Category Archives: Syria

One in three people killed by Russian airstrikes in Syria are civilians

Adam Chandler writes: Exactly three weeks after Russia decided to launch airstrikes in Syria, the country’s campaign has already been criticized for hitting non-ISIS targets, its violations of Turkish airspace, and allowing its planes to fly too close to American ones, as well as a misfiring of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea that mistakenly landed in Iran.

On Tuesday, some light was shed on the civilian toll of Russia’s bombing campaign. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 370 people have been killed by Russian warplanes since September 30. Of that number, 34 percent have been civilians—127 people, including 36 children and 34 women.

When held against one assessment of the airstrikes by the American-led coalition, which started in September 2014, the Russian numbers come more clearly into view. Back in June, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights noted that of 3,000 people who had been killed by coalition airstrikes in Syria, 162 were civilians. (At the time, the British-based monitoring organization “re-expressed its strong condemnation” of the United States and its international partners.) [Continue reading…]

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Three Russians killed in Syria: pro-government source

Reuters reports: At least three Russians fighting alongside Syrian government forces were killed and several more wounded when a shell hit their position in the coastal province of Latakia, a senior pro-government military source said on Tuesday.

If confirmed, the deaths which occurred on Monday night would be the first known incidence of Russians being killed in Syria since Moscow began air strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad on September 30.

RIA news agency quoted the Russian embassy in Damascus as saying it had no information about the reported deaths. Syrian officials could not be reached for comment. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. agrees with Russia on rules in Syrian sky

The New York Times reports: Russia and the United States signed an agreement on Tuesday that regulates all aircraft and drone flights over Syria, the defense departments of both countries announced.

At a Pentagon briefing, Peter Cook, the department’s press secretary, said the agreement, called a memorandum of understanding, established safety protocols requiring the Russians and the United States-led international coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria to maintain professional airmanship at all times, use specific communication frequencies and establish a communication line on the ground.

Anatoly I. Antonov, the Russian deputy defense minister, said in a Defense Ministry statement, “The memorandum contains a set of rules and restrictions aimed at preventing incidents between the Russian and U.S. aviation.” He did not go into details, but said it had “important practical significance.” [Continue reading…]

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Canada to end airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, new prime minister Trudeau says

The Guardian reports: Canadian Liberal prime minister designate Justin Trudeau has confirmed that Canada will withdraw its fighter jets from the US-led mission against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

In his first news conference following the sweeping majority Liberal victory in Canada’s federal election, the visibly fatigued leader said he had spoken with US president Barack Obama in a phone call during which he discussed his intention to pull Canada’s fighter jets out of the anti-Isis campaign.

“I committed that we would continue to engage in a responsible way that understands how important Canada’s role is to play in the fight against Isil, but he understands the commitments I’ve made about ending the combat mission,” Trudeau said. [Continue reading…]

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Intervention in Syria may last a year or longer, Russian official says

Bloomberg reports: As Russia’s air war in Syria nears its fourth week, officials now admit that Moscow’s aim is far broader than the publicly announced fight against terrorist groups.

The Kremlin’s real goal is to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retake as much as possible of the territory his forces have lost to opponents, including U.S.-backed rebels, Russian officials told Bloomberg News. Moscow’s deployment of several dozen planes, as well as ships in the Black and Caspian Seas, could last a year or more, one official said.

President Vladimir Putin is willing to run the risk of falling into the kind of quagmire that helped sink the Soviet Union a generation ago for the chance to roll back U.S. influence and demonstrate he can dictate terms to Washington. If the strategy is successful, Russia’s largest military drive in decades outside the former Soviet Union would force the U.S. and its allies to choose between Assad, whom they oppose for his human-rights abuses, and the brutal extremists of Islamic State.

“They’re going to have to recognize that Islamic State is the real threat that has been countered only by the Syrian regular army commanded by President Bashar al-Assad,” said Iliyas Umakhanov, deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house Federation Council, who oversees international relations at the assembly.

