28/10/12

Activists say government forces continue air raids in the Syrian capital in breach of a truce violated by both sides.

Syrian fighter jets have bombarded eastern suburbs of the capital, Damascus, activists say, continuing air raids despite an internationally brokered ceasefire supposed to take hold two days ago.

Warplanes reportedly hit the adjacent suburbs of Zamalka, Arbeen, Harasta and Zamalka on Sunday, where government forces are trying to root out rebels. Videos posted online purporting to show the aftermath showed huge plumes of smoke billowing over rooftops.

A statement by the Harasta Media Office, an activists’ organisation, said electricity, water and communications had
been cut and dozens of wounded at the Harasta National Hospital had been moved as the bombardment closed in

Activists also reported fighting in the nearby suburb of Douma, where rebels have been attacking roadblocks, and clashes in Qadam district.

Damascus suburbs have played a major role in the 19-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, both in terms of peaceful protests and armed resistance.

Eid truce bid

Joint UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had brokered a ceasefire that was to begin on Friday, the first day of Eid al-Adha.

Regime forces and the rebels had both agreed to a call by Brahimi to lay down their arms for the four-day Muslim holiday, with both reserving the right to respond to attacks.

But fierce fighting erupted after a short lull in fighting, with the rival sides accusing each other of breaching the ceasefire.

State news agency SANA said “armed terrorist groups” had attacked checkpoints and planted explosive devices in several cities.

While violence flared in Damascus on Sunday, shelling and clashes were also reported in the eastern Deir al-Zor province.

Fighting was also reported near Maaret al-Numan, a town along the Aleppo-Damascus highway that rebels seized earlier this month. Opposition fighters have also besieged a nearby military base and repeatedly attacked government supply convoys heading there.

Reports of violence cannot be independently verified as most journalists have been barred from entering the country legally.

The opposition says an estimated 32,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March last year. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled to neighbouring countries.

15/09/12

President of the Syrian National Council, Abdulbaset Sieda. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty Images

“I have never been involved in a revolution before,” said Naser Danan, a pediatrician and one of the board members of the Syrian Support Group. The new group is serving as a conduit between the United States and the armed forces seeking to topple Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

WASHINGTON — From a one-room office in an unfinished glass tower three blocks from the White House, an amorphous network of activists is doing what the Obama administration will not: attempting to arm the rebels trying to overthrow Syria’s government.

The Syrian Support Group, incorporated here in April as a nonprofit, has few resources and, so far, few donations, and whether it succeeds in its larger goal remains to be seen, but it is already serving as a conduit between the United States and the armed forces seeking to topple Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and having an effect on American policy.

The group has surprisingly extensive contacts among rebel commanders of the Free Syrian Army, a rare license from the Department of Treasury allowing it to sidestep sanctions and a conviction that the assistance the administration has so far offered Syrians — mainly communications equipment — is simply not enough to defeat Mr. Assad.

Its members regularly consult with State Department officials, including the American ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, who has been based in Washington since the embassy in Damascus closed in February. Their unusual relationship with the American government reflects the Obama administration’s constrained, at times convoluted policy toward Syria’s raging conflict.

Although the administration advocates Mr. Assad’s removal from power as fervently as the group’s members do, it has so far resisted calls to intervene militarily or to provide the weapons that Mr. Assad’s opponents say are needed to accomplish the task. And yet, it is tacitly encouraging others to do so, including nations like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and, now with the license, a network of Syrian émigrés in the United States and Canada who, like many of those opposed to Mr. Assad’s rule, began their campaign in the virtual universe of Facebook and Skype.

“If you keep giving people videos and cameras and satellite equipment so they can document how they are getting killed, it won’t stop the killing,” said Louay Sakka, one of the group’s eight board members, referring to the American aid. As for Mr. Assad’s loyalists, he added, “it’s only the language of force they understand.”

Mr. Sakka, a telecommunications engineer in Toronto, said the group hopes to raise $7 million to help the Free Syrian Army level the playing field against Mr. Assad’s overwhelmingly superior forces with the purchase of more sophisticated weaponry, including antiaircraft and antitank missiles.

“For a long time we’ve been telling them there is no political solution,” he said of American and other officials who held out hope for a negotiated end to Mr. Assad’s rule.

Administration officials say that outsourcing the supply of money and arms to the rebels maintains a crucial distinction that keeps American military fingerprints off a conflict that has already turned into a bloody civil war. “It’s not for us to determine what the donations are used for,” said one official, who requested anonymity to discuss administration thinking, describing a plausible deniability that might not be plausible to all. “It could be for medical supplies.”

The Syrian Support Group came together late last year, uniting a diaspora of émigrés with close family, social and cultural ties inside Syria. Like the protesters inside Syria, they began by advocating peaceful political change, but as the Syrian government cracked down ever more forcefully, they too became more militant, making contacts with the rebel military commands that took shape inside Syria’s major cities.

For some it has been a jarring transition. “I have never been involved in a revolution before,” another board member, Dr. Naser Danan, said in a telephone interview from Cleveland, where he settled after leaving Syria in 1986. “I’m a pediatrician.”

The group became more organized last spring when it formally incorporated, started its Web site and, in May, hired a former NATO political officer, Brian Sayers, to act as its director of government relations here in Washington after finding him through an online employment agency.

That same month, it applied for a license from the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to raise money for the rebels. It was granted on July 23 after the Obama administration intensified its efforts to provide humanitarian and other nonlethal assistance inside Syria. American law restricts arms sales generally, and sanctions prohibit them to Syria specifically. But while the group cannot ship weapons, it can send money that the rebels can use to buy them.

