“The change we’re now seeing after the fall of the Assad regime has been immense, creating great hopes, but there are many challenges still ahead,” he said upon his arrival according to the official website of the Office of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Syria (OSES).

Pedersen’s visit comes at a pivotal time for Syria. The official emphasized the need for an inclusive Syrian-led political process.

“This process needs to be led by the Syrians themselves,” he said, adding that international support remains crucial in facilitating the path forward.

One of the immediate challenges Pedersen identified is re-establishing state institutions to ensure the delivery of basic services, law and order, and security.

“It is extremely important to get state institutions functioning effectively,” he noted.

He also stressed the urgency of addressing Syria’s humanitarian crisis.

“We need to ensure increased and immediate humanitarian assistance for the people in Syria and for all refugees who wish to return,” he said, describing this as a critical step.

Economic recovery was another focal point of his remarks.

He called for measures to spur Syria’s reconstruction efforts, including an orderly process to lift sanctions imposed by countries such as the US and members of the EU: “We need to see sanctions lifted quickly to rally efforts for rebuilding Syria.”

Justice and accountability for crimes committed during the conflict were underscored as essential components of Syria’s recovery.

“A credible justice system is needed to ensure accountability and prevent acts of revenge,” Pedersen emphasized.

During his briefing, the UN envoy highlighted a unified willingness from Syrians within and outside the country to support rebuilding efforts.

“I have been contacted by a wide range of Syrians from across Syria and abroad, all expressing readiness to help,” he said, citing positive momentum from recent discussions in the Jordanian province of Aqaba.

The UN official is scheduled to meet with Syrian authorities and other stakeholders during his visit, with further updates expected following these engagements.

“I look forward to continuing my discussions here and organizing a bigger event to outline the way forward,” he concluded.

The visit marks a crucial step in revitalizing efforts to secure a sustainable and peaceful resolution to Syria’s protracted crisis.

Bashar al-Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron fist for nearly 25 years, fled to Russia on Dec. 8 after anti-regime groups seized control of Damascus. The takeover came after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters captured key cities across the country in a swift offensive that lasted less than two weeks.

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Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says that the Israeli regime will regret attacking Iran’s consulate building in Damascus.

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The Israeli regime attacked the building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syrian sources reported on Monday evening.

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Iran’s Embassy in Syria has slammed the Israeli airstrikes on southern Damascus on Friday that resulted in the martyrdom of an IRGC advisor.

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Shortly after midnight on August 21, 2013, the Syrian regime attacked the towns of Zamalka, Ein Tarma, and Irbin in the Ghouta countryside with a nerve agent.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a total of 1,127 people were killed in the attacks. Nearly 6,000 others suffered from suffocation and respiratory problems.

The SNHR said gassing people in their sleep demonstrates that the attacks were “premeditated and deliberate”.

“The weather in the region had been forecast to be relatively cool and calm between 02:00 and 05:00 that night, meaning those responsible knew that the air would be still and the heavy poison gas would naturally drift downwards and settle at ground level rather than blowing away,” a statement by the rights group said.

At the time, Umm Yahya had finished her shift at the hospital at about 1 am. She noted that, unusually, she was short of breath, and went home. But a few minutes later, an ambulance driver she knew – Abu Khaled – was knocking on her door, telling her there were many injured people.

That surprised her, as she had not heard the sound of shelling or missile attacks.

“I went down to the ambulance and found that Abu Khaled had brought people – men, women and children – foaming at the mouth, suffocating,” Umm Yahya recalled, speaking at a memorial in Idlib that marked a decade since the Ghouta attacks.

The Sunday memorial was attended by activists, witnesses, and civil defense volunteers, who had gathered as part of the “Don’t Suffocate the Truth” campaign. They carried slogans and demanded accountability for the perpetrators of the chemical attack.

For Umm Yahya, that night in 2013 was long and painful, mired in chaos, and the body count continued to grow to the point where her hospital could no longer accommodate any more patients and victims.

“All we could see were people choking and convulsing,” she said. “We did not understand what was happening. Someone came and told us to spray the injured with water, then a doctor said to give them atropine. I didn’t know what to do, and I had nothing but oxygen to administer to them.”

Atropine is used to treat a slow heartbeat in an emergency. It is also used to reduce saliva and fluid in the respiratory tract during surgery.

Umm Yahya recalls the events of the 2013 Eastern Ghouta chemical attacks at the Don’t Suffocate the Truth memorial in Idlib [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

It was only at dawn that the hospital staff realized the cause of the suffocation was a chemical weapon, Umm Yahya said.

“I cannot forget the gasps coming out of the suffocating children, the foam coming out of their mouths, the terrified look in their eyes. In the morning, the hospital floor was full of dead bodies.”

