Wednesday 30 August 2017

Syrian Coalition: Hezbollah-ISIS Deal Exposed Close Links Between Them

Syrian Coalition: Hezbollah-ISIS Deal Exposed Close Links Between Them

 'The Syrian Coalition strongly condemned the negotiations that were conducted between the Hezbollah militia and the Assad regime on one side and the ISIS extremist group on the other. The Coalition expressed surprise at the silence of the international community over these negotiations as it fully rejected their outcome.

 Over 300 ISIS militants on Monday left the western Qalamoun area in Rural Damascus to Deir Ezzor province under regime forces escort after ISIS and the Hezbollah Militia concluded a deal to transfer ISIS militants from the border areas between Syria and Lebanon.

 In a press release issued on Monday, the Syrian Coalition said that the negotiations have exposed the close links between ISIS, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and the Assad regime.

 The Coalition said that these three sides are complicit in the spread of terrorism in Syria and Lebanon. It stressed that the deals resulting from these negotiations fall within the framework of supporting terrorism and violate the resolution of the UN Council Security and the General Assembly which prohibited the establishment of contacts or cooperation with terrorist organizations.

 The Coalition emphasized it totally rejects the deal reached by the three sides and the provision of safe passage for ISIS militants to move from the area bordering Lebanon deeper inside Syria. It called on the Lebanese government to prevent the transfer of terrorist elements from Lebanon to the liberated areas in Syria.

 “Condemnation of this deal should not be limited to the parties involved, but extends to the Lebanese security agencies that played a role in reaching and sponsoring the agreement as well as to international organizations that have remained silent about the deal,” the Coalition added.

 The Coalition reiterated calls on the UN Security Council to shoulder its responsibilities towards this serious violation and all violations and crimes being committed by the Assad regime and its allies targeting the sovereignty of Syria and the rights of the Syrian people to live in security and stability.'

The families of Syria’s disappeared face blackmail with impunity

The families of Syria's disappeared face blackmail with impunity

 ' “I was a revolutionary from the beginning, but my husband had nothing to do with that. He told me: I am a farmer. If Assad is in power, I am a farmer. If he goes, I am still a farmer,” says Ghazal (not her real name), from the small Lebanese town of Al-Marj where she has taken refuge with her five children since July 2015.

 On 9 September 2012, nearly five years ago to the day, her husband was arrested while picking pears on his small parcel of land in the town of Zabandani, by a Syrian army brigade searching for suspects following an attack.

 She has not seen him since, and she does not know where he is being held, or even whether he is still alive. Time has come to a standstill for Ghazal, as it has for thousands of the loved ones of the forcibly disappeared.

 The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) estimates that 106,000 people have been detained or reported missing since the beginning of the popular uprising in March 2011.

 The Syrian regime is responsible for about 90 per cent of these cases, compared to 8.5 per cent for the radical Islamist groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State and the Fatah al-Cham Front.

 Thousands of them have died as a result of torture and hardship, as revealed by the unbearable photographs by Caesar, a former military police photographer who defected in 2013.

 In February 2017, Amnesty International revealed that up to 13,000 detainees had been executed by hanging at the infamous Saidnaya prison.

 The SNHR puts the number of people who have simply fallen off the radar at 65,000, leaving behind families ready to do anything to discover their whereabouts.

 After hoping in vain that her husband would be released after the legal 60 day limit for preventive custody, Ghazal has begun like so many others to move heaven and earth in search for him: “There isn’t a single police station in Damascus where, from the person in charge to the cell warden, my husband’s name hasn’t been mentioned. I was told to go and see people who have lots of blood on their hands, because they alone can release prisoners. I did it. I even paid for a ring for an officer’s wife to get my husband back! But it didn’t work,” she sighs.

 Bashar al-Assad’s regime first used mass detention to silence all the pacifist protestors. But as the popular uprising mutated into armed conflict, then a war of attrition, detention became a source of personal enrichment for the regime’s supporters, explains Ansar Jasim, author of the article The Malice of Power: Arrests in Syria as part of a politico-economic rationale.

 “People will sell their house or borrow money to get their loved ones out of prison, because everyone knows about the horrors that take place in Syrian jails. For the regime, it is a means of ensuring loyalty in its ranks and of alleviating its economic difficulties,” says the researcher.

 The centrepiece of this strategy is the counter-terrorism court. Created by the Counter-Terrorism Law of 2012, this body has created an anomalous justice system detailed in the report Counter-Terrorism Court in Syria: A tool for war crimes, published by the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) in April 2015.

 According to the testimony of lawyers gathered by the organisation, the right to a defence is denied, trials are held behind closed doors and the judges base their decisions on confessions obtained under torture in the detention centres run by the intelligence agencies.

 The simsar act as the eyes and ears of the families of the detainees in the corridors of the court. They are the intermediaries who know which judge or which prosecutor to buy off, in the hope of securing the release or a reprieve for a detainee. Sometimes the court’s judges themselves demand eye-watering amounts from the families of the detainees, failing which they will impose even longer sentences.

 Like certain business people for whom war is a lucrative business, the corruption surrounding the prisoners enables the judges to line their pockets on the backs of the prisoners’ loved ones, already ruined by six years of war.

 Everything can be paid for, from information on where they are being held to the possibility of visiting them, as well as attempts to secure their release. This corruption reaches a climax with the general amnesties decided arbitrarily by the regime, which released 672 detainees at the end of Ramadan last June. Families pay dearly to have their loved ones put on the amnesty list.

 “As soon as an amnesty is announced, the prison officers begin to promise families they will put their loved ones name on the list,” a lawyer told Jasim.

 The only alternative to this institutionalised blackmail is the release of detainees. Alive.

 “I was lucky enough to survive,” says Mansour Omari, one of those who was miraculously freed. Arrested with activists from the Syrian Centre for the Media and Freedom of Expression (Mazen Darwish, Hussein Ghrer, Hani Zitani and Abdel-Rahman Hamada), Mansour Omari was released in February 2013, after a year of torture and ill-treatment, in one of the intelligence agencies’ numerous detention centres.

 He and his cellmates decided that whoever was released first would wear a piece of cloth which bore the names of all the detainees, written in blood using a chicken bone. The task fell to him.

 “I came out with this piece of cloth on which 82 names were written. Some of them got wiped out by sweat when I was transferred to an overcrowded cell. There are 60 left: I have managed to contact most of the families to let them know where their loved one is,” he explains from Sweden, where he has built a new life.

 Six years after the conflict began, some families have decided to end their silence.

 During the talks on Syria in Geneva in February 2017, five women relatives of men who have disappeared, who founded the organisation Families for Freedom marched carrying a photo of their loved ones to demand that the case of the enforced disappearances be put on the negotiating table ahead of the other issues.