A top Russian military official said on Friday that the Kremlin sees no moderate opposition in Syria, leaving only terrorists and the pro-Assad forces Moscow is backing. [Continue reading…]

This echoes the position that the Assad regime has long maintained: that the only opposition it faces is from “terrorists.”

On the one hand the Syrian government claims that it is open to diplomatic initiatives and yet at the same time it says there is nothing to negotiate until its opponents have been “eradicated.”

In essence, what Putin and Assad are saying is this: We want to promote peace — as soon as we’ve won the war.

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What it means to become a refugee

For most people, most of the time, the news is a kind of background noise. It’s something to which we are willing to give some attention and when our attention tires, our gaze moves elsewhere. The media, forever hungry for attention, tosses up something new to revive its weary audience. But relentless stimulation produces numbness.

All too rarely is the news told from the inside. We mostly hear the voices of passive observers who serve as uninformative guides to a mass of rubberneckers. But every so often, there is an exception — such as this:

Kim Ghattas writes: Last month, 44 children died at sea trying to cross to safety from the Middle East to Europe. None of them made world headlines. The world has moved on since the body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, briefly focusing the globe’s attention on the crisis. According to Google Trends, searches for the word “refugee” have already declined by more than half.

Every single one of these stories throws me back to a dark time in my own life, a time of helplessness and fear.

I was never a refugee, but I could have been. For the first 12 years of my life, I lived in a no-man’s land in Beirut, on the front lines of a war that ravaged my country. I was born two years into the 15-year conflict, and bombs and shelters seemed normal to me while growing up, just part of everyday life, like having breakfast and going to school. We had no power or running water for days on end; stray bullets periodically were fired into our apartment. Men with guns camped out on the ground floor of our building for years.

I often get asked why my family never left — or more pointedly, why my parents kept us there, dodging sniper fire on the way to school and back. The answer is this: We stayed because leaving is hard. Becoming refugees meant leaving our lives, our identity, and our dignity behind.

No one’s first instinct is to leave. Their first choice is usually to hold on to the comforting familiarity of home; when that becomes impossible, you leave for another safer area within the country. Then you leave for a neighboring country, so you can return as soon as possible or even keep an eye on your property while you’re away. Only when the walls are closing in and the horizon is total darkness do you give up and leave everything you have ever known behind, lock the door to your home, and walk away.

This is the choice Syrians are making today. In a country of 23 million people, more than 4 million are now refugees, 7.5 million are internally displaced, and 12 million are in need of assistance. The crisis has reached a point where, unless we end the war, the country will slowly empty itself — a hemorrhaging of its brightest and best, its young and old, escaping unspeakable horrors in the largest refugee migration since World War II, until all that will be left are the fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey ready to accept six-month transition period for Syria’s Assad, say officials

Reuters reports: Turkey is ready to accept a political transition in Syria in which President Bashar al-Assad stays in symbolic power for six months before leaving office, and is discussing the plan with Western allies, two senior government officials said on Tuesday.

NATO member Turkey has long been one of Assad’s fiercest critics, insisting that no lasting peace can be achieved in Syria without his removal from power.

“Work on a plan for Assad’s departure is under way … (Assad) can stay for six months and we accept that because there will be a guarantee of his departure,” one of the officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We have moved forward on the issue to a certain degree with the United States and our other allies. There is not an exact consensus on when the six-month period would begin, but we think it won’t be too long.” [Continue reading…]

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Hamas calls for Russian intervention to protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression

Haaretz reports: Hamas called on Russia on Saturday to intervene in what it describes as Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal spoke with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov on Saturday evening, according to a statement released by the group.

Referring to the recent spate of attacks perpetrated by Palestinians against Israelis, Meshal told Bogdanov that the “uprising” is a result of the Israeli “policies of oppression” toward the Palestinian people, as well as attempts to “damage the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” Meshal asked that Russia press Israel to stop the “aggression” against Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

According to the Hamas statement, Bogdanov expressed discontent over Israeli conduct, and promised to take action against it, including measures in the international arena. [Continue reading…]

The only way in which Russia currently has an interest in influencing Israel is by blocking its access to Syrian air space.

