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Turkiye says over 25,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall

A Syrian living in Turkey pushes his suitcases at the Cilvegozu border crossing gate in Reyhanli on December 12, 2024, on the way back to his country following the oust of Syrian president. (AFP)
A Syrian living in Turkey pushes his suitcases at the Cilvegozu border crossing gate in Reyhanli on December 12, 2024, on the way back to his country following the oust of Syrian president. (AFP)
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Updated 24 December 2024

Turkiye says over 25,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall

A Syrian living in Turkey pushes his suitcases at the Cilvegozu border crossing gate in Reyhanli on December 12, 2024.
  • Ankara is in close touch with Syria’s new leaders and now focussing on the voluntary return of Syrian refugees

ISTANBUL: More than 25,000 Syrians have returned home from Turkiye since Bashar Assad was overthrown by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham militants, Turkiye’s interior minister said Tuesday.
Turkiye is home to nearly three million refugees who fled the civil war that broke out in 2011, and whose presence has been an issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.
“The number of people returning to Syria in the last 15 days has exceeded 25,000,” Ali Yerlikaya told the official Anadolu news agency.
Ankara is in close touch with Syria’s new leaders and now focussing on the voluntary return of Syrian refugees, hoping the shift in power in Damascus will allow many of them to return home.
Yerlikaya said a migration office would be established in the Turkish embassy and consulate in Damascus and Aleppo so that the records of returning Syrians could be kept.
Turkiye reopened its embassy in Damascus, nearly a week after Assad was toppled by forces backed by Ankara, and 12 years after the diplomatic outpost was shuttered early in Syria’s civil war.


Israel starts calling up reservists as it pushes into initial stages of Gaza City offensive

Updated 7 sec ago

Israel starts calling up reservists as it pushes into initial stages of Gaza City offensive

Israel starts calling up reservists as it pushes into initial stages of Gaza City offensive
DEIR AL BALAH: Israel began mobilizing tens of thousands of reservists on Tuesday as part of its plan to widen its offensive in Gaza City, which has sparked opposition domestically and condemnation abroad.
The beginning of September call-up, announced last month, comes as ground and air forces press forward and pursue more targets in northern and central Gaza, striking parts of Zeitoun and Shijaiyah — two western Gaza City neighborhoods that Israeli forces have repeatedly invaded during the 23-month war against Hamas militants.
Zeitoun, once Gaza City’s largest neighborhood with markets, schools and clinics, has been transformed over the past month, with streets being emptied and buildings reduced to rubble as it becomes what Israel’s military last week called a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gaza City is Hamas’ political and military stronghold and, according to Israel, still home to a vast tunnel network despite multiple incursions throughout the war. It is also one of the last refuges in the northern strip, where hundreds of thousands of civilians are sheltering, facing twin threats of combat and famine.
The reservist call-up will be gradual and include 60,000, Israel’s military said last month. It will also extend the service of an additional 20,000 already on active duty.
Since the world’s leading authority on food crises declared last month that Gaza City was experiencing famine, malnutrition-related deaths have mounted. Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday that a total of 185 people died of malnutrition in August — marking the highest count in months.
A total of 63,557 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the ministry, which says another 160,660 people have been wounded. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count, but says women and children make up around half the dead.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government but staffed by medical professionals. UN agencies and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of war casualties. Israel disputes them, but hasn’t provided its own toll.
The war started with an attack on Oct. 7, 2023, on southern Israel in which Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people hostage. Forty-eight hostages are still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefires or other deals.

Over 1,000 killed in landslide in western Sudan village, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army says

Over 1,000 killed in landslide in western Sudan village, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army says
Updated 02 September 2025

Over 1,000 killed in landslide in western Sudan village, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army says

Over 1,000 killed in landslide in western Sudan village, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army says

At least 1,000 were killed in a landslide that destroyed a village in the Marra Mountains area of western Sudan, leaving only one survivor, The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army said on Monday.
The landslide struck on August 31 after days of heavy rainfall, the group led by Abdelwahid Mohamed Nour said in a statement.
The movement, which controls the area located in Darfur region, appealed to the United Nations and international aid agencies to help recover the bodies of victims, including men, women and children.
The village “has now been completely levelled to the ground,” the movement added.
Fleeing the raging war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces  in North Darfur state, residents sought shelter in the Marra Mountains area where food and medication are insufficient.
The two-year civil war has left more than half the population facing crisis levels of hunger and driven millions from their homes with the capital of North Darfur state, Al-Fashir, being under fire.


