Category: Syria

  • Syria Sends Tanks to Border Area Near Turkey, Holds Hundreds

    Syria Sends Tanks to Border Area Near Turkey, Holds Hundreds

    (Updates with death toll in third paragraph, more protests in sixth. For more on the Middle East turmoil, see MET.)

    July 1 (Bloomberg) — Syria’s army carried out attacks on anti-government demonstrators near the border with Turkey and detained hundreds at rallies across the country today, a human- rights activist said.

    At least 60 tanks were sent north to the border province of Idlib, part of a deployment that includes helicopters, Mahmoud Merhi, head of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, said by phone from Syria’s capital, Damascus. At least 10 people were killed and as many as 50 wounded in Idlib in the past day in raids on the village of Rameh, with more deaths reported today in Halab, he said. The Associated Press put the total at 12.

    Three people died during rallies in the central province of Homs today, Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, said by phone from Cairo.

    Security forces have killed more than 1,500 people since the start of the unrest, according Qurabi. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today that President Bashar al-Assad is “running out of time” to meet protesters’ demands. A U.S.- led effort to get the United Nations Security Council to condemn the violence was blocked by China and Russia.

    Arrests have been carried out in the Damascus suburbs of Barzeh, Douma, Harasta and Kaswa, and in the governorate of Raqa, Merhi said, while demonstrators including female students were detained in the northern city of Aleppo, where protests continued today. In Daraa, the southern city where the rallies against Assad’s rule began in mid-March, at least 200 people were held, Merhi said.

    Protests numbered about 400,000 people in Hama and about 100,000 in Homs, with major protests also in other cities, he said.

    National Dialogue

    Critics of Assad’s leadership met at a conference in Damascus this week, and his government set up a national dialogue committee. Most activists say such measures won’t work without policy changes. Assad blamed the protests on a foreign conspiracy last week, while also saying that the demands of demonstrators “have merit” and that reforms are needed.

    At least 20,000 people have been arrested since the start of the unrest, and half of them remain in detention, according to Qurabi.

    Thousands of Syrians have fled across the border to Turkey to escape violence in northern towns, straining relations between the countries. About 10,500 refugees are currently staying in Turkish camps, Turkey’s government said today. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will visit Syria during a tour of the Middle East beginning this weekend, Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency said.

    More ‘Resistance’ Possible

    Clinton said the Syrian government’s actions so far aren’t enough to begin a transition to democracy.

    Assad’s government can “allow a serious political process that will include peaceful protests to take place throughout Syria and engage in a productive dialogue with members of the opposition and civil society” or the government is “going to continue to see increasingly organized resistance,” Clinton told reporters in Vilnius, Lithuania.

    The U.S. and its European allies accepted defeat yesterday in their latest effort at the UN to pressure Assad to halt his crackdown.

    Russia led opposition that stripped U.S.-drafted language critical of the Assad regime from a Security Council resolution renewing the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission on the Golan Heights. Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa have blocked adoption of a draft resolution that would condemn the attacks and demand an immediate end to the Syrian violence.

    –With assistance from Bill Varner at the United Nations, Vivian Salama in Dubai, Emre Peker in Ankara and Nicole Gaouette in Vilnius, Lithuania. Editors: Ben Holland, Heather Langan, Karl Maier, Andrew Atkinson

    via Syria Sends Tanks to Border Area Near Turkey, Holds Hundreds.

  • Turkey watching dev’ts in Syria

    Turkey watching dev’ts in Syria

    By NICOLAS CHEVIRON

    July 1, 2011, 4:18am

    ISTANBUL, Turkey (AFP) — Turkey’s relationship with Syria’s embattled regime grows frostier each day and Ankara may withdraw support for President Bashar al-Assad if his crackdown on protests continues, analysts said.

    In public, top Turkish officials insist that policy towards their southern neighbour – of maintaining cordial relations while nudging Damascus toward democratic reform – remains unchanged, despite the intensifying unrest.

    Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently gave Assad lukewarm support, telling journalists his recent speech ”contained positive elements and indications in terms of reform,” according to the Anatolia new agency. But at a press conference last Friday, Davutoglu added, ”it is very important that concrete steps be made” in implementing some of the demands fuelling the protests.

    Analysts say that Ankara’s goodwill for Assad has been pushed almost to breaking point now that some 12,000 Syrian refugees have fled into Turkey after Assad’s troops cracked down on protests in their home areas.

    ”Turkey cannot guarantee its support for the Syrian regime,” said Sedat Laciner of the University of Canakkale. ”If it loses all legitimacy, Turkey cannot continue to support it.”

    Osman Bahadir Dincer of the strategic research institute USAK argued that Turkey gave Assad the space to reform at his own pace, but now that conditions in Syria have deteriorated so dramatically, Ankara is basically fed up.

    ”We have arrived at a point where the (Turkish) government is going to tell the Syrian government ‘the time has expired, we have given you time and you have done nothing,”’ Dincer said.

    He further argued that if a Libya-type scenario unfolds, and ”international actors decide something” regarding the situation in Syria, Turkey may side with the majority.

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, since coming to power in 2002, improved relations with Syria, and encouraged Assad to reform, but without success, according to Dincer.

    via Turkey watching dev’ts in Syria | The Manila Bulletin Newspaper Online.

  • Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media

    Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media

    DisinformationBy Jay Janson

    27 June, 2011
    Countercurrents.org

    What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency. A monolithic unified slant media cartel restricts reports to indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters by Syrian government

    Now that the West’s war on Gaddafi is going well, American news commentators can in rare moments proudly admit that the CIA is heavily involved. No so, when if comes to Syria. It’s too early. The public has not been yet been properly taught to hate Syria’s President Assad sufficiently.

    The imperialist media cartel that controls what news is selected and how and with what intention it shall be broadcasted has done its best to demonize Assad. How? Simple! They just keep repeating day in day out that Syrian government forces are shooting and massacring protesters, period. They don’t say anything else. That’s it. There is nothing else happening. When it is necessary to admit that police and soldiers are being ambushed and killed, a cover story comes with it, like, ‘it is suspected that they were killed by defecting police and military.’

    This amazing great cartel of Pentagon/CIA fed media conglomerates, which seems to have the great majority of the basically indifferent population of the West in tow, is effortlessly running its usual cascade of disinformation, half-truths and propaganda preparing justification for military intervention as previously in the cases of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran.

    However, “The plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that well. It succeeded in persuading public opinion that the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government. Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it, notably Tel Aviv” surmises Thierry Meyssan in “The Plan to Destabilize Syria”, Voltaire Network, Lebanon, 6/13/11.

    A few scholarly sites on the Internet always manage to fill in what is intentionally blacked out in Pentagon counseled and fed commercial mass media of the Western pseudo-democracies. Here, Michael Chossudovsky, consultant with a half-dozen UN agencies and publisher of Global Research out of Canada tell us:

    “What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency.
    This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. “We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country,” she said.

    Action against Syria is part of a “military roadmap”, a sequencing of military operations. According to former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark–the Pentagon had clearly identified Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon as target countries of a US-NATO intervention:
    ‘[The] Five-year campaign plan [included]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan’ (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark) In Winning Modern Wars (page 130) General Wesley Clark states the following:

    ‘The objective is to destabilize the Syrian State and implement “regime change” through the covert support of an armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist militia.
    The reports on civilian deaths are used to provide a pretext and a justification for humanitarian intervention under the principle “Responsibility to Protect”.’

    Media Disinformation

    What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters. Press reports confirm, however, from the outset of the protest movement an exchange of gunfire between armed insurgents and the police, with casualties reported on both sides.

    The insurrection started in mid March in the border city of Daraa, which is 10 km from the Jordanian border. The Daraa “protest movement” on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)
    Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.

