One by one, the churchgoers trudged into the bare-brick cathedral in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre for the last Sunday Mass before Christmas, their clothes sodden by rain and their minds haunted by war.

There were no parties this year for the children, no music recitals and no Christmas tree in the city square. Much of the city is gone. Flattened apartment buildings. Mangled cars. Blown-out and abandoned mom-and-pop stores. After months of Israeli airstrikes, the holiday season began not with celebration, but with funerals as church members tended to their dead.

The pastor, Yaacoub Saab, did his best to lift spirits as he stepped up to the altar. “It’s a great blessing to gather and pray together,” he said. But later, out of earshot of his parishioners, he conceded that “we are finding it difficult to celebrate.”

Amid a cease-fire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Tyre’s ancient Christian community has resigned itself to a muted Christmas this year. While most of Tyre’s 125,000 residents fled during the war, the city’s Christian quarter, nestled alongside the harbor with its winding alleyways, was one of the few neighborhoods where some people remained. For months, they survived largely on handouts of bread, cut off from the outside world as water, electricity and medicine dwindled.

Despite the reprieve from the violence in recent weeks, the community remains haunted by trauma and loss. When friends and loved ones cross paths in the street, festive greetings are the last thing on anyone’s tongue. “Thank God for your safety,” they would say.

On Sunday, after Mass was over, Charbel Alameh, 11, ran outside and jostled among friends to ring the church bells, the boys leaping into the air and pulling down with all their might on the hefty ropes. Charbel had gone months without seeing their faces. His mother, Souraya Alameh, who was pregnant, had decided to stay put when other families in the neighborhood fled. She feared having to give birth away from home in a hospital crammed with war wounded.

Like many Lebanese, the Alameh family had been caught off guard by Israel’s sudden bombing campaign in late September. The ramped-up offensive followed nearly a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel in October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas militants in Gaza.

Faced with one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare, hundreds of thousands of people tried to flee, and the highways in southern Lebanon quickly clogged with miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“There was nowhere for us to go,” recounted Ms. Alameh as she sat in the family’s damp, single-room home, watching intently over little Christina as she slept in her cot — a child of war born into an uncertain peace.

After months spent sheltering as Israeli fighter jets roared overhead, members of the family were desperate to claw back some sense of holiday cheer. They had already prepared and wrapped their gifts months ago, ready to cart them away in case they needed to flee. Charbel and his younger brother, Elias, had decorated a small Christmas tree in the corner and were now tucking into baklava as members of the local clergy came in to see the newborn baby.

Both boys are receiving trauma counseling at school, Ms. Alameh said. “We tried to explain as much as a child’s understanding allows,” she said, “but at the end of the war, we, the adults, needed someone to explain what had happened, too.”

Next door, the Kahwaji family’s home was devoid of decoration. Where a Christmas tree once stood there was now just a collection of empty water bottles. With running water scarce during the bombardment, family members had made a perilous journey to the neighborhood’s outskirts to fill up the containers and lug them home. They said they had survived mostly on boiled potatoes, cooked atop a simple burner affixed to a gas canister.

“We surrendered ourselves to God,” said Rita Kahwaji, gesturing to the Christian iconography that adorned the home’s peeling walls.

This was not their first war.

Ms. Kahwaji’s daughter, Nazha, or “Nana,” as her family calls her, is deaf in one ear after she was maimed as a 7-month-old baby when, they said, an Israeli strike hit a relative’s home more than three decades ago. Ms. Kahwaji herself was injured in the blast, the shrapnel still lodged centimeters from her heart.

“We’ve lived our whole life in war,” she said.

Nana Kahwaji sat on the family’s couch, her neck adorned with a small gold cross, and at times strained to hear her family speak. She had hastened to design the nativity scene at the church as soon as the cease-fire was announced, but it had done little to cheer up her normally bubbly 7-year-old daughter.

“There are barely any celebrations this year,” Nana said. “Mentally, we are unable.”

In the weeks since the truce was reached, life has begun to stutter back to normal in Tyre, where tens of thousands of residents have returned to the coastal city. Teenage girls snap selfies on the seafront. Fishermen repair their nets. Groups of friends sit in cafes gossiping over cups of bitter, cardamom-infused Arabic coffee.

The destruction, however, is not easy to ignore.

