Syria

04 Jan 2023; MEMO: The Syrian regime, on Monday, devalued its currency for the second time in under four months, as the country's economic situation continues to drastically deteriorate.

In a statement on Monday, Syria's Central Bank lowered the official exchange rate to 4,522 Syrian pounds against the US dollar, down from the previous official rate of 3,015 pounds to the dollar.

04 Jan 2023; MEMO: Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad received the United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister in Damascus on Wednesday in the latest sign of thawing relations between Assad and an Arab State that once supported rebels trying to overthrow him, Reuters reports.

RAQQA, Syria (AP) — Marwa Ahmad rarely leaves her run-down house in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The single mother of four says people look at her with suspicion and refuse to offer her a job, while her children get bullied and beaten up at school.

She and her children are paying the price, she says, because she once belonged to the Islamic State group, which overran a swath of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and imposed a radical, brutal rule for years.

24 Dec 2022; MEMO: YPG/PKK terrorists raped and killed two women from the Al-Baggara tribe in eastern Syria's Deir ez-Zor province, according to local sources.

The victims were from the province's village of Sur.

The people of the region held the so-called Deir ez-Zor Military Council head and the terrorists with him responsible and staged a demonstration against the YPG/PKK terror group.

23 Dec 2022; MEMO: The United States Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs to the United Nations Robert Wood has called on the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad to "constructively" participate in the Syrian Constitutional Committee meetings.

22 Dec 2022; MEMO: The Syrian regime President Bashar Al-Assad yesterday issued a legislative decree granting a general amnesty for military service deserters on the condition that they surrender within three months for those living in Syria, and four months for those living outside the country.

20 Dec 2022; MEMO: Turkiye and Russia have resumed joint patrols along the northern border of Syria after a four-week hiatus. According to local sources on Monday, a joint patrol made up of eight Russian and Turkish army vehicles, accompanied by two Russian helicopters, left the village of Ashma, west of Ayn Al-Arab in the countryside to the east of Aleppo.

20 Dec 2022; MEMO: Israeli warplanes bombed targets in the vicinity of the Syrian capital, Damascus, last night, killing two soldiers, the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has reported.

At least four missiles were fired from the Israeli aircraft, targeting the area around Damascus International Airport. According to Sana, one of the targets of the attack was an air defence battery that was deployed recently near the airport.

QAMISHLI, Syria (AP) — Baran Ramadan Mesko had been hiding with other migrants for weeks in the coastal Algerian city of Oran, awaiting a chance to take a boat across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

Days before the 38-year-old Syrian Kurd was to begin the journey, he received news that a smuggler boat carrying some of his friends had sunk soon after leaving the Algerian coast. Most of its passengers had drowned.

It came as a shock, after spending weeks to get to Algeria from Syria and then waiting for a month for a smuggler to put him on the boat.

DAMASCUS, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said here on Wednesday that the U.S.-led Western sanctions on Syria shouldn't block humanitarian assistance.

Stressing 90 percent of Syrians live in poverty, Pedersen told reporters that he had repeated his demand to the United Nations Security Council a day earlier that the sanctions imposed on Syria should not affect humanitarian assistance.