbeing and safety of Palestinian journalists. What they care about is trashing Israel.
By ignoring the suffering of Palestinian journalists at the hands of their own leaders, the international community is allowing the Palestinian Authority to pursue its efforts to arrest and intimidate Palestinian journalists, as well as teachers, human rights activists, businessmen and university students. The PA knows that it can arrest any journalist it wants without being held accountable by anyone.
The Palestinian Authority's crackdown on journalists and political activists is part of an ongoing effort to silence and intimidate its critics.
Palestinian leaders have repeatedly shown that they reject any form of criticism directed against them. The only criticism they accept is that which is directed against Israel. Palestinian leaders are not different than most of the Arab heads of state whose governments control the media, which serves as a mouthpiece for the Arab regimes.
The Palestinian Authority also knows that it can send its officers to kill anyone who dares to speak out against financial corruption or abuse of power without being held accountable by the international community. This is what happened with Nizar Banat, a prominent political and human rights activist, who was arrested and beaten to death by Palestinian security officers in June 2021.
Banat was a well-known critic of the PA. Although two years have passed since his brutal killing, none of the officers involved in the incident has been prosecuted. According to Amnesty International's Middle East regional director Heba Morayef:
"Two years ago, Nizar Banat was arrested and beaten to death while being held in the custody of the Palestinian security forces. Since that time the authorities have failed to hold to account those responsible for his arrest and assault.
"The repeated, unjustified delays, the failure to investigate senior officers, and the ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against Nizar Banat's family members all point to an orchestrated ploy by the Palestinian authorities to cover up the crime and evade accountability."
The latest victim of the Palestinian Authority crackdown is Palestinian journalist Tariq al-Sarkaji, a resident of the West Bank city of Nablus.
Ironically, al-Sarkaji's arrest coincided with the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Journalists. The Palestinian Authority did not give any reason as to why al-Sarkaji was arrested. On September 27, one day after the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Journalists, a PA court remanded his detention by 15 days.
The group Palestinian Lawyers for Justice condemned the arrest of al-Sarkaji as "illegal and arbitrary" and called for his unconditional release and an end to the persecution of journalists and clampdown on media freedoms in the West Bank. The group said that the continued detention of al-Sarkaji aims to obstruct the work of journalists and is a violation of the freedom of the press.
Al-Sarkaji is not the only Palestinian journalist to be arrested by the Palestinian security forces. In recent weeks, several other journalists were also arrested. They include Sami al-Sa'i, Mohammed Shawasha, Jarrah Khalaf, Hatem Hamdan, Akeel Awawdeh, Ahmed al-Bitawi, and Muath Washha.
The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) condemned the arrest of freelance journalist Jarrah Khalaf by the Palestinian Military Intelligence Service on September 4. The group said that Khalaf, 23, was summoned for an interview at the Military Intelligence headquarters in the city of Jenin. The next day, he was brought before the Jenin Prosecution Office and charged with "possession of weapons." This is a charge that the Palestinian Authority often uses to justify the arrest of journalists and political activists. MADA said it views with extreme gravity the arrest of the journalist and called for his immediate and unconditional release. It called for an end to the crackdown on journalists, which has significantly increased recently. The group also urged human rights institutions to assume their responsibilities towards the "political detention of Palestinian journalists by the Palestinian Authority."
"The phenomenon of arresting journalists at the hands of the Palestinian security services represents a dangerous policy," the Palestinian Journalists' Forum said in a statement on March 15, 2023. The forum called on the PA to "stop its violations against male and female journalists and to release them immediately."
It is a sad truth that, three decades after the inception of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians still do not have a free and independent media.
It is another sad truth that Palestinian journalists are being arrested and intimidated by PA security forces for the crime of carrying out their duties. Palestinians who want to practice real journalism are forced to seek work with Israeli and foreign media, where they enjoy far more freedom than in their own media outlets.
An even sadder truth is that most international human rights organizations care nothing about the abuse perpetrated against Palestinian journalists by their own leaders.
*Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East.
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Syria’s Druze Have Run Out of Patience With Assad

Makram Rabah/New Lines Magazine/October 05/2023
While recent protests in Sweida seem like a radical break, they are part of a community's long tradition of resisting oppression.
n mid-August, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime announced the doubling of public sector salaries and the lifting of subsidies, including its last remaining subsidy on gasoline. The measures drove up prices, added to Syria’s hyperinflation and made life yet harder for the 90% of the country living below the poverty line. The regime’s decision was expected to invoke nationwide protests, which would eventually peter out, leaving the disgruntled masses with the choice of returning to their homes or facing repression.
Yet the regime’s wishful thinking did not factor in that the lifting of subsidies left public servants totally exposed, including those in the armed forces and security agencies, with a minimum monthly pay that would buy them only seven shawarma sandwiches, with nothing left for rent, transportation or any other worldly needs. As a consequence, disgruntled Syrians, including the Druze inhabitants of Sweida province in the southwest, reacted by taking to the streets to protest these liberalizing economic measures and to demand the government’s reinstatement of the financial safety net that, in one way or another, had kept the majority of them docile up to that point.
