Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
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As some of you may know, the situation in Syria is declining rather rapidly. Earlier today, I compiled a list of links from the past month that show how much the situation has collapsed.
Syrian boy, 10, killed by sniper fire.
Syrian opposition: Deadline nears for residents to stop dissent or face attack
Anti-regime Syrian doctor killed, opposition says
Al asad denies responsibility for syrian crackdown
Just about four of the links and stories associated in the past month with the Syrian crackdown. I will post the other dozen links here shortly.
What is your opinion on the Syrian revolution? Do sanctions against Syria go far enough? How long do you think the revolution will last? Who will be in power? How many people will most likely die as this continues?
I would like to hear opinions on this matter.
Syrian boy, 10, killed by sniper fire.
Spoiler :
From a distance, he appears to be taking a nap. His long, delicate eyelashes are closed as his head rests on a blanket.
The 10-year-old boy, however, is not asleep.
The turn of his gauze-wrapped head reveals a mass of blood. Maher al-Husseini is dead, reportedly from a sniper bullet.
He bled to death.
In his own home.
"What is the fault of this child?" asks a man, whose voice rises in anger on a video posted Friday on YouTube. He kneels down and gestures to the boy, whose hands and ankles are tied.
"What did this child do that they hit him inside his house? This is unacceptable."
Friday was a day of protest, pain and sorrow in Homs, a center of demonstrations and death in Syria. At least 17 people were reported slain in the city, according to the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an activist group.
Women, children and dissident soldiers were among those killed Friday in Syria, the group said.
The United Nations said last week that more than 4,000 people have died in Syria since a brutal government crackdown against protesters erupted in mid-March.
The unidentified narrator of the video starts the tour of the home upstairs, pointing to a bullet hole on a window frame, then blood on the chair beneath it.
He leads the cameraman down blood-spattered stairs to the body of Maher, lying in the family sitting room.
The boy wears a maroon sweatshirt featuring a comic character.
"We could not aid the child, we did not know where to take him because of the firing in the neighborhood," the agitated man said. "He kept bleeding for half an hour and we could not aid him."
The speaker blamed Maher's death on "thugs" who fired upon the home in the Mreiji neighborhood.
Another man sits in a chair, his head in his hands.
"We are not safe, this government is murderous," the narrator says. "It is killing people, it is killing its own people."
Near the end of the video, the man leans down and kisses the boy.
A longer version of the video shows a woman crying over the boy. Others can be heard in background wailing. The boy is wrapped in a white sheet and carried by men in street towards a cemetery. Some of the men chant "The martyrs blood will not be lost in vain," as the lifeless boy is carried.
As the men walk towards the cemetery gunfire can be heard.
They get to the cemetery and start digging as gunfire continues to ring out.
Another video posted on YouTube features another scene from Homs, a city wracked by eight months of violence.
Three shrouded bodies are being carried into a mosque to be laid out alongside Friday worshippers. One is of a boy identified as Nasser Mohammed, 12.
A chorus of voices rises as they are brought in. Some shout "Allahu Akbar!" (Allah is the greatest).
CNN could not independently confirm what was depicted in the videos. Western networks are not allowed inside the embattled country.
Out on the streets Friday, Syrian tanks rolled past the wreckage of past confrontations and gunfire echoed.
The street battles and demonstrations come as the United Nations and the Arab League continue to press the government of President Bashar al-Assad to allow monitors or observers on the ground. The regime continues to resist those calls -- as it maintains the conflict is with armed terrorists and its own security forces and supporters are the victims.
In a rare interview this week with a U.S. television network, al-Assad said he is not responsible for the crackdown.
The nation's military forces "are not my forces," al-Assad told ABC's Barbara Walters.
Syrian opposition: Deadline nears for residents to stop dissent or face attack
Spoiler :
As explosions and gunfire continued to ripple in Syria, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights on Monday raised the death toll from the Damascus government's crackdown on anti-regime activists to close to 5,000 people.
"This situation is intolerable," Navi Pillay said in a briefing for the U.N. Security Council.
The same day that Pillay spoke, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a resident of Homs -- an opposition hotbed and frequent site of violence in recent months -- reported that a gas pipeline exploded near the city, followed by gunfire and circulating military airplanes.
