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Hundreds may be dead after ISIS abductions in Deir Ezzor

The city of Deir Ezzor in northern Syria has seen more than its share of conflict and suffering since the Syrian insurgency began

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Sunday that at least 400 civilians -- including families of pro-regime fighters -- had been abducted by ISIS during the latest fighting and taken to the surrounding countryside.

The Syrian Kurds, however, were both disciplined and pragmatic. But they could not be harnessed as a purely Kurdish force, plowing into Sunni Arab areas held by ISIS. So a fig leaf was created -- a new name for the Syrian Kurdish fighting units, normally called the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG.

Reflecting how little the Trump administration cared for the details as it rushed to clean up its self-inflicted mess, Vice President Mike Pence mistakenly referred to the SDF as the "Syrian Defence Forces" several times as he announced a ceasefire that further betrayed them. And, earlier, President Donald Trump blurted out the poorly-kept secret that the PKK were in their ranksAmerica's imperfect pact with the Kurds was always going to fall apart one day. But nobody could have imagined the SDF's 10,000-plus dead sons and daughters would have been betrayed by overwhelming ignorance, fealty to Turkish and Russian interests, and the toxic aversion to details that the Trump administration displayed.

Moscow is unlikely to be too fussed. Their key goal is becoming the new power in the region, and this settlement, almost directly replacing US forces with their own police and political clout, does that.

And while Mr. Biden implicitly criticized Russia for supporting the Assad government, he gave the Syrian opposition little hope that Washington would change its mind about allowing more sophisticated arms to flow to the rebels.

“As the Syrian people have their chance to forge their own future, they will continue to find a partner in the United States of America,”

The fight to retake Raqqa, the Syrian city that serves as the capital of the Islamic State, must begin soon — within weeks — to disrupt planning believed to be underway there to stage terrorist attacks on the West

“sense of urgency.

isolate the city begin soon to prevent attacks on the West that could be launched or planned from the militants’ capital.

Russian officials said Thursday that the Syrian Army had stopped combat operations in the divided city of Aleppo in order to evacuate civilians, but residents of the rebel-held enclave reported that after a day of intense bombardment, fighting was continuing

150 airstrikes had killed at least 50 people and in which residents said they were unable to flee because of the intense combat

At the United Nations, the agency’s envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters he could not verify whether the fighting had stopped or whether civilians were being allowed to evacuate

Growing tensions between Europe and Turkey over elements of a deal to end the refugee crisis are raising fears that the accord, signed by the two sides in March, may already be on the verge of collapse.

The latest sign of trouble came this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned European leaders that he would block the deal if the European Union refused to lift visa restrictions for Turks

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31 October 2013 Last updated at 19:42 ET Share this page Email Print Share this page2.6KShareFacebookTwitter Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); Jerry Smith, OPCW: "We have... observed all of the destruction activities" Continue reading the main story Syria conflict Arms destruction Chemical stockpile 'Please let it be over' Assad opponents Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says. This comes a day before the deadline set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The weapons have been placed under seal, an OPCW spokesman said. Inspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas. Continue reading the main story Analysis Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent The achievement of this crucial initial target is an important moment for the chemical weapons destruction effort in Syria. The inspectors' first task was to move swiftly to prevent the government from producing any more chemical agent and to destroy facilities and equipment used for mixing agents and filling munitions. Production facilities will be closely monitored to ensure that there are no moves to repair them. The next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. All sorts of questions are raised. Where will this destruction be carried out ? Who will provide the necessary equipment and so on? Western intelligence agencies will be studying Syria's declarations carefully. They will be eager to direct inspectors to additional locations if there are any grounds to believe that Damascus has been less than frank in its disclosures. The inspections were agreed between Russia and the US after Washington threatened to use force in Syria. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad

Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says.

nspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas.

The second deadly car bomb to strike the Beirut area in less than a week exploded on Thursday in a southern suburb of residential apartment buildings that is home to top Hezbollah offices and heavily populated with the group’s supporters.

It accelerated the tempo of political violence, which is mostly fueled by deep splits between Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shiites that have been inflamed by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

The explosion came six days after a car bomb killed a prominent member of the Future Movement, Hezbollah’s main political rival, who had openly criticized the group. And it came a day after reports of the arrest of a Saudi militant who leads a Lebanon-based affiliate of Al Qaeda, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in November near the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.

ISTANBUL — Turkey has confirmed that it struck positions in Syria held by Kurdish militias that over the last year have become the most important allies within Syria of the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State.

In an interview on a Turkish news channel Monday night, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey did not specify when the strikes had taken place, but he said they came after Ankara warned Kurdish fighters not to move west of the Euphrates River.

