Tuesday, March 28, 2017

- #UN: 400,000 Civilians In Raqqa City Are In Danger



Agencies (IRW) – The United Nations expressed its fear on Monday for the security and safety of more than 400,000 Civilians in the residential areas in Raqqa, following reports about the latest military updates in the area.

“Farhan Haq” spokesman of UN’s Secretary-General said in the daily press conference “we are still receiving reports about the death and injure of dozens of civilians in addition to the destruction in the infrastructure of the city including schools, bakeries, markets and main infrastructure of water due to the running battles and airstrikes. Around 35-40 thousand people fled the area due to the battles since November 2016”

Noteworthy that Raqqa city is suffering lack in the Basic elements of life, where no electricity, water or fuel since several days, as it also suffering another danger about the possibility of Euphrates dam collapsing.

Syrian opposition: #Assad and associates aren’t part of Syrian solution



ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — With the fifth round of United Nations-brokered negotiations underway in the Swiss city of Geneva between pro government and opposition factions, amid increased violence in the Syrian countryside, the High Negotiations Committee for the Opposition (HNC) took the position that President Bashar al-Assad must go.

“We cannot accept any role for Bashar al-Assad or any of his cliques at the beginning of the transition or in the future,” the HNC posted in a statement online.

Naser al-Hariri heads the opposition delegation for this round of peace talks in Geneva.

“The only commitment the regime and its backers continue to show is the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure,” Hariri also tweeted on Monday.

The HNC’s stance for the removal now aligns with that of Turkey.

"As far as our position on Assad is concerned, we think that the suffering of (the) Syrian people and the tragedies, clearly the blame is squarely on Assad. But we have to be pragmatic, realistic," said Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek.

"The facts on the ground have changed dramatically, so Turkey can no longer insist on a settlement without Assad, it's not realistic," he added at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

The Damascus countryside has seen increased attacks in the past week with both sides blaming each other, or their proxies, or international backers for the violence. 

The UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura has called on Russia, Iran, and Turkey to restore a ceasefire.

“Growing violations in recent days are undermining the ceasefire regime addressed through the Astana meetings, with significant negative consequences for the safety of Syrian civilians, humanitarian access and the momentum of the political process,” Mistura said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has claimed the use of ground-to-ground missiles by the regime on the outskirts of the capital city within the past week.

“Sixteen civilians, including a child, were killed and around 50 others wounded in an air strike on the main street in the town of Hammuriyeh,” SOHR director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The UN has estimated at least 400,000 people have died because of the six-year-long conflict and half of Syrians have left their homes.

Spanish court investigates Syrian officials over torture, execution



A Spanish National Court judge has ordered an investigation into nine Syrian officials over the disappearance and execution of a man in 2013, in the first criminal case accepted by a European court against President Bashar #Assad regime.

Investigative magistrate Eloy Velasco said Monday the nine could be charged with terrorism and forced disappearance.

The case is built around the 2013 arbitrary detention, disappearance, torture and execution of a truck driver in Damascus. The complaint was filed last month by the driver's sister, Amal Hag Hamdo Anfalis, a Spanish national.

Velasco is investigating the case under Spain's principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows prosecution of crimes outside of the country only if there is a Spanish victim. In Monday's acceptance of the case, Velasco considers the sister as the victim.
Photographs confirming the death and apparent torture of Amal’s brother were smuggled out of Syria by a forensic photographer, codenamed “Cesar”.

The photographer smuggled 50,000 graphic photos of detainees tortured and maimed in government prisons out of Syria in 2013.

The cache of photos, showing emaciated bodies and people with their eyes gouged out, provided a dossier of crimes allegedly committed by Assad's regime.

Judge Velasco asked that both "Cesar" and the victim’s sister testify in the case in April.
The Syrian conflict began when the Baath regime, in power since 1963 and led by President Bashar al-Assad, responded with military force to peaceful protests demanding democratic reforms during the Arab Spring wave of uprisings, triggering an armed rebellion fueled by mass defections from the Syrian army.

