Middle East thread

[Akka]

Zionist 'after the war' policy announced amounts to blatant annexation.

Is anyone surprised ?

 

[E.man]

Is anyone surprised ?

Only that they are so blatant as to announce it as official govt policy. It has been de facto policy already.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Protests in north-west Syria mark 13 years since start of fight for democracy
Rallies take place in Idlib region, held by rebels against Bashar al-Assad, whose repression sparked civil war in 2011


Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Syria’s rebel-held north-west to mark 13 years since pro-democracy protests swept the country, chanting against President Bashar al-Assad and the region’s jihadist rulers.

The government’s brutal suppression of the 2011 uprising triggered a civil war that has killed more than half a million people, drawn in foreign armies and jihadists, and divided the country.

The former al-Qaida affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) now controls a significant swathe of the north-west, where hundreds have protested in recent weeks against its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Anger is still simmering over the death of a man in the group’s custody.


Syria: rallies in Idlib province mark 13 years since uprising – video
Hundreds of protesters paraded through the city of Idlib, many of them brandishing placards that read “Down with Jolani … Assad.”

Mohammed Harnoush, 35, who attended the protest, said the anniversary was a reminder that “our revolution is against everyone … whether it is Bashar al-Assad or Jolani”.
“This people shall not be ruled by iron and fire,” he said, speaking in the city’s main square.
The rebel-held region around Idlib hosts about three million people, many of whom have fled other parts of the country held or recaptured by Assad’s Russian and Iranian-backed government.

View image in fullscreen
A refugee camp on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey, near the town of Atma in Idlib province. Photograph: Ghaith Alsayed/AP

Khalidia Agha, 72, was also among the protesters. She said government forces had killed one of her sons, and that two others had disappeared into HTS prisons six years ago. She has not heard from them since.

“I am protesting today because my children are jailed … All I ask for is to see them and know where they are,” she said.
In the southern, government-held city of Sweida, hundreds took to the streets to mark the anniversary, footage from the Suwayda24 media outlet showed.
It followed about seven months of anti-government demonstrations in the wider Sweida region, the heartland of Syria’s Druze minority, which has largely been spared from the war.
Protests against deteriorating economic conditions have erupted sporadically in Sweida since 2020. The latest wave started after the government cut fuel subsidies in August.
In a joint statement to mark the anniversary, Britain, France, Germany and the US said the Sweida protests “show that the demands for peace, freedom and dignity that led to protests 13 years ago endure”.
“The war in Syria is not over,” the quartet said, pointing to government bombardments of rebel-held areas and Islamic State attacks.


The epic failure of our age: how the west let down Syria
Read more
They rejected any normalisation of relations with the Assad government, which was readmitted to the Arab League last year, until “there is authentic, meaningful and enduring progress towards a political solution”.

The UN special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said on Friday that after 13 years of war, the country was “without a political solution in sight”.
“We must prioritise peace. If we do not do so, the grim downward trends across nearly all indicators in Syria will only continue in the year ahead,” Pedersen said.
About 7.2 million people have sought refuge from the fighting inside Syria while millions more have fled the country.
The UN has said that 16.7 million people in Syria will require some type of humanitarian assistance or protection this year, the largest number since the start of the conflict.
About 90% of Syrians live in poverty, according to UN figures.
Almost 7.5 million children in Syria will need humanitarian assistance in 2024, more than at any other time during the conflict, according to Unicef.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Looks like the situation is serious in Jordan

https://twitter.com/x/status/1773151920070217987

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

‘Every day I cry’: 50 women talk about life as a domestic worker under the Gulf’s kafala system

Denounced as giving a ‘veneer of legality to slaveholding’, the kafala labour code persists, allowing employers to abuse women, who vanish from society. This is the testimony of some of those workers, gathered over two years in a Guardian investigation

www.theguardian.com

Women spoke of being dehumanised and treated like “animals”. Perlah*, 33, from the Philippines, worked in Jordan for two years, for a family of six in a flat in Amman until 2022. She was given one meal a day of bread and instant noodles, and had no bed.

“I slept on the outside balcony of the apartment,” she says. “It was too cold. The neighbours could see me sleep.”

Beatrice* was 21 when a recruiter – a man from her community in Liberia – told her she had been awarded a scholarship to study in Oman. When she arrived in 2021, she was put to work. “The job is tough. You clean, wash the car, wash clothes. We don’t have any vacation.

“They beat you; they starve you,” she says. “We are dying – we need help.”

 

[r16]

in the Time or Newsweek of 1980s or 90s it would be very much the same but the top story once was some guy pressing a hot iron onto the face of a domestic servant . Seems time improves things , like slowly .