JEDDAH: On Oct. 17, a US-backed alliance of Syrian fighters took full control of Raqqa, the de-facto capital of Daesh’s self-styled caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq, following a four-month assault.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured Raqqa with the help of the US-led coalition airstrikes, and — with US Defense Secretary James Mattis describing the fight against Daesh as a war of “annihilation,” the assumption was Daesh soldiers would not be allowed to leave Raqqa alive.
“Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We are not going to allow them to do so,” Mattis said on US television back in May.
However, a BBC report, “Raqqa’s Dirty Secret,” reveals that hundreds of battle-hardened foreign militants and their families were allowed to leave Raqqa under an evacuation deal.
“We took around 4,000 people including women and children — our vehicles and their vehicles combined,” the report quotes a lorry driver as saying. “When we entered Raqqa, we thought there were 200 people to collect. In my vehicle alone, I took 112 people.”
According to the BBC report, the convoy included 10 truckloads of weapons and ammunition.
“We didn’t want anyone to leave,” Col. Ryan Dillon, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the Western coalition against Daesh, told the BBC. “But this goes to the heart of our strategy, ‘by, with and through’ local leaders on the ground. It comes down to Syrians — they are the ones fighting and dying, they get to make the decisions regarding operations.”
Along the route, many people told the BBC’s reporters they heard coalition aircraft, sometimes drones, following the convoy.
According to the report, due to the collapse of the so-called Daesh caliphate, smugglers are having a field day.
“In the past couple of weeks, we’ve had lots of families leaving Raqqa and wanting to leave for Turkey,” a smuggler operating on the Syria-Turkey border, told the BBC. “This week alone, I personally oversaw the smuggling of 20 families. Most were foreign but there were Syrians as well.”
He said he now charges $600 (£460) per person and a minimum of $1,500 for a family.
As Turkey has increased border security, the work has become more difficult, another smuggler explained: “In some areas we’re using ladders, in others, we cross through a river, in other areas we’re using a steep mountainous trail. It’s a miserable situation.”
An alternative route for those fleeing Raqqa is to go west to Idlib, which the report describes as “a haven” for “countless” Daesh fighters and their families. Foreigners including Britons, other Europeans and Central Asians have made it out, the report claims. The costs range from $4,000 (£3,000) per fighter to $20,000 for a large family.
According to a French member of Daesh interviewed by the BBC, a group of French Daesh fighters have escaped Raqaa and headed to France, where they intend to carry out terror attacks “in what would be called ‘a day of reckoning.’”
Hundreds of foreign Daesh fighters allowed to leave Raqqa: BBC
Hundreds of foreign Daesh fighters allowed to leave Raqqa: BBC
Lebanon PM says IMF wants rescue plan changes as crisis deepens
- “We want to engage with the IMF. We want to improve. This is a draft law,” Salam said
- “They wanted the hierarchy of claims to be clearer. The talks are all positive”
DAVOS, Switzerland: The International Monetary Fund has demanded amendments to a draft rescue law aimed at hauling Lebanon out of its worst financial crisis on record and giving depositors access to savings frozen for six years, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said.
The “financial gap” law is part of a series of reform measures required by the IMF in order to access its funding and aims to allocate the losses from Lebanon’s 2019 crash between the state, the central bank, commercial banks and depositors.
Salam told Reuters the IMF wants clearer provisions in the hierarchy of claims, which is a core element of the draft legislation designed to determine how losses are allocated.
“We want to engage with the IMF. We want to improve. This is a draft law,” Salam said in an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.
“They wanted the hierarchy of claims to be clearer. The talks are all positive,” Salam added.
In 2022, the government put losses from the financial crisis at about $70 billion, a figure that analysts and economists forecast is now likely to be higher.
Salam stressed that Lebanon is still pushing for a long-delayed IMF program, but warned the clock is ticking as the country has already been placed on a financial ‘grey list’ and risks falling onto the ‘blacklist’ if reforms stall further.
“We want an IMF program and we want to continue our discussions until we get there,” he said, adding: “International pressure is real ... The longer we delay, the more people’s money will evaporate.”
The draft law, which was passed by Salam’s government in December, is under parliamentary review. It aims to give depositors a guaranteed path to recovering their funds, restart bank lending, and end a financial crisis that has left nearly a million accounts frozen and confidence in the system shattered.
The roadmap would repay depositors up to $100,000 over four years, starting with smaller accounts, while launching forensic audits to determine losses and responsibility.
Lebanon’s Finance Minister Yassine Jaber, who is driving the reform push with Salam, told Reuters it was essential to salvage a hollowed-out banking system, and to stop the country from sliding deeper into its cash-only, paralyzed economy.
The aim, Jaber said, is to give depositors clarity after years of uncertainty and to end a system that has crippled Lebanon’s international standing.
He framed the law as part of a broader reckoning: the first time a Lebanese government has confronted a combined collapse of the banking sector, the central bank and the state treasury.
Financial reforms have been repeatedly derailed by political and private vested interests over the last six years and Jaber said the responsibility now lies with lawmakers.
Failure to act, he said, would leave Lebanon trapped in “a deep, dark tunnel” with no way back to a functioning system.
“Lebanon has become a cash economy, and the real question is whether we want to stay on the grey list, or sleepwalk into a blacklist,” Jaber added.
