Here’s what to know.
The leader of the rebel coalition that governs Syria on Monday called for governments like the United States to remove their terrorism designations for his group and to lift sanctions imposed on the country so that it could rebuild, a public show of diplomacy as maneuvering for Syria’s future intensifies.
The comments by the leader, Ahmed al-Shara, came on the same day a statement purportedly from Syria’s ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, said that Mr. al-Assad had wanted to stay and fight but had been evacuated by Russia after rebel forces infiltrated the capital, Damascus. That statement, which was issued on Monday on social media accounts Mr. al-Assad had used while in office, was apparently his first public comment since he and his family fled Syria just over a week ago.
In the statement, Mr. al-Assad said that he had not considered “stepping down or seeking refuge” as the rebels advanced, and that he had remained in Damascus until Dec. 8, when, he said, rebel fighters moved in. Coordinating with “our Russian allies,” Mr. al-Assad said, he then headed to the coastal city of Latakia, near where Russia operates a military base.
Hours later, Mr. al-Shara gave his own public statements in an interview with a small group of journalists. Trading his combat fatigues for a dark business suit, Mr. al-Shara seemed to continue his pivot from rebel to diplomat.
He called for the lifting of sanctions placed on the Assad regime; carefully criticized Israel’s cross-border incursions onto Syrian territory; and said his rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was prioritizing building a state and creating public institutions that served all Syrians.
Here’s what else to know:
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Assad statement: Tass, the Russian state news agency, said Mr. al-Assad’s statement had been issued from Moscow. The statement later appeared to have been removed from one of the social media accounts of the former Syrian presidency, but it offered new details of his final days in power.
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Syria diplomacy: As the world reckons with the rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a conservative Islamist group long designated a terrorist organization, Mr. al-Shara met on Sunday with the U.N. special envoy to Syria, Geir O. Pedersen. The new government was also expected to meet with leaders from across Europe and the Middle East. Many international powers have said they want to see a stable, unified Syria with an inclusive government that respects the rights of Syria’s minorities, and they now have the leverage to coax the new leadership toward that notion.
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Russian moves: The Kremlin acknowledged that the fate of its critical bases in Syria was uncertain, and video reporters from The New York Times observed a convoy of Russian military vehicles moving from Tartus to Latakia, two cities in western Syria where it has military bases.
Syria’s top rebel tries out the role of top diplomat.
The green fatigues have been replaced with a gray suit, the combat boots switched out for black dress shoes and socks.
In an interview on Monday, Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel group that headed the lightning advance across Syria that toppled President Bashar al-Assad last week, sought to lay out a conciliatory vision for the country’s future.
Despite hailing from the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which evolved from a branch of Al Qaeda, his language focused on reconstruction and inclusion, albeit with few details on how it will be carried out.
“Syria is tired of wars, and we want to build a state and institutions away from conflicts,” he said.
Given the country’s state after 13 years of civil war, it is not logistically ready to hold elections, he said.
First, the state needed to be able to meet Syrians’ basic needs for food, water, shelter and education, he said, adding that the country’s new leaders would cooperate with foreign powers and Syrians in the diaspora to rebuild.
In many ways, Mr. al-Shara has turned from Syria’s most prominent rebel leader into its top diplomat. It is a remarkable change.
Until recently, Mr. al-Shara was known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. As a young man, he fought American forces in Iraq, later returning to Syria to found Jabhat al-Nusra, a Qaeda affiliate that sought to topple Mr. al-Assad. The United States and other governments still consider him and his group, Hayat Tahir al-Sham, terrorists.
In recent years, Mr. al-Shara’s original group merged with more mainline rebel factions, and his rhetoric has grown less jihadist and more nationalistic, although Syrians debate how genuine is his transformation.
His interview on Monday with nine journalists — eight men and one woman — took place in a sitting room in the cavernous building that previously held the office of Syria’s prime minister. A New York Times reporter was present.
Cellphones and recording devices were not allowed, presumably for security reasons, and Mr. al-Shara responded to questions in Arabic in a voice so soft that he was often hard to hear.
Many of his answers appeared to be crafted to reassure foreign powers and other Syrians who distrust his group’s intentions.
A “national conference” would be held at an undefined date to allow people from all parts of Syrian society to shape the country’s future, he said.
Restoring services was a priority, which would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees, he said. That was a message sure to be welcomed by the governments hosting many millions of Syrian refugees.
Mr. al-Shara did not go into detail about what Syria’s future legal code or system of government would be, saying they would be set by experts and defined in a constitution. But when asked if Syria would ban alcohol or pork — both forbidden in Islam — he said, “We will not interfere in personal freedoms in a deep way.”
Some answers he framed in terms of international law.
He criticized Israel for moving its forces into a buffer zone between the countries — and into Syrian territory. He did it not with a tirade against Israel, but by calling the moves a violation of the 1974 armistice agreement between the countries.
He harshly criticized Iran, a key all of Mr. al-Assad’s, by accusing it of spreading sectarianism, drugs and dangerous militias. But he did not single out Russia, which also sent its military to back Mr. al-Assad and which has two strategically important military bases in Syria whose future remains unclear.
Seeking to reassure Syria’s minorities, many of whom fear that rule by the country’s overwhelming Sunni Muslim majority would deprive them of rights, he said his group had already been in touch with leaders from Syria’s Druse, Christian and Kurdish communities.
But Syria’s new government would seek justice against people who had committed crimes under the old regime, he said, including Mr. al-Assad.
“There is a group of people who need to be held accountable,” he said.
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The U.S. military says its airstrikes killed 12 Islamic State operatives in Syria.
American airstrikes targeted Islamic State camps in areas of Syria that were formerly controlled by Russia and Bashar al-Assad’s government, the United States Central Command said in a statement on Monday.
The statement said that the strikes were part of its ongoing mission to prevent the Islamic State from re-emerging in central Syria, and that they had killed 12 Islamic State operatives. There were no indications of civilian casualties, the statement said.
“CENTCOM, working with allies and partners in the region, will not allow ISIS to reconstitute and take advantage of the current situation in Syria,” Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, Centcom’s commander, said in the statement.
Just over a week ago, the United States conducted one of its largest strikes in Syria against ISIS in months, saying that it hit “over 75 targets.” Earlier this year, the Pentagon warned that the group’s attacks in Iraq and Syria were on track to double.
The latest U.S. strikes came on the same day that the Kurdish-led administration governing much of northern Syria pleaded for unity and for a countrywide cease-fire. Kurdish forces backed by the United States have come under attack from Turkish-backed rebels on multiple fronts.
Those rebels, supported by Turkish air support and drones, are fighting to take territory from the Kurdish administration. The top commander of the the main Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, said the assaults had forced fighters to be diverted from defending the prisons that house people accused of being ISIS members.
Amid the fighting in northern Syria, other parts of the country have been pummeled by an Israeli aerial campaign. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad and his government, Israel has sought to destroy Syria’s military assets.
Putin stays silent on Syria, with Russia’s future there in question.
For an hour on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin and his defense minister presided over a televised, annual meeting of the Russian military’s top brass. They held forth on NATO, Ukraine and issues as obscure as mortgages for service members.
But one topic went unmentioned: Syria.
Mr. Putin has yet to say anything in public about the collapse of his close ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria more than a week ago, even as Russia struggles to salvage what influence it can in the Middle East. The silence underscores the uncertainty surrounding the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria — and the overwhelming priority for the Kremlin that the war in Ukraine has become.
Mr. al-Assad’s fall is a painful topic right now in Moscow, said Anton Mardasov, a Moscow-based military analyst focusing on the Middle East. “It’s better not to say anything.”
Things were very different just a year ago, when Sergei K. Shoigu, then the defense minister, boasted at the same annual meeting that Russian troops remained deployed both in Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-populated enclave that Azerbaijan recaptured from Armenia last year.
“Russian groups of forces remain the backbone and the main guarantee of peace in Syria and Karabakh,” Mr. Shoigu said at the time.
Russian peacekeeping forces pulled out of Nagorno-Karabakh in May, a sign of Russia’s loss of influence in the Caucasus region, which had been part of the Soviet Union.
