The Syrian revolution through a rebel's eyes

 'In the dusty backyard of a small house with cracks down its walls sits Obada Dabbas, cooking eggs.

 Despite suffering from old wounds, a broad smile is drawn across his face.

 Dabbas's story is the story of the Syrian revolution. He has at turns been protester, detainee, rebel fighter and one of 14 million Syrians who have been displaced from home.

 Though it has been eight years since demonstrations against Bashar al-Assad’s government began on 15 March 2011, those early days of the revolution, a time when protests were toppling autocrats across the Arab world, are seared into his memory.

 Dabbas's hometown, Daraya, became rebellious soon after the first demonstrations began in southern Syria's Daraa.



 Known as the "city of grapes," the Damascus suburb had a reputation for the sweetness of its fruit and beauty of its trees.

 It is purportedly the site of Paul the Apostle's vision on the road to Damascus, and many of the city's residents had their own Damascene conversion when protests began sweeping through Syria like wildfire.

 "The aim of the demonstrations was to secure public freedoms, allow multi-partyism, curb violations by the security services and put an end to the ruling family's monopoly on power," Dabbas says from al-Dana, a small town in northern Idlib province, the opposition's last redoubt.



 Dabbas was 19 then, working as a carpenter building furniture. Every Friday, he and his friends would help organise protests in mosques, raising banners decrying corruption and handing out fliers promoting the revolutionary movement.

 Thousands gathered to chant slogans against Assad, whose presidential palace could be seen atop a hill just a handful of kilometres away.

 "The Syrian army and security forces stood for hours waiting to break up the demonstrations by force," Dabbas says.

 "We distributed water and roses to them, but to no avail. We were confronted with live bullets and were arrested randomly."



 While handing roses and bottled water to the soldiers deployed to quash a protest - a peaceful gesture that became an iconic image of the early days of the revolution - Dabbas's cousin Khairou Dabbas was arrested.

 Soon after, on 24 February 2012, Dabbas himself was also detained.

 Walking to the mosque to pray, he was intercepted by soldiers. They took his ID card and mobile telephone, on which they found a photograph of one of Daraya's dead wrapped in the green, white and black of Syria's revolutionary flag.

 That photo condemned Dabbas to 74 days of detention under the notorious Air Force Intelligence Directorate - time spent between overcrowded cells and solitary confinement.

 "I underwent five sessions of interrogation and torture, each lasted about four to five hours. I cannot forget the cries of tortured women."

 During the last interrogation session, his captors blindfolded him, took his thumb and pressed it on a sheet of paper, making him implicitly sign a confession the contents of which he was not told.

 "I was released in deplorable condition at 3 in the morning, barely able to reach my house and cross hundreds of checkpoints."

 Despite his gruesome experience, Dabbas was one of the lucky ones. His cousin Khairou was not.

 On Dabbas' phone is a picture of Khairou, and as he gazes at it a grave sadness descends on the otherwise lighthearted man.



 Khairou's death in detention was recently confirmed by the Assad régime.

 He joins one of Dabbas' brothers as a victim of Assad's notorious prisons. Another brother detained by pro-government forced is yet to be accounted for.

 According to the Syrian Network of Human Rights, 128,00 people have been arrested or detained by the Syrian government since 2011. The group estimates 13,983 people, at least, have died under torture in Assad’s prisons.

 "The government has resorted since the crisis in 2011 to a systematic practice of arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances of a harrowing scale in order to silence its opponents - journalists, civil society activists, human rights lawyers," said Lynn Maalouf, Middle East research director at Amnesty International.

 "It is an issue that has affected every single community in the country and will no doubt bear its scar on the society’s fabric for generations to come."



 The heavy-handed tactics of Assad's forces only succeeded in angering the people of Daraya more. Residents took to arms and tried to wrest the city from the soldiers arresting protesters en masse.

 In the summer of 2012, the Free Syrian Army rebels took control.

 However, with Daraya only some 10km from Assad's seat of power in Damascus, the Syrian government was not going relinquish the suburb easily.

 Between the 20 and 25 August, Assad's forces stormed the city.

 "It was a day like the Day of Resurrection," Dabbas recalls. "The smell of blood rose from the entire city of Daraya after the Syrian government forces invaded the area from all directions."

 The city was subjected to four days of continuous bombardment, and all contact with the outside world was cut off.

 "News coming from different neighbourhoods told of how the Syrian government forces conducted mass killings in brutal ways as they progressed and combed the buildings.

 "Nothing could be done other than wait for an unknown fate. The Syrian army was driving young men, women, children and old people into cellars, then throwing grenades at them or setting them on fire."

 Totally surrounded by Assad’s forces and trapped, Daraya's residents had no other choice but to hide and hope for the best.

 "It was hard to forget the sound of the bullets and the screams of women and children. They drove young people out of the houses and tortured them to death."

 Terrified, Dabbas tried to hide wherever he could, in places such as water tanks and sheds. But the growing realisation that his family too was at risk drove him home to seek them out.

 "I watched the street through a bullet hole in the wall of the house. I saw dozens of soldiers storming the neighbourhood, carrying sharp objects stained with blood."

 The sight became too much for Dabbas to bear.

 "In fact I am not a hero, I lost my consciousness completely.

 "When I woke up, my family told me that the soldiers did not enter the house. They shot at the building's door and ordered all the young men to leave, threatening to demolish the building if they refused. After most of the young men were arrested they left."

 Worried the soldiers would return, Dabbas and his family moved to a different house, only for the forces to congregate outside that one too.

 "The soldiers were about to enter the house, but they were busy chasing young men running through the fields. I was even more appalled by the news that many of my friends and relatives had been brutally killed."

 As many as 500 people were killed in the assault, one of the bloodiest of the war.



 After the massacre, Dabbas saw no other option but to take up arms and join the Martyrs of Islam battalion of the FSA.

 By November, the rebels had taken Daraya back and the government had laid siege to the suburb. Little did Dabbas and his comrades know Daraya's siege would last for four long years.

 Over the course of the war, sieges have been a brutal weapon used by Syrian government forces, the opposition and the Islamic State militant group.

 According to Siege Watch, a monitoring organisation, 2.5 million Syrians have suffered under sieges between 2012 and 2018, when the last were broken.

 In the Damascus countryside, Assad's forces kept several urban areas such as Daraya under total lockdown, depriving them of food, medicine and other necessities.

 "The siege strategy flourished and spread because it was effective for its perpetrators," Siege Watch noted in its final report issued this month. "Today, the Syrian government and its allies have reasserted control over all of the areas they once besieged."

 Dabbas and his Martyrs of Islam did fight back, however, and tried to keep lines of communication open between Daraya and the neighbouring rebel-held town Moadamiyah.

 In the process, Dabbas was severely wounded.

 "We were targeted by a tank shell and I was hit. I felt that I had been killed, I was thinking about whether I was going to meet my brother, and whether the victim does not feel his wounds after death."

 Sounds of gunshots broke Dabbas from his daze.

 "I tried to crawl and search in the dark for survivors around me. I found an extended hand and tried to awaken the owner, but it was not connected to the body."

 Dabbas, who suffered shrapnel wounds in his eyes and feet, was rescued from the fray and taken to a hospital.

 "The doctors told me that I would lose my sight. I do not know how I was cured. It's a miracle."

 According to Dabbas, the battles waged in the Damascus countryside were more ferocious than any other across the country.

 Ill-equipped and lacking any kind of professional training, Daraya's rebels fought against, among others, the seasoned fighters of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

 "We fought very fierce, face-to-face battles," Dabbas recalls.

 "The distance between the Syrian government forces and the opposition was no more than a kilometre, and we fought street to street."

 Eventually, the rebels cracked.

 In August 2016, the Free Syrian Army negotiated a withdrawal agreement with Damascus, handing Daraya to Assad in return for safe passage to opposition-held northern Syria.

 Green buses, which would become notorious as more and more rebel-held areas fell, pulled up to take the rebels and the rest of Daraya’s residents away.

 "I cannot describe the feeling of leaving Daraya, the city where I was born and raised. Which I fought for, and lost so many of my friends. It was the city that carried us in its difficult times," Dabbas says.

 "Parting from Daraya was like parting the spirit from the body. All those destroyed houses, witness to the criminality of the Syrian government, and Daraya's steadfastness.

 "I wish I could die in Daraya, and be buried under its land forever."

 Daraya's residents arrived in Idlib province to a hero's welcome. They had surrendered, but only after holding out for more than four years, starving, outgunned and alone.

 "We did not give up, we did not surrender our weapons and equipment, and we basically had no heavy weapons."



 Alighting from their green buses, Daraya's residents found a whole new world within their own country.

 "When we reached the north it looked like a fortress that could not collapse, because there were vast areas, wide and large fronts," Dabbas says.

 "There were thousands of fighters in the north and many heavy and medium weapons any fighter would dream of. We hadn't seen equipment like this except with the Syrian government."

 Around four million Syrians now reside in Idlib province, most of them displaced from around the country.

 Daraya was the first significant rebel centre to negotiate passage to Idlib. But by New Year 2017, east Aleppo had fallen. After that Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, then Daraa, the cradle of the revolution.

 Idlib is now a hodgepodge of civilians from every region. Dialects and cuisine from across Syria can be found mingling together.

 But it is also home to rebel fighters of varying degrees of militancy, including Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly linked to al-Qaeda.

 "The makeup of the opposition factions is very chaotic, even though they are all sons of one land. I do not know why they are scattered with different affiliations," Dabbas says.

 Dabbas decided to take a course in medical care, and he now works in a centre in al-Dana, tending to wounded fighters.

 "Having been wounded twice in the past, I preferred to take a field ambulance course," he explains. "The fighter must have knowledge of everything to help himself or his friends on the battlefield."



 Many in Idlib see a battle approaching, especially with the rising violence in the south.

 Dabbas says he will be ready if and when that happens.

 "If there is will, we can resist the régime for years, as we resisted in Daraya with only Kalashnikovs," he asserts.

 "All the north needs is the will to fight and nothing more, then we will be able to withstand." '

It is an occupation by Russia and Iran

 Mouaz Moustafa:

 'It's really hard to sit here eight years in. We thought that when these protests cam out, calling for freedom and democracy, for the God-given rights we enjoy in the West, the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere, didn't think the brutality of the régime would be to this extent. But the winners right now are Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, extremists and their propaganda. Not the Assad régime. General McMaster, the former National Security Adviser to President Trump, said that 80% of on the ground troops for Assad are Iranian militias. It is the Russian air force that has bombarded and targeted civilians. So the winner isn't Assad. It is an occupation by Russia and Iran of our country because its people came out calling for their dignity.

 Assad is merely a puppet. He's a puppet of Tehran, and to a lower degree, of Moscow. If you look at the areas he controls right now, he's unable to govern. Even some of his loyalists have been critical of the régime. They have to be careful, because anyone who shows any criticism, even loyalists of the régime, are tortured to death in some of the worst dungeons. Even though he has the Russian air force and Iranian ground troops, he still has not taken over the entirety of Syria, and even those in the "reconciliation" areas that came under régime control, have come out in protests in the last 48 hours, calling for democracy. He's there now, but he's more of a puppet than anything, and I think the Syrian people will still call out for their democracy, for their freedom, for their rights of self-determination, as long as they have the power to do so, despite the fact that the world has deserted Syria, has deserted our Never Again moment.

 What's shocking is the Assad régime, Jamil Hassan who heads his Air Force Intelligence Branch, at one point announced that there are three or four million arrest warrants still out. Those refugees who essentially came back on the basis of guarantees that nothing would happen to them. were either arrested, killed, or forcibly conscripted to go kill their own people. The conditions in Assad's jails since Caesar - an incredibly brave humanitarian hero, not just a Syrian national hero, that brought out almost 55.000 pictures of men, women, children and elderly tortured to death - that systematic machinery of death, continues. It continues to kill people, it continues to torture people in the most sadistic ways. I was talking to a Holocaust survivor, and he mentions that he's hearing from victims of Assad's régime about the sadistic torture; he can't imagine that this is sort of OK in this century, that we allow this to happen, knowing we have the documentation, having someone like Caesar, a defector who documented on behalf of the régime what happened, and showed the world.

 It is mind-boggling that we aren't doing more to stop him, and what's more disturbing is that the Assad régime probably holds more American citizens than any state or non-state actor in the world. So I call on President Trump, who has had a success record in bringing Americans home, to bring every American held by the Assad régime home, and to hold him accountable for what he's doing to his own people. There are a large number of foreign nationals being held in Syria today. The American families for the most part have decided not to go public, but I could point to one amazing family, who decided the bring their case publicly, the family of a man called Majd Kamalmaz, who is a humanitarian therapist, who was arrested when he went to visit his elderly family in Syria, he spent less than 24 hours there before he was arrested. This American citizen continues to be held by the Assad régime, as does Austin Tice, an amazing journalist. There are quite a few other who have not decided to go public yet, but even one American is one too many and they need to be home yesterday.

 There are two ways to go. Either the world can continue to do nothing, and the Assad régime will slaughter millions. You have in Idlib, a province with three million people, one million of them children. You have countless civilians who continue to be targeted, and you have hundreds of thousands of people who are being tortured to death. If we do nothing about it, this will continue, this will empower more extremists. ISIS, al-Qaeda and others will point to this and say it shows the world doesn't care about the Syrian people, and try to recruit. And the Assad régime is very smart about manipulating and utilising extremists.

 There is a ray of hope. There is a Bill in the United States Congress, called the Caesar Civilian Protection Act. It has passed the House three times. It has passed the House of Representatives on a voice vote. It has passed the Senate in a different form. I call on members of Congress, of the House and Senate, to put this at the President's desk at the nearest possible opportunity. I know the White House is in support of the Caesar Bill, which calls for the protection of civilians. I also call on the President, who has done this in the past, to continue to raise the alarm about Idlib, to continue to make it clear that Iran, Russia, and the Assad régime, cannot murder civilians in Idlib province which has the potential to double the number of refugees in Europe. I call on everyone, all human being, to know, that sometimes when the Holocaust happened we should all have been calling for the bombing of the railroads so that six million Jews don't get murdered. When Rwanda happened we should have stopped the machetes being shipped. When it comes to Syria, civilians are targeted, and men, women, and children, are tortured in prisons. It is our obligation to raise our voices, to do all we can, to put a stop to the killing.'

No, of course Syrian refugees can't go home

 Abdulwahab Tahhan:

 'When the Syrian uprising against Assad began back in March 2011, the protesters demanded reforms such as equality and freedom of speech.

 Now, nine years into the conflict, these demands still stand and there have been no reforms.

 Instead, Assad's régime stands accused of human rights violations against its civilians, and US Congress is pushing to introduce more sanctions on the Syrian régime based on the Caesar report which documents the number of civilians tortured to death in Assad's prisons.

 Last month, two members of Assad's régime were arrested in Germany based on a report that they were involved in torturing civilians in prison back in 2012.



 Despite all these documented violations, some media outlets still choose to focus on the return of Syrian refugees, and promote an image of a normal country, ignoring all the red flags, violations and risk of persecution these refugees might face on their return.

 In November 2018, the Lebanese minister of state for refugee affairs, Mouin Merhebi stated that about 20 Syrian refugees who returned from Lebanon to Syria had been killed by régime forces.

 Moreover, Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, stated that around 700 were arrested when they crossed the borders and went back home, though not all of them remained in prison.

 The practice of incarceration is however very common by the Syrian régime, and those who leave prison do not necessarily live freely.



 Last year, Sally Hayden and Ziad Ghandour reported for The Irish Times that those who returned where detained at the airport and had their passports confiscated, while others were sent to prison, later conscripted and taken to the front lines to fight.

 In a country when law is on the side of those connected with the régime, there is no guarantee they'd be protected by presidential amnesty or any laws that might otherwise guarantee their safety.

 In a TV appearance, Syrian Republican Guard General, Issam Zahreddine once infamously threatened those who had fled Syria and since returned, telling them they'd regret their decision.

 This general is now dead, by his mentality prevails.

 When I was a university student in Aleppo, I had to attend a two-week mandatory military training camp one summer. We were given a military uniform and boots and were told to show up at the camp on our own. At the entrance, the colonel, who goes by the name Abu Saqer shouted at all the students, ordering us to duck. He took some soil and scattered it over our heads.

 Swearing at us, he intoned, "your worth is less than this soil!" People serving in the army had, and still enjoy a status above civilians, and often practiced such violations without ever being questioned.



 Syria is no longer fit for normal life.

 The gas, electricity and petrol crisis in Assad-controlled areas make life very difficult even for supporters of the régime. Following the fall of Aleppo in December 2016, the city was devastated, drawing comparisons with WWII Stalingrad.

 It remains perilous to live there: A couple of residential buildings have since collapsed, putting more civilians at risk of sudden death.

 And then there are the recent, horrific allegations of kidnap for ransom and body parts, which have become common in régime-controlled areas. Many I speak to in Aleppo describe how unsafe they feel, especially given the 'disappearances'.

 In Idlib, where according to the UN around 3 million now live, the majority are displaced from all over Syria, and the régime continues to violate the Russian-Turkish de-escalation zone, carrying out air and artillery strikes.

 In one week alone, Airwars - an independent monitoring organisation based in London - reported that 16 civilians were killed in these airstrikes, including women and children.

 In the East of the country the situation is no better; the US-led coalition's air campaign is ongoing and civilians are trapped between IS snipers and mines, and coalition airstrikes reportedly killing up to 120 civilians in a week.



 Assad's régime is notorious for torturing civilians to death in its prisons. Save the Rest campaign and others advocate on behalf of those who are missing in Assad's prisons and demands their release.

 Layla Shweikani, for example, a 26-year-old Chicago native was detained in Assad's prison and tortured to death for helping refugees and displaced people in Syria. The family learned about her death two years after she had died.

 This practice is common by the Syrian régime; many families learn about the death of their loved ones in prison years after they were arrested.

 The Syrian Network for Human Rights, based in Qatar, estimates that over 118,000 have been arbitrarily arrested since March 2011.

 Despite all of this, some journalists happily go to Syria on a régime issued visa, surrounded by régime minders as they interview people on the street about how safe they feel.

 By promoting this image that the country is safe for refugees to return, despite the fact that many members of the present régime are facing allegations of human rights violations, these outlets act as a mouthpiece for a régime responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

 When Twitter's CEO tweeted photos of his meditation trip to Myanmar last year, it backfired, and he was widely accused of being a mouthpiece for a government that oppressed and killed thousands of Muslims and is accused of ethnic cleansing.



 Concerning Syria, western journalists with a powerful platform are at best ignorant of a régime accused of killing hundreds of thousands, and at worst whitewashing the most brutal crimes of a generation.

 I am reminded of Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born British citizen who migrated to the UK when he was still a child and later became a professor in Cultural Studies. He wrote that all of his tutors asked him, "When are you going back home?" when he was lived in Britain and went to school there.

 I am a Syrian refugee living in London, and I still wonder why people are obsessed with sending me home, while I am paying my taxes and contributing to society.

 Is it not obvious that we are fleeing the bombs, and that Europe could be the safest place? For now, at least, returning home is not an option.'

Syria Will Never Be Stable With Assad in Power

 'In March 2011, tens of thousands of enraged Syrians gathered in the southern city of Daraa to attend an anti-government demonstration. There a group of protesters toppled a statue of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's late father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad. Days later, hundreds of Syrians climbed on top of the rubble of the statue, shouting slogans denouncing the Assad régime, which by that time had begun using violence to crush popular protests calling for political reforms. Still, despite the régime's brutality, the Syrian people had hope for a better Syria, one that was a little freer, a little more prosperous. Then the mass slaughter began.

 Eight years later, after killing some 500,000 Syrians and displacing millions more, Assad won. Indeed, barbarity won. With the support of Russia and Iran, the Syrian president is still in power, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But victory is not enough, apparently. Supporters of the régime are now rubbing the Syrian people's faces in the dirt, erecting the statue of Hafez in the same spot where protesters tore it down.

 In response, hundreds of Syrians took to the streets in Daraa, the cradle of the Syrian uprising. "Syria is ours, not for the house of Assad!" the protesters chanted, walking through the old quarter of the city. "Long live Syria, down with Bashar Assad!" others chanted, as well as, "Your statue is from the past, it's not welcome here!"



 Security forces closed off the area to prevent residents from other parts of Daraa from joining the protests.

 The latest demonstrations are a reminder that a Syria ruled by Assad will never be stable. Some commentators and politicians have argued the opposite for years, claiming that, while Assad may be brutal, he is necessary to ensure stability and to prevent Islamist terrorists from taking control. This notion, often articulated as some deeply intellectual notion of hard-nosed realism, is deeply misguided.

 The Syrian people will never accept the Butcher of Damascus, whose régime probably raped, tortured, or murdered their friends and families, as their legitimate leader. What's more, their desire to topple Assad has not gone away, nor has their rage. Yes, the régime has defeated opposition forces through shocking savagery, which can crush and deter them for a time. But that is no recipe for a stable and sustainable—let alone prosperous—situation, especially today, when social media and other new-age technologies make political movements so much easier to spread.

 Even now, there is evidence that the protests in Daraa will continue and grow. "There have been small, peaceful protests after prayers on Friday for a few weeks now," one resident of Daraa told the Telegraph by What's App, another tool that can help the opposition organize and solicit outside help. "But the Russians are in charge of everything, so everyone's scared."

 "But," the resident added, "people are testing the limits now, seeing how far we can push back."

 On cue, protests continued Monday in the nearby town of Tafas. Residents protested against the régime's corruption and brutality, including its shelling of Idlib.



 The Syrian people have been demoralized, their homes leveled, but their spirit and dignity seem to remain intact. Moreover, their level of hatred for the régime is a powerful force, one that should not be underestimated. And Assad continues to provoke that rage, even after conquering most of Syria. Just look at Syrian refugees who have returned home. Some of them have disappeared into the country's notoriously brutal prison system. No one is safe from the régime's persecution.

 More broadly, the situation that sparked the Syrian conflict is still in place: a brutal régime is oppressing its people, who want better lives and a more responsive government. The key difference now is that the Syrian people want the Assad régime thrown into the sea, not to institute reasonable reforms, as they wanted in March 2011.

 Beyond the Syrian people, recall how the Islamic State grew in power in Syria after the American surge in Iraq in 2007-2008. The terrorist group waged an insurgency in Iraq, as it is doing now, and then moved into Syria following the outbreak of the Syrian conflict. It gained strength from revenue courtesy of the oil fields in eastern Syria, but also from thousands of disgruntled Sunnis opposed to the Assad régime. And there is the small detail that Assad strengthened ISIS and other terrorist groups to discredit opposition forces and ensure that Western countries did not intervene against him. ISIS is going back to its old playbook in Iraq. It is not that crazy to imagine a similar sequence of events happening again.

 Assad's survival also risks a region-wide war in the Middle East. It is no secret that Assad has allowed Iran to entrench itself militarily throughout Syria, which the Islamic Republic has sought to make a forward operating base against Israel. As Iran and its proxies continue to threaten Israel, and as Israel responds with military strikes against Iranian assets in Syria, the two sides move closer toward a large-scale conflict, one that could be disastrous for the entire region. While Assad remains in power, this dynamic is sure to continue to hold, forming a storm cloud over the Middle East. The question is if and when the cloud opens up, and it begins pouring.

 It is not just a moral stain on humanity for Assad to remain in power, but also a major threat to American and allied interests. But now there are reports that some European countries want to recognize that Assad won the Syrian conflict and help him reconstruct Syria. Under no circumstances should any Western country do such a thing. Rather than help the Syrian people, Western money for reconstruction will further entrench Assad's control over Syria, enrich those who committed war crimes, and bolster those who would do harm to the United States. Put aside morality for the moment: Assad is no force for stability; he is a walking time bomb.'

Syrian forces use sexual violence to humiliate men

 'Assad régime forces are using widespread sexual violence to humiliate and silence male prisoners, psychologists and a monitoring group said Monday, offering a rare window into a form of abuse rarely discussed by its survivors.

 Eight years after the start of Syria’s uprising, more than 100,000 detainees remain unaccounted for, most of them in Assad régime custody. According to the United Nations and human rights groups, torture and abuse are systematic, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those detainees are probably dead.

 But while many forms of abuse are well documented, the men who emerge from régime cells — often after years of neglect in near-total darkness — rarely discuss the levels of sexual violence they encountered, and little psychological help is available for survivors.



 According to a report released Monday by Lawyers and Doctors for Human Rights, a Syrian rights group, security forces have used rape and enforced sterilization, as well as the tying, burning and mutilation of men’s genitals, to force confessions and submission.

 The abuse has taken place at checkpoints, on journeys to prison and inside interrogation rooms, the group said. Several men said their jailers inserted a water hose into their anus and turned on the tap, causing the prisoners’ bodies to swell up.

 There are no accurate statistics for the scale of the sexual abuse inside Syrian custody, in part because survivors are scattered around the world. Former detainees also are often hesitant to report such abuse, particularly when they come from conservative communities in which discussion of sexual violence is taboo.



 But of 138 people interviewed by the LDHR, more than 40 percent reported some form of sexual assault. That figure rose to almost 90 percent when describing instances of forced nudity ordered by their prison guards.

 “What is revealed is extensive, pervasive and brutal sexual violence against Syrian political prisoners across time, government security agencies and their detention centers,” the group said. The testimonies were accompanied by medical evaluations. Where possible, experts in treating sexual violence then cross-checked the details from the survivors’ accounts and the evaluations.

 In interviews, dozens of men formerly held in régime prisons, particularly in Damascus, have described how they were ordered to strip before being severely beaten, or how they spent days lying naked alongside other prisoners in packed and squalid cells. Others reported extreme forms of sexual abuse involving mechanical tools or sharp objects.



 “These were moments when you didn’t recognize yourself as a human,” said one man, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his family’s security in a régime-held area. “As I lay there, it wasn’t that I wanted to die. It was that I wished I’d never existed.”

 These accounts by survivors describe historical cases of abuse, but there are few indications that the practice has stopped. More than 2,000 Syrians have been detained since November, most of them by régime-linked forces, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

 It remains unclear how many have been sent to detention facilities, rather than being forcibly conscripted. But recently released detainees say the pace and scale of abuse inside régime prisons and security branches remain unchanged.

 The legacy of sexual abuse can be devastating, and trauma can last years after release. More than three-quarters of the men interviewed described depression, flashbacks and nightmares since they left prison.



 Psychologists in Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey and a hub for Syrians fleeing the war, have recorded cases of suicide that they believe to be linked to sexual abuse experienced in régime custody.

 “Coming from conservative societies, these men often leave feeling destroyed and humiliated as men,” said Jalal Nofel, a Syrian psychiatrist who works with former detainees in Gaziantep. “The patients we see often believe that they cannot recover from that.”

 He said, “A man from Douma did not speak to his family for three days upon his return, and then he killed himself. We only learned his full story from cellmates after his death.”

 There is scant help available for rehabilitation of former detainees, as needs outstrip the capacity of international and local humanitarian groups working in Syria and in countries hosting the war’s refugees. And men are far less likely to seek help than women.



 In their interviews with the LDHR, survivors said they had often chosen isolation, in some cases forgetting details about their family lives while being unable to shake flashbacks from their time in jail. One man likened himself to a small bird. Another man, identified only as Abdullah in the report, told a researcher that he lived in constant fear.

 “The soul has died, doctor,” he said.'

New Assad statue triggers protest in Daraa

 'Hundreds of Syrians in the city of Daraa protested Sunday at the erection of a new statue of Bashar Assad's late father, nearly eight years after the original was toppled at the start of Syria's civil war. Demonstrators and witnesses said residents walked through the streets of the war-ravaged old quarter of the city calling for Assad's overthrow, days before the eighth anniversary of the start of the conflict. This is the largest anti-régime protest to be held in any area outside of opposition control since the first year of the Syrian uprising.

  Daraa was where peaceful protests against 40 years of autocratic Assad family rule began in 2011, and were met by deadly force, before spreading across the country. The Syrian army, aided by Russian airpower and Iranian militias, recaptured Deraa from rebel forces in July on its way to regaining control of the bulk of Syrian territory. But since then, residents of Deraa say disaffection has been growing as Assad's secret police once more tighten their control.

The régime had given schools and government employees a day off Sunday to attend a pro-régime rally to inaugurate the new bronze statue of late President Hafez Assad, erected on the site of a previous statue felled by protesters. But a group of youths protesting in Daraa's old quarter carried a placard reading: "It will fall. Your statue is from the past, it's not welcome here."

 Lawyer and activist Adnan Masalma said: "People have gathered without organization and to peacefully demonstrate over just demands."

 After Daraa surrendered to régime forces last summer, many residents chose to stay put rather than head to remaining rebel-held areas in northern Syria, where tens of thousands of others displaced from recaptured areas have gathered.

 "The country has been destroyed and, instead of reconstruction, we place memorials," read another protest placard.

 The Syrian authorities have reinstalled several large statues of the elder Assad after military victories that have seen his son regain most of the territory once held by rebels. Many residents of those areas now complain that services have not been fully restored, while young men fear being conscripted into the army to fight the remaining rebels. There has been a spate of attacks on army checkpoints in Deraa province, which the authorities blame on rebels operating covertly.'

Syria rallies demand release of jailed women, children

 'As the world marks International Women’s Day, demonstrators in northwestern Syria are urging the international community to take immediate action to secure the release of women and children still languishing in Syrian prisons.

 Friday’s demonstrations were organized in support of the Conscience Movement, an alliance of individuals, rights groups and organizations who demand the release of women and children from the jails of Syria’s Assad régime.

 Rallies were held in the towns of Azaz, Al-Bab, Cobanbey and Bizaah in Syria’s northeastern Aleppo province.



 According to the Conscience Movement, more than 13,500 women have been incarcerated since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, while more than 7,000 women remain in detention where they are reportedly subjected to torture, rape and sexual violence.

 Marwa -- a female Syrian engineer who did not give her full name due to security concerns -- called for the immediate release of jailed Syrian women and children.

 “As relatives of those who are still behind bars, we came here today to demand their release,” Marwa said. “We hope these rallies will help achieve that objective.”

 Maryam al-Ali, a young girl who attended the rally in Bizaah, said her father had once been jailed by the régime.

 “My father was held in an Assad régime prison for a year and a half. He was finally released two years ago,” she said.

 “But his friends still remain in prison and we are demanding that they be freed without delay,” she added.

 The Conscience Movement was founded last year after an all-female international convoy made global headlines by raising awareness about the abuses suffered by female prisoners of the Assad regime.

 In March of last year, the 55-bus convoy made a three-day journey from Istanbul to Turkey’s southern Hatay province near the Syrian border, where 10,000 women staged a massive rally marking International Women's Day.'

Fleeing régime fire, Syrians desert northwestern town

 'During a lull in régime bombardment, Abu Abdo al-Sarmani drove a pickup hurtling into his wrecked hometown in Syria’s Idlib province to grab his family’s belongings a day after they fled. The northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun is supposed to be protected by an internationally brokered cease-fire deal, but increased shelling and airstrikes by régime forces last month have left its streets near empty.

 “There was a truce and everything quietened down, and then suddenly the bombardment picked up again and we could no longer stay,” Sarmani said, wearing a maroon bomber jacket.

 “The bombardment was so close ... I spent two hours hiding in the bathroom,” the 36-year-old said, describing the events that pushed his family to flee last week.

 Khan Sheikhoun lies in the Idlib region, the last major bastion of opposition to President Bashar Assad in Syria.

 In September, rebel backer Turkey and régime ally Russia inked a deal to set up a buffer zone around the region, part of which runs just south of Khan Sheikhoun.



 Sarmani said he, his wife and three daughters escaped Khan Sheikhoun last week because of the bombardment, but also because the town has become unlivable.

 “There’s no work, no more people about, no hospitals, no doctors, no pharmacies, no basic infrastructure for living,” said the accountant, whose family has relocated to Sarmada, 100 kilometers north.

 Outside Khan Sheikhoun, two lone donkeys stood in a field of bright green grass, as shelling sent a grey cloud billowing up into the sky.

 “We hope we won’t be displaced for long,” Sarmani said, standing by a pickup truck loaded with a large plastic rug, pillows, and a cooking gas canister.



 Eight years into Syria’s civil war, the Damascus régime has gained ground against rebels and militants with Russian military backing since 2015. It now controls nearly two thirds of the country and has taken back control of most of the main commercial arteries.

 But a section of the highway linking the capital to the northern city of Aleppo remains out of its reach as it runs through Idlib, including through Khan Sheikhoun.

 At least 46 civilians including 18 children have been killed in bombardment on the town since the start of February, the civil defense says.

 Elsewhere in Khan Sheikhoun, 29-year-old Ahmad Faraj and his family brought out what remained of their belongings from a temporary home shot through with rocket fire.



 In their pickup, the farmer from the nearby village of Zaka piled blue plastic chairs, and bags of pistachio husks his family would later burn for heating.

 “When we came here about three months ago, the town was safe,” Faraj said, dressed in a zipped dark blue hoodie.

 But “for a month, there has been violent bombardment ... The war planes have started up again,” he said.

 In order to stay close to his land, Faraj, his wife and child had headed to Morek, a town in the nearby buffer zone.

 They hoped Turkish observers deployed there under the September deal would earn them some protection, but said conditions were likely to be tough. “Running water, sewers, electricity - there’s absolutely none of that,” he said.'



 "Turkey begins patrolling with armoured vehicles the countryside of Aleppo, Hama and Idlib (part of the de-escalation zone) in order to stop the SAA shelling on civilian areas."
[https://twitter.com/Kyruer/status/1103927692292837379]

 "Turkish army convoy patrolling in Southern Idlib today to prevent régime shelling on civilians. There was no régime shelling today."
[https://twitter.com/worldonalert/status/1104029455935332353]

 Note 11/8/25, worldonalert link broken.

How one Syrian is saving lives in the Greek island camps

 'Omar Alshakal is 24 years old, but when he speaks it seems like he's a hundred.

 "When I was in Germany I sometimes stopped looking at the boys with backpacks in front of the high school," he said. "Or those who crowded at the entrance to the university. I looked them and I suffered. Not just because they could study and I could not, but because they were my age and lived like 20-year-olds. And I lost my light heartedness, forever, eight years ago, when the Syrian war began."

 He carries the burden of war on his shoulders; a wounded body and an indelible memory, the loss of loved ones, the failure of revolutionary expectations, the escape.

 He speaks while drinking a hot coffee on the island of Samos, after a morning spent distributing winter clothes to the thousands of migrants in the main facility here, as well as those living in informal arrangements in a field and forest that surrounds the facility.

 Thousands of women and children are here. Even when the temperature drops below zero, many walk in the mud without shoes; the lucky ones have slippers.

 Omar has a tired face, worn out from smiling to all the children in the camp. His smiles mask his despair.

 "Eight years ago I lost my life," he said. "After being a year in Germany I realised that I had to help others. In Germany I was not doing anything that was not for me, but for the ones in need. I felt useless. So I returned to Greece and founded Refugee for Refugees. I feel more useful; people here have nothing. The hardest thing to explain when talking about migrants is that these people - like me - were not born like that. They were not born poor and dirty. The war and the escape made them poor and dirty. I, like them, up until eight years ago had a house, some friends, a school. Then suddenly we did not have anything any more. That's what brought us here, asking for help, asylum."

 Omar was born and raised in Deir ez-Zour; he left Syria for Lebanon in 2010 to work as a lifeguard. When the uprising began, he returned home and was arrested by Assad's army in the early days of the protests. When he recalls that time, he remembers prisoners beaten to death.

 After the prisons of Assad, he says, you no longer distinguish between life and death.

 He became a volunteer, driving ambulances for the rebels. As an activist, he believed in the revolution, he wanted a new, free Syria.

 In 2013, his ambulance was hit by a bomb. The paramedics and the six wounded in his vehicle were all killed. Omar escaped with his life, his leg seriously injured.

 After using a wheelchair for a few months, Omar travelled to Turkey, where a doctor recommended he venture onwards to Europe for treatment.

 To 20-year-old Omar, "Europe" was the Greek coast. Thousands of people were attempting the same journey, so one day Omar and two of his friends tried their luck - but not in rubber boats, like the others. Omar and his friends started swimming. It was a 14-hour swim from Turkey to Kalymnos.

 "I realised I was still the good swimmer I was when I was a lifeguard in Lebanon. And then I was not afraid to die. A piece of me had already died forever."



 Once he arrived in Greece he realised his onward path would be hard: he was repeatedly turned back at the Macedonian border, he slept on the street in Athens, with other Syrians like him. Then, finally, he found transport to Germany, and waited eight months for his documents to be ready. It was now May 2015.

 Omar lived in Rostock for a while. The government had provided him with a place to live and he volunteered at a local NGO that cooked food for the refugees.

 One night he woke up to the sound of the police breaking down his door. He was arrested and held at the local police station. They suspected he was linked with the Islamic State group.

 It was a farcical situation. The very man who had risked everything to escape from Deir ez-Zour, who carried both the physical and invisible scars of a fierce war, was arrested on suspicion of being an IS supporter.

 "I felt like going crazy," he says.

 After a few weeks he received a letter of apology: we were wrong, we received false indications. Two months later, Omar left Germany. He wanted to help his people.

 At the beginning of 2016, he returned to Greece, at the peak of the migration crisis. The EU and Turkey were about to sign the pact that created holding facilities on the Greek islands, turning them into de facto prisons. Thousands of people would be held in humiliating conditions awaiting the assessment of their asylum application.

 Omar started to help those in need, to help those who crossed the sea. He volunteered for several organisations. Then he decided to build his own.



 He began to collect clothes, toys and shoes and help migrants, first on the island of Lesbos and now also on Samos, where he is building a warehouse for shoes and basic necessities with other volunteers.

 "This cold [weather] is an emergency, we do our best to give everyone clothes for the winter," he said.

 "There are thousands of people in tents, for them living outside or inside is the same. The situation is terrible, they have no electricity, water, toilets, showers. Their conditions are not safe, at night it is very dangerous for women especially, when they need to go out to urinate they are not safe at all. And for children it's the same, there are hundreds of children with summer clothes and there's a lot of wind. The night is terrible."

 Omar is affectionate with all the children who line up in the early morning. He wears a hat shaped like a bear, tells jokes, teaches the youngsters a few words of English - but at the same time remains strict: one piece each, everyone has the right to be clothed.

 "No one can understand how living in a tent is," he said. "It is a loss of dignity to live in a place where you feel you are worth less than nothing. I believe that Europe cares more for animals than for these people. And I strongly believe that children and families will never forget the time spent here. Before the war, we had normal lives, schools, houses, friends. And then we lost everything. We had only a dream, to be welcomed and helped. But once here people don't even receive a tent."

 Omar helps a woman who has just escaped from Syria with her two sons. She arrived on the island with $150. She found no space in the official detention facility, and bought a tent with the little savings she had. For two days she did not eat, she told Omar. "When you have a house, you do not imagine how your life could be in a tent, in the middle of winter," he said.

 "I am pretty sure that the Greek government has prepared an emergency plan for the cold, for their streets, for their schools. But they did not think about the emergency for migrants living in the cold. I say this because last year we had the snow in Lesbos and someone died because of the snow, guys died, freezing. And despite that, this year there are no winter plans. Winter is not an emergency, it is not difficult to predict. It depends only on the calendar."

 Omar does not know what his future holds, but every day he wakes up to help those in need.

 "If you let people live like this for months or years, you can not talk about humanity," he said. "I do not think this Europe is human." '

The teachers of Idlib on the impossible struggle to educate

 'Abdulkafi Alhamdo is an English teacher in Syria. He loves Coleridge and Shakespeare and is currently teaching his students Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In 2016, he was evacuated from Syria’s very own heart of darkness – Aleppo – where he taught traumatised school children in cellars and bombed-out buildings throughout the siege, even as they starved. Now he lives and works in the rebel-held north-west province of Idlib, where he and fellow teachers are struggling with few resources and little support to educate the next generation, those who will shape the future of Syria.

 Idlib, the largest province in Syria to remain outside the control of Bashar al-Assad’s régime, has seen a steady increase in bombing raids by Russian and Syrian jets and the arrival of refugees fleeing from other war-ravaged zones, which – according to Alhamdo – makes the ongoing work of Syria’s teachers all the more vital. “We want education to continue because we don’t want these young children or students to think of guns,” he says. “Without schools, they would carry guns but, because of their attendance at school, they are students.”

 According to Anna Nolan, director of the human rights group The Syria Campaign, at least 2.5 million locals and refugees are now packed into Idlib, which has been described as “a kill box”. There is great humanitarian need and no state education, but Nolan says that remarkable efforts are afoot on the ground to preserve civil society, with teachers organising their own schools and university classes, often working voluntarily without pay to build an extraordinary patchwork of DIY education.

 Some have set up their own after-school clubs offering formal lessons, creative arts and vocational training, while others forced out of buildings by armed rebel groups are teaching classes in the open air and on WhatsApp. “There’s a real determination,” says Nolan. “What we hear again and again is that they know that education is the key to the future and this is the generation that will rebuild Syria. The depth and creativity of the services being provided is incredible.”



 Many of the teachers now working in Idlib are themselves displaced, among them Alhamdo, who fled Aleppo with his wife and young daughter and nothing else. In Idlib, the bombs are still falling – “There’s always bombing. This is our life,” says Alhamdo – but it’s nothing like his experience in Aleppo. “Aleppo was something unusual,” he says. “Every day when I went to school to see my students – they are like my children – I just check who is absent, who is alive and who is not, and then I start teaching them. We would stop many times because there were bombings. For one or two hours, we go to a cellar then, after the bombing stops, we go back again to our class and teach. If the bombing was heavy, we let our students go home.”

 In April 2015, Saad Al-Ansari school, where Alhamdo was teaching, was hit by a rocket. He was returning from the playground when an explosion ripped through the building, killing four teachers and three students and injuring dozens more. “My heart jumped out of my body,” he recalls. “I saw the students running out, blood on their faces. They were in trauma, crying: ‘Did you see my little brother? Did you see my sister?’ They did not know what to do. Most of them were running out without shoes, without their books. I went inside and saw blood everywhere.”

 From that point on, the large-scale schools were abandoned and teachers organised their classes in small, makeshift schools in local neighbourhoods, so that the children did not have so far to travel to school and – should another rocket hit – the number of potential victims would be fewer.

 “When you teach in such circumstances, you are more psychologist than teacher,” says Alhamdo. “You have to be so careful about their trauma and their personal stories. When there’s heavy bombing, you tell the children they are heroes because they are still learning. It was a very, very difficult job.”

 The children, traumatised by their experiences, found it hard to concentrate, but their teachers tried to preserve some normality for them. They still sat their public exams, hidden in cellars away from the shelling. “The conditions were very, very bad, but we could not let the war or their situation affect their progress. They are the future of Syria for us.”



 Now in Idlib, he is teaching linguistics and the modern novel at the Free Aleppo University in the Idlib countryside to students who have fled from regime-held areas. The university opened in 2016 as one of the country’s few remaining centres of higher education. On days when shelling is intense and the danger is too great, students have lessons via WhatsApp, and some medical students have lectures online from doctors in the US. “I am proud of my students and I’m proud of teaching … My students are my heroes,” says Alhamdo.

 In one recent incident, students and teachers resisted an attempted takeover of the university by the armed military faction Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). When they refused to sign the university over, HTS threatened the university and prevented them from using the building for lectures, so Alhamdo and his colleagues took their lessons outside. “It might not be safe for me as a teacher but we cannot surrender.”

 In Atmeh, a village in the north of Idlib near the Turkish border, Sawsan Abbar has opened the “Read and Rise” primary school for girls. Her husband is the headteacher. The school is attended by 120 girls, all of whom have been displaced from their home towns and cities by the war. There are few teaching resources so Abbar and her colleagues have to be creative, sourcing materials from the internet and printing them out for their students.

 In the absence of so much else, the school has taken on a central nurturing role in the children’s lives. “Some of the kids call me and other teachers Mama or Auntie,” says Abbar, adding: “What keeps me awake at night is aerial bombardment. We have to skip school sometimes and it’s very worrying.”



 Meanwhile, in the city of Maarat al-Nu’man, also in Idlib province, teacher Mariam Shirout has set up her own after-school provision for children in the area. In the morning she teaches in the city schools that are still functioning – they were once state schools but have been taken over by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – and in the afternoon she opens the doors to her own school for children aged four to 15. It is called Bilelem Nartaqi, which means “with education, we advance”. It started small in 2013 but has grown and now educates between 150 and 200 children from all over the city.
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 “Education is the backbone of the area,” she says. “No matter what happens, I will be working until the last minute. When I see the children coming to the centre under the bombardment because they want to spend time with their friends and me, I can’t think about stopping anything, ever.”

 Shirout and five colleagues teach reading, writing, mathematics, English and Arabic. They also provide extracurricular activities including drama and singing and vocational training such as sewing. “My school also provides psychological and social support to the children to help them deal with the traumatic experiences they are going through.



 “The shelling can really affect their work,” she says. “They are trying to be ambitious and believe they can continue with their work, but sometimes they have to stop for a few days because the shelling is unbearable. They are really afraid. Sometimes the schools stop for around 10 days or a month because of the intensive shelling.”

 Shirout, who is single and has no children of her own, says her pupils are becoming adults prematurely. “They just want to survive. They are always distracted, always thinking of something else. Their minds are always busy. They love school. They want to come, but they are still really distracted and that makes it hard to learn.

 “I worry about my students all the time – not just about their physical safety but their mental health and their future. The education services available are not enough – it’s like a sticking plaster. If the situation continues as it is, the future of most of the students will be lost.

 “My students are not children any more. We can’t ask them what they want to be in the future. The future is not clear.” '

Rebels attack Syrian army posts to avenge civilian deaths

 'Fighters of the Ansar al-Tawheed rebel group launched attacks against Syrian army posts in northwestern Syria, which they said killed at least 25 soldiers to avenge civilian deaths during recent army shelling. Dozens of rebels belonging to Ansar al-Tawheed attacked two major army checkpoints near the village of Masasneh in northern Hama province in a dawn attack on Sunday.

 Syrian state television showed several corpses, which Ansar al-Tawheed rebels said were the bodies of their suicide squads who had caught army troops off guard in an area close to the opposition-held territory.

 Stepped up missile and rocket attacks on villages and towns in northern Hama and adjoining Idlib province have been blamed by residents for dozens of civilian deaths and injuries since the latest army campaign began early last month.

 The recent escalation has targeted schools, mosques and bakeries and caused widespread damage to infrastructure, civil defence workers and hospital sources in opposition areas say.

 Both civilian-run opposition bodies and residents say the attacks have prompted thousands to flee from a number of front-line villages and towns, and have threatened a new exodus towards the Turkish border.

 Khan Sheikhoun, which has borne the brunt of the recent rocket and missile attacks, has become a ghost town as most of its inhabitants fled to the safety of makeshift camps housing tens of thousands of people displaced after previous Russian and Syrian army air raids.'



 "Taking advantage of bad weather, battle moved tonight to Jebal Turkman (NE. Latakia Mountains). HTS raided several positions killing most in those positions and the inghimasis returned safely with several wounded."[https://web.archive.org/web/20190313180759/https://twitter.com/AlKhali72189230/]

This girl survived an airstrike in Syria. Her siblings didn't.

 'The heartbreaking photo shows a 6-year-old girl, blood smeared all over her face, as she waits to be rescued from the rubble of a bombed-out building in northwestern Syria.

 Looking past her shell-shocked face, you can see a lifeless hand under her knee.

 It's the hand of her 3-year-old sister, who didn't survive the airstrike. Her 1-year-old brother also died in the attack, as did a cousin, according to Anas al-Dyab, a White Helmets volunteer who took the photo of her and others at the scene.

 The incident took place Tuesday in Khan Sheikhoun, which is in the rebel-held province of Idlib.

 The rocket hit several residential buildings that led to deaths and injuries among two different families, al-Dyab said.



 In recent weeks, Syrian and Russian planes have conducted scores of airstrikes in Idlib, where a large-scale military campaign is looming. Some 3 million civilians have been scrambling to find safety in the province.

 The girl who was rescued Tuesday is Hasna'a Qatran, al-Dyab said, and it took nearly two hours for the White Helmets to pull her out of the rubble. She was released from the hospital on Thursday, he said.

 Al-Dyab's dramatic photos also show the father, Abdul Razzak Qatran, clutching his dead daughter, Elaf, close to him while he cries. He kisses her feet as one of the White Helmets carries her away.

 The attack happened around 12:30 in the afternoon, said al-Dyab, who has filmed dozens of airstrikes and was himself injured in one last year.

 Al-Dyab said he's been injured several times while covering these rescue missions, but he keeps going because he believes strongly in his work with the White Helmets.
"We want to rescue the biggest number of lives in the shortest time," he said.'

Syrian National Coalition calls for aid to Rukban camp

 'The Bashar Assad régime in Syria has been toughening the blockade on the Rukban refugee camp along the border with Jordan in order to force out the 60,000 residents of the camp, the chairman of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition said in a statement Tuesday.

 In a statement released on the coalition's website, Chairman Abdurrahman Mustafa said that the regime forces have blocked the routes used for the humanitarian aid transfer, aggravating the already worsened conditions in the camp.

 "The siege will lead to a genocide before the eyes of the silent world," Mustafa said.

 The camp, located in a remote area of the Syrian desert near the Jordanian border, is home to some 60,000 refugees living under harsh conditions.

 The Russian Defense Ministry announced last week it would open two "humanitarian corridors" near Jleighem and Jebel al-Gurab settlements, with the help of the United Nations, to "allow Syrian refugees to leave voluntarily for places of residence they choose."

 However, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that the U.N. was not involved in the opening of the corridors.



 Udey Selame, a civilian living in the Rukban camp, said that he fled from the regime offensive and does not want to return without security.

 Selame called for much-needed humanitarian aid to be provided to those at the camp who have nothing.

 He said that while Syrians living along the northern border with Turkey are safe, displaced persons in the south "have nothing but the mercy of God."

 Muhammad Elasura, another civilian living in Rukban, said that they have all been asked to leave the camp. However, since they have no security of life and livelihood, they do not know where to go.

 Elasura said the refugees do not want to return to the territories controlled by the Assad régime, and would prefer to go to the areas which were cleared of PKK-affiliated People's Protection Units (YPG) in Turkey's Operation Euphrates Shield.

 Turkey conducted two successful cross-border operations into Syria – Operation Euphrates Shield launched in August 2016, which cleared Syria's Al-Bab and Jarablus from Daesh terrorists and Operation Olive Branch launched in January 2018 to clear northern Afrin from YPG terrorists.



 Most of the refugees in Rukban camp fled areas in eastern Syria that had once fallen to the Daesh terror group, and were trapped after Jordanian authorities closed the border.

 Last year, at least 20 people died inside the camp, faced with starvation, disease and lack of medicine.

 The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has blamed the Assad regime for the humanitarian crisis in the desert camp and accused the Jordanian government of banning the entry of humanitarian aid into the camp.'

David Nott: ‘Chances of leaving Aleppo alive were 50/50’

 'It was in Syria that I began to get seriously angry about the inability of the major powers to prevent hospitals and medical staff being targeted in war zones; in Syria that I realised I must begin seriously to collate and share the knowledge I had acquired over my career to help other doctors; and after Syria that post-traumatic stress disorder finally tipped me over the edge.

 By the time I first arrived in east Aleppo with Syria Relief in August 2013, many of the more senior doctors and surgeons had already left. As many as 95% of the city’s physicians had found a route out. Those who remained were brave and committed, but there were very few of them and the risks were considerable. Clinics were assigned codenames to disguise how many there really were. Ambulances carried no sirens or insignia and at night drove with their headlights off. Anything that looked like help for the injured was seen as aiding the rebels, and so a legitimate target for the regime.

 The hospital where I was based was close to the frontline, codenamed M1. The majority of injuries we saw were gunshot wounds. There were as many as 70 individual snipers dotted around east Aleppo at that time. They simply picked people off as they were crossing the street, going to work or going to the shops. From babies to pensioners, no one was immune.

 On that first day alone in M1, 11 civilians shot by snipers were brought in. The doctors told me they had been losing a lot of patients with wounds to the major arteries; they needed significant training. I immediately agreed to give evening lectures, plus hands-on instruction for any surgeons who wanted it, where I could show my “best moves” – introducing them to new techniques, or little tricks such as how to hold their hands or instruments to save time on the table.



 On that first day, all 11 patients who had been shot survived – but only after a solid 18-hour shift at the end of which I fell on to my bed absolutely exhausted. As the days went by, I noticed there was a weird consistency to the injuries we saw coming in – the patients all seemed to have been shot in the same part of the body. One day we would receive patients who had all been shot in the left groin area; on other days six or seven would arrive shot in the right groin. The same thing was happening with patients shot in the upper limbs and chest – the injuries all seemed to be on the same side, in clusters. Also, despite the snipers having telescopic sights, we rarely saw the head shots that would have resulted in an instant kill. Another surgeon told me that he’d heard that the snipers were playing a game: they were being given rewards, such as packs of cigarettes, for scoring hits on specific parts of the anatomy.

 This sick competition reached its nadir towards the end of my time there when it appeared that one particularly vicious and inhumane sniper had a new target of choice: pregnant women. One such casualty arrived shot in the abdomen. The bullet had missed the baby but gone through the placenta. The woman was on the operating table only a few minutes after being shot and we delivered her baby boy via caesarian. I quickly clamped the cord and gave the infant to one of the nurses to resuscitate, but sadly she was unable to do so. We carefully sewed up the mother’s uterus in the hope that she would be able to have another baby; we weren’t going to let the sniper take that away from her.

 The same day another sniper’s victim came into the hospital. She was a first-time mother, almost at full term. She was very beautiful, wearing an immaculate white headscarf and a long, elegant coat that now had a large red stain on the front. An abdominal X-ray showed that the bullet was still inside her abdomen, but appeared also to show, horrifically, that it was lodged in her unborn baby’s head. In the operating theatre, we performed a midline incision as quickly as possible and pulled the baby out. It was handed to a nurse as usual but it was pointless: the poor thing had a massive head wound and was obviously dead. The uterus was in tatters and we ended up having to give the mother a hysterectomy as well. This was probably the most upsetting and shocking act of violence I had ever witnessed against another human being.



 A few days later, Ammar [a Syrian doctor who became a close friend] and I were grabbing an afternoon nap between operations when there was a knock on the door. Abu Abdullah [a Syrian surgeon] wanted to know whether I could help him with a thoracotomy. I dragged myself out of my slippery plastic bed and put on my operating shoes, which by this time were caked in dried blood – the floor was often awash with it. Once I got to the theatre I heard the patient had been shot in the back just below his shoulder blade. He was very pale under his thick beard and it was obvious that he was bleeding significantly.

 Just as I was about to suture the pulmonary vein, the doors of the operating theatre burst open. I looked up and saw six fully armed men wearing black combat fatigues and headscarves storm into the room. They were Isis fighters, and the patient on the table was one of them. My heart lurched and I froze stock still. I felt a rush of adrenalin. The leader of the group came forward with his gun levelled at us.

 “This is my brother!” he said aggressively, in English but with a very strong, Russian-sounding accent. Not just Isis, but Chechen Isis. “What are you doing to him?”

 In English, Abu Abdullah told him that we were trying to save the man’s life.

 “You should have asked us before taking our brother to surgery!” was the reply. “Who are these people?” he went on, indicating Ammar and me.

 It was vital that I kept a low profile – I was almost certainly the only westerner in Aleppo at the time, and it would have been a major coup if I had been kidnapped. Ammar piped up in his strongest Syrian accent to say that we were all surgeons simply trying to save the man’s life. By this time I had begun to shake. It was all I could do to keep my legs from buckling under me.

 “Who’s this?” he said, pointing to me. Abu Abdullah whispered in my ear, “Don’t say a word,” before turning back to the Isis leader and saying, “This is the senior surgeon. If you disturb him he will not be able to save your brother’s life.”

 The leader came up to the operating table and peered into the man’s wound to see what we were doing. The rest of the group milled around the room menacingly – a few sat on the floor while others leaned on equipment and made themselves comfortable. It took us another hour to finish the operation. Usually, there is a lot of banter in the operating theatre but today we were silent. As we neared the end they all left, apart from the leader, who stayed until the last suture was in place. Afterwards, I found myself feeling confused and lost. I had saved the life of someone who might go on to commit terrible crimes. Did that make me complicit, somehow? Perhaps it did. And yet, I still firmly believe that it was my duty to save his life.



 I promised to go back to Syria. When we reached the outskirts of Aleppo, the difference from the previous year was immediately visible. Where in 2013 there had been shops, markets and people, now there was only destruction on an industrial scale. We could see dozens of cars, trucks and lorries on the side of the road, some completely destroyed and others bearing the scars of rocket attacks. I was certain bodies must still be inside the wreckage of the vehicles. It was like something out of a Mad Max movie.

 I noticed the atmosphere in the hospitals and among my colleagues was quite different: tense, charged. It felt altogether edgier and more dangerous than my previous trip. The doctors looked drained, hollow. They were under constant barrage from barrel bombs, rockets and machine guns. Simply getting around the city had become exceptionally dangerous. The chance of being killed simply moving from one hospital to another was something like one in four. One of the new doctors helpfully told me my chances of leaving Aleppo alive were 50/50.

 I had a near-constant pain in the middle of my chest, which I could ignore only when I was immersed in an operation. Day after day we saw entire families brought in to the hospital, their homes destroyed by barrel bombs. Most of the children we saw were under 10. Some were dead on arrival, from the effects of the shockwave or from inhaling pulverised concrete. One particular day will stay with me for the rest of my life. Following a colossal bang, a family of seven children came in with their dead mother. The first child was just a toddler, and had lost both her feet. Her brother on the next trolley was about seven – he had a massive pelvic injury. Another boy, about the same age, had blood streaming from his face. I still have nightmares about what happened next. A little boy, about five years old, was brought in, face down on the trolley. Both his buttocks and the backs of his thighs had been completely blown off. He was still alive but completely silent as he gazed around the room. One of the nurses pulled his hair back from his face and started to comb it gently with her fingers. That was all we could do for him; we had run out of morphine. A few minutes later another child was brought in, his sister. Half of her head and brain were missing.

 On our last day, we heard the sound of heavy gunfire outside the house. I peered through a crack in the window and could see about 20 armed men coming towards us, some walking and firing their weapons, others with heavy-calibre machine guns on the back of pickup trucks. I began to panic. I was cold and clammy and began shaking uncontrollably. Had Isis finally caught up with me? We hit the deck, hiding under our beds. I closed my eyes and lay there, in despair – for myself, and for this poor country that had been overwhelmed by darkness. The shooting lasted around an hour. At some point the hospital administrator told me not to worry – the fighting was just between two rival Free Syrian Army factions. It turned out later he had hidden the reality of the situation to protect me. The fighters were Isis, and it was their last chance to take me hostage.'

Inside HTS' takeover of northwestern Syria

 'In a conference hall adorned with the flags of Hay’at Tahrir a-Sham, the Free Syrian Army and National Liberation Front, a banner read overhead, “Hand in hand, we win our revolution.”

 Syria’s remaining rebel factions—diverse, and at odds with one another almost as often as they are with the Assad régime—came together at a General Conference of the Syrian Revolution in Bab al-Hawa in rural Idlib province at the beginning of this month.

 Meant as a show of unity, the meeting produced a 12-point statement promising to “unify revolutionary efforts socially, economically, and militarily” through a new government for the rebel-held northwest, a joint military council and the creation of new civilian institutions purportedly aimed at improving the lives of civilians.

 The last similar conference, more than a year ago, resulted in the formation of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG)—a governance body largely considered a puppet of Hay’at Tahrir a-Sham (HTS).

 Much has changed since then.

 Through a combination of military force and negotiated settlements, HTS has asserted effective control over the majority of Syria’s rebel-held northwest following a lightning campaign against rival rebel factions launched at the beginning of this year. HTS now maintains control over Idlib and outlying opposition areas of neighboring Aleppo and Hama provinces.

 In response, international organizations pulled funding for key healthcare infrastructure and opposition-era structures, including the Free Syrian Police, dissolved. Private universities have closed and residents have little choice but to navigate new taxes and checkpoint fees imposed by the hardline group.

 And while international funders announced Monday that funding for health directorates would be reinstated according to “strict conditions,” the true impact of HTS’ takeover may not be known quite yet—with civilians increasingly fearful of what may come next.

 HTS’ rapid military expansion has paved the way for the expansion of the SSG in step—and the hardline group’s leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani insisted last month that the group intends to “hand over all our areas to a civilian government.”

 Following an outbreak of rebel infighting last month with longstanding rivals Harakat Nour a-Din a-Zinki, part of the Turkish-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) rebel coalition that was present across the northwest, HTS suddenly made its move.

 Zinki all but collapsed within a matter of days. A January 10 ceasefire agreement between HTS and the NLF saw factions from the Ankara-backed coalition agree to evacuate north to Turkish-controlled Afrin, in neighboring Aleppo province, while the SSG would take over administrative control of the region.

 In territories newly acquired by HTS, the hardline group is now absorbing local councils previously under the administration of the opposition-affiliated Syrian Interim Government (SIG), based out of the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep. Those councils are falling under the umbrella of the SSG, which is using the annual January 1 expiration of the tenure of all local councils as a pretense to recreate them in its image.

 HTS has historically used the SSG to control civil society in the territories it holds—overseeing aid efforts and local councils while collecting taxes, policing local communities and controlling water and electricity stations. Its apparatus has embedded HTS into civilian life.

 In the past, local councils that came under SSG control were mostly dissolved and reformed with HTS-approved cadres from the top down.

 In Saraqib, a city in eastern Idlib province that HTS seized by force in July 2017, the local council was later dissolved and reformed without elections and now “completely abides by the specifications of the...SSG,” according to the city’s former local council head Muthanna Mohammad.

 Last month’s military advances have allowed HTS to repeat the process across the northwest, by absorbing several new council bodies while using a semblance of bureaucratic procedure to do so.

 SSG officials talk up what they describe as an efficient, legitimate government infrastructure that comprises much more than local councils—with so-called ministries, and even a prime minister. Meanwhile, the SSG has developed seven directorates and other province-level institutions for running local infrastructure—water, electricity, transportation, sanitation and telecommunications—and administering services.

 Observers and residents meanwhile question whether these SSG-affiliated authorities can even properly distribute basic services to the communities they purportedly now serve.

 At the same time, taxation and royalties have become key to SSG’s strategy of control, but also its own stability.

 “Most of the [SSG’s] resources come from taxes and royalties on citizens and organizations, as well as entry and exit fees at the Bab al-Hawa crossing,” says an SSG employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to press.

 SSG Minister of Local Governance Muaed al-Hasan claims that taxes allow the SSG to provide key services across the northwest.

 However, he admits, enforcing taxation and service fees remains a problem for the SSG—not least because of a “lack of compliance among some people with paying the duties, even though they are low.”

 The SSG has reportedly not yet introduced taxation in areas acquired during recent advances—according to some observers, because of concerns over the response from local communities.

 The SSG has also started imposing additional taxes in Idlib city—the epicenter of its civil control in the province—on car registrations, shops and street vendors.

 In response to HTS’ recent expansion, German development agency GIZ pulled funding last month from over 50 health directorates across the northwest—although the GIZ reportedly reinstated support to health directorates in Aleppo, Hama and Idlib provinces albeit with strict conditions on where that money ends up.

 Still, civilians and local aid organizations are bracing for more cuts in the future.

 “It will definitely stop. I have no doubt about this,” Mohammad Halaj, director of the Response Coordination Group NGO that documents service provision in Syria’s northwest, tells Syria Direct.

 “There is an international consensus that these areas are categorized as ‘terrorist,’ so funding will stop.”

 However, according to al-Bakour from Maarat a-Numan’s United Council for Local Councils, ongoing bombardments by pro-government forces across southern Idlib province—and not HTS advances—have led to NGO closures.

 “Some NGOs are stopping their operations, but it’s because of regime [military] campaigns and not because of the entrance of the SSG,” he says.

 David Swanson, an Amman-based spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), says that “despite a difficult operating environment, both the United Nations and [NGOs] continue to operate in the area,” by providing “critical life-saving assistance through cross-border operations out of Turkey.”

 There is one possible scenario that could upturn all that—the looming threat of a possible pro-régime offensive on the rebel-held northwest.'