American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.
Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014 – the agreed date for all 130,000 combat troops to leave — despite continuing public debate in Washington and among other members of the 49-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan about the speed of the withdrawal.
American officials admit that although Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, recently said Washington did not want any “permanent” bases in Afghanistan, her phrasing allows a variety of possible arrangements.
“There are US troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently,” a US official told the Guardian.
Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.
Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.
The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.
The terrorist described as the linchpin in the hunt for Osama bin Laden has rejoined al-Qaida after the Bush administration released him from a secret CIA secret prison under pressure from Pakistan, according to former and current U.S. intelligence officials.
Shortly after the CIA decided to close the secret prisons, the U.S. intelligence agency returned al-Qaida operative Hassan Ghul in 2006 to his native Pakistan, which had been demanding his release since his capture about two years earlier.
Pakistan held Ghul for at least a year before he was released, eventually making his way back to al-Qaida to help with operations against the U.S., the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because details about Ghul’s case remain classified.
It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — for the bungled attempt to cool his body and make him look less dead — perished in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. But now there are rumbles in Washington that the notorious case, as well as other alleged CIA abuses, could be returning to haunt the agency. TIME has learned that a prosecutor tasked with probing the CIA — John Durham, a respected, Republican-appointed U.S. Attorney from Connecticut — has begun calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., looking into, among other things, the lurid Nov. 4, 2003, homicide, which was documented by TIME in 2005.
TIME has obtained a copy of a subpoena signed by Durham that points to his grand jury’s broader mandate, which could involve charging additional CIA officers and contract employees in other cases. The subpoena says “the grand jury is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses.”
In 2009 — after President Barack Obama replaced President George W. Bush — new U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder tapped Durham to review roughly a dozen cases of alleged abuse against “war on terror” suspects that had gone dormant. Holder’s decision to expand the probe occurred shortly before the CIA released a five-year-old IG report detailing a litany of detainee abuse by the agency.
There aren’t many foreigners traveling to Sanaa these days, but one group of outsiders is getting a lot of attention: an FBI forensics team, which reportedly arrived last week to investigate the attempted assassination of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is now convalescing in Saudi Arabia.
Evidence from the scene indicates that the explosion may have been caused by a device that was planted inside the mosque on the presidential compound, and not by a mortar shell or rocket, as was initially reported. If true, this means that someone with close access to the president was involved, which raises the question of why members of the Yemeni regime’s inner circle — set to mark its 33rd anniversary in power next month — now appear intent on destroying each other?
To answer this question, it is necessary to look beyond the protests that have called for Saleh’s resignation and instead look at the premises of the political settlement that has held the inner circle together for so long.
The first spectacular rupture within the group came on March 21, when Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar publicly defected from the Saleh regime three days after snipers gunned down peaceful protesters in Sanaa, killing more than 50 people. Ali Mohsen is the country’s most powerful military leader and a distant cousin of Saleh. A fight between the two men has been simmering for at least a decade; empathy for the protesters was certainly not the only factor contributing to Ali Mohsen’s decision to jump ship. The rivalry between the two former allies was probably more decisive.
By joining the opposition movement, Ali Mohsen and other defectors from the regime have not necessarily heralded a new era for the Yemeni people. Instead, they appear to be settling old scores.
President Saleh once compared his rule to “dancing on the heads of snakes”.
Earlier this year, Saleh appeared to stumble as protests engulfed the nation and succeeded in bringing together formerly disparate groups of military officials, politicians, tribal chiefs and demonstrators. The 69-year-old leader – who has reportedly maintained power through a network of patrimony and cronyism – seemed to have been caught off guard when, inspired by the Arab Spring, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets to demand an end to his 33-year rule.
Now in its fourth month – one of the longest uprisings of the Arab Spring thus far – it is a testimony to both the protesters’ determination and Saleh’s elusive style and stubborn politics. Although the demonstrations turned the tables of power on Saleh, he did not change his modus operandi, opting instead to treat the crisis as if it were a minor impasse. He attempted to bargain his way out and coupled empty promises with brute force.
Saleh initially offered not to run for re-election in 2013 and stated that his son, Ahmed Ali, head of the elite Republican Guard, would also not stand. It was the same promise he made in 2005, announcing he would not be a candidate in the 2006 election. He reneged on his word just three months before polls opened.
