From Asylum to Airport Detention: A Journey Cut Short
Despite the promise of asylum protections under international law, many asylum seekers are detained upon arrival, held without charge, and sometimes deported back into danger.
This press release examines the legal landscape, historical precedent, and recent high-profile cases that highlight the fragility of asylum rights when they conflict with national security interests.
Amicus International Consulting, a firm specializing in legal identity transitions and global asylum advisory services, has seen a marked increase in clients facing 'airport limbo'—a state of uncertainty where neither asylum nor freedom is guaranteed.
Asylum and the Airport: Where Law Meets Reality
The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol form the foundation of global asylum law, obligating signatory countries not to return individuals to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened. Known as the principle of non-refoulement, it is a central principle of international human rights law.
But at international airports, these protections can fall apart.
Travellers arriving without valid visas or documentation—even those declaring an intent to seek asylum—are often detained in secure transit areas or immigration holding centers. In many cases, they are denied entry before ever setting foot on sovereign soil, creating a legal gray area.
Case Study: The Detention of Edward Snowden
In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden found himself stranded in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. After leaking classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs, Snowden attempted to seek asylum in multiple countries.
Though he had applied for asylum, he had no valid passport. The U.S. had cancelled his travel document mid-flight. Trapped in legal limbo for over a month, Snowden's case demonstrated how state power and passport control can override humanitarian protections. It also spotlighted how modern airports can serve as detention facilities by another name.
The Practice of 'Inadmissibility'
Countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia commonly rely on inadmissibility determinations to prevent entry. In such cases, an arriving asylum seeker is denied access on the grounds of documentation failure, a criminal record, or security concerns—even before a refugee hearing can be held.
In many of these jurisdictions, immigration officers have the authority to exercise discretion at the border. And while claimants can request a hearing or legal review, the process is often delayed or inaccessible from inside detention.
Case Study: The Syrian Family in Malaysia
In 2017, a Syrian family fleeing civil war arrived at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, seeking asylum. With no valid entry visa, they were denied access and spent over seven months in the transit area, surviving on airline food and sleeping in terminal chairs.
Despite Malaysia not being a signatory to the Refugee Convention, human rights groups intervened, and eventually, Canada agreed to resettle them. Their case raised urgent questions about moral obligations beyond legal treaties and the role of non-signatory states in humanitarian crises.
Statelessness and Detention
One of the most vulnerable groups facing indefinite detention at airports is stateless individuals—those without nationality or recognized citizenship.
With no travel documents, no issuing authority to accept them, and no country of return, stateless people can languish in holding areas for years.
Notable Example: Mehran Karimi Nasseri
The inspiration behind Steven Spielberg's The Terminal , Mehran Karimi Nasseri, lived in Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport's Terminal 1 for 18 years. A complex web of lost documents, denied entry, and bureaucratic impasses left him in a perpetual state of limbo. Though dramatized in pop culture, his case remains a chilling example of bureaucratic abandonment in global mobility systems.
When the System Backfires: Cases of Return to Danger
While many countries promise legal due process for asylum seekers, expedited removals have led to tragic outcomes.
In 2022, a Cameroonian journalist, fleeing political persecution, was deported back after being denied asylum at a U.S. airport. Within weeks, he was reportedly imprisoned and tortured by government forces.
In 2024, an Iranian LGBTQ+ activist was detained upon arrival in Istanbul. Despite declaring intent to seek asylum, he was returned to Tehran under a bilateral deportation agreement. His fate remains unknown.
These cases highlight the life-and-death consequences of ignoring asylum declarations made in transit.
How Technology Is Weaponizing Borders
Modern border surveillance technology—biometric scans, advanced passenger screening (APIS), and artificial intelligence—has made it easier for governments to pre-screen and flag travellers before they arrive.
In 2025, over 120 countries are expected to participate in Passenger Name Record (PNR) data sharing, which tracks a wide range of details, including meal preferences and seat selections. When correlated with immigration risk profiles, this can result in pre-arrival denials or on-the-spot detentions.
According to Amicus International's research, more than 4,000 travellers were denied boarding based on advanced biometric or risk analysis in 2024 alone.