According to independent monitors, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in the war, mostly by the regime and its powerful allies, and millions have been displaced both inside and outside of Syria.

The brutal tactics pursued mainly by the regime, which have included the use of chemical weapons, sieges, mass executions and torture against civilians have led to war crimes investigations.

Friday, March 24, 2017

- #Assad torturers told me I'd hang by my fingernails

The prison guard stood in front of Maryam Khleif. She was shaking with fear.

"I swear to god, I will hang you by your fingernails," he said.

"I haven't done anything," Maryam pleaded. "What have I done?"

The officer held up photos of men from Maryam's neighbourhood. She recalled providing first aid to some of them after they were injured in a demonstration against Bashar al-Assad.

"You treated these terrorists," he said, throwing the photos on the floor.

"If you saw a wounded bird, what would you do?" Maryam asked him.

"I'd step on it," the officer sneered.

"Well, I would treat it," Maryam said. "What if you saw a man bleeding? What if it was your brother? What would you do then?"

The officer reached out and slapped her across the face.

"If my brother was against Assad, I would crush him under my boot," the officer said, before stepping away from her and moving to the next prisoner.

Maryam Khleif is a 30-year-old mother of four now living in Reyhanli, Turkey. She is one of tens of thousands since 2011 to have been incarcerated in one of the Assad regime's prisons. While The New Arab cannot verify details of her testimony, the abuses she describes are very much in line with accounts of former prisoners that have been published in UN and Amnesty International reports. 
I was a rich girl. I was living in luxury. But I was not happy with the abuses of Bashar al-Assad. When the demonstrations started, I had to do something


At the start of Syria's revolution, Maryam was a young mother working at a government agricultural office in Hama. Her husband was a veterinarian. Maryam was happy with her life:

"I was a rich girl. I was living in luxury. But I was not happy with the abuses of Bashar al-Assad. When the demonstrations started, I had to do something."

Maryam volunteered at makeshift field hospitals in Hama, helping treat injured protesters.

"At first, I couldn't do much, so I helped the doctors, handing them gauze and needles."

In the spring of 2012, a neighbour informed State Security about Maryam. With the regime searching for her, she went into hiding. She found a safe haven at Dar al-Shifa Hospital in Hama, where a pro-revolution doctor agreed to train and employ her as a surgical nurse. To avoid detection, she moved to a new hospital every few weeks. 

But Maryam missed her children, and her longing for her family overcame her. She visited her parents' home in Hama to see them. At 6:00am on the morning of September 27, 2012, Maryam stepped into her parents' home, and was greeted by her children and her mother's cooking.

The joyous reunion ended less than two hours later, when plain-clothes officers broke down the front door.

Regime officers tore her parents' house apart, looking for evidence that could tie Maryam to anti-government activity. Officers beat her 17-year-old brother and began to interrogate her four-year-old son, Mouaz.

"The boy has stuttered since that day," Maryam told The New Arab. Finally, they led Maryam off to a waiting vehicle where several women sat, blindfolded, and drove them to a prison 15 minutes away.

"I will never forget arriving at that prison. When we got out of the car, the officers were yelling 'the terrorists are here! The terrorists are here!' I looked around, and just saw other women from my neighbourhood. And we had done nothing wrong."
 
Soon after arriving at the prison, Maryam and the other female prisoners were brought in front of a lieutenant. "He was eating pistachios, and as we stood before him, he threw the shells at us while calling us whores and sluts."

Maryam and the other prisoners were assigned numbers. Prison officers then tried to take Maryam's photo, and she resisted.

"A guard yelled, 'take her', and they took me to a room where I spent the next three days suspended by my hands. There were three men suspended in the room, as well. The guards beat all of us. The men begged the guards to hit them more instead of me, but they didn't listen.

