Crisis in Syrië #12 Als christenen in een Colosseum

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Op dinsdag 10 juli 2012 00:44 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op dinsdag 10 juli 2012 09:41 schreef FemacampSurvivor het volgende:
Nou komt er nog wat van?
We zouden die gewelddadige en martelende Assad toch gaan bombarderen of was dat een loos dreigement?

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Syrische ambassadeur in Irak loopt over naar oppositie

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Volgens Reuters melden bronnen van de Syrische oppositie dat ambassadeur Nawaf al-Fares is overgelopen. Volgens Mohamed Sermini van de Syrische Nationale Raad is dit pas het begin van een reeks aan breuken in de diplomatiek met het regime van Assad: “We hebben contact met meerdere ambassadeurs.”

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Champagne Flows While Syria Burns

A country at war with itself. Bombs and civilian massacres. Yet, in Damascus, the music plays on.

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Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's isolation is growing

The defection of Nawaf al-Fares shows that the conflict is sliding inexorably into a primarily ethnic civil war

The defection of Syria's ambassador to Baghdad marks the second time in a week that Bashar al-Assad has been deserted by a top Sunni ally, suggesting that the isolation of the Allawite core of the regime is accelerating, and that the conflict is sliding inexorably into a primarily ethnic civil war.

Like Manaf Tlass (below), the Republican Guard general whose defection became known last Thursday, Nawaf al-Fares is part of the Syrian Sunni elite, whose alliance with the Assad family and the Allawite security apparatus was the pillar on which the Syrian Ba'ath party regime was built. As that pillar crumbles, what is left is a heavily armed, highly militarised Allawite minority with its back to the wall in the face of a vengeful, if fragmented, Sunni majority.

Fares is an especially significant figure. His selection by Assad in 2009 as Syria's first ambassador to Baghdad in three decades was a high honour reflecting his status in Syrian society. He was the head of the Ba'ath party in his home city of Deir ez-Zor, the seventh largest in Syria, as well as serving as governor of the sensitive Quneitra province, along the Israeli border.

Most importantly, Fares is the Syrian head of the Uqaydat tribe which straddles the Syrian-Iraqi border along the Euphrates river. They and other border tribes have long been a powerful force in the region's history and some observers see them as the key to Assad's survival.

Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Centre said: "This is actually more important than the Manaf Tlass defection because of where Fares comes from and his tribal connections. The one thing the regime should fear more than anything else is a new front in the east. Its efforts to dampen down the revolt there, particularly in Deir ez-Zor, have had clear political consequences."

Until now, like the Kurds, these big border tribes have sat on the fence, unwilling to turn against Assad too early for fear of sharing the fate of the Shia of southern Iraq who rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 thinking they had US support, only to find they were on their own and massacred by the Iraqi Republican Guard. It was a bloody and salutary lesson no one in the region has forgotten.

The ambassador's defection realises the highest hopes of the Syrian opposition, that the defection of the Tlass family would embolden other members of the Sunni elite to break with the regime. What seems to be holding that elite in place is principally fear of what would happen to their families if they fled. The Tlass family managed to get one member after another out of the country before Manaf, the general and childhood friend of Bashar al-Assad, made his run for it. The clan's homes in Damascus have been since comprehensively trashed by the security forces.

Fares, as a powerful tribal leader, would also have had the wherewithal to protect his family before announcing his defection. For others it will be harder. Reports from Damascus say that prominent Sunnis are being pulled in for questioning and are having their passports confiscated. But such treatment in itself will loosen the habitual bonds of loyalty.

The Guardian

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Syria: Evidence of Cluster Munitions Use by Syrian Forces

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(New York) – A pair of videos posted online by a user believed to be a Syrian activist on July 10, 2012, appear to show cluster munition remnants, Human Rights Watch said today. The images include Soviet-produced unexploded submunitions and a bomb canister, apparently found in Jabal Shahshabu, a mountainous area near Hama.

An activist in the area told Human Rights Watch that the region where the cluster remnants were allegedly found has been under sustained bombardment by Syrian forces over the past two weeks.

