Meet the soldiers hunting down senior Assad regime leaders who terrorised Syria
By the standards of other cities I have been in or visited shortly after a revolution, Damascus seems on the face of it relatively calm.
More often than not, I’d expect masked gunmen to be deployed on every corner, patrolling the streets in groups, or whizzing around on battered trucks, with heavy machine guns at the ready and rocket-propelled grenades strapped to roofs or on the backs of fighters.
But that isn’t the case in Damascus.
There are checkpoints in and out of the city but generally speaking, the militia groups that supported Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), which led the takeover of Syria, are keeping a low profile.
Indeed, many have now become part of the newly formed General Security force, and they’re all dressed in matching black uniforms and fatigues.
I’m often asked what Damascus is like now that Bashar al Assad’s regime is gone.
Destroyed Damascus suburbs
First, I have to admit that apart from a couple of brief visits to Damascus before 2011, once the uprising began, I was either in the west or north of the country with the demonstrators and later the rebel forces – far from the capital.
I was also among a small group of journalists on a wanted list by the regime, so travel to government-controlled areas was a non-starter.
The new Syrian flag in Damascus
So for me, my visits to Damascus are part discovery, and part depressing confirmation of what I had expected to see, especially the vast suburban areas reduced to rubble by Assad’s security forces with the aid of the Russian military.
My impression is of a city looking to the future but still suffering from its recent bloody history.
Its people are trying to move on, but many remain in the midst of the ruins, and rebuilding remains a distant hope.
Listen: Inside the fall of Assad
‘Syrians have every right to see justice served’
From the Umayyad Square in Damascus, we jumped onto the back of a pick-up truck full of General Security soldiers and sped away through busy traffic and towards a road leading to a hilltop that overlooks the city.
We passed the sprawling presidential palace, built by the Assads, but now under the management of the self-proclaimed “Salvation Government”.
Abdulrahman Dabbagh, head of security in Damascus
We were meeting the man in charge of security here in the capital, Abdulrahman Dabbagh, a youthful cousin of the country’s new president Ahmed al Sharaa.
He told me that to move forward, Syria must also hunt down the senior leaders of the Syrian regime who terrorised the entire population.
“Syrians have every right to see justice served for those who caused them harm during the reign of this now-defunct regime,” Mr Dabbagh said.
“By nature, every human finds comfort in witnessing accountability, justice, and the rightful reclaiming of what was taken.”
I asked him if it is difficult tracking down those responsible.
“There are assessments, research, and round-the-clock work being done to locate these criminals,” he explained.
“It’s not always about taking direct action against every person we identify, though, we wait for official orders to arrest certain figures.”
‘The torture was endless’
Barely a family in this country was untouched by the regime and its relentless programme of detentions and torture in jails.
Bariya, 63, was detained for 100 days. Her crime? She was accused of cooking food for demonstrators and spying on regime checkpoints in the city of Homs.
Stuart Ramsay with 63-year-old Bariya who was detained for 100 days
Inside her prison, she says torture was the norm, and the memories of the cries of the men still haunt her.
“It would begin as soon as the sun went down. The torture was endless. My husband was not spared – I recognised his cries. They tormented him,” she told me.
Inside an empty prison in Damascus
“One of the inmates called out to him, shouting that his family was here, the warders heard her, came straight for him, they dragged him away and beat him in the corridor.”
“They tortured him relentlessly, with no regard for his age – he was born in 1955,” she sobbed.
A legacy of pain and death
Bariya is still so afraid of the Assad regime, she won’t show her face or allow us to use her last name.
She was arrested at the height of the anti-Assad protests, along with multiple members of her family. Seven of them died in detention: her husband, one of her sons, two of her brothers, her nephew, a cousin, and the son of her brother-in-law.
To this day she has no idea what happened.
The legacy of the Assad tyranny is pain and death, and this ancient country’s recent history is still raw for so many.
Consigning it to the history books is going to take some time.
World
In the idyllic Cognac region of southern France, Trump’s tariffs threaten a centuries-old way of life
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is reaching deep into every economy.
We travelled into the French rural heartland, heading for Cognac – the home of French brandy.
It is only half the size of Surrey but its exports to America are worth €1bn a year and that trade is now severely threatened.
The first buds are out on the vines of Amy Pasquet’s vineyard.
An American, she has married into the industry and with her French husband owns JLP Cognac.
She knows more than most the bond brandy has formed between their two countries that goes back to the war.
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Ms Pasquet said: “A lot of the African-American soldiers had really loved their experience here and had brought back the cognac. And I think that stayed because this African-American community truly is a community. and they want to drink like their grandfather did.”
The ties remain with rappers like Jay Z’s love for cognac.
However, Ms Pasquet adds: “There’s also this other community of people who have been drinking bourbon for a long time, love bourbon, but find the prices just outrageous today. So they want to try something different.”
Amy Pasquet owns JLP Cognac with her husband
JLP’s products were served at New York’s prestigious Met Gala.
They were preparing to launch new product lines in the US. But now that’s in doubt.
It is hard being an American in France now, Ms Pasquet says.
Her French neighbours are appalled by what US President Donald Trump is doing.
She continues: “They’re like, okay, America’s forgotten how close France and America are as far as (their) relationship is concerned. And I think that’s hurtful on both sides. I think it’s important to remember that the US is many things, and not just this one person, and there are millions of inhabitants that didn’t vote for him.”
A fresh challenge for a centuries-old tradition
Making cognac takes years, using techniques that go back centuries. In another vineyard we met Pierre Louis Giboin whose family have been doing it for more than 200 years.
