Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a Syrian truce deal with Druze militants, a secret British relocation scheme for Afghansand a deadly stampede at a Gaza food distribution site.
Sectarian Violence
Syrian officials and leaders of the Druze religious minority announced a cease-fire deal on Wednesday to end days of deadly clashes in the southern Syrian city of Suwayda. The announcement came just hours after Israeli forces launched a slew of strikes on Syrian military and government infrastructure to demand that Damascus withdraw from Suwayda or else risk further attack.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a Syrian truce deal with Druze militants, a secret British relocation scheme for Afghansand a deadly stampede at a Gaza food distribution site.
Sectarian Violence
Syrian officials and leaders of the Druze religious minority announced a cease-fire deal on Wednesday to end days of deadly clashes in the southern Syrian city of Suwayda. The announcement came just hours after Israeli forces launched a slew of strikes on Syrian military and government infrastructure to demand that Damascus withdraw from Suwayda or else risk further attack.
Clashes initially worsened on Monday, when Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa deployed security forces to Suwayda to break up fighting between Druze and Bedouin militants, who have a long history of animosity. But the conflict quickly spiraled out of control when government troops joined the fray. According to local officials, at least 50 people have been killed thus far.
Israel—arguing that it is under pressure from its own substantial Druze community to halt the attacks—has also carried out strikes near Syria’s presidential palace and on its military headquarters in Damascus, the latter of which killed at least three people and injured 34 others. Israeli forces also launched attacks on targets in southern Syria, and the office of the Israeli prime minister unilaterally declared a demilitarization zone within Syria that “prohibits the introduction of forces and weapons into southern Syria.” Damascus does not recognize this zone.
The Israel Defense Forces “will continue to attack regime forces until they withdraw from the area [the demilitarization zone]—and will also soon raise the bar of responses against the regime if the message is not understood,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Wednesday.
Israel’s operation comes as the country is seeking to improve relations with its Arab neighbors, and as the United States has been working to facilitate talks between Syria and Israel toward that end. However, such an outcome now seems less likely as a result of Israel’s military actions, which Damascus has condemned.
“Syria holds Israel fully responsible for this dangerous escalation and its consequences, and [it] affirms that it retains its legitimate rights to defend its land and people,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, calling the escalation “treacherous Israeli aggression.”
Sharaa has struggled to maintain his tenuous grip on power since leading a rebel offensive last December that ousted longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad and ended Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war. Outbreaks of sectarian violence have largely undermined his authority since then, including deadly clashes in March between government troops and the minority Alawite sect, much of which was loyal to Assad, as well as fighting in April between pro-government forces and Druze militants.
Sectarian violence poses “a direct threat to efforts to help build a peaceful and stable Syria,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on Wednesday. An initial Syria-Druze truce deal announced late Tuesday collapsed within hours of its declaration. But authorities hope that Wednesday’s agreement—which will see state forces withdraw from Suwayda, local residents establish regional checkpoints, and an investigative committee examine the violence—will help quell the fighting and prevent Damascus from sliding into a wider regional conflict.
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What We’re Following
Secret relocation scheme. A massive British data leak more than three years ago forced London to secretly relocate thousands of Afghans to the United Kingdom; the breach was publicly revealed on Tuesday after a British court lifted a gag order. The incident marked one of the worst data breaches in the country’s history, as it endangered the lives of thousands of Afghans and cost the British government roughly $2.7 billion.
In early 2022, a British official accidentally leaked a spreadsheet containing details of Afghans who had worked for the British government prior to the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. The data contained the personal information of around 18,700 Afghans and their families who were applying for relocation to the United Kingdom. Two years later, the British Defense Ministry discovered that part of the spreadsheet had been posted to Facebook.
In an effort to keep the breach hidden, a British court granted a superinjunction on the leak, and in April 2024, London set up a secret relocation scheme to prioritize those on the spreadsheet facing the highest risk of reprisal from the Taliban. Around 900 Afghans and 3,600 of their family members were relocated to the United Kingdom via this program, according to British Defense Minister John Healey. More than 16,000 affected by the leak had been moved to the United Kingdom as of May.
“Death traps” in Gaza. At least 20 Palestinians were killed in a stampede on Wednesday while trying to access food at an aid distribution site near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, according to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israeli- and U.S.-backed organization responsible for delivering food to civilians in the territory.
The GHF accused armed individuals “affiliated with Hamas” of fomenting unrest within the crowd and sparking the crush. Hamas denied involvement. According to the GHF, 19 people died from being crushed, and one individual was fatally stabbed in the crowd.
However, the Gaza Health Ministry cited conflicting fatality numberswith local authorities saying the death toll from the stampede ranged from 15 people to 21 people.
Around 875 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food in Gaza since late May, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday. Of those, roughly 674 people have been killed while en route to GHF sites. Most of those deaths have been blamed on shootings by Israeli forces. The Israeli military has denied responsibility in many of the cases, though it has acknowledged that some Palestinians have been harmed near the aid centers and said its forces have since been given new instructions with “lessons learned.”
On Wednesday, the Gaza Health Ministry called the GHF sites “death traps” and accused Israel and the United States of “deliberately committing massacres in a systematic manner and using various methods against the starving people.” Israel declined to comment on the most recent incident.
Third-country deportations. The United States has sent five migrants to the southern African country of Eswatini as part of Washington’s third-country deportation program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday. Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a series of posts on X that the five men—whom she said are citizens of Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen—had been convicted of crimes including gang activity, robbery, murder, and child rape, and she described them as “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.” She included the men’s mugshots and listed their apparent criminal convictions in her posts, but she did not provide their names.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration to allow third-country deportations to continue, marking a major win for the White House, which had already sent hundreds of migrants to El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica. Since then, Washington has also transported eight individuals to South Sudan and revealed that it is in talks with Rwanda to strike a similar deal.
“If there is a significant public threat or national security threat—there’s one thing for sure—they’re not walking the streets of this country,” U.S. border tsar Tom Homan said on Friday, adding, “We’ll find a third, safe nation to send them to, and we’re doing it.” U.S. President Donald Trump discussed migration concerns with the leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal last week, though no third-country deportation agreements were formally struck.
Odds and Ends
While Pompeii may be most famous for the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., the ancient Roman city was also a hub for art, particularly of the romantic variety. On Tuesday, German authorities returned to Italian officials an erotic mosaic stolen from the ancient city by a Nazi officer more than 80 years ago. Art experts say that the mosaic represents a cultural turning point for the time period, as it depicts ordinary intimacy (in this case, a woman leaning over a man reclining in bed) rather than a heroic myth. “Here we see a new theme, the routine of domestic love,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the Pompeii archaeological park, though he added that the male figure “seems almost a little bored.”
