No to reconciliation! No to surrender! No to occupation!

 'The Syrian north witnessed on Friday major demonstrations in the cities and towns of Idlib and suburbs of Aleppo and Hama in a Friday called "Rejection of the Russian aggression," denouncing the recent statements made by the international envoy, "Staffan deMistura," and to emphasize the people support the revolutionary factions and their decisions.

 There were demonstrations of Idlib residents and rebels in the areas of Sarmada, Idlib city, Sarqib, Ghadfa, Habit, Bennish, Ma'rat al Shlaf, Ma'arat al-Nu'man, Al-Dana, Jirjanaz, Ma'arShurin, Kifroma, Harem, Kafraweid, Ma'arat Mater, Khan Shikhun, Ariha, Jisr al-Shoughour, Kafranbel, Ma'arat Misreen, al-Teh and Jbala.

 Demonstrators in Idlib confirmed their rejection of reconciliation and acceptance with what they called the occupation "in reference to Russia" and their stand in support of the factions' decision to repel any upcoming attacks. They also raised a group of banners say that Idlib is strong and both the military and political factions are supported by the residents of the region completely.

 In the city of al-Dana, which also witnessed demonstrations as some children carried figures in the form of frogs as an expression of their rejection of the advocates of surrender and confirmation that the Syrian revolution is the only way to them.

 As for the countryside of Aleppo where people came out and the rebels in each of the areas of Atarb, A'zaz, Jarabulus, al-Bab, Baza'a, Anadan, Darat Ezza, Anjara, al-Eis, al-Zerba, and Abin Sam'an as slogans blamed de Mistura for his own demands to open humanitarian corridors, calling his as a partner in the aggression against the people asserting that they do not need a human path rather than they need a humanitarian situation. Another demonstration took place in the city of Morek in rural Hama.


 The statements made by the international special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, have aroused great discontent among the rebels and the civil activities, especially because of his adoption of the regime and Russia's novel about Idlib and accusing the revolutionary factions of possessing chemical weapons. He said that the province includes about 10,000 "terrorists" ,calling at the same time for establishing a humanitarian corridor allows civilians to leave and this is what is sought by both Moscow and the Assad regime.

 Commenting on the words of the envoy, the organization "Response Coordination Group" specialized in follow-up of the displaced in Syria, called on the international community to end the mandate of "Staffan de Mistura" and search for another one to end the suffering of civilians, considering that the statements of the envoy is not different from the statements of the Russian Foreign Minister or the regime itself, as the organization sees that he is an employee of both Russia and the Syrian regime and works to get them out of the crises that plague them.

 The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria condemned the remarks of de Mistura and considered that he turned with the United Nations to "promoters for a military attack on millions of civilians in Idlib," noting that this is "the summit of international failure to prevent the protection of innocent people displaced by the violation of the De-escalation Zones agreements by the Russian occupation.

 Activists described de Mistura as the spokesman for the Syrian regime's army. Among the comments, activist Wael Abdel Aziz posted a picture of the envoy behind a platform reading "The General Command of the Army and the Armed Forces," saying that it is a leaked picture of de Mistura is believed to have taken last comments directly , which justified and legitimized the attack of Russia, Iran and the Assad regime on the liberated north, and likely the picture from the statement of his announcement of zero hour to start the attack.


 The Syrian regime and its militias have brought military reinforcements over the past two weeks to the villages of Hama in preparation for the attack on Idlib. They also set up an operations room to manage the battle. In return, the revolutionary factions announced that they had finished preparing their defensive and offensive plans and become ready to repel any operations that might target the villages of Lattakia, Hama and Idlib.

 Turkish Defense Minister Khulosi Akkar confirmed that his country is exerting efforts to prevent attacks on the city of Idlib and to ensure the safety of 4 million people, adding that his country has 12 monitoring posts to maintain the agreement of de-escalation zone.'

Kafr Zeita's Displaced People Condemn Russian Claims on Chemical Weapons

 'The displaced people of the town of Kafr Zita, in the camps of Atmeh in northern Idlib, held a protest rally in which they condemned the Russian statements about the intention of the revolutionary factions to use chemical weapons in the town.

