https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9a9pPZTwmc
Syria. 2003. Directed by Omar Amiralay.
This film completes Amiralay's trilogy on the Tabqa dam as it critiques the impacts the dam's construction and collapse had on the local townspeople. While his first film ("Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam" (1970)) praised the Ba'ath party for its "innovative" development, his second ("Everyday Life in a Syrian Village" (1974)) and third films critiqued the government's refusal to take responsibility for the faulty dam and failure to provide basic amenities to the poor, despite its promise of radical economic improvements. In this documentary, Amiralay explores the region and the village of el-Machi to examine the consequences of the Ba'ath's 40 year rule in Syria.
https://twitter.com/VDC_Syria
https://www.facebook.com/vdcsy
https://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/
Violations Documenting Center (VDC) in Syria
https://twitter.com/snhr
http://sn4hr.org/
Syrian Network for Human Rights
https://twitter.com/im_PULSE/status/703714546842734593
"SNHR is actually different from SOHR (whose numbers/methods aren't transparent). SNHR's track with VDC's estimates."
http://www.vocativ.com/345313/hunting-syrian-war-crimes-from-5000-miles-away/
http://syrianaccountabilityproject.org/
Syrian Accountability Project (SAP)
https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef
Syrian Civil Defense (The White Helmets)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War
List of massacres during the Syrian Civil War
http://www.dawn.com/news/1269420/syrias-violent-descent-into-chaos
Central themes include how Syrian governments flirted with Sunni extremism, dating back to Bashar al-Assad’s assumption of power in 2000.
.....
Essentially, Assad played a similar double game near 2003 when the US went into Iraq. The regime historically and tactically used jihadists, playing a double game by cracking down on them when necessary, while also encouraging them to wage terror campaigns abroad, and even at times, facilitating their movement.
After 9/11, Assad’s “security apparatus continued to provide Islamists and jihadists circles the necessary space to operate, albeit under their constant surveillance.” As it happened, these jihadists would turn their attention to neighbouring Iraq when the US invaded in March 2003. Jihadi leaders in Aleppo, Idlib, Deraa, and other districts were skilled at rousing internal anti-American sentiments — as witnessed across the Arab world. Attracting young fighters to travel to and defend Iraq against a foreign invasion, Syrian Salafist leaders recruited actively for the fledging jihadist insurgency in Iraq — such as the Aleppo-based Syrian preacher Abu al-Qaqaa, who used his jihadist contacts to recruit inside Syria, the wider Middle East and North Africa. Interestingly, the description of al-Qaqaa as a young man when first brought by a military intelligence officer to Aleppo, read he was “dressed like a Pakistan[i] and barely spoke a word … We were instructed to produce a local ID card, a driving license and other documents for him, but without any registered address or other personal information. This was illegal in Syria so we knew right away, despite his youth and foreign appearance, we were dealing with someone important.”
However, it was obvious that the establishment turned a blind eye to the expansion and consolidation of these Syrian networks around 2003-2004. It was well-known that the ‘dominant actor’ — Syria’s military intelligence led by Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat — ensured that hundreds of thousands of jihadists did not remain in Syria for long, but were imported across the border. Opening a long jihadist corridor, connecting eastern Syria’s border with western Iraq, this transit point also facilitated many independent and interlinked foreign fighter recruitment and smuggling networks, established during this period, with the military aware of such activities.
This nexus of Syrian Baath-Iraqi Baath-Al Qaeda, established in 2003 at the time of the Iraq conflict, also laid the foundation for militant associations based on requirements (recruitment and financial purposes) between the Iraqi Baathists and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the same in Syria. Documenting this historical nexus in the context of the emergence of IS in later years is significant because it reveals how jihadists do not completely sever ideological ties despite inter-rivalries. Besides this is how IS has managed to strengthen its transnational organisational structure — further drawing recruits and funds from Europe as well.
https://tcf.org/content/report/assads-broken-base-case-idlib/Certainly, minorities did play an outsized role in many such groups, particularly in religiously mixed areas, but the exact composition of the groups varied according to local demographics. In the Sunni-dominated Qusayr area near the Lebanese border, for example, the security agencies relied on certain Greek Orthodox Christian families; in Kurdish-majority Qamishli, on Syriac Christians and members of the Sunni Arab Tai tribe; in the large city of Aleppo, on certain Sunni Arab clans from the suburbs and the surrounding countryside, as well as on Palestinians; and in Sunni-majority Homs City, primarily on Alawites.
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2016/8/27/the-tragedy-of-daraya
Daraya's courageous social and political activism stretches back long before the eruption of the revolution in 2011. Its residents protested against Israeli oppression in Palestine during the Second Intifada, and then against the US invasion of Iraq. Those who believe that Assad's regime represents popular anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism won't realise how brave these actions were. Independent demonstrations were completely illegal in Syria, punishable by torture and imprisonment, even if the protests were directed against the state's supposed enemies.
....
This legacy of civic engagement owes a great deal to the Daraya-based religious scholar Abd al-Akram al-Saqqa, who introduced his students to the work of "liberal Islamist" and apostle of non-violence Jawdat Said, and was twice arrested as a result. Jawdat Said emphasised, amongst other things, rights for women, the importance of pluralism, and the need to defend minority groups.
In 2011, Daraya became one of the most important laboratories for exploring the possibilities of non-violent resistance. Ghiath Matar - known as "little Gandhi" - put al-Saqqa and Said's principles into practice by encouraging protestors to present flowers and bottles of water to the soldiers bussed in to shoot them. The regime responded, as usual, with staggering violence. Matar, a 26-year-old tailor, was arrested in September 2011. Four days later his mutilated corpse was returned to his parents and pregnant wife.
From the start, despite the regime's divide-and-rule provocations, Daraya's protest movement rejected sectarian polarisation. As in Deraa and Homs, Christians in the town joined protests, and church bells rang in revolutionary solidarity with the martyrs. Even as Salafism and jihadism rose to prominence elsewhere in the traumatised country, Daraya preserved its tolerance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO3r443E5xw
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2899.htm
April 14, 2011: Footage of Syrian Security Forces Beating Demonstrators in Baydha
https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/04/15/syria-rampant-torture-protesters
April 15, 2011: Human Rights Watch reviewed video footage showing evidence of severe beatings on the face and arms of another child, described in the footage as a 12-year-old from Douma, a town near Damascus.
....Several told Human Rights Watch that they were put in small solitary confinement cells about 1 by 1.5 meters - too small even to lie down.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=224_1303590464
April 23, 2011: Very Graphic: Syrian Forces Open Fire On Demonstrators in Izraa near Daraa
https://www.lawfareblog.com/siege-warfare-syria
April 25, 2011: The first siege in the Syrian conflict was imposed just a month into the uprising. On April 25, 2011, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) surrounded the southern city of Dera’a and besieged it as part of a ten-day operation that would leave over 500 Syrians dead and 2,500 detained.
The Dera’a offensive mirrored tactics that Bashar al-Assad’s father used to quash dissent in Hama nearly 30 years before. In February 1982, after several days of street battles, Hafez al-Assad imposed a hermetic siege on the restive city, and then razed whole neighborhoods to the ground with indiscriminate shelling, killing between 10,000 to 40,000 civilians.
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Sieges have helped the Syrian regime weather its problems of manpower. With the uprising spreading across the country and growing numbers of defections and casualties, the SAA lacked the manpower to launch multiple ground assaults across the country in 2012. Besieging an area requires limited forces, and yet effectively limits the spread of opposition. Additionally, as conscription is a common feature of siege tactics, sieges also provide opportunities for detaining and forcibly drafting men into the army at the checkpoints on the sieges’ perimeter.
http://www.rferl.org/content/dorothy_parvaz_missing_back_in_doha_safe/24178159.html
May 18, 2011: The 39-year-old Parvaz was detained in Syria while on assignment for Al-Jazeera's English-language television channel. She had left Doha for Damascus on April 29 to cover the antigovernment uprising in Syria and the government's deadly crackdown on demonstrators there.
But the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has banned most outside journalists and has placed strict controls on the few media outlets remaining in the country. Syrian officials said Parvaz was handed over to Iranian diplomats in Damascus on May 1 and deported to Iran.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/protester-who-exposed-lies-at-the-heart-of-syrias-regime-2287789.html
May 22, 2011:How Ahmad Biasi showed Assad's brutality to the world?
After the Syrian authorities dismissed video footage of security forces beating protesters they were holding captive (pictures 1 and 2) as fake, one of the men attacked, Ahmad Biasi (sitting on a step in picture 3), decided to prove them wrong. He appeared on camera (picture 4) in another video, brandishing his ID card to prove he was Syrian (picture 5), and that the film had not been recorded in Iraqi Kurdistan, as the authorities had claimed. He began the footage by filming a sign (picture 6) bearing the town's name, al-Bayda, and then headed to the same spot featured in the original film (picture 7), recording his journey continuously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E4FpfOywkM&bpctr=1468969935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Hamza_Ali_Al-Khateeb
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8556619/How-a-13-year-old-boy-became-the-face-of-the-Syrian-uprising.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/31/syria-unrest-teenage-victim-hamza
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/world/middleeast/31syria.html
May 31, 2011: Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Dara’a, on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.
But
the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture.
Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is
scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would
probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are
shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped
off.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/06/01/weve-never-seen-such-horror/crimes-against-humanity-syrian-security-forces
June 1, 2011: Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March 2011, Syrian security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arbitrarily arrested thousands, subjecting many of them to brutal torture in detention. The security forces routinely prevented the wounded from getting medical assistance, and imposed a siege on several towns, depriving the population of basic services. Some of the worst abuses took place in Daraa governorate in southwestern Syria.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/06/01/weve-never-seen-such-horror/crimes-against-humanity-syrian-security-forces
June 1, 2011: Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March 2011, Syrian security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arbitrarily arrested thousands, subjecting many of them to brutal torture in detention. The security forces routinely prevented the wounded from getting medical assistance, and imposed a siege on several towns, depriving the population of basic services. Some of the worst abuses took place in Daraa governorate in southwestern Syria.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2HTfBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT252&lpg=PT252&dq=AlQashoush&source=bl&ots=lfheWKYdUJ&sig=JP_FeJKefdECxxQgVHKyt5Gmk-A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPg6n-y9nNAhXGC8AKHS1IBz8Q6AEILjAD#v=onepage&q=AlQashoush&f=false
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/145578#.V3o5444Sy8o
July 11, 2011: The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the body of Syrian singer Ibrahim Qashoush, who wrote a song about the Syrian uprising and who had taken part in riots in the city of Hama, was found last week in a river in the city. His throat had been cut.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/world/middleeast/05syria.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hpw
August 4, 2011: Syrian human rights activists said Thursday that Syrian government forces had killed more than 100 people in the rebellious city of Hama in the first 24 hours since seizing control of its central square with armored columns and snipers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/ali-ferzat-cartoonist-exile-syria
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2012/jun/21/drawing-syria-revolution-ali-farzat-video
http://www.smh.com.au/world/militiamen-break-cartoonists-hands-in-violent-attack-20110826-1je9x.html#ixzz4DR6uhjiN
August 27, 2011:
Syrian forces have beaten up a prominent Syrian political cartoonist and left him bleeding on the side of a road in the latest episode of a campaign to quash dissent against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Ali Ferzat, 60, is one of the Arab world's most famous cultural figures, and his drawings have pushed at the boundaries of freedom of expression in Syria.
.....
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/02/03/syria-stop-torture-children
Feb 3, 2012: Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centers, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.
.....
Children, some as young as 13, reported to Human Rights Watch that officers kept them in solitary confinement, severely beat and electrocuted them, burned them with cigarettes, and left them to dangle from metal handcuffs for hours at a time, centimeters above the floor. Detention facilities where children reported being tortured include: the military security detention center in Homs, the military security detention center in Tartous, the Balooneh detention center in Homs, the Palestine detention center in Damascus, and the 291 detention center in Damascus. All children interviewed said that they received inadequate food and water in detention, and most received no medical treatment for torture-inflicted injuries.
http://www.rferl.org/content/syria-ramouseh-artillery-base-victory/27903617.html
By February 2012, the protest movement in Syria was making its final transition into a full-blown civil war. By this time, Homs, a working-class city in the center of Syria, was in full rebellion. Assad, in direct contradiction to his agreement with the Arab League, deployed his tanks and artillery to the city. The death toll exploded, and even peaceful protesters began to realize that Assad would stop at nothing to kill all those who opposed him. For many Syrians rebels whom I've spoken with over the years, the siege of Homs was the moment they realized that there was no peaceful solution to the conflict. It was time to take up arms.
Despite what Syria has become, it might come as a surprise to many that at this time there were effectively no armed groups that had an obvious jihadist or Salafist ideology. Syria was a secular country with a secular military, most rebels were former military or police, and despite being driven to take up arms, they were not particularly interested in overthrowing their government, much less installing some sort of Islamic caliphate, the stated goal of groups like Al-Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), which were relative latecomers to this crisis. What Western leaders often refer to now as the “moderate opposition” made up nearly the entirety of the opposition back in early 2012.
http://www.rferl.org/content/syria_crackdown_/24491921.html
Feb 22, 2012: "Sunday Times" correspondent Marie Colvin, 56, and French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, died when a shell hit a makeshift media center in the Baba Amr district in Homs.
Homs has been under siege by Syrian government forces for nearly 20 days. The city has been an opposition stronghold since protests against Assad's regime began a year ago.
European Union foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton strongly condemned the killings of the two journalists and others in Homs, describing them as "crimes."
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said France held the Syrian government "responsible and accountable" for the safety of its citizens there.
Three other Western journalists were wounded in the shelling of Baba Amr, including a second French journalist, Edith Bouvier, who was reportedly in critical condition.
.....
Syrian authorities said they were not aware Colvin and Ochlik had entered the country and urged foreign reporters in Syria to register with the government.
Since the beginning of protests against Assad's regime, the Syrian government has barred foreign media from operating freely in the country.
https://rsf.org/en/news/citizen-journalist-sentenced-death-al-jazeera-interview
18 May 2012: the death sentence passed today on the citizen journalist Mohammed Abdelmawla al-Hariri for “high treason and contacts with foreign parties”. He was arrested on 16 April just after giving an interview to the television station Al-Jazeera about the situation in his hometown of Deraa.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/25/syria-local-residents-used-human-shields
March 25, 2012: Witnesses from the towns of al-Janoudyah, Kafr Nabl, Kafr Rouma, and Ayn Larouz in the Idlib governorate in northern Syria told Human Rights Watch that they saw the army and pro-government armed men, referred to locally as shabeeha, force people to march in front of the advancing army during the March 2012 offensive to retake control of areas that had fallen into the hands of the opposition. From the circumstances of these incidents, it was clear to the witnesses that the purpose of this was to protect the army from attack.
“By using civilians as human shields, the Syrian army is showing blatant disregard for their safety,” said Ole Solvang, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Syrian army should immediately stop this abhorrent practice.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houla_massacre
May 25, 2012: Syrian regime and allied militias accused of killing 108 people, including 34 women and 49 children, in Houla.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9307411/The-Shabiha-Inside-Assads-death-squads.html
June 2, 2012: The door to Dr Mousab Azzawi's clinic, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, was always open to anyone who needed help. But, operating in the heartland of the feared Shabiha militia, there were some patients the doctor would have preferred not to treat.
"They were like monsters," said Dr Azzawi, who worked in Latakia. "They had huge muscles, big bellies, big beards. They were all very tall and frightening, and took steroids to pump up their bodies.
"I had to talk to them like children, because the Shabiha likes people with low intelligence. But that is what makes them so terrifying – the combination of brute strength and blind allegiance to the regime."
As President Bashar al-Assad's country continues its savage slide towards full-blown civil war, the violent, dark and secretive world of the Shabiha is coming out into the open.
Nine days ago, 108 people were butchered by the Shabiha in the town of Houla. The pro-Assad thugs went through the village, house to house, and slit the throats of anyone they came across – including 49 children. Exactly a week later, the Shabiha pulled 12 factory workers off a bus in the town of Qusayr, 40 miles to the south; tied their hands behind their backs, and shot them in the head.
.....
Initially the Shabiha were a mafia clan, making money through racketeering. Selma, the Alawite with Shabiha family, said her cousins were "filthy rich" through smuggling in diesel, milk and electronics. "Anything to Lebanon that is cheaper in Syria, and whatever is needed in Syria from Lebanon," she said.
The ruling Assad family turned a blind eye to their criminal behaviour and violent methods. In return, the Shabiha became the Assads' fiercely loyal defenders and enforcers.
"They are fuelled by this belief that they are fighting for their survival," said Dr Azzawi. "Assad tells them that they must defend the government or else they will be destroyed; it's kill, or be killed."
Dr Azzawi, who now runs the Syrian Network for Human Rights from London, showed The Sunday Telegraph a video of the Shabiha in action.
An enormous man, identified on the video as Areen al-Assad – a member of the president's family clan – posed with his gun, grinned from the steering wheel of his car, and flexed his muscles. His huge bicep bulged with a tattoo of the president's face.
At the end of the video, the posturing Shabiha militants proclaim: "Bashar, do not be sad: you have men who drink blood."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9382057/Amateur-footage-shows-Syrian-security-forces-giving-electric-shocks-to-protesters.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qubeir_massacre
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/07/syria-regime-troops-militiamen-massacre
http://www.rferl.org/content/un-says-syria-kills-tortures-children/24611518.html
June 12, 2012: Syrian Army troops, as well as pro-government Shabiha militia fighters, have intentionally targeted children as young as 9 in their deadly crackdown against the country's 15-month uprising.
Based on interviews conducted by UN monitors with children and former soldiers in Syria, the report presents evidence of children who have been victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and sexual violence.
Children with the scars of torture described being beaten, blindfolded, forced into stress positions, whipped with heavy cables, and burned with cigarettes during interrogations.
It records one case in which Syrian authorities subjected a young boy to electrical shocks on his genitals.
The report also says children are being placed on Syrian Army tanks and troop transports to be used as human shields in battles against the opposition Free Syrian Army.
It describes one specific case -- a March 9 attack by government forces on the village of Ayn l'Arouz in Idlib Province -- in which Syrian troops rounded up dozens of young boys and placed them at the windows of busses carrying soldiers into the raid.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN's special representative for children and armed conflict, says she has rarely seen "such brutality against children" as the violence being carried out by the Syrian regime.
.....
Assad's regime prevents independent journalists from entering the country to report on the uprising.
But during the past month, video footage has emerged on social-media websites like YouTube showing civilian victims of massacres at villages like Houla, where dozens of women and children were hacked to death or shot in the head at close range.
UN monitors say evidence shows that the Houla atrocity was carried out by Shabiha militia fighters in a coordinated operation with Syrian Army troops.
One of the latest videos to emerge, reportedly shot on June 10, shows relatives of 10 dead children lamenting over their bodies in the village of Bakas near Haffeh, Syria.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/sites/default/files/deadly_reprials.pdf
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/06/syria-fresh-evidence-armed-forces-ongoing-crimes-against-humanity/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9382057/Amateur-footage-shows-Syrian-security-forces-giving-electric-shocks-to-protesters.html
July 6, 2012: The video, which activists claim was shot in the Southern city of Suwayda, was uploaded to YouTube on Thursday.
