Category Archives: Syria

Assad negotiates from a position of strength

Joshua Landis writes: President Bashar al-Assad comes to the negotiating table in Switzerland apparently stronger today than at any time in the last two years. Thus his cavalier tone ahead of the talks, dismissing opposition representatives as a “joke” and brushing off U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s and the opposition’s demand that he relinquish power and accept a “transitional governing body.” Instead, Assad maintains, Syria will hold elections this year, and “I see no reason why I shouldn’t stand.”

Understanding why Assad’s regime survives more than two years after then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it a “dead man walking” is critical for gauging the outcome of the Geneva II talks.

The regime’s resilience is based, first and foremost, on the Syrian army. Without its loyalty, Assad would likely have fallen as quickly as Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak did in 2011. But while many soldiers and officers did join the rebellion, most did so as individuals; few entire units defected, and no entire divisions did. Structurally, the military held together, and it was able to replenish its ranks through intensive recruitment among the Alawite minority, where many are loyal to the regime and still more live in mortal fear of sectarian retribution at the hands of the Sunni-led armed rebellion. The same factors allowed the military to expand its capabilities through the paramilitary Popular Committees, often called shabiha. And it has also been able to enlist the support in critical battles of units of the Shia Hezbollah militia from neighboring Lebanon, whose leaders recognize that their own military fortunes depend on maintaining the resupply lines that the Assad regime has long provided.

Just as important as the military’s loyalty to the regime have been its superior armaments. Even if rebel fighters, who number well in excess of 100,000 by most estimates, outnumber the Syrian army, in any battle for territory they are often little match for the army’s dramatic technological and organizational advantage. Rebel militias have no answer for the artillery, armor and airpower of the Syrian military. Perhaps even more important, the rebels have no central command. And it is difficult to imagine, today, how the rebels could plausibly overcome these disadvantages.

The fragmentation and radicalization of rebel fighting forces has been the opposition’s greatest weakness. Had a unified political-military command emerged among the rebels in the first year of the uprising, at the height of optimism over the Arab Spring, the United States and Europeans might well have been persuaded to give direct military backing to the uprising. Today, such hopes have been dashed.

Infighting among rival militias battling for control over rebel-held areas has, in recent weeks, cost over 1,000 lives. The prospect of militia chaos combined with widespread human rights abuses, the radicalization of the militias and an estimated 10,000 foreigners fighting on the rebel side have spooked Western leaders, even amid the anguish caused by images depicting gruesome torture and murder in the dungeons of the regime.

Few policymakers talk about “good guys” in Syria anymore; some — most notably former CIA Director Michael Hayden last December — even argue that a rebel victory would be worse than an Assad win. Not even the recent emergence of a larger militia coalition, the Islamic Front, to organize rebel fighting and challenge forces aligned with Al-Qaeda has been able to end rebel chaos.

Foreign involvement in the Syrian civil war has also worked strongly to the advantage of the regime. Iran and Russia have proved to be far more reliable as allies to Assad than the U.S. and Gulf Arab states have been to the rebels. From day one of the revolt, Assad’s top worry has been that the U.S. would invade. He and his generals were convinced that they could survive as long as F-16s did not appear over the Damascus horizon. So far, their assumption has proved to be correct. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The speech that changed Syria

Mike Giglio reports: On March 30, 2011, around 3 p.m. in Damascus, Lawand Kiki took a seat in front of the TV in a friend’s living room and waited for Syria’s president to appear on the screen.

Bashar al-Assad had been silent for more than a week.

Dictatorships had just been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia, and NATO jets were pounding Libya. Now unrest had reared its head in Syria. Earlier that month, protests erupted the small city of Daraa, south of Damascus, after police arrested and tortured some kids who’d been caught spray-painting anti-Assad graffiti. Crackdowns on the protests there inspired more around the country. Security forces had reportedly killed dozens of protesters by the time Assad decided to speak.

Syrians across the country tuned in. Many of them saw Assad as their savior. Kiki thought the speech would be historic: Assad would show himself as the reformer he’d long claimed to be, apologizing for the bloodshed and calming the anxious nation’s nerves. This is a crisis, and he’s gonna fix it, he thought. Don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be fine.

Kiki was far from the hardened sectarian stereotype that defines Assad’s supporters today. He spent half his life in the United States, moving there at 14 when his father, a Kurdish dissident, won asylum. For the next 15 years he lived with his family in Fairview, N.J., developing a thick Jersey accent and a deep love for the U.S. But he overstayed his visa and was deported back to Syria in 2007.

The return was a shock for a guy who did a mean DeNiro impression and recited lines from Analyze This. He was arrested upon landing at the airport, by authorities suspicious of his time in the U.S. They whipped him with electric cables and beat him until his teeth cracked. Then they set him free, and he settled in Damascus, where he was jarred by the poverty and isolation — the overcrowded homes, the fact that most people couldn’t afford to own a car or even to buy meat. He quickly learned not to talk politics in a country blanketed by Soviet-style secret police. “The walls have ears,” said his family and friends.

