Fear and mistrust in Syria

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kate Adie presents stories from Syria, the US-Mexico border, Poland and Germany.

As Syria tries to rebuild after the fall of Assad, a wave of sectarian violence is fuelling suspicion between communities, and long-held grievances are proving a thorny issue for the country's new leadership. Lucy Williamson travelled to Syria's coastal region, where minority Alawite communities recently came under attack.

In Texas, many Hispanic voters came out in support for Donald Trump in last year's election. Now he is back in the White House, his hard-line approach to immigration is leading some voters to have second thoughts, says Nomia Iqbal. who travelled to the Rio Grande river along the US-Mexico border.

Sitting on the border of Ukraine and Russia, Poland has pledged to up its military spending this year, and is also rolling out military training for civilians. Will Vernon visited a military training camp - but found not everyone is keen to enrol.

And in Germany, Amie Liebowitz has been to a reunion of pensioners born at the Bergen-Belsen camp, around the time allied forces liberated Nazi concentration camps. While there, she also traced her own family's history, and story of survival.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello. Today we're at a military training camp in Poland, after Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced plans to double the size of the army, but not everyone's keen to enlist.
0:17.6	We cross the alligator-infested waters of the Rio Grande River on the U.S.-Mexico border
0:23.7	to hear what locals think of Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. And 80 years on from
0:30.5	Nazi Germany's surrender in the Second World War, we tell the story of the babies born in
0:36.3	Bergen-Belsen.
0:43.4	But first, it's not yet six months since the Assad regime fell in Syria,
0:47.3	but the new transitional government is facing tough challenges.
0:53.3	Perhaps greatest among them is unifying a country made up of numerous fighting factions, and winning the trust of the country's
0:55.8	religious minorities is proving particularly tricky. It's a problem that's been compounded by
1:02.4	a wave of sectarian violence, including attacks back in March against alloite villages along
1:09.0	Syria's coast. Hundreds of people were killed.
1:12.9	Lucy Williamson recently embedded with the country's newly formed security forces,
1:18.5	travelling into hard-to-reach communities that came under attack and saw the country's schisms up
1:25.5	close. At the immigration desk at Syria's newly opened, Damascus airport, I had questions.
1:32.3	I'd just seen a group of Tajik visitors pay 25 US dollars for their Syrian visas.
1:38.2	The same entry visa for my American cameraman had cost 200.
1:42.9	But the immigration officer instead wanted to talk about
1:46.2	King Arthur. The myth of the medieval British king had captured his imagination.
1:52.3	Who was he really? He asked me, his face alight with admiration, and then insistently, did he actually
1:59.1	exist? Syria's belief in heroes has been sorely tested,
2:04.3	but the story of a valiant British king who brought warriors together around the governing
2:09.3	round table had stuck with this friendly Syrian bureaucrat,
	...

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