The group has not yet registered as a lobbyist, but it has already become a clearinghouse for American lawmakers and administration officials trying to learn more about the loose network of rebels that has gradually coalesced into the Free Syrian Army. A senior administration official who did not want to discuss intelligence matters on the record said the group’s greatest asset has been its contacts, providing some of the best intelligence available on those squaring off against Mr. Assad’s security forces.

The only thing adorning the group’s tiny office in downtown Washington is a large map of Syria with Post-it tabs designating the commanders of the Free Syrian Army’s nine regional military councils, from Dara’a to Aleppo. Mr. Sayers said the group’s directors routinely contacted the commanders of those councils — and recently managed a Skype conference call with all nine at once.

“There’s not one head — that’s true,” Mr. Sayers said of the still-amorphous organization of the rebels. “It doesn’t mean you can’t work with them.”

Mr. Sakka said the group’s directors, all professionals, were originally from the cities now under siege, allowing them to establish trust with the rebels, and vice versa. One of the group’s accomplishments has been to negotiate a “proclamation of principles,” signed by each of the rebel commanders. It calls for a free, democratic Syria that would protect the rights of Syria’s myriad ethnic and sectarian groups, create rule of law, and seek peace with its neighbors.

The group has not disclosed its fund-raising efforts so far, though its license requires it to report each month to the State Department how much it raises and sends. If the Internal Revenue Service approves the group’s status as a charity, donations to help Syria’s rebels could soon be tax-deductible.

Dr. Danan, originally from Damascus, lamented that the group had yet to receive an influx of donations large enough to do much more than set up the office in Washington.

While maintaining good relations with the Obama administration, the group has also been a critic of the administration’s approach, with added credibility because of its ties inside Syria. Dr. Danan, for example, said President Obama’s warning that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be “a red line” that could provoke intervention amounted to a “green light” for Mr. Assad to use as much conventional force as possible.

“Without force, tyranny will persist,” Dr. Danan said. “We will advocate with whatever means we can to mobilize the United States and other world powers to support the Syrian people, and not just with mere rhetoric.”

19/08/12

#Syria,Damascus/migrants/migrant neighborhood attest widespread intensive Republican Guard barriers, according to several eyewitnesses the car radio and television flocked and cart webcast to the collector as well as praise of many ceremonies and electricity emergency vehicles and mobile generator. Also used dogs to search the area surrounding the mosque was the first afraa Khurshid and second cars are completely empty square last line also.

The following video shows a police car, car radio, television and some cars.

Syrian rebels drew criticism for images like this one from Aleppo on Tuesday in which they dragged a suspected pro-government militiamen into the street.

02/08/12

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s rebels shelled an airport near Aleppo on Thursday in what was described as one of the first known instances of insurgents using captured heavy weapons, as opposition activists warned that fighting for the city, the country’s main commercial center, would likely intensify.

A Syrian activist said President Bashar al-Assad’s army appeared to be preparing for an all-out assault.

 “We have seen military reinforcements making their way to Aleppo,” said Abou Firas, an activist in Aleppo using a satellite Internet connection because telephone and Internet service from the city was cut off. “We were worried about massacres but now we are issuing a warning about a war of extermination to be launched by the regime.”

The news about the government reinforcements could not be independently confirmed because of restrictions on reporters. It came after the battle for Aleppo intensified on Wednesday when United Nations observers there reported that Syrian jets had fired rockets into contested neighborhoods and that rebels had commandeered tanks and other heavy weapons.

The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said the rebels had put the captured armor to use, shelling a military airport near Aleppo.

A video forwarded by Mr. Firas, purportedly from a highway between Aleppo and the coast, showed a convoy of nearly a dozen tanks, gas tankers, and several pick-up trucks carrying armed soldiers.

It was not clear when the video was shot, but before earlier ground assaults, the Syrian government has cut off communication in what appears to be an effort to keep rebels — who have become extremely savvy with YouTube videos and Skype — from broadcasting the army’s attacks.

 By Thursday afternoon in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Internet was coming back online gradually. Clashes continued, especially in the southwest of Aleppo, where rebels and Syrian troops have been engaged in a bitter battle for control.

 Some reports from Turkey also suggested that government forces were trying to cut rebel supply lines, with fighting raging in a rebel-held town near the Turkish border.

On Wednesday, hours after President Assad urged his forces to step up the fight, opposition leaders said they had found dozens of bodies in a suburb of Damascus in the aftermath of the Syrian Army’s house-to-house search for rebel fighters and activists. This claim of a new massacre came as the rebels faced severe criticism themselves for what appeared to be their brutal summary execution, one day earlier, of suspected pro-government gunmen on the streets of Aleppo, recorded and uploaded on the Internet.

Videos purported to have been taken in the Damascus suburb, Jdeidet Artouz, showed bodies lined up under bloodstained sheets, as a narrator gave an estimated count that continued rising: 37, 42, and then even more.

“I counted 52 bodies,” said Abu Abdullah, a resident who said he had helped move the dead to a local mosque before burial. “I’m really shocked. Why here?”

The bodies were found near an area where rebels said fighting had flared in the past week. But analysts said the bodies appearing outside Damascus in a town also filled with refugees — along with reports of renewed fighting in the capital and an escalation of combat in Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolis and commercial center — all suggested that the 17-month-old conflict was becoming increasingly intense and bitter, with more front lines and more bloodshed.

