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Islamic State emerges from rubble of north-east Syria to exploit discontent with al-Sharaa

On the surface, all that remains of Islamic State in the Syrian town of Baghuz are discarded tubs of whitening cream, spent RPG motors and children’s backpacks, with an old grenade nestled in the frayed pink nylon. It was here nearly seven years ago that IS made its last stand. Its most zealous followers were obliterated along with the blood-soaked caliphate they fought to defend. Their bodies were collected and buried next to the town graveyard, while bulldozers came and sealed the entire area under a layer of heavy yellow earth. Today, nothing grows on the former battlefield. The ground remains barren despite the heavy winter rains that have sent green shoots sprouting in the furrowed fields just metres away. Yet while the graveyard lies undisturbed, residents say the town is deeply uneasy once more. IS is stirring again, its members living among the people of Syria. “They are our neighbours. It’s known who in the village is with IS. They feel nostalgic for the days of the caliphate, and for sure they would readily join IS if it came back,” said an activist in Baghuz, asking to remain anonymous out of fears for his security. The sense of unease is shared across Deir ez-Zor, a long neglected rural province of Syria that was a stronghold of IS during the height of its control of Syria. “You can see them in the streets. It’s clear who is sympathetic to them from their dress and habits,” said Deeban Harwil, a civil society activist in Deir ez-Zor. This week, the group lurched back into the open. Its spokesperson Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari released a speech more than 30 minutes long – the first time in two years that IS has put out such a public display to its followers. In the speech, the spokesperson took aim at the new Syrian government, decrying President Ahmed al-Sharaa as an apostate and a puppet for the west. Fighting Syria’s new government, al-Ansari claimed, was a duty for followers of IS. Its followers quickly answered the call. At least nine attacks were launched against government checkpoints across the north-east of the country this week, including one gun battle in Raqqa that killed four members of the Syrian security forces. Unknown gunmen opened fire on a checkpoint in Baghuz on Tuesday. The attacks were unprecedented, the most serious activity seen in Syria since the fall of Bashar al-Assad just over a year ago. It is part of what analysts say is a strategic “rebrand” for the radical group in an attempt to recruit a new generation of followers and reconstitute itself. “They want to change the perception of the group in order to revive it. They want to cancel the mistakes they committed in 2014, when you would see mass killings and walk through the countryside and see beheaded people,” said Bashar Hassan, an IS analyst from Deir ez-Zor who was imprisoned by the group. When the group controlled vast parts of Iraq and Syria, its rule was marked by brutality. The group kept sex slaves and published videos of its members burning enemies alive. Residents of Raqqa, once the capital of the group’s so-called caliphate, still shudder when they walk by the clock tower square, where severed heads were mounted on stakes after public executions. IS has since calculated that the shocking violence it became known for led people to reject it. The group has instead decided to focus more on winning hearts and minds at the local level in Syria. To do that, Hassan said, the group is trying to exploit more radical elements in Syrian society who are disappointed by the new government in Damascus, which, despite its Islamist background, has not imposed strict Islamist law on the country. Al-Sharaa, once an al-Qaida commander, has largely moved the country into the west’s orbit since becoming president. He has made Syria a member of the global coalition to defeat IS and has pushed mostly liberal economic reforms in the country – a far cry from the demands of the more extremist members of his base. IS has sought to recruit those alienated by this western turn. In a press release claiming responsibility for the attack in Raqqa this week, they included a picture of al-Sharaa meeting Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command. The Syrian government has vowed to defeat the group in Syria, but experts warn that the same factors which allowed for IS’s initial rise are still present. Most Syrians are impoverished and the streets of Deir ez-Zor are still covered in rubble. Cars queue for an hour at a time to cross the town’s only bridge, as the others lie collapsed in the Euphrates. “Education could get young people out of this ideology, but no one is implementing this. The group is not showing its dangerous side yet, and those at a formative age are being radicalised,” said Harwil. For some disaffected young men, the group’s new branding might hold some allure – or at least some sense of purpose. But in Baghuz, where residents are still careful not to stir the town’s soil in fear of what they might find, memories of IS offer nothing but fear. “We have a saying here,” the activist in Baghuz said. “Nothing can be worse than what has already happened.”

