Assad is considering genocide and has Russian backing

 'Last week the Syrian regime bombed Al-Kamouna camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Idlib. Moscow and Damascus both resorted immediately to deception in order to ward off any accusations of responsibility for this criminal act. They accused Al-Nusra Front of killing those displaced in a camp which is in an area under the group’s control. Washington also participated in the deception, with the secretary of state saying no more than “nothing justifies attacks on civilians.”

 What is the result of this lack of responsibility demonstrated by Russia and the US? The alarming answer to this question is the legitimisation of genocide. With the escalation of the conflict and the heated search for an end to a crisis that has become more complicated both internally and externally, the regime believes that it has a solution supported by its Iranian and Russian allies – genocide — elements of which it has adopted periodically since 2011 in a repeat of the 1982 Hama massacre that the US also chose to overlook.

 An example of this genocidal mentality and its justification can be seen in the heinous acts committed by the Kurds from Afrin on the bodies of those they’ve killed. It was one of the ugliest incidents of the war, but it happened and passed without anyone addressing it, as if it was something normal.

 A study conducted by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (UNESCWA) and Britain’s University of St Andrews, is shocking: “Millions are deprived of the essential necessities of life: 13.5 million are in need of human assistance and 12.1 million lack adequate access to water, sanitation and waste disposal, over 4 million of whom live in Damascus, its suburbs, and Aleppo.” These are areas that the regime intends finish off in order to achieve what Assad called “the final victory” in a telegram thanking Vladimir Putin.
What was revealed in Aleppo and then in the bombing of the Kamuna camp was not only the approach of genocide or the difficulty in reaching a comprehensive truce, but also the US-Russian efforts to cover up the false “political solution” that actually aims to subordinate the Syrian conflict to the war criminal Assad and his gang of killers. Perhaps this approach to the logic of genocide is what pushed the French, the British and the Germans to sound the alarm bells, which is what the Arabs and Turks did before them. They support the American action and understand much of its aspects, despite its vagueness and confusion. However, they reject the idea of the Americans following the Russian-Iranian approach and justifying and overlooking Assad’s crimes.

 The Europeans believe that there is a vast difference between using the US-Russian understanding to urge Assad and the opposition to come to a political understanding that requires commitments and concessions, and using this understanding to please the Iranians and encourage the Syrian president to carry out a military takeover and protect him from any accountability or responsibility. What is more important is that the Europeans who wanted to alleviate or ease the waves of refugees and therefore accepted a political solution, albeit one that is unfair to the opposition, realised that the Americans and Russians lied in terms of the truce being upheld or the feasibility of the proposed political process.

 What is happening now is that the difficulty in establishing a truce and ensuring that it is respected and upheld by the regime and the Iranians has made it difficult to get the opposition to return to the Geneva talks, because the game that is being played with people’s lives has been exposed. Now the regime does not even want the unfair settlement, as it wants to break the truce deliberately in order to hinder negotiations. This is what drove the Europeans to call for a new initiative, as the formulation stemming from the Vienna talks, that later became UN Resolution 2254 has been ruined — and destroyed — by the Russians, Assad and the Iranians.'

Syrian Regime Blocks Aid Convoy and Shells Civilians

 'On Thursday, Omar eagerly awaited the arrival of an international aid convoy that was scheduled to bring medicine and baby formula into Daraya. It would have been the first convoy to reach Daraya since it was first besieged in 2012 — but the trucks didn't make it to the town.

 According to the ICRC, it was turned away at the last checkpoint outside of Daraya. Just minutes after the convoy was sent back, the Local Council of Daraya — a committee that operates as the local government — reported that the Syrian army had shelled a group of civilians who'd gathered to receive the aid. A father and son were killed and five other civilians were injured, the council said.

 After the shelling, Omar rushed to a nearby field hospital where the wounded were being treated.

 "The people are now filled with frustration and anger," he told VICE News via messaging app. "To be honest, at this point we no longer trust the international community or the UN."

 Though it's just a 20-minute drive from the center of Damascus, Daraya is one of the most isolated places in Syria: it's been under siege for over four years, and it's one of the few areas where no aid convoys have ever been permitted to enter. According to residents interviewed by VICE News, people survive on meager meals of lentil and rice soup that are often fortified with weeds or grass. The water supply was cut off two years ago.

 The UN later reported that regime soldiers at the last checkpoint outside of Daraya began removing medical and nutritional items for children — everything except vaccines — from the convoy. Speaking to reporters in New York, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that Staffan de Mistura, the UN's special envoy for Syria, and Jacob el-Hillo, its humanitarian coordinator for the country, "made the decision not to go through because these key items were taken out" despite the fact that the regime had already authorized their delivery.

 But less than an hour after the UN accused the Syrian regime of pilfering supplies, the UN and ICRC released a joint statement with no reference to the removal of items in the Daraya mission. The convoy was simply "refused entry," the statement said.

 Pawel Krzysiek, an ICRC spokesperson who was traveling with the convoy, also stressed that the convoy didn't turn back because certain items were removed. The convoy had waited for more than seven hours at the regime checkpoint outside of Daraya before being turned away, he said, noting that he didn't think the soldiers at the checkpoint had any intention of permitting the convoy into the besieged area.

 Daraya has endured round after round of atrocities. Shortly before the siege was imposed in November 2012, nearly 500 residents were killed in just two and a half days in one of the most bloody massacres of the Syrian civil war. For most of the last four years, Daraya has been pounded from the air — locals say Assad's forces dropped more than 6,800 barrel bombs between January 2014 and February 2016, when a cessation of hostilities agreement was reached between the regime and some rebels groups. Over the course of the war, what was once a city of 80,000 people has dwindled to a ghost town of 8,000.

 Muhammad Shihadeh, an English teacher who works with the Local Council, said that the failure of Thursday's aid convoy fits within the regime's pattern of behavior.

"I believe it's revenge," he told VICE News via-messaging app. "The regime is trying to take revenge against the people by starving it, even as they allow aid to other places within Syria." '

Women emerge as changemakers in war-torn Syria

 'As in a number of Arab countries, many of Syria's women were largely confined to traditional roles before the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the outbreak of war. Now, however, more and more women are at the forefront of new efforts to solve local problems and counter the death and destruction that has engulfed the country.

 One of the ways they've done this is by starting their own independent magazines and radio stations, such as Jasmine Syria, Sayedet Souriya, Radio Souriyat and Nasaem Radio, which focus on highlighting the daily struggles of Syrian women amid the conflict."The stereotypical image of women presented in media reflects a patriarchal society," said Reem al-Halabi, director of Nasaem Radio, which is based in the northwestern city of Aleppo. "Women's interests are not limited to fashion, beauty, cooking, family and children. This image does not reflect the real interests or concerns of Syrian women or how hard they are working to take part in building their country."

 More women are also launching community initiatives, such as Women Now for Development, a center formed by women in 2012 in the besieged town of Hazza in the Damascus countryside to provide training in new skills. The initiative focuses on young women who have had to quit school due to the security situation and widows who need to generate income to support their families. Layla, the manager of Women Now for Development, said the conflict had paradoxically "opened new horizons" for some Syrian women. "They are more self-confident and not afraid to express their opinions anymore, and this is reflected in the way they raise their children and deal with their husbands and the society around them," said Layla, who asked that her real name not be used for security reasons.Layla added that Women Now's workshops about women's rights have contributed to increasing the number of women who voted in local council elections in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus.

 "Since the revolution began, Syrian women have shown an interest in politics," she said. "They do not base their opinions on what men say; they form their own opinions by analyzing the news themselves."

