[Produced with Reuters colleagues Jonathan Saul and Maha El Dahan and published here December 19, 2022]
LONDON/DUBAI/BEIRUT, Dec 19 (Reuters) – Using a low-profile fleet of ships under U.S. sanctions, Syria has this year sharply increased wheat imports from the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea that Russia annexed from Ukraine, a sign of tightening economic ties between two allies shunned by the West.
Continue reading[Produced with Reuters colleagues Orhan Coskun and Laila Bassam and published here on December 2, 2022]
BEIRUT/ANKARA, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Syria is resisting Russian efforts to broker a summit with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, three sources said on Friday, after more than a decade of bitter enmity since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war.
Continue reading[Published here on November 29, 2022]
BEIRUT, Nov 29 (Reuters) – The head of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Tuesday he still feared a Turkish ground invasion despite U.S. assurances and has demanded a “stronger” message from Washington after seeing unprecedented Turkish deployments along the border.
Continue reading[Produced with Reuters colleague Riham Alkousaa and published here on November 18, 2022]
DOHA/BERLIN, Nov 18 (Reuters) – Syrian lawyer Amrou Sabahi had hoped to spend his first World Cup at the heart of the action, working behind the scenes at the stadiums in Qatar, the first Arab country to hold the crowning event of soccer.
But when the tournament kicks off on Sunday, the 27-year-old will be watching from Spain, where he lives as a refugee, after his application to attend the Cup, was rejected.
Continue reading[Published here on June 25, 2021]
BEIRUT, June 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Syrian refugee girls are increasingly at risk of child marriage due to a surge in pandemic-linked poverty, legal loopholes and long-term displacement in countries across the Middle East and North Africa, charity Save the Children said on Friday.
Continue readingOn May 19, I took part in a panel hosted by the UCLA Center for Middle East Development titled, “Can the US Still Promote Democracy in the MENA Region?” I noted the varied approaches to democracy promotion that the US has adopted across the Middle East – with little success. Watch the full panel discussion here:
[Published on AFP’s Correspondent Blog on May 24, 2019]
Mosul — “There are families living in this alleyway.” The Arabic words were hand-painted in red, black, and blue on a tattered canvas, pinned up where a small side street led off a main thoroughfare in Iraq’s Mosul. The alleyway looked anything but livable — bullet holes and craters from mortar rounds still scarred the walls around it nearly two years after the fighting had stopped, and sewage water gurgled down the cracked pavement. The banner, my AFP colleagues said, was hung to alert passing aid groups to needy residents eking out a living, unseen, in the battered labyrinth of west Mosul.
[Published here on February 21, 2019]
Two feet deep, below a plot of farmland outside the Syrian city of Raqa, lies a large and deadly legacy of the Islamic State group: a mass grave holding an estimated 3,500 people.
I spoke to BBC Scotland’s Isabel Fraser and Gordon Brewer on February 16, 2019 on the deeply disturbing state of civilians fleeing the final Islamic State group pocket of Baghouz in eastern Syria.
Listen in here, with my interview starting around 1:07:00.
[Published here on February 15, 2019]
As destitute civilians stumble out of the Islamic State group’s last enclave in east Syria, a mixed bag of unlikely characters are pitching in to help get them to safety.
MAYA GEBEILY 