    What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement” The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War, By Michael Chossudovsky

    One would be naive to believe that the century of brutal occupation of the Arab lands of Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco by France and those of Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Somaliland, Aden, and Yemen by the British, with both occupying Libya after W.W.II, that British M16 and and the French Secret Service would not be indispensable for the johnny-come-lately America empire and its CIA. But one would have to be even more naive to believe the excellent secret service of Israel, Mossad, at war with the Arab world since 1948 was not playing a key role in Syria and Libya, two adamant adversaries of the State of Israel. Here below is some background.

    Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, 6/19/11
    https://www.voltairenet.org/The-plan-to-destabilize-Syria

    “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, in 1982, ” Written by Oded Yinon, then a senior advisor for Israel’s foreign ministry, the essay explicitly calls for breaking up the Arab states of the region along ethnic and sectarian lines. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas… is Israel’s primary target on the eastern front in the long run.”

    “In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines… is possible,” he writes. “So, three states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”

    As for Egypt, Yinon calls for breaking the country up into “distinct geographical regions.” The establishment of an independent Coptic-Christian state in Upper Egypt, he writes, “alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government…seems inevitable in the long run.”

    Yinon goes on to mention Sudan in similar terms, describing it as “the most torn-apart state in the Arab-Muslim world today…built upon four groups hostile to each other: an Arab-Muslim Sunni minority which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, pagans and Christians.”

    According to Mazloum, political maneuvering in recent years by Israel and the western powers – both overt and covert – appears to conform to this strategy of balkanization.

    “Israel and the U.S. have both helped break up Iraq by encouraging the emergence of an independent Kurdish state and fostering Sunni-Shiite division,” he said. “And in Sudan, Earlier this month, Mohamed Abbas, a leading member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Coalition Council (RCC), likewise warned of an ongoing “conspiracy” aimed at breaking Egypt into three petty states.

    “The Zionist plan to politically fragment the Arab Middle East so as to keep Arab states in a perpetual state of instability and weakness has been well known for the last three decades,” Gamal Mazloum, retired Egyptian major-general and expert on defense issues, told IPS.

    “The western campaign against Libya … was launched with the aim of breaking Libya; Libya could be split in two, with Gaddafi staying on in the west of the country and a revolutionary government loyal to the western powers in control of the east, Mohamed al-Sakhawi, leading member of Egypt’s as-yet-unlicensed Arabic Unity Party, told IPS.”

    The satellite generated media conglomerate cartel’s unified single angle presentation of world events is really difficult for progressive alternate media to dare challenge as slanted. Its deceptions become truths to everyone except the skeptical. Most progressive magazines and Internet sites and newsletters depend on keeping their less politically educated liberal readership.

    What this writer suggests is that progressives at least identify Network news and conglomerate owned print media in some manner as to warn their liberal readership to be wary of giant major media’s ownership and agenda. Warn that what is being projected in between commercials is the very same agenda of our now well understood, Military Industrial Financial Complex and the three branches of government it firmly controls.

    Notice how the general term media appears, even in the scholarly investigative journalism quoted in this article. Would it not carry more awareness to the reader if it was more carefully defined as ‘imperialist media.’ For what is referred to by peoples historian journalists in fighting deception and war mongering is not media per se, which must include all media, including more inclusive foreign media and U.S. alternate media containing investigative reporting in historical context without a war justifying agenda.

    Someone surely can come up with something besides ‘imperialist media’ to describe the monolithic output of all the media conglomerates of an increasingly moronic U.S. media cartel with overseas linkage.

    Are we never to hear of the mass homicidal crimes of the CIA until files are forced open by law decades too late? Progressives have to move on this, or lose credibility among Socialists and anti-capitalists.

    Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalReserch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, DissidentVoice, HistoryNewsNetwork, are among those who have republished his articles.

    www.countercurrents.org, 27 June 2011

  • Turkey soccer team sends sports equipment to Syrian children

    Turkey soccer team sends sports equipment to Syrian children

    The statement also said that 139 of the Syrians returned to their countries on Tuesday and Wednesday, while 46 more Syrians arrived in Turkey to take shelter.

    hatayy

    Number of Syrian people who fled the violence in their country and took shelter in Turkey was 10,659 as of Wednesday.