Now Mr. al-Assad’s ouster could become an even greater setback to Mr. Putin’s efforts to revive Russia as a world power. Mr. Mardasov said a best-case scenario for Russia could be a scaled-down military presence at the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean. That could allow Moscow to keep a refueling and staging point for limited military activity there and in Africa.
But that scenario wouldn’t fulfill Mr. Putin’s earlier, broader ambitions of projecting might on the doorstep of NATO. Russian nuclear-capable bombers flew training missions from Syria in 2021, a signal that Mr. Putin saw his military’s presence in the country as a bulwark in his global conflict with the West.
Now, Mr. Mardasov said, the security situation in Syria is likely to remain so tenuous that Russia wouldn’t be able to station nuclear-capable weaponry there even if it struck an agreement to hold on to its bases.
“Such outposts to threaten NATO’s southern flank are already 100 percent lost,” Mr. Mardasov said. “Even if they manage to keep a presence, it will be symbolic.”
To Mr. Putin, the outcome of the war in Ukraine has now become the biggest factor in Russia’s future security. And in that war, he believes he is winning, both on the battlefield and in his standoff with the West, as politicians skeptical of supporting Ukraine, led by President-elect Donald J. Trump, increasingly come to power.
The government in Germany, one of Ukraine’s largest supporters, collapsed on Monday, and the cost of the war is one of the issues likely to dominate the upcoming election campaign. On Thursday, the leaders of the European Union’s 27 member countries are scheduled to meet in Brussels to discuss, among other things, a path forward in Ukraine.
In Syria, Russia has apparently been scaling down its presence in recent days, with convoys of troops that had been stationed across the country seen pulling back to Russia’s Hmeimim and Tartus bases. Satellite images last week showed Russian military equipment being packed up for loading onto transport planes.
Russian officials have sought to engage with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the conservative Islamist group that led the rebel offensive that toppled Mr. al-Assad. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters Monday that there had been “no final decisions” on the future of Russia’s military presence in Syria.
“We are in contact with representatives of the powers that currently control the situation in the country,” Mr. Peskov said. “All this will be determined in the course of the dialogue.”
Just hours before Mr. al-Assad fell on Dec. 8, Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey V. Lavrov, was still describing the Syrian rebels as “terrorists.” In one sign of Russian hopes for rapprochement, one of the country’s most powerful men, the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham should be taken off Russia’s terror list.
Mr. Kadyrov, who rules the majority-Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya, also said that Chechen authorities were willing to go on joint patrols “with the Syrian law enforcement agencies.”
It’s not clear whether Moscow’s diplomacy will be enough, however, to allow Russia to keep a military presence. Some European Union officials said Monday that they would seek to make Russia’s exit from Syria a condition of lifting sanctions on Syria.
“Many foreign ministers emphasized that it should be a condition for the new leadership to eliminate Russian influence,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters in Brussels.
But Mr. Putin made clear once more on Monday that Syria had become a secondary concern. In his speech to the military leadership, he claimed his troops “hold the strategic initiative” along the entire front line in Ukraine and that the flow of Russians volunteering to fight “is not stopping.”
It was fresh evidence that Mr. Putin believes he can outlast Ukraine on the battlefield, even as Mr. Trump promises to negotiate a peace deal to end the war. Mr. Putin’s defense minister, Andrei R. Belousov, said in Monday’s meeting that “ensuring victory” in the Ukraine war was the military’s top priority, but he said nothing about its plans or aims in the Middle East.
Russian state television has sought to fill the silence with claims that Russia fulfilled its mission in Syria and that any instability there is now the West’s fault. On the marquee weekly news show on the Rossiya channel on Sunday, the host, Dmitri Kiselyov, said that Russia had made contact with “the leaders of the armed opposition” and that both sides were showing “mutual restraint.”
“Russia did all it could to leave calm and stability in Syria,” Mr. Kiselyov said. “Russia has now taken a pragmatic position.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Berlin, and Alina Lobzina from London.
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Ben Hubbard
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
In his interview with a small group of journalists, Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel coalition that overthrew the Assad regime, criticized the advance of Israel’s military into Syrian territory, beyond the disputed Golan Heights and into a buffer zone mandated by the United Nations. Al-Shara said that Syria would continue to abide by the 1974 agreement that followed the end of the Yom Kippur war, and called on the international community to make sure that Israel — which has launched hundreds of attacks on Syrian targets in the past week — followed it as well.
Ben Hubbard
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
Israel has framed its advance onto Syrian territory as a defensive measure, to ensure militants do not take up positions on its border. On Monday, al-Shara countered that Israel no longer needed to hold that land to protect itself because the toppling of the Assad government had removed the threat from Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias.
Austin Tice’s mother asks Netanyahu to pause strikes around Syrian area to search for the missing journalist.
The mother of the missing American journalist Austin Tice has told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in a letter that her family has “credible information” that Mr. Tice may be held in a prison outside the Syrian capital, Damascus, and urged the Israelis to pause military strikes in the area to allow rescuers to search the site.
Mr. Tice’s mother, Debra Tice, said in the letter, dated Dec. 14 and addressed to Mr. Netanyahu, that the prison was under a Syrian military museum in the mountainous Mount Qasioun area and had a tunnel that was connected to a neighborhood and a government palace.
“We are aware that your military has an active campaign in the area, preventing rescuers from approaching and accessing the prison facility,” Ms. Tice wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
“We have no way of knowing if the prisoners there have food and water. We urgently request you pause strikes on this area and deploy Israeli assets to search for Austin Tice and other prisoners. Time is of the essence.”
Gal Hirsch, the Israeli government’s lead envoy for hostage affairs, confirmed he had received the letter, and he said that he was coordinating on a daily basis with U.S. officials, including Roger D. Carstens, the U.S. government’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.
“We will do everything possible in assisting the United States of America to bring the hostages and missing persons back home,” Mr. Hirsch said.
U.S. officials said on Monday that they did not have specific information about Mr. Tice’s whereabouts.
The Israeli military has been bombing weapons depots and air defenses in Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based organization that tracks the conflict in Syria. Israel has said it wants to keep military equipment away from extremists.
Mr. Tice was abducted in 2012 outside Damascus as the country descended into civil war. The United States has said it believes he was being held by the government of Bashar al-Assad. The Assad regime had long maintained that it was not holding Mr. Tice and had no information about him.
Mr. Tice’s family and the United States government have stepped up efforts to locate him since Dec. 8, when rebel groups seized Damascus after overrunning several other major cities, and Mr. al-Assad fled to Russia.
Ben Hubbard
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
Al-Shara said that Syria’s priority now needed to be building a state and creating public institutions that served all Syrians.
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Ben Hubbard
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
In an interview, Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel coalition that toppled President Bashar al-Assad last week, called for governments such as the United States to remove terrorism designations from his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, saying that all constraints needed to be lifted so that Syria could rebuild. He also called for sanctions that had been imposed on al-Assad’s government to be lifted, saying that they had been imposed on “the executioner” – meaning al-Assad – who was gone.
Ben Hubbard
Reporting from Damascus, Syria
As for terrorism designations of Al-Shara himself, as imposed by the United States and other countries, he said, “That is not very important to me.”
Turkish-backed forces have prevented ambulances and buses from entering the northwestern Syrian city of Manbij to evacuate people, according to a war monitoring group and a spokesman for the Kurdish-led forces in the region. Clashes between Turkish-backed rebels and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., erupted after Syria’s former government was overthrown, and fighting has continued as the Turkish-backed forces seek to wrest control of the city from the S.D.F. Farhad Shami, an S.D.F. spokesman, said vehicles to evacuate “the wounded, fighters and civilians trapped within the city” had been denied entry into Manbij.
Reporting from Latakia, Syria
As speculation mounts over Russia’s future in Syria, we observed a convoy of Russian military vehicles — including armored personnel carriers, supply trucks and mobile surface-to-air systems — traveling north from Tartus toward Latakia on Monday. Russian military activity has increased in western Syria in the past few days. The region is home to several key sites used by Russia’s military, including a naval base in Tartus and an airbase near Latakia.
