Speaking at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, top Syrian economic officials said they need to build new institutions, and not rebuild those that led to the country’s collapse.

As Syria’s regime collapsed, the world’s eyes were on Bashar al-Assad’s getaway flight. Behind him, officials key to his brutal rule made a mass exodus, virtually undetected.

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan on Friday said the international community stood with Syria, and many investments were being finalized for the country after the overthrow of longtime President Bashar al-Assad last December.

Ms Connolly is pictured with other members of an Irish delegation in the company of Saed Abd al-Aal, who led a pro- Assad armed group responsible for killing and starvation in a refugee camp in Yarmouk, a southern district of the Syrian capital Damascus.

Agriculture Minister Amjad Badr met with Dr. Ali Abou-Sabaa, Director General of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), to explore avenues for scientific and research cooperation and to advance Syria’s agricultural sector.

For two years, Syria’s Assad government secretly trucked thousands of bodies from an exposed mass grave to the desert, trying to hide evidence of atrocities.

In the heat of the Syrian summer in 2018, presidential candidate Catherine Connolly, alongside TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O’Sullivan, stood amid the rebar and flattened concrete of Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp with a number of camouflage-clad guards led by a man in civilian clothes.

Syria has reportedly elected to only use the equipment on its northern border, to avoid further stoking the already tense relations with neighboring Israel. Turkey has reportedly agreed to supply the Syrian regime with military equipment in exchange for Damascus allowing Ankara to target Kurdish militant groups on Syrian soil,