The trial of Syria’s former grand mufti, Ahmed Bareddin Hassoun, opened at the Palace of Justice in Damascus on June 26. Hassoun led Syria’s official religious establishment under the Bashar Assad dictatorship. He is accused of incitement to murder and abusing his position as a mufti to provide religious cover for the crimes of the regime, as well as participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. He famously issued fatwas justifying the bombing of civilians and called the regime’s use of indiscriminate barrel bombs “liberation,” winning him the epithet “Barrel Bomb Mufti.” He also issued a fatwa in 2017 authorizing the execution of detainees held at the notorious Sednaya Prison, where the Assad regime killed thousands, many through torture and starvation.

Hassoun was arrested in March 2025, four months after the Assad regime fell, at Damascus Airport while trying to leave the country. The hearing was presided over by Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan, who defected to the Syrian opposition in 2013 and had been sentenced to death by the Assad regime. (The New Arab)

See our last report on the Assad regime’s crimes.

Photo: SANA via Arab News

The presence of Uyghur fighters in Syria has been a presistent concern for China, helping to prompt Beijing military support for the Bashar Assad regime before it was overthrown in late 2024.

Map: PCL

by Mihai Coca-Constantinescu, JURIST

Within the span of one week, Romania was struck twice by drones originating from the conflict in Ukraine: first by an aerial drone in the city of Galați on May 29, and then by a maritime drone that exploded in the Port of Constanța on June 5. The two incidents, unprecedented in their proximity and severity, have reignited urgent debates about the legal and security implications of modern drone warfare spilling across international borders.

The first aerial drone struck the roof of a residential apartment building in Galați, a Danube port city bordering Ukraine. Two people, a 14-year-old boy and a 53-year-old woman, were hospitalized, while two others were treated at the scene for panic attacks. The drone was confirmed to be of Russian origin, carrying explosives, and formed part of a larger overnight attack on Ukraine that involved 232 drones and one ballistic missile. A week later, a Ukrainian naval drone self-detonated near an oil terminal in Constanța. Ukraine confirmed the device was its own, attributing the loss of control to Russian electronic jamming that knocked the drone off its course.

These are incidents that did not occur in isolation. Romania, which shares a 650 kilometer border with Ukraine, has recorded more than two dozen confirmed drone incursions into its airspace since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Fragments of Russian drones have been recovered on Romanian soil on multiple occasions. In November 2025, a drone made its deepest recorded penetration into Romanian airspace, prompting the scrambling of both Romanian F-16s and German Eurofighter Typhoons stationed at the Mihail Kogălniceanu airbase.

What distinguishes the May and June 2026 incidents is their scale of consequence. The Galați strike marked the first time a Russian drone caused physical injury to Romanian civilians in a densely populated area. It is, by any reasonable measure, a qualitative escalation—one that transforms a long-simmering border security concern into an acute sovereignty crisis with international law implications.

The Romanian government’s response to the incident was swift and resolute. Following a meeting of the Supreme Council of National Defense, President Nicușor Dan declared the Russian consul in Constanța persona non grata and announced the closure of the Russian consulate in the city. Minister of Foreign Affairs Oana Toiu confirmed both the Russian origin of the Galați drone, and that it was carrying explosives, stating plainly that Romania considers the incident “the full responsibility of the Russian Federation.” Foreign Affairs officials also summoned for discussions Moscow’s ambassador.

Romania’s Defense Ministry acknowledged that the drone had been detected by radar systems and tracked into the southern area of Galați, but said there was “no opportunity” to intercept it given the limited time available. This candid admission reflects a genuine operational challenge: the speed and low-altitude flight paths of modern drones make interception extremely difficult, even for well-equipped NATO members. In the aftermath of the incidents, authorities issued Ro-Alert (Romania’s national emergency alert system) notifications to affected populations, deployed helicopters to search for additional drones, and evacuated over 1.300 people from Black Sea beaches near Constanța as a precautionary measure.