 One of the women, Bayan Sharbaji, carried the portraits of Yahya and Maan, her two brothers who disappeared six years ago in Daraya: “We are demanding the release of all prisoners detained without trial and judged in a summary court, the publication of a list of all detainees and their places of detention, the delivery of a death certificate to the families of those that have died, and the opening of detention centres to NGOs to put an end to torture. Whatever the result of our initiative we can no longer remain silent,” she said by Whatsapp from England.

 Ghazal, who has joined the initiative, feels torn between hope and realism: “Our campaign is a powerful means of pressure, because it is peaceful. But the regime does not want to tackle the subject of the disappeared, because everyone knows what happens in the prisons. It is the scandal of the Syrian regime. It knows that if it agrees to open the case, it will be its downfall.” '

Tuesday 29 August 2017

Inside Assad's prisons: Horrors facing female inmates in Syrian jails revealed

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 'Zahira (not her real name) was 45 when she was arrested at her workplace in a suburb of Damascus in 2013. As soon as she arrived at Al Mezzeh Military Airport, she was strip searched, tied to a bed and gang raped by five soldiers.

 For the next 14 days, she was raped, or threatened with rape, again and again and again.

 During one interrogation, in which she says she was sexually penetrated in “every body cavity”, a soldier filmed what was happening and threatened to show it to her family and community.

 Shunted from facility to facility over the course of five months, in addition to repeated brutal sexual violence Zahira was also regularly beaten. One one occasion she was electrocuted and beaten with a hose pipe; on another, tied upside down for over an hour and hit in the face.

 Between interrogations at Al Mezzeh she was held in solitary confinement, in a cell no bigger than one metre by one metre, with no natural light.

 In Military Intelligence Branch 235, she slept in a three by four metre cell with up to 48 other women that was so cramped the prisoners had to sleep in shifts. They were allowed to use the toilet once every 12 hours, and to wash once in every 40 days.

 Zahira was only released from the notorious Adra prison when the conditions affected her health so severely she lost consciousness and was taken to hospital, her jailers fearing they’d killed her.

 On arrival at a medical facility doctors found she had hepatitis, pneumonia and anaemia. She had to stay in hospital for four months for corrective surgeries for faecal-urinary incontinence caused by her repeated rapes.

 The woman’s story is not easy to read. Experiencing what she went through is beyond the imagination of most of us.

 But Zahira, and dozens of other brave women, have shared their stories with a network of exiled Syrian doctors and lawyers, who have documented what happened to them in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s prisons in a new report.

 One pregnant woman, arrested because the government suspected her husband of supplying medicine to rebel forces, describes seeing dead bodies dragged through corridors, leaving them slick with blood. The screams of those being tortured still haunt her.

 Another former detainee described being locked in a pitch black cell for six days with a dead body. A razor blade had also been purposefully left there, and she used it to try and kill herself.

 The physical and mental scars from detention will affect these women for the rest of their lives. Many feel shame, and their relationships with their families and communities has changed because of the stigma attached to sexual assault and rape.

 Their hope is that shedding a light on what happens in Assad’s detention centres will amount to international pressure to allow inspectors into the country and thus stop the government acting with impunity.

 What their testimony also means, however, is that officials in Syria’s government, police and military could be held accountable for their actions in potential future war crimes trials.

 “This might be the most powerful evidence we have, the international lawyers say,” one neurosurgeon and founding member of Syrian NGO Lawyers and Doctors for Human Rights(LDHR) said on the phone from Gaziantep, on the Turkish-Syrian border.

 “This is one of our best chances to get justice for these crimes against humanity.”

 There has been precious little in the way of legal redress for any of the victims of Syria’s complex six-year-old war so far. There are few avenues open to them.

 Carla del Ponte, a distinguished international war crimes prosecutor, resigned from her position on the UN’s investigative panel into human rights abuses in the civil war earlier this month because she was so frustrated with its inability to hold criminals to account.

 “I give up. The states in the [UN] Security Council don’t want justice,” she told media when it emerged she had quit.

 The Security Council, she said, should have appointed a court similar to those for the Rwanda and Yugoslavian conflicts – a decision vetoed by permanent member Russia, which is a key backer of the Assad government.

 While the investigative panel has compiled thousands of interviews and other documentation of possible war crimes committed by all sides in Syria, the work was pointless without a tribunal, she added.

 “We have had absolutely no success” holding perpetrators of war crimes in Syria to account, the prosecutor said. “For five years we’ve been running up against walls.”

 Faced with a powerless UN and no prospect of an International Criminal Court tribunal, transitional justice and human rights lawyers have begun trying new tactics.

 In March, a Spanish court agreed to hear the case of the torture and death of a 43-year-old truck driver at the hands of the Syrian government, because the man’s sister, a Spanish citizen, was the plaintiff.

 Under international law relatives of victims of crimes against humanity committed elsewhere are also counted as victims – so the Spanish judge’s decision to hear it was viewed as an important landmark for potentially prosecuting high-level Syrian officials.

 Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers, the Madrid-based legal advocacy group that bought the case, said in a statement it would “specifically allow the courts to investigate the torture and execution of thousands of civilians in the illegal detention centres” operated by the Assad government.

 It could also mean international arrest warrants could be issued for the nine Syrian officials named in the complaint – meaning their assets could be seized or they could be charged if they travel abroad.

 While the decision was reversed due to a split panel of Spanish judges last month, the case has been appealed. Stephen J Rapp, a former United States ambassador at large for the Office of Global Criminal Justice and current nonresident fellow at The Hague Institute for Global Justice, who helped to file the preceedings, told The Independent if necessary they would fight it to the Spanish Supreme Court.

 “The attorneys of Guernica 37 are quite confident regarding the law and of eventual success,” he said.

 “Given the years of pain that has been visited on tens of thousands family members of persons who have been forcibly disappeared into Syrian government custody this is also a very important issue of principle.”

 Buoyed by the progress in Spain, Syrian victims and survivors now living in Germany have also filed a prosecution case based on an investigation by the NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).

 This represents another type of case – one based on the concept of universal jurisdiction, which allows states to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where their crimes were committed because of the severity of the allegations.

 More than 65,000 people are thought to have died in the Syrian regime’s prisons over the last six years, and thousands and thousands more have faced abhorrent treatment in detention. The allegations are crimes against humanity - and are thus too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage, the prosecutor will argue.

 LDHR’s activists are hopeful that their findings – compiled under the Istanbul Protocol, the UN’s methodology on how to recognise and document signs and symptoms of torture so the documentation may serve as valid evidence in court – will be presented as evidence in future cases constructed on the same basis.

 “There were too many women to choose from, with horrible stories, when we set about compiling this report," the LDHR doctor said.