    A statement from the Turkish Prime Ministry Disaster & Emergency Management Directorate (AFAD) said that the Syrians were staying in five temporary tent-sites set up by Turkish Red Crescent in Altinozu and Yayladagi towns of Turkey’s southern province of Hatay.

    The statement also said that 139 of the Syrians returned to their countries on Tuesday and Wednesday, while 46 more Syrians arrived in Turkey to take shelter.

    AFAD stated that the food assistance, which was started to be extended on June 17 in the region, was still continuing, adding that also 3.7 million Turkish lira (TL) was given to the region so far. (one USD equals 1.641 TL)

    Hundreds of people have been killed during pro-democracy protests in Syria since January 2011.

    Meanwhile, 101 press members ?60 of them from foreign countries- are covering the developments in the town. There are press members from Britain, the U.S., Canada, Germany, China, France, Japan, Spain and India in the region.

    Ankaragucu soccer team of Turkey sent sports equipment to children living in tent-sites in Yayladagi town of Hatay.

    AA

  • Turkey Is Not Invading Syria

    Turkey Is Not Invading Syria

    Today’s Zaman, a large and respected English-language daily newspaper based in Turkey, made a big splash today with a story suggesting that that Turkish government had informed Western diplomats it was considering invading Syria to topple President Bashar al-Assad. “Report: Turkey tells West it might launch offensive against Syria,” reads the headline. The article cites a Kuwaiti newspaper, As-Seyassah, which in turn cites an anonymous British diplomat.

    It’s the kind of story that’s outrageous enough to attract suspicion, but still gets passed around both because it has aspects of plausibility and because it tells people something they want to hear.

    Syria’s awful violence against its citizens has no obvious Western solutions. Assad’s regime is already heavily sanctioned, and Western governments have few diplomatic levers to influence his behavior. Regardless of whether a Libya-style intervention would be a good idea, the North African conflict has become so protracted and expensive that NATO is extremely unlikely to want to repeat in Syria. The idea that Turkey might simply take care of the Syria problem itself, however unlikely and however unwise, could tempt Western readers, even normally skeptical analysts and journalists, into letting themselves believe it.

    The fighting in Syria has indeed spread into nearby Turkey, where thousands of refugees have fled, creating an expensive and complicated humanitarian and diplomatic problem for a country that already has plenty of diplomatic problems. Though the countries are allies, their relationship was very tense not so long ago, and Assad’s isolationism, aggressive foreign policy, and brutal domestic leadership have made it difficult for Turkey to remain close at a time when it is also trying to join the European Union. So while the prospect of Turkey invading Syria is extremely unlikely, if you wanted to believe it, you could find justification.

    Alas, the story appears to be false. When I expressed incredulity at the likelihood of Turkey invading its neighbor, Today’s Zaman news editor Mahir Zeynalov responded, “I think the Kuwaiti daily misquoted the diplomat.” As for the prospect of Turkey launching an entire war with so little warning, Zeynalov pointed out that the country has not even suggested as much to Syria, which it surely would if invasion were a real possibility. “No need to exaggerate, Turkey did not even warn Syria of deploying troops.” He added of the newspaper’s own sourcing for the story that no government source “was used while writing this report.”

    via Turkey Is Not Invading Syria – Max Fisher – International – The Atlantic.

  • Iran: Turkey Must Not Pressure Syria

    Iran: Turkey Must Not Pressure Syria

    Iran: Turkey Must Not Pressure Syria

    The Iranian daily Kayhan, which is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned Turkey that if it continues to pressure the Syrian regime and to call on Hamas to recognize Israel, then Iran, Syria, and Iraq would limit their cooperation with it.

    An article in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps weekly Sobh-e Sadeq said that Ankara had encouraged Syrian citizens to flee to its territory in order to increase the number of refugees there – thus justifying foreign intervention in Syria.

    The article further said that Ankara’s actions against Syria on behalf of the U.S. and Israel, would lead to an uprising by the Syrian Turks and by millions of Alawis living in its territory.

    Source: Kayhan, Sobh-e Sadeq (Iran), June 27, 2011.

    via Iran: Turkey Must Not Pressure Syria.