Euan Ward
Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
The Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria called on Monday for unity with the new authorities in Damascus and an end to all military operations inside the country. Amid an offensive by Turkish-backed fighters, there are fears among Syria’s Kurds that Assad’s downfall could unravel hard-fought gains made during the civil war, including limited autonomy.
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Matthew Mpoke Bigg
In the statement released on Monday, al-Assad at times appeared to refer to himself in the third person as he defended his record during the country’s brutal civil war and the last days of his presidency. He lamented that Syria had fallen into the “hands of terrorism,” but said his bond with the Syrian people remained “unshaken.”
Anton Troianovski
Reporting on Russia
Syria went unmentioned in an hourlong televised meeting that President Vladimir V. Putin held with the Russian military’s top brass on Monday. Putin has yet to comment on Syria since his ally Bashar al-Assad’s fall, and his continued silence is a sign that the Kremlin is still struggling to determine what its future military presence in Syria will be.
Anton Troianovski
Reporting on Russia
Earlier Monday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said there had been “no final decisions” on the future of Russia’s two military bases in Syria. He added that Russia was “in contact” with the new Syrian authorities.
Bashar al-Assad appears to give his first account of leaving Syria.
Syria’s former leader, Bashar al-Assad, said he was evacuated from Syria by Russian forces after a rebel alliance seized the capital but had wanted to stay and fight, according to a statement that was posted on Monday to social media accounts he used while in office and reported by Russian state news media.
The statement, which said it had been issued from Moscow, contained what seemed to be the first public comments from Mr. al-Assad since his government was overthrown just over a week ago. In it, he defended his record during the country’s long and brutal civil war, criticized the country’s new leadership and gave details of his flight from Syria. The Russian state news agency, Tass, reported news of the statement on its website on Monday.
Mr. al-Assad said that he had not planned to leave the country, and said he did not “consider stepping down or seeking refuge” as the rebels advanced. He said he had remained in Damascus, the capital, “carrying out my duties” until early on Dec. 8, when, he said, rebels began to infiltrate the city. At that point, he moved “in coordination with our Russian allies” to the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, and later arrived at Russia’s Hmeimim air base nearby, he said.
“As the field situation in the area continued to deteriorate, the Russian military base itself came under intensified attack by drone strikes. With no viable means of leaving the base, Moscow requested that the base’s command arrange an immediate evacuation to Russia on the evening of Sunday Dec. 8,” Mr. al-Assad said in the statement, which was published in English. This account of the episode could not be independently confirmed.
The Kremlin has said that Mr. al-Assad made the “personal decision” to leave office and that President Vladimir V. Putin had offered exile to him and his family. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has said Moscow will not disclose details of Mr. al-Assad’s location in Russia, which has been a staunch ally of Mr. al-Assad.
The Assad family ruled Syria with unrelenting force for more than 60 years. Since the rebel coalition overthrew Mr. al-Assad’s government over a week ago, Syrians have begun to reckon with the network of prisons, police stations and torture chambers that were central to his family’s brutal rule, and the abuses of the past 13 years, after the failed rebel uprising and subsequent civil war. Death toll estimates from the conflict are as high as 620,000, in a country with a prewar population of 22 million.
Mr. al-Assad’s arrival in Russia has effectively put him out of the reach of international justice, human rights advocates have said.
In the statement, Mr. Assad offered a defense of his record in office, saying he had “refused to barter the salvation of his nation for personal gain.” Mr. al-Assad, who at times in the one-page statement referred to himself in the third person, also did not mention any plans for his future, and said that his bond with Syria and its people remained “unshaken.”
“When the state falls into the hands of terrorism and the ability to make a meaningful contribution is lost any position becomes void of purpose,” he said, in an apparent attempt to provide a larger explanation for his departure. There was no immediate public response to the statement from Syria’s new transitional government.
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Syria’s new leadership is taking steps toward international recognition.
A little more than a week after overthrowing the longtime Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, the rebel alliance that took power in Syria was making rapid progress toward international recognition of its legitimacy as its officials began to receive diplomats from the United Nations, the Middle East and Europe.
The leader of the rebel coalition, Ahmed al-Shara, met on Sunday with the United Nations special envoy to Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, and they discussed the unfolding political transition, according to a message on Telegram posted by the coalition. Mr. al-Shara, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, “stressed the importance of rapid and effective cooperation” to rebuild Syria, develop its economy and maintain Syria as a unified territory, the Telegram post said.
Speaking to reporters on his arrival in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Mr. Pedersen said many challenges lay ahead for Syria and called for increased aid to assist with the country’s humanitarian crisis.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters on Monday that she had sent the “European top diplomat in Syria” to meet with the new government in Damascus. The European Union is the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Syria through U.N. agencies, making the relationship with Brussels a crucial one.
France’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that a team of diplomats would travel to Syria on Tuesday. And Turkey and Qatar, which were in contact with the rebels well before the surprise offensive that rocketed them from obscurity in Syria’s northwest to control of nearly the entire country, were both reopening their embassies in Damascus.
Since Mr. al-Assad fled the advancing rebels on Dec. 8, the rest of the world has had to reckon with a sudden new reality in Syria: A country where nearly 14 years of civil war had left Mr. al-Assad in seemingly firm control was now in the hands of a conservative Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, that the United Nations, the United States, Turkey and many other countries had long designated as a terrorist organization for its early ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Arab countries had for years been moving toward normalizing relations with Mr. al-Assad, despite his brutal treatment of his people, and Western countries, while hitting him with heavy sanctions, had grudgingly come to accept that he was there to stay. His overthrow scrambled that calculus, forcing foreign powers to decide how to deal with a largely unknown quantity that many of them had shunned as extremists for years.
Many of those powers, including the United States, European countries and Turkey, say they want to see a stable, unified Syria with an inclusive government that respects the rights of Syria’s minorities, including Shiite Muslims, Druse, Christians of various sects and Alawites, the Shiite offshoot sect that the Assad family and many of its strongest supporters belongs to.
Foreign countries have the leverage to push Syria’s new leadership toward that vision. To unlock greater flows of humanitarian aid, get suffocating economic sanctions lifted and earn international legitimacy — all required for a crippled, impoverished Syria to stabilize and rebuild — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will need other countries to remove its designation as a terrorist group.
Ms. Kallas has said that the European Union will not lift sanctions on Syria until its new leadership shows it will protect minorities and women’s rights and disavow extremism. On Monday, she told reporters that European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels would discuss “how we engage with the new leadership of Syria and on what level we engage the leadership and, of course, what more steps are we willing to take if we see that Syria goes to the right direction.”
Individual European countries were also gradually reaching out to Damascus.
Italy, which has maintained a diplomatic presence in the Syrian capital since 2018, was the first to engage on the ground. Its ambassador was the only European representative in a meeting the Syrian transitional administration held last week with several Arab ambassadors, according to Italy’s foreign ministry.
Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, told France Inter radio on Sunday that a team of four French diplomats would head to Syria on Tuesday for the first time since 2012, when France and many other countries broke with Mr. al-Assad over the bloody crackdown on peaceful antigovernment protesters that instigated the civil war.
Mr. Barrot said the main goals were to establish first contact with the Syrian authorities there and to evaluate the needs of the Syrian population.
“But also to verify whether or not the initial statements made by this new authority — which were rather encouraging, which called for calm, which apparently did not commit any abuses — are actually being followed up on the ground,” Mr. Barrot added.
The quickening diplomatic engagement reflected the winners and losers in the new Syria.
Russia, a key ally of Mr. al-Assad, said over the weekend that it had evacuated some staff members from its embassy in Damascus, though the embassy confirmed that its ambassador was staying.
But Turkey, which has long had tacit links to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and has emerged as an important go-between for the group and other foreign governments, raised its flag over its embassy in Damascus on Saturday for the first time in 12 years. And Qatar, which like Turkey has maintained a relationship with the group and supports Islamist groups around the Middle East, likewise sent a diplomatic delegation to Syria to reopen its embassy there, its foreign ministry said in a post on X on Sunday evening.
Mr. al-Shara, who has long craved international legitimacy for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, appears attuned to concerns about whether his group is ready to lead. According to the Telegram post announcing his meeting with Mr. Pedersen, he said it would be important to secure economic and political support for creating a safe environment for the millions of Syrian refugees in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere to return.