 “I have often felt powerless during the war. This is documenting our history, no matter how terrible it is, and probably the only way the Syrian people will ever have some justice.” '

Quietly, the Assad regime is reshaping Syria

Image result for stephen starr pro regime militias syria's anarchy

 Stephen Starr:
 'Away from the fight­ing and humani­tarian disasters pummelling Syria, another tragedy that may have deep socio-economic consequences for generations is unfolding.

 As residents of opposition-held districts and towns have been forced from their homes by the violence that encompassed Syria, an illegal, state-sponsored mass redistribution of property has been taking place.

 A report published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation stated that authorities in Damas­cus were systematically destroy­ing property owned by communi­ties that opposed it during the war. The regime has also “erased and falsified property records with the aim to prevent the population from returning and from claiming any rights,” and “has passed many laws and regulations to formalise the transfer of public assets to regime cronies,” the report said.

 The Syrian regime is attempting to reshape the country’s societal map by stealing and redistribut­ing private property.

 The document, written by Jihad Yazigi, a former resident of the Syrian capital and editor of the Syria Report, recognises that many claims are subject to broad interpretation or based on circumstantial evidence. Much of this is due to the absence of trans­parent or formal government procedures or the lack of inde­pendent media outlets to report on individual cases of the state allegedly stealing from people.

 Nonetheless, Syrian authori­ties’ efforts suggest the destruc­tion of homes and businesses is a central strategy of its war effort. It is an enterprise that will allow the regime to fund itself for years.

 The destruction of residential and commercial buildings, properties rendered uninhabit­able or unusable, forces the owners to leave. Government authorities can then claim ownership and hand the proper­ties to influential individuals to secure their allegiance.

 In the words of one World Bank analyst writing on the subject: “For now, Syria’s disparate reconstruction efforts appear to be cementing divisions rather than building bridges.”

 The Friedrich Ebert Foundation report said the regime was readying itself for the massive reconstruction work needed ahead. It has established a council to oversee the metal and steel sector and two regime cronies have joined forces to run a major steel melting plant.

 An entire district in Hama, once controlled by rebel groups and reduced to ruins, has been declared open to investment by a state development commission without the approval or consent of the people who lived and worked there.

 With reports suggesting the post-war rebuilding of Syria could cost $200 billion, the regime and its backers clearly plan on being front and centre when the awarding of contracts begins in earnest.

 There was also, the report stated, growing evidence that Iranian elements were buying or being given property in and around Damascus and Homs. Iran has invested heavily in propping up the Assad regime and would, once the guns have fallen silent, exact a heavy price for this. Given that the Syrian regime is essen­tially broke, the ability to confis­cate privately owned land to pass off to its supporters, including influential Iranians, is crucial to its survival.

 The Assad dictatorship has prior record in this regard. Starting in 1973 under President Hafez Assad, Syrian authorities moved thousands of people to the predominantly Kurdish north-eastern region of the country, where it built 41 villages for settlers. The intention was to establish an Arab belt that would ensure that corner of the country would have a pro-government population. In that case, Kurdish-owned land was expropriated by the state.

 What are the long-term consequences of the regime’s current actions? Undoubtedly, we are seeing the redistribution of entire local populations because of their loose opposition to the regime. Broadly, it has been Sunni Syrians who make up the majority of those opposed to the regime. This is not a conse­quence of sectarian loyalties but simply because most of the Syrian population are Sunni Muslims. As such, this systematic cleansing of mostly Sunni communities may constitute crimes against humanity.

 When Israel began the forced removal of Palestinian communi­ties and settling Palestinian territory in the West Bank, the Arab world was enraged. Now that Damascus’s tactics mirror that same occupation, the Arab world cannot ignore the Assad regime’s actions. That is some­thing to be remembered when the task of rebuilding Syria finally comes into view.'

Friday 25 August 2017

Something better change



 Abu Summiyah Khalidi:

 'Disunity, fighting over the few areas liberated, bending over backwards to please foreign nations, accepting the role of becoming proxies instead of having an independent voice, etc are some of the reasons which have led to this position. On the other hand Russia has played this one smart and has outmaneuvered their opponents inside Syria as well as in the international stage. ‬

 ‪The Russian strategy is working and the opposition are to blame above all else. The Russian strategy of enforcing "cessation of hostility zones" is very VERY clear in its motives and inevitable outcome. Russia is attempting to create these "ceasefire zones" with regional and international backing to enable the regime to recapture all of eastern Syria from IS. When this task is done, the regime (with full Russian and probable western aide) will try to recapture Idlib under the guise of fighting "AQ" in Idlib which doesn't exist. The remaining pockets of resistance whether in Ghoutta, Homs, Dara, etc will then be offered a humiliating "political solution" which will include Asad remaining - and if they refuse - the regime (w/Russian backing and western negligence) will finish off these few remaining areas. This is the plan, and EVERYONE sees it coming. Now what can be done to avert this? Is there any way out of this seemingly "inevitable" finale? ‬

‪ Yes. But with this opposition as it stands it seems very unlikely. This clear plot - of allowing the regime to retake east Syria then enabling a global alliance to fight HTS- had a huge impact on the latest HTS/Ahrar dilemma. Let me put it very clear - the oppositions only real hope is IDLIB all other areas mean very little if Idlib falls. And let me put it even clearer, if something didn't change and real fast in Idlib and the opposition remains divided IDLIB WILL FALL. Frankly put no ONE group can take the fight to the regime alone. We saw this clearly in the HTS led offensive in reef Hama which faltered near Qomhana at the gates of Hama city. In Idlib, Reef Hama, and Reef South Aleppo there are over 40,000 fighters - they can take the fight to the regime and change the current dynamics - but unfortunately the opposition has instead chosen division and has become content with the current state as "proxies" - which will lead to their demise. ‬

 ‪Whether you agree or disagree with the recent HTS positioning after the infighting between them and Ahrar, one thing is for certain. The "international community" is all to willing to hand Syria to the regime on a silver platter under the guise of fighting "AQ". This poses a problem of its own and HTS has to be wise enough to make the correct decision. ‬

‪ HTS has to remove these justifications no matter how unjust and false they may be. Their are several ways this can be done and recent leaks from HTS figures have revealed that HTS is in fact undergoing a new project in northern Syria designed specifically for this task. ‬

‪ A) HTS has to hand over civil administration to local bodies selected by the noteable figures in the designated locations. In short the affairs of the cities and their administration has to be run by local bodies free from any groups ‬

 ‪B) The task of administrating justice and the courts, police, etc has to be tasked to a united justice administration and not the task of any one group‬

