Nov 14/12 By TIA GOLDENBERG, Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — Syrian rebels have taken control of nearly all villages near the frontier with the Israel-held Golan Heights, according to Israel’s defense minister who said Wednesday that Bashar Assad’s forces were “displaying ever-diminishing efficiency.”

Fighting in the area this past week has already drawn Israeli retaliatory fire into Syria twice after apparently stray mortar shells flew into Israel-held territory. That raised fears that Syria’s civil war could take a new and even more dangerous twist, widening further into an armed conflict with the region’s strongest military power.

“Almost all of the villages, from the foot of this ridge to the very top, are already in the hands of the Syrian rebels,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday during a tour of the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and later annexed. “The Syrian army is displaying ever-diminishing efficiency.”

Barak said Israel will remain “vigilant and alert.”

Israel’s frontier with Syria is the Golan Heights. The border area on the Syrian side is a buffer zone, with some villages where fighting has flared over the past week. The 46-mile-long buffer zone is governed and policed by the Syrian authorities, and no military forces other than U.N. forces are permitted within it.

The Syrian civil war threatens to enflame an already combustible region. The fighting already has already spilled into Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

While many doubt President Assad wants to pick a fight with Israel, they fear the embattled Syrian leader may try to draw Israel into the fighting in a bout of desperation. Israeli officials believe it is only a matter of time before Syrian rebels topple the longtime leader.

On Wednesday, Syrian troops used aircraft and artillery in an attempt to dislodge rebels from a town next to the border with Turkey, as Ankara warned it would retaliate against any airspace violations.

An Associated Press journalist in the Turkish town of Ceylanpinar witnessed Syrian airstrikes in the adjacent Syrian town of Ras al-Ayn, where rebels say they have ousted troops loyal to Assad.

Deadly air strikes began several days ago, and many casualties were rushed into Turkey for treatment. Local officials said as many as 30 people have died since Monday. The journalist also saw Syrian forces shelling a wooded area near Ras al-Ayn from where rebels had been firing.

The violence in Syria has killed more than 36,000 people since an uprising against Assad’s regime began in March 2011. Hundreds of thousands have fled the fighting into neighboring Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

Another 11,000 escaped into Turkey last week following the surge of fighting at Ras al-Ayn, which is located in the northeastern Syrian province of al-Hasaka, an oil-producing region where the population is mostly Kurdish.

The proximity of the fighting to Turkey has raised fears of an escalation.

Turkish media, including the Anadolu news agency, said several villages west of Ceylanpinar have been evacuated to protect residents from any spillover of the fighting in Syria. About 1,000 people left Mursitpinar, 180 kilometers (110 miles) from Ceylanpinar, after an appeal from the loudspeakers of local mosques.

Turkey’s defense minister, Ismet Yilmaz, indicated that Turkey would use military force in response to any incursions by Syrian aircraft. Last month, Turkish artillery fired on targets in Syria after Syrian shells landed inside Turkey and killed several Turkish civilians in one instance.

“The necessary response will be given to Syrian planes and helicopters that violate our border,” Yilmaz said.

A Turkish official in Ceylanpinar said the sound of shelling was heard through the night. Two rocket-propelled grenades hit houses on the Turkish side, but there were no injuries, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is barred from speaking to the media on the record.

Later, the official said a dozen wounded Syrians had been brought across the border, and one died during treatment. Rumors swirled about the situation in the Syrian town; the Turkish official cited contacts in Ras al-Ayn as saying Syrian forces had entered the town.

A convoy of seven white jeeps and a truck was seen near the Syrian town, but it was unclear who was in the vehicles. On the Turkish side of the border, Turkish jets were heard flying overhead.

At one point, sounds of jubilation were heard coming from Ras al-Ayn. One rebel shouted in Arabic: “The Syrian army fled, did you see?”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday that warplanes carried out six airstrikes in al-Hasaka, including those at Ras al-Ayn.

Regime jet fighters also targeted the rebellious suburbs of Damascus on Wednesday, the Britain-based Observatory said. Heavy clashes between rebel units and Assad’s troops were ongoing in the northern city of Aleppo, the Observatory said. The group relies on reports from activists on the ground.

23/10/12

11/10/12

#Syria, the insurgents establish a “Buffer Zone”

10/10/12

#Syrian fighters seek to create

buffer zone

Syrian opposition fighters near the border with Turkey have said they are creating a buffer zone to act as a safe haven for the thousands of people trying to escape the fighting in their country.