"They beat me mercilessly. They broke most of my teeth and kept kicking me in one of my kidneys. I later learned I'd lost 90 percent of function in that kidney."

After three days, they moved Maryam to a tiny cell with six other women. There was one small vent allowing air to enter from the outside, but the cell itself was nearly pitch dark.

"There was no toilet," she said. "They would take us to the toilet once per day."

The women would also be fed just once a day; usually a boiled potato and a piece of bread. Almost every day at mealtime, guards would torture men near the women's cell.

"I can't have boiled potatoes in my house to this day. It makes me remember their screams."

Maryam says the women were routinely brought up to the lieutenant's office to be interrogated and beaten. 
It was here that she met her fingernail-threatening torturer. As he moved on to the next woman, she shouted.

"Against Assad?" Maryam called out. "It's not like we are going against the word of Allah. We just want justice." The officer returned and beat her some more.
To the girls who screamed and begged in the name of Allah and the Prophet, he would say 'Allah is on vacation'. If the girl resisted too much, he forced her to drink arak until she was too drunk to fight


After the interrogations, the women would be returned to their cell. Some beatings were so intense the women would be covered in blood. But as bad as the beatings became, there was something the women came to fear even more.

"The lieutenant had an office with a bed and a small table for alcohol. He would bring us up there while he drank. Then he would invite officers from outside into his office and tell them to choose a woman. And that's when we would get raped.

"To the girls who screamed and begged in the name of Allah and the Prophet, he would say 'Allah is on vacation'. If the girl resisted too much, he forced her to drink arak until she was too drunk to fight.

"I watched them take the virginity of one of my friends… she was a fourth-year medical student who had done nothing wrong. One of my other friends bled severely every time she was raped. A man called Ahmad from Aleppo would come to our cell and bring her injections to stop the bleeding. He would sneak them in, and pretend he was yelling at us in our cell. He has since defected from the regime."

Maryam recounts countless more horrors. She remembered a young male prisoner who'd been starved for weeks and then forced to eat from a toilet. One of the women in her cell was tortured with electric wires and suffered lasting nerve damage as a result. A male prisoner was forced to walk around the torture and interrogation rooms with a bucket. "He swore that he would pick up ears, hands, and feet," Maryam said. 

Eventually, Maryam was released in a prisoner exchange deal.

"I thought the world would embrace me, but that wasn't the case."

Her husband divorced her immediately. Her parents disowned her and her four children.

Maryam took her children and fled to Jabal Zawiya, near Idlib, where opposition fighters helped to house and feed them. Eventually, she met and married an officer in the opposition. They had a child, a boy.

"I thought my suffering had ended," she said. "But then my husband was captured [by the regime]… and now, if he is alive, he is facing the same treatment I did as a prisoner."

When her husband was captured, Maryam took her children to Turkey, expecting an easier time. "It is so hard here. So many times my children and I have gone to sleep hungry."

Maryam's children, traumatised by her ordeal and years in war-torn Syria, are receiving psychological treatment in Turkey. Despite everything, Maryam is hopeful.

"I looked around, and I had nothing in the world but my children. I will raise them and educate them, and pray that they become doctors or engineers. I want to show Bashar, and my parents, and the whole world, that these are the children of the prisoner.

"And I don't want my children to be embarrassed. I want them to be proud that their mother sacrificed, and left an impact as a political prisoner."

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Trump Bombs Aleppo Mosque, Sparking Exactly Zero Emergency Protests from ‘Anti-War’ Forces

Over 50 Syrians were killed by U.S. airstrikes on a mosque in Aleppo governate last night and how have ‘anti-war’ forces responded?
Ex-journalist Max Blumenthal couldn’t be bothered to Tweet about it.
Stop the War Coalition has yet to condemn it.
Not one emergency protest has been called by the forces who went into overdrive to stop a U.S. military strike on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2013.
Workers World Party — which brought a “U.S. Out of Everywhere Banner” to troll Syrian first responders known as White Helmets — isn’t calling on people to march on Trump Tower over this atrocity.
Ignoring Assad’s massacres for years has finally given way to ignoring Trump’s massacres — all in the name of being ‘anti war’ and ‘anti imperialist.’ Hard to mobilize solidarity for people (Muslims) you’ve spent half a decade slandering as ‘terrorists,’ ‘jihadists,’ and ‘al-Qaeda supporters.’