The Legal Loophole: 'Not Yet Admitted'
A central problem lies in the legal status of individuals who arrive at an airport but are 'not yet admitted' into a country. In this state, they are often not considered to be under the country's jurisdiction, despite being physically present within its borders.
This loophole allows countries to bypass due process by claiming that immigration laws don't apply until the individual is officially admitted.
Critics argue that this destroys the intent of asylum law and creates a humanitarian vacuum in some of the world's most modern transportation hubs.
Amicus International: Creating Legal Pathways Before the Journey Begins
At Amicus International Consulting, clients are advised not to wait until they are at the airport to begin their asylum process.
Instead, the firm helps at-risk individuals: Obtain second passports through legal citizenship-by-investment or ancestry programs
through legal citizenship-by-investment or ancestry programs File pre-travel asylum or humanitarian visa requests
Legally change names and identities when doing so provides enhanced security
when doing so provides enhanced security Secure legal counsel in receiving countries before embarking on high-risk travel
before embarking on high-risk travel Create documented case files that support asylum or protected status
Amicus believes that the key to avoiding airport detention is preparation and proactivity, rather than post-arrival improvisation.
Case Study: Asylum Success Through Strategic Planning
In 2023, Amicus assisted a Rwandan political dissident targeted by government militias. Rather than risk detention in transit, the client was helped through a multi-jurisdictional citizenship program, securing Saint Lucia nationality via investment. With that passport, they entered Europe visa-free and applied for asylum once safely within a cooperative jurisdiction.
The asylum case was approved within nine months, and the client is now a professor at a public university in the Netherlands.
Legal Solutions, Not Smuggling
Amicus stresses that its approach is rooted in legality and ethics. It rejects any association with smuggling networks or fraudulent document operations. Instead, it provides clients with diplomatic, legal, and administrative solutions to ensure safety, dignity, and compliance with international law.
Policy Recommendations
To address this growing global issue, Amicus calls on governments and institutions to: Create expedited humanitarian visa programs at embassies and consulates Ensure immediate access to legal counsel upon declaration of asylum Ban the detention of stateless individuals for more than 90 days Reform inadmissibility policies to include pre-screened protections Enhance accountability for returns that result in torture or death
Conclusion: The Airport Is Not a Courtroom
As migration pressures increase globally, airports have become unexpected battlegrounds for asylum rights. Between biometric profiling and bureaucratic indifference, genuine refugees risk being turned away—sometimes with fatal consequences.
Amicus International Consulting believes that asylum is a right, not a privilege, and that systems must be redesigned to reflect this principle at every stage of the journey.
Contact Information
Phone: +1 (604) 200-5402Email: info@amicusint.ca
Website: www.amicusint.ca
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Politico
5 hours ago
- Politico
Has a Breakthrough Happened in the Agonizing Saga of Austin Tice?
In August 2012, despite never having published a single article before arriving in Syria, Austin Tice accomplished what few if any foreign journalists covering the country's brutal civil war had managed at the time. Passing from rebel faction to rebel faction on an epic three-month journey from the Turkish border, he had made it to Darraya, a suburb of Damascus, where the regime was fighting for its life. Then he went missing. A rebel driver he knew was driving him from Darraya to Lebanon and safety. En route, he simply vanished. What happened to the intrepid 31-year-old after that has been the subject of intense debate and more than a little opportunistic distortion and deliberate deception over the intervening 13 years. Was Tice still alive and if so, who had him? The case has baffled several U.S. presidential administrations that have failed to deliver a resolution for Tice's family. But a dramatic recent development has provided what might be evidence that Tice was killed by his captors in the Syrian regime back in April, a former Syrian official, Bassam al-Hassan, met secretly with a group of FBI agents and U.S. officials in Beirut. Al-Hassan remains a sanctioned individual and a wanted man — one of the most brutal enforcers in the now-defunct Bashar Assad regime. Not only was al-Hassan a key powerbroker at the presidential palace during the tenure of Assad, he'd also been the mastermind behind the Syrian regime's most powerful militia, the Iranian-funded National Defense Forces. What al-Hassan told the FBI in April was explosive. According to al-Hassan's account, it was his NDF militiamen who'd had Tice briefly in their custody following his disappearance. And after Tice had embarrassingly escaped, in the months following his disappearance, al-Hassan had handed him over to his henchmen for execution on the direct instruction of Assad. The fact the meeting occurred was confirmed to me by an official in the U.S. government and by