Onrust in Syri� #4 - Waar het momentum groeit

quote:

Op vrijdag 29 april 2011 13:45 schreef BeSimple het volgende:
Ik hoop dat CLF dit voor mij kan vertalen

اهداء لثورة سورية جمعة الغضب

مجزره في درعا سوريا لك الله يا درعا

شام - حمص - تلبيسة - بدء مظاهرات جمعة الغضب 29-4

Bij deze wil ik weten wat er op de spandoeken staat.

Danku

quote:

Ondanks intimidatie toch protesten Syri�, militairen dood en ontvoerd

Op de gezworen Dag van Woede braken vandaag in de Syrische hoofdstad Damascus grote protesten uit. In Deraa zijn door “bewapende terroristen” vier militairen gedood, meldt het staatspersbureau. De soldaten werden aangevallen bij hun militaire post, twee van hen zijn gekidnapt.

Dag van Woede om moordpartij te herdenken

“Werp het regime over!”, zongen betogers volgens Reuters terwijl ordetroepen traangas afvuurden in Damascus. De demonstranten hebben gezworen de demonstraties tegen het regime van president Bashar al-Assad voort te zetten. Vandaag is voor hen Dag van Woede om de moordpartij van vorige week te herdenken waarbij 112 mensen om het leven kwamen.

Ook duizenden mensen in Koerdische regio’s in het oosten van Syri� demonstreerden vandaag. Ze verklaren solidair te zijn met de oppositieleiders in Deraa, het epicentrum van de protesten. Bussen vol mensen uit omliggende dorpen trokken daar vandaag naartoe om de stad binnen te gaan en zich aan te sluiten bij de demonstraties. Syrische soldaten schoten vanmiddag in Deraa in de lucht in een poging te voorkomen dat mensen na het vrijdaggebed de straat op gingen. Later werd gericht geschoten op de mensenmassa’s die de stad probeerden binnen te komen, meldde een getuige aan Reuters.

Protesten in een niet nader benoemde plaats in Syri�, vandaag gepost op YouTube. De mensenmassa demonstreert ondanks dat plotseling traangas in hun richting wordt afgevuurd.

Syria Revolution 2011

Leger schiet met scherp in Latakia

In Latakia werd ook met scherp geschoten. Ordetroepen openden het vuur op betogers waarbij minstens vijf mensen gewond raakten. In de kustplaats Banias zijn ook duizenden de straat op gegaan. In Homs hebben tienduizenden Syri�rs aansluiting gevonden bij elkaar om zich tegen het regime te keren.

“We houden niet van jou! Bye, bye Bashar!”, schreeuwden duizenden in Homs terwijl het vuren van geweren in de verte te horen was. “Bashar, we zien je in Den Haag (waar het Internationaal Strafhof zetelt, red.)!”

De opstand in Syri� heeft sinds vandaag de steun van de door Assad verboden Moslim Broederschap. De president heeft tot nu toe tevergeefs geprobeerd met zowel concessies als hard ingrijpen de protesten de kop in te drukken. Gisteren kwamen berichten binnen over tweespalt binnen het Syrische leger na een geweldsexplosie afgelopen maandag. In totaal hebben de onlusten meer dan 450 levens gekost.

quote:

Website Syrische parlement gehackt

De website van het Syrische parlement is vandaag overgenomen door hackers. In plaats van de normale voorpagina is een reeks foto's te zien.

In de slideshow van foto's zijn beelden te zien van mensen die, vermoedelijk tijdens de betogingen in het land, zijn mishandeld of vermoord. Daaronder staat een tekst in het Arabisch (Google Translate-vertaling), waarin onder meer te lezen is: 'de moordenaar van de menselijke wezens te doden'.

Het filmpje (hieronder staat het) dat te zien is op de website, is afkomstig van een YouTube-kanaal van iemand die meerdere beelden van de opstanden in Syri� de wereld in stuurt.

quote:

Syrian Revolution News Round-up

Day 44: Wednesday, 27 April 2011

Coming together in the face of all odds!

For long people have been asking about the alternative, now the activists are fielding one.

We are now getting our act together as dissidents, activists and opposition members living inside and outside the country in order to field a recognizable alternative which the world can now engage. Decision-making will remain a collaborative process involving all members, and support networks abroad will soon be established.

Meanwhile, and on the ground, the situation in Deraa remains murky and tragic. Communications have been sporadic. But the few we had paint a serious humanitarian situation. Communications lines are down, basic services severed, food and water rations and medical supplies are running low, and gunfire and the echoes of artillery shells continue to reverberate through the street of this small city. House to house searches were conducted in certain neighborhoods, and dozens of arrests were made. Some were shot on the spot by some eyewitness reports. Even doctors and patients at the National Hospital were put under arrest.

