Category Archives: Syria

Kurdish fighter, Viyan Peyman, killed fighting ISIS


(Click “CC” for English subtitles.)

Viyan Peyman, a Kurdish woman fighter with the YPG/YPJ featured in an NBC News report from Kobane in November. This week she was killed in a battle with ISIS near Serekaniye, a town also known as Ras al-Ayn, in northern Syria.

Richard Engel writes: When I saw her lying on her stomach firing through a small hole in a wall in a snipers nest in the town of Kobani in northern Syria, I remember thinking she was one of the strongest and most dynamic women I’d ever met in the Middle East. Sitting among sandbags, the smell of spent rounds hanging in the room, Viyan Peyman told us she was fighting ISIS, but also for women’s rights in the Middle East.

“We stand and fight, especially here in the Middle East where women are treated as inferiors,” Peyman told us. “We stand here as symbols of strength for all the women of the region.”

Peyman wasn’t just a fighter. She was a poet and a singer, a voice of her movement. She sang a song for us about her fallen comrades from the YPG/YPJ, secular Kurdish groups battling ISIS in Syria and demanding greater rights for the Kurdish people.

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ISIS’s capture of Yarmouk could only have happened with Assad’s complicity

Qusai Zakarya writes: After Bashar al-Assad’s regime spent nearly two years massacring Palestinians in Yarmouk camp, after regime bombardments destroyed nearly 70 percent of the camp, after thousands were arrested and tortured to death, and after civilians were forced to resort to scavenging through trash and weeds to ward off starvation — after all this, the world is finally paying attention to the situation in this long-suffering southern Damascus neighborhood. And all they want to talk about is the Islamic State.

I think this is a disgrace. But since this is what the world wants to hear, I will tell them. You cannot understand the Islamic State’s assault on the camp or what it means unless you also consider how Bashar al-Assad, as a gift to the Palestinian people, turned a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die.

We cannot stop what happened in Yarmouk from repeating itself elsewhere unless we save the 600,000 besieged civilians whom Assad is starving to death.

Let me go back to the beginning, when the siege of Yarmouk began in late 2012. I was there at the time because, as a Syrian-Palestinian, I had many family members living in the camp. My brothers had pleaded with me for hours to join them on a trip to the camp, because they wanted me to move into my aunt’s house there. Yarmouk at the time seemed much safer than my nearby hometown of Moadamiya, a Damascus suburb southwest of the capital, where I was an opposition activist.

We arrived at the camp on the evening of Dec. 15, 2012, at a time when the Free Syrian Army and its Palestinian supporters were making rapid gains. As usual, Assad was responding by shelling innocent civilians at random. The shelling kept us up for much of the night, but eventually I drifted off to sleep. I woke up to the sound of a huge explosion close by.

It was the first attack on Yarmouk camp by a fighter jet. The regime’s target: Abdul-Qader Mosque, a place of worship that was packed with displaced people. Watching from my window, I saw scenes of panic and chaos, shrapnel and body parts lying everywhere. Tanks then moved in to surround the camp. When an announcement came ordering us to leave in three hours or not at all, we left. On our way out, we passed dozens of tanks and thousands of troops ready to march. The siege on Yarmouk had begun. [Continue reading…]

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Airstrikes. Siege. Starvation. And now ISIS — welcome to Yarmouk

Anna Lekas Miller writes: “What do you think of my room?” Firas asks me in his apartment in Shatila refugee camp, one of the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut. “The walls are so blank — at home, in Yarmouk I had so many pictures and posters.”

When Firas talks about his former home in Yarmouk, once the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, his emotions vary from minute to minute. One moment he’s laughing uproariously, recalling a fond memory or a funny story. The next he’s somber, overcome with a palpable sadness.

“So many emotions, it makes me so sad to think about this,” he says. “At the same time, it’s all I think about.”

One week ago, Islamic State (IS) militants stormed Yarmouk. All this week, Firas and his roommates — also Palestinian refugees from Syria— are preparing a series of events to draw attention to the plight of Yarmouk. Though pushed to action by IS’s invasion, their goal is to show that the humanitarian catastrophe in Yarmouk is nothing new — the world just hasn’t paid attention until now. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military sidesteps red tape to coordinate with PKK

The Daily Beast reports: On the volatile front lines facing the so-called Islamic State outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, American military personnel have been coordinating with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), according to a local commander from the left-wing guerrilla group that is still on the U.S. State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Ageed Kalary commands a unit of about 30 PKK fighters positioned some 500 meters from the front. He claims that he has met with U.S. military personnel accompanying commanders from Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, whose soldiers are known as the Peshmerga, and which has strong, open American support. The last direct encounter, he said, was in December. But the coordination does not have to be face to face.