a representative for the Tice family, Phil Elwood. Elwood also confirmed to me the FBI told the family that al-Hassan said he had Tice killed on the orders of Assad. These developments have been reported by the BBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Interviews I have done with half a dozen other well-placed people in the U.S. and Middle East, most of whom have been involved in different ways in the 13-year-long hunt for Tice, have added telling details to a complex and murky story — about how Tice is believed to have come into al-Hassan's custody, where he might have been kept and why Assad might have ordered him killed. The saga of Tice's capture has fixated journalists here and abroad for more than a decade. (The Post published an exhaustive piece this week, detailing the many unsuccessful bids by American officials and Tice's family to locate Tice and the relentless obstruction by the Assad regime to block those efforts.) The fall of the Assad regime in December has given new urgency to the quest for information and raised hopes Tice's fate finally might be determined. 'Finding the location of Austin Tice remains a priority for the Trump administration,' said Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary. 'While we have no new details to share, our search for Austin will not end until his case is resolved.' 'The FBI has no comment as the investigation remains ongoing,' a spokesperson for the FBI's press office said by email. 'The FBI and our partners in the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell continue to support the families of hostages taken overseas. We remain steadfast in our determination to locate and bring home hostages.'Though the Tice family has confirmed U.S. officials spoke to al-Hassan it has also questioned the reliability and motives of the former Syrian regime official. Elwood, the family spokesperson, told POLITICO Magazine, 'The Tice family don't put a lot of credibility into what al-Hassan said. He is a known liar, and his motives are deeply in question. He has an agenda. The Tice family believes that this information is false and unhelpful to their efforts to locate and safely return Austin.' Everything now depends on whether al-Hassan's information can be verified. 'I'm inclined to believe that this is true,' says a knowledgeable insider in Middle Eastern politics whose work on the Tice case gave him access to both senior Syrian regime figures and U.S. officials and who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. As for al-Hassan's possibly self-serving story that the execution had been on the orders of Assad, he was inclined to believe that, too. 'The way the Syrian regime works, Assad would have been involved. He wouldn't have done this without orders of Assad. Tice was a high-value individual.' (Efforts were unsuccessful to reach representatives of Assad, who sought asylum in Russia after his regime collapsed.)U.S. officials are taking al-Hassan's account seriously enough that, using locations and co-ordinates inside Syria offered by him, they have instructed personnel to work alongside Syrians in the search for Tice's body, according to the U.S. government official who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. But Debra Tice, Austin's mother who has spent much of the last 13 years relentlessly trying to turn up information about her missing son and meeting anyone who might be able to help, is skeptical of the FBI's progress as well as al-Hassan's motives. 'The last time I spoke to them [the FBI] they were trying to find someone in Syria to take photos of the location [that al-Hassan identified]' she told me. 'They needed to find someone to take a picture of that place. Have they no cameras in Syria?'Over the last decade, searching for Tice has become something of an obsession, for myself as well as a few other Syria journalists. I got to know the Syrian rebels who met Tice on the Syrian-Turkish border in the spring of 2012, some of whom helped me cross the same dangerous route into rebel-held Syria that Tice had taken a few months before; some of those rebels are now dead. They had warmed to Tice, they told me, for his devil-may-care charm and his courage. They loved him even more when, unlike most Syria freelancers, he didn't come out in a few weeks but managed to make his way toward the Syrian capital Damascus, getting passed along from one tiny battalion of the fledgling Free Syrian Army to another. By the time he went missing this talented novice war reporter had published some truly outstanding journalism, collecting bylines in McClatchy and the Washington Post. He'd also taken time out to crow on Twitter about how thrilling it was to be reporting from a place many Western journalists feared to set foot at the time. Then he disappeared. My first investigation into the incident, placing Tice in the custody of the Syrian government (which had denied possession of him), was published in Vanity Fair magazine in May 2014. I've been scratching away at the story ever since. Along the way, as searches for the kidnapped — as well as kidnapping itself — became a Syrian cottage industry, I've met unsavory Syrian rebel activists along the Turkish border who lured me to assignations with purported information about Tice and who wanted money. In one case, after an initial meeting in public, I broke off contact when I suspected that the second proposed meeting in an obscure location was intended as