“It’s a rapid escalation,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Once you start using fixed-wing aircraft and you have a city under full revolt, it’s clear that the Assad regime is not going to stop and is not breaking. We’re entering a new phase of this conflict.”

Aleppo, which for much of the anti-Assad uprising had been relatively stable, now is the site of the most vicious fighting. For nearly two weeks, the Syrian Army has been battling rebel troops for control of the city, and for the first time, the United Nations said on Wednesday what rebels had been saying for days: the Syrian Army was using jet fighters in its arsenal of heavy weapons aimed at crushing the opposition. And they are not just flying, as in the past; now, according to the United Nations monitor mission in Syria and videos showing flashes of light bursting from dark jets, they are firing.

“Our observers confirmed fighter aircrafts firing rockets and cannons — heavy machine-gun fire,” said Sausan Ghosheh, a spokeswoman for the United Nations monitor mission.

Mr. Tabler noted that the Syrian warplanes were not yet dropping bombs. But the calculated escalation in the use of jets seemed to be part of a concerted effort by Mr. Assad to rally his supporters by making clear that he would not limit his military effort. In rare published remarks seemingly designed to marshal government forces and dissuade anyone thinking of defecting, he called on Syria’s military to show “more readiness and continued preparations” to confront “internal agents” seeking to destabilize his battered country, according to the official SANA news agency.

This week, it has become increasingly clear to outside military analysts that the fighting is likely to drag on in Aleppo. Helicopters thwacked overhead Wednesday as clashes broke out around several more police stations, which have become a focal point for rebels seeking to hold neighborhoods or gain ground.

Taxi drivers skittered down streets charging four or five times the usual fare, while residents said water, food and electricity seemed ever scarcer.

With the rebels now possessing tanks — United Nations observers did not have information on how many, or where they might be deployed — the conflict seems to be moving ever further away from the six-point plan for peace outlined by Kofi Annan, the special Syria envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League, whose plan seems increasingly irrelevant. Instead of steps toward a cease-fire, both sides appear to be rushing into the breach of civil war.

Opposition figures drew special attention to the bodies in Jdeidet Artouz — sending an alert to reporters with a link to live-streaming video of a mass funeral procession and mass burial — just one day after rebels in Aleppo caused an outcry among rights groups and others over their videotaped public executions of men identified as pro-government militiamen.

Those executions attracted hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and were cited by Russia, the Syrian government’s most important foreign backer, as evidence of brutality by Mr. Assad’s armed adversaries, whom he calls terrorists.

“Bloody reprisal of the opposition forces over the government supporters in Aleppo proves that human rights are violated by both sides,” said Gennady Gatilov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, in a Twitter message.

Last fall, “Kardokh,” a 25-year-old dissident and computer expert in the Syrian capital of Damascus, met with British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister. (Kardokh is his online pseudonym, used at his request.) McAllister, who’s made award-winning films in conflict zones like Yemen and Iraq, explained that he was shooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about underground activists in Syria, and asked if Kardokh would help him.

At the time, the situation in Syria was deteriorating rapidly, as protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime turned violent following a vicious crackdown by security forces. The Syrian government had drastically curtailed visits by foreign journalists, but McAllister had managed to get in undercover. Kardokh was grateful for a chance to tell his story. “Any journalist who was making the effort to show the world what was happening, that was a very important thing for us,” he told me in February.

At the time, Kardokh was providing computer expertise and secure communications to the resistance. He agreed to be interviewed about his work on camera by McAllister, who filmed his face, telling Kardokh that he would blur it out before publishing the footage. McAllister also asked Kardokh to put him in touch with other activists.

But some of McAllister’s practices made him uneasy, Kardokh said. He worried that the filmmaker didn’t realize how aggressive and pervasive the regime’s surveillance was. Kardokh and his fellow activists took elaborate measures with their digital security, encrypting their communications and using special software to hide their identities online. “I started to feel that Sean was careless,” Kardokh told me. He said he had urged McAllister to take more precautions in his communications and to encrypt his footage. “He was using his mobile and SMS, without any protections.”

Then, in October, McAllister was arrested by Syrian security agents. He wasn’t harmed, but was held for five days and said that he could hear the cries of prisoners being tortured in nearby rooms. Eventually, he was released and returned to the UK. “I didn’t realize exactly what they were risking until I went into that experience,” McAllister said in an interview on Channel 4 after his release.

The Syrians had interrogated McAllister about his activities, and seized his laptop, mobile phone, camera, and footage. All of McAllister’s research was now at the disposal of Syrian intelligence. When Kardokh heard that McAllister had been arrested, he didn’t hesitate—he turned off his mobile phone, packed his bag, and fled Damascus, staying with relatives in a nearby town before escaping to Lebanon. He said that other activists who had been in touch with McAllister fled the country as well, and several of those who didn’t were arrested. “I was happy that I hadn’t put him in contact with more people,” Kardokh said.

Rami Jarah, a Syrian activist based in Cairo, said that he tried to help another activist, known as Omar al-Baroudi, get out of the country after McAllister’s arrest. “He was terrified,” Jarrah said. “His face was in those videos. He said that his number was on Sean’s phone.” The next day, Baroudi disappeared, and Jarah said that he has not been heard from since.

Officials at Channel 4 say they took action to help McAllister’s sources after his arrest. “We have been in contact with everyone who felt at risk because they spoke to Sean,” said Amy Lawson, the channel’s head of communications. “He is an experienced filmmaker and took steps to protect his material. Syria is an extremely difficult environment to work in, so we continue to look for ways to minimize that risk whilst ensuring we tell this important story.”