Over time, he fell in love with the ancient city, finding peace in things like the jasmine flowers that grew from its old stone walls. He sometimes thought he felt the city breathing. In Assad — the young, Western-educated president who dined with John Kerry and mingled with people in the street — Kiki saw hope, believing the president would roll back the repressive regime handed down by his father, Hafez. Things like corruption and police abuse were the mistakes of individual people, not reflections on Assad. It has nothing to do with the president himself, Kiki would think.

Kiki also feared the demons that a push to oust Assad might unearth, as the bloody histories of Syria’s neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq cast a long shadow over its own sectarian balancing act. I don’t want this mess in my country, he thought as Assad prepared to take the stage.

In the U.S., Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, had told reporters three days earlier that members of Congress from both sides of the aisle saw Assad as “a reformer.” His biographer, the author and historian David W. Lesch, said the jury was still out: “[I]t’s not yet clear what sort of leader Mr. Assad is going to be,” Lesch wrote in an op-ed titled “The Syrian President I Know” published in the New York Times the day before the speech. “Mr. Assad’s background suggests he could go either way.”

Frederic C. Hof, then a senior U.S. official tasked with negotiating peace between Syria and Israel, didn’t buy into Assad’s reformist image, but thought: “This is Bashar’s opportunity. He’s been talking about reform and a new Syria for nearly 11 years.”

CNN and the BBC broadcast the speech live.

As Assad approached the podium, the regime-sanctioned parliament broke into thundering applause.

“I speak to you at this exceptional moment when events and developments pose a great test to our unity,” he said. “It is a test which is repeated every now and then because of the continued conspiracy against this country.”

Assad said he was responsible for all Syrians but didn’t apologize for the violence. He spoke vaguely of reform but mentioned nothing specific. And he warned of conspiracy, again and again. “I am sure you all know that Syria is facing a great conspiracy whose tentacles extend to some nearby countries and faraway countries, with some inside the country,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Al-Qaeda slaughters on Syria’s killing fields

Al Jazeera reports: Al-Qaeda fighters have struck a bloody blow in scenes of medieval violence in Syria’s northern border-town of Jarabulus. Fighting came to a head on January 17, between rebel groups Liwa al-Tawhid Brigade and the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the town, when reinforcements arrived from Raqqa and reclaimed the city in a brutal four-hour battle.

By nightfall, at least 10 men had been beheaded, their heads mounted on spikes, and more than 1,000 refugees fled the 3kms across the border to Turkey.

It’s a shocking turn of events for residents and Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters alike, who just a week ago believed they were hours away from expelling the al-Qaeda group from their city altogether after surrounding the last 40 fighters in the city’s cultural centre.

But when an ISIL car bomb killed 33 people – all women and children – the FSA brigade called for backup. Instead, what arrived was a 70-car ISIL convoy from Raqqa, an ISIL stronghold 160kms to the south-east. Fighters say half of the militants wore their usual black uniform and half wore camouflage like the FSA, and were uncharacteristically clean-shaven. The disguised fighters tied white bands around their arms to distinguish themselves from the real FSA. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Where is Al Qaeda holding its Western hostages in Syria?

The Daily Beast reports: Fears for the safety of dozens of Western captives—among them journalists and aid workers—kidnapped in northern Syria by al Qaeda factions are mounting amid signs they are being moved deeper into territory firmly under jihadist sway. Private security experts and Western intelligence sources say the captives are in the process of being transported closer to the Iraqi border in an operation directed by a Chechen commander.

The movement of the captives appears to be a precaution against them being freed as a consequence of furious rebel infighting that has plunged insurgent-held areas in northern Syria into chaos in the past two weeks.

Speaking on the condition they would not be identified, private security experts working on several abduction cases say a commander called Abu Omar al Chechen, a former Georgian soldier who has sworn allegiance to the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is overseeing the movement of the captives amid heavy security.

“The Westerners are being moved in groups and individually in armored vehicles,” one of the security advisers told the Daily Beast. Foreign fighters, including Saudis, are guarding them, he says. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The kidnapping of journalists in Syria

James Traub writes: In the ancient southeastern Turkish city of Antakya,1 20 miles from the border with Syria, a plump Syrian merchant who calls himself Abu Nabil can be found most evenings drinking tea in the Bellur, a pleasant open-air cafe. Abu Nabil is the kind of mysterious middleman who germinates spontaneously in war zones. His specialty, or so he says, is arranging the release of journalists and activists kidnapped by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

When I met Abu Nabil, in the first days of October 2013, he told me that he was at that very moment negotiating for the freedom of James Foley, an American freelance journalist who had disappeared the year before. I said that I had heard that Foley was held by rebels, not by the regime. Abu Nabil shot me a masterful look.

“The company” — Kroll Risk and Compliance Solutions, the private security firm working the case — “doesn’t know anything; the government doesn’t know anything; nobody knows anything,” he said, through an interpreter. “James Foley will come to his family in 15 days.”