 Another such initiative is the Network of Guardians, which was founded by a group of young women in 2012 and provides training in caring for children during emergencies – for example, how to deal with the psychological shock many children suffer after a bombing. The organization also works with educators in schools in Ghouta, near the capital, and northwestern Idlib to develop school curricula that take into consideration war and its influence on children.

 "My work with the Network of Guardians helped me develop management skills, which was something I never learned in college," said Hiba, a fourth-year architecture student at the University of Damascus who had to quit her studies because of the security situation, especially the random arrests at checkpoints between Damascus and her home in Douma. "The current conflict in Syria has played a positive role in breaking the stereotype of women as housewives. Women today have a great opportunity and they should take advantage of it, especially with the number of men being lost in Syria to the fighting, imprisonment and abduction."

 In the city of Raqqa in northeastern Syria, Suad Nofal has become a symbol of resistance to tyranny. For a long time, she had opposed the Syrian regime. Later, she confronted the Islamic State. Since she had been a well-known teacher in Raqqa, she initially succeeded in opening a dialogue with a number of IS fighters who were former students, which irritated IS's foreign leaders. They banned their fighters from talking to her, then they began to harass and threaten Suad and issued a fatwa ordering her execution, which forced her to move to Turkey in 2013.'

Humanitarian workers recall death threats, prison and torture

 'In April 2011, as protesters began gathering in Homs’ Clock Square, Atassi joined them. Like many women, she brought her children along. For hours, she said, people stood and peacefully protested, for “freedom, justice, dignity, and pride.” Around midnight, regime forces began shooting.

 “I saw the first man killed. He was killed in front of his wife and children. My children were so afraid. We left, running to the car,” said Atassi. Though they escaped unharmed, she said, “this made me look for victims of the regime … This is when I decided to help.”

 In late 2012, her son, who was then 17, was detained at a Red Cross checkpoint in Homs while en route to distribute supplies to protesters. He was released only a week later.

 “Then myself and my family received direct threats for our humane work,” said Atassi. “That’s when we decided to leave.”

 Before fleeing Syria, Sandra Bitarova told Women in the World, she was detained twice for getting involved in humanitarian work there. This included connecting protesters with media outlets to share videos of their demonstrations, and distributing supplies, such as baby milk, in central Homs. The first time Bitarova was detained for only 24 hours. But the second time she said she was held for 35 days. While in jail, she said, “I kept hearing people screaming out of torture, and smelling burning flesh.”

 “I am one of the lucky few who didn’t get physically tortured, but there was psychological torture,” she said. “They were saying: ‘You will be next’ and ‘Where is your sister? We hear she is active too.’”

 After being released, Bitarova said she received information from a government agent, who later defected, that she would be arrested a third time. This time, the agent said, she would not be released. “He said you have two days to vanish,” according to Bitarova. And so, in August 2012, she and her sister fled the country.

 The women described a continued lack of basic services in many areas of Syria, random searches and arrests by government forces, millions who have lost their homes, children who have never been to school, and no recourse for government violations. “Anybody who does open a mouth is detained and tortured, eventually leading to death,” claimed Atassi.

 While Atassi said the general atmosphere of fear increased after the extremist group ISIS — or Daesh, as it is known in Syria — began seizing large parts of the country, the main terror remains Assad’s forces.

 “We always have to have hope, because without hope, we are not going to be living creatures,” said Atassi. “Our hope is to get rid of this crisis and this war… But I implore the world community to stick to their resolution to get Assad out, because as long as Assad is there, the problems are not going to end.” '

Aleppo in a time of monsters

 Muhammad Idrees Ahmad:

 'There are no conflicts in the Middle East that date back millennia. The conflict in Syria is just over five years old. Nothing about it is fixed. In its scope and its intensity, in its balance of forces and its cast of characters, the conflict has been constantly evolving. The only element that has remained static, however, is the international response.

 In speaking of the horrors unfolding in Syria, it is hard to avoid a certain sense of déjà vu. Everything that can be said about Aleppo has already been said about Homs, Houla, Daraya and Douma. But with each new horror comes a growing sense that, for all the obtrusive violence, for all our pleas, we are plunging into the deep, smothered by apathy, abandoned by hope.

 Syria today is a free-fire zone with no check on criminality. The red line that Barack Obama set was blithely crossed. In having his bluff called, the constitutionally weak president was himself stung. Reluctant to initiate action in Syria, he has become fearful of setting new limits - lest they are crossed, further exposing his cowardice.

 Barack Obama has betrayed the people of Syria twice over. First by drawing a line on chemical weapons, at a time when most Syrians were being killed by conventional means; and then by failing to enforce it, giving Assad an unconditional license to kill by any means, including chemical weapons.

 Barack Obama is on his way out. He has nothing to gain politically from confronting Assad. And morally - well, he is "proud of this moment", a time when he has abandoned Syrians to Assad's inexhaustible appetite for killing. Nearly three times as many people were killed in the two years after Obama's embarrassing climb-down than had died in the two years before - victims of "ancient hatreds", no doubt.

 The US, however, is no mere bystander. As in Bosnia, it has actively blocked the transfer of much needed anti-aircraft weaponry to Syrian rebels, allowing the regime and Russia to bomb with impunity. And by accepting Russia's "war on terror" rationale, the US has made itself complicit in Russia's crimes. The US legitimised Russia and the regime's ferocious aerial assault, while its military spokesman alleged that "it's primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo, and of course, al-Nusra is not part of the cessation of hostilities." The Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's local franchise, has a small presence in the city; it certainly doesn't "hold Aleppo".

 In 2005, with much fanfare, the UN had introduced the doctrine of the "right to protect" (R2P), codifying "never again" into a norm of international conduct. Its timely application in Syria might have saved thousands of lives. But even as the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon was acknowledging the "shame" of its failure in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the UN was providing cover to the regime's starvation sieges across Syria, censoring its documents, and obfuscating responsibility with the anodyne language of "both sides". But as the Italian writer and holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, "to confuse [perpetrators] with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth".

 Where once "no justice, no peace" was considered a truism, demands for justice are now deemed a threat to "stability". Peace without justice is the nostalgia hankered after by the negators of truth. Preserving truth is therefore the first step towards confronting fascism.

 It is by now clear that no power will intervene to aid the Syrian people. But regional powers, unlike the US, will not be shielded from the consequences of a regime victory. In the form of the "refugee crisis", Europe is already feeling the repercussions. It is time for regional powers to step up and provide vetted rebel groups with portable misile launchers to target regime aircraft. Only by revoking the regime's aerial capacity can it be coaxed into negotiating in good faith. R2P and "never again" were examples of false hope. The new moral order that was then struggling to come forth is now dead. But that is no reason to let the monsters reign.

 People have a right to defend themselves; let's give them the means.'

International Bodies threaten medics if they mention Assad

 'One employee at a major medical institute working in Aleppo has revealed that a discussion took place on Thursday [sic 27/04/2016] in one of the institutes complaining from the pressure donors are imposing on them to be “neutral” and not give any statements that would accuse the Assad regime of launching attacks against those medical facilities. Mutasem Alsyoufi stated on his Facebook: “the same donors had no problem if the accusation subjected JN [al-Nusra Front], ISIS, or even the moderate armed groups because they are “not state actors”.

 Alsyoufi also mentioned that a number of workers at those Medical Organisations were martyred in the Assad regime’s air force attacks over Aleppo, adding that “apparently, the real international community is the one unveiled in the Panama leaks not the UN or the Universal declaration of human rights”.

 The Assad and Russian invasion forces had earlier targeted more than one Medical Center, the latest of which was the UOSSM Center providing healthcare in the Marjah area of Aleppo, that had it completely destroyed and rendered inoperable.'

