International flights resume at Damascus airport
Syrians are cheering as they board the first international flight to Damascus in 13 years following President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
Syrians are cheering as they board the first international flight to Damascus in 13 years following President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was instrumental in shaping French far-right politics, even though he never achieved his dream of winning the French presidency.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that because of their ethnicity, the RSF has targeted civilians and repeatedly murdered men and boys.
He also charged the organization with using rape and other forms of sexual abuse against girls and women because of their ethnicity.
According to Blinken, “the United States is committed to holding accountable those accountable for these atrocities.”
Over 11 million people have been internally displaced and tens of thousands have been killed in Sudan’s military-religious conflict over the last 18 months.
According to a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, thousands have also been killed as a result of conflict-related causes like illness and starvation.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians”, Blinken said.
“Those same militias have targeted evading civilians, murdered innocent people who are escaping conflict, and prevented last-ditch civilians from getting life-saving supplies,” they claim.
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the RSF, is also the subject of sanctions from the US Treasury Department. He is prohibited from visiting the US by the sanctions, as are any US-based assets he might have frozen.
In Sudanese regions, where civilians are battling to survive amid food and other essential goods shortages, international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) have struggled to access areas.
At a media briefing in October, WHO’s regional director Hanan Balkhy stated that “malnourished children and mothers are dying because there is no access to care and cholera is pervading many parts of the nation.”
The RSF and Sudanese army, both of whom are alleged to have committed atrocities, are “enabling the slaughter,” according to the UN, and arms supplies must be stopped.
The Sudanese government has denied the claim that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is arming the RSF.
In a release released on Tuesday, the US Treasury Department announced that sanctions were also being put in place for seven RSF-owned businesses in the UAE.
In recent months, the US itself has been accused of facilitating severe human rights abuses, including genocide, in the Gaza Strip.
There, its ally Israel has carried out a military campaign that has killed 45, 885 Palestinians, supported by US military aid. Israel’s involvement in a genocide in Gaza has not been denied by the US.
The move, revealed on Tuesday, comes as tech executives embrace incoming US President Donald Trump, whose right-wing supporters have long decried online content moderation as a tool of censorship.
Instead of third-party fact-checkers, Meta said it will rely on “community notes”, similar to those used on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Contributors there draft factual corrections for posts that only become apparent after being approved by other contributors with opposing viewpoints.
Joel Kaplan, the company’s COO Global Affairs Officer, stated that the previous fact-checking initiative, which was launched in 2016, sought to provide more reliable data on viral hoaxes. But, he added, that’s “not the way things played out”.
Over time, Kaplan said in a statement, “we ended up with too much content being fact checked so that people would accept legitimate political speech and debate.”
“Our system then added actual consequences to the distribution and intrusive labels. Too frequently, a program intended to educate turned into a censor’s tool.
Meta, which donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund last month, also announced it would remove restrictions on controversial political subjects, including immigration and gender identity.
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms”, Kaplan said, adding that the changes will take a few weeks to implement.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, stated in a separate video message that the company would switch its content editing team from liberal California to Texas with Republican influences.
In a video message, Zuckerberg stated, “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in areas where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
He added that the company will lower the bar for dismissing posts for alleged policy violations and reduce the company’s moderation policies.
“The reality is that this is a trade-off”, Zuckerberg said. It means we’ll catch less bad content, but it also means we’ll reduce the number of innocent users’ accounts and posts.
In the wake of the announcement, President-elect Trump praised Zuckerberg during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“I think they’ve come a long way”, Trump said of Meta and Zuckerberg, adding: “The man was very impressive”.
When a reporter asked if the decision resulted from threats Trump had made to social media companies in the past, the president-elect offered a short response: “Probably”.
Palestinian rights supporters have long accused Meta of censoring their posts, despite the fact that COVID-19 and election interference dominate the discussion over social media content moderation in the US.
Human Rights Watch claimed in a report that Meta was “siling voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights” in 2023.
The Damascus airport has welcomed the first international commercial flight since Bashar al-Assad’s ascent since he was ousted from power.
The Qatar Airways flight touched down in a terminal building on Tuesday, where the passengers’ friends and relatives greeted the arrivals.
Ashad al-Suleibi, head of Syria’s Air Transport Authority, said Qatar had provided assistance in rehabilitating the airport, which had suffered from years of neglect as well as sustaining damages from periodic Israeli air strikes.
“There was a lot of damage from the]al-Assad] regime to this lively area and this lively airport and also the Aleppo airport”, he said.
Many of the travelers were Syrian nationals returning for the first time in more than ten years.
Osama Musalama, a citizen of the United States, described it as his first visit since the start of the civil war in 2011.
“I lost hope that I would come back to Syria”, he said. “We were hoping for this moment and lost hope,” he said, “but God bless, the country is now welcoming its citizens.”
A Royal Jordanian Airlines plane took off for Damascus on a test flight, according to a separate report from the Jordanian state-run Petra news agency.
The objective of the study was to assess the technical state of Damascus airport before resuming regular flights, according to Haitham Misto, the head of Jordan’s Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission.
Arab and Western nations that had strained diplomatic ties with Syria’s new de facto authorities, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have since resumed diplomatic contact with the country’s former government following the lightning rebel offensive that a month ago.
Syria’s new foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, has travelled to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in recent days. After nearly 14 years of civil war that came to an end with al-Assad’s ouster, Gulf nations are likely to be instrumental in funding Syria’s reconstruction.
On Tuesday, al-Shibani travelled to Jordan to meet with his counterpart in Amman. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said the officials were set to discuss “mechanisms of cooperation in many areas including borders, security, energy, transportation, water, trade and other vital sectors”.
Jordan had been the main conduit for the highly addictive Captagon amphetamine smuggling into Gulf states, which created a source of tension between the two nations under al-Assad’s rule.
The new government of Syria has taken to the streets of former factories in locations like the Mezzeh air base in Damascus, a car trading company in Latakia, and a factory that once produced snack chips in the Douma suburb of Damascus.
In a joint press conference with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi, al-Shibani and al-Shibani stated, “We pledge that this thing has ended and will not return to the country.”
Al-Safadi stated that his country supports the Syrian people in their efforts to “rebuild their homeland on the foundations that safeguard its security, stability, sovereignty, and unity and uphold the rights of its citizens,” adding that Jordan is “ready to provide electricity to our brothers immediately, and we are also working together to provide gas.”
Syria, targeted by stringent Western sanctions, has been in a prolonged economic crisis. Only a small percentage of the day’s electricity is provided by the state.
At the joint news conference, al-Shibani also stated that an inclusive committee is expected to be formed to prepare for a “national dialogue conference” to discuss the country’s future.
He claimed that the interim authorities had intended to hold the conference in the first few days of January, but instead “we decided to establish an expanded preparation committee” that would convene at an undetermined time.