In the footage security forces appear to chase after fleeing protesters delivering fierce beatings with batons when they catch them. One man is subjected to what look and sound like electric shocks from the end of one of these batons.
Suwayda is in southern Syria, about 30 miles from the border with Jordan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qubeir_massacre
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/07/syria-regime-troops-militiamen-massacre
June 7, 2012: Witnesses to an apparent massacre that killed close to 100 civilians in a small Syrian village have described watching pro-regime militiamen whom they personally knew pass by with loyalist troops minutes before the killing started.
http://www.rferl.org/content/un-says-syria-kills-tortures-children/24611518.html
June 12, 2012: Syrian Army troops, as well as pro-government Shabiha militia fighters, have intentionally targeted children as young as 9 in their deadly crackdown against the country's 15-month uprising.
Based on interviews conducted by UN monitors with children and former soldiers in Syria, the report presents evidence of children who have been victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and sexual violence.
Children with the scars of torture described being beaten, blindfolded, forced into stress positions, whipped with heavy cables, and burned with cigarettes during interrogations.
It records one case in which Syrian authorities subjected a young boy to electrical shocks on his genitals.
The report also says children are being placed on Syrian Army tanks and troop transports to be used as human shields in battles against the opposition Free Syrian Army.
It describes one specific case -- a March 9 attack by government forces on the village of Ayn l'Arouz in Idlib Province -- in which Syrian troops rounded up dozens of young boys and placed them at the windows of busses carrying soldiers into the raid.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN's special representative for children and armed conflict, says she has rarely seen "such brutality against children" as the violence being carried out by the Syrian regime.
.....
Assad's regime prevents independent journalists from entering the country to report on the uprising.
But during the past month, video footage has emerged on social-media websites like YouTube showing civilian victims of massacres at villages like Houla, where dozens of women and children were hacked to death or shot in the head at close range.
UN monitors say evidence shows that the Houla atrocity was carried out by Shabiha militia fighters in a coordinated operation with Syrian Army troops.
One of the latest videos to emerge, reportedly shot on June 10, shows relatives of 10 dead children lamenting over their bodies in the village of Bakas near Haffeh, Syria.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/sites/default/files/deadly_reprials.pdf
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/06/syria-fresh-evidence-armed-forces-ongoing-crimes-against-humanity/
June 13, 2012: Amnesty International visited 23 towns and villages in the Aleppo and Idlib governorates, including areas where Syrian government forces launched large scale attacks including during negotiations over the implementation of the UN-Arab League-sponsored six-point ceasefire agreement in March/April.
In every town and village visited grieving families described to Amnesty International how their relatives – young and old and including children - were dragged away and shot dead by soldiers - who in some cases then set the victims’ bodies on fire.
Soldiers and shabiha militias burned down homes and properties and fired indiscriminately into residential areas, killing and injuring civilian bystanders. Those who were arrested, including the sick and elderly, were routinely tortured, sometimes to death. Many have been subjected to enforced disappearance; their fate remains unknown.
June 15, 2012: As Syria descends into civil war, Abu Jaafar said he is ready to kill women and children to defend his friends, family and president. “Sunni women are giving birth to babies who will fight us in years to come, so we have the right to fight anyone who can hurt us in the future,” said the Allawite militiaman, a member of the ancient offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Syrian President Bashar Assad and the powerbase of his regime belong. With his massive, tattooed muscles, shaved head, bushy black beard and trademark white trainers, Abu Jaafar, 38, looks every bit the figure of terror that is now imprinted on the international conscience. It is militiamen like Jaafar that are believed responsible for recent massacres in Houla and Qbeir, in which nearly 200 Sunni civilians were killed, many of them women and children who were stabbed to death. Though he has a wife and children, after a day lifting weights and drinking some local Arak, Jaafar spends most evenings in the nightclubs of Lattakia, the port city on the Mediterranean coast where regime forces this week attacked a rebellious village. As a member of the mafia militia who grew up smuggling commodities, appliances, drugs and guns between Syria and Lebanon at the behest of Assad’s extended family, Abu Jaafar has no problem getting past the nightclub bouncers.
http://www.rferl.org/content/syria-backgrounder-sectarian-war/24615642.html
June 15, 2012: The Syrian regime appears to regard the Shabiha as valuable for two reasons.
One is the regime's own uncertainty about the loyalty of all its army units. Balanche says those worries require Damascus to use just one army corps, the Fourth Division commanded by Bashar's brother, to do the fighting in restive Homs Province.
"The Fourth Division, led by Maher Assad, is exclusively Alawite; there is no Sunni, no Christian, no Druze in this corps, and this Fourth Division is used by the regime against the resistance very strictly," Balanche says. "The Sunni battalions are in other areas where it is less dangerous because the regime is not sure about the fidelity of the Sunni soldiers."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/06/15/syria-sexual-assault-detention
June 15, 2012: Witnesses and victims also told Human Rights Watch that soldiers and pro-government armed militias have sexually abused women and girls as young as 12 during home raids and military sweeps of residential areas.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/07/03/torture-archipelago/arbitrary-arrests-torture-and-enforced-disappearances-syrias
July 3, 2012: Based on more than 200 interviews with former detainees, including women and children, and defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies, this report focuses on 27 of these detention facilities.
https://rsf.org/en/news/thirty-three-professional-and-citizen-journalists-killed-march-2011
7 July 2012: A total of 33 professional and citizen journalists have been killed since the start of the uprising in Syria in March 2001.
http://www.economist.com/node/21559392
July 21, 2012: Amounting to about 10% of the country’s 23m people, Syria’s Christians increasingly, if still often privately, express sympathy for the opposition. In battered cities, behind closed doors in living rooms cluttered with statues of the Virgin Mary, many grumble about the bloody crackdown. Christians and Muslims often attend funerals together for the victims of government violence, such as Basil Shehadeh, a young Christian film-maker recently killed in Homs, Syria’s third city. Christians are well represented in the political opposition. The Syrian National Council, a group mainly of exiles, includes several. The “local co-ordination committees”, as activists’ cells are known, contain numerous Christians. A church-based group ferries medicine around the country to help the victims of repression.
It is true, however, that among the armed rebels, mainly angry young Sunni men bolstered by defectors from the forces, religious minorities are under-represented. Moreover, the growing visibility of Islamists within rebel ranks, as well as the election of a Muslim Brother, Muhammad Morsi, as president of Egypt, has made some Christians nervous. In Qusayr, near Homs, two Christians were recently kidnapped for supporting the regime.
....
On social networks Christians send each other cartoons of women draped in the veil and men with bushy beards as harbingers of the new Syria. “I’d rather have this regime than chaos or Islamists,” says a teacher in Bab Touma, a Christian quarter of Damascus, proudly pointing to his scantily clad female family members. But such views are becoming rarer.
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/07/24/salimiyeh-proves-that-assad-is-no-protector-of-minorities/
July 24, 2012: Salamiyeh began protests against the regime very early on in the uprising on April 1 2011, as this YouTube clip depicts. During this first demonstration, protesters in Salamiyeh held up a banner saying “Sunni, Ismaili, Alawi; freedom is my homeland,” indicating the unity of their cause despite the diversity of their backgrounds. Throughout the spring and summer of 2011, the city held large weekly protests including but not limited to those on April 22, April 29, May 13, May 20, June 17, June 24, July 7, up through August (they were attacked by pro-Assad shabiha gangs in a number of these demonstrations). The city continued to protest throughout 2011 and in 2012, marking its place in the revolution forever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/world/middleeast/dozens-of-bodies-are-found-in-town-outside-damascus.html
August 26, 2012: A video of what activists described as the fifth and latest mass grave to be filled showed two small children near the edge. Up close, in the field where there were more bodies than people to wash and prepare them for burial, the scent of decay swirled and gunshot wounds could be seen in the heads of many men.
“The Assad forces killed them in cold blood,” said Abu Ahmad, 40, a resident of Daraya, where the Syrian government has waged a campaign it described as a “cleansing.” “I saw dozens of dead people, killed by the knives at the end of Kalashnikovs, or by gunfire. The regime finished off whole families, a father, mother and their children. They just killed them without any pretext.”
August 28, 2012: Opposition groups in Syria on Tuesday said up to 400 bodies had been found in the town of Daraya, south-west of the capital Damascus, in what appears to be the worst single massacre by government forces in the country's 17-month-old civil war.
At least 200 bodies were found among the Sunni community on Saturday, after Syrian troops stormed the town and carried out house-to-house searches.
On Tuesday following the army's withdrawal residents reported the death toll was higher. They said that government troops and pro-government shabiha militia raided some streets "two or three times", in some cases demanding hospitality and then killing their hosts when they left.
http://www.dawn.com/news/747220/the-soundtrack-of-the-syrian-revolution
Sep 5, 2012: The revolt has forced Syria's celebrities to take a public stand and some of the Arab world's best loved artists who chose to extoll the virtues of Bashar and his regime, such as actress Raghda, are now hate figures in rebel strongholds.
Conversely, star singer Asala unexpectedly announced she was siding with the rebels and has since been touring the world to raise funds for the revolution.
One of the most popular figures among Syrian rebels is Abdelbaset Saroot, the goalkeeper of Syria's football youth team who joined the armed struggle.
An injury sustained during clashes with the army might jeopardise his future in sport but his song “Have you no pity?” is a hit and a new career beckons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/world/middleeast/syria-conflict-spills-over-to-northern-lebanon.html
Dec 9, 2012: The latest conflict began after a number of Sunni fighters from northern Lebanon were killed in an ambush by pro-government forces as they tried to enter Syria to join opposition fighters. Sunnis in Tripoli, angry over videos that purported to show the men’s bodies being stabbed and kicked, attacked Alawites, starting days of clashes between militias wielding rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Lebanese news media put the death toll at 17.
https://rsf.org/en/news/well-known-syrian-cartoonist-died-detention-after-being-tortured
2013: Syrian cartoonist Akram Raslan died in detention in 2013, less than a year after his arrest in October 2012, and that his death was almost certainly the result of having been tortured by the Syrian security services.
http://www.aymennjawad.org/12858/syria-anti-islamism
January 24, 2013: Recently a video emerged in which pro-Assad militiamen can be seen beating and shooting a prisoner to death. What might seem remarkable is that the militiamen are insulting Islam in the process, mocking the takbir — that is, the cry of "Allahu akbar" — and the Islamic conception of paradise for martyrs. In the first half of the video, one of the executioners — disparaging Muhammad — shouts, "F—k you and your prophet." Later, another of them yells, "Damn your God."
It may come across as odd that pro-Assad militiamen would disparage the Islamic religion in such a crude manner, but it should be noted that there are many videos like this in which the anti-Islamic sentiment takes a more subtle form.
Thus throughout in the course of the civil war there have been some videos of regime loyalists beating detainees and insisting that they proclaim that "there is no god except Bashar," which reflects not so much cult-worship of Assad as a mockery of the Shahadah (Muslim declaration of faith, of which the first part goes "There is no deity but God").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBoAjFBToUU&feature=youtu.be
13 March 2013: Assad bombing Tadmur (Palmyra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr1_UWnMlHo&feature=youtu.be
30 March 2013: Tadmur | Homs | Regime Forces Make Roads Through Historical Sites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayda_and_Baniyas_massacres
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/world/middleeast/grisly-killings-in-syrian-towns-dim-hopes-for-peace-talks.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=05f_1368432956
May 13, 2013: Mihrac Ural, an Alawite Turk is seen in this leaked video encouraging the cleansing of civilians in Sunni-dominated towns of Baniyas and Bada. The massacre happened on May 2, 2013 after rebels attacked the regime's soldiers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22684359
May 28, 2013: Earlier this month the government said it had killed "terrorist fighters" in an operation in three neighbouring districts in al-Bayda and Baniyas in the west of the country.
But graphic video footage and fresh eyewitness testimony appear to support claims that the area was witness to one of the worst atrocities of the conflict.
http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Nabk_Massacre
http://www.albawaba.com/news/massacre-syria-nabk-538895
Dec 5, 2013: At least 40 bodies of men, women and children were discovered on Saturday in the Syrian town of al-Nabk, a Damascus suburb, in an apparent new massacre, the Syrian Revolutionary Council reported, following a heavy shelling campaign by the regime’s army.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2014/Jan-28/245562-syria-activists-urge-lifting-of-600-day-siege-of-homs.ashx#axzz2tfbdW1vt
Jan 28, 2014:
Syrian activists on Tuesday urged opposition figures holding peace talks with regime officials to push for the lifting of a 600-day army siege on rebels districts in Homs.
Homs activists issued the plea after UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said the regime had agreed to allow women and children safe passage out of rebel-held areas in the central city.
Brahimi on Sunday also voiced hope that a humanitarian aid convoy would be allowed to enter the besieged areas on Monday but that has not yet happened.
Dubbed "the capital of the revolution," Syria's third city Homs has paid a high price for its opposition to Assad.
Activists say that food and medical supplies have all but completely run out for the more than 3,000 people who have been under siege in rebels areas of the Old City since June 2012.
http://www.thenational.ae/world/syria/syria-evacuees-all-of-their-names-will-go-to-the-mukhabarat#full
Feb 8, 2014: The Syrian government is recording the names of people being evacuated from Homs, prompting fears that the evacuees may be arrested and used as leverage against rebels and civilians who remain in the city.
The UN-brokered evacuation of civilians from a besieged area of the city continued yesterday despite concern over the fate of those leaving, with no guarantees in place against arrest by the authorities.
Syrian officials insisted on registering all 83 people who were evacuated from the Old City district on Friday, prompting concern they may be detained or interrogated at a later date.
“All of their names will go to the mukhabarat [secret police], there is no question about it, and we know the Syrian regime has arrested family members of rebels and opposition activists in the past, as a way of trying to get them to surrender – innocence is not a defence," said a veteran NGO worker, who has been involved in international aid efforts throughout Syria since the start of the uprising in March 2011.
“Those being evacuated do not have any protection – once they are out of the view of UN officials, they are on their own," he said.
According to the NGO worker, who is part of a major aid organisation, in 2012 international groups refused to hand the Syrian authorities names during a similar evacuation of civilians from Homs.
“The regime wanted names then and they were told, ‘no deal – if people come out they must be free to go’," he said.
International NGO staff are often reluctant to speak openly about working conditions inside Syria because they rely on permission from the Syrian authorities in order to carry out their work. Visas are often denied to aid workers.
Peter Kessler, spokesman for the UNHCR, one of several UN agencies involved in the evacuation, in addition to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, confirmed Syrian officials recorded the names of all evacuees on Friday.
“UNHCR and Unicef protection colleagues witnessed the registration procedure by Syrian authorities and also conducted individual interviews to assess their state of health and needs," he said. “We also asked questions to get a better idea of the humanitarian needs inside the city, particularly in the besieged areas."
...
Previous evacuations of civilians from siege areas have resulted in arrests, according to activists and aid workers, although details remain hard to pin down because Syrian refugees move frequently.
“We know that people, some of them children, were arrested after an evacuation of civilians from Moadamiya last year. It’s always a risk," the NGO worker said.
“There is a difficult choice for them: stay in a conflict zone where they might starve or be killed in fighting, or leave and risk being arrested."
At least 10 children under the age of 14 were evacuated from Moadamiya on October 13, some of whom were later detained by the authorities, according to residents of the besieged suburb on the south-western edge of Damascus.
...
Government-run medical facilities have been criticised by human rights groups since March 2011, with the authorities routinely arresting wounded people they suspect of involvement in anti-regime activity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303874504579377250947171122http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304703804579381392088573478
Feb 13, 2014: HOMS, Syria—The Syrian regime released some of the men detained upon evacuation from a besieged rebel zone here as the United Nations called off the relief mission marred by violence and detentions of hundreds of evacuees.
....
During the six-day mission that began Friday and ended Wednesday night, Syrian authorities arrested several hundred men aged 16 to 54 as soon as they were taken out of the old quarter of Homs. They were among some 1,500 people evacuated, many of them frail and starving after more than 18 months under a government siege that prevented food from going into the zone.
All the detainees were presumed by the regime to be rebel combatants. But about 70 of them were freed after signing a pledge never to bear arms against the state.
"The regime has forced more than 200 men…into screening facilities and given past actions, we cannot take the safety of those men for granted," said Samantha Power,the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. "It is essential to press the Syrian regime to release those individuals and to ensure that the U.N. remains present as any contact with government authorities takes place."
The head of the U.N. operation has said his team informed all the men of the risk of detention before they came out. But he acknowledged that the U.N. had no control over the fate of the prisoners and wasn't equipped to handle the complications. He said they should have brought in an organization such as the international Red Cross, which has expertise in safeguarding prisoners' rights.http://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticlePrintPage.aspx?id=2361049&language=en
Feb 13, 2014:
PARIS, Feb 13 (KUNA) French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius joined on Thursday the chorus of condemnations following the arrest by Syrian regime forces of certain evacuees being taken out of the battered town of Homs.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2014/Apr-15/253414-hundreds-of-evacuees-from-syrias-homs-fear-indefinite-detention.ashx
http://www.jordantimes.com/news/region/hundreds-evacuees-homs-fear-indefinite-detention
April 15, 2014: Some 400 men, including rebels and draft evaders from besieged areas of Syria's city of Homs, who recently surrendered to the authorities, fear they may be held indefinitely, activists said on Tuesday.
http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/syria/another-60-homs-evacuees-freed-in-syria-1.1295177
April 24, 2014: According to figures provided by the governor, the latest releases bring to 330 the number of males so far freed by the authorities. Another 181 are still being held.
April 24, 2014: According to figures provided by the governor, the latest releases bring to 330 the number of males so far freed by the authorities. Another 181 are still being held.
https://en.qantara.de/content/syrian-christians-and-the-assad-regime-assad-is-only-protecting-himself
June 13, 2014: This image of the Syrian regime as a champion of Christians, was also carefully tended by Hafez al-Assad, the father of the incumbent president. Christians who complied with the dictatorship enjoyed certain privileges, and in comparison with the rest of the region, the Syrian constitution afforded extensive rights to Christian minorities: among other things, the state paid for Christian religious education in schools.
But this did not mean that Christians enjoyed equal civil rights. In accordance with the constitution, the president of Syria must still be a Muslim. Moreover, anyone not explicitly submitting himself to the Assad regime risked his livelihood and his life – also as a Christian: "Some Church representatives were courageous and lived up to their responsibilities, but they were unfortunately suppressed by the regime," says journalist Samir Matar.
The list of Christian activists and dignitaries killed, tortured or banished by the Assad regime, is long. In 2012, the Syrian army in Hama murdered the priest Bassilius Nassar because he had taken food to starving people in besieged parts of the city. Also in 2012, the Syrian army in Homs killed the 28-year-old Christian filmmaker and IT engineer Basil Shehade.
A short time later, Bashar al-Assad had the Italian Jesuit priest Paolo Dall'Oglio thrown out of the country – presumably because he had, among other things, taken part in the funeral service for Basil Shehade. Dall'Oglio, who was known for his social activism, then spent periods of time in rebel-held areas, where he is thought to have been abducted by the extremist group ISIS in 2013.