a ruse to rip me off or kidnap me. Just in the last few weeks, via contacts in Syria, I've been offered and seen video of a purportedly alive Tice, clearly dubbed or an AI-enhanced deep fake, together with a detailed story of his whereabouts and who was now holding him on the Syrian coast. The group behind this 'wanted money.' It was obvious nonsense. The only conclusive sighting of Tice appeared six weeks after his disappearance; a grainy 46-second video which purported to show him being mocked and humiliated by Islamic militants on a remote mountainside. To most Syria observers, including U.S. officials, it was clearly a ruse since it had emerged from pro-Assad social media. The Syrian regime's central propaganda aim was to show the world that it was battling only al-Qaeda, and its agents had every reason to show an American being held by jihadis. Though observers surmised that the regime was actually holding him, how he had come into their possession remained a mystery. The truth could be that Tice was betrayed by one of his rebel minders. A close friend of Tice in Syria supplied me with a report he said that the journalist's rebel hosts prepared shortly after he went missing. According to this report, Tice was betrayed by the same rebel driver who'd ferried him to the Damascus suburb of Darraya and who later arrived to pick him up to carry him to Lebanon and safety. On the way to Lebanon, the driver handed Tice over to the regime forces at a checkpoint. The rebel report claimed that the driver exchanged Tice for his own son who'd been taken into custody by the Syrian regime. Marrying this with al-Hassan's account to the FBI, that betrayal appears to have ended with Tice in the hands of gunmen from the National Defense Forces militia loyal to al-Hassan. Al-Hassan was for many years a commander of Syrian Republican Guard and for several years he managed Syria's sensitive stash of chemical weapons. Promoted to the rank of major general, he became head of security at the presidential palace and a trusted adviser to Assad. 'He was a hard man around the family, one of about half a dozen,' recalls an Assad family friend who met him on various occasions at their house and who was granted anonymity because he fears for his safety in Damascus. 'He basically opened doors for the Assads.'It was around the time of the faked video, according to the insider with access to Syrian regime officials because of his work, that Tice managed to escape. The story of Tice's escape attempt was confirmed to me by someone close to the Tice family, the knowledgeable insider with access to both Syrian and regime officials and a former Assad adviser now working for the new Syrian government. It also appears in reporting from The Economist, Reuters and The New York Times. (The Tice family, according to their spokesperson, agreed that Tice had escaped and been recaptured but they dispute some details of published accounts.) By all accounts, the escape was a bravura performance typical of the charismatic Tice. The Economist recently interviewed a former regime official named Safwan Bahloul, who said he was asked by al-Hassan to interrogate Tice not long after his capture. Tice befriended Bahloul, he told The Economist, before requesting soap and a towel, both of which he used to squeeze his body out of a small hole in his prison wall. The prison where he was being held must have been close to central Damascus, said the knowledgeable insider with access to regime officials, because Tice escaped into Mezzeh, an upmarket area of the capital that is home to many regime officials and vast security compounds controlled by different intelligence agencies. His escape was short-lived. It ended with Tice finding brief refuge in a residential house before being picked up by the authorities, according to Reuters. The owner of that home, according to the knowledgeable insider with access both to U.S. and former regime officials, was found dead shortly afterwards from what was believed to be a drug overdose, which the insider took as a sign that he'd been killed by regime thugs to keep the affair quiet. It was shortly after Tice's recapture, according to al-Hassan's statements to the FBI, that Tice was killed on the orders of Assad. (According to Elwood, the Tice family spokesperson, the FBI told the family that al-Hassan alleges this happened in 2013.)After that, the information trail went cold. For many years, barring a handful of unverifiable sightings and grainy attempts at proof-of-life (invariably accompanied by requests for money), the U.S. government operated on the assumption that Tice must be alive. There was justification for this because it did follow a pattern for how the Assad regime worked — saving up hostages in a secret network of political prisons for later use as negotiating leverage. Assad's father, Hafez, famously held his rival and former Syrian de facto leader Salah Jadid in a Damascus prison for 23 years until his death from a heart attack in 1993. In a face-to-face interview last year at his home in Beirut, Michel Samaha, a well-connected former minister in the Lebanese government who's only recently emerged from a decade in prison for smuggling explosives on behalf of the Syrian regime, told me that his best guess was that Tice must still be alive. 'There are several issues outstanding, oil and the Kurds, and they are waiting for the time to make a bargain,' he told me. 