 The protesters raised slogans in which they stressed that the régime is responsible for the use of chemical weapons in both Khan Sheikoun and Eastern Ghouta.

 The displaced people who participated in the protest denied that the revolutionary factions possessed such type of weapon, pointing out that the Russian statements are a prelude to the use of chemical weapons in the region.

 The Russian Defense Ministry makes daily statements accusing the Civil Defence ("White Helmets") of preparing to use chemical weapons in cooperation with the military factions in north Hama.'

White Helmets rescuers start over in northern Syria

 'Syrian rescue worker Samir Salim found his mother's body under their collapsed house, but there was no time for a funeral.

 "We buried her and went back to work. There were a lot of people under the rubble," he said. Months later, he can no longer even visit her grave.


 When Syrian government forces clawed back his eastern Ghouta hometown, near the capital Damascus, Salim followed hundreds of thousands of others who had fled to the northwest under rebel surrender deals.

 Now, he and "White Helmet" workers driven from different parts of Syria have come together in the rebel-controlled town of Azaz to try to rebuild their lives near the Turkish border.

 Their work has changed drastically: with no warplanes cruising overhead, they help the opposition authorities put out fires, clean the streets, and plant trees.
Azaz falls within a de facto buffer zone which Turkey has carved out since 2016. The northwest corner remains Syria's last major insurgent stronghold and is now in President Bashar al-Assad's crosshairs.

 The White Helmets have often said they worried about reprisals as government forces defeated rebel enclaves with Russian and Iranian help.

 The civil defense service, which receives funding from Western governments, pulls people from the rubble of air strikes in rebel territory. Assad has accused it of being a Western-sponsored front for al Qaeda's branch in Syria.


 Salim said many comrades stayed behind in eastern Ghouta.

 Before leaving, he helped burn down the emergency center he had once helped establish in his town, where his three brothers also worked.

 As buses shuttled evacuees out through government territory, including Salim's wife, five children, and relatives, some people cursed and threw stones at them, he added.

 "We arrived with great misery," said Salim, 45. "Our peers gave us an exceptional welcome."

 Azaz is worlds apart from Ghouta, which lived through years of bitter siege and air strikes - far from the Turkish influence of the northwest.

 Salim recalled a sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of people in 2013 in the rebel enclave. "People were running down the streets screaming 'chemicals' and there were a lot of civilians lying in the streets foaming at the mouth."

 He said he injured his spleen during an air strike on a market in 2016 and had part of his intestines removed.

 The White Helmet first responders say Damascus has specifically targeted them during the more than seven-year conflict. The government says it only targets militants.

 "We fear building a new life in a foreign place and then having to leave once again," Salim said. "I fear northern Syria will face what we did in Ghouta."

 His family now lives in the nearby Afrin region, where a Turkish assault earlier this year ousted Syrian Kurdish fighters. Those forces have accused Turkey of expelling Afrin's residents to resettle other people, which Ankara denies.

 Salim's new team includes Ahmed Rashid, 30, who was bussed out of eastern Aleppo two years ago after fighter jets leveled entire districts.

 The bloody battle for Aleppo in northern Syria marked a turning point in the war as pro-government forces swept through the insurgent half of the city. Rashid said 12 friends from his center in Aleppo were killed.

 "Nobody expected me to persevere, especially since my parents are in Turkey. But I cannot leave the civil defense," the former shoe designer said.

 "In Aleppo, the bombing was so heavy we couldn't sleep. "Here (in Azaz), there is no such pressure."

 Nayef al-Aboud, also part of the same team, said they largely work on services like helping with car accidents.

 "Today, our center has workers from the displaced populations," said Aboud, 22, who is from Azaz. "Our strength has grown because they are here, we learn from their experiences, they lived through harsher times." '

Assad’s Syria recorded its own atrocities. The world can’t ignore them

 'Imagine your son or daughter was arrested. And you heard nothing about them for years. Until one day, thousands of photographs of dead bodies were published – corpses of people who had died in custody. You start looking through them one by one, sick to your stomach wondering if the next photograph you click on is of your loved one. But as you go through them, you realise many of the corpses are so severely emaciated, mutilated, some with their eyes missing, that you’d find it hard to recognise even yourself in that state.

