Abu Shadi stood in front of the Ras Al Aamood checkpoint with a blanket around his shoulders. He looked with tears in his eyes at the then rebel-held Barada valley from where he had just walked. Behind him was a blue ceramic wall with portraits of Bashar Al Assad and his father Hafez surrounded by the Syrian and Baath party flags. “We are back inside Assad’s barn now”, the 67-year-old retired army colonel thought.
Abu Shadi was forced to cross into government-held territory earlier this month after conditions became unbearable inside Wadi Barada, an area north-west of Damascus. The piece of territory had been held by rebels since 2012 before it was finally captured by regime forces on Sunday.
The loss of the wadi, the main water source for the Syrian capital, is a huge blow for the rebels after they were driven from their last stronghold in Aleppo last month. That victory allowed government troops and Hizbollah to turn their attention to the valley and, after more than a month of fighting, they took control of the main water pumping station at Ain Al Fijeh on Saturday.
The following day, the Syrian military said they had taken the whole of Wadi Barada.
“Units of our armed forces, together with ... allied forces have achieved their mission in returning security and stability” to the area, the military said.
Under a deal with the authorities, rebels can choose to stay in the area but hand over their weapons, or leave for the northern province of Idlib, the last major bastion of the armed opposition.
The fighting and the damage to the pumping station caused acute water shortages in Damascus. Meanwhile the suffering of the people inside the rebel-held area, once a picturesque tourist attraction drawing visitors from across Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf, deepened further.
Around 100,000 civilians in Wadi Barada – including tens of thousands who had arrived from other besieged communities – have been suffering from severe shortages of food, water and heating gas.
Escape from the valley
Earlier this month, Abu Shadi was trying to get his wife, their daughter-in-law and her newborn baby, out of the valley through the Ras Al Aamood army checkpoint, one of three that sealed off roads to the valley.
He needed a well-connected official to take money and let him and his family move out. The task was made more difficult by the lack of telephone and mobile networks in the valley. When the assault started, the Syrian army and Hizbollah targeted basic infrastructure, including telecommunications and health centres.
He finally managed to bribe an army officer at a checkpoint with 750,000 Syrian pounds (Dh13,000) with the help of a member of the local National Reconciliation Committee – one of many the regime set up across Syria to foster talks in a six-year conflict that has killed more than 500,000 people. Abu Shadi felt humiliated while giving money to the official whom, he said, is in fact a property commissioner who participated in stealing villagers’ lands.
“I have never bribed,” he said. “But I had to buy the life of my family. There is nothing left inside the valley while bombing and the shelling is non-stop.”
The family walked 6 kilometres to reach the Ras Al Aamood check point. It was painful for Abu Shadi to leave his home and the place where he held so many memories. Passing fields of cypress and pine trees on his left, he recalled the time his father collected rocks from the land there by donkey to build their house.
Abu Shadi said he had lost contact with his other family members in the recent weeks of fighting.
“I do not know anything about my brother and his family,” he said. “We heard that one of his daughters has lost her hand by a sniper and then she died. No medical care, no food, no fuel, no electricity, no water, no UN, no Red Cross.”
At the Ras Al Aamood checkpoint, government soldiers crowded around and heavy military vehicles were parked nearby. A tent had been erected by regime officials for the purposes of “national reconciliation” aimed at those fleeing the rebel-held areas. A few young men, women and children were waiting in the chilly weather to be let out.
Songs packed with nationalist rhetoric in praise of Mr Al Assad blasted from huge subwoofers – mixing with the sounds of shelling and bombing in the distance.
Pro-regime reporters interviewed those who had just arrived as they put their thumbprints on papers to prove they had legal status in government territory.
Most of the arrivals were wanted by the regime for military service and a few, the regime said, “carried weapons against the army but had no blood on their hands” – meaning it did not believe they had killed or kidnapped any pro-government fighters or any civilians.
The elderly, women and children were sent back to the valley unless they paid a bribe.
“We are here to come back to the homeland,” one young man said. “It is time to come back to the old days when we were one united people.”
Most of the women and children were too scared to talk.
“It is hell in the valley,” Abu Shadi’s wife said with a fragile voice. “People are starving. It is a tragedy. Children are sick. No electricity, no food, nothing.”
Assault on Wadi Barada
The assault on Wadi Barada began on December 23 after the government accused rebels of polluting the water spring with diesel fuel. They later said the rebels had tried to blow up the spring.
