Global News Podcast - Syrian rebels continue their rapid advance

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

In Syria, Islamist-led rebels continue their rapid advance. The UN says 300,000 have fled their homes as rebels reach the outskirts of Homs. Also: Romania will rerun its election, and how to survive a polar bear attack.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If Hitler isn't defeated, it's the end of the free world. Purple Heart Warriors, listen now by searching for dramas wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson. At 1300hrs GMT on Friday the 6th of December, these are our main stories. In Syria, Islamist-led rebels continue their rapid advance. The UN says hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced with the rebels on the outskirts of the city of Homs.

Romania's top court has annulled the results of the first round of the presidential election, saying the whole process must be rerun. Also in this podcast, we're in Ghana, where the cost of living dominates voters' concerns ahead of the general election on Saturday. Everything has increased in price. The increase is too much. It's really affecting us but we have to live to survive so we have to manage it. And how to react to a polar bear on the attack.

Almost 14 years after civil war broke out in Syria, it's taken just nine days for Islamist rebels to turn the country upside down. They've already captured the country's second city Aleppo and further south, Hama, where a statue of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, the father of President Bashar al-Assad, has been torn down. As we record this podcast, the rebels have reported have advanced a further 70 kilometres closer to the capital Damascus than are on the outskirts of another big city, Homs. Thousands of people have fled the city.

Images posted on social media show people celebrating as a convoy of rebel vehicles drives through a town 10 kilometres from Homs. The leader of the rebel group, HTSM or Hayat Tari' al-Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Jilani, told CNN that its goal is the end of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the government elites. The seeds of the regime's defeat have always been within it. It has been effectively dead since that time. However, the Iranians attempted to revive the regime, buying it time, and later the

Russians also tried to prop it up. But the truth remains, this regime is dead. Civilians caught in the middle continue to bear the brunt of the conflict, with the UN saying 300,000 people have been displaced since the fighting escalated just over a week ago and that number is only going to rise. Salma Abdul Jabbar is the head of emergency coordination at the World Food Programme. So in the first few hours after the 27th of November we saw that the number went up from 48,000 to almost 280,000 people who got displaced so far.

And if the situation continues evolving in that pace, we're expecting collectively around 1.5 million people that will be displaced and will be requiring our support. Our correspondent Barbara Blatt-Hasher is in the Lebanese capital Beirut. The latest that we're hearing is the rebels operations room saying that they are advancing very quickly from Hama south to Homs which is Syria's third largest city so they're reporting that they have already passed through two towns along the way where we had been hearing that the army had been preparing defenses and that they are now about five kilometers from Homs they

have released video footage on their channels showing them in a town that is close to Homs or appearing to show them that. We have not been able to verify that, but the main war monitor has been saying the same thing that they are quite close to Homs. So they're advancing apparently at an extraordinary speed, which suggests they're not facing much resistance. We understood that the Russian Air Force which which backs the Syrian regime had carried out several airstrikes on a bridge in a town that

is on the road hoping to slow the advance but if the reports were hearing are correct it has not done so. If the rebels capture Homs that would effectively cut off Damascus from President Assad's Alawite heartland that's on the Syrian coast. So how significant is that? That is significant because that is his political stronghold and Homs is really the main, maybe the only route to get to the coast because you come up north from Damascus, then when you reach Homs

you are able to turn towards the coast and get to this area which has been essentially untouched by the civil war which is the heartland for the minority Alawite population from which Bashar al-Assad comes and which also hosts a Russian naval base. So cutting that off would be a big blow to Bashar al-Assad, to the strength that he still has and to the perception of his regime, I should think also. The other would be, of course, if the rebels capture Homs and then head south to Damascus, which is, is of course the capital and really the heart of the regime's power. Barbara Platt-Ossher. I got more details from our Arab Affairs Analyst, Sebastian Ossher.

