Top secret intelligence files uncovered by the BBC confirm for the first time that missing American journalist Austin Tice was imprisoned by the regime of the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Former Syrian officials have also confirmed Mr Tice’s detention to the BBC.
The US government has previously stated that it believed he had been held by the Syrian government, but the Assad regime continuously denied this, and nothing was known about the details of his detention.
Abdul Hamid walks slowly in a black Adidas tracksuit, head bowed, through a dusty graveyard. The cemetery, ringed by the remains of bombed-out buildings, bears silent witness to what unfolded in Syria.
The 36-year-old tradesman stops, murmurs a prayer and begins pulling weeds from the earth around the sun-bleached gravestones. He points to them one by one: “My cousin, my wife Sana, both of my children — the twins — another cousin and his daughter, two more cousins and one of his sons, both of my brothers Yasser and Abdul Karim and their children.”
The list continues, an unrelenting rhythm of grief. Not a mass grave, but a mass death, all felled by a single, silent killer. On April 4, 2017, a sarin-laced rocket dropped from a Syrian air force jet into Khan Shaykhun, a sleepy town 34 miles south of Idlib.
The United States will remove all sanctions from Syria, Donald Trump announced on Tuesday.
“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said to applause at the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh.
”It’s their time to shine. We’re taking them all off,” Trump said, “Good luck Syria, show us something very special.”
#BREAKING: President Trump just announced he will be LIFTING US sanctions on Syria "to give them a chance at greatness."
The Syrian leader is set to travel to Riyadh to meet with Trump tomorrow.
Globalists and neocons are going to be BIG mad! pic.twitter.com/mYuBYtSvWD
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 13, 2025
One of the men accused of taking part in a wave of sectarian violence against Syria’s Alawite minority two months ago has told the BBC that he and other armed civilians who travelled to the area were advised and monitored by government forces there.
Abu Khalid said he had travelled as a civilian fighter to the Mediterranean coastal village of Sanobar on 7 March, to help battle former regime insurgents.
“The General Security department told us not to harm civilians, but only to shoot at insurgents who shot at us,” he told me.
A lot of scores waiting to be settled in Syria.
The priest would prefer that the ghosts of his community’s violent past are laid to rest. Every family in Maaloula — where Christian and Muslim neighbours were riven by bloodshed — has a deeply personal memory of the civil war: a killing, an abduction, a disappearance; displacement, grief and loss.
In the interests of reconciliation Father Fadi Barkil believes it may be better to forgive and forget.
Yet as word of the latest sectarian violence against the Druze community in Syria spreads, fears for the future keep Maaloula’s ghosts of the past alive.
Last week, Iraqi authorities intercepted one of the largest shipments of the illegal drug, Captagon, they had ever stopped. Just over a ton of the pills — an amphetamine-like drug that’s highly addictive and popular with users in wealthy Gulf states — were found hidden in a truck heading over the Iraqi border from Turkey. It had apparently come from Syria.
Observers immediately asked: Why were such large shipments of Captagon still being discovered, several months after Syria’s authoritarian Assad regime was ousted?
An “act of faith” worth 5.8 billion euros to the “new Syria”: The Donors Conference organized by the European Union certifies the change of pace in the West’s relations with Damascus after the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime and the arrival to power of Ahmad al Sharaa, known as “al Julani”. The conference raised 5.8 billion euros in loans and grants, 80 percent of which from the EU. From the Commission alone, Ursula von der Leyen announced, 2.5 billion euros are arriving in Damascus.
Six billion a week after the worst religious pogrom in recent history?
A new regime ruled by a former jihadist who until December had a $10 million bounty on his head, who is building an Islamic dictatorship and who has just organized a religious pogrom of Alawites?
The new bearded Syrian dictator had declared “diversity is our strength,” a phrase that came out of Western academic departments, and he had repeated it to European foreign ministers (including Italy’s Tajani, France’s Séjourné, and Germany’s Baerbock), to the UN secretary general, to the Hague prosecutor, to the BBC director, to the spin doctor, and to other gullible Westerners.
Like the “inclusive Taliban,” the jihadists had figured out how to sell themselves to us multicultural idiots.
And so it ended: thousands of innocent people butchered because they were Alawis, Christians and others.
Perhaps some would call it the good massacre: Following a global rush to legitimize the new strongman at Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa, his forces are killing Syrians — up to 15,000 over one weekend — and condemnations, including at the United Nations, are nearly nonexistent.
A few days after Secretary-General Guterres shook Mr. Sharaa’s hands and praised his efforts at uniting all Syrians, has the world body’s chief made a call to Damascus? “No, he has not,” the UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, tells the Sun.
Militants from Syria’s ruling Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) engaged in a ruthless killing spree this weekend, taking delight in beating, torturing and executing helpless civilians in Alawite-majority areas along the nation’s west coast.
More than 1,000 people have reportedly been slaughtered, the majority of whom were civilians, as HTS militants filmed themselves subjecting unarmed citizens in Alawite and Christian communities to extreme violence.
Some were forced to crawl besides the bloodied corpses of their neighbours as they were battered by branches and sticks.
Syria’s interim leader has appealed for unity, as violence and revenge killings continued in areas loyal to ousted former leader Bashar al-Assad on Sunday.
Hundreds of people have reportedly fled their homes in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus – strongholds of Assad support.
Local residents have described scenes of looting and mass killings, including of children.
This photo shows a village in Syria that was completely massacred.
When Israel defends itself, outrage erupts. But when entire Syrian villages are erased, the world stays silent. pic.twitter.com/kR7uWouakv
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 10, 2025
Remember way back when all the “right” people were insisting that Syria’s al Qaeda terrorist “president,” who displaced Bashar al-Assad, had reformed from his al Qaeda ways and was going to lead his newly liberated country into an era of multicultural peace, love and understanding?
⚠️ Graphic Violence ⚠️
At this point they are just randomly shooting at people they find along the way.
While filming themselves with huge smiles on their faces pic.twitter.com/UFZBBBuzJj— Hamas Atrocities (@HamasAtrocities) March 8, 2025
Christians are facing the same in Syria that Hindus are facing Bangladesh. Over 200 Christians were massacred and Dozens of Churches destroyed in Syria in the last 24 hours by radical Islamists. We can only pray for them pic.twitter.com/7yb3xKMnvF
— Baba Banaras™ (@RealBababanaras) March 8, 2025
Sadly, the persecution of Christians in Syria’s “Valley of the Christians” (Wadi al-Nasara), overwhelmingly inhabited by Greeks originally from Antioch, has been escalating.
After forces from the al-Qaeda affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group conquered Damascus and overthrew Syria’s Assad regime in December 2024, they urged the residents of the Valley of the Christians to surrender any weapons they kept for self-defense, telling them that civilians would not be harmed. Since the jihadists’ takeover of Syria, however, around 500,000 Christians in the country have been faced with increased persecution and abductions.
While stacking its leadership with jihadists and threatening minorities, the new regime in Syria is also seeking to radically revise its educational curriculum for children aged 6 to 18. While some of the reforms to de-Ba’athify are welcome, others are causing concern about the future of Syria post-Assad.
Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a’s hands-off diplomacy is setting off alarm bells — as it should.
There’s a lot in a handshake — and a lot in its absence too.
Remember the awkwardness when a tense President Donald Trump and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemingly ignored the press corp’s request to shake hands in 2017? It certainly foretold how bumpy the relationship between the two leaders would be.