“Leader al-Shara pointed out the need to implement these steps with great care and high precision without haste and under the supervision of specialized teams, so that they are achieved in the best possible way,” it said.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris; Emma Bubola from Rome; Jacob Roubai from Beirut, Lebanon; and Natalia Vasilyeva from Istanbul.
Israel strikes Syria’s coast, a war monitor says.
Israel carried out a heavy wave of airstrikes overnight on Syria’s coastal region, a war monitor said early on Monday, as the Israeli military continued to pound Syria in a bid to destroy the country’s military assets after rebels seized power.
The overnight strikes targeted former Syrian Army positions including air defense sites and missile warehouses, according to the war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization based in Britain that has long tracked the conflict in Syria. Earlier in the day, an Israeli airstrike also targeted radars in Deir al-Zour’s military airport in the country’s east, the Observatory said.
The “successive strikes” along the Syrian coast — home to Russian naval bases — amounted to “the most violent strikes in the area” since 2012, according to the Observatory. It said there were 18 airstrikes, which were particularly powerful because they were consecutive and detonated missiles in warehouses, leading to secondary explosions.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the strikes. Israeli officials have previously said that the campaign in Syria is an effort to keep military equipment out of the hands of “extremists,” after an alliance of rebel groups ousted the Assad regime earlier this month. There were no immediate reports of casualties from the latest strikes, the Observatory said.
Israel has struck Syria more than 450 times since the collapse of the Assad government, according to the Observatory, destroying Syria’s navy and dozens of air bases, ammunition depots and other military equipment.
Israel’s military has also seized and occupied an expanse of territory in Syria over the de facto border between the two countries, including on the Syrian side of the strategic Mt. Hermon. Israel has given no timeline for its departure, apart from saying that it would stay until its security demands were met.
On Sunday, the Israeli government unanimously approved plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to expand settlements in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, part of an $11 million scheme to double the population in the area. The move was necessary, the prime minister’s office said, because a “new front” had opened up on Israel’s border with Syria after the fall of the Assad government.
Israel seized the Golan Heights during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and it is considered illegally occupied under international law.
The head of the group leading the rebel coalition that now governs Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, said in an interview on Saturday with Syria TV, a pro-opposition channel, that Israel was using pretexts to justify “unwarranted” territorial seizures in Syria.
Still, he said, Syria could not afford any further conflict and was instead focused on diplomatic solutions.
“Syria’s war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations,” Mr. al-Shara said. “The priority at this stage is reconstruction and stability, not being drawn into disputes that could lead to further destruction.”
Gabby Sobelman and Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
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Why America’s Kurdish allies are under threat in a new Syria.
The 13-year civil war between Syria’s government and rebel fighters has ended. But the peril is not over for Syria’s Kurdish minority.
A number of armed factions are still jostling for control after the collapse of the Assad regime. They include the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have allied with the United States to combat the extremist Islamic State, and the Syrian National Army, a militia backed by Turkey, which is hostile to the Kurdish forces.
For more than a decade, the Kurdish-led soldiers have been America’s most reliable partner in Syria, liberating cities seized by the extremist group and detaining around 9,000 of its fighters.
But Turkey, which shares a border with Syria, has long considered the Kurdish group to be its enemy. The Turkish government believes the Kurdish fighters in Syria are allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has fought the Turkish state for decades.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who backs the rebel groups that toppled the Assad regime, appears eager to seize the opportunity created by the momentous political shift in Syria to pursue his own agenda against the Kurdish fighters.
Turkey’s new dominance leaves the Kurds exposed
The shape of the new Syrian government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is still being determined. But American officials and Middle East analysts agree: Turkey will have an outsized influence.
That means Kurdish groups’ foothold in the northeast looks increasingly “tenuous,” said Wa’el Alzayat, a Syria expert and former American diplomat. Turkey “will have the biggest leverage in what’s happening, and will happen, in Syria for the foreseeable future,” he said.
As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies seized control from President Bashar al-Assad, “they brought with them a tide of Turkish power and influence over the future of Syria,” said Nicholas Heras, a senior analyst at the New Lines Institute.
The high stakes for the Kurds, and for Western forces determined to prevent a renewed ISIS threat, were illuminated earlier this past week. Even as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies took over, Turkish-backed rebels attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by Turkish airstrikes and artillery fire.
The commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Gen. Mazloum Abdi, told The New York Times he had to divert fighters who were defending the prisons that house accused ISIS members to fight off the Turkish-backed militants.
Now, Mr. Heras predicted, Arabs who had joined the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the Islamic State could disband or defect to other rebel groups, under pressure from Turkey and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. That would further weaken the Kurdish forces.
A best-case scenario for the Kurds, officials and experts said, might see them receive enough support from the United States to secure the territory they hold in northeast Syria. That could give them leverage with the new government in Damascus to pursue a fully autonomous state, something minority Kurds in Syria have long sought.
At worst, the Kurds could face an inflamed conflict with Turkish-backed fighters, be forced to cede control of at least some of their oil-rich territory and, if President-elect Donald J. Trump decides to withdraw U.S. troops, lose vital help on the ground.
America’s role will be pivotal
“There really needs to be some kind of cease-fire/peace agreement between the Turks and the Kurds that both sides can agree with,” said Natasha Hall, a Syria expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The Biden administration is racing to negotiate just that before it leaves office next month.
Following meetings in Turkey last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday that “making sure that ISIS was in a box” remained an urgent priority in Syria. He said the Kurdish fighters were “playing a critical role in pursuing that mission.”
But the diplomatic balancing act he faced was clear: His meetings in Turkey included talks with the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who earlier last week said that “any P.K.K. extension in Syria cannot be considered a legitimate partner.”
And on Friday, Mr. Fidan pointedly cited the P.K.K. as he described efforts to keep terrorist organizations from exploiting the political chaos in Syria.
Yet there are signs that American diplomacy is having an impact. Last week, an American commander, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, visited northeast Syria, where 900 American troops are stationed. Hours later, a cease-fire between the Kurdish forces and a Turkish-backed rebel group known as the Syrian National Army was announced in the northern city of Manbij, where the two sides have frequently clashed.
General Abdi, the Kurdish commander, said on X that the cease-fire was brokered with American help. Under the agreement, he said, Kurdish forces would withdraw from Manbij, a majority Arab city which they seized from the Islamic State in 2016 but that has since become a flashpoint among battling factions for control. But he and other Syrian ethnic Kurds are increasingly worried that their retreat from Manbij is just the beginning.
The city of Kobani could be the next flashpoint
Last Tuesday, a senior Hayat Tahrir al-Sham officer said that local tribes allied with his group had wrested control of the eastern city of Deir al-Zour from Kurdish fighters who had taken over as Mr. al-Assad’s forces collapsed just days earlier.
And in the days since, the Turkish-backed rebels have repeatedly battled with Kurdish forces in the region around the Euphrates River.
Mr. Heras, the New Lines analyst, said he thought those skirmishes could be military preparations for an invasion of Kobani, a majority Kurdish city.
The city, just south of the Turkish border, holds deep emotional significance for the Kurdish forces, who fought with American troops to reclaim it after a four-month Islamic State siege that began in late 2015.
General Abdi now appears to be bracing for a possible invasion by Turkey’s allied fighters. Mr. Heras said residents were fleeing Kobani by the thousands despite a shaky truce agreement this past week that aimed to buy time for negotiations.
“Turkey is taking advantage of the crisis in Syria to destabilize the region and seize our land, while claiming they are fighting terrorists,” said Sinam Sherkany Mohamad, the head of the Kurdish fighters’ political wing in Washington, in a statement. “But we are not terrorists, we are democratic U.S. allies.”
James F. Jeffrey, a former American ambassador to Turkey who was a chief Syria envoy during Mr. Trump’s first administration, said any invasion of Kobani would violate a 2019 agreement that the U.S. negotiated for a détente, “and whether by the Turks, or Syrian forces associated with the Turks, it makes no difference.”
In the meantime, General Abdi has sought to shore up the Kurdish fighters’ relationship with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, saying he is seeking direct relations with the group’s leaders.