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Experts say war crimes case against #Assad government growing




Experts say war crimes case against #Assad government growing By Stephanie Nebehay | GENEVA Criminal investigators say they have built a case documenting the widespread torture and murder of Syrian detainees by the Assad government, relying on official photos and meticulous documents. More than 700,000 pages from Syrian intelligence and security archives have been smuggled out by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an independent group of legal experts, through a secret network. "The documentation is, in the main, generated by the security-intelligence, military and political structures of the regime," William Wiley, who has worked for U.N. war crimes tribunals on former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, told Reuters. A key document from 2011 orders the arrest of protesters or people in contact with foreign media, he said in a new documentary "Syria's Disappeared: The Case Against Assad" that tracks Wiley and his group's work in Syria. In another, an official asks what to do with a "hospital refrigerator full of unidentified corpses that have decomposed". "This person copied the Ministry of Justice, so a localized problem is being brought to the attention of the regime," said Wiley, executive director of CIJA, a non-profit foundation that is also preparing cases in Iraq for prosecution. The government of President Bashar al-Assad denies findings by U.N. investigators that detainees are tortured and executed in a policy of "extermination", in the war that is entering its seventh year. "The queen and king of evidence in any criminal investigation is a document. It isn't cross-examined because it is factual, it is truth," Wiley said in the documentary. The film, which had its premiere at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva this week, includes interviews with former detainees and grieving mothers. "We are trying to lay the foundation for prosecution along the lines of Nuremberg," Wiley said in the documentary. His group is funded by countries including Britain, Canada and Germany. Stephen Rapp, former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, said of Syrian authorities: "They were keeping meticulous records." "This is the legal equivalent of a 'slam dunk'," he said in the film. Investigators have access to 55,000 photos of detainees' bodies - some with gouged out eyes - smuggled out by a former forensic photographer code-named Caesar who worked at Tishreen military hospital. All files have been moved to a secret location in Europe with the aim of sharing them with national judicial authorities or a future international court. "The real potential (for prosecution) is with national war crimes units domestically," Wiley told the film's audience. Lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, shown in the film, has lodged a case in Spain, alleging "state terrorism" on behalf of a Syrian-Spanish woman who recognized her dead brother among the Caesar photos. A judge will rule on whether the case is admissible. At the screening, former detainee and activist Mazen Al Hamada, who was released, says interrogators broke his ribs, hung him by handcuffed wrists, and sexually assaulted him. "We want those perpetrators to be tried, we have to be patient," he said to a standing ovation. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Alison Williams)

- #Assad regime, PKK/PYD terrorists said to deepen ties :