The New York Times reported last week:

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced on Thursday that it had established a hotline with the Israeli military to avoid clashes in the sky during these operations. On Wednesday, representatives of both sides used the hotline to inform each other about their plans, the ministry said in a statement.

The next day, it became obvious how this hotline is meant to function: the Russians can use it to warn “the Israelis that entering Syrian airspace would be a pretext for opening fire.”

As far as Hamas’s petitions are concerned, they should already understand that Putin has made his philosophy clear: sovereignty means that a government can do whatever it wants within the territory it controls.

Beyond that, let’s not forget that there are a million Israelis who were born in Russia. How many Palestinians are there of Russian descent?

Putin’s intervention in Syria is far from unwelcome in the eyes of many Israelis.

In Haaretz, Moshe Arens asks whether Israel would be better off if Putin succeeds in Syria. “The one advantage of a dictatorship is that there is someone there — someone you can threaten, someone with whom you can negotiate and even make peace.”

It’s not without reason that the canny sign writers in Kafranbel see Russia, Israel, Iran and Hezbollah all siding with Assad against the Syrian people.

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Iran backs Assad in battle for Aleppo with proxies, ground troops

The Washington Post reports: In a striking sign of Iran’s growing regional influence, a major assault on Syria’s most populous city is being coordinated by an Iranian military commander using Shiite forces from three countries to back President Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered troops, militia officials said.

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, has ordered thousands of Iraqi Shiite militia allies into Syria for the operation to recapture Aleppo, according to officials from three of the militias. The militiamen are to join Iranian troops and forces from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, the officials said.

Soleimani has been a frequent sight on the battlefields in neighboring Iraq, where he has been advising Iraqi forces fighting Islamic State militants. But the war there has stagnated, and the shift of the commander along with Iraqi militiamen and Quds Force members to Syria appears to signal a change in Iranian priorities. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurdish and Arab rebels say they are poised to attack the ISIS capital of Raqqa

Wladimir van Wilgenburg reports from Raqqa province: [A]ccording to the men here on the eastern front, the U.S. is hoping to capitalize on the recent successes of Kurdish and Arab rebels in Kobane and Tal Abyad, where, with coalition air support, they pushed ISIS back.

“There are around 20,000 Kurdish fighters, and around 3,000 to 5,000 Arab fighters,” senior Kurdish official Idris Nassan told The Daily Beast in his office in Kobane. That jibes, roughly, with the numbers given by Abu Hamza, an FSA fighter, who says there are a total of 30,000 troops poised to move on Raqqa, but the numbers could not be verified independently.

In the field, one way to spot the difference between the fighters of the Free Syrian Army and those of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG, is that the FSA soldiers appear to lack strict military discipline, sometimes manning checkpoints without uniforms and in slippers.

They are, as they say themselves, reluctant soldiers. Many came from Raqqa and Deir ar-Zour, another eastern Syrian city, but were driven out by ISIS during clashes in January 2014. They consist of a ragtag band of Arab and also Kurdish fighters who are eager to go back to their home towns. Holding up a Kalashnikov, local FSA commander Abu Isa ar-Raqqawi says, “We were forced to hold this weapon, it was not our will.”

Their flight from ISIS put these FSA fighters in the territory of an unlikely ally. Previously they had fought against the YPG and accused it of links to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Unlike the FSA, the multi-ethnic but mainly Kurdish YPG force has dozens of years of experience fighting the well-equipped Turkish army as part of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) established in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, who is now held in an island prison near Istanbul. Until shortly before his capture in 1999, Ocalan had been able to operate out of Syrian territory with the cooperation of Hafiz al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father and predecessor as dictator. So mistrust by other anti-Assad fighters today has deep roots. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s overlords


Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani is conspicuous by his absence on this billboard, but with a group of four it would be that much harder to make Assad look like the man at the top.

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Russia’s arsenal in Syria: What do we know?

