Glad we have the UN to state the obvious, will they do anything about it? Not with the US backing Israel.
UN experts say Israeli strikes on Syria against international law
Israel’s strikes on Syria following the fall of al-Assad violate international law, UN experts said, branding Israel’s attempts to “preemptively disarm” its foes as “lawless”.
Since al-Assad’s overthrow, Israel, which borders Syria, has sent troops into a buffer zone on the east of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, in a move the UN has said violates a 1974 armistice. Israel’s army said it had conducted hundreds of strikes against Syrian military assets in the past two days, claiming to target everything from chemical weapons stores to air defences to keep them out of rebel hands.
“There is absolutely no basis under international law to preventively or preemptively disarm a country you don’t like,” said Ben Saul, UN special rapporteur on the promotion of human rights while countering terrorism. “If that were the case, it would be a recipe for global chaos,” he told reporters in Geneva, pointing out that “lots of countries have adversaries they would like to see without weapons”.
“You can’t just follow your enemy wherever they are in the world, and bomb them in some third country, which has been Israel’s approach.”
SNA to press on after taking Manbij from Kurdish-led forces
We are in one of the areas that has been taken over by Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters. They say there were intense battles to take the city of Manbij from Kurdish-backed fighters, and that they will continue towards the Euphrates so that they have complete control of all areas west of the river.
According to SNA fighters, there are a number of networks of tunnels under the city of Manbij and that is why they’re operating cautiously. Manbij was strategically important for the Kurdish-led forces who had held this area since the defeat of ISIL [in 2016].
Turkiye sees the Kurdish-backed fighters as “terrorists” and wants Arab villages to be under the control of Arab fighters so that it can create a so-called buffer zone on its border. Since the fall of Syria’s al-Assad government, it seems to be closer to making that zone secure.
Far-right trend behind ‘concerning’ moves to suspend asylum claims across Europe
The decision by several European countries to suspend the assessment of Syrian asylum claims after the fall of al-Assad is a “concerning” and premature development that will create a backlog in the asylum system across Europe, an expert in migration has told Al Jazeera.
“The European asylum system decides on a negative or positive decision based on a safe country or unsafe country. For the time being, we do not really know what Syria is going to be,” said Marianna Karakoulaki, a journalist and a sociology lecturer at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
“A lot of Syrians I have spoken to told me they are extremely happy for what is happening in Syria, but at the same time they are concerned because they don’t really know what is going to happen [in the future].”
She said that many governments seem eager to consider Syria as “safe”, even though the leading Syrian group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is designed as a “terrorist” organisation in many countries, including the United Kingdom.
“It’s a bit of an oxymoron to stop people from applying and then consider the current [Syrian] government as ‘terrorists’,” she said.
Karakoulaki said she expected Syrian refugees to come under pressure to return home from countries across Europe amid an increasingly influential far right.
“This far-right trend is rising, slowly but steadily, and it’s quite concerning,” she said.