 Hundreds, if not thousands, of Syrian families have done just that – looked through the so-called Caesar photographs – images of over 11,000 people who apparently died in Syrian regime custody. A defector, codenamed Caesar, claimed he smuggled the photographs out of Syria and, astonishingly, that they had been taken by the regime itself as part of its record-keeping. Chillingly, each corpse has a number, alongside the number of a regime detention facility. No names, just numbers.

 In May 2014, in part motivated by these images, the UN security council debated a draft resolution to refer Syria to the international criminal court. Thirteen of its 15 members voted for the resolution, but it was vetoed by Russia and China. The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has consistently questioned the authenticity of the photographs, and when confronted with one of the horrific images by reporter Michael Isikoff in a Yahoo News interview last year, the president referred to them as “fake news”, and asked: “Who verified the pictures?”


 New evidence suggests his own regime verified the pictures. War crimes investigators have recently uncovered documents they say provide corroboration of the Caesar photographs by the regime itself. Investigators at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (many of them veterans of the international criminal court and the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) discovered the evidence among hundreds of thousands of records abandoned by the Syrian regime when it lost control of areas to opposition forces.


 The key documents are from the head of detention facility 227 to one of the regime’s senior intelligence chiefs, the head of military intelligence, informing him of the arrest, interrogation and deaths of detainees, and crucially, referring to their dead bodies with a number. When the investigators cross-checked these body numbers in the regime documents, with the corpse numbers and detention facility numbers displayed on bodies in the Caesar photographs, they matched. So not only do we have the Caesar photographs of thousands of corpses bearing marks of torture and starvation, we now have documents which appear to link the Syrian regime to some of the people in the photographs, and to their deaths. The photographs captured one moment in time, depicting the state of the detainees’ bodies. But the documents name the detainees, and talk about them from the time they were arrested, to the details gleaned from their interrogation, to the day they died, and finally, to what should be done with their bodies – confirming all of it happened in regime custody.

 For example, among the Caesar photographs, corpse 2668, detention facility 227, is an emaciated man who appears to have had one eye gouged out. In the documents, he has a name, a village where he came from, the date he was arrested, what he confessed to during his interrogation, his death, and the cause given: “his heart and breathing stopping”. Somewhere he has a family, but the head of detention facility 227 didn’t recommend returning his body to them.


 There are likely to be more of these documents because the records show the head of military intelligence asked to be informed of every single detainee death, and be consulted on what to do with the corpses. This is a man who, at the time the Caesar photographs were taken, held one of the most senior intelligence roles within Syria’s security structures, which report to President Assad.

 Records reveal the regime knew detainees were being tortured and that deaths had risen considerably. A haunting new detail in the documents is the reference to detainees’ bodies being buried in a “known place”. Known to the regime, but as yet unknown to detainees’ families who are denied that information – an ongoing source of pain and anguish for them.


 Why does all this evidence matter now? Because you only have to look at the calls from some quarters to lift sanctions on the Syrian regime, and at reports the Greek government, for instance, has already started importing phosphates from them, to know that steps are afoot to normalise this regime.

 If that’s what people want, then they should own it. And they should understand exactly what they’re owning. Look at the Caesar photographs – just as families trying to identify their loved ones do – and ask whether it’s acceptable to normalise this.'

Syrians in Idlib brace for final showdown

 'Locals in the village of Urem Kubra gesture to a man standing surrounded by rubble.
"He can't talk much. He's in shock," the village elder said, referring to 33-year-old Ibrahim Abu Naif.

 On the wreckage of what used to be his house, Ibrahim set aside a neat pile of children's clothing he had dug out of the debris. He lifted a blue jacket with "sports" emblazoned on the back, and brought it to his face, taking in a whiff as he did so.

 "This, this was Nayef's. He's gone," Ibrahim said of his 3-year-old son.