“The Americans tell us what they need and share information but there is no formal agreement,” he says about the U.S. military’s interaction with a group that earned its “terrorist” label for the tactics it employed in its 29-year armed struggle against Turkish rule. [Continue reading…]

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Senior Muslim lawyer says British teenagers see ISIS as ‘pop idols’

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of British teenagers are in danger of being radicalised by Islamic State (Isis) because they see the terrorists as “pop idols”, the country’s leading Muslim prosecutor has said.

Nazir Afzal believes that recent departures to Syria show that “many more children” are at risk of what he terms “jihadimania” than was previously thought.

“The boys want to be like them and the girls want to be with them,” he said. “That’s what they used to say about the Beatles and more recently One Direction and Justin Bieber. The propaganda the terrorists put out is akin to marketing, and too many of our teenagers are falling for the image.

“They see their own lives as poor by comparison, and don’t realise they are being used. The extremists treat them in a similar way to sexual groomers – they manipulate them, distance them from their friends and families, and then take them.” [Continue reading…]

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Yarmouk: Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus has become ‘hell on earth’

Hussein Ibish writes: Given their tragic modern history, Palestinians are used to being trapped between Scylla and Charybdis in one form or another. But rarely has the situation been as stark and alarming as has now befallen the 18,000 remaining Palestinians and Syrians in the Yarmouk refugee camp just outside of Damascus.

Much of Yarmouk has been overrun by the fanatical terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The group’s familiar campaign of repression, beheadings and vicious abuse have already been reported in parts of Yarmouk. Meanwhile, Syrian government forces loyal to the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad have been attacking the camp with the regime’s equally familiar deadly assortment of indiscriminate firepower, including the dreaded barrel bombs.

One resident reported that in Yarmouk, “people are trapped because of the clashes and the continuous and indiscriminate bombing. It’s hard to go out at all. But they can expect where the guerilla war will take place, but they can never predict where the barrel bombs will come. There is no water. People are running out of food.”

Christopher Gunness, of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), summed up the dire situation as “beyond inhumane.” He explained that “the camp has descended into levels of inhumanity which are unknown even in Yarmouk, and this was a society in which women died in childbirth for lack of medicine, and children died of malnutrition. Now ISIS have moved into the camp and people are cowering in their battered homes, too terrified to go outside. We in UNRWA have not had access since the fighting started, so there is no U.N. food, no U.N. water, no U.N. medicine. Electricity is in very, very short supply. It is astonishing that the civilized world can stand by while 18,000 civilians, including 3,500 children, can face potential imminent slaughter and do nothing.” [Continue reading…]

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Chlorine attacks continue in Syria with no prospect of Assad being brought to account

By Brett Edwards, University of Bath and Mattia Cacciatori, University of Bath

For more than a year, there have been numerous reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. This includes reported incidents which occurred in late March, as thousands of Syrians fled the city of Idlib in the face of a government-rebel stand-off. According to witnesses, chemical weapons were used.

These allegations come on the heels of a year’s worth of similar incidents in which rebel and government forces stand accused of using industrial chemicals such as chlorine against civilians and troops alike. A recent report has found with a “high degree of confidence” that chlorine attacks took place in three Syrian villages in the summer of 2014. A UN Human Rights Council Inquiry into Syria also found that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that government helicopters carried out chemical attacks during this period.

The international response has been superficially demonstrative. At the beginning of March 2015, almost a year after those attacks, the UN Security Council finally adopted a resolution that condemns the use of chlorine as a weapon. Steps such as these are to be welcomed for reaffirming the abhorrence of these weapons and the importance of the international prohibition against them.

But resolutions do not imply immediate action. The use of chlorine as a weapon in Syria goes on – and there is so far little evidence that the world’s major powers have the wherewithal to bring those responsible to justice.

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ISIS atrocities feared at Palestinian camp in Syria

The Los Angeles Times reports: The Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus was already an emblem of the enormous suffering unleashed by Syria’s civil war — and that was before the militants of the Islamic State moved in.

Besieged, starved and bombarded over the past two years, the camp is the scene of fresh calamity, with reports beginning to filter out of beheadings and other atrocities that have become Islamic State hallmarks.

Over the past few days, the Sunni militants have seized most of Yarmouk, officials and residents say, giving the group its most significant foothold to date in Damascus. Most Islamic State-held territory is in eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq, where the group has been the target of a months-long campaign of U.S.-led airstrikes.