A few days into these protests, the chants and slogans demanding better pay, economic reform, education and other simple rights were brushed aside. A more militant and revolutionary rhetoric replaced them, demanding the overthrow of the tyrannical Assad regime. The main public square in the city of Sweida, dubbed Sahat al-Karama (Dignity Square), was transformed into a bastion of anti-Assad slogans and iconic chants revived from the first days of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Druze from different villages around Sweida trickled into the square, chanting, “Long live Syria and down with Bashar al-Assad!” and “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” They then tore down and burned pictures of both Bashar and his late dictator father, Hafez al-Assad, even going as far as to shut down all branches of the ruling Baath Party in the area.
The sudden shift among the Druze left the regime, as well as the wider public, bewildered and guessing at the trajectory of these protests, which have been crescendoing in recent weeks and could potentially spill over to other parts of the country. Yet a sober reading of the history of the Druze of Syria over recent decades can unravel the supposed mystery surrounding the current demonstrations, and reveal the strengths and limitations of this dissident movement.
The province of Sweida, in the southwest of Syria and adjacent to the Jordanian border, takes its name from the volcanic rocks and soils that make it a fertile agricultural site. Established by the Nabataeans — the ancient Indigenous people of northern Arabia and the southern Levant — Sweida was a vibrant site of commercial activity and an important entry point from Syria into the Arabian desert. The Druze settlement in the area began in the 18th century and was brought about by the battle of Ain Dara in Lebanon, in which the Qaysis and Yemenis, the two main rival Druze factions at the time, faced off, resulting in the former’s victory and the subsequent eviction of the Yemenis into Syria. Following the Druze settlement of Sweida, the region was rebranded as Jabal al-Duruz (the Druze Mountain), and its inhabitants were tasked by the Ottomans with policing the area and disciplining the rowdy Bedouins of the Syrian desert, a job they carried out meticulously and with fervor.
The Druze, or al-Muwahhidun (people who affirm the unity of God) as they prefer to call themselves, form a heterodox sect of Islam that traces its roots to the cult of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the sixth Fatimid caliph who, in the 11th century, led a revisionist movement within the Ismaili faith that ended in the conversion of many of the heterodox tribes of Syria, including the ancestors of the Druze.
In the 20th century, Sweida was pushed to center stage when it provided the spark of the nationwide rebellion against the French occupation, led by the Druze dignitary and tribal chieftain, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, who was later joined by other notables from other areas in Syria in an uprising that lasted two years, from 1925 to 1927. The Great Syrian Revolt, as it was popularly called, was ignited by the French mandatory authority’s arrest of a Lebanese Shiite dissident, Adham Khanjar, who had sought refuge at the home of Atrash in the town of al-Qurayya, though Atrash was away at the time. Upon returning home, Sultan Pasha was informed of the French crime against him and his tribe’s honor and dignity, after which he instructed his own family to vacate the house, which he set on fire, shouting, “A house that cannot protect our guest is useless to us.” He then took his men and started the two-year rebellion.
This revolt solidified the perception and identity of the Druze as brave anti-colonial Arab nationalist warriors, something that would subsequently fit well with Baath Party propaganda surrounding its power grab in 1963.
It is through this lens that the current Druze uprising for honor and dignity needs to be seen. And while many look at the ongoing uprising as a departure from the Druze’s somewhat lukewarm support for the 2011 Syrian Revolution, many of the Druze activists who have taken to the streets see it simply as a return to the nonviolent protest movement of 2011.
According to Bassima al-Akbani, a retired government employee from the village of Imm al-Riman, “Sweida was never docile, but the forms of protest took on different forms which more or less went through rapid bursts, which for one reason or another unfortunately would eventually peter out.” Bassima, who has been active throughout the past decade, confirms that the Druze of Syria simply did not wish to partake in the violence of the Syrian revolution, as it included “the spilling of Syrian blood,” something that drove many of the young men of the province to refuse to serve as conscripts in the Assad army. If they did serve, they would do so only within their own region.
For Kinan al-Brihi, a 30-year-old activist and journalist from Sweida, the protests that he and his Druze coreligionists have embarked on “returned the Syrians to the essence of the 2011 revolution” and have reminded them that “the road to salvation does not go through economic reform, and that the main cause is above all a political one.” While Brihi does not deny that the main catalyst for this protest was the lifting of state subsidies, the people of Sweida have a major problem with the Assad regime itself. Along with its assortment of “gangs,” the regime has been using Sweida as a hub for the manufacture of Captagon (an especially powerful amphetamine that has been officially banned for decades) and its export to neighboring Arab countries.
According to a study conducted by Etana, an independent anti-Assad nongovernmental organization, “Up to 79% of Sweida’s total drug network is affiliated with Military Intelligence, compared with 63% of the total drug network in Daraa.” Many of these armed gangs, some of whom are sponsored by Hezbollah and Iran, have expanded their scope of work to include other illicit activities such as arms smuggling, human trafficking and even taking hostages for ransom. Brihi confirms that many of the people who were previously delusional about the capacity and willingness of the Assad regime to reform have now joined the masses in demanding his removal.