You would have thought if the Syrian army is going to put up a fight now is the time but the issue is whether they actually have that ability. I mean we know from way back in the war that the Syrian army wasn't up to it. It was overstretched. It was under-equipped, very bad morale. And it depended on outside forces. It depended on the Russian bombardments. It depended on Iranian-linked militias. And those just don't seem to be in the same kind of intensity that we saw then, whether this is the moment that Russia will feel that whatever it can do, it will attempt. We heard again from Barbara trying to hit a bridge that is strategic. But what we are likely to see if Russia and Iran really want to support President Assad in a military sense rather than perhaps diplomatically is the kind of

horrific war of attrition that we saw over Aleppo that we saw in Homs where whole districts are reduced to rubble and the cost in civilian lives isn't really taken into account. I think that's why people are fleeing Homs because they fear they're going to get caught up into that kind of conflict. This would be the moment but all the indications are for now the Syrian army still isn't up to it. So tell us about the rebels. What do they want and what are they offering the people of Syria? I mean what they want is interesting because they hadn't really as far as I could see expressed a wider wish beyond Idlib, where they had been building up their control, they'd been administering the place, essentially

making it a power base, but also a showcase for what they wanted to bring. I mean, HTS, the main rebel faction leading this, was an offshoot of al-Qaeda. It broke publicly with al-Qaeda back in 2016, but still suspicions that it was essentially with them still. And whether its ideology was still that very zero-sum fundamentalist jihadist ideology is a big question. Now they've been saying its leader, Mohammed Abu Al-Jalani, has been saying, no, that's not what we want to do. We don't want to impose this. We do want a state that is run by Islamic law if we were to take power. We do want, he was saying just this morning in an interview he gave to CNN that he does want to topple President Assad. Whether that was

their initial goal when this started or the momentum has carried them away that this now seems possible I think is a big question. And even if you do topple President Assad, it doesn't leave you in control of the whole of Syria. There are other groups obviously in the east, the Kurds, in the very north you have a Turkish-backed militia there. You have other factions around. ISIS is liable to take advantage of this. That terrible complexity and instability of Syria is still there and this is bringing it back out into the open. Sebastian Ascher. Romania's Constitutional Court has ruled that the country's presidential election

must be rerun just two days before the second round was due to take place. It's annulled the results of the first round. That was won by a far-right, alternatious candidate, Carlin Gheorghescu, in a surprise result. Recent opinion polls suggest he was the favourite to beat his pro-EU rival in Sunday's run-off. Sarah Ainswood reports. This is a shock ruling by Romania's Constitutional Court but it comes after two weeks of high political tension here. The judges have annulled the entire

presidential election which will now have to be rerun from scratch including campaigning. This is all after a candidate from the far-right fringe of Romanian politics, Calin Gheorgheescu, won the first round of voting two weeks ago. He was almost totally unknown and only campaigned on TikTok. Then documents from Romania's intelligence agencies revealed what they called a massive external operation on TikTok to warp the vote in his favour. Suspicions have focused firmly on Russia. This week Mr Gheorghescu denied to the BBC that he was Moscow's man. He claimed the political establishment here

couldn't cope with his success and was trying to block him. The government, which hasn't been formed yet after a parliamentary election last week, will have to name the date for a new presidential vote. But the country is now in totally new territory politically and no one is quite sure what comes next. Sarah Ainsford. South Korea is still in limbo waiting for Saturday night's vote on a motion to impeach the president after he unexpectedly declared martial law on Tuesday and then went back on his decision just six hours later.

Opposition MPs have spent the time since then trying to secure enough votes from the governing party to back his removal. So far the head of the governing party says he supports impeachment but other members have said they don't. The opposition needs to find at least eight governing party members to pass the vote. With the latest here's our correspondent Laura Bicker, who's outside Parliament in South Korea. So this is the third day of protests and as usual in Korea it turns into a bit of a party atmosphere, but they are growing in size. They are once again calling for his impeachment, and in the next 24 hours a vote will be held in the National Assembly, which is just a few hundred metres from here.

