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      As Syrian Government Loses Control, the Skies Above Go Quiet

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      For more than a decade of civil war, Syrians in rebel-held areas craned their necks to look at the sky — listening and fearing the sounds of an airplane engine or the whirring blades of a helicopter.Those sounds meant imminent danger.People scrambled in every direction. Mothers futilely tried to shield their children. After the strikes, rescue workers and ordinary Syrians rushed to tend to the wounded and bury the dead.The planes and helicopters — which dropped terrifyingly destructive barrel bombs filled with TNT and shrapnel — instilled terror. Only when the government captured an area did the airstrikes stop. But in the northwest, which remained a rebel stronghold, they continued until days ago.On Sunday morning, for the first time in years, people who lived in fear of those bombs woke to silence in the skies.“Always, that was our life during all those years,” said Hamid Qutaneh, a member of the White Helmets rescue group. He and the other members of the rescue team spent more than a decade responding to the aftermath of airstrikes by Syrian and Russian warplanes that were key to keeping President Bashar al-Assad in power.Mr. Qutaneh, 30, a father of two, grew up in the northwest city of Khan Sheikhoun, which was hit by chemical weapons in 2017.Warnings of airstrikes came in brief phrases or in one word: “The warplane has taken off.” “The warplane is flying overhead.” “Airstrike.”Mr. Qutaneh’s own home in Khan Sheikhoun was destroyed in one of those strikes.“You can’t imagine the joy today,” he said, adding that people for the first time were gathered in the streets in large crowds, no longer fearful that they could be targeted from the skies. “What happened is the beginning of the road to justice.”More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed from airstrikes alone, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a watchdog group.“We are living a happiness that can’t be described,” Ramez Abu Farhan, 41, from the central city of Homs said after he returned home from celebrating in the city’s main square. “There is safety, there isn’t shelling; there aren’t airstrikes; there are no planes, and we are hopeful for the future.”The city had not been hit with airstrikes for years after the Assad regime regained control of it. But for years, he said, “we saw the shelling and the destruction.”Even when planes weren’t carrying out airstrikes on his neighborhood, he said, he could hear them flying overhead, headed to drop their bombs in the countryside. More

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      Nobel Laureate: Remember Political Prisoners

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      No mission is more important than preserving the lives of those who have been jailed for their principles.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: On Aug. 1, 24 people were released in a multicountry prisoner swap — the largest exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War.I experienced a moment of happiness earlier this year when Evan Gershkovich returned to his parents and Lilia Chanysheva to her husband, when Vladimir Kara-Murza saw daylight after 11 months in solitary confinement and Ilya Yashin and Sasha Skochilenko regained their freedom. But I fear for those political prisoners who remain in Russian jails. If there are no Americans, Germans or Britons among their ranks, will anyone stand up for them?During World War II, it was necessary to open a second front to defeat fascism. In the present fight against creeping authoritarianism, democratic states so far have put all their efforts into standing up for political principles, but there is an urgent need to open a “second front” to stand up for the value of human life, centered on a call for the rights of political prisoners to be observed.Thanks to YouTube and social media, we were able to keep track of the fate of the prisoners freed earlier this year. From now on, however, we will know little about the suffering of those still behind bars because the Russian government has blocked these channels. Only the remnants of free speech still being exercised inside the country allow us to be aware of the circumstances facing those who are held in terrible conditions in Russia’s prisons.Among those who remain incarcerated is the boiler mechanic Vladimir Rumyantsev, who declared war on censorship and opened his own personal radio station in the northern Russian city of Vologda. In Siberia, Mikhail Afanasyev, the editor of the online magazine Novy Fokus, is serving a five-and-a-half-year sentence for his reporting on 11 military servicemen who refused to go to Ukraine. A court in the city of Akaban convicted him for spreading false information about the “special military operation,” as the war in Ukraine is called in Russia. The director Yevgeniya Berkovich and the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were thrown into jail and accused of condoning terrorism after Berkovich staged Petriychuk’s play “Finist the Brave Falcon,” which tells the story of women who were persuaded to become the wives of militants in Syria.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Romanian Court Annuls Presidential Election