The Syrian regime and the PYD/PKK terrorist group have consolidated their relations in the northern part of the war-torn country, Turkish security sources told Anadolu Agency on Tuesday.
The regime supported the terror group establishing training centers in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Hellok regions of the northern province of Aleppo, said the sources, on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media.
A part of the Turkmen-populated area of Hellok was captured by the PYD/PKK terrorist group at the end of last year. Now the region is controlled by both regime forces and PYD/PKK elements.
Last month the regime allowed the terror group to open another “terror academy” in the northern Aleppo city of Afrin, bordering Turkey, where hundreds of terror elements have been trained by foreign trainers to use heavy weapons, bombs, and combat techniques.
The newly formed camps in Aleppo will be used for similar armed training, the sources noted.
Relations between Damascus and the terror group have reached such a high level that regime aircraft carried scores of wounded terrorists from Kobani and Afrin to the Damascus Public Hospital, the security sources said.
Moreover, two top-level PKK members at Mt. Qandil, the so-called headquarters of the terror group in northern Iraq, were also taken to the same hospital by regime planes after they crossed into Syria, they added.
The PYD is a Syrian offshoot of the PKK, a recognized terrorist group to Turkey, the EU, and U.S. 
Cooperation not conflict
A January 2016 report by the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that since the withdrawal of Syrian regime forces in 2012, forces of the PKK/PYD have committed significant human rights violations in northern and northeastern Syria -- including "ethnic cleansing massacres".
The group has increased its activities in northern Syria following the uprising-turn-civil war in 2011. Since then, the regime and PYD/PKK seldom engaged in conflict, but have rather forged cooperation.
Following the capture of the Al-Hasakah province from government forces in 2012, the group started to pay taxes to the government.
Regime forces and terror elements have been jointly providing the security in the city while the regime operates public institutions.
The PYD/PKK also control the Rumeylan oil field in northeast al-Hasakah along with Damascus.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and EU -- resumed its armed campaign in July 2015 and since has been responsible for the deaths of approximately 1,100 security personnel and civilians, including women and children.
Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests – which erupted as part of the Arab Spring uprisings – with unexpected ferocity.


Since then, hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been killed and millions more displaced by the conflict.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

- منظمة أممية تحقق في 8 هجمات لقوات #الأسد بالغاز السام منذ بداية 2017





أفاد تقرير، نشر أمس الجمعة، بأن منظمة حظر الأسلحة الكيميائية تنظر في ثمانية هجمات بغازات سامة في سوريا منذ بداية العام الحالي.

وقال المدير العام للمنظمة أحمد أوزومجو، في تقرير إلى مجلس الأمن، إنه “تم تسجيل ثمانية حوادث استخدام مزعوم للأسلحة الكيميائية منذ بداية العام 2017 ويجري حالياً تحليلها”، دون أن يحدد مكان وقوع تلك الهجمات، بحسب ما نقلت وكالة “فرانس برس”.

ولفت التقرير الذي أُرسل إلى المجلس الاثنين الماضي، إلى أن بعثات تقصي حقائق تحقق في حوادث في شرق حلب وريف حلب الغربي، وجنوب حمص وشمال حماه وريف دمشق وإدلب. وتمت مقابلة شهود، فيما تواصل فرق المنظمة جمع الأدلة.

واتهمت منظمة “هيومن رايتس ووتش” الشهر الماضي قوات الأسد بشن ثمانية هجمات كيميائية على الأقل خلال الأسابيع الأخيرة من معركة حلب في شمال سوريا، ما أدى إلى استشهاد تسعة أشخاص بينهم أطفال.

وبحسب التقرير، فإن خبراء منظمة حظر الأسلحة الكيميائية ما زالوا بانتظار زيارة مركز البحوث والدراسات العلمية الذي يشرف على برنامج الأسلحة الكيميائية لنظام الأسد، بعدما تم تأجيل عمليات تفتيش عدة.

وخلص تحقيق مشترك للأمم المتحدة ومنظمة حظر الأسلحة الكيميائية في تشرين الأول/أكتوبر 2016 إلى إن قوات الأسد نفذت على الأقل ثلاثة هجمات كيميائية في 2014 و2015، في حين أن تنظيم “داعش” استخدم غاز الخردل في 2015.

يشار إلى أن روسيا والصين استخدمتا مؤخراً، حق النقض “فيتو” ضد مشروع قرار صاغته فرنسا وبريطانيا لفرض عقوبات على مسؤولين في نظام الأسد متورطين باستخدام أسلحة كيميائية ضد المدنيين في سوريا.