On the city’s main shopping street, businesses that once bustled in the holiday season have been pulverized, and some of those that remain have been blackened by fire. Jewelry stores, restaurants, chic swimwear outlets — many have been reduced to rubble, the torsos of shop mannequins strewed amid the rubble. In the remnants of one residential building, a sole curtain fluttered in the wintry breeze; the floors below it were collapsed like a pancake.

“We’re still alive,” one man called down as he combed through what was left of his apartment.

At Nour and Mahdi Akanan’s toy store, the husband and wife had only recently reopened after an airstrike across the street gutted their building, destroying what they said was nearly $35,000 in stock. Now, just a flimsy piece of paper advertised their store name. They had placed outside one of the few objects to survive the blast, a saxophone-playing Santa Claus, in the hopes of enticing customers.

“The demand for toys is very little this year,” said Ms. Akanan.

The store had sold only seven items since reopening and may be forced to close, Ms. Akanan said, gesturing to a family across the way pulling belongings from the flattened building.

“Priorities,” she said. “They don’t want to celebrate anything.”

Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.

Visitors from Mexico and around the world stood for hours in a line that stretched for blocks to see a spectacle that the city of Oaxaca has hosted for more than 120 years.

The attraction? Radishes.

Every Dec. 23, the southern Mexican city, celebrated for its vibrant culture, cuisine and history, comes to a near standstill for a simple vegetable typically served in soups, on salads and with tacos.

But instead of eating the radishes, the crowds gather for the annual Noche de Rábanos competition (the Night of the Radishes), where local residents transform the root vegetable into extravagant works of art.

This year there were Nativity scenes, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) displays, depictions of Indigenous mythology and much more.

“The material is so fun,” said María de los Angeles Aragón García, 21, a local visual arts student who competed for the first time with two friends. “It reminds me of my childhood, when they said, ‘Don’t play with your food.’ But here they say, ‘Sculpt something with your food.’”

Mexico bursts with vibrant traditions, yet few are as enchanting as this one in Oaxaca. What began as local vendors decorating their fish and vegetable stands at a Christmas market in the city center evolved into a contest back in 1897. The radish became the official medium because it was abundant and easy to mold.

“It’s part of our idiosyncrasy and our economic reality,” said Francisco Martínez Neri, Oaxaca’s mayor. “People make art or songs or poetry from whatever they have.”

Although Oaxaca has expanded from a farming town into a city with a metropolitan population of 800,000, its residents have kept the custom alive. A state decree protects the yearly event, and the city provides the radishes — 12 tons this year — free to the participants.

There are two different varieties of radishes for contestants to use, including one that grows up to seven pounds. (No, these aren’t supposed to be eaten, city officials said, because of the insecticides and treated water used to grow them.)

Some Oaxacan families have been competing for decades, passing down the craft and their carving tips from one generation to the next.

“In the beginning, you want to win because there is a prize,” said José Domingo Luría Aquino, 44, a local artist and sculptor. In the traditional radish category this year, first place won about $1,500, with cash awards extending to 20th place.

“But with time,” Mr. Luría Aquino continued, “you do it because of tradition, and it’s why we’ve instilled it in our children.”

Mr. Luría Aquino met his wife, Ileana, 39, at the contest 18 years ago, and they have competed almost every year since. “December smells like radishes to me,” she said.

The night before the event, the entire family — including their children Fernando, 14; Sofia, 11; and Alejandro, 5, — gathered in the garage of a studio to carve radishes for their display. Their entry depicted the traditional Flor de Piña (Flower of Pineapple) dance in which Oaxacan women wear radiant outfits while holding the fruit on their shoulders.

Not all families competing, though, have professional artists leading the charge.

The winner in the traditional radish category this year was Carlos David Vásquez López, a 19-year-old communications student who was home in Oaxaca from college in Chicago for the winter break.

His father, 50, is a pastor and his mother, 47, is a midwife, yet the family has won first place several times over the decades.

Although Mr. Vásquez López has been competing in the event since he was 7, this was his first time choosing the theme for the family’s entry and directing them. He picked Oaxacan food because he missed it so much while away.

“For me, for my family, it’s a chance to share a message and an idea about Oaxaca,” he said. Some of his earliest memories, he added, are of sitting around and talking as a family while making a radish display.

