Crisis in Syri� #15 23.000 doden.

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http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2664/Nieuws/article/detail/3306363/2012/08/25/Syrisch-leger-voert-aanvallen-uit-op-Damascus.dhtml

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Volgens de oppositie maken de aanvallen deel uit van een operatie van het leger om de stad 'voor eens en altijd' weer onder controle te krijgen.

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Syria: '200 bodies' found in town near Damascus

Assad's forces accused of massacre in Daraya after scores killed 'execution-style', Syrian activists claim

Syrian opposition activists accused President Bashar al-Assad's forces of committing a massacre of scores of people in a town close to the capital that the army had just retaken from rebels.

More than 200 bodies were found in houses and basements around Daraya, a working-class Sunni town to the southwest of Damascus, according to activists who said most had been killed "execution-style" by troops on house-to-house raids.

Due to restrictions on non-state media in Syria, it was impossible to independently verify the accounts.

"Assad's army has committed a massacre in Daraya," said Abu Kinan, an activist in the town, using an alias to protect himself from reprisals.

"In the last hour, 122 bodies were discovered and it appears that two dozen died from sniper fire and the rest were summarily executed by gunshots from close range," Abu Kinan told Reuters by telephone.

The activist said he witnessed the death of an 8-year-old girl, Asma Abu al-Laban, shot by army snipers while she was in a car with her parents.

"They were trying to flee the army raids. Three bullets hit her in the back and her parents brought her to a makeshift hospital. Nothing could be done for her," he said.

The official state news agency said: "Our heroic armed forces cleansed Daraya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town and scared them and sabotaged and destroyed public and private property."

The Local Coordination Committees, an activists' organisation, said Assad's forces killed 440 people across Syria on Saturday, including dozens of women and children, in one of the highest death tolls since the uprising against his rule broke out in March last year.

The organisation, which monitors Assad's military crackdown, said 310 people were killed in Damascus and its environs, including Daraya, 40 in the northern province of Aleppo and 28 in Syria's Sunni tribal heartland region of Deir al-Zor.

The rest were reportedly killed in the Idlib, Deraa, Hama and Homs, outlying provinces where poverty and discontent with Assad's minority Alawite rule have been building up since bloody repression by Assad's father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s.

Video footage from activists showed numerous bodies of young men side-by-side at the Abu Suleiman al-Darani mosque in Daraya, many with what looked like gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

"A massacre," said the voice of the man who appeared to be taking the footage. "You are seeing the revenge of Assad's forces … more than 150 bodies on the floor of this mosque."

The southern fringe of Damascus is a frontline in what has snowballed over the last 17 months from anti-Assad protests into a sectarian civil war.

Tanks deployed on the Damascus ring-road shelled the southern neighbourhoods of al-Lawwan and Nahr Aisheh late into Saturday night and fighting raged in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of the capital, residents said.

The army overran Daraya, one of a series of mostly rundown Sunni Muslim towns that surround Damascus, on Saturday after three days of heavy bombardment that killed 70 people, according to opposition sources and residents. They said most of the dead were civilians.

UN investigators said in a report this month that both sides in the conflict had performed summary executions - a war crime - but that Assad's troops and militia loyal to the president had committed many more offences than the rebels.

The report said government forces and militiamen loyal to Assad committed a massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla in May that the government blamed on Islamist "terrorists".

The UN estimates that more than 18,000 people have been killed in the conflict that pits a mainly Sunni opposition against a ruling system dominated by the Assad family for the last five decades.

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'Chef geheime dienst luchtmacht Syri� gedood'

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Tegenstanders van het regime van president Bashar al-Assad hebben al-Arabiya laten weten dat Hassan zaterdag is vermoord door een medewerker die de kant van de oppositie heeft gekozen.

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Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2012 14:39 schreef penny-wise het volgende:


Ben niet pro-VS maar als ze nu daar zouden binnenvallen zou ik het toejuichen...

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Iran Said to Send Troops to Bolster Syria

Commanders and Hundreds of Elite Soldiers Deployed to Damascus, Members Say, as Deepening Conflict Worries Key Ally

BEIRUT—Iran is sending commanders from its elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and hundreds of foot soldiers to Syria, according to current and former members of the corps.

The personnel moves come on top of what these people say are Tehran's stepped-up efforts to aid the military of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with cash and arms. That would indicate that regional capitals are being drawn deeper into Syria's conflict—and undergird a growing perception among Mr. Assad's opponents that the regime's military is increasingly strained.

A commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, appeared to offer Iran's first open acknowledgment of its military involvement in Syria.

"Today we are involved in fighting every aspect of a war, a military one in Syria and a cultural one as well," Gen. Salar Abnoush, commander of IRGC's Saheb al-Amr unit, told volunteer trainees in a speech Monday. The comments, reported by the Daneshjoo news agency, which is run by regime-aligned students, couldn't be independently verified. Top Iranian officials had previously said the country isn't involved in the conflict.

Iran has long trained members of the Syrian security apparatus in cybersecurity and spying on dissidents, U.S. officials and Syrian opposition members have said. The decision to send Iranian personnel comes after rebel attacks this summer in Syria's biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, in particular an explosion in July that killed four members of Mr. Assad's inner circle, according to the people familiar with the IRGC.

Syria's regime is increasingly relying on a core of loyalists to conduct operations, say Syrian opposition members and rebel fighters. In recent weeks, Mr. Assad's army has been hobbled by defections, losing territory in Kurdish areas as well as near Turkey's border, these people say. On Monday, a Syrian military helicopter crashed in a ball of fire in Damascus, according to the Associated Press, citing activists and video footage.

