Category Archives: Lands

Militias pull out of Libya’s capital, Tripoli

The Associated Press reports: Militias from a string of Libyan cities left the capital, Tripoli, on Thursday, nearly a week after militiamen killed more than 40 people protesting their presence in the city.

The withdrawal is a triumph for the residents of Tripoli, who on Nov. 15 held a mass protest against the militias, which have fueled lawlessness across Libya since the fall of longtime autocrat Moammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The heavily armed groups, some of them led by Islamist extremists, have defied control by the weak central government, carving out fiefdoms and acting as a law unto themselves.

Witnesses said the militiamen gave their bases to army troops in handover ceremonies before they headed out of Tripoli. They kept their weapons, mostly assault rifles, antiaircraft guns mounted on pickup trucks and rocket-propelled grenades. The militias that left come from four cities, including Zintan, to the south of Tripoli, and Misurata to the west.

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Inequality is (literally) killing America

Zoë Carpenter writes: Only a few miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Upton Druid Heights. But residents of the two areas can measure the distance between them in years — twenty years, to be exact. That’s the difference in life expectancy between Roland Park, where people live to be 83 on average, and Upton Druid Heights, where they can expect to die at 63.

Underlying these gaps in life expectancy are vast economic disparities. Roland Park is an affluent neighborhood with an unemployment rate of 3.4 percent, and a median household income above $90,000. More than 17 percent of people in Upton Druid Heights are unemployed, and the median household income is just $13,388.

It’s no secret that this sort of economic inequality is increasing nationwide; the disparity between America’s richest and poorest is the widest it’s been since the Roaring Twenties. Less discussed are the gaps in life expectancy that have widened over the past twenty-five years between America’s counties, cities and neighborhoods. While the country as a whole has gotten richer and healthier, the poor have gotten poorer, the middle class has shrunk and Americans without high school diplomas have seen their life expectancy slide back to what it was in the 1950s. Economic inequalities manifest not in numbers, but in sick and dying bodies. [Continue reading…]

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Friedman on the Israel lobby’s effort to block a deal with Iran

Thomas Friedman writes: Never have I seen Israel and America’s core Arab allies working more in concert to stymie a major foreign policy initiative of a sitting U.S. president, and never have I seen more lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — more willing to take Israel’s side against their own president’s. I’m certain this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.

That said, I don’t mind Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia going ballistic — in stereo — over this proposed deal. It gives Kerry more leverage. Kerry can tell the Iranians: “Look, our friends are craaaaaazzzy. And one of them has a big air force. You better sign quick.”

No, I don’t begrudge Israel and the Arabs their skepticism, but we still should not let them stop a deal. If you’re not skeptical about Iran, you’re not paying attention. Iran has lied and cheated its way to the precipice of building a bomb, and without tough economic sanctions — sanctions that President Obama engineered but which Netanyahu and the Arab states played a key role in driving — Iran would not be at the negotiating table.

It’s good to see Friedman again acknowledging the influence of the Israel lobby and not surprising that like so many others he repeats the trope that sanctions forced Iran to negotiate, but as Hossein Mousavian points out, the actual effect of sanctions has been the opposite of their intended effect:

Contrary to the claims of some US lawmakers and Israeli officials, sanctions only caused a dramatic rise in nuclear capability, as Tehran sought to show it would not respond to pressure. Before, Iran was enriching uranium to below 5 per cent at one site with 3,000 centrifuges and possessed a minute stockpile of enriched uranium. Today, it is enriching to 20 per cent at two sites with 19,000 centrifuges. It has a stockpile of 8,000kg of enriched uranium and more sophisticated centrifuges.

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Go south young Jew to a land you’ve never seen

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s appeal to young American Jews to “go south” involves a cultural mashup, mixing the promise of an open frontier ready to be settled by adventuresome pioneers, along with the idea that the Negev desert is part of their ancestral homeland.

A would-be recruit says that as a Jew in America he’s “living in exile.”

What apparently hasn’t dawned on him or any others who swallow Nefesh B’Nefesh’s bait, is that this sense of exile might have more to do with being American than being Jewish.