Foley did not come to his family in 15 days; whatever hole he has been deposited in, he is there still. Abu Nabil’s tale, like so many of the narratives emerging from a vicious civil war now well into its third year, was a compound of outright lies, exaggerations, and, quite possibly, truth. The kidnapping and ransom specialists at Kroll had been sufficiently persuaded of Abu Nabil’s veracity that they dispatched two agents to Antakya, where they had spent weeks trying fruitlessly to press this Arabian Sydney Greenstreet for hard proof.

The fate of journalists kidnapped in Syria is a terrifying mystery. As of press time, at least 30 journalists, as well as a number of humanitarian actors, are languishing in captivity. In only a few cases do their colleagues or employers know where they are or who is determining their fate. In almost no cases have their captors made any effort to communicate. It is as if these unlucky men and women have simply disappeared.

The early days of the war saw a number of tragic deaths of journalists, including the Sunday Times of London’s Marie Colvin and freelance photographer Remi Ochlik, killed by regime shelling during the bombardment of Homs. And then things took an even nastier turn. On August 13, 2012, Austin Tice, an American former Marine, law student, and sometime journalist, was nabbed, apparently by the regime. Nothing has been heard from him since October 2012. Two months later, the NBC reporter Richard Engel and his team were kidnapped by what Engel described as the pro-regime militia known as shabiha. They escaped after five days when their captors drove into a rebel checkpoint. Those were just early mile markers on the road to anarchy. Today, rampant kidnapping has become the norm.

Covering wars is, of course, a dangerous job; that’s one of the things many war correspondents like about it. But Syria is dangerous in a way that is less thrilling than sickening. Stephanie Freid, who covers the war for the Chinese CCTV network, says, “I’ve never been in a bleaker, darker setting; it’s a godless place. Whenever I go in I feel like, ‘Just let me get out alive.'” While some major news organizations continue to work inside Syria, many of the world’s most experienced war correspondents — including C.J. Chivers of the New York Times, Paul Wood of the BBC, and Janine di Giovanni of Newsweek — stopped crossing into Syria in September 2013. They’re not afraid of being killed, at least no more than any sentient being would be in such a dangerous place. “I can take anything but kidnapping,” says di Giovanni.

Thus at a moment when Syria’s destiny hangs in the balance, and states opposed to Assad’s regime debate how, if at all, to support the rebels, it has become almost impossible to know what is actually happening inside the country. Though YouTube videos and citizen journalism of various bias and veracity litter the Internet, the average engaged person knows less and less about the real balance of forces, both between the regime and its opponents, and among the rebels themselves. Of course, given the actual state of chaos and internecine warfare on the ground, more coverage might not result in more support for the rebel cause.

The Assad regime has arrested journalists and probably targeted others like Colvin for death. That is what pitiless regimes do in the midst of wars. What makes Syria unique is the growing role of foreign jihadi forces among the rebels. Since the summer, the al Qaeda affiliate known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has spread like a contagion across the “liberated” region of northern Syria, from Idlib in the west to Raqqa in the east. Journalists who travel there are thus all too likely to come in direct contact with al Qaeda, which rarely happened even in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And al Qaeda has made clear that it views Western journalists as infidels and worse — CIA agents. They seize them not in order to get something in exchange, as criminal gangs and even “moderate” rebels brigades do. They seize them as agents of the enemy. The only mystery is why ISIS doesn’t kill them. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Testy exchange sets tone as peace talks open on Syria

The New York Times reports: Friction and acrimony broke out almost immediately on Wednesday with the start of a long-delayed peace conference on Syria, punctuated by a testy exchange between the Syrian foreign minister and the leader of the United Nations, casting doubt on the prospects for easing hostilities or even opening up emergency aid corridors to help besieged civilians.

The conference of delegates representing some 30 countries in the lakeside Swiss city of Montreux, already troubled by last-minute diplomatic stumbles, was described by Secretary of State John Kerry as a test for the international community. But the meeting had barely begun when the atmosphere grew even more charged over divisions between the United States and Russia and especially among the Syrians themselves.

The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, who led his country’s delegation, was openly defiant, calling Syrian insurgents evil and ignoring appeals by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, to avoid invective or even yield the floor as a bell rang signaling that he had exceeded the allotted time for his remarks.

“You live in New York, I live in Syria,” Mr. Moallem snapped after Mr. Ban asked that he conclude his speech, which lasted more than 30 minutes.

After Mr. Moallem finished Mr. Ban lamented that his injunction that participants take a constructive approach to the crisis “had been broken.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Should the fate of Syria concern you?

The Guardian reports: The cache of evidence smuggled out of Syria showing the “systematic killing” of 11,000 detainees in Syrian jails may only be the tip of the iceberg, international aid agencies have said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, various United Nations bodies and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly complained of having next to no access to detainees and being stone-walled by Syrian authorities despite repeated requests to visit infamous detention sites, such as Sayednaya prison in Damascus.

They said Monday’s report by three eminent international lawyers that at least 11,000 victims have been killed while in detention represents numbers in only one part of the country.

“All I know after years of trying to get access is that this is likely to eventually shock the world,” one senior official from an international body told the Guardian, on condition of anonymity. “What we have seen in the [war crimes lawyers’] report broadly reflects what we have pieced together over the past few years.”