Several rebel groups have joined forces to drive government troops out of the area near the border, but they are demanding that NATO assist them in defending the buffer zone against government air strikes.

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught reports from the town of Bdama in northern Syria.

05/10/12

Syrian rebels raise their weapons during a patrol in the town of Tal Abyad near the border with Turkey. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Syria has agreed to keep its forces six miles (10km) from the Turkish border in the wake of this week’s deadly shelling incident, Turkish media have reported.

Such a move would amount to a buffer zone, fulfilling a longstanding request by Syrian opposition groups that would allow rebels to operate freely and civilians to seek refuge.

Syria has not confirmed the claim and Ankara has made no official announcement. However, several Turkish media outlets, citing well-placed sources, claimed that a deal had been struck.

Opposition groups have implored Turkey and the international community to establish an area in which they can move without fear of jets and helicopters, claiming it would be a significant step in their 19-month battle to oust the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

However, the demands have been rejected by Ankara, as well as the US and Nato, who have all repeatedly balked at suggestions that they intervene directly in the conflict. A buffer zone would not be effective unless it was enforced militarily, something that Turkey has so far been unwilling to do. However, the Syrian shelling of the Turkish border town of Akcacle has spurred Ankara to recalibrate its military options to deal with the growing crisis across the southern border.

On Thursday, the Turkish parliament approved a bill that would allow its military to launch cross-border raids at any point in the next year. Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Turkey was not pushing for an escalation with its once close ally. “We are not interested in war,” he said. “But we’re not far from it either.”

Syria said it was waiting for the results of an investigation before publicly assigning blame for the shelling, which killed five Turkish civilians and wounded nine more. But it has privately conceded it was at fault and did not respond to a barrage of retaliatory Turkish shellfire, which is thought to have killed several Syrian soldiers.

Turkish troops fired at Syria again yesterday, responding to another mortar shell that struck Turkish territory, the country’s state-run news agency said.

The shelling came hours after Erdogan called on Syria not to test Turkey’s patience. The Anadolu Agency quoted Governor Celalettin Lekesiz as saying a mortar shell hit 50m inside the border in a rural area near the village of Asagipulluyaz in Hatay province. No one was hurt by the mortar, but Turkish troops based in the area immediately responded with fire, he said.

The Syrian air force continued to pound Aleppo on Friday and reportedly launched its heaviest raids over the city of Homs in the past five months.

Video footage uploaded to the internet on Thursday appeared to show a military helicopter being struck then crashing to the ground over Damascus, not far from where rebels claimed earlier on Friday to have seized control of a missile base.

09/09/12

04/09/12
By Dominique Soguel

Beres is currently working in Aleppo.

ALEPPO, Syria: Veteran war surgeon Jacques Beres has his own compelling reasons for urging that a no-fly zone be imposed over Syria – one bomb dropped by the regime leaves more wounded than doctors can fix in a day.

Working under cover in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been pounded for weeks as President Bashar Assad’s forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Beres insists the death toll in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.

“At least 50,000 people have been killed without counting the disappeared,” Beres, a French surgeon who daily patches up dozens of people in a hospital near the front lines of Aleppo, told AFP in an interview.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground across Syria, has given a latest toll of at least 26,283 people killed in Syria since the revolt began in March last year – 18,695 civilians, 1,079 defectors and 6,509 troops.

But Beres said watchdogs such as the Britain-based Observatory are unable to paint a full picture of the losses because many deaths are documented “only with ink and paper.”

“I am sure that the dead that I have here are not tallied in London,” he said.

In the past two weeks, he said, he has treated a daily average of 20 to 45 wounded people, the majority of them fighters with the opposition Free Syria Army, including “quite a few jihadists.”

Fatalities in rebel ranks range between two and six each day, he said.

But those are just the figures collected in one small hospital within a massive commercial city which is now almost evenly divided between rebel and army-controlled areas.

Many gray zones lie between both camps and the security situation remains fluid: Shops are open and pedestrian traffic has resumed in some neighborhoods while tank shells and mortar hit others.

“It is shameful that a no-fly zone hasn’t been set up,” said the co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, setting aside a cup of tea to review X-rays and offer a Syrian colleague advice on how best to dislodge a bullet from a man’s leg.

“It is an incredible massacre. Even if now it is a civil war, it is a very asymmetric conflict: light weapons against tanks and aerial bombardment,” said Beres, whose experience on the field covers almost every major war from Vietnam in the 1960s to Libya last year.