Tunisian brutalist landmark faces wrecking ball, sparking outcry

Tunisian brutalist landmark faces wrecking ball, sparking outcry
Updated 02 September 2025

Tunisian brutalist landmark faces wrecking ball, sparking outcry

Tunisian brutalist landmark faces wrecking ball, sparking outcry
  • Tunisian historian Adnen El Ghali sees the Hotel du Lac as one of the world’s “top 10 brutalism jewels”

TUNIS: Tunisia’s brutalist landmark the Hotel du Lac — a 1970s postcard icon said to have inspired a desert-roving vehicle in “Star Wars” — is being demolished, sparking calls from architects, historians and activists to save it.
Built by Italian architect Raffaele Contigiani in central Tunis, the concrete-and-steel inverted pyramid opened in 1973 during a push to boost post-independence Tunisia’s tourism industry.
Its daring silhouette has since enraptured brutalism and modernizt architecture admirers from across the globe.
But after getting caught up in inheritance disputes and mismanagement, the hotel shut down in 2000, and its 10 floors and 416 rooms have grown decrepit since.
Tunisian historian Adnen El Ghali sees the Hotel du Lac as one of the world’s “top 10 brutalism jewels.”
Its demolition would mean “a great loss for world heritage,” he said.
LAFICO, a Libyan state investment fund that has owned the hotel since 2010, has not made any public announcements about its future.
But earlier this month, its head, Hadi Alfitory, told AFP the fund had “obtained all the necessary permits for demolition.”

When construction fences went up around the building in recent weeks, outrage spread.
A petition on Change.org calling to “save the urban landscape” of Tunis and preserve the “brutalist icon” collected more than 6,000 signatures within days, with a protest set to take place in Tunis in September.
Alfitory said the decision to tear down the structure came after “various expert assessments” determined that “the building is a ruin and must be demolished.”
Its replacement, a 20-story luxury hotel and mall, will keep to its “concept and shape,” Alfitory said, with the Libyan fund pledging $150 million in investment and 3,000 jobs.
Critics say the plan ignores both the building’s engineering achievements and its cultural resonance.
“Investing and modernizing does not mean demolishing and erasing collective memory and architectural heritage,” said Amel Meddeb, a member of parliament and architect who first raised alarms about the demolition permit this year.
Like many, she said the proposed plan was “totally vague,” and therefore difficult to officially challenge.
Safa Cherif, head of Tunisian conservation group Edifices et Memoires, said there was “no official sign explaining the nature of the work underway, nor any indication about the new project.”
The Hotel du Lac has survived other close calls.
Between 2010 and 2020, demolition plans were shelved, and in 2022, a wave of media campaigns led by civil society convinced the Culture Ministry to grant it temporary protection.
That safeguard expired in April 2023, and the ministry declined to renew it despite an expert rebuttal maintaining that the building was indeed restorable.

Parliament member Meddeb said the refusal was “a 180-degree turn,” insisting the hotel was a cultural monument worthy of saving.
To Gabriele Neri, a professor of architectural history at the Polytechnic University of Turin, its loss would be profound.
“These buildings are 50 years old and will soon be 60 or 100,” he said. “They are witnesses of important eras.”
The Hotel du Lac is “the main symbol in Tunisia” of the independence wave that swept across African nations, when leaders like the country’s first president Habib Bourguiba “sought to project a new, modern and international image,” he added.
It is an “engineering feat” with its narrow base supporting a wider top using Austrian-imported steel, said Neri, who urged authorities to preserve “as much as possible.”
Across the world, he pointed out, nations are learning to embrace late 20th-century architecture rather than discard it.
“In Uzbekistan, where I just returned from, the authorities have undertaken efforts to seek UNESCO recognition for Soviet monuments of the 1970s and 80s,” he said.
Brutalism — a style characterised by its use of exposed concrete — had “a very powerful era in many places,” Gabriele added.
It’s now “attracting a growing amount of attention, almost becoming fetishistic,” he added, citing books, magazines and movies like 2024’s “The Brutalist.”
Amid this wave, Hotel du Lac as it stands could “become an attraction for high-level cultural tourism.”
 


Siege tightens on Sudan city with fiercest RSF assault: what we know

Siege tightens on Sudan city with fiercest RSF assault: what we know
Updated 02 September 2025

Siege tightens on Sudan city with fiercest RSF assault: what we know

Siege tightens on Sudan city with fiercest RSF assault: what we know
  • The RSF evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias, mobilized in the early 2000s by the government to crush a rebellion by non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, causing an estimated 300,000 deaths amid accusations of genocide

KHARTOUM: The western Sudanese city of El-Fasher has been under siege for more than a year by paramilitary forces seeking to capture it amid a wider war with the army that began in April 2023.
Gripped by brutal violence, the city has become the latest strategic front in the conflict as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) pushes to seize the last major city held by the army in the Darfur region.
The paramilitaries, who lost much of central Sudan including Khartoum earlier this year, are attempting to consolidate power in the west and establish a rival government.
Here are key facts about the situation inside El-Fasher:

The Sudanese army is fighting alongside the Joint Forces, a coalition of former rebel groups led by militia commanders who are part of the army-allied government.
These groups abandoned neutrality in November 2023 following RSF-led ethnic massacres against the Massalit tribe in West Darfur’s El-Geneina, and the RSF’s capture of four Darfur state capitals.
The RSF evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias, mobilized in the early 2000s by the government to crush a rebellion by non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, causing an estimated 300,000 deaths amid accusations of genocide.
The current war erupted after a power struggle between former allies, army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, over integrating the RSF into the regular army.