The American fascination with roots springs precisely from the fact that nearly everyone comes from elsewhere, yet from exactly where is for so many very hard to trace. What distinguishes the Zionist hucksters is that they can easily trade with a ready-made answer to this question: where do I come from?

Alex Kane writes: On the 17th floor of a Manhattan conference building, young Jews from the New York area listened intently to two Israeli-Americans speak of the wonders of the Jewish state. They were going through the finer points of emigrating to Israel, talking up the varied benefits those who become citizens receive. Outside, it was a dreary and overcast Sunday. But the atmosphere inside was sunny: the banter light-hearted, the jokes from the speakers free-flowing, and all happy to be at the “Think Israel” conference (held on November 17th).

There was a serious task at hand, though: deciding how to choose a community in Israel where they would feel at home, which is part of Nefesh B’Nefesh’s core mission of encouraging aliyah to the Jewish state.

Ravit Greenberg, an Israeli citizen from upstate New York now working for Nefesh B’Nefesh, had just the right answer for them. They should move to the Negev in the south of Israel. It’s an area the government is encouraging Jews to move to with a variety of incentives. Greenberg was asked why the Negev was attractive by a boisterous and overeager pony-tailed man named Aaron.

“They want to encourage development,” Greenberg told him, talking about the Israeli government. And to help the Israeli government, Nefesh B’Nefesh seeks to enlist young North American Jews in the a key state project: populating the Negev with more Israeli Jews. [Continue reading…]

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Likud drifts into an apartheid mood

Aaron Magid writes: The recent Likud primaries in Israel highlighted the rightward shift in the ruling party. Three prominent Knesset members representing the more liberal wing of the party were pushed off the Knesset list in 2013. This was a consequence of their respect for Supreme Court decisions and democratic norms.

“Human rights and democracy is not part of their thinking. It is like South Africa. It is not Likud.” Comparing Likud hard-liners to South African apartheid supporters is common among leftist critics of Israel, but the man who said this to me is no anti-Zionist. He is Dan Meridor, who was a senior Likud minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government less than a year ago.

Meridor’s bluntness may be surprising. But his political downfall at the hands of right-wing voters in the Likud primary exemplified the trend within the party, which goes beyond domestic politics. With Netanyahu engaged in negotiations with the Palestinians, his party’s move to the right threatens the viability of any potential deal.

Meridor served in the Knesset for 23 years, including as deputy prime minister and intelligence minister. Until this year, he sat in the Security Cabinet and participated in Israel’s most sensitive discussions. Meridor spoke about the Knesset bills designed to curtail democratic norms, such as requiring Arab citizens to take a loyalty oath to Israel. He and his two like-minded peers, Michael Eitan and Benny Begin, fought to prevent these Likud-led bills from passing. Meridor warned that the law passed to detain African migrants to Israel for up to three years without a trial was illegal, but his party, including Netanyahu, ignored the recommendation.

Meridor explained: “Democracy became a leftist word. This is so strange and dangerous.” His support for democracy and a Palestinian state led to his departure from Likud. [Continue reading…]

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Sewage floods streets in Gaza’s power crisis

The New York Times reports: Raw sewage has flooded streets in a southern Gaza City neighborhood in recent days, threatening a health disaster, after a shortage of electricity and cheap diesel fuel from Egypt led the Hamas government to shut down Gaza’s lone power plant, causing a pump station to flood.

Three more sewage stations in Gaza City and 10 others elsewhere in the Gaza Strip are close to overflowing, sanitation officials here said, and 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage is seeping into the Mediterranean Sea daily. The sanitation department may soon no longer be able to pump drinking water to Gaza homes.

“Any day that passes without a solution has disastrous effects,” Farid Ashour, director of sanitation at the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, said Tuesday in an interview. “We haven’t faced a situation as dangerous as this time.”

The sewage crisis is the most acute of an array of problems since the Islamist Hamas movement that governs Gaza shut down the power plant on Nov. 1. Four months earlier Egypt’s new military-backed government closed the smuggling tunnels that were used to transport around one million liters (about 260,000 gallons) of diesel here each day.