“These videos show identifiable cluster bombs and submunitions,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch. “If confirmed, this would be the first documented use of these highly dangerous weapons by the Syrian armed forces during the conflict.”

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Minutes of Assad-Annan new truce deal

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Known as Syria’s mouthpiece, Beirut’s daily al-Akhbar has a proven record of privileged access to authoritative news and views from Damascus.

Today, the paper’s front-page screamer consists of four words: “The Assad-Annan agreement.”
Though bylined Jean Aziz, the front-page lead actually highlights what I deem to be the minutes of the meeting between UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan and President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Monday, July 9.

Jean Aziz is a Lebanese socio-political activist, journalist, university professor and talk show host. He is now close to Michel Aoun, Christian leader of Lebanon’s Free Patriotic Movement and a maverick ally of both Syria and Hezbollah.

Here is what I believe was passed on to Aziz by Damascus:

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Syrian opposition activists: more than 250 dead in Hama village massacre

Forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad have killed more than 250 people – mostly civilians – in Tremseh, activists say

More than 250 people have been killed by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the village of Tremseh in Hama province, according to opposition activists.

The Revolution Leadership Council of Hama told Reuters that most of those killed were civilians. The opposition activists said the village had been attacked by helicopter gunships and tanks, and that pro-government militia men then moved in and carried out execution-style killings.

Reports of the massacre come as the international community remains deadlocked over how to resolve the Syrian crisis, with Russia and China continuing to oppose a western move to press the United Nations to threaten Damascus with sanctions before 20 July.

That is the day the mandate expires for the current UN mission which, despite a 90-day remit, has failed to stem a mounting casualty toll in Syria, where the daily death toll often tops 100.

China and Syria's allies have agreed to an extension of the mission, but have refused to support a UN resolution that allows for the threat of new sanctions.

Western nations want to ensure that a 10-day ultimatum to Syria to withdraw its heavy weapons and pull back from towns and cities is a central part of a new resolution, which must be passed before the current mission's term expires next Friday.

UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has warned of "clear consequences" if a ceasefire does not take root this time.

Annan has returned from visits to Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, where he has tried to secure support for a new attempt to establish a ceasefire in Syria.

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The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?

It's a tale about some of the most quoted members of the Syrian opposition and their connection to the Anglo-American opposition creation business. The mainstream news media have, in the main, been remarkably passive when it comes to Syrian sources: billing them simply as "official spokesmen" or "pro-democracy campaigners" without, for the most part, scrutinising their statements, their backgrounds or their political connections.

It's important to stress: to investigate the background of a Syrian spokesperson is not to doubt the sincerity of his or her opposition to Assad. But a passionate hatred of the Assad regime is no guarantee of independence. Indeed, a number of key figures in the Syrian opposition movement are long-term exiles who were receiving US government funding to undermine the Assad government long before the Arab spring broke out.

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They're selling the idea of military intervention and regime change, and the mainstream news is hungry to buy. Many of the "activists" and spokespeople representing the Syrian opposition are closely (and in many cases financially) interlinked with the US and London – the very people who would be doing the intervening. Which means information and statistics from these sources isn't necessarily pure news – it's a sales pitch, a PR campaign.

But it's never too late to ask questions, to scrutinise sources. Asking questions doesn't make you a cheerleader for Assad – that's a false argument. It just makes you less susceptible to spin. The good news is, there's a sceptic born every minute.

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Op vrijdag 13 juli 2012 05:56 schreef NorthernStar het volgende:

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Hoe vaak moet het gezegd worden voordat het doordringt? Iedere dode die valt is een potentieel PR middel. Hell, er hoeft niet eens een dooie te zijn, je kan ze ook verzinnen, maar als je lijken hebt deste beter. Enige wat je dan nog hoeft te doen is ze aan Assad toe te schrijven. En aangezien de westerse media het woord van de zelfbenoemde woordvoerders voor waarheid aannemen is dat een gegeven.