Over recent decades, many of the pro-Assad Druze have either defected or simply vanished into the background, as successive attempts to petition the Syrian government led to empty promises, and succeeded only in adding to the province’s resentment. The breaking point came in July 2018, with an attack on Sweida by the Islamic State group, which left over 258 dead, while 14 Druze women were captured and later ransomed. The majority of the Druze, many of whom had remained neutral until that time, blamed the regime for facilitating, if not directing, the Islamic State attack by moving its heavy weapons out of Sweida a few weeks before the offensive.
The Islamic State attack, as well as other factors, have fully transformed the Druze, as Shadi Azzam sees it. Azzam, who was one of the early conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the Assad army, fled Syria in December 2011 and has been living in Lebanon ever since, heading the Nuon Organization for Peace-Building. Azzam could not believe his eyes as he saw his neighbors and family from the village of Tara, west of Sweida, take to the streets, shouting for the removal of the dictator. A few years back, these same people, including his own brother-in-law and immediate family, used to brand him a traitor. Now those days are long gone.
Equally, the Druze of Sweida are alarmed by the continuous attempts by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies to expand into their territory, both to establish a political power base and to protect logistical lines into southern Syria, a challenge which the Druze have been extremely vehement in opposing. Over the past few years, Hezbollah, using local Druze proxies, has tried to purchase land and establish paramilitary groups under the premise of fighting the Islamic State, and has recruited some of its Lebanese allies for this purpose, among them the Druze politicians Wiam Wahhab and Talal Arslan. Before the start of the 2011 revolution, Wahhab went to al-Qurayya, the hometown of Atrash, and visited the drawing room (guest diwan) of Hassan al-Atrash in an attempt to portray the Syrian Druze as fully subservient to Assad and the so-called axis of resistance.
Hassan al-Atrash, a direct maternal descendant of Sultan Pasha, is an outspoken critic of the Assad regime and was unusually inhospitable as he expelled his Lebanese guest and drove him out of his house and from the village, something that later led to his arrest. These various existential threats led the Druze to take a step back, to reassess the many challenges they face and to seek the advice of their elders and their clerics.
Consequently, the Druze protest has the open support of the community’s religious establishment and its top spiritual leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari, who has identified the Assad regime as the reason for his compatriots’ plight. Hajari, who previously touted a pro-regime line, did not hold back in declaring, “Silence does not mean consent. The state’s actions and procedures have affected our livelihoods. The time has come to suppress those who cause these harms and those who issue unjust and destructive decisions, and uproot them from our land; every stranger, every abuser and every infidel, before they steal our resources.” Hajari, one of a long-established triumvirate of Syrian Druze clerics, who commands considerable respect and allegiance, has supplied the most potent incentive to many Druze who would usually stay home when previous calls for protest were issued. As a result, Noura Azzam, a journalist and active member of the ongoing protest movement, sees Hajari’s blanket support as a primary reason for the protesters “burning their boats” and replacing calls for bread and water with demands for regime change. Both Azzam and Akbani, who belong to different generations of women activists, confirm that the active participation of their women comrades goes beyond the ceremonial, and conveys the deep commitment of both the secular and religious elements of the Druze community not to leave anyone behind, even those who in the past collaborated with the regime. Azzam affirms that, if needed, “Druze women are willing to take up arms, as they did in 2018, to defend themselves and their families from the Islamic State or any other threat, both foreign and domestic.”
Hajari’s regional counterparts in both Lebanon and Israel were cautiously supportive of his stance. Their endorsement underscored the unity of the Druze and their legitimate demands, while stressing their “deep roots with the Syrian nation.” Walid Joumblatt, considered to be the preeminent political chieftain of the Druze and a staunch opponent of the Assad regime, was equally vocal in affirming the patriotic and inclusive nature of the uprising. Yet the veteran Lebanese politician was careful not to issue any statements that would burden the protest movement and garner further accusations of treason.
Many have scrambled to understand the real motives of Hajari, even suggesting that his abandonment of the sinking Assad regime was brought about by implicit support from international and regional players, ranging from Jordan to Saudi Arabia and even Russia, who have simply given up on resurrecting what remains of Assad. The majority of the Arab countries who accepted to normalize with the Assad regime in the recent past did so with the explicit assumption that the regime would curtail the production and export of drugs into their countries, and would possibly entertain limiting the growing influence of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yet months have elapsed since the start of the normalization process and no concrete steps have been taken toward drug enforcement, prompting countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia to double back on their decision, and thus support the Druze of Sweida in their uprising. While there is no hard evidence to support these theories, it is certain that Hajari has become more outspoken following the embarrassment that the regime has caused him in his interactions with his own people. On multiple occasions, Hajari used his moral capital to defuse earlier protests or simply framed them as internal calls for reform, yet this time around, his tone and messaging, according to the activists who have visited him, is far from conciliatory toward Assad and his associates.
