US vows retaliation for Islamic State group attack

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this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service

I'm Paul Moss and in the early hours of Sunday the 14th of December, these are our main stories. A gunman allied to Islamic State has killed three Americans at an army base in Syria.

The Israeli government has announced the killing of a senior Hamas commander and Chile goes to the polls on Sunday. But will voters choose the far right or a communist?

Also in this podcast, Belarus celebrates the release of political prisoners, but opposition leaders insist their struggle continues.

Our goal is to change the situation in Belarus so that their country becomes truly democratic and independent.

And a manhunt is underway in the US state of Rhode Island after a mass shooting at one of the country's top universities.

Intelligence sources estimate there are still between five and seven thousand members of the extremist Islamic State group at large in Iraq and Syria, some of them in sleeper cells which carry out regular attacks.

And there was a terrible reminder of that on Saturday when three Americans were killed by a gunman at an army base close to Syria's famous ruins of Palmyra.

Donald Trump, speaking next to a rather noisy helicopter, reacted to the news.

Syria, by the way, was fighting along with us. The president, the new president of Syria, is, as they told me, and I'm not surprised, he's devastated by what happened.

This was an ISIS attack on us and Syria. It's pointed that Mr.

Trump took the trouble there to refer to the stance of Syria's President Ahmad al-Shara, a sign of how things have changed in the relations between Washington and Syria.

As our correspondent in Washington, Sean Dilley, explains. Ahmad al-Shara was once upon a time a sworn enemy of the United States.
The politics in Syria is, of course, very complex.

He was a rebel, overthrowing Assad, the previous president, in Syria. So once upon a time, the two countries really would have had absolutely no love loss between them.

Last month, however, President Trump had welcomed the new Syrian president into the White House, into the fold. He'd lifted sanctions on Syria, which had been crippling the country.

And the quid pro quo for that is the expectation that the US wants Syria to help out lower that heat in the region, with its neighbouring countries, in Israel.

So it's very important that this is seen as something that they're tackling together. And that's why President Trump and Pentagon sources are saying that there was an attack on US and Syrian forces.

In other words, the very serious retaliation, to use the words that he has used, would be against those deemed responsible.

Donald Trump has said that he believes that would be ISIS, but certainly this isn't a question, as historically would have been the case, of potentially having to deal with the Syrian government.

So, very much keeping the presidents of Syria in the tent on this one. Sean Dilley, the U.S.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegzeth responded to Saturday's shooting by saying: if you target Americans anywhere in the world, the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.

But US forces have been trying to defeat the Islamic State in Syria for several years.

I spoke about this with our reporter Yousf Taha, who knows the region well, and I asked him about the US operation.

US forces have been conducting various operations across Syria on the quiet without too much fanfare, really, for the last few years. And it says that they are there to

make sure that the Islamic State never becomes active again or powerful for that matter. So that's why they are there.
We had this operation earlier in which the two U.S.

soldiers have been killed along with an interpreter. And as we speak, joint operations by the US and Syrian forces are combing the area in search for any remnants of Islamic States there.

Can you tell us anything about how successful they have been? I mean, as I say, they're promising to get revenge for this and any other attacks. But how successful have they been?

They have been... partially successful.

And again, I can't say that they have been completely successful because we still have members of Islamic State being active, conducting these sporadic operations and various attacks as well.

Just over a week ago, the U.S.

Central Command announced that, in collaboration with Syrian security forces, they had destroyed around 19 weapon dumps for the Islamic State across southern Syria and south of the capital Damascus.

So, this again tells you two things. One, the Islamic State group is not dead, and two,

that the US forces have been successful in various operations there. However, these operations seem to be low-key or they are not giving massive massive publicity.
Yusuf Taha.

It was apparently a rare visit above ground for Raid Saad, but one long enough for Israel to locate the Hamas leader's car and hit it with an airstrike, killing him and three others.