The army and its allies now control less than 13 square kilometers (five square miles) of the city’s total of about 80 square kilomtres, primarily clustered around the airport in the city’s west, according to satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.
Their remaining control areas stretch from the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp in the north to Shalla prison in the south and as far east as the Grand Souk.
The area under army control “is the smallest it has been since the siege began,” Nathaniel Raymond, a war investigator and executive director of Yale’s HRL, told AFP.
The RSF captured much of Abu Shouk camp — which came under repeated attacks over the past weeks — seized the police headquarters in the city center and targeted hospitals and densely populated areas near the airport.
Satellite imagery from Yale’s lab shows extensive damage to the city’s water authority, disrupting access to clean drinking water.
The RSF has constructed over 31 kilometers of dirt berms, encircling El-Fasher to trap its population, “creating a literal kill box,” according to Yale’s latest report.
These earth barriers were started by the army, but completed and fortified by the RSF, Yale’s Raymond said.
The berms form “a half-circle crescent” along the northern side, Raymond said, while the southern side is fully under RSF control after it captured Zamzam camp — also struck by famine — in April.
“There is no way out,” said Raymond.
Those trying to scale the berms face likely death as RSF fighters reportedly demand bribes for passage and execute those suspected of army links, he added.
“We can see the choke points from space that the RSF is using for controlling civilian access.”

Some 300,000 civilians remain trapped inside El-Fasher, cut off from food, water, medicine and humanitarian aid, according to the UN.
Famine was declared last year in Zamzam, Abu Shouk and a nearby camp.
In El-Fasher, nearly 40 percent of children under five suffer acute malnutrition, according to UN data. Civilians eat animal fodder and many who flee into the desert die from starvation, exposure or violence.
Satellite imagery shows expanded cemeteries. Starving civilians report hiding in makeshift bunkers to protect themselves from relentless shelling.

The RSF assault on Zamzam displaced hundreds of thousands. Aid agencies fear another mass exodus if El-Fasher falls.
Capturing El-Fasher would also give the RSF control over all five Darfur state capitals, effectively strengthening its push for a parallel administration in western Sudan.
Experts warn of mass atrocities against El-Fasher’s dominant Zaghawa tribe, similar to the 2023 massacres in El-Geneina, in which up to 15,000 people, mostly from the Massalit tribe, were killed.
Political analyst Kholood Khair called the battle “existential” for both sides: the RSF seeks legitimacy and supply lines with backers in Libya, Chad and the United Arab Emirates, while the Joint Forces, mostly composed of Zaghawa fighters, see the city as their last line of defense.
“El-Fasher has become a siege of attrition much like Stalingrad,” Khair told AFP. “And it is only likely to bring more death and destruction before it ends.”

 


Israel buries slain hostages recovered from Gaza

Israel buries slain hostages recovered from Gaza
Updated 02 September 2025

Israel buries slain hostages recovered from Gaza

Israel buries slain hostages recovered from Gaza
  • His wife Shiri and daughter Noga, kidnapped at their home, were released in November 2023, during a first truce
  • Israel has killed at least 63,557 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable

KFAR MAAS, Israel: Two hostages whose bodies were recovered from Gaza last week were buried by family and friends in Israel on Monday in separate ceremonies.
The Israeli military on Friday announced the return of the remains of Idan Shtivi, 28, and Ilan Weiss, 55, from the Palestinian territory, nearly 23 months after they were both killed on October 7, 2023.
Shtivi, a student who had been attending the Nova music festival as a volunteer photographer when Hamas-led militants stormed the site, was laid to rest in Kfar Maas in central Israel.
His mother Dalit spoke in her eulogy of the “divine bond” with her son, asking him to “forgive me for not being able to protect and keep you safe” during the ceremony, where mourners gathered around his casket draped in an Israeli flag.
For nearly a year, Shtivi’s family clung to hope that he was still alive, before Israeli authorities informed them on the eve of the first anniversary of the attack that he had been killed.
The student had tried to flee the scene with two wounded people he was attempting to rescue, but lost control of his car, which crashed into a tree. The car was found riddled with bullet holes.
Ilan Weiss was buried in kibbutz Beeri, in southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip, in the community he had died trying to defend from Hamas militants.
His wife Shiri and daughter Noga, kidnapped at their home, were released in November 2023, during a first truce.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Saturday that Shtivi and Weiss’s bodies were recovered in a “complex rescue operation.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s 2023 attack, 47 are still being held in Gaza, including 25 the military says are dead.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 63,557 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.