November 2012 - #Syria - American meets Free Syrian Army, An inside look at the values and ideologies of the Free Syrian Army

02/10/12

By ROBERT MACKEY

Analysts have questioned the authenticity of video posted on YouTube last week, apparently showing the American reporter Austin Tice in the hands of Islamist fighters in Syria.

Last Updated | Tuesday, 7:12 a.m. As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, video posted on YouTube five days ago, apparently showing a missing American journalist in the hands of jihadist captors in Syria, may have been staged to discredit the armed opposition to the Syrian government, according to several analysts who viewed the clip on Monday.

The reporter, Austin Tice, left the United States Marine Corps last year and has been contributing freelance articles to two American newspaper companies, McClatchy and The Washington Post, and other outlets since he smuggled himself into Syria from Turkey in May. He last communicated with colleagues by e-mail on Aug. 13. An update he posted on Twitter two days earlier, about enjoying an alcohol-fueled birthday party with members of the Free Syrian Army, underscored that he was on good terms with the rebels he was reporting on at the time.

Spent the day at an FSA pool party with music by @taylorswift13. They even brought me whiskey. Hands down, best birthday ever.

— Austin Tice (@Austin_Tice) 11 Aug 12

A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said at a briefing on Monday: “We’ve seen the video. We are not in a position to verify, (a) whether it’s him, (b) whether it represents an actual scene that happened or something that may have been staged.” She added: ” There’s a lot of reason for the Syrian Government to duck responsibility, but we continue to believe that, to the best of our knowledge, we think he is in Syrian Government custody.”

Mr Tice’s parents, Marc and Debra Tice, confirmed that the man in the video was their son, in a statement that began: “Knowing Austin is alive and well is comforting to our family. Though it is difficult to see our eldest son in such a setting and situation as that depicted in the video, it is reassuring that he appears to be unharmed.”

As the McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam explains, the brief video clip showing the reporter alive was uploaded to a new YouTube account last Wednesday, but seen much more widely on Monday after it was posted on Facebook by supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. James Ball of The Washington Post reports that the pro-Assad blogger who drew attention to the video on Facebook wrote that the images of the reporter being held by Islamists, rather than government forces, proved that “Western media is working against Syria.”

Analysts contacted by both McClatchy and The Post, and bloggers who have worked to authenticate video from Syria for the past 18 months, agreed that some details of the video did not ring true.

The clip shows the American captive, wearing a blindfold, clearly distressed as he tries to recite an Islamic prayer in Arabic to armed captors, before breaking off and exclaiming in English: “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” Close observers of video from Syria and of jihadist clips drew attention to the unusual clothes worn by Mr. Tice’s captors, and the halting way they shouted expressions of praise for Allah, as if they needed to be prompted.

Joseph Holliday, a former United States Army intelligence officer who tracks Syrian rebel groups for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, told The Post that it seemed strange that the armed men around Mr. Tice were wearing what appear to be salwar kameez, traditional clothing worn in Afghanistan, which looked very clean. “It’s like a caricature of a jihadi group,” he said. “My gut instinct is that regime security guys dressed up like a bunch of wahoos and dragged him around and released the video to scare the U.S. and others about the danger of Al Qaeda extremists in Syria. It would fit their narrative perfectly.”

The video came to light the same day that Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, scolded other countries who “clearly induce and support terrorism in Syria with money, weapons and foreign fighters,” in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In an interview with McClatchy, Murad Batal al Shishani, an analyst in London who monitors extremist groups, cast doubt on a comment on the pro-Assad Facebook page, which said that “the American journalist Austin Tice is with the Nusra Front gangs and Al Qaeda in Syria,” an apparent reference to Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist group. But, as Ms. Allam writes, that organization has “a sophisticated media wing that produces a Twitter feed and videos that are clearly labeled and edited.” It would be unusual for the group to have simply uploaded the clip to YouTube and waited for pro-Assad bloggers to draw attention to it, rather than using well-known jihadist Internet forums.

Jenan Moussa, a reporter for Al Aan TV in Dubai who has worked in Syria recently, wrote on Twitter that none of the fighters from that group she saw there wore Afghan-style clothing.