It’s easy to argue that McAllister should have taken stronger precautions, but what, exactly? How many reporters are familiar enough with the technical aspects of digital security that they could protect their computers and phones from the Syrian intelligence service? The fact that McAllister, an experienced and committed journalist, jeopardized his sources with inadequate digital precautions is indicative of a broader problem in journalism today: We haven’t kept pace with technological advancements that have revolutionized both information-gathering and surveillance.

After researching the subject of digital security, I realized that there have been occasions in my own work as a freelancer covering the conflicts in Libya and Afghanistan when I’ve exposed myself and my sources by carrying unencrypted data or e-mailing sensitive information over insecure channels. It’s unclear what, if anything, major news organizations are doing about it. When CJR’s Alysia Santo recently tried asking outlets likeThe New York Times, she got a firm “no comment.” Curious, I e-mailed an informal survey to journalist friends and colleagues, and several who’ve worked as senior correspondents in Afghanistan for major US news outlets said they’d had little-to-no formal training or assistance from their organizations in digital security.

“I think that the journalism community in the US, and to some degree elsewhere, is just beginning to grasp the fact that they need to protect their information and, by extension, their sources,” said Frank Smyth, who is the senior adviser for journalist security at the Committee to Protect Journalists and also runs a private company, Global Journalist Security. “It’s just too easy to get in and lift their information or monitor their communications without them ever knowing they were compromised.”

For correspondents who report from conflict zones or on underground activism in repressive regimes, the risks are extremely high. Recently, two excellent investigative series—by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News—and the release of a large trove of surveillance industry documents by Wikileaks dubbed “The Spy files,” provided a glimpse of just how sophisticated off-the-shelf monitoring technologies have become. Western companies have sold mass Web and e-mail surveillance technology to Libya and Syria, for instance, and in Egypt, activists found specialized software that allowed the government to listen in to Skype conversations. In Bahrain, meanwhile, technology sold by Nokia Siemens allowed the government to monitor cell-phone conversations and text messages.

Journalists are tempting targets for spies armed with these technologies. During a reporting trip to Libya after the revolution, I spoke with former members of Qaddafi’s regime who told me that there had been an extensive program of surveillance targeting journalists both online and at the Rixos Hotel, where foreign correspondents visiting Tripoli were required to stay.

One of the sources, Marwan Arebi, was in charge of information technology at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had access to Libyan intelligence correspondence. He says hackers working for the regime had been able to access the accounts of foreign journalists using simple techniques, such as embedding a so-called Trojan-horse virus in a video ostensibly about human-rights violations in Tripoli, and then sending it to reporters. When the reporters opened the video file, spyware would be installed, allowing Qaddafi’s spies to access their computers remotely. Arebi said he was given access to the e-mail accounts of journalists working at CNN and other media organizations. “The problem wasn’t the sophistication of the tools, but rather the lack of knowledge of the reporters,” he said. “I think many sources who were speaking to these correspondents have been captured or killed.”

Arebi, no fan of Qaddafi, was secretly in contact with the Libyan opposition. In an attempt to warn the people named in the e-mails, he contacted Ahmed Ali, a Libyan activist in the US at the time, and passed him a list of the journalists who’d been hacked, as well as a spreadsheet which showed the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of underground sources in Tripoli that he said he’d obtained from a CNN account. As proof, he provided the journalist’s username and password to Ali, and Ali was able to log into the journalist’s CNN account with Outlook. Ali then passed along the information to CNN. A CNN spokeswoman told me the network had been informed of “a possible breach,” and had taken steps to remedy it. She declined to go into further detail.

Ali later showed me the spreadsheet, which included detailed information about sources in Tripoli who were in contact with the regime. One entry, titled “Hasan,” included a phone number and read: “Eyewitness who did not want to be named even with first name. Has a land line to prove he is in Tripoli but does not want to talk on it.” The spreadsheet’s authors also seemed to recognize the sensitivity of the information: “Please keep these contacts internal for just the int’l desk—and our team in Cairo. Do not pass these around to shows, etc.” Chillingly, Ahmed Ali recognized his fiancee’s phone number, though her name was not mentioned—she was still in Tripoli at the time. “I told her she needed to ditch that SIM card,” he said.

Despite the fact that the technology is complex and always changing, there are some basic practices that reporters can learn about online—such as how to encrypt your hard drive—that will only take an evening or two to implement. These precautions should extend to your smartphone as well. Look for a model that offers hardware encryption, and lock it with a longer password that includes random numbers and letters. It’s not rocket science (though it would have helped the NASA engineers who, it was reported in March, lost an unencrypted laptop with codes for the International Space Station).

If you’re reporting from a country with sophisticated electronic surveillance capabilities, like China or Iran, or trying to shield sources from Western intelligence agencies, then the techniques involved are more complicated and might require expert assistance. News organizations need to have in-house resources for their reporters, and they should offer assistance to the freelancers with whom they work.

Smyth, who helps train journalists in security practices, believes that part of the problem is one of mindset, as veteran reporters and editors find it frustrating and unnecessary to change longstanding practices. “You’re asking someone who’s already established and proven themselves to learn a new language,” he said.

Too many journalists I spoke to still regard digital security as an esoteric province of the technically inclined, and expressed fatalism that if “they” want to get it from you, they’ll get it. But as our research methods and communications are increasingly digitized, we need to accept that digital security is a fundamental aspect of the trade, as basic as maintaining accurate notes or paying attention to libel law.