Aleppo Is Burning

 'Last Friday, in an attempt to show solidarity with Aleppo, massive numbers of people changed their Facebook profile pictures to a red box. Now, a week later, we have seen protests in Argentina, Poland, Belgium, the United States, Turkey, Germany, Lebanon, Italy, Sweden, France, Canada, Jordan, Norway, Greece, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, Indonesia, Egypt, and Palestinian Occupied Territories.

 This campaign is beautiful, but it is not enough. Every day, people’s houses, schools, mosques and markets get bombed. Civil defense members try and save them. Then civil defense members get bombed. Hospital staff members try and save them. Then hospitals get bombed. So people leave for refugee camps. Their camps get bombed.

 Negotiating refugee borders and fighting ISIS is not what Syria needs to end the war. What Syria needs right now — what Syrians need — is a ceasefire that ensures Assad stops killing his own people. The bombing has to stop so Syrians can rebuild hospitals, buy groceries, go to schools. The bombing has to stop so people in Aleppo do not live as though every second is their last.

 Assad is killing his people. Syrians have been saying this over and over and over again for five years now, and yet Assad is still committing massacres, bombing and torturing and killing. And now, Assad is burning Aleppo.

 So what do we do? We organize protests. We go out. We yell, chant, demand justice. Because Syrians are being killed for doing the same. Syrians are waiting for the international community to do something, but we have had enough of the inaction. We launched this movement to show the world that someone is watching, to reject the international community’s indifference. And we call on you to join us, wherever you are. Because the world has been deaf for five years. And we need as many voices as possible for it to start listening.'

The world has failed the test of Syria’s revolution

 'For five years, the regime of Bashar Al Assad has been murdering its own people. It has recruited armed militias of the darkest kind to help it exact its punishment on Syrian citizens in successive attacks that have been concentrated in recent weeks around Aleppo.

 The Saudi columnist Hussein Shabakshi wrote in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat: “Nothing was spared. Schools, hospitals, mosques and homes. Streets were strewn with bodies of children, women and elderly people. The bloodbaths everywhere only confirm that this is indeed the most horrific crime against humanity in recent history. Crimes continue under international cover."

 The author referred to intelligence reports revealing that the matter of Mr Al Assad’s position was “resolved" during a meeting between Mr Putin and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr Putin allegedly proposed alternatives to Mr Al Assad to lead Syria, but Mr Netanyahu rejected all the proposed names. Mr Netanyahu said he trusted no one but Mr Al Assad to protect the peace and the borders with Israel – a position that Mr Putin saw as a green light to escalate the number of Russian attacks alongside the regime forces. All this had taken place under an unmistakable western diplomatic silence, Shabakshi wrote.

 “When a regime is allowed to perpetrate genocide, undeterred, against an entire city by means of air strikes, bombs and explosive barrels, then everyone is an accomplice. Only a miracle would put a stop to Aleppo’s holocaust today," he added.

 “Aleppo isn’t burning. It is getting burnt," said the online publication Albawaba. “The aim is to displace the people and empty the city in order to change the demography of the country along sectarian lines to entrench Bashar Al Assad’s regime," it said.

 Meanwhile, ISIL continues to expand its presence in northern Aleppo. This means that the Syrian Free Army and civilians outside regime-held areas are facing two wars at the same time: against Russia and against ISIL.

 “The regime seems to be facilitating ISIL’s expansion in an effort to distort the Syrian revolution in the global public opinion," it said.'

As bombs fall, Aleppo asks: 'where are the Americans?'

 'Recovering in Turkey after a deadly air strike on a hospital in Aleppo, all that Abu Abdu Tebyiah could think about was the six children he had been forced to leave behind.

 “They are too young to be on their own,” Mr Tebyiah told the Telegraph. “The government is using barrel bombs on our neighbourhood again, so I stopped them going to school. They are now in great danger.”

 Mr Tebyiah said the only way to bring his children to Turkey, which closed its border to fleeing Syrians earlier this year, was to pay smugglers $500 for each child - money he did not have.

 “The fighting there is very alarming,” a US State Department spokesman said when asked why America did not try to halt the escalating violence in Aleppo. "But the situation is very complex," he added.Thousands of Aleppo's people have fled in the last 72 hours, according to Ismail al-Abdullah, an activist living in the city who said that residents were afraid of what is to come.

 “Many gather between 5 and 6am under the cover of darkness, before they can be spotted by the planes,” he said.

 The regime's air strikes have become a grim routine - always beginning at 7am, pounding the rebel side of the city, where some 200,000 people still live. Zahra al-Mansour and her three children were among those leaving. Carrying only a hastily packed bag of schoolbooks, food and clothes, she did not know exactly where they was going, but she knew they had to get away before the Syrian and Russian bombs started dropping.

 Ms Mansour, a 38-year-old teacher, had stayed in Aleppo out of loyalty to her husband - a rebel fighter who was killed in battle last Christmas - and after his death out of a pride that had stopped her from leaving the only city she has called home.

 “No matter how bad it got, I somehow always had faith we would be ok,” she told the Telegraph. “This time it is different. Every street is marked by war - I realise now Assad will not stop until there is no one left.”

 Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst at the Henry Jackson Society, believes that America’s inertia shows that President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Assad’s loyal ally, is now calling the shots.

 “Russia has always had a clear idea of what this ceasefire is - a cover for them to consolidate and plan what we are now seeing,” he said.

 “The US seems to have been torn between understanding the ceasefire was a mirage, establishing a Plan B in the event of its failure, and on the other hand really committing to the process and going along with the pretence that the truce is in operation long after it has clearly failed. It just looks like they’ve sided with Russia by allowing them to claim the city is full of terrorists. The Americans have effectively signed off on Russia taking over the city.”

 “The Russians are great friends to Assad,” said the activist, Mr Abdullah. “We can’t say the same for the Americans. When we heard Mr Kerry say Aleppo was run by al-Qaeda we realised we were on our own. There are no terrorists where the government is bombing - it is a lie that everyone is agreeing to accept for the sake of the ceasefire agreement.”

 With only one road out of Aleppo for those who live in the rebel-held east, residents worry that if the regime forces manage to sever that lifeline, then thousands will be besieged.

 Fadi Hakim, a doctor from Aleppo, said: “This offensive will leave thousands encircled, without food and without medicine. The regime has already bombed the hospitals and its doctors so when the casualties mount up there is no one left to treat them.

 “It will be a massacre, the likes of which we haven’t seen before.” '

Patients and doctors killed in Syria hospital airstrike

 Rageh Omaar:

 'Whatever remained of Syria's tenuous ceasefire, that came crashing down in the city of Aleppo today, buried along with at least fourteen people under rubble, ash and smoke. Even in streets already used to five years of unrelenting bombardment, there was desperation and anguish after the attack by Syrian government planes.

 As though the city's anguish wasn't enough, Aleppo's traumatised children have now had their last medical lifeline cut. All because of the death of this man, Muhammad Waseem Moaz; born, bred and educated at medical school in Aleppo, was the last paediatric doctor for the whole of Aleppo. All other paediatricians have either fled or been killed.

 Dr. David Nott, a trauma surgeon in a major London hospital, has volunteered in Syria, working in Aleppo in 2014. He knew Dr. Moaz.

 "If you take out the only paediatrician that's going to be able to look after children, the 200,000 children that are left in Aleppo will not get any medical treatment at all. Another year from now, perhaps there won't be any doctors left there, at all."

 This is the remains of the al-Quds hospital where Dr. Moaz worked. The medical supply stores and the treatment rooms left in utter ruin. Human rights groups have already accused the Assad government of directly targetting medical facilities. The UN says this conflict now kills a Syrian civilian every 23 minutes, and wounds one every 13.

