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In his workshop near the Syrian capital, Ghassan Aama is at a loss following a recent decision to massively hike electricity prices, even as much of the country continues to face extensive outages.Last month, the energy ministry raised prices by at least 60 times compared to the previous tariff, sending shockwaves through a population already reeling from decades of sanctions and 14 years of war.”We were surprised to see electricity prices rise, as our income is limited,” said Aama, a blacksmith.”If the bills are high, we might not be able to make ends meet,” he added.Aama already pays a subscription to a private generator so he can run his workshop — a common practice in the country’s whose electricity sector has been ravaged by the civil war, with power cuts reaching up to 20 hours a day.”We are coming out of a war, and our homes are destroyed… we were hoping things would get better, not worse,” he added.- Liberalisation -Since the toppling of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December, Syria has slowly begun to emerge from decades of political and economic isolation. The new Islamist authorities are hoping to attract funding and investments for reconstruction, which the World Bank estimated could cost more than $216 billion.The government’s decision to hike tariffs is part of a policy of liberalisation that the government seems to have adopted at the start of the year, said Jihad Yazigi, editor of economic publication The Syria Report.”What they are doing, basically, is just trying to cut costs and to remove subsidies,” he added.Contrary to what Assad claimed, Yazigi said the Syrian economy was “obviously not a socialist economy”. It was “relatively liberal… and here (they) are liberalising further”, he said, as they also lifted subsidies on bread earlier this year.- ‘No one will pay’ -But having born the brunt of the country’s crippled economy for years, Syrians are struggling to accept yet another blow. “After liberation, we expected people to return and reconstruction to take place quickly,” said Muhieddine Salam, a real estate agent.”Now, if rent is $200 and the electricity tariff is between $200 and $400, what will I do?”Vendor Alaa Mussa shared his frustration, arguing that “no one will pay, no one has the money”. “Let them turn the electricity off, it would be better,” she told AFP.”There are no jobs, and all factories are closed… (At first) everyone was happy, we thought money would start coming in, but no one expected this to happen.”Syria previously announced major investment agreements with countries in the region to rebuild infrastructure.It also announced major agreements with Qatar and Turkey to supply it with gas for electricity production.But these projects have yet to make a dent in the daily lives of Syrians.Nine out of 10 people in the country live in poverty, and one in four is unemployed, according to the United Nations.Many of them resort to informal, temporary jobs to survive, like Umm al-Zein, 43, who sells bread on the street.”I can barely afford to pay my son’s university tuition and my daughter’s private lessons for the high school exam,” she said.”The electricity barely comes on for an hour, and if the electricity doesn’t come, the water doesn’t come either.”We will be warming ourselves under blankets in the winter.”

A French-British investigation into alleged bribery at France-based defence giant Thales is examining a contract with Indonesia, an AFP investigation has showed.In November last year, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said it had launched a joint investigation with its French counterparts into “suspected bribery and corruption” at the multinational, which denies any wrongdoing.A 41-year-old management controller, who worked at the company between August 2018 and June 2023, was the whistleblower who alerted the authorities and caused the probe to be opened, according to two sources following the case who requested not to be named because not allowed to speak to the press.The former member of staff, who wishes to remain anonymous and who AFP reached through his lawyer, said he started asking colleagues questions after he noticed suspicious orders on the margins of big air defence deals with Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.He said that in late 2018 he noticed a curious payment order for a service worth £400,000 ($520,000 at today’s rate) on the sidelines of a deal between Thales UK and Indonesia.He said he grew suspicious when someone asked him for a retroactive approval of the order with incoherent documents produced after it was made, and reported this to his superiors.”The only thing I was told was to keep quiet,” he said.He alleged that months later, he noticed another £100,000 transferred to Saudi Arabia, where a contract had also been signed.He said he alerted colleagues in writing and orally, then via an internal complaint platform in 2022.He believes this is why he was fired.- Multiple probes -Thales told AFP the former employee only filed an internal complaint “several hours after being summoned to a meeting towards a possible dismissal for professional incompetence”.A team of in-house auditors led an internal probe and concluded that there were no grounds to his allegations, it said, adding however that it was cooperating with the British and French authorities.Neither the SFO nor the French financial prosecutor’s office wished to comment on an ongoing investigation.One source following the case said the Indonesian contract was being investigated in the joint probe.But no source confirmed or denied that any Saudi contract was also being examined.A judicial source, also wishing to remain anonymous, said the French investigators were looking at an “arms market” in Asia, without saying which country was involved.The French judiciary is looking into at least five other cases of alleged graft involving the defence firm.An investigating magistrate is investigating the sale of submarines to Malaysia in 2002 and could order a trial against parties including the firm.Four other preliminary probes, launched between 2016 and 2023, are looking at alleged corruption in places including Brazil, India and the United Nations. No charges have been pressed against Thales in those investigations.Thales told AFP the probes were ongoing and that it “strictly follows national and international regulation”.