In an echo of the French insult to Sultan Pasha almost a century ago, Assad refrained from punishing his regional chief of military intelligence, Brig. Gen. Luay al-Ali, who insulted Hajari during a phone call, prompting the latter to abruptly end the conversation. Ali, a member of Assad’s Alawite community, was never reprimanded. Nor did he offer a public apology, which, in the tribal traditions of the Druze and of Syria, is unforgivable.
In the initial phase of the current protests, the Assad regime practiced restraint and refrained from using lethal force to suppress them, resorting instead to its media networks and mouthpieces to discredit the protestors and suggest the protests are the work of foreign intelligence services, part of a global conspiracy hatched against the Syrian people by the West and, naturally, Israel.
On Sept. 13, however, the regime changed its methods and opened fire on crowds protesting in front of the Baath Party headquarters in Sweida, injuring a number of them. Consequently, Hajari lashed out against the regime. While he forbade any spilling of Syrian blood, he went as far as to ask the Druze to take up arms against those who wished to harm them. Speaking to a large crowd, Hajari ordered the Druze to “keep your rifles shiny and clean like a beautiful bride and locked and loaded, yet do not fire the first shot, and only do so in self-defense,” going further to declare jihad (holy war) against Hezbollah and the Iranian militias, which the Druze elder branded as “forces of occupation that we do not condone anywhere on Syrian soil.”
Along these lines, perhaps the main point to consider from the Druze uprising against Assad is the shattering of the myth that the regime has peddled since the days of Bashar’s father of being a modern, secular nation-state that offers protection and rights to minorities against the hegemony of Sunni Islam and its various political manifestations. According to this narrative, the secular Baath, under the leadership of the Assads, is the only protector of Syria’s Druze, Shiites, Alawites, Christians and even the Maronites of Lebanon. The proponents of this union even stretch to the assumption that Israel, as a Jewish state, is an organic member of this alliance and benefits from having a secular regime protecting its borders from a presumed radical Sunni alternative. The Druze of Syria have never been an active element in these alliances of minorities, yet they have refrained from challenging the regime’s rhetoric and, for a time, the regime was careful not to use force or intimidation against them, trying instead to neutralize any form of protest by giving them a form of quasi-autonomy and trying to bribe them with economic subsidies, measures it was ultimately unable to sustain.
The Assad regime has not resorted to violence for a few obvious reasons. Its regular armed forces, as well as the paramilitary groups, are depleted, and the economic hardship has affected their morale and fighting spirit. More importantly, Assad cannot mobilize his army, like he did against Sunni Muslims, because attacking a religious minority, especially one like the Druze, will officially end his guardianship of the minorities and might also cause the Druze of Lebanon, and more importantly Israel, to come to the aid of their Syrian brethren. Contrary to the way the Assad regime dealt with the dissident Sunnis in Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and across Syria, using death squads, chemical weapons and barrel bombs to punish the Druze is not an option. Yet this does not mean that the use of violence is off the table.
Having failed to keep the Druze under control, the Assad regime has resorted to a bag of tricks ranging from scaring the Druze with the Islamic State to simply accusing the protestors of aspiring to clone the minority-run Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which is under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and has virtually seceded from the Syrian republic. Hassan al-Atrash confirms that such accusations do not really hold water, since the Druze of Syria have a strong sense of ownership of modern Syria and regard it as “a product of the Druze and the struggles of Sultan Pasha who unified Syria under the banner of the revolution.”
Atrash also confirms that while there is a small section of the Druze who have officially established links with the SDF, the mentality of the majority of protesters does not entertain any form of secession. Similarly, for Brihi, such calls are unrealistic, as the economic and political infrastructure is nonexistent. Nor is there any Druze appetite for such a perilous venture. According to Brihi, the Druze simply wish to live under a viable decentralized local governance model, a concept enshrined in the laws and practices of the Syrian republic.
Atrash also defends his peoples’ uprising as being nonsectarian, saying, “It wishes to save the entire country, not only Sweida.” While the Assad regime accuses the Druze of sectarianism in hoisting their five-colored banner during the demonstrations, Atrash insists unequivocally that this banner is simply a tool for unity, as they wish to avoid using the flag of the regime or that of the revolution, so as not to cause any sort of rift among the ranks of the protesters.
Despite the imminent dangers that both the Assad regime and the Islamic State pose to the uprising, many activists agree that the real challenges lie within the uprising itself. As they near the two-month mark, the protests are at risk of getting bogged down by the perhaps unrealistic demand of toppling Assad, and thus signs of discord are likely to arise and ultimately lead to the implosion of the movement. This fear is made more ominous by the fact the Assad regime likely has loyalists lurking on the inside, waiting for the optimal time to strike and divert the course of the protest movement. Therefore, the real challenge moving forward is for the leadership to generate a slogan that everyone can rally around, a theme that would allow the movement to expand to include all sectors of the Druze.
Equally, while the Druze need to underscore the continuity of the 2011 peaceful protest in their ongoing uprising, they also need to move beyond this conventional framework and realize that the regional and global situations have changed, and that the protest movement thus needs to establish a solid network, including different elements of the Syrian people, and also to secure the legal and — above all — the military protection of the international community. Druze activists are naturally too afraid or perhaps embarrassed to publicly inquire about the stance of the Biden administration in the case of a possible future attack against Sweida. The U.S. military base at al-Tanf is less than 100 miles away and could be a potent deterrent against any attempt by Assad or the Islamic State to punish the Druze for their uprising.