Despite all this, more and more people are taking to the streets and mingling with tanks, trying to prevail upon more army troops to join and protect them. The size of the mutiny is not yet known, too many conflicting keep pouring in. But one thing is clear: the situation warranted the addition of thirty more tanks sent earlier this morning from Damascus too much for a mere show of force, or to combat an armed gang.

Elsewhere, gunfire by security forces against unarmed protesters in Hawleh Town in Homs left many dead. A similar development took place in Tal Kalakh. But the protests in Homs Khaldiyyeh suburb went without incident, and so did the daily protests in Banyas City, the Damascene suburbs of Tal, Saqba and Qara among many others, and the towns of Jassem and Ankhel in Deraa Province.

The failure by the Security Council to come with a resolution was disappointing, but expected. We can all count on the Assads impunity to have the matter revisited soon however. Because we will not give up in our struggle for freedom, and they can never curtail for long their murderous appetites. Meanwhile, we renew our call for effective and comprehensive targeted sanctions, travel bans and assets freeze of all key members in the Assad regime.

quote:

Internationale sancties tegen Syri�
BRUSSEL - Ambassadeurs van de 27 lidstaten van de EU hebben vrijdag in Brussel besloten tot sancties tegen Syri�. Dit is na de vergadering van diplomaten vernomen. Het besluit moet nog formeel worden goedgekeurd door de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken.
(...)
bron: http://www.nu.nl/buitenla(...)-sancties-syrie.html

quote:

The Syrian chessboard

By Pepe Escobar

Ironies in the Middle East come bathed in arsenic; the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria lifts a state of emergency in effect for 48 years just when Syria is in a real state of emergency. And then a regime newspaper, Tishrin, states "the most sublime form of freedom is the security of the homeland".

To "secure the homeland" of Assad's regime - a family-business-military oligarchy - de facto invaded the city of Daraa with columns of tanks. Assad had made a few concessions to calm the Syrian protests. It didn't work. Thus the regime decided to try to emulate the success of the House of Saud in establishing "democracy" in Bahrain.

When in doubt, clone the Pentagon; the assault on Dara is Syria's version of shock and awe. The problem is the regime may have created the conditions for a long, bloody Iraq-style civil war. And that's why all major players - regional and across the West - are running for cover.

What you see is not what you get
The crucial question in Syria - and not even the venerable stones of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus can provide a definite answer - is what's really in the hearts and minds of most Syrians.

The Syrian opposition is not cohesive or organized. In many aspects - as in Egypt - this may be a revolution of the poor. The Assad regime abolished fuel subsidies and let prices follow the free market; the price of diesel fuel tripled; the price of basic foodstuffs also went up; there was a drought; and the explosion in global food prices compounded popular misery.

The legitimate grievances of Syrians include a lot of rage directed towards an intolerably harsh police state; the decades-long Ba'ath party dictatorship; the excesses of a very small business elite contrasted with very high unemployment among the youth - all that with the middle classes and the poor fighting to survive low wages and high inflation.

If there's a popular revolution in Syria, the new political power players would be the rural poor - in contrast with the small Sunni business elite and the Alawite-controlled police state.

This means that the opposition's number one task for now is to seduce the middle and the upper middle classes in major cities, especially Damascus and Aleppo. But even if the protests in Syria do not reach Egypt's Tahrir Square proportions, they could slowly bleed the regime to death by paralyzing the economy.

The revolutionary drive in Syria seems to be much more hardcore than among the "Green" movement in Iran. Syrian protesters don't want a Ba'ath regime reform - which they consider out of the question anyway; they want regime change, the only way to bring down the Alawite-controlled security state and its key insider trading/corruption component.

Some protesters are pacifists. Some are already resorting to improvised light weapons. Confronted with ruthless, armed state repression, there seems to be only one way out: armed struggle.

Truckloads of weapons smuggled from Iraq have already been intercepted by the regime. Wealthy Sunni donors in the Gulf are bound to come up with financial support. And, crucially, the weaponizing necessarily will be Muslim Brotherhood-related - because regional governments such as Turkey and Lebanon don't want to see the fall of the regime. They see the ensuing chaos privileging only the Muslim Brotherhood and even more jihadi sects.

And forget about R2P ("responsibility to protect") leading to a United Nations resolution and a no-fly zone over Syria. Besides, unlike Libya, Syria has no oil and no lavishly endowed sovereign fund.

Enter the Saudis
The al-Khalifa Sunni dynasty in majority-Shi'ite Bahrain has blamed the pro-democracy protests in the Gulf island as an Iranian conspiracy. The Assad regime also blamed an external (and "known") conspiracy - but refused to name names. As much as Bashar al-Assad does not want to antagonize Saudi Arabia, the fact is the House of Saud is deeply involved in the destabilization of Syria, supporting Salafi networks.