 ‪C) All groups must disband into one unified military body led by a unifying figure - some have floated the name of the first FSA leader Riyaad Al As'ad (whom in my opinion is the perfect candidate)‬

 ‪Recent meetings including HTS leader and ex-Ahrar leader Abu Jabber Al Sheikh have hinted that this project is in fact underway and HTS media outlet Aba news covering the local Idlib civil administration meetings further solidifies that HTS is pushing in this direction. ‬

 ‪Recent leaks from Turkish officials including Turkish media outlets have mentioned in detail that Turkey made it very clear that in order for Turkey to oppose a Mosul like operation targeting Idlib - there are 3 demands as they put it: ‬

 ‪1. Civil admin‬
 ‪2. Free police force (as they put it) ‬
 ‪3. HTS disbands ‬

 ‪These "demands" no matter how unjust HTS may see it are all plausible and this opportunity should now be missed. Now more then ever, all groups in Idlib need to disband and unite in one body. HTS essentially handicapping Ahrar and removing them as the largest group in Idlib makes this scenario far more likely. Keep in mind that the failed merger which would have united most of Idlib under one command failed due to Ahrar rejecting the proposal after they initially accepted the proposal. ‬

 The next few months are crucial for the fate of Syria, unless it is played well everything can be lost. And if it is played well - I say this with certainty - everything will change for the better. The regimes biggest ally has been the opposition which has shot itself in the foot and has refused to win! Insha'Allah this will all change if everything goes to plan.'




Wednesday 23 August 2017

Bringing up baby in a Syrian jail: I covered his ears to block out the screams

Image result for Bringing up baby in a Syrian jail: I covered his ears to block out the screams

 'Omar had been imprisoned for 14 months when he learned to walk.

 His mother can’t recall the exact date, all she knows is that they were in the Adra jail outside Damascus.

 “I didn't recognise whether it was day or night,” she says. “We weren't allowed to leave, for the bathroom or for a shower.”There wasn’t much legroom in the dark and airless room that she and her son shared with their fellow prisoners.

 “I would stand up and create some space so I could teach him how to walk, playing with him,” says Om Omar from her new home in the countryside of Idlib.

 She does not reveal her true identity for fear of her life and asks to be referred to as "Om Omar" - which translates into English as "mother of Omar".

 “I was on one side and another girl named Marwa was in front of me, about one-and-a-half metres away. I would walk with him, using my hands, towards her. Then we would swap over.”

 When Omar fell, his mother would catch him. Slowly but surely, with uncertain steps to begin with, he found the confidence to walk.

 “He was strong,” she says. “He was the only baby there. It made the other prisoners happy to look at him. It was one happy time amid the darkness of this prison and its cruel guards.”

 Omar spent the early years of his life in a Syrian jail while his mother was tortured. This is their story.

 When she was younger Om Omar, now 38 and originally from Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria, would imagine what life might hold for her.

 “Like every woman in the world, I would dream of having babies,” she recalls, “of raising my family in a good decent house like every family in the world.

 “When I was teenager, I was so obsessed with babies, taking care of our neighbours’ babies and friends’ when they used to visit my mother. I dreamt I would have at least one, and I did. But unfortunately it wasn't the life I expected."

 Om Omar and her husband Khalid, also from Deir ez-Zor, married in 2006 and moved to Aleppo before the war, where he was employed in a fabric manufacturing business by his uncle.

 When conflict broke out, the city, the country’s second largest, rapidly became a focus for protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

 Khalid lived in the rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods: He joined the Free Syrian Army but was killed by mortar fire during a battle against government forces in August 2013. He was 44 and had been married to Om Omar for seven years.

 Omar was born in March 2014 in Eza’a in western Aleppo. Father and son never met.

 Om Omar was widowed, alone and had no contact with her family, who disapproved of the couple’s activism against the government. She had already been detained in 2011 and 2013 for her opposition, the second time for three days.

 “I didn't bother trying to talk to them or convince them,” she says. “I continued with my activism.”

 Her life now, Om Omar says, is like that of a single woman. But while she grieved for the loss of her husband, she also worries for the future of herself and her son.

 Even before Khalid’s death, Om Omar feared arrest by the government. For almost two years, she had moved much-needed medicine to eastern Aleppo through Bustan al-Qasr, a rebel district and home to opposition groups.

 The neighbourhood, which was a frequent haunt for snipers, provided a corridor between the divided city before it became a no-go zone after clashes in 2014.

 Om Omar knew that her activism carried a high risk - but still regarded it as her duty. “I was reckless, yes. But I had to do it and don't regret it. I had a priority, which was the sick people who needed the medicine.”

 She thought those hopes of her younger years would never come true. “This was my life after giving birth and Khalid's death,” she says. “I was struggling to breastfeed my baby because of the intensity and pressure I was living under at that time.”

 And then, in September 2014, Om Omar's life took another turn for the worse.

 One night, five men from a government intelligence agency burst into her home while she and Omar were asleep. She believes they were betrayed by a neighbour.

 The men broke the crockery and chairs and overturned family possessions.

 They searched the house, swore at Om Omar and took away packets of medicine.

 They accused her of helping injured terrorists with medical supplies.

 Om Omar denied the allegations and refused to provide the names of her social circle, lest they also fall under suspicion and face arrest. When she began to scream, the men put guns to her head. “The raid was the straw that broke the camel's back," she recalls.

 She and Omar were then taken to the agency HQ in Damascus, more than 200 miles away where, Om Omar says, “the horror began”.

 Om Omar was blindfolded when she first entered the state’s prison system – but she could already detect the “stinky, dirty smell” that would permeate her life during the coming years.

 “I felt shocked,” she says. “I was shaking with my crying baby, wondering what my or his destiny would be.”

 Mother and son were to spend nearly a month there, then shuttled between other prisons across the capital, including that at Al-fiha'a. “They took the baby from me on the first night, to put pressure on me, then they gave him back after the first interrogation."

 Omar was two months old at the time.

 “When I entered, there was water on the ground that smelled terrible," she says. "The walls were full of words, the names of previous prisoners who used be in the same room. It was like an abandoned basement that had not been fixed for ages. I could barely walk because I felt dizzy. I had not slept and it was night.”

 The room was crammed with other women. There was no ventilation: Instead, prisoners resorted to digging holes through the walls to try and let in air. Throughout her first night, Om Omar could hear the sounds of men and women screaming.

 For her first interrogation Om Omar was led into a room. Her hands were bound. Her eyes were blindfolded. She was hit with every step she took.

 The interrogator asked her about her family, about her husband, about her work. She was accused of taking medical supplies to help the Free Syrian Army.

 When Om Omar started to answer, her interrogator hit her on the head. "Stop lying and tell me the truth about your work and husband!” she recalls him shouting.

