Syrias

Operation Hawkeye has killed and captured more than 50 ISIL fighters after hitting about 100 targets.

United States forces have carried out a series of strikes against ISIL (ISIS) targets in Syria in retaliation for last year’s killing of two of its soldiers and an interpreter.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement on Saturday that it attacked more than 30 ISIL targets in Syria between February 3 and 12, hitting the armed group’s infrastructure and weapons storage facilities with “precision munitions”.

CENTCOM said it launched the most recent attacks to “sustain relentless military pressure on remnants from the terrorist network”.

ISIL attacked US and Syrian forces near the historic city of Palmyra in December, killing Sergeant Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, Sergeant William Nathaniel Howard, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, identified as an American civilian interpreter.

Launched after the killings, Operation Hawkeye has killed and captured more than 50 fighters and hit about 100 ISIL infrastructure targets over the past two months, said CENTCOM.

The US military on Friday completed the transfer of thousands of ISIL detainees from Syria to Iraq, where they are expected to stand trial.

The prisoners were sent to Iraq at the request of Baghdad in a move welcomed by the US-led coalition that had for years fought against the armed group.

In other developments, the Syrian Ministry of Defence confirmed that government forces took control of the al-Tanf military base in the east of the country, which was run for years by US troops fighting ISIL.

The US-led coalition worked alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the battle that led to ISIL’s territorial defeat in Syria in 2019.

However, Washington has now drawn close to Syria’s new authorities, recently saying that the purpose of its alliance with the SDF was largely over.

The US withdrawal from al-Tanf comes as Damascus seeks to extend its control over all of Syria.

In Syria’s Aleppo, an artists’ collective is bringing Syrians from different religious and political backgrounds together in a creative shared space. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi had a look at how workshops, concerts and film screenings are helping rebuild trust in a city marked by years of war.

Beirut, Lebanon – The Lebanese and Syrian governments have reached a deal to repatriate about 300 Syrian inmates in Lebanese prisons back to their home country in a move that could pave the way for better relations between the two neighbours.

The issue of Syrian prisoners in Lebanon has been a priority for Damascus since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. Relations between the two countries have long been marked by what many Lebanese describe as nearly 30 years of occupation and a tutelage rule by Syria over Lebanon, which ended when Syria withdrew its troops in 2005.

About 2,400 Syrian prisoners are currently in Lebanese prisons. Some are held on “terrorism” charges while others are held for links to attacks against the Lebanese army. But most have never been tried despite having spent years in jail, largely due to a myriad of issues, including political gridlock, judicial strikes and general political indifference.

And while the deal reached on Friday may signal the beginning of a new relationship between Syria and Lebanon – one built on mutual respect rather than Syria’s direct or indirect control of the smaller state on its western border – it did not come about without any public controversy.

In Syrian eyes, many of the prisoners are being held for political rather than judicial reasons. The government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa believes they are in prison mostly due to the influence of the former al-Assad regime and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

But for many Lebanese, anyone accused of attacks against the Lebanese armed forces should not be released.

“Lebanon has long insisted that anyone Syrian or otherwise accused of committing serious crimes against the Lebanese army should not be extradited,” David Wood, the senior Lebanon analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. “That has been one key obstacle to resolving this prisoner agreement up until now.”

Political prisoners?

Lebanese-Syrian relations have long been complex. Under Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and later his son Bashar, Syrian forces controlled Lebanon from 1976 to 2005.

Even after Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon, Syria maintained influence over Lebanon via its allies there, including the political and military group Hezbollah.

When the 2011 Syrian uprising began and was subsequently repressed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria’s border with Lebanon soon became a hotspot for the transportation of people – both fighters and refugees – weapons and drugs.

In Lebanon, the Syrian war had a strong impact. It spilled over into clashes in the northern city of Tripoli; the Battle of Abra, which involved firebrand anti-Assad sheikh Ahmad al-Assir and Lebanese-Palestinian pop star Fadel Shaker; battles with Hezbollah and the Lebanese army on one side and ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda-aligned groups on the other; and attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs.

In the intervening years, hundreds of Syrians were arrested by Lebanese authorities and held in Lebanon’s overcrowded prisons.

When the al-Assad regime fell, the new Syrian government quickly looked to reframe the relationship with Lebanon, expressing an interest in building ties based on mutual respect and interests.

Among Damascus’s priorities were delineating their shared border and economic and security cooperation. But it also prioritised the repatriation of Syrians in Lebanese prisons.