Er ontstaat daarom een behoefte aan geweld en doden, behoefte aan barbaarse toestanden en 'atrocities'. Het maakt niet uit wie de doden zijn (en meer sinister, het maakt ook niet uit wie de moordenaars zijn) lijken zijn er nodig om de druk erop te houden. Brute moorden op mannen, vrouwen en kinderen.

Ik zeg het nog maar een keer voor degenen die ogenschijnlijk de disinfo en propaganda over Syrië als zoete koek slikken, jullie worden er ingeluisd.

Leer voor jezelf te denken en kritisch te worden, niet alleen om te voorkomen dat je spijt krijgt over waar je steun aan hebt verleent, er kan in de nabije toekomst heel goed een periode komen dat niemand aan je scepticisme kan appelleren en de beslissingen die je moet maken van direct belang voor jezelf en je omgeving zijn. Je eigen goedgelovigheid gaat je dan nekken.

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Syria working to secure chemical weapons, say Israeli officials

Move is in response to international concern that chemical arsenal could fall into terrorist hands or be damaged in fighting

Syria's armed forces have taken steps to secure deadly chemical weapons in response to mounting international concern that they could fall into rebel or terrorist hands or be accidentally damaged in fighting, according to Israeli officials.

Syria's undeclared chemical arsenal, the largest in the Arab world, is believed to include mustard gas as well as nerve agents such as Sarin, Tabun and VX, which have been "weaponised, tested and deployed", according to the Israelis, for whom Syria is a priority intelligence target.

US sources said Bashar al-Assad's forces had started to move part of the stockpile out of storage facilities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Israeli officials monitoring the escalating violence believe that Damascus is working to protect its chemical warfare arsenal.

"It is dispersed and under the control of a dedicated army unit that has a high degree of loyalty to the regime and is commanded by senior Alawites [Assad's sect]," said a senior official in Jerusalem. "It has not been involved in the nitty-gritty of fighting. It has been impacted by it but has not been used to fight the people. There are signs that Syria has understood the problem."

Bases in or near Homs, Hama, Deir al Zour and Aleppo all house long-range Scud missiles that are thought to carry chemical warheads. In recent weeks western sources have described intensified activity including the movement of rockets, the construction of new bunkers and the expansion of existing facilities.

The US officials told the Journal they were not certain whether this activity was to make the weapons ready to use against rebels or civilians, to safeguard the material or to complicate foreign efforts to track them.

"For the moment the Syrian regime is not significantly changing the location or the state of readiness of its chemical and biological weapons," the Israeli military commentator Ron Ben-Yishai wrote in Friday's Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "At the most it is moving them to more secure storage sites that are far from areas under rebel control or where fighting is taking place."

Alarm about the implications of Syria's bloody internal conflict echoes international concerns over the fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya last year when advanced shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles were seized by the Nato-backed opposition forces. The Israeli official said Libya "might turn out to be a picnic compared to what could happen in Syria".

Diplomats say messages of western and Israeli concern about weapons proliferation have been passed to Syria via Russia, which has close ties with Assad. On Thursday the US government repeated a public warning to Syria that it had a responsibility to safeguard its stockpiles. The Syrian government denied that any had been moved.

The Israelis fear that al-Qaida or other extremist groups could get hold of chemical weapons; that Assad might transfer them to Hezbollah in Lebanon; or in an extreme scenario that he might launch an attack on Israel as a diversion. "Is there a possibility that an Assad regime with its back to the wall would try to change the subject and try to do something against us?" asked another senior Israeli government source.

Eyal Zisser, an Israeli academic, said: "As long as he feels he can win the battle in Syria, Assad has no reason to open a new front with Israel. When he decides that it's finished he will want to take Asma and the kids and escape from the palace. Israel will not be on his agenda."

Syria is an example of the adage that chemical weapons are the poor man's nuclear deterrent. Israel has a large but undeclared nuclear arsenal in addition to chemical weapons. In 2007 it bombed and destroyed what it described as a nuclear reactor in north-eastern Syria. Neither country has signed the chemical weapons convention, the international treaty that outlaws their use.