The opposition said the damage was done when regime forces conducted air strikes and shelled Ain Al Fijeh twice and targeted all ten of the rebel-held villages in the valley with barrel bombs last January.
Late last month and earlier this month, Qatar’s Al Jazeera news channel broadcast footage showing that the Ain Al Fijeh spring had been subjected to aerial bombardment. Meanwhile, analysis carried out by the citizen journalism site Bellingcat concluded “the most likely scenario is that the regime was responsible for the damage to the spring structure”.
The rebels called for a UN investigation into the bombing of the spring and called on the regime to send technicians to fix it as long as the government would honour the ceasefire and lift the siege.
On December 30, a ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia came into effect across Syria that excluded extremist groups including ISIL and Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, the former Al Qaeda wing in Syria. Under that pretext, the regime and Hizbollah continued its brutal assault on the valley with barrels bombs loaded with chlorine and napalm, rockets, snipers and mortars from the tops of surrounding hills.
On January 1, around 1,200 civilians were allowed out of the valley where the regime said they were “evacuated” to a neighbouring village.
Two weeks later, the minister of national reconciliation, Ali Haidar, said there had been a “truce” with the “armed men” in Wadi Barada for the past three years to keep the water flowing to Damascus and protect the spring.
“We accepted to halt the military operations [in Wadi Barada for years] because we needed the army in other areas,” Mr Haidar added.
The regime and the rebels reached an agreement on January 13 when Mr Al Assad commissioned retired Major General Ahmad Al Ghadban – a tough negotiator and top representative of the valley – to administrate and supervise the maintenance of Ain Al Fijeh.
However, the next day Maj Gen Al Ghadban was assassinated at the Ras Al Aamood checkpoint, with the government blaming the “terrorists” for his killing. The opposition said the regime killed him because he was a tough negotiator who forced the government into a reconciliation that would not humiliate the valley’s rebels.
The regime forces increased their offensive in the area and on January 15 at least 12 civilians were killed and 20 injured in the village of Dayr Qanon.
In addition to its water supply, Wadi Barada is strategically important for the Syrian government and its ally forces. Its capture will now allow an easier and safer passage for Iranian supplies to pass to Hizbollah in Lebanon through the town of Zabadani.
Dispossession and exploitation
The displacement of the people of Wadi Barada now is the culmination of decades of dispossession and exploitation by the Assad regime.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many villagers from the valley lost hundreds of hectares of agricultural land as a result of large-scale government expropriation in the Damascus countryside.
The army and ministry of defence seized most of the lands under laws that allow private property to be taken for projects “of public benefit”.
During the late 1970s, Abu Shadi’s parents lost more than 25,000 square metres of land in different parts of Wadi Barada.
A few years ago, a court retroactively offered Abu Shadi’s family 800 Syrian pounds for every 1,000 square metres seized but he never received any payment. Today, land in the area sells at prices between 20,000 and 50,000 Syrian pounds per square metre depending on whether it is to be used for agriculture or property development.
Meanwhile, the increase in the population of Damascus, from 700,000 in 1950 to 7 million in 2011, put more pressure on the water source. To meet the increasing demand, the authorities drilled a series of boreholes around the wadi in the mid-1990s. The Barada River dried up soon after that, forcing farmers to abandon their land in the valley.
The drop in their water was one of the reasons the residents of Wadi Barada joined the protests during the Arab Spring in 2011 against Mr Al Assad.
But once the conflict started, both the opposition and the government depended on the source, so an unofficial truce in the area remained in place until the end of 2016.
With the capture of Wadi Barada it is unclear what the Syrian government has planned for the 100,000 civilians that remain there in desperate conditions.
“I do not know if I will ever be allowed to go back to my valley,” said Abu Shadi. “Or will we be like the Palestinians who only see their homeland on the map?”
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
SCORES
Multiply Titans 81-2 in 12.1 overs
(Tony de Zorzi, 34)
bt Auckland Aces 80 all out in 16 overs
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COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Total funding: Self funded
Cryopreservation: A timeline
- Keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic
- Ovarian tissue surgically removed
- Tissue processed in a high-tech facility
- Tissue re-implanted at a time of the patient’s choosing
- Full hormone production regained within 4-6 months
Our legal consultant
Name: Dr Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Grubtech
Founders: Mohamed Al Fayed and Mohammed Hammedi
Launched: October 2019
Employees: 50
Financing stage: Seed round (raised $2 million)
if you go
The flights
Emirates fly direct from Dubai to Houston, Texas, where United have direct flights to Managua. Alternatively, from October, Iberia will offer connections from Madrid, which can be reached by both Etihad from Abu Dhabi and Emirates from Dubai.