“All this because they asked for a little bit of freedom and said that they had enough of Bashar.”

This is the third humanitarian mission that Beres has undertaken to Syria this year, backed variously by organizations such as France Syrie Democracie, UAM93, Doctors Without Borders, and AAVS (Association d’aide aux victimes en Syrie).

He was in the central city of Homs in February when the neighborhood of Baba Amr was decimated by Assad’s forces. In May he roamed around Idlib province where he says pro-regime soldiers destroyed pharmacies and burned a clinic down to the ground.

Beres, in his 70s, has been smuggling himself into the country at great risk, armed only with the firm belief that he has a “humanitarian duty to heal.

Main opposition group pleads for weapons, urgent military intervention ‘to defend civilians’ from bombardments by Assad’s army.

Middle East Online

‘We are seeking very quick action’

02/09/12

Will a buffer zone calm or stoke tensions?

We discuss the feasibility and risks of enforcing a buffer zone and a no-fly zone in Syria.

Turkey has appealed to the UN Security Council to create a safe zone inside Syria, but they hold out little hope for an endorsement from the council that has failed so far to take action to stop the violence.

Ankara believes that 100,000 refugees would be a tipping point and with that threshold fast approaching, the government is proposing a solution: Ankara wants UN approval for a buffer zone for displaced Syrians that stretches about 20km into Syrian territory.

Britain and France say they have not ruled out any options - including a no-fly zone - to help civilians fleeing the war.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, says so-called liberated zones have been identified and with proper funding and administration they could serve as a refuge for civilians caught in the violence.

But to be effective, a buffer zone would also need a no-fly zone to protect the area, and that cannot be established without a UN Security Council resolution.

Turkey has been pressing for the establishment of safe havens inside Syria to stem the mounting exodus of refugees, and reacted with frustration when its calls fell on deaf ears at the UN Security Council on Thursday.

But on Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, acknowledged that any such move would require UN backing and would be far too risky without the prior establishment of a no-fly zone. Enforcing such a zone without consent from the Damascus regime would risk military confrontation.

However, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has called the proposal for a buffer zone unrealistic. 

“I believe that talk about a buffer zone is not practical, even for those countries which are playing a hostile role (against Syria),” al-Assad said in a recorded interview broadcast on Syria’s Addounia television.

But Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, has warned that the problem goes beyond being an internal issue. He says that “no one has the right to expect Turkey to take on this international responsibility on its own.”

“According to OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), there are more than two million internally displaced people in Syria. In the face of such a humanitarian disaster, the UN should initiate the establishment of IDP camps within Syria without delay. Needless to say, these camps should have full protection. Let us also be clear, there is only one side which is responsible for this tragedy, it is the regime in Syria.”

It is something that Erdogan seems to agree with: “We cannot take such a measure unless the United Nations Security Council decides in favour of it …. First a decision for the no-fly zone must be taken; then we would be able to take a step towards a buffer zone”

To discuss the issue, Inside Syria, with Teymoor Nabili, speaks to Halla Diyab, a Syrian writer and spokeswoman for the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria; Daniel Serwer, a professor at the John Hopkins school of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the Middle East Institute, who also blogs at peacefair.net; and Birol Baskan, a professor of government at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

“We are excluding no option for the future. We do not know how this crisis will develop, how it will develop over the coming months - it’s steadily getting worse, we’re ruling nothing out and we have contingency planning for a wide range of scenarios. We don’t generally go into what all that contingency planning is, but we also have to be clear that anything like a safe zone requires military intervention and that of course is something that has to be weighed very carefully.”

William Hague, British foreign secretary

FACTS ABOUT THE BUFFER ZONE:

• Turkey wants international support for creating safe zone inside Syria
• UN Security Council met on Thursday to discuss supplying aid to Syria
• French FM: France and Turkey have identified liberated zones in Syria
• France says parts of Syria are out of government’s control
• Syrian opposition member says al-Assad’s enemies need safe zone
• Turkey originally said it could host no more than 100, 000 refugees
• UN officials: Turkey has about 80, 000 refugees while Jordan has 150, 000
• Over last two weeks up to 5, 000 refugees a day entered turkey
• UN: Nearly 20, 000 people killed in Syria since the uprising began in 2011
• Humanitarian agencies estimate up to 300, 000 people have fled Syria

29/08/12

#Syria’s Assad Rejects Buffer Zone

Plan

More than 35,000 Syrians have sought shelter in Turkey. Most of the refugees at the Kilis refugee camp in southern Turkey are women and children.