 "In the beginning I was utterly terrified because of the torture and beating,” Om Omar says. “I was afraid of being raped, or killed.”

 And then there was the threat to Omar. Human rights groups have documented how the Assad government has tortured and killed children to punish, or extract information from, their families.

 “My child had nothing to do with jails or anything else," says Om Omar. "But the Syrian regime is criminal enough to kill and imprison children or babies. My son was always on my mind. Who's going to take care of him? Are they willing to kill him too? Or beat him in front of me?”

 In the days after her first interrogation, Om Omar was left in an overcrowded room. Omar cried all the time. The guards paid no attention to her appeals for food or baby supplies. Eventually she had to improvise diapers by ripping up pieces of old clothing.

 Soon the torture sessions became a regular part of prison life. “When I came back after every interrogation, I held my son and cried,” Om Omar says. “So did he.”

 Om Omar also had to face torture sessions at night, the first after she had been detained for a week. She recalls how she handed Omar to one of the friends she had made in prison before she was dragged to a large room and faced, as she puts it, by a “fat middle-age man, with a big stick in his hand. He started to come close to me, and said: ‘Tell me everything or you will never return to see your baby tonight.' I said nothing. I was shocked.”

 The man screamed at Om Omar to confess, then beat her to the ground. She was covered in blood and already barely able to stand. Later he returned with an accomplice and a rope, which he hung from the ceiling. Om Omar was then suspended by her bound hands, her feet only just touching the ground.

 What she describes is a common and well-documented form of torture practised by the Assad regime. Prisoners call this method "shabeh" (hanging), according to a report released by the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria in September 2013, which inflicts “awful pain, ligament rupture and semi-permanent paralysis in the hands".

 Om Omar was left strung up for hours. Then, more questions. Still, she said nothing. “I knew that if I said anything then they would keep on torturing me and increase the level and the brutality of the torture.”

 This treatment continued for almost two months. She recalls fellow detainees being repeatedly raped and tortured, dying from hanging or lack of medical treatment.

 At one point Om Omar was moved to the notorious Branch 215 where, the VDC reported, up to 70 prisoners would be crammed into a cell four metres by four metres. Consistent testimony from survivors describes how prisoners were starved or thrown onto the floor “swimming in a pool of blood and pus that oozes out of their bodies due to the lack of sanitisers and hygienic conditions”.

 In December 2015, Human Rights Watch reported that at least 3,532 detainees had died at the centre, based on evidence smuggled out of Syria, although the group regards this figure as an underestimate.

 To many Syrians, the centre is simply known as “the Branch of Death”.

 In December 2014, Om Omar and Omar were taken to Adra prison, where they were to spend the rest of their imprisonment.

 About a year after they were first arrested, Om Omar started telling Omar about the outside world, “about real life, about parks, school and so on".

 Omar began to form words when he was nearly 18 months old and his mother was teaching him parts of the Quran. “His first word was 'mommy', which he said very roughly,” she recalls. Teaching her son the word "daddy" caused great sadness - but Om Omar wanted Omar to remember that he had a father.

 The toddler's progress had a positive effect on the other prisoners. “The atmosphere in the jail room was happy, despite the desperate conditions we were all living under,” Om Omar says. “Everyone gave Omar a kiss. But then the guards heard that it was getting noisy and started to hit the metal door quite hard, which made Omar cry.

 “They didn't supply me with milk or any other items that I needed for my newborn baby. His size and weight were low because of the lack of food when he was meant to be growing.

 “Once he got an infection because of the hot weather in the prison. It was so incredibly bad, he couldn't sleep, or calm down, until the prisoners came and took me to the prison doctor and gave him medicine.” Still Omar did not get better. Eventually some friends "had some leaves which we put in water and after half an hour he fell into a deep sleep".

 Prison was Omar’s home. Sometimes he might toy with a blanket – but it was a world where he was too young to make friends.

 “That broke my heart,” his mother says, “because I looked back at when I was pregnant with him and the life I dreamt of him having in the future. Of buying his small bed and toys and everything any mother dreams of getting for her baby.

 “It's heart-breaking. It made me cry many times at night, thinking of a bright future with his dad, who is dead already.”

 Om Omar would sing to lull her son to sleep or else “start to tell him short stories about the Prophet Muhammad and his fellowship, trying to reassure him”.

 But sometimes Omar could not sleep because the weather was too hot or too cold - or because of the sounds of torture from the prison yard.

 “I was covering his ears to prevent these voices from entering his head,” Om Omar says. “I couldn't do it in the end, he was crying so intensely when he heard these voices.”

 For support, Om Omar clung to her faith and the struggles of the prophet as well as the love of her son and encouragement from fellow prisoners.

 “Many times I burst into tears out of pressure and desperation. I thought I would die here and never get out to live a normal life and in a house. They were the worst days of my life.

 “I took an oath that I wouldn't give up, because of Omar, so long as he's with me... for him and his beloved dead father, who left me a piece of him. I'll be taking care of him for the rest of my life."

 And then Om Omar and Omar were free. On 8 February 2017, the government cut a deal with opposition forces that resulted in the release of 50 women from government prisons. As part of the agreement, Om Omar had to pay a judge just under $6,000.

 Her relief was uncontainable, she recalls, as she told Omar that they would return home and see the sun, people, children. “I cried a lot,” she says. “It was unbelievable, the reaction on his face. He was crying and happy.”

 Om Omar now lives with a friend in the countryside in Idlib and is in contact again with her sister, with whom she lost touch while she was imprisoned. She also has space to reflect on what her years in detention did to her and her son, who is comprehending the outside world for the first time.

 "One time he asked ‘Are we in heaven, Mum?' because he saw birds and cats and wanted to know,” she says. “You can imagine how surprised he was when he was realised it was the actual world.”

 Omar, who now sports short brown hair, lives at a rehabilitation centre with other children in an attempt to reintegrate him back into society. His mother visits her son as much as she can.

 Ahmad Khaldon, assistant manager at the facility, said that Om Omar’s case is not that unusual amid a conflict that has left more than 470,000 people dead, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research.

 “They have been through similar circumstances, of struggling from the aftermath of the war and its physiological effects and losing their childhood," he says. "We try to give them the proper atmosphere of bringing up a family, which they miss back in their home.”

 At first Omar had problems interacting with other children, including fighting, but is now more relaxed and playing and eating. Om Omar says: “It’s like he's born again, seeing everything new and adapting to aspects of his new life. He has flashbacks about what and how it was like in the prison, but he's got better recently."

 He is forming new memories of things he had never seen before, of animals, buildings, cars and food.

 “I hope he gets rid of all the bad influences from the first three years of his life and starts a new page with no bombing or death or fighting, just craving a normal, decent life where he can have what he wants."