Now today we've heard some extraordinary accounts of the night that he declared martial law. We have heard from the leader of his own party who said that he had to be removed for the safety of the Republic of Korea. He said that he'd seen new evidence that President Yun had planned to round up the members of parliament and have them detained in a prison. We've also heard from the intelligence services that President Yun had given orders to round up the members of parliament to tie up loose ends. Now this relates to the fact that this is a president who is desperately trying to grip on to power, deeply unpopular and struggling to gain the

support of his own party. It does seem, given the evidence that we've heard, that he wanted to somehow use martial law to overrule his own national assembly. So what we're seeing over the last few hours is a buildup of pressure on the president himself. But he is showing no signs that he wishes to resign. Earlier, there were rumors within the National Assembly that he was going to come, going to apologize, and going to resign. At that time, the members of Parliament

were locked in the door, linked arms, calling again for him to be impeached. He did not show up. There is no sign so far that he's even going to speak publicly. Meanwhile, the number of people who are coming out to try to call for him to be removed is increasing, and we are expecting these crowds to grow in the next 24 hours ahead of that impeachment vote. Laura Bicca. The ongoing civil war in Sudan is often called a forgotten war but it's fuelling the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Millions of people are displaced and many thousands are at risk of famine. Nowhere in the country is this worse than in the western region of Darfur

where the rapid support forces, a paramilitary group fighting the army for control of the country, has been targeting non-Arab communities. It's been nearly impossible for aid workers or journalists to get into Darfur. One of the main aid organisations in the country is Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, and its Secretary General, Christopher Lockhear, has just arrived in Darfur. From the city of Al-Juneina he spoke to Victoria Owankunda. Sudan is probably facing one of the most devastating humanitarian crises that the world has seen for decades. You mentioned the

displacement that's 11 million people or one in five Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes and you mentioned the hunger situation, that's more than half the population facing acute hunger at the moment throughout Sudan. And there's been a decimation of the health service and a strangulation of humanitarian supplies. I saw some of this firsthand yesterday in the hospital in El Janina. I've seen a boy who'd been shot in the jaw and had undergone reconstructive surgery in a hospital that was lacking in supplies. I've seen premature babies on oxygen who just two days ago were introduced to the world with a traumatic birth. A hospital fully reliant on humanitarian medical supplies as the health

facilities in Darfur are administratively and politically cut off from the state system. What we're seeing is a global humanitarian failure and at the same time there are huge areas in Sudan which we or other humanitarian actors don't have access to. For example, there is the Zamzam camp near Al-Fasha where we're running a hospital despite it being under siege, but the acute lack of food and medicines because of, in this case, the rapid support forces preventing supplies coming in, and despite a declaration of famine in this camp back in August, we are forced to focus our treatment on children who are at the greatest risk of death. And we've had to reduce our services,

including stopping outpatient care to 5,000 children, including thousands of whom are malnourished. So it's a complex patchwork. There are areas in which there is access, and we need to massively scale up and there are areas of the country which is hugely unserved and hugely worrying. The sound of Finland. the BBC World Service. I'm Katie Watson in the Cook Islands where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get to your BBC podcasts.

Economic questions, especially the rising cost of living, have topped people's concerns in Ghana ahead of general elections in the country on Saturday. Nearly 19 million voters will be choosing the next president and MPs. At the end of 2022, the annual inflation rate hit 54%. It's come down since then, but prices are still rising steeply. Poor prices are up and you have to work very hard for it. Somebody in Ghana will say it's not filling the heats, containing inflation or the price of each. No, no, no, everybody will feel it.

Everything has increased in price. The increase is too much. It's really affecting us, but we have to live to survive, so then we have to manage it. For now, the business has gone down. There's no job. There's no job. So, like, for example, if my husband didn't go to work, so he will not get money, how will he give me? So, it means I can go to markets and buy some little things. Kumasi is Ghana's commercial capital and there's one area that is a hive activity with a reputation that goes well beyond Ghana's borders.

The place is called Suami Magazine and it's home to a vast array of garages and foundries. It's so big, in fact, that local authorities think there might be more than 200,000 people working there. The BBC's James Copenal went to find out what they want from a new government. ["The Bells of the New World"] Welcome to a place unlike any I've seen before. This is Swami Magazine.

It's a place where clapped out old cars from Europe and elsewhere come, not to die, but to be reborn. The mechanics here strip the cars and use the parts to repair other vehicles. It's a vast, sprawling, noisy place. And luckily, we have a guide from the Ghana National Association of Garages. Just introduce yourself.