Aside from the strategic location of the camp, on the Syrian capital’s southern flank and only a few miles from President Bashar Assad’s palace, U.N. and Palestinian officials say Yarmouk is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

About 1,800 people remain trapped in the camp, which had a prewar population of about a quarter-million, many of them the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes upon Israel’s creation in 1948. Before the civil war began in 2011, the camp was among the largest concentrations of Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The crisis has struck a nerve with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who feel a sense of kinship, and among Israeli Arabs still living in the northern Galilee region, where many of the camp’s Palestinian residents have family roots. [Continue reading…]

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Pope Francis uses Easter message to focus on Kenya, Syria and Iraq

The Guardian reports: Pope Francis used his Easter message on Sunday to pray for the nearly 150 victims of the Kenya university massacre, while also highlighting the suffering of people across the Middle East and elsewhere.

“May constant prayer rise up from all people of goodwill for those who lost their lives – I think in particular of the young people who were killed last Thursday at Garissa University College in Kenya,” the pontiff told crowds of believers cowering under umbrellas amid heavy rain in St Peter’s Square.

The pope’s comments came after Islamist militants stormed the Kenyan university on Thursday, killing 148 people. While the al-Shabaab gunmen initially killed students indiscriminately, survivors said Christians were later identified and shot.

The pope put persecuted Christian minorities and those suffering from conflicts at the centre of his Easter address in Rome, known as the Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) address, with particular emphasis on the Middle East.

“We ask for peace, above all, for Syria and Iraq: that the roar of arms may cease and that peaceful relations be restored among the various groups which make up those beloved countries,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The Iraqi former Baathist army officers at the core of ISIS

The Washington Post reports: When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS takes control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

Reuters: Islamic State has taken control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp on the Damascus outskirts where 18,000 civilians have suffered years of bombing, army siege and militia control, a monitoring group said on Saturday.

The hardline group’s offensive in Yarmouk gives it a major presence in the capital. Islamic State, the most powerful insurgent group in Syria, is now only a few kilometers from President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power.

The United Nations has said it is extremely concerned about the safety and protection of Syrians and Palestinians in the camp. Civilians trapped there have long suffered a government siege that has led to starvation and disease.

“The situation in Yarmouk is an affront to the humanity of all of us, a source of universal shame,” U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness said.

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In Russia, the struggle to un-recruit ISIS followers

The Daily Beast spoke to Sevil Navruzova, head of the Center for Countering Extremism in Dagestan, who spends her working hours on Skype interviewing Russian citizens who are fighting for ISIS: Most of the men and women interviewed each day by Navuzova and her staff say they are determined to die for their beliefs.

The “insane propaganda” on the Internet is the main source of information for the recruitment strategy of the so-called Islamic State, Navruzova said. Instructions tell them where to go and how to get the money for the trip.

Navruzova told The Daily Beast in a recent interview that some recruiters were local—Special Services had arrested at least two of them in the past two years, but that didn’t make a dent.

“The drain of youth is massive, it amounts to hundreds from Dagestan alone,” Navruzova said.

Young Russian Muslims watched videos of ISIS leaders and sheikhs calling to join the holy war. The travel package for a recruited Russian included an air ticket, $500 of pocket money and a backpack with T-shirts, socks and other basic needs.

“This is not just a popular trend, this is a lifestyle. Many in the Muslim community live day and night with the idea of joining the war, not for the sake of money but for pure hope to live for once in Sharia World. Recruiters say that the entire Muslim world has to be involved in the war now,” Navruzova said.

Male recruits are not the only ones who are leaving Russia. Women take off to join ISIS, too.

On the morning of February 27, Beke Gadzhiyeva, a 20-year-old from Derbent, seemed to be just another student at the local university, She had breakfast with her family, showing no sign of any plans to travel; a few hours later she was in a car driving across the Russian border to Azerbaijan. The last time she was seen was at Baku airport. “Somebody provided her with luggage,” said Navruzova, who now has to deal with Gadzhiyeva’s broken-hearted mother, looking for ways to bring her daughter back to Russia, “before she marries one of the fighters.”

It is one of Navruzova’s priorities to prevent widows of local insurgents from taking extreme actions against themselves or others, she said.

Nobody in ISIS has “zombified” the young Russian citizens, nobody offered them money: “On the contrary, insurgencies often recruit well-educated youths from wealthy, intelligent families,” says Navruzova. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq and Syria are ‘finishing schools’ for foreign extremists, says UN report

The Associated Press reports: Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.

The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.

The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes most of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

AFP reports: Militants from ISIS seized control of most of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.

“Fighters from ISIS launched an assault this morning on Yarmouk and they took over the majority of the camp,” said Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus.