 Will Om Omar tell Omar the full story of those years spent in prison?

 “I will tell him what happened,” his mother says. “I won't lie to him ever. He will know from the internet what has happened to his country, his land, his dad and how death and devastation were brought to his land.

 “The media tells people everything, so I would rather tell him myself. I will tell him how they were torturing men and women. And how hard it was to carry on and be positive and have a dream.” '

Image result for Bringing up baby in a Syrian jail: I covered his ears to block out the screamsImage result for Bringing up baby in a Syrian jail: I covered his ears to block out the screams

ISIS Jurist Conspired With Hezbollah to Defeat Rebels: FSA Commander













 'Jihadist fighters have blamed Islamic State (ISIS) jurist and commander Ahmad Wahid al-Abd (Abou al-Baraa) for losing rebel strongholds at the Syrian-Lebanese border following the commander's recent surrender to the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.

 In an exclusive interview with Zaman al-Wasl, rebel commander Samer Mohamad al-Masri said Hezbollah members were able to advance and take control of the Jurd Jiyet and Maraat Yabroud areas without facing any notable resistance.

 Masri said his faction had imprisoned members of the ISIS forces, including Abou al-Baraa, but that other parties intervened to see their release because those arrested were locals. No foreigners were among the group members being held by Masri.

 The ISIS fighters were released after they pledged to return to their homes and abandon the organization, except they soon returned to fight the Free Syrian Army factions until Jurd al-Qalamoun fell and rebel fighters were forcefully displaced to Idleb.

 In the interview, Masri claimed that Abou al-Baraa’s faction in Qalamoun received half a million dollars a month from oil billionaire George Hassouani for more than two years. Hassouani, who is closely tied to the Assad regime and is facing sanctions from the U.S. and EU, is known to have financed and purchased oil from ISIS.

 Despite claims it was fighting the Hezbollah forces, ISIS forces based in the Qalamoun were secretly coordinating with the militia to kill rebel fighters in the area, Masri said, adding that the Lebanese group's shelling never targeted ISIS areas.'

Monday 21 August 2017

Remembering Ghouta: Obama's meaningless red line

Remembering Ghouta: Obama's meaningless red line

 Sam Charles Hamad:

 'Winston Churchill once remarked about appeasement that it's like someone feeding a crocodile and hoping that it will eat them last.

 This was true of the threat posed to the world by an expansive superpower like Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but when it comes to the Syrian civil war and its allies, the appeasers do so without any fear of being consumed by the war that has been unleashed by Assad and his allies.

 They do so without the fear of ever having to face death squads, or torture dungeons, or missiles, or barrel bombs, or napalm - or, of course, poison gas. Only nameless and faceless Syrians must suffer these things.

 It was on this day four years ago, and a week after Sisi made his brutal name on the world stage by massacring hundreds of people at Rabaa and Nadha, that Bashar al-Assad poisoned to death over 1,000 innocent people with sarin gas in the Ghouta area of Damascus.

 Sarin, it ought to be noted, brings a particularly brutal form death, and before it strips of you of your life, it strips you of dignity. This is precisely its function - cruelty and terror.

 Those of us who live far away from such horrors can barely begin to understand the personal aftereffects of this violent chemical weapon on those who survive. Pictures and eyewitness testimonies of whole families lying dead in their beds were widespread, while survivors spoke of stepping over bodies trying to look for friends and loved ones.

 However, while Assad's 2013 Ghouta attack was a particularly vicious one, it must be remembered that it was but one atrocity within the much larger atrocity that is his genocidal war against those Syrians who revolted against his tyrannical regime. Most of the murder, maiming, torture and trauma in Syria is carried out by so-called "conventional weapons", but it was Barack Obama who famously said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "red line" – one which, if crossed, would see US action taken against the perpetrators.

 When this red line was finally crossed at Ghouta, it turned out to be little more than a red herring. One of the most perverse narratives concerning the events after Ghouta was that there was a "drive to war" by the US and its allies. At its very worst, this narrative produced conspiracy theories, mostly emanating from the alt-Left and alt-Right, which claimed that the Ghouta attack was a "false flag" used to justify western "regime change" against the victim, Assad.

 Of course, these conspiracy theories have been firmly debunked, but even the conventional narrative seems to in some way accept that the US failing to live up to its promises to the Syrian opposition was in some way a triumph for "peace". Firstly, following Ghouta, there was no "drive to war" - Obama reacted to the attack with characteristic hesitance and indecisiveness.

 In truth, the calculation had been made long before Ghouta that the US would not decisively intervene to aid the Syrian opposition in overthrowing Assad. However, if Obama was to be taken at his word, the "red line" that was crossed at Ghouta might be the impetus needed for the US and NATO to act as they had done in Libya to avert further mass murder.

 This is what was rendered by a collection of so-called "peace" activists, Assad supporters and "anti-war" groups as a "drive to war", as if acting to protect Syrians in any manner would've been a greater injustice than atrocities such as Ghouta.

 The closest any "drive to war" came to materialising, was when UK Prime Minister David Cameron - one of the key proponents of NATO intervention on behalf of the Libyan revolution - held a vote in the House of Commons on whether the UK would aid the US in any strikes on Assad regime targets following Ghouta.

 The vote failed, mostly due to the squalid politicking of then Labour opposition leader Ed Miliband who thought he could exploit weaknesses in Cameron's coalition government.

 Watching Labour MPs who had voted for the catastrophic Iraq war based on the spectre of mythical weapons of mass destruction, trooping through the lobby to vote against protecting Syrians who had been the victim of real WMDs was sickening. Cameron, the alleged warmonger intent on overthrowing Assad as he had done Gaddafi, respected the decision of parliament and said no more about it.

 In the US, intervention following Ghouta was suggested in a bill that didn't even make the floor of the Senate. There was no real "drive to war" – military action was not favoured by Obama. Even when it looked like the US might be expected to act, John Kerry went out of his way to reassure Russia and Assad's allies that any such action would be "unbelievably small".

 What followed was not a drive for some US-driven fantasy war of regime change against Assad, but rather a Russian-driven drive to continue Assad's very real war of regime preservation. With the US allegedly poised to strike, far from the prophets of doom who very conveniently croak about World War III whenever the very notion of action against Assad is brought up, Russia didn't react with threats of military violence to defend its ally from a potential US strike.

 Rather, it came up with a plan that simultaneously got Obama out of having to act against Assad, while allowing Assad to get away with Ghouta entirely unscathed.

 The Kerry-Lavrov deal, as it was called, allowed Assad to allegedly get rid of his chemical weapons stockpiles under supervision. Some people perversely called this deal "peace", but it was merely a manner through which Obama's red line that morphed into a red herring, could now become a green light – a green light for Assad to continue his genocidal war by conventional means.