 "The last child doctor in Eastern Aleppo was killed," said Jan Egelund, chairman of the UN humanitarian taskforce in Syria, "Hospitals have been bombed. What we basically see is that while people are bleeding, the health workers are unable to do their work."

 The targetting of doctors and hospitals is a grim weapon of war in Syria. The aim - to make civilians flee whole areas, and with over two million Syrians as refugees in the region, it's a weapon that's working.'

Syria’s saving will be through its women

 ' “The Syrian mother is resilient and deeply loves her children — but not at the price of losing her dignity and that of her family,” Nadia Alawa, president and executive director of NuDay Syria, a humanitarian relief nongovernmental organization focused on empowerment through stability efforts for women and families, explained. “It has been very humbling to be able to help and provide relief to mothers who stand by their children and their right to live and believe in freedom.”

 One particular case study demonstrates just how resilient Syrian mothers are. NuDay Syria’s Outreach and Empowerment Center in the Turkish city of Antakya providesrefugee mothers, who may have lost everything except their pride, a venue to earn money on their own and learn skills, gain independence and renew their self-esteem. The center is also a school for refugee children, and NuDay Syria is raising funds to expand their educational endeavors at an additional location.

 “What makes our center run so smoothly is the fact that it is run by a mother who herself was an active participant of humanitarian efforts inside Syria. This woman is also a grandmother and is now the guardian of her orphaned grandson,” Alawa shared. (Her name is not being shared out of concern for her security.) The two narrowly escaped getting caught by the Syrian regime as they fled the country, making their way across a river to Turkey in a barrel.

 “Refugees do not leave their home country unless they really have to. In the case of Syrians, often not until their homes have gotten bombed, and the regime is actively targeting them. In the past two years, Syrian mothers are now also escaping ISIS, so they are running from two evils,” Alawa said.

 It’s easy to generalize the Syrian refugee crisis as being one and the same as other crises, but the staggering death toll, widespread displacement and mounting number of women who have been left in charge of their families’ survival have made it another story entirely. Historically, Syrian women were creative and economical when it came to running their households, so for NuDay Syria’s efforts, Alawa found it integral to bypass the humanitarian works typical of other relief organizations. Rather than focusing on short-term emergency initiatives, NuDay Syria has discovered first-hand that there is more that can be done with an expanded focus on self-esteem and sustainability.

 “Ensuring that [Syrian women] became empowered instead of victimized further by both the poverty and aid processes meant consequently that the resources would be used optimally and with a long-term outcome,” Alawa explained.

 The organization works in a besieged area near Damascus, Syria, with a mother-activist on the Syrian regime’s Most Wanted list. (Her name is also not being cited for her security.) Rather than standing back and disempowering herself — and in effect, those around her — she’s taken charge leading humanitarian efforts in an area with “several hundred widowed mothers and their orphans,” Alawa said. “We work together to ensure these families get food. Getting caught would likely mean torture until death. It is for mothers like this activist and those that she helps that inspire and drive me to keep going and to keep working towards being able to help as much as possible.”

 “These mothers want the same things we all want for our children: Freedom, happiness and choices in life. Their wants are so simple, yet we complicate them by hatred, power and greed — so much so that we forget who the victims really are.” '

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

 President Obama: "It would be a mistake for the United States, or Great Britain, or a combination of Western countries to send in ground troops and overthrow the Assad regime. But I do believe that we can apply international pressure to all the parties, including Russia, and Iran, who are essentially propping up Assad; as well as those moderate opposition that exist and may be fighting inside of Syria, to sit down at the table and try to broker a transition."

 It's a straw man. Nobody asked President Obama to send in ground troops to overthrow Assad. The only variation he allows for in this schema is that other countries might also invade. There are other options. In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg¹ he mentions that John Kerry asked for missiles to be fired at specific régime targets. Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination to be the next president has come out in favour of a no fly zone, while Bernie Sanders is opposed. He could have called for the Syrian National Coalition to be recognised as the legitimate government. He could have supported the establishment of the FSA as the national army. He could have exerted diplomatic pressure on Iran and Russia to give up support for Assad and his régime, and pressured them to allow an immediate transition to a democratic and accountable government.

 Instead he did none of those things. He recognised the SNC as the "legitimate opposition", allowing the US to pretend to be a friend and keep its leaders beholden to the West. He sent the CIA to Turkey's borders to act as gatekeepers to ensure that weapons that might stop Assad's massacres like anti-aircraft missiles were kept out, and the flow could be shut off if it looked like the rebels were advancing too fast. This isn't an inevitable policy for the US, but it is one that the dead weight of their previous choices has tied this administration to.

 Russia and Iran are propping up Assad. No kidding! That the President is forced to even mention that now is a sign of the reality of their complicity in the genocide forcing its way even into his twisted narrative. Where the US has uttered ritual denunciations of the Assad régime, it has been muted about those who have enabled it. There are sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine. There are none such when it comes to Syria.

 There is no pressure on them, other than to get Assad to show up at Geneva. If you want to know why the peace talks are a joke, ask why the United States expects the Russians to give up Assad, let alone the régime, when there is no downside to doing so.

 And so to the moderate opposition. Who may be fighting inside of Syria. Not who are fighting against Assad, not who are fighting against Assad and ISIS, not who are the only line of defence against his depredations (other than the Islamists who are also fighting Assad and ISIS). Because that would be to give the game away, that there is an alternative to a US invasion as a way to stop the bloodshed. To maintain the illusion that there is no alternative to the status quo the victims of this war have to be rendered as unpersons.

 And what sort of pressure is the US going to exert on them, to force them to talks? To not make precondtions that Assad must leave, so that Iran and Russia can happily keep him in place, perhaps replacing him if he becomes inconvenient, but maintaining the core of the régime so they can retain their influence. All this talk of a transition is a con, designed to make it look like a game of musical chairs will bring peace. In reality the opposition knows that saying Assad doesn't have to go now means there will be no change, no democracy, no justice, no end to the rape and torture. The US administration believes, or purports to believe, that those are only functions of the war situation, Syrians know that the régime will not go back, cannot go back, to operating any other way. The US won't even support for the opposition's minimal basic demands, that prisoners be released, that bombing, starvation and torture stop.

 Just before that passage, from the full interview²:

 "Syria has been a heartbreaking situation of enormous complexity, and I don't think there are any simple solutions to Syria, and those who pretend that there are, probably haven't been paying attention to a lot of the details."

 Hypocrite. The man who can't tell us if the moderate opposition are fighting in Syria for sure, let alone who they are fighting against, lectures unnamed critics with undescribed solutions that they haven't been paying attention. Once again the claim of complexity is a charm to enable the avoidance of the elephant in the room. And then afterwards:

 "We continue to strike ISIL targets in Raqqa. There is going to be a military component to this, even as we try to bring an end to the civil war. In order to solve the long-term problems in Syria, a military solution alone, and certainly us deploying ground troops, is not going to bring that about."

 The incoherence should be clear. There is only a military solution being offered to deal with one symptom of the problem. While he casts this as a civil war, not a revolution against genocide, he can only continue to be seen to enable the Assad narrative that this is all about a struggle against terrorism, and there are no fundamental changes needed to bring about peace.

 Responding to the suggestion that the lack of assertive response or engagement by the US has helped the fuel the migration crisis:

 "You can't have it both ways. You can't say, 'We don't want to do anything in Syria,' our parliaments won't ratify any actions in Syria, but we do want the United States to do something about it."