Officials and experts said Turkey may wait until its interests are locked in with the new Syrian government before deciding whether to launch a full-bore military offensive against the Kurdish forces. It may also watch to see whether Mr. Trump withdraws American troops, and how his administration deals with Mr. Erdogan, a like-minded strongman whose relationship with the United States has often been tempestuous.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, warned in a statement on social media that he was prepared to push for economic sanctions against Turkey if it attacked the Kurdish forces, which he said would “set in motion an ISIS jailbreak.” He added: “If Turkey takes military action against Kurdish forces in Syria, it will jeopardize America’s interests dramatically.”
Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul.
German Government Collapses at a Perilous Time for Europe
The German government collapsed on Monday as Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in Parliament, deepening a crisis of leadership across Europe at a time of mounting economic and security challenges.
The war in Ukraine has escalated, with Russia issuing increasingly dire threats against Kyiv and its supporters. President-elect Donald J. Trump is set to take office in the United States, raising new questions over Europeans’ trade relations and military defense. The government of France — Germany’s partner in leading Europe — fell earlier this month.
And now, Europe’s largest economy will be in the hands of a caretaker government, ahead of elections early next year.
On Monday, German lawmakers voted to dissolve the existing government by a vote of 394 to 207, with 116 abstaining.
Coming just nine months before parliamentary elections had been scheduled to happen, the vote was an extraordinary moment for Germany. The elections, now expected on Feb. 23, will be only the fourth snap election in the 75 years since the modern state was founded. The moment reflects a new era of more fractious and unstable politics in a country long known for durable coalitions built on plodding consensus.
Mr. Scholz had little choice but to take the unusual step of calling for the confidence vote after his three-party coalition splintered in November, ending months of bitter internal squabbling and leaving him without a parliamentary majority to pass laws or a budget.
But the country’s political uncertainty is likely to last a month or more, with a new permanent government not forming until parties have agreed on a coalition, probably in April or May.
Seven parties will go into the campaign for Parliament with a realistic chance of gaining seats, and some on the political fringes — especially on the right — are poised for strong showings, according to polls. Mr. Scholz is widely expected to be ousted as chancellor, with polls suggesting that the conservative Christian Democrats are poised to finish first, well ahead of Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats.
The campaign is likely to be dominated by several issues that have vexed Europe in recent years. Both Germany and France are mired in debates over how best to revive their struggling economies, bridge growing social divides, ease voter anxieties over immigration and buttress national defense.
They and their European Union partners are looking warily toward Russia, where President Vladimir V. Putin has escalated threats about the use of nuclear weapons amid Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
They are also fretting over their economic relationship with China, which has grown into a formidable competitor for many of their most important industries but has not become the booming consumer market for European products that leaders long envisioned.
And they are bracing for the start of a new presidential term for Mr. Trump, who has threatened a trade war and the end of the United States’ commitment to NATO, which has guaranteed Europe’s security for 75 years.
The combination of challenges has proved politically unsettling. President Emmanuel Macron of France on Friday named his fourth prime minister in a year and is under mounting pressure to resign. Mr. Macron says he will stay in office and try to repair the deep fissures in his government over the 2025 budget.
Mr. Scholz’s government faced similar budget challenges, along with growing concerns about how to rebuild the German military in the face of a belligerent Russia and Mr. Trump’s criticism of NATO.
The German economy has stagnated, narrowly avoiding recession this fall, and its parties will spend the campaign arguing over how best to revitalize it. Disagreements over how to balance the budget — and over whether to increase government borrowing or implement further austerity measures — helped to deepen the fissures in Mr. Scholz’s government before it split apart.
It is an inopportune time for Germany to be plunged into a grueling winter election campaign and a political freeze that could last until a new government takes power.
“The timing is absolutely terrible for the E.U. — basically, these multiple crises are hitting the E.U. at the worst possible time, because the bloc’s traditional engine is busy with itself,” Jana Puglierin, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, referring to Germany and France.
The war in Ukraine and the need to bolster Germany’s military — and what that will cost — will be among the urgent issues likely to dominate the election campaign, along with the floundering economy, failing infrastructure, immigration and the rise of the political extremes.
Badly behind in the polls, Mr. Scholz is planning to highlight his caution in supplying Ukraine with weapons, especially sophisticated offensive hardware.
Under Mr. Scholz’s watch, Germany became the biggest European donor of weapons to Ukraine, according to a ranking by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a research organization in Germany. But as some voters are growing nervous about Russia’s threats, he prefers to point to his decision not to export the long-range missile system Taurus, which could have antagonized Mr. Putin.
Mr. Scholz, who used his address to lawmakers just before the vote on Monday as a campaign speech, said that he had promised President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine continued support, but also made clear that he remained cautious about what Germany would deliver.
“We do nothing that jeopardizes our own security,” he said in the speech, which lasted nearly half an hour. “And that is why we do not supply cruise missiles, a long-range weapon that can reach deeply into Russia.”
The strategy appears to be working. Since the end of the three-party coalition, Mr. Scholz’s personal approval ratings have risen somewhat. But his party is still polling at around 17 percent, about half of what the conservatives are projected to win.
Mr. Scholz will have to fight hard to persuade voters to give him another chance. For now, it is Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party and a longtime figure on the political stage, who is widely expected to be the next chancellor, given his party’s strong lead in polls.
Speaking to lawmakers on Wednesday, Mr. Merz accused Mr. Scholz and his government of failing on a number of fronts.
“You are leaving the country in one of the greatest economic crises in postwar history,” Mr. Merz said, addressing Mr. Scholz.
The two other mainstream parties are also led by well-known politicians who held important posts in the government: Christian Lindner, leader of the pro-business Free Democrats, whose falling out with the chancellor helped precipitate the collapse of the coalition, and Robert Habeck, the economic minister and lead candidate for the left-leaning Greens.
But in Germany’s fractious political landscape, no single party is likely to win an outright majority, and that could lead to potentially tricky negotiations to build a coalition more functional and durable than the one that failed.
All the mainstream parties have said they would refuse to team up with the far-right Alternative for Germany, parts of which are being monitored as a threat to the Constitution by the domestic security services. Nonetheless, the party — which is known as the AfD and is polling at about 18 percent — appears to be gaining ground.
In closely watched state elections in the east of the country in September, both the AfD and a newer, extreme-left party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, had their best showings ever. But mainstream parties still consider them an anathema, which has made it hard to form governing coalitions in those states.
Those results could portend equally messy coalition haggling in Berlin after the parliamentary vote, though the political fringes are less popular nationally than they are in those eastern states.
Given the likely vote tally, many political watchers predict a return of the grand coalition of the center between the Christian Democrats and the progressive Social Democratic Party. That coalition governed Germany for 12 of the past 20 years.
Hundreds Feared Dead After Cyclone Hits French Territory of Mayotte
Emergency workers and families on Monday desperately searched for victims after a storm devastated the French territory of Mayotte, off the eastern coast of Africa. Officials fear that hundreds or even thousands could be dead, far higher than the current confirmed toll of 21.
Tropical Storm Chido, which hit over the weekend, destroyed homes, schools and businesses on the tiny archipelago, with wind gusts of up to 124 miles per hour. Forecasters said that it was the worst storm in 90 years to hit the territory.
Mohamed Abdallah, the father of a family of seven, said that they had “lost everything.” As he picked up pieces of iron on the streets to rebuild a shelter on Monday, he said, “It will take us a while to even be safe.”
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, led an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday evening to coordinate the government’s response. He said afterward that he would soon go to Mayotte and declare a period of national mourning.
France is sending over 1,200 firefighters, security forces and rescue workers, and has started aid flights carrying tons of tents, beds, food and water from Réunion, another French territory in the region.
The interior ministry said that 21 people had died in the hospital, and that over 1,300 people had been injured. However, François-Xavier Bieuville, France’s top-ranking representative on Mayotte, told a local news channel, “I think that there will be several hundred” deaths.
“Maybe we will be closer to a thousand, maybe several thousand,” he added.
The interior ministry cautioned that officials would likely be unable to count all the victims. About a third of the territory’s 320,000 people are undocumented immigrants, many of them living in precarious housing, the ministry said, which could complicate official tallies. Also, many residents are Muslims, who traditionally try to bury their dead within 24 hours.