Another important intrinsic challenge for the Druze is to realize that they are not alone in demanding a life of dignity and honor and to live in a nation governed by the rule of law, not by the whims of a tyrant and his oligarchs. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are values shared by the majority of the Syrians and their neighbors. These can never be protected unless a long-term strategic vision that includes other segments of the Syrian nation is put into practice.
The fate of the current Druze uprising is precarious and impossible to predict, but it is clear that Sweida, which over the last six decades has been docile, not to say complicit with the Assads, has now shed any belief that its dignity and honor can be protected by what Assad calls a state.
When all is said and done, 12 years of dissent and living in limbo have engendered a generation of Druze youth who are immune to the strand of Arab nationalism propagated by the Baath Party, and to the narrative that equates modern Syria with its founding father, Hafez al-Assad, and his so-called legitimate successor Bashar. More than ever, the voice of Abdul Baset al-Sarout, the iconic rebel leader who died fighting for freedom and change, echoes across the streets and villages of Sweida: “Syria wants freedom, Bashar it is time to go.” The picture of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash has replaced the statues of antiquated Baathist ideology — an ominous reality that Assad and his Iranian allies cannot simply ignore.
**Makram Rabah is an assistant professor of history at the American University of Beirut and the author of “Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory”

High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington ...The trail that leads from Tehran to D.C. passes directly through the offices of Robert Malley and the International Crisis Group

Lee Smith/The Tablet/October 05/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/122887/122887/
The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.
On Thursday, Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”
The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.
The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.
The IEI, according to a 2014 email from one Iranian official to one of Iran’s lead nuclear negotiators, “consisted of a core group of 6-10 distinguished second-generation Iranians who have established affiliation with the leading international think-tanks and academic institutions, mainly in Europe and the US.” The network was funded and supported by an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) official, Mostafa Zahrani, who was the point of contact between IEI operatives, and Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
According to the correspondence, the IEI recruited several U.S.-based analysts, including Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and Dina Esfandiary, all of whom willingly accepted Iranian guidance. These Middle East experts were then subsequently hired, credentialed, supported, and funded by Malley and the ICG where he was president from January 2018 until January 2021, when he joined the Biden administration. Malley was also ICG’s program director for Middle East and North Africa before the Obama administration tapped him in February 2014 to run negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal. Vaez joined the ICG in 2012 and served as Malley’s top deputy.
Emails quoted in the stories show that even once in government, Malley directed Vaez’s actions at ICG, sending him to Vienna where the Iranian and U.S. teams held nuclear negotiations. “Following the order of his previous boss Malley, Ali Vaez will come to Vienna,” Zahrani reportedly wrote Zarif in an April 3, 2014, email. “Who from our group do you instruct to have a meeting with him?”
Vaez wrote Zarif directly after the Iranian foreign minister expressed dissatisfaction with an ICG report on Iran. “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty,” wrote Vaez in an October 2014 email, “I have not hesitated to help you in any way; from proposing to Your Excellency a public campaign against the notion of [nuclear] breakout, to assisting your team in preparing reports on practical needs of Iran.”
These emails likely explain why Vaez was unable to obtain a security clearance in order to join Malley in the Biden administration. At the same time, they raise the question of why Malley sought to bring Vaez into the State Department in the first place, and why he remained in close operational contact with him even after he was denied a security clearance.
After the Iran deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was finalized in July 2015, ICG hired another IEI operative as a consultant—Adnan Tabatabai, not to be confused with Pentagon official Ariane Tabatabai. Like Vaez, Adnan Tabatabai also pledged to dedicate his efforts to the Iranian regime.
In an email from 2014, as the agreement was being negotiated, Adnan Tabatabai wrote to Zarif about the foreign minister’s meeting in Vienna with IEI operatives: “As you will have noticed, we are all very much willing to dedicate our capacities and resources to jointly working on the improvement of Iran’s foreign relations. Iran is our country, so we, too, feel the need and responsibility to contribute our share. When I say “we” I mean the very group you met.”
In early 2021, shortly before he joined the Biden administration, Malley brought a third IEI operative, Dina Esfandiary, into the ICG. ICG did not respond by press time to Tablet’s email requesting comment on its employees’ role in an Iranian spy ring.
In February 2021, Malley hired Ariane Tabatabai to join his Iran team at the State Department. The emails document her cloying determination to prove her worth to the Iranian regime. Shortly after the 2014 meeting in Vienna, Ariane Tabatabai sent Zahrani a link to an article she’d co-authored with Esfandiary. “As I mentioned last week, Dina and I wrote an article about the nuclear fuel of Bushehr [nuclear power plant] for the Bulletin which was published today. Our goal was to show what is said in the West—that Iran does not need more than 1500 centrifuges—is wrong, and that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges.” Zahrani then forwarded the email to Zarif.