Jabhat AlNusra fighters I saw w/ @HaraldDoornbos in #Syria had military fatigue. Few fighters had long Dashdasha, not afghan Shalwar Kameez.

— Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) 1 Oct 12

A Syrian activist who writes on Twitter as @THE_47th posted a link to another Web video, with a logo, titles, music and flashy editing, noting, “This is what a Jabhat Al Nusra capture video looks like, it is of 5 Yemeni Officers captured in Syria thought to be helping the regime.”

Video said to show five Yemeni soldiers taken prisoner in Syria by a jihadist group.

In an interview with Matt Weaver, the Guardian’s Middle East live-blogger, on Tuesday, a friend who helped Mr. Tice enter Syria said the journalist had tried to interview a Jabhat Al Nusra commander, but the group then cancelled a scheduled meeting.

Mr. Tice’s friend, Michael Weiss, is the research director of the conservative Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy institute in London. He also told The Guardian: “The last time I spoke to Austin was on G-chat August 8th and he was in an area of Damascus that was subsequently pummeled by the regime and then raided.”

After viewing the video, Mr. Tice’s family in Texas and senior editors at McClatchy and The Post called for his immediate release.

As he reported from Syria this year, Mr. Tice used social networks to stay in touch with his family, to publish his work and even to argue about coverage of the conflict with colleagues.

Darraya residents clean a town street. Most gov services have been cut to this suburb on the west side of Damascus. http://t.co/k5SVamaF

— Austin Tice (@Austin_Tice) 7 Aug 12

In a series of Twitter updates the week before he disappeared, Mr. Tice criticized a post on The Lede drawing attention to a spate of new reports from Western journalists who made it into rebel-held territory in August. “The way has always been open. This whole spin is an excuse for laziness,” he wrote. “Clearly the risk is real,” he added: “But idea that it’s prohibitive of more/better coverage is a red herring. I see it as corporate overlawyering.”

.@RobertMackey @thelede @hadeelalsh @javierespinosa2 @martinchulov The way has always been open. This whole spin is an excuse for laziness.

— Austin Tice (@Austin_Tice) 7 Aug 12

Just weeks before he went missing, the former soldier wrote a manifesto of sorts on Facebook, explaining his decision to work in such a risky environment to family and friends, which was reproduced in its entirety by The Post in August. The message began:

It’s nice and all, but please quit telling me to be safe.

Against my better judgment, I’m posting this on Facebook. Flame away.

People keep telling me to be safe (as if that’s an option), keep asking me why I’m doing this crazy thing, keep asking what’s wrong with me for coming here. So listen.

Our granddads stormed Normandy and Iwo Jima and defeated global fascism. Neil Armstrong flew to the Moon in a glorified trashcan, doing math on a clipboard as he went. Before there were roads, the Pioneers put one foot in front of the other until they walked across the entire continent. Then a bunch of them went down to fight and die in Texas ‘cause they thought it was the right thing to do.

Sometime between when our granddads licked the Nazis and when we started putting warnings on our coffee cups about the temperature of our beverage, America lost that pioneering spirit. We became a fat, weak, complacent, coddled, unambitious and cowardly nation. I went off to two wars with misguided notions of patriotism and found in both that the first priority was to never get killed, something we could have achieved from our living rooms in America with a lot less hassle. To protect careers and please the politicians, we weighed ourselves down with enough armor to break a man’s back, gorged on RipIts and ice cream, and believed our own press that we were doing something noble.

He contrasted American life to the current struggle in Syria, where “every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment.”

He concluded:

No, I don’t have a death wish – I have a life wish. So I’m living, in a place, at a time and with a people where life means more than anywhere I’ve ever been – because every single day people here lay down their own for the sake of others. Coming here to Syria is the greatest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s the greatest feeling of my life.

And look, if you still don’t get it, go read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. That book explains it all better than I ever could.

The Associated Press

BEIRUT - A French photojournalist and a prominent American war correspondent working for a British newspaper were killed Wednesday by Syrian shelling of the opposition stronghold Homs as President Bashar Assad’s regime escalated its attacks on rebel bases by strafing from helicopter gunships, activists said.