The trip
Geodyssey’s (Geodyssey.co.uk) 15-night Nicaragua Odyssey visits the colonial cities of Leon and Granada, lively country villages, the lake island of Ometepe and a stunning array of landscapes, with wildlife, history, creative crafts and more. From Dh18,500 per person, based on two sharing, including transfers and tours but excluding international flights. For more information, visit visitnicaragua.us.
Guide to intelligent investing
Investing success often hinges on discipline and perspective. As markets fluctuate, remember these guiding principles:
- Stay invested: Time in the market, not timing the market, is critical to long-term gains.
- Rational thinking: Breathe and avoid emotional decision-making; let logic and planning guide your actions.
- Strategic patience: Understand why you’re investing and allow time for your strategies to unfold.
The%C2%A0specs%20
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EEngine%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%204-cylinder%202-litre%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETransmission%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E9-speed%20automatic%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPower%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E252%20brake%20horsepower%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETorque%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E352Nm%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPrice%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Efrom%20Dh146%2C700%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EOn%20sale%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Enow%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs: 2019 GMC Yukon Denali
Price, base: Dh306,500
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Power: 420hp @ 5,600rpm
Torque: 621Nm @ 4,100rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 12.9L / 100km
Biog
Age: 50
Known as the UAE’s strongest man
Favourite dish: “Everything and sea food”
Hobbies: Drawing, basketball and poetry
Favourite car: Any classic car
Favourite superhero: The Hulk original
Emergency
Director: Kangana Ranaut
Stars: Kangana Ranaut, Anupam Kher, Shreyas Talpade, Milind Soman, Mahima Chaudhry
Rating: 2/5
The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
Film: In Syria
Dir: Philippe Van Leeuw
Starring: Hiam Abbass, Diamand Bo Abboud, Mohsen Abbas and Juliette Navis
Verdict: Four stars
The five pillars of Islam
'Munich: The Edge of War'
Director: Christian Schwochow
Starring: George MacKay, Jannis Niewohner, Jeremy Irons
Rating: 3/5
If you go
Where to stay: Courtyard by Marriott Titusville Kennedy Space Centre has unparalleled views of the Indian River. Alligators can be spotted from hotel room balconies, as can several rocket launch sites. The hotel also boasts cool space-themed decor.
When to go: Florida is best experienced during the winter months, from November to May, before the humidity kicks in.
How to get there: Emirates currently flies from Dubai to Orlando five times a week.
The%20specs
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Company%20profile
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Essentials
The flights
Emirates, Etihad and Malaysia Airlines all fly direct from the UAE to Kuala Lumpur and on to Penang from about Dh2,300 return, including taxes.
Where to stay
In Kuala Lumpur, Element is a recently opened, futuristic hotel high up in a Norman Foster-designed skyscraper. Rooms cost from Dh400 per night, including taxes. Hotel Stripes, also in KL, is a great value design hotel, with an infinity rooftop pool. Rooms cost from Dh310, including taxes.
In Penang, Ren i Tang is a boutique b&b in what was once an ancient Chinese Medicine Hall in the centre of Little India. Rooms cost from Dh220, including taxes.
23 Love Lane in Penang is a luxury boutique heritage hotel in a converted mansion, with private tropical gardens. Rooms cost from Dh400, including taxes.
In Langkawi, Temple Tree is a unique architectural villa hotel consisting of antique houses from all across Malaysia. Rooms cost from Dh350, including taxes.
COMPANY PROFILE
● Company: Bidzi
● Started: 2024
● Founders: Akshay Dosaj and Asif Rashid
● Based: Dubai, UAE
● Industry: M&A
● Funding size: Bootstrapped
● No of employees: Nine
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre 6-cyl turbo
Power: 374hp at 5,500-6,500rpm
Torque: 500Nm from 1,900-5,000rpm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 8.5L/100km
Price: from Dh285,000
On sale: from January 2022
Crazy Rich Asians
Director: Jon M Chu
Starring: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeon, Gemma Chan
Four stars
Tales of Yusuf Tadros
Adel Esmat (translated by Mandy McClure)
Hoopoe