Category Archives: Syria

Britain, Government, Politics, Society, Syria, United Nations, United States

The Syrian Civil War enters its seventh year

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An example of the devastating effects that the Syrian civil war has had. A number of NGOs have reported deteriorating physical and mental health in many children exposed to the futility of war.

Intro: The Syrian conflict, one of the bloodiest in 70-years, has claimed almost 500,000 lives with millions more displaced. The war is about to enter its seventh year with no likelihood of it coming to an end anytime soon. But as several NGO’s have reported, aspects of how children in the region have been affected raises great concern.

THE SYRIAN WAR, a power struggle between President Bashar al-Assad, Sunni rebel groups and other militant factions and splinter groups, gave rise to the extremist Islamic State group (IS), which routinely recruits children to fight and has claimed responsibility for numerous atrocities across the region.

The complex, multi-party, tinderbox conflict has claimed almost 500,000 lives, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and has displaced millions of people, creating a refugee crisis across Europe and the Middle East.

What started as a series of anti-Assad protests in 2011 has led to an all-out war that has spiralled out of control. The fragmented nature of the conflict and the rise of extremist forces, many of which are closely affiliated to Al-Qaeda, have led to an almost total breakdown of normal civilian life in the country.

While the progression of the conflict has stagnated in recent years into an ebb-and-flow territorial war, the last two months have seen Kurdish and Arab coalition forces – backed by the US-led coalition – besieging territory held by IS in eastern Syria.

Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have used the six-year anniversary of the war to give updates on those affected by the conflict.

In a report titled “Hitting Rock Bottom”, UNICEF gave a grave analysis of the deteriorating situation for children.

“Children have paid the heaviest price in the conflict, and in 2016 their suffering hit rock bottom in a drastic escalation of violence,” it said.

“Nearly 6 million children now depend on humanitarian assistance, with almost half forced to flee their homes.”

The report claims that at least 652 children died last year, a 20 per cent increase in the number killed a year earlier. Troubling, UNICEF believes that over 850 children were recruited to fight for various groups in 2016, double the number estimated for 2015.

Another report by OXFAM has taken aim at the growing wave of anti-migrant sentiment around the world.

“Those who have fled Syria are seeing doors slammed in their faces as rich countries across the world enact policies hostile towards refugees,” an Oxfam report has said.

It has also heavily criticised Donald Trump’s blanket ban of migrants from Syria entering the United States, as well as the British government’s cancellation of the so-called Dubs Amendment to give asylum to unaccompanied Syrian child refugees.

Save the Children released a study regarding the mental wellbeing of children in the rapidly worsening conflict. The study claims that one in four children in Syria are at risk of severe mental health disorders.

The organisation interviewed 450 subjects and found signs that many had been traumatised by six years of war, and were “living in an almost constant state of fear” even after escaping from the war zone.

Parents claim their children are showing increasing signs of aggressive and disturbing behaviour, suffering from bedwetting and speech impediments, and in some cases attempting suicide.

At present, almost all major NGOs are claiming that verified instances of murder, maiming and kidnapping are on the increase in Syria.

Although bombing campaigns in eastern Syria may liberate the regions from the threat of Islamic State, an effective and safe resolution to the conflict looks a long way off.

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Britain, Islamic State, Syria, United States

US have advanced plans for taking back Raqqa

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Raqqa, a city in Syria located on the northeast bank of the Euphrates River, is about 160 kilometres east of Aleppo.

Intro: Pentagon plan to seize Raqqa calls for significant increase in U.S. participation.

A PENTAGON PLAN for the coming assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State capital in Syria, calls for significant U.S. military participation, including increased Special Operations forces, attack helicopters and artillery, and arms supplies to the main Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighting force on the ground, according to U.S. officials.

The military’s favoured option among several variations currently under White House review, the proposal would ease a number of restrictions on U.S. activities imposed during the Obama administration.

Officials involved in the planning have proposed lifting a cap on the size of the U.S. military contingent in Syria, currently numbering about 500 Special Operations trainers and advisers to the combined Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. While the Americans would not be directly involved in ground combat, the proposal would allow them to work closer to the front line and would delegate more decision-making authority down the military line from Washington.

President Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to expand the fight against the militants in Syria, Iraq and beyond, received the plan last Monday after giving the Pentagon 30 days to prepare it.

But in a conflict where nothing has been as simple as anticipated, the Raqqa offensive has already sparked new alliances. In just the past two days, U.S. forces intended for the Raqqa battle have had to detour to a town in northern Syria to head off a confrontation between two American allied forces — Turkish and Syrian Kurdish fighters. There, they have found themselves effectively side by side with Russian and Syrian government forces with the same apparent objective.

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Approval of the Raqqa plan would effectively shut the door on Turkey’s demands that Syrian Kurds, considered terrorists by Ankara, be denied U.S. equipment and kept out of the upcoming offensive. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that arming and including the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, in the operation is unacceptable and has vowed to move his own troops and Turkish-allied Syrian rebel forces toward Raqqa.

