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Iraq Says Won’t Be Used for Activities Hostile to Syria

Iraqi soldiers and members of the Popular Mobilization Forces guard the border with Syria. (AFP)
Iraqi soldiers and members of the Popular Mobilization Forces guard the border with Syria. (AFP)
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Iraq Says Won’t Be Used for Activities Hostile to Syria

Iraqi soldiers and members of the Popular Mobilization Forces guard the border with Syria. (AFP)
Iraqi soldiers and members of the Popular Mobilization Forces guard the border with Syria. (AFP)

The Iraqi government denied that any activity hostile to Syria was taking place inside its territories.

Iraq will not be a haven for foreign outlaws, a trusted source in the Iraqi government told Asharq Al-Awsat.

It dismissed as false reports about Syrian or foreign fighters entering Iraq who are being led by external parties.

Recent reports have claimed that Syrian fighters have set up a training camp in Iraq.

The source categorically denied the report, saying it is part of a media campaign aimed at undermining Iraq’s position towards neighboring Syria.

Iraqi security and military authorities are closely securing all borders and firmly confronting any attempts to infiltrate or threaten the country, it stressed.

Iraq is committed to respecting the national sovereignty of other countries and it refrains from meddling in their internal affairs, it declared.

Moreover, the source reiterated the Iraqi government’s stance in solidarity with the Syrian people and their right to determine their fate.

It is ready to help support Syria’s reconstruction and economic revival after years of war, it went on to say.

Syria’s stability is integral to Iraq’s own stability, it remarked. Both countries have an interest in their own security and stability, which will in turn support regional stability.

Baghdad will host an Arab League summit in May. Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has been officially invited to attend in what is seen as an attempt to ease the tentative relations between Baghdad and Damascus after the ouster of the Syrian regime on December 8.

Media reports had said that former members of the Syrian army have set up camp in Iraq after refusing to return to their country. Members of pro-Iran militias have also reportedly left Syria for Iraq.

Last week, the Iraqi Interior Ministry firmly denied claims that dozens of Syrian regime officers, who had sought refuge in Iraq, were granted temporary residency on humanitarian grounds.

On December 19, Iraqi authorities turned over 1,905 regime officers, who had fled Syria, to the new authorities in Damascus.

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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.