In the patio at his parents’ home, the family had a giant whiteboard with sketches of their plans. Mr. Vásquez López, his younger brother Daniel, 15, and his father focused on the larger structures in their exhibit: the food stands, carts and tables. His mother and aunt handled the smaller details: the traditional Oaxacan tlayudas (imagine a large crispy corn tortilla pizza), clothing or hair.

The family was racing against time. All the adult participants picked their radishes from the field on Thursday, leaving four days to prepare their entries. But radishes dry out and rot quickly when out of the ground, particularly after being carved. So the contestants try to keep them moist, submerging the vegetables in water or constantly spraying them.

The day before the competition, Mr. Vásquez López and his family worked into the wee hours. He said he didn’t get to sleep until 4:30 a.m. Monday and his father until 6 a.m. They woke up soon after to head to the city center and set up their stand. The judges came by around noon and the gates opened for the public from 2 p.m. until midnight.

Any resident of Oaxaca state is allowed to compete and for free. The city spent roughly $65,000 on this year’s event, including buying the radish seeds and hosting children’s workshops, said Ángel Norberto Osorio Morales, the city’s tourism secretary. Officials view it as an important promotional tool for the city — an estimated 10,000 visitors came to the event in 2022 — as well as for Oaxacan customs and creativity.

“It’s impressive how this tradition among Oaxacans keeps reinventing itself every year because no figures are the same,” he said. “It keeps surprising us.”

This year there were more than 100 entries, including the smaller competitions where displays are made mostly from a local flower or corn husks. In the radish categories, participants are allowed to use other materials, such as wood or grass, but they have to be organic and the majority of the stand has to be made from the star of the night: radishes.

Día de los Muertos and Nativity scenes were the most common themes on Monday. Two submissions came from inmates at penitentiaries in the state. Four children — and their teacher — participated from a local public culinary school.

Over the decades, city officials said, the event has not only exhibited Oaxacan culture but society at large. When humans first landed on the moon, in 1969, and during the Zapatista uprising, in 1994, for example, the displays those years reflected those events.

When the winners were declared on Monday night, Mr. Vásquez López was shocked to find that his entry had triumphed. After accepting his certificate and ceremonial check, he embraced his family, including a cousin who clinched third place. Overwhelmed with joy, his mother cried.

“The satisfaction I feel is that I brought the same spirit that I saw in my parents when I was little,” Mr. Vásquez López said.

He vowed to defend his title next year.

Dozens of people were feared dead after a jet carrying 62 passengers and five crew members crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the country’s authorities said.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that at least 29 people had survived, including two children, and that they had been hospitalized with various injuries. An unverified video from the scene, published by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, showed injured people being pulled from the wreckage. In the video, some passengers were lying on the ground, while others were able to walk away from the plane.

The emergency ministry posted photographs that it said were from the scene showing firefighters searching through the debris. One photograph appeared to show the tail of the plane largely intact, though it had been separated from the fuselage.

The Kazakh authorities said they were compiling a list of the names of the dead and injured but did not give a death toll.

The Azerbaijan Airlines plane had been trying to make an emergency landing in Aktau after hitting a flock of birds, Russia’s state aviation authority said in a statement cited by RIA Novosti soon after the crash. The airline said in a statement that its plane had come down about 1.8 miles away from Aktau. Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said it had opened an investigation into the causes of the crash.

Later on Wednesday, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement that it had opened a criminal investigation. The office said that it had dispatched a team of investigators to the scene. Similar criminal investigations were also opened in Russia and Kazakhstan.

The Embraer-190 plane was traveling to Grozny, in Russia’s Chechnya republic in the North Caucasus, from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital on the Caspian Sea. RIA Novosti reported that the plane had been rerouted to Kazakhstan because of fog in Grozny.

The airline said in a statement that it was suspending flights from Baku to Grozny and Makhachkala, in neighboring Dagestan, until investigations into the cause of the crash had concluded.

Earlier on Wednesday, Flightradar24, a flight tracking service, said in a post on the social media platform X that the plane had been “exposed to GPS jamming and spoofing near Grozny.” Radar jamming is often used to defend an area against drones. It was not immediately clear whether this had played any role in the crash.

On Wednesday, local news outlets in Chechnya reported drone strikes against the republic. Grozny Inform, a state-run news website in Chechnya, cited Khamzat Kadyrov, a local security official, as stating that all of the drones had been shot down. The reports could not be independently verified. Ukrainian drones have hit various targets in Chechnya in recent weeks, including a site belonging to a riot police battalion.