Russia, for its part, denied responsibility for the Galați strike. President Vladimir Putin suggested that the drone may have been of Ukrainian origin, noting previous incidents in Baltic states that were later attributed to Ukrainian drones. The Russian government also warned of a forthcoming response to Romania’s decision to close the Constanța consulate.

The legal dimensions of these incidents are considerable. Under international law, the principle of state sovereignty enshrined in Article 2(1) of the United Nations Charterguarantees each state exclusive jurisdiction over its territory and airspace. The unauthorized entry of an armed drone into Romanian airspace, whether deliberate or the result of navigational error, constitutes a violation of that sovereignty. Romania’s Foreign Affairs Ministry formally characterized the Galați incident as a serious violation of international law.

The distinction between a deliberate attack and an incidental overflight matters significantly in legal terms. The law of state responsibility, as codified in the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, provides that a state bears responsibility for an internationally wrongful act attributable to it, regardless of intent. Russia’s pattern of launching mass drone attacks on Ukrainian territory—attacks that, by their nature and frequency have predictably resulted in drones crossing into Romanian airspace—may be sufficient to establish the imputability of harm, even without evidence of deliberate targeting.

As for the Constanța maritime drone, Ukraine confirmed ownership of the vessel and attributed its errant trajectory to Russian electronic jamming. This raises a distinct but equally complex legal question: when one belligerent’s interference with another’s weapons system causes that system to strike a neutral third state, who bears responsibility? The law of armed conflict does not yet offer a settled answer to this scenario, and the Constanța incident may prove to be significant in the evolving jurisprudence surrounding drone warfare and electronic countermeasures.

For NATO, the incidents in Romania present a structural challenge that the Alliance has been grappling with, largely without resolution, since 2022. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treatycommits all North American Treaty Organization (NATO) members to treat an armed attack against one as an attack against all. Whether recurring drone incursions into a member state’s territory that resulted in civilian casualties meets the threshold of an “armed attack” as defined in Article 5 is a question of enormous political and legal weight.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte condemned the Galați incident, stating that “Russia’s reckless behavior is a danger to us all” and that “the implications of their illegal war of aggression don’t stop at the border.” The United States Ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, called the strike a “reckless incursion” and reaffirmed the Alliance’s commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory. NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) spokesperson confirmed the Russian origin of the drone. Yet the Alliance stopped short of treating the incident as a trigger for consultations under Article 4, let alone collective defense measures under Article 5.

This restraint is deliberate and arguably prudent. Analysts have long warned that ambiguity in NATO’s response to incremental violations may itself function as an invitation to further provocation. At the same time, overreaction to what may be—or what can plausibly be—framed as navigational accidents risks a dangerous escalation with a nuclear-armed state. The Alliance’s challenge is to calibrate a response that is firm enough to deter future incursions while avoiding a spiral toward direct confrontation.

Romania’s own legal framework has evolved in response to this dilemma. Law No. 73 of 2025 introduced a domestic legal basis for the interception and shooting down of unauthorized aerial vehicles under specific conditions. This measure sought to address the gap between Romania’s standing rules of engagement and the operational realities of low-altitude drone intrusions.

The events of late May and early June 2026 underscore a structural vulnerability that no bilateral diplomatic protest can adequately address. Russia’s ongoing drone warfare against Ukraine will continue to affect neighboring NATO countries both physically and legally. The incidents in Galați and Constanța are not anomalies—they are predictable consequences of a war being fought with technologies that do not respect borders.

What is needed, at both the national and alliance level, is a clearer legal and operational framework for responding to drone incursions; one that establishes transparent thresholds for what constitutes a casus belli—an act or event that provokes or justifies war—under international law; one that defines the conditions under which interdiction is authorized, and strengthens collective anti-drone capabilities along NATO’s eastern flank. Romania has requested support from its allies for anti-drone defense measures, and this request now merits a considered response.