The nurse counted 300 dead and asked for the bodies of the women and children to be separated from the men’s. The hospital staff began wrapping them in shrouds, but there were not enough to go around.

The ordeal did not end there. While the surviving families and hospital staff were transporting some of the bodies for burial, they were attacked by warplanes.

“Those families who were killed by the chemical weapon had a merciful death, compared with those who were killed by the warplanes,” Umm Yahya said bitterly. “As a result of the bombing, there were amputated limbs and blood everywhere.”

Among the dead were paramedics and Dr. Abdul Ghani, who worked at the hospital and was killed along with his son. There were so many dead people that it was decided to dig a mass grave for them instead of individual ones.

Three days after the attack, people came to the hospital to say they had not heard or seen their neighbors for days. Umm, Yahya, ambulances, and a monitoring committee made their way there and were greeted by the macabre sight of whole families lying lifeless in their homes.

“Honestly, there wasn’t a door in Zamalka and Ein Tarma that we opened without finding entire families dead,” she said. “We stood helpless, not knowing what to do.”

In one of the houses, she found a bride and a groom, whose wedding she had attended just days earlier, lying lifeless near the door, as if they were trying to escape. In another house, a family of seven was found dead.

The dead were covered in nylon bags because the funeral shrouds had run out. Six days after the attack, there were still a few houses that had not been checked, their dead inhabitants still inside.

A total of 1,127 people were killed in the chemical attacks on Eastern Ghouta in 2013, and nearly 6,000 others suffered from suffocation and respiratory problems [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

“What I saw there was horrible. The features of someone killed by chemical weapons change after five or six days. Believe me, they had no recognizable features left,” Umm Yahya said.

Some of the surviving family members would not claim their relatives because of their distorted faces, leading the nurse to record many of the dead as anonymous.

The ordeal took a great toll on Umm Yahya, and for two weeks, she was unable to work or even move her body.

“I keep remembering how the children were sobbing, and how a father begged me to save his child, and all I could tell him was that I couldn’t do anything,” she said.

“I can take care of people who are wounded, or take out shrapnel from a bombing, but I couldn’t do anything for the victims of the chemical attack. We did everything we could.”

Umm Yahya hopes there will be justice for the families and victims, and that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his government are held accountable one day.

“I just hope that people will not forget Assad’s criminality, and to support us with their hearts and souls,” she said.

The SNHR has documented a total of 222 chemical weapon attacks in Syria since the first recorded use of chemical weapons on December 23, 2012, up until August 20, 2023.

“Approximately 98 percent of all these attacks have been carried out by Syrian regime forces, while approximately 2 percent were by ISIS [ISIL],” the group said.

Referring to the 2013 Ghouta attacks as “the largest chemical weapon attack in the modern age”, SNHR said the al-Assad regime is still protected by impunity and called on the United Nations to impose economic, political, and military sanctions on the Syrian government.

Activists and members of the Syrian White Helmets commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Eastern Ghouta attacks on August 20, 2023, in Idlib, northwest Syria [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

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The State Department said late on Thursday that top US diplomat Antony Blinken discussed a recent meeting in Amman between Syria and its Arab neighbors during a phone call with his Jordanian counterpart, Ayman Safadi.

“Secretary Blinken made clear that the United States will not normalize relations with the Assad regime and does not support others normalizing until there is authentic, UN-facilitated political progress in line with UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2254,” the department said.

The 2015 resolution calls for free and fair elections in Syria under UN supervision.

The foreign ministers of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan met for talks in the Jordanian capital on Monday amid a push to bring al-Assad’s government back into the Arab fold.

Syria was suspended from the Arab League and ostracised by regional powerbrokers in 2011 after its crackdown on Arab Spring protests, which turned into a protracted war. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

As the Syrian government regained control over large parts of the country – with support from Iran and Russia – some Arab countries began to soften their stance towards Damascus.

The US, however, has maintained that it would not change its opposition to al-Assad without an inclusive political settlement to the conflict.

The State Department said on Thursday that Blinken expressed gratitude to Jordan for the “hosting of refugees and reinforced the US position that Syria must create conditions including greatly improved respect for human rights that would motivate refugees to return in a safe, voluntary, and dignified manner”.

Earlier this week, Blinken said the US was “engaged” with the Syrian government to secure the release of Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012. US officials have accused the Syrian government of detaining Tice, a claim that Damascus has denied.

“We’re extensively engaged with regard to Austin – engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries – seeking to find a way to get him home. And we’re not going to relent until we do,” Blinken said on Wednesday.

Because the US does not recognize al-Assad’s government as legitimate, it was not clear how the purported direct discussions between Washington and Damascus were taking place.