Michael Kofman writes: Russia’s campaign in Syria is about saving the Syrian regime by recapturing as much of the territory lost this spring as possible and translating those military gains into a much stronger negotiating hand. These strikes target the Army of Conquest and Free Syrian Army forces surrounding and inside the regime’s territory. A combined Russian, Iranian, and Syrian campaign with support from Hezbollah aims to destroy non-Islamic State rebels. Not since the Soviet war in Afghanistan has Moscow deployed for such an expeditionary operation, in even a limited fashion. Can Russia hope to achieve such ambitious gains with limited means? Does this application of military power truly stand a chance of changing the facts on the ground? The answers to these questions in large part depend on the array of weapons and platforms that Russia has deployed as a part of this campaign and how it is using them. By exploring Russia’s arsenal in, above, and off the shores of Syria, we can also learn a bit about Russia’s military modernization efforts.

Thus far the Russian intervention is serving as the glue for the joint Syrian-Iranian effort, but its impact has been more to shift momentum and reinvigorate the Syrian Army On the ground, the airstrikes are no doubt denting rebel forces, but they are not yet able to punch holes in rebel positions for Syrian forces to exploit. These are fairly humble capabilities compared to that of the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but leaps and bounds ahead of where the Russians were as recently as 2008, when it lost six aircraft in the Russia-Georgia war. Military reforms, a large modernization effort, and a relentless exercise program have restored competence and capability to a percentage of the Russian military. Meanwhile Russian missile technology has not only reached parity, but in some areas leapfrogged that of Western counterparts. Its air force is attempting to emulate in a limited fashion the U.S. performance during the 1991 Gulf War, with mixed results, but nonetheless a dramatic improvement over anything Russia has been able to do in its post-Soviet history. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey is buying its way into the EU with a deal that won’t solve the refugee crisis

By Durukan Kuzu, Coventry University

The EU has struck a deal with Turkey designed to stem the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe. It offers Turkey a multi-billion euro aid package to handle refugees and take back refugees who entered the EU from Turkish territory, eventually giving them a legal right to settle and work.

In return, the halted talks on advancing Turkey’s EU membership bid will be jump-started, and the EU will accelerate visa-free access for Turks who want to visit the Schengen area.

The deal certainly looks like a win-win scenario for president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ever-pragmatic counterparts in Europe. Many of them fervently blocked Turkey’s accession to the EU only a few years ago after deciding Turkey’s human rights record was not befitting an EU member state. Now, with the prospect of relief from the refugee crisis, those concerns seem to have been shelved.

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Germany shows signs of strain from mass of refugees

Der Spiegel reports: The road to the reception camp in Hesepe has become something of a refugees’ avenue. Small groups of young men wander along the sidewalk. A family from Syria schleps a clutch of shopping bags towards the gate. A Sudanese man snakes along the road on his bicycle. Most people don’t speak a word of German, just a little fragmentary English, but when they see locals, they offer a friendly wave and call out, “Hello!”

The main road “is like a pedestrian shopping zone,” says one resident, “except without the stores.” Red-brick houses with pretty gardens line both sides of the street, and Kathrin and Ralf Meyer are standing outside theirs. “It’s gotten a bit too much for us,” says the 31-year-old mother of three. “Too much noise, too many refugees, too much garbage.”
Now the Meyers are planning to move out in November. They’re sick of seeing asylum-seekers sit on their garden wall or rummage through their garbage cans for anything they can use. Though “you do feel sorry for them,” says Ralf, who’s handed out some clothes that his children have grown out of. “But there are just too many of them here now.”

Hesepe, a village of 2,500 that comprises one district of the small town of Bramsche in the state of Lower Saxony, is now hosting some 4,000 asylum-seekers, making it a symbol of Germany’s refugee crisis. Locals are still showing a great willingness to help, but the sheer number of refugees is testing them. The German states have reported some 409,000 new arrivals between Sept. 5 and Oct. 15 — more than ever before in a comparable time period — though it remains unclear how many of those include people who have been registered twice.