In June 2014, Ariane Tabatabai emailed Zahrani to say she’d been invited to conferences in Saudi Arabia and Israel and asked for his prior approval of her trips. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she wrote. Zahrani replied that “Saudi Arabia is a good case, but the second case [Israel] is better to be avoided.” She responded: “Thank you very much for your advice. I will take action regarding Saudi Arabia and will keep you updated on the progress.” There is no record of Tabatabai traveling to Israel.
A month later, she again wrote Zahrani asking for additional instructions. She’d been invited to join academic experts Gary Samore and William Tobey to brief House members on the Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Intelligence committees. “I am scheduled to go to the Congress to give a talk about the nuclear program,” she wrote the IRGC official. “I will bother you in the coming days. It will be a little difficult since both Will and Gary do not have favorable views on Iran.” Zahrani forwarded the email to Zarif.
Ariane Tabatabai’s correspondence with Zahrani offers clear evidence that Malley’s protégé was an active participant in a covert Iranian influence campaign designed to shape U.S. government policy in order to serve the interests of the Iranian regime. Her requests for guidance from top Iranian officials, which she appears to have faithfully followed, and her desire to harmonize her own words and actions with regime objectives, are hardly the behavior of an impartial academic, or a U.S. public servant. Tabatabai’s emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic.
“I know what a spy network looks like,” says Peter Theroux, a veteran Mideast analyst who is now retired from the CIA, where he was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal for his service. During his 25 years at the agency, Theroux was frequently called on to analyze the Iranian regime and its foreign spying and terror networks. “This is how recruited assets speak to their handling officers. There’s lots of the mood music around that correspondence saying, let me know what you need me to collect. It seems clear who’s the subordinate here—what you’d call responsive to tasking.”
In response to a Tablet email requesting comment on Malley’s and Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring, a State Department spokesman wrote: “We have seen the Semafor article, which does not presume it was a ‘spy ring,’ and we reject that characterization. Rob Malley remains on leave and we have no further comment due to privacy considerations. The Biden-Harris administration appointed Ariane Tabatabai to serve various roles in the U.S. government because of her expertise on nuclear and other foreign policy issues.” The Defense Department did not respond by press time to Tablet’s email requesting comment on Ariane Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring.
Whether the IEI is best characterized as an Iranian “spy ring” or as a “regime-directed influence operation” is a semantic question that beggars the larger question of how any responsible U.S. security official in possession of Tabatabai’s correspondence could have cleared her to enter the State Department building or the Pentagon—let alone cleared her to work as a chief of staff in the Defense Department, with direct access to the most sensitive real-time details of U.S. special forces operations.
It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles. “The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” says Theroux. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether—what would normally be totally disqualifying.”
There is also the fact that, as early as 2014, as Tablet has reported, the Obama administration was spying on Israeli officials and their contacts within the United States, including U.S. lawmakers and pro-Israel activists. The fact that U.S. intelligence services routinely disobeyed guidelines preventing them from unmasking the identities of U.S. persons recorded in transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts has been exhaustively demonstrated in a long series of U.S. government reports, Congressional investigations, and other reporting. Since Zarif’s communications and the IRGC’s communications were also collected, U.S. officials would have known about the IEI—and about the names of those working on behalf of Iran, such as Vaez and Tabatabai.
Theroux suggests that a range of U.S. authorities would have likely known about Malley’s involvement with the IEI as well—and that Malley would have been well aware of what they knew. “When I was on the National Security Council, the National Security Agency would call to alert me when my name had popped up in a conversation among bad actors,” Theroux recalls.
The facts of Malley’s involvement with the IEI and its agents are likely to have been old news within the Biden administration; the impending publication of the IEI emails is likely the reason why Malley was put on leave in April and had his security clearances suspended. As news of emails and their impending publication circulated in Washington, the administration moved him to the sidelines before Republican officials had the chance to demand his head on a spike.
Why an Iranian operative is still at the Pentagon, especially in a job which gives her daily access to classified information that puts the country’s most sensitive military operations at risk, is another matter entirely. “The optimistic reading,” says Theroux, “is that they were watching her to see what she does and the FBI has her apartment all teched up. But to be an optimist you have to believe the FBI is clean, rather than see this as a huge counterintelligence failure. Though, of course, it’s not a failure if they were complicit.”
So far, however, the evidence points to a less optimistic reading: The Biden administration allowed Malley to push an Iranian agent into sensitive national security positions because she was best equipped to carry out the administration’s own policy—to appease a terror regime with American blood on its hands. Because the number of American officials who want to be responsible for protecting Iran’s nuclear weapons program is limited, the White House went outside the federal bureaucracy for someone who was well-connected to the regime, and would relish the job of advancing its interests—an Iranian spy.
Congress needs to demand the Biden White House make Malley and Tabatabai available to testify immediately. It must also press to interview the security officials who buried evidence of Tabatabai’s covert activities, putting her in a position to endanger the lives of American civilians and special forces operators. It’s time to find out why the interests—and now the personnel—of the Iranian “death to America” regime intersect so frequently with those of America’s own ruling party.