But despite all this, many Christians prefer to view the Assad regime as "the lesser evil". Father Jihad Nassif, a Maronite cleric from the Syrian port town of Lattakia who currently heads a Maronite community in Jordan, explained while attending a Konrad Adenauer Foundation conference in Germany in late 2013 that he would rather have the Assad dictatorship than radical Islamists: "Please let's not talk about toppling the regime. That's what's led to this catastrophe. It would be better to talk about regime development rather than regime change. I would rather put up with this government for another 20 years, than have this disaster in Syria," he said.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/08/khamenei-urged-assad-reforms.html#ixzz4EtBQ7Pas
August 5, 2014: Hossein Sheikholeslam, Iran's former ambassador to Syria and the current foreign policy adviser to the speaker of parliament, spoke to Ramze Obour magazine about Iran’s relationship with Syria and the mistakes of the Syrian government, revealing some previously unknown information.
He said many of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders have been in the region and “know what Bashar’s problem is. As soon as four people would gather, instead of using police, the army would use automatic weapons. … They wanted to solve it with force.”
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/features/2014/12/30/syrias-children-behind-bars
Dec 22, 2014: Rasha Shurbaji is mother to four young children. All of them are in prison with her. She was arrested at the Immigration and Passports Department in Damascus last May with her children, aged between two and five.
Sharbaji's children share their fate with the thousands of other Syrian children documented in a recent report published by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). According to the network, at least 9,500 children have been imprisoned since the start of the uprising almost four years ago. Many were imprisoned because of their relatives' alleged crimes.
http://www.euromedmonitor.org/en/article/735/Execution-by-Burning:-A-Practice-by-Syrian-Government-Forces
http://euromid.org/uploads/reports/Executions_by_burning_EN.pdf
Feb 2015: According to gathered data and witnesses a mix of regular government troops; members of the National Defense Force, a paramilitary group organized by the government from pro-government militias; and armed pro-government residents of neighboring villages and foreign militias have burned at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women, and 35 of the armed opposition fighters, since the beginning of the events in Syria in March 2011 and until the publication date of this report. A detailed list of all these victims is available, which includes the place and date of the crime and personal data of the victims.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/report-more-600-medical-staff-killed-syrian-war-150435239.html
March 11, 2015: BEIRUT (AP) — More than 600 medical workers have been killed in Syria's civil war in deliberate and indiscriminate attacks, most of them by government forces, an international rights group announced on Wednesday.
Physicians for Human Rights said it has documented 233 attacks on 183 medical facilities across Syria since the country's conflict began in March 2011. In a report, it said that President Bashar Assad's government is responsible for 88 percent of the recorded attacks on hospitals and 97 percent of the killings of medical workers.
It documented 139 deaths directly attributable to torture and execution.
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2015/5/1/at-least-63-syrian-churches-attacked-since-2011
May 1, 2015:A total of 63 Syrian churches have been targeted at the hands of the regime, opposition groups and the Islamic State group since March 2011, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has said. A further 11 churches have been converted to military or administrative headquarters.
....
According a report released by the network, government forces were the top violator, shelling two-thirds of the monastries and churches that came under attack in the conflict.
The Assad regime targeted 40 churches, including 12 that came under repeated assault, including the Our Lady of Peace Church in Homs, which was attacked six times, and the St Mary Church of the Holy Belt, also in Homs, which was targeted on four occasions.
The network's director, Fadel Abdul Ghani, said the rate of attacks had increased.
"In our previous report published in December 2012, we documented how government forces targeted 19 churches," Abdul Ghani said. "Now we observe that the figure has doubled."
Abdul Ghani said that repeated attacks on some churches indicated they were being deliberately targeted.
The report stated that IS attacked six churches in Raqqa and Hasakah provinces, as well as converting two other churches into military and administrative buildings.
The al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front also targeted one church, as well as a number of other churches that had been converted by the government into military headquarters. The group also turned the monastry of St Simeon in Aleppo into a military base.
The mainstream armed opposition was also responsible for attacks on churches, with 14 attacks noted in the report, as well as the conversion of two churches into military and administrative buildings.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/24/syria-regime-accused-of-using-chlorine-bombs-on-civilians
May 24, 2015: Assad regime accused of 35 chlorine attacks since mid-March
http://sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/The_Societys_Holocaust.pdf
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/19/a-damning-indictment-of-syrian-president-assad-s-systematic-massacres.html
June 19, 2015: According to the survey by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, there have been 56 major massacres displaying obvious sectarian or ethnic cleansing traits. Of these 49 were carried out by Syrian government forces or local and foreign militia allies of President Bashar al-Assad, making a mockery of the Syrian leader’s frequent claim to foreign broadcasters that his soldiers would never harm their own people deliberately as a matter of policy.
In fact, three days before Assad sat down with the BBC for an especially chilling interview last February and lamented how war, alas, causes casualties, government-aligned militiamen stormed the As-Sabil neighborhood in the Syrian city of Homs and slaughtered three Sunni families, including four children and five women.
The non-profit SNHR, which is based and registered in the U.K., was founded in 2011 after the outbreak of the uprising against Assad. The UN has used SNHR’s statistics in reports analyzing the conflict’s victims and it is widely considered among the most reliable NGO’s when documenting death tolls.
July 9, 2015:Khateeb and his colleagues have documented about 170 deaths from hunger in Yarmouk, along with other deaths from wounds untreated because of the lack of medical facilities, staff and equipment. Close to two-thirds of Yarmouk’s children suffer from malnutrition.
“The regime has used all weapons, from direct weapons like shelling, air strikes, rockets, chemical weapons, to starvation and torture, so nothing is surprising,” he said. “They haven’t left a single method you can think of to make a people bow.” But instead of bowing, Khateeb carried on working, and he began writing about the siege.
Oct 22, 2015: At least four hospitals have been bombed by fighter jets in north-western Syria since Russia’s intervention in the war began in late September, doctors and international observers claim.
The latest attack, on Tuesday, killed at least 12 people at Sarmin hospital in Idlib province. At least three of the victims were believed to be medical staff. Survivors and witnesses said the hospital was hit by two airstrikes at about 1pm.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/05/amnesty-damns-syrian-regime-over-thousands-of-enforced-disappearances
Nov 5, 2015: More than 65,000 people, most of them civilians, were forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2015 and remained missing, Amnesty said, citing figures from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a Syria-based monitoring group.
Detainees were squeezed into overcrowded, dirty cells where disease was rampant and medical treatment unavailable, Amnesty said, while those imprisoned suffered torture through methods such as electric shocks, whipping, suspension, burning and rape.
“People would die and then be replaced,” Salam Othman, who was forcibly disappeared from 2011 to 2014, was quoted as saying in the report.
“I did not leave the cell for the whole three years, not once … Many people became hysterical and lost their minds.”
https://news.vice.com/article/children-are-eating-leaves-off-the-trees-the-nightmare-of-the-siege-of-madaya-syria
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/09/madaya-siege-starvation-syria-aleppo-united-nations
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/iran-deal-fuels-syria-s-war
When the Assad regime failed to capture the town of Zabadani in July and August of 2015, Iran negotiated a ceasefire with the Islamist rebel-group Ahrar al-Sham that entailed the sectarian cleansing of all civilians in Zabadani and the passage of civilians from Shiite towns to Damascus. Iran’s proposed ceasefire stipulated that civilians would be allowed to stay in Zabadani and that there would be humanitarian access to Madaya. Yet as soon as the rebels left, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah rounded up civilians in Zabadani and expelled them into Madaya, putting them under siege in what the United Nations called the “worst suffering” since the beginning of the Syrian conflict. Under the Iranian military arm, Hezbollah instituted checkpoints and minefields to prevent civilians from escaping. This tactic succeeded in entrapping and killing dozens including children.
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/assad-and-academics-disinformation-in-the-modern-era/
"A central point of misinformation in both Sachs’ and Kinzer’s articles is that the U.S. is hell-bent on overthrowing Assad. When Syria’s uprising broke out, “the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory,” Sachs writes. Note the list of States that Sachs cites as being ranged against Assad. In many ways, it has to be said, Sachs can be forgiven for thinking this. In 2011 and since, those interested in containing Iran were advocating for the Assad regime’s overthrow: Iran’s gateway into the Arab world, its lifeline to the terrorist Hizballah in Lebanon, and increasingly an Iranian vassal regime on NATO’s doorstep. But in reality, U.S. policy has been essentially the exact opposite.
While President Obama said Assad must “step aside” in August 2011 and drew a “red line” around chemical weapons of mass destruction in August and December 2012, he never had any intention of enforcing either; the overarching goal was to stay out of Syria. In December 2011, Obama told Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s then-Prime Minister whose relationship with Iranian intelligence goes back decades, “We have no intention to intervene militarily” in Syria. The regime’s propaganda campaign basically worked. The U.S. was expressing misgivings about the Syrian rebellion in terms reminiscent of regime talking points by early 2012 and shortly thereafter Assad’s survival became part of a broader U.S. policy realignment.
Barack Obama came into office determined to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, where the U.S. was “over-invested,” as Obama’s former National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon put it, and the President alighted on détente with Iran as the means of achieving this. By respecting Iranian “equities” in the region and finding areas of common interest—such as fighting the Islamic State (even if such common interests are illusory)—Obama hoped to create an “equilibrium” that could police itself with minimal U.S. involvement. The nuclear deal would facilitate rapprochement, removing a thorny issue from U.S.-Iranian relations and giving Tehran access to resources to pursue these overlapping interests."
............
"Meanwhile, the Assad regime, enabled at every stage by Iran and Russia, not only bears moral responsibility for every death in this war since it met peaceful protests with live fire and turned a struggle for its spoils system into a grand religious war, but has gone some way to distinguish itself—above and beyond even the Islamic State—for the scale of its cruelty and murder. Six-hundred witnesses and a mountain of documentation taken out of Syria led the United Nations to conclude that the regime was guilty of extermination, rape, and five other crimes against humanity, as well as a raft of war crimes.
The liquidation of at least 11,000 prisoners held by the regime using torture and starvation has been revealed by the defector CAESAR. Something like 200,000 more are held in regime detention in subhuman conditions. In November 2011, barely a month after organized armed resistance had broken out, the U.N. reported that among the tactics the regime was using to suppress the uprising was raping male children in front of their families. Later the regime would cause female captives to bleed to death by inserting rats into their vaginas. IS burned a pilot alive in a cage; the Iranian-run sectarian militia, the National Defence Force, which has eclipsed the national army, burns whole families alive in their homes. And that is before the regime’s methods of warfare—indiscriminate artillery fire, barrel bombs, and airstrikes to destroy ancient cities, and chemical weapons of mass destruction and chlorine-laced incendiaries to intimidate—aimed at mass-killing and the displacement of survivors is factored in."
....
"The myth of Saudi Arabia as a financier of IS apparently will not die but it simply isn’t true. IS deliberately chose to eschew the al-Qaeda model of relying on external donors: since 2005—i.e. even during its nadir—no more than five percent of IS’s funding ever came from foreign individuals and none of it ever came from the Saudi government. If Kinzer wanted to look at IS’s sources of funding, its shared hydrocarbon industry with the Assad regime—assisted by Kremlin-approved oligarchs and technicians—might be a better place to start."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/siege-of-madaya-40000-starving-syrians-trapped-by-assad-regime-forced-to-make-soup-from-grass-a6800811.html
Jan 7, 2016: Up to 40,000 people in the besieged Syrian settlement of Madaya have been forced to turn to leaves and flower petals to stay alive after eating all of the town's stray dogs and cats.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/18/msf-will-not-share-syria-gps-locations-after-deliberate-attacks?CMP=share_btn_tw
Feb 18, 2016: Hospitals in opposition-held parts of Syria are refusing to share GPS coordinates with Russian and Syrian authorities because of repeated attacks on medical facilities and workers, Médecins Sans Frontières and humanitarian workers on the ground have said.
International charity MSF said it took the decision not to formally inform Syria’s government or its Russian allies about the location of some medical facilities, such as the one hit by a deadly airstrike this week, amid concerns that doing so could make them targets.
Joanne Liu, MSF International president, told reporters in Geneva that deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructures were routine. “Healthcare in Syria is in the crosshair of bombs and missiles. It has collapsed,” Liu said. “Let me be clear: attacks on civilians and hospitals must stop. The normalisation of such attacks is intolerable.”
Humanitarian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian that the Syrian government has explicitly threatened to bomb a hospital in a besieged suburb of Damascus if it continues to admit emergency cases, and said doctors and families were targeted by the regime.
“Since 2011 during the demonstration time, medical activities that are not under their control are considered by the government of Syria as illegal and consequently as legitimate targets,” one official said. “This decision explains the repeated threat, arrest, torture and killing of doctors … and their direct families in addition to the systematic targeting of networks in charge of supplying underground medical activities in besieged zones.”
“Given the number of hospitals that have been bombed since the war started, they do not think [giving GPS coordinates] is going to protect them, rather the opposite,” another official said.
Earlier this week, airstrikes hit an MSF-supported hospital in northern Syria, killing 11 people. Another hospital in the rebel-held town of Azaz was destroyed by what Turkey said was a ballistic missile fired by Russia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world/middleeast/death-toll-from-war-in-syria-now-470000-group-finds.html
Feb 11, 2016: The report from the Syrian Center for Policy Research said that at least 470,000 Syrians had died as a result of the war, almost twice the 250,000 counted a year and a half ago by the United Nations until it stopped counting because of a lack of confidence in the data.
Life expectancy has dropped 14 years, to 56 from 70, since the war began, with an even deeper plunge for Syrian men, says the report, which the group compiled from its longtime base in the capital, Damascus. It put the war’s economic cost at $255 billion, essentially wiping out the nation’s wealth.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/letters/2016/02/27/distorted-picture-journalists-reporting-from-syria-what-shameful/bQcXD3t8P9yBa6NTzQ0FgO/story.html?event=event25
Feb 27, 2016: "From the safety of Brown University, Stephen Kinzer effectively cheers Russia’s war of extermination in Syria and implies that reports of regime and Russian atrocities originate from the Pentagon and think tanks in Washington (“Getting it wrong in Syria,” Ideas, Feb. 21). Kinzer presents a distorted picture of a brave generation of journalists who produce work that is exceptional, not “shameful,” as he purports. If we who cover Syria are “astonishingly brave,” as Kinzer claims, perhaps he should listen to what we have to say. Information on Russian and regime atrocities comes from humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. These organizations have reported on Russia’s use of illegal cluster munitions against civilian targets. Kinzer suggests that the encirclement and carpet bombing of Aleppo offers a “glimmer of hope” to its residents. This is appalling given how the regime-imposed starvation sieges in Madaya and Yarmouk have turned out. I have been to Syria many times. Kinzer will not fool me into believing that regime atrocities are an illusion concocted as part of “Washington’s narrative.” Information on Russia’s deliberate bombing of hospitals comes from Medecins Sans Frontieres, not the Pentagon, as Kinzer would claim. In fact, MSF has condemned the US military for targeting its facility in Afghanistan. Kinzer presents an inaccurate picture of the work that so many journalists and aid workers have literally died for. Witnessing the scale of the mass murder in Syria and subsequently thanking the perpetrators is beneath the otherwise excellent standards of The Boston Globe. I will publicly debate Kinzer any time he sees fit. Patrick Hilsman New York The writer reported from Syria between 2012 and 2015 as a freelance journalist, and is currently associate editor of theinfluence.org. "
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/566717-partners-in-terror
March 9, 2016: "Last week, a judgment in United States District Court in Washington, D.C., awarded
nearly $350 million to the families of two Americans killed in Jordan
in 2005 by the predecessor organization to the Islamic State (ISIS). The
important point of the case was who the court found liable: the regime
of Bashar al-Assad, currently presenting itself to the world as the last
line of defense to a terrorist takeover of Syria. This case highlights a
neglected history, which began in 2002, where the Assad regime
underwrote ISIS and fostered its growth, first to destabilize
post-Saddam Iraq and later Lebanon, and since 2011 to discredit and
destroy the uprising against Assad in Syria."
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/566787-assad-cannot-keep-europe-safe-from-isis
"Assad's No Ally Against Terrorism
It is important that partnering with Assad be seen as the single most counter-productive thing that the West could do if it wants to defeat ISIS. Empowering local Sunni communities is the only sustainable way to destroy the caliphate; siding with a regime responsible for ninety-five percent of the civilian casualties, using tactics that amount to extermination, is the surest way to have those Sunnis who would be our allies look at ISIS as the lesser-evil.
But there is another reason why siding with Assad to defeat ISIS makes no sense: there is no government in the world as responsible for ISIS's rise as Assad's.
During the US presence in Iraq, foreign fighters were funneled to ISIS's predecessor by Assad's military intelligence service, which began this collaboration with jihadis before the Iraq invasion. As Charles Lister recently put it, "Without help from Damascus [to ISIS] … dozens if not hundreds of US soldiers would still be alive today." If not for Assad's help after the Awakening and the Surge, ISIS might no longer even exist.
When the uprising began against Assad, he released hundreds of jihadist prisoners, including Al-Absi, to try to switch the narrative away from reform and toward sectarianism. Assad then deliberately inflamed sectarian passions and endangered minority communities so they would rally around the regime and he could pose as their defender. It is a matter of simple military fact that Assad barely engaged ISIS during its critical growth period, while hammering the opposition with airstrikes. When the rebels fought ISIS, Assad bombed the rebels. Since Russia's intervention the same tactics have been adopted, leading to ISIS gains against the rebels. Assad has collaborated with ISIS in Syria's energy market, transferring millions of dollars to the terrorist group, and Russia has been a key facilitator of that.
Pro-Assad forces—overwhelmingly composed of foreign, Iranian-controlled Shiite jihadists—backed by devastating Russian airstrikes, are currently moving on ISIS-controlled Palmyra. If the pro-Assad forces take Palmyra this will be held up as evidence that the regime is on the front line against barbarism and thus an ally in what we once called the “War on Terror”. Put aside that the regime has no power to extend beyond Palmyra: this isn't a first step toward "liberating" Raqqa; this is the regime at full stretch trying to score international political points. The notion that Assad is a counter-terrorism partner means ignoring mountains of evidence that terrorism has been the central instrument of the Assad regime's foreign policy.
Assad's cynical policy, first of using ISIS against western troops and then empowering ISIS to cannibalize the rebellion and face Syria's population and the world with a binary choice of the dictatorship or a terrorist takeover of Syria has brought us to this point and spawned a monster that might eventually consume him too—but only after Assad and ISIS worked in tandem to eliminate all the other options. For now Assad still needs ISIS: ISIS's existence is Assad's only chance of survival."
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/dont-pretend-assad-will-save-palmyra-when-he-has-destroyed-rest-syria-1552279
"Perhaps looking at Palmyra in pre-IS days could prove useful for that matter. Assad's local version of Mafia capitalism had already threatened the site before 2011, when rapacious Rami Makhlouf (his cousin) decided to benefit from the construction of tasteless five-star hotels practically on the remains of the unexcavated Hellenistic city, which had been partly explored by an archaeological expedition headed by Professors Schmidt-Collinet and Galikowski.
For denouncing this encroachment on ancient remains for the sake of quick profit, Mohammed Taha, a local Syrian archaeologist working for the Palmyra Antiquities Department, was forced to flee to Europe in 2006 or face arrest and detention. The Syrian army drove tanks across the site in 2012 and 2013, something that could then easily be checked by simply looking at Google Earth photographs.