U.S. officials, some of whom have spoken on the condition of anonymity about the still-secret planning, believe Erdogan’s tough talk is motivated primarily by domestic politics, specifically a desire to bolster prospects for an April 16 nationwide referendum that would transform Turkey’s governing system to give more power to the presidency.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the Baghdad-based U.S. commander of the anti-Islamic State coalition, has said that there was “zero evidence” that the YPG was a threat to Turkey. With some apparent exasperation, Townsend called on all anti-Islamic State forces in northern Syria to stop fighting among themselves and concentrate on the best way to beat the militants.

U.S. talks with Turkey, a NATO ally and coalition member, are ongoing. But events over the past several days in and around the town of Manbij have injected a new element in the conflict that could either help the Americans avoid a direct clash with Ankara, or set the many forces now converging on the town on the path toward a new confrontation.

Manbij, located near the Turkish border about 85 miles northwest of Raqqa, was captured by the Islamic State three years ago and retaken last August by the YPG, backed by U.S. airstrikes and military advisers. The town now forms the western edge of a militant-cleared border strip extending to neighbouring Iraq.

The United States had promised the Turks that Kurdish control would not extend to the west beyond the nearby Euphrates River, and Manbij was turned over to the Manbij Military Council, Arab fighters within the SDF. Kurdish police are in charge of local security, but the Americans have insisted that YPG fighters have largely left the scene.

Turkey disagrees and has long threatened to forcibly eject the Kurds, who it says are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a designated terrorist organisation in both Turkey and the United States that is waging an insurgency inside Turkey for greater autonomy. After Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel allies took the nearby Syrian town of Al-Bab from the Islamic State on Feb. 23, the Turkish-led force began advancing toward Manbij and has captured at least two villages.

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Last Thursday, as Turkish shells reached the outskirts of the town, the Manbij Military Council announced it had invited the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to take over several nearby villages as part of a deal brokered by Russia to avoid conflict with the Turks.

Then on Friday, Moscow announced that Russian and Syrian “humanitarian” convoys were heading toward Manbij. Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis briefed that the convoys also included “some armoured equipment.”

Davis said that the U.S. government had been “informed” of the movements by Russia but that “it’s nothing that we’re party to.”

Meanwhile, photographs posted on social media showed U.S. military vehicles headed into Manbij from the east.

On Saturday, the U.S. military confirmed that it had “increased force presence in and around Manbij to deter hostile acts, enhance governance and ensure there’s no persistent YPG presence,” effectively inserting U.S. forces to keep two coalition members — Turkey and the Syrian Kurds — from fighting.

In postings on his Twitter account, coalition spokesman Col. John L. Dorrian said the coalition “has taken this deliberate action to reassure Coalition [members] & partner forces, deter aggression and keep focus on defeating ISIS,” an acronym for the Islamic State.

The United States and Russia have managed to avoid confrontation in Syria’s separate civil war, where they are on opposing sides. Trump has said repeatedly that the two powers should cooperate against the Islamic State, and he has indicated that the future of Russia-backed Assad is of less concern to him.

The Pentagon disapproves of possible U.S.-Russia cooperation, although U.S. officials are not unhappy at the buffer Russia and Syria now appear to be creating between Turkey and the Kurds, or the prospect of the Syrian government moving into Manbij. A positive result, officials said, would not only prevent Turkish forces and their Syrian allies — many of whom are on the jihadist side of the anti-Assad rebel coalition — from moving into the town, but it would also potentially push any remaining YPF forces to the eastern side of the Euphrates.

While Turkey has supported rebel forces fighting against Assad, it has never come into direct conflict with the Syrian military, and U.S. officials believe it would far rather have the Syrian government in charge of Manbij than the Kurds. There are hopes that Moscow, which has been simultaneously working to improve relations with Turkey, can help persuade Erdogan to back off.

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What the Americans manifestly do not want to see happen is the creation of a new military front and potential conflagration around Manbij that would drain both attention and resources away from plans for Raqqa. With the city believed to be the centre of Islamic State planning for overseas attacks, the offensive is seen as urgent and has already been delayed from original plans to begin in February.

In his final days in office, former president Barack Obama approved plans to send two or three Apache attack helicopters to the Syrian theatre but deferred approval of arming the Kurds as part of the SDF. Rather than moving immediately on the plan already in place, Trump at the end of January ordered the Pentagon to draw up new options by the end of February.

With the only real alternative being to use U.S. ground troops against Raqqa, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has stuck with the basic outline of the plan drawn up under Obama, officials said. The combined Syrian Arab-Kurdish force, now numbering more than 50,000, has moved steadily to within less than six miles of the outskirts of Raqqa in an isolation phase that is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.

Even if Turkey does direct its forces south toward Raqqa, the hope is that the difficult terrain they would have to travel would prevent them from reaching there until after the offensive is well underway.

Rather than a wholesale revision, the new proposal calls for increased U.S. participation, with more personnel and equipment and less-restrictive rules. As they have in support of the Iraqi military in Mosul, U.S. fixed-wing aircraft and attack helicopters would actively back the ground force. U.S. owned and operated artillery would be moved into Syria to pound the militants from afar, while more Special Operations troops would move closer to the front lines — requiring more U.S. military assets to protect them.

