Syria

This week, municipal authorities in Damascus banned the sale of alcohol in most of the city. Bars and restaurants that have served alcohol there for decades will no longer be allowed to, and it will only be possible to buy alcohol in closed bottles in a handful of Christian-majority neighborhoods, to take away.

This isn’t all that unusual in the Middle East — practicing Muslims are not supposed to imbibe “intoxicating” substances while individuals of the Christian faith may. That is why liquor stores and bars, if there are any, are often found in traditionally Christian neighborhoods around the region.

An alleged war criminal is facing trial accused of crimes against humanity in the first UK prosecution of its kind.

The 58-year-old man, who now lives in this country, faces three murder charges, three charges of torture and a single charge of conduct ancillary to murder.

It is the first time the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has brought charges of murder as crimes against humanity under the International Criminal Court Act 2001.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that 15,000 to 20,000 people, including Islamic State affiliates are now at large in Syria, after an exodus from a camp that held jihadists’ families, U.S. officials familiar with the estimate said.

Security experts have long warned that the wives of Islamic State fighters were effectively raising the next generation of militants at the sprawling Al-Hol facility. Security at the camp fell apart in recent weeks after Syria’s government routed the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which had guarded Al-Hol for years, raising concerns about the release of people who might have become radicalized during the years held behind the razor wire.

Ramia was preparing for a family picnic, on a warm summer day in her village in Latakia province in western Syria, when a white car drove up, she said.

Three armed men got out, saying they were government security forces, and dragged her into the vehicle, the teenager, whose name has been changed for her safety and to protect her identity, told the BBC World Service.

The men beat her, she said, hitting her harder when she started crying and screaming.

Humanitarians warned for years that the camps in north-east Syria holding tens of thousands of family members of suspected Islamic State (IS) fighters would have to be dealt with. Calling them a “ticking time bomb”, relief groups said the women and children could not just be left to rot in squalid desert camps indefinitely, because eventually they would come home.

Despite the warnings, most states ignored the problem, refusing to repatriate their citizens. At least 8,000 women and children from more than 40 countries have been stranded in the camps of north-east Syria since 2019.

This week, they started to come home. Belgian authorities reported a woman charged in absentia for IS membership had made her way from Turkey to Belgium. An Albanian woman, kidnapped as a child by her father and taken to Syria, managed to smuggle herself to Turkey, where she requested travel documents.