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UN Welcomes 'Brighter Chapter' as Crisis-hit Lebanon Forms Government

This handout picture released by the Lebanese Presidency shows designate Prime Minister Nawaf Salam delivering a statement to the press at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut on February 8, 2025. (Lebanese Presidency / AFP)
This handout picture released by the Lebanese Presidency shows designate Prime Minister Nawaf Salam delivering a statement to the press at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut on February 8, 2025. (Lebanese Presidency / AFP)
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UN Welcomes 'Brighter Chapter' as Crisis-hit Lebanon Forms Government

This handout picture released by the Lebanese Presidency shows designate Prime Minister Nawaf Salam delivering a statement to the press at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut on February 8, 2025. (Lebanese Presidency / AFP)
This handout picture released by the Lebanese Presidency shows designate Prime Minister Nawaf Salam delivering a statement to the press at the presidential palace in Baabda, east of Beirut on February 8, 2025. (Lebanese Presidency / AFP)

The United Nations welcomed the formation of a new government in Lebanon on Saturday, which ended more than two years under a caretaker cabinet.

"Today's government formation heralds a new and brighter chapter for Lebanon," the office of the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a statement.

Lebanon formed a new government on Saturday, following unusually direct US intervention in the process and in a step intended to bring the country closer to accessing reconstruction funds following a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Speaking to reporters at the presidential palace, new Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said the 24-member cabinet would prioritize financial reforms, reconstruction and the implementation of a United Nations resolution seen as a cornerstone to stability on the Lebanese border with Israel.

Salam said he hoped the politically diverse cabinet would "work in harmony".

"This government will seek to restore confidence between citizens and the state, between Lebanon and its Arab surroundings, and between Lebanon and the international community," he said.

Lebanon has been hit hard over the last half-decade by a financial collapse that impoverished large parts of the population, a cataclysmic explosion at the Beirut port and a more than year-long war between Israel and Hezbollah that destroyed swathes of the country.

Forming a cabinet was seen as an essential step to undertaking reforms that could open the door to a financing plan under the International Monetary Fund and accessing support from key Gulf countries to help rebuild destroyed areas.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.