 He pulled out more clothing: a red and white knit cardigan, a pair of tights with a Christmas pattern and a striped t-shirt. The clothes belonged to four of his children who were killed in last week's airstrikes.


 He has one surviving child.

 "Hatice. Hatice is alive and living at her grandparents. She has a head wound," Ibrahim said, holding one of her pink sweaters.

 When Syrian régime war planes struck Urem Kubra, a rebel-held village just outside Idlib province on Friday night, most of the women in the village were home with children, preparing dinner. The planes hovered in the air for around 10 minutes before the first strikes, witnesses said. The jets then swung back around, hitting the town two more times. More than 40 people were killed in 30 minutes, the majority of them women and children.


 Ten-year-old Ibrahim Dervish wandered aimlessly around the Urem Kubra town square, a few meters from the ice cream shop where he and his friends used to play.

 "I miss Mohammad Hasan, Mays and Omar," he said, listing his friends' names. They were all killed in the strike.

 The ice cream shop was reduced to a heap of rubble. Dervish said he used to get vanilla and cherry flavored ice cream in a cone for 100 Syrian pounds ($1). The shop owner, he said, often gave them freebies.

 "I'm sad that we don't have the shop anymore and that my friends are dead," Dervish said.
It is a scene that has played out across Syria for more than seven years. Idlib is one of several de-escalation zones agreed on by some of the war's main international actors, Russia, Turkey and Iran. Yet it has been repeatedly bombed, with airstrikes targeting alleged rebel posts, medical facilities and residential neighborhoods.


 United Nations estimates put the population here at more than 3 million. Most live in camps along the border with Turkey, which already has taken in 3.5 million Syrian refugees since the start of the war. But the Turkish border is now effectively closed, with Ankara choosing to prevent another wave of refugees from crossing by building a border wall and bolstering aid to Idlib.

 "We have sent in a lot of humanitarian aid, set up military observation points and have taken on diplomatic efforts to sustain this area," said a senior Turkish official, who asked not to be named.

 Earlier this month, Syrian government planes dropped leaflets on the city of Jisr Al Shugur in Idlib.

 "Your cooperation with the Syrian Arab Army will get rid of the armed terrorists among you and will keep you and your families safe," the leaflet read.

 For those who'd previously fled other opposition areas, this is an ominous sign. One activist, who was relocated to Idlib from Eastern Ghouta following a brutal government incursion there, said the leaflets were identical to ones he saw in Eastern Ghouta before a Russian and Syrian government assault overran the rebels there.

 "I'm afraid the same thing will happen in Idlib," he said, asking for his name not to be quoted. People in Idlib know the violence is closing in on them, but no one sees an escape route.


 An assault on Idlib would mean high casualties. The province is more tightly packed and more densely populated than other areas in the country.

 Along the Turkish border, the white tents of the refugee camps have grayed with time. As residents build up concrete block walls and cement floors, the camps have taken on an air of permanence and transformed into sprawling slums. Shops selling wedding dresses, restaurants, and pharmacies have popped up.

 For now, an uneasy calm has taken over.

 Some of the first internally displaced people to move to Idlib's tent cities live in a makeshift district called the Rahme Cluster.

 Hishan Hadar, 48, originally from the adjacent Hama, has been here for five years.
"This area started out as tents, but then over time people managed to build it up," he said.
He said the possibility of a Syrian régime operation leaves people in Idlib only one choice. "We have nothing to do but to defend. Either we die with honor, or we die with honor -- there is no other choice," he said.

 Others are even more resigned.

 "There is no hope," says Sara Shahin who, along with her five children, has been in Rahme for six years. Her children may never see their native Kafra Buda in the countryside of the northeastern province of Hama. Her eldest son hopes to be married soon.

 "He might marry here... my kids will grow up here... I have a feeling we will be here till we die," she said.


 Around the corner, in what has been transformed into the town's main street, Abdulkadir Halit, 25, has opened a barber shop after airstrikes destroyed his old shop in his native town of Hama.

 "I would go back tomorrow if I could, and God willing, maybe I will," he said.