The SDF — both Kurds and Arabs — would be supplied with weaponry along with vehicles and equipment to travel through and disarm what are expected to be extensive minefields and other improvised explosive devices along the way.

Trump’s executive order also directed the Pentagon to recommend changes to Obama administration restrictions on military rules of engagement that went beyond those required by international law. Principal among them is an Obama executive order, signed last summer, imposing strict rules to avoid civilian casualties. It is not known whether the new military proposal would lift those restrictions.

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Britain, Government, Syria, United Nations

Assad’s trail of torture and extermination

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Intro: Boris Johnson sickened by Amnesty report that Syrian regime ‘exterminated’ 13,000 captives.

The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has said he was “sickened” by reports that Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has tortured and hanged 13,000 political prisoners in four years.

Amid compelling evidence that the Syrian president’s henchmen carried out an unprecedented “policy of extermination”, Mr Johnson said the dictator had “no future as leader”.

Civilians perceived to be opposed to the brutal regime – including medical doctors and aid workers – were executed in mass hangings of up to 50 detainees at a time, according to a chilling Amnesty International dossier.

Victims were given death sentences after sham trials lasting less than three minutes, often on the basis of confessions extracted through torture, the human rights charity has said. Many thousands of others held at the notorious 20,000-capacity Saydnaya military prison, north of Damascus, died from starvation and disease.

Amnesty International’s year-long investigation drew on graphic accounts from witnesses, including judges, officials, and former guards at the prison.

One source, a former military officer known only as Hamid, who was arrested in 2011, described hearing the killings taking place from the floor above. He said: ‘If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling … We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death.’

The bodies of those hanged are believed to have been dumped in mass graves on military land on the outskirts of the war-ravaged capital.

The report said it was ‘inconceivable that these large-scale practices have not been authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government’.

It is the first evidence said to prove that Assad, 51, has authorised torture to punish opponents and crush dissent. He has long been suspected of such action.

Individual death sentences are supposed to be approved by either the Syrian minister of defence or the chief of staff of the army, both of whom are authorised to act on behalf of Assad.

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Thousands hanged at Saydnaya prison, Amnesty International has said.

Following publication of the study, Mr Johnson took to social media networking site Twitter, and said: ‘Sickened by reports from Amnesty International on executions in Syria. Assad responsible for so many deaths and has no future as leader.’

His comments appear to back away from his suggestions last month that Assad could be allowed to run for re-election in a bid to end Syrian’s civil war, which has left nearly 400,000 dead and half the population displaced.

A statement released by 10 Downing Street said: ‘The Foreign Secretary stressed that Britain [doesn’t] believe that Assad can govern the country or take control of its democratically elected government.’

Amnesty’s report, titled Human Slaughterhouse, reveals that as well as extrajudicial executions, the Syrian authorities are deliberately inflicting horrific conditions on detainees, including torture and denial of food, water and medicine.

Since the uprising began in 2011, the prison has been filled with those accused of opposing Assad or taking part in anti-government protests, as well as military personnel said to be working against the regime or plotting to defect.

Upon arriving at Saydnaya, they undergo a brutal session of beating – referred to as the ‘welcome party’. Witnesses described a methodical routine to the killings, in which the doomed detainees were collected from their cell blocks in the afternoon and told they were being transferred to civilian prisons.

Instead, they were moved to a facility in the grounds known as the ‘red building’, where they were beaten for several hours.

Between midnight and 3am, they were then blindfolded and moved in delivery trucks and minibuses to another part of the jail called the ‘white building’. There, they were taken into a basement room, nooses were placed around their necks and they were hanged. Following the executions, the prisoners’ bodies were taken to Tishreen military hospital where they were registered as having died of natural causes. The corpses were then loaded onto trucks to be secretly buried in mass graves, the report said. Families of the dead were never informed.

Amnesty said the evidence, from between 2011 and 2015, amounted to crimes against humanity and called on the UN to investigate.

A spokesperson for Amnesty said: ‘The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population.

‘The cold-blooded killing of thousands of defenceless prisoners, along with the carefully crafted and systematic programmes of psychological and physical torture that are in place inside Saydnaya prison cannot be allowed to continue. Those responsible for these heinous crimes must be brought to justice.’ The report adds to previous evidence of abuses, which could result in Assad and key figures in his regime being hauled before international criminal courts charged with crimes against humanity.

In August 2013, a defector known only as Caesar fled Syria with files containing photographs of the bodies of more than 28,000 victims who had died under torture in prison.

The state of the bodies – which were covered in horrific wounds – and their sheer number revealed the scale of the abuse.

Amnesty’s report was published ahead of talks in Geneva aiming to end the bloody civil war.

Assad’s representatives are preparing to meet officials from Turkey, who have backed the rebels, later this month. Russia and Iran, both Assad’s allies, will join the talks.

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