In recent months, relations have warmed between Syria and several Arab countries. In February, Egypt’s foreign minister visited Damascus for the first time since 2011, and last month, Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat also made a trip to the Syrian capital and met al-Assad.

The rapprochement came amid a Chinese-brokered detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Syrian government remains under heavy US sanctions aimed at isolating the country economically in response to widely documented human rights violations.

While the US has said it discourages its allies from normalizing ties with Syria, it has not penalized countries that move closer to al-Assad’s government.

The United Arab Emirates, a key US partner in the Gulf region, reopened its embassy in Damascus in 2018, and last year, it became the first Arab state to host al-Assad since the start of the war more than a decade ago.

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The Israeli army acknowledged it struck Syrian facilities early on Wednesday using targeting aircraft, including “radar and anti-aircraft batteries”.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

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The attack early on Wednesday was the deadliest in Damascus in years, and a rare event since government forces captured suburbs formerly held by opposition fighters in Syria’s 10-year-long conflict.

Syrian state TV showed footage of the charred bus in central Damascus, saying the attack occurred during rush hour when people were heading to work and school.

Two explosive devices went off as the bus was near the Hafez al-Assad bridge, it said, adding a third device was defused by an army engineering unit in what officials said was a “terrorist” blast.

A military source quoted by the state news agency SANA said the bombs had been planted on the bus itself.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

Security forces inspect the site of an explosion in central Damascus, Syria 
October 20, 2021. Firas Makdesi/Reuters]

“It is a cowardly act,” Damascus police commander Major General Hussein Jumaa told state TV, adding that a police force had cordoned off the area immediately and made sure there were no more bombs. He urged people to inform authorities about any suspicious object they see.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent Zena Khodr said the attack, which occurred in the heart of the Syrian capital is clearly a “security breach”.

“The regime definitely has many enemies,” she said, speaking from the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

One is opposition fighters, who are largely confined to the north of the country, she explained. There are also ISIL (ISIS) fighters who continue to operate in the sprawling desert area of the country and engage in ongoing clashes with the regime time and time again.

“Then there’s also division within the security apparatus, within the army and within the region itself. So we can only speculate but clearly, the regime believes it is the opposition,” Khodor added.

“Just a few minutes after that explosion was reported, heavy artillery shelling targeted a town in Ariha, which is in the opposition-controlled southern Idlib countryside. At least 10 people were killed, many of them on their way to school. This is seen as some form of retaliation on the part go the regime, even though this area faces regular fire despite the ceasefire that was in place last year.”

Syria ‘far from stability’

Joseph Daher, affiliate professor with the wartime and post-conflict Syria project at the European University Institute, said the explosion shows once again that Syria is “very far from any kind of stability”.

“The regime is threatened by multiple actors,” he said, speaking from Geneva. “This type of terrorist action is a trademark by the so-called Islamic State [ISIL], which despite the 2019 defeat by US joint forces and SDF did not mean the end of the organization, and still poses as a threat and security challenge especially after the change of the strategy.”

“This shows once again we are very far from any kind of stability in Syria, whether politically, militarily, or economically. We’re still in a conflict situation.”

The attack on Wednesday is the deadliest in the capital since a bombing claimed by ISIL hit the Justice Palace in March 2017, killing at least 30 people.

In August, Syria’s state media said a short circuit triggered an explosion in the gas tank of a bus carrying soldiers, killing one and wounding three.

Blasts in Damascus have been rare since forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad took control of rebel enclaves around the city. Helped by Russia’s military presence and Iran’s militias, al-Assad now controls most of the country.

Syria’s conflict, which began in March 2011, has left more than 350,000 people dead and displaced half the country’s population, including five million who are refugees abroad.

People clean debris at the site of an explosion in central Damascus 
[Firas Makdesi/Reuters]

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The Israeli airstrike was launched at 22:40 (local time) on Monday from the occupied Golan Heights against some military sites in southern Damascus, a military source told Syria’s official news agency SANA.

The Syrian army air defenses repelled the aggression and shot down most of the missiles before they reach their targets, the source added.

The source said that the Israeli aggression led to the martyrdom of two soldiers and injuring seven others in addition to material damages.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in the country.

Israel frequently targets military positions inside Syria, especially those of Hezbollah which has played a key role in helping the Syrian army in its fight against terrorists.

The Tel Aviv regime mostly keeps quiet about the attacks on Syrian territories which many view as knee-jerk reaction to Syrian government’s increasing success in confronting terrorism in country.

Israel has been a main supporter of terrorist groups that have opposed the government of President Bashar al-Assad since militancy erupted in Syria nine years ago.

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