In a cellar dating back to the French Revolution, barrels of oak sit under thick cobwebs, ageing the brandy.
The walls are lined with a unique black mould that thrives off the vapours of cognac.
They have seen threats come and go over those centuries, wars, weather, pestilence. But never from a country they regard as one of their oldest allies and best of customers.
Read more:
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How tariffs will affect your money
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Pierre Louis Giboin’s cellar dates back to the French revolution
Mr Trump’s tariffs, says Mr Giboin, now threaten a way of life.
“It’s at the end of like very good times in the Cognac region. It’s been like 10 years when everything’s been perfect, we have good harvest, we sell really easily all the stock, but now I mean it’s the end.”
Ms Pasquet and Mr Giboin are unusual.
Most cognac makers sell their produce through the drink’s four big houses, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier.
Some have been told the amounts they can sell have been drastically reduced.
Independents though like them must find new markets if the tariff threat persists.
Confusion away from the chaos
Outside in the dappled light of a Cognac evening Mr Giboin and I toast glasses of pineau – the diluted form of cognac drunk as an aperitif.
In this idyllic corner of France, a world away from Washington, Mr Trump’s trade war on Europe simply makes no sense.
“He’s like angry against the whole world and the way he talks like that Europe the EU was made against the US to cheat on the US. It’s just crazy to think like this,” Mr Giboin says.
It’s not just what Mr Trump’s done. It’s how Europe now strikes back that concerns the French. And it’s not just in Cognac where they’re concerned
France exports more than €2bn worth of wine to America.
In the heart of the Bordeaux wine region, Sylvie Courselle’s family have been making wine since the 1940s at their Chateau Thieuley vineyard.
It’s bottling season but they can’t prepare the wine headed for America while everything is up in the air.
Showing me the unused reels of US labels for her wine she told me she was losing sleep over the uncertainty.
Later she was meeting with her American distributors.
Gerry Keogh sells Ms Courselle’s wine across the US.
He says the entire industry is reeling
Sylvie Courselle with distributers
The Chateau Thieuley vineyard in the Bordeaux wine region
“I think it’s like anything. You don’t really believe it’s happening. And even when you’re in the midst of it, it was kind of like 9/11.
“You’re like… This is actually happening. It’s unbelievable. And when you start seeing the repercussions from the stock market, et cetera, and how it’s impacting every level, it’s quite shocking.”
They know the crisis is far from over and could now escalate.
“We feel stuck in the middle of this commercial war and we don’t have the weapons to fight, I think,” Ms Courselle said.
It is, she says, very stressful.
Gerry Keogh
The histories of America and France have been intertwined for centuries through revolutions against tyranny and two wars fighting for liberty.
America used to call France its oldest ally, but under Mr Trump it is now being as turned on, as France, along with the rest of Europe, finds itself in what many would argue is a reckless and unjustified trade war.
It is all doing enormous harm to relations between the US and its European allies.
How Europe now decides to retaliate will help determine the extent of that damage.
World
Donald Trump’s 104% tariffs on China – and other levies on ‘worst offenders’ – in effect this morning
Donald Trump’s trade tariffs on what he calls “the worst offenders” come into effect at 5am UK time, with China facing by far the biggest levy.
The US will hit Chinese imports with 104% tariffs, marking a significant trade escalation between the world’s two largest superpowers.
At a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Donald Trump “believes that China wants to make a deal with the US,” before saying: “It was a mistake for China to retaliate.
“When America is punched, he punches back harder.”
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White House announces 104% tariff on China
After Mr Trump announced sweeping levies last week – hitting some imported goods from China with 34% tariffs – Beijing officials responded with like-for-like measures.
The US president then piled on an extra 50% levy on China, taking the total to 104% unless it withdrew its retaliatory 34% tariff.
China’s commerce ministry said in turn that it would “fight to the end”, and its foreign ministry accused the US of “economic bullying” and “destabilising” the world’s economies.
‘Worst offender’ tariffs also in effect
Alongside China’s 104% tariff, roughly 60 countries – dubbed by the US president as the “worst offenders” – will also see levies come into effect today.
The EU will be hit with 20% tariffs, while countries like Vietnam and Cambodia see a 46% levy and 49% rate respectively.
The UK was not included on this list, and instead saw a “baseline”, worldwide 10% tariff on imported goods in effect from last Saturday.
At the weekend, Sir Keir Starmer promised the government was ready to “shelter British businesses from the storm”.
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What’s going on with the US and China?
Since the tariffs were announced last Wednesday, global stock markets have plummeted, with four days of steep losses for all three of the US’ major indexes.
As trading closed on Tuesday evening, the S&P 500 lost 1.49%, the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.15%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.84%.
According to LSEG data, S&P 500 companies have lost $5.8tn (£4.5tn) in stock market value since last Wednesday, the deepest four-day loss since the benchmark was created in the 1950s.
Global stock markets have been reeling since Trump’s tariff announcement last week. Pic: AP
Read more:
What China could do next as Trump’s tariff war ramps up
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Trump signs coal orders
Meanwhile, the US president signed four executive orders to boost American coal mining and production.
The directives order:
• keeping some coal plants that were set for retirement open;
• directing the interior secretary to “acknowledge the end” of an Obama-era moratorium that paused coal leasing on federal lands;
• requiring federal agencies to rescind policies transitioning the US away from coal production, and;
• directing the Department of Energy and other federal agencies to assess how coal energy can meet rising demand from artificial intelligence.
Read more:
The good, the bad and the ugly in Trump’s coal plans
At a White House ceremony, Mr Trump said the orders end his predecessor Joe Biden’s “war on beautiful clean coal,” and miners “will be put back to work”.
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