Along with Israel, the US, Britain, Jordan and Turkey are all following the Syrian situation closely. Risk assessments use plumology, the study of the dispersal and flow patterns of poison gases and chemical agents, which have different degrees of toxicity and persistence.

Washington is known to have held talks with Jordan about the need to co-operate on border security to prevent the smuggling of sensitive materials. It is also thought that Jordanian special forces, the most effective such units in the Arab world, could be used to secure bases in Syria in the event of a collapse of Assad regime. Israel refuses to confirm reports that it has contingency plans for dealing with the threat. "We are sharing our concerns with some of our closest interlocutors," the official said.

Western diplomats admit that the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the 2003 Iraq war have made it extremely difficult to use the apparently more solid information about Syria's chemical arsenal to justify any outside military intervention.

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Op vrijdag 13 juli 2012 22:57 schreef Frikandelbroodje het volgende:

Dit is de hoogst gedeserteerde rang tot nu toe. Vrijwel iedere dag arriveren er hooggeplaatste officieren van het Syrische leger in Turkije. Het regime vertoont steeds grotere scheuren.

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Op vrijdag 13 juli 2012 23:03 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Er lijkt nu echt tempo in te komen.

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'Hevige gevechten in wijk Damascus'

In de volkswijk al-Tadamon in het zuiden van de Syrische hoofdstad Damascus wordt hevig gevochten tussen militairen en aanhangers van de oppositie. Dat heeft een activist vandaag via Skype uit Damascus laten weten. In de wijk wonen vooral mensen met zeer lage inkomens.

Volgens de activist is zwaar geweervuur te horen en is rook te zien. Sommige bewoners zouden gewond zijn geraakt. In de nacht van zaterdag op zondag is er volgens de activist gevochten in de nabijgelegen wijk Hajar al-Aswad.

Burgeroorlog
Het gewapende conflict in Syrië is zo omvangrijk en zo ernstig dat het als een burgeroorlog kan worden beschouwd. Dat heeft het Internationaal Comité van het Rode Kruis vandaag laten weten.
Oud-voorzitter Jakob Kellenberger wilde kort voor zijn aftreden op 30 juni niet verder gaan dan dat er in het Arabische land sprake was van een gewapend intern conflict dat zich evenwel tot bepaalde gebieden beperkte.

De hulporganisatie definieert een burgeroorlog als 'een niet-internationaal gewapend conflict'. De definitie van het conflict als een burgeroorlog betekent dat het internationaal humanitair recht onder alle omstandigheden van toepassing is op alle plaatsen in Syrië waar gevechten zijn.

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Op zaterdag 14 juli 2012 11:15 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Het is een kwestie van tijd voordat het regime ineenstort. Wat erop volgt, dat is een tweede.

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Syria crisis: border tribes could finish off Assad regime

The Red Cross's declaration that Syria is in a state of civil war is an important milestone as government control starts to weaken

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) avoids the words "civil war". It prefers the blander "non-international armed conflict", but the meaning is essentially the same, and the ICRC's declaration that it has spread across Syria is an important milestone.

According to Sean Maguire, the organisation's spokesman in the UK, the criteria for the ICRC statement are the intensity of the violence, the level of organisation of the armed opposition, and the duration of the fighting.

"It is not everywhere in Syria and it's not all the time, but it has become much more widespread. It is an extension of the conflict rather than necessarily an escalation," Maguire said.

As a consequence, the protections given to civilians and detainees offered by the Geneva conventions apply to the whole of Syria, although the targeting of residential areas was previously covered by international humanitarian law. In effect, what could be previously prosecuted as "crimes against humanity" can now be prosecuted as "war crimes". The point is largely moot, however, as the international criminal court cannot open an investigation into what is happening in Syria without a UN security council mandate, and Russia and China have blocked any such move.