Syrian activists say an estimated 50,000 detainees remain unaccounted for. Tens of thousands of Syrians have been held in the country’s infamous detention centres and released, often after months of deprivation and torture.

In reaction to this report, here is a sampling of the comments from readers at The Guardian. While there are a few expressions of outrage, the comments I’ve picked out are fairly representative of the prevailing sentiment.

— “Assad, while not being the best of leaders, is arguably what many Arab countries need in the face of aggressive militant fanatics.”

— “Propaganda alert somebody wants to bomb them back to the stone age”

— “we should keep out of it. We can do no good here. Any attempt to intervene will inevitably result in uncoordinated disaster.”

— “All these allegations just before the peace conference smack of propaganda and manipulation. Obama was so sure that Assad had used sarin until it was shown to be a lie. But, of course, no one in the land of the free would report it (nor the Guardian). Cry wolf too many times and many will be skeptical. The timing of this report and the fact it was sponsored by Qatar is very suspicious.”

— “I supposed they need some Anti-Assad material before the scheduled talks. One last try by Qatar and the Saudi’s to propaganda us into their view. Won’t work.”

— “the west should be backing assad in his fight against the islamists/ as bad as assad might be, he is far better than the islamists/ al qaeda would butcher far more people if they took power”

— “This is nothing to do with us. We have nothing to gain from involving ourselves in this war and we’re in no position to make things better. We need to just leave them to it.”

— “Look, I’m sorry that I’m so cynical, but it’s really not my fault. They lied us into Iraq, twice! Once using the ‘babies being thrown out of incubators’ lie and once using Curveball’s lies. They have already tried to lie us into Syria once, with what looked very much like a false flag sarin attack (in that nobody could provide any real evidence of culpability). Now they are trying a new tack.”

— “I don’t think we can trust any mainstream report on issues in the middle east and elsewhere. There are to many untrustworthy players, Saudis Israel, the US can’t be trusted on Syria. You can’t trust report coming from the other side as they are not much better. Best we stop interfering in other countries affairs and most of these problems will resolve themselves.”

— “Whilst I have no doubt that the Syrian government is responsible for atrocities in Syria, I have misgivings about this report. It seems to have come out at a very convenient time, just before the peace talks, and is sponsored by the Qatar government (who back the rebels), so is hardly subjective. Seems to be another attempt to persuade Western governments to start yet another war.”

— “Haven’t we seen regimes we backed torture their population and kill thousands without a murmur of objection from our political masters? It’s time we kept out of this type of conflict. We only make things worse for the innocents.”

Never has a war been fought in which so many lives were lost, so many families displaced, and so much destruction wrought, while an antiwar “movement” was seized by one concern alone: that the West not intervene.

Of course this isn’t really an antiwar movement since with no Western government on the brink or even considering military intervention, there is nothing to protest against.

Neither is it really antiwar, since there is much less interest in ending this war than there is in making sure it not become our war.

Look at the level of public interest in Syria as measured through Google searches since the uprising began in March 2011. The only major spike came after the Ghouta chemical attack when briefly there was the prospect of very limited Western military intervention. For about three weeks, Syria — or to be more precise, the fear of war — overshadowed America’s fascination with Justin Bieber.

I used to think that being opposed to war had something to do with wanting to make the world a better place, yet in recent years the deeply conservative underpinnings of this orientation have become increasingly evident.

When Western opponents of war look at Syria or pretty much anywhere else in the Middle East, the answer to the question — am I my brother’s keeper? — appears to be a resounding, no.

Granted, whether it’s in the geopolitical realm or within the narrow sphere of ones own life, it is always necessary to balance ones aspirations with a realistic assessment of ones capabilities. And the principal of do no harm applies just as well to international affairs as it does to medicine.

But to be able to casually dismiss a report on “industrial-scale killing” seems to have less to do with expressing humility in the face of what looks like an intractable conflict and more to do with a very mundane mentality: I’ve got enough problems of my own; I don’t need to hear about yours.

Yet it’s not as though anyone reading about the latest accounts of Syria’s horrors in The Guardian has been asked to do anything. It’s not as though we have to decide whether we might be willing to make some personal sacrifice and, for instance, accommodate some refugees.

We do indeed live in a world where for vast numbers of people the demands of everyday life make it next to impossible to pay attention to the plight of people living far away.

There are however significant numbers of people who profess a concern about social justice and in the name of some kind of global conscience, champion causes such as supporting the rights of Palestinians, yet for many, their internationalism inexplicably halts at the Syrian border.

In the name of not “starting another war” (no one bothers to explain how it’s possible to start a war half way through), the antiwar camp is content to absolve itself of all concern on the basis that in Syria there are supposedly no “good guys”; that to oppose Assad is to support al Qaeda; and because it’s not our job to solve the world’s problems.

