Tracking Website Shows Turkish Air Bridge to Western Libyahttps://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2650246/tracking-website-shows-turkish-air-bridge-western-libya
Tracking Website Shows Turkish Air Bridge to Western Libya
Libyan soldiers conduct a graduation ceremony following the completion of training by the Turkish Armed Forces, Nov. 22, 2020. (AA)
Itamilradar, a website on military aircraft tracking in Italy and the Mediterranean, has disclosed movements for Turkish military transport aircraft above the center and east of the Mediterranean towards Libya.
The website noted that it tracked two Turkish Air Force flights between Libya and Turkey. They headed towards the west of Libya in Misrata. This indicates that Turkey continues to arm its members in western Libya.
Moreover, the Turkish Ministry of National Defense announced resuming training for the Government of National Accord forces in line with the deal struck with the GNA on Nov. 27, 2019.
The training is provided by Turkish army personnel “in order to raise the Libyan army to international standards,” the Ministry tweeted.
Such developments occurred amid a crisis between Ankara and the European Union resulting from the German frigate Hamburg stopping the Turkish-flagged cargo ship, Roseline A, as part of a European Union mission called Operation Irini.
The Operation was launched by the EU to monitor and enforce compliance with the United Nations Security Council resolution which bans arms shipments to Libya.
German personnel from the Irini mission boarded the Roseline A to search for arms belonging to militias loyal to GNA head Fayez al-Sarraj.
Turkey said the inspection was carried out without its consent, and submitted a complaint to the EU.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saw this as an “aggression” that is unjustified by virtue of the international law and the law of the sea.
Syrian Refugee Returns Set to Slow as Donor Support Fadeshttps://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5217059-syrian-refugee-returns-set-slow-donor-support-fades
People sit after receiving bread from Ecir Kapici, Turkish humanitarian NGO at Al-Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, after Syria's Bashar Al-Assad was ousted, in Damascus, Syria, December 20 , 2024. (Reuters)
Syrian Refugee Returns Set to Slow as Donor Support Fades
People sit after receiving bread from Ecir Kapici, Turkish humanitarian NGO at Al-Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, after Syria's Bashar Al-Assad was ousted, in Damascus, Syria, December 20 , 2024. (Reuters)
More than 3 million Syrians have returned home since the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's rule a year ago but a decline in global funding could deter others, the UN refugee agency said on Monday.
Some 1.2 million refugees in addition to 1.9 million internally displaced people have gone back home following the civil war that ended with Assad's overthrow, but millions more are yet to return, according to UNHCR.
The agency said much more support was needed to ensure the trend continues.
"Syrians are ready to rebuild – the question is whether the world is ready to help them do it," said UNHCR head Filippo Grandi. Over 5 million refugees remain outside Syria's borders, mostly in neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon.
RISK OF REVERSALS
Grandi told donors in Geneva last week that there was a risk that those Syrians who are returning might even reverse their course and come back to host states.
"Returns continue in fairly large numbers but unless we step up broader efforts, the risk of (reversals) is very real," he said.
Overall, Syria's $3.19 billion humanitarian response is 29% funded this year, according to UN data, at a time when donors like the United States and others are making major cuts to foreign aid across the board.
The World Health Organization sees a gap emerging as aid money drops off before national systems can take over.
As of last month, only 58% of hospitals were fully functional and some are suffering power outages, affecting cold-chain storage for vaccines.
"Returnees are coming back to areas where medicines, staff and infrastructure are limited – adding pressure to already thin services," Christina Bethke, Acting WHO Representative in Syria, told reporters.
The slow pace of removing unexploded ordnance is also a major obstacle to recovery, said the aid group Humanity & Inclusion, which reported over 1,500 deaths and injuries in the last year. Such efforts are just 13% funded, it said.
Some aid officials say Syria is one of the first crises to be hit by aid funding cuts because the end of the war means it no longer counts as an emergency, eligible for priority funding.
Others may have held back as they wait to see if authorities under President Ahmed al-Sharaa make good on promises of reform and accountability.
On Anniversary of the Fall of Bashar Assad, Syrians and Their Country Struggle to Heal https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5217056-anniversary-fall-bashar-assad%C2%A0syrians%C2%A0and-their-country-struggle%C2%A0%C2%A0heal%C2%A0
Syrians shout slogans and wave flags outside the Umayyad Mosque before a prayer held ahead of celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP)
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On Anniversary of the Fall of Bashar Assad, Syrians and Their Country Struggle to Heal
Syrians shout slogans and wave flags outside the Umayyad Mosque before a prayer held ahead of celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP)
A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as opposition forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.
Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.
His Dec. 8, 2024 homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.
But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.
He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.
“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”
A country struggling to heal
Marwan's country is also struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.
