05/14/2013 - #Syria - Ar Raqqah - Demonstrations against Jabhat Al Nusra executions in revenge of Banyas massacre (via @Alexblx)
03/12/12 Graphic Warning!
#Ziabiyeh #Damascus #Syria: at least 30 people were field executed by Syrian regime forces in the Ziabiyeh
24/10/12 Graphic Warning!
#Syria Assad Soldiers Plant Weapons On Executed Civilians 10 21 12 Con Artist Dictator
Reports suggest that the Syrian government is using helicopter gunships, and conducting violent raids, in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo.
This action comes as the Free Syrian Army appear to be celebrating their key advances in key regions, and taking over border posts.
Witnesses say the Syrian government is using helicopter gunships and conducting raids in the capital Damascus.
There’s also reports of unrest in Aleppo — an economic and political hub.
Jane Ferguson has more.
Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and his regime have been dealt a series of powerful blows in recent days, most notably a Damascus bomb attack that struck at the heart of the regime. Assad appeared on Syrian television on Thursday to swear in his new minister of defense Fahd Jassem al-Freij, however video has emerged on YouTube of burning tanks and street fighting across the country, as well as the takeover of a Turkish border post. All of this suggests that the FSA (Free Syrian Army) are making progress in this 17-month civil war.
Syria’s Assad regime under mounting pressure.
24/10/12
#Syria, #Assad army field executed COWS in Shifonieh in #Damascus;They don’t spare animals from their barbarity
08/10/12 GRAPHIC WARNING!
#Syria, Security forces in #Maaret Al Nouman, #Idlib, executed all their detainees before retreating from the town’s jail
#Syria, Founder of Shabiha militia dies
02/10/12
Assad Shabiha militiamen carrying guns during a raid campaign. Photo source: SRCC.
Mass anti-Assad protests were reported in his home town in the Latakia suburb of Kerdaha as the founder of the Shabiha organization Mohammad al-Assad known as “the Sheikh of the Mountain” was killed during clashes with armed militias from al-Khayer clan.
At least 30 civilians killed “execution style” were discovered in a basement in southern neighbourhood of Asaly in Damascus. Meanwhile, regime forces committed the 4thmassacre in less than a week in the neighbourhood of Barzeh claiming the lives of eight civilians who were discovered near the Tishrin military hospital.
Regime forces stormed the Harasta national hospital in the Damascus suburb of Harata and arrested all injured civilians following a heavy shelling that also left more than 13 civilians dead.
At least ten people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Douma and ten more died in the provincial town of Deir Suleiman in the eastern Ghouta district due to the fierce and indiscriminate shelling by regime forces.
Atavists said at least eight Syrian intelligence agents were killed and several dozen people wounded in a car-bomb attack in the north-eastern town of Qamishli.
Several dozen people were also killed as regime forces resumed shelling the Damascus suburbs of Zabadani, Saqba, Kafarbatna, Erbin, Asal al-Ward, Hosh Arab, Mesraba, Mdeira and Hejeira Balad.
In Deir Azzour, at least 41 civilians died, of which nine were killed in an air strike by a MIG fighter jet that targeted a four-story building in the neigbourhood of Hamidiya, while eight family members were killed “execution style” in the neighbourhood of Qosour. Several dozen people were also reported dead in several neighbourhoods and towns as the fierce fighting and shelling continued in the provincial town of Boukamal and Deir Azzour.
Fierce clashes continued for the third consecutive day throughout the city of Aleppo as the regime’s heavy artillery and fighter jets continued to pound the residential areas killing dozens of people and wounding many more.
In the meantime, regime forces resumed their fierce and indiscriminate shelling of densely populated areas throughout the country, leaving scores of civilians dead and wounded while destroying dozens of houses. They shelled several neighbourhoods in the city of Homs as well as its provincial towns of Talkalakh, Qosayr and Rastan. They also shelled several villages in the western suburbs of Hama as well as the Daraa suburbs of Inkhel, Bosra, Ghariya Gharbiya, Um Mayathen and the Lajat district.
They shelled the Idlib suburbs of Ma’arrat Noman, Sarmin, Kafarnabel, Taftanaz, Has and Heish as well as the Raqa suburbs of Ain Eissa and Tal Abyad in addition to the village of Bakas in the Latakia suburb of Haffeh.
29/09/12
#Syria,#Assad thugs used civilians as human shields 2 storm Qudsaya in #Damascus sub. & were field-executed after that
16/09/12
#Syria| Damascus | Extra Judicially Executed Civilians in Jobar-
Four civilians executed extra judicially by Al- Assad’s militias in Jobar. This footage was taken on September 15, 2012
U.N. envoy says he’ll ‘spare no effort’ to halt #Syria bloodshed
14/09/12
Lakhdar Brahimi replaces Kofi Annan as the U.N. envoy to Syria
(CNN) — The newly minted U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria vowed Thursday during his first visit to Damascus to “spare no effort” to help end that country’s civil war.
Lakhdar Brahimi, who replaced Kofi Annan as the international community’s point man for the conflict, held “candid and comprehensive” talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, a U.N. statement said.
“Mr. Brahimi emphasized that, as he said before, he would spare no effort to help find a solution to the crisis,” the statement read. “His only masters in this endeavor were the Syrian people, whose welfare and security were his prime concern.”
Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, was also to meet with opposition figures and other groups during his visit.
Brahimi was named to the post after Annan resigned in August, blasting the Syrian government for refusing to implement a cease-fire he had negotiated in April and complaining about the “escalating military campaign” of the opposition.
The 18-month-old conflict claimed another 165 lives Thursday, opposition activists reported, with 66 reported in the suburbs of Damascus and another 52 in the commercial hub of Aleppo. Both cities have been the scene of recent intense fighting between government troops and rebel fighters.