'They always keep assets.' (Samaha has not responded to recent requests for comment.) But Tice was a special case. For one thing, his background was not in journalism but as a captain in the Marine Corps. Given their paranoia the Syrians would have automatically assumed, quite wrongly, that they had a dangerous American spy on their hands. 'We caught an American who seemed to be a journalist, but we doubted him because of his equipment,' Bahloul, the former Syrian regime official, told an interviewer from Al-Jazeera. 'We interrogated him and it turned out that this guy was a former officer in the American Marines and he made a tour of Afghanistan.' If the outspoken Tice had also been brutalized in a Syrian regime prison, the authorities would have had reason to fear the interviews that he likely would have given on his release. The Syrian regime was also keen to deter foreign journalists from entering their country illegally; releasing Tice would not have helped and might have encouraged others to take the same route. Moreover, any release following the publication of that Tice propaganda video would have been a public relations calamity for the Syrian authorities, undermining their argument they were bravely battling 2018, when officials in the first Trump administration sent out feelers to the Syrian regime in search of information about Tice, they went as far as to meet with Ali Mamlouk, another senior regime security chief and one-time head of the Ba'ath Party's National Security Bureau, according to Reuters. Mamlouk, according to the insider with access to both regime and U.S. officials and who was able to observe the progress of negotiations because of his involvement in the search for Tice, tried to use the case as part of his battle to discredit what he considered to be the thugs from the NDF. '[Mamlouk] is an old Damascene who likes horse trading. He wanted to trade Tice, as did many of his Shia friends of the regime in the region, for a reduction in sanctions.' The Americans were willing to do a deal, too. 'Trump was offering a huge amount, sanctions relief and a drawdown in U.S. forces, to get him back. It was eventually taken off the table because of changing geopolitics … but there was in any case a very slow response from the Syrian government.' [Assume we tried to confirm this with Trump admin?] By that time, it was clear to the knowledgeable insider, there was no Tice to course, there remain other possibilities about what befell Tice different from al-Hassan's version. He might have been killed or died for another reason in al-Hassan's custody. Keenly aware that he's on the radar of the American authorities, al-Hassan now might be seeking to shift the blame upward — an easy thing to do since Assad is hiding in Moscow and out of America's judicial reach. (In al-Hassan's account, according to Elwood, the Tice family spokesperson, he argued with Assad. ''We shouldn't do this,' he said, 'Tice is a valuable asset.' But Bashar al-Assad was intractable and not listening to reason.') There will also be the suspicion that al-Hassan is trying to win some advantage by peddling spurious information about the only thing that U.S officials want to know. Some eyebrows will be raised at the fact that the FBI has an outstanding $1-million reward for information 'leading directly to the safe location, recovery and return' of Tice while the U.S State Department is offering $10 million for the same. 'Maybe the region is changing, and he's a survivalist,' guessed the U.S. law enforcement official. But the same official was clear: There were no deals. In the wake of the fall of Assad's regime in December, more than a few journalists traveled to Damascus and began combing through Syrian regime prisons in search of Tice. In December, for example, The Times (of London) reported an interview with a 'Syrian undercover journalist,' who claimed to have been detained in the same Damascus prison as Tice, as recently as 2022. The prison, according to the report, was Branch 85 of the general intelligence directorate, in the Kafr Sousa neighbourhood. The undercover journalist said he'd seen Tice a few times 'when he was allowed out to the main corridor for exercise or on his way to be tortured.' The Times shared the information with the Tice family. But if al-Hassan's account is to be believed Tice was never held by the General Intelligence directorate. In any case, according to Syrian human rights groups, there was no such prison in Damascus named Branch 85. In January, CNN followed Austin's mother Debra Tice as she toured another prison formerly controlled by the General Intelligence Directorate, Branch 251, otherwise known as 'al-Khatib' alongside Nizar Zakka, who was publicly co-ordinating the search. Zakka's team led Debra Tice inside a grim underground Damascus prison where she became emotional at the discovery of some graffiti that they thought was written by Tice. 