To the cheers and surprise of the people on the street, two truckloads of Syrian soldiers defied orders and joined the demonstrators in northern Syria this week — a mass defection that reveals the key weakness of the Assad regime.
After weeks of being ordered to fire into crowds — more and more soliders don’t want to shoot anymore. Many are defecting and fleeing into Turkey –including a Syrian soldier who spoke with CBS News Wednesday near a refugee camp.
He was ordered, he says, to confront a group of armed protestors outside the strategic town of Dara but found an unarmed crowd full of women and children.
“I didn’t want to fire,” he says, “so I aimed my gun in the air. Some of the other behind me, they did fire.”
Amateur video taped near Dara three weeks ago matches the soldier’s story — with peaceful protestors falling to an army attack and survivors racing to take shelter in an olive grove.
The Syrian soldier told us most of the men in his unit felt betrayed and used by the regime.
“I felt so bad these were women and children,” he says,” I thought I’d shoot myself before I shot them.”
Meanwhile the Assad regime is trying to claim all is well — staging a rally in support of Assad in Damascus — and sending an envoy to Turkey to insist all those frightened refugees will soon be welcomed home.
“Soon they will be returning. We have prepared everything for them, they have started returning,” said a Syrian envoy.
Meanwhile, eyewitnesses tell us skirmishes are still being fought in Syria roughly 20 miles south of where we are — and that the Syrian army is massed around several other key towns here in the north but has not moved in.
It’s likely that none of the refugees will be going home anytime soon. CBS News traveled 30 miles north of the border where the Turkish government is making arrangements to receive thousands of more refugees. And crowds are gathering on the Syrian side of the border.
via Defecting Syrian soldiers join refugees in Turkey – CBS News.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie visits Somali refugees at Shousha camp at Ras Djir, 8 kilometres (5 miles) from the Tunis-Libyan border on April 5, 2011.
Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie wants to visit Syrians who have taken refuge in Turkey, Turkish officials said on Wednesday.
More than 8,500 Syrians fleeing a government crackdown on anti-regime protests have crossed the border with Turkey. They have been given shelter in tent cities set up by the Turkish Red Crescent Society in the border province of Hatay.
Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Selçuk Ünal confirmed that Turkey has received a request for a visit by Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to the refugee camps. Ünal, speaking to The Associated Press, said the application is still being assessed.
The request for permission for Jolie’s visit was made on Tuesday, said the Anatolia news agency, citing diplomatic sources.
updated 6/14/2011 5:59:04 PM ET 2011-06-14T21:59:04
What’s stranger than a man posing as a Syrian lesbian blogger? Two men posing as lesbian bloggers and being unmasked when the “Syrian” staged his/her own abduction.
AFP – Getty Images Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old Edinburgh University masters student and Middle East activist, poses in the lobby of his Istanbul hotel on Monday
The emergence of a second male imposter posing as a lesbian is the latest twist in the strange case of the “Gay Girl In Damascus,” a supposed Syrian lesbian blogger named Amina Arraf, who was the subject of headlines around the world last week after she was believed to have been abducted by two masked men.
Readers may have assumed the story had run out of gas over the weekend, when Arraf was revealed to be a 40-year-old Georgia man, Tom MacMaster, who said he had assumed the lesbian persona in order to call attention to the political situation in Syria.
But that was before the Washington Post revealed late Monday that “Paula Brooks,” the editor of the lesbian news site LezGetReal.com, where Arraf began posting, was in fact Bill Graber, a 58-year-old retired U.S. Air Force pilot.
The unmasking of the two men began when Arraf was reported missing last week. Word spread quickly via Twitter and other social media that the articulate woman who bravely detailed accounts of life in Damascus had disappeared — and soon, so did suspicions.
In an effort to track down Arraf, reporters and online sleuths tracked her digital footprints, and came across a lesbian news site called LezGetReal.com, where she had posted comments.
“We are very worried about her,” the editor of LezGetReal.com, who identified herself as Paula Brooks, emailed msnbc.com on June 7, when contacted to request permission to use photos of Arraf. “PLEASE get as much attention out as you can.”
That attention arrived, more than Graber ever wanted.
“I was telling other people’s stories, people who didn’t want to tell them with their own names, so Paula told them,” Graber told msnbc.com in a phone interview on Tuesday. “I wasn’t being evil; I wasn’t being crazy.”
While MacMaster apologized for the international firestorm his Syrian blogger hoax had set off, Graber expressed less remorse — except to his wife, Paula. Paula Graber found out about her husband’s online persona at the same time the rest of the world did.
“My wife is a busy lady. She knows that I do something on the computer, but she respects my privacy,” he said. Now that she knows, she “is really, really, really annoyed that I used her name. She said, ‘Couldn’t you have used another one?’ I probably should have done that.”