...
Many in the Western world have been fooled once by Assad's propaganda machine, when it pretended to have truly fought IS jihadists arriving from al-Anbar province in Iraq. (One should ask, by the way, how a column of IS SUVs managed to cross 350km of desert from Fallujah and Ramadi without being bombed by an air force so keen to level Aleppo and Homs...).
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/03/syrian-and-russian-forces-targeting-hospitals-as-a-strategy-of-war/
March 3, 2016: “Syrian and Russian forces have been deliberately attacking health facilities in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. But what is truly egregious is that wiping out hospitals appears to have become part of their military strategy,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International.
.....
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/714220727638077440
March 27, 2016:#Syria #Assad-forces from Suqur al Sahara/Desert Falcons beheading
Rebel fighters in #Homs & #Latakia
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/714219801237970945
March 27, 2016:#Syria #Assad-forces from Suqur al Sahara/Desert Falcons beheading #IslamicState fighters in #Palmyra
https://twitter.com/Mr_Ghostly/status/714017543674064896
March 27, 2016: The wax statue of Suheil al-Hassan watches#Assad's loyalists decapitate enemies for trophies. @MH17_Ru @THE_47th
https://twitter.com/Mr_Ghostly/status/713965013468332032
March 27, 2016: Suqur Al-Sahara and the rest of@mod_russia coalition said to take #Palmyra from #ISIS. File photo: Suqur Al-Sahara.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/09/where-are-the-syrians-in-assads-syrian-arab-army/
April 6, 2016:" The video shows the attack on Palmyra, the historic Syrian city reclaimed from Isil for the Assad regime, and as a column of troops heads across the desert behind him a soldier is giving a commentary.
“Despite many casualties, they are moving forward in the advance,” he says.
The oddity is that he is not speaking Arabic, but Persian. The man himself is Afghan, a member of a 10-20,000-strong Afghan army recruited in Iran to fight the war in Syria.
The reconquest of Palmyra was presented to the world as a victory for President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army.
.....In fact, it is now clear it was an eccentric multinational force that took Palmyra. Analysis of photographs, social media posts and Iranian, Russian and even Syrian media has shown that the path was led by the Russians, with much of the “grunt” work done by Afghan Shia and Iraqi militiamen under generals from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard."
....
"The Russians played an advance role in the attack on Palmyra. But the final surge came only after Iran poured in troops, a desperate surge in reinforcements after the attack had been seemingly held up.
The army was already heavily supplemented by Iran-trained Shia militias from Iraq, and by Hizbollah, Iran’s Lebanese ally.
Syrian marines were diverted from the defence of Latakia - President Assad’s home province - but suffered a disaster when, according to reports, they were hit by Russian Air Force “friendly fire” and 17 killed.
Units of Syria’s own Iran-trained militias, the National Defence Forces were added, before finally fighters from the Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade - those seen in the video - arrived.
The Fatemiyoun are largely recruited not from Afghanistan itself, which has a large Shia minority, but from Iran’s large population of Afghan refugees and migrants.
A report by the BBC World Service due to be broadcast this weekend interviewed Afghan refugees in Europe describing how they had been given the choice of being returned home or joining up to the brigade. Instead, they ran away."
http://muftah.org/noam-chomsky-syria/#.Vxnn2j9uW8p
http://www.syriadeeply.org/op-eds/2016/04/10365/noam-chomsky-betrayed-syrian-people/?lang
The implications of Chomsky’s statements are clear. With almost 250,000 Syrians dead and 13 million more displaced by the Assad regime and its allies, only “the Kurds” deserve special attention. Similarly, while a Syrian Arab (or even a Kurd who lives in rebel-held Aleppo) is not worthy of support, those who live in and around PYD areas somehow are.
But, the fate of Syrians in rebel-held locations ought to inspire alleged progressives, like Chomsky, to express, not withhold, their solidarity and support. In many of these areas, revolutionary, democratic Local Coordination Committees have taken over the reigns of government, providing critical public and social services, and providing people with their first experience of genuine freedom of expression.
Admittedly, the rebels are by no means perfect, but in every area they govern, the very worst of them have proven to be better than the dynastic tyranny of the Assad regime. This is why the inhabitants of these areas leave when regime forces approach. It is also why the vast majority of refugees are fleeing from ISIS and Assad, but not from the rebels.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exposed
http://eaworldview.com/2016/05/syria-video-the-russia-regime-attack-on-aleppos-al-quds-hospital/
https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/vb.6622931938/10153717762416939
April 29, 2016: Aleppo hospital: before and after deadly air strike Channel 4 News has obtained CCTV footage from inside the Aleppo hospital that was bombed this week. It shows the last paediatrician to stay in the war-torn city, Dr. Muhammad Maaz, just moments before the fatal attack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/world/middleeast/syrian-city-torn-by-war-shows-jarring-resolve-to-try-to-live-normally.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
April 30, 2016: Most fatalities are civilians — at least 202 in the past week, about two-thirds in rebel-controlled eastern areas and the remainder in the government-held west side, according to groups that monitor casualties. The violence shows a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives,” the United Nations’ human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said Friday.
....
Although Syria’s revolt started as a protest against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 46 years, it has stirred sectarian tensions and century-old historical grievances. Most of the city’s Armenian population, known for its goldsmiths, has fled to Europe or Canada. Many of those who remain are staunch supporters of Mr. Assad, whom they see as their only hope against Islamist fighters who would never let them live in peace.
....
http://muftah.org/hardline-leftists-corroborate-media-lies-defend-assads-atrocities-aleppo/#.VzHYgWZuUcj
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/566787-assad-cannot-keep-europe-safe-from-isis
"Assad's No Ally Against Terrorism
It is important that partnering with Assad be seen as the single most counter-productive thing that the West could do if it wants to defeat ISIS. Empowering local Sunni communities is the only sustainable way to destroy the caliphate; siding with a regime responsible for ninety-five percent of the civilian casualties, using tactics that amount to extermination, is the surest way to have those Sunnis who would be our allies look at ISIS as the lesser-evil.
But there is another reason why siding with Assad to defeat ISIS makes no sense: there is no government in the world as responsible for ISIS's rise as Assad's.
During the US presence in Iraq, foreign fighters were funneled to ISIS's predecessor by Assad's military intelligence service, which began this collaboration with jihadis before the Iraq invasion. As Charles Lister recently put it, "Without help from Damascus [to ISIS] … dozens if not hundreds of US soldiers would still be alive today." If not for Assad's help after the Awakening and the Surge, ISIS might no longer even exist.
When the uprising began against Assad, he released hundreds of jihadist prisoners, including Al-Absi, to try to switch the narrative away from reform and toward sectarianism. Assad then deliberately inflamed sectarian passions and endangered minority communities so they would rally around the regime and he could pose as their defender. It is a matter of simple military fact that Assad barely engaged ISIS during its critical growth period, while hammering the opposition with airstrikes. When the rebels fought ISIS, Assad bombed the rebels. Since Russia's intervention the same tactics have been adopted, leading to ISIS gains against the rebels. Assad has collaborated with ISIS in Syria's energy market, transferring millions of dollars to the terrorist group, and Russia has been a key facilitator of that.
Pro-Assad forces—overwhelmingly composed of foreign, Iranian-controlled Shiite jihadists—backed by devastating Russian airstrikes, are currently moving on ISIS-controlled Palmyra. If the pro-Assad forces take Palmyra this will be held up as evidence that the regime is on the front line against barbarism and thus an ally in what we once called the “War on Terror”. Put aside that the regime has no power to extend beyond Palmyra: this isn't a first step toward "liberating" Raqqa; this is the regime at full stretch trying to score international political points. The notion that Assad is a counter-terrorism partner means ignoring mountains of evidence that terrorism has been the central instrument of the Assad regime's foreign policy.
Assad's cynical policy, first of using ISIS against western troops and then empowering ISIS to cannibalize the rebellion and face Syria's population and the world with a binary choice of the dictatorship or a terrorist takeover of Syria has brought us to this point and spawned a monster that might eventually consume him too—but only after Assad and ISIS worked in tandem to eliminate all the other options. For now Assad still needs ISIS: ISIS's existence is Assad's only chance of survival."
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/dont-pretend-assad-will-save-palmyra-when-he-has-destroyed-rest-syria-1552279
"Perhaps looking at Palmyra in pre-IS days could prove useful for that matter. Assad's local version of Mafia capitalism had already threatened the site before 2011, when rapacious Rami Makhlouf (his cousin) decided to benefit from the construction of tasteless five-star hotels practically on the remains of the unexcavated Hellenistic city, which had been partly explored by an archaeological expedition headed by Professors Schmidt-Collinet and Galikowski.
For denouncing this encroachment on ancient remains for the sake of quick profit, Mohammed Taha, a local Syrian archaeologist working for the Palmyra Antiquities Department, was forced to flee to Europe in 2006 or face arrest and detention. The Syrian army drove tanks across the site in 2012 and 2013, something that could then easily be checked by simply looking at Google Earth photographs.
...
Many in the Western world have been fooled once by Assad's propaganda machine, when it pretended to have truly fought IS jihadists arriving from al-Anbar province in Iraq. (One should ask, by the way, how a column of IS SUVs managed to cross 350km of desert from Fallujah and Ramadi without being bombed by an air force so keen to level Aleppo and Homs...).
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/03/syrian-and-russian-forces-targeting-hospitals-as-a-strategy-of-war/
March 3, 2016: “Syrian and Russian forces have been deliberately attacking health facilities in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. But what is truly egregious is that wiping out hospitals appears to have become part of their military strategy,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International.
.....
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a local monitoring group, at least 27 hospitals, including eight in Aleppo governorate, have been targeted by Russian and Syrian government forces since September 2015. The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) told Amnesty International that since December 2015 at least 13 hospitals had been targeted in Aleppo by airstrikes and one by a surface-to-surface missile on 15 February. A total of four medical staff workers and 45 civilians were killed in these 14 attacks.
Physicians for Human Rights has reported that, since the conflict began, at least 346 attacks on medical facilities have been carried out by parties to the conflict, with 705 health workers killed. Syrian government forces and their allies have been responsible for the overwhelming majority of these.
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/714220727638077440
March 27, 2016:
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/714219801237970945
March 27, 2016:
https://twitter.com/Mr_Ghostly/status/714017543674064896
March 27, 2016: The wax statue of Suheil al-Hassan watches
https://twitter.com/Mr_Ghostly/status/713965013468332032
March 27, 2016: Suqur Al-Sahara and the rest of
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/09/where-are-the-syrians-in-assads-syrian-arab-army/
April 6, 2016:" The video shows the attack on Palmyra, the historic Syrian city reclaimed from Isil for the Assad regime, and as a column of troops heads across the desert behind him a soldier is giving a commentary.
“Despite many casualties, they are moving forward in the advance,” he says.
The oddity is that he is not speaking Arabic, but Persian. The man himself is Afghan, a member of a 10-20,000-strong Afghan army recruited in Iran to fight the war in Syria.
The reconquest of Palmyra was presented to the world as a victory for President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army.
.....In fact, it is now clear it was an eccentric multinational force that took Palmyra. Analysis of photographs, social media posts and Iranian, Russian and even Syrian media has shown that the path was led by the Russians, with much of the “grunt” work done by Afghan Shia and Iraqi militiamen under generals from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard."
....
"The Russians played an advance role in the attack on Palmyra. But the final surge came only after Iran poured in troops, a desperate surge in reinforcements after the attack had been seemingly held up.
The army was already heavily supplemented by Iran-trained Shia militias from Iraq, and by Hizbollah, Iran’s Lebanese ally.
Syrian marines were diverted from the defence of Latakia - President Assad’s home province - but suffered a disaster when, according to reports, they were hit by Russian Air Force “friendly fire” and 17 killed.
Units of Syria’s own Iran-trained militias, the National Defence Forces were added, before finally fighters from the Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade - those seen in the video - arrived.
The Fatemiyoun are largely recruited not from Afghanistan itself, which has a large Shia minority, but from Iran’s large population of Afghan refugees and migrants.
A report by the BBC World Service due to be broadcast this weekend interviewed Afghan refugees in Europe describing how they had been given the choice of being returned home or joining up to the brigade. Instead, they ran away."
http://muftah.org/noam-chomsky-syria/#.Vxnn2j9uW8p
http://www.syriadeeply.org/op-eds/2016/04/10365/noam-chomsky-betrayed-syrian-people/?lang
The implications of Chomsky’s statements are clear. With almost 250,000 Syrians dead and 13 million more displaced by the Assad regime and its allies, only “the Kurds” deserve special attention. Similarly, while a Syrian Arab (or even a Kurd who lives in rebel-held Aleppo) is not worthy of support, those who live in and around PYD areas somehow are.
But, the fate of Syrians in rebel-held locations ought to inspire alleged progressives, like Chomsky, to express, not withhold, their solidarity and support. In many of these areas, revolutionary, democratic Local Coordination Committees have taken over the reigns of government, providing critical public and social services, and providing people with their first experience of genuine freedom of expression.
Admittedly, the rebels are by no means perfect, but in every area they govern, the very worst of them have proven to be better than the dynastic tyranny of the Assad regime. This is why the inhabitants of these areas leave when regime forces approach. It is also why the vast majority of refugees are fleeing from ISIS and Assad, but not from the rebels.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exposed
April 18, 2016: "The commission’s work recently
culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic
torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy
approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coördinated among his
security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives,
who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in
Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of
Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of
state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its
cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but
they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led
prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and
Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States
Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the CIJA’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”
The case is the first international war-crimes investigation completed by an independent agency like the CIJA,
funded by governments but without a court mandate. The organization’s
founder, Bill Wiley, a Canadian war-crimes investigator who has worked
on several high-profile international tribunals, had grown frustrated
with the geopolitical red tape that often shapes the pursuit of justice.
Because the process of collecting evidence and organizing it into cases
is purely operational, he reasoned that it could be done before the
political will exists to prosecute the case."
http://eaworldview.com/2016/05/syria-video-the-russia-regime-attack-on-aleppos-al-quds-hospital/
https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/vb.6622931938/10153717762416939
April 29, 2016: Aleppo hospital: before and after deadly air strike Channel 4 News has obtained CCTV footage from inside the Aleppo hospital that was bombed this week. It shows the last paediatrician to stay in the war-torn city, Dr. Muhammad Maaz, just moments before the fatal attack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/world/middleeast/syrian-city-torn-by-war-shows-jarring-resolve-to-try-to-live-normally.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
April 30, 2016: Most fatalities are civilians — at least 202 in the past week, about two-thirds in rebel-controlled eastern areas and the remainder in the government-held west side, according to groups that monitor casualties. The violence shows a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives,” the United Nations’ human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said Friday.
....
Although Syria’s revolt started as a protest against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 46 years, it has stirred sectarian tensions and century-old historical grievances. Most of the city’s Armenian population, known for its goldsmiths, has fled to Europe or Canada. Many of those who remain are staunch supporters of Mr. Assad, whom they see as their only hope against Islamist fighters who would never let them live in peace.
....
Mr. Assad, the president, faced new accusations of war crimes after airstrikes hit Al Quds hospital, on the rebel side of Aleppo, on Wednesday night.
By Friday, rescuers said they had pulled 55 bodies from the rubble,
including 29 children and women, some of whom had been in labor,
according to one aid group. Doctors Without Borders, which had been
supporting the hospital, denounced the bombing as “outrageous.”
Residents
in government-controlled areas have learned to fear the “hell cannon,”
an improvised form of rocket fashioned from modified propane gas
cylinders and packed with explosives and metal objects that is used by
some insurgent groups, including those that receive American assistance.
Both
sides have been ravaged by bombardments, although only the government
has fighter jets and helicopters at its disposal, which have reduced
broad swaths of rebel territory to rubble.
Disregard
for civilian life is universal. On Thursday, after the hospital attack,
rebel rockets rained on virtually every district of
government-controlled Aleppo in a fierce barrage that claimed dozens of
casualties. Taxis and ambulances screeched to a halt outside the city’s
Al Razi hospital as desperate relatives rushed bloodied and dust-covered
people, many of them children, into the emergency ward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/world/middleeast/wartime-damascus-preserves-tenuous-air-of-normalcy.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/world/middleeast/wartime-damascus-preserves-tenuous-air-of-normalcy.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0
May 2, 2016: Damascus, Syria - Across
the city, tattered posters from the recent parliamentary election cover
the walls. Few people, however, feel comfortable speaking openly about
politics, particularly with foreigners, like me — who are accompanied by
an official from the ministry of information.
http://www.dailysabah.com/syrian-crisis/2016/05/04/bbc-arabic-presenter-resigns-amid-biased-news-on-syria
May 4, 2016: The Syrian presenter, Dima Izeddin, announced her resignation over her Facebook account, saying, "It is time to quit appearing on TV. BBC has taught me a lot. I love my friends here. I am sorry to be leaving them. There should be standards to an institution. However, this did not happen, and unfortunately nothing is the way it is supposed to be."
"What separated me from BBC were the news covering my country," she said.
BBC had also sent a tweet apologizing for the mistake that was made during the coverage of the attacks on Aleppo.
BBC Arabic had said that the attacked areas in Aleppo belonged to Bashar Assad's forces, while in fact they are currently being held by the opposition. Later, BBC Arabic had sent a tweet correcting the factual mistake and apologizing for the error.
http://www.dailysabah.com/syrian-crisis/2016/05/04/bbc-arabic-presenter-resigns-amid-biased-news-on-syria
May 4, 2016: The Syrian presenter, Dima Izeddin, announced her resignation over her Facebook account, saying, "It is time to quit appearing on TV. BBC has taught me a lot. I love my friends here. I am sorry to be leaving them. There should be standards to an institution. However, this did not happen, and unfortunately nothing is the way it is supposed to be."
"What separated me from BBC were the news covering my country," she said.
BBC had also sent a tweet apologizing for the mistake that was made during the coverage of the attacks on Aleppo.
BBC Arabic had said that the attacked areas in Aleppo belonged to Bashar Assad's forces, while in fact they are currently being held by the opposition. Later, BBC Arabic had sent a tweet correcting the factual mistake and apologizing for the error.
http://muftah.org/hardline-leftists-corroborate-media-lies-defend-assads-atrocities-aleppo/#.VzHYgWZuUcj
May 7, 2016: In one incredible display of yellow journalism, Russia’s state-owned news outlet, RT, distorted footage
taken by Hadi Abdullah, a well-known freelance journalist in Syria. The
video shows the aftermath of regime bombardment in Aleppo’s Kallaseh
and Bustan Al-Qaser districts. Rather than acknowledging this fact, RT falsely reported that Jabhat Al-Nusra and “other rebel factions” were responsible for what happened. Similarly, a BBC report blamed “rebel factions” for a series of bombardments in Aleppo that killed forty-four people, when in fact the regime and its allies were responsible. Unlike RT, however, the BBC did later acknowledge on Twitter that its report was “an error.”