Fighting was continuing inside the camp, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, said ISIS was in control of a “large part” of the camp after fighting with Palestinian groups also opposed to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s fighting and besieged by regime forces for more than a year.

Only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda in Syria signals sharia law for Idlib

Reuters: The al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front indicated on Wednesday that a Syrian city captured from the government in recent days would be ruled according to Islamic sharia law but the group would not seek to monopolize power there.

Nusra Front’s leader, Abu Mohamad al-Golani, also said residents of the northwestern city of Idlib would be treated well by his fighters and other Islamist factions that captured it on Saturday.

“We salute the people of Idlib and their stand with their sons, the Mujahideen, … and God willing they will enjoy the justice of sharia, which will preserve their religion and their blood,” Golani said in an audio recording posted on Nusra Front-affiliated online media.

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Signs that ISIS may be in decline in Syria

Jalal Zein Eddine writes: For Syrians under Islamic State (ISIS) rule, the jihadist group is an incidental disease, not an authentic part of the society in which it has appeared, and the peak of its growth bears the seeds of its disintegration and demise. A number of factors are contributing to the group’s disintegration:

Firstly, the significant drop in the number of foreign fighters has been boosted by the pledges of allegiance Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi attained in the Sinai Peninsula, Libya and Nigeria. The damage these pledges have done to the group outweighs the publicity they have generated, as believers in ISIS’s extremist doctrine in the Arab Maghreb, Africa and perhaps even parts of Europe will join groups in their home countries. This will impact negatively on the group’s strength in Syria and Iraq.

“There are also signs of a big drop in the influx of people from the Arab Maghreb, mainly after the group’s battles against the rebels,” says Adnan, who is close to ISIS members in Aleppo Countryside. “It can even be said that emigration has stopped.” Perhaps this is what made Baghdadi accept pledges of allegiance from outside of the Levant; gaining such allegiances, even in faraway areas, was better than losing foreign fighters altogether.

The decrease in the number of foreign fighters, due to intensified international monitoring of their movement, has contributed to locals’ hesitation to join the group. “All the biggest assaults have been attributed to foreign fighters, who have a highly-effective combat doctrine,” says Mustafa, a lawyer from eastern Aleppo Countryside. “The drop in their numbers has not only reduced the Islamic State’s combat readiness, it has caused a recession in the number of local entrants in to the group.” Foreign fighters amazed young Syrians, their mad bravery attracting many local recruits. The drop in the number of foreign fighters has also weakened the identity ISIS is trying to force on the region. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels plan seat of government in Idlib

The Daily Star reports: Syria’s opposition-in-exile vowed Sunday to launch efforts to turn the newly seized provincial capital of Idlib into its base of operations, in a bid to maintain the momentum generated by a five-day battle that resulted in a shockingly sudden regime withdrawal.

Supporters of the regime and the opposition spent much of the weekend digesting the news that government forces had abandoned the northwestern town, amid reports that the regime would soon launch a fierce counter-offensive.

The provisional government, which is affiliated with the Turkey-based National Coalition opposition umbrella group, issued a statement in which it promised to work with all rebel factions in a bid to finally relocate inside Syria, and thus meet a long-standing demand of opposition figures and groups inside the war-ravaged country.

“The Syrian provisional government will strive to make the free city of Idlib an example to the entire world about what Syrians want for the future of their country,” it said. “It will begin sending its [government bodies] to work inside the city, along with the local council for the province of Idlib, to begin coordinating with its partners and with the [militias] and influential forces to make the city a headquarters for administering liberated regions of Syria.” [Continue reading…]

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Stop the barrel bombs in Syria

Raed al Saleh writes: No words can adequately describe what it is like to save a life. It is pure elation to find and rescue a baby from beneath mountains of rubble. But for us the elation never lasts because we are constantly under attack.

In Aleppo, as in many Syrian cities, the sky has become an obsession. Children on street corners stand watching for helicopters. A clear sky in the morning means we must prepare for barrel bombs.

Before the uprising, I was an electrical supplies salesman. Today, I lead the biggest rescue operation in Syria. We are more than 2,000 men and women who volunteer as firefighters, search-and-rescue workers and paramedics. We are nonsectarian, unarmed and neutral, and we have saved more than 15,000 people from all sides of this conflict, including fighters for the regime. We are the Syrian Civil Defense, but because of our uniforms we are known as the White Helmets.

After the bombs rain down, we rush in to dig for survivors. Our motto, “to save one life is to save all humanity,” is what drives us on. But for every life we save, countless more are lost. [Continue reading…]

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