Tag: syrian government
Amnesty Report: Syrian Government Secretly Executing Thousands Of Prisoners

Amnesty Report: Syrian Government Secretly Executing Thousands Of Prisoners

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) – The Syrian government executed up to 13,000 prisoners in mass hangings and carried out systematic torture at a military jail near Damascus, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

The Syrian Justice Ministry denied the Amnesty report, calling it completely “devoid of truth,” Syrian state news agency SANA reported late on Tuesday.

Amnesty said the executions took place between 2011 and 2015, but were probably still being carried out and amounted to war crimes. It called for a further investigation by the United Nations, which produced a report last year with similar accusations also based on extensive witness testimonies.

Syria’s government and President Bashar al-Assad have rejected similar reports in the past of torture and extrajudicial killings in a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Amnesty report said an average of 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in the four years after a popular uprising descended into war, it said.

“The victims are overwhelmingly civilians who are thought to oppose the government,” the report said.

“Many other detainees at Sednaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care.”

The prisoners, who included former military personnel suspected of disloyalty and people involved in unrest, underwent sham trials before military courts and were sometimes forced to make confessions under torture, Amnesty said.

SANA quoted the justice ministry as saying Amnesty’s accusations were not based on real evidence but rather on “personal emotions aimed at achieving known political goals”.

The ministry also accused rebel groups fighting to unseat Assad of executing and kidnapping civilians, SANA said.

The justice ministry described the report as an attempt at “harming Syria’s reputation on the international stage especially after the victories of the Syrian army”.

The army and allied forces drove rebel groups out of Aleppo city in December, in Assad’s most important gain of the nearly six-year-old war.

SECRECY

The executions were carried out secretly and those killed were buried in mass graves outside the capital, with families not informed of their fate, Amnesty said.

The report was based on interviews with 84 witnesses including former guards and officials, detainees, judges, and lawyers, as well as experts.

It followed a report issued a year ago by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria, whose war crimes investigators said they had documented a high number of deaths in Sednaya military prison.

“Amnesty’s findings are almost completely in-line with our ‘Death in Detention’ paper,” Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the U.N. panel, told Reuters.

“We mentioned the executions in Sednaya and have extensive details on the systematic details of the regular ceremonies they have to conduct hangings in front of an audience of public officials. It is one of the clearest instances of a systematic practice that we had and based some of the key findings upon.”

The foreign ministers of Britain and France decried Amnesty’s findings. Britain’s Boris Johnson tweeted: “Sickened by reports from Amnesty International on executions in Syria. Assad responsible for so many deaths and has no future as leader.”

“@Amnesty has documented the horror in the prisons of the Syrian regime. This barbarity cannot be the future of Syria,” said France’s Jean-Marc Ayrault.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited selected government-run detention facilities since 2011, but its confidential findings are only shared with Syrian authorities.

“We only visit central prisons, which are under the Ministry of Interior,” ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said.

The ICRC has systematically requested “access to all detainees arrested by all parties to the conflict”, she added.

(Reporting by John Davison in Beirut and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; additional reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut; editing by Angus MacSwan and Jonathan Oatis)

IMAGE: Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with NBC News in this handout picture provided by SANA on July 14, 2016. SANA/Handout via REUTERS

United States To Track Jihadists In Syria With Spy Planes

United States To Track Jihadists In Syria With Spy Planes

Damascus (AFP) — The United States is poised to send spy planes into Syria to track Islamic State jihadists whose advances have sparked international concern and American air strikes in neighboring Iraq.

A U.S. official confirmed the plans after Syria said on Monday it was willing to work with the international community, including Washington, to tackle extremist fighters.

But American officials said they did not plan to ask Damascus for permission for the flights, despite Syrian insistence that any military action on its soil must be coordinated in advance.

International concern about IS has been rising after a lightning offensive by the group through parts of Iraq and a string of brutal abuses, including the murder of U.S. journalist James Foley.

The United Nations has accused IS and affiliated groups in Iraq of acts that could amount to crimes against humanity.

On Monday, Damascus said for the first time that it was willing to work with the international community, including the United States and Britain, to tackle IS and Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front.

But Foreign Minister Walid Muallem also made it clear that Syria would not accept unilateral military strikes by the United States or any other country.

“Any violation of Syria’s sovereignty would be an act of aggression,” he said.