This time round, the nation would reject his offer. Demonstrators wanted nothing less than an immediate transfer of power and settled in for the long haul. Protests soon spread to other cities and Saleh began to respond with violence, particularly in the city of Taiz, where demonstrators were hit hardest.
The watershed moment that would mark a major turning point in the conflict was the March 18 attack against protesters. Known as “Bloody Friday”, 52 demonstrators were killed when they were fired upon by government-controlled gunmen.
The incident resulted in mass defections and resignations from top military and civilian officials, including several Yemeni ambassadors. To spare himself of the embarrassment of further political losses, Saleh sacked his entire cabinet on March 20.
Just one day later, General Ali Mohsen, Saleh’s former chief military advisor, defected – pledging to protect the demonstrators in Change Square – and signalling the first major blow to the regime. According to Gregory Johnsen, a former Fulbright Fellow in Yemen and expert witness on the country to the US Congress, the defection indicated a break between Saleh’s immediate family and the rest of his supporters in the military.
Media outlets and blogs in Israel, England, and the U.S. have responded with considerable incredulity to claims by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of sanguine reactions if Iran tests an atom bomb.
The IRGC’s scenario underscores an unfortunate reality, however. After years of hollow threats, politicians and generals in the U.S., E.U., and Israel likely will adapt to the mullahs obtaining a nuclear weapon. World stock markets would follow their lead and recover from initial tumbles. Crude oil and natural gas prices may surge for a while but will fall back down. Arab countries relying on petroleum revenues to stay afloat and Western ones needing a steady flow of energy to power their societies are likely to back away from challenging Iran.
In February 2011 a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate maintained an earlier conclusion that Iran’s leadership had not yet made the decision to assemble nuclear weapons. Indeed, until now, Iran has gone back and forth with the West at the negotiating table. The Revolutionary Guards’ statement seeks to break the deadlock by suggesting Iran’s policymakers should not fear domestic and foreign consequences of crossing the nuclear breakout threshold.
There is history in Iran for such media-based nuclear maneuvers. The Islamic Republic recommenced its atomic program, originally begun by the last shah, after suffering Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks during the 1980s. But even then only concerted pressure persuaded its first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A major turning point occurred in October 1988 when a speech by Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of Iran’s parliament, recommending atom bombs was published by the IRGC.
They were once ordinary Syrians: farmers with fields to tend, doctors with patients to treat, students with exams to take and homemakers with children to nurture.
But after longtime Syrian President Bashar Assad’s security forces stormed their towns and villages in an attempt to crush a largely peaceful pro-democracy movement, they represent the emerging human toll, a small segment of the many thousands of Syrian civilians who have fled into the hills or across the border into Turkey to escape the violence.
Hundreds have set up a temporary camp in a muddy field on their country’s border with Turkey.
Now, they draw fetid water from a well and relieve themselves in the woods. They rely on handouts of food from relatives smuggled from across the border. They seek medical care at a makeshift “clinic,” a tarp where a 30-year-old pharmacist attempts to give medical advice.
The Syrian military widened its crackdown on anti-government protesters Tuesday, dispatching tanks to at least two more locations, including a town near the border with Iraq, as the government sought to extinguish an expanding rebellion that has appeared to threaten the army’s cohesion.
Tanks moved into position on the outskirts of the eastern border town of Deir al-Zour, site of some of the biggest protests of the three-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Activists said tanks were also converging on the town of Maarat al-Nouman on the highway between Hama and Aleppo, where protesters reportedly burned government buildings over the weekend.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.
For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”
Just in time to spoil the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Obama Justice Department is trying to do what Richard Nixon couldn’t: indict a media organization.
A grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is under way in Alexandria, Virginia. The Justice Department has already subpoenaed the electronic records of many former WikiLeaks volunteers and at least three people have now been subpoenaed to testify in a case that could potentially criminalize forms of investigative journalism.
Many comparisons have been made between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, and most have focused on the landmark decision in New York Times v. United States that essentially banned prior restraints—or censorship orders—on the press. But long forgotten in Nixon’s war on the press is an equally dangerous legal maneuver: Nixon convened a grand jury to indict The New York Times and its reporter, Neil Sheehan, for conspiracy to commit espionage—the same charge Obama’s Justice Department is investigating Assange under today.
FBI agents took box after box of address books, family calendars, artwork and personal letters in their 10-hour raid in September of the century-old house shared by Stephanie Weiner and her husband.
