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Hariri: Cabinet Crisis is an Internal, not Regional Issue

Hariri speaks during a conference at Chatham House in central London on December 13, 2018. Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP
Hariri speaks during a conference at Chatham House in central London on December 13, 2018. Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP
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Hariri: Cabinet Crisis is an Internal, not Regional Issue

Hariri speaks during a conference at Chatham House in central London on December 13, 2018. Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP
Hariri speaks during a conference at Chatham House in central London on December 13, 2018. Daniel LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP

Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has hoped that his national unity government would be formed by the end of the year.

“I think we are in the last 100 meters of forming the government,” Hariri said Friday during a Q&A session at the Chatham House think tank in London.

“We are getting there, it’s not a regional issue, it’s an internal issue, it’s because the equation changed a little bit in parliament and some people want more. I believe that most of the obstacles were solved, there is still one obstacle and I am sure that we will be able to resolve it,” he said in response to a question.

Hariri has refused to grant six Hezbollah-backed independent Sunni MPs a representative in the cabinet for not making up a coherent political bloc.

He stressed that “Lebanon cannot afford to continue without a government that can protect it from regional turmoil and economic downfall.”

The PM-designate reiterated the importance of overcoming political differences among Lebanon’s different factions.

“Hezbollah is not going to change my mind on Iran and I am not going to change its mind on Saudi Arabia,” stressed Hariri. “So we decided to put our regional differences aside.”

Hariri told the audience that Riyadh will back Lebanon through several agreements that are set to be announced once the new cabinet is formed.

“You will see Saudi Arabia taking some serious steps towards Lebanon and helping economically.”

At the CEDRE conference that was held in Paris last April, Saudi Arabia committed one billion dollars, he said.

“Our strategy is to invest in infrastructure, prepare Lebanon to be a platform so that big companies … would invest in Lebanon or make Lebanon a hub for reconstruction in Syria, in Iraq and even in Libya,” Hariri stated.

He reiterated the importance of sticking to Lebanon’s dissociation policy, saying the new government will continue to abide by it.

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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.