'The Tice family asked us not to show the graffiti itself out of respect for their privacy,' said the journalist, as the camera drew away. But from a different activist video of the same cell it's clear that it simply read 'Mama I love you' — and could have been written by any of the hundreds of foreign fighters who had joined Syria's rebellion. (Asked about her trip to the prison, Debra Tice didn't want to comment.) Bassam Al-Hassan wouldn't be the only one still seeking to deploy Tice for his own advantage; some have accused the new Syrian regime of improperly leveraging Tice's case. In an interview with ITV News in December, Tice's sister Megan gently warned Syria's new leaders that her brother was 'not a pawn in a political playbook.' But whether dead or alive, Tice's fate will continue to be an important political bargaining chip between Syria and the United States. A risible story was published by Al Jazeera in May that Tice had been discovered in a grave in northern Syria along with victims of ISIS; it was immediately denied by the Tice family. The knowledgeable insider with access to both former Syrian regime and U.S. officials, said he learned the report angered some of those U.S. officials because they suspected it had been orchestrated by the Qataris, close allies of Syria's new Islamist government, to help guarantee a meeting between Syria's new President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Trump which took place a few days later. The two most common baseless rumors about Tice's purported location since the fall of the Assad regime have focused on Syria's Coast and the currently restive province of Suwayda. Both areas have seen heavy-handed interventions by forces allied to the new Syrian government to quell rebellions against its authority, involving major human rights abuses by its soldiers against two of Syria's minorities, the Alawi and the Druze. It's conceivable that Tice's alleged location might be deployed as another justification for such incursions, to root out 'regime remnants' and get him the exception of Assad and his former henchmen, no one wants Tice to be dead. But the continued litany of fallacious tips, evidence-free sightings and credulity-defying tall stories seem to represent the triumph of hope over the weight of evidence, which is that this intrepid adventurer turned brilliant warzone journalist has joined the ranks of Syria's disappeared. They also risk perpetuating his family's agony. In the absence of a body or any more definitive proof of his death, that agony seems certain to continue.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Historic drought, wheat shortage to test Syria's new leadership
By Sarah El Safty and Maha El Dahan DUBAI (Reuters) -Syria faces a potential food crisis after the worst drought in 36 years slashed wheat production by around 40%, squeezing the country's cash-strapped government, which has been unable to secure large-scale purchases. Around three million Syrians could face severe hunger, the United Nations' World Food Programme told Reuters in written answers to questions, without giving a timeframe. Over half of the population of about 25.6 million is currently food insecure, it added. In a June report, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that Syria faced a wheat shortfall of 2.73 million metric tons this year, or enough to feed around 16 million people for a year. The situation poses a challenge to President Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose government is seeking to rebuild Syria after a 14-year civil war that saw the toppling of long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad in December. Wheat is Syria's most important crop and supports a state-subsidised bread programme - a vital part of everyday life. Yet Sharaa's government has been slow to mobilise international support for big grain purchases. Reuters spoke to a Syrian official, three traders, three aid workers and two industry sources with direct knowledge of wheat procurement efforts, who said more imports and financing were needed to alleviate the impending shortage. The new government has only purchased 373,500 tons of wheat from local farmers this season, the Syrian government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. That is around half of last year's volume. The government needs to import around 2.55 million tons this year, the source added. So far, however, Damascus has not announced any major wheat import deals and is relying on small private shipments amounting to around 200,000 tons in total through direct contracts with local importers, the two industry sources said, also declining to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. The ministry of information did not respond to a request for comment. "Half of the population is threatened to suffer from the drought, especially when it comes to the availability of bread, which is the most important food during the crisis," Toni Ettel, FAO's representative in Syria, told Reuters. So far, Syria has received only limited emergency aid, including 220,000 tons of wheat from Iraq and 500 tons of flour from Ukraine. 'THE WORST YEAR' While Syria consumes around four million tons of wheat annually, domestic production is expected to fall to around 1.2 million tons this year, down 40% from last year, according to FAO figures. "This has been the worst year ever since I started farming," said Nazih Altarsha, whose family has owned six hectares of land in Homs governorate since 1960. Abbas Othman, a wheat farmer from Qamishli, part of Syria's breadbasket region in northeast Hasaka province, didn't harvest a single grain. "We planted 100 donums (six hectares) and we harvested nothing," he told Reuters. Only 40% of farmland was cultivated this season, much of which has now been ruined, particularly in key food-producing areas like Hassakeh, Aleppo, and Homs, the FAO said. Local farmers were encouraged to sell what they salvaged from their crop to the government at $450 a ton, around $200 per ton above the market price as an incentive, the official source said. "In a good year I can sell the government around 25 tons from my six hectares but this year I only managed to sell eight tons," said Altarsha, the Homs farmer. "The rest I had to just feed to my livestock as it wasn't suitable for human consumption," he said, hoping for better rains in December when the new planting season begins. Before the civil war, Syria produced up to four million tons of wheat in good years and exported around one million of that. U.S. POLICY SHIFTIn a major U.S. policy shift in May, President Donald Trump said he would lift sanctions on Syria that risked holding back its economic recovery. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates Syria will need to import a record 2.15 million tons of wheat in 2025/26, up 53% from last year, according to the department's database. Still, Syria's main grain buying agency is yet to announce a new purchasing strategy. The agency did not respond to Reuters questions over the issue. Wheat imports also face payment delays due to financial difficulties despite the lifting of sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Food was not restricted by Western sanctions on Assad's Syria, but banking restrictions and asset freezes made it difficult for most trading houses to do business with Damascus. Russia, the world's largest wheat exporter and a staunch supporter of Assad, had been a steady supplier but to a large extent has suspended supplies since December over payment delays and uncertainty about the new government, sources told Reuters following Assad's ouster.
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Iraq begins excavating mass grave believed to hold thousands of victims of Islamic State
IRBIL, Iraq — Iraqi officials have begun the excavation of what is believed to be a mass grave left behind by the Islamic State extremist group during its rampage across the country a decade ago. Local authorities are working with the judiciary, forensic investigations, Iraq's Martyrs Foundation and the directorate of mass graves to carry out the excavation of the site of a sinkhole in Khasfa, south of the northern city of Mosul, the state-run Iraqi News Agency reported Sunday. Ahmad Qusay al-Asady, head of the Martyrs Foundation's mass graves excavation department, told the Associated Press that his team began work at Khasfa on Aug. 9 at the request of Nineveh province's Gov. Abdulqadir al-Dakhil. The operation is initially limited to gathering visible human remains and surface evidence while preparing for a full exhumation that officials say will require international support. After an initial 15 days of work, the foundation's Mosul teams will build a database and start collecting DNA samples from families of suspected victims. Al-Asady explained that laboratory processing and a DNA database must come first to ensure proper identification. Full exhumations can proceed only once specialized assistance is secured to navigate the site's hazards, including sulfur water and unexploded ordnance. Khasfa is 'a very complicated site,' he said. Based on unverified accounts from witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, authorities estimate that thousands of bodies could be buried there, he said. Scores of mass graves containing thousands of bodies of people believed to have been killed by Islamic State have been found in Iraq and Syria. At its peak, the extremist group ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria and was notorious for its brutality. It beheaded civilians and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq's oldest religious minorities. The group was defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces captured the northern city of Mosul. Three months later, it suffered a major blow when Kurdish forces captured the Syrian northern city of Raqqa, which was the group's de facto capital. The war against the Islamic State officially ended in March 2019, when U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces captured the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz, which was the last sliver of land the militants controlled. Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who has worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, told the AP that information he obtained from the foundation and different Iraqi courts during his investigations points to Khasfa as 'the largest mass grave in modern Iraqi history.' Al-Asady said that claim cannot yet be confirmed, 'but according to the size of the space, we estimate it to be one of the largest.' Attiyah said roughly 70% of the human remains at Khasfa are believed to belong to Iraqi army and police personnel, with other victims including Yazidis. He said he has interviewed numerous witnesses from the area who saw Islamic State fighters bring people there by bus and kill them. 'Many of them were decapitated,' he said. Attiyah's uncle and cousin were police officers killed by the extremist group, and he is among those hoping to identify and recover the remains of loved ones. Testimonies and witness statements, as well as findings from other mass graves in Nineveh, indicate that most of the military, police and other security forces personnel killed by Islamic State are expected to be found at Khasfa, along with Yazidis from Sinjar and Shiite victims from Tal Afar, he said. Martany writes for the Associated Press.