At this isolated part of the Turkish border, there’s just one Turkish guard, a fence and, beyond an olive grove, Syria.

The Syrian side is just a short walk, perhaps 10 minutes. The area looks completely calm and there is no sign of the Syrian military.

Abu Amar, a rebel who has fought in Syria for five weeks, walked across this field from the Syrian village of Atma, which is now serving as a rebel headquarters. He says much of the northwestern province of Idlib is now controlled by the rebels, and it has become easy to move back and forth between Syria and Turkey here.

“Actually we have a buffer zone now. I mean it’s not declared by the Turkish government,” he says. “People transport arms freely. The Turks are closing their eyes. We bring our wounded people here; we go back and forth and nobody bothers us at all.”

There are now more than 35,000 Syrian refugees living in camps inside Turkey, along the Syrian border, with several hundred more arriving every day. As the fighting in Syria escalates, these camps have become logistic bases for rebel fighters.

Syrian Troops Stay Away From Border

In June, Turkey moved anti-aircraft guns along its southern border after Syria shot down a Turkish jet over the Mediterranean. The effect has been the creation of a kind of no-fly zone for Syrian army helicopters that were patrolling the border. It is much safer now — for the rebels in northern Syria — and for Syrians who live in border camps just inside Turkey.

Refugee camp doesn’t quite describe the Kilis camp. It’s more like a city made up of shipping containers and can house 12,000 people. There are banks, schools and food markets, paid for and protected by the Turkish government.

When many of these Syrians first left their country, the trip was dangerous and long. Now, the picture is much different. The traffic goes both ways, and it’s a relatively safe journey.

Haj Nasr, who invites us to his camp home, says he now goes to northern Syria a couple times a week.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

A member of the Free Syrian Army stands near a medieval castle outside Homs, a flashpoint for much of the recent fighting, last month. The Syrian army continues to wage offensives against the rebels in many places, but the rebels say they can move back and forth between northwest Syria and southern Turkey.

“We go back to bring families, children,” he says.

He has become a logistics chief for the rebels in his village. When a Syrian government soldier defects, Nasr gets a call.

“We took them to a safe place. They will take some rest and go back to the fight [for the rebels],” he says.

A Changed Atmosphere

Mahmoud Mosa, a former headmaster of a school in northern Syria, joins the conversation, saying it was too dangerous to go back into Syria for the past year. But then about a month ago, he walked right in.

Asked if the Syrian army is getting weaker, he says, “Yes, because I was there [in northern Syria]. I know the army is weaker and weaker.”

Mosa is a teacher not a fighter. He gathers data for Western human rights organizations documenting atrocities and deaths. He says he hopes leaders of the Assad regime will eventually be put on trial. He confirms that rebels are in control in some northern areas, but that it’s not yet time to take his family home.

“I want my children to stay here, it’s safer for them, this camp is for families,” Mosa says. “But young men can do something inside [Syria].”

The population in the camp is mostly women and children. The classrooms are packed, with Turkish teachers guiding the lessons. When the kindergarten students are asked to draw, they draw scenes of war that they witnessed in their homeland.

Asked where they’re from, they rattle off places that have been hardest hit by the Syrian army: Homs, Jisr al-Shughour, Khirbet al-Jouz.

At their home, Mosa and his children watch a Turkish soap opera while huddled near a fan to keep cool in the dry summer heat.

Rebels Operate More Freely

Mosa says the rebel operation — the flow of arms and medical care — has improved in recent weeks. The camp has become a rear base for the fight against the regime.

“They are more organized,” he says of the rebels. “They come here to see their children and families every week, every 10 days, and then they go back to Syria,” he says.

Still, the Syrian army is waging a punishing offensive across the rest of the country. The undeclared safe zone in the north remains a limited success. So far, the rebels have been unable to expand the territory under their control.

ANKARA

Military mobilization in Aleppo can be a ‘red line’ for Turkey, says Clinton. AP Photo

Turkey believes that the recent wave of bloody attacks on civilians by Syrian forces is a clear indication of the disintegration of the military and a loss of control, expressing its concerns that a massing of the Syrian military near Aleppo could result in massive migration toward the Turkish border.

“The disintegration of the military has begun. The al-Assad regime has started to lose control. It’s desperately attacking populous residential areas,” is the assessment in Ankara, a source told the Hürriyet Daily News. 