Weeks of withering barrages on the central city of Homs have failed to drive out opposition factions that include rebel soldiers who fled Assad’s forces. Hundreds have died in the siege and the latest deaths further galvanized international pressure on Assad, who appears intent on widening his military crackdowns despite the risk of pushing Syria toward full-scale civil war.

“This tragic incident is another example of the shameless brutality of the Assad regime.” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said of the journalists killed.

“That’s enough now, the regime must go,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after his government confirmed the two deaths.

French spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse identified those killed as French photojournalist Remi Ochlik and American reporter Marie Colvin, who was working for Britain’s Sunday Times.

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppe, said the attacks show the “increasingly intolerable repression” by Syrian forces. French Communication Minister Frederic Mitterrand said of the journalists killed: “It’s abominable.”

Syrian activists said at least two other Western journalists - French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times - were wounded in Wednesday’s shelling, which claimed at least 13 lives.

The Syrian military has intensified its attacks on Homs in the past few days, aiming to retake rebel-held neighborhoods that have become powerful symbols of resistance to Assad’s rule. For the government in Damascus, Homs is a critical battleground to maintain its control of Syria’s third-largest city and keep more rebel pockets from growing elsewhere.

In the northwestern restive province of Idlib, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that Syrian army helicopters fitted with machine guns opened fire on the village of Ifis. Idlib is a main base of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

Another opposition group, the Local Coordination Committees, said troops conducted raids in the Damascus district of Mazzeh district and the suburb Jobar, where dozens of people were detained. In Jobar, the group said troops broke doors of homes and shops and set up checkpoints.

The group also said Syrian troops backed by tanks stormed the southern village of Hirak and launched a wave of arrests.

The Obama administration opened the door slightly Tuesday to international military assistance for Syria’s rebels, with officials saying new tactics may have to be explored if Assad continues to defy pressure to halt a brutal crackdown on dissenters that has raged for 11 months and killed thousands.

The White House and State Department said they still hope for a political solution. But faced with the daily onslaught by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians, officials dropped the administration’s previous strident opposition to arming anti-regime forces. It remained unclear, though, what, if any, role the U.S. might play in providing such aid.

A Homs-based activist, Omar Shaker, said the journalists were killed when several rockets hit a garden of a house used by activists and journalists in the besieged Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, which has come under weeks of heavy bombardment by forces from Assad’s regime. At least 13 people were killed in Wednesday’s shelling, including the journalists, activists said.

The U.N. estimates that 5,400 people have been killed in repression by the regime of President Bashar Assad against a popular uprising that began 11 months ago. Syrian activists, however, put the death toll at more than 7,300.

He added that intense Syrian troops shelling with tanks and artilleries began at 6:30 a.m. and was continuing hours later. He said the apartment used by journalists was hit around 10 a.m.

An amateur video posted online by activist showed what they claimed were bodies of two people in the middle of a heavily damaged house. It said they were of the journalists. One of the dead was wearing what appeared to be a flak jacket.

Many foreign journalists have been sneaking into Syria illegally in the past months with the help of smugglers from Lebanon and Turkey. Although the Syrian government has allowed some journalists into the country their movement is tightly controlled by Information Ministry minders.

Colvin, from Oyster Bay, New York, was in her 50s and a veteran foreign correspondent for Britain’s Sunday Times for the past two decades. She was instantly recognizable for an eye patch worn after being injured covering conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001.

Colvin said she would not “hang up my flak jacket” even after the eye injury.

“So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night,” she wrote in the Sunday Times after the attack. “Equally, I’d rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no offense to desk jobs.

In Geneva, the International Red Cross said it was holding talks with members of the opposition Syrian National Council. The ICRC called Tuesday for a daily two-hour halt to fighting in Syria so it can bring emergency aid to affected areas and evacuate the wounded and sick.

Head of ICRI operations for the Middle East, Beatrice Megevand-Roggo, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the ICRC had almost no contacts with opposition figures inside Syria.

The journalists’ deaths came a day after a Syrian sniper shot dead Rami al-Sayyed, a prominent activist in Baba Amr who was famous for posting online videos, Shaker and the Local Coordination Committees activist group said.

On Jan. 11, award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs. The 43-year-old correspondent for France-2 Television was the first Western journalist to die since the uprising began in March. Syrian authorities have said he was killed in a grenade attack carried out by opposition forces - a claim questioned by the French government, human rights groups and the Syrian opposition.