 This is not a fair or true argument. The British parliament did agree last year to take action in Syria, but only against ISIS, the way President Obama likes it. When he and David Cameron presented proposals for action in 2013, they kept the options deliberately vague, enabling opponents to make it look as if they were starting another war. Even going to the legislatures, when they feel no need for other military operations, were a sign they didn't want the votes to go in favour of action, so that they could subsequently use them as an excuse for their inaction, as President Obama does here. None of the people who were protesting against the proposal for airstrikes are asking the US to sort things out, nobody is asking for what the President claims is the only interventionist course of action open to him.

 Meanwhile, the spokesman for the anti-ISIS coalition, Colonel Steve Warren, has offered implicit support to a Russian assault on Aleppo by saying³ it is mostly held by al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate, which the US also likes to bomb, because its counter-terrorism focus makes them worse villains than the murderers of hundreds of thousands. And the White Helmets said of Friday:

 "Today has been the worst day in Syria for over a year. Attacks are everywhere….Tracking attacks in Aleppo, Idlib, Homs and Damascus. Furious intensity. Teams report streets littered with bodies….We return to work with sadness and heavy hearts."

 As the opposition said⁵ in suspending cooperation with the talks in Geneva:

 "For two years, Mr de Mistura was appointed in his task as a U.N. envoy and during this period the killing was increased or doubled in Syria and also the number of villages and areas that were under siege also increased where is Mr De Mistura and his team.

 We put our participation in the negotiations on hold to respect the Syrian blood that is shed under strike from the regime and its allies and to respect the Syrians who are killed of hunger following the siege and to respect Syrians who are killed under torture."

 President Obama says in the BBC interview:

 "Whether we like it or not, we live in an interconnected world...It would be tempting for a lot of people to believe we can pull up the drawbridge...It requires us to build international institutions, and support regional and international structures...In the absence of such cooperation, we won't solve these problems. That's true in Syria."

 Not all of us have castles, like his friends in the royal family, to pull up the drawbridge to. The only way this is true in Syria is if you think of Iran and Russia as partners whose sphere of influence needs to be respected, and ignore the demand of Syrians for sovereignty over their own country.

 He says of Libya:

 "I continue to believe that had we stood by passively, that Gadaffi would have killed enormous numbers of his own people. Libya would be embroiled in a continuing war, that would have been even more disruptive and damaging."

 That's what he's done in Syria, in spades, and no amount of reframing of the narrative will erase that.

 1. [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/]
 2. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07b7wg9/bbc-news-special-president-obama-interview]
 3. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160426031606/http://uk.businessinsider.com/defense-department-nusra-aleppo-putin-assad-2016-4]

 4. [http://eaworldview.com/2016/04/syria-daily-deadly-russian-regime-bombing-of-aleppo/]
 5. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160424114658/http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-opposition-idUKKCN0XK0KU]

Janine di Giovanni: The Morning They Came For Us

 " 'I lay there hiding my face as they kicked and thought: “They are using my body to practise their judo moves.”

 And the entire time they were beating me, they kept saying: “You want freedom? Here’s your freedom!” Every time they said freedom, they kicked or punched harder. Then suddenly the mood changed. It got darker. They started saying if I did not talk, they would rape me.'

 By early 2012, reports began emerging of mass rape in Syria, they seem to be perpetrated predominantly by President Bashar al-Assad’s men, largely paramilitary agents known as Shabiha, or ‘ghosts’.

 Although Assad’s own government troops were not always the perpetrators, the Shabiha did most of the dirty work when it came to sexual violence. Their tactics were largely to incite fear within communities — to enter towns or villages after the government troops had been fighting nearby, and spread the word that they would rape the women — daughters, mothers, cousins and nieces. Frightened, people would run, leaving scorched earth behind. It’s a convenient way to ethnically cleanse an entire region.

 Sexual violence was not reported to be only against women either. There are many accounts of male rape, particularly in detention. Although prisons and detention centres were usually the most susceptible places for the crime to occur, it happened at checkpoints and when houses were being ‘cleansed’ as well.

 The danger of such confessions is they could not be verified as not having been given under great duress, but the testimony given by a captured Shabiha is still chilling documentation.

 Question: How long have you been with the security forces?

 Response: Since the beginning of the revolution.

 Question: What is your aim?

 Response: To quash the revolution.

 Question: Do you go out to carry out raids?

 Response: Indeed. We enter the houses to search. If there are men we push them out of the houses for a few hours. We take all the money and jewels we find. And if there are women, we rape them.

 Question: How many women did you rape?

 Response: Seven cases of rape.

 Question: Seven?

 Response: Indeed.

 Question: Where did these rapes happen?

 Response: Some at the village Al Fawl. First cases at the school, we raped them for six continuous hours. Then we entered another house as security forces on the ground that there are terrorists inside. We entered the house, we have tied the man, stolen jewels and money, and we raped women. One of them is from Knissat Bani Az. And we were four to rape her (me and three shabiha) and she committed suicide following her rape. The other case is a girl, we entered to search her house as security forces and we have stolen money and raped her. And there is another rape in Damascus. We entered her house on the ground we are security forces elements. We entered the house and raped the girl.

***

 A small, dark cell became Nada’s home for eight months.

 Nada’s cell was not even big enough for her already small frame to stretch out in; she remained curled up. The jeans she wore throughout the entire ordeal are still creased in the areas of her body which she was unable to move.

 Other men and women were kept in the cells next to her own. She did not know who they were, but they too would scream out, crying, pleading for mercy, for an end to the torture. Some cried for their mothers.

 “This was part of my torture,” she says.” To hear other people begging, and to know they were coming for me next. When they would stop in front of my door and turn the key — my heart would stop.”

 When she asked for water, they would bring a male prisoner, make him urinate into a bottle, and try to force her to drink it. When she spat it out, they would throw it back in her face. The male prisoner, equally humiliated, would avoid her eyes.

 “I remember every single one of their faces,” she says bitterly of her tormentors, of that memory. “I will look for them. I AM looking for them.”

 One day, when she was not telling them what they wanted to hear, they brought her to an all-male cell where the prisoners were in their underwear.

 “I am a conservative Muslim woman, I thought I was being given to these men for them to rape me,” she said. “And so I started screaming. I think I screamed for three hours. Until my throat was stripped raw. They wanted to break me. And they did. Finally, I said, ‘Okay, I will tell you the truth’.”

 She said she talked. She told them things. But what she told them was not enough. After several hours, they moved her — the first of many moves — and brought her to a place that she calls “the horror room”. The room was only as wide as “a man’s body”. They tied her hands to an iron bar behind her back.

 Then a man entered with a whip. “Every time I said something he did not like,” she says, beginning to break into sobs, “he whipped me.”

 Her bloodied and bruised body was then handed over to another interrogator, who was told, “Okay, now really take care of her.”

 “Now the real beatings began,” she says sombrely, “and the terrible things.”

 When we first met, she cowered when I touched her hand in greeting. She seemed broken, vulnerable. She would not use the word rape. She told her story in staccato. But after a while of sitting quietly, her face changed into a myriad of emotions — sadness, pain, then the heavy flood of memory, and finally revulsion. She told of the day they brought in a male prisoner and forced her to watch him being sodomised. As she talks, her voice deadened, she opens and closes her hand mechanically, clutching at the straps of her backpack. She starts to cry. It very quickly turns to a raw sobbing.

 “The things I saw ... the things I saw ...” she spits out. “It is unbearable to explain what I saw ... I cannot forget … I saw ... another prisoner being raped ... a man being raped. I heard it ... I saw it ... Do you know what it’s like to hear a man cry?”

 “I changed a lot when I was in prison,” she says quietly.

 Then she smiles. “But you know, even there, I was the revolutionary.”

 In between beatings and interrogation sessions, she confronted her jailers. She chastised them for small things, for prisoners’ rights. It gave her a feeling of having some control.
“I made them get plates for the other prisoners!” she says proudly. “I made them realise we are not just dogs to be kicked and used, but people. I made them put plastic over the broken windows.” She looks faintly triumphant. “Before we had nothing, then we got plates!”
Small victories for a broken spirit."