Yet another mid-talks attack jeopardises chances of Iran taking Trump seriously

The attack mounted jointly by Israel and the US on Iran had been planned for months, but the timing, in the midst of negotiations between Iran and the US, will again raise questions about whether Washington was ever serious about striking a deal with Tehran. In June last year, Israel, with the US later in tow, launched a 10-day attack on Iran just three days before Iran and the US were due to meet for a sixth set of talks. So this assault, in the middle of a second negotiation process, must torpedo the chances of the Iranian regime ever taking a US offer of talks seriously. They have been stung twice. As one Iranian Telegram channel put it: “Once again the US attacked while Iran was pursuing diplomacy. Once again diplomacy does not work with the terrorist state of the US.” Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, was acutely aware that Trump might jettison diplomacy, but felt it was a risk worth taking. Clearly knowing what the US had planned, and how imminent a US military attack was, Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, which has been mediating the talks, made an emergency dash to Washington in a desperate attempt to put the best gloss on their progress. He even took the unusual step of going on CBS to reveal many of the secrets of the deal taking shape. A peace agreement was in reach, he said. But Albusaidi was permitted only to meet the vice-president, JD Vance, to make the case that the talks were on the brink of a breakthrough. The deal would be far better than the 2015 agreement which Trump left in 2018, he said. He claimed Iran had agreed to zero stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, the down-blending of its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium inside Iran, and full verification access for the International Atomic Energy Agency. US weapons inspectors might even be allowed inside Iran alongside the inspectors from the IAEA UN body, he said. Iran would enrich only what it needed for its civil nuclear programme. A final agreement on principles could be signed this week and the details of how the verification system would work might take another three months. There was little or nothing on offer on human rights, Iran’s ballistic missile programme or on its support for proxy forces in the region. From Iran’s perspective, the issue of the 1,250-mile (2,000km) range of its ballistic missiles could be discussed in talks with the Gulf Cooperation Council, but the missiles were in principle part of Iran’s defences and, as the joint US-Israeli attack demonstrated, central to Iranian national security. The previous Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, had always defended the missiles by pointing out how defenceless Iran had been during the Iran-Iraq war. He suggested that if the US stopped selling arms across the Gulf, Iran would have less need for its own missile programme. But this was neither an agenda nor a timetable that suited Trump. Indeed Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, hinted at what the president wanted when he said Trump was surprised Iran had not yet capitulated. In justifying the attack, Trump did not delve into the progress of the talks, or the gaps that existed between the two sides. He simply declared: “Iran’s threatening activities put the US, its forces and bases abroad and our allies around the world at risk.” Inside the US, the debate will soon start over whether Albusaidi’s assessment of the talks’ fruitfulness was justified. Needs-based enrichment at low levels and eradication of highly enriched stocks, if indeed that was offered by Iran, alongside verification would, on the surface, deprive Iran of the means to make a bomb. If so, Trump, encouraged by Israel and Republican hawks, will be accused of wilfully spurning an agreement that would have peacefully ended the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme for the last 30 years. Others will argue that the continuance of an irredeemable and repressive Iranian regime in itself was a threat to world security. Either way, what is extraordinary is that Trump himself, prior to the attacks, made next to no attempt to articulate or justify to the American people, to Congress or to his allies his actions or his objectives.