Since the beginning of the implementation of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point plan on April 12, the violence committed by Syrian forces and pro-regime militias has changed color as it turned bloodier and more threatening, according to Ankara. Burning corpses and killing children are seen as moves of a military that has already lost control.

Use of attack choppers

The use of attack choppers, particularly in operations against urban structures of Syrian opposition groups, is another indication of this shift, according to Ankara. The Syrian move to purchase 15 attack choppers from Russia is being evaluated in light of this Syrian army strategy. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday denied a claim by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that “there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria.” Lavrov said during a visit to Iran that Russia was completing earlier weapons contracts with Syria exclusively for air defense systems. “The Syrian army has just one division, which is being moved from one city to another. Their recent target seems to be Aleppo, which is home to some 4 million Syrians in its greater region,” the source said. 

Clinton urges red line

This observation by Ankara is also shared by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She warned on June 12 about the massing of Syrian forces near Aleppo over the last two days, saying such deployment could be a “red line” for Turkey “in terms of their strategic and national interests.” 
“We are watching very carefully,” she said in Washington. “This term of ‘red line’ is not our terminology,” a senior Foreign Ministry official told the Daily News yesterday. “But this reflects the importance we attach to this specific development in Aleppo,” the official said, expressing concerns that an offensive in such a large city could cause hundreds of thousands to flee across the Turkish border.

Turkey is planning to take some precautions along or inside the Syrian border only if the refugee situation becomes uncontrollable. 

According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the number of Syrian migrants in Turkey has increased to nearly 30,000 with 2,500 more crossing the border in the last 48 hours. The fact that more wounded refugees are crossing the border shows that Syrian forces have increased the level of their violent acts against civilians. 

The establishment of a buffer zone or creating humanitarian corridors could be considered Turkey’s contingency plan for such a situation but requires a multilateral consensus.

(Reuters) - More than 2,800 Syrians fled across the border to Turkey from the region of Idlib on Thursday, a Turkish official said, more than double the highest previous one-day total.

The refugees all crossed close to the Turkish village of Bukulmez and more were waiting on the other side of the border, the official said. Forty-four minibuses ferried the arrivals from the border to a refugee camp at Reyhanli.

“The army is destroying buildings and bombing them till they turn to charcoal,” said Mohammed Khatib, a refugee who said he came from Kastanaz, a Syrian town of 20,000 people.

“The army wants people to move out of their houses. If the residents refuse, they destroy them with the people inside.”

He said he had crossed into Turkey after attacks on Kastanaz intensified, first from the air, then from ground troops.

“For the past three days there have been bodies lying in the streets. Around 200 have been killed. The town is now abandoned. It took us two days to get to Turkey with our women and children.”

He said he had seen soldiers execute one man in front of his family.

Villagers on the Turkish side said they could hear the sounds of heavy fighting throughout the day.

The confirmed number of new refugees was the highest since March 15, when around 1,000 Syrians entered Turkey in one day.

A smaller, unknown number were also thought to have crossed on Thursday near Kilis, further north in the Turkish province of Gaziantep.

Turkish leaders have said a flood of refugees or massacres of civilians by Syrian troops near its border could force them to act to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said last month that setting up a “safe” or “buffer” zone along the border was among the options his government was considering.

But that would mean sending in troops to secure the area, which could lead to confrontation between Syrian forces and the Turkish army, the second biggest in NATO.

Erdogan said again on Thursday that Assad had not been honest in the past about pledges to halt the fighting.

“We will see by what he does only after April 10 if he is being true and honest now,” he said, referring to a deadline set by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan for Syrian troops to withdraw from conflict cities and comply with his peace plan.

Khatib and other refugees said seven towns and villages had been attacked in the past two days: Hazzano, Kastanaz, Billish, Magara, Chillah, Zardenah and Killi.

Abu Isa, 28, from a village near Killi, said he had left home at around 11 a.m. and reached Turkey around sunset.

He said his village had come under fire from helicopters, and that he had seen one helicopter fire two rockets.

“There was indiscriminate firing,” he said.

“The village is 80 percent empty. Some came to Turkey, some went to other villages.”

He said the village of Hazzano, 2 km away, was three-quarters destroyed and its school and mosque were in ruins.

Abu Musa, a 36-year-old from the same village, said he had crossed with a group of 600-700 people.

He said they had been helped to cross the border, 20 km away, by the Free Syrian Army, the loosely organized armed opposition formed in response to Assad’s crackdown on a peaceful uprising that began a year ago. One FSA soldier was killed, Musa said.

(Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Kevin Liffey)