Latest News from Syria

[toastman]

'There is 'strong evidence' of Syrian chemical weapons use' | JPost | Israel News

 

[waltky]

Hmmm, message must be lost in translation...

Kerry: US message to Russia not to sell missiles to Syria is 'crystal clear'
May 9, 2013 -- Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday the transfer of advanced missile defense systems from Russia to Syria would be a "destabilizing" factor for Israel's security.

Kerry said the U.S. has expressed concerns about what such defensive systems in Syria would mean for Israel's security. He wouldn't address what the missiles might mean for Syria's civil war. He spoke to reporters in Rome after the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia was preparing to sell the weapons to President Bashar Assad's regime.

Coming just days after Kerry hailed what he described as a U.S.-Russia breakthrough on Syria, the report suggested Moscow may already be angling to further strengthen the Assad regime two years into a war that has killed more than 70,000 people. "We have previously stated that the missiles," Kerry said, "are potentially destabilizing with respect to the state of Israel." "We have made it crystal clear that we prefer that Russia would not supply them assistance," Kerry told reporters alongside new Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino. "That is on record. That hasn't changed."

White House spokesman Jay Carney, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said, "We have consistently called on Russia to cut off the Assad regime's supply of weapons," including air defense systems that destabilize the region. "The provision of additional weapons to the regime will not hasten a political solution," Carney said. Israeli officials said they have asked Russia to cancel the imminent sale to the Assad regime of advanced ground-to-air missile systems. Such weapons would enhance the Syrian government's defensive ability and make it even harder for the U.S. and other governments to consider even the possibility of trying to enforce a no-fly zone in the country or otherwise intervening militarily.

Russia rarely comments publicly on arms sales or transfers, and there has been no official word on the deal in Moscow. Even before Syria's 2011 uprising, the Israelis warned about a sale of S-300 batteries - which can target manned planes, drones and incoming missiles. Moscow had held off on the deal under persistent U.S. and Israeli pressure. The S-300 would be a state-of-the-art upgrade for Syria's aging Soviet-supplied defense system, which was easily circumvented in 2007 when Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear reactor site along the Euphrates River in northeastern Syria.

MORE

See also:

Russia says it will keep selling weapon systems to Syria
May 10, 2013 — Russia defended its sales of anti-aircraft systems to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, just days after joining forces with the U.S. for a new push to end Syria's civil war through negotiations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov avoided saying whether those sales included advanced S-300 batteries. Israel has asked Russia to cancel what it said was the imminent sale of the S-300 missiles, portrayed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as destabilizing to Israel's security. The S-300s would make it harder for the U.S. and other countries to even consider intervening militarily or enforcing a no-fly zone in Syria. The U.S. has urged Russia — an Assad ally along with China, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia — to cut off weapons supplies to Syria.

Despite such disagreements, Russia and the U.S. decided this week to convene an international conference to bring representatives of the Assad regime and the opposition to the negotiating table. Such talks would aim at setting up a transitional government. No date has been set. The regime and the Syrian opposition have welcomed the idea, but with conditions. The opposition says talks can only begin once Assad and his aides have left. The regime says it will keep fighting the rebels, without saying at which stage it would be willing to halt its fire.

The civil war, which began as a popular uprising against Assad in March 2011, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians and displaced several million. The two sides are deadlocked, though the regime has scored recent military gains. On Friday, the U.N. commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, raised alarm over the western rebel-held town of Qusair, close to Lebanon, which has been besieged by Syrian troops for several weeks. Pillay said her team reported a major troop buildup in the area and noted that an increasing number of residents were being displaced.

The commissioner said she fears atrocities if Qusair is overrun. Last week, regime forces were blamed for killing dozens of civilians in Banias and Bayda, two communities in western Syria. "It appears likely that this (the troop buildup) is in preparation for a large-scale attack to uproot the armed opposition from Qusair, and local people clearly fear a possible repeat of last week's killings of civilians," she said in a statement. The Syrian military dropped leaflets over Qusair, urging rebel fighters to surrender, but did not set a deadline for them to do so, according to the office of the Homs governor. Rebels have lost ground in the area since a Hezbollah-backed government offensive there last month.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Tens Of Thousands 'Disappeared' In Syria...

