Syria civil war - Page 13

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abd Al-Aziz “agreed to support safe zones in Syria” in a phone call on Sunday, the White House said, marking a potentially dramatic shift in Washington’s posture toward the civil war there.

The UN envoy for Syria said Tuesday that a final declaration was close to being achieved at indirect talks between Syrian rebels and their war-torn country’s regime in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana.

Syria rebels began peace talks with the war-torn country’s government Monday in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, but refused to negotiate face-to-face in the first session.

Syrian rebels are set to meet their war-torn country’s government on Monday in the Kazakh capital Astana, in the latest push to end the conflict.

In an interview with Politico published on Wednesday, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes admitted that the White House did not have the ability to back up the president’s infamous “red line” threat against Syria.

With hospitals and clinics around her village destroyed, 29-year-old woman makes dangerous trek to Israeli border and is brought to hospital by IDF.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said late Tuesday that his government opposed the United States joining Syrian peace talks to be held in Kazakhstan next week, local media reported.

Russia plans to improve and expand its naval and air bases in Syria, Interfax news agency reported on Sunday, citing an unnamed source, as Moscow cements its presence in the Middle Eastern country, its only overseas military deployment.

The crisis in Syria hasn’t been ignored by Israel. Various Israeli youth movements, including the Youth Federation for Working and Studying, The Dror Movement, and the committed for the fight against genocide are leading a wide scale operation to collect winter clothes for Syrian refugees.

The Islamic State group launched a ferocious assault Saturday on a city in eastern Syria, leaving more than 30 jihadists and regime fighters dead, a monitoring group said.

Syria on Friday called on the international community to “punish” Israel for an apparent missile attack on a major military airport west of Damascus, and accused the US, Britain and France of supporting the assault.

The Syrian army said on Friday that Israeli missile strikes caused a series of explosions at an airbase outside Damascus before dawn.

Russian military officials on Tuesday slammed US-led coalition action against Islamic State jihadists in Syria as having had “less than zero” impact, and claimed that a US air strike killed 20 Syrian civilians this month.

An Israeli spy satellite has discovered a number of Russian mobile short-range ballistic missiles stockpiled in Syria, Channel 2 reported Friday.

Russia’s military on Friday said it has begun scaling back its deployment to Syria, with Moscow’s sole aircraft carrier ordered to leave the conflict zone first.

Thousands of people are starting to return to formerly rebel-held east Aleppo despite freezing weather and destruction “beyond imagination”, a top U.N. official told Reuters from the Syrian city.

Syrian pro-government forces clashed with rebels around the main water source for Damascus on Thursday, a monitor said, threatening a fragile ceasefire as it entered its seventh day.

The Islamic Republic will always back nations and groups that fight Israel, a top Iranian official vowed on Tuesday, the Tehran regime-aligned Tasnim news agency reported.

Turks reacted angrily Friday on social media to a video released by the Islamic State group purportedly showing two captured Turkish soldiers being burned alive, while awaiting an official reaction from the government.

Evacuations from rebel-held parts of Aleppo continued overnight with dozens of vehicles leaving the city and the operation likely to end on Thursday, aid workers said.

The United States denied Wednesday an Israeli claim that US-supplied armored vehicles seen being operated by Hezbollah in Syria had been given to the Islamist militia by Lebanon’s official army.

The warning from the UN envoy could not have been starker: Pounded by a near-daily barrage of air strikes, Aleppo would be totally destroyed by Christmas unless the United Nations stopped the carnage.

Israel has informed the United States that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in Syria are using U.S. armored personnel carriers originally supplied to the Lebanese Army, a senior Israeli military officer said on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that he instructed his government to find ways to extend medical assistance to Syrians injured in the latest round of fighting, especially those from the embattled city of Aleppo.

JAFFA, Israel — The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey on Monday highlighted the divisions within the Arab world between Russia’s proponents and detractors.

Russian investigators worked Tuesday to determine whether the assassination of their ambassador to Turkey was the work of a lone gunman or part of a wider conspiracy as the two countries, which have backed opposing sides in the Syrian war, said they would not let the killing disrupt efforts to repair their relationship.

Syria’s army broadcast messages into the last rebel enclave of Aleppo saying it would enter the area on Tuesday, a military media unit run by the government’s ally Hezbollah reported, urging insurgents to speed up their evacuation of the city.

The foreign and defense ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey will discuss the future of Syria and the city of Aleppo at talks in Moscow on Tuesday, Turkish and Russian officials said.

More than 1,000 people were evacuated from the last rebel-held pocket of the eastern area of the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo early on Monday after hours of delay, a medical official told AFP.

Convoys of evacuees travelled from a rebel-held area of Aleppo and two Shiite villages besieged by insurgents on Monday, a war monitor and rebels said, as a deal enabling evacuations held after a tense, days-long stand-off and before a UN vote.

Hundreds of Israelis gathered in downtown Tel Aviv on Sunday night to protest the international community’s failure to stop the reported massacres of civilians trapped in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.

An agreement was reached Saturday to allow “humanitarian cases” to leave two besieged government-held Shiite villages in northwestern Syria, a step that would allow the resumption of civilian and rebel evacuations from eastern Aleppo which were suspended a day earlier, Hezbollah’s media arm and a monitoring group said.

The battle for Aleppo has gripped the world, but it is hardly the only active front across war-torn Syria. One of the next targets for the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad will probably be the heartland of rebel territory, the neighboring province of Idlib.

Evacuation buses have started to enter the last insurgent-held enclave of east Aleppo under the supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Arab Red Cross, Syrian state news agency SANA said.

Hundreds of Israelis are expected to attend a demonstration running between the US and Russian embassies in Tel Aviv on Sunday to denounce the international community’s failure to stop the reported massacres of civilians trapped in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government of carrying out “nothing short of a massacre” in Aleppo, where thousands on Thursday were evacuated under a ceasefire deal from the last rebel enclave in a city besieged by fighting for years.