The agents seemed keenly interested in Weiner’s home-based business, the Revolutionary Lemonade Stand, which sells silkscreened baby outfits and other clothes with socialist slogans, phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries.”
The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.
The probe — involving subpoenas to 23 people and raids of seven homes last fall — has triggered a high-powered protest against the Department of Justice and, in the process, could create some political discomfort for President Obama with his union supporters as he gears up for his reelection campaign.
The apparent targets are concentrated in the Midwest, including Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.
In the United States, “profiling” is a dirty word — and rightly so. It is one way in which state power transgresses civil rights with the consequence that individuals can be subject to unjustified questioning or detention. But when the US employs profiling overseas, the targets don’t just get arrested, they get killed — killed merely on the basis of suspicions about who they are and what they might be doing. An individual for whom an arrest warrant couldn’t be issued because investigators had not even been able to establish his name, can nevertheless be eliminated — no further questions asked. Whoever the US government calls a terrorist it also claims the right to kill.
The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to launch a secret program to kill al Qaeda militants in Yemen, where months of antigovernment protests, an armed revolt and the attempted assassination of the president have left a power vacuum, U.S. officials say.
The covert program that would give the U.S. greater latitude than the current military campaign is the latest step to combat the growing threat from al Qaeda’s outpost in Yemen, which has been the source of several attempted attacks on the U.S. and is home to an American-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who the U.S. sees as a significant militant threat.
The CIA program will be a major expansion of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Yemen. Since December 2009, U.S. strikes in Yemen have been carried out by the U.S. military with intelligence support from CIA. Now, the spy agency will carry out aggressive drone strikes itself alongside the military campaign, which has been stepped up in recent weeks after a nearly yearlong hiatus.
The U.S. military strikes have been conducted with the permission of the Yemeni government. The CIA operates under different legal restrictions, giving the administration a freer hand to carry out strikes even if Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, now receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, reverses his past approval of military strikes or cedes power to a government opposed to them.
The CIA has been ramping up its intelligence gathering efforts in Yemen in recent months in order to support a sustained campaign of drone strikes. The CIA coordinates closely with Saudi intelligence officers, who have an extensive network of on-the-ground informants, officials say.
The new CIA drone program will initially focus on collecting intelligence to share with the military, officials said. As the intelligence base for the program grows, it will expand into a targeted killing program like the current operation in Pakistan.
While the specific contours of the CIA program are still being decided, the current thinking is that when the CIA shifts the program from intelligence collection into a targeted killing program, it will select targets using the same broad criteria it uses in Pakistan. There, the agency selects targets by name or if their profile or “pattern of life”—analyzed through persistent surveillance—fits that of known al Qaeda or affiliated militants.
By using those broad criteria, the U.S. would likely conduct more strikes in Yemen, where the U.S. now only goes after known militants, not those who fit the right profile.
No one was paying much attention to the time, but it was probably a few minutes before 11 a.m. on Tuesday of last week when the action began in Tripoli, clearly visible from the windows of the Rixos hotel.
The morning hours are usually calm in Tripoli, and this too was a quiet, clear morning. Behind the tall trees in the adjacent park lies Bab al-Aziziya, the fortress-like headquarters of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. The compound is as large as an entire city neighborhood and is surrounded by a massive wall, machine gun nests, barriers and watchtowers. It’s a short walk from the hotel to Bab al-Aziziya.
Suddenly the first jet came screaming through the sky, but the noise it made was different this time: higher, shriller and much louder. Then the sound of loud explosions punctuated the air. The walls shook and the bombing continued unabated.
NATO jets were attacking Tripoli at low altitude for the first time. They came in waves separated by a few minutes. Then, around 2 p.m., they came a second time. They dropped 60 to 80 large bombs. Giant brown and black clouds of smoke rose into the sky on the other side of the park.
The bombing represents a new phase in the war over Libya, say NATO officials, who are trying to increase pressure on Gadhafi. They know that time is short, now that the Libyan leader appears to have his back against the wall. In Tripoli, it feels as if the NATO forces were now directly targeting the dictator, a man responsible for the deaths of so many people. In theory, however, Gadhafi can not be made into a target, because the United Nations resolution on Libya only permits the Western forces to engage in actions intended to protect civilians.
Meanwhile, a group of reporters from around the world are holed up in the five-star luxury of the Rixos, watching the hunt at close range — in an atmosphere that couldn’t be more bizarre, at room prices of €300 ($435) a night and dinner at $50 a person.
