What To Do About Syria

[flabbybody]

russta, politically speaking, are your views considered mainstream in the land down under ?

[russtafa]

yeah pretty much if you look at the polls

[russtafa]

our government is rated the worst ever but you people will love their policies which are close to getting them lynched

[thx1138]

Just to note, the 1982 CIA sponsored rebellion failed. This one will fail too unless Putin caves in. And BTW: the so called free Syrian army has been getting its weapons from the US via Israel. This has been planned on for years. Remember the US info sources are very tightly censored. Don't believe everything to hear or read from them.

[Stavros]

Just to note, the 1982 CIA sponsored rebellion failed. This one will fail too unless Putin caves in. And BTW: the so called free Syrian army has been getting its weapons from the US via Israel. This has been planned on for years. Remember the US info sources are very tightly censored. Don't believe everything to hear or read from them.

Do you have a reference you can cite for your claim that the CIA sponsored the rebellion in Hama in 1982? We know that the rebellion was mounted by the military faction of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Tali'a as-Muqatila Lil-Mujahideen = Fighting Vanguard of Warriors) and that it was the climax of a move against the Brotherhood that had begun the year before and that 400 pro-Brotherhood officers in the Army were rounded up in January 1982. But we also know that the elderly leader of the Brotherhood, Isam al-Attar had been living in West Germany since 1964 (in Aachen). Is it possible that arms went from Germany via Turkey? The reports on the one hand claim the rebels were well-armed, yet intelligence doesn't seem to account for significant external support, so perhaps in the previous year sympathisers in the Syrian Army had gradually built up a stockpile in Hama which was a stronghold of the Brotherhood -there was a rebellion against French rule there in 1925-intriguing, but in the absence of any evidence, I don't think the role you claim is being played by the CIA/USA is as clear as you think it is.

[Dino Velvet]