The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, or SANA, played up local elections Monday as an expression of "democracy and free will." Yet the Homs resident said there was no evidence of voting in that city. Instead, this witness reported nonstop shooting and bombardments.
Such violence is nothing new in Syria, with Pillay reporting more than 200 people have died in the last 10 days, and "the Syrian population continues to live in fear of further violent repression."
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has consistently blamed the violence on "armed terrorist" gang members and denied any efforts to target peaceful civilians.
CNN cannot independently confirm events because the Syrian government restricts access of international media to the country.
Pillay said Monday that "the nature and scale of abuses" indicate that Syrian forces likely committed "crimes against humanity." Citing reliable sources, she said more than 300 of the dead have been children "killed by state forces."
Several defectors from military and security forces said they got orders "to shoot unarmed protesters without warning," according to Pillay.
"Independent, credible and corroborated accounts demonstrate that these abuses have taken place as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians," she said.
Homs has been a regular flash point. As nightfall arrived Monday, many city residents went to bed afraid the steady waves of violence could soon give way to a historic siege.
Opposition figures said the Syrian government had warned people in Homs to stop anti-government protests, hand in weapons and surrender defecting military members by Monday night -- or face attack by government forces.
Syrian forces gave a 72-hour warning, said Lt. Col. Mohamed Hamdo of the Free Syrian Army, an opposition group of defected Syrian military personnel. Activists on the ground said the ultimatum was issued Friday for Homs.
The government has not acknowledged any deadline for Homs in state-run media.
Hamdo said there are concerns about a repeat of what happened in 1982, when Syria's military -- acting under orders from then-President Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad -- launched an assault on the city of Hama, killing thousands.
"People are very afraid," said Wissam Tarif, a human rights activist in Beirut, Lebanon, with the organization Avaaz, who is in touch with people in Syria.
There are enough troops around Homs "to take over the city," he said, and casualties have been increasing "in very big numbers" over the past couple of days. Hamdo said the military has dug trenches around Homs and largely cut it off.
"There is no electricity, water, and the communication lines are much worse. The food supply is also decreasing, mainly because little food is going in," he said.
The Syrian government denied reports of water and electricity being out in the city, according to a SANA report.
In fact, besides a story about seven "army, security and police martyrs" being buried Monday, state-run media did not report much on such dire conditions or violence.
Rather, state TV painted a picture of normalcy, with reports of local elections under way across the country.
SANA noted that more than 3,000 candidates are vying for seats in the Homs region alone. It billed the elections as part of the "process of building institutions, promoting democracy and achieving the comprehensive reform process led by President Bashar al-Assad."
Activist groups, though, offered a different story.
The Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a network of opposition activists in the country, said Monday the Syrian army and security forces killed 21 people, including four women and three children. Thirteen of the deaths were in Homs, three were in Hama, three in Damascus suburbs and two in Idlib.
And fierce clashes broke out between security forces and defectors in the cities of Daraa and Idlib, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which collects information from people in different parts of the country.
Hamdo, from the Free Syrian Army said, "We conducted an operation late last night against the Syrian forces in Idlib and killed eight of them and injured 22. Two of our men are critically injured."
He also said Syrian forces were conducting mass arrests of shop owners who shut their stores Sunday as part of a nationwide anti-government strike.
The Syrian government, via SANA, on Sunday quoted people saying there was no strike and no sign of a strike.
The last nine months has seen a steady stream of clashes, amid reported government push-back against activists demanding democratic elections and the end of al-Assad's regime. Al-Assad has been in power since 2000; his father ruled Syria for three decades.
World leaders and diplomats have widely condemned Syria's crackdown and called on it to halt violence against the opposition.
The Arab League announced it will hold emergency meetings this week in Cairo. In a statement on Egypt's state-run MENA news agency, an Arab League official said leaders will "discuss the Arab response to a message from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem to approve the signing of an agreement on an Arab League observing mission to Syria with conditions."
Pillay's report especially drew strong responses from representative countries' ambassadors to the United Nations.
Britain's ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, called it "the most horrifying briefing that we've had in the Security Council over the last two years," citing the thousands of deaths and "tens of thousands of detentions, rapes, torture (and) violations of abuses right across the system by the Syrian regime.
German Ambassador Peter Wittig said his country is "shocked and appalled" by the U.N. human rights branch's view of the situation, calling it "unbearable" that the Security Council appears "condemned to remain silent on Syria."