An attack on a funeral in the strategic city of El-Obeid in Sudan’s central Kordofan region killed 40 people, the UN said Wednesday, as paramilitaries looked poised to launch an offensive there.The United Nations’ humanitarian office did not specify when the attack took place or who was behind it, but said that the situation in Kordofan was worsening.The war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, with the fighting spreading to new areas in recent days, sparking fears of an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the military since 2023, appears to have shifted its focus to Kordofan after capturing El-Fasher, the last army stronghold in the vast western Darfur region.”Local sources report that at least 40 civilians were killed and dozens injured yesterday in an attack on a funeral gathering in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan State,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said. “Once again, OCHA calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and for all parties to protect civilians and respect international humanitarian law.”El-Obeid is a logistics and command hub that links Darfur to the Sudanese capital Khartoum. The RSF claimed control of Bara, a city north of El-Obeid, last week.- Mass rape -People forced to flee El-Fasher have described horrific abuse, including rape, at the hands of the RSF.”The rapes were gang rapes. Mass rape in public, rape in front of everyone and no one could stop it,” mother of four Amira said from a makeshift shelter in Tawila, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) west of El-Fasher.”You’d be asleep and they’d come and rape you,” she said, using a pseudonym while speaking during a webinar organised by campaign group Avaaz. “I saw with my own eyes people who couldn’t afford to pay (for safe passage) and the fighters took their daughters instead.”Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab released close-up satellite images showing evidence of atrocities committed during the RSF’s takeover of El-Fasher. The lab’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, told AFP in an interview that the images were “a spark plug for public outrage”. Both sides in the war have been accused of committing atrocities.The fall of El-Fasher gave paramilitaries control over all five state capitals in Darfur, raising fears that Sudan would effectively be partitioned along an east-west axis.The RSF now dominates Darfur and parts of the south, while the army holds the north, east and central regions along the Nile and Red Sea.The UAE is accused by the UN of supplying arms to the RSF — allegations it has repeatedly denied.Abu Dhabi on Wednesday voiced its support for a ceasefire and its “deep denunciation of the ongoing human rights violations and horrific crimes being committed against civilians in various parts of Sudan”, including El-Fasher.The Sudanese army, meanwhile, has received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, according to observers.- Truce proposal -Sudan’s army-backed defence minister on Tuesday said the military would press on with its fight against the RSF after an internal meeting to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire.”We thank the Trump administration for its efforts and proposals to achieve peace,” Hassan Kabroun said in a speech broadcast on state television, but added that “preparations for the Sudanese people’s battle are ongoing”.No details of the US truce proposal have been made public.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday that Washington wanted “to see this conflict come to a peaceful end”, but added “it’s a very complicated situation on the ground right now”.She said the United States was “actively engaged” in seeking a peace deal alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.The army-aligned authorities had rejected an earlier truce proposal from the four countries — referred to as the Quad — under which both the army and the RSF would be excluded from a transitional political process.Speaking at a forum in Qatar on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the warring parties to “come to the negotiating table, bring an end to this nightmare of violence — now”. 

Iran since the Islamic revolution has employed the tactic of arresting Westerners in a bid to extract concessions from its foes, in a strategy of “hostage diplomacy” that has long presented Europe and the United States with a dilemma, observers say.Iranian authorities this week released two French nationals, Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris, from jail in Tehran after more than three years. They had been convicted on charges of espionage but their families said they were innocent tourists unwittingly caught up in a wider game being played out between Tehran and the West.France described the pair, as well as several other French nationals detained in Iran who were recently released, as “state hostages”. Over the last years, dozens of Europeans and Americans have been detained in similar circumstances.The strategy has long antecedents, going back to the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 by Islamist radicals in the wake of the revolution, which saw dozens of Americans held for 444 days into early 1981. “Iran has pursued hostage diplomacy since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979,” said Jason Brodsky, policy director of US-based think tank United Against Nuclear Iran. “It uses hostages as pawns to extract concessions that it could not otherwise achieve from the United States and its allies,” he added.The Islamic republic denies it has any strategy of hostage taking and all foreigners jailed are convicted after due legal process.- ‘Not the only ones’ -Such concessions include unfreezing assets or the release of Iranian nationals convicted in the United States, Europe and elsewhere on charges such as sanctions violations, assassination plots, or terrorism, he said.”What the Iranian regime is practising is state-sponsored hostage taking, also known as hostage diplomacy,” added Daren Nair, a security consultant who has for years campaigned for detainees’ releases worldwide.”And the Iranian regime are not the only ones to do that. The Venezuelans do it, the Russians do it, the Chinese do it,” he added.For Clement Therme, an academic at France’s Universite de Montpellier Paul-Valery, who closely follows the issue, the policy is “a pillar of Iranian foreign policy”.”Over time, there are arrests and releases, during periods of rapprochement and tension. But it’s the intensity that varies, and the practice continues.”The release of Kohler and Paris, who have yet to be allowed to return to France, came after France freed on bail Iranian woman Mahdieh Esfandiari, detained in Paris on charges of spreading terror propaganda. Tehran had explicitly linked the two cases, although the French foreign ministry has declined to comment on any deal.- ‘Piecemeal manner’ -The release of Western nationals detained in similar circumstances over the last years was often timed with Tehran receiving something in return after painstaking and ultra-secret diplomacy.The cases of several British citizens, including dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, were linked to a payment owed by the UK to Iran for tanks ordered by the ousted shah that were never delivered. That debt was eventually settled and Zaghari-Ratcliffe and two other Britons were released in 2022.In 2023, five Americans held in Iran, including the US-Iranian businessman Siamak Namazi who had been imprisoned for eight years, were released in a scheme that saw $6 billion of Iranian assets unfrozen in South Korea.The release of British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert by Iran in 2020 came after Thailand freed three Iranian men jailed over a 2012 bomb plot. But despite the recent releases, others remain held by Tehran, including Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali, sentenced to death in 2017 on espionage charges his family vehemently rejects.British couple Lindsay and Craig Foreman have been held in Iran since January on espionage charges after Iranian authorities seized the pair while they were on a round-the-world motorbike trip.Brodsky said Europe and the United States should consider imposing a wholesale ban on travel to Iran by their nationals. But he acknowledged too that Washington and its allies had treated “this problem in a piecemeal manner” for too long.”The US government should be working collectively with its allies to impose a range of multinational penalties on the Islamic Republic the moment any hostage from these countries is taken by the Iranian regime — this includes sanctions and diplomatic isolation,” he said.