OK. But if you think Syria looks so difficult, forget about climate change, forget about inequality, and forget about opposing war. You might as well just go fishing and forget about the world.

syrian-solidarity

Facebooktwittermail

Assad goes into Geneva with the upper hand

Rajan Menon writes: It would certainly be wonderful if Wednesday’s peace conference in Geneva were to result in some kind of blueprint, however fragile, for winding down a Syrian civil war that is now approaching the three-year mark. The carnage has consumed some 130,000 lives — at least half of them civilians — turned 2.4 million Syrians into refugees in neighboring countries and displaced another 6.5 million within Syria itself.

Add to this devastation the children who have lost one or both of their parents, the destruction of essential infrastructure, the outbreak, actual or potential, of multiple diseases and the scarcity of basic necessities, and what’s evident is that Syria is being consumed by catastrophe. Syrians will feel its malign effects for years to come, as will people in adjacent countries, particularly Lebanon and Iraq, where Syria’s sectarian war has aggravated Sunni-Shi’a tensions.

With all of these factors in play, it appears unlikely that a substantive and sustainable resolution will be reached in this week’s “Geneva II” peace talks.

First, there’s a deep divide between the Syrian groups in exile — which claim to be the authentic voice of Syrians and have been recognized as such by many governments — and the most effective fighting forces within Syria. The former are organized as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (aka the Syrian National Coalition, SNC) and have established a provisional government — based in Turkey — as well as a Supreme Military Council. But no matter the rhetoric of the SNC and its backers in Washington and elsewhere, other opposition groups that do not answer to the SNC bear the brunt of the fighting and are therefore more consequential to Syria’s political future.

The pressure the United States has applied on the SNC to join Geneva II has further divided what was already a creaky coalition. When the SNC voted Saturday on whether to participate in the talks, about half of its members refused to vote, voted no or abstained. The dissenters worried, with good reason, that sitting down with Assad’s representatives would further erode their standing within Syria and diminish the likelihood of removing the dictator from power. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Evidence of ‘industrial-scale killing’ by Syria spurs call for war crimes charges

The Guardian reports: Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the “systematic killing” of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.

The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.

Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.

The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.

The three lawyers interviewed the source, a military policeman who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group and later defected and fled the country. In three sessions in the last 10 days they found him credible and truthful and his account “most compelling”.

They put all evidence under rigorous scrutiny, says their report, which has been obtained by the Guardian and CNN.

The authors are Sir Desmond de Silva QC, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, and Professor David Crane, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court.

The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was a photographer with the Syrian military police. He smuggled the images out of the country on memory sticks to a contact in the Syrian National Movement, which is supported by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups, has called for the overthrow of Assad and demanded his prosecution.

The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors acting for Qatar, is being made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Its publication appears deliberately timed to coincide with this week’s UN-organised Geneva II peace conference, which is designed to negotiate a way out of the Syrian crisis by creating a transitional government. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria’s polio epidemic: the suppressed truth

Annie Sparrow reports: One way to measure the horrific suffering of Syria’s increasingly violent war is through the experience of Syrian children. More than one million children are now refugees. At least 11,500 have been killed because of the armed conflict,1 well over half of these because of the direct bombing of schools, homes, and health centers, and roughly 1,500 have been executed, shot by snipers or tortured to death. At least 128 were killed in the chemical massacre in August.

In the midst of all this violence, it is easy to miss the health catastrophe that has also struck Syrian children, who must cope with war trauma, malnutrition, and stunted growth alongside collapsing sanitation and living conditions. Syria has become a cauldron of once-rare infectious diseases, with hundreds of cases of measles each month and outbreaks of typhoid, hepatitis, and dysentery. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, and whooping cough are all on the rise. Upward of 100,000 children are stigmatized by leishmaniasis, a hideous parasitic skin disease that flourishes in war. Many of these diseases have already traveled beyond Syria’s borders, carried by millions of refugees. Five million more children have been forced out of their homes but are still living within Syria, increasingly vulnerable to early marriage, trafficking, and recruitment as child soldiers.

And now polio is back. Since May, Syrian doctors and international public health agencies have documented more than ninety cases of polio in seven of Syria’s fourteen administrative districts, or governorates: Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, Idlib, Hamas, Damascus, al-Hasakeh, and Ar-Raqqa. At an average age of just under two, most victims are—or used to be—literally toddlers. Few were fully vaccinated. None has had treatment to prevent paralysis from becoming permanent. All are from areas long opposed to the Assad regime, which reflects the political dimension of the outbreak. Not a single case has occurred in territory controlled by the government.

Once the most feared disease of the twentieth century, polio in most countries had long ago passed into the history books. Syria was no exception. Polio was eliminated there in 1995 following mandatory (and free) immunization introduced in 1964 after the Baath party took power.2 Yet wildtype 1 polio—the most vicious form of the disease—has been confirmed across much of Syria.