While some of these reports, including RT’s, have been thoroughly debunked, hardline leftists continue to echo their claims, despite insurmountable evidence to the contrary.
http://muftah.org/assad-become-lesser-evil-syria/#.V5M7M5OAOkq
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-13/humanitarian-aid-convoys-blocked-by-syrian-government/7410714
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/12/red-cross-convoy-denied-entery-to-syrian-city-of-darayya
May 12, 2016: An aid convoy has been refused entry to the besieged Syrian city of Darayya , the Red Cross said, dashing hopes for the first such delivery since regime forces surrounded the rebel-held town in 2012.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-war-children-refugee-camp-bombed-bashar-al-assad-government-a7027436.html
May 13, 2016: Around 3,000 children are among civilians facing a mounting humanitarian crisis in a town besieged by Syrian regime forces near Damascus.
http://eaworldview.com/2016/05/syria-feature-assad-airstrikes-damage-5th-century-church/
May 16, 2016: Pro-Assad airstrikes have damaged one of Syria’s oldest religious buildings, the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites in Aleppo Province.
The 5th-century church, in the village of Daret Azza, was dedicated to St Simeon because of his decades of devotion and prayer. He is said to have have spent 47 years in contemplation atop a pillar, which was also damaged on Thursday.
Reports differed on whether Russian or regime warplanes carried out the attack. Both the Russian and Syrian air forces have been bombarding opposition-held areas of Aleppo Province despite a February 27 “cessation of hostilities”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/assads-forces-have-used-sarin-nerve-gas-for-the-first-time-since/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
http://muftah.org/assad-become-lesser-evil-syria/#.V5M7M5OAOkq
May 9, 2016: One of the most dismal examples of the way Syrian victims are neglected as “unworthy” can be seen in a TRT World interview with political scientist, Max Abrahms, on May 9, 2016. In the interview, Abrahms openly admits that he analyzes the Syrian war and the “question of what to do with Assad from the perspective of an American, not from a Syrian.” As he states: “If I were a Syrian, it’s quite possible…that I would be in favor of removing Assad…But, from the perspective of U.S. national security, frankly, I’m much more worried about the kinds of groups that Assad is fighting against in Syria than I am of Assad himself.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-13/humanitarian-aid-convoys-blocked-by-syrian-government/7410714
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/12/red-cross-convoy-denied-entery-to-syrian-city-of-darayya
May 12, 2016: An aid convoy has been refused entry to the besieged Syrian city of Darayya , the Red Cross said, dashing hopes for the first such delivery since regime forces surrounded the rebel-held town in 2012.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-war-children-refugee-camp-bombed-bashar-al-assad-government-a7027436.html
May 13, 2016: Around 3,000 children are among civilians facing a mounting humanitarian crisis in a town besieged by Syrian regime forces near Damascus.
http://eaworldview.com/2016/05/syria-feature-assad-airstrikes-damage-5th-century-church/
May 16, 2016: Pro-Assad airstrikes have damaged one of Syria’s oldest religious buildings, the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites in Aleppo Province.
The 5th-century church, in the village of Daret Azza, was dedicated to St Simeon because of his decades of devotion and prayer. He is said to have have spent 47 years in contemplation atop a pillar, which was also damaged on Thursday.
Reports differed on whether Russian or regime warplanes carried out the attack. Both the Russian and Syrian air forces have been bombarding opposition-held areas of Aleppo Province despite a February 27 “cessation of hostilities”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/assads-forces-have-used-sarin-nerve-gas-for-the-first-time-since/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
May 17, 2016: Syria’s regime has used sarin
nerve gas for the first time since 2013, dropping bombs laden with the
chemical agent on Isil fighters outside Damascus, according to a senior
Israeli official. This use of sarin would show that Bashar al-Assad has retained the
ability to gas his enemies despite an agreement that supposedly disarmed
Syria of its chemical arsenal.
That deal was reached after the regime used sarin and VX gas to kill as many as 1,400 people in rebel-held areas of Damascus on August 21, 2013. President Barack Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a “red line” that would trigger US air strikes. Once Assad agreed to disarm, however, Mr Obama abandoned his plan for military action.
Since then, Assad’s forces are believed to have used relatively unsophisticated chlorine gas on several dozen occasions. But the regime refrained from employing sarin – a far more lethal substance – until the latest incident.
The Syrian air force dropped the bombs laden with sarin just over three weeks ago, said the official.
The apparent aim was to prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) from seizing two air bases located north-east of Damascus.
Israel believes that scores of Isil fighters were killed in the incident, although the exact impact is uncertain. The casualties were far heavier than those that would have been inflicted by chlorine gas, leading Israeli analysts to conclude that sarin was used.
https://warisboring.com/whats-left-of-the-syrian-arab-army-eec39485df43#.3os8iwxws
https://rsf.org/en/news/renewed-calls-bassel-khartabils-release-4th-anniversary-detention The Syrian air force dropped the bombs laden with sarin just over three weeks ago, said the official.
The apparent aim was to prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) from seizing two air bases located north-east of Damascus.
Israel believes that scores of Isil fighters were killed in the incident, although the exact impact is uncertain. The casualties were far heavier than those that would have been inflicted by chlorine gas, leading Israeli analysts to conclude that sarin was used.
https://warisboring.com/whats-left-of-the-syrian-arab-army-eec39485df43#.3os8iwxws
May 18, 2016: Because of
draft-avoidance and defections — and because Al Assad’s regime was
skeptical of the loyalty of the majority of its military units — the SAA
never managed to fully mobilize.
Not
one of around 20 divisions it used to have has ever managed to deploy
more than one-third of its nominal strength on the battlefield. The
resulting 20 brigade-size task forces — each between 2,000- and
4,000-strong — were then further hit by several waves of mass
defections, but also extensive losses caused by the incompetence of
their commanders.
....
major
assaults on insurgent-held pockets in Damascus and eastern Ghouta are
overseen by two brigades from the Lebanese Hezbollah, three brigades of
the PLA and various of local IRGC surrogates, including the Syrian
branch of Hezbollah.
Units
of Iraqi Shi’a militias are not only securing the Sayyida Zaynab
District of southern Homs, but have also deployed to fight Syrian
insurgents, too. Furthermore, IRGC-controled units of Iraq’s Hezbollah
branch, Hezbollah-Syria, the PFLP-GC and the PLA played a crucial role
during the offensive that resulted in the capture of Sheikh Mishkin in
January 2016.
Currently,
Homs and Hama appear to be the last two governorates with any kind of
significant concentration of the SAA. Actually, merely the HQs of
various former SAA units are still wearing their official designations.
Their battalions all consist of various sectarian militias — including
that of the Ba’ath.
....
It’s unlikely that Al Assad has more than 70,000 troops left under his command.
....
It’s unlikely that Al Assad has more than 70,000 troops left under his command.
On
the contrary, while Iranians are said to have about 18,000 troops in
Syria, considering the average size of the brigades they and Iraqi Shi’a
are deploying there, they more likely to oversee at least 40,000
combatants.
On
the top of this all, one should not ignore the Russian military
presence, which is also larger than media usually report. In addition to
the units listed above, Moscow’s forces include elements of no fewer
than four Spetsnaz brigades — the 3rd, 16th, 22nd and 24th, primarily
responsible for the Hmemmem and Sanobar air bases near Latakia and
Shayrat air base in southeastern Homs.
All told, the Russians have at least 10,000 — and more likely up to 15,000 — troops in Syria.
21 May 2016: Renewed calls for Bassel Khartabil’s release
https://twitter.com/Paradoxy13/status/734428774293504000
May 22, 2016: Aftermath of the#Russia|n airstrike that hit the Bara Bin Malik mosque for the 2nd time in Hraytan, #Aleppo today
http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2016/5/25/assads-allies-in-the-west
May 25, 2016: They are the type of reports that wouldn't get a second glance in mainstream news outlets, but that's just the point. Publishing coverage that is more activist than journalistic, they have formed a network of "independent" and "alternative" news websites aiming to challenge the mainstream media.
One such outlet, The Anti-Media, has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers. Many such groups make their bread and butter from blogging and tweeting articles about environmentalism, mass surveillance and policebrutality, with a general affinity for protests and distaste for global capitalism - with the occasional exception.
Courting an engaged, young and progressive audience concerned about global inequality and social injustices, wary of mainstream media and weary of foreign wars - they offer simple answers to complex problems. Among them, examples abound, running the gamut from hagiography of Muammar Gaddafi and singing praises of President Assad, to comfortably wading in the realm of conspiracy theory.
When there was starvation in besieged Madaya, Eva Bartlett, a Canadian writer for Russia Today,trumpeted reports claiming that the images of severely malnourished children were either fake or propaganda.
The White Helmets? Those guys who regularly pull bodies out from the rubble of airstrikes? According to Vanessa Beeley, a writer for 21st Century Newswire, their their life-saving work is "propaganda designed to reinforce Washington's policy of 'regime change' in Syria".
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/26/the-morning-they-came-for-us-janine-di-giovanni-syria
May 26, 2016: The book continues by recounting the ramifications for Syrian civilians of Assad’s various scorched earth strategies. An estimated 200,000 people disappeared into the regime gulag. Most have experienced torture.
....
Medical staff are recruited to keep torture victims alive enough to experience further pain, in precise ways that only doctors would understand. The book paints a phantasmagoric scene of physicians pulling intestines out and carefully puncturing lungs.
...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/31/syria-idlib-national-hospital-bombing-dozens-killed
https://twitter.com/Paradoxy13/status/734428774293504000
May 22, 2016: Aftermath of the
http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2016/5/25/assads-allies-in-the-west
May 25, 2016: They are the type of reports that wouldn't get a second glance in mainstream news outlets, but that's just the point. Publishing coverage that is more activist than journalistic, they have formed a network of "independent" and "alternative" news websites aiming to challenge the mainstream media.
One such outlet, The Anti-Media, has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers. Many such groups make their bread and butter from blogging and tweeting articles about environmentalism, mass surveillance and policebrutality, with a general affinity for protests and distaste for global capitalism - with the occasional exception.
Courting an engaged, young and progressive audience concerned about global inequality and social injustices, wary of mainstream media and weary of foreign wars - they offer simple answers to complex problems. Among them, examples abound, running the gamut from hagiography of Muammar Gaddafi and singing praises of President Assad, to comfortably wading in the realm of conspiracy theory.
When there was starvation in besieged Madaya, Eva Bartlett, a Canadian writer for Russia Today,trumpeted reports claiming that the images of severely malnourished children were either fake or propaganda.
The White Helmets? Those guys who regularly pull bodies out from the rubble of airstrikes? According to Vanessa Beeley, a writer for 21st Century Newswire, their their life-saving work is "propaganda designed to reinforce Washington's policy of 'regime change' in Syria".
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/26/the-morning-they-came-for-us-janine-di-giovanni-syria
May 26, 2016: The book continues by recounting the ramifications for Syrian civilians of Assad’s various scorched earth strategies. An estimated 200,000 people disappeared into the regime gulag. Most have experienced torture.
....
Medical staff are recruited to keep torture victims alive enough to experience further pain, in precise ways that only doctors would understand. The book paints a phantasmagoric scene of physicians pulling intestines out and carefully puncturing lungs.
...
Searching for rape survivors in Atma camp she comes across a burned 11-year-old, his mouth “nothing more than a hole” his nose non-existent, his ears flaps of skin “stretched tight into pink crevasses”.
Giovanni attended the aftermath of the regime’s August 2012 massacre of at least 300 civilians in Darayya, a suburb west of Damascus. The war correspondent Robert Fisk, she notes, entered Darayya on the same day, embedded with the regime army, and described the rebels as the perpetrators. Giovanni went in with civilians, interviewing locals. None of them corroborated Fisk’s story. Nor did Human Rights Watch, nor Darayya’s local coordination committee. Of course, once Giovanni’s article appeared, her Syrian visa was revoked.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/31/syria-idlib-national-hospital-bombing-dozens-killed
May 31, 2016: At least two dozen people including several children have been killed in
northern Syria in the latest apparent attack by forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime on medical facilities in opposition-held areas, UN officials and activists have said.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/hospitals-are-now-normal-targets-of-war-says-medecins-sans-frontieres-adviser
June 1, 2016: Michiel Hofman, a senior humanitarian specialist at the charity, offered a grim analysis, saying instead of rebel groups it was conventional armies that were repeatedly violating the laws of war. He chided the permanent members of the security council, four of whom are engaged in conflicts where medics are targeted, saying such a situation had not occurred since the Korean war in the 1950s.
He described the fighting in Syria as a “dirty war”, saying both the government of Bashar al-Assad and the rebels have targeted hospitals while adding that the greater destructive firepower was held by states.
“When we talk about the bombing of hospitals, bombing means air forces,” he said. “Rebel groups don’t have air forces, so this is exclusively states who by definition have much larger firepower [...] and they are the ones that actually signed these conventions.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/syrian-troops-looting-ancient-city-palmyra-says-archaeologist
June 1, 2016: Syrian regime troops are looting the ancient city of Palmyra like the Islamic State jihadis who controlled it until March, according to a leading archaeologist.
Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said off-duty soldiers were conducting illegal excavations and had looted at the Unesco world heritage site.
.......
He wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily that retaking Palmyra was “an important victory for culture … But this victory has not made Bashar al-Assad and his backers the saviours of cultural heritage.
“Assad’s soldiers too plundered the ruins of Palmyra before the Isis takeover, and their rockets and grenades indiscriminately pounded the antique columns and walls when this promised even the slightest military advantage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/world/middleeast/syria-aid-convoy.html?_r=1
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/syria-crisis-first-aid-convoy-enters-besieged-daraya-since-2012
June 1, 2016: An aid convoy carrying medicine, baby milk and vaccines has entered the Damascus suburb of Darayya for the first time since it was besieged by regime forces in 2012, according to the Red Cross.
The joint convoy organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered the starving town on Wednesday afternoon.
The aid, which does not contain food, arrived three weeks after a similar convoy was barred from entering the town by forces from the elite Fourth Armored Brigade commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.
It is understood that food was excluded from the convoy as a confidence-building measure, with humanitarian officials hoping further aid deliveries would include food.
ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek, who accompanied the convoy, said people inside Darayya had welcomed the convoy even though it did not contain any food.
https://twitter.com/leloveluck/status/738241676213399552
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/02/assad-regime-says-no-need-for-air-drops-as-no-one-is-starving-in/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36479415
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/08/casualties-reported-airstrikes-rebel-held-districts-aleppo
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/syria-food-aid-reaches-daraya-time-years-160610081433309.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/food-aid-besieged-damascus-suburb-darayya-syrian-arab-red-crescent
https://www.yahoo.com/news/raids-syria-market-kill-21-hundreds-flee-bastion-170636802.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/syria-civil-war-idlib-air-strikes-160612150541117.html
June 12, 2016: At least 21 people, five of them children, were killed in raids, including on a marketplace, in Idlib city, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.
https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/wheat-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-syria
June 24, 2016: Assad has used siege tactics to starve out rebel-held areas, and his military has bombed breadlines and bakeries from the air. As the war has escalated, limited access to agriculture and the food-production cycle has caused the formerly self-sustaining country to resort to importing wheat and other foodstuffs—facilitated by Russia and Iran, its military allies—to feed the population in government-held areas.
.......
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/02/syrian-civilians-killed-in-apparent-revenge-bombing-for-pilot-death
http://eaworldview.com/2016/07/syria-feature-regime-airstrikes-kill-40-in-retaliation-for-pilots-execution/
July 2, 2016: Regime airstrikes have killed more than 40 civilians near Syria’s capital Damascus, in retaliation for the downing of a warplane and execution of its pilot on Friday.
The airstrikes on Saturday targeted a medical center, a school, and a residential area in Jairoud, a densely-populated town including thousands of people displaced by fighting and bombing in nearby areas.
The Local Coordination Committees said 40 victims had been identified by names, while dozens of others have yet to be named because of severe burns or mutilation.
Jairoud, in the eastern Qalamoun region in Damascus Province, had been spared bombardment because of a local truce. However, on Friday a Su-22 jet fighter crashed near the town, with rebels claiming their third downing of a warplane within a week.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/palestinian-refugees-killed-syria-khan-eshieh-camp-160701160957338.html
July 2, 2016: The Palestinian refugee camp of Khan Eshieh in the Damascas area has been hit by deadly air strikes amid an escalation of fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels, residents and a local aid group have told Al Jazeera. Early on Thursday, at least six residents, including a seven-year-old child, were killed when warplanes dropped bombs on civilian homes in the camp, said camp resident Abo Muslem.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=772125
July 5, 2016: Three Palestinian refugees were killed and another five injured Monday in airstrikes targeting the besieged Khan al-Shih, a Palestinian refugee camp in war-torn Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/war-reporter-marie-colvin-was-tracked-targeted-and-killed-by-assads-forces-family-says/2016/07/09/62968844-453a-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html?postshare=5521468106141031&tid=ss_tw
July 9, 2016: Prominent freelancers, citizen journalists and cartoonists began to be arrested or killed in late 2011. Intelligence branches received instructions to target media critics and wanted lists were distributed, the lawsuit says. Rewards were offered for the capture of any foreign journalist.
In January 2012, high-ranking Syrian officials met with Arab League monitors and demanded to know where they had met journalists during their visit. They accused reporters associated with the media center of being terrorists, denounced The Washington Post and the New York Times as “terrorist newspapers” and accused foreign journalists of being spies, the lawsuit states in a chronology of events.
Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat told the monitors “he could destroy Baba Amr in ten minutes . . . if there were no cameras,” according to the lawsuit.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-south-idUSKCN0ZS2M0
July 12, 2016: Jets believed to be Russian on Tuesday struck a refugee camp along Jordan's north-eastern border with Syria, killing at least 10 people and injuring scores, rebels said.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2016/Jul-13/361877-syria-must-explain-chemical-warfare-agents-watchdog.ashx
July 13, 2016: The world's chemical weapons watchdog is pressing Syria to explain why it has four undeclared warfare agents, its head said Wednesday, after a U.S. official accused Damascus of continuing to hoard a toxic stockpile.
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons chief Ahmet Uzumcu said despite previous declarations by Syria, OPCW teams have found indications of five additional chemical agents.
After recent consultations with The Hague-based OPCW's secretariat, Syria "declared research and development of one more chemical agent," Uzumcu said in a report released last week, of which AFP was given a copy on Wednesday.
http://www.voanews.com/content/syria-government-denies-medical-aid-to-civilians-in-besieged-areas--says-un/3418294.html
July 14, 2016: GENEVA—United Nations officials accuse the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad of denying medical aid to hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in besieged areas. The officials say people are dying for lack of medicines and treatment.
A special adviser on Syria, Jan Egeland, says progress, although not enough, is being made in providing food and other relief to hundreds of thousands of Syrians in besieged areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CkmY4xVMHY
July 14, 2016: The population of Darayya near Damascus reduced from 1,70,000 to 8000 due to Assad's barrel bombing of the city.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3693213/Air-raids-kill-18-civilians-Syrias-Aleppo.html
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/air-raids-kill-25-civilians-syrias-aleppo-monitor-1196646069
July 16, 2016: Air raids on rebel-held districts of Syria's battleground second city of Aleppo killed at least 25 civilians including children on Saturday, a monitor said.
.....
An AFP correspondent in eastern Aleppo said helicopters and fighter jets were still circling rebel-held neighbourhoods, adding that barrel bombs - crude, unguided explosive devices - had been dropped on several areas.
A hospital in the Maadi neighbourhood was hit in the bombing, wounding some of the staff and patients inside.