In Pamanzi, home to Mayotte’s airport and many administrative buildings, the buzz of chain saws filled the air on Monday as emergency workers scrambled to clear uprooted trees and debris. Doctors worked in flooded health care centers. Children slept on mattresses outside of houses that had been torn apart.
Hundreds of people lined up to collect water from public taps that had been spared. Shop owners kept their businesses closed because of electricity blackouts. The cyclone destroyed entire slums, and the remains of precarious shelters made of rugged iron littered the streets.
Patrice Latron, the state prefect in Réunion, said that starting on Tuesday at least 20 tons of food and water would be airlifted to Mayotte daily, and that at least two ships would carry over containers full of aid later in the week.
“There are people who haven’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday,” Salama Ramia, a French senator who represents Mayotte, told French television outlet BFMTV on Monday from the archipelago.
Water use on the archipelago had already been restricted in recent weeks because of drought. Last year, Mayotte experienced its worst drought in over two decades, which had led to protests over accusations of mismanagement and cuts to service.
Ms. Ramia said emergency workers had not yet been able to reach some neighborhoods that had been demolished, adding to uncertainty about the death toll.
“We are worried about what we will find,” she said.
But Mayotte, France’s poorest territory, was already struggling before the storm hit on Saturday. The health care system was “on its last legs,” according to a 2022 French Senate report, with a single overburdened hospital and a severe shortage of doctors.
About 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, five times more than the percentage in the rest of France. Many people on Mayotte are crowded into shanty towns, which were hit especially hard. Videos and photos showed the destruction: Homes were destroyed, debris was strewn about hillsides and trees had been ripped apart by wind.
“Some shanty towns were completely devastated,” Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte, told French television on Sunday.
Mayotte has recently become a focal point for bitter French debates around immigration. The population has grown rapidly, which has strained social services. And French security officials have intervened in recent years to try to crack down on illegal immigration and unsanitary housing.
Much of the increase comes from an influx of undocumented immigrants, many from Comoros, a neighboring archipelago that is one of the world’s poorest countries.
In February, the French interior minister tried to make Mayotte less attractive to immigrants by pushing to end birthright citizenship there. The effort, which some argued was a serious breach of French values that would do little to deter migrants, came to a halt when Mr. Macron called snap elections this summer.
Bruno Retailleau, France’s departing interior minister, dismissed suggestions that the authorities were ill-prepared for the storm, arguing instead that the devastating impact was largely because thousands of undocumented immigrants live in shoddy housing.
“That’s the weak point,” he said. “But the alert and forecasting systems worked perfectly.”
Mozambique also suffered serious damage, although the death toll there appears lower: Chido killed at least three people, according to an early estimate, local officials told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
The storm, which has since been downgraded to a depression, is expected to dissipate by Tuesday.
Guy Taylor, the spokesman in Mozambique for the United Nations Children’s Fund, said that aid teams were traveling to rural areas throughout the northern part of the country on Monday to assess the situation.
The organization fears that many of those communities, which already had little access to clean water and sanitation, would be susceptible to cholera outbreaks.
On Monday, families in Mayotte were still trying to reach relatives, even though mobile and internet networks were disrupted. Outages kept Mayotte almost entirely offline for more than 36 hours, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group.
Many people posted desperate pleas on a Facebook page to try to find loved ones. Some ended their posts with a statement of solidarity: “Force à tous,” or stay strong.
Madi Ali contributed reporting from Pamanzi, Mayotte; John Eligonfrom Johannesburg; Elian Peltier from Dakar, Senegal; and Nazaneen Ghaffar from London.
Why America’s Kurdish Allies Are Under Threat in a New Syria
Why America’s Kurdish Allies Are Under Threat in a New Syria
The Kurds helped the United States contain the Islamic State. Now they fear a resurgent Turkey that has long considered them an adversary. Here’s a guide.
Lara Jakes
Lara Jakes writes about global conflicts and diplomacy.
The 13-year civil war between Syria’s government and rebel fighters has ended. But the peril is not over for Syria’s Kurdish minority.
A number of armed factions are still jostling for control after the collapse of the Assad regime. They include the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have allied with the United States to combat the extremist Islamic State, and the Syrian National Army, a militia backed by Turkey, which is hostile to the Kurdish forces.
For more than a decade, the Kurdish-led soldiers have been America’s most reliable partner in Syria, liberating cities seized by the extremist group and detaining around 9,000 of its fighters.
But Turkey, which shares a border with Syria, has long considered the Kurdish group to be its enemy. The Turkish government believes the Kurdish fighters in Syria are allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has fought the Turkish state for decades.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who backs the rebel groups that toppled the Assad regime, appears eager to seize the opportunity created by the momentous political shift in Syria to pursue his own agenda against the Kurdish fighters.
Turkey, Syria and the Kurds
- Turkey’s new dominance leaves the Kurds exposed
- America’s role will be pivotal
- The city of Kobani could be the next flashpoint
Turkey’s new dominance leaves the Kurds exposed
The shape of the new Syrian government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is still being determined. But American officials and Middle East analysts agree: Turkey will have an outsized influence.
That means Kurdish groups’ foothold in the northeast looks increasingly “tenuous,” said Wa’el Alzayat, a Syria expert and former American diplomat. Turkey “will have the biggest leverage in what’s happening, and will happen, in Syria for the foreseeable future,” he said.
As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies seized control from President Bashar al-Assad, “they brought with them a tide of Turkish power and influence over the future of Syria,” said Nicholas Heras, a senior analyst at the New Lines Institute.
The high stakes for the Kurds, and for Western forces determined to prevent a renewed ISIS threat, were illuminated earlier this past week. Even as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies took over, Turkish-backed rebels attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by Turkish airstrikes and artillery fire.
The commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Gen. Mazloum Abdi, told The New York Times he had to divert fighters who were defending the prisons that house accused ISIS members to fight off the Turkish-backed militants.
Now, Mr. Heras predicted, Arabs who had joined the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the Islamic State could disband or defect to other rebel groups, under pressure from Turkey and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. That would further weaken the Kurdish forces.
A best-case scenario for the Kurds, officials and experts said, might see them receive enough support from the United States to secure the territory they hold in northeast Syria. That could give them leverage with the new government in Damascus to pursue a fully autonomous state, something minority Kurds in Syria have long sought.
At worst, the Kurds could face an inflamed conflict with Turkish-backed fighters, be forced to cede control of at least some of their oil-rich territory and, if President-elect Donald J. Trump decides to withdraw U.S. troops, lose vital help on the ground.
America’s role will be pivotal
“There really needs to be some kind of cease-fire/peace agreement between the Turks and the Kurds that both sides can agree with,” said Natasha Hall, a Syria expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The Biden administration is racing to negotiate just that before it leaves office next month.
Following meetings in Turkey last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday that “making sure that ISIS was in a box” remained an urgent priority in Syria. He said the Kurdish fighters were “playing a critical role in pursuing that mission.”
But the diplomatic balancing act he faced was clear: His meetings in Turkey included talks with the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who earlier last week said that “any P.K.K. extension in Syria cannot be considered a legitimate partner.”
And on Friday, Mr. Fidan pointedly cited the P.K.K. as he described efforts to keep terrorist organizations from exploiting the political chaos in Syria.
Yet there are signs that American diplomacy is having an impact. Last week, an American commander, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, visited northeast Syria, where 900 American troops are stationed. Hours later, a cease-fire between the Kurdish forces and a Turkish-backed rebel group known as the Syrian National Army was announced in the northern city of Manbij, where the two sides have frequently clashed.
General Abdi, the Kurdish commander, said on X that the cease-fire was brokered with American help. Under the agreement, he said, Kurdish forces would withdraw from Manbij, a majority Arab city which they seized from the Islamic State in 2016 but that has since become a flashpoint among battling factions for control. But he and other Syrian ethnic Kurds are increasingly worried that their retreat from Manbij is just the beginning.