Some would call it perverse, the idea that journalists are spooning the foam from their cappuccinos in the hotel’s outdoor bar while precision bombs rip apart bunkers and probably soldiers just beyond the nearby trees. But life at the Rixos and at Bab al-Aziziya follows its own rules. Gadhafi’s people escort the reporters to the hotel, and guards are posted in the driveway to prevent them from setting out on their own. Anyone who wants to investigate the situation outside the hotel must do so in the company of a friendly government “minder.” Of course, this makes it impossible to speak with rebels in the city.
As Washington urged African countries to reject the government of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, rebels reported progress Monday against government forces in western mountain cities.
After a siege of nearly two months, rebels have freed the city of Al-Rayyana, northeast of Zintan, said Talha Al-Jiwali, a rebel fighter. Nine rebels were killed, and 35 were wounded, he said.
Al-Jiwali said forces entering Al-Rayyana found that more than 20 residents had been killed, a number of the women had been raped, and the town’s electricity and water had been cut.
In nearby Zawiet al-Baqool, just east of Zintan, 500 to 600 government forces retained control, but the fighting was ongoing, he said.
One of the greatest abandoned cities of the Ancient World is at risk of destruction after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces took over the ruins of Leptis Magna as a base for operations, rebel leaders claimed yesterday .
Rebel commanders in the city of Misrata said that Libyan government troops had moved Grad rockets and munitions into the World Heritage Site, on the coast between Misrata and Tripoli, to avoid NATO bombing.
“We received information yesterday that Gaddafi’s forces are hiding inside Leptis Magna,” said Abu Mohammad, the overall commander of rebel forces for the nearby town of Zlitan.
In a sign of the rising specter of BDS and its potential impact on Israel’s export driven economy (50% of its value is in exports), a group of 80 of the nation’s most important business leaders, met in closed session (Hebrew) sponsored by a peace group called Israel Initiates (website), to address their fears. The outline of the initiative roughly follows that of the 2002 Saudi peace plan. They agreed that if no political initiative was taken by Israel, the country’s financial stability was in grave danger. Though it wasn’t clear what specific political plan they were advancing, their call was clearly a criticism of the quiescence of the Netanyahu government:
We’re fast becoming like South Africa. The economic damage that will result from the boycott and sanctions will be felt by every Israeli family from the wealthy classes to the middle class and most harshly on the underclass.
These words were spoken by Eyal Ofer, son of the recently deceased Israeli billionaire Sami Ofer. The Ofer conglomerate is one of Israel’s largest and most profitable with strong alleged ties to Israel’s defense and intelligence apparatus. So a peace initiative originating from the Ofers must truly indicate a split of some sort among the Israeli far right political and military echelons and the more pragmatic elements. The passage above and what follows is a summary of an article in Calcalist, Israel’s leading business journal, on the meeting.
The Syrian military expanded its deployment of forces to restive regions in the north and east of Syria on Tuesday, as hundreds of civilians displaced by the crackdown huddled in muddy olive groves near the Turkish border, where some lacked shelter and food, residents said.
The scenes on both sides of the border, a 520-mile frontier that Syrians can cross without visas, brought yet another dimension to the three-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Unfolding Tuesday was the repressive force of the state, with reports of more arrests, along with the consequences of thousands of lives uprooted.
“Not even my mother would recognize me,” complained Saeb Jamil, one of the Syrians who fled toward Turkey and said he was stranded with hundreds of others.
The crisis of displaced Syrians, along with the relentlessness of the crackdown, has drawn growing international condemnation, thrusting Syria’s leadership into some of its starkest isolation in its four decades in power. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a friend of Mr. Assad’s, urged him yet again to end the crackdown in a telephone call Tuesday.
But so far, the Syrian government, led by Mr. Assad and a tight-knit, opaque circle, has signaled its intention to repress by force what it describes as an armed, religiously motivated uprising and what activists describe as a largely peaceful protest against the oppression of one of the Arab world’s most authoritarian states.
A gypsy named Melquiades who died many years ago in Singapore returned to live with the family of Colonel Aureliano Buendia in Macondo, because he could no longer bear the tedium of death. These are the kinds of characters that populate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnificent work One Hundred Years of Solitude. Today they also seem to occupy the tribal badlands of Pakistan’s north-western frontier.