Kazakhstan’s transportation ministry said that the flight’s passengers included 37 Azerbaijani nationals, 16 Russians, six Kazakh citizens and three Kyrgyz nationals.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called Ilham Aliyev, his Azerbaijani counterpart, to express condolences for the crash victims, according to Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman. Mr. Aliyev had been traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday for a gathering of leaders of some former Soviet states, but returned to Azerbaijan because of the crash, the Kremlin said.

Mr. Aliyev declared Thursday a day of mourning for the victims.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry initially said 25 people had survived the crash, but later revised that number to 29 as emergency workers continued their search and rescue efforts.

Azerbaijan Airlines is the country’s flag carrier, formed from the regional branch of Aeroflot shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan Airlines inherited a fleet of Soviet planes but has since undergone a transformation, during which time most of its fleet was replaced with modern Western aircraft, according to the carrier’s website.

The airline’s last major episode was in 2005, when an An-140 plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 18 passengers and five crew members. Airline officials later said the crash was caused by instrument failure.

Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

For much of the last two years, Vladimir Kara-Murza barely used his voice. A political activist and vehement critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he was confined to a harsh isolation cell in a Siberian penal colony.

Now, he is using his voice as often as possible.

Since being traded to the West in August in the biggest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, Mr. Kara-Murza, 43, has been lobbying Western leaders to take stronger action against Mr. Putin. At the same time, he is trying to give opposition-minded Russians at home and abroad reasons for hope.

Mr. Kara-Murza said the need for more prisoner swaps had been among his main arguments to world leaders, including President Biden, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France.

“While people are listening, I feel a responsibility to speak because I feel a responsibility toward all the others who are still left back there,” he said, referring to the hundreds of political prisoners in Russia. “We need to have more of these exchanges.”

He has promoted this cause even though he has maintained that he was released from Russia against his will.

“It has always been a question of principle that a Russian politician has to stay in Russia,” he said. “Because what moral right do I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist the dictatorship if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself?”

Many of the others who were released have spent some time decompressing and getting used to their freedom. Mr. Kara-Murza immediately got to work.

“The hardest part was that there was no re-acclimating, because I went from solitary confinement in a strict regime prison in Siberia to traveling around to four or five different countries every week,” Mr. Kara-Murza said in a video interview from his study in the Washington area.

In his calmer moments, he still wonders if it has all been a dream.

“Frankly, it still feels completely surreal,” he added. “It feels like I’m watching some kind of a film. It’s a really good one, but it still does not feel real.”

“I still get this feeling sometimes that, you know, at 5 a.m. tomorrow, I’m going to wake up from the Soviet national anthem blasting on my radio,” he said. “I have to attach my bunk bed to the wall, and then we start again.”

He was referring to a practice in the punishment cells he was held in: From 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., the beds must be folded against the wall, forcing the prisoner either to sit on the floor or stand the entire time.

Finally, this holiday season, he will get to take his first vacation — at the beach — with his family in three years.

Like Aleksei A. Navalny, the prominent activist who died in prison last February, Mr. Kara-Murza is believed to have been poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. The F.B.I., at the behest of Congressional lawmakers, investigated his resulting illness as a case of “intentional poisoning” but blood tests by an American weapons research laboratory and hundreds of pages of F.B.I. files were not released to him.

His supporters say it was punishment for his active lobbying in the West for sanctions against Kremlin-connected elites.

Mr. Kara-Murza suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities. It is believed to be a side effect of the poisoning.

While he was incarcerated, Mr. Kara-Murza lost 55 pounds. Eventually his feet and ankles were so swollen from his condition that he could not put on his boots. Before falling asleep each night, he said, he would lie on his bed with his legs lifted up, to let the blood flow back toward his core.

“Human beings get used to anything,” he said. “So in any conditions, you sort of find things that you can do to make things a little better.”

Although such frailty would be grounds to release many convicts, he refused to let his lawyers make the state of his health public.

“My point was that I should be released because I’m innocent, not because I have a health problem,” he said.

