U.S. diplomats visit Damascus for first time in over a decade

American diplomats are visiting the Syrian capital for the first time in over a decade, the State Department said Friday, less than two weeks after a blitz offensive led by rebel group Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime and propelled the country into a new era.

The Damascus delegation will “be engaging directly with the Syrian people” about “their vision for the future of their country and how the United States can help support them,” the department said in a statement. The group also plans to meet with representatives of HTS “to discuss transition principles endorsed by the United States and regional partners in Aqaba, Jordan.”

HTS remains on the State Department’s terrorist list and was previously affiliated with al-Qaeda, but it has since tried to shed its past and said it has moderated. The leader of HTS met with British diplomats this week and called for restoring relations and relief from sanctions on Syria.

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that the Biden administration has been in direct contact with HTS. He said the United States and its partners have agreed on a set of principles they hope Syria’s interim leaders will follow in exchange for support and recognition of a future Syrian government, The Washington Post reported.

The U.S. delegation also hopes to uncover information about the fates of Americans who disappeared under the Assad regime, including journalist Austin Tice and therapist Majd Kamalmaz, the statement said. Tice has been missing since his abduction near Damascus 12 years ago, and Kamalmaz disappeared in 2017 and died while being held in Syria, the State Department has said.

Daniel Rubinstein, a senior adviser in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, is leading the State Department’s diplomatic engagement on Syria. The delegation also includes Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf and Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens.

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Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal said late Thursday that Israel is “intensifying its bombardment of residential homes in Gaza City.” In less than 24 hours, more than 50 civilians, including 14 children and eight women, were killed in northern Gaza, Basal had said earlier.

Doctors Without Borders said in a report it is “witnessing clear signs of ethnic cleansing” in northern Gaza “as Palestinian life is being wiped off the area.” Israel did not immediately comment on the report but has said it has respected international law in Gaza and has a right to defend itself after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

The spokesman for the U.N. secretary general said Israel’s airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, which Houthi-controlled media reports said killed at least nine people, have caused “considerable damage to the Red Sea ports that will lead to the immediate and significant reduction in port capacity.”

At least 45,206 people have been killed in Gaza during the war and 107,512 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. At least 3,961 people have been killed and 16,520 injured in Lebanon, the country’s Health Ministry says. Neither agency distinguishes between civilians and combatants.

Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, including more than 300 soldiers. It says 386 soldiers have been killed in its military operation in Gaza.

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U.S. failed to evacuate Palestinian Americans from Gaza, lawsuit alleges

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Victoria Bisset

A new lawsuit has accused the U.S. government of failing to rescue Palestinian Americans trapped in Gaza after the war with Israel began in late 2023.

The complaint accused President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin of depriving U.S. citizens, permanent residents and their immediate relatives “of the normal and typical evacuation efforts the federal government extends to Americans who are not Palestinians.” It was filed Thursday and announced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The suit is the second filed this week against the U.S. government over the war in Gaza. The other, filed Tuesday in Washington, accused Blinken of deliberately circumventing U.S. human rights law by providing military aid to Israel amid the war.

Eight of the nine plaintiffs in Thursday’s case are U.S. citizens; the ninth is a permanent resident. All are either trapped in Gaza themselves or have immediate relatives still in the besieged enclave. They include an American mother stranded in Gaza with her three children, ages 7, 12 and 15, and a U.S. man suffering from untreated hepatitis A.

The lawsuit noted that U.S. citizens and their families were evacuated in other circumstances — including from Israel following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and from Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. It said the United States has managed to arrange some evacuations from Gaza since the war began.

But while some of the plaintiffs received U.S. government approval to leave Gaza, their names did not appear on an online list of those allowed to depart before the Israeli closure of the Rafah crossing in May, the lawsuit said. Others did not gain State Department approval, or did not want to leave without immediate relatives who had not been granted permission to travel, the lawsuit added.

Since the Rafah closure, the State Department has facilitated or coordinated the departure of American doctors and sick and injured Palestinian children via the Kerem Shalom crossing, but the United States has not evacuated Palestinian Americans and their immediate relatives through this route, the lawsuit said.

In a briefing Thursday, State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel declined to comment on pending litigation but said the safety and security of American citizens around the world is a “top priority.”

Analysis: After Assad’s fall, a new Middle East ‘order’ is taking shape

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Ishaan Tharoor

Fear and hope color the unfolding drama in Syria in equal shades. After the stunning fall of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, attention has centered on the new dispensation taking shape in Damascus — and the powerful regional actors that may be influencing it. Analysts have already declared geopolitical winners and losers: Iran and Russia, Assad’s longtime backers, are licking their wounds; Turkey and Arab monarchies that supported the Syrian rebels to varying extents are in the ascendance. Israel, which carried out a ruthless bombing campaign on Syrian military targets and moved ground forces across the disputed Golan Heights into Syrian territory clearly feels emboldened, too.

As the Islamist rebel group that ousted Assad takes the reins in steering the country’s political transition, Western governments are starting to reengage a country long in the diplomatic cold. On Tuesday, the French flag was hoisted above France’s embassy in Damascus for the first time in 12 years. And on Friday, a U.S. delegation was in Syria, the first American diplomatic visit to Damascus in more than a decade.

Much remains uncertain. On Thursday, hundreds of Syrians demonstrated in the heart of Damascus, calling on the new Islamist-linked authorities to preserve a secular, inclusive state. Kurds in Syria’s northeast are bracing for potential battles with Turkish-backed militias. As my colleagues reported, members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect have faced reprisal attacks and killings at the hands of rebel groups long suppressed by a half-century of dictatorship.

This is an excerpt from a full story.

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For Syrians in U.S., joy, worry and a longing to return after Assad’s fall

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Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Mohamad El Chamaa

When Tasnim Alhamwi found out Bashar al-Assad had fled her home country, she couldn’t stop dancing and laughing. Her family in Baltimore County had stayed up all night huddled around a TV, watching, waiting, praying for the end of the Assad regime.

When the end officially came on Dec. 8 local time, it also brought back a wave of painful memories for the 18-year-old student. In between the euphoria, Alhamwi cried while remembering the first time she hid under a desk as a 6-year-old when soldiers banged on the door and bombs collapsed houses around her.

With Assad gone, could her family actually now go back, she wondered. Would she?

Alhamwi and other Syrians across the United States are grappling with those questions following the end of a 53-year brutal regime and a civil war that displaced roughly half of the country’s population. Many said they can’t wait to reunite with family they haven’t seen in years, if not decades, hopeful a friend or relative who had disappeared under the Assad regime might still be alive.

This is an excerpt from a full story.

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Gaza ceasefire talks continue, but no apparent breakthrough

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Karen DeYoung, Claire Parker and Miriam Berger

After more than a year of mediating ceasefire and hostage release negotiations between Hamas and Israel, the Biden administration has learned to temper its optimism.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, amid numerous media reports that a deal was imminent and the arrival of CIA Director William J. Burns in Qatar for what might be the final round of talks during the Biden administration, said Wednesday he was “hopeful.”

But “there’s the Lucy and the football moment,” Blinken told the Council on Foreign Relations, “when Lucy puts the football down and Charlie Brown comes up to kick it, and Lucy pulls the football away.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who visited the region last week, told MSNBC Wednesday that a deal was close, but “we’ve been close before.”

No progress toward agreement was reported Thursday. Burns departed Doha after a day and is no longer in the Middle East, said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive diplomacy, although a U.S. delegation remains.

One factor pushing the talks toward conclusion is the upcoming change of administration in Washington, now just weeks away.

This is an excerpt from a full story.

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