‘Adventurism has had its day’: speedboat shootout leaves Miami’s exiled Cubans bewildered

Foot traffic was slow outside the Bay of Pigs Museum on Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood. A few tourists in T-shirts and shorts bypassed the gallery dedicated to one of the most fateful days in Cuba’s history and headed instead to nearby Máximo Gómez Park to take photographs of Cuban exiles playing dominoes. This is the street at the heart of the Cuban expat community of more than 1 million people where tens of thousands partied through the night in November 2016 to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, and where they gathered in sorrow almost exactly 30 years ago to mourn four Cuban-Americans shot down by the communist country’s air force as they conducted a mission for the humanitarian exile group Brothers to the Rescue. This week, however, the air was more of curiosity and bewilderment at news of a shootout on Wednesday at Cayo Falcones, barely a mile off Cuba’s north coast, between the Cuban coastguard and 10 heavily armed men onboard a speedboat stolen in Florida. Cuba’s government said border agents shot back when somebody on the speedboat started firing on them, killing four and wounding six. It said the men were dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights, and in possession of “a significant number of containers bearing the symbols of counter-revolutionary organisations”. “Didn’t we stop doing that years ago?” said Javi González, a second-generation Cuban-American office worker on his coffee break, referring to the ill-fated, CIA-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban paramilitary exiles seeking to overthrow the Castro regime, for which the museum is named. The mystery deepened as family, friends and acquaintances began to confirm the names of those involved (a list provided by Cuban officials on Wednesday night of “terrorists and mercenaries” mistakenly identified at least one person who had been in south Florida at the time), and a vigil was held in Miami late on Thursday. The tributes were warm, praising “patriots committed to the cause of freedom”. José Daniel Ferrer, the prominent Cuban dissident leader freed last year, posted to social media his “respect and admiration for those who died assassinated by the Castro-communist tyranny north of Villa Clara”. But there were few clues as to how the 10, confirmed by the state department on Thursday night to include at least two US citizens, one dead, and a number of permanent residents and visa holders, had come together from various places across Florida. Or why they had embarked on such a misadventure. Or what they had been hoping to achieve. One of the four killed was Michel Ortega Casanova, a member of the Casa Cuba de Tampa expat group and the city’s chapter of the Cuban Republican party. A truck driver, Casanova had been pulled into what his brother Misael told the Associated Press was an “obsessive and diabolical” quest for Cuba’s freedom. “They became so obsessed that they didn’t think about the consequences, nor their own lives,” he said. Also unknown, so far at least, is who funded their operation. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, has insisted the government was not involved and had no knowledge of it, and would be conducting its own inquiry “to figure out exactly what happened” instead of accepting information provided by Cuba. Guillermo Grenier, a Havana-born professor of sociology and faculty member of the Cuban-American Institute at Miami’s Florida International University (FIU), said: “Some people are suggesting the CIA are involved, but the CIA doesn’t do this. If they want to be in there they land on an airplane, they’re not sneaking in.” Grenier said the Cayo Falcones endeavour had parallels in the immediate post-Cuban revolution period of the 1960s, when thousands of exiles formed themselves into a commando-style group called Alpha 66 and conducted military training in the Florida Everglades in readiness to seize back their homeland. It is also reminiscent of more recent, unrealistic “made in Miami” coup plots, including a fanciful 2019 plan to abduct Venezuela’s leader (which the Trump administration achieved last month), and a 2021 scheme to assassinate Haiti’s leader using Colombian mercenaries. But Grenier said the post-revolution days were long gone. Two decades of FIU polling shows newer generations of Cuban-Americans are increasingly in favour of engagement with their homeland, while the older, hardline exile groups that traditionally backed a forcible overthrow of the Castro regime have struggled to maintain members and interest. “This kind of approach is anachronistic and not serious, to tell you the truth,” Grenier said. “Once upon a time there was an ethos in the community that armed rebellions would get you where you wanted to go. But I think that there’s a sense that any kind of adventurism like this has had its day, and this is not a serious anything.” US policy towards Cuba has seesawed through successive presidencies, with the current favoured tool to bring about change being a campaign of economic pressure. It was reported on Thursday that US officials talked with the former Cuban president Raúl Castro’s grandson on the sidelines of Caricom, the annual meeting of Caribbean leaders, in St Kitts and Nevis. Late on Friday, Trump confirmed there were conversations between the two governments and even suggested the US could even carry out a “friendly takeover” of Cuba. In Havana, Cuba’s vice-minister of foreign affairs and point man on the US, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, told reporters that lines of communication were open with the US government, which had “shown a willingness” to cooperate in clarifying these “regrettable” events. Grenier said: “They just want this story to go away, ultimately. If it doesn’t get any more complicated, it’s not going to hamper any negotiations, and their chill response shows me that they are really aware of that. They’re hoping it was like 10 crazy folks from Hialeah who decided to go over there and start a little revolution from the inside.” In his statement, de Cossio also said: “Cuba has been the victim of aggression and countless terrorist acts for over 60 years, mostly organised, financed and carried out from the territory of the US.” It is a position shared by many in Havana. “It’s the same story,” said Hugo Hernandez, an accountant who was walking past the Tribuna Antiimperialista José Martí, the square in front of the US embassy where protests against Cuba’s neighbour are often held. “It’s been happening since the beginning. When I was young in Santa Clara I had to guard those cays. The coastguards were always worried someone might turn up in a boat and attack them.”

