Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said yesterday he is confident of victory against rebels in a devastating 28-month-old civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and sent nearly 2 million fleeing abroad.
Insurgents have seized large swathes of territory, but al-Assad’s forces have staged a counteroffensive in recent weeks, pushing them back from around the capital Damascus and retaking several towns near the border with Lebanon.
“If we were not sure that we were going to win in Syria, we would not have the ability to resist and the ability to continue fighting for more than two years against the enemy,” state news agency SANA quoted al-Assad as saying.
Al-Assad has framed the revolt against four decades of his family’s rule as a foreign-backed conspiracy fought by Islamist “terrorists.” When pro-democracy protests started in March 2011, a military crackdown eventually led to an armed insurrection.
Addressing officers on the 68th anniversary of the Syrian army’s creation, al-Assad said soldiers had shown “courage in the face of terrorism ... and the fiercest barbaric war in modern history.”
UN investigators say al-Assad’s forces have carried out war crimes, including unlawful killing, torture, sexual violence, indiscriminate attacks and pillaging in what appears to be a state-directed policy. They say rebels have also committed war crimes, including executions, but on a lesser scale.
Meanwhile, the UN announced on Wednesday that experts would travel to Syria as soon as possible to investigate three alleged incidents of chemical weapons attacks.
UN spokesman Martin Nesirky in New York said the green light for the investigation followed “the understanding reached with the government of Syria” during last week’s visit to Damascus by UN disarmament chief Angela Kane and the head of the chemical weapons investigation team, Ake Sellstrom.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
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It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
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