The stakes can be incredibly high. Kardokh is still hiding. He’s now working on the Cyber Arabs Project, sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which aims to build an out-of-the-box laptop and mobile kit for activists that supports secure and anonymous communication.

Kardokh said that he is still grateful that McAllister helped draw attention to the situation in Syria, and noted that Channel 4 had been very active in providing assistance to their sources after the arrest. “For me, this was enough to say that Sean is still a friend,” he told me. He wished, though, that journalists would better inform themselves about the risks before visiting. “I think Western journalists can’t imagine the power of the regime here.”

Apr 4, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

By Jamie Crawford

The United States is providing Syrian opposition groups specialized equipment to help the opposition organize and communicate outside of the watchful eye of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

The equipment comes in addition to the increase in financial contributions that were announced this past weekend.

“The United States is going beyond humanitarian aid and providing additional assistance, including communications equipment that will help activists organize, evade attacks by the regime, and connect to the outside world - and we are discussing with our international partners how best to expand this support,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday in Istanbul at a meeting of the so-called ‘Friends of Syria.’

With the uprising in Syria entering its second year, the administration said the communications assistance is needed to supplement the $25 million in humanitarian assistance already pledged.

U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the aid say it includes satellite communication equipment, as well as hardware and software systems to help the opposition evade government censors, and more easily communicate internally and externally.

In her meetings in Istanbul, Clinton met with a woman from the besieged city of Homs who explained the communication challenges in Syria. The woman “made clear” to Clinton “that when Homs was under shelling attack, they didn’t even know what was happening on the other side of the city let alone be able to talk to opposition leaders in cities across Syria,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Monday.

In addition, Iran has provided assistance in helping the Syrian government use computer monitoring to rout out opposition using social media and other Internet tools, intelligence officials told CNN last month. The intelligence officials described the assistance as similar to the tools used by Iran to suppress its own revolution.

“The goal is to help the opposition communicate with itself, communicate with the outside world to help it to organize better and to help it have better situational awareness so it can evade regime attack,” Nuland said.

“What I will say is that we had a pretty modest program through (the Middle East Partnership Initiative) as we do in many countries,” Nuland said. “We will now be expanding this in scope.”

Last weekend Britain also announced additional non-lethal assistance for the opposition. Foreign Secretary William Hague said his government would be providing 500,000 pounds (nearly $802,000) to the opposition, which would include money for satellite communications equipment and training.

While the Obama administration refuses to arm the disparate opposition groups in Syria, the United States and other nations at the Istanbul meeting agreed to set up a “working group” to monitor countries that continue to arm and support the al-Assad regime.

-CNN’s Barbara Starr and Elise Labott contributed to this report

by Baba Amro News (@BabaAmroNews)

Since one week, the neighborhoods of Karam al-Zeitoun, Ashira, al-Adawia, al-Refai, and al-Wawiat are under siege with dozens of tanks and thousands of soldiers. The neighborhoods were under heavy continues shelling for several days. Following that, Assad troops and militia “Shabiha” were break into civilian houses in those neighborhoods, in the time where all telecommunication networks disconnected. Day after day, we discover new massacres in this area of Homs.

NUMBER OF KILLED CIVILIANS
======================

There is still no clear idea about the final number of killed civilians in the last ten days, but what we documented is more than thundered person killed. The most brutal one was in al-Adawi, the following videos bring you close to the event:
Children and women massacre in al-Adawi when we found it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrbdNCW03_k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V54XtBl_-VQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKOighAP6tU
Homs: Baba al-Sebaa: The bodies of women and children fill the place of makeshift hospital 11-03-2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnz1YvBMm04
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPMLtO_VWQI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEzs4kc1uro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW7o6HYO8n4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R5tTBhiF5M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJeWQPiA0VQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71mwvgApLg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRtBPKOdrcs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUNKPOh55GU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGz87YglpEI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_7hpxev5Hs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp5k9QniITU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acAStRnNzns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGxVAHXGdMc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjPd60OAvQg
The only survivor from the massacre of al-Adawia speaks about what he witnessed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdC6-ad3RGo

MASSACRE OF FAMILIES, AND 32 CHILDREN SURVIVED AFTER THEIR BODIES BEING DISMEMBERED
======================

On 15 March 2012, the rebels were able to reach some places on the border of al-Refai neighbourhood to look for any saviour and to recover the killed bodies. They found 32 children, 2 women are still alive and many died bodies (men, women, and children). The signs of gun shot can be seen on the bodies of children, some of them his stomach was stabbed, some their fingers were cut off, and others their hand were cut off. We saw the bones of the rib cage of one of the children as he got stabbed.
A girl, 10 years old told us that she gave an armed Assad thug “Shabih” all the money they have in their home to save herself from rapping. Three of those children are under 3 years old. The age of most of them range between 10-15 years. 18 of the children were given to their relatives, and we kept the rest in several places of our makeshift clinics. Most of those children lost their parents or members of their families, in the following are the filmed videos of this massacre:
One survived children from the massacre of Karm al-Zeitoun
http://youtu.be/vdC6-ad3RGo
Children were found among died bodies in the massacre of Karm al-Zeitoun
http://youtu.be/Gqq7cgLptUU
http://youtu.be/GsbA9X7quO0
A child talks about the massacre of Karm al-Zeitoun
http://youtu.be/ZQ2g9AK_1Jw
A woman talks about the massacre of Karm al-Zeitoun
http://youtu.be/WU7QctyTpLw
http://youtu.be/oiy3XfWy4R4
A survived child after being stabbed
http://youtu.be/QvvCkySnxq4
Another survived child after being stabbed talks about the massacre