Ninety or so afflicted children may sound like a small number, but they are only a tiny manifestation of an enormous problem, since for each crippled child up to one thousand more are silently infected. Polio is so contagious that a single case is considered a public health emergency. Ninety cases could mean some 90,000 people infected, each a carrier invisibly spreading the disease to others for weeks on end. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. says invitation to Iran to attend Syria talks should be withdrawn

Reuters reports: The United States insisted on Monday that a U.N. invitation to Iran to attend a January 22 peace conference on ending Syria’s war should be withdrawn unless Tehran fully supports a 2012 plan to establish a transitional government in Syria.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said chances of the conference going ahead were still “fluid” given that Iran has not fully endorsed the Geneva 1 agreement from 2012 to end the conflict.

The 2012 Geneva 1 plan agreed to establish “by mutual consent” a transitional body to govern Syria.

Syrian opposition groups, which voted on Saturday to attend the conference, have threatened to withdraw from the talks unless the invitation to Iran is withdrawn.

The official said Iran was providing substantial military and economic support for President Bashar al-Assad and Tehran’s participation in peace talks was not helpful.

“They are doing nothing to de-escalate tensions … and their actions have actually aggravated them, and so the idea that they would come to the conference refusing to acknowledge support for Geneva 1, we do not see how it could be helpful,” the official said.

No wonder this State Department official was speaking on condition of anonymity. He or she would hopefully be embarrassed to have their name attached to such nonsensical statements.

If this so-called peace conference was to require that all participants be committed to de-escalating tensions, then either there would be no participants who are qualified or no conference would be necessary.

The purpose of a peace conference is not to bring together peace lovers; it is to bring together adversaries in order to explore alternatives to the continuation of fighting. For any alternative to gain any traction it will need to offer each side the prospect of a better outcome than does the continuation of war.

Facebooktwittermail

The Syrian revolution’s Kuwaiti supporters

Through the lens of a new Orientalism with which many on the Left now view the Middle East, the war in Syria is an old fashioned proxy war in which the forces of Western imperialism, using their local autocratic allies are engaged in the latest phase of a struggle against the “axis of resistance” which unites Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Iran.

Even if there is an element of truth in that perspective, it contains a fundamental distortion in the degree to which it discounts the roles of individuals. Syrian civilians along with Syrian and non-Syrian fighters, are all viewed as pawns whose fates will be determined in the real centers of power: Washington, Jerusalem, Paris, London, Riyadh, Qatar, Ankara, Amman, Beirut, Tehran, and Moscow.

In a report on Kuwaiti private support for the opposition, Elizabeth Dickinson provides a much more granular view of who has been funding the war, why this support arose and is now waning. Her account shows why the view of Syria at the center of a geopolitical chessboard is so limited.

Jamaan Herbash used to smile when he talked about Syria. When I met the former Kuwaiti parliamentarian, a year ago, just outside Kuwait City, he scrolled through snapshots of Syria on his iPhone as if they were vacation pictures. One showed him with Free Syrian Army fighters in Aleppo, another was of an F.S.A. hospital that he had helped to fund. He told me that he was even conducting human-rights training for moderate rebel brigades. He was evidently proud of his work, and his face softened as he talked about his most recent visit to Syria. He said that other countries should be doing more to help the rebels, like supplying anti-aircraft weapons to the F.S.A. In the meantime, he explained, private donors were trying to make up the difference: “People pay for their own travel and make sure they convey their donations hand to hand, so the money is disbursed in a very clean manner, untainted by any corruption.”

When I saw Herbash again, nine months later, in October, he looked weary. His beard, scraggly and untrimmed, in the style of strict Islamists, framed exasperated eyes, and his feet fidgeted as we talked about the deteriorating state of the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad. “It’s clear that there is a war of exhaustion in Syria now,” he said, reversing his earlier prediction that the rebels were only months away from victory. More extreme fighters had taken control, and the rebels were so disorganized that many of them were primarily fighting among themselves. Herbash was still raising money—a poster outside his home urged people to contribute: “THEIR CHILDREN ARE BEING KILLED WHILE OUR CHILDREN ARE ENJOYING THE BOUNTIES OF LIFE”—but his optimism had faded.

On Wednesday, Kuwait hosted an international donors’ conference, chaired by Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary-General, which aimed to raise some of the $6.5 billion that the U.N. estimates will be needed for humanitarian relief in Syria in 2014. The Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Sabah, made the largest pledge, five hundred million dollars; the United States added three hundred and eighty million. In all, the conference generated $2.4 billion, well short of its goal. But, even before the event began, Herbash was convinced that it would make little difference. Last year, the Kuwaiti government’s donation was channelled through the U.N., which under international law must work with the Syrian government—the al-Assad regime—to coördinate relief efforts. That aid hadn’t helped the refugees, not even a little, Herbash wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. So, he asked, why not give the money to private Kuwaiti charities to disperse?

Since the Syrian revolution began, in 2011, private Kuwaiti donors like Herbash have been among its most generous patrons, providing what likely amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars to the armed opponents of Assad. The majority of Kuwaitis—like most of the rebels—are Sunni; the Syrian regime and its Army are predominantly Alawites, a small Shiite sect that counts Assad among its members. With its open political atmosphere and its weak terror-financing laws, Kuwait also serves as a hub for private donors across the Gulf.