Assad's downfall came as a shock, even to the opposition factions who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an opposition group whose then-leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president — launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.
They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, opposition groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.
06 December 2025, Syria, Damascus: People walk through al-Hamedya market in Damascus, which is decorated by flags marking the first anniversary of the fall of Assad. (dpa)
The opposition took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country's new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.
Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after suffering heavy losses in 2019 and 2020, when Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly opposition-controlled areas.
The opposition offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib, Abdul Ghani said.
“The defunct regime was preparing a very large campaign against the liberated areas, and it wanted to finish the Idlib file,” he said. Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas.”
In timing the attack, the opposition fighters also aimed to take advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.
When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the opposition pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.
Successes abroad, challenges at home
Since his sudden ascent to power, Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and Sharaa.
A crowning moment of his success in the international arena: in November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.
But the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed. Local Druze groups have now set up their own de facto government and military in the southern Sweida province.
There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.
Israel is wary of Syria's new government even though Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly UN-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.
Meanwhile, the country’s economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.
A Boy Scout band parades down a street during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025. (AP)
Rebuilding largely an individual effort
The rebuilding that has taken place so far has largely been on a small scale, with individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.
On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.
Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have been coming back.
The most heavily damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any sort of larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.
“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back to it even though the area doesn't even have a water connection.
His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.
“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed," she said.
Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”
But he remains anxious about the still-precarious security situation and its impact on the still-flagging economy.
“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come,” he said. “The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”
Marwan, the former prisoner, says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he has also been struggling economically.
From time to time, he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.
Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.
Israel’s Netanyahu to Discuss Second Phase of Gaza Plan with Trump Later This Month https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5216949-israel%E2%80%99s-netanyahu-discuss-second-phase-gaza-plan-trump-later-month
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz address a joint press conference in Jerusalem, 07 December 2025. (EPA)
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Israel’s Netanyahu to Discuss Second Phase of Gaza Plan with Trump Later This Month
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz address a joint press conference in Jerusalem, 07 December 2025. (EPA)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the second phase of a US plan to end the war in Gaza was close, but cautioned several key issues still needed to be resolved, including whether a multinational security force would be deployed.
Netanyahu, speaking to reporters alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Jerusalem, said that he would hold important discussions with US President Donald Trump at the end of the month on how to ensure the plan's second phase was achieved.
The prime minister's office in November said that Trump had invited Netanyahu to the White House "in the near future", although a date for the visit has not yet been made public.
Netanyahu said that he would discuss with Trump how to bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza. A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is entering its second month, although both sides have repeatedly accused each other of violating the truce agreement.
Netanyahu said that it was important to ensure Hamas not only upholds the ceasefire but also follows through on "their commitment" to the plan to disarm and for Gaza to be demilitarized.
Israel retained control of 53% of Gaza under the first phase of Trump's plan, which involved the release of hostages held by fighters in Gaza and of Palestinians detained by Israel. The final hostage remains to be handed over are those of an Israeli police officer killed on October 7, 2023 fighting Gazan gunmen who had invaded Israel.
"We'll get him out," Netanyahu said.
Since the ceasefire started in October, the militant group has reestablished itself in the rest of Gaza.
GERMAN CHANCELLOR: PHASE TWO MUST COME NOW
According to the plan, Israel is to pull back further in the second phase as a transitional authority is established in Gaza and a multinational security force is deployed, Hamas is disarmed, and reconstruction begins.
A multinational coordination center has been established in Israel, but there are no deadlines in the plan and officials involved say that efforts to advance it have stalled.
"What will be the timeline? What are the forces that are coming in? Will we have international forces? If not, what are the alternatives? These are all topics that are being discussed," Netanyahu said, describing them as central issues.
Merz said that Germany was willing to help rebuild Gaza but would wait for Netanyahu's meeting with Trump, and for clarity on what Washington was prepared to do, before Berlin decides what it would contribute but that phase two "must come now".
Israel has repeatedly carried out air strikes since the ceasefire came into effect that it says are fending off attacks or destroying militant infrastructure. Gaza's health ministry says 373 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire started. Three Israeli soldiers have been killed by gunmen.
Netanyahu said that he would also discuss with Trump "opportunities for peace", an apparent reference to US efforts for Israel to establish formal ties with Arab and Muslim states.
"We believe there's a path to advance a broader peace with the Arab states, and a path also to establish a workable peace with our Palestinian neighbors," Netanyahu said, asserting Israel would always insist on security control of the West Bank.
Trump has said he promised Muslim leaders that Israel would not annex the occupied West Bank, where Netanyahu's government is backing the development of Jewish settlements.
The "question of political annexation" of the West Bank remains a subject of discussion, Netanyahu said.
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