Follow New Year’s Eve 2025 celebrations around the world

(LONDON) — There are early indications that a Russian anti-aircraft system may have struck the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing dozens, a U.S. official told ABC News.

If these indications prove true, they would further underscore Russian recklessness in its invasion of Ukraine, the official added.

The White House referred ABC News to officials in the region as the investigation continues.

At least 38 people are dead and 29 others injured after the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger aircraft crashed near Kazakhstan’s Aktau Airport on Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations told ABC News.

Many of the 29 survivors were hospitalized, including two children, the spokesperson said.

The aircraft was flying from Baku in Azerbaijan to Grozny in Russia when it crashed near Aktau in Kazakhstan, the spokesperson said. The flight had been rerouted to Aktau due to fog in Grozny, Russian news agencies reported.

The prosecutor general’s office of Azerbaijan has launched a criminal case regarding the facts of the crash, officials announced during a press briefing on Wednesday.

“Currently, the investigation process is ongoing in cooperation with the prosecutor’s office of Kazakhstan. All versions are being explored in the criminal case,” Farid Huseynov, a spokesperson for Azerbaijan Airlines, said.

Aviation authorities from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia are collaborating to determine the exact cause of the crash, a spokesperson for Kazakhstan’s ministry of emergency situations said.

The plane was carrying 69 people: 64 passengers and five crew members. Based on preliminary data, the passengers included 37 Azerbaijani citizens, six from Kazakhstan, three from Kyrgyzstan and 16 from Russia, officials said.

Embraer, the aircraft manufacturer, released a statement about the crash, saying, “We are closely monitoring the situation, and we remain fully committed to supporting the relevant authorities.”

ABC News’ Dragana Jovanovic and David Brennan contributed to this report.

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(LONDON) — Tens of thousands of Georgians took to the streets of the capital Tbilisi on Monday evening to protest what the opposition said were fraudulent parliamentary elections handing victory to the ruling Georgian Dream party.

Opposition leaders — joined by President Salome Zourabichvili — gathered with the protesters hoping to spark a new round of mass demonstrations against GD akin to those that swept the capital in 2023 and 2024 in response to the government’s proposed foreign agent bill.

Russia looms large over the showdown. Moscow occupies 20% of Georgian territory, and officials in Moscow have threatened war if Georgia continues on its professed path to NATO and membership. GD, the Western-facing opposition says, is at best sympathetic to the Kremlin — and at worst in thrall to it.

Mamuka Khazaradze — the leader of the Strong Georgia coalition — told ABC News on Tuesday that his compatriots will not stand for the electoral “irregularities orchestrated through a Russian special operation and a clear pattern of systemic fraud.”

“Over the past twelve years, the government of the Georgian Dream has operated in service of Russian interests, resembling a Russian-style clan syndicate, and has established a system of manipulation and influence that undermines the integrity of our elections,” Khazaradze said.

“Georgia is not a nation that will tolerate such actions,” he added.

The official results published by the Central Election Commission said GD secured almost 54% of the vote, with the combined share of the four opposition parties just under 38%.

The CEC said GD will therefore take 89 seats in the 150-seat parliament — one less than it secured in the last election in 2020. The four pro-Western opposition parties combined will take 61 seats. The CEC said Khazaradze’s Strong Georgia coalition won 8.8% of the vote and 14 seats.

International election observers reported “frequent compromises in vote secrecy and several procedural inconsistencies, as well as reports of intimidation and pressure on voters that negatively impacted public trust in the process.”

Leaders in Hungary, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Venezuela and China were quick to acknowledge the official results and congratulate GD. But the U.S., European Union and several individual Western states raised concerns about suspected electoral violations.

President Joe Biden said the contest was “marred by numerous recorded misuses of administrative resources as well as voter intimidation and coercion,” and called for a full and transparent investigation.

Bidzina Ivanishvili is GD’s billionaire founder, former prime minister and purported decision-maker behind the party. Ivanishvili is Georgia’s wealthiest person and made his fortune in post-Soviet Russia through an empire of metals plants, banks and real estate.

Ivanishvili and GD leaders like Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze framed the election as a choice between renewed war with Russia or peaceful co-existence. They repeatedly pointed to Ukraine as a cautionary tale for Georgians voting for pro-Western parties.

Opposition leaders see Moscow’s hand behind GD’s legislative agenda, particularly its 2023 and 2024 efforts to introduce legislation to curb foreign funding of media and civil society groups. Opponents dubbed it the “Russian law” given its similarities to a similar measure passed by Moscow in 2012.

“Ivanishvili and his government are governing this country in accordance with Russian directives; this assertion no longer requires extensive evidence — merely the existence of the Russian law suffices,” said Khazaradze, who also transitioned into politics after a successful business career.

Asked if there was concrete proof of Russian meddling, Khazaradze said “rigorous and qualified research” will be needed. “The substantial support of our international partners will be essential, as Russia is adept at obscuring its actions,” he added.

Khazaradze alleged that Russian influence operations have been ongoing in Georgia since long before Saturday’s vote.

“Over the past year, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has been actively disseminating narratives that align with the primary messages of the Georgian Dream’s campaign regarding the war,” he said.

“They have employed the most disreputable Russian tactics, with campaign materials closely mirroring” the rhetoric of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Khazaradze said.

Moscow has denied any involvement in the recent election. “This has become standard for many countries, and, at the slightest thing, they immediately accuse Russia of interference,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said this week.

“There was no interference and the accusations are absolutely unfounded,” he added.

The opposition is now hoping to stoke major protests while gathering evidence of electoral fraud and appealing to Western partners for their backing.

“We have a strategy in place, and we do not intend to disclose this plan in advance to the oligarchs who have usurped power,” Khazaradze said of the opposition’s next steps.