A correspondent in Jerusalem, James Cook, explains who he was and why he was targeted. Raid Saad is the man in question.
He was a senior Hamas commander.

Indeed, it's understood that he'd recently be appointed to a newly established senior military group of Hamas figures, a senior military council. And Israel says that he was involved.

Indeed, he was one of the architects of the attack on October the 7th, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

He's said to have been killed on a strike on a car near Gaza City or around the Gaza City area, in which a total of four people are said to have died.

And Israel says it acted because it accuses him of violating the ceasefire, which came in a couple of months ago, rebuilding Hamas's military capabilities, manufacturing weapons, and targeting Israeli forces, it says, with explosive devices.

James Cook in Jerusalem. It's a choice between a communist and a candidate of the far right.
People in Chile are heading to the polls on Sunday for the country's presidential election.

The Communist Party's candidate is Yanet Harra. And from the far right, we have candidate José Antonio Cast.

While Hara narrowly won the first round, Cast has been the front runner for the final stage, with immigration and crime dominating the election campaign.

Our South America correspondent Ioni Wells has been asking people in the capital Santiago what's at stake. It's Saturday morning in a sunny Santiago and I'm with Carlos Luis Gonzalez.

He's Bolivian but he's lived in Santiago for 35 years. He runs a Salteña business here, essentially a type of Bolivian empanadas, and he's out delivering them today.

Much of the workforce that he employs are migrants from around Latin America, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia.

For us, the migrant workforce is very important because, like me, they come here eager to work. It's harder for migrants to change jobs.

If they have a work contract visa, they have to stay at the same job until the visa is issued to get a permanent visa. We fear if CAST wins, there'll be a problem regularising migrants.

In 2023, the number of foreigners living in Chile was up by 46% compared to 2018. Official estimates suggest about 336,000 people live here undocumented, many from Venezuela.

Gabriel Funes is a Venezuelan who works as a waiter. He moved four years ago.
He's applied for a visa, but he still had no response from the government.

I left Venezuela because the country was in a very, very bad economic situation.

I came here by land, illegally, across the border. I gave my fingerprints, handed over my criminal record, my passport, my ID, a photo.

I got a temporary Chilean ID so I can contribute to social security and pay taxes here. I submitted the paperwork to the Chilean Immigration Office, but I still haven't received a response.

My payments go into a friend's account. I'm basically a ghost here.

Since Cast said he's going to deport us, we've seen more xenophobia. That has stirred up hatred.
He's validating it.

I work in a restaurant and it never happened to me. And then, about 20 days ago, a table arrived.
They started talking about migrants having to leave. Super hurtful words.

This election campaign has been dominated by crime and immigration as the flow of people into the country has recently grown.

Communist Party's Yanet Hara has said she'd deploy the army to protect borders.

Don't let fear freeze your hearts. It is not worth it.
Fear must be fought by giving families more security, not by inventing imaginary solutions.

The far-right frontrunner, Jose Antonio Cast, has pledged a Donald Trump-style border wall and mass deportations.

He's the most right-wing candidate since Chile's dictator Agosto Pinochet, who he has praised.

People who are breaking the law today and are in Chile irregularly have 90 days to leave if they want to apply again to enter.

At this building in Santiago, preparations are going on for Jose Antonio Cast's watch party of the election results.

I'm here to meet Jeremías Alonso, who is a supporter of Caste, but also somebody who volunteers to get the youth vote out for him.

Jose Antonio is not a xenophobic or racist person as the left has tried to portray him.

What CAST is saying is that foreigners should come to Chile, but they should enter properly, because Chile was not prepared to receive the wave of immigration it did.

The problem with having undocumented immigrants in the country is they use the healthcare system, the public education system, the public resources funded through Chilean taxpayers.

With such different candidates, this result is set to be polarizing. The right fear the consequences of sticking with the status quo.
The left say they fear a return to Chile's far-right past.

