(22 Jul 2025)
RESTRICTIONS SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Busra al-Harir, Syria – 22 July 2025
1. U.N. vehicles lined up
2. Security forces pick-up truck
3. Various of ambulances going to Sweida
4. Various of buses and vehicles going to Sweida
5. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Suleiman al-Akeedi, Fighter in support of Bedouins:
"If the government doesn’t seize control of Sweida we will stay here, we’ll stay tomorrow, and the day after, and the following day, and for a month’s time. We have so far respected the government and stayed outside of Sweida out of respect for the government’s decision. But we will not allow for our martyr’s blood to have been spilled in vein."
6. Various of U.N. vehicles
7. Ambulance driving by
8. Bus and U.N. vehicles waiting
STORYLINE:
The head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Mohammed Hazem Baqleh, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the situation in the city of Sweida was grim, particularly in the main hospital, where some 300 bodies piled up during the clashes. The city had been almost entirely cut off from supplies during the two-week fighting.
A Red Crescent team worked with the hospital’s forensics to document the dead and prepare them for burial, he said.
Baqleh said that with electricity and water largely cut off during the fighting, “there is a significant shortage of materials and a shortage of human resources” in the hospital.
“The markets, in general, were closed and services have almost completely stopped” during the fighting, he said.
The Red Crescent brought in one aid convoy on Sunday, the first to enter the city since the violence started, and prepare to send another on Wednesday carrying some 66 tons of flour, along with other foodstuffs, fuel and medical items, Baqleh said.
The group was registering names of civilians who want to leave the city to give them safe passage out on Wednesday, he said.
During the fighting, Red Crescent teams came under attack. One of their vehicles was shot at, and a warehouse burned down after being hit by shelling, he said.
Evacuation of Bedouin families from Druze-majority areas has already begun. Syrian state media on Sunday said the government had coordinated with officials in Sweida to bring buses to evacuate some 1,500 Bedouins. Many of them are now staying in crowded shelters in neighbouring Daraa province.
Some worried that the displacement will become permanent, a familiar scenario from the days of Syria’s civil war.
Human Rights Watch in a statement Tuesday said that “while officials have said the relocation is temporary, concerns remain that these families may be unable to safely return without clear guarantees.”
Sweida’s provincial governor, Mustafa al-Bakour, reiterated promises that the displacement will not be long term.
“There can be no permanent displacement in Syria,” he told AP. “Nobody will accept to leave the house his lives in and was raised in, except as a temporary solution until things calm down.”
The Human Rights Watch report said that all parties in the conflict had reportedly committed “serious abuses” and that the violence had also “ignited sectarian hate speech and the risk of reprisals against Druze communities across the country.”
AP video by Ghaith Alsayed
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