Yes, my name is Daniel Mbabuguri. So people, when they have a problem with a car, they come here to get it fixed, right? But is it just people from Kumasi coming, or people come from elsewhere in Ghana, even further afield? No, in West Africa, Togo, Beni, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Africa, Togo, Beni, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Mali, and Burkina Fashu, all of them come here. Suame magazine is an industrial hub whereby every car, type of a car, from every country

can be repaired in Suame magazine. Tell me your name. My name is Master Musa Malik. I'm a mechanic doing service in heavy trucks. Is it hard work right now? Yeah, you know everywhere is hard. So we don't have any help from anywhere. Even me, I'm a master myself and I have more than 40 something apprentices they are working with me. But I don't have any help from anywhere. I'm just managing with them how they're going

to get their food, their chop money, everything is from me. So that's that once make it hard to me. We have a election coming up on Saturday of course. Ghana's new president, whoever it is, what could they do to help you and the to me. We have an election coming up on Saturday, of course. Ghana's new president, whoever it is, what could they do to help you and the people who work here? We can manufacture more things, because the knowledge is here. So we ask them to come to Herpa so that we can manufacture the parts we are using here. If we are manufacturing it here in Ghana, it will help the economy.

So that's why we are miliflated, it's here Ghana. It will help the economy. So that's how we are telling them. Are you proud to work here in Suwami magazine? Yes. Daniel, this is quite a strong smell we can get here. Where are we now? Here is a car sprayer area where they spray cars. Oh, so it's the smell of the paint we're getting. So there's chemicals that they use to spray the car.

It's what we are now feeling. Is that bad for people's health, the people who work here? Yes, it has health effect because when you breathe in the chemicals, unprotected, it can affect your health. So we are appealing the government that they should give us a vast place so that we'll be able to relocate, so that we can group ourselves, so that when we are working it will not affect the entire community or the people in that area. My name is Idris Abdaleganyu.

You do foundry work here? Yes, we do foundry. It's quite a difficult time economically in Ghana right now. Lots of people complaining about high prices. In fact, in fact, that one we can't talk about now. I feel like crying. We are dying. In terms of inflation, Ghana here, we are dying.

It's that bad? It's very, very bad. There are elections on Saturday. Whoever wins, do you think they can make a difference to your life, make things better here? If I'm to get opportunity to face government today, what I would say is let his mind come to youth. Youth, we are suffering. The young people of Ghana. The young people of Ghana, we are suffering. There are obviously lots of people working here as mechanics, as apprentices, but are there also, do you see people who try and go to Europe, try and migrate,

just feel that there is no hope for them here in Ghana? I'm here today if I get the opportunity, by tomorrow you'll see me in Ghana. Idris, ending that report from James Copnell. Now to India, where a Muslim couple have been hounded out of their new home by Hindu neighbours in an upmarket residential block in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Activists say discrimination against minority communities, especially Muslims, has become common in many Indian cities. I heard more from our South Asia regional editor, Anbarasan Etharajan.

This happened in the city of Muradabad, about 165 kilometres from the capital Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Now, the original owner of this villa or an independent house in a gated community, so he was telling that he was a doctor and he knew a fellow doctor, both of them are working for nearly 40 years, their families knew each other and he decided to sell his house to his friend, a Muslim doctor. And then somehow the neighbours came to know about it and then there was a protest on Tuesday night and this video went viral on social media saying, you know, we cannot tolerate

a Muslim family living right in front of our local temple. This is also a question of the safety of our women. So this was like, you know, outrageous comments by these women. It went viral. And after all this controversy, then the Muslim couple decided to sell the flat to another person, another Hindu, because they didn't want to live there anymore because it would cause a lot of uneasiness for them and as well as for the neighbors.

But this has also triggered a wave of anger on social media in India and people talking about what happened to our tolerance, what happened to the legal procedures, because there is nothing in the law which says that a particular religious community person cannot buy a house in any particular locality. So this is what people are talking about, the wider issue of what is happening to minority communities in India. How difficult is it to be a Muslim in India now? I have my friends saying that how difficult it is for them to find a house in Delhi especially if you're from the northern Indian administered part of Kashmir.

People are saying you know the owners will not talk to you, the brokers will not even take to you, the estate agents won't even show you houses. But it is a broader problem. It's not simply about common people. A very famous actor called Imran Hashmi, he filed a complaint in 2009 after the housing society blocked his purchase of a flat. This comes in the wake of a number of reported attacks on Muslims for carrying beef because Hindus consider cows as sacred. And also about lynchings a number of people were killed.