http://news.yahoo.com/red-cross-syri...222632538.html

Red Cross in Syria fails to evacuate reporters

By BASSEM MROUE and BEN HUBBARD | Associated Press – 2 hrs 50 mins ago



BEIRUT (AP) — A Red Cross team evacuated 27 people from a besieged neighborhood in the Syrian city of Homs on Friday but apparently failed to get out two wounded Western journalists and the bodies of two others killed by government rockets.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said a local team entered the besieged neighborhood of Baba Amr, but spokesman Hicham Hassan said he wasn't sure if foreign journalists were among them.
An earlier statement said that seven people were taken to the privately owned al-Amin hospital, which is nearby. It was not immediately clear where the others were moved to.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused "armed groups" of refusing to hand over the journalists, and an opposition activist in the area said the journalists had refused to leave.
French journalist Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times both asked for help leaving the embattled city after they were wounded in a government attack on a makeshift media center Wednesday. French photographer William Daniels, who was not injured, was also with the group, as was Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa.
American correspondent Marie Colvin, also of the Sunday Times, and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in the same attack.
The effort to evacuate the reporters and wounded Syrians is part of a wider international push to bring aid to people in the areas hardest hit by the regime's efforts to quash the uprising against President Bashar Assad's rule.
But the inability of the Red Cross to navigate the tremendous hatred and distrust between Assad's regime and opposition activists seeking to overthrow it does not bode well for future international efforts to help those suffering the most in the country's 11-month-old political crisis.
At a high-level international conference Friday in Tunisia, American, European and Arab nations asked the United Nations to plan a civilian peacekeeping mission to deploy after Assad's regime halts its brutal crackdown. It also called on Assad to end the violence and allow humanitarian aid to reach embattled areas.
Workers from the local branch of the Red Cross entered one of those areas Friday, Baba Amr in Homs, to negotiate the evacuation of wounded civilians with Syrian authorities and opposition groups.
In a statement, the Syrian Foreign Ministry accused "armed groups" in Baba Amr of refusing to hand over a wounded female journalist and the dead bodies of two other journalists. Syrian authorities regularly blame the violence on radical Islamists and "armed gangs."
The Foreign Ministry said the government had sent several local "dignitaries" and ambulances from the Syrian Red Crescent to evacuate the journalists.
But after several hours of negotiations, the statement said, the groups "refused to hand over the wounded journalist and the two bodies, which endangers the life of the French journalist and blocks the return of the bodies to their countries."
A local activist, Abu Mohammed Ibrahim, reached on Skype, said the journalists had refused to leave because the ICRC did not enter, only the Syrian Red Crescent, which he said is full of "collaborators with the regime."
"The journalists also refused to give over the bodies," he said. "They don't know what the government is going to do with them."
He said the four journalists remained in the city, each staying in a different apartment, and that the two dead bodies are being kept in yet another apartment, where they have begun to decay.
Hassan, the spokesman for the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, said "as for Red Crescent's reputation, they are independent and their volunteers risk their lives on a daily basis." He said the ICRC has often accompanied the Red Crescent volunteers into the field.
Speaking at the Tunisia conference, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Syrian authorities had refused a request to tell the French Ambassador to Syria travel to Homs to arrange the evacuation.
"I appeal personally to the Syrian authorities that Madame Bouvier and the others receive the medical care they urgently need," he said.
One video posted on YouTube on Wednesday showed Bouvier lying on a hospital gurney with a white cast stretching from her left ankle to her thigh. Conroy is on a nearby bed, with white bandages around his left thigh and calf. The video says he was injured by shrapnel from the rocket attack.
In another video, posted Thursday, Bouvier is covered with a blanket and lying on a couch. She says her leg is broken in two places and that she needs an operation that local medics cannot perform.
"I need, as soon as possible, a cease-fire and a medically equipped car in good condition to drive us to Lebanon," she says.
Daniels stands at her side and pleads for their swift evacuation.
"It is difficult here. We don't have electricity. We don't have much to eat. The bombs continue to fall," he said, adding that they only have Internet access in a dangerous place on the neighborhood's edge.
A boom is heard outside as he speaks.
Conroy appears in a third video, also posted Thursday. Lying on couch, he says he has three large wounds in his leg.
"I am currently being looked after by the Free Syrian Army medical staff who are treating me with the best medical treatment available," he says, referring to armed opposition forces.
"It's important that I am here as a guest and not captured," he says. "I am absolutely OK."
The Syrian uprising, which began last March with protests in some of Syria's impoverished hinterlands, is evolving into one of the most violent of the Arab Spring. Assad's security forces have used extreme force against protesters, and the opposition is increasingly taking up arms.
The U.N. said last month that 5,400 people had been killed. Hundreds more have died since. Activists put the number at more than 7,300, but overall figures are impossible to confirm independently.
___
Associated Press writer Frank Jordans contributed to this report from Geneva.

This image from amateur video purports to show Edith Bouvier of Le
Figaro in a makeshift clinic in Homs, Syria, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012.
Bouvier was wounded in shelling Wednesday in Homs. (AP Photo)

[Dino Velvet]

Syrian forces pound Homs, block aid convoy http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8220CI20120303

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Mohammed Abbas
BEIRUT | Sat Mar 3, 2012 6:49pm EST