“The allegation from Damascus is that in many cases the reason for [imprisonment] is political and specifically due to perceived ties between the inmates and groups that were opposed to the former regime of Bashar al-Assad,” Wood said. In its view, “it was actually Assad’s Lebanese allies who conspired to make sure that these people were imprisoned in Lebanon.”

By that logic, the fall of al-Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah after Israel’s 2024 war on Lebanon meant that these prisoners should be released.

Some Lebanese disagree and see the issue as more of a grey area. Even if the Syrian prisoners in question had fought Hezbollah, it had been at a time when the Shia group had been coordinating with the Lebanese army – and, for many Lebanese, fighting the army is a red line.

An important step

On Friday, the agreement was signed with a number of Lebanese ministers present, including Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, Deputy Prime Minister Tarek Mitri and the two countries’ justice ministers.

“This is a very important first step on the road of a comprehensive treatment regarding Syrian prisoners in Lebanese prisons,” Mitri said to reporters on Friday.

Syrian Justice Minister Mazhar al-Wais said: “This step will boost existing confidence, and we hope that relations will progress more.”

The agreement reportedly stipulates that over the next three months, about 300 prisoners will be repatriated to Syria and those serving time for serious crimes, such as rape or murder for example, must have served 10 or more years of their sentences in Lebanese prisons to be eligible for repatriation.

Lebanese prisoners, such as al-Assir, are not included in the deal.

But other issues remain. Among them are Lebanon’s backlogged judicial system and issues related to Lebanese inmates in Syrian prisons.

Only about 750 Syrian prisoners out of the 2,400 have been convicted. That means roughly 65 percent of prisoners are not eligible for repatriation yet.

Fadel Abdulghany of the Syrian Network for Human Rights described this as a “two-track” problem. On his personal website, Abdulghany noted that the transfer of prisoners convicted with final sentences can be carried out with a “swift step”.

However, for those who have yet to be convicted, the issue is not as straightforward. A mechanism for pretrial detention has not yet been agreed by the respective authorities.

“This is not merely a Syrian issue but one that touches the very structure of the Lebanese criminal justice system,” Abdulghany wrote. “Therefore, transferring convicts will not resolve the problem, because the root cause is the slow pace of procedures in Lebanon and the accumulation of detainees held without trial, along with the ensuing issues concerning the legality and continuation of their detention.”

He warned that such detainees could be used as political bargaining chips by Hezbollah. Some members or supporters of the group blame these prisoners for car bombings or other such attacks on their villages. While many of those attacks were on Shia Muslim areas where Hezbollah support is predominant, Christian villages, such as al-Qaa and Ras Baalbeck in the Bekaa Valley, were also subject to attacks.

‘There are no names’

Marcel Baloukji, a former brigadier general who oversaw the Lebanese army’s border committee with Syria, told Al Jazeera that the 300 or so prisoners who are to be transferred do not include many of the more hardened prisoners associated with ISIL or al-Qaeda whom Lebanese authorities have apprehended over the years.

But Baloukji also pointed out that the issue of Lebanese prisoners in Syrian jails is still important for the Lebanese side. Under the al-Assad regime, more than 100,000 people were forcibly disappeared, including hundreds or potentially thousands of Lebanese, going as far back as the Lebanese Civil War.

Mass graves have been found around Syria since the fall of the regime. However, much work needs to be done to identify all the bodies. Until now, the vast majority have still not been identified – neither Syrian nor Lebanese.

“There’s still a problem because there has to be an exchange between Lebanon and Syria,” Baloukji said. “There’s no one there. Most of them are not identified. There are no names.”

On a recent trip from Germany, where he lives, to his hometown of Aleppo, Alhakam Shaar made a decision. He would not stay at a hotel or with friends. Instead, he would stay at what used to be his father’s office in Aleppo’s Old City.

There was only one problem.

“Not a single room had a closable window or door,” Shaar, who had been away from the city for a decade, told Al Jazeera. Aleppo’s winters are brutally cold, with temperatures reaching well below zero degrees Celsius.

Still, he bought a sleeping bag that had been advertised as capable of withstanding extreme weather.

“That didn’t turn out to be true, and I still woke up with cold toes many nights,” he said. But despite the cold, he did not regret the decision.

Although his trip to Syria was short – about two weeks, in part due to flight cancellations after armed clashes in Aleppo – Shaar started renovating his old family home, also in the Old City, that had been looted and damaged during the war.

The roof was collapsing, and the door to the street had been removed. Two weeks did not seem to be enough time to make a dent in the extensive renovation work required.

But he got the job done, and placed a metal door on the house to signal that it was no longer an abandoned property.

