MUST-READS

• Iran’s Guards pull officers from Syria after Israeli strikes

  Iran's Revolutionary Guards have scaled back deployment of their senior officers in Syria due to a spate of deadly Israeli strikes and will rely more on allied Shi'ite militia to preserve their sway there, five sources familiar with the matter said. The Guards have suffered one of their most bruising spells in Syria since arriving a decade ago to aid President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war. Since December, Israeli strikes have killed more than half a dozen of their members, among them one of the Guards' top intelligence generals.

• Gulf thaw with Syria gains steam: UAE sends envoy, Saudi diplomats plan visit

  The restoration of diplomatic ties between Arab Gulf countries and Syria is currently witnessing renewed impetus more than a decade after President Bashar al-Assad’s regional isolation due to his government’s brutal crackdown of peaceful anti-regime protests. A delegation of Saudi diplomats is reportedly heading to Damascus later this week, days after the UAE dispatched its first ambassador to the Syrian capital in more than 10 years. The pro-government Syrian Al-Watan newspaper said in a Wednesday report that Saudi charge d'affaires Abdullah al-Haris, along with several other diplomats, will arrive in Damascus on Saturday to resume Saudi consular services. Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/01/gulf-thaw-syria-gains-steam-uae-sends-envoy-saudi-diplomats-plan-visit#ixzz8QV41JpbP

• Saudi Arabia gives Assad regime control over Hajj file, removing it from Syria opposition

  The decision by Saudi Arabia to hand over the authority to the Syrian regime comes over a decade after the Kingdom gave the responsibility to the Syrian opposition’s Supreme Hajj Committee in May 2013, following the closure of the Saudi embassy in Damascus and the withdrawal of Saudi diplomats in response to the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protests and the outbreak of the ongoing Syrian civil war.

• Jordanian army says five killed in battle to stop Syrian drug smugglers

  Jordan's army said on Saturday that five drug and weapons smugglers linked to Iranian militias operating in southern Syria had been killed after infiltrating from Syria.

  The kingdom has promised to respond to what it says is an alarming rise in such incursions, accusing Syria of failing to stem Iranian-run smuggling networks.

  Jordanian officials, like their Western allies, say the operations are controlled by Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group and other pro-Iranian militias who control much of southern Syria after supporting President Bashar al-Assad in a civil war that has lasted almost 13 years.

• Syria regime appoints new envoy to Saudi Arabia following 11-year absence

  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has appointed a new envoy to Saudi Arabia following an 11-year absence, amid a recent thaw in relations between the regime and Riyadh.

  Deputy Foreign Minister Ayman Soussan was appointed with the role according to Syria’s state-run news agency SANA, and was subsequently sworn in during a ceremony attended by Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad.

  The move comes as ties between Syria and Saudi Arabia were restored earlier this year, after Riyadh severed its ties with Damascus in 2012 over the country’s devastating civil war, in which the Assad regime led the brutal suppression of peaceful protesters.

• As Aid Runs Out, Syria’s Displaced Fear Dying Of Hunger

  Displaced people in camps in northeast Syria have expressed fears about their future after the World Food Programme announced the end of food assistance across the war-torn country. "Stopping aid to the camps will exponentially increase suffering," said Ali Farahat, the director of the Maram camp for the displaced in the town of Atme near the border with Turkey.

• Climate change: Intensity of ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran ‘not rare anymore’

  Large parts of Iraq, Iran and Syria have been gripped by an intense drought for years. Low rainfall and high temperatures have caused crops to fail and driven water shortages across the region, pushing millions of people into food insecurity. The study finds that, between July 2020 and June 2023, climate change made the drought more intense – mainly due to high temperatures that dried out the soil. In a world without climate change, the dry period would not have even been severe enough to be called a drought, the study notes. The authors find that climate change also made the event more likely.

• U.S. military strikes more Syrian facilities

  U.S. military aircraft attacked two facilities in eastern Syria on Sunday, in retaliation for a string of attacks on American personnel in Iraq and Syria in recent months. It’s the second set of airstrikes in less than a week.

  The strikes were “proportionate, precision” attacks designed to destroy the facilities and limit the capabilities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and related groups, a defense spokesperson told reporters traveling with the defense secretary in the Indo-Pacific region Monday.

• F-15s strike weapons facility in Syria

  Two U.S. F-15 fighter jets attacked a weapons storage facility in eastern Syria on Wednesday, in what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called a “precision self-defense strike” in response “to a series of attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by the [Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]-Quds Force” and related groups.

• Syria mourns scores killed in drone attack on military academy

  Syria on Friday held funerals for scores of people killed in a drone attack on a graduation ceremony at a military academy in the Homs region the previous day, one of the bloodiest strikes against the military in more than 12 years of civil war. Several weaponised drones hit the Homs Military Academy's courtyard where families were gathered with the new officers on Thursday, minutes after defence minister Ali Mahmoud Abbas had left. Syria declared three days of mourning

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