The long journey of two Syrian revolutionaries

 'Sami went to the streets with hundreds of thousands of other Syrians. As the demonstrations surged, so did the casualties, and Sami and others stood daily against the regime knowing they could be the next in line when the military opened fire.

 “They started to have these big demonstrations inside Damasus, in Midan.” Sami says, “And we had many in Qudsayya. Those were the really hard ones, you know? You had to run a lot, there were a lot of bullets. Sometimes you had to carry people who got shot and you put them in a car, you didn’t even know who is in the car. The car would drop them off before the hospital so the driver would not be taken by secret police. Eventually, we had hospitals that we made in safe houses in each neighborhood, so the injured would not be taken away.”

 At one point, Sami tells me, Syrian forces went house to house in Qudsayya over a two-day period and rounded up 120 people, half of whom were killed under torture. It was normal to hear of another friend or neighbor who had been arrested, beaten, or disappeared. This climate took Sami and Tariq into 2012, when a lot of people started picking up guns to fight against the regime.

 Something struck me almost immediately about these two men; both broadcast something like hope. As we talked further, I realized it was something deeper than that; pride. A pride that I have never experienced. When they speak about their journey to Europe and of their brushes with death, they do so knowing that they stood on the right side of history, that they did exactly what they would want themselves or anyone to do in their situation; they stood and pushed forward when the Arab world was trying to rid itself of the regimes and dogmatic political doctrines that oversaw the repression of their generation.

 Though they carry trauma and scars from Syria, and while their families and friends are scattered, dead, or in prison, neither regret their role in the Syrian revolution. But Sami and Tariq have hope as well, a hope in knowing that perhaps the revolt in Syria will be a building block toward some better future. It had to happen, they stress, and once it had started, they had to push it as far as they could.

 Such hope does not come from blind faith, but from knowing that something could work, from a sense of potential and possibility. That is what Tunisia and Egypt taught the world in late 2010 and early 2011, and it’s what drove people like Sami and Tariq to the streets of Damascus a month later. They live now knowing that they were among the millions who tried.
Things don’t always look the way you think they will, the three of us agree, rolling cigarettes in a smoke-filled anarchist bar in central Amsterdam. When the revolution began, there was no turning back. And though they were defeated in the streets, disappeared in prisons, and driven out of the country, it wasn’t without reason.

 “There’s a difference between losing and failing,” Tariq says.'

WNYC - Syrian Voices

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 "The Assad régime would have gone in 2013 if the Iranian military hadn't come in to rescue him, and then he would have gone by the end of 2015, even with that help, if Russia hadn't come in to rescue him. So Putin has a big influence. He's saved the régime, he seems to have kind of frozen the battle lines for now. We're not going into this in a good way. The opposition negotiations committee is threatening to withdraw from the negotiations because none of their minimal demands have been met, which include an end to the bombing, an end to the starvation sieges which a million people are suffering from, and the release of political prisoners. John Kerry is threatening to blame the opposition committee if it doesn't work out, as usual, but of course they're much more beholden to the Syrians on the ground than to a United States that hasn't helped them.

 There is indeed a renewed concern about human rights. The people on the ground are demanding that they get more than this reduced level of hostilities. There's been a reduction in bombing, which has been very welcome. You've seen the civil activists go back on to the streets. Women and men returning to the streets, calling for the original aims of the revolution, waving the revolutionary flag, protesting against the foreign jihadist groups which have jumped in as well as the Assad régime. The people on the ground after five years of this terror, and the scorched earth policy the régime has unleashed against them, are expecting a lot more than they're getting at the moment. So unless the people on the ground see more, I don't think this process is going to go very far."

 Leila Al-Shami:

 "I was working there as a human rights activist prior to the revolution, during the time of the Damascus Spring, which was a time of hope for political change in Syria. People were starting to ask for political reforms. They were starting to ask for the release of political prisoners, more political pluralism, and an end to emergency law, which was the law really used to crack down on political dissent. So it was work defending political prisoners, because that movement was ruthlessly suppressed.

 Assad certainly had a very populist rhetoric, as an anti-imperialist resistance régime, but his rhetoric didn't match reality. Because ostensibly emergency law was in place because of the war with Israel - that was the justification for it - but it was the law that was really used to suppress political dissent. Torture was very widespread prior to the revolution, and since the revolution occurred we've seen torture being practised on an industrial scale.

 Assad was a partner in the War on Terror. There was an illegal rendition programme, where people were rendered by the US to Syria for torture by proxy. A very famous case is that of the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was arrested at JFK airport, deported by the Americans, by the CIA, to Syria, where he was held in detention and tortured for over a year on suspicion of being a terrorist; in fact he was completely innocent."

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 "The Ba'ath Party came to power in both Syria and Iraq in 1963, and then in both countries it changed from being a supposedly socialist nationalist movement, into really a vehicle for the power of dictators, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, in Syria. He came to power in 1970, and he established a totalitarian dictatorship, which very quickly went far away from the socialist origins. It was really a vehicle for his personal power. It was in some ways secular, but it was also very sectarian, one sectarian community was vastly over-represented in the army and the security forces which really run the country. By the time Bashar, the son, inherited the dictatorship, it really became a neo-liberal régime, and a crony capitalist régime, in which the president's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, by 2011 was estimated to have a finger in 60% of the national economy.

 I think a lot of Syrians misunderstood Bashar, and gave him the benefit of the doubt. He personally remained popular until his first speech in 2011 after the outbreak of the popular uprising which then became a revolution. It was when he degenerated into conspiracy theories, and laughed at the fact that people were being killed, and threatened a fight, that so many people came off the fence and lost their respect for him. It is remarkable that in this country - the Western media as well was making a huge fuss about the fact - that briefly in the year 2000 there was one semi-tolerated semi-independent satirical newspaper. Today of course, in revolutionary Syria, in the liberated areas, there are tens of Free newspapers, tens of Free radio stations.

 It's chaos, but it's a wonderful revolutionary chaos, which is being attacked. There are over four hundred local councils in Syria, which we don't really talk about here. Most of them are democratically elected, so there are real achievements in the middle of this bloodbath.

 I don't think Obama has been weak. I think he has made a very definite, deliberate, and very unwise decision to hand over to Syria to other savage imperialist powers, primarily Russia, but also Iran. The crowning achievement of his administration has been a deal with Iran which I don't think we're against in principle, but it comes precisely at the time that Iran's got tens of thousands of occupation troops, and transnational Shia jihadists that it's organised, in Syria, who are really contributing to the problem, they're contributing to the arguments that ISIS use for their Sunni identity politics. I wish that Obama - it's a good aim after the Bush years to want to withdraw from the Middle East - but what he should have done is try to hand over to the democrats who are standing up in the Middle East and asking for a say in running of their own country, and not just handing it over, as if it's a cake he doesn't want. to other savage imperialist powers, who are causing more refugees, more extremism, and helping Assad destroy Syria, which isn't in anybody's interest.

 Iraq is a complicated situation, there are mistakes on all sides, the Iraqi society is divided and wounded. I think American policies have contributed to the sectarianism there. Saddam Hussein's policies contributed to the sectarianism, likewise Iran and other regional players. In Syria today, as I said, we have over 400 mostly democratically elected local councils, so the Arabs in Syria are practising democracy, and they're being ignored."

 Leila Al-Shami:

 "The media has focused on Syrians either as victims or as terrorists, and people have not focused on them as agents of positive change within their communities. I think it's essential that the local councils are given support. I also think it's essential that they're at the negotiations, because these are the only democratically elected representatives of Syrians that we have, and legitimacy really needs to be built from the ground up, democracy has to be built from the ground up, not imposed externally from outside.