**Lee Smith is the author of The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President (2020).
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-spy-ring-robert-malley-lee-smith?fbclid=IwAR16E-G0kcNmJwUMiztZ1t56eKaRJ1pbmHPry2KXhnd8M0P4bchsSHxN8_8

The Persecution Of Armenian Christians Is Not Just A Religious Freedom Issue
Joel Veldkamp/First Things/October 05/2023
This September, the end came for Nagorno-Karabakh.
The tiny mountain region was once home to 120,000 Armenian Christians governing themselves in a de facto independent republic, the Republic of Artsakh. Armenians have been living in this region for thousands of years, and they have been Christians since the fourth century. The dozens of ancient and medieval churches dotting the landscape bear witness to this history.
But for nine months, the dictatorship of Azerbaijan had been blockading this region. The siege led to a hunger crisis and created dire fuel and medicine shortages. One horrifying indicator of the scale of the suffering: the miscarriage rate in the territory reportedly quadrupled.
Then, on September 19, Azerbaijan attacked. The military assault drove half of the region’s population out of their homes, and swamped the capital’s hospital with wounded for whom there were no medical supplies. Widespread atrocities were reported, including the apparently deliberate bombing of a group of fleeing children. Five days after the attack began, the Karabakh Armenians accepted Russia’s offer to evacuate their population to the neighboring Republic of Armenia.
In one fell swoop, one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships destroyed one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Not only that, but the dictatorship in question receives U.S. military aid and is considered a “valued partner” of the U.S.
How did conservative Christians in the United States—members of the world’s largest, freest, richest, and most influential Christian community—respond to the ethnic cleansing of their coreligionists by a U.S. ally?
With almost complete silence.
Two facts make this shameful non-reaction particularly strange. First, since the 1990s, the U.S. has been home to a robust and vocal movement on behalf of persecuted Christians abroad. This movement has been especially strong among conservative Christians. Second, during the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923, American Christians mobilized to help the genocide’s victims as never before in history. They raised a phenomenal $100 million for relief, aiding perhaps two million refugees in total. Herbert Hoover would later remark that, “probably Armenia was known to the American school child in 1919 only a little less than England.”
Contrast that with what one of my colleagues in the U.S. told me earlier this year: “Joel, most people in my congregation don’t even know what an Armenian is.”
How do we account for an abdication this massive?
From my perspective as a staff member at Christian Solidarity International, one factor appears salient: the absorption of Christian organizing and political energy into a movement for “international religious freedom.”
Over the past three years, when I have talked about Karabakh with Christians who work in organizations dedicated to helping the persecuted, I have repeatedly gotten versions of this question: “But is this really about religious freedom?”
There is a history to how this question became the overriding determinant for organizations like mine. After the end of the Cold War, a large coalition of Christian and Jewish activists and organizations began working to get the U.S. government to address the persecution of Christians in the Global South.
To do so, these activists chose to frame the problem within the discourse of human rights. They settled on one human right in particular: the right to “religious freedom” enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Today, we have become used to thinking of religious persecution as, by definition, an attack on religious freedom. Yet the twentieth century’s worst instance of anti-Christian persecution—the Armenian Genocide—did not fit the “religious freedom” category so neatly. The architects of the genocide were not, after all, trying to keep Armenians from worshipping Jesus, building churches, or reading the Bible. Much like Azerbaijan today, they were trying to exterminate a Christian people (whether practicing or not) that they had long held in subservience but had come to see as a threat to their power.
At the time, this fact posed no obstacle at all to American Christians organizing for their suffering coreligionists. Later generations of Christendom would not benefit from this clarity.
The anti-persecution movement achieved its greatest legislative victory in 1998, with the passage of the “International Religious Freedom Act.” Significantly, as the scholar Elizabeth Castelli notes, the final legislation does not use the word “persecution” even once in its definitions of terms. It speaks only of “violations of religious freedom.” These violations might include “forced mass resettlement,” “rape,” “enslavement,” “murder,” and so forth—but only “if committed on account of an individual’s religious belief or practice.”
This framing suits the priorities of the U.S. foreign policy establishment rather well. If persecution is primarily a problem of individual liberty, rather than a question involving ethnic identity, peoples, or even nations and nation-states, then it becomes an issue between governments and their citizens. U.S. diplomats can grade the performance of foreign governments and otherwise address the issue at their leisure, without calling into question broader U.S. foreign policy.
In order to pass key legislation and gain a foothold in the U.S. government, Christian anti-persecution activists accommodated themselves to the government’s preferences. This came at a cost. Soon, the institutions the U.S. and its allies set up to promote religious freedom began to shape the way Christians did advocacy. Eventually, it shaped the very way we thought about persecution.
This category shift has been so debilitating that, as the bombs were falling on Armenian Christians in September 2023, Christianity Today saw fit to publish just one piece about the attack—an article that interviews six “religious freedom experts” about whether or not specifically Christian advocacy for the Armenians would be appropriate.
An urgent task is now before Christian leaders and activists: to free our imaginations from the constraints of “international religious freedom” and its definitions, and to rediscover our biblical calling to solidarity with the body of Christ (I Cor. 12:25–26).