He spent at least 315 days in solitary confinement, in contravention of Russia’s own rules. According to the United Nations, more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement is considered torture. The only other opposition politician subjected to such an intense regime of solitary confinement was Mr. Navalny, an inspirational leader to the Russian opposition and a fierce critic of Mr. Putin.

Mr. Kara-Murza, who speaks fluent English, comes from a long line of Kremlin opponents. One of his great-grandfathers was a Latvian social democrat and revolutionary executed as an “enemy of the people” in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s “Great Terror.” His grandfather, a journalist and historian, was arrested in 1937, and forced to do hard labor in the Russian Far East.

Mr. Kara-Murza’s father, Vladimir, became an independent journalist as democracy was starting to emerge in Russia in the 1990s, and the son followed in his footsteps, starting his journalism career when he was 16. In 1999, while still a teenager, he interviewed the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and he soon got involved in politics as Mr. Nemtsov’s aide.

It was the same year that another man sharing his name and patronymic, Vladimir Vladimirovich — Mr. Putin — rose to lead Russia.

As a young adult, Mr. Kara-Murza remained active in both journalism and politics in Russia, working alongside Mr. Nemtsov and producing a documentary series about the Soviet dissident movement. His extensive studies of those who defied the Kremlin during the Soviet era helped sustain him while he was in prison, he said.

“It was just absolutely mind boggling how everything is exactly the same,” he said. “I mean, down to the last details, down to the way the cell is organized, the way you’re taken to the courtyard for the prison walk, the way prison guards speak to you.”

Rereading Gulag memoirs in his cell was a source of solace, he said. “My education as a historian perhaps never came as useful to me as it did when I was in prison,” he said. “Because I know that we’ve had all this in Russia before, and we know that it ended, and we know how it ended.”

“And this one’s not any different,” he added, referring to the Putin era.

Out of prison, Mr. Kara-Murza knows he cannot feel 100 percent secure.

On Aug. 1, as he was about to be freed, one of the Russian security service agents escorting the prisoners told him and Ilya Yashin, another activist who was released, that they should not allow themselves to feel safe in the West.

“He told us, ‘Remember, Krasikov can come for you any time,’” Mr. Kara-Murza said. It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, the assassin who killed a Kremlin opponent in Berlin and was sent back to Russia as part of the same exchange.

“I just try not to think about it because — first of all, because I know that what I’m doing is right,” he said.

Mr. Kara-Murza became well known in Washington because of his lobbying for the so-called Magnitsky sanctions against human rights abusers in Russia. He grew so close to Senator John McCain, a champion of those sanctions, that he was a pallbearer at his funeral.

Since 2017, Mr. Kara-Murza has been a regular columnist for the Washington Post, and this year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns written while he was in prison.

Mr. Kara-Murza hopes opposition leaders can find common cause with the incoming Trump administration. He praised Senator Marcio Rubio of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has nominated to be his secretary of state, for advocating for political prisoners in Russia, Belarus and other repressive countries.

He said his top priority is holding the Kremlin elite accountable for the atrocities they committed inside and outside of Russia, but he has steadfastly rejected the assertion, common in Ukraine and elsewhere, that all Russians bear responsibility for Mr. Putin and his aggression.

“We were protesting Putin from the beginning, from the year 2000, while Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were looking into his eyes and seeing his soul, pushing reset buttons with him, rolling out red carpets, inviting him for summits, buying oil and gas and so on,” he said.

“So if people want to talk about collective responsibility in Russia,” he said, “let’s not forget about the collective responsibility of Western leaders who were aiding and abetting and enabling and appeasing Putin throughout his first many years in power.”

At least 21 people have been killed in the southern African nation of Mozambique since Monday, a government official said, as police officers and protesters clashed in the latest wave of unrest over a presidential election that demonstrators claim was rigged by the governing party.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, the official, Pascoal Ronda, Mozambique’s interior minister, did not provide details on how the deaths occurred. He said that two police officers were among the dead and that the authorities had made 71 arrests in connection with the violence.

The political unrest comes as the country is working to recover from a deadly storm. Mozambique’s death toll from Cyclone Chido has risen to 120 since the storm made landfall more than a week ago, according to the country’s National Institute for Natural Disasters.

The storm’s death toll has nearly quadrupled from the initial reported figures as rescue workers reach isolated rural areas. Most of those who died in the storm were in the northern Cabo Delgado Province, where hundreds of thousands of people had already fled their homes after years of attacks by an Islamic State-backed insurgent group. The storm has affected more than 450,000 people in the country, the natural disaster institute said.