"All kinds of weapons were used to bomb the hospital, from midnight until about 11am. Now it's unusable," Mohammad Kheir, one of its doctors, told AFP.
"There were some injuries among the medical staff but thankfully they are only light wounds."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-20/aleppo-american-doctors-risk-lives-to-help-bombing-victims/7644982
July 20, 2016: According to Physicians for Human Rights, the Syrian Government has assassinated, bombed and tortured to death almost 700 medical personnel in the past five years.
A UN investigation also found that Syrian Government forces have been systematically attacking hospitals in opposition controlled areas.
"We visited seven hospitals in the city of Aleppo," Dr Sahloul said.
"Every one of them have been targeted and bombed several times, so it's not incidental."
One hospital had been hit so many times by airstrikes that it has, literally, been driven underground and is now operating in the basement with sandbags on the windows.
"In spite of that you have all these people who continue to work in this environment risking their live, knowing that at any moment they might be killed," Dr Attar said.
The majority of patients the two doctors treated were civilians hit by Syrian Government and Russian airstrikes.
https://twitter.com/Sophiemcneill/status/756083132269486080
July 21, 2016: Today in #Aleppo. Doctors report so many ambulances have been destroyed, trucks are now used to transport patients
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/24/russian-airstrikes-aleppo-starvation-assad-siege
July 24, 2016: A fortnight after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, with Russian air support, cut the only road into rebel-held Aleppo, it is claimed a water shortage is affecting hospitals. Brita Haji Hasan, leader of the Aleppo city council, said that the situation was deteriorating rapidly and that he believed the rebel-held areas could only hold out for “two to three months” before people started to die in their thousands.
.....
https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/757180306185129985
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/syria-civil-war-airstrikes-hit-aleppo-hospitals-160724090834185.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/four-hospitals-hit-air-raids-syrias-aleppo-doctors-082017646.html
July 24, 2016: Beirut (AFP) - Four makeshift hospitals and a local blood bank in Syria's battered Aleppo city have been hit by air raids in the past 24 hours, a group of doctors said Sunday.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-air-strikes-two-day-old-baby-dies-as-four-hospitals-hit-in-aleppo-a7153641.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/hospitals-are-now-normal-targets-of-war-says-medecins-sans-frontieres-adviser
June 1, 2016: Michiel Hofman, a senior humanitarian specialist at the charity, offered a grim analysis, saying instead of rebel groups it was conventional armies that were repeatedly violating the laws of war. He chided the permanent members of the security council, four of whom are engaged in conflicts where medics are targeted, saying such a situation had not occurred since the Korean war in the 1950s.
He described the fighting in Syria as a “dirty war”, saying both the government of Bashar al-Assad and the rebels have targeted hospitals while adding that the greater destructive firepower was held by states.
“When we talk about the bombing of hospitals, bombing means air forces,” he said. “Rebel groups don’t have air forces, so this is exclusively states who by definition have much larger firepower [...] and they are the ones that actually signed these conventions.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/syrian-troops-looting-ancient-city-palmyra-says-archaeologist
June 1, 2016: Syrian regime troops are looting the ancient city of Palmyra like the Islamic State jihadis who controlled it until March, according to a leading archaeologist.
Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said off-duty soldiers were conducting illegal excavations and had looted at the Unesco world heritage site.
.......
He wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily that retaking Palmyra was “an important victory for culture … But this victory has not made Bashar al-Assad and his backers the saviours of cultural heritage.
“Assad’s soldiers too plundered the ruins of Palmyra before the Isis takeover, and their rockets and grenades indiscriminately pounded the antique columns and walls when this promised even the slightest military advantage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/world/middleeast/syria-aid-convoy.html?_r=1
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/syria-crisis-first-aid-convoy-enters-besieged-daraya-since-2012
June 1, 2016: An aid convoy carrying medicine, baby milk and vaccines has entered the Damascus suburb of Darayya for the first time since it was besieged by regime forces in 2012, according to the Red Cross.
The joint convoy organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered the starving town on Wednesday afternoon.
The aid, which does not contain food, arrived three weeks after a similar convoy was barred from entering the town by forces from the elite Fourth Armored Brigade commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.
It is understood that food was excluded from the convoy as a confidence-building measure, with humanitarian officials hoping further aid deliveries would include food.
ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek, who accompanied the convoy, said people inside Darayya had welcomed the convoy even though it did not contain any food.
https://twitter.com/leloveluck/status/738241676213399552
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/02/assad-regime-says-no-need-for-air-drops-as-no-one-is-starving-in/
June 1, 2016: In the Damascus suburb of Daraya, some 4,000 people have been without food aid since 2012. Footage from across the Greater Damascus region has shown men, women and children on the verge of starvation. On Wednesday, a 12 year old girl died of malnutrition, bringing the number of starvation-related deaths in her area to more than 70.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36479415
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/08/casualties-reported-airstrikes-rebel-held-districts-aleppo
June 8, 2016: A hospital in rebel-held east Aleppo in Syria has been put out of service after government airstrikes in the vicinity killed at least 10 people, a day after the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, vowed to reclaim “every inch of Syria” no matter the bloodshed that caused.
Sources in Aleppo said al-Bayan hospital had been shut down after airstrikes on the crowded al-Shaar neighbourhood of Syria’s largest city, an area that contains several well-known health facilities, including a blood bank and at least three other clinics, as well as a public market.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/syria-food-aid-reaches-daraya-time-years-160610081433309.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/food-aid-besieged-damascus-suburb-darayya-syrian-arab-red-crescent
Jun 10, 2016: The Syrian government’s willingness to allow humanitarian aid into besieged towns is freshly in doubt after it reportedly started barrel bombing the Damascus suburb of Darayya hours after allowing food aid in for the first time since 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvO6O0Q7G7ghttps://www.yahoo.com/news/raids-syria-market-kill-21-hundreds-flee-bastion-170636802.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/syria-civil-war-idlib-air-strikes-160612150541117.html
June 12, 2016: At least 21 people, five of them children, were killed in raids, including on a marketplace, in Idlib city, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.
https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/wheat-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-syria
June 24, 2016: Assad has used siege tactics to starve out rebel-held areas, and his military has bombed breadlines and bakeries from the air. As the war has escalated, limited access to agriculture and the food-production cycle has caused the formerly self-sustaining country to resort to importing wheat and other foodstuffs—facilitated by Russia and Iran, its military allies—to feed the population in government-held areas.
.......
As protests gave way to all-out war, and the country tried to adjust to the sudden disruption of daily life, the government devised
a devastating strategy to combat rebel forces: It bombed the
increasingly long bakery lines caused by the scarcity of wheat in
contested areas of the city. These bombings have continued throughout
the conflict; in a recent attack, Russian airstrikes reportedly struck a
bakery that had provided bread for nearly 45,000 people.
......
In May, regime forces at the final checkpoint blocked the first shipment of aid brought to Daraya since November 2012.
The government’s manipulation of food
access makes humanitarian intervention, aimed at creating a
self-sustaining food cycle that is not sponsored by the regime, crucial.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/syrias-war-on-doctors
June 27, 2016: In the first weeks of March, 2011, the start of the insurrection in Syria, the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad detained and tortured children who had drawn anti-regime slogans on a wall in the southern city of Dara’a. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, and on March 22nd Assad’s forces stormed into the city hospital, kicked out the nonessential medical staff, and positioned snipers on the roof. Early the next morning, the snipers fired at protesters. A cardiologist named Ali al-Mahameed was shot in the head and the chest as he tried to reach the wounded. Thousands of people attended his funeral, later that day, and they, too, were attacked with live ammunition. For the next two years, the snipers remained stationed on the roof, “firing on sick and wounded persons attempting to approach the hospital entrance,” according to the U.N. commission.
......
In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”
.......
Despite the onslaught, doctors and international N.G.O.s have forged an elaborate network of underground hospitals throughout Syria. They have installed cameras in intensive-care units, so that doctors abroad can monitor patients by Skype and direct technicians to administer proper treatment. In besieged areas, they have adapted hospitals to run on fuel from animal waste.
.....
By the end of 2012, Syrian government forces had attacked medical outposts at least eighty-nine times, in eight provinces. Near Damascus, they raided and burned to the ground a clinic and three hospitals, killing all the patients and staff in one of them. In Homs, they shelled a field hospital twenty times in two days. In Aleppo, military aircraft fired rockets at a children’s hospital, causing it to shut down. Ground forces spent four days shelling a mental hospital. M1 was bombed twice, M2 once, and M4, which was attacked at least four times, finally collapsed in a pile of concrete and twisted metal, crushing to death several patients and staff.
.....
In the first week of June, Syrian and Russian aircraft carried out more than six hundred air strikes on the opposition side of Aleppo, and Assad vowed to take back “every inch” of Syria. The next day, pro-Assad warplanes bombed three medical facilities, including a health center for newborn babies, in the span of three hours. M2, M3, M4, M6, M7, and M9 have been destroyed.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/reporting-syria-direct-threat-160628061015960.html
June 28, 2016: During 2016, two journalists have been killed in Syria - photojournalist Osama Jumaa was killed in Aleppo on June 5 while reporting on the rescue of civilians following a regime bombardment; Daraya-based journalist and media activist Majid Diraani was also killed in February while filming a bombardment on the regime-besieged area just south of Damascus. Both were killed by pro-government forces.
At the same time, many more media activists - citizens, journalists and activists armed with camera phones, video cameras and social media - have been killed.
A report released by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a monitoring group, found that 463 media activists had been killed either by regime forces or armed groups. Another 1,027 media workers had been arrested or abducted between March 2011 and April 2015......And while the Syrian regime remains, according to the report, by far and away "the top killer" of journalists, rebel factions often harass, detain or kill media personnel as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/opinion/in-syria-starving-instead-of-fasting.html
June 30, 2016: 590,000 Syrians who the United Nations says live under siege. (Some estimates say that more than one million civilians are enduring siegelike conditions.) A vast majority of those trapped are, like Hussein, penned in by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, though the Islamic State, the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and some rebel groups have also imposed sieges on civilian populations.
......
In April, the International Syria Support Group, a coalition that includes Russia and the United States, said that the Assad regime must stop blocking humanitarian deliveries. It set a June 1 deadline for the free flow of aid. The coalition and the United Nations even promised that they would support airdrops of supplies if food isn’t allowed in.
https://twitter.com/Sophiemcneill/status/752866042377015296
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-hunger-report-idUSKCN0ZS2C1
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/madaya-portrait-of-a-syrian-town-under-siege.html
July 2016: Through May, at least 86 people have perished from siege-related causes since the siege on Madaya began – 65 from malnutrition and starvation, 14 from landmines, six from snipers, and one from a chronic health condition
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/syrias-war-on-doctors
June 27, 2016: In the first weeks of March, 2011, the start of the insurrection in Syria, the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad detained and tortured children who had drawn anti-regime slogans on a wall in the southern city of Dara’a. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, and on March 22nd Assad’s forces stormed into the city hospital, kicked out the nonessential medical staff, and positioned snipers on the roof. Early the next morning, the snipers fired at protesters. A cardiologist named Ali al-Mahameed was shot in the head and the chest as he tried to reach the wounded. Thousands of people attended his funeral, later that day, and they, too, were attacked with live ammunition. For the next two years, the snipers remained stationed on the roof, “firing on sick and wounded persons attempting to approach the hospital entrance,” according to the U.N. commission.
......
In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”
.......
Despite the onslaught, doctors and international N.G.O.s have forged an elaborate network of underground hospitals throughout Syria. They have installed cameras in intensive-care units, so that doctors abroad can monitor patients by Skype and direct technicians to administer proper treatment. In besieged areas, they have adapted hospitals to run on fuel from animal waste.
.....
By the end of 2012, Syrian government forces had attacked medical outposts at least eighty-nine times, in eight provinces. Near Damascus, they raided and burned to the ground a clinic and three hospitals, killing all the patients and staff in one of them. In Homs, they shelled a field hospital twenty times in two days. In Aleppo, military aircraft fired rockets at a children’s hospital, causing it to shut down. Ground forces spent four days shelling a mental hospital. M1 was bombed twice, M2 once, and M4, which was attacked at least four times, finally collapsed in a pile of concrete and twisted metal, crushing to death several patients and staff.
.....
In the first week of June, Syrian and Russian aircraft carried out more than six hundred air strikes on the opposition side of Aleppo, and Assad vowed to take back “every inch” of Syria. The next day, pro-Assad warplanes bombed three medical facilities, including a health center for newborn babies, in the span of three hours. M2, M3, M4, M6, M7, and M9 have been destroyed.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/reporting-syria-direct-threat-160628061015960.html
June 28, 2016: During 2016, two journalists have been killed in Syria - photojournalist Osama Jumaa was killed in Aleppo on June 5 while reporting on the rescue of civilians following a regime bombardment; Daraya-based journalist and media activist Majid Diraani was also killed in February while filming a bombardment on the regime-besieged area just south of Damascus. Both were killed by pro-government forces.
At the same time, many more media activists - citizens, journalists and activists armed with camera phones, video cameras and social media - have been killed.
A report released by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a monitoring group, found that 463 media activists had been killed either by regime forces or armed groups. Another 1,027 media workers had been arrested or abducted between March 2011 and April 2015......And while the Syrian regime remains, according to the report, by far and away "the top killer" of journalists, rebel factions often harass, detain or kill media personnel as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/opinion/in-syria-starving-instead-of-fasting.html
June 30, 2016: 590,000 Syrians who the United Nations says live under siege. (Some estimates say that more than one million civilians are enduring siegelike conditions.) A vast majority of those trapped are, like Hussein, penned in by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, though the Islamic State, the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and some rebel groups have also imposed sieges on civilian populations.
......
In April, the International Syria Support Group, a coalition that includes Russia and the United States, said that the Assad regime must stop blocking humanitarian deliveries. It set a June 1 deadline for the free flow of aid. The coalition and the United Nations even promised that they would support airdrops of supplies if food isn’t allowed in.
The
deadline came and went. The Assad regime permitted the Syrian Red
Crescent to deliver aid to Daraya on June 10 — that city’s first food
convoy in over four years — but the trucks were allowed to bring in food
only for 2,400 of the 4,000 to 8,000 civilians trapped there. So far,
the only airdrops have been in Deir Ezzor, a regime-held city that is
surrounded by the Islamic State.
https://twitter.com/Sophiemcneill/status/752866042377015296
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-hunger-report-idUSKCN0ZS2C1
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/madaya-portrait-of-a-syrian-town-under-siege.html
July 2016: Through May, at least 86 people have perished from siege-related causes since the siege on Madaya began – 65 from malnutrition and starvation, 14 from landmines, six from snipers, and one from a chronic health condition
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/02/syrian-civilians-killed-in-apparent-revenge-bombing-for-pilot-death
http://eaworldview.com/2016/07/syria-feature-regime-airstrikes-kill-40-in-retaliation-for-pilots-execution/
July 2, 2016: Regime airstrikes have killed more than 40 civilians near Syria’s capital Damascus, in retaliation for the downing of a warplane and execution of its pilot on Friday.
The airstrikes on Saturday targeted a medical center, a school, and a residential area in Jairoud, a densely-populated town including thousands of people displaced by fighting and bombing in nearby areas.
The Local Coordination Committees said 40 victims had been identified by names, while dozens of others have yet to be named because of severe burns or mutilation.
Jairoud, in the eastern Qalamoun region in Damascus Province, had been spared bombardment because of a local truce. However, on Friday a Su-22 jet fighter crashed near the town, with rebels claiming their third downing of a warplane within a week.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/palestinian-refugees-killed-syria-khan-eshieh-camp-160701160957338.html
July 2, 2016: The Palestinian refugee camp of Khan Eshieh in the Damascas area has been hit by deadly air strikes amid an escalation of fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels, residents and a local aid group have told Al Jazeera. Early on Thursday, at least six residents, including a seven-year-old child, were killed when warplanes dropped bombs on civilian homes in the camp, said camp resident Abo Muslem.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=772125
July 5, 2016: Three Palestinian refugees were killed and another five injured Monday in airstrikes targeting the besieged Khan al-Shih, a Palestinian refugee camp in war-torn Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/war-reporter-marie-colvin-was-tracked-targeted-and-killed-by-assads-forces-family-says/2016/07/09/62968844-453a-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html?postshare=5521468106141031&tid=ss_tw
July 9, 2016: Prominent freelancers, citizen journalists and cartoonists began to be arrested or killed in late 2011. Intelligence branches received instructions to target media critics and wanted lists were distributed, the lawsuit says. Rewards were offered for the capture of any foreign journalist.
In January 2012, high-ranking Syrian officials met with Arab League monitors and demanded to know where they had met journalists during their visit. They accused reporters associated with the media center of being terrorists, denounced The Washington Post and the New York Times as “terrorist newspapers” and accused foreign journalists of being spies, the lawsuit states in a chronology of events.
Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat told the monitors “he could destroy Baba Amr in ten minutes . . . if there were no cameras,” according to the lawsuit.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-south-idUSKCN0ZS2M0
July 12, 2016: Jets believed to be Russian on Tuesday struck a refugee camp along Jordan's north-eastern border with Syria, killing at least 10 people and injuring scores, rebels said.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2016/Jul-13/361877-syria-must-explain-chemical-warfare-agents-watchdog.ashx
July 13, 2016: The world's chemical weapons watchdog is pressing Syria to explain why it has four undeclared warfare agents, its head said Wednesday, after a U.S. official accused Damascus of continuing to hoard a toxic stockpile.
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons chief Ahmet Uzumcu said despite previous declarations by Syria, OPCW teams have found indications of five additional chemical agents.
After recent consultations with The Hague-based OPCW's secretariat, Syria "declared research and development of one more chemical agent," Uzumcu said in a report released last week, of which AFP was given a copy on Wednesday.
http://www.voanews.com/content/syria-government-denies-medical-aid-to-civilians-in-besieged-areas--says-un/3418294.html
July 14, 2016: GENEVA—United Nations officials accuse the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad of denying medical aid to hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in besieged areas. The officials say people are dying for lack of medicines and treatment.
A special adviser on Syria, Jan Egeland, says progress, although not enough, is being made in providing food and other relief to hundreds of thousands of Syrians in besieged areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CkmY4xVMHY
July 14, 2016: The population of Darayya near Damascus reduced from 1,70,000 to 8000 due to Assad's barrel bombing of the city.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3693213/Air-raids-kill-18-civilians-Syrias-Aleppo.html
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/air-raids-kill-25-civilians-syrias-aleppo-monitor-1196646069
July 16, 2016: Air raids on rebel-held districts of Syria's battleground second city of Aleppo killed at least 25 civilians including children on Saturday, a monitor said.
.....
An AFP correspondent in eastern Aleppo said helicopters and fighter jets were still circling rebel-held neighbourhoods, adding that barrel bombs - crude, unguided explosive devices - had been dropped on several areas.
A hospital in the Maadi neighbourhood was hit in the bombing, wounding some of the staff and patients inside.
"All kinds of weapons were used to bomb the hospital, from midnight until about 11am. Now it's unusable," Mohammad Kheir, one of its doctors, told AFP.
"There were some injuries among the medical staff but thankfully they are only light wounds."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-20/aleppo-american-doctors-risk-lives-to-help-bombing-victims/7644982
July 20, 2016: According to Physicians for Human Rights, the Syrian Government has assassinated, bombed and tortured to death almost 700 medical personnel in the past five years.