Rights groups say "disappeared" in Syria number in tens of thousands
5/18/2013 — About 30 security agents showed up just after midnight, breaking down the door to an apartment in the town of Daraya near the Syrian capital of Damascus. They grabbed a 24-year-old university student and drove off.

That was a year ago. The young man, who had been providing aid to Syrians displaced by the country's civil war, was never heard from again. His family was told by former prisoners that he ended up in one of the torture dungeons of President Bashar Assad's regime. They don't know if he's dead or alive. More than two years into the conflict, such accounts have become chillingly familiar to Syrians. Intelligence agents have been seizing people from homes, offices and checkpoints, and human rights activists say the targets often are peaceful regime opponents, including defense lawyers, doctors and aid workers.

Syrian human rights monitors say the number of those disappeared without a trace is now in the thousands. By comparison, the official figure of those who disappeared in Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s is about 13,000, though rights activists say the actual figure is more than twice that. In such "enforced disappearances," governments refuse to acknowledge detentions or provide information about those taken. The point traditionally is to get rid of opponents and scare the rest of the population into submission — a rationale laid out in Adolf Hitler's "Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)" decree of 1941.

Syrian detainees who took part in anti-government protests sit in a courtroom before their release in September 2012 in Damascus, Syria. Intelligence agents are grabbing civilians seen as a threat to President Bashar Assad's regime, including human-rights activists and lawyers, and are delivering them to torture dungeons where they vanish.

In Syria, the goal is to "terrorize the society and dry up the revolution," said Anwar al-Bounni, a veteran defense lawyer and human rights campaigner in Damascus. "The regime focuses on arresting peaceful activists to turn it purely into an armed conflict." Four Syrian human rights monitors offered separate estimates ranging from about 10,000 to as many as 120,000 disappeared. The two lower estimates are based on information from families and released prisoners, while the higher figures are based on extrapolation from partial data.

Two international groups, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they think a majority of detainees in Syria are held under conditions amounting to enforced disappearance. Amnesty said it estimates that tens of thousands of Syrians are in detention but does not have exact figures. The wide range of numbers also reflects the difficulty of collecting information at a time of chaos, on a practice the regime doesn't acknowledge.

A U.N. panel said in a 2013 report that when it asked about allegations of thousands of enforced disappearances in Syria, the Assad government responded that "there were no such cases in Syria" and that all arrests were being carried out legally. In Damascus, al-Bounni, the defense lawyer, said he personally knew of hundreds who had disappeared, some for weeks or months and others whose fate remains unknown. The Violations Documentation Center in Syria, one of the rights monitors, said nearly 2,400 detainees have been killed in custody since March 2011, including 1,375 by torture.

Rights groups say "disappeared" in Syria number in tens of thousands - The Denver Post

 

[Indofred]

BBC News - Syrian army storms rebel town of Qusair

Take a look at the pictures.
Homes destroyed as easily as the lives of the civilians who are the real victims of two groups, greedy for power and outside countries supplying arms because it's in their national interest.

Bad news but it hardly gets a mention when people talk about these wars.

 

[SherriMunnerlyn]

A Proxy war for control of Syria and the victims are the civilian population of Syria. I think maybe Nationalism is the greatest threat to Humanity in our world today.

 

[irosie91]

A Proxy war for control of Syria and the victims are the civilian population of Syria. I think maybe Nationalism is the greatest threat to Humanity in our world today.

Totalitarianism has been at the base of all genocides in human history. The most
dangerous totalitarian movement on the planet today is that which envisions a
WORLD MONOTHEISTIC THEOCRACY. Any ideology involves the imposition
of MONOTHEISM-----should be considered genocidal. Any person who announces
that this or that "religion" is "THE RELIGION FOR THE WORLD"----should be
considered a dangerous war criminal