More broadly, the international community faces a normative gap that the Constanța incident has brought into sharp view. The use of electronic warfare to redirect armed drones into neutral territory, whether by design or as a foreseeable consequence of jamming, is a scenario for which the existing law of armed conflict provides insufficient guidance. Legal scholars, international organizations, and state governments would do well to begin the work of filling that gap before the next incident transforms a legal ambiguity into a geopolitical crisis.

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Mihai Coca-Constantinescu, who holds an International and European Law LLB from the University of Groningen and an International Trade & Investment Law LLM from the University of Amsterdam, is a PhD candidate in Transboundary Legal Studies at the University of Groningen, based in the Netherlands

This piece first appeared June 23 in JURIST.

Image: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

From our Daily Report:

Romania scrambles F-16 jets after drone incursion
​CounterVortex, Sept. 16, 2025

See also:

GAS INTRIGUES, ECOLOGY AND THE UKRAINE WAR
by Eugene Simonov and Jennifer Castner, Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group
CounterVortex, October 2023

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Reprinted by CounterVortex, June 25, 2026
Used with permission.

Since the mass protests in Iran earlier this year, the Baluchistan region has been flooded with Revolutionary Guard troops. On the same day as the violence in Pashmouki, a Baloch youth was killed by Revolutionary Guards in unclear circumsatnces in Saravan, in the neighboring province of Sistan & Balochistan. Two days earlier, another Baloch youth was killed by Iranian border guards, apparently while attempting to re-enter the country from Afghanistan, to where he had been improperly deported. The traditional Baloch homeland is divded between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with many Baloch unable to get citizenship papers from any of these three governments, and left effectively stateless. (Hengaw, Hengaw, Hengaw, Gunaz, Balochistan Pulse, Express-Tribune, Express-Tribune, Pakistan)

Map: PCL

Speaking at the G7 summit in France, Trump praised Sharaa as doing “an amazing job” and said: “If Israel can’t do the job [against Hezbollah] without killing everyone else, then he will do the job. Syria will do the job.”

But Trump’s comments came days after President al-Sharaa dismissed reports that Syria could become involved in the war in Lebanon as “mere rumors.”

Sources in Damascus told Asharq Al-Awsat that no official US request had been made for Syrian military intervention, and stressed that “entering the quagmire of war and sending military forces unilaterally is completely ruled out.”

The sources said that while US envoy Tom Barrack had previously urged Damascus to take a clear position against Hezbollah, discussion of deploying Syrian troops to Lebanon was “very, very early” and would only be considered in coordination with the Lebanese state.

Syria’s Interior Ministry also emphasized that “Lebanon is a sovereign state and not a backyard, as the former regime viewed it.” (Radio Free Syria)

Photo: Ahmad al-Sharaa meeting Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in Damascus, May 9. Credit: SANA via Radio Free Syria

Ukraine’s religious sites have been repeatedly targeted by Russia over the course of the war.

Photo via Wikipedia

The statement came as PJAK Presidential Council member Siyamend Moini was in Brussels to deliver a speech before a conference at the European Parliament entitled “Weaving a Democratic Iran Together.” In his comments, Moini called for international support for the “reconstruction of a free, democratic, and secular Iran that consistently defends women’s rights, the rights of peoples and minorities, and environmental protection.” (ANF)

Image: Middle East Forum via Wikimedia Commons

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, speaking in state capital Kolkata on June 8, said nearly 5,000 Bangladeshi citizens had been deported across the border. “We have started the work of deporting Bangladeshi infiltrators who do not fall under the purview of the Citizenship Amendment Act,” Adhikari said, refering to the 2019 national law that has been assailed for denying citizenship to thousands of Muslims. (TNH, TRT World)

Mass detention of Muslims on questionable immigration grounds is most advanced in the neighboring state of Assam, leading the group Genocide Watch to issue a “warning alert” for India.