‘Crazy, without limits’: Paris disco haunt of Jagger and Grace Jones to reopen

In the late 1970s, Le Palace in Paris’s busy theatre district was one of continental Europe’s most famous nightclubs. On the opening night on 1 March 1978, Grace Jones stunned VIP guests with her rendition of Edith Piaf’s classic La Vie en Rose. Later, Serge Gainsbourg and Prince came to perform, Bob Marley was photographed there and Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Karl Lagerfeld were part of a glittering cast of international celebrities, politicians, designers and models who came to drink and dance. It was, as the queen of disco Donna Summer would sing, hot stuff. But within five years of Le Palace opening, disco was on its way out. The Parisian boogie wonderland where they had strutted their stuff to Stayin’ Alive was dead and not even Gloria Gaynor’s defiant I Will Survive would save it. The avant garde nightclub that had attracted a glitterball generation closed temporarily in 1982 when its owner, Fabrice Emaer, was ill with terminal cancer. It turned out to be the end of Le Palace as everyone knew it. But today, Le Palace is rising from the rubble strewn across its famous dancefloor. The French producer Mickael Chétrit bought the iconic building last year and wants to revive Le Palace as a popular venue and breathe some of the spirit of the era back into it. “I’m too young to remember the club in its heyday but I’ve seen the photos and documentaries and I’ve spoken to people who used to come here,” he said during a tour of what is left of the historic building. “In those days everyone knew Le Palace.” Since news of its reopening – planned for the start of 2027 – spread, Chétrit says he has been inundated with requests from artists all over the world who want to visit and perform. “We’ve had lots of requests, and from some great artists. Everyone wants to come back and have a show here. Many French artists and foreign artists want to perform at Le Palace because they started here and want to return to where it all began for them,” he said, refusing to name names. “It’s a big thing. When you said you were singing at Le Palace, it was like saying you were performing at Olympia. Le Palace is still a well-known name.” “I knew it was a symbolic place but I never knew how much it meant to people,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place. You can feel its spirit. “The idea of the renovation is to respect that spirit, the history and what people experienced here. I didn’t want to change everything and create something completely new, it’s about keeping the name and using the history of what it was to create what it will become.” The building on the busy Rue du Faubourg Montmartre first opened in 1912 as a cinema before being transformed into a concert and music hall where Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier and Joséphine Baker appeared. In the 1920s an operetta containing a scene of simulated sex caused a scandal and nearly had the authorities closing the place down. After the war it became a cinema once more, but it closed in 1969 as France turned to television. In the late 1970s it was bought by Emaer, a restaurant and nightclub owner, who modelled it on the celebrated Studio 54 nightclub in New York. Celebrities had a laissez passer but the club’s unusual door policy meant you were just as likely to be bopping with a local firefighter or a Parisian plumber as a well-known name. Fame was only one way in; guests were also admitted for having a certain style, look or attitude. After Emaer’s death in 1983, Le Palace reopened under new management, but eventually lost its beat. By the end of the 1990s, the legendary nightclub was abandoned to squatters and looters. It was eventually revived as a theatre and concert venue, but closed definitively in 2023. “The place was squatted in and completely ransacked. There used to be magnificent chandeliers here and wall lights, but everything was stolen,” Chétrit said. “We can’t recover everything but we have photos of how it was and we’re going to try to restore it to its original state.” Today, the facade’s neon sign is partly hidden with scaffolding in preparation for the renovations that begin next month to recreate a basement nightclub and a theatre-concert venue with a capacity of up to 1,400 people. Parts of the main theatre, including a large hand-painted fresco depicting naked dancers that dates back to when the building opened in 1912, are listed and the renovation has to be overseen by official architects responsible for protecting France’s heritage. “It costs a lot of money when things are listed because the work has to be done by specific companies and craftsmen chosen to restore it to its original state. It complicates things, but it’s a way of respecting the architecture and the historical aspect of the place,” Chétrit said. The revamp is being overseen by the interior designer Jacques Garcia, best known for his contemporary redesigns of luxury Paris hotels and for creating the Gainsbourg boutique and cafe bar next to the late singer-songwriter’s home, which is now a museum. The 78-year-old designer told French media: “I spent my life here, with one party after another alongside some incredible people. We were crazy, without limits, but with a certain elegance. “The name Le Palace is a setting in itself. It represents a myth for many people who experienced it. I can only embrace the myth and the setting.” The glass cabinets flanking the entrance corridor still display posters of some of Le Palace’s most famous patrons. Photographs from the late 1970s and early 80s feature Yves Saint Laurent, Tina Turner, Jerry Hall and Gainsbourg. Chétrit says these will brought alive on video screens when Le Palace reopens. “You will be able to experience Le Palace with photos, videos of the people who frequented it, so that those who didn’t know it back then can understand what Le Palace was like,” he said. “There is no other venue of its kind in Paris with such a history. It’s been neglected but we’re going to restore it all.”