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      The decision came days after the government asserted it had found an online campaign that promoted a little-known ultranationalist candidate, who emerged as a front-runner in the vote.Romania’s Constitutional Court on Friday canceled the final round of a pivotal presidential election with only two days before the vote, saying it needed to ensure the “correctness of the electoral process.” The surprise decision was the latest in a series of political upheavals across Europe, where right wing movements across the European Union are in the ascendancy. The front-runner in Sunday’s now canceled election had been Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist whose victory in a first-round vote late last month stunned Romania’s political establishment.George Simion, a far-right leader who had endorsed Mr. Georgescu, denounced the court ruling, saying “a coup is underway,” but he urged supporters not to take to the street in protest. “The system must fall democratically,” Mr. Simion said.The court gave no explanation for its decision, and it was not clear when a new first round would take place. “The electoral process for the president of Romania will be entirely redone,” it said in a statement.The move set off angry reaction among right-wing groups on social media but was welcomed by the prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, the leader of the governing Social Democrats and a losing candidate in the opening round of the presidential vote.The decision to annul the vote, he said, was the “only correct solution” following the declassification of security council documents that indicated Russian meddling in the election.Not long after the first round last month, The Supreme Council of National Defense, which oversees national security, announced that there had been “cyberattacks” meant to undermine the vote and social cohesion. Mr. Georgescu benefited from the campaign, according to Romanian intelligence documents declassified by the president this week.“Romania, along with other states on NATO’s Eastern Flank, has become a priority for the hostile actions of some state and nonstate actors,” the statement said, singling out Russia.The council, which is led by President Klaus Iohannis and includes other senior officials, also criticized TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, saying the platform had violated electoral laws because it had not identified Mr. Georgescu as a candidate.One of the race’s presidential candidates also made allegations of irregularities in the vote, and the Constitutional Court took up the case, soon ordering a recount. More

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      Senior Biden aide commits to giving Ukraine avalanche of military assistance

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      The White House has gamed out a last-minute strategy to bolster Ukraine’s war position that involves an avalanche of military assistance and sweeping new sanctions against Russia, according to a background briefing from a National Security Council spokesperson.National security adviser Jake Sullivan met with the head of the office of the Ukrainian president Andriy Yermak for more than an hour on Thursday, committing to provide Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery rounds, thousands of rockets and hundreds of armored vehicles by mid-January, according to the briefing shared with the Guardian.The US is also pledging to support Ukraine’s manpower challenge, offering to train new troops at sites outside Ukrainian territory. This comes alongside a nearly finalized $20bn in loans, which will be backed by profits from immobilized Russian sovereign assets.The United States is tying that to a number of new sanctions to come in the coming weeks, all with the intent of complicating Russia’s ability to sustain its war effort and boosting Ukraine’s bargaining power at the negotiation table that could lay the groundwork for a future settlement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House’s latest move comes a little more than a month in advance of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the US may unload an all-new strategy for a ceasefire altogether.According to a Reuters report, the president-elect’s team is quietly developing a peace proposal for Ukraine that would effectively sideline Nato membership and potentially cede significant territory to Russia, signaling a dramatic shift from current US policy. Trump, for his part, has often stated that he would end the Ukraine and Russia war within 24 hours.Still, Ukrainian officials, including Yermak and Ambassador Oksana Markarova, have been meeting with key figures in Trump’s transition team this week, including JD Vance, Florida representative and potential National security adviser Mike Waltz and Trump’s pick for Russia and Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, in a bid to secure continued support.These meetings carry heightened urgency, particularly after House speaker Mike Johnson blocked a vote on $24bn in additional aid to Ukraine. The Pentagon has nonetheless committed to sending $725m in military assistance this week, the largest shipment since April. More

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      in US Politics

      Former US officials alarmed over Tulsi Gabbard’s alleged ‘sympathy for dictators’

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      Nearly 100 former US diplomats and intelligence and national security officials have called for the Senate to hold closed-door briefings on Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence for her alleged “sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and [Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad]” and other concerns.In an open letter, the officials blasted Tulsi Gabbard, a former presidential candidate and representative from Hawaii, for her lack of experience in the field of intelligence, embracing conspiracy theories regarding the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and “aligning herself with Russian and Syrian officials” after an “uncoordinated” meeting with Assad in Damascus in 2017.The letter was signed by the former deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, the former Nato deputy secretary general Rose Gottemoeller, the former national security adviser Anthony Lake, as well as a number of other former ambassadors, intelligence and military officers, and other high-ranking members of the national security apparatus.It was addressed to the current Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, and to the incoming majority leader John Thune, a Republican.In the letter, the officials called on the Senate to “fully exercise its constitutional advice and consent role … including through appropriate vetting, hearings, and regular order”. It called for Senate committees to consider “all information available” in closed sessions to review Gabbard’s qualifications to manage “the protection of our intelligence sources and methods”.Gabbard and her supporters have denounced similar attacks as a smear campaign, saying that her record of anti-interventionism in Syria and Ukraine has been misrepresented by her political enemies.In Washington, she has staked out a unique foreign policy position as a strong supporter of Israel and the “war on terror” – but also as a critic of US rivalries with countries like Russia and Iran (she strongly criticised Trump’s decision to assassinate the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani as an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war”).“When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told a Hawaiian newspaper in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”But many in Washington’s tightly knit foreign policy and intelligence community see Gabbard as dangerous. The concerns listed in the open letter included Gabbard’s public doubts of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians in spite of “US intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting” corroborating the attacks.They also noted her online posts after the Russian invasion “insinuating that US-funded labs in Ukraine were developing biological weapons and that Ukraine’s engagement with Nato posed a threat to Russian sovereignty”.Her public sympathy for Putin and Assad, the letter said, “raises questions about her judgement and fitness”.“These unfounded attacks are from the same geniuses who have blood on their hands from decades of faulty ‘intelligence’,” and who use classified government information as a “partisan weapon to smear and imply things about their political enemy”, Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for Gabbard with the Trump team, told ABC News in response to the letter.Activists have told the Guardian that staffers from both parties had expressed concern during a 2018 hearing with a Syrian ex-military whistleblower that Gabbard could leak details of the person’s identity. A person with knowledge of high-level intelligence discussions said that there were concerns over Gabbard’s other contacts in the region as well. More