"We share the assessment that the Syrian security forces have committed crimes against humanity this year," he said. "And we believe that the Syrian authorities have failed their international obligations of human rights law."
Anti-regime Syrian doctor killed, opposition says
Spoiler :
A Syrian doctor who became one of the country's most wanted men has been killed trying to flee to Turkey, opposition sources said.
Dr. Ibrahim Othman, 26, was a founder of the Damascus Doctors, a network of doctors that secretly treats wounded protesters who are afraid to go to government-run hospitals.
A video purporting to show him dead, and including shots of what appear to be his passport, was posted on YouTube on Saturday. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the video.
Friends and colleagues described him on a Facebook memorial page as "strong and fearless, with a pure heart."
Well known for his love of pranks, Othman said he was born to help people -- a desire that may have ultimately cost him his life.
Syrian opposition warns of looming bloodbath
In July, he showed CNN a secret treatment center where he works, a tiny room with basic equipment and supplies.
"It's illegal, but this is the only way to treat injured demonstrators," he said.
He knew he was putting his life on the line.
"Yeah, I know that, but the demonstrators, they are risking their life too, so we have to help them," he said.
There was little the Damascus Doctors could do for many of the wounded, he conceded.
"We spend all of our life to help people, and it's so hurtful to see people dying. And we cannot do anything," he said.
Some wounded protesters could be saved if they went to hospitals, Othman said. But there were risks involved.
"They refuse to go the government hospitals because they will be arrested," he said.
The director general of Damascus Hospital rejected that claim.
"We accept all cases without regard as to how the injuries were sustained or where It happened," Dr. Adib Mahmoud said.
But many do not believe it.
"They would detain me if I went to the hospital," said a teenaged patient of Othman's who said his back was cut when Syrian security forces dragged him over broken glass.
In the end, Syrian security caught up with Othman too, his friends and colleagues said -- as he feared they would.
"Every time when I leave home, I say goodbye to my mother," he told CNN when asked in July about the hardest part of his life. "Sometimes I feel I won't be able to come back and see her again."
Al asad denies responsibility for syrian crackdown
Spoiler :
In a rare interview with an American television network, Syria's embattled President Bashar al-Assad denied he is responsible for the violence engulfing his country and distanced himself from the behavior of his armed forces.
"They are not my forces," al-Assad told ABC's Barbara Walters in an interview that was broadcast Wednesday. He was responding to a question about whether he thought his forces had cracked down too hard on protesters over the past nine months.
"They are forces for the government. I don't own them. I'm president. I don't own the country. So they are not my forces."
Wouldn't al-Assad, the commander in chief, have had to give the order for any military actions? "No, no no," he said.
Not by your command? "No," he said, "on no one's command. There was no command to kill or to be brutal."
Al-Assad said those members of the armed forces who "went too far" have been disciplined.
"Every 'brute reaction' was by an individual, not by an institution, that's what you have to know," he said in the interview. "There is a difference between having a policy to crack down and between having some mistakes committed by some officials. There is a big difference."
"We don't kill," al-Assad said. "It's impossible for anyone in this state to give orders to kill."
"No government in the world kills its people, unless it's led by a crazy person," al-Assad said.
Defections continued Wednesday from al-Assad's forces, some of whom rose up against the regime in a counterattack in Idlib province, near the Turkish border, according to the opposition Free Syria Army, which said it had seized and destroyed a number of military vehicles, including three tanks. Two al-Assad soldiers were killed and more than 50 were wounded, it said.
Instability and violence have been raging in Syria since mid-March, when the al-Assad regime responded brutally to peaceful protests.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, citing 4,000 deaths in Syria, told CNN he thought al-Assad had gone too far and pledged that the world body was prepared to help. "It is important, first of all, that he stops killing people, and he engage immediately with all political forces and their own people, including opposition to find a way out, so that all the people of Syrians can enjoy genuine freedom and democracy."
Reports and images of violence have led powers such as the Arab League, Turkey, the United States and the European Union to impose sanctions against the regime.
Just about four of the links and stories associated in the past month with the Syrian crackdown. I will post the other dozen links here shortly.
What is your opinion on the Syrian revolution? Do sanctions against Syria go far enough? How long do you think the revolution will last? Who will be in power? How many people will most likely die as this continues?
I would like to hear opinions on this matter.