Khazaradze said he was “confident” that foreign nations “will play a pivotal role.”

“We are engaged in intensive communication with the diplomatic corps and are collaborating with international organizations to investigate reported violations,” he added.

“The West must implement effective mechanisms to curtail Russian influence in Georgia, which may include sanctions against those responsible for undermining the electoral process,” Khazaradze said.

He added, “Ultimately, the West remains our reliable and trustworthy partner, and the Georgian people have the full support of both European and American allies.”

The protests against the foreign agent bill in 2023 and 2024 saw violent scenes in the streets surrounding the parliament building in central Tbilisi. On Monday, large numbers of riot police descended on the area.

Khazaradze said the opposition would not be silenced.

“While resistance is anticipated, I firmly believe that no amount of water cannons or rubber bullets can deter the will of the Georgian people,” he said. “It is in Ivanishvili’s best interest to acknowledge the reality that his time in Georgia has come to an end.”

“I remain hopeful in the resilience of the Georgian people and the hundreds of thousands of voters who stand with us,” he said. “I assure you that the world will bear witness to our determination.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Assad regime in Syria came toppling down in lightning speed after rebel forces led a days-long offensive across the country and captured the capital, Damascus, on Sunday, with President Bashar Assad ultimately fleeing to Russia.

How did it happen so quickly?

Some Syrian analysts, as well as the Biden administration, have pointed to Assad’s chief backers — Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — as having been “weakened and distracted” in recent months. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September said the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was a “historic turning point.”

Other close watchers of Syria have also pointed to another key factor: a tiny white pill with a pair of interlocking half-moons on one side.

The pill is the synthetic stimulant fenethylline or fenetylline, known by the brand name Captagon, that overtook the Middle East as a popular drug. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report last year, “the main departing area for ‘captagon’ shipments” continues to be Syria and Lebanon, and, “[a]ssuming that all amphetamine seizures reported in the subregion are of ‘captagon,’ seizures doubled from 2020, reaching a record high of 86 tons in 2021.”

Caroline Rose, who studies the Captagon trade at the Washington-based think tank New Lines Institute, told ABC News the drug has a “licit” history and is incorrectly perceived as not being dangerous, and therefore doesn’t garner the stigma of party drugs like cocaine or ecstasy. It’s also popular in Muslim countries where alcohol is banned by the Quran, she said.

“It makes you feel invincible,” Rose said. “It staves [off] hunger and helps keep you up late at night, and you have taxi drivers, university students, poor people in bread lines, wealthy people who want to lose weight — you have fighters who are using it because it keeps you up late, it gives you energy and you can survive on one MRE [meals ready to eat] a day.”

The world’s leader in Captagon trade has been Syria, generating an estimated $10 billion for the country — and an estimated $2.4 billion a year directly for the Assad regime, according to a 2023 study conducted by the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, a nonprofit that conducts research on organized crime and corruption in Syria.

One person who has had a very close eye on the Captagon trade from Syria in recent years is Rep. French Hill, one of dozens of lawmakers who co-sponsored the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, which proposed to place heavy sanctions on Assad and his closest allies. The bill ultimately passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.

Hill subsequently introduced the Captagon Act in 2021, which he told the publication The New Arab in 2022 was designed to “disrupt and dismantle the Assad regime’s production and trafficking of the lethal narcotic.”

“In my view, the Assad regime turning to narcotics production for its main source of revenue was a sign that the world treating Assad like a pariah was working,” Hill told ABC News. “It is clear after last week’s events that the rot in Assad’s military and finances ran deep.”

According to Rose, the booming Captagon trade was a “zombie economy” born out of the stiff sanctions imposed on Syria by the United States and Europe — and it was also lining the pockets of the Assad regime.

“If there ever was a perfect case for a narco-state, I think it was Syria, because you had the state security and political apparatus defending Captagon production and putting out a public narrative that there wasn’t Captagon but then using the president’s brother, all its security apparatus and the Fourth Armored Division all involved in carrying out the trade,” Rose said.

Meanwhile, Turkey and Saudi Arabia grew frustrated with their efforts to normalize relations with Assad, and their borders were being flooded with the drug, according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment.

According to Rose, in recent negotiation efforts for normalization, Assad was trying to use the power he wielded over the trade of Captagon as leverage over them, and it backfired.

“In many of my discussions with high-level officials in Gulf countries, they said the Assad regime used it [the Captagon trade] as a leverage tool for normalizations, and that the regime often explicitly acknowledged their connection to the Captagon trade,” Rose said. “This was a strategy to garner a transactional deal between Gulf states and Damascus, to incentivize them to pay the regime in return for lessened Captagon flows. And that frustrated Gulf states because it really was not the way they wanted to start normalization discussions.”

“They believed that after isolating the regime, sanctions and severed diplomatic relations, the regime should be the actor accepting their demands, not the other way around,” she added.

Matthew Zweig, a sanctions expert at the lobbying arm of the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed to another question related to Captagon that may have also ultimately contributed to Assad’s downfall.

“The question is whether Assad could even control the trade,” Zweig told ABC News. “Or did the trade control him? And the same question can be applied to the transitional government. Can they control the trade or will the trade control them? There is a lot of money.”

On Sunday, just hours after the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, captured Damascus and took power, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani stood up in front of a crowd of supporters inside the capital’s historic Umayyad Mosque and declared: “Syria has become the biggest producer of Captagon on Earth, and today, Syria is going to be purified by the grace of God.”

The future remains uncertain when it comes to the powerful forces of a cartel economy driven by billions of dollars, high demand and a fragile transitional government. 

The experts, as well as Hill, conveyed hope to ABC News that Syria would be able to pivot toward a better future with a normalized economy.

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