#Syria

#Syria

As Syria turns the page after Bashar al-Assad's fall, the transitional government promises justice, truth, and rule of law.

For more than 11 years, I told myself it was too early to grieve. My father, Ali Mustafa, was arrested by Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria on 2 July 2013 and disappeared. Since that day, we have had no word, no trace, nothing. Every morning since he was taken I made my first thought after waking up: He is alive. Every night I went to sleep repeating it.

The United States has ended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Syria, warning Syrian migrants they now face arrest and deportation if they do not leave the country within 60 days. The action on Friday came as part of US President Donald Trump's broad effort to strip legal status from migrants. It will terminate TPS for more than 6,000 Syrians who have had access to the legal status since 2012, according to a Federal Register notice posted Friday.

Desperate families flocked to former detention centres, prisons, morgues, and mass grave sites to try to find their missing relatives after al-Assad's removal, and investigators gained unprecedented access to government documents, witness accounts and human remains. A limited number of detainees were released alive, while the fate of tens of thousands remained unknown, rendering them forcibly disappeared. This revealed a major tragedy that affected Syrian society as a whole.

Back in 2015, with his native Syria in the full throes of civil war, Maso had little choice but to leave if he wanted to pursue a career in swimming. Hailing from Aleppo, a major battleground in the war, he was going for months on end without training. "It always had to depend on how safe the situation was and what the priorities were," he said. And so, together with older brother, Mo, he took the long and arduous journey to Europe via Turkey.

Iraqi and Lebanese intelligence agencies coordinated to discover and destroy one of Lebanon's largest drug factories making the highly addictive amphetamine Captagon.