Late last year, as the regime of Bashar Assad was continuing its murderous rampage against the people of Syria, the governments of Iran and Russia offered their diplomatic support. But Bashar also received significant practical assistance from a much more unlikely ally: an Italian surveillance firm by the name of Area SpA. Throughout all of 2011, employees of that company were being flown to Damascus to direct Syrian intelligence officers in the installation of a computer system that would allow the Syrian government to scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country. As the violence escalated, so did the regime’s insistence that the project be completed. It was a “race against time to set up monitoring centers,” says Trevor Timm, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who recently provided a report to the EU parliament on the subject—a race that Area SpA showed few qualms about participating in.

Indeed, the Italian company has plenty of competition from other Western firms—including Finfisher, Trovicor, and Blue Coat Systems, to name just a few—that are in the same line of work. The provision of high-tech surveillance equipment is a burgeoning business for technology companies in Europe and the United States—currently worth an estimated $5 billion per year and growing 20 percent annually—due in large part to the increased demand from authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and Asia. “They’re profiteering off people’s lives,” Timm says. But the companies have shown little inclination to voluntarily curtail the trade. That’s why a growing number of activists are now trying to increase the pressure on them.

Public shaming has been one of their primary methods. Timm’s report to the EU was unreservedly damning. And then there is Eric King, human rights advisor to Privacy International, who had been investigating the use of surveillance technology by authoritarian regimes for over a year—and who subsequently minced no words when it came to addressing those who furnished the wares, saying that Western companies were going “out of their way” to aid authoritarian regimes. When I recently spoke with him by telephone, King told me of people in post-revolutionary Libya and Egypt who had been sending him pictures of technology that had been acquired by their respective deposed regimes. “There’s barely a week that goes by without an activist sending me a photo of something and saying, ‘What is this and can it spy on my?’,” he says. “And it’s British-made satellite phone surveillance technology.”

The increased attention that activists like Timm and King—together with investigative reports in recent months by reporters at Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal—have brought to the issue has already convinced a few companies to change course. Area SpA, for example, has pulled out of its Syrian operations due to protest and public outcry. But many more firms still maintain an attitude of “plausible deniability”—as Timm terms it—wherein they claim they had no idea their technology would be used for nefarious purposes. This defense is made possible because the technology itself is not illegal, and is also used by democratic governments to target legitimate cybercrime.

Needless to say, this is a thin, and cynical, defense. After all, leaked files in the form of marketing slideshows by Cisco Systems have already come to light showing the American communications giant touting the capacity of their software to target and eliminate dissent. Further doubt is cast by the overall lack of transparency in this highly guarded industry, where much of the sales happen behind closed doors or at the notoriously journalist-prohibited ISS World Trade Shows. Taken all together, this suggests that at worst these companies are knowingly selling their product to egregious human rights abusers, and at best practicing what Timm calls “willful blindness.”

Activists have responded by taking a tough line, demanding government intervention. Eric King and Privacy International are advocating for Western governments to pass legislation regulating the types of software that can be exported. They want high-tech surveillance equipment to fall under “dual-use export control regimes, meaning that in order for companies to sell them abroad, the national government would need to grant an export license” as King puts it. Furthermore, Privacy International wants companies that violate such regulations—with the result that their technology is sold to known human rights abusers—to face stiff criminal charges.

By contrast, Timm’s organization, EFF, has come up with what he calls a “three-pronged strategy that goes after the customer as the choke point, and not the technology itself,” which, like most new software, is exceedingly hard to regulate. Its first aim is to set up a voluntary “know your customer” program that would remove any factor of deniability for these companies and create a culture of transparency, where public reaction against selling to despots makes it no longer an economically viable option. (King, for his part, believes that there is a problem with the “know your customer” program, namely that companies knowingly trading with repressive countries won’t be cowed by the mere threat of exposure.) The EFF also advocates the funding of circumvention technology that can be used by activists to mask their locations and encrypt communications. This last goal would have the greatest immediate effect, but is also the hardest to achieve, as governments are wary of giving funding to technology that could be used to stifle their own cyber security efforts.

Indeed, it will be difficult to pass any legislation at all targeting this powerful industry. King is already having discussions with the Business Minister and Head of Export Control of his native Britain about the prospect of tough legislation, but thus far little has come of it. In the United States, meanwhile, the only legislative action on this issue is a bill by Rep. Chris Smith that is waiting to be heard by the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises. The bill seeks to enact some of the desired export controls on this technology. But currently it has only two cosponsors and there’s little word of it gaining traction any time soon.

However, even without the large-scale legislation in place that is advocated by King and Timm, there have been positive results in recent months. California-based Blue Coat Systems is now under investigation by the Commerce Department to determine whether they had prior knowledge that their technology was being used by Assad’s regime. Also facing litigation is Cisco Systems, who will have to answer for the leaked documents that suggest they were fully aware of the intended use for their products. Although these companies represent a tiny fraction of a massively profitable and rapidly growing industry, holding them accountable sets an important precedent for the future.