Daraa is 120 kilometers south of Damascus, near the Jordanian border, in a sensitive security zone. It's a dreary, impoverished backwater. Not by accident Daraa is the birthplace of the Jordan chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Saudi Wahhabis, very influential over Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, have been instrumental in inciting the people of Daraa as well as Homs. Their grievances - the long drought, total neglect from Damascus - may be justified. But most of all they have been seriously instrumentalized.

Years ago, the House of Saud paid US$30 million to "get" former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam. It helped that Khaddam is a relative of Saudi King Abdullah and former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. He went into exile in France in 2005. Saudi Arabia has been using him and exiled leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Assad regime for quite a while. Khaddam carries a Saudi passport. His sons, Jamal and Jihad, have invested over $3 billion in Saudi Arabia.

The House of Saud agenda is essentially to split the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah alliance - and thus progressively debilitate Hezbollah's resistance to US/Israel. Thus, in Syria, we find the US, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia once again sharing the same agenda. The stakes are extremely high. What you see is not necessarily what you get.

There is, apart from all these foreign interests, a legitimate, popular protest movement in Syria. The Communist Action Party, for instance - which opposed the regime for decades - has been very forceful among the opposition. The leftist component of the opposition, in fact, is wondering whether the Salafis are a minority or a majority. The ultra- sectarian agenda of many protesters is not an encouraging sign.

And the road ahead may be very bumpy; the progressive, secular current in the opposition - let's say, for the moment, a minority - may even be trapped in an Iran 1979-1981 scenario, as they may end up being crushed by the fundamentalists if the regime falls.

It's easy to understand how progressives squirm when they see themselves aligned with the Medieval House of Saud - which unleashed the counter-revolution against the great 2011 Arab revolt - in a drive to bring down the Assad regime. Progressives also have reasons to squirm when they see themselves aligned with Israel - who gives the impression of wanting Assad to remain in power because the alternative is the Muslim Brotherhood.

In this aspect, the Saudi-Israeli alliance may agree on the counter-revolution as applied to Bahrain and Libya, but not when it comes to Syria.

Hezbollah TV in Lebanon is spinning that the Syrian protests are part of an "American revolution". That may be so in part - as Washington has been investing in counter-regime types for decades. But as it stands, this is more like a House of Saud operation mixed with genuine rage against decades of Ba'athist police state.

For his part, King Abdullah of Jordan, in trying to debunk the Assad line, quoting Assad's "it's either me or the Muslim Brotherhood", he is predictably spinning this is all about containing Iran. Abdullah is inviting Arabs and Westerners to place their bets on a coalition of Kurds, Druze, Sunni tribes and the Sunni urban middle class (which is allied to the Saudis) as the post-Assad regime in Syria.

An Egyptian loss is a Syrian gain
A Syrian paper offers a very interesting take (see here). What the regime defines as a "conspiracy" against Syria would be a US plan to compensate for the "loss" of Egypt - and this while in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain "appeals to reform are ignored" and the repression is carried on "under silence".

The objectives would be to plunge Syria into chaos; slide it towards Saudi influence; reduce Iran's influence in the overall Arab-Israeli conflict; and torpedo the Turkey-Syria entente.

This makes perfect sense. The Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis is the only counterpunch in the Middle East against US/Israeli hegemony. A fragile Damascus weakens both Tehran and Hezbollah. It's not an accident that in Lebanon, former prime minister Saad Hariri - a Sunni, and basically a House of Saud lackey - has been amplifying his sectarian rhetoric.

Syrian Sunnis, as much as Saudi Wahhabis, deeply resent the Alawite sect - an offshoot of Shi'ism - controlling a great deal of the wealth of the country while representing only 12% of the population. It's no wonder the House of Saud and the Muslim Brotherhood - rabidly anti-Shi'ite - have been trying for decades to get rid of the Alawite-controlled Syrian regime.

The Ankara-Damascus alliance - which progressed as much as the Turkey-Israel entente regressed - is also in danger. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have been very busy building up Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan as an economic bloc, fueled by a lot of Turkish investment and high-tech. No one knows what could happen with regime change in Damascus.

Syria matters on all fronts - from Iran to Iraq, from Turkey to Lebanon, from Palestine to Israel. But what the House of Saud intervention in Syria is inciting, above all, is tremendously destructive; a bloodthirsty sectarian epidemic spreading all across the Middle East (it started in Bahrain).

Washington would love a Syrian destabilization if it led to US/Israel restoring their regional hegemony, seriously threatened by the emergence of a new Egypt. But forget about the West dreaming of "democracy" in Syria. If history would pull a magic trick - like in Bashar al-Assad offering to sign a peace treaty with Israel next week - the US, the French and the British would not care if the regime shocked and awed whole Syrian towns and cities to the ground.

So it's up to Syrian progressives now to get their act together and prove Bashar al-Assad wrong. Because if it's not him, it will indeed be a horrendously regressive, House of Saud-supported Salafi new master.

