Aleppo - Page 2

UNITED NATIONS – Syria’s foreign minister told world leaders Saturday that his country is “marching steadily” toward the goal of rooting out terrorism—and “victory is now within reach.”

The odds had been stacked against Hajar, a lion cub born just hours after her mother Dana, rescued from a defunct zoo in war-torn Syria, was released into a wildlife reserve in Jordan.

Contents: Russian-led Syria peace talks collapse in Astana, Kazakhstan; The four de-escalation zones; Is the end of the Syrian war in sight?

The evacuation of more than 3,000 Syrians that was scheduled to take place Sunday from four areas as part of a population transfer has been postponed, opposition activists said, a day after a deadly blast that killed more than 120 people, many of them government supporters.

A suicide car bombing killed at least 24 people Saturday in an attack near buses for Syrians evacuated from two besieged government-held towns, a monitor said.

Contents: Al-Nusra descendant claims credit for massive terror attack in Damascus, Syria; Al-Nusra becomes Levant Liberation Committee (LLC) and gains at expense of ISIS

BEIRUT — The Islamic State group has imposed an “Afghan-style” dress code on men in its Syrian stronghold Raqqa to help its fighters blend into the civilian population, a monitor and activists said Monday.

Voice of America News quotes Iranian media reports and spokesmen for the Syrian opposition to report that Iran is using the Syrian battleground to train its military officers.

The Islamic State’s Zakat charity center in Raqqa, Syria, has handed out more than $500,000 in the last month, the pro-IS Aamaq news agency claimed.

Human Rights Watch is accusing the Syrian government of using chemical weapons at least eight times during the siege of Aleppo and is asking the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on the regime.

Syrian government forces carried out at least eight chemical attacks during the final weeks of the battle for Aleppo, killing nine people, among them four children, and injuring hundreds more, Human Rights Watch said Monday.

A human rights group accused the Syrian government on Monday of conducting at least eight chemical attacks using chlorine gas on opposition-controlled residential areas during the final months in the battle for Aleppo.

Contents: Investigation reveals depraved new atrocities by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad; Epicenter of Syrian conflict moves from Aleppo to Idlib and al-Bab

Actress Lindsay Lohan met Friday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inside the country’s presidential palace, and also met with Bana al-Abed, the 7-year-old social media star who made headlines last year after tweeting about her life in war-torn East Aleppo.

Contents: Russia, Iran, Turkey sign farcical Syria peace agreement; Syria peace conference sees a return to ‘proximity talks’; The aftermath of the destruction of Aleppo

The UN envoy for Syria said Tuesday that a final declaration was close to being achieved at indirect talks between Syrian rebels and their war-torn country’s regime in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana.

Speaking to French reporters this week, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad said he was “ready to negotiate everything” in an upcoming round of peace talks surrounding the six-year-old civil war in his country, including potentially stepping down as head of state.

Thousands of people are starting to return to formerly rebel-held east Aleppo despite freezing weather and destruction “beyond imagination”, a top U.N. official told Reuters from the Syrian city.

The young women married to two of the Islamic State’s most notorious executioners are arrested while trying to sneak into Europe after their husbands’ demise.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed on Monday that “mass graves of several dozens of Syrians who suffered atrocious torture and massacre” have been found near Aleppo.

Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which purports to speak for American Muslims, spent part of Christmas Day tweeting that he had hoped more people had died in the previous night’s Russian plane crash into the Black Sea.

Turks reacted angrily Friday on social media to a video released by the Islamic State group purportedly showing two captured Turkish soldiers being burned alive, while awaiting an official reaction from the government.

Evacuations from rebel-held parts of Aleppo continued overnight with dozens of vehicles leaving the city and the operation likely to end on Thursday, aid workers said.

The warning from the UN envoy could not have been starker: Pounded by a near-daily barrage of air strikes, Aleppo would be totally destroyed by Christmas unless the United Nations stopped the carnage.

Russian investigators arrived in Turkey on Tuesday to probe the assassination of Moscow’s ambassador at an Ankara art show, as both sides pledged the murder would not damage improving relations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that he instructed his government to find ways to extend medical assistance to Syrians injured in the latest round of fighting, especially those from the embattled city of Aleppo.

JAFFA, Israel — The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey on Monday highlighted the divisions within the Arab world between Russia’s proponents and detractors.

Syria’s army broadcast messages into the last rebel enclave of Aleppo saying it would enter the area on Tuesday, a military media unit run by the government’s ally Hezbollah reported, urging insurgents to speed up their evacuation of the city.

Actress Lindsay Lohan will reportedly spend the Christmas holidays working and visiting with refugees in Turkey.

The on-again, off-again evacuation of civilians from Aleppo has resumed, despite an attack on evacuation buses blamed on al-Qaeda’s Syrian operation, the Nusra Front.

A leading church figure in the Middle East said Monday Christians across the region were facing a “tragedy,” and accused the international community of failing to act.

More than 1,000 people were evacuated from the last rebel-held pocket of the eastern area of the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo early on Monday after hours of delay, a medical official told AFP.

Convoys of evacuees travelled from a rebel-held area of Aleppo and two Shiite villages besieged by insurgents on Monday, a war monitor and rebels said, as a deal enabling evacuations held after a tense, days-long stand-off and before a UN vote.

Hundreds of Israelis gathered in downtown Tel Aviv on Sunday night to protest the international community’s failure to stop the reported massacres of civilians trapped in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.

An agreement was reached Saturday to allow “humanitarian cases” to leave two besieged government-held Shiite villages in northwestern Syria, a step that would allow the resumption of civilian and rebel evacuations from eastern Aleppo which were suspended a day earlier, Hezbollah’s media arm and a monitoring group said.

Contents: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad calls Aleppo’s ‘liberation’ a historic event; Syria and Russia suffer a big military setback in Palmyra; Syria’s civil war shows similarities to America’s Vietnam war