Still, activists like Timm and King are taking such a tough stand now because they know that not much more progress can be made unless Western governments stick up for their own humanitarian foreign policy objectives. For those living under authoritarian regimes, Western technology is still being used to extract information that leads to activists’ arrest and, quite often, torture. Such was the case of Abdul Ghani Al-Khanjar, a 39-year-old school administrator and activist who was seized from his home in Bahrain last year and tortured while being read a series of text messages he sent that lead to his arrest. There have been and—for the immediate future at least—will likely continue to be many more such cases in Syria. As Timm put it, “It’s getting worse and the longer we wait to do something the worse it will get.”

Nick Robins-Early is an intern at The New Republic

UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Kofi Annan. Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Kofi Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, said he would urge president Bashar al-Assad and his foes to stop fighting and seek a political solution, drawing angry rebukes from dissidents.

“The killing has to stop and we need to find a way of putting in the appropriate reforms and moving forward,” Mr Annan said yesterday in Cairo ahead of his trip to Damascus tomorrow.

Syrian dissidents reacted with dismay and said government repression had destroyed prospects of a negotiated deal. More than 7,500 people have been killed in a year-long crackdown on an uprising against Mr Assad, according to the United Nations.

“We reject any dialogue while tanks shell our towns, snipers shoot our women and children and many areas are cut off from the world by the regime without electricity, communications or water,” said Hadi Abdullah, contacted in the city of Homs.

Another activist said Mr Annan’s call for dialogue sounded “like a wink at Bashar” that would only encourage Mr Assad to “crush the revolution”.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, on a separate mission to Syria, said she was “devastated” by the destruction she had seen in the Baba Amr district of Homs city, and wanted to know what had happened to its residents, who endured a 26-day military siege before rebel fighters withdrew a week ago.

Ms Amos is the first senior foreign official to visit Baba Amr since the government assault.

As world pressure on Syria mounted, the deputy oil minister announced his defection, the first by a senior civilian official since the start of the uprising. Abdo Hussameldin (58) said he knew his change of sides would bring persecution on his family.

Two rebel groups later said four more high-ranking military officers had defected over the past three days to a camp for Syrian army deserters in southern Turkey.

Lieutenant Khaled al-Hamoud, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), told Reuters by telephone the desertions brought to seven the number of brigadier generals who had defected.

In Damascus, the authorities continued to crack down on Assad opponents, with government forces shooting and wounding three mourners at a funeral for an army defector that turned into a protest against the president, locals said.

Opposition sources and residents say protests in the capital are driven by inflation and the plunging value of the Syrian pound.

The world has failed to stop an unequal struggle pitting mostly Sunni Muslim demonstrators and lightly armed rebels against the armored might of Assad’s 300,000-strong military, secret police and feared Alawite militiamen.

Western powers have shied away from Libya-style military intervention in Syria, which sits at the heart of a conflict-prone Middle East.

This week, US defense secretary Leon Panetta defended US caution about military involvement, especially without international consensus on Syria, but said the Pentagon had reviewed US military options.

Tunisia and Turkey, a neighbor of Syria, have also declared their opposition to intervention by any force from outside the region, and Mr Annan argued against further militarisation of the conflict.

“We should not forget the possible impact of Syria on the region if there is any miscalculation,” the former UN chief said.

But Syrian dissidents said diplomatic initiatives had proved fruitless in the past. “When they fail no action is taken against the regime and that’s why the opposition has to arm itself against its executioner,” said one rebel army officer.

Russia, a staunch defender of Syria, said Mr Assad was battling al Qaeda-backed “terrorists” including at least 15,000 foreign fighters who it said would seize towns if Assad troops withdraw.

“The flow of all kind of terrorists from some neighboring countries is always increasing,” Russia’s deputy ambassador Mikhail Lebedev said in Geneva.

The Libyan government denied Russian accusations that it was running camps to train and arm Syrian rebels.

On the ground, the humanitarian situation appeared dire. The United Nations said it was preparing food supplies for 1.5 million Syrians as part of a 90-day emergency plan.

“More needs to be done,” John Ging of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which is headed by Ms Amos, told a Syria Humanitarian Forum in Geneva.

Reuters

Shelling: A woman holds her daughter as she looks at a building hit by Syrian Army bombings

Attempts to evacuate two wounded journalists from the besieged city of Homs failed as ambulances carrying injured civilians left without them.

Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy and French reporter Edith Bouvier, of Le Figaro newspaper, were injured in a deadly bombardment which killed war correspondent Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik on Wednesday.

Teams from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent made their way into the embattled neighbourhood of Baba Amr yesterday to remove casualties but parted without the wounded journalists or the bodies of their colleagues.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said last night: “We were not able to evacuate the foreign journalists or the bodies of those journalists killed last week.
“We do not know the reason why.

“The situation on the ground is very tense and communications are very difficult.”

The ambulances left Baba Amr, which has been devastated by a month of shelling by Syrian government forces, carrying an elderly woman and a pregnant woman with her husband.

Efforts to rescue Mr Conroy and Ms Bouvier were launched last week following the rocket attack on the makeshift media centre where they were working.

On Sunday, Mr Conroy’s wife Kate said her husband had rejected an opportunity to leave Homs with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent for fear it was “not to be trusted”.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has said there was evidence of people on the ground “infiltrating” the humanitarian organisation and “posing an additional danger” to anyone seeking to leave the city.

Foreign Office officials are understood to be working alongside the French embassy to try to retrieve the journalists and are said to be pressing the Syrian ministry of foreign affairs.
Mr Conroy, 47, from Totnes, Devon, has appealed for help in a video posted on YouTube.

Lying on a sofa in a darkened room and covered in a blanket, he said he sustained “three large wounds” to his leg in the attack and was being looked after by the Free Syrian Army medical staff.

