Jordan will host a Jordanian-Syrian-American meeting on Tuesday to discuss ways to support the rebuilding of Syria, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates says, as Damascus seeks investment deals with international companies to revive its war-ravaged economy.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and United States envoy to Syria Thomas Barrack are expected to attend, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s fledgling government has been grappling with the fallout from sectarian violence between Bedouin and Druze fighters in the southern province of Suwayda as well as Israeli strikes on Syrian soldiers and the capital, Damascus.
Syria’s economy remains in tatters after nearly 14 years of war and the ouster of longtime President Bashar al-Assad in December.
Jordan made its announcement after Damascus signed 12 agreements worth $14bn on Wednesday, including a $4bn agreement with Qatar’s UCC Holding to build a new airport and a $2bn deal to establish a subway in Damascus with the national investment corporation of the United Arab Emirates.
The projects “will extend across Syria and represent a qualitative shift in infrastructure and economic life”, Talal al-Hilali, head of the Syrian Investment Authority, said during a ceremony at the presidential palace in Damascus.
He described the agreements as “a turning point” for Syria’s future.
Al-Sharaa and Barrack were both present at the signing ceremony, according to Syria’s official SANA news agency.
The United Nations has put Syria’s post-war reconstruction costs at more than $400bn.
Syria’s new authorities have worked to attract investment for the reconstruction of infrastructure across the country after the US and the European Union lifted sanctions on Syria in the wake of al-Assad’s ouster.
Other major developments on the investment front include the $2bn Damascus Towers project for residential high rises, signed with the Italian-based company UBAKO; a $500m deal for the Baramkeh Towers project, also in Damascus; and another $60m agreement for Baramkeh Mall.
Last month, Saudi Arabia said it would invest about $3bn in real estate and infrastructure projects in Syria.
Ukraine’s military has said it struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Saratov region in an overnight drone attack, causing explosions and destruction, according to an army statement, as daily aerial exchanges intensify with diplomatic momentum to end the war in play.
Saratov’s governor said on Sunday that one person was killed and several residential apartments and an industrial facility were damaged, but did not mention the oil refinery being struck.
“[Ukrainian] drones are targeting … deeper into Russian territory [than] in the past, where previous attacks have been focused on the line of contact in the south and the western parts of Russia,” said Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid, reporting from Moscow. It is still unclear whether Ukraine’s claims that it hit a refinery are true, he added.
Ukraine’s military also said on Sunday that it had taken back a village in the Sumy region from the Russian army, which has made significant recent gains there.
Ukrainian troops have “liberated and completely cleared” Russian forces from Bezsalivka, the military general staff said in a Telegram post. It said 18 Russian troops had been “eliminated” in the fighting.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is now into its fourth year, as European leaders have welcomed plans by United States President Donald Trump to hold direct talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on ending the conflict.
In Ukraine, three swimmers were killed by unexploded objects in the country’s southern Odesa region at two beaches where swimming has been banned, regional officials said on Sunday. The Black Sea region has long been a popular summer destination, but authorities have urged caution since Russia’s full-scale invasion left mines scattered near its coast.
“All of them were blown up by explosive objects while swimming in prohibited recreational zones,” Regional governor Oleh Kiper said in a statement.
On Saturday, Russia launched a drone attack on a bus in Ukraine’s Kherson region, killing at least two people and wounding 16 others, according to Ukrainian officials.
Another drone hit the bus as the police were responding to the attack, injuring three officers, the police added.
Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region also killed two people travelling in a car in the Bilenkivska community on Saturday, as well as a 61-year-old woman who was in her home in the Vasylivka district, a local official reported.
Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted 16 of the 47 Russian drones launched overnight, while 31 drones hit targets across 15 different locations.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 97 Ukrainian drones over Russia and the Black Sea overnight and 21 more on Saturday morning.
Europe stresses support for Ukraine ahead of Trump-Putin talks
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected any suggestion of land concessions to Russia as international efforts to end the war continue.