Hamas has refused to import Israeli diesel because of taxes imposed by the Palestinian Authority.

Having gotten used to years of scheduled blackouts, generally eight hours without electricity two of every three days, Gaza’s 1.7 million residents are now facing daily power failures of 12 or even 18 hours. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s military regime sets up memorial to its own massacres

The Telegraph reports: Egypt’s military-backed regime is attempting to win hearts and minds by setting up memorial sculptures at sites of protests where its army and police gunned down demonstrators.

Residents and passers-by in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, made famous the world over by the 2011 revolution, have watched agog and puzzled in recent days as a circular stone creation has begun to take shape in the grass-covered central roundabout.

On Sunday, the authorities announced it would be unveiled on the eve of Tuesday’s anniversary of the so-called Mohammed Mahmoud massacre, several days of protests in 2011 when scores of demonstrators against the then interim Supreme Council of the Armed Forces were shot dead on the street of that name that leads away from the Square.

In addition, several more lost eyes to a central security force marksman who was later convicted of deliberately targeting them with birdshot.

The memorial is the second in a sequence. Earlier this month, another sculpture consisting of two angular arms, representing the police and army, protecting a silver orb, representing the people, was completed in the square in front of Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, where the army killed more than 600 Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators in August. [Continue reading…]

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Poll: Most Americans say Snowden leaks harmed national security

The Washington Post reports: Americans increasingly believe that former federal contractor Edward Snowden’s exposure of U.S. surveillance programs damaged national security, even as the programs have sparked widespread privacy concerns, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll has found.

Six in 10 Americans — 60 percent — say Snowden’s actions harmed U.S. security, increasing 11 percentage points from July after a cascade of news reports based on his disclosures detailed the National Security Agency’s expansive web of telephone and Internet surveillance efforts. Clear majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe disclosures have harmed national security.

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How is Hamid Karzai still standing?

William Dalrymple writes: The Karzai family graveyard lies a few miles outside Kandahar, on the edge of the village of Karz. On the day I drove there, burned-out cars stood rusting by the sides of the road, children splashed through open drains and bullet holes riddled the mud walls opposite checkpoints. Amid all this, the graveyard stood out — gleaming, immaculate. Straggling bougainvillea and mulberry trees blossomed over the calligraphic tiles topping the cream-colored walls. Through the double gates were lines of cypresses. In the middle stood a domed enclosure containing the graves of the clan elders.

Hamid Karzai was entering the final lap of his presidency, and I had traveled to Karz with Mahmood, one of the president’s elder brothers, accompanied by a phalanx of his bodyguards. Afghanistan’s presidential election is set for April, and as the deadline for registering candidates approached, the country’s future seemed to hang in part on the fraught internal family politics of the Karzais. Hamid is ineligible to run for a third term, and it had been long rumored in Kabul that he would anoint his brother Qayum as his successor. Mahmood had made it clear that he wanted the presidency to stay in the family; he had even begun to raise campaign funds for Qayum, just as he once had for Hamid.

So far, however, the president had been publicly silent on the subject, and Qayum had yet to tip his hand. Mahmood’s business dealings — banking scandals and supposedly dodgy real estate deals — had long been perceived as Hamid’s Achilles’ heel, and it remained unclear whether family loyalty would trump the president’s growing preoccupation with his own legacy. All this, along with Karzai’s angry rhetoric against the alleged misdeeds of his American backers, had caused some tensions around the family table. “I don’t feel comfortable talking to Hamid these days,” Mahmood said as we rode in his armored Land Cruiser, sandwiched between pickup trucks full of troops. “These ridiculous conspiracy theories. And his cynical view of the West. These ideas aren’t helping Afghanistan. I don’t think he understands the importance of a good economic policy.”

On arrival, however, the sight of the massed Karzai dead quickly brought back Mahmood’s sense of dynastic solidarity. “See over there — the grave with the old carved headstone?” he said. “That was my grandfather, the real leader of the family. He migrated to Karz from the west of the province and bought this land.”