There would be “no justification” for strikes on Syrian territory “except in coordination with us to fight terrorism”.

– Syria seeks cooperation –

Muallem said Syria was seeking cooperation within an international or regional coalition, or at the bilateral level within the framework of a recent UN Security Council resolution targeting IS and Al-Nusra.

On Tuesday, a security source in Damascus reiterated Syrian insistence on coordination after the U.S. comments about possible surveillance.

“Any entrance into Syrian airspace without coordination would be considered an act of aggression,” the source told AFP.

There have been few signs that the international community is willing to work publicly with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has been engaged in a brutal effort to put down an uprising that began in March 2011.

Washington has accused Assad’s regime of using chemical weapons against his own people and carrying out other widespread abuses.

The United States began air strikes against IS in neighbouring Iraq on August 8, in a bid to roll back its advances.

But U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey has acknowledged that the group cannot be defeated “without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria”.

The White House says no decision has been taken on whether to carry out air strikes in Syria, although U.S. aircraft have already entered Syrian airspace covertly at least once for a failed mission to rescue hostages including Foley.

– IS ‘crimes against humanity’ –

Foley’s murder and advances by IS in both Syria and Iraq have heightened fears about the group, which emerged from Al-Qaeda’s one-time Iraqi affiliate but has since parted ways.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said Monday that IS and affiliated groups in Iraq were “systematically targeting men, women, and children based on their ethnic, religious, or sectarian affiliation and are ruthlessly carrying out widespread ethnic and religious cleansing.

“Such persecution would amount to crimes against humanity,” she said in a statement.

On Sunday, IS also cemented its control over an entire province in Syria for the first time, seizing the Tabqa military airport in a bloody battle that killed hundreds of people.

The air base was the last outpost controlled by the Syrian military in Raqa province, which has now become an IS stronghold.

The group has also advanced in recent days in northern Aleppo province and controls territory in the oil-rich eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Syrian war planes launched at least 12 raids using precision rockets against IS positions in Deir Ezzor on Tuesday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights NGO.

In Iraq, the group has seen its momentum curbed in some areas by Kurdish forces backed by American air strikes, but it still holds significant areas that federal troops are struggling to regain.

On Tuesday, a car bomb struck a crowded Baghdad intersection, killing 15 people and wounding at least 37, in an area where a suicide bomber targeted Shiite worshippers the day before, leaving 11 people dead.

AFP Photo

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As Syrian Army Sets Sights On Aleppo, Residents Flee A Broken City

As Syrian Army Sets Sights On Aleppo, Residents Flee A Broken City

By Raja Abdulrahim, Los Angeles Times

ALEPPO, Syria — Minutes after the barrel bomb eviscerated the crowded market, those still alive had to contend with matters of survival — and collecting what little remained of the dead.

A woman with tired eyes walked away cradling a bottle of water and a few onions like she would a baby. Her black abaya was almost gray from the dust and pulverized concrete. Behind her, her son held a small grocery bag full of the little they had bought before the oil drum filled with TNT killed at least 15 people.

“Oh my God!” a man on a motorcycle said as he stopped near a destroyed fried chicken restaurant.

His shock wasn’t over the human wreckage, but something more pragmatic in a city struggling to feed itself: “The chickens!”

As he spoke, another man walked up behind him, his outstretched arm gingerly holding a bulging black bag.

“Where are the body parts?” he asked.

Several bystanders pointed him to Persian rugs folded over one another to hide their contents. Half a leg and an arm had been collected in a wide-brimmed pan that moments earlier had been used to display freshly harvested vegetables.

Abu Karam, a rebel fighter, was helping to gather the body parts for burial. They had become accustomed to this hurried, bloody task.

“Yeah, yeah, this is Syrian meat,” he said angrily.

It was a rare moment of anger in Aleppo. Anger these days has been overtaken by exhaustion after months of intense air bombardments from emboldened government forces attempting to regain control of the entire city.

Just a few months ago, residents here tried to maintain some level of normality.

Now there is an exodus from a broken city.
___

It was a little past sunrise, and at intersections and roundabouts drivers of buses and microbuses yelled out a stream of destinations: Turkey, Aleppo’s government side, the countryside, even cities controlled by the extremist group the Islamic State.

Anywhere but here.

