Deir ez-Zor

So just so people can understand the cultural connection and how this is actually a one people.

And a final thing that I would say here is before we maybe move on from this specific time period, is that, you know, right after the French occupation of Syria, there was multiple revolts, one of them being in the area of Deir ez-Zor, where I come from, my family come from, on the northeast of what is now the Syrian state.

And this revolt declared a state, the Arabic Republic, that include what is now north of Iraq.

If people want to look back at the Sykes-Picot maps, actually, the Syria map of Sykes-Picot includes all of north of what is now Iraq, those parts that are Assyria, really.

themselves who told me these choices were all strategic about the visits, about the alliances, about the thinking behind this.

So if we look at this group of people that is ruling Syria as individuals who are power hungry, and this is something that led to their monumental success, right, from a group that established itself in late 2011, Jabhat al-Nusra and Der Zor, counting about 20 people, to ruling all of Syria.

And this stemmed from their incessant search for power and willingness to adapt.

So this involved, you know, cutting alliances, but also attacking other rebel groups, weakening others, playing people off of each other, etc.

The UN said that 70 serving personnel and five former staff members were being detained by the Houthis, intensifying scrutiny of the detention campaign.

In Syria, authorities said they arrested two alleged members of the Daesh terrorist group in Deir Ezzor.

The internal security forces announced the arrests following close intelligence surveillance.

The two are accused of carrying out a series of assassinations.

By the beginning of 1916, There were an estimated 500,000 refugees in the Syrian area, and the Ottoman government ordered another wave of persecution.

Around 200,000 Armenians were killed between March and October 1916, often in remote areas near Deir ez-Zor and in parts of the Kaaba Valley, while further campaigns to rid Anatolia of its few remaining Armenians also took place.

It's generally considered that the state-sponsored side of the genocide ended in January 1917, though massacres and starvation continued well after, often carried out by militias or bandits.

For many, however, the horror was far from over.

I sent him a DM and said, hey, I want to meet you sometime.

And a few weeks later, I flew on a couple of Blackhawks into Deir ez-Zor and Hasakah, Syria.

And we had a meeting there in Syria, November 11th, Veterans Day, Armistice Day 2019.

At the same time, the U.S. was bringing in some Bradley fighting vehicles from the South Carolina National Guard to provide deterrence for Russians.

Turkey having what they describe as legitimate security concern about Kurdish forces aligned with the PKK.

And the Russians were patrolling throughout the western part of Syria, but also in the north central and northeast of Syria.

Believe it or not, the Assad regime still had little strongholds in cities in northeastern Syria, where there's an airport that had Russian attack helicopters, Russian cargo planes, and also the city of Deir ez-Zor along the Euphrates River.

So Russian mobile infantry would go on patrols throughout the region, and sometimes they would encounter U.S. troops.

That's an 83% decrease of Christianity.

In one of the cities like Deir ez-Zor, once home to 7,000 Christians, there's only four Christians left.

This is the one side, Brad.

But then you look at the other side.

Yet a campaign of bombardment by American warplanes, coupled with warfare on the ground, had reduced it to a smaller, less predictable enemy.

By July 2022, the caliphate was making its last stand outside Deir ez-Zor in the Kurdish-held villages that snake along the banks of the Euphrates.

The latest flashpoint was Al-Zer, a riverside settlement of 100 or so homes.

Far from its rapid advance through the desert a decade earlier, ISIS was now behind a deadly insurgency.

We, the Sunday Times Insight team, have unraveled the stories of the dead, each a portrait of the chaos of Syria over the preceding decade and its consequences.

One was Muhammad Fateh Khalaf al-Daham, said to have been 17 years old.

He grew up in Deir ez-Zor, the nearby city.

His father was a cleric who had spent 12 years in prison on charges of joining the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist movement the regime of Bashar al-Assad had briefly suppressed.

If we do not stand up, we will all be subjected to genocide.

And I say this as an opposition, but I also say that, yes, today the citizen of Armenia is not on the road to Der Zor, and the citizen of Armenia must be able to protect himself.

[beep]

Um, it's a very nebulous situation and of course, you know, you spoke about operating outside the government's sort of control, the, the tribes as well.

You know, for a long time they were given their share of the oil, for example, by the SDF and they produced their own oil, you know, um, and, and made some money, right? Uh, and now I think they, they don't have any of that kind of economic, uh, autonomy left either and some of those, most of those oil fields have been handed over at least in the mainly Kurdish areas, I don't mean Deir ez-Zor, to, to foreign company, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, interestingly you've seen some pipelines getting blown up recently and there's been some speculation as to who might be, you know, responsible for those acts of sabotage.