At the beginning of 2013, Herbash still thought that the moderate rebels of the F.S.A. could win the war. At that point, the Syrian conflict had produced fewer than five hundred thousand refugees, and, he believed, the opposition controlled seventy per cent of Syrian land. Today, there are at least 2.4 million Syrian refugees, with another 6.5 million Syrians displaced inside the country itself. The regime has reclaimed territory, and bitter fighting has erupted between mainstream-opposition fighters and the Al Qaeda affiliate called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), whose reputation for ruthlessness has shocked even the strictest of the Islamist rebels. Earlier this month, ISIS ceded territory that had come under assault from other rebel groups—including Jabhat al-Nusra, another brigade linked to Al Qaeda—but regained some of it in fierce fighting in the past week, which has claimed over a thousand lives.

As the war took a more sectarian and extremist turn, so, too, did its private funders. As the grandmothers, wives, brothers, and even children in Kuwait who had donated to the rebels watched as the conflict turned fratricidal, they wondered what they had given their money to. But the funding didn’t stop—instead, it simply flowed in more extreme directions. Moderates like Herbash have essentially been eclipsed by donors who have fewer qualms about the tactics of the most violent jihadist groups. When I spoke to Herbash in October, he lamented the emergence of hundreds of new rebel brigades, each one accountable only to its own funders. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS may be led by former Iraqi army officers

@wikibaghdady, a Twitter account that started on December 10, allegedly provides an insider’s account of the development of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A report in Al-Akbar based on the information provided in the tweets, begins by examining the identity of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS “emir.”

The leaks maintain that he is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Bou Badri bin Armoush, known as Abu Awwad or Abu Doaa. Abu Bakr is an alias.

According to the leaks, Baghdadi worked in Fallujah and served as an imam in a mosque in Diyala. Baghdadi is not from Baghdad, since he belongs to the Bou Badri clan, which is a part of the Bou Abbas clan from Samarra, which claims to be a descendant of Imam al-Hassan Bin Ali. This means Abu Bakr has roots in the Quraish tribe, which is a condition for becoming an emir in a jihadi group. However, the Alawi Heritage Validation Organization, which authenticates Hashemite heritage, published a statement in 2009 maintaining that the Bou Badri are neither descendants of Mohammed al-Jawad nor of Bin Idris, and thus do not belong to the Hassans as they claim.

The page indicates that the ISIS leadership council is 100 percent Iraqi, saying that Baghdadi would not accept any other nationality, since he does not trust anyone. The number of people in the council always changes, ranging between eight and 13 people. The leadership of the council is held by three former Iraqi army officers who served during the regime of Saddam Hussein.

They are commanded by a former Iraqi army colonel called Hajji Bakr, who joined ISIS when it was under the command of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (killed in 2010). Hajji Bakr was appointed as a consultant to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hafs al-Muhajir, after providing them with military information about combat plans and communication methods with former Baath commanders.

The leaks mention that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was not a member of the former leadership council of the Islamic State of Iraq, headed by Abu Omar, although he was part of the organization and lived in Fallujah. However, after the killing of Abu Omar and his deputy, Hajji Bakr surprised everyone in the military council by supporting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a new emir of the organization.

A new phase of the State began under two leaders, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in public and Hajji Bakr behind the scenes. The appearance of the colonel, “a beardless western imitator,” next to Abu Bakr, irritated members, so he grew a beard and changed his appearance and mannerisms. However, the members are not allowed to inquire about the leadership, “since inquiring is doubting, and doubting is a break in ranks, which calls for blood.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A widow of Bayada and the death of Syria

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: Our car turns through the crowded alleyways of single-storey breezeblock houses, foggy with coal smoke in the icy December morning. This is the poorest quarter of Reyhanli, a Turkish town just across the Syrian border, and it’s crammed with Syrian refugees.

The woman whose story I’ve come to hear puts on a niqab when the camera comes out. And she prefers to be nameless, because she fears for her two married daughters still living in regime-controlled territory.

She lives in an empty, unheated house. Her son sits with us, and her small daughter shivers under a blanket. The woman is in early middle age but looks older. Her face is long, worn, and haggard, her voice pain-strained and sharp.

Her husband, born in 1972, worked with the military security for seventeen years but retired early when he needed an operation on a vertebral disc. After that he opened a roast chicken place in his Homs neighbourhood, Bayada. The family lived what his wife describes as a working-class life “of an acceptable standard”. They had six children. Bayada comprised both Sunni and Alawi families, “and the relationship between us was very good, even if the state favoured Alawis. We drank maté together. There was no problem.”

The revolution broke out less than a year after her husband’s retirement, and the newly-pressured military security began asking him to return to work. He refused. “How could he work for them? At that time Bab Dreib was being shelled. In our area there were house searches and random arrests of young men. They even took women, those who attended demonstrations and those who shouted ‘God is Greater!’ from their windows at night.”

Her husband supported the revolution and was part of a local network which helped the revolutionaries, finding shelter for those on the run and collecting food, medical supplies and money. His wife believes an Alawi neighbour informed on him. On the other hand, it was an Alawi friend who warned him that his name was on the wanted list at regime checkpoints.