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      Syrian Rebels Storm Hama as Government Forces Withdraw

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      In another startling setback for President Bashar al-Assad, government forces retreated from the city of Hama after rebels advanced.Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, another stunning setback for President Bashar al-Assad.The swift advance on Hama, which was confirmed by both the rebel side and the Syrian government, comes just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country and created a long-term refugee crisis for many neighboring countries.Analysts have attributed the rebel’s surprise success to the cumulative attrition of the war on Mr. al-Assad’s forces and to the fact that foreign allies who have intervened powerfully on his behalf in the past — notably Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — are now preoccupied with their own crises.Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, is recovering from a war with Israel that killed many of its leaders and displaced many of its supporters. And Russia — which dispatched its military to bomb rebel areas, turning the war’s tide in favor of Mr. al-Assad years ago — has diverted its attention toward its invasion of Ukraine.The rebels behind the offensive are a combination of forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which evolved from an affiliate of Al Qaeda. But the group says it has cut ties with the global terrorist organization. Other groups backed by Turkey and based in Syrian territory just south of the Turkish border have also joined in the fight.The rebels announced on Thursday that they were entering Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities. A rebel commander, Lt. Col. Hassan Abdulghany, said in a social media statement that government forces were in “a significant state of confusion,” with soldiers and commanders abandoning their posts.The Syrian military issued its own statement, saying that its forces had withdrawn from the city after rebels broke through its defenses. More

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      in US Politics

      Conspiracy theories and cosying up to dictators: why intelligence experts are spooked by Tulsi Gabbard

