A statement issued by the United Nations report on Tuesday cites Alena Douhan, the UN’s ‘special rapporteur on the negative impacts of unilateral coercive measures on human rights’, who expressed concern that the sanctions imposed on Bashar al-Assad’s regime under the Caesar Act “risk exacerbating the already dire humanitarian situation in Syria, especially in the course of COVID-19 pandemic, and put Syrians at even greater risk of rights violations.”

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has claimed that Qassem Soleimani, the late head of Iran’s Quds Force, was responsible for convincing Russia to intervene militarily in Syria.

Ten prominent free Syrian political figures have sent a letter to Dominic Raab, the United Kingdom’s First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, urging him to impose sanctions on the regime of Bashar al-Assad, just as the United States did with the “Caesar Act” to protect the civilian population in Syria.

The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) has quoted a number of families of Palestinian victims of torture killed in Assad regime prisons as stating that regime security personnel forced them to sign forged reports and death certificates issued by the infamous Tishreen Military Hospital claiming that their family members had died as a result of a ‘heart attack’.

Media in Deir Ezzor province have reported that Iran’s so-called ‘Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) has been disposing of unidentified bodies in unmarked graves near the village of Al-Suwayyah, with the report stating that numerous bodies have been secretly buried in this way in the desert areas in the province.

The Assad regime has submitted an official complaint to the United Nations Security Council over a visit in October by a delegation of American officials, headed by the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (‘Rojava’), insisting that this is a “violation of sovereignty”, although it’s not the first such visit by American and other Western delegations to the area, which is under the control of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

A senior member of the Syrian Civil Defense rescue and medical aid group that operates in opposition-held areas, known as the White Helmets, has been flown to Germany, a German diplomat said Tuesday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to be quoted by name, the official confirmed a report by German weekly Der Spiegel that Khaled al-Saleh and his family had arrived in Germany.

Der Spiegel reported that al-Saleh was flown out of Jordan by a German air force plane late on Monday.

Photo: A scene from Idlib following Russia's and Assad's 'weapons tests'

Article from 'Syrian TV' news site. Original (in Arabic) below

A senior Russian military official has announced that Russian forces have successfully used Kalashnikov drones in Syria, the latest of a long series of weapons to be ‘tested’ in Syria by Moscow mostly against Syrian civilians, as documented by local and international human rights networks.

Prosecutors in Belarus are reportedly considering whether to bring terrorism charges against several protesters for crimes allegedly committed during the recent demonstrations against the country's Kremlin-backed dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

During an appearance on the state-owned Belarus 1 channel on Wednesday, Belarusian Prosecutor General Andrey Shved said, "There is a war going on, which over the past few weeks, has taken on radical forms - extremely radical."

A Danish court on Friday found a Norwegian citizen guilty of spying for an Iranian intelligence service and of complicity in a suspected plot to kill an Iranian Arab opposition figure in Denmark.