Syrian interim president Ahmed Sharaa yesterday called for peace after hundreds were killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed president Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new rulers.
The clashes, which a war monitoring group said had already killed 1,000 people, mostly civilians, continued for a fourth day in al-Assad’s coastal heartland.
A Syrian security source said the pace of fighting had slowed around the cities of Latakia, Jabla and Baniyas, while forces searched surrounding mountainous areas where an estimated 5,000 pro-al-Assad insurgents were hiding.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Sharaa urged Syrians not to let sectarian tensions further destabilize the country.
“We have to preserve national unity and domestic peace, we can live together,” Sharaa said in a circulated video, speaking at a mosque in his childhood neighborhood of Mazzah, in Damascus.
“Rest assured about Syria, this country has the characteristics for survival... What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges,” he said.
Rebels led by Sharaa’s Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group toppled al-Assad’s government in December last year. Al-Assad fled to Russia, leaving behind some of his closest advisers and supporters, while Sharaa’s group led the appointment of an interim government and took over Syria’s armed forces.
Al-Assad’s overthrow ended decades of dynastic rule by his family marked by severe repression and a devastating civil war that began as a peaceful uprising in 2011.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of Syrians.
After months of relative calm following the ouster of al-Assad, violence spiraled last week as forces linked to the new rulers began a crackdown on a growing insurgency from al-Assad’s Alawite sect in the Mediterranean provinces of Latakia and Tartous.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, on Saturday said that more than 1,000 people had been killed in the two days of fighting.
It said 745 were civilians, 125 members of the Syrian security forces and 148 fighters loyal to al-Assad.
Observatory founder Rami Abdulrahman said the civilians included Alawite women and children.
He yesterday said that the death toll was one of the highest since a chemical weapons attack by al-Assad’s forces in 2013, which killed about 1,400 people in a Damascus suburb.
The EU, whose officials have met Sharaa since he became de facto leader of Syria, condemned “all violence against civilians” and “any attempts to undermine stability and the prospects for a lasting peaceful transition” in Syria.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
RSS