Erdogan Threatens to 'Crush the Heads' of Kurdish Units in Syria https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3603841/erdogan-threatens-crush-heads-kurdish-units-syria
Erdogan Threatens to 'Crush the Heads' of Kurdish Units in Syria
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to expand the operations against the Kurdish forces in Syria, as was the case against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.
Speaking at the parliamentary group meeting of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Ankara, Erdogan announced that the Turkish forces would expand their military operations against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria, coinciding with the Claw-Lock military operation in northern Iraq, which started Monday dawn.
The president asserted that sooner or later, Turkey will "crush the head of terrorist organization," in reference to the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).
Turkey considers the YPG an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, whose leaders are stationed in northern Iraq and have been engaged in an armed conflict for more than 40 years for the autonomy of the Kurds of Turkey.
Turkey designated the PKK a "terrorist organization," saying they constitute a threat to its national security.
Erdogan stressed that Turkey will continue its operations against "terrorists" in northern Iraq and northern Syria until their final elimination.
On the issue of Syrian migrants, Erdogan asserted that his country embraces migrants, noting that the Syrians will want to return to their homes when peace is established, and the construction is completed.
Meanwhile, Turkish forces bombed Ain Issa district's eastern and western countryside, targeting Mushaiyrefah and the international M4 highway in the eastern al-Raqqah countryside and Hoshan and al-Khalidiyah in the western countryside of Ain Issa district in northern al-Raqqah countryside.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that Turkish forces fired six rocket shells on the Qubour Qrajanah area in the countryside of Tel Tamr, north-west al-Hasakah.
Also, the Turkish Defense Ministry said it "neutralized" ten terrorists who attempted to infiltrate and launch attacks in the Operation Olive Branch and the Operation Peace Spring zones in northern Syria.
"The fight against the PKK/ YPG continues in Syria," the ministry added.
Later, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said the government is considering banning Syrian refugees residing in Turkey from visiting their country during the upcoming Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha holidays.
Soylu accused the head of the Republican People's Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of adopting a provocative approach to inflame xenophobia in Turkey ahead of the election.
Kilicdaroglu reiterated Tuesday that his party would send Syrian migrants to their countries, and they would "voluntarily" leave.
"They will come to visit Turkey as tourists," he said, adding that his party would mend ties with the Bashar Assad regime to facilitate their return.
The decision came after the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader said that Syrians who go back to their country to celebrate Eid al-Fitr should not be allowed to return to Turkey, adding that the migrants sheltered in Turkey should return voluntarily with dignity once the decade-old internal conflict ends in their country.
"Our fundamental objective should be to see Syrians off in a voluntary way and with dignity after the harsh conditions that led them to flee their country disappear," MHP leader Devlet Bahceli said in his weekly address to his lawmakers at parliament.
Turkey used to allow Syrian migrants to return to their country for the Eid holidays in previous years. However, intense pressure from the opposition ahead of the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections in June 2023 forced the government to make some changes to the Syrian issue in Turkey.
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.
Al-Sharaa: Israel’s Push for a Buffer Zone in Southern Syria Puts the Region at Riskhttps://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5216815-al-sharaa-israel%E2%80%99s-push-buffer-zone-southern-syria-puts-region-risk
Al-Sharaa: Israel’s Push for a Buffer Zone in Southern Syria Puts the Region at Risk
Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa speaks during the 23rd annual Doha Forum (Reuters).
Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa warned on Saturday that Israel’s effort to establish a demilitarized buffer zone in southern Syria risks pushing the country into a “dangerous place.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the Doha Forum, al-Sharaa said US-mediated negotiations with Israel remain underway to address the “security concerns” of both sides.
Following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military positions, saying its goal is to prevent the new authorities from seizing the former army’s weapons arsenal.
Over the past year, Israel has repeatedly publicized ground operations and arrests of individuals it accuses of “terrorist” activity in southern Syria. Israeli forces have also entered the Golan Heights disengagement zone established under the 1974 cease-fire agreement.
Al-Sharaa said all major international actors back Syria “in its demand that Israel withdraw and reposition to the lines of Dec. 8.” He emphasized that Damascus insists on full respect for the 1974 accord, describing it as a durable, internationally supported agreement.
“Tampering with this agreement, while proposing alternatives such as a new buffer zone, could drive us into dangerous territory,” he said.
Al-Sharaa accused Israel of “fighting ghosts” and “searching for enemies” in the wake of the Gaza war, adding that since assuming office a year ago he has sent “positive messages about peace and regional stability.”
Thirteen people were killed in late November during an Israeli incursion into the southern town of Beit Jin, a raid Damascus denounced as a “war crime.” Israel said the operation targeted suspects linked to the ISIS group.
Though Syria and Israel maintain no diplomatic relations and remain technically at war, several US-brokered ministerial meetings have been held in recent months.
“Negotiations are ongoing, and the United States is fully engaged,” al-Sharaa said, noting broad international support for addressing “legitimate security concerns so both sides can feel secure.”
He asked: “Syria is the one under attack, so who should be demanding a buffer zone and withdrawal?”
In September, al-Sharaa warned in New York of the risk of renewed Middle East instability if Damascus and Tel Aviv fail to reach a security arrangement, accusing Israel of “delaying negotiations and continuing to violate our airspace and territory.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli forces deployed in the buffer zone outside the occupied Golan Heights in November, a move Damascus condemned as “illegitimate.”
Domestically, al-Sharaa said all segments of Syrian society are now represented in government “on the basis of competence, not sectarian quotas.” Syria, he said, is charting a “new path” for post-conflict governance. He acknowledged the country inherited “deep problems” from the former regime and said investigative bodies are working to address alleged crimes in the coastal region and Sweida.
He stressed that Syria is “a state of law, not a collection of sects,” and that accountability and institutional reform are essential to rebuilding the state.
The Syrian president added that economic revitalization is crucial for lasting stability, which is why Damascus continues to argue for the lifting of the Caesar Act sanctions.
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