Only on msnbc.com
AFP – Getty Images
Phony lesbian blogger ‘Gay Girl’ wasn’t alone
But the Paula Brooks lesbian persona was necessary, Graber argued.
He said he started using the character of Paula Brooks six years ago, describing her as a gay surfer mom who lived in The Outer Banks, N.C., an area Graber loves and hoped to promote as a vacation destination. Paula blogged about surf conditions and her dog. Graber created it as a “harmless little game,” but soon discovered the blog was gaining popularity.
“I had a lot of readers who didn’t know that Paula wasn’t real,” he said. “… She was a hiding place for me.”
More recently, Graber, who lives in Ohio, said he decided to provide an online space for gay and lesbian activists after seeing first-hand how gay couples in domestic partnerships are treated.
“I had a very good lesbian couple that were my friends,” he said. “They had a relationship that was to kill for. I watched one of them die, and I watched the hell that they went through that I wouldn’t have had to go through” as a straight, married man.
So in 2008, Graber said, he created LezGetReal.com. Surfer Mom Paula became lesbian editor-in-chief Paula.
“That character had to be credible,” Graber said. “I’m an impressive guy, but the gay community is going to tell me to get screwed” if he had blogged as a straight man.
Enter ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’
In February, Amina Arraf began commenting on LezGetReal. Her writing was superb, Graber said, but he was immediately suspicious. He emailed her — as Paula — seeking verification of her identity and asking why, among other red flags, her website’s IP address was in Scotland, not Syria.
“She said that’s the way you to do it in Syria. You had to use a proxy to get out,” he said. “So I never looked into it again.”
Meanwhile, to beef up his own fake character’s authenticity, Graber had created a Facebook profile for Paula Brooks. He used a photo of his sister when she was 20 for the profile picture.
As Arraf, Tom MacMaster looked Paula Brooks up on Facebook.
“He was a player,” Graber said. “He tried to flirt.”
The two exchanged messages for months, but Graber said he kept it strictly business. Whenever Arraf became flirtatious, he said, he claimed Paula had a girlfriend and was not interested in anything beyond the reporting from Syria.
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Davutoglu will meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s special representative Hasan Turkmani in Ankara on Wednesday evening.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will travel to southern province of Hatay on Wednesday to observe the living conditions of Syrians who fled to Turkey escaping violence in Syria.
Sources told the AA that Davutoglu would depart for Hatay in the next hour.
Davutoglu will meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s special representative Hasan Turkmani in Ankara on Wednesday evening.
Davutoglu’s meeting with the Turkish ambassadors commissioned in the Middle East to discuss the latest developments in the region and in Syria is expected to be postponed to Thursday.
ISTANBUL—Syrian refugees streamed into Turkey on Monday, fleeing a crackdown in the country’s north, as Turkey’s foreign ministry convened a high-level meeting on its neighbor with members of Turkey’s intelligences service.
The Syrian military, meanwhile, said it had retaken control the town of Jisr al-Shoghour, where 120 soldiers were killed last week in an apparent mutiny.
On Monday, as the number of Syrians who have fled across the border reached close to 7,000 since last week, according to Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish government dismissed media reports that Turkey was planning to create a military buffer zone just inside Syria.
“There are no such plans yet,” said Ibrahim Kalin, foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “If the number [of refugees] really goes up, then we are prepared for everything, but we have no plans to create a buffer zone.”
The Turkish foreign ministry meeting on Syria, which also included its ambassadors to Damascus and Beirut, was reported by Anadolu Ajansi.
Unrest in Syria
Despite the rising death toll from weeks of unrest, people across Syria continue to protest the government of President Bashar al-Assad. See events by day.
Turkey has been one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strongest supporters, but appeared to lose patience as Syrian forces triggered a refugee crisis on Turkey’s border in the lead-up to elections on Sunday, which Mr. Erdogan’s party won.
Hundreds of Syrians huddled under trees and makeshift camps in harsh rain and wind on Monday evening, said Mohammed Abdelwahab, a resident of Jisr al-Shoghour who is helping drive families from neighboring villages to the border. “We’re afraid the security forces will attack us at the border any minute,” he said. He estimated there were as many as 15,000 Syrians now waiting in makeshift camps at the Syrian side of the border.
“It poured rain and got chilly and it became a problem—the women were trying to take care of crying children, the men trying to get food,” said Mr. Abdelwahab. He said snipers patrolled villages near the border from which families were fleeing, with one man who went to get bread for the refugees suspected detained or killed.
People at the border said the flow of mini-bus traffic crossing into Turkey increased Sunday night, as thunderstorms set in and Syrian forces swept villages in the border area, although there was no sense of chaos.