After that he stayed in his own neighbourhood. But one night at around nine the security arrived in five or six cars, and announced their arrival by drenching the street in tear gas. They broke down the family’s front door and directed a stream of insults at their ex-colleague, the kindest of which was ‘dog’. “Dog, why didn’t you return to work when you were told?” They beat him savagely in front of his children, then dragged him away.

Some days later they delivered his corpse. There was a bullet in the head, a bullet in the thigh, three bullets in the chest. Chunks of flesh had been carved out of the body, which was also covered with burns. It seems the latter injuries were inflicted while he was still alive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Collective punishment: easier to condemn in Gaza than Yarmouk

The Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus has been under siege by forces of the Assad regime since last July and 28 of the residents have already starved to death. Yet the pro-Palestinian movement which never fails to raise its voice in outrage about the effects of an Israeli siege on Gaza, is reluctant to takes sides when it comes to Syria.

Talal Alyan writes: While you were insisting on neutrality about Yarmouk, the Syrian regime dropped barrel bombs on it. Mohammad Al Far. Husam Abo Ahmad. Mohammad Tafori. Mohammad Suhaib Al Qides. Ala’a Fri’j. These men are all dead. Mohammad Taha would later die too when he, along with a larger demonstration, approached a regime checkpoint in frustration after the carnage rained on them from above.

The Pro-Palestinian movement was delayed in picking up on the tragic unraveling of Yarmouk. It took the work of a great deal of dedicated activists to force it into the forefront of the solidarity movement’s agenda. What couldn’t be predicted, however, was that, in the place of silence, an ugly neutrality would hover over the new-founded concern. And that said the neutrality was often an unconvincing veil for something much more vile. Perhaps, in our naivety, we believe that when Yarmouk became visible, it would be nearly impossible to omit the clear fact that the siege was being imposed by the Syrian regime. Instead, it was the oppositional fighters in the camp who fell under the spotlight. A chorus emerged, one familiar enough to evoke a surreal sense of Déjà vu.

Yarmouk had transformed into Gaza. But this time, it was our side that was rationalizing the blockage, entertaining and validating the motives offered for collective punishment, instead of flatly rejecting it as a cruel practice. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

EU must open doors to avoid Syrian refugee catastrophe, says UN

The Guardian reports: The crisis posed by millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war flooding into neighbouring countries is becoming a humanitarian and political catastrophe that can only be eased if Europe opens its doors, the UN and European commission have warned.

More than 2.1 million refugees have been registered by the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) in Syria’s four neighbouring states; hundreds of thousands more are known to be living outside Syria’s borders without access to aid.

The scale of the crisis is perhaps the most acute since the end of the second world war. David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), described the ever-deteriorating situation in Syria as “the defining humanitarian crisis of our time”.

The UNHCR, European commission and British Refugee Council have urged EU leaders to acknowledge the exceptional crisis posed by the Syrian civil war and accept the temporary settlement of Syrian refugees inside their borders – relaxing “fortress” policies designed to keep migrants out of Europe.

The UN has issued an urgent call to resettle 30,000 of the most vulnerable Syrians worldwide – a call that remains unmet as the exodus from Syria into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq fast outpaces the capacity to provide for them. The UK government has refused to take part in the resettlement scheme, calling the idea tokenistic and stressing the importance of the £500m of aid it has sent to the region. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria: Extremists restricting women’s rights

Human Rights Watch: Certain extremist armed opposition groups are imposing strict and discriminatory rules on women and girls that have no basis in Syrian law, Human Rights Watch said today. The harsh rules that some groups are administering in areas under their control in northern and northeastern Syria violate women’s and girls’ human rights and limit their ability to carry out essential daily activities.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 43 refugees from Syria in Iraqi Kurdistan and conducted telephone interviews with two refugees from Syria in Turkey in November and December 2013. The refugees interviewed said that the extremist armed groups Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) have enforced their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law, by requiring women and girls to wear headscarves (hijabs) and full-length robes (abayas), and threatening to punish those who do not comply. In some areas, the groups are imposing discriminatory measures prohibiting women and girls, particularly those who do not abide by the dress code, from moving freely in public, working, and attending school.

“Extremist groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra are undermining the freedoms that Syria’s women and girls enjoyed, which were a longtime strength of Syrian society,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “What kind of victory do these groups promise for women and girls who are watching their rights slip away.”

Facebooktwittermail

Palestinian refugees starving in Damascus

Electronic Intifada reports: “There is profound civilian suffering in Yarmouk with widespread incidence of malnutrition and the absence of medical care, including for those who have severe conflict-related injuries,” Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees says.

Since July, some 20,000 Palestinian and Syrian residents remaining in Yarmouk camp on the outskirts of Damascus, have been under a tight siege by the Syrian army, with persistent reports of people dying of starvation.

Gunness says that women are dying in childbirth and children are suffering from malnutrition-related diseases, including anemia, rickets, and kwashiorkor.

In his full statement below, sent to The Electronic Intifada, Gunness describes the desperate and horrifying situation in the camp. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail