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CNBC
4 hours ago
- CNBC
OpenAI's Altman warns the U.S. is underestimating China's next-gen AI threat
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that the U.S. may be underestimating the complexity and seriousness of China's progress in artificial intelligence, and said export controls alone likely aren't a reliable solution. "I'm worried about China," he said. Over Mediterranean tapas in San Francisco's Presidio — just five miles north of OpenAI's original office in the Mission — Altman offered a rare on-the-record briefing to a small group of reporters, including CNBC. He warned that the U.S.–China AI race is deeply entangled — and more consequential than a simple who's-ahead scoreboard. "There's inference capacity, where China probably can build faster. There's research, there's product; a lot of layers to the whole thing," he said. "I don't think it'll be as simple as: Is the U.S. or China ahead?" Despite escalating U.S. export controls on semiconductors, Altman is unconvinced that the policy is keeping up with technical reality. Asked whether it would be reassuring if fewer GPUs were reaching China, Altman was skeptical. "My instinct is that doesn't work," he said. "You can export-control one thing, but maybe not the right thing… maybe people build fabs or find other workarounds," he added, referring to semiconductor fabrication facilities, the specialized factories that produce the chips powering everything from smartphones to large-scale AI systems. "I'd love an easy solution," added Altman. "But my instinct is: That's hard." His comments come as Washington adjusts its policies designed to curb China's AI ambitions. The Biden administration initially tightened export controls, but in April, President Donald Trump went further — halting the supply of advanced chips altogether, including models previously designed to comply with Biden-era rules. Last week, however, the U.S. carved out an exception for certain "China-safe" chips, allowing sales to resume under a controversial and unprecedented agreement requiring Nvidia and AMD to give the federal government 15% of their China chip revenue. The result is a patchwork regime that may be easier to navigate than enforce. And while U.S. firms deepen their dependence on chips from Nvidia and AMD, Chinese companies are pushing ahead with alternatives from Huawei and other domestic suppliers — raising questions about whether cutting off supply is having the intended effect. China's AI progress has also influenced how OpenAI thinks about releasing its own models. While the company has long resisted calls to make its technology fully open source, Altman said competition from Chinese models — particularly open-source systems like DeepSeek — was a factor in OpenAI's recent decision to release its own open-weight models. "It was clear that if we didn't do it, the world was gonna head to be mostly built on Chinese open source models," Altman said. "That was a factor in our decision, for sure. Wasn't the only one, but that loomed large." Earlier this month, OpenAI released two open-weight language models — its first since GPT-2 in 2019 — marking a significant shift in strategy for the company that has long kept its technology gated behind application programming interfaces, or APIs. The new text-only models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, are designed as lower-cost options that developers, researchers, and companies can download, run locally, and customize. An AI model is considered open weight if its parameters — the values learned during training that determine how the model generates responses — are publicly available. While that offers transparency and control, it's not the same as open source. OpenAI is still not releasing its training data or full source code. With this release, OpenAI joins that wave and, for now, stands alone as the only major U.S. foundation model company actively leaning into a more open approach. While Meta had embraced openness with its Llama models, CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested on the company's second-quarter earnings call it may pull back on that strategy going forward. OpenAI, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction, betting that broader accessibility will help grow its developer ecosystem and strengthen its position against Chinese rivals. Altman had previously acknowledged that OpenAI had been "on the wrong side of history" by locking up its models. Ultimately, OpenAI's move shows it wants to keep developers engaged and within its ecosystem. That push comes as Meta reconsiders its open-source stance and Chinese labs flood the market with models designed to be flexible and widely adopted. Still, the open-weight debut has drawn mixed reviews. Some developers have called the models underwhelming, noting that many of the capabilities that make OpenAI's commercial offerings so powerful were stripped out. Altman didn't dispute that, saying the team intentionally optimized for one core use case: locally-run coding agents. "If the kind of demand shifts in the world," he said, "you can push it to something else." Watch: OpenAI's enterprise bet pays off as startups in Silicon Valley switch to GPT-5
Politico
8 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
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
The crisis in Syria's Sweida and its threat on Israel's northern border