The only vehicles on the road at this hour, which usually offers a brief lull in the airstrikes, are full of people fleeing the bombs and the threat of a government siege, a lifetime’s worth of possessions strapped tightly atop buses and pickup trucks.

“Fear of the siege and fear of the barrels,” one man said, quickly explaining his reasons for leaving before jumping into a microbus headed for Manbij, a city under Islamic State control. “The barrels increased, and every day the government advances from here and from here.”

In an effort to replicate their success in parts of Damascus, the capital, and the central city of Homs, forces loyal to the government of President Bashar Assad advanced this month to retake Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub. Rebels say Assad is pursuing the same policy of submission by starvation.

Rebel reinforcements have come from neighboring provinces to help stave off the government encroachment, but the opposition has no antiaircraft weaponry to combat the air bombardment.

Life in Aleppo is marked by morbid calculations: At the sound of a helicopter, men light up to enjoy a cigarette one last time. As rockets strike nearby targets, a rebel places his car keys across the room: In case he is killed, why have the keys covered in blood?
___

“Grab the injured first; leave the bodies for now,” Khalid Hijjo yelled from the back seat of the truck.

As the civil defense team careened through rubble-lined streets in its red first-responder truck, attacking each speed bump with little hesitation, driver Jameel Minahijji peered through a windshield cracked by previous airstrikes.

“Where, Abu Abdo?” Minahijji asked a bystander as he briefly slowed the truck and leaned out the window. The man pointed in the general direction of the Masaken Hanano neighborhood.

But when the team got there, the streets were abandoned and there was no one to ask where the barrel bomb had landed. The neighborhood had long since been emptied of its last holdouts.

“Where?” Minahijji asked no one in particular.

“Take a right,” guessed Sobhi Hussein.

“Here,” someone yelled, and they all jumped out of the truck, scrambling for signs of a recent attack amid remnants — pancaked roofs and sunken buildings — of so many others.

By this point, an ambulance had caught up with them. “Where?” the driver asked.

The men hopped back into the truck and kept frantically searching for fire or smoke or even a cloud of dust. When they couldn’t find anything, they consoled themselves by saying the bomb probably hadn’t killed anyone because everyone had already left.

“We don’t have the ability to know,” Hijjo explained as they drove back to the civil defense station, a repurposed middle school reeking of sweat and blood, indications of its former self — desks, books, models of human organs — relegated to forgotten corners.

While waiting for the next barrel attack, civil defense member Diya Badoor repeatedly flicked a switchblade open and shut.

“It’s gotten to the point where you hope to die,” he said.

“The most important thing is to die in one piece,” Hijjo said.

“Why does it matter? It’s all the same — your soul has left your body,” said Shahood Hussein, Sobhi’s brother.

“It’s not for me,” Badoor said, shaking his head. “But I don’t want you guys to get tired picking up all the pieces.”

Photo: Los Angeles Times/MCT/Raja Abdulrahim

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Syrian Government Declares War On Its Own Civilians

The now months-old domestic protest movement against the hardline — and less-than-democratic — rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced its most brutal crackdown yet this weekend, with some 75 confirmed dead:

The simultaneous raids on several cities came a day before the holy month of Ramadan, during which activists had vowed to escalate their uprising with nightly protests. The scale of the assault and the mounting death toll underlined the government’s intention to crush the uprising by force, despite international condemnations and its own tentative and mostly illusory reforms ostensibly aimed at placating protesters’ demands.

“Today we are witnessing a major assault,” said Omar Idlibi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committee, an opposition group that helps organize and document protests. “It is a last-minute attempt by the regime to reclaim cities that it lost control of.”

“It appears on the ground that the Syrian government has chosen to engage in full-scale warfare against its own people,” said J.J. Harder, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. “This is a regime that continues to surprise us by how horrific it can be.”

In an interview, he added that Syrian officials were “delusional.”

The Obama administration predictably lambasted the “violence and brutality,” in a Sunday statement, and assailed Assad as a regular practitioner of “torture, corruption, and terror” who has precious little time left before the forces of democracy overtake him.

There’s no sign yet that the Syrian military will hold fire and refuse Assad’s orders at some point, and, just like in Libya, no one’s exactly sure what factions — Islamists? Secular liberals? Disgruntled military officials? — will steer the nascent rebel movement.