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      In 2018, a Syrian dissident codenamed Caesar was set to testify before the House foreign affairs committee about the torture and summary executions that had become a signature of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on opposition during Syria’s civil war.It was not Caesar’s first time in Washington: the ex-military photographer had smuggled out 55,000 photographs and other evidence of life in Assad’s brutal detention facilities years earlier, and had campaigned anonymously to convince US lawmakers to pass tough sanctions on Assad’s network as punishment for his reign of terror.But ahead of that hearing, staffers on the committee, activists and Caesar himself, suddenly became nervous: was it safe to hold the testimony in front of Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman on the committee who just a year earlier had traveled to Damascus of her own volition to meet with Assad?Could she record Caesar’s voice, they asked, or potentially send a photograph of the secret witness back to the same contacts who had brokered her meeting with the Syrian president?View image in fullscreen“There was genuine concern by Democrats in her own party, and Republicans and us and Caesar, about how were we going to do this?” said Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an activist group, who had previously traveled with Gabbard in Syria in 2015. “With the member sitting on this committee that we believe would give any intelligence she has to Assad, Russia and Iran, all of which would have wanted to kill Caesar.”During a congressional trip in 2015, Moustafa recalled, Gabbard had asked three young Syrian girls whether the airstrike they had narrowly survived may not have been launched by Assad, but rather by the terrorist group Isis. The one problem? Isis did not have an air force.Photographs from the 2018 briefing showed a heavily disguised Caesar sitting in a hoodie and mask giving testimony before the House committee.“I often disguise [witnesses],” said Moustafa, who had worked closely with Caesar and served as his translator. “But that day I was especially wary of Tulsi.”There is no evidence that Gabbard sought to pass any information about the Syrian whistleblower to Damascus or any other country, nor that she has any documented connection to other intelligence agencies.But within Washington foreign policy circles and the tightly knit intelligence community, Gabbard has long been seen as dangerous; some have worried that she seems inclined toward conspiracy theories and cosying up to dictators. Others, including the former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have gone further, calling her a “Russian asset”.Those concerns have been heightened by Gabbard’s nomination under Donald Trump to the post of director of national intelligence, a senior cabinet-level position with access to classified materials from across the 18 US intelligence agencies, and shaping that information for the president’s daily briefing. The role would allow her to access and declassify information at her discretion, and also direct some intelligence-sharing with US allies around the world.“There is real concern about her contacts [in Syria] and that she does not share the same sympathies and values as the intelligence community,” said a person familiar with discussions among senior intelligence officials. “She is historically unfit.”View image in fullscreenGabbard and her supporters have denounced those attacks as a smear, saying that her history of anti-interventionism in Syria and Ukraine has been misrepresented as a kind of “cold war 2.0”.In Washington, she has staked out a unique foreign policy position as a strong supporter of Israel and the “war on terror” – but also as a critic of US rivalries with countries like Russia and Iran (she strongly criticised Trump’s decision to assassinate the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani as an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war”).“When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told a Hawaiian newspaper in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”Jeremy Scahill, the leftwing US journalist and activist, wrote that to “pretend that Gabbard somehow poses a more grave danger to US security than those in power after 9/11 or throughout the long bloody history of US interventions and the resulting blowback is a lot of hype and hysteria”.But Gabbard has repeatedly shared conspiracy theories, including claiming shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine that there are “25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world”. In fact, the US program stemming back to the 1990s is directed at better securing labs which focus on infectious disease outbreaks.Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, with Kyiv engaged in a desperate defense of the country’s sovereignty, Gabbard said: “It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country.”View image in fullscreenAnd she has repeatedly supported dictators, including Assad, suggesting that reports of the 2013 and 2017 chemical weapons attacks were false, and calling for the US to “join hands” with Moscow following its 2015 intervention in Syria.Establishment Democrats and Republicans have openly questioned whether or not she poses a threat to national security.“I worry what might happen to untold numbers of American assets if someone as reckless, inexperienced, and outright disloyal as Gabbard were DNI,” wrote Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman who served on the foreign affairs committee with Gabbard in 2018 when Caesar testified.The person close to the intelligence community said that there were continuing concerns about Gabbard’s contacts in the Middle East, stemming back to the controversial 2017 meeting with Assad – an encounter that Gabbard has insisted she does not regret.Those contacts may be explored during a Senate confirmation hearing early next year, the person said.Gabbard was briefly placed on a Transportation Security Administration watchlist because of her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections, CNN reported last month, but was later removed.She does not have a background in intelligence, although the Hawaii native served in the army national guard for more than two decades, and has deployed to Iraq and Kuwait.Moreover, there are concerns that her choice could affect intelligence sharing among US foreign allies, including the tightly knit Five Eyes intelligence group that includes the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Nato and allies in Japan and South Korea.“Much of the intelligence we get, at least from the human collector side, is from our partners,” said John Sipher, formerly deputy director of the CIA’s Russia operations, noting that the cooperation was usually informal, “personality- and trust-based”.“They’re going to be really hesitant to pass [information] to a place that that is becoming more partisan and less professional … they would be making their own checklist: ‘Hey, this sensitive thing that we would in the past have passed to the CIA that could do us damage if it becomes public … Let’s just not do that this time.’” More

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      U.S. Sending $725 Million in Arms to Ukraine, Including More Land Mines

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      The package, the largest since April, comes amid deep concerns in Ukraine that the Trump administration may cut off aid. The president-elect has vowed to end the war quickly, but has not said how.The Pentagon will send Ukraine an additional $725 million in military assistance from its stockpiles, including anti-personnel land mines, drones, portable antiaircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles.In a statement, the Pentagon said on Monday that the shipment was part of a surge in security aid as Ukraine battles a renewed Russian offensive.The new support comes amid deep concerns in Ukraine that the incoming Trump administration might cut off military aid to the country. President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to end the war quickly, though he has not said how. But Vice President-elect JD Vance has outlined a plan that would allow Russia to keep the Ukrainian territory it has seized.The new tranche will be the single largest that the United States has sent to Ukraine since a $1 billion shipment was announced April 24, just days after the House approved new aid to the country after a monthslong hold.The arms are provided under what is called presidential “drawdown” authority, which allows the administration to transfer Pentagon stocks to Ukraine instead of waiting the months or years it can take for defense contractors to manufacture weapons under new contracts.There had been 15 such drawdowns totaling $4.6 billion of arms, ammunition, vehicles and other supplies since the $1 billion package was announced.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More