The armed wing of the P.Y.D., the People’s Protection Units, said in a statement that Turkey had struck its positions in Tal Abyad on Saturday and Sunday, and that a separate Turkish attack, on Sunday in the village of Buban, had wounded two civilians.

40,000 fleeing Aleppo as battle for Syrian city intensifies, U.N. group says

The battle for Aleppo -- once Syria's commercial heart -- is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the devastated city

Reports said forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing.

All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday, along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris, they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their normal evening business.

A Syrian man whose wife and seven children drowned as they attempted to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey to mainland Europe has warned other refugees that the risks of migration are not worth taking.

hat smugglers had told his family they would not need life jackets because the boat was safe

“I would say don’t take this risk. Don’t go by sea. You will lose your children. The smugglers are traitors. They said we would reach Greece within 15 minutes. I advise everyone: don’t come, stay in Syria, however difficult it is.”

The United States has accepted only a small fraction ofthe four million refugees who have fled Syria. But theyare settling in new places, and more are on the way.

President Obama has said the UnitedStates will accept five times as manySyrian refugees this year as the totaladmitted over the last four years.

Syrians still account for a small share ofall refugees admitted in the United States.

In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation

BEIRUT, Lebanon

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics

An ISIS "massacre" and possible kidnapping in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor may have left hundreds of civilians and fighters dead, according to monitoring groups and Syrian state media.

Up to 400 civilians were kidnapped in an Islamic State attack on government-held neighborhoods in the city and taken to the countryside, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a United Kingdom-based monitoring group. ...

New peace negotiations are set to begin on January 25 in Geneva, Switzerland, and January 20 meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will include discussions to allow humanitarian aid to reach "beseiged and hard-to-reach places," according to a State department spokesperson. 

The United Nations says 42,000 people in the area are at risk of starvation. And they make up only a fraction of the 400,000 in similar situations in other towns -- and millions more struggling in hard-to-reach areas -- because of the country's civil war, which is about to mark its five-year anniversary. Millions more Syrians have become refugees abroad.When a conflict lasts this long, when reports about the suffering it is inflicting become a relentless wave of depressing news, and when the forces at play are this complicated, many people are tempted to turn

The truth is that this war is not about to end anytime soon. It is a conflict in which the various sides are fighting for power, for territory, for sectarian advantage, for religion and ideology, but one in which no one seems to be fighting for the interests of the Syrian people themselves.Killing civilians, starving them, is a now common military tactic in the Syrian war.

The United Nations says it wants "unimpeded humanitarian access" to reach everyone who needs help in Syria. The latest word from the Assad regime is that it will allow food convoys. But pressure must be exerted so he keeps his word, and prevents the crisis from reoccurring here or elsewhere. One convoy, as we have already seen, does not end the siege.Assad has laid siege to other places before, notably Yarmouk, a Palestinian camp, and Eastern Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. Yet for some reason the plight of the residents never seemed to reach the level of international concern expressed over fighting in Gaza or the actions of ISIS.

For decades, Jordan has taken in millions of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees, earning it a reputation as an island of peace.

Yet Jordan also deports and blocks aid access to refugees and asylum seekers, regularly violating basic humanitarian principles, all in the name of maintaining that same “security.”

Years ago, this man was an ornithologist, he said. He’d worked at a reserve in the central Syrian Desert with more than a thousand Arabian gazelles and oryxes, specializing in tracking the bald ibis, a rare bird that once migrated between the Levant, the Gulf, and Central Africa. Then he had to flee from Palmyra to Raqqa to Rukban, where his six children and wife are living among at least 50,000 displaced people in tents and mud shelters. The bald ibis has since gone extinct in the Middle East.

The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won the civil war in his country—but that doesn’t mean peace is coming. In fact, the conflict seems to be escalating—fueled by the many outside powers who have joined the Syrian battlefield with interests of their own.

Over the seven years of Syria’s war, it has sucked in numerous other countries, who have attempted to shape the conflict with every tool from bombing to mercenaries to special operators to weapons shipments to money. The war has grown ever more complicated and more deadly over time, and Syria’s future is now largely being determined outside of its borders.

Former CIA Director and retired US Army Gen. David Petraeus said on Sunday the United States betrayed its longstanding ally in its fight against ISIS, the Syrian Kurds, by withdrawing US forces from the northern part of the country.

Well, I think we have abandoned our Syrian Kurdish partners. They took over 10,000 losses as the defeat of Islamic State was carried out," he told CNN's Jake Tapper. "The elimination of the caliphate that ISIS had certainly with our advice and assistance and enabling and then very suddenly, this is not a phased deliberate plan withdrawal, this is a very sudden exit."

"This does not end an endless war. It probably prolongs it because this gives ISIS an opportunity for a resurgence," Petraeus said. "This is not a strategic success."