A UN investigation also found that Syrian Government forces have been systematically attacking hospitals in opposition controlled areas.
"We visited seven hospitals in the city of Aleppo," Dr Sahloul said.
"Every one of them have been targeted and bombed several times, so it's not incidental."
One hospital had been hit so many times by airstrikes that it has, literally, been driven underground and is now operating in the basement with sandbags on the windows.
"In spite of that you have all these people who continue to work in this environment risking their live, knowing that at any moment they might be killed," Dr Attar said.
The majority of patients the two doctors treated were civilians hit by Syrian Government and Russian airstrikes.
https://twitter.com/Sophiemcneill/status/756083132269486080
July 21, 2016: Today in #Aleppo. Doctors report so many ambulances have been destroyed, trucks are now used to transport patients
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/24/russian-airstrikes-aleppo-starvation-assad-siege
July 24, 2016: A fortnight after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, with Russian air support, cut the only road into rebel-held Aleppo, it is claimed a water shortage is affecting hospitals. Brita Haji Hasan, leader of the Aleppo city council, said that the situation was deteriorating rapidly and that he believed the rebel-held areas could only hold out for “two to three months” before people started to die in their thousands.
.....
The head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Syria, Marianne Gasser, told the Observer that the effects of the siege were already beginning to show in Aleppo’s remaining hospitals.
She said: “Numerous health facilities have been attacked and are now out of service, depriving many more of lifesaving medical care. There is no more respect for hospitals and medical staff.
“The lack of electricity and water is also mainly affecting hospitals.”
https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/757180306185129985
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/syria-civil-war-airstrikes-hit-aleppo-hospitals-160724090834185.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/four-hospitals-hit-air-raids-syrias-aleppo-doctors-082017646.html
July 24, 2016: Beirut (AFP) - Four makeshift hospitals and a local blood bank in Syria's battered Aleppo city have been hit by air raids in the past 24 hours, a group of doctors said Sunday.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-air-strikes-two-day-old-baby-dies-as-four-hospitals-hit-in-aleppo-a7153641.html
July 25, 2016: Air strikes by Syrian government forces have hit four makeshift hospitals and a blood bank in the city of Aleppo, killing a two-day-old baby.
The strikes took place over the space of 24 hours as part of an overnight raid in the Al-Shaar neighbourhood on Sunday.
The hospitals, which provide urgent medical care to more than 200,000 civilians, were out of action on Sunday.
A newborn boy was killed when his oxygen supply was cut off after the raid in the early hours of the morning, AFP reported.
Footage posted online by the Independent Doctors Association (IDA), a group that provides emergency medical care in the city, shows the aftermath of one of the attacks. In the film, a small baby is carried in a room filled with incubators. The camera shows that outside the children's hospital, the dust from the strike has not yet settled.
The IDA say their children’s hospital, the only paediatric facility in the Syrian city, had been hit twice by strikes over a period of 12 hours.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/28/russia/syria-widespread-new-cluster-munition-use
July 28, 2016: The Syrian-Russian joint military operation in Syria has extensively used internationally banned cluster munitions in its recent offensive, Human Rights Watch said today.
Human Rights Watch has documented 47 cluster munition attacks which killed and injured dozens of civilians in opposition-controlled territory across three governorates since May 27, 2016. The actual number of cluster munition attacks is most likely higher.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/28/extreme-measures/abuses-against-children-detained-national-security-threats
July 28, 2016: Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Syrian authorities have detained tens of thousands of people in dozens of detention centers scattered across the country. According to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, at least 1,433 of these detainees have been children.[68] In cases documented by Human Rights Watch, detained children were usually between the ages of 13 and 17, but some witnesses and defectors have reported seeing boys as young as 8 in Syrian detention centers.[69]
https://twitter.com/Syria_Hezb_Iran/status/758965385592909825
July 29, 2016: Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba beheads 3 anti-Assad militants in Aleppo.
July 28, 2016: The Syrian-Russian joint military operation in Syria has extensively used internationally banned cluster munitions in its recent offensive, Human Rights Watch said today.
Human Rights Watch has documented 47 cluster munition attacks which killed and injured dozens of civilians in opposition-controlled territory across three governorates since May 27, 2016. The actual number of cluster munition attacks is most likely higher.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/28/extreme-measures/abuses-against-children-detained-national-security-threats
July 28, 2016: Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Syrian authorities have detained tens of thousands of people in dozens of detention centers scattered across the country. According to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, at least 1,433 of these detainees have been children.[68] In cases documented by Human Rights Watch, detained children were usually between the ages of 13 and 17, but some witnesses and defectors have reported seeing boys as young as 8 in Syrian detention centers.[69]
During
2011, 2012, and parts of 2013, intelligence services, often assisted by
the military, apprehended people following anti-government protests in
large-scale house-to-house “sweep” operations and at checkpoints on
roads. Defectors from the Syrian military told Human Rights Watch that
anyone over 14 was liable to be arrested and detained. In 2011, a
lieutenant colonel deployed in Douma with the 106th Brigade of the
Presidential Guard told Human Rights Watch that his brigade arrested
about 50 people, any male between ages 15 and 50, at his checkpoint
after each Friday protest.[70] Security
forces also targeted specific activists for arrest, and if they were
not at home, arrested family members, including children, instead.
.....
Syrian security forces used a broad range of torture methods, including prolonged beatings, often with objects such as batons and wires, holding the detainees in painful stress positions for long periods, electrical shocks administered with stun guns and electric batons, use of improvised metal and wooden “racks,” burning with car battery acid, sexual assault and humiliation, the removal of fingernails, and mock execution.[72] Of the cases Human Rights Watch documented, 27 involved children. One 13-year-old boy, “Hossam,” said he had been tortured for three days at a military facility near Tal Kalakh.
....
Ahmad al-Musalmani, 14, was arrested in 2012 when Syrian intelligence officers found an anti-Assad song on his cell phone. He died in detention.
.....
Of the 1,433 children the Violations Documentation Center in Syria has identified as being detained by Syrian authorities, only 436 are known to have been released.[79] The status of the remainder is unknown.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-wa-maternity-hospital-save-the-children-bombed-idlib-casualties-injuries-assad-russia-rebels-a7162506.html
https://twitter.com/IvanSidorenko1/status/758931834185015296http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-wa-maternity-hospital-save-the-children-bombed-idlib-casualties-injuries-assad-russia-rebels-a7162506.html
July 29, 2016: One of the biggest maternity hospitals in a rebel-held area of Syria has been bombed, leaving at least two people dead and many injured. Save the Children, which supports the hospital in rural Idlib province, said air strikes struck the front of the building on Friday afternoon.
https://twitter.com/Syria_Hezb_Iran/status/758965385592909825
July 29, 2016: Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba beheads 3 anti-Assad militants in Aleppo.
June 29, 2016: An aerial attack which partially destroyed a maternity hospital in rural Idlib province in northwest Syria this afternoon appears to be part of a despicable pattern of unlawful attacks deliberately targeting medical facilities, said Amnesty International.
The number of casualties in today’s attack is not yet clear, but a spokesperson from Save the Children, which supports the hospital, told media there were at least two fatalities. It is unclear who carried out the attack, but it was in an area under the control of armed groups where Syrian and Russian armed forces had been launching airstrikes.
Photos and video footage taken in the aftermath showed part of the hospital in ruins, with rubble strewn both inside and outside the building. Other photographs taken around the time of the airstrike showed new-born babies in incubators. According to Save the Children, it is the area’s only maternity hospital, delivering around 700 babies a month. The attack comes after four hospitals and a blood bank in eastern Aleppo were struck in aerial attacks on 23-24 July. According to United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, one of them, a paediatric hospital, was hit twice in less than 12 hours.
Today’s airstrike appears to fit into a pattern documented by Amnesty of apparently deliberate attacks on Syrian hospitals and medical infrastructure by Syrian and Russian armed forces - attacks which seem to be part of their military strategy.
http://time.com/4433345/aleppo-rebels-siege-counterattack-isis-syria/
https://www.rescue.org/article/irc-supported-hospital-syria-hit-airstrike-killing-six
July 31, 2016: The IRC-supported Jasim hospital in the Daraa Governorate in southern Syria struck by an airstrike provides some 4,000 consultations per month in Jasim, a city of approximately 55,000 residents.
http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-29/doctors-tell-of-horrifying-conditions-in-aleppo-as-medical-supplies-run-out/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/world/middleeast/aleppo-syria-doctor.html
July 31, 2016: Where CPR on a Boy Is Time Wasted: U.S. Doctors Recall Aleppo’s Horrors
.....
On both sides, civilians have suffered for years from indiscriminate attacks. But only the government and its Russian allies have warplanes, making the bombardment of the east more devastating. Four hospitals were hit last weekend, and a strike Sunday on another in Dara’a Province killed six.
Medical organizations say the government has systematically singled out medical workers across Syria; the group Physicians for Human Rights has documented the deaths of more than 700, most killed by pro-government forces. Opposition groups say this violence is part of a scorched-earth policy to drive out residents by denying them basic services.
http://time.com/4433345/aleppo-rebels-siege-counterattack-isis-syria/
https://www.rescue.org/article/irc-supported-hospital-syria-hit-airstrike-killing-six
July 31, 2016: The IRC-supported Jasim hospital in the Daraa Governorate in southern Syria struck by an airstrike provides some 4,000 consultations per month in Jasim, a city of approximately 55,000 residents.
http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-29/doctors-tell-of-horrifying-conditions-in-aleppo-as-medical-supplies-run-out/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/world/middleeast/aleppo-syria-doctor.html
July 31, 2016: Where CPR on a Boy Is Time Wasted: U.S. Doctors Recall Aleppo’s Horrors
.....
On both sides, civilians have suffered for years from indiscriminate attacks. But only the government and its Russian allies have warplanes, making the bombardment of the east more devastating. Four hospitals were hit last weekend, and a strike Sunday on another in Dara’a Province killed six.
Medical organizations say the government has systematically singled out medical workers across Syria; the group Physicians for Human Rights has documented the deaths of more than 700, most killed by pro-government forces. Opposition groups say this violence is part of a scorched-earth policy to drive out residents by denying them basic services.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2016/0801/Death-of-a-child-star-underscores-suffering-of-those-still-living-in-Aleppo
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/08/01/world/middleeast/ap-ml-syria-child-actor.html
August 1, 2016: Qusai Abtini, the 14-year-old boy who played the husband, was killed when a missile struck the car he was in as he tried to escape Aleppo.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idlib-idUSKCN10D0OZ?il=0
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/02/chlorine-attack-syria-dozens-ill-saraqeb-idlib
August 8, 2016: Russian jets dropped incendiary thermite bombs on a civilian area of Idlib city in Syria on Sunday night, according to local emergency workers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37049555
August 11, 2016: The UN is investigating evidence of a toxic gas attack on a rebel-held area of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Rebels said the attack - which reportedly left four people dead and many injured - was carried out by government forces using chlorine gas.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/11/syria-government-airstrikes-closing-down-hospitals
August 11, 2016:
Human Rights Watch documented six airstrikes by Syrian government or Russian planes on health facilities in Idlib and Aleppo over the past two weeks, all of which forced the medical facilities to temporarily shut down. The airstrikes also killed 17 civilians and wounded at least six people. According to the Syrian American Medical Society, which operates clinics and field hospitals in opposition-controlled areas, there were 43 such attacks in July, the worst month for attacks on medical facilities since the conflict in Syria began.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/16/syria/russia-incendiary-weapons-burn-aleppo-idlib
August 16, 2016: The joint Syrian-Russian military operation has been using incendiary weapons, which burn their victims and start fires, in civilian areas of Syria in violation of international law, Human Rights Watch said today. Incendiary weapons have been used at least 18 times over the past nine weeks, including in attacks on the opposition-held areas in the cities of Aleppo and Idlib on August 7, 2016.
https://justpaste.it/xdvl
Loyalist militias in Hama:
Talal Dakkak, the most powerful shabiha in Hama city $ shadow ruler in Hassan's absence. This fella runs one of Syria's biggest kidnapping rings. Hezbollah once arrested his convoy for abducting half a village. Military Intel and SAA command have tried to reign in Hassan's warlords with little success. Situation is tense in Hama Governorate and has reached a point where the state is being swallowed whole by its clients. Loyalist commanders openly defy Damascus w/o consequence:...
They're from all sects: The Spahis from Qamhana - Sunni - control many N Hama check points, clashed w/ SAA inside city last year. There is no loyalist force left strong enough to reign these people in. We're moving towards "War of the Camps" phase of this conflict.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/4508/2016/en/
August 17, 2016: The experiences faced by detainees in Syria’s detention system are often lethal. An estimated 17,723 people were killed in custody across Syria between 2011 and 2015, with the real number likely to be even higher. Of the 65 former detainees interviewed by Amnesty International for this report, most had witnessed at least one death in custody. All had been tortured and/or otherwise ill-treated.
https://twitter.com/DRovera/status/766965103597985792
August 18, 2016:#Children of #Aleppo: baby born in barrel bomb attack almost killed before being born #Syria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHxVn84md5U
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/08/01/world/middleeast/ap-ml-syria-child-actor.html
August 1, 2016: Qusai Abtini, the 14-year-old boy who played the husband, was killed when a missile struck the car he was in as he tried to escape Aleppo.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idlib-idUSKCN10D0OZ?il=0
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/02/chlorine-attack-syria-dozens-ill-saraqeb-idlib
August 2, 2016: More than two dozen people have been injured in a suspected chemical attack on a town in northern Syria, a doctor who treated the victims and aid workers said.
The attack, using a gas cylinder laced with chlorine, targeted the town of Saraqeb in Idlib province, which is under opposition control, and near where a Russian helicopter was shot down on Monday.
It came almost exactly a year after the UN security council adopted a resolution that set a 12 month-deadline to identify the perpetrators of chlorine attacks in Syria. The deadline expires next week.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/syria-strains-to-bolster-depleted-military-1470413365
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/08/russian-jets-drop-thermite-bombs-on-syrian-city/ http://www.wsj.com/articles/syria-strains-to-bolster-depleted-military-1470413365
August 5, 2016: Prisoners in the sweltering, overcrowded Adra prison on the outskirts of Damascus were presented in June with an unusual offer from the Syrian regime, which promised amnesty if they agreed to fight on the front lines.
About 200 inmates decided to risk their fate on the battlefield rather than serve out long sentences in dismal conditions, according to army officers, a lawyer who represented some of the prisoners and other people with knowledge of the deals.
.....
Thousands of state employees and teachers have been ordered to become part of the regime’s security apparatus and told that their salaries will be withheld if they refuse, according to state employees and anti-government activists.
....
Checkpoints in cities are increasingly manned by minors, older men or young men with medical conditions that should exempt them from military service. Residents in Damascus have reported seeing even Russian, Afghan and other foreign soldiers at checkpoints, something that was unheard of until this year.
August 8, 2016: Russian jets dropped incendiary thermite bombs on a civilian area of Idlib city in Syria on Sunday night, according to local emergency workers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37049555
August 11, 2016: The UN is investigating evidence of a toxic gas attack on a rebel-held area of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Rebels said the attack - which reportedly left four people dead and many injured - was carried out by government forces using chlorine gas.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/11/syria-government-airstrikes-closing-down-hospitals
August 11, 2016:
Human Rights Watch documented six airstrikes by Syrian government or Russian planes on health facilities in Idlib and Aleppo over the past two weeks, all of which forced the medical facilities to temporarily shut down. The airstrikes also killed 17 civilians and wounded at least six people. According to the Syrian American Medical Society, which operates clinics and field hospitals in opposition-controlled areas, there were 43 such attacks in July, the worst month for attacks on medical facilities since the conflict in Syria began.
August 16, 2016: The joint Syrian-Russian military operation has been using incendiary weapons, which burn their victims and start fires, in civilian areas of Syria in violation of international law, Human Rights Watch said today. Incendiary weapons have been used at least 18 times over the past nine weeks, including in attacks on the opposition-held areas in the cities of Aleppo and Idlib on August 7, 2016.
https://justpaste.it/xdvl
Loyalist militias in Hama:
Talal Dakkak, the most powerful shabiha in Hama city $ shadow ruler in Hassan's absence. This fella runs one of Syria's biggest kidnapping rings. Hezbollah once arrested his convoy for abducting half a village. Military Intel and SAA command have tried to reign in Hassan's warlords with little success. Situation is tense in Hama Governorate and has reached a point where the state is being swallowed whole by its clients. Loyalist commanders openly defy Damascus w/o consequence:...
They're from all sects: The Spahis from Qamhana - Sunni - control many N Hama check points, clashed w/ SAA inside city last year. There is no loyalist force left strong enough to reign these people in. We're moving towards "War of the Camps" phase of this conflict.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/4508/2016/en/
August 17, 2016: The experiences faced by detainees in Syria’s detention system are often lethal. An estimated 17,723 people were killed in custody across Syria between 2011 and 2015, with the real number likely to be even higher. Of the 65 former detainees interviewed by Amnesty International for this report, most had witnessed at least one death in custody. All had been tortured and/or otherwise ill-treated.
https://twitter.com/DRovera/status/766965103597985792
August 18, 2016:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-hospitals-idUSKCN10U1DL
August 19, 2016: Local communities in Syria are refusing aid agencies permission to open new hospitals out of fear the facilities will draw more bombings to the area, a medical charity said on Friday. Many hospitals have been hit or damaged during the five-year conflict, prompting opposition groups to say Syrian and Russian forces deliberately target medical buildings. Mazen Kewara of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), said the charity had backed off from plans to set up at least five field hospitals in opposition-held areas over the past two years, after pressure from the local population.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/world/middleeast/syria-used-chlorine-in-bombs-against-civilians-report-says.html
August 24, 2016: Syrian military helicopters dropped bombs containing chlorine on civilians in at least two attacks over the past two years, a special joint investigation of the United Nations and an international chemical weapons monitor said on Wednesday in a confidential report.
The report also found that militants of the Islamic State in Syria had been responsible for an attack last year using poisonous sulfur mustard, which, like chlorine, is banned as a weapon under an international treaty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world/middleeast/daraya-syria-assad-surrender.html
August 25, 2016: a single airstrike by the government or its Russian allies killed 14 people, 11 of them children and the others women, in the northern city of Aleppo, doctors there said.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/residents-of-besieged-syrian-town-say-goodbye-to-those-left-behind-forever-1472235636?mod=e2tw
August 19, 2016: Local communities in Syria are refusing aid agencies permission to open new hospitals out of fear the facilities will draw more bombings to the area, a medical charity said on Friday. Many hospitals have been hit or damaged during the five-year conflict, prompting opposition groups to say Syrian and Russian forces deliberately target medical buildings. Mazen Kewara of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), said the charity had backed off from plans to set up at least five field hospitals in opposition-held areas over the past two years, after pressure from the local population.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/world/middleeast/syria-used-chlorine-in-bombs-against-civilians-report-says.html
August 24, 2016: Syrian military helicopters dropped bombs containing chlorine on civilians in at least two attacks over the past two years, a special joint investigation of the United Nations and an international chemical weapons monitor said on Wednesday in a confidential report.