 As Syrian revolutionary activist and Ghouta survivor Dani Qappani put it, "If a murderer kills someone with a hammer, you don't just take away the hammer and leave the murderer unpunished".

 But this is precisely what happened. Russia and the US could act as if they were dealing with Assad's chemical weapons stockpiles, which are of course merely one aspect of his Iranian-supplemented, Russian-provided arsenal, as well as posing as "peacemakers", while the barrel bombs and missiles were falling on Syrians.

 Even on its own terms, the Kerry-Lavrov deal failed dramatically, assuming it was ever meant to succeed. Yet barely anyone has mentioned the great crime that was the US-Russia theatrics that followed Ghouta. When 130 people were murdered by Assad using sarin gas again at Khan Sheikhun earlier this year, the Trump administration at least responded with a warning that it wouldn't tolerate Assad using chemical weapons. But, as we've seen subsequently, no US administration cares about the genocidal destruction unleashed by Assad and his allies in its totality.

 It's of no surprise that following the brutality of Ghouta and the lack of any meaningful action to protect Syrians and aid rebels in fighting Assad, the region was partially eclipsed by the black banner of the Islamic State group, trading, as it does, on the perceived indifference of the world to Muslim suffering.

 That this entity has struck at the heart of Europe is certainly not in any sense a comeuppance, but there is a brutal irony at the heart of it. All this poison - whether sarin gas attacks in Ghouta or vehicle attacks on civilians in Barcelona - seeps out from the open wound that is Assad.

 As Qappani summed up, "[Western] governments have pretended to be interested in Syria, but they have never cared about the lives lost at Ghouta or the hundreds of thousands killed by Assad in general in the way they do about the innocents killed in Europe, most recently Barcelona."

 Today marks the fourth anniversary not just of a single monstrous attack on innocent people, but on the day where the world said that the hopes, dreams and lives of Syrians don't matter and seemingly never will.'

Syrian regime launched 174 chemical attacks in 4 years

Syria regime launched 174 chem attacks in 4 years: NGO

 'The Assad regime has carried out 174 chemical weapons attacks since its attack in East Ghouta near Damascus that left hundreds dead, according to a London-based rights watchdog.

 In a Monday report -- released on the fourth anniversary of the East Ghouta attack -- the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) stated that the Assad regime had carried out a total of 207 chemical attacks since the first one in Homs’ Al-Bayyada district on Dec. 23, 2012.

 The SNHR also recalled April’s chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun, in which around 100 civilians in the opposition-held village were killed.

 The NGO went on to assert that the international community, including the U.S., had failed to prevent the Assad regime from carrying out chemical weapons attacks or confiscate its arsenal of chemical arms.

 According to Monday’s report, the regime carried out at least five more chemical attacks since April’s attack on Khan Sheikhun.

 “Over the course of the six-year Syria crisis, Russia and China have used their veto right seven times in favor of the Syrian regime, which has hamstrung the UN Security Council and stopped it from safeguarding international law and order,” the report states.

 On Aug. 21, 2013, more than 1,400 civilians were killed and more than 10,000 injured -- including women and children -- in the chemical attack on East Ghouta.

 In September of the same year, the Syrian regime signed on to a chemical weapons convention, but this did not prevent it from carrying out additional chemical attacks.'

Obama's failure to enforce his "red line" emboldened and strengthened Al Assad

The United States military launched tomahawk cruise missiles against Al Shayrat military airfield near Homs.  Seaman Ford WIlliams / EPA

 'In August 2012, the American journalist Chuck Todd, enquiring into Barack Obama’s “latest thinking” on the rebellion in Syria, which at the time was a year old, asked the now former president if he ever envisioned intervening militarily in Syria to ensure “the safe keeping of the chemical weapons” in Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s arsenal. According to the Federation of American Scientists, Syria under the Al Assads had built up “one of the largest and most sophisticated chemical weapons programmes in the world”. Mr Obama answered the question with uncharacteristic unambiguity: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime”, the president said, “that a red line for us is … chemical weapons moving around or being utilised”.

 Mr Al Assad did not wait long to start testing president Obama’s red line. On December 23, he dropped bombs containing a toxic gas called Agent 15 on Syrians queuing for bread in the city of Homs. The White House not only did not take action, but it also issued a statement saying that reports of chemical weapons use were not “consistent” with its own assessments. Mr Obama’s failure to enforce his own warning clearly emboldened the Syrian regime. On August 21, 2013, four years ago today, Mr Al Assad rained bombs loaded with sarin gas on Syrian citizens outside Damascus. The images of suffering that emerged that day from Ghouta will long haunt humanity. They are a stain on our conscience.

 Even though the red line had been crossed, Mr Obama feared that intervention in Syria might turn it into another Iraq. This was the wrong lesson to draw from history. As events have shown, his refusal to punish the Syrian president has meant that, four years on from the massacre in Ghouta, Mr Al Assad has consolidated his position. The insidious narrative that Iran, Russia and Mr Al Assad are fighting terrorism, when if anything they are at the forefront of terrorising and killing Syrians, has taken hold. And Mr Al Assad is now treated as integral to any solution to the crisis in Syria, rather than as the person who precipitated the conflict. The Syrian president again used chemical weapons in April this year, killing dozens of people in Idlib. While the crossing of that red line once more was enough to stir the new US president, Donald Trump, to order a retaliatory cruise missile attack on Shayrat air base, the action appeared more symbolic than strategic. It was designed to prevent and deter the Syrian regime from launching future chemical attacks, but in reality served only as a light slap on the wrist to Mr Al Assad.

 No atrocity, it seems, can shock the world into acting against Mr Al Assad.'

Sunday 20 August 2017

Syrian army pounds rebel areas near Damascus after Russian brokered truce

Image result for Syrian army pounds rebel areas near Damascus after Russian brokered truce

 'Syrian jets and artillery struck rebel-held eastern Damascus suburbs on Saturday a day after a Russian sponsored ceasefire with a rebel group agreed a halt of fighting in the last opposition enclave in the capital, rebels and witnesses said.

The Russian defense ministry said on Friday it had reached a ceasefire that took effect at 21.00 hrs Moscow time (1800 GMT) with Faylaq al Rahman, the main Free Syrian Army (FSA) group fending off a two-month widescale Syrian army offensive in Jobar district and nearby town of Ain Tarma.

 A spokesman for Faylaq al Rahman said both Jobar, which lies some 2 km (1.2 miles) east of the Old City wall, and nearby Ain Tarma on the edge of Eastern Ghouta witnessed army strikes and shelling soon after the ceasefire went into effect.