Ioni Wells in Santiago.

Another Football World Cup, another set of controversies. Next year's men's contests will be held in cities across Mexico, Canada, and the US.

There were worries earlier this week when the Trump administration hinted that anyone wanting to enter the country would have their social media history for the past five years scrutinized before a visa was issued, and a travel ban's already been slapped on fans from a number of countries, including Iran and Haiti.

Others are complaining that the organisers' FIFA have made it almost impossible for some fans to go to the World Cup because the ticket prices are so high.

The cheapest ones for the final cost over $4,000 each. The Sports Illustrated journalist Henry Winter told the BBC what he thought of these issues.

I think this is possibly predictable, heading to the United States in particular, and the cost.

Obviously, there are issues for some countries for the visas getting in, but I think that FIFA will have to step in, and that anyone who actually has a valid match ticket should automatically be allowed a visa.

But I think the real cost is the cost of the tickets, which are absolutely prohibitive. To follow England through the whole tournament would be six and a half thousand dollars.

And then you look at what it means for Ghanaian fans or haitian fans and their average monthly wage in those two countries respectively is two hundred and fifty four dollars a month and one hundred and forty seven dollars a month which barely even covers the cost of the ticket the president johnny mfintino has so much power and remember with that power the revenues that are generated by the world cup keeps a lot of these national associations going so they're not going to argue against it fifa prides itself in being a not-for-profit organization and it does does go into youth development, it goes into women's grassroots, it goes into men's grassroots, a lot of it in Africa.

So, you're not going to get them having a go at Infantino, just like you're not going to get the English Football Association having a go at FIFA or actually standing up to them because England wants to host the 2035 Women's World Cup, which is bestowed by FIFA.

Henry Winter from Sports Illustrated.

Still to come, music for an alien world.

Every time we dream, we dream as

one.

With the latest avatar film said to be released, we hear from the soundtracks composer.

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A police hunt has been launched in the U.S. city of Providence, Rhode Island, after a man opened fire on students at Brown University.

The shooting took place in the Engineering and Physics Building at the Ivy League University on a day when exams were scheduled. The suspect has been described as a male wearing black clothes.

The mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, told a news conference what they know so far. At four o'clock in the afternoon, we received a report of an active shooter.

I can confirm that there are two individuals who have died. We do not have a shooter in custody at this time.
There is a shelter in place in effect for the Greater Brown University area.

If you live on or near Brown's campus, we are encouraging you to stay home and stay inside.

If you're not home at this time, we would encourage you not to return to your homes until the shelter-in-place has been lifted.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, Steph Machado, a journalist from the Boston Globe, gave my colleague Carl Nassman this update from the scene of the shooting.

looking for this gunman throughout the city. Obviously, the big question is whether he is still here.
And we don't know that.

And so that is why the sheltering place is still in effect until we have some sort of additional information.

The mayor did say at a news conference a short time ago that there is no indication that there's an imminent threat.

I assume that's because the gunman has not been spotted since he left that engineering building.

But just very, very tense, obviously devastating night, and I'm sure devastating days to come, especially if we learn more about the victims. Yeah, devastating night.

And of course, we heard that the two victims who were killed in the shooting are confirmed to be by the Brown University president students on campus.

All or most of these victims are students here at Brown. There were finals going on in that building at the time.

And so, you know, we don't know yet where exactly all of this took place or what the students were doing at the time, but we do know that that was why there were students in the building on a Saturday that they were teaching finals.

Steph Machado from the Boston Globe, and the BBC will bring you more on this story as it develops. Check our website, BBCNews.com, for updates.

I feel immense joy and immense love. The words of Maria Kalesnikava standing outside a prison in Belarus as her sister Tatsiana Komich was released from prison.

Komich was just one of 123 people who were released on Saturday, all of them widely regarded as political prisoners locked up for opposing the regime of Alexander Lukashenko.