US and Israel launch strikes on Iran: what we know so far

On Saturday morning, the US and Israel launched a series of strikes on Iran. In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it fired missiles against US military bases in the Gulf. Explosions were reported in Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar. One person was killed by shrapnel from an Iranian missile in the UAE, officials said. Explosions shook the Iranian capital Tehran, where people reported seeing smoke rising from the district that includes the presidential palace. Iran also launched multiple waves of missiles at Israel, with blasts reported in the skies over Jerusalem. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said air defence systems were working to shoot down the “barrage of missiles” launched from Iran. Israeli officials told the media that top Iranian regime and military leaders, including Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and president Masoud Pezeshkian, were targeted in the attacks. It is believed that Khamenei is not in Tehran and has been taken to a secure location, while Iranian media is reporting that Pezeshkian is safe. The US president, Donald Trump, vowed that the “massive and ongoing” campaign against Iran would crush its military, eliminate its nuclear programme and bring about a change in government. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” he said. TheIsraeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the operation was to remove an “existential threat”. Talks between the US and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear programme ended inconclusively on Friday, with a suggestion that further discussions would be held next week. Trump had said he was “not happy” with the progress of discussions.

‘I live in constant fear’: surge in giant sinkholes threatens Turkey’s farmers

Fatih Sik was drinking tea with friends at home when he heard a rumbling sound outside that grew to a loud boom, like a volcano had erupted nearby. From the window, he saw water and mud shoot into the sky, as high as the tallest trees, less than 100 metres away. The 47-year-old knew what it was, because it is common in Karapınar, Konya, a vast agricultural province known as Turkey’s breadbasket. A giant sinkhole had opened up on his land. Fifty metres wide and 40 metres deep, it had appeared almost a year to the day after a previous one had formed. It was August – the hottest month of the year. Sik was born on the farm he now owns, which his father ran before him, yet he says scientists have told local people the area is no longer livable. One house nearby has collapsed into a sinkhole. “Every night I pray before I go to bed and when I wake up I pray again,” said Sik. “I live in constant fear that a sinkhole will take my house.” Konya, part of the once-fertile Central Anatolia region, gave life to ancient civilisations, including what is believed to be the world’s first agricultural society, at Çatalhöyük, in about 8,000BC. It is dotted with the remnants of water cults, Hittite sacred springs and Roman aqueducts, and once offered vital watering holes to traders on the Silk Road. Now, though, the land is drying up. Turkey is on the brink of a major drought crisis, with almost 90% of the country at risk of becoming desert. Sinkholes are appearing in farmland in the region at an increasing pace. Experts say there are now almost 700, causing uncertainty and devastation for the farmers who live and work there. According to Fetullah Arik, a professor of geology at Konya Technical University who studies sinkholes, the problem stems from dwindling rainfall and reduced groundwater. Local