On June 3, when Ilyas Kashmiri was killed in a US drone strike, he had already been dead for over a year. In September 2009, the CIA claimed that it killed Kashmiri along with two other senior Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. But the lure of the limelight was seemingly irresistible even in death, because on October 9, Kashmiri returned to give an interview to the late Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online.
Baitullah Mehsud, the former commander of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also rose from the dead many times. On at least 16 occasions, Mehsud was in the gun-sights when CIA drones loosed their Hellfire missiles. Yet, until August 2009, he proved unable to settle into the afterlife. Mullah Sangeen also experienced at least two resurrections.
Death is clearly not what it used to be.
Or perhaps the people who were killed in the other attacks were not Kashmiri, Sangeen or Mehsud. Indeed, the attack on a funeral procession on June 23, 2009, which killed Sangeen was supposedly aimed at the TTP chief. It killed 83 people who certainly were not who they were supposed to be.
These are not isolated events. At the end of 2009, the Pakistani daily Dawn calculated that, of the 708 people killed in 44 drone attacks that year, only 5 were known militants. Earlier that year, The News, Pakistan’s other major English-language daily, had calculated that between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, 60 drone attacks killed 701 people – of whom only 14 were known militants.
The US has come a long way since July 2001 when it rebuked the Israeli government for its policy of “targeted assassination”, which it said were really “extrajudicial killings”. In September of that year, CIA director George Tenet confessed that it would be a “terrible mistake” for someone in his position to fire a weapon such as the predator drone. By 2009, such qualms were obsolete. Indeed, the new CIA director Leon Panetta declared predator drones “the only game in town”. The catalyst was 9/11 – and lifting the ban on extrajudicial killings was just one of the many illegal policies it licensed.
Syrian troops have moved closer to the Turkish border as they sweep through villages north of Jisr al-Shughour, rounding up hundreds of people they claim are linked to armed gangs.
Turkey was on Monday assembling a fifth refugee camp in its southern border towns, but with the number of Syrians who have crossed the boundary topping 7,000, these camps may not be sufficient to deal with the fast-increasing number of people in need of help.
“There are 7,000 people across the border, more and more women and children are coming towards the barbed wires,” said Abu Ali, one of those who left Jisr al-Shughour. “Jisr is finished, it is razed,” he told Associated Press.
The Syrian colonel sat cross-legged on a patch of moist soil, in a borrowed plaid shirt and pale green trousers, surrounded by dozens of men who had fled from the besieged northern Syrian city of Jisr al-Shughour to an orchard a few hundred meters from the Turkish border. He says his name is Hussein Harmoush, and shows TIME a laminated military ID card indicating that and his title. Everyone around calls him moqadam, the Arabic for his rank. A colonel with the 11th Armored Division of the army’s 3rd Corps, the 22-year military veteran said he burnt his uniform in disgust more than a week ago, starting with the rank designated on his epaulettes, and then the rest of it.
“I defected from the Syrian Arab army and took responsibility for protecting civilians in Jisr al-Shughour,” he says. “I was late in taking this decision.” His lower lip quivers. He struggles to maintain his composure. After a long pause, and several deep breathes, the man with the thinning salt-and-pepper hair resumes: “I feel like I am responsible for the deaths of every single martyr in Syria.”
There have been growing reports of Syrian military defections in recent weeks, after regime loyalists escalated their attacks in the northwest of the country. On June 5, units of the army reportedly defected en masse in Jisr al-Shughour, and used their weapons to defend unarmed protesters. Some 120 security personnel were killed in the mutinous clashes with loyalists, according to residents and rights activists, although Damascus denies a mutiny and says the deaths were at the hands of “armed gangs” wearing stolen military uniforms.
Although foreign journalists are banned from reporting in Syria, TIME managed to get across the Turkish border along steep mountainous terrain to reach thousands of refugees, most from Jisr al-Shughour, staying in open fields and orchards on the outskirts of the Syrian town of Khirbet al-Jouz.
Harmoush, a native of the Syrian city of Homs, some 160 kilometers from the capital Damascus, says his orders were clear. His division was told to leave its base in Homs and “sweep the towns,” starting at al-Serminiyye and continuing five kilometers north to Jisr al-Shughour. “We were told that we were doing this to capture armed gangs, but I didn’t see any. I saw soldiers indiscriminately shooting people like they were hunting, burning their fields, cutting down their olive trees. There was no resistance in the towns. I saw people fleeing on foot to the hills who were shot in the back.”
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