Friday, March 3, 2017

- Syria's Secret Mass Executions



An investigation from Amnesty International details #Assad's attempt to create a phony paper trail to cover up mass executions in #Syria
At a prison in Syria, thousands of people opposed to President Bashar al-Assad have been executed in secrecy. From the moment detainees arrive they are tortured with strips of tires used to flog their bodies, shocked with electricity, raped, and deprived of food and water.

“In the morning, the guard would come to the wing and ask for the ‘carcasses,’” one former prisoner who went by the pseudonym “Nader,” told Amnesty International in a report released Monday night. “There was one time that nobody died for three days [in our wing], and the guards came to us, room by room, and beat us on the head, chest and neck. Thirteen people from our wing died that day.”

Few people are ever released from this prison 20 miles north of Damascus, and those who do not die of torture or starvation, are sometimes led quietly after midnight to a 25-by-15 foot concrete room. Blindfolded, it is here that Syria’s top officials have overseen the clandestine hangings of between 5,000 and 13,000 people, the report found. Later, their causes of death will be ruled by doctors as respiratory failurean effort by the Assad regime to create a phony paper trail to legitimize these thousands of executions and hide them from the world.

Saydnaya prison is notorious for being a closely held secret, and until recently little was known about how it operates. Earlier this summer, Amnesty released a separate report on the prison that detailed its living conditions. But these new interviews outline a structured means to kill those opposed to Assad—everyone from factory owners to students and professors. The report shows how Assad’s regime has executed these men in ways deliberate, and highly conscious of how, if exposed, the global community would denounce such acts. Amnesty investigators interviewed 84 people, including former prisoners, guards, judges, and the doctors who signed off on the death certificates of those killed at Saydnaya. These interviews show a human rights crisis that the Syrian government has sanctioned since at least 2011, and which could pose a problem for the new Trump administration.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the U.S. would work “with any country” in order to eradicate ISIS. Trump has specifically referenced his willingness to work with Russia, and he has already discussed this with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia, meanwhile, has backed the Syrian government in the country’s six-year civil war, saying it shares a common interest in defeating ISIS. Syria has used this same smokescreen as excuse to target civilians with bombs and to arrest dissenters. And, according the Amnesty, the executions inside the Saydnaya prison are authorized by the highest-level officials in the Syrian government, including the Grand Mufti, and either the minister of defense or the chief of staff of the Army, both of whom act on behalf of Assad.

Saydnaya is operated by Syria’s Military Police. It had once housed members of captured militant groups, but in July 2011 the government packed it full of those deemed dangerous to the Assad regime. Since the beginning of the civil war, Syrian soldiers and intelligence officers have raided neighborhoods seen as hostile to the government, rounding up people often on little more than rumor. Some in the prison have found themselves detained for years only because they marched in peaceful protests.

Once they arrive, the guards throw them a “welcome party,” a euphemism that one detainee, a former attorney, described like this:

“You are thrown to the ground and they use different instruments for the beatings: electric cables with exposed copper wire ends...  Also they have created what they call the ‘tank belt,’ which is made out of tire that has been cut into strips... They make a very specific sound; it sounds like a small explosion. I was blindfolded the whole time, but I would try to see somehow. All you see is blood: your own blood, the blood of others.”

Along with the beatings, guards were ordered to torture prisoners psychologically, often by forcing them to rape each other, or by withholding water from detainees so they could not wash away the excrement that had piled up in their cells. Guards also deprived the prisoners of medical care and food. One detainee, who used the pseudonym “Jamal,” told Amnesty: “I remember we were lying down and looking to the ceiling, for hours and hours. There was one piece of ceiling that fell, and one of our cell mates ran to it. He started eating it. He thought it was bread. He had been one of the most refined, educated men in Damascus.”

- نزوح كبير للمدنيين من مناطق قسد في دير الزور إلى الشمال السوري

- دير الزور : تحدثت تقارير إعلامية أن موجة نزوح كبيرة للمدنيين، تشهدها مناطق سيطرة قوات سوريا الديموقراطية بريف دير الزور إلى الشمال ا...