Turkey's foreign minister says a Turkish delegation will hold talks in Russia on Monday on the situation in Syria's Idlib province amid mounting fears of a humanitarian disaster there.
Hundreds of thousands in Idlib province are scrambling to escape a widening, multi-front assault by President Bashar Assad's forces.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Saturday after meeting his German counterpart on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that 2 million people could head for Turkey's border with Syria if no cease-fire is achieved.
He said that a Turkish delegation was due to visit Moscow on Monday in order to talk about the situation in Idlib, much of which remains in rebel hands. The meeting follows previous visits by a Russian delegation to Ankara. Russia supports Assad, while Turkey backs the opposition.
“We are very worried that this is going become a humanitarian catastrophe if the fighting there doesn’t stop,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said. He said he pushed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was also in Munich, for Russia to lean on Assad's government to stop the fighting.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials have developed specific and highly credible intelligence suggesting that an American citizen who disappeared seven years ago while traveling in Syria has died, the man's daughter said Saturday.
Maryam Kamalmaz said in an interview with The Associated Press that during a meeting in Washington this month with eight senior American officials she was presented with detailed intelligence about the presumed death of her father, Majd, a psychotherapist from Texas.
The officials told her that on a scale of one to 10, their confidence level about her father's death was a “high nine." She said she asked whether other detained Americans had ever been successfully recovered in the face of such credible information, and was told no.
“What more do I need? That was a lot of high-level officials that we needed to confirm to us that he’s really gone. There was no way to beat around the bush,” Maryam Kamalmaz said.
She said officials told her they believe the death occurred years ago, early in her father's captivity. In 2020, she said, officials told the family that they had reason to believe that he had died of heart failure in 2017, but the family held out hope and U.S. officials continued their pursuit.
But, she said, “Not until this meeting did they really confirm to us how credible the information is and the different levels of (verification) it had to go through."
She did not describe the intelligence she learned.
A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment Saturday. The FBI's Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell issued a statement that did not offer any update on Kamalmaz but said that no matter how much time has passed, it continues to work “on behalf of the victims and their families to recover all U.S hostages and support the families whose loved ones are held captive or missing.”
Majd Kamalmaz disappeared in February 2017 at the age of 59 while traveling in Syria to visit an elderly family member. The FBI has said he was stopped at a Syrian government checkpoint in a suburb of Damascus and had not been heard from since.
Kamalmaz is one of multiple Americans who have disappeared in Syria, including the journalist Austin Tice, who went missing in 2012 at a checkpoint in a contested area west of Damascus. Syria has publicly denied holding Americans in captivity.
In 2020, in the final months of the Trump administration, senior officials visited Damascus for a high-level meeting aimed at negotiating release of the Americans. But the meeting proved unfruitful, with the Syrians not providing any proof-of-life information and making demands that U.S. officials deemed unreasonable. U.S. officials have said they are continuing to try to bring home Tice.
The New York Times first reported on the presumed death of Majd Kamalmaz.
FILE - Rep. Al Green, right, listens as Samar Hamwi, sister of Majd Kamalmaz, speaks during the Bring Our Families Home Campaign, a campaign led by family members of Americans wrongfully detained or held hostage abroad, news conference on Tuesday, July 4, 2023 in Houston. U.S. officials have developed specific and highly credible intelligence suggesting that Majd Kamalmaz, an American citizen who disappeared seven years ago while traveling in Syria has died, his daughter, Maryam Kamalmaz, said Saturday, May 18. (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP, file)
FILE - Maryam Kamalmaz poses for a photo in her home in Grand Prairie, Texas, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. U.S. officials have developed specific and highly credible intelligence suggesting that Majd Kamalmaz, an American citizen who disappeared seven years ago while traveling in Syria has died, Maryam Kamalmazr said Saturday, May 18. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, file)
FILE - Maryam Kamalmaz hold a photo of her father with some of his 14 grandchildren in Grand Prairie, Texas, Jan. 17, 2024. U.S. officials have developed specific and highly credible intelligence suggesting that Majd Kamalmaz, an American citizen who disappeared seven years ago while traveling in Syria has died, Maryam Kamalmaz said Saturday, May 18. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