The next Karabakh will most likely be Syunik, the southernmost province of the Republic of Armenia, which Turkey and Azerbaijan are now eyeing greedily. And there will be other Karabakhs. Christian communities around the world are facing oppression, military attack, and ethnic cleansing in ways that are not easy to define as violations of individual religious freedom. This is the case today in the Nuba Mountains, West Papua, Benue, Southern Kaduna, Manipur, and Karen state.
But you likely haven’t heard of most of these places.
*Joel Veldkamp is the head of international communications at Christian Solidarity International.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/10/the-persecution-of-armenian-christians-is-not-just-a-religious-freedom-issue?fbclid=IwAR3Ddw3E6I1TlZgwqPn6DP7dFBQc27kGryWUQqU74pcEhVJvS1sFzp3XpkM

Syrian government must address the people’s grievances
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/October 05/2023
While the Syrian government is attempting to put the civil war behind it, protests continue to erupt in some parts of the country, posing a significant challenge to the leadership in Damascus. Even though the civil war, which broke out in 2011, has not yet been fully resolved, the Syrian government appears to be entering the next phase, which is seeking regional and international rehabilitation and attempting to reintegrate itself into the global financial system. Syria’s readmission to the Arab League in May and the latest diplomatic rapprochements between Damascus and other regional powers are likely to be just the start of a long process that will hopefully help to resolve the crisis in the country.
But any widespread protests in the country could create obstacles for the government’s rehabilitation efforts. For example, protests have recently been witnessed in Suwayda, with women playing a prominent role. Suwayda is under the control of government forces and it is the heartland of the nation’s Druze minority, which has attempted to avoid being dragged into the civil war. Protests have also taken place in the north (Aleppo and Idlib), the south (Deraa), government strongholds along the Mediterranean coast, the capital Damascus and the northeast (Deir Ezzor, Hasakeh and Raqqa).
As a result, it is critical for the Syrian leadership to address people’s grievances in order to facilitate the country’s rehabilitation process. But in order to accomplish this crucial goal, the people’s most pressing grievances must first be identified.
Any widespread protests in the country could create obstacles for the government’s rehabilitation efforts
While the conflict has ended in many parts of the country, this key development has not translated into economic recovery for the overwhelming majority of the Syrian people. In fact, many people believe that the economy has become worse since the fighting dissipated. Sawsan, a mother of three who works as a secretary at a doctor’s office in Damascus, pointed out: “We are very grateful that the civil war has ended and we do not constantly hear bombs and bullets in the suburbs of Damascus anymore. We thought that when the conflict and fighting finishes, we will go back to the old days. But the financial situation keeps getting worse and it is surprising to many of us that it is more difficult to make ends meet now in comparison to a few years ago during the war.”
The economic shock of a war can often be long-standing and its real impact is only revealed after the war ends. On top of that, the February earthquake, which inflicted an estimated $5.1 billion of damage in Syria, has further exacerbated the situation caused by more than a decade of civil war. Even before that disaster, more than two-thirds of the Syrian population needed humanitarian assistance, according to UNICEF, due to the “worsening economic crisis, continued localized hostilities, mass displacement and devastated public infrastructure.”
First and foremost, the Syrian government must enhance people’s purchasing power. This means addressing three core issues: inflation, the devaluation of the currency and unemployment.
The problem is that the Syrian currency keeps losing its value at a fast pace, making any wage raises trivial
Inflation is reportedly now at its highest ever level. While Syria’s average inflation rate from 1957 to 2020 was about 11 percent, it last year reached 139 percent — higher than countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola and Libya. This placed Syria fourth in the world in terms of highest inflation rates, only ranking behind Venezuela, Sudan and Lebanon, according to World Population Review. To put this in perspective, Syria’s inflation rate is about 40 times higher than the average in the Arab Gulf states. The likes of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman are among the countries with the lowest inflation rates in the world. It is worth noting that a healthy and standard rate of inflation is about 2 percent to 3 percent per year.
Before the civil war, the unemployment rate nationally was almost 9 percent. Some areas in Syria have recently experienced unemployment rates that have reached a staggering 85 percent. Prices have increased by more than 800 percent in the last two years alone, with nearly 90 percent of the Syrian population now living below the poverty line. The government did recently double pension payments when it cut fuel subsidies, but the problem is that the Syrian currency keeps losing its value at a fast pace, making any wage raises trivial. At the start of this year, the exchange rate was 7,000 Syrian pounds to the US dollar, but it recently hit an all-time low of about 14,000 pounds to the dollar, which means it has lost more than 80 percent of its value in less than a year.
What is the best policy for the Syrian government to take on key issues such as unemployment, inflation and the dire economy? It is a step in the right direction that the Syrian leadership is attempting to reintegrate itself into the global financial system and bring the country out of isolation. More fundamentally, however, Damascus needs to invest significant political capital in the reconstruction of the nation’s infrastructure, as this can play a key role in creating jobs and improving the economy. This means attracting investments from other countries as well.
In a nutshell, as the Syrian government seeks regional and international rehabilitation, it is critical for the leadership to address its people’s economic grievances.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. X: @Dr_Rafizadeh