He then pointed to a poster of a mustached man on the guardhouse: “That’s my uncle, Khalil.” Khalil was killed in the 1980s. Some say he was murdered in a family dispute, but Mahmood told me he was assassinated during the war with the Soviets. “And over there,” he continued, “another uncle. Also assassinated.”

We walked into the domed mausoleum where two recumbent gravestones were covered with pink plastic flowers: “My father’s grave,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “He was shot dead leaving a mosque. And that, by his side, is Ahmed Wali, my half brother.”

He didn’t bother saying what we both knew, that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, effectively governor of Kandahar and the man suspected by the West of controlling part of the Afghan heroin trade, but who also helped the C.I.A. operate an anti-Taliban paramilitary group, was himself killed by a trusted member of his inner circle. The shooting took place not far from where we were standing, two years earlier, almost to the day. I asked if anyone else in the family died violently. “Many!” Mahmood replied. He pointed to the different grave plots: “One, two, three . . . altogether about eight. Maybe more.”

From the graveyard, we headed on into Karz, where the brothers spent their childhood. Low mud-brick houses flanked the road. “Imagine having to live in these conditions!” Mahmood said. “If I had my way, I’d demolish the entire village, rehouse everyone in apartments and turn this space over to agriculture.” After decades in the United States, where he started an Afghan restaurant chain, it all seemed a bit of a surprise to him: “Imagine hanging up goat meat in the sun in this heat! So unhygienic. . . . And all these people just sitting there. Do they have nothing to do, for crying out loud? Just look how weak the retail community is here. Call these shops? What era are we in — the Roman Empire?”

I had asked to see the house where the brothers grew up, but after several false turns, we still couldn’t find the place. None of them had been back for years, not least because the village is now in the hands of a rival leader of the clan, their cousin Hashmat Karzai, and relations between the two factions of the family are not cordial.

“It’s changed beyond all recognition,” Mahmood said. “This mosque I remember: I used to play with Hamid over there. But the vineyards! Where have they gone?” Eventually his driver came to a stop. “This is it?” Mahmood asked. “It can’t be.” We got out in a field of dried mud, surrounded by mud houses with egg-carton domes. Mahmood summoned an old man in a turban wandering past and after conferring with him, announced: “The driver’s right. This is our home.” He gestured at the empty space around us.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The Russians.” He paused. “Any clan who were known to be prominent in the mujahedeen had their property seized or demolished.”

For the first time, Mahmood looked deflated: “Qayum and I were in the U.S., but Hamid and my father were prominent in the jihad. These houses here,” he said, pointing at the mud houses, “this was where my cousins lived. The same night the Soviet governor sent troops to demolish our house, they were all called out and lined up. Then they were shot. Every last one of them.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. and U.K. struck secret deal to allow NSA to ‘unmask’ Britons’ personal data

The Guardian reports: The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America’s National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance programs, an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to “unmask” and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.

The memo, published in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Britain’s Channel 4 News, says the material is being put in databases where it can be made available to other members of the US intelligence and military community.

Britain and the US are the main two partners in the ‘Five-Eyes’ intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others. [Continue reading…]

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Toxic waste ‘major global threat’

BBC News reports: More than 200 million people around the world are at risk of exposure to toxic waste, a report has concluded.

The authors say the large number of people at risk places toxic waste in a similar league to public health threats such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The study from the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross calls for greater efforts to be made to control the problem.

The study carried out in more than 3,000 sites in over 49 countries.

“It’s a serious public health issue that hasn’t really been quantified,” Dr Jack Caravanos, director of research at the Blacksmith Institute and professor of public health at the City University of New York told the BBC’s Tamil Service.

The study identified the Agbobloshie dumping yard in Ghana’s capital Accra as the place which poses the highest toxic threat to human life.

The researchers say that the report has not been hidden from governments, and they are all aware of the issue.