farmers are digging more and deeper wells due to water scarcity, which further depletes groundwater reserves, exacerbating the problem. Konya has always been geologically prone to sinkholes because much of the region lies on bases of limestone and other soluble rocks, but in recent decades intensive agriculture has led to heavy groundwater extraction for irrigation. As water tables drop, underground cavities lose the support that once held them up. Pointing to a map of global sinkholes on his office wall, Arik says Konya has the highest density in the world. “Over the past two years, things have accelerated and the difference is hard to ignore,” he says. What was once a slow-moving disaster driven by climate breakdown has accelerated dramatically. Last year saw record heat and low rainfall, and farmers and fishermen told the Guardian they have seen unprecedented drying. The region has lost 186 of its 240 lakes over the past 60 years, according to local reports. Prolonged heatwaves and dry spells, once rare in Europe, now cost about €11bn a year. Central Anatolia faces the brunt in the Mediterranean, one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth. Yet Turkey will host the UN climate summit Cop31 this year, sharing duties with Australia, posing questions about its climate leadership. The country’s climate policies are “highly insufficient” to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, according to Climate Action Tracker. Sik used to water his crops with additional groundwater once in spring and twice in summer, but now there is so little rain he waters five times, then 10. “Ten years ago, we only had to go 30 metres down to find water. Now, it’s 90,” he says. There are 100 sinkholes in his neighbourhood, by his estimates. Two swallowed a beetroot field he owned, costing him about £17,000 a year. He estimates he would need 6,000 trucks of sand to fill in his land so he could use it again, but this would cost almost £35,000. Sik has not received any support and believes he is the last generation to farm the area. He sent his children away to study nursing and dentistry rather than teaching them farming. Most of Konya’s farmers grow water-intensive crops, such as corn, wheat and sugarbeet. Some believe the solution to the region’s problems is to adapt farming practices, growing crops that need less water – or no water at all. Mahmut Senyuz is the head of a farming collective who are the first to reintroduce hemp production in the region, which had been slowly phased out due to regulatory restrictions. While he used to water his corn nine or 10 times a season, he said with hemp it is down to three. Meanwhile, Dr Ece Onur, lovingly referred to in Turkish media as the country’s “most colourful farmer” due to her tendency to wear striking dungarees, is reviving ancient dry-farming practices. Leaving behind a career lecturing military anthropology at Indiana University to return to her ancestral homelands in Burdur, she started a female-led cooperative and also trains growers from across the country. Dry farming uses no irrigation, instead preparing the soil and encouraging plants to dig their roots deep to draw on natural water reserves. She grows roses and medicinal plants, and says these sorts of crops could be vital to Turkey’s future. “Soil is a living organism,” she says. “The only way to solve this crisis is to stop trying to make nature do things our way. We have to imitate her ways.” This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center This article was amended on 28 February 2025 to correct the byline. The piece was written by Liz Cookman, not Emre Çaylak, who took the photographs.