 "After the first few hours ... there were many violations midnight they dropped barrel bombs and from the morning there have been strikes across the Ghouta," Wael Alwan, spokesman for the group, said.

 At least five civilians were killed in the towns of Hamouriya and Zalamka and fighters said there were several case of suffocation from rockets filled with chlorine that were fired at the front lines of Jobar and Ain Terma, he added.

 The Syrian army elite 4th Division has been trying unsuccessfully to storm Jobar and residents say the army has retaliated for its heavy losses by shelling residential areas, leaving scores killed and wounded since the campaign was launched.

 Moscow said on Friday that the ceasefire meant an earlier one announced last month in Eastern Ghouta now included all the moderate opposition groups in the main rebel stronghold that stretches from eastern to northeastern suburbs of Damascus.

 The army has not commented on the latest Russian agreement with Failaq al Rahman whom it considers a terrorist group that threatens the capital. It however says it abides by truces Moscow has brokered.

 Many fighters welcomed the ceasefire to help alleviate plight of civilians most hurt by aerial strikes but remain deeply skeptical about Russia's readiness to get the Syrian army to stick to the terms of a cessation of fighting in several de-escalation zones that Russia has already announced

 Moscow had already began to deploy military police in several areas across Syria such as in southwestern Syria where "de-escalation" zones had been announced.

 "This shows the lack of seriousness by the Russia to put pressure on the regime," Alwan added.

 Failaq al Rahman said the Syrian army bombardment appeared to be an attempt to wreck a ceasefire deal whose main points included deploying Russian military police along the frontline, the release of detainees and allowing humanitarian goods into the besieged Eastern Ghouta.

 "It seems the regime wants to take advantage of the opportunity to take revenge for its big losses during their many attempts to storm the Ghouta before the Russian military police enter to disengage the forces," Alwan said.

 Outnumbered and outgunned, local rebels fortified in elaborate tunnels and deploying ambushes have repelled repeated attempts to storm their stronghold, inflicting dozens of losses on the army since the campaign began.'

Thursday 17 August 2017

Syrians in Montreal remember deadly chemical attacks four years ago

Father Ziad Alrayes and mother Eman Shelh with sons Ziad Jr., right, and Yousef and daughters Abeer and Mariam, left, are refugees from Syria in their home in Notre-Dame-de-Grace.

 'During the first attack, in the spring of 2013, Eman Shelh didn’t understand what was happening. It was the middle of the night and someone was shouting from the minarets to close your doors, close the windows, and cover your mouths.

 Then came the screaming and the ambulance sirens and the bodies of men, women and children with no injuries or blood — but with blue lips and swollen hands, some foaming from the mouth. There were so many bodies that they had to be buried together in tunnels, she said.

 “It was like a dream, at that moment I was in disbelief,” said Shelh, 37. “You see the dust and the people suffocating. Even now sometimes I think — was it a dream or was it real? There were people dying in front of me.”

 That first attack on Harasta would be followed by three more on the suburbs of Damascus, commonly known as Ghouta, each one more intense and widespread than the last. The fourth, on August 21, 2013, using the nerve agent sarin, would kill more than 1,000 people.

 According to UN inspectors, it was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since 1988, when Saddam Hussein turned them on civilians in Halabja in 1988.

 Though Wikipedia still lists the perpetrators of the Ghouta attack as “disputed,” it would force Syrian president Bashar al Assad to give up his chemical stockpiles — or at least pretend to do so.

 But for Shelh and her family, the attacks also precipitated their hasty exodus from Syria to Jordan and finally to Montreal, where they landed three weeks ago — to safety and comfort, if not peace of mind.

 At home on a quiet street in N.D.G., Abeer, Shelh’s eldest daughter, now 15, serves mint tea, complaining in jest of having to do all the housework while her mother nurses a sprained ankle.

 “At least we can still laugh,” says her mother, speaking through an interpreter.

 The family’s sponsors — St. Monica’s Catholic parish — have furnished the apartment and filled the fridge. The only personal item on view is a black and white photocopy of a family portrait taken in Jordan and thumbtacked to the wall. Ziad Jr., now 13, appears so much older than his years.

 Like many of the Syrians who have arrived in Canada since 2015 — at last count more than 40,000 across the country and almost 10,000 in Quebec — Shelh’s family had to leave everything behind. But as the fourth anniversary of the Ghouta attack approaches, they still carry with them the memories of the horror and mayhem.

 At the time of the second attack, a few days after the first, which they believe was using chlorine gas, it had been a year since President Obama had drawn a red line at the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. If that line was crossed, Obama had said, the U.S. would intervene.

 Already there was little bread, water or electricity and Shelh could no longer visit her father and siblings who lived only one street away, for fear of being hit by snipers near the security checkpoint. Finally, she thought, the international community will be forced to react.

 Instead, the red line kept shifting, further and further into irrelevance.

 Shelh’s husband, Ziad Alrayes, who was an ambulance driver and paramedic in Syria, says everyone had expected the United Nations or the foreign diplomats in Damascus to intervene.

 “When we went into homes after the attacks to try and give first aid, we saw whole families who looked like they were sleeping. The most difficult part was seeing the children. … What did they do to deserve this?”

 They didn’t expect the third attack, one month later, this time using sarin gas.

 For Shelh and Alrayes, it was the last straw. Both Yousef, 6, and Ziad Jr. still suffer from that attack, with ongoing respiratory problems. Yousef, who was 2 at the time of the attack, was too little to understand how to cover his mouth or try not to breathe. Ziad Jr., who helped bury the bodies, has suffered psychologically as well, they said.

 The family waited until after dark and walked four hours into the night, Alrayes carrying Yousef in his arms, until they reached a car and driver who would drop them off 20 kilometres from the border of Jordan.

 Mariam, who was five years old, was very tired, they recalled. Abeer, then 11, got separated from the family as they joined a throng of other Syrians walking the last few kilometres.

 “I was following a woman who I thought was my mother but it wasn’t her,” she said. “I was crying and looking for my mom for an hour before I found her.”

 By the time the fourth attack hit, they had made it to the Mrajeeb Al Fhood refugee camp, run by the United Arab Emirates and the Red Crescent society, where they stayed for three months, before moving into a one-room apartment in Zarqa.

 Life was hell in Jordan, the family says. Alrayes was not allowed to work, and when he worked illegally, he was often not paid. The boss would send him on his way, daring him to complain to authorities, at the risk of being sent back to Syria.

 Ziad Jr. was the only one working, at a vegetable stand on the street. The girls went to school sporadically, but only from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., after the Jordanian children had left the building. Meanwhile the Jordanian hospitals refused to treat Yousef for his respiratory problems. It wasn’t until their church sponsors in Canada sent money for treatment in a private hospital that he started to improve.'