فلاش- البطل وليد القشعمي من الحرس عملية انشقاقه

quote:

Video in Arabic, just released. A Syrian special forces commando from Bashar AlAssad's republican guards escapes & explains in details how his 250 man unit was ordered to fire at Syrian peaceful protesters. He explains how intelligence & security services were killing protesters. For the pro-dictators commenters & before you say the usual fake comment: In the video, he shows his military ID & commando magnetic ID.

quote:

Op zondag 1 mei 2011 02:51 schreef Charismatisch het volgende:

[..]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD28Ak01.html

quote:

Syrian activists go into hiding to avoid arrest

As government forces try to crush dissent in a wave of raids and arrests, influential intellectuals are fleeing their homes

Scores of Syria's most prominent intellectuals and activists have gone into hiding as government forces try to crush dissent by carrying out raids and arrests in towns and cities across the country.

Influential political figures including the lawyer Haitham al-Maleh and doctor Walid al-Bunni, whose prominence has until now protected them, have joined younger activists in fleeing their homes.

Security forces rounded up more than 70 people in Zabadani and Idleb on Monday and dozens more in Kafer Nabul, 200 miles north of Damascus, activists said.

At least three women were arrested at a protest in Hamra street, in the centre of the capital as all-female groups increasingly take to the streets to protest against the violence and arrests, the brunt of which has been borne by men. One of those held was named as Dana al-Jawabra.

The arrests continued in a wave in Deraa on Sunday, with residents saying security forces backed by soldiers marched from house to house methodically selecting people and carrying them away in buses and trucks. Kurdish sources also said seven people had been arrested in the north-eastern towns of Qamischli and Amouda, where large protests have been held. The state news agency, Sana, gave a different version of arrests in Deraa, saying army units had arrested 499 members of "terrorist groups" and killed 10 of their members.

The authorities also set a deadline of 15 days for people who had committed "unlawful acts" to give themselves up.

Seeking to increase pressure, security forces are increasingly targeting the families of known activists. Human rights monitors said the 22-year-old nephew of the political activist Ayman al-Aswad, Osama, had been arrested in Deraa.

Razan Zeitouneh, a lawyer who has been in hiding since the end of March, said her husband had also gone underground after security forces raided their house and arrested her 20-year-old brother-in-law over the weekend.

"It is not easy but we have no choice if we want to work," said Zeitouneh, adding that she believed she would be found and arrested at some point.

Foreigners appear no longer immune from arrest as al-Jazeera announced it had not heard from journalist Dorothy Parvaz since she landed in Damascus last Friday.

Human rights organisations estimate the Syrian authorities have detained more than 7,000 people since protests calling for the regime to go began in mid-March. About 600 have also been killed.

Those emerged report tales of torture and the confiscation of personal belongings including money. One man recently released told the Guardian that he had been badly beaten and prodded with electric tasers.

Despite the arrests and violent clampdown, protests posing the biggest challenge to over 40 years of Assad family rule have continued, with violence leaving a trail of devastation across parts of the country.

Rastan, a town close to Homs where 13 were killed on Friday, is described by witnesses as a "war zone" littered with tanks, sandbagged checkpoints and burned-out cars.

On Monday a humanitarian aid convoy was due to depart from the Jordanian border for the besieged southern city of Deraa from where accounts of devastation continue to emerge.

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 22:58 schreef Smoofie het volgende:
Ik vraag me af, de mensen die zo protesteren, zijn die nou westers ingesteld of is het meerendeel anti-westers?

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 23:40 schreef rakotto het volgende:

[..]

Zijn vrijheid ingesteld.

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 22:58 schreef Smoofie het volgende:
Ik vraag me af, de mensen die zo protesteren, zijn die nou westers ingesteld of is het meerendeel anti-westers?

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 23:54 schreef waht het volgende:

[..]

Geen van beide. Ze willen simpelweg meer vrijheid, maar niet op de manier zoals wij dat in het westen hebben. Ze willen het gewoon zelf invullen, best logisch toch?

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 23:56 schreef Smoofie het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar als ik eerlijk ben, heb liever "de dictatuur" die er nu zit dan dat er straks een 2e Iran komt.

quote:

Op woensdag 4 mei 2011 00:00 schreef waht het volgende:

[..]

Mwah, een pot nat. Het zijn beide dictaturen. Beide drukken ze alle politieke tegenstand de kop in, voor zover dat lukt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 3 mei 2011 23:40 schreef rakotto het volgende:

[..]

Zijn vrijheid ingesteld.

quote:

Op woensdag 4 mei 2011 07:55 schreef Djaser het volgende:

[..]

Hoe weten we dat?

quote:

Op woensdag 4 mei 2011 07:55 schreef Djaser het volgende:

[..]

Hoe weten we dat?