 I think the US could support the local councils, or at least make them more visible and support their inclusion in the negotiation process, because where the US does seem to have influence is over the external negotiations. It doesn't really have much influence on the ground."

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 "Early on there were many members of the Ba'ath Party who hoped that pan-Arab secular nationalism would happen. That's why many members of the religious minorities in the early days went into the Ba'ath Party. But of course these dictatorships use divide and rule tactics. They were vehicles of power for the dictators, and the dictators, not because they were interested in religion, but just for divide and rule purposes, and because they trusted men that they were close to, they brought in people from their families, from their villages, from their communities, from their sectarian communities.

 But I must say the conflict in Syria is not ultimately a Sunni-Shia conflict at all. The president is from the Alawi community, which journalists tell us are Shia, but actually they're not. Traditionally both Sunni and Shia clerics consider Alawis to be heretics. Most Alawis are not very religious. To the extent that they are loyal to the régime, and several or many aren't, but to the extent that they are loyal, it is due to their fear of Islamist alternatives, and because the régime has been very clever in manipulating those fears, by releasing salafist jihadists from prison, having in effect a non-aggression pact with ISIS for a very long time, to allow them to build up, to scare both the West and religious minorities in Syria. But it's not really about that. It's about a struggle between dictatorship and democracy, and there are people from all sectarian backgrounds on the side of the revolution and also people from all sectarian backgrounds who are still loyal to the régime."

No-Fly Zone: Why Syria Solution Is No Easy Feat

 'They say a no-fly zone is an act of war against a sovereign nation that still has a seat at the United Nations.'

 No, régimes committing war crimes and crimes against humanity are not protected by their retention of a UN seat from actions designed to prevent the commission of those crimes.

 'Establishing a no-fly zone—two, actually, as advocates have proposed one in Syria’s south and one in its north—would dramatically escalate American involvement in Syria’s civil war, require a ground force willing to defend the sanctuary, and do little to directly challenge ISIS’ control of territory outside the zone.'

 1. It wouldn't dramatically escalate America's involvement. Every time Assad has been threatened, he has backed off. He barely has an army to call his own left, he's not going to fight the US when he can't fight poorly-armed Syrians.

 2. The ground force is the Free Syrian Army. If it gets relief from the air, it is so much easier for it to recruit and retain those wishing to free their country, rather than them going to the Islamist militias or on boats to Europe.

 3. The Free Syrian Army has been the most effective force against ISIS, despite being the worst armed, and ISIS concentrating its attacks on the FSA. When ISIS lost ground to the FSA in Northern Aleppo last week, it launched 13 vehicle borne IEDs in retaliation. Allowing the FSA and the liberated areas relief from Assad's bombing would allow them to deploy more resources against ISIS, and as Assad is the greatest recruiting sergeant for ISIS, once he is gone it will be much easier to get rid of ISIS entirely.

 'If the primary goals are stopping Assad’s barrel bombing of civilian populations, or degrading ISIS, there are less burdensome ways to accomplish them.'

 Let's hear them. Giving the FSA anti-aircraft weapons might be more effective, but that is precisely the policy that the US has vetoed since Assad's bombing campaign started.

 'Perhaps most importantly, absent a wider strategy for ending the war, a no-fly zone could essentially freeze the Syrian conflict in place, leaving U.S. air power, already stretched thin, mired in a costly operation with no definable end.'

 It's not true. Assad has faced losing to a much worse armed force repeatedly, because he has no real support, and has required massive foreign intervention to keep him on life support. In 2013 a massive intervention by Hezbollah, in 2014 by Iran itself, in 2015 by Russia. If you take away his ability to force those who might show any opposition to leave the country, he has no strategy left, and his ability to keep any of the country hostage to his survival diminishes. Take steps that would weaken him are the way to bring the conflict to an end, because it is his out of control torture-rape state that is the source of instability. When a major source of state employees income is selling torture victims back to their families, there is no way that state can ever be at peace with its victims.

 'Some military experts believe the Russian warplane shot down by Turkey was probing inside that NATO ally’s airspace precisely to send a message that Moscow would oppose establishment of a no-fly zone along the border.'

 And the Russians didn't try it again when the Turks shot the plane down. Putin has enough trouble with the wars he has started in Crimea and now Syria, and it is only the present administration's persistent backing off that has encouraged him to push his luck.

David Davis sucking up to Assad

 One of the best informed supporters of the Syrian revolution is a Hawkwind fan, so after Urban Guerilla as the backing for a Free Army video we get this¹.

 The Tory MP David Davis has just been sucking up to Assad. "We had warned him before we arrived that we were going to be very frank with him." They asked him about barrel bombs, he ignored the question. They asked him about the torture of prisoners, he said it was a foreign conspiracy. And still this douchebag thinks if we help him it will moderate his behaviour.

 There aren't any moderate oppositionists, because the head of an NGO told David Davis so. Maybe the same NGO of which Dr. Annie Sparrow wrote², "OCHA’s defense that any aid delivered from Damascus is better than none has not been weighed against the human and financial cost of bolstering a regime that is deliberately increasing the hardship of people in opposition-held areas. It’s time for OCHA to do its part by revisiting its underlying principles and acting accordingly—to check out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, to leave the Syrian capital, and to stop supporting the atrocities of the Syrian government."

 Presumably the Free Syrian Army has to infiltrate the Four Seasons as chambermaids in order to get their message to Tory MPs. In other news, the Syrian government forces, i.e. Shia militias invading Syria at Iran's behest, have just lost a huge arsenal of weapons³ to ISIS. Remember when the problem with arming the Free Army was that weapons would end up with ISIS? Now it happens for real, and its not important. In fact this might have been deliberate, like the loss of Palmyra⁴, "A month before the city fell to Daesh, we had received information that Daesh was planning to attack Tadmur and the adjacent city of Sukhna. We conveyed the information to Assad himself," said Mohamed Qassim, who formerly served as attorney-general in Syria’s central city of Tadmur. "But instead of laying out a plan to defend the city, Assad ordered military forces to vacate Tadmur in hopes of tempting Daesh to fill the vacuum."

 Much better was right-wing US senator Lindsey Graham⁵,

 "General Jones, I just returned from Turkey. Turkey is -- is no longer taking refugees from Syria. Are you aware of that?"

 "Yes, sir, I am."

 "Mr. Blinken, has Jordan taken refugees from Syria?"

 "As a practical matter, very, very few."

 "What about Lebanon?"

 "Also, it slowed down. They put requirements on admissions, but as a practical matter make it difficult for people to get in."

 "So I want the Committee to know that people in Syria are trapped. There's no place to go."

 1. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061426/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqXNKZigb1o]
 2. [https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-united-nations-ocha-helped-assad.html]
 3. [https://twitter.com/archicivilians/status/721202000281645057]
 4. [https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/02/ex-syria-official-tells-of-collusion.html]
 5. From 45 mins in. [https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-committee/combating-violent-extremism/438607]

Justice Seen Key to Sustained Peace in Syria

 'The solution to the situation in Syria should include a comprehensive process for accountability and transitional justice, according to Mazen Darwish, President of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.

 Darwish noted that at the Geneva talks, everyone is going “around the main topic, without discussing the real solution.” He stressed that there is no easy way to reconciliation. “You cannot press end to this conflict and then expect everything to be right again,” he added.

 In order to have real solutions and to prevent the resurgence of another civil war, questions regarding the Kurdish population, political transformation, accountability, and reconciliation need to be addressed, according to Darwish. If these underlying issues remain unaddressed and “do not take into consideration the transitional justice, then we will just have ticking bombs for the future,” he said.