Image: Sowmya Reddy

Evidence of the existential threat posed to humanity by artificial intelligence accrues day by day.

The United Nations on June 4 issued a call for a “responsible AI ecosystem,” warning that daily use of AI is having a vast and insufficiently appreciated environmental impact. The appeal came after a United Nations University study predicting AI’s global water use will match the needs of all 1.3 billion people in Africa south of the Sahara by 2030. The report also warned of a growing challenge from electronic waste, with AI infrastructure projected to generate up to 2.5 million metric tons of e-waste annually by 2030.

The critical minerals needed for AI raise concerns about environmental degradation and social iniquities in the extraction zones—most notably war-torn Central Africa.

But the study especially noted the massive energy demands of AI. Media reports have largely focused on the energy required to train AI models, but the study found that daily consumer use once a model is deployed accounts for more than 80% of the industry’s energy demand. By 2030, data centers powering AI worldwide are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria—countries collectively home to more than 650 million people.

This is unfolding as the minimum goals for reducing emissions to avoid devastating global climate collapse set by the 2015 Paris Agreement are being openly abandoned. So, we are going straight over the edge into climate catastrophe—while a large proportion of that “consumer use” is mindless slop spread on social media.

Nonetheless, the report ended with a roadmap for a “responsible” industry, with proposals including a mechanism for “standardized environmental footprint reporting.”

Given the magnitude of the impacts at a time when reducing industrial civilization’s “footprint” is an urgent imperative, this call can be seen as a dangerous legitimization of the technology. Even in critical commentary, its “advance” is taken as fait accompli—as if that, and not passing a habitable planet to posterity, were the urgent imperative.

Ironically, the forthright call for an outright moratorium or “pause” on AI development has been put forth by one of the industry’s corporate leaders, Anthropic. The company’s June 4 statement warned that AI systems appear to be approaching “recursive self-improvement”—the ability to expand their own capabilities by writing their own code, completely outside human control.

Which brings us what this ubiquitous “slop” means for human culture and consciousness.

This was the focus of Pope Leo XIV’s May 15 encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The encyclical warns of the impacts of this technology on labor—the threat of mass unemployment as workers are replaced by AI, as well as slavery being enabled by the industry (such as in the coltan mines of Central Africa). But it properly views this in itself, dire a threat as it represents, as symptomatic of a deeper and more thoroughgoing threat.

Writing on the threat posed to the consumer of chat-bots, designed as a simulacrum of humanity (as implied by the very name “Anthropic”), the Pope states: “Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

Next, he turns to the assault on truth represented by AI—not merely on truth itself, but the very idea of truth. Here he actually quotes from Hannah Arendt and her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism:

When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened. After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts… Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Which speaks to the sinister nature of what is dismissively called “AI slop.” The reference to a “slow” descent into totalitarianism seems unwarrantedly optimistic as Trump seeks to establish a dictatorship in the United States—a process enabled by the unprecedented environment of true saturation propaganda, bombarding us every moment of our waking lives, with the volume and sophistication now in hypertrophy due to the proliferation of AI.

Social media propaganda has already been implicated in inflaming genocide—particularly that of the Rohingya of Burma and Tigray of Ethiopia. Yet every day, we continue to share unvetted slop—because this abuse is inherent to the technological model.

The encyclical next moves from the epistemological threat—that concerning the nature of truth—to the eschatological: that concerning the ultimate fate of humanity. Noting the “underlying narratives” of “transhumanism and posthumanism,” the Pope warns against the futuristic vision of an “enhanced human being” or “human-machine hybrid.”

Unfortunately, in this most important point in the entire screed, Leo retreats to obfuscation, writing that post-humanism is “difficult to define them in a single, unambiguous way.”

Alas, there is nothing ill-defined about it; it is very concrete and imminently upon us. The advent of Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant technology, now approved for human testing by the US Food & Drug Administration, will give corporate power the ability to directly control our thoughts and emotions. This not only means the extinction of human freedom, even as an idea, but it actually portends the ultimate abolition of humanity itself, and its replacement by a conditioned post-humanity stripped of all autonomy, dignity and reason.

The Pope concludes with a call for “disarming” AI so that it does not serve the aims of “domination, exclusion, and war.” This is the encyclical’s most serious failure—also seen in its frequent nods to AI’s “genuinely helpful” uses.

AI cannot be “disarmed,” because it is by its very nature a weapon.

This technology cannot do other than dominate humanity—or, at the very least, the risk it holds of total domination and ultimate abolition of humanity makes it far too great a threat to allow it to advance. Regardless of what seeming social good it may be made to serve. Like nuclear weaponry, it is sui generis. This is the Latin phrase used by CS Lewis for this kind of technology in his amazingly prescient 1943 essay, The Abolition of Man—meaning of its own class, completely distinct and a break with all precedent.

Nuclear weapons must be rejected in toto, and the only possible legitimate demand concerning them is their total elimination from the Earth. Similarly, we must reject the notion that there is any legitimate use for a technology that bends reality and ultimately the human organism to the will of those who wield it. AI must be rejected in toto. The only possible legitimate demand concerning it is its total elimination.

But another problem with the encyclical is precisely that it is a papal encyclical. It is disturbing that much of the critique of this technology is coming from organized religion and cultural conservatives. Some on the “left” are even so deluded as to view it as a tool for liberation—what’s been called “cyborg socialism.”

Groups such as the Luddite Club in New York and Pull the Plug in London have recently held protests outside the offices of the AI giants, warning of impending “techno-fascism.” This is indeed an apt name for the system now consolidating nearly worldwide, but we must have a critique of the techno as well as the fascism, and avoid the fallacy that the problem is merely what the tech is being used for. The techno and the fascism are inseparable.

Labor unions striking for guarantees against worker replacement by AI are a significant glimmer of hope. So too are the spreading grassroots movements against the proliferation of data centers. But these movements must go beyond mere NIMBY sentiment (Not In My Backyard) to an unflinching critique of the technology.

Of course, it is predictable that the techno-fascist state is criminalizing dissent to techno-fascism, with Trump’s counter-terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka explicitly targeting “anti-tech extremists” for repression. And Trump’s June 2 executive order purporting to establish a regulation regime for artificial intelligence (something he has heretofore rejected) actually serves the aim of a government partnership with the AI industry to advance the police state. Companies are not restrained under the order, but encouraged to share the “cyber capabilities of AI models” with the state.

There is precedent for an abolitionist position on AI. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is urging support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—which has now taken force at the UN, although none of the nine nuclear weapons states have signed it.

We must take a similar abolitionist position on AI, in light of unacceptable threats it poses to humanity on ecological, epistemological and eschatological grounds.

It must be abolished before it abolishes us.

———

A shorter version of this piece first appeared June 11 in Freedom News.

Image: Pixabay via Wikimedia Commons

Audio version:

AI: the case for abolition
​CounterVortex podcast, June 7, 2026

See also:

ORBITAL DATA CENTERS IN LEGAL VACUUM
by Vishal Sharma, JURIST
CounterVortex, March 2026

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Reprinted by CounterVortex, June 12, 2026
Used with permission.

The project includes the uninhabited Adriatic island of Sazan and several hundred hectares of the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape, a sensitive coastal wetland which is home to flamingos, seals and sea turtle nesting sites.

SPAK, the office of Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, confirmed that it has opened an investigation into controversial changes in the area’s protected status and land ownership in 2024, which opened the door to tourism development.

The project is being spearheaded by Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, a company tied to Qatari investors as well as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The couple aims to develop a string of ambitious tourism projects in the region that they have dubbed the “Albanian Riviera.” (Greek Reporter, Politico, AP)

Image: Wikimedia Commons