In apparent anticipation of more refugees, workers of the Turkish Red Crescent, the equivalent of the Red Cross, began building a fourth tent camp Monday near the border, the Associated Press reported
Syria on Monday said the army “restored peace and safety” to Jisr al-Shughour after a military operation hunted down what the government said were terrorist gangs, and discovered a mass grave of 12 bodies of security force members. Two gunmen were killed and many others arrested in clashes on Sunday, the state news agency said.
Residents of Jisr al-Shughour on Sunday said some 160 tanks shelled the town for most of the day as an attack helicopter sprayed machine gun fire. The town had emptied out of most residents in the days leading to Sunday as it braced for the military attack.
Local residents and government opponents say the deaths of the 120 soldiers last week were caused not by terrorists, as the government claims, but by other government forces when the soldiers mutinied.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com and Nour Malas at nour.malas@dowjones.com
KHIRBIT EL JOUS, Syria — Hundreds of Syrians displaced by a ferocious crackdown on the uprising here fled to the Turkish border by tractor, truck and foot on Tuesday, some huddling in muddy olive groves without shelter and food, residents said.
A Syrian refugee in a school in Ain al-Baida, Syria, on Tuesday. The school has sheltered about 100 Syrians who have fled the violence in their towns.
The scenes on both sides of the border, a 520-mile frontier that Syrians can cross without visas, brought yet another dimension to the three-month rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The repressive force of the state unfolded Tuesday, with the military expanding its deployment to restive regions in the north and east and security forces making more arrests, along with the consequences of thousands of lives uprooted.
In wrenching scenes, occasionally playing out under rare but torrential summer rains, some of the Syrians here spoke of the pain of flight in a region where land — as well as the attachment to it — stands as one of the most visceral notions of belonging.
“They think we are refugees, but we are not,” said a man who refused to give his name, holding a bag of bread and seeking shelter on the Syrian side of the border. “We have everything — our houses, properties and memories there. What would happen if we enter Turkey now and, when it’s time to return, find everything gone in our absence?”
The humanitarian crisis, along with the relentlessness of the crackdown, has drawn growing international condemnation, thrusting Syria’s leadership into some of its starkest isolation in its four decades in power. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a friend of Mr. Assad’s, urged him yet again to end the crackdown in a telephone call on Tuesday.
But so far, the Syrian government, led by Mr. Assad and a tight-knit, opaque circle, has signaled its intention to repress by force what it describes as an armed, religiously motivated uprising and what activists describe as a largely peaceful protest against the withering oppression of one of the Arab world’s most authoritarian states.
Residents in northern Syria said the military had deployed thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and jeeps in and around Jisr al-Shoughour, where insurgents, military defectors or a combination of both fought Syrian security forces earlier this month. The government retook the town on Sunday, prompting the exodus.
Reports from the town were contradictory, underlining the difficulty of reporting with authority in a country where foreign journalists are mostly barred. One resident, a 31-year-old government employee who gave his first name as Muhanna, said the town was relatively quiet on Tuesday, with some residents returning and electricity restored.
“The army received us and offered us bread and water,” he said.
But a driver from a nearby town who gave his name as Abu Khaled said Jisr al-Shoughour remained largely deserted, though the military had set up a base in the town’s hospital to direct operations in the conservative, predominantly Sunni Muslim region.
Activists and residents said tanks and soldiers were also moving east toward Deir al-Zour and Abu Kamal, a region near the Iraqi border dominated by extended clans. Video taken by residents showed a handful of tanks on a main highway, but some activists said the numbers of armored vehicles were larger, perhaps in the dozens.
Protests have gathered almost daily in Deir al-Zour, and clashes have erupted in Abu Kamal, a town inhabited by families that span the border with Iraq and Syria. One 27-year-old protester who gave his name as Abdullah said demonstrators hurled epithets as the tanks approached Abu Kamal, asking why the Syrian military was fighting its own people and not Israel, which seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war.
“Are you going to the Golan to liberate it?” he quoted them as shouting.
One local leader, Nawaf el-Bashir, said Syrian military forces had yet to enter Deir al-Zour, while Abdullah said they had already taken up positions inside the town.
Opposition activists have sought to rally Syria’s extended clans to their side, particularly the groups living in eastern Syria. Some activists speculated that the military’s deployment toward the region was meant as a show of force for a government that, at least momentarily, appeared to lose control of Jisr al-Shoughour and its hinterland.
“I think they want to signal strength to the tribes,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group. “But it’s not an easy environment, and the people there don’t like anyone to intrude in their territory.”
via Fleeing Syrians Take Refuge Along Border With Turkey – NYTimes.com.