Since the protests that erupted after the country’s October election, human rights groups have asserted that Mozambique’s security forces have responded with excessive force, including by firing live rounds and rubber bullets into crowds. More than 100 people have died in sporadic protests since the election was held.

Tensions escalated this week after the nation’s top court on Monday upheld the result of the election in favor of Daniel Chapo, the candidate for Frelimo, which has governed Mozambique since it gained independence from Portugal in 1975.

Protesters responded to the ruling by burning tires and blocking roads with trash and streetlights. Mr. Ronda said hundreds of buildings were looted and vandalized, including police stations, schools, hospitals, courts and homes. A penitentiary was attacked, and 86 inmates were released.

“These acts pose a direct threat to stability, public safety and the values of our young democracy,” Mr. Ronda said. “Defense and security forces must act firmly to restore normalcy and hold those responsible accountable.”

The top opposition candidate, Venâncio Mondlane, has asserted that he won the election. He has called for a national shutdown and for Mozambicans to take to the streets in protest. Mr. Mondlane said in a livestream on Tuesday that he was open to dialogue, “but only with international mediation.”

“I will do what the people tell me to do,” he said. “I am with the people.”

Much of the anger stems from widespread irregularities in the election process — including voter registration and vote counting — that were identified by independent observers. Demonstrators argue that those irregularities helped to tip the poll in favor of Mr. Chapo and Frelimo.

Despite the concerns, the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest court, certified the results on Monday, saying Mr. Chapo won 65 percent of the vote to Mr. Mondlane’s 24 percent.

In central Maputo, the capital, a large group of protesters surrounded a police car and heavily armed forces on Tuesday evening, demanding the release of protesters who had been detained for throwing objects at the police. Another group of protesters joined in. Outnumbered, the officers opened the back of the police car and freed two young men, to the cheers of many.

The chaos spells further problems for the troubled economy of Mozambique, a coastal nation of 33 million people.

The government was already struggling to address high unemployment and poverty, and an Islamic State-backed insurgency in the northern part of the country has left several thousand dead and derailed lucrative natural gas projects. Much of the nation is now shut down at a time when things are usually bustling with the festive holiday season. Several airlines have canceled flights to Maputo.

The months of upheaval have also threatened stability across the region, and South Africa has sought to fortify its border with Mozambique to prevent any of the violence spilling over.

South Africa’s foreign minister, Ronald Lamola, traveled to Mozambique last week to meet with Mr. Ronda. They discussed ways to tackle disruption at the ports of entry between the countries, which has affected trade and supply chains and threatens food and energy security, according to the South African government.

“South Africa calls on all parties to commit to an urgent dialogue that will heal the country and set it on a new political and developmental trajectory,” South Africa’s foreign ministry said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Lynsey Chutel contributed reporting.

Syria’s new leadership has taken steps to unite disparate rebel factions under a single government in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Under a new accord, a number of rebel factions agreed to dissolve themselves, Sana, the Syrian state-run news service, reported on Tuesday. The agreement suggested that the new Syrian administration was making progress in asserting its authority over the country.

The rebel groups agreed to be integrated under the defense ministry, the Sana report said. Pictures posted on social media showed Ahmad al-Shara, the rebel who led the offensive that overthrew the Assad dictatorship, meeting on Tuesday with dozens of rebels, many of them clad in military uniforms.

On Sunday, Mr. al-Shara, who has sought to present himself as a moderate despite past links to Islamist extremists, told a news conference that the “logic of a state is different from the logic of a revolution.” He spoke standing alongside Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan.

“We absolutely will not allow for weapons outside the framework of the state,” Mr. al-Shara said.

Mr. al-Shara has called publicly for all armed opposition groups in Syria to be disbanded and has said he wants all weapons in the country under state control.

It was not immediately clear whether all rebel factions had signed onto the new unity agreement. A separate Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, did not appear to be part of the deal. The force dominates northeastern Syria and is backed by the U.S. military.

The Kurdish-led force has been battling the Islamic State terrorist group for years inside Syria. Neighboring Turkey is hostile to the Kurdish force, viewing it as an extension of a Kurdish group in Turkey that has been fighting the Turkish state for decades.

Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.