The ICRC designation reflects the extent to which the Assad regime's counter-insurgency is backfiring. Every time it sends troops to quell opposition in a city, district or village, its blunderbuss use of artillery and air power has claimed more and more innocent lives, alienating one slice of society after another.

The intensity of fighting in Damascus reached a new high on Monday, with plumes of black smoke rising above the capital and tanks in suburban streets. Bbut the fate of Syria may also be decided in the remoter governorates, away from the camera, where the ground is shifting, perhaps decisively.

Hassan Hassan, a Syrian columnist at UAE-based the National newspaper, described those shifts in his home region along the Iraqi border as a way of explaining the defection last week of the ambassador to Baghdad, Nawaf al-Fares. At the beginning of the revolt last year, Hassan says, Fares armed his clansmen in the region, part of the Egaidat confederation, and organised them against other Sunni tribes who had joined the insurgency.

His position, however, became untenable last month, when the government mounted an offensive on his home town of Deir ez-Zour, allegedly killing 350 people. "The tribes are aware their stance today will affect their reputations for generations to come," Hassan wrote. "As a leader of a prominent tribe, Mr Al Fares's loyalty to the regime is secondary to his loyalty to the tribe and its place in the region. The news of his defection has already been received well by many tribal leaders. The defection of Fares, a longtime loyalist, shows the regime has lost its ability to turn the tribes against each other, and use them to maintain relative calm. It is yet another example of how the regime has become its own enemy,"

The conservative Gulf monarchies, who are determined to bring Assad down and are widely reported to be supplying arms to the Free Syrian Army, have long identified these tribal allegiances as the key to the regime's survival, and have gone about courting them. It is no accident Fares has made his new base in Qatar.

"The regime is desperate – at all levels they know it is dead, it is a matter of time," Fares said on al-Jazeera over the weekend.

The question now is how much time. Fares said the relatives he left behind were not being targeted by military interrogators. But the regime still has fear at its disposal, and that can be a powerful glue.

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Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of The Road from Damascus, is the latest to join the fray. In a post on his Qunfuz blog (it's Arabic for "hedgehog"), he decries "blanket thinkers" from "the infantile left":

The problem with blanket thinkers is that they are unable to adapt to a rapidly shifting reality. Instead of evidence, principles and analytical tools, they are armed only with ideological blinkers. Many of the current crop became politicised by Palestine and the invasion of Iraq, two cases in which the imperialist baddy is very obviously American. As a result, they read every other situation through the US-imperialist lens ...

This in turn leads to grossly unfair portrayals of the people resisting oppression in Syria, he says.

At best they are passive tools. They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they'll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut.

The blanket thinkers search for evidence of crimes committed by the popular resistance, and when they find them (usually on very flimsy evidence) they use them to smear the entire movement. They demand the resistance negotiate with a regime which has proved again and again that its only strategy is slaughter. They demand that the people remain peaceful as their children are tortured, their women raped, their neighbourhoods levelled.

Leftist blanket thinkers do not apply the same criteria to the popular resistance of the Palestinians. It's Zionists who do that.

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More than 500 Syrians, including several army officers, fled to Turkey on Monday, according to the Turkish daily Zaman. The Syrians include one general, four colonels, one lieutenant colonel, there majors, six captains, one lieutenant and many soldiers with their families, it said.

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Op dinsdag 17 juli 2012 13:47 schreef tong80 het volgende:
Het Syrische regime zal er niet voor terugdeinzen om chemische wapens in te zetten tegen de eigen bevolking.Dat heeft Nawaf Fares tegen de BBC gezegd.
Fares is de Syrische oud-ambassadeur in Irak.Hij liep onlangs over.

Volgens Fares zijn er niet bevestigde berichten dat in Homs al chemische wapens zijn gebruikt door het regime.

De directeur van het Nederlandse Rode Kruis,Cees Breederveld,zegt dat het niet makkelijk is voor hulporganisaties om in te spelen op de gevolgen van chemische oorlogvoering.
Hij zegt geen aanwijzingen te hebben dat Assad al chemische wapens heeft ingezet.