“I was happy. I was truly, truly happy to be in Aleppo, not as a guest or as a tourist, but as an Aleppan,” he said. “As someone who is home. And I felt at home.”

Thousands of Syrians are returning to Aleppo, a great city damaged by years of neglect and war. Much of it, however, is plagued by infrastructure damage, requiring significant reconstruction efforts.

The new Syrian government – in power since December 2024 – has already started some of the work to rebuild Aleppo. But residents wonder if this will be enough to bring the city back to its past glory.

Years of damage

Aleppo was Syria’s most populous city until the war heavily reduced its population.

Its geographical position made it an important stop on the Silk Road trade route, as well as for travellers who passed through Anatolia – a large peninsula in Turkiye – eastwards into Iraq or further south towards Damascus.

While the emergence of Egypt’s Suez Canal in international shipping diminished Aleppo’s regional role, it still maintained an importance in Syria for being the country’s capital of industry.

Its prominence lasted throughout the rule of President Hafez al-Assad, who took control of Syria in 1970. The Assad regime’s massacre in the town of Hama in the early 1980s also spread to Aleppo, where thousands of opponents were killed. Still, the city held on.

However, by the time the 2011 Syrian uprising came around, Aleppo had already faced a lack of state investment and neglect.

The city deteriorated further as Bashar al-Assad, who took over the presidency when Hafez, his father, died in 2000, violently cracked down, and Syria deteriorated into war. Aleppo soon became divided, with regime forces controlling the west and the opposition controlling the east.

Then, in 2016, the Assad regime, with the help of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, violently took the eastern part of the city, which had become the capital of the Syrian revolution. In the process, they destroyed vast swaths of east Aleppo, expelling thousands.

As the Assad regime fell a little more than eight years later, some of Aleppo’s children returned as its liberators. But they found that the regime had not rebuilt the city during their absence. Many of Aleppo’s suburbs, where Syrian production had flourished in the pre-war years, were now ghost towns, after the regime had cut off water and electricity services.

Aleppo is still struggling. Informal settlements and overcrowded schools are common in the city and the rest of northern Syria, where a European Union report in January said that “2.3 million people reside in camps and informal settlements, of which 80 [percent] are women and children”.

Locals say they fear Aleppo may never be the same again.

“There is nothing that will return to the same as it was,” Roger Asfar, an Aleppo-native and the Syrian country director for the Adyan Foundation, an independent organisation focused on citizenship, diversity management and community engagement, told Al Jazeera.

Asfar said that Aleppo’s needs are the same as all parts of Syria devastated by more than a decade of war. Reconstruction is among the top priorities, but it will require heavy investment, particularly if the city’s historic character is to be protected.

Reconstruction

The Syrian government has worked with organisations like the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) to restore parts of Aleppo’s Old City, including its historic souk – a 13km-long (8 miles) covered marketplace.

The government also installed water pipes and new lighting around the city’s historic citadel, its crown jewel and a tourist attraction for both Syrians and foreigners. The municipality of Aleppo has also collaborated with the Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums to rehabilitate parts of the citadel, as well as the Old City’s Grand Umayyad Mosque.

Still, the effort to rebuild Aleppo is Herculean and will require more investment.

Asfar said the challenge starts with governance. This requires that Damascus, instead of merely imposing its decisions on the city, consults with locals. “Aleppo doesn’t need an authority that decides on its own and ignores all other voices,” he said.

The Aleppo governorate, which includes the city and eight districts in northern Syria, is Syria’s most densely populated region, according to UNICEF. Its 4.2 million population is forced to live with the problems facing much of Syria, including infrastructural issues and long power cuts.

Shaar, the Aleppan native who recently visited his hometown, is also a founding scholar on the Aleppo Project, a Central European University project that aims to address the key issues facing the city’s eventual reconstruction.

He said he expects infrastructural issues to “improve in the coming years”, particularly as Syria’s oil and gas revenues increase. But he warns that expectations should be tempered.

Shaar is one Aleppan who holds out hope that the city may bounce back. He pointed out that a silver lining of Assad’s neglect is that the city had not become gentrified by the former government’s economic and political elites, unlike Homs or Damascus.

To return or not to return?

Aleppo has always been a city defined by its culture and diversity. Some Aleppans hope this of its character will return.

Musician Bassel Hariri is an Aleppo native, now based in London, who learned to play instruments from his father. He remembers the rich and diverse tradition of his native city, which has been passed on from one generation to the next.

“Music, art, cooking, whatever – everything is carried directly from the community,” Hariri said. “And this richness and this cultural access and the diversity of Aleppo makes it one of the most wonderful cities in Syria.”