So now Muslim community leaders feel that they are being treated like a second great citizen especially after the Hindu nationalist, the BJP government came into power after Mr. Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. But the BJP and supporters of Mr. Modi, they strongly deny these charges. But you see the reports of how Muslims are being ill-treated every now and then on social media and it is going to have a huge impact on the social fabric of the country in the long term. And Barisan Ehtherajan.

A Boeing plea deal intended to resolve a case related to two fatal crashes of its 737 Max planes back in 2018 and 2019 has been rejected by a US judge. Judge O'Connor criticised Boeing's decision to consider race in the hiring of an independent monitor to assess compliance, which was part of the plea deal. Boeing has 30 days to respond to the ruling. The US Department of Justice said it was reviewing the decision. Our business correspondent Marika Oye has the details. In somewhat of a victory for those family members of the 346 people who were killed

in those two fatal crashes, a US judge has basically rejected a plea deal that Boeing made with the US government in which basically they had managed to avoid criminal persecution by facing independent monitoring and by paying just over $200 million in fine. Now, the family members had called this plea deal as a get out of jail free card for Boeing and they have been fighting back ever since. In the court ruling, the judge actually agreed with those family members, pointing out that the proposed agreement didn't actually require Boeing to comply with the monitor's

recommendations and also gave the companies a say in selecting a candidate. He also described the diversity requirements for hiring the monitor contradictory. So somewhat of a victory for family members of those victims. Marika Oy, to Canada now where a man who leapt on a polar bear to save his wife is expected to recover despite suffering serious injuries all over his body. The couple were outside their home in a First Nations community in northern Ontario. Stephanie Prentice told me more. Well Val, this all happened in a small remote community around 400 people in Fort Seven First Nation and this was a couple who went out on their driveway in the dark, they were looking for their dogs, they were completely taken by surprise by

this bear. Now local police have been keeping us updated, they said the bear lunged at the woman, she fell to the ground and her husband then leapt on the bear, that's the words they used, and it began attacking him instead. He seriously injured his arms as well as his legs. Now a neighbour heard their screaming and arrived on the scene and did shoot the bear several times. That did make it run away and police did later find it dead in the woods nearby. Now polar bear attacks are pretty rare, aren't they? But that's changing, isn't it? Is that driven by climate change? It absolutely is. They're rare because normally the bears are far from human settlements. They

spend their time at sea, they're hunting out there. Climate change, as we know and we have been warned about in this instance, it's led to temperature fluctuations breaking up of that polar ice and in some cases bears coming inland to look for food. Now experts do tend to say if a bear does attack humans that bear could be hungry, that bear could be in ill health but with that degradation of their natural habitats of course these instances will undeniably increase. I hope it's not going to happen on my shift this morning but what do experts say people should do if faced with a polar bear or indeed any bear or is that different? What about a polar bear?

It really is so while fighting a polar bear really probably seems to many like an impossible prospect, we have been hearing from scientists at Polar Bear International what they've said is the couple did the right thing. A strategy of playing dead or making noise if surprised by a bear doesn't apply to polar bears. Brown bears, yes, grizzly bears sometimes. So there's a woman called Alyssa McCall. She does work at Polar Bear International. She's been speaking out and she said if you are attacked by a polar bear definitely do not play dead and she added fight as long as you can. So that's what we saw happen here and thankfully that was

effective. Stephanie Prentice. Finland has become the world's first country to launch a national soundscape. The aim of the 15-part composition is to convey impressions of northern space, of nature and life. Mr. Pocco has been listening to the sounds of his native country. The music starts in the forest with birdsong in the background and then sweeps over the country from the rocky islands of the Baltic to favorite spots for picking berries and mushrooms in lush groves. The music is minimal, pared down and unhurried, and uses a wide range of instruments from cellos and pianos to the cantele, the Finnish zither. The composer, Lauri Porra, said he wanted his work to reflect the way the Nordic world gave you space and time to think, experience, and just be in a way more hectic international environments

don't. Risto Poco. And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod.

This edition was mixed by Chris Kazaris. The producer was Marion Straughan. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Cook Islands, where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.