Trump, who had promised to end the war within 24 hours of reentering the White House in January, plans to meet Putin in Alaska on Friday, saying the parties were close to a deal that could resolve the conflict.
Trump is reportedly open to inviting Zelenskyy to Alaska, but there has been no confirmation as of yet. Putin has insisted the conditions must be right for him and the Ukrainian leader to meet in person.
The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Finland, together with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, on Sunday issued a joint statement welcoming Trump’s efforts, while stressing the need to maintain support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.
“The emphasis [of the European statement was] … that this is a war that is in Ukraine, but is in Europe too, and has huge potential ramifications for European security,” said Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that European officials who met US Vice President JD Vance in the UK on Saturday had presented a counterproposal for peace, which included demands that a ceasefire must take place before any other steps are taken.
Police in London carried out the most arrests in a single day for a decade, detaining close to 500 peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters for ‘terrorism’. Demonstrators condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza and expressed support for the banned activist group Palestine Action. Many say the crackdown violates free speech and targets peaceful dissent.
Tehran, Iran – Every morning at 6am, Sara reaches for her phone – not to check messages, but to see when the day’s blackout will begin.
The 44-year-old digital marketer in Tehran has memorised the weekly electricity schedule yet still checks her phone each morning for last-minute changes as she plans her life around the two-hour power cuts.
“Without electricity, there is no air conditioner to make the heat tolerable,” Sara says, describing how Iran’s convergent crises – water scarcity, power shortages and record-breaking temperatures – have fundamentally altered her daily routine.
The water service cuts are unannounced. They last hours at a time and truly unnerve Sara, so she scrambles to fill buckets whenever she can before the taps run dry.
Crisis
For millions of Iranians, this summer has brought survival challenges in light of record-breaking heat, according to data from Iran’s Meteorological Organization.
The country is simultaneously grappling with its fifth consecutive year of drought, chronic energy deficits and unprecedented heat, a perfect storm that is exposing the fragility of basic services.
The Meteorological Organization said rainfall is down 40 percent during the current water year, the 12-month rainfall-tracking period, which starts in autumn.
As of July 28, Iran had received only 137mm (5.4 inches) of precipitation compared with the long-term average of 228.2mm (9 inches).
The electricity shortage is rooted in both infrastructure limitations and fuel supply challenges that have caused production capacity to fall behind rapidly rising demand.
An October report from parliament’s Research Center showed 85 percent of Iran’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, 13 percent from hydropower and the remainder from renewables and nuclear power.
While Iran possesses vast gas and oil reserves, decades of sanctions and underinvestment in transmission networks and power plants mean the system can’t keep up with consumption.
Adding to these capacity constraints, fuel supply disruptions have forced some power stations to resort sometimes to using mazut (heavy fuel oil) instead of natural gas, but authorities try to restrict it due to air pollution concerns.
Summer droughts compound the crisis by reducing hydroelectric generation precisely when air conditioning demand peaks, leaving millions of Iranians planning their lives around predictable blackouts and unpredictable water outages.
Survival
Twenty-six-year-old Fatemeh moved to Tehran from Andisheh, a town 15km (9 miles) west of the capital, a year ago to pursue her education.
She rented her first apartment, an exciting milestone that became a daily exercise in crisis management.
Fatemeh’s first unannounced water cut saw her in a sweltering apartment with temperatures soaring to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
“The first thing I did was to stop moving altogether so my body temperature wouldn’t rise,” she recalls.
A water channel in Tehran that has dried up due to low rainfall [Mohammad Lotfollahi/Al Jazeera]
With only two bottles of drinking water and a block of ice available, she carefully rationed her supplies although she used precious ice to cool her feet.
Showering and using the bathroom became challenges, she says, describing how she ordered expensive bottled water online and used two bottles just to shower.
Now, after months of unpredictable outages, Fatemeh has a survival routine: storing water in multiple containers, pouring it into her evaporative cooler when cuts occur and tossing blocks of ice into vents during extreme heat.
When both the water and electricity go, she says it “feels like having a fever” and she soaks towels in her stored water to press them against her body for relief.