While the city may not return to its past glory, thousands of Syrians are still coming back to their homes in Aleppo and its countryside. Others simply have nowhere else to go.

For Shaar, Aleppo is still calling. Two things are keeping him away: his wife’s full-time job as a lecturer in Germany, and the lack of a stable salary in Syria.

“Not much more than this,” he said. “It wouldn’t take much to bring me back to Aleppo, personally.”

Cheers broke out during Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo’s live report as a Syrian military convoy reached the town square of Tel Brak in northern Syria. It’s part of the nationwide unification of Syria after the central government reached a deal with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The Syrian army has deployed to the northeastern city of Hasakah, previously controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), implementing the first phase of a United States-backed ceasefire agreement.

A large convoy of military trucks entered Hasakah on Monday, hours after the SDF imposed a curfew. Syrian forces arrived as part of the newly brokered agreement between Damascus and the SDF announced last Friday.

The agreement aims to solidify the ceasefire that halted weeks of conflict during which the SDF lost substantial territory in northeastern Syria.

It establishes a framework for incorporating SDF fighters into Syria’s national army and police forces, while integrating civilian institutions controlled by the group into the central government structure.

Under the terms of the agreement, government forces will avoid entering Kurdish-majority areas. However, small Interior Ministry security units will take control of state institutions in Hasakah and Qamishli, including civil registries, passport offices and the airport.

Kurdish local police will continue security operations in both cities before eventually merging with the Interior Ministry.

The government forces’ entry into Hasakah occurred without incident and as scheduled.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – whose government has long viewed the SDF as an extension of the Kurdish-led armed rebellion in Turkiye – issued a stern warning to Kurdish forces.

“With the latest agreements, a new page has now been opened before the Syrian people,” Erdogan said in a televised address. “Whoever attempts to sabotage this, I say clearly and openly, will be crushed under it.”

Friday’s agreement includes provisions for establishing a military division incorporating three SDF brigades, plus an additional brigade for forces in the group-held town of Ain al-Arab, also known by its Kurdish name Kobane, which will operate under the state-controlled Aleppo governorate.

The arrangement also provides for the integration of governing bodies in SDF-held territories with state institutions.

According to Syria’s state news agency SANA, Interior Ministry forces began deploying in rural areas near Kobane on Monday.

Since the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad 14 months ago, interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s efforts to unify the fractured nation under central authority have been hampered by deadly clashes with the SDF and other groups.

Syrian forces move into the northeastern city, which was previously under the control of the Kurdish-led SDF.

The Syrian army has moved into the northeastern city of Hasakah, which was formerly under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a first step towards implementing a US-backed ceasefire deal.

A large convoy of trucks was seen entering the city on Monday hours after the SDF declared a curfew there.

Syrian government forces were also expected to enter the cities of Kobane and Qamishli.

The SDF reached a comprehensive agreement with the government on Friday to integrate with the Syrian army, after Kurdish-led forces ceded territory to advancing government troops in recent weeks after months of tensions and sporadic clashes.

Government forces are expected to be stationed in Syrian state buildings in Hasakah’s so-called “security zone”, a Syrian official and a Kurdish security source told the Reuters news agency ahead of the deployment.

“What’s happening here is very significant,” Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo reported just outside of Hasakah, adding that a convoy of 150 personnel from the Syrian military had entered the city.

“Where I’m standing right now, there used to be a checkpoint run by the Kurdish-led SDF, and it is now being manned by soldiers from the Syrian army. This shows just how significant this territory is: an area that has been under the control of the SDF throughout the Syrian civil war,” she said.

The United States has hailed the agreement as a historic milestone towards unity and reconciliation after 14 years of war.

SDF integration

The SDF was ⁠once Washington’s main Syrian ally, playing a vital part in the fight against ISIL (ISIS).

But its status weakened as US President Donald Trump built ties with Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa after the fall of former leader Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

The deal announced on Friday includes the formation of a military division that will include three SDF brigades, in addition to a brigade for forces in the SDF-held town of Kobane, also known as Ain al-Arab, which will be affiliated with the state-controlled governorate of Aleppo.

The deal also provides for governing bodies in SDF-held areas to be merged with state institutions.

The ​Syrian state news agency SANA reported that Interior Ministry forces had begun deploying in rural areas near Kobane on ‌Monday.

Since rebels toppled al-Assad 14 months ago, al-Sharaa’s efforts to bring the fractured nation under central rule have been complicated by deadly violence last year involving the Alawite and Druze communities.