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Bashar al-Assad says there is no end in sight to Syrian civil war

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"The truth is that Syria doesn't need a green light when dealing with its internal affairs, neither from our allies or our enemies,"

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In northern Syria, an armed Islamist rebel group claimed it had carried out a major attack on the Taftanaz airbase near the town of Idlib. At least five helicopters were destroyed, it said, with the rebels assaulting the airbase using tanks captured from a Syrian military checkpoint and rocket-propelled grenades.

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"The Iranians rolled out the red carpet for Morsi. But he didn't follow the Iranian script. It was embarrassing for the Iranians," said David Hartwell, senior Middle East analyst at IHS Jane's, adding: "The non-aligned movement tries to be fairly anodyne and focused on anti-imperialism. But Syria has made it problematic. Egypt also views Iranian influence in Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories as particularly unhelpful. It sees it as an Iranian/Shia attempt to spread influence in the region."

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Syrian rebels 'seize air defence base'

Fighters take anti-aircraft rockets and 16 captives in attack on air defence facility in east, says UK-based group

Syrian rebels have seized an air defence facility and attacked a military airport in the east of the country, according to a UK-based monitoring group.

Saturday's attacks in the oil-rich province of Deir al-Zor follow rebel strikes against military airports in the Aleppo and Idlib areas, close to the border with Turkey.

The Syrian government has recently used helicopter gunships and fighter jets to attack rebels and residential areas.

Rebels in Deir al-Zor overran an air defence building early on Saturday, taking at least 16 captives and seizing an unknown number of anti-aircraft rockets, said Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Video posted on the internet by activists showed the officers and soldiers captured by the rebel fighters, and al-Arabiya television broadcast footage of what it said were rockets and ammunition seized in the raid.

Syrian TV also claimed that government forces had repelled an attack on the Rasm al-Abboud air base near Aleppo and showed footage of captured guns and vehicles.

Abdulrahman said rebels also attacked the Hamdan military airbase at Albu Kamal, close to Syria's eastern border with Iraq, but did not succeed in breaking into it.

The attacks come three days after rebels attacked the Taftanaz air base in Idlib province, where they said several helicopters were damaged. The insurgents also said they shot down a fighter jet and a helicopter last week.

Assad's forces have launched numerous air strikes against civilians in rebel-held parts of Syria. Helicopters have strafed towns with heavy machine guns, and jets have unleashed rockets and bombs against opposition strongholds.

Turkey has called for the creation of safe havens inside Syria after the UN refugee agency said the flow of Syrians into Turkey and Jordan – which already host more than 150,000 registered refugees – was increasing markedly.

Turkish government sources said Ankara would again push for agreement on safe zones inside Syria at the UN general assembly later this month and would try to put pressure on Russia and Iran, which strongly oppose any such action.

The Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, a former ally of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said: "We cannot take such a measure unless the United Nations security council decides in favour of it … First a decision for the no-fly zone must be taken, then we would be able to take a step towards a buffer zone," Erdogan said in an interview broadcast on Turkish television late on Friday.

"Bashar al-Assad has come to the end of his political life. At the moment, Assad is acting in Syria not as a politician, but as an element, an actor, of war," he said.

A UN official said 1,600 people were killed in Syria in the last week, the highest weekly figure in nearly a year and a half of conflict, and aid agencies say living conditions are worsening dramatically.

An estimated 1.2 million people are uprooted within Syria, including 150,000 in Damascus and surrounding areas, according to the UN.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he had pressed the Syrian government to allow international aid workers in, and received a positive reply during talks in Tehran this week.

Ban told Reuters he had "long and in-depth discussions with the Syrian officials" on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned Movement meeting. "While I criticised all the parties that have been depending on military means to resolve this issue, the primary responsibility rests with the Syrian government," he said.

But the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said it would be wrong to press Damascus alone to end the violence.

"It is absolutely unrealistic to say that the unilateral capitulation of one of the parties in conflict is the only way out, in a situation when there's ongoing urban fighting," he told students of the Moscow Institute of Foreign Relations.

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Al-Jazeera websites hacked by Assad loyalist group

Group calling itself al-Rashedon said hacking came as 'response to your position against the people and government of Syria'

The websites of the Arabic news network, Al Jazeera, were hacked on Tuesday, apparently by a group sympathetic to the Syrian regime.

Al-Jazeera's English and Arabic websites were affected by the hack, made by a group calling itself al-Rashedon, or "the guided ones".

"This is a response to your position against the people and government of Syria, especially your support of the armed terrorist groups and spreading false fabricated news," the group said in a statement blanketing aljazeera.net. "Your website has been hacked, and this is our response to you."

Al-Jazeera had not commented by the time of publication, but prominent bloggers and journalists were speculating about the motives for the attack on social media.

"I have not heard of this group before," wrote Ahmed Al Oman, a Saudi journalist and blogger, in an email to the Guardian. "Previous attacks of similar nature have been claimed by the Syrian electronic army."

Since the start of the Arab spring, al-Jazeera has made a name for itself as one of the leading news organizations covering the region's instability. Unlike some other state-controlled media, al-Jazeera has been known for aggressive coverage of dictators and oppressive regimes.

"I think the hackers were just trying to make a statement and get their voices heard," said Aaron Zellin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a thinktank based in Washington DC. "It will get them attention, if just for a few days." Zellin added that there had been rumors on Twitter that the hackers might be a cyber arm of the Shabiha militia loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, but that such a connection is difficult to prove.

A number of staff resigned from al-Jazeera earlier this year, accusing it of being biased against the Syrian regime but in favor of Bahrain, a Gulf state neighbor of Qatar, where the network is based.

"Over the past year al-Jazeera has become more sectarian and more biased in what they cover and what they don't cover," said Zellin. "They don't cover issues that don't fit the Qatari foreign policy narrative."

Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari government; critics say it follows its sponsor's foreign policy objectives, although the broadcaster says it is independent of government control.