The balcony offers no escape. The air outside remains hotter than indoors, even at night.
Ripple effect
The infrastructure crisis extends beyond household inconveniences and is threatening livelihoods across the economy as offices and retail shops are forced to close for hours or for the day.
The repeated shutdowns and the economic pinch they cause could lead to layoffs, affecting families who depend on these jobs.
Small businesses face particular challenges.
Pastry shop owners have shared videos of themselves throwing spoiled cakes away after refrigerators fail.
Remote work, promoted as a solution, becomes impossible when homes lack both electricity and internet connectivity.
Shahram, a 38-year-old software company manager, says he has to send his employees home sometimes.
“Power cuts usually occur between 12 and 5pm,” he says. “That coincides with peak work hours, … [so] if the power cuts happen at 2, 3 or 4pm, I usually send everyone home because there’s no point. By the time power comes back, it is the end of their working day.”
Experts attribute the energy crisis to insufficient investment, failure to adopt new technologies – both of which are influenced by international sanctions – and unsustainable consumption.
Mohammad Arshadi, a water governance researcher and member of the Strategic Council of the Tadbir-E-Abe Iran think tank, agrees, saying Iran’s water crisis requires fundamental changes in consumption patterns.
While natural scarcity has been amplified by climate change, he says the main reason behind the current problem is how water is being used in Iran.
Expansion of water-intensive farming, large industries and urban sprawl have “fuelled the runaway growth of water demand”, he says.
Despite the water crisis, a man in Tehran uses a hose to wash the street as he waters trees [Mohammad Lotfollahi/Al Jazeera]
Uncertainty
Back in her apartment, Sara continues checking her phone each morning, adjusting her schedule like millions of Iranians who have learned to navigate this new reality.
For Fatemeh, the psychological adjustment proves as challenging as the practical adaptations. Each morning brings new uncertainty about whether water will flow from her taps or electricity will power her laptop.
In a country where citizens once took infrastructure for granted, a generation is learning to live with scarcity.
As Iran approaches another winter with unresolved water and energy deficits, the experiences of Sara, Fatemeh, Shahram and millions like them suggest that the country’s infrastructure crisis has moved beyond temporary inconvenience to become a defining feature of modern Iranian life.
Explicit death threats have been made against dozens of Afghan women working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, according to a new UN report, where their rights have been severely curtailed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
The UN mission to the country said female national staff were subjected to direct death threats in May, in the latest update on the human rights situation in Afghanistan published on Sunday.
The report says the Taliban told the UN mission that their cadres were not responsible for the threats, and an Interior Ministry investigation is under way.
The threats came from unidentified individuals related to their work with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, other agencies, funds, and programmes, “requiring the U.N. to implement interim measures to protect their safety”, according to the report.
Afghan authorities, including the Taliban Interior Ministry, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the report or the investigation, according to The Associated Press news agency.
The Taliban barred Afghan women from working at domestic and foreign nongovernmental organisations in December 2022, extending this ban to the UN six months later. They then threatened to shut down agencies and groups still employing women. Aid agencies and NGOs say the Taliban have disrupted or interfered with their operations, allegations denied by authorities.
The UN report is the first official confirmation of death threats against Afghan women working in the sector. The report also highlighted other areas affecting women’s personal freedoms and safety, including inspectors from the Vice and Virtue Ministry requiring women to wear a chador, a full-body cloak covering the head. Women have been arrested for only wearing the hijab.
Women have also been denied access to public areas, in line with laws banning them from such spaces.
A UN report from August 2024 found that Afghanistan’s Taliban government has “deliberately deprived” at least 1.4 million girls of their right to an education during its three years in power.
About 300,000 more girls are missing out on school since UNESCO last carried out a count in April 2023, it said on Thursday, warning that “the future of an entire generation is now in jeopardy.”
ICC targets Taliban for persecution of women
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in July for two top Taliban leaders in Afghanistan on charges of abuses against women and girls.
ICC judges said at the time there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhunzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani of committing gender-based persecution.
“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement in July.
The Taliban has “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy, family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.