Agbobloshie has become a global e-waste dumping yard, causing serious environmental and health issues Dr Caravanos explained. [Continue reading…]

A striking example of exposure to toxic waste appears in “Shower,” a short film made in Aleppo, Syria:

Every morning, Muhammed, 9 years, starts his journey towards landfill sites in his hometown of Manbij, near Aleppo. He searches for combustible, edible, or fit-to-wear materials. We join Muhammed in one of his daily journeys to find flammable materials to use for cooking and boiling water for bathing. In the afternoon, he comes back to his family with useable refuse and combustible materials. He awaits his turn as his mother baths his younger siblings.
Muhammed is just one of thousands of Syrian children who had to leave school and resort to vagrancy. Those children had to collect garbage because their families had been reduced to poverty by the Assad regime’s systematic policy of starvation and continuous targeting of civilians.

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Poll: Majority of Americans support nuke deal with Iran

Time: As nuclear negotiations with Iran resume in Geneva today, a new poll by the Washington Post and ABC News finds the majority of Americans would support an agreement between major world powers and Iran that would scale back its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

64 percent of the 1,006 adults polled by Abt-SRBI between Nov. 14-17 said they would support an agreement between Iran and the six major world powers—meeting in Geneva today — that would ease some of the economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic in return for restrictions on its ability to produce nuclear weapons. 30 percent of the respondents said they would oppose the agreement.

But when asked how assured they were that the agreement would actually prevent Iran from developing the weapons, only 36 percent were either somewhat or very confident, while 61 percent were more pessimistic.

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U.S. considers destroying Syria’s chemical weapons on a barge in international waters

The New York Times reports: Unable to find a country willing to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons, the United States is considering plans to place the chemical components of the weapons on an barge where they would be dissolved or incinerated, according to senior American officials.

The two systems under review are intended to destroy the precursor materials that are designed to be combined to form chemical munitions. Syria’s smaller arsenal of operational chemical weapons would be destroyed separately, officials said.

Officials from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is operating in Syria to locate and identify the weapons, would monitor the destruction, which would be carried out following safety standards set by legislation in the United States and the European Union, according to officials familiar with the proposal. Officials did not say whether any chemical residue would be dumped in the ocean.

The system could be operational in 75 days.

The seaborne options have received more serious consideration after Albania on Friday turned down an appeal by the United States to destroy the weapons on its territory; the decision followed street protests by thousands of Albanians. Norway rejected an earlier request, saying it did not have the expertise or the facilities to destroy the weapons. The issue caused a major political dispute there as well. [Continue reading…]

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Surviving ‘death boat’, Syria Palestinians locked up in Egypt

Reuters reports: After escaping shelling in Damascus and terrifying bloodshed at sea, 14 month-old Palestinian twin girls are now among hundreds of people living in limbo in grimy Egyptian police stations, with no end in sight to their plight.

Of the 2 million people who fled Syria’s civil war, none may have it worse than Palestinians, who have known no other home than Syria but do not have Syrian citizenship and have therefore been denied even the basic rights secured for other refugees.

The United Nations says the Egyptian government has refused it permission to register Palestinians from Syria as refugees and give them the yellow card that allows them to settle. As a result, hundreds of Palestinians civilians have ended up detained in police stations, with no place else to go.

The twins’ family fled Syria after their house was nearly hit by shelling. But when they arrived in Egypt they were denied permission to work or to receive refugee benefits. After five months, with no other way of obtaining a living, they attempted to leave Egypt for Italy.

They were captured at sea on September 17 by the Egyptian navy, which fired on the overloaded rickety craft, the mother of the twins said. She held her daughters tight as bullets flew by. At least one person was hit and the boat was filled with blood and flying shrapnel.

“The children were traumatised,” she said. “I was holding my daughter hunched down. The bullets were coming…. There was so much screaming… There was so much blood….”

If the family were Syrian citizens, once detained they would most likely have been permitted to leave Egypt for refugee camps in other countries in the region, says Human Rights Watch.

But because they are Palestinians they have been given no other option but to camp out in a police station indefinitely, or somehow make their way back to the war zone in Syria.