 He stated that the only way to protect the Syrian minorities is to hold the regime accountable, “not by extermination of the majority or by rewarding those who committed crimes against the humanity and letting them go with those crimes.”

 “Putting the Syrian people in front of only two options, dictatorship or terrorism, is unethical, immoral and unacceptable,” said Darwish. He highlighted the importance of peace in Syria for Europe and the international community: “This world won’t be alright without peace and development in Syria. Even here in the US, or in Europe, or in any place in the world, we need democracy and peace inside Syria to have democracy and peace in the whole world.”

 According to Darwish, if the Syrian citizens who are looking and willing to fight for freedom and democracy for the future are defeated, then everyone will be defeated. “No one would benefit from that except for terrorism.” As such, the removal of dictators and the defeat of terrorism are linked. “If we are really serious to fight ISIS and its ideology, we should guarantee that dictatorship should be defeated first,” he said.'

Thanks to UK and US intervention

 Patrick Cockburn shows more clearly than ever that he prefers dictators to popular revolution. It would be nice if his admirers, from Noam Chomsky to Jeremy Corbyn, would acknowledge this. There is extreme dissonance if you say, "I'm not saying things were better when Gadaffi was in power, but...", or "I'm not pro-Assad, but...", and then promote a man who is saying precisely that, that it is better when the tyrants are in charge, that the people love them, that the opposition is just a Western-backed illusion that paved the way for dangerous extremist Muslims.

 'There was the same lethal pretence by Western powers in Libya and Syria that the rebels they backed represented the mass of the population and were capable of taking over from existing regimes. In reality, the weakening or destruction of central government created a power vacuum promptly filled by extreme jihadi groups.'

 It's noticeable that in Yemen, Cockburn presents everything as being the fault of Saudi Arabia - and the West that should be backing dictators, though not the Saudi ones for some reason. He refers a couple of times to suggestions that the pro-the previous dictator and Houthi side has any Iranian backing as inaccurate labelling and having little evidence for it, but gives no reason why we should take his word for it. And this feels a bit like traditional stereotyping of Arabs:

 'Yemeni politics is exceptionally complicated and often violent, but violence has traditionally been followed by compromise between warring parties.'

 In truth it is allowing Assad to proceed with his genocide against Sunni Muslims that has wrecked "a whole country and enable al Qaeda and Isis to use the chaos to establish safe havens." The Institute For War & Peace Reporting* shows how much there is nothing but a barbarous kleptocracy where the Syrian state once was, where it hasn't simply handed over parts of the country to Iran. There can be no end to ISIS while this cancer persists, the very disease Cockburn wants us to preserve.

 'My family and I fled Syria on January 24, 2012. Too many of us had already been arrested and it was no longer safe.

 The government had eyes and ears everywhere. Young men were being paid handsome amounts of money to join the ranks of the shabiha paramilitaries. They were on every corner, in every neighbourhood. They were the worst kind of human beings, with no moral scruples.
My family and many others suffered a great deal because of the shabiha. They detained people for trivial reasons without a second thought as to what would become of them. They didn’t care if the person was a man or a woman, young or old.
We fled our country because of these villains.

 One woman told us how she had been detained in al-Qusur street. She was carrying a laptop the shabiha probably wanted for themselves. They accused her of participating in terrorist activities and threw her in jail. When her youngest son went to the local intelligence headquarters to ask after her, he too was thrown in one of their cells. The woman was later released, but her son remained in prison for two years. He was tortured until he died.

 A friend of mine from a village in Latakia’s countryside also suffered at their hands. “They took my husband and held him for three years, following which they executed him. He died before meeting his youngest daughter. He was an aircraft engineer and was caught while sabotaging one of their military aircrafts.”

 Then there was the woman from the village of al-Bayda in Banyas. The village was one of the first in the governorate of Tartus to announce its support for the revolution. The woman I met told me about a massacre in May 2013 in which at least 250 people were killed as a punishment for the uprising.

 “They divided the men, women and children into separate groups, then killed them in the ugliest of ways. It was indiscriminate murder. Neither gender nor age mattered to them. They even set the wounded on fire. When they left, those of us who had survived gathered the bodies of the dead and buried them in mass graves. Then more than 500 families fled, and we were amongst them,” she said.

 The woman’s elderly father-in-law was slaughtered along with his two sons, while his third son watched in horror. That third son was her husband. The couple sold their house in Banyas for a fraction of what it was worth to fund their journey to Turkey and then to Europe where they hoped to find medical care, jobs and a future for their young children.

 Umm Mohammed last saw her son Mohammed on November 6, 2012. That day, the government launched a major offensive on her town of Saraqib. Mohammed’s wife was martyred. When they found her she was still clutching the loaf of bread she had gone out to buy for her children. Umm Mohammed searched amongst the bodies of the martyrs for her son, but she could not find him. She took his children and fled to Reyhanli in Turkey where she how lives with her daughter.'

 *[https://iwpr.net/global-voices/tales-revolutions-heartbreak]

Labels Do Matter: It’s a Revolution, Stupid.

 Maryam Saleh:

 'Since day one, there have been various competing versions of events: the Syrian people’s narrative has been of a movement seeking freedom and dignity, the Assad regime’s rhetoric has been of terrorists, infiltrators, and foreign conspirators, and the initial U.S. discourse was of support for the people.

 In 2012, even as the Syrian opposition began to take up arms, it was abundantly clear that the government, propped up by Iran and Russia, was the unlawful aggressor, and the defenseless people were desperately trying to protect themselves and their communities.

 Gradually though, the narrative in mainstream media and among policymakers shifted. Conflict or civil war, not revolution or popular uprising. Rebels or insurgents, not revolutionaries or freedom fighters. Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra— an enemy of the revolution — somehow became synonymous with it. ISIS, which waged war on anti-Assad Syrians nearly a year before it began threatening the West, took center stage and became a primary global concern, eclipsing any discussion of the Assad regime’s ongoing wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people.

 I grew tired of explaining to anti-interventionists that my people deserved to live without constant fear of barrel bombs, and that either a no-fly zone or anti-aircraft weaponry (or both) was necessary to accomplish that. I no longer wanted to explain that President Barack Obama’s August 2011 call for Assad’s departure did not transform the “revolution” into a U.S. ploy to effectuate regime change reminiscent of Iraq; that a popular revolution born in the streets of Syria was invariably different from a foreign occupation planned in the White House and Pentagon; and that President Obama’s policies (especially his appeasement of Iran and his chemical weapons “red line”) breathed life into Assad’s killing machine.

 I became more cynical, angry, and jaded than I ever could have imagined, and I knew that if I spoke of al-thawra al-sooriyyeh to anyone watching mainstream media in 2015, I would come off as a lunatic. So I too began referring to Syria as a conflict, not a revolution.

 Late last month, the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) negotiated a shaky (and extremely flawed) “cessation of hostilities“ in Syria. Syrians felt free to protest en masse for the first time in years. On March 4, a Friday named “The Revolution Continues,” Syrians held 104 peaceful protests throughout the country, renewing their basic demand for Assad’s departure. On March 11, protesters once again came out to “Renew Their Vows” to the Syrian revolution. And on March 15, Syrians celebrated the fifth anniversary of the start of the protests.

 History will not be kind to those who abandoned the Syrian people, and the Syrian people will not look favorably on those who conveniently and lazily reduced their revolution for dignity to a civil war. Revolutions are messy, and they parry with counterrevolutions such that they often descend into war, but the war in Syria would not be without the revolutionary spark that ignited it. So I have resolved to stop being stupid. From today onward, it’s a revolution, never a conflict.'