Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, has been diagnosed with leukemia, the Syrian presidency said on Tuesday, almost five years after she announced she had fully recovered from breast cancer, Reuters reported.
The statement said Asma, 48, would undergo a special treatment protocol that would require her to isolate, and that she would step away from public engagements as a result.
In August 2019, Asma said she had fully recovered from breast cancer that she said had been discovered early.
Since Syria plunged into war in 2011, the British-born former investment banker has taken on the public role of leading charity efforts and meeting families of killed soldiers, but has also become hated by the opposition.
She runs the Syria Trust for Development, a large NGO that acts as an umbrella organisation for many of the aid and development operations in Syria.
Last year, she accompanied her husband, President Bashar al-Assad ,on a visit to the United Arab Emirates, her first known official trip abroad with him since 2011. She met Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, the Emirati president’s mother, during a trip seen as a public signal of her growing role in public affairs.
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France begins first war crimes trial of Syrian officials
France has opened its first trial into officials from the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad with three top security officers tried in absentia for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, according to Al-Jazeera.
The Paris Criminal Court was on Tuesday hearing the cases against the officials for their alleged role in the deaths of two French Syrian men, Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick, who were arrested in the Syrian capital, Damascus, in 2013.
Ali Mamlouk, former head of Syria’s National Security Bureau, Jamil Hassan, former director of the Air Force intelligence service, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former head of investigations for the service in Damascus, are subject to international arrest warrants and will be tried in absentia.
“For the first time, French courts will address the crimes of the Syrian authorities and will try the most senior members of the authorities to ever be prosecuted since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011,” said the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
Trials into abuses in Syria have taken place elsewhere in Europe. In those cases, the people prosecuted held lower ranks and were present at the hearings.
IS attack in Syria kills three regime soldiers: war monitor
Islamic State (IS) group militants killed three Syrian regime soldiers in an attack Tuesday on an army position in the Badia desert, a war monitor said.
The militants “attacked a site where… regime forces were stationed,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Right said, adding that a lieutenant colonel and two soldiers died.
The Syrian army had sent forces to the area, where IS attacks are common, ahead of an expected wider sweep, said the Britain-based Observatory which has a network of sources inside the country.
In an attack on May 3, IS fighters killed at least 15 Syrian pro-regime fighters when they targeted three military positions in the desert, the Observatory had reported.
IS overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror.
It was defeated territorially in Syria in 2019, but its remnants still carry out deadly attacks, particularly against pro-regime forces and Kurdish-led fighters in the Badia desert.
Syria’s war has claimed more than half a million lives and displaced millions more since it erupted in March 2011 with the regime’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.