(Reuters) - Syrian forces renewed their bombardment of parts of the shattered city of Homs on Saturday and for a second day blocked Red Cross aid meant for civilians stranded without food and fuel in the former rebel stronghold, activists and aid workers said.
The government assault came a day after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had received "grisly reports" that President Bashar al-Assad's troops were executing and torturing people in the city after rebels abandoned their positions there.
"In an act of pure revenge, Assad's army has been firing mortar rounds and ... machine guns since this morning at Jobar," said the Syrian Network for Human Rights, naming a district next to Baba Amro, where rebels held out against almost a month of siege and shelling before fleeing this week.
"We have no immediate reports of casualties because of the difficulty of communications," the campaign group said in a statement.
Syria's government says it is fighting foreign-backed "terrorists" whom it blames for killing hundreds of soldiers and police across the country.
The United Nations says Syrian security forces have killed more than 7,500 civilians since a revolt against Assad's rule began in March last year.
Concern was mounting for civilians in freezing conditions in Baba Amro, where International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) trucks were being held up by Assad's forces.
Anti-government activists said they feared troops wanted to prevent the ICRC witnessing a reported massacre of rebels in Baba Amro, which had become a symbol of the year-long uprising.
A Damascus-based ICRC spokesman said Syrian authorities had given the convoy permission to enter but government forces on the ground had stopped the trucks because of what they said were unsafe conditions, including "mines and booby traps."
"There has been fighting there for at least a month. The situation cannot be good. They will need food, it's cold, they will need blankets. And there are injured there that need to be evacuated immediately," Saleh Dabbakeh told Reuters.
Syrian state television broadcast interviews with unnamed civilians in what it said was the stricken district, against a backdrop of empty streets, some with heavy conflict damage.
"Anyone who went out on the street was kidnapped or slaughtered. We called for the army to come in. God bless the army, they saved us from the armed terrorist gangs," said one interviewee, referring to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels.
INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION
The outside world has proved powerless to halt the killing in Syria, where repression of initially peaceful protests against Assad's rule has spawned an armed insurrection by army deserters and others.
Russia and China have twice vetoed council resolutions that would have condemned Damascus, accusing Western and Arab nations of pushing for Libya-style "regime change" in Syria.
China urged both Damascus and the rebels to end the violence immediately and start talks, but again said it opposed any foreign military intervention in Syria.
"We oppose anyone interfering in Syria's internal affairs under the pretext of 'humanitarian' issues," said a foreign ministry statement carried by Xinhua news agency early on Sunday Beijing time and monitored in London.
Former Syrian ally Turkey said Assad was committing "war crimes" and condemned Syria for blocking aid to Baba Amro.
"The Syrian regime is committing a crime against humanity every day," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said his government was again seeking to have the U.N. Security Council tackle the Syrian crisis.
"This means working with other countries such as Russia and China that have blocked previous initiatives," he told Sky News.
The United States is drafting a legally binding council resolution that would call for aid workers to be allowed into besieged towns and an end to the violence, U.N. envoys said.
UNREST SPREADS
Syria's SANA news agency reported a suicide car bombing in the southern town of Deraa, but activists denied it was a suicide attack.
SANA said the Deraa bomber killed three people and wounded 20 others, while residents said seven people had been killed.
Elsewhere in Syria, anti-Assad activists reported mass arrests and the killing of six soldiers.
Campaigners said seven people had been killed in Syria's north, and three had been shot dead in east Syria's Deir al-Zor when troops opened fire on a funeral for two killed in a crackdown on democracy protests.
Senior rebel FSA officer Colonel Malik Kurdy said his fighters had seized an arms cache in a battle in countryside north of Damascus and killed and wounded about 100 Syrian troops, but added the report was preliminary.
Rights group Human Rights Watch distributed satellite images of Baba Amro that it said showed widespread destruction.
"The bombardment has severely restricted movement and relief efforts and deprived thousands of civilians of the ability to access the most basic commodities," it said in a statement.
Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said anti-Assad fighters had killed six soldiers and wounded nine in the town of al-Herak, south of Deraa.
He also said seven people had been killed in Syria's north in and around Idlib province, three by a roadside bomb and the others by gunfire from Syrian security services.
In the suburbs of Damascus, activists reported hundreds of arrests and said Syrian security forces had killed three people during raids in which they also set alight homes and cars.
Due to media restrictions, the activists' reports could not be independently verified.
In unusually tough remarks to the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on Friday, Ban explicitly blamed Damascus for the fate of civilians in the conflict.
"The brutal fighting has trapped civilians in their homes, without food, heat or electricity or medical care, without any chance of evacuating the wounded or burying the dead. People have been reduced to melting snow for drinking water," he said.
"This atrocious assault is all the more appalling for having been waged by the government itself, systematically attacking its own people."
Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari, said Ban's comments included "extremely virulent rhetoric which confines itself to slandering a government based on reports, opinions or hearsay."
Western diplomats on Saturday received the bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, who were killed on February 22 during shelling of Baba Amro.
The diplomats, believed to be the French ambassador to Syria and a representative from the Polish embassy, which is managing U.S. affairs in Syria, had taken the bodies from the Al-Assad University Hospital in Damascus.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Michelle Nichols in New York, Avril Ormsby in London; Writing and additional by Mohammed Abbas; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Andrew Heavens)

[russtafa]

Syrian forces pound Homs, block aid convoy http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8220CI20120303

they look like they are having fun

[thx1138]

Assad: 1, Obama. Clinton, Netanyahu: 0
http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/ad...ccatid=20&s1=1

[thx1138]

@ Stavros: Sent you a message. Re Homs: Doesn't look too different from what the US military did to Falluja.