The freelance photographer and film-maker, who was also hit in the stomach by shrapnel, added that he wanted to reassure family and friends in Britain that he was “absolutely OK”.

Ms Bouvier, who suffered multiple leg fractures, was also seen begging for help in being evacuated to safety in Lebanon.

On Friday, teams from the ICRC were deployed to Homs to evacuate seven wounded and 20 women and children.

The organisation has since stressed the “urgent” need to evacuate those who require help and bring in vital assistance.

The Foreign Office has said “all the necessary work” was being done to repatriate Ms Colvin’s body and ensure Mr Conroy “gets to safety”.

The award-winning war reporter, 56, was killed after defying an order from her editor to leave the opposition stronghold of Homs because she wanted to finish “one more story” her mother Rosemarie has said.

At the time, she was the only British newspaper reporter in the city, which has become a symbol of the 11-month uprising against Syrian president Bashar Assad.

Syrian activists have accused his forces of deliberately targeting the journalists.
The Syrian foreign ministry has offered condolences to the families of Ms Colvin and Mr Ochlik but denied any responsibility for their deaths.

Getty Images

Washington, D.C.—Fifty-six foreign policy experts and former U.S. government officials signed an open letter today urging President Obama to act more assertively to stop the Assad regime’s continuing atrocities against Syrian civilians.  Organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the letter calls on the President to immediately establish safe zones and no-go zones within Syrian territory; establish contacts with the Free Syrian Army and provide a full range of direct assistance including self-defense aid; improve U.S. coordination with political opposition groups and provide them with secure communication technologies; and work with Congress to improve crippling U.S. and multilateral sanctions on the Syrian government.

For eleven months, the Syrian people have been dying on a daily basis at the hands of the Assad regime.  The letter urges that, “Given the United Nations Security Council’s recent failure to act…the United States cannot continue to defer its strategic and moral responsibilities in Syria to regional actors such as the Arab League, or to wait for consent from the Assad regime’s protectors, Russia and China.”

The letter calls on the President to lead on Syria. “Unless the United States takes the lead and acts, either individually or in concert with like-minded nations, thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die, and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider instability in the Middle East.  Given American interests in the Middle East, as well as the implications for those seeking freedom in other repressive societies, it is imperative that the United States and its allies not remove any option from consideration, including military intervention.’”

The full text of the letter and signatories can be found below.

February 17, 2012

 
The Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
Washington, D.C.
 
Dear Mr. President:
 
For eleven months now, the Syrian people have been dying on a daily basis at the hands of their government as they seek to topple the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad.  As the recent events in the city of Homs—in which hundreds of Syrians have been killed in a matter of days—have shown, Assad will stop at nothing to maintain his grip on power.
 
Given the United Nations Security Council’s recent failure to act, we believe that the United States cannot continue to defer its strategic and moral responsibilities in Syria to regional actors such as the Arab League, or to wait for consent from the Assad regime’s protectors, Russia and China.  We therefore urge you to take immediate steps to decisively halt the Assad regime’s atrocities against Syrian civilians, and to hasten the emergence of a post-Assad government in Syria.
 
Syria’s future is not purely a humanitarian concern.  The Assad regime poses a grave threat to national security interests of the United States.  The Syrian government, which has been on the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list since 1979, maintains a strategic partnership with the terror-sponsoring government of Iran, as well as with Hamas and Hezbollah.  For years, it facilitated the entry of foreign fighters into Iraq who killed American troops.  For years, it secretly pursued a nuclear program with North Korea’s assistance.  And for decades, it has closely cooperated with Iran and other agents of violence and instability to menace America’s allies and partners throughout the Middle East.
 
Equally troubling, foreign powers have already directly intervened in Syria—in support of the Assad regime.  Russia is providing arms and supplies to the Syrian government.  Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah are reportedly operating in Syria, and assisting Syrian military forces and pro-regime militias in efforts to crush the Syrian opposition.  In turn, the lack of resolve and action by the responsible members of the international community is only further emboldening the Assad regime.
 
Given these facts, we urge you to take the following immediate actions to hasten an end to the Assad regime and the humanitarian catastrophe that it is inflicting on the Syrian people:

• Immediately establish safe zones within Syrian territory, as well as no-go zones for the Assad regime’s military and security forces, around Homs, Idlib, and other threatened areas, in order to protect Syrian civilians.  To the extent possible, the United States should work with like-minded countries like Turkey and members of the Arab League in these efforts.

• Establish contacts with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and, in conjunction with allies in the Middle East and Europe, provide a full range of direct assistance, including self-defense aid to the FSA.

• Improve U.S. coordination with political opposition groups and provide them with secure communications technologies and other assistance that will help to improve their ability to prepare for a post-Assad Syria.

• Work with Congress to impose crippling U.S. and multilateral sanctions on the Syrian government, especially on Syria’s energy, banking, and shipping sectors.

Unless the United States takes the lead and acts, either individually or in concert with like-minded nations, thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die, and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider instability in the Middle East.  Given American interests in the Middle East, as well as the implications for those seeking freedom in other repressive societies, it is imperative that the United States and its allies not remove any option from consideration, including military intervention.

The Syrian people are asking for international assistance.  It is apparent that American leadership is required to ensure the quickest end to the Assad regime’s brutal reign, and to clearly show the Syrian people that, as you said on February 4, 2012, the people of the free world stand with them as they seek to realize their aspirations.

Sincerely,

By Barbara Starr