The city of Kobani could be the next flashpoint
Last Tuesday, a senior Hayat Tahrir al-Sham officer said that local tribes allied with his group had wrested control of the eastern city of Deir al-Zour from Kurdish fighters who had taken over as Mr. al-Assad’s forces collapsed just days earlier.
And in the days since, the Turkish-backed rebels have repeatedly battled with Kurdish forces in the region around the Euphrates River.
Mr. Heras, the New Lines analyst, said he thought those skirmishes could be military preparations for an invasion of Kobani, a majority Kurdish city.
The city, just south of the Turkish border, holds deep emotional significance for the Kurdish forces, who fought with American troops to reclaim it after a four-month Islamic State siege that began in late 2015.
General Abdi now appears to be bracing for a possible invasion by Turkey’s allied fighters. Mr. Heras said residents were fleeing Kobani by the thousands despite a shaky truce agreement this past week that aimed to buy time for negotiations.
“Turkey is taking advantage of the crisis in Syria to destabilize the region and seize our land, while claiming they are fighting terrorists,” said Sinam Sherkany Mohamad, the head of the Kurdish fighters’ political wing in Washington, in a statement. “But we are not terrorists, we are democratic U.S. allies.”
James F. Jeffrey, a former American ambassador to Turkey who was a chief Syria envoy during Mr. Trump’s first administration, said any invasion of Kobani would violate a 2019 agreement that the U.S. negotiated for a détente, “and whether by the Turks, or Syrian forces associated with the Turks, it makes no difference.”
In the meantime, General Abdi has sought to shore up the Kurdish fighters’ relationship with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, saying he is seeking direct relations with the group’s leaders.
Officials and experts said Turkey may wait until its interests are locked in with the new Syrian government before deciding whether to launch a full-bore military offensive against the Kurdish forces. It may also watch to see whether Mr. Trump withdraws American troops, and how his administration deals with Mr. Erdogan, a like-minded strongman whose relationship with the United States has often been tempestuous.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, warned in a statement on social media that he was prepared to push for economic sanctions against Turkey if it attacked the Kurdish forces, which he said would “set in motion an ISIS jailbreak.” He added: “If Turkey takes military action against Kurdish forces in Syria, it will jeopardize America’s interests dramatically.”
Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul.
After seven years of medical school in Myanmar, May finally achieved her goal of becoming a doctor. But a month after she graduated and found a job, her dreams started unraveling.
In February 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, and the country’s economy, already hammered by the pandemic, started to buckle. Prices soared and May’s paycheck, the equivalent of $415 a month, evaporated even faster. With her father suffering from kidney disease, she grew more and more desperate.
Then she met “date girls,” who were making twice as much as her. The money was enticing — even if it involved sex with men.
“It’s difficult to accept that, despite all my years of study to become a doctor, I’m now doing this kind of work just to make ends meet,” said May, 26, who has been working as a prostitute for over a year in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. She, like others who spoke for this article, asked not to be identified by her full name because her family does not know how she earns money and prostitution is illegal in Myanmar.
The coup and ensuing civil war have ravaged Myanmar’s economy. Inflation soared to 26 percent this year as power shortages crippled factories, unseasonal rain flooded farms and fighting in areas near China and Thailand decimated cross-border trade. The currency, the kyat, has lost two-fifths of its value against the dollar this year. Nearly half of Myanmar’s people now live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
This calamity has forced a new cadre of women in Myanmar into sex work: doctors, teachers, nurses and other educated professionals.
It is hard to track how many women are involved in the trade, but women plying the streets have become much more apparent. In interviews, half a dozen women — four white-collar workers who have turned to prostitution and two rights activists — said that more educated women are now having sex with men to make a living.
Following the coup, women were at the forefront of protests. They marched on the streets and hung up their sarongs as a hex against soldiers. There was a flicker of hope over dismantling Myanmar’s deep-rooted patriarchy. But the rise in prostitution is another blow to the status of women, who have been sexually abused by the military for decades.
There is no end in sight to this misery — the junta has lost a lot of ground to the rebels but still controls Myanmar’s cities, where prostitution has increased in brothels, karaoke bars, nightclubs and hotels.
Zar was a nurse at a private hospital in Mandalay, which was shut down by the military government because its doctors had joined the protest movement.
Then a friend pitched her a way to make money. Just be a date girl, her friend said.
Before her first day on the job, Zar, 25, said she watched some pornography to try to figure out what to do. She said her first client was a Chinese man who looked around 40 and spoke little Burmese and no English. At one point, he tried to have sex without a condom, but she insisted that he had to use one.
“It lasted about 20 minutes, but to me, it felt like an eternity,” she said. “It was pure hell.”
On a recent Tuesday, her phone buzzed with a terse message on the Telegram app with details of her next encounter. A name, contact number, venue and time.
She put on a pink dress and checked that her purse had condoms. That night, she earned $80, the equivalent of what she made in a month previously.
“I feel a bit ashamed doing this job,” she said. “It’s not that I enjoy this work, it’s just a necessity.”
This desperation is forcing women to break the law by selling sex. Those detained by the police often have to pay bribes to secure their release, adding another layer of jeopardy.
Myanmar, with a population of about 55 million, has a long history of military regimes. But when civilian rule took hold in 2011, a middle class started to thrive. Now that group has shrunk by 50 percent, according to the United Nations Development Program.
In Mandalay, Su, who was a doctor, said she used to be part of that community. She tells of vacations to Singapore, India and Nepal, and dining in malls with her friends.
But after the coup, prices of goods like eggs and toothpaste tripled. She had to deplete her savings and skip meals.
Her daily trials are well known in Myanmar, where the cost of a typical meal has surged 160 percent, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
In 2023, Su, 28, said she decided to send naked pictures of herself to a madam who connected her with clients. When she has an appointment with a client, her parents think that she is heading to a night shift at a hospital.
“I wanted to be a pediatrician and help children, but the coup and my family’s financial situation left me with no other options,” she said. “It’s far from the life I dreamed of.”
Women have borne the brunt of the economic crisis. They already earn less compared with their male counterparts — a study from April to June 2024 showed female daily-wage workers make an average of about $5, while men could earn as much as 40 percent more doing the same job. And the unemployment rate for women remains far higher than that for men.
Garment factories were once a lifeline for women from Myanmar’s villages and were projected to employ 1.6 million workers by 2026. Many of these are now shut and their companies have pulled out of Myanmar after the coup.
Mya, 25, a single mother, said she tried to find a job in a garment factory after her husband was shot and killed by soldiers during a protest in 2021. But no one was hiring. She said she sold everything of value and finally turned to prostitution to provide for her 3-year-old daughter.
“People might judge me, but they don’t understand what it’s like to be hungry, to watch your child go hungry, and to have nothing,” she said. “Every day, I pray for a way out.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hold on power was threatened on Monday after the deputy prime minister who led Canada’s response to the first Trump administration resigned abruptly, in a stinging rebuke to the country’s leader.
The high-profile departure of the minister, Chrystia Freeland, comes at a treacherous moment for Canada. President-elect Donald J. Trump has warned that he will impose 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico unless the two countries do more to curb the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs into the United States.
Ms. Freeland, who has helped steer the Trudeau government through many challenges, had been playing a prominent role in forming Canada’s response to the incoming Trump administration, leading a team of government officials preparing for the transition.
In her letter of resignation, Ms. Freeland accused Mr. Trudeau, who is deeply unpopular at home, of engaging in “costly political gimmicks” instead of focusing on countering the grave threat of tariffs.
Canadians, she said, “know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves.”
She said the breakdown with Mr. Trudeau came over his push for measures, including a sales tax holiday and sending modest checks to taxpayers, that would add to the government’s deficit.
She said she believed this spending, aimed at currying support among voters, would undermine Canada’s finances and its ability to deal with Mr. Trump’s tariff threat.
Ms. Freeland, who had been the finance minister, was scheduled on Monday to outline the government’s commitments to improve border security with the United States as part of an interim budget known as the economic statement.
Mr. Trudeau’s office declined to comment.
Under Pressure
The resignation of Mr. Trudeau’s most steadfast ally set off a broad revolt from members of his own party who called on the prime minister to resign as the leader of the Liberal Party.
Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, which is more than 20 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals in recent polls, read excerpts from Ms. Freeland’s resignation letter at a news conference in Ottawa on Monday.
“What we are seeing is the government of Canada itself is spiraling out of control right before our eyes, and at the very worst time,” Mr. Poilievre said, asking Mr. Trudeau to immediately schedule a federal election.
On Monday, another senior cabinet member and rising star within Mr. Trudeau’s party, Sean Fraser, the housing minister, announced he would resign, compounding the sense that the prime minister’s lieutenants were abandoning him.
In addition to Mr. Fraser, four cabinet ministers have in the past several weeks said they would not run in the next election. Mr. Trudeau’s party has lost two long-held seats so far in special elections called this year.
Trudeau’s Dilemma
Given Canada’s political system and the rules around elections and party leadership, Mr. Trudeau faces three possible scenarios.
First, there could be such an overwhelming challenge by his own party that he is forced to step down as leader of the Liberals. This would set off an internal election process for a new leader. Ms. Freeland is considered a likely contestant, alongside other senior cabinet members such as the foreign minister, Mélanie Joly.
A new party leader would steer the Liberals to a federal election in which the leader would vie to become prime minister, facing off with Mr. Poilievre and his Conservatives. This is what many Liberal members of Parliament are calling for, but the decision rests with Mr. Trudeau: There’s no official mechanism to force him to step down as head of the party.
Mr. Trudeau could also call for an early election and lead the Liberals to the polls himself. He has repeatedly said that is what he intends to do. Under Canadian rules, he must call for a vote by October.
Mr. Poilievre would like these elections to happen sooner, in part so that a new government is in place to manage the transition to Mr. Trump’s new tenure in the White House.
Mr. Trudeau could also simply ignore calls to step down by his own party, as well as calls to schedule early elections by the opposition leader, and stay in charge until a later date closer to the October deadline, eventually leading the Liberals to elections again.
An election could also be triggered if the government’s economic statement, which is a type of interim budget, fails to get parliamentary support. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals do not hold a majority of votes in the House of Commons and rely on alliances with opposition parties to pass laws.
Adding further uncertainty to the political process, Mr. Trudeau could also ask the governor general, Canada’s ceremonial head of state as King Charles’s representative, to shut down parliamentary sessions in a process known as prorogation.
The Bitter End
The breakdown between Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland had been building for weeks, especially after Mr. Trudeau did not include her when he visited Mar-a-Lago to see Mr. Trump in person last month.
Ms. Freeland, who had an international career as a senior journalist and newsroom leader at The Financial Times, Reuters and elsewhere before entering Canadian politics, is married to a New York Times reporter who works for the Culture desk.
In the end, the key relationship between Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland unraveled over a Zoom call on Friday, two people familiar with the events said.
During the call, Mr. Trudeau asked Ms. Freeland to step down as finance minister but suggested she continue leading the government’s response to Mr. Trump, in what would have amounted to a demotion, said the people who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a private meeting.
Ms. Freeland responded that she could not credibly lead the transition efforts without commanding a government department, said the people.
The updated economic statement unveiled on Monday after Ms. Freeland’s dramatic exit held clues about her dismay: It calls for about 20 billion Canadian dollars in new spending and calculated the federal deficit at 61.9 billion Canadian dollars ($43.4 billion), unraveling Ms. Freeland’s promise to keep it below 40.1 billion Canadian dollars.
The budget includes a boost of 600 million Canadian dollars to border security spending over the next six years, bringing total spending to 1.3 billion Canadian dollars without offering specifics on how the extra funds would be spent.
By all accounts, Ms. Freeland was among the most experienced cabinet members in Mr. Trudeau’s government to deal with Mr. Trump.
A Ukrainian Canadian, she had been a point person for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. And she had successfully renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with the first Trump White House. In her resignation letter, she said that managing Mr. Trump’s second term would be a consequential issue for Canada’s future.
“How we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer,” Ms. Freeland said.
In his only public remarks on Monday evening, Mr. Trudeau made only passing references to his political crisis during a speech to major Liberal Party donors.
“It’s obviously been an eventful day,” Mr. Trudeau said.
He did not mention Ms. Freeland in his remarks, which went through his stock recap of the government’s accomplishments and critique of his Conservative rival, occasionally prompting cheers from the partisan crowd, many of whom later lined up to pose for selfies with Mr. Trudeau.
“That’s at the core of what makes us Liberals,” Mr. Trudeau said after discussing his love of Canada. “And that’s why you show up here, even on the toughest days as a party.”
Vjosa Isai contributed reporting from Toronto.
Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, and senior officials orchestrated a centralized program of enforced disappearances with thousands of likely victims, a commission set up by the country’s interim government said in a preliminary report.
The full extent of the practice during Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule started becoming apparent after she was toppled this summer and fled to India amid widespread protests against her increasing authoritarian turn.
In the chaotic vacuum after her fall, families of the disappeared camped outside government offices and military barracks seeking news of their loved ones. Victims who had spent years in underground cells without seeing daylight came out to share their stories, including in detailed accounts in The New York Times.
Members of the commission, led by a retired judge, Mainul Islam Chowdhury, said they had received more than 1,600 reports of enforced disappearances since they began their work in late August, but they estimated the actual number of victims, mostly political opponents and dissenting voices, at two or three times that.
The report said that the practice had a “central command structure” and “was systematically designed over 15 years to remain undetectable.” It operated in a top-down manner, implicating Ms. Hasina and her closest lieutenants, most of whom have fled the country.
The commission identified at least eight secret facilities where detainees had been held, and relays accounts of what it described as institutionalized torture.
In a preliminary report presented on Saturday to Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is Bangladesh’s interim leader, it called for the disbanding of the Rapid Action Battalion, which had started as a counterterrorism force with U.S. and British training but became notorious for widespread abuses.
“We collected eyewitness accounts, chain-of-command details and information about how directives were issued,” said Nur Khan Liton, a member of the commission. “These details were gathered from individuals who were directly involved.”
Leaders of Ms. Hasina’s party rejected the commission’s findings as politically motivated, saying it was an effort to tarnish her strong record of combating terrorism.
“This is a made-up story,” said A.F.M. Bahauddin Nasim, a senior leader of her party, the Awami League. “It is nothing but to mislead, to assassinate her character and to diminish her in front of people.”
Sanjida Islam Tulee, a co-founder of a victims’ group called Mayer Daak, or the Mother’s Call, said the commission was not helping with healing or closure by sharing its findings with Mr. Yunus’s office and not victims’ families.
“If they have the information, it should be made public to these families who need it the most, rather than a statement,” said Ms. Tulee, whose brother Sajedul Islam Sumon disappeared in 2013. “I think the priority is to inform the families who are actually waiting.”
The report, a shortened version of which was shared with journalists by Mr. Yunus’s office, said the disappearances were the work of several units across various security forces who often worked in a coordinated manner, moving victims from one facility to another to maintain deniability.
It described how targets would be tracked through phone surveillance, abducted by security forces often in plain clothes, and held in secret facilities where torture was “not only systemic but also institutionalized.” In one instance, a victim’s “lips were immediately sewn without the use of any anesthetic,” the victim describing it as “akin to stitching cowhide.” In another, a middle-aged man told the commission that his “genitals and ears were electrocuted.”
The bodies of those who were killed were disposed of through a “standard procedure,” the report said: Cement bags were tied to the bodies, which were then thrown into rivers. One of the river sites had a boat that was “modified for use in these nefarious operations,” the report said.
Those who were released to their families were often let go on condition of staying silent, but only after they were charged with fabricated crimes that not only absolved the abductors but also ensured a pressure point to maintain that silence, the report found.
Mr. Liton, the commission member, said investigators estimated that the real number of victims could be two or three times the 1,600 complaints registered so far, because many still remain in fear of the units that carried out the abductions.
Nabila Idris, another member of the commission, said the fact that only some individuals of cases with clear multiple victims had officially registered a complaint, and that cases of women as well as victims from remote regions had remained “largely underreported,” led them to believe the numbers are much larger.
Mr. Liton said the commission was careful to avoid identifying details to ensure the safety of the victims.
“Bangladesh does not have any victim protection law,” he said. “So we had to be cautious.”