The real question is not only whether Israel will help the Druze, but how it will do so without making them even more isolated in their homeland. Thousands of members of the Druze community in Sweida in southern Syria were massacred and looted this past July. What began as the local murder of a young Druze man in Damascus quickly escalated into a wave of kidnappings, mass killings, and large-scale attacks by pro-Turkish militias and local Bedouin elements. These crimes were documented and spread on social media as part of a terror campaign. To this moment, the population remains under a brutal siege — and the world is silent. 'At the time, I said that when [Bashar] Assad falls, Israel should lower its flag to half-mast — I was not mistaken,' IDF Col. (res.) Dr. Anan Wahabi told Walla. Wahabi, a fellow at the ICT at Reichman University, served in the IDF Intelligence Directorate, commanded operational units, and headed Israel's international strategic perception, psychological warfare, and cyber operations efforts. 'There's a de facto siege on the Druze there. It's a terror attack on the Druze,' he added, drawing parallels to October 7: 'It's terror from the same source that justifies murder, rape, and looting.' Now, the ICT warns: Israel cannot allow hostile terrorist forces to gain a foothold on its northern border. The question is not whether to intervene — but how. Sweida has become 'the arena the world forgot,' but Israel cannot ignore it. For the Jewish state, this is a double test: a test of morality toward the Druze community facing an existential crisis, and strategic, regarding threats to its northern border and the regional tensions as a whole. The position paper warned that over-involvement could drag Israel into a war of attrition in Syria, further damage relations with Turkey, and even ignite internal protests among Druze citizens of Israel — potentially leading to refusal to serve in the security forces. The paper was initiated by Reichman University President Prof. Boaz Ganor, a pioneer in the academic study of terrorism and founder of the ICT, and prepared by eight ICT fellows, including Wahabi. But if Israel sits on the sidelines, terrorist organizations could entrench themselves near the border, and southern Syria could become a base for attacks. On the diplomatic front, there are concerns that the new regime led by Al-Shaara could exploit the crisis to build international legitimacy as a 'terrorist in a suit.' On the other hand, the report points to the diplomatic potential in this tectonic shift. Israel could cultivate ties with Arab groups in preparation for 'the day after,' the Gaza war, strengthen its commitment to the Druze within Israel, and send a message of solidarity to all minorities in Syria, which could contribute to stabilizing southern areas of the country, strengthen the moderate regional bloc led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and secure its position as a central partner in a broad regional settlement led by the United States. US Republican Congressman Abraham Hamadeh, a former US Army reserve intelligence officer, made the first visit in decades by a US official traveling between Jerusalem and Damascus. He spent six hours in Syria this week to meet with President al-Sharaa. He also addressed the need for a secure humanitarian corridor to ensure safe delivery of medical and humanitarian aid to Sweida. He also addressed the need for a secure humanitarian corridor to ensure safe delivery of medical and humanitarian aid to Sweida — explicitly to advance former President Donald Trump's 'peace through strength' policy and to push Syria at this time toward normalization with Israel and joining the Abraham Accords. Until that happens, the report warns: overt Israeli involvement could be perceived as 'stamping an Israeli mark' on the Druze, making them even more isolated within Syria. Images coming from Syria of Druze waving the Israeli flag in gratitude for Israel's support are being framed in Syria and the Arab world as collusion with the enemy. Act cautiously, combine aid, diplomacy, limited military action The report details a series of steps Israel should adopt: 1. Controlled humanitarian aid – expand shipments of medicine and food, but via international mechanisms (Red Crescent, UN) to avoid harming the Druze. 2. Limited military action – avoid inserting ground forces and carry out only precise airstrikes in case of a direct threat to the border or the Druze. 3. Diplomatic measures – maintain close coordination with the US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, but also keep a secret dialogue channel with Turkey to avoid direct confrontation. 4. Information campaign – expose the massacres through international media, mainly Al Jazeera, and counter propaganda portraying the Druze as 'Israel's proxy.' 5. Managing expectations with Israel's Druze – establish a joint command room with community leadership, allow legitimate protest but set red lines against attempts at independent action across the border. 6. Caution regarding autonomy – Israel shouldn't lead the initiative, but support it indirectly through civilian aid to avoid stigmatizing the Druze or provoking retribution. The emerging humanitarian corridor could serve as an interim solution — if managed carefully, with broad coordination and discretion. Ultimately, the real question is not only whether Israel will help the Druze, but how it will do so without making them even more isolated in their homeland. Wahabi believes that funding from Turkey and Qatar, which works to incriminate Israel's activities in Gaza, is working day and night to divert international attention away from what is happening in Syria. 'First, they created the crisis by essentially renewing an old historic conflict between the Druze and the Bedouin of Jabal al-Druze," according to him, "Along with that came a supposedly spontaneous call for help to the tribes and all of Syria — and suddenly forces arrive in large numbers from Turkish-controlled areas, with new vehicles, equipment, weapons, fuel, salaries — everything. Israel views this area as a demilitarized zone, but suddenly there's this side-story, an interim situation, that no one quite knows how to handle.' Solve the daily Crossword