Last week, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria after he sneaked in to cover the conflict.

The Syrian Expatriates Organization reports that on Jan 03-2012, U.S. born American citizen,Obada Mzaik, disappeared in Damascus, Syria as reported by Obada’s family member Mr. Firas Naashef in Michigan. Obada Mzaik departed from Detroit Metro Airport, January 03-2012 on flight bound to Damascus-Syria, and was never seen exiting the immigration clearance at Damascus airport according to Obada’s receiving family in Syria.

Detroit, MI (PRWEB) January 20, 2012 

The Syrian Expatriates Organization reports that: on Jan 03-2012, U.S. born American citizen Obada Mzaik disappeared in Damascus, Syria as reported by Obada’s family member Mr. Firas Naashef in Detroit Michigan.

According to flight records, Obada Mzaik departed from Detroit Metro Airport on January 03-2012 on board a Royal Jordanian Airliner, flight number RJ268 connecting in Amman, Jordan on flight RJ 435 bound to Damascus, Syria. He was never seen exiting the immigration clearance at Damascus airport according to Obada’s receiving family in Syria.

The U.S embassy was promptly informed of Obada’s disappearance. The family has attempted to follow up with Syrian authorities and the U.S. Embassy in Damascus but has been unsuccessful in securing any information that pertains to his whereabouts.

Obada Mzaik is a 21 year old American citizen. He is a civil engineering student at Al-Yarmouk University in Damascus, Syria. He attended Fall classes at Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Michigan where he also has family members there.

The Syrian Expatriates Organization is disturbed by the news of Mr. Obada Mzaik’s disappearance and is deeply concerned about his safety In Syria. Over the past 10 months, several cases of U.S. citizens being detained by Syrian authorities with no official charges filed against them have been reported.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/syria-arrested-blogger-razan-ghazzawi

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/26/syrians-protests-two-americans-detained_n_841074.html

Syrian Expatriates Organization asks our US Ambassador in Damascus Mr. Robert Ford to press Syrian Authority to disclose the circumstances surrounding Mr. Mzaik’s disappearance.

The official website of the US embassy in Damascus states the following:

http://damascus.usembassy.gov/service/arrests.html

“Syria is a signatory to the Vienna Convention on consular access to prisoners; this requires Syrian police authorities promptly to notify the U.S. Embassy of the arrest of aU.S. citizen. However, Syrian authorities rarely, if ever, provide such notification, even when the U.S. citizen specifically requests it. The U.S. Embassy will attempt to visit each American prisoner as soon as notification of an arrest is received. However, access may be delayed by a few days or weeks while Syrian authorities are investigating the case.

Upon learning of your arrest, a U.S. consular officer will visit you, provide a list of local attorneys, inform the Department of State of your arrest and, if requested, contact family or friends in the U.S. or elsewhere. Consuls can help you transfer money, food, and clothing from your family and friends. They will also try to get relief if you are held under inhumane or unhealthful conditions or are treated less equitably than others in the same situation.”

The Syrian Expatriates Organization also asks Secretary Hillary Clinton to hold the Syrian government responsible for the safety of Mr. Obada Mzaik and requests immediate information on his location, circumstances of his disappearance and his immediate release in line with the international obligations and the Vienna Convention.

The US State departments states on its web site the following:

“Sometimes concerned relatives and friends call us when they haven’t heard from a loved one who is abroad. We can help to pass messages to these missing Americans. Consular officers use the information provided by the family or friends of a missing person to locate the individual, and pass the caller’s message. We check with local authorities in the foreign country to see if there is any report of a U.S. citizen hospitalized, arrested, or otherwise unable to communicate with those looking for them. Depending on the circumstances, consular officers may personally search hotels, airports, hospitals, or even prisons. The more information that the caller can provide, the better the chances are that we can find the missing American.

We can and do monitor conditions in foreign prisons and can protest allegations of abuse against U.S. citizen prisoners when requested to do so. We work with prison officials to ensure treatment consistent with internationally recognized standards of human rights and to ensure that Americans are afforded due process under local laws”.
http://travel.state.gov/travel/tips/emergencies/emergencies_3881.html