Turkey and Jordan will not accept Palestinians from Syria and Lebanon will only allow them to pass through for 48 hours. [Continue reading…]

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‘Syria is not a revolution any more — this is civil war’

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: For three men in northern Syria, the second civil war started shortly after the first staggered into a quagmire of sectarian violence. The goals of the first war – freedom, Islam, social equality of some sort – were replaced by betrayal, defeat and anger towards rival militias, jihadis and foreign powers fighting in Syria.

Like many others, the three men are bewildered at what has become of their war. Their alliances – and their goals – are shifting. The regime is far away, the jihadis are near – and seem unstoppable. Their resources are dwindling; their families are shattered. Their villages and farm lands are lost to regime militias. Their allies are at best unreliable, and at worst actively conspiring against them.

They are a businessman, a smuggler and an army defector who became respectively the political officer, treasurer and military commander of a once-formidable battalion in northern Syria.

The businessman is the shrewdest: a tall, wide-shouldered man with a square head and thinning hair. A devout Salafi, he was once a rich man in Homs, but after two and half years of war, most of his fortune has been spent on arms and ammunition. What remains of his wealth is being slowly drained by the families of his dead, injured and missing relatives, many of them languishing in refugee camps.

On a cold autumn evening he sat in the courtyard of a newly built concrete house on the Turkish side of the Syrian border – the latest in a string of temporary homes since his house was razed by the Syrian government in the early days of the revolution.

“I need Bashar [al-Assad] to last for two more years,” said the businessman. “It would be a disaster if the regime fell now: we would split into mini-states that would fight among each other. We’ll be massacring each other – tribes, Islamists and battalions.

“Maybe if the regime lasts for a few more years we can agree on the shape of the new Syria. At least then we might end up with three states rather than 10,” he said. Meanwhile, the killings and massacres will continue, until sectarian cleansing has been carried out in all of Syria’s cities and regions, he added. “There will be either Alawites or Sunnis. Either them or us. Maybe in 10 years we will all be bored with fighting and learn how to coexist.” He paused, then added: “In 10 years maybe, not now.”

The battalion that the three men were part of was once the darling of the rebels’ foreign backers: Qatari royalty, Saudi preachers and Kuwaiti MPs all donated money and funnelled weapons to them. The businessman regularly met Turkish military intelligence officers on the border who safeguarded his arms shipments from Mediterranean ports.

But as jihadi influence grew among the opposition forces, the battalion’s position came under threat. A clash – as much about resources as it was about ideology – was inevitable. A jihadi leader was assassinated and the battalion was forced from its footholds in the oil-rich east. Further divisions within the battalion followed and some of its men left to join other factions or set up their own.

Gulf dignitaries accused the three men of sowing dissent in the Muslim community and financial backers switched their support to other battalions with a stricter Islamic outlook.

As his brother spread out blankets on the porch, the businessman stared up at the night sky, and smoked his last cigarette of the day. “This is not a revolution against a regime any more, this is a civil war,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Why has the UN given Assad a free pass on mass murder?

Colum Lynch reports: During the past year, the United Nations’ chief relief agency has routinely withheld from the public vital details of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s systematic campaign to block humanitarian assistance to Syrian civilians. This silence has infuriated human rights advocates, who believe that greater public exposure of Assad’s actions would increase political pressure on the Syrian government to allow the international community to help hundreds of thousands of ordinary Syrians who are trapped in the line of fire.

Instead, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) — which oversees international relief efforts in Syria — has relied on low-key, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to quietly persuade the Syrian regime to open the aid floodgates. So far, critics say, the strategy has been ineffective. Worse, it provides a measure of political cover to the Assad regime as it carries out mass starvation and slaughter, these critics contend.

The U.N. “should be much more willing to point the finger at the Syrian government when they are responsible for vast blockages of aid. They haven’t said enough about who is responsible for violations and the character of those violations,” said Peggy Hicks, the head of advocacy for Human Rights Watch. “There is always a balancing act, but we have been concerned that the U.N. has been reluctant to recognize the limits of working behind the scenes.” [Continue reading…]

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