Six weeks after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s historic decision to open Germany’s borders, there is a shortage of basic supplies in many places in this prosperous nation. Cots, portable housing containers and chemical toilets are largely sold out. There is a shortage of German teachers, social workers and administrative judges. Authorities in many towns are worried about the approaching winter, because thousands of asylum-seekers are still sleeping in tents. [Continue reading…]

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Across the Middle East, national and religious leaders fuel sectarianism

The New York Times reports: The Shiite leaders of Iran and the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia traded insults over the deaths of hundreds of Iranian pilgrims near Mecca. The government of Bahrain, long criticized for repressing the country’s Shiite majority, expelled the Iranian ambassador, after accusing Iran of shipping arms to Bahrain and trying to foment “sectarian strife.”

And a group of hard-line Sunni clerics in Saudi Arabia, fired up by Russia’s intervention in Syria, issued a scathing sectarian call for holy war.

Events over the last few weeks have raised fears of an accelerating confrontation between the region’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims, with Saudi Arabia and Iran escalating their power struggle, extremists attacking Shiite mosques in the Persian Gulf and armed conflict aggravating religious differences in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen.

But as the violence flares and crosses borders, national and religious leaders seem as eager as ever to stoke the fires, mobilizing followers using implicit or naked sectarian appeals that are transforming political conflicts into religious struggles and making the bloodshed in the region harder to contain, scholars and analysts say.

“This is unprecedented, and we don’t have a road map,” said Rami Khouri, a senior fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. “When political dynamics fail, people turn back to religion. We are in this terrible moment of transition where sect is very high in people’s minds.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia paves way for Assad regime’s Iranian-backed advance on Aleppo

The Observer reports: After many scares and several false starts, the crucial battle for Syria’s second biggest city has begun.

For more than a year the southern edges of rebel-held Aleppo have been a wasteland. Regime soldiers have been fixed in their positions several kilometres from the battered city limits, while rebels have shored up defences on their side of the ruins.

Now, three weeks into Russia’s intervention in the Syrian war, there is movement on one of the conflict’s most static fronts. And weary opposition forces don’t like what they are seeing.

“The regime advanced six kilometres [on Friday] and they took three villages,” said Zakaria Malafji, a member of the Free Syrian Army inside Aleppo. “The Russians showered us with bombs even in the civilian areas. They want to clear everything so the regime tanks and even the soldiers on foot can advance.”

Pitched against the mix of Islamists and non-ideological rebels in the rubble is the strongest force that Bashar al-Assad has been able to call on at any point during the four-and-a-half-year war. An Iranian military brigade is stationed around 20km south, along with hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, Shia militias from Iraq and the Syrian Army.

A senior US official on Friday said the Pentagon estimated the Iranian strength at 2,000 officers and soldiers – Tehran’s largest contribution to a battle and a signal that it is no longer shy to acknowledge the fact that its troops are actively defending the regime.

Straight from a grinding battle in the mountains near Damascus, Lebanon’s Hezbollah has also travelled to Aleppo en masse. “Every one of the brothers I know has gone there,” said one resident of the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold. “This is the first time they’ve all disappeared like that. They’re even shortening their vacation times.”

Rebels inside Aleppo say they have the weapons and the stamina to keep their enemies from seizing the eastern half of the city they have controlled since July 2012. They say that large numbers of anti-tank missiles supplied by their allies – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US – have reached them in recent days and warn that they have had three years to prepare their defences. [Continue reading…]

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Cuba denies sending troops to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

Deutsche Welle reports: Last week the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies issued what it called an unconfirmed report from an unspecified source that Cuban troops had been seen in Syria “in support of Syria’s dictator Assad and Russian involvement in that country.” US news channel Fox News repeated the claims on Wednesday and said an unnamed US official had “confirmed” them.

On Saturday the Cuban government called the reports “irresponsible and unfounded.”

Havana’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying it “categorically denies and refutes the irresponsible and unfounded information regarding the supposed presence of Cuban troops in the Syrian Arab Republic.”

On Thursday, a White House spokesman said the US government had seen no evidence to indicate the reports were true. [Continue reading…]

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