They were freed following negotiations between Belarus and the United States.

A reason for gratitude, according to the Belarusian opposition leader, Svietlana Tsikhanovskia, as she told my colleague Owen Bennett-Jones.

We are grateful to President Trump personally and special envoy John Cole and everyone who took on the humanitarian track of releasing political prisoners.

These are our people, and the fact that the U.S. is working on their release is a shared achievement.
Has Europe got anything to do with this, or is it all coming from Washington?

The fact that people are being released is the result of joint efforts, US diplomacy and European sanctions pressure.

Without strong European Union pressure, the regime would have no motivation to release anyone.

So that's why our goal is to release people first of all, but also to return home together and to change the situation in Belarus so that there are no more political prisoners, no repressions, and our country becomes truly democratic and independent.

Your husband was released, I think, after five years in prison back in June. Would you say he's gone through that rehabilitation process yet? How difficult is it?

All the people who went through prison cells, they are very much traumatized. Of course, they're strong people.

All those people who went the streets in Belarus and fight with the dictator or were supporting Ukraine, they will manage to recover sooner or later.

But of course, all those memories they experienced in jails, they will stay with people forever. But we will need time to see if some psychological assistance will be needed.

Can you just give us your assessment of what the government in Belarus, you know, the leadership, what they will be thinking about this? Will they be anxious that they've done this?

Will they be nervous about it? Or because they're all abroad, not that bothered? They know that people want Lukashenko to step away,

people want free and fair elections in Belarus. Of course, he wants normalization, if I may say so, of situation in the country.
That's why they're bragging about this communication with the USA.

But of course, there cannot be normalization with the Belarusian regime until all political prisoners are released and repressions stop. Svetlana Tsukhanovskaya.

So, why has the US been so keen apparently to get political prisoners released in Belarus? It's not a country Donald Trump has talked much about.

And why would President Lukashenko be happy to free them? He has, after all, described his political opponents as bandits and opponents of the nation.

We asked Nigel Gould Davies, a former UK ambassador to Belarus, who's now a Russia and Eurasia analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It's a very good deal for Lukashenko.

He has released barely 10% of the political prisons that he holds, although he might release more in due course. And in return, he's got an easing of the biggest, the most important U.S.

sanction against his economy. It's much harder to understand why America is doing this.
This easing of sanctions is likely to reduce global potash prices.

That will perhaps be good for American farmers and also lower consumer prices for agricultural goods.

But the other point I'd make is that since it's good for Belarus, it's also good for Russia, and it eases in particular the burden that Russia faces in helping to subsidize the Belarusian economy, which is very dependent on Russia, even as Belarus itself continues to provide a large range of very important war-related services to Russia.

Belarus is aiding the war and doing everything really that Russia asks of it, except for committing its own troops.

It follows from that that anything that eases the economic pressures on Belarus is helpful for Russia too.

And Russia, of course, will have been deeply involved in these negotiations between America and Belarus. So Putin is also watching carefully for the kind of deal that he might be able to hope for.

Former Ambassador Nigel Gould Davies.

The man once known as Prince Andrew has been told he won't be investigated over a recent allegation involving his accuser, Virginia Guffray. A newspaper had claimed that he tried to dig up dirt on Ms.

Guffray, the woman who who said she'd been forced to have sex with him by Jeffrey Epstein.

More than that, it said, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, as he's now known, had given this dirt-digging task to his bodyguard, a publicly paid official.

But the police have now said they won't be investigating this allegation any further. A decision Ms.
Juffray's family said was a disappointment. Here's our correspondent, Helena Wilkinson.

In October, the Mail on Sunday alleged it had seen emails in 2011 which the former Prince had sent to Geoffrey Epstein and Queen Elizabeth's Deputy Press Secretary Ed Perkins.

The paper claimed that in the messages, he wrote that Virginia Dufray had a criminal record in the US and that he had given her date of birth and social security number to his on-duty personal protection officer.