 A few doors down, smoke from a tiny restaurant wafts into the street. Hasan Ali is turning skewers of chicken and tomatoes over slow-burning coal. The 38-year-old cook says he has no sense of what will become of him and his family, but the thought of never returning to his hometown in Hama is unfathomable.

 "Pain. That's what we feel. We left our home. What can we feel but pain?" he said while fanning the grill.

 On the hills above the Rahme Cluster, children fly kites, old men reflect in a somber silence, and others revel in the open space. Vaciha Turki-Al Omar comes to the edge of a cliff and points out roughly where her tent is. Since the beginning of the war, this mother of eight has lost too many family members and loved ones to count.

 The war brought with it a relentless move northward.

 "We left because of airstrikes. Our home is gone, destroyed," she said. "This place is our last hope." '

We direct a message to the faction leaders to unite

Hadi al-Abdullah:

 "Many mistakes have happened in the Syrian revolution, and it is difficult to sum them up in an sentence or two. This is first time the Syrian people have carried out a popular revolution. The Syrian situation is different from other countries' revolutions, due to the support of the Great Powers for the Assad régime. Perhaps the most important and notable errors: Disunity without the presence of any unified military, political or even media leadership, and the Syrian revolution is still making this mistake to this day. The second is dependency on the exterior, compared to 2012 and 2013 when the decision was Syrian only, and what led to our arrival at this stage recently from following the exterior which caused a great loss to the people and revolution. One of the mistakes as well was the confidence in the leaders of the factions, the Syrians have relied on them because there was no other solution to resort to.

 There are various ways to confront the promoters of reconciliation or "frogs": The Syrians must adhere to the principles of the Syrian revolution for which we have sacrificed much. Second, through awareness campaigns for the popular incubator urging adherence to the revolutionary principles and clarifying the danger of reconciliation with the Assad régime and his betrayal, he and his Russian ally who promote a false narrative regarding returning to the fold of al-Assad. We observe that he in a number of areas has expelled the revolutionaries and civilians from it and there are cases of arrest by Russia and the Assad forces on a daily basis, including in the Homs countryside, Eastern Ghouta, and the areas of Daraa. There needs to be pressure on the factions not to carry out any reconciliation with the Assad regime, in addition to dealing firmly with those who promote reconciliation in the north of Syria, and this is what the factions started with recently.

 We all know that Idlib turned into a mini-Syrian state inhabited by most of the Syrians displaced by the Assad régime from the rest of the country. It is the last refuge for them after they refused to reconcile with the régime. The fate of the city of Idlib is different from the other regions because it has observation points for protection, and we do not expect Turkey to forsake the province and its countryside, because it will reflect negatively on them, and there will be hundreds of thousands of displaced people on the Turkish border, and it is not easy to forsake them under these circumstances. Everyone in Idlib knows that it is the last point or bastion of the Syrian revolution today. If the régime would launch a war on Idlib there will be a strong response in defense of it and it could be the start for retaking control of the areas occupied by the régime and its allies. And there are efforts that have recently begun to form a unified force in Idlib to confront the regime composed of several large factions, except for HTS and others.

 The restoration of political or military autonomy under the current circumstances is almost impossible. Most military or political leaders became dependent on the exterior and the restoration of political autonomy needs raising awareness, through citizens carrying out popular initiatives to return the spirit of the Syrian revolution and hope to the souls of the civilians. Restoring political autonomy is very difficult and not easy.

 There have been many bad moments for me from seven years ago until now, from threats, targeting, bombing, to assassination attempts. Among the most difficult was the year 2016 in Aleppo when Khaled al-Issa was martyred, in addition to the loss of the people we love. And the most difficult is trying to traverse the situations of sadness.

 There is no doubt that the conditions experienced by the Syrians today are difficult and most of them suffer from all kinds of pressure, but there is no solution other than resistance against the Assad régime, especially since the régime has not changed. For those who are in the interior; sticking to the land and for all outside Syria; sticking to the cause. Despite the setbacks and betrayals that we are facing, we will remain steadfast upon the principles of the revolution and its martyrs and detainees. We direct a message to the faction leaders to unite and form a unified body and a united leadership different from what we have seen before."