PARIS: France said on Wednesday it would host an international meeting on Syria in January and that the lifting of sanctions and reconstruction aid would be conditional on clear political and security commitments by the transitional authority.
A team of French diplomats met an official from the Syrian transition team on Tuesday in Damascus and raised the flag over the French embassy there 12 years after cutting ties with Syria’s Bashar Assad amid the country’s civil war.
Acting Foreign Minister Jan-Noel Barrot told parliament that the diplomats had seen positive signals from the transitional authority and that in the capital, at least, Syrians appeared to be resuming their normal life without being impeded.
“We will not judge them by their words but by their actions, and over time,” Barrot said.
The January meeting would be a follow-up to a meeting in Jordan last week that included Turkiye, Arab and Western states. It was not immediately clear whether Syrians would attend or what the precise objective of the conference would be.
Western nations have welcomed Assad’s fall but are weighing whether they can work with the militants who ousted him, including Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), an extremist group that is designated a terrorist organization by the EU.
Barrot said an inclusive transition would be vital and that Western powers had many tools at their disposal to ease the situation, notably the lifting of international sanctions and aid reconstruction.
“But we are making this support conditional on clear commitments on the political and security front,” he said.
Kurds
Since cutting ties with Assad in 2012, France has backed a broadly secular exiled opposition and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria, for which it has given military support in the past.
The SDF is the main ally in a US coalition against Daesh militants in Syria. It is spearheaded by the YPG militia, a group that Turkiye, a NATO ally, sees as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), whose militants have battled the Turkish state for 40 years.
France’s ties with the SDF persist. Barrot stressed that the political transition needed to ensure they were represented, especially given they had been at the forefront in the fight against Daesh, and were currently guarding thousands of hardened militants in prisons and camps.
“We know of Ankara’s security concerns toward the PKK, but we are convinced that it’s possible to find an arrangement that satisfies the interests of everyone. We are working on it,” Barrot said.
“This stabilization also means including the SDF in the Syrian political process,” he said, adding that President Emmanuel Macron had made this point in talks with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.
France to host Syria meeting, cautious on aid, sanctions lifting
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France to host Syria meeting, cautious on aid, sanctions lifting
- “We will not judge them by their words but by their actions, and over time,” Barrot said
- January meeting would be a follow-up to a meeting in Jordan last week that included Turkiye, Arab and Western states
Mystery of CIA’s lost nuclear device haunts Himalayan villagers 60 years on
- Plutonium-fueled spy system was meant to monitor China’s nuclear activity after 1964 atomic tests
- Porter who took part in Nanda Devi mission warned family of ‘danger buried in snow’
NEW DELHI: Porters who helped American intelligence officers carry a nuclear spy system up the precarious slopes of Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, returned home with stories that sent shockwaves through nearby villages, leaving many in fear that still holds six decades later.
A CIA team, working with India’s Intelligence Bureau, planned to install the device in the remote part of the Himalayas to monitor China, but a blizzard forced them to abandon the system before reaching the summit.
When they returned, the device was gone.
The spy system contained a large quantity of highly radioactive plutonium-238 — roughly a third of the amount used in the atomic bomb dropped by the US on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in the closing stages of the Second World War.
“The workers and porters who went with the CIA team in 1965 would tell the story of the nuclear device, and the villagers have been living in fear ever since,” said Narendra Rana from the Lata village near Nanda Devi’s peak.
His father, Dhan Singh Rana, was one of the porters who carried the device during the CIA’s mission in 1965.
“He told me there was a danger buried in the snow,” Rana said. “The villagers fear that as long as the device is buried in the snow, they are safe, but if it bursts, it will contaminate the air and water, and no one will be safe after that.”
During the Sino-Indian tensions in the 1960s, India cooperated with the US in surveillance after China conducted its first nuclear tests in 1964. The Nanda Devi mission was part of this cooperation and was classified for years. It only came under public scrutiny in 1978, when the story was broken by Outsider magazine.
The article caused an uproar in India, with lawmakers demanding the location of the nuclear device be revealed and calling for political accountability. The same year, then Prime Minister Morarji Desai set up a committee to assess whether nuclear material in the area near Nanda Devi could pollute the Ganges River, which originates there.
The Ganges is one of the world’s most crucial freshwater sources, with about 655 million people in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh depending on it for their essential needs.
The committee, chaired by prominent scientists, submitted its report a few months later, dismissing any cause for concerns, and establishing that even in the worst-case scenario of the device’s rupture, the river’s water would not be contaminated.
But for the villagers, the fear that the shell containing radioactive plutonium could break apart never goes away, and peace may only come once it is found.
Many believe the device, trapped within the glacier’s shifting ice, may have moved downhill over time.
Rana’s father told him that the device felt hot when it was carried, and he believed it might have melted its way into the glacier, remaining buried deep inside.
An imposing mass of rock and ice, Nanda Devi at 7,816 m is the second-highest mountain in India after Kangchenjunga.
When a glacier near the mountain burst in 2021, claiming over 200 lives, scientists explained that the disaster was due to global warming, but in nearby villages the incident was initially blamed on a nuclear explosion.
“They feared the device had burst. Those rescuing people were afraid they might die from radiation,” Rana said. “If any noise is heard, if any smoke appears in the sky, we start fearing a leak from the nuclear device.”
The latent fear surfaces whenever natural disasters strike or media coverage puts the missing device back in the spotlight. Most recently, a New York Times article on the CIA mission’s 60th anniversary reignited the unease.
“The apprehensions are genuine. After 1965, Americans came twice to search for the device. The villagers accompanied them, but it could not be found, which remains a concern for the local community,” said Atul Soti, an environmentalist in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, about 50 km from Nanda Devi.
“People are worried. They have repeatedly sought answers from the government, but no clear response has been provided so far. Periodically, the villagers voice their concerns, and they need a definitive government statement on this issue.”
Despite repeated queries whenever media attention arises, Indian officials have not released detailed updates since the Desai-appointed committee submitted its findings.
“The government should issue a white paper to address people’s concerns. The white paper will make it clear about the status of the device, and whether leakage from the device could pollute the Ganges River,” Soti told Arab News.
“The government should be clear. If the government is not reacting, then it further reinforces the fear.”
