Posted by Scott Lucas | May 24, 2021 |
A man rides a bicycle past campaign billboards of Bashar al-Assad, Damascus, May 23, 2021 (Louai Beshara/AFP)
UPDATE, MAY 24: Syrians abroad have spoken about the staging of Wednesday’s Presidential “election” to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.
Saed Eido, originally from Aleppo and now in Gaziantep in southeast Turkey, said:
My brother disappeared into a regime prison in 2013. We still have no idea if he is alive or dead. They won’t give us any information. All this Presidential election does is whitewash crimes and maintain a dictatorship.
With State media featuring gatherings for Assad but not the other two nominal candidates Mahmoud Ahmad Mar’ai and Abdallah Saloum Abdallah Suhail al-Ghazi, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, explains:
Monday, 15 March, 2021 - 09:15
A view of the Iraqi-Syrian borders at Al Qaim Al Abu Kamal border crossing, after being reopened for travelers and trade in Anbar province, in Qaim, Iraq September 30, 2019. (Reuters) Baghdad – Asharq Al-Awsat
The Iraqi army arrested five ISIS militants in Baghdad and Anbar governorates as security forces continue to pursue terrorists throughout the country.
Military spokesman Major General Yahya Rasool said the counter-terrorism unit carried out security operations and arrested two terrorists in Abu Ghraib - Karma, and three others in Heet district in Anbar.
Meanwhile, the Joint Operations Command announced that one of its units thwarted the infiltration of ISIS terrorists from Syria into Iraq at al-Dukji border area, west of Mount Sinjar in the northern Nineveh region.
Middle-East Arab News and Opinion - Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities