The View From Inside Syria

 Montagne: Wow. Well, let me ask you, when we first spoke with you late last year, you were quite angry that the U.S. was paying so much, at that point, attention to ISIS. And what you said was, what about the regime? The Assad regime - more people have been killed by far by them in Syria than by ISIS. I wonder, though - it's been months now - what about ISIS? Or - are they coming into your neighborhood? Is there a threat?

 Al-Batal: Most of the population here, like, do not agree with how ISIS think or act. So they don't have any place to grow any followers here. But what I am afraid is that the more you have been feeling injustice and the more you feel that you have been left alone, that you have been pushed to maybe sometime even make a deal with the devil to get out of here. So we manage to push back those ridicules, but the more the situation get bad, no one knows what going to happen.

 Montagne: How are you getting news, and how much news are you getting about what is happening outside?

 Al-Batal: Most of the people get the news. They have this two hours a day of electricity, and they watch television. But they don't watch it with that much care anymore. They are more interested in the local news because they say that the news here, like, it has been the same for, like, three years. The only thing that's changed is the number of people who die. Nothing major have change. There's always an airstrike. There's always someone dying. Even this morning, we have two airstrikes. So people are walking the street. They hear the plane coming, so they just look up, wait for the bomb to fall, and after that they keep walking normally like nothing had happened. That's one side of human nature - that you can get used to anything. I told you my friend of mine lost all of his family, and he didn't even cry. He was, like, the meaning of death have been changed. And he was like, maybe they are relieved now or out of the siege in the one way that no one can stop them - up to the sky.

Syrian rebels decry Iran's nuclear deal with the west

 Well done again to Kareem Shaheen, for actually reporting what Syrians have to say.

 ' “It is the belief of many on the ground that America and Iran are strategic allies, and all the overt signs of animosity are simply hypocrisy,” said Ahmad al-Alwan, a religious official with the Army of Conquest, an alliance of rebel groups in the north of Syria that scored a series of victories against the regime’s army this year.

 “Iranian assistance has never been severed from Assad and Iran has been aiding Assad above and below the table before the entire world with the tools to kill the Syrian people,” he added. “The nuclear agreement will not change this equation.”

 “We have a real fear that Iran will use the unfrozen accounts for more shameless intervention in the region and enflaming strife and war, as well as providing more support to the Assad regime to prevent its fall and allow it to continue carrying out terrorist massacres against the Syrian people,” said Mohammed Maktabi, the secretary general of the Syrian National Council, the exiled opposition.

 “We know that if America wanted to remove Assad it would have, but America wants to lengthen the conflict in Syria, to manage it, not to end it,” said Alwan.



 “Iran is America’s best partner in the region,” said a source close to Jabhat al-Nusra. “The war in Syria will continue, and the solution for them is a political transition while preserving the regime.”

 “Everyone is feeling resentment: why at this decisive time?” said Ibrahim Noureddine, a spokesman for the First Legion, an opposition faction in the south. Many of the opposition groups in the area, save for Jabhat al-Nusra, are seen as moderate and close to western and Gulf states opposed to Assad.

 “The street and the opposition factions in the south resent this because it is completely against them,” he said. “Iran’s role in resolving the Syria crisis is to leave Syria.” '

Joint action by US and Iran has never felt closer

 Patrick Cockburn isn't lying less because someone else is saying it. Turkey and Saudi Arabia aren't providing military aid to ISIS, or even to anyone affiliated to al-Qaida in Syria. Nor are the Turks encouraging people to cross their border to join ISIS.

 'A senior Shia clergyman called for the US to supply Iraq with modern weapons and to put pressure on Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar to stop providing covert military aid to Isis, and to rebel groups in Syria affiliated to al-Qaeda.'

 The US hasn't really supported the approach of backing the rebels. To actively support their oppressor would be a disaster. And to call them Sunni at every turn obscures their far less sectarian aims and methodology than that of the Islamic Rpeublic of Iran and its proxies. That it is Shia clergymen Cockburn is constantly quoting should give one a bit of pause on that front. I don't see any Sunni imams being given such respect.

 'Shia clerical leaders are cautious, but they hope the US will no longer automatically support the approach of Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar – its traditional allies, which have backed the Sunni-dominated rebels in Syria.'

 It's probably not true what he's saying about Iraq either, but I'm not an expert on that front.

 'In reality, Iranian control is predominant in only three of the main militia units.'

A Syrian Parody Features the Civil War

 The New York Times wants to blame all sides, but you can see, if you look, that Assad and the rebels are not the same threat.

 'The show skewers President Bashar al-Assad and his government, as well as the religious groups that have taken over much of the uprising. It even mocks the rebels in the Free Syrian Army, who provide security when the show is filmed on location.

 “We make fun of the way they treat civilians, but they have no choice but to protect us,” said Yamen Nour, one of the stars of the show. Mr. Nour, 37, a painter and actor who led demonstrations in 2011, considers his theater and television work a continuation of the revolution by other means.

 “We want to show people that we are still living,” he said. “It’s very difficult to make people smile during war. We want them to forget the war for a moment.”

 Tony el-Taieb, 24, the producer of the series, said he and the 55 or so actors and crew members who work for his company, Lamba Productions, believed that Syria’s original revolutionaries must establish cultural alternatives to those generated by the government in Damascus.

 “Our videos drive the regime crazy, because we show the reality,” Mr. Taieb said. “We can’t leave the field of drama to the regime.” '

Did Saudi Arabia Barter in Christian Lives?

 No. Even the Wikileaks version still makes it sound like the Saudis were threatening Christians, "Saudi to Vatican: Help us bring down Assad and we will ensure Christians are spared from retaliation". In fact what they told the Vatican was this, "All parties who support the Syrian people are committed to the rights of minorities in Syria and, in the event of the fall of the Syrian regime, will not accept for them to be subjected to any acts of retribution."

 Similar elisions in Robert Fisk's latest for the Independent*. '[Iran's] Guard Corps and its Hizballah allies from Lebanon are literally in the front lines against the Islamists.' Not against ISIS, but against those fighting to free Syria from Assad. Similarly, "'Israel has been allowing Iran’s militant Sunni enemies to slip across the Golan from Syria into Israel for medical treatment every few days.' Will it really need him to write that all Sunnis are terrorists before it becomes obvious what Fisk is like?

 Patrick Cockburn** has wrapped up his lies in support of an alliance with Assad into a neater little bundle.

 'Isis, the Syrian army’s main opponent.'

 'Now we apparently want to remove Daesh, but without helping Assad. These two things are incompatible. It is a choice of evils”.'

 'President Bashar al-Assad probably holds another third, though these proportions are a little deceptive because the government still holds most of Damascus, the main cities and the roads linking them.'

 'There is an attempt to rebrand al-Nusra as kinder, gentler jihadis, but those who believe this propaganda should reflect on al-Nusra’s unstinting praise for the perpetrators of 9/11." "Assad may be about to lose the city of Daraa in the south to the Southern Front, an alliance of groups which present themselves as more moderate than Isis or al-Qaeda.'

 'It is Isis and the most extreme Islamist groups that will ultimately benefit from the weakening of Assad and the government in Damascus.'

 'In the case of the Southern Front, often advertised as an anti-Assad force which is not extreme jihadi, its guise may be adopted to hoodwink foreign backers." "Assad’s forces are exhausted but are not close to collapse.'

 'The militarisation of politics in Syria since 2011 has benefited both Isis and Assad: it has left Syrians opposed to Isis and al-Nusra, but even more terrified of Assad’s forces, with no alternative but to fight and die with the jihadis.""You will have heard the opposition slogan “Alawites to the cemetery and Christians to Beirut”.'

Most have some reflection of the truth, but have been elided so far from it as to be unrecognisable. His conclusion that we should ask Assad to stop barrel bombing in return for bombing ISIS that he hardly bothers to fight is a fantasy, and the idea that we will end up supporting Assad if ISIS or al-Nusra threaten Damascus, so we should do so now, is utterly stupid as it will only preserve the disorder of Assad's genocide and encourage the extremist response to it.

*[https://web.archive.org/web/20150717032007/http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iran-nuclear-deal-however-the-great-and-good-represent-it-america-has-now-taken-the-shia-side-in-the-middle-easts-sectarian-war-10388940.html]
**[http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-in-syria-we-cant-win-a-war-without-taking-sides-10366142.html]

Pan-Arabists and the Iran "deal"

 'You're reading the blog of a bitter and disillusioned man who once cheered for Hassan Nasrallah during the 2006 war and believed that Tehran's 'Axis of Resistance' was the region's only hope. I changed my mind because Syrians were being murdered by the thousands, their legitimate claims dismissed, and their uprising brushed off as a terrorist uprising by a tinpot dictator who would not have survived had it not been for the help of Tehran and Hezbullah. The pan-Arabists were blasé about the news. We were brutalised and the world did nothing. We were tortured, and the world did nothing. We were starved, and the world did nothing. The world looked away when Syria started.

 I'm sorry that Syrians are inconvenient, that we're not being killed by the right type of enemy for you people. I'm sorry we haven't received your stamp of approval. Pan-Arabists are cheering a deal with Iran, because, as they keep reminding us, Israel is the real enemy; Palestine the real goal. Never mind the untold misery, guts and excrement that we are being forced to crawl through in the name of this mythical liberation that hovers on our horizon like a promised paradise for the wretched of the world. Syria is "complicated". Syrians are only to be felt "sorry for", like the victims of some flood or an earthquake. From your glass towers in Dubai you intellectual pan-Arabists can toast a deal with Iran, and celebrate the fact that nothing has been allowed to deviate your attention from the lofty goal of "liberating Palestine".'

Refugees content in Turkey, await Assad's fall to return

 "We will never return to Syria unless the Assad regime is gone. He must be ousted."

 "I was a fourth-grade student and I cannot go to school here. If Assad goes in Syria, I still have a hope of returning. He is a bad guy, but Erdoğan is giving iftar to us."

 "I do not have any hope of returning to Aleppo. I had built my house there with blood and sweat. But Assad's missiles turned it into ruins. I cannot go back."

Documenting Death Inside Syria's Secret Prisons

 ' “I saw his color, and was like, ‘Thank God he wasn’t starved to death.’ He didn’t have his ears taken off or his nose. So, I thought he made them furious enough to kill him right away rather than being tortured on a daily basis. It’s always better to know, is he alive or is he dead.”

 “It was systematic, the regime was using it as a way to quell the revolution.

 There’s a lot of missing Syrian people and a lot of people don’t know the fate of their family members. They hear about it through rumors. They pay money to try and find information and really there’s nothing concrete. And unfortunately there’s nothing more concrete than pictures of dead bodies. So the idea was to open up to help people identify their own family members.

 For an American audience, I think it was shocking. But the sheer … mass production of this, I think, is what overwhelms. They’ve documented it in such detail.

 Syrians inside Syria that had any experience with intelligence [services] automatically knew why the documentation had to happen.

 When there’s an order from above, they need evidence that those orders are being carried out. In a highly corrupt government, where you can pay people to release people, they need the evidence. They needed to keep the evidence to show that you told us this is what we need to do, and therefore, this is what we are doing.” '

Palestinian refugees in rural Damascus appeal for help

 'In a statement published by the the National Working Group for Palestinians in Syria yesterday, the families who live in the neighbourhoods of Duma, Zamalka, Hazzah and Humouriya in rural Damascus said they suffer from a severe shortage of food and medical supplies due to the suffocating siege imposed on them by the Syrian regime since the beginning of September 2013.

 It said the heavy shelling and strict blockade imposed by President Bashar Al-Assad's forces caused Palestinian families to lose their income and stopped them receiving the aid needed for their survival.'

Syrian War Takes Rising Toll on Hezbollah

 'Hezbollah units are now spearheading the fight against opposition rebel groups while the faltering Syrian army plays a supporting role. Although the militia is highly secretive about the size of its footprint in Syria, Western officials and analysts believe it has roughly 6,000 to 8,000 fighters on the ground there.

 The group also refuses to discuss its losses in Syria, but the numbers are substantial and on the rise. Since Hezbollah began taking part in full-fledged combat in Syria in 2013, officials and outside analysts estimate that roughly 700 to 1,000 fighters have been killed or wounded in battle, a substantial loss for the group.

 Losing the border town of Zabadani would be a massive setback for the militia, as the town lies along vital land routes that link up Hezbollah-controlled territory with Syria. In the past, Zabadani served as a logistical hub used to transport Iranian arms to the militia.
Iran, which backs Hezbollah as well as other Shiite foreign fighters in Syria, has doubled down on its gamble on the Syrian regime, expanding shipments of weaponry, ammunition, and other equipment.

 Tehran also has deployed advisors from the country’s Revolutionary Guard force closer to the front, and some have reportedly taken charge of some operations from Syrian army officers, analysts said.

 “They’re running a high-risk, high-reward type of path right now. If it gets to a point where the [Assad] regime looks like it is on its last legs, then Iran has a big decision to make.” '

Syria is caught between bombs and butchery

 'As a Syrian, I feel guilty about warning a child or teenager against a smuggler’s promise to take him to Europe. I know where their thoughts might head if that desperate option ceases to be a possibility. I then wonder how long sane people can resist as the situation deteriorates.

 It is no better in the rest of Syria. Even though ISIL dominates the headlines, the Assad regime remains the top killer in the country by some margin. The daily suffering caused by the regime now rarely makes it to public discussions, but highlighting Mr Assad’s disproportionate violence has practical benefits. Apart from the humanitarian factor, failure to focus on the atrocities committed by both ISIL and the regime distorts the reality and creates a schism between how outsiders and Syrians conceive of a resolution to the conflict.

 Nowhere is this clearer than when America’s train-and-equip programme reportedly failed to attract enough recruits because volunteers are asked to focus on ISIL. A year after Barack Obama announced the programme, no more than 200 Syrians joined it. Moreover, even those who have joined the programme will be treated as mercenaries by fellow rebels as long as the focus is ISIL not the regime. Even before the US officials publicly admitted the challenge, it was apparent.

 As long as the suffering and sacrifices of people on the ground are overlooked, the world should not expect true partners in the conflict. The savagery of the Assad regime is no less than the barbarity of ISIL. On the contrary, it helps perpetuate it.'

Tremseh 'massacre' - Friday 13 July 2012

 'A big number of the young men were killed in the field when they were trying to escape the army attack. Helicopters targeted them by heavy machine guns while they were driving their motorcycles - while they were fleeing the village.

 Today the people of Tremseh opened a house that was burned by troops. They found two people who were burned alive. My sister told me that the only two doctors in the village were targeted by mortar shells. Both doctors were killed in their houses.

 Khalid Saleh, executive member of the Syrian National Council, insisted the reported atrocities were well documented.

  Asked why alleged massacres often coincide with UN security council meetings, he said:

 "From the Assad regime's perspective it is very clear that any political or international solution at this point will mean the end of the Assad regime. I think the Assad regime, in committing all these massacres, is really talking to [its] shabiha, to his forces on the ground. I think these massacres unfortunately increase the morale of the Assad gangs. It is the same thing when they shot down the Turkish airplane.

 Assad doesn't really care about the international community. What he is focused on is winning the battle on the ground, so he is doing all he can to raise the morale of his troops. Unfortunately it is a sad reality that committing massacres like these will increase the morale of the gangs ...

 The Syrian regime has made it very clear that they are killing any chance for a peaceful transition." '

 Three years ago tomorrow. All the elements of the mainstream media narrative are here. The undeniable massacre, the denial by the régime, the splitting the difference by calling the massacre 'alleged', the back-covering condemnation by the UN, the promise of some binoculars by the West to the rebels, amid American fears that guns don't mix well with Muslims, the denial by the Guardian's commentariat that we can possibly know anything. And this, from Brian Whittaker among others, is some of the best of the mainstream reportage.

Assad pummels key rebel province with ship mines

 'Bullets, bombs and explosive barrels have long been a feature of Bashar al-Assad’s campaign to quell dissent in the southern province of Daraa, birthplace of the rebellion against the Syrian president’s brutal rule.

 Residents are now reporting a new, even more potent and indiscriminate instrument of death: naval mines, designed to destroy armoured ships, that regularly tumble from regime helicopters, leaving craters 15ft deep and up to 30ft wide.

 Their explosive power has been a devastating addition to an already brutal bombing campaign directed at the first town to rise up against Assad’s regime. Witnesses to the deployment of the new weapon report that the mines are smaller than barrel bombs and can be distinguished as they fall from above by their bright red colour.'

The consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries

 'In December, Secretary of State John F. Kerry stated that “Syrians should not have to choose between a tyrant and the terrorists.” There was, Kerry declared, a third option: “the moderate Syrian opposition who are fighting both extremists and [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad every day.” Unfortunately, this commendable view has broken down because the United States has defined the term “moderate” in such a narrow and arbitrary fashion that it excludes the bulk of the mainstream opposition.

 The group to which I belong, Ahrar al-Sham, is one example. Our name means “Free Men of Syria.” We consider ourselves a mainstream Sunni Islamic group that is led by Syrians and fights for Syrians. We are fighting for justice for the Syrian people. Yet we have been falsely accused of having organizational links to al-Qaeda and of espousing al-Qaeda’s ideology.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that Syria needs a national unifying project that cannot be controlled or delivered by a single party or group and should not be bound to a single ideology. We believe in striking a balance that respects the legitimate aspirations of the majority as well as protects minority communities and enables them to play a real and positive role in Syria’s future. We believe in a moderate future for Syria that preserves the state and institutes reforms that benefit all Syrians.

 Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State. Further, the self-defeating policy of regarding the war against the Islamic State as being fundamentally different from, and in some cases diametrically opposed to, efforts to remove Assad from power has brought no end to either battle.

 Despite a disappointing lack of genuine engagement from the international community, we remain committed to dialogue. The issues that need to be discussed are how to end Assad’s reign, how to defeat the Islamic State and how to ensure that a stable and representative government in Damascus puts Syria on the path to peace, reconciliation and economic recovery while avoiding the disintegration of the state. It is not too late for the United States to change course. Kerry’s “third option” exists — but only if Washington is willing to open its eyes and see it.'

When Israel gave Bashar Assad a lifeline

 'Recently, an interesting news item relating to Syria seemed to remain under the public radar. In his book “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” the Israeli former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote of how the Russian plan in 2013 to remove Syria’s chemical arsenal, and in that way avoid an impending American attack against the country, originated with an Israeli minister, Yuval Steinitz.

 The reason Steinitz did so is not difficult to understand. The Israelis saw a golden opportunity to get rid of what worried them most in Syria, namely the regime’s chemical weapons. They were far less concerned with seeing Assad and his acolytes punished for having deployed such weapons against civilians. Once the deal was agreed, Oren writes, “the phrase ‘Assad must go’ vanished from [Barack] Obama’s vocabulary.”

 Nothing has really changed since the CIA director, John Brennan, told the Council on Foreign Relations last March that the “last thing we want to do is to allow [ISIS and other jihadist groups] to march into Damascus.” Brennan had added then, “That’s why it’s important to bolster those forces within the Syrian opposition that are not extremists.” However, at the catatonic rate the U.S. is training such forces, the chances that “moderates” will soon change the tide in Syria is negligible.

 Whether we are talking about the United States or Israel, Assad has imposed on both a very successful “either-or” equation – “It’s either Assad or chaos.” That has given the Syrian president and Iran tremendous leverage over Washington and Tel Aviv. This will only increase when, as is likely, the Americans and Iranians reach a nuclear deal. Once that happens, Iranian funds to assist Assad will be freed up and the Obama administration may more firmly recognize an Iranian “sphere of influence” in Syria. That will not sit well with Israel, but the complexities of the situation will most probably expand Assad’s margin of political survival.

 Obama should bear in mind what he said about Assad. Syria’s war will not end while he remains in power. But the U.S. president has seemed unwilling to pursue his own logic in Syria. Bashar Assad has lasted thanks to such incoherence.'

Divided country, divided narratives

 'Ms Yazbek’s book makes a valuable contribution to the attempt to explain the turmoil still unfolding in Syria. Mr Glass’s work, by contrast, serves to muddy the waters further. Foreign powers are undoubtedly playing an unhelpful role, but Mr Glass attributes too much to them. He criticises Turkey and other Arab countries, who have chaotically backed Syria’s rebels, while more or less letting off Iran and Russia, who have funded and armed Mr Assad to a far greater degree. Though he is no diehard fan of the regime, he also downplays its crimes relative to those of the rebels (which are not in dispute).

 Sometimes this borders on the outright disingenuous. He writes that chemical weapons are “alleged to have been used not only by the government but by the rebels as well”. Yet there is overwhelming evidence against the regime, including of a sarin attack on Damascus suburbs in 2013 that left hundreds dead. By contrast, there is little sign of rebels using chemicals, and certainly not on that scale.

 Although Ms Yazbek’s book is written exclusively from the rebel-held area of the country, and she considers herself part of the opposition to Mr Assad, her account of weeks spent in the northern province of Idlib is more balanced. She lets people of all stripes speak for themselves: the rebel leader who threatens Alawites (the minority sect to which Ms Yazbek and the Assads belong; see article), Raed Fares, a well-known secular activist, as well as ordinary Syrians, male and female.



 She is not blind to the changing nature of the war, as it has turned from a peaceful uprising to an armed, and increasingly religious, conflict. She fears the danger not just of jihadists but of the growing devoutness of ordinary civilians left with nothing to turn to but their faith. Yet in her book, bursting with Syrian voices, the revolution to overthrow the Assad regime continues. One woman, who pleads with Ms Yazbek to tell the world what is really happening, tells her she will never “kneel” to Mr Assad. “I’m going to get pregnant every nine months and keep having children so that we don’t become extinct,” she says.

 Her trips show why: the brutality of the regime is evident on every page. In rebel-held Syria the unimaginable is now the norm: children without limbs; whole families wiped out in barrel bombs; playgrounds turned into burial grounds as cemeteries fill up. Through snippets of these people’s lives Ms Yazbek does the important job of putting faces to the numbing numbers of Syria’s crisis: over 200,000 dead and 10m displaced. Amid the rubble, many Syrians have an incredible sense of social solidarity and they find ingenious ways to survive. It is impossible not to share her anger at “the great injustice that had fallen on us as a people and a cause”.

 Ms Yazbek does much to make Syria better understood; her book is gripping. Mr Glass’s feels more hastily written and polemical. One can only hope that more Syrians, with better access to and understanding of the country, write their stories. Their take on the war needs to be heard.'

In Yarmouk, hope is the only currency with value

 'Yarmouk, Khateeb’s home, a once-bustling neighbourhood in southern Damascus and a symbol of Bashar al-Assad’s regime’s supposed dedication to the Palestinian cause, is in ruins after being starved of food, water and electricity by the government in a brutal three-year siege.

 Khateeb and his friends participated in demonstrations, but never organised anything inside the camp, which housed many refugees fleeing other parts of Syria, to keep it neutral. But, he said, the regime was determined to drag the Palestinians into the conflict, allowing local factions to distribute weapons at random for self-defence and demanding they act as local enforcers.

 In response, rebels entered the camp, the Palestinian factions that were supposed to defend it withdrew and the regime responded with air strikes, many of which killed refugees. It slowly ramped up the siege, first limiting food, medical supplies and fuel, then finally imposing a total blockade that has lasted to this day.

 The brutality of the siege has left Khateeb with a desire for “personal revenge” against a regime whose violence has meant that he had to personally bury about 10 of his friends. It was that brutality, he said, that had led to the rise of extremism in Syria, where Isis now controls roughly half the country’s landmass and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, reigns as one of the most powerful rebel groups.

 “Extremism is a result of extremism,” he said. “The revolution was peaceful, the regime acted with monstrosity, people carried weapons. The regime launched air strikes, more gunmen emerged. The regime used chemical weapons, people became Islamist. The regime killed women, people became Nusra. It became more extreme, people became Daesh (Isis).”
Khateeb was not surprised when Isis entered the camp in collusion with the local branch of Jabhat al-Nusra, many of whom had secretly pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

 Still, he resents how the Syrian uprising is portrayed outside the country as a battle between the regime and Isis, which he described as a “cancerous organisation”.

 “When Daesh entered, 10 people were killed in the fighting but, before that, 170 people died of hunger,” he said. “Those who see the events in Syria with the lens of Isis and extremism are partners in the massacre against the Syrian people.”

 “Yarmouk has been dying for three years,” he added.'

Exodus from Syria reaches 'almost biblical proportions'

 'A few weeks ago, Mo's life took a dramatic turn. He was picked up by Syrian authorities and held for ransom. Basatneh says government officials have asked for approximately $50,000 for his release. "The regime has been battling the Syrian revolution for five years now. They are losing resources, they are losing money," she says. "They hardly have anything so now they are up to the point where they're detaining activists and asking for money." '

Challenging Stereotypes with Syrian Refugee Children

 'Dick Simon responds to the question he was asked by Syrian refugee children in Turkey – “Why does everyone hate Syrians?”

 "They listened politely. And then they started asking questions. Tough questions. Although Karam Foundation’s programs have a strict no-religion/no-politics policy, my topic stirred something in the students.

 Why is the regime’s use of chemical weapons not considered terrorism?

 Are ISIS beheadings worse than dropping chemical weapons and barrel bombs slaughtering thousands of your own people?

 Why does the kidnapping of three nuns in Maloula receive international media focus while no one cares about the slaughter of more than 200,000 people, including tens of thousands of women and children?

 One handsome boy in the front row, Ali, dressed in a pressed white shirt and jeans, looked at me directly while asking, “How can you tell me there is no THEM? I watched THEM hang my uncle from a tree, cutting him with a knife until he bled to death. If America wanted to do something, they would have done it already. Why does everyone hate us?” He looked down at his desk, hiding his tears." '

Asking Syrian Airmen anything

 ' “The regime wanted me to use excessive and unimaginable force against unarmed civilians and innocent people. … I felt I could not protect my family anymore… That is the reason why I defected and I'm proud of it. I refuse to kill my own people and destroy my own country.

 Sectarian hatred was evident from the beginning of his superiors’ involvement: “The Alawite pilots often bragged [openly] during my time at Ksheish and Kweiress airport about how they dropped bombs and killed 'Dirty Sunnis'. Sometimes we'd ask them: ‘Did you hit the target (rebels)?’ He'd say ‘No, I dropped it on a village or on fishing boats....who cares they're all Sunnis let them burn.’ I swear on everything valuable that was their response.” In another instance, when a Colonel from Homs did not react to a newscast with screams of ‘terrorist,’ “he was handcuffed and a bag was placed on his head in front of me by the moukhabarat. He was then taken and tortured for a week before he was returned.” '

Assad's chlorine bomb attacks

 'Note how Assad's chlorine bomb attacks are nowhere near the front lines? They're 'just' used to attack civilians.'

Ogres and Orientalism

 Yassin al-Hajj Saleh:

 'Who among the Western leftists knows anything about the war in refugee camps? About the siege of Tripoli? Tal Al-Zaatar? Palestinian detainees in Assad’s prisons? And I needn’t add, what do they know about Syria in the first place? About its society, economy, or politics? Or about the Syrian detainees and the massacres the regime committed against Syrians? About the emergence of a ‘white’ segment of the population that discriminates against most Syrians and kills them in colonial-style punitive campaigns? Or about the colonial structure of the Assad state and its fostering of a ‘superior civilisation’ culture like that of the “white” settlers against the colonised peoples? About the sectarian divide-and-conquer policy also modelled on the colonial methods? Nobody.

 I have read Noam Chomsky for years and translated a book of his after my release from prison. I also helped translate a book about him. Not once have I seen in all his abundant work anything in reference to the Syrian people’s feelings about the Assads’ colonialism. He may have mentioned in passing something about the brutality and tyranny of the Assad regime, but that was it. All his views revolved around the United States and Israel. He doesn’t see us. He sees the Palestinians to some extent. Three years ago a few Syrian and Lebanese friends met with him in Beirut. The man knows very little and didn’t seem compelled to listen to his mostly young interlocutors. And it looked like he was irritated with them after the meeting because, instead of them listening to his views, they expressed theirs. I am talking here about a man with indisputable courage and morals, but the traditional Western left is incomparably less courageous and ethical than that in the region.

 To further understand this situation we should also remember that the Assad regime benefits from two types of ideologists: The ‘anti-imperialist resistance’ ideologists with previous ties to the Soviet Union (like Egypt after Abdul Nasser) and their relations with Iran and Hezbollah and with North Korea and Chavez, and the ‘modernization’ ideologists (like Saudi Arabia and the like) similar to the modernity of Iran before the Islamic revolution.

 The regime’s also gained from Western journalists like Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and Seymour Hersh. All of them have visited Damascus for a few days at a time, staying in five-star hotels and meeting with Bashar and some of his trusted cabinet members and intelligence officers, engaging in classified conversations about Blair and Cameron, or Clinton, Bush, and Obama. They also accompanied Assad army tanks which were carrying out punitive measures against ‘black’ Syrians like Fisk did in summer 2012, when he was the only embedded journalist in Darya near Damascus. Or they’ve fabricated eyewitness accounts of themselves like Patrick Cockburn who falsified a report a few months ago. That man calls for a coalition between the US and Assad, between Syria’s first world and the Western first world. But to him, we - the leftist opposition to the regime - are not just invisible, we don’t even exist.

 During the second, still ongoing, Assad war on Syria, other killers turned up to aid the regime two years ago. The solution to that is to stop the killers and punish them, and for those who are ‘neutral’ to spare no effort in preventing the continuous killing, including helping those subjected to the killing to more effectively stand up to the killers. So if the people are being bombed with barrels from air space that only the Assad regime has access to, is it too much to ask for anti-aircraft weapons? Doesn’t preventing the people from defending themselves contribute to complicating matters further? And if the regime is getting mercenaries from Iran, Lebanon, and Afghanistan to support it, why aren’t these mercenaries considered terrorists just like ISIS and the Nusra Front? Isn’t this another contribution to complicate matters? Is it really so difficult to understand such things? Is it so complicated?

 Fair-minded people who study the American administration’s policy will discover that the outcome of it has been a continuation of the Syrian conflict with no regard to justice or human life, and that the U.S. has given priority to its geopolitical interests over the rights and the blood of the Syrian people.

 We are now witnessing a rise in discrimination in most Western countries against Syrian refugees. Europe is inventing new ways to monitor the Mediterranean Sea and to win the war on refugees, no matter how hard it tries to disguise this as a war on intercontinental human trafficking mafias.

 In this context, the left that is supportive of the Syrians’ struggle stands in the world’s defense, for a fairer world. And that is an honor to the left and the West.'

"The regime killed my husband"

 "There was a Christian fixer, Mother Mary Agnes [a Carmelite nun notorious for spreading pro-Assad propaganda] working for the regime who eventually put us on the bus to Homs. She forced Gilles to go on the bus to film a report."

 Mother Agnes has just had her libel action against the authors of Attack Express, about the murder of Gilles Jacquier by Assad's régime, finally* rejected by the French courts.
*[https://www.lenouvelliste.ch/monde/syrie-gain-de-cause-pour-trois-journalistes-dont-deux-suisses-dans-un-proces-a-paris-350954]



Note 9/5/25, first link from June 2013, second original link unrecoverable, replaced with one from October 2014.

No exaggeration

 "No exaggeration, this is how medical services are operating now across Northern Syria"

 In southern Syria too*.
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20150703102043/https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/Jul-02/304793-4-south-syria-hospitals-shut-after-regime-raids-activists.ashx]

Senator Kaine Leads Delegation to Syrian Border

 'During their conversations, the activists and leaders emphasized the devastating role of the Syrian regime’s brutal aerial attacks in crippling civil life throughout liberated Syria on a daily basis, as well as the disappointingly minimal role the United States has taken in helping to curtail these atrocities.

 “We can advocate in Washington until we are blue in the face,” said Executive Director Mouaz Moustafa, “but there is nothing more impactful than real Syrians – the brave young men and women who started this revolution – sitting face to face with members of congress and telling their stories. Four years on, these brave Syrians still feel abandoned by the international community. These delegations illustrate that there are still Americans in government who care about them, and want to hear their stories. We would like to thank Senator Kaine and the entire delegation for showing this interest, and making that human connection.” '

UK strategy of not attacking Isis in Syria is illogical

 “It is a new parliament and MPs will want to think very carefully about how we best deal with Isil. [There is an] illogicality [with] Isil not respecting the border lines; they don’t differentiate between Syria and Iraq, they’re establishing this evil caliphate across both countries. There is no legal bar to us operating in Syria but we don’t have the parliamentary approval for it.

 We don’t need it at the moment because we are playing our part in the campaign and what we do in Iraq actually frees up the US aircraft to attack in Syria. Isil has to be defeated in both countries. Its evil in Iraq is all being directed by its headquarters in Syria.”

 The logic is that the Americans don't want to do anything on the Syrian side of the border that might upset Assad, like protecting Syrians from ISIS attacks, or God forbid, Assad's bombing. The logic is that Britain entirely supports the American strategy, it is only because this is becoming unsustainable for those countries most directly affected by this neglect and partiality, like Turkey, which is threatening to establish a buffer zone in Northern Syria* to protect Syrians from Assad and ISIS, and forestall the possibility that the Kurds will establish a state in Northern Syria, that Michael Fallon is expressing any doubts as to the direction they've taken.
*[http://eaworldview.com/2015/06/syria-daily-turkey-considers-intervention-with-air-operations-and-ground-troops/]

European parliament to showcase regime torture photos

 ' “This is an important victory,” said James Sadri, campaign manager at the Syria Campaign, which organised a petition urging the parliament to reverse its decision. “If European politicians won’t even look at pictures of human rights abuses in Syria what hope is there that they’ll do anything to stop them happening?”

 “Rather than send gunships to stop refugees crossing the Mediterranean these European politicians should do more to stop what these Syrians are fleeing in the first place,” he added.'

Syria, You’re On Your Own

 'In his May 19 briefing, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest leveled, in his own peculiar way, with the people of Syria: “... the President feels very strongly that the very significant problems that are faced by people in Syria, for example, are not problems that the United States is going to come in and solve for them. We're not going to impose a solution on Syria. We're not going to commit billions of dollars and the lives of hundreds of thousands of our men and women in uniform to try to solve those problems.” The fact that no one is calling for a ten-figure expenditure of money or the commitment of hundreds of thousands of troops is neither here nor there: the Syria straw man strategy is a permanent staple of administration disinformation. What is important is the implicit, but blunt message to the people of Syria: you are on your own.

 There are twenty months left for an administration so self-absorbed and yet so self-unaware that a key spokesperson is actually able to say, “We’re not going to impose a solution on Syria” without betraying even a hint of irony. Twenty months in Syria-time is an eternity. One could easily imagine 500 thousand dead, 5 million refugees, and 15 million internally displaced. Recent setbacks notwithstanding, one could see the Assad regime continuing to prosecute a campaign of mass homicide, buoyed aloft by new injections of Iranian cash made possible by the lifting of sanctions. Twenty months from now an incoming US president could find Syria essentially partitioned between two sets of arch-criminals: the Assad regime in the west, and the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) to the east—a country in its death throes, hemorrhaging terrified human beings in all directions.

 Faced with these kinds of prospects, Syrians already aware of the moral and policy vacuity of the West have no choice but to take matters into their own hands. This is the tallest of tall orders. As ISIL gobbles up more territory while being chased futilely from 30 thousand feet and as Assad—with Iran’s blessing—plasters residential areas with barrel bombs, the options for ordinary, nationalistic Syrians and those trying to represent them seem slim indeed.'

As a patriotic Syrian, I never imagined I would do this

 'In an incredibly candid and powerful address Raed Saleh, head of the White Helmets, speaks truth to power at the UN Security Council Arria Briefing on the 26th of June.

 "The international community has lost its credibility for Syrians in the absence of any political will to end the killing in Syria, and the UN Security Council has been transformed from the Security to the Insecurity Council in the eyes of the downtrodden because it has failed to uphold its own resolutions.

 The Syrian people who are being killed every day, Ladies and Gentlemen, hold you responsible and demand that all measures available to end the killing, particularly with indiscriminate weapons, be taken immediately.

 As a patriotic Syrian, I never imagined I would one day ask for a foreign intervention in my country, by land or air. But the lives of innocent women and children that we see dying in our hands every day compel us to ask for any intervention possible to stop the barbaric killing machine led by Bashar al-Assad, including preventing Syrian aircraft from flying, and especially preventing helicopters from hovering above us and dropping these bombs." '

 The Associated Press take, via the Guardian*, on this is somewhat different.

 'The Security Council has been bitterly divided over Syria between Russia, a close ally of president Bashar Assad’s government, and western nations who have have campaigned for a transitional government leading to democratic elections.'

 Not an abandonment of Syria by the West, but a campaign for régime change. In miniature we see the difference between the media narrative and the experience of Syrians over the last four years, and how the delusion of many leftists that they are doing Syrians a favour by blaming their condition on Western meddling isn't some challenge to the prevailing ideology, but what the press and the politicians would like us to believe.

*[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/27/syrian-rescue-organisation-appeals-to-un-security-council-over-barrel-bombs]

Response to EI article (Electronic Intifada)

 'Thus whilst Syria should not distract from Palestine as this is what Israel wants and would allow its ethnic cleansing to go ahead unimpeded, neither should our attention be diverted to such an extent from the fact that there has been no regime that has come close to representing Israel’s than Assad’s. He comes second to Israel in the number of Palestinians he has killed. He has tortured more Palestinians to death than Israel could ever hope to do (http://beyondcompromise.com/2014/09/19/faces-of-our-dead-photos-of-the-palestinians-tortured-to-death-by-syrian-regime/). He has employed exactly the same tactics of starvation of civilian areas under the excuse of them being ‘held hostage by terrorists'; indeed his opponents have had to dig tunnels to try and circumvent those sieges (and those tunnels been labelled ‘terrorist’ tunnels). He has carpet-bombed civilian areas to the ground for four years unimpeded. It has stopped people returning to its homes (such as the famous uprising Baba Amr neighbourhood in Homs). 

 For the past four years we have watched Syrian women and men scream in cameras ‘where are the Arabs? Where are the Muslims’ with rubble behind them in exactly the same way that they do in Gaza. If Zionism did not mean ‘Jewish nationalism’ Assad’s state would be the archetypal example of its Arab form.

 The fact remains that Hezbollah is now knees-deep in Palestinian blood, and I would like it if such outlets like EI are brave enough to call it and Iran on its betrayal of the Palestinian people, and call on it to put their actions where their mouths are, how can they be pro-Palestinian when they refuse to take off sieges of Palestinians, which according to someone who has recently visited Yarmouk and previously Gaza, has been multiple times worse than Gaza? Through doing this campaign and put pressure on it to stop the regime starving and torturing the Palestinians under its mercy (to say nothing about the Syrians).'

​The “Israel backs Jabhat al-Nusra” fairy-tale

 Michael Karadjis:

 'Thus the “Israel supports Nusra” discourse had simply led to the murder of a member of the FSA. But where does this theory come from? A number of writers in recent months have come up with the proposition that Israel is in some kind of alliance with Nusra in the southern Syrian region bordering the Israeli-stolen Golan Heights. “Why has Israel embraced al-Qaida’s branch in Syria?” asks Rania Khalek in the Electronic Intifada (​https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-has-israel-embraced-al-qaidas-branch-syria/14619). “In the Golan, Israel has cultivated an alliance with Islamist forces it falsely claims to detest: the al-Nusra Front,” claims Richard Silverstein (http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2015/06/25/israels-dangerous-game-with-syrian-islamists/). “Why is the media ignoring Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda?” asks Asa Winstanely (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/inquiry/18855-why-is-the-media-ignoring-israels-alliance-with-al-qaeda).

 Unlike ISIS, Nusra fights mostly against the regime (and against ISIS) alongside other Syrian rebel groups. Therefore, this “Israel supports Nusra” fairy-story is not aimed at claiming that Israel is secretly aiding a sectarian diversion of the revolution, but, on the contrary, the aim is the same old warped conspiracy theory that the mighty Syrian revolution is just a conspiracy orchestrated by a US-Zionist-Gulf-Jihadist-Martian cabal bent on destroying the nice progressive “secular” regime of Assad.

 Quite deliberately, these writers conflate Nusra with the FSA and other rebels; the fact that the UN reports talk about, for example, handing two boxes to members of an “armed group” for these writers automatically means Nusra. Even when it was found out that the wounded fighter murdered by the Druze lynch-mob was in the FSA and not Nusra, these haters declare him an “Islamist” fighter, in order to be as dishonest as is humanly possible without still calling him “Nusra” – for them, Nusra, Islamists and FSA are all the same thing.

 The entire fairy-tale of Israeli support to either Nusra or the FSA in the south is based on nothing. Stupid stories, however, can have deadly results.'

Obama's ISIS policy is backwards

 'The president and his people are intellectually attuned to the fact that Tehran is the principal outside facilitator of mass murder in Syria. They are intellectually accepting of the proposition that the Assad regime mass murder is a recruiting tool for ISIL. People in the administration are not lacking in intelligence, they can connect the dots on these things.

 If the commander in chief, Barack Obama, says, 'I’ve had enough of this … I want you to do something, give me some options that minimize the slippery slope argument, but give me some options that complicate Assad’s ability to launch helicopters with these horrible barrel bombs, including the resumption of chemical warfare.' ... If the president is willing to do that, I am utterly convinced that thousands of lives can be saved starting very quickly.'

Middle East Policy and Combating ISIS

 [01:23:26] Defense Secretary Ashton Carter: "We are trying to recruit and identify people who ... can be counted on ... to fight, to have the right mindset and ideology, and not be aligned with groups like ISIL on the one hand, and on the other hand, as you put it, work towards our goals, and our goal being for them to fight ISIL in the first instance."

 In other words, they are looking for mercenaries who will agree not to fight Bashar al-Assad. The administration's line is that they are weeding out extremists, but we can glean the truth from Fox News' take* on the story:

 'Abdul-Jabbar Abu Thabet, commander of Aleppo Swords Battalion, a moderate faction that is fighting both Assad's forces and IS, said he believes the Americans are more interested in recruiting Syrian army defectors than moderate rebels.

 He said he would no longer give Americans the names of training candidates from his group, after having done so once and not receiving a U.S. response.

 "The Americans are saying they want to train rebels to fight against Daesh only," he said by telephone from northern Syria, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. "The fighting should be against Daesh, the (Assad) regime and everyone who is against the revolution." '

*[https://web.archive.org/web/20150629180343/http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/06/29/us-training-moderate-syrian-rebels-sputtering-limited-by-strict-weeding-out/]

Syrians forced to survive on handouts during Ramadan

 'Nawal Ramadan jokingly quoted one of the most famous Syrian Ramadan series this year, Bab al-Hara, which deals with life in a Damascus neighborhood under the French mandate in the 1930s.

 The director and writer should have focused on our own time “and film how the regime hits the city of Aleppo with barrel bombs and how ISIS is executing people like sheep and lashing women.”

 “It would’ve been better,” she added bitterly.'

Kafranbel

 "Qatar & Saudi Arabia! it seems you need American Decision to help us."

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Aleppo

 Looking for barrel bombs.
 Looking for barrel bombs.
 Looking for barrel bombs.
 I'm hungry.

Isis in Kobani: Why we ignore the worst of the massacres

 'They are desensitised by seeing so many pictures of children killed or maimed by Isis suicide bombers or government barrel bombs.'

 What a hypocrite. Patrick Cockburn ignores the barrel bombs, the sieges, the torture, which Assad daily visits on Syria, to scare us with the dangers of ISIS into backing Assad and his allies as they carry out more bombing, rape and torture,

 'Thus the US, Britain and their allies are supposedly seeking to combat Isis, but they simultaneously oppose the main enemies of Isis such as Iran, Hezbollah, the Syrian army, Shia militias in Iraq, and the PKK in Turkey in the shape of its Syrian branch, the PYD.'

 It's a lie that America and Britain are opposing what Iran and Assad are doing.

 Andrew Marr said this morning, "Patrick Cockburn is one of the people I turn to on the Middle East," Stephanie Flanders echoed Cockburn, "We have to stop our Sunni allies funding groups like ISIS." The British political and business establishment takes their lead from Cockburn, he isn't some anti-establishment figure, but one linking the Western élite to their Middle Eastern counterparts. Two more lies, the states mentioned are not funding ISIS, and the groups they support do not commit atrocities like Assad or even ISIS, but reading Cockburn you would never know that, as there are no moderates in his picture of Syria except for Assad, and all the people fighting him are mad Muslims.

 'Isis and al-Qaeda-type groups that are little different from it, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham in Syria.'

Samar Yazbek: ‘Syria has been hung, drawn and quartered’

 ' “I was not frightened for myself. Not at all. Why should I be so? This was my homeland. This is where I had grown up. I spoke the languages, I knew the people. What did frighten me as time went on, and as I made more trips, was the way everything I had once known in Syria was being turned into something else, something I didn’t quite recognise. This had once been a cosy place, a place of traditional loyalties and hospitality. But now the people have been scarred and mutilated. I don’t know whether it will ever go back to what it was. That is what Assad has done.”

 She is especially angry with young Muslim women who have travelled from the west to join Isis. “Of course I am a feminist,” she says, “and what they are doing is sending the condition of women in Syria back to some terrible place. But also what they are doing is to ‘Orientalise’ Syria – these young girls are Muslims but they are creatures of the west. They know nothing of Syria and its ways. But they love the fantasy of the virile Arab warrior on a horse with a gun. This is a cliche and a fantasy and they come because it’s erotic and exotic – they are bored in the west and they need to rebel. But they do not understand Islam or Syria and that they are making things worse for the women who live here.” '

Syria’s Alawites: The People Behind Assad

' “We are witnesses to the country’s unraveling,” a 56-year-old Alawite public servant told me last summer in Latakia, the western coast’s main city. “Many people I know—especially those who have lost loved ones—are fed up, but few dare speak out because this would contradict the facade of defiance,” he said.'

Munther Khalil was killed in Majdal Shams

 Sam Charles Hamad:

 "Pro-Assad Druze pulled this fellow out of an ambulance and murdered him as the IDF watched on. He was slandered by Israeli Jews and Israeli Druze, for absolutely no good reason, as being a member of Jabhat an-Nusra, yet his name is Munther Khalil and he was a fighter with the Free Syrian Army. In fact, right-wing Israelis are still slandering him and justifying his murder because some injured Syrian fighter being treated in Israel made sectarian statements in an interview with some Israeli TV channel, which apparently means that murdering any Syrian fighter is perfectly understandable."

 Note 8/5/25, original Facebook link unavailable.

Syrian rebels take over regime headquarters in Daraa

 'The fall of Daraa city in the hands of rebels makes it the third Syrian city that is completely free of Assad forces after Raqqa (held by ISIS) and Idlib (held by Syrian rebels).'

The Civil War in Syria Is Invisible

 'Abounaddara—the name translates to “the man with the glasses,” which is to say the man who, through his lenses, can see clearly—has been able to maintain a steady stream of production since April 2011, when the regime of Bashar al-Assad upped their wanton killing of protesters. Since then, Abounaddara has released a new short film on Vimeo every Friday. And as the Syrian uprising turned into a revolution and then morphed into a gruesome civil war, the film collective—the majority of whose members are women—has managed to capture the social and human dimensions of war with an intimacy that is almost never seen in any conflict, let alone in Syria today.

 This is no small feat. Merely getting images from Syria is treacherous. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 17 journalists were killed in Syria in 2014, making it the deadliest place for journalists for three years running, and more journalists have been forced into exile since 2010 from Syria than any other country. The result is that we see very little of what’s really happening in Syria, enabling ISIS to promote its high-gloss terror pornography and the Assad regime to hide its crimes from view.'

Civilians Pay the Price

 'Ideally, those under arms who oppose the Assad regime would not take the poisoned bait of collective punishment and sectarian targeting spread promiscuously by the regime over the past four years. But some have, thereby imposing on their external supporters and suppliers an obligation to secure immediate corrective action. ISIL, of course, is beyond the pale and is not in any event part of the Syrian Revolution. Yet those seeking to draw Nusra away from its murderous al-Qaeda origins might concentrate first on stopping its war crimes.

 It is, however, the Assad regime that runs circles around “anti-Government armed groups” in terms of gross criminality. Consider some of the Commission’s more striking passages:

 “ . . . the Government continues to direct attacks towards locations where civilians are likely to congregate, among them, bus stations, marketplaces, and bakeries.”

 “In particular, the continuing use of barrel bombs in aerial campaigns against whole areas, rather than specific targets, is in violation of international humanitarian law and, as previously documented, amounts to the war crime of targeting civilians.”

 “The larger strategy [of the regime] appears to be one of making life unbearable for civilians who remain inside armed-group controlled areas.”

 “The previously documented pattern of attacks indicating that Government forces have deliberately targeted hospitals, medical units, and ambulances remains an entrenched feature of the conflict.”

 “Government sieges are imposed in a coordinated manner . . . [I]n particular, Government forces have refused to allow aid deliveries of essential medicines and surgical supplies . . . [G]overnment authorities act in direct breach of binding international humanitarian law obligations to ensure that wounded and sick persons are collected and cared for, and to ensure the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief.”

 “Everyday decisions—whether to go visit a neighbor, to send your child to school, to step out to buy bread—have become, potentially, decisions about life and death. Large numbers of children have been killed in bombardments of their homes, schools, and playgrounds.”

 The Obama administration is operationally indifferent to all of this. This is not to say it is at a loss for words when describing the depredations of Bashar al-Assad, a person it stubbornly continues to recognize as the President of the Syrian Arab Republic. Yet its strategy for degrading and destroying ISIL—notwithstanding effective military-humanitarian interventions at Mount Sinjar in Iraq and Kobane in Syria—is operationally silent on protecting Syrian civilians from the regime. This despite its intellectual acceptance that Assad’s program of mass homicide produces recruits for ISIL from around the world and convinces increasing numbers of Syrians that ISIL may be their best bet for protection against regime atrocities.'

Hashem Alsouki risks his life crossing the Mediterranean

 'He isn’t particularly political. He’s just a 37-year-old civil servant at the regional water board. He runs the computer department, and it’s his job to print the bills every month for the residents of Damascus and the surrounding countryside. He focuses on the water business, and minds his own.

 But today, none of that will matter. The regime is going from house to house, rounding up all the men they find. Whether it’s because they’re Sunni, living in a country run by Alawites, an offshoot of the Shia, Hashem can only speculate.

 Hashem’s children watch him as he goes to open the door. Outside stand 20 men. Whether they’re from the army, the police, or a pro-regime militia, Hashem doesn’t know. But they’re here for him, and half the people on his street.

 Until now the war has largely avoided Haran al-Awamid, a place of around 15,000 a few miles south-east of Damascus. It’s a quiet town with a lot of government employees. But in recent days, tensions have been raised. The regime killed two young men, tied their corpses to a car, and dragged them around town. Not everyone dared to react, but the pair’s friends and family did – they protested and chanted in the street.

 And now, as Hashem is shoved into the back of a van, his children watching from their front room, the regime is getting its revenge. It’s a long revenge, too. First Hashem and his neighbours are taken to a secret network of cells, dug deep beneath the nearby Damascus airport. Three days later, they’re moved on – to the headquarters of aviation intelligence in Damascus.

 Here, hundreds of men are crammed into single cells, deep underground. Every day, four or five of them are dragged to torture rooms. Single men are electrocuted with shocks to their genitals. Husbands like Hashem are sometimes spared that humiliation, but instead are hung from their wrists. Hashem spends 12 hours like this, the cords cutting into his skin. Others spend even longer and their hands later have to be amputated.

 After several weeks, he’s moved to some kind of airport hangar. It’s a vast space, capable of holding a few planes. But there are so many prisoners crammed in here that they have to take it in turns to lie down. With no watches or natural light, they have no way of telling the time.

 One day, months later, the prisoners are driven in vans to the centre of Damascus, where they’re tossed out into the street. They have no idea that it’s now late October, or that today is the festival of Eid al-Adha. They emerge blinking into the bright sunlight wondering what kind of Syria awaits them.

 For Hashem, the future is immediately bleak. While he was away, two of Hayam’s brothers were shot by the same sniper on the same day. The second was trying to retrieve the corpse of the first.'

"I must save my life and not risk my family’s safety!”

 'Karima (40) is not the type of Syrian heroine that the mainstream media would like to interview. She did not participate in the Syrian Uprising. She did not lead a demonstration.'

 I don't think this is the case. The media is not looking for revolutionaries, it is looking for people who will blame the rebels as much as Assad, to reflect the same sort of balance it imagines it can impose on the conflict. That Assad's has been a war against civilians, not just or even mainly a war against those actively resisting, has been an unfamiliar theme in most press and TV, when they talk about the rest of Syria at all and not only about ISIS.

 'On March 12, 2012, Karima’s life would change forever. Around noon she heard that a mission from the Syrian Army is searching the houses in her neighborhood for armed men. She prayed that they would not take her boys and husband because they were not involved in any military activities. Around 2.00 p.m. the mission entered their apartment asking them to surrender their weapons. Her husband declared that they had no weapons. The officer ordered his fellows to take her husband out. Another officer took her eldest son Mahmmod (18) and he forced him to prostrate himself to Bashar al-Assad photograph in front of his mother and siblings. Then, they commanded Karima and her smaller children (a girl and two boys) to stay inside while they took the father and the son Mahmmod with them. In few minutes, Karima and her children heard gunshots. Karima held herself together because she was worry about the safety of her younger children.

 Her husband’s dead body was left next to their flat door, and her son was left dying on the stairs after they shot him in the head. Karima remembered how his flesh and blood had dispersed and adhered to the walls around him. Her daughter Lama (15) tried to give Mahmmod water before he died because he was muttering “water,” but he could not drink it. Karima told me this with a big sigh that even her son last wishes did not come true: “My daughter came back inside, her hands were covered with Mahmmod’s blood. I kissed her hands and I smelled my son scent.” When the army mission finished investigating the building, they came again to Karima’s apartment. She locked the door. They unlocked it by shooting it.

 It was winter and dark, and Karima, who has no experience in public spaces, felt scared and decided to stay the night at one of her neighbor’s houses. When they entered her neighbor’s house, they saw another dead body of a stranger. Karima learned that the regime forces killed all men in her neighborhood, and they randomly threw all the dead bodies into neighbor’s houses. They do so to ensure that the rest of the families are terrorized and humiliated and other anti-regime regions would look at this example of consequences for rebelling against the regime. Once again Lama covered the dead body with a sheet, so the small children would stop looking at the body exploded by bullets. Karima continued her story:

 At 6:30 in the morning we left the neighbor’s houses, the regime forces were shooting toward our feet and screaming at us to go back. I gestured with my hand that it is impossible to go back. We kept running through the shooting, and sometimes we hid in some buildings, but there were dead bodies in every building. When we passed our neighborhood, we met armed rebels. I expressed my disappointment with the rebels because they did not confront and fight the regime troops. But the rebel leader told me to thank my god because no one touched my daughter or me and we had escaped with our honor. He said in the nearby neighborhood most women were raped.'