The report also found that militants of the Islamic State in Syria had been responsible for an attack last year using poisonous sulfur mustard, which, like chlorine, is banned as a weapon under an international treaty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world/middleeast/daraya-syria-assad-surrender.html
August 25, 2016: a single airstrike by the government or its Russian allies killed 14 people, 11 of them children and the others women, in the northern city of Aleppo, doctors there said.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/residents-of-besieged-syrian-town-say-goodbye-to-those-left-behind-forever-1472235636?mod=e2tw
August 26, 2016: Before they evacuated their besieged and bombed-out Syrian town on Friday, the people of Daraya made their way to three makeshift graveyards to say goodbye to the thousands of dead who will be left behind.
“They went to talk to them and to say farewell,” said Muhammad Zakaria, who visited the graves of nine relatives in the Damascus suburb, including a brother killed in a regime artillery attack. “Most of the families here have at least a son or relative in the ground.”
....
The first wave of burials came in August 2012 in the wake of a massacre by Syrian regime forces that killed 700 people by local estimates. The bodies were buried in three mass graves in an open field. The last cemetery created had about 1,000 graves and had nearly filled up.
...
During its years under siege, Daraya received only two humanitarian-aid convoys and they were closely followed by hundreds of regime air attacks with barrel bombs—oil drums filled with explosives and shrapnel.
....
Residents who had once risked sniper fire to forage for food on farmland on the edge of town could no longer venture out. The regime had launched a ground offensive and advanced 3 miles, cutting off access to vegetation and tightening the noose around the residents. Those who remained were squeezed into an area about one square mile, local officials and residents said.
In recent months, residents said they only had enough for one meal a day, often consisting of little more than broth and wild vegetation.
On Aug. 19, the town’s last operational hospital was destroyed in a bombing. That left the town’s remaining residents, many of them sick and wounded, without any medical care.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/un-pays-tens-of-millions-to-assad-regime-syria-aid-programme-contracts
August 29, 2016: The UN has awarded contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to people closely associated with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as part of an aid programme that critics fear is increasingly at the whim of the government in Damascus, a Guardian investigation has found.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/how-assad-regime-controls-un-aid-intended-for-syrias-children
http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/the-decay-of-the-syrian-regime-is-much-worse-than-you-think/
August 31, 2016: Consider for example the Desert Hawks, the regime’s second most important offensive formation and bitter rivals of the Tiger Forces. This unit was founded by the brothers Mohamed and Aymen Jaber, who personify the rise of smugglers to power. The two had made their first big money as ordinary criminals in the Iraqi oil-for-food smugglingbonanza of the late 1990s and then prudently invested their newfound wealth into state-granted monopolies on the Syrian coast during Bashar’s first privatization wave. In August 2013, under pressure from outside sanctions and rebel advances, Assad signed a decree allowing private businessmen to raise their own militias in defense of their capital assets. With the stroke of a pen, the regime thus armed its own kleptocrats. Over the next three years, the brothers would run oil convoys and money laundering operations through Iraq and Lebanon, protect oil facilities, and, in the process, build one of the regime’s most formidable fighting formations. While vowing loyalty to Damascus, they are, in practice, independent of Syria’s chain of command, financing, recruitment, and even procurement process. The Hawks pay up to three times regular army wages, operate private training facilities, and produce their own fighting vehicles. This much independence can lead to friction on the battlefield. During the much publicized Palmyra offensive in March, tensions between the Hawks and other loyalists came to a head, after Jaber accused the Tiger Forces of deliberately firing onto one of his positions, killing nine and wounding two dozen more. According to multiple sources, including since deleted social media accounts, the militiamen were said to have drawn their guns at Hassan’s men and threatened to depart. In the end, Damascus dispatched a high-ranking delegation to reconcile the warlords and bring the offensive back on track. The units have not shared a frontline since.
https://www.thenation.com/article/assad-regime-to-besieged-aleppo-surrender-or-starve/
Sep 2, 2016:
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21706225-dr-assad-turns-syrias-hospitals-death-traps-part-kneel-or-starve?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/theultimatebarbarity
August 27, 2016: Syrian warplanes appeared to target a funeral Saturday morning in east Aleppo, killing dozens of civilians who had come to mourn the deaths of at least 13 people days earlier.
The attack on Bab al-Nayrab, a Syrian suburb named after one of the city’s ancient gates, took place in waves, activists said. The first barrel bomb hit a funeral procession, the second landed as rescue workers arrived. Doctors said the preliminary death count was 25.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/syrias-suffering-families/ghouta-attack-dad-recalls-sarin-strike-killed-34-relatives-n636426
August 27, 2016: A dad who lost 34 relatives in Sarin attack on Ghouta in 2011.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/syrias-suffering-families/ghouta-attack-dad-recalls-sarin-strike-killed-34-relatives-n636426
August 27, 2016: A dad who lost 34 relatives in Sarin attack on Ghouta in 2011.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/un-pays-tens-of-millions-to-assad-regime-syria-aid-programme-contracts
August 29, 2016: The UN has awarded contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to people closely associated with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as part of an aid programme that critics fear is increasingly at the whim of the government in Damascus, a Guardian investigation has found.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/how-assad-regime-controls-un-aid-intended-for-syrias-children
August 29, 2016: A soon-to-be-published study by the academic Dr Reinoud Leenders, who shared some of his findings with the Guardian, will add to the concerns. Figures show that $900m (£688m) of the $1.1bn in the UN 2015 response plan was spent on aid funnelled through Damascus, all of which is controlled to some extent by the Syrian authorities.
Documents seen by the Guardian also make clear the UN is continuing to allow the government to dictate whether aid can be delivered to certain areas of the country. It then further restricts what can be distributed and by whom.
Despite heavily publicised UN convoys reaching many besieged places in recent months, the Syrian government is known to have removed items such as incubators, and refused to let subsequent convoys into some areas.
......
Syria’s national blood bank, which is responsible for providing services for the total population, is operated by the Syrian Department of Defence, raising concerns about how the blood supplies are being distributed.
....
Early in the conflict, medical centres calling for blood supplies found themselves and their patients under increased scrutiny by Syrian security services, and in some cases requests for supplies led to the arrest of those protesting or fighting against the government.
Blood bags and testing kits are not included on UN aid convoys from Damascus to areas outside of government control.
http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/the-decay-of-the-syrian-regime-is-much-worse-than-you-think/
August 31, 2016: Consider for example the Desert Hawks, the regime’s second most important offensive formation and bitter rivals of the Tiger Forces. This unit was founded by the brothers Mohamed and Aymen Jaber, who personify the rise of smugglers to power. The two had made their first big money as ordinary criminals in the Iraqi oil-for-food smugglingbonanza of the late 1990s and then prudently invested their newfound wealth into state-granted monopolies on the Syrian coast during Bashar’s first privatization wave. In August 2013, under pressure from outside sanctions and rebel advances, Assad signed a decree allowing private businessmen to raise their own militias in defense of their capital assets. With the stroke of a pen, the regime thus armed its own kleptocrats. Over the next three years, the brothers would run oil convoys and money laundering operations through Iraq and Lebanon, protect oil facilities, and, in the process, build one of the regime’s most formidable fighting formations. While vowing loyalty to Damascus, they are, in practice, independent of Syria’s chain of command, financing, recruitment, and even procurement process. The Hawks pay up to three times regular army wages, operate private training facilities, and produce their own fighting vehicles. This much independence can lead to friction on the battlefield. During the much publicized Palmyra offensive in March, tensions between the Hawks and other loyalists came to a head, after Jaber accused the Tiger Forces of deliberately firing onto one of his positions, killing nine and wounding two dozen more. According to multiple sources, including since deleted social media accounts, the militiamen were said to have drawn their guns at Hassan’s men and threatened to depart. In the end, Damascus dispatched a high-ranking delegation to reconcile the warlords and bring the offensive back on track. The units have not shared a frontline since.
Sep 2, 2016:
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21706225-dr-assad-turns-syrias-hospitals-death-traps-part-kneel-or-starve?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/theultimatebarbarity
Sep 3, 2016: ON A wintry morning in February warplanes supporting Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad launched a series of missiles that slammed into a field hospital in northern Syria. Medics raced towards the thick cloud of grey dust that mushroomed above the building, before clambering over breeze blocks and fallen trees to pull the wounded from the rubble.
About 40 minutes later, the jets—either Russian or Syrian, no one is sure—circled back and dropped another bomb on the medics as they worked. The air strikes killed 25 civilians, including eight medical workers, making it the single deadliest attack on medical personnel since the war in Syria began in 2011. Unsatisfied with the death toll, the jets tracked the ambulances carrying the wounded to another field hospital three miles north. They hit the hospital entrance with another missile and then, ten minutes later, dropped yet another bomb. “There’s no way on that day they didn’t know what they were doing,” says Ahmed Tarakji, president of the Syrian American Medical Society, which financed the second hospital hit that day.
In the euphemistic lexicon of war, these attacks are known as “double-tap” or “triple-tap” strikes. This devastating tactic, used to hit schools, bakeries and marketplaces, has become a common feature of the Syrian government’s air campaign.
It has also turned Syria’s hospitals into death traps. Barrel bombs, artillery and air strikes have struck more than 265 medical facilities since the start of the war. Last month, possibly the deadliest since the war began, bombs and missiles hit a hospital or field clinic every 17 hours. Experts reckon that no previous war has witnessed such widespread, systematic targeting of hospitals and medical workers.
There is little doubt among human-rights groups and UN officials that many of these attacks are deliberate. There is also little doubt about who is responsible: those documenting attacks on medical facilities say Syria’s government and its Russian backers have launched more than 90% of the attacks. “It’s not that hospitals haven’t been bombed in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. It’s that the intent and strategy as a tool of war is on another level. The government of Assad has aimed its weapons at the delivery of health care,” says Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based chronicler of the atrocities in Syria.
.....
On August 26th rebels in the Damascus suburb of Daraya surrendered to the government after enduring a siege that lasted four years and saw residents forced to eat grass to stay alive. A week before the surrender, Mr Assad’s air force bombed the last remaining hospital with incendiary weapons. Mr Assad once trained as a doctor himself.
The destruction of Syria’s once sophisticated health system has forced doctors and medical charities to come up with innovative ways to escape the daily bombardment. Western-funded aid agencies have built a handful of secret hospitals underground. Others have tunnelled into the side of a mountain to build wards inside caves. But the costs are prohibitive.
https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/773266282938527745
Sep 6, 2016: In two separate attacks, 4 volunteers were killed today and several injured. They died so that others may live
https://twitter.com/Conflicts/status/773143390942814208
https://twitter.com/nytvideo/status/773579969524076545
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-syria-chlorine-attack-disturbing-video-injured-child-strikes-a7230606.html
http://reut.rs/2cxItuY
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37291182
Sep 7, 2016: Syrian government forces have been accused of dropping barrel bombs containing chlorine from helicopters on a suburb of Aleppo, injuring 80 people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/world/middleeast/syria-attack-peace-plan.html
Sep 7, 2016: doctors in the city of Aleppo were still treating people in intensive care after an attack believed to involve the use of chlorine gas sickened more than 120 people, including 10 women and 37 children.
At least two people died in the attack, which witnesses said was carried out by government forces in the rebel-held section of Aleppo. Rescuers and citizen journalists who went to the scene said by text message that there had been a strong smell of bleach.
One of the victims, a 13-year-old girl named Hajer Kyali, died Wednesday afternoon. She had been in intensive care since the attack, which doctors said they believed had struck her family’s house directly, delivering a deadly dose of the gas.
Medical staff members described seeing people with symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughing, sneezing, irritation of the eyes, nausea and in some cases respiratory failure. Such symptoms are consistent with attacks involving chlorine, which can kill in high concentrations.
Rescue workers also said that four members of the White Helmets volunteer rescue group had been killed responding to attacks in the past day in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, both in “double-tap” strikes that hit the area a second time to target rescuers.
The rescue workers said the Sukari district, the same neighborhood hit by the suspected chlorine attack on Tuesday, was struck on Wednesday by two barrel bombs, killing an estimated 20 people, according to witnesses and rescuers. Doctors were still working to confirm the final death toll.
Sep 6, 2016: In two separate attacks, 4 volunteers were killed today and several injured. They died so that others may live
https://twitter.com/Conflicts/status/773143390942814208
https://twitter.com/nytvideo/status/773579969524076545
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-syria-chlorine-attack-disturbing-video-injured-child-strikes-a7230606.html
http://reut.rs/2cxItuY
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37291182
Sep 7, 2016: Syrian government forces have been accused of dropping barrel bombs containing chlorine from helicopters on a suburb of Aleppo, injuring 80 people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/world/middleeast/syria-attack-peace-plan.html
Sep 7, 2016: doctors in the city of Aleppo were still treating people in intensive care after an attack believed to involve the use of chlorine gas sickened more than 120 people, including 10 women and 37 children.
At least two people died in the attack, which witnesses said was carried out by government forces in the rebel-held section of Aleppo. Rescuers and citizen journalists who went to the scene said by text message that there had been a strong smell of bleach.
One of the victims, a 13-year-old girl named Hajer Kyali, died Wednesday afternoon. She had been in intensive care since the attack, which doctors said they believed had struck her family’s house directly, delivering a deadly dose of the gas.
Medical staff members described seeing people with symptoms such as shortness of breath, coughing, sneezing, irritation of the eyes, nausea and in some cases respiratory failure. Such symptoms are consistent with attacks involving chlorine, which can kill in high concentrations.
Rescue workers also said that four members of the White Helmets volunteer rescue group had been killed responding to attacks in the past day in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, both in “double-tap” strikes that hit the area a second time to target rescuers.
The rescue workers said the Sukari district, the same neighborhood hit by the suspected chlorine attack on Tuesday, was struck on Wednesday by two barrel bombs, killing an estimated 20 people, according to witnesses and rescuers. Doctors were still working to confirm the final death toll.
Sep 7, 2016: Doctors in Madaya have reported that at least six teenagers and seven more young adults have attempted to kill themselves in recent months as the psychological effects of the siege on the Syrian rebel-held town take their toll.
Hundreds of people are suffering from mental illnesses, including depression and paranoia brought on or exacerbated by the desperate conditions, Save the Children said on Wednesday.
http://europe.newsweek.com/bashar-al-assads-war-syria-could-spell-end-antibiotics-498035
Sep 14, 2016: the growing number of Syrians who are immune to almost all antibiotics. The only way to treat them is to amputate their affected limbs and inject them with last-resort drugs. For those suffering from less peripheral wounds, the prognosis is even grimmer. “If the infection is in the chest or brain, he will die,” says Rashid Fakhri, surgical coordinator for the organization, known internationally as Médecins sans frontières (MSF), in Amman. “You can’t amputate there.”
.....
Last month, a 14-year-old boy from a barrel-bombed Damascus suburb, whose body had rejected all available antibiotics, succumbed to multiple infections not long after he arrived at a Jordanian clinic. At a field hospital in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, medics say ineffective antibiotics appear to have increased the death rate over the past year. “In 2015, we lost two people,” says Mariam Mohamed, a volunteer nurse at an emergency refugee clinic outside Chtoura, halfway between Beirut and the Syrian border. “So far this year, we’ve already lost four who weren’t responding to treatment.”
....
At MSF’s hospital in Amman, half of the patients now arrive with some sort of chronic infection; of those, 60 percent are resistant to multiple drugs.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-chemicalweapons-idUSKCN11M1UU
Sep 16, 2016: U.N. inquiry blames Syrian military for chlorine bomb attacks. The finding by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the global chemical weapons watchdog, is based on Western and regional intelligence, the diplomat said. "It was the 22nd Division, the 63rd Brigade and the 255 and 253 squadrons of the Syrian government," the envoy said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37430824
http://wpo.st/Ooz12
http://wpo.st/Ogs12
Sep 28, 2016: There is no electricity in the rebel-held portion of eastern Aleppo, and the warplanes flying overhead target any light piercing the blackness beneath. So families huddle together in the dark, gathered in one room so that they don’t die alone, listening to the roar of the jets and waiting for the bombs to fall.
...
Selma described how White Helmets rescuers dug one family out of the rubble of a strike last week and transported them to a different neighborhood, only to respond to an airstrike in that neighborhood the following day and find that the family they had saved had been killed.
http://thebea.st/2f92Pvv
Nov 3, 2016: A detailed report on how sieges and starvation have helped Assad and the Russians win back control of suburbs around Damascus and Homs
http://europe.newsweek.com/bashar-al-assads-war-syria-could-spell-end-antibiotics-498035
Sep 14, 2016: the growing number of Syrians who are immune to almost all antibiotics. The only way to treat them is to amputate their affected limbs and inject them with last-resort drugs. For those suffering from less peripheral wounds, the prognosis is even grimmer. “If the infection is in the chest or brain, he will die,” says Rashid Fakhri, surgical coordinator for the organization, known internationally as Médecins sans frontières (MSF), in Amman. “You can’t amputate there.”
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Last month, a 14-year-old boy from a barrel-bombed Damascus suburb, whose body had rejected all available antibiotics, succumbed to multiple infections not long after he arrived at a Jordanian clinic. At a field hospital in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, medics say ineffective antibiotics appear to have increased the death rate over the past year. “In 2015, we lost two people,” says Mariam Mohamed, a volunteer nurse at an emergency refugee clinic outside Chtoura, halfway between Beirut and the Syrian border. “So far this year, we’ve already lost four who weren’t responding to treatment.”
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At MSF’s hospital in Amman, half of the patients now arrive with some sort of chronic infection; of those, 60 percent are resistant to multiple drugs.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-chemicalweapons-idUSKCN11M1UU
Sep 16, 2016: U.N. inquiry blames Syrian military for chlorine bomb attacks. The finding by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the global chemical weapons watchdog, is based on Western and regional intelligence, the diplomat said. "It was the 22nd Division, the 63rd Brigade and the 255 and 253 squadrons of the Syrian government," the envoy said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37430824
http://wpo.st/Ooz12
Sep 24, 2016: The Sept. 19 attack alongside Aleppo’s Highway 60 was the most shocking act of violence in the general collapse of a days-old cease-fire agreement...Open source analysis by research teams at CIT and Bellingcat, two groups dedicated to analyzing photos and information from conflict zones, suggests that the bomb could be an OFAB 250-270, a high-fragmentation weapon designed to destroy exposed equipment and personnel. OFABs are of Russian design and are in use by both the Russian and Syrian air forces.
Other munitions recovered at the scene include what appear to be S-5 aerial rockets. The roughly 4 1/2-foot pencil-looking weapons are often fired from pods mounted on ground-attack aircraft and helicopter gunships.
http://wpo.st/Ogs12
Sep 28, 2016: There is no electricity in the rebel-held portion of eastern Aleppo, and the warplanes flying overhead target any light piercing the blackness beneath. So families huddle together in the dark, gathered in one room so that they don’t die alone, listening to the roar of the jets and waiting for the bombs to fall.
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Selma described how White Helmets rescuers dug one family out of the rubble of a strike last week and transported them to a different neighborhood, only to respond to an airstrike in that neighborhood the following day and find that the family they had saved had been killed.
http://thebea.st/2f92Pvv
Nov 3, 2016: A detailed report on how sieges and starvation have helped Assad and the Russians win back control of suburbs around Damascus and Homs
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