It was alleged that he was trying to dig up dirt on his accuser ahead of the publication of a photograph showing him with his arm around Miss Dufray.

She took her own life earlier this year and was one of Jeffrey Epstein's most prominent accusers.

The police said in a statement it had carried out an assessment of the newspaper claims, which hadn't revealed any evidence of criminal acts or misconduct.

Scotland Yard said, should new and relevant information be brought to its attention, including in the release of material in the US, it would assess it.

This is a reference to the images and documents being published about Epstein by Congressional Democrats. The statement means that Mr.

Mountbatten Windsor will not face any police action over the paper's claims.

The family of Virginia Dufray expressed their deep disappointment and said the investigation had been dropped without explanation and without speaking to them. Helena Wilkinson.

Local residents trying to stop their natural resources being plundered by outsiders. No, this isn't another environment story, or at least not an earthly one.

It is instead the third film in the Avatar series, which is about to come out in cinemas. Each installment in this sci-fi franchise has taken years to make.
And the same is true of the soundtrack.

According to the film's composer, Simon Franklin, it occupied seven years of his life, he told our music correspondent, Mark Savage.

This

is the only pure thing in this world.

There's a little over three hours of music in the film. The copyist told me that I had done 1,907 pages of a conducting score.
How does that compare to a typical Hollywood movie?

What would the score be for that? Probably a quarter of that.

The Avatar movies are a huge technical achievement, full of cutting-edge visual effects and performance capture techniques. This world goes much deeper than you imagine.

But Simon Franklin says that the director, James Cameron, insists everything the audience sees and hears is created by humans.

He very specifically asked me, he said, we're not using any AI and I said no. He said, we're not putting any real musicians out of work.
I said, no.

He said, because it's really important to me that these are real musicians. This is part of what gives that music that organic feeling that I want.

At what point did you start writing the music? The first cues I wrote in February 2018. We meet the wind traders in Avatar, Fire and Ash.
They have a hoedown on their enormous galleon.

The hoedown has to have a piece of music in it. We see it on the screen.
The problem was, what did they play?

Because it's not animation, it's performance. You have to have a real instrument that would be designed for three meter high blue people with four fingers.
So I sketch out instruments.

The art department make these beautiful 3D designs. So the prop master 3D prints these instruments, which we use as part of the score, but they're also played on screen.

Do they have names? They are the stringy things and the drummy things.

Currently, I'm sure I should have come up with better names.

One of the main storylines in Avatar Fire and Ash is grief. Jake and Neytiri, the two two main characters, have lost their son.
Yeah.

And they react to that in very different ways, and it drives a wedge in their relationship. So, where was Akin? Where was Abel?

Jake?

For any family, the loss of a child is the worst thing you can go through. And I think it's something that often in these sorts of films, grief is not something that is ever addressed.

It's normally just crashing and banging, and so on.

And the important stuff is often the quiet moments as much as it is the loud.

Yes,

The first two Avatar films made more than $5 billion at the box office combined. Scripts are ready for parts four and five, but there's a question mark over whether they'll get made.

I really hope we break even so that we can make four.

Is it really contingent on breaking even? Remember the costs involved. I think they said on the last one, Avatar 2, the break-even point was like $1.4 billion.

Wow. That's how much we...
That's a lot of money. That's quite a lot of money.
I presume that I have no way of knowing, but I presume that it's a similar number for this one.

Every time I break,

it's a song to give this. But with Miley Cyrus' theme song for Avatar Fire and Ash already nominated for a Golden Globe, there is hope that the series' musical legacy will continue.

If the audience tells us that they want an Avatar 4, I'm very much looking forward to doing that. Every time

Mark Savage reporting.

And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service use the hashtag hash global newspod.

This edition was mixed by Javid Gilani and produced by Beta Goffin and Wendy Urquhart. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Paul Moss. Until next time, goodbye.

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