Syria's Assad regime is resisting calls to substantiate its claim that Israel has destroyed evidence relating to an alleged chlorine attack on Douma in 2018.
According to the regime, two gas cylinders at the centre of the Douma investigation were among the "losses"...
Blog archive: All
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29th October 2021Syria falls silent over claim that Israel destroyed evidence in Douma chemical weapons investigation
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23rd October 2021New Covid-19 cases recorded in the Middle East and North Africa averaged 19,075 a day during the past week. This is the first time since September last year that the daily average among the 20 countries monitored has dropped below 20,000. New infections peaked in...
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21st October 2021Leaked documents show that Saudi Arabia and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have been lobbying to water down a crucial scientific report on climate change. News of the lobbying comes just days before the start of the COP26 conference on international action to slow...
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16th October 2021New Covid-19 cases recorded in the Middle East and North Africa averaged 20,176 a day during the past week – the lowest figure for more than a year. Numbers have declined sharply since mid-August when they peaked at 73,000 a day. Iran, which has been reporting high...
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28th September 2021In April last year a report by the OPCW, the international chemical weapons watchdog, blamed the Assad regime for two sarin attacks on Ltamenah in northern Syria. The implications of this were especially serious because the attacks took place in 2017 – four years after the regime had formally...
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22nd September 2021Patrick George Zaki, a 27-year-old Egyptian, was studying for a postgraduate degree at Bologna University in Italy. In February 2020 he returned to Egypt for a family visit – only to be arrested on arrival at Cairo airport. Zaki has been in custody ever since, awaiting a trial which finally...
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17th September 2021Hundreds of people died – many of them in their sleep – when rockets laden with the nerve agent sarin hit Ghouta, a rebel-held area on the outskirts of Damascus, in the early hours of 21 August 2013. It was the deadliest chemical attack anywhere in the world since the 1980s and it caused...
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26th July 2021Syria's claim that crucial evidence relating to chemical weapons was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes has been greeted with widespread scepticism: it sounds too convenient to be true. In a diplomatic note to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Syria announced that...
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24th July 2021Two gas cylinders that formed crucial evidence in connection with a suspected chemical attack in Syria have been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, according to the Syrian authorities. The cylinders were at the centre of an investigation by the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) regarding...
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10th July 2021Facebook reported this week that it removed 2,784 accounts in June for "coordinated inauthentic behaviour". Among those, 947 related to countries in the Middle East and North Africa region: Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria and Sudan. Facebook treats online campaigns as "coordinated inauthentic...
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6th July 2021Four tonnes of a chemical supplied by a German firm and supposedly intended for making pharmaceuticals vanished after arriving in Syria, according to a Swiss newspaper investigation. The chemical – isopropanol – has multiple civilian uses but also is a crucial ingredient in the nerve agent...
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3rd July 2021The Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism is named in memory of a Lebanese-American journalist who died in a car crash while working for Iran's Press TV in 2014. The purpose of the award, according to its website, is to honour non-mainstream journalists who "tell...