UN Report Charges Shabiha in #Syria Killings
Syria’s shabiha militia are suspected of recent summary executions in Daraya on August 25 (AP)
September 11, 2012
A United Nations report to be issued this week accuses President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government of using its military and an allied militia, the shabiha, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity to help the regime stay in power.
The document, entitled the Syria report, says the Syrian opposition also has committed rights violations during the uprising that started a year and a half ago, but concludes the government and its allies have been the main perpetrators.
The report is to be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. The Human Rights Council opened a three-week meeting in Geneva on Monday.
A panel of U.N.-appointed independent commissioners listened to more than 1,000 accounts of murder, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and torture during its investigation of human rights violations and war crimes in Syria over the past 18 months.
The panel’s report places part of the blame for the violations on units of the loosely organized Free Syrian Army rebels. But most of panel’s accusations of criminal acts are leveled at President Assad’s military and the much feared shabiha militia – pro-government enforcers closely tied to the Assad regime and its supporters in the Alawite community.
“The commission finds reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity, breaches of international humanitarian law and gross human rights violations have been committed in the Syrian Arab Republic,” the report says.
“The shabiha were identified as perpetrators of many of the crimes” said the report, which includes a confidential list of suspected individuals and units.
Karen Koning AbuZayd, one of the commissioners investigating evidence in the Syria violence, described the panel’s investigation and the prominence of testimony against the shabiha.
”As some of the defectors said, they [the shabiha] go in to clean up and get rid of many of the people who they can identify to be murdered,” she said.
This is the commission’s third report. AbuZayd said a fourth is likely.
Assad leans more on Alawi shabiha
For more than a year, protest organizers and citizen journalists have reported a large number of non-uniformed combatants known as shabiha, who accompany regular Syrian army units attacking communities sympathetic to the revolution or act as eager enforcers at military and police checkpoints.
According to August 1 testimony by Martin Indyk, foreign policy director for the Brookings Institution, there were at the time several thousand shabiha.
“With their backs to the wall, the Alawite regime considers its choice as binary – either kill or be killed,” Indyk told the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations.
In addition to the government’s estimated 300,000-member military, Indyk cited “a paramilitary force – the feared ‘shabiha’ [ghosts] – of several more thousand…”
Recent reports indicate that as Sunni Muslims defected from the Syrian military, the Assad regime is increasingly filling the vacancies with Alawites, many who have previously served in the nation’s conscript army.
Jeffrey White, a military analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C., recently returned from meeting with military defectors and Free Syrian Army rebel commanders.
“One of the things we heard when we were out in Turkey,” said White, “is that, in fact, the government had mobilized retired military officers to train the shabiha, that they have a training camp and headquarters, that there is some sort of organizational structure for them…”
Houla massacre
The U.N. panel singled out the Assad regime and its Alawite supporters in a massacre of more than 100 people last May in the small town of Taldou in al-Houla.
Contemporary accounts of the incident described Taldou as a village of Sunnis surrounded by several villages of Alawites who are believed to have helped the government to invade the village in search of rebels. Until recent reports of deaths in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, the Houla massacre captured the attention of the world.
The panel found that most of the fatalities were the result of summary executions by armed civilians accompanying military troops. According to the U.N. report, for example, 60 members of one family, the Abdulrazzaks, were killed in broad daylight on May 25.
The commission examined but dismissed the regime’s own investigation and claim that anti-government forces were to blame.
The U.N. inquiry is based on satellite imagery of the village and telephone conversations with six witnesses in the village. The commissioners said the deaths of members of two extended families were politically motivated.
Ghosts in a shifting culture of violence
However, much of the testimony about shabiha violence involves perpetrators without names. And in Syria’s current lawlessness, the acts of local armed defense councils, shabiha and common criminals may look alike, according to commission member AbuZayd.
The image of the shabiha has been blurred in international media as well.
“The groups referred to as shabiha by the Arab satellite news channels are a different breed altogether: violent ex-offenders and outlaws who enjoy a complex relationship with the mukhabbarat [secret police] and police officers, who run them and share in the profits of their criminal enterprise,” writes Damascus journalist Yassin al-Haj Salih.
Even so, the threat of the shabiha remains strong. Shortly after he published an analysis of the shabiha in a Heinrich Boll Foundation publication, Salih felt it necessary to go into hiding and declined further interviews on the subject.
Could the shabiha be tried in the Hague?
AbuZayd said there is concern that while the shabiha’s criminal activities are well-documented, more evidence needs to be developed on the identities of the shabiha members who commit them.
White said, “I think there’s more structure, more organization than we know. We see that the shabiha are cooperating directly with regime forces. They ride with the tanks; they use them in combat; they use them as light infantry. The regular army and the shabiha are working together.
“It should not be an overwhelming obstacle to bring some of these guys to trial,” said White. “For one thing, the opposition knows who these guys are by name. The names of shabiha people and commanders, the opposition is going to know that.”
In addition to testimony from shabiha victims, defectors who managed units of shabiha confirmed the government role to the U.N. commissioners. “That’s why we are able to say we think what is going on is a product of state policy. Someone is controlling this,” AbuZayd said.
“With shabiha, it’s hard to tell, but people describe them pretty consistently, I would say, and our information comes from victims who say, ‘The shabiha did to us.
#Syria, Assad’s forces shell Damascus rebel stronghold, 4 killed
11/09/12
(Reuters) - At least four people were killed and dozens wounded on Tuesday in ground and aerial bombardments of one of the last rebel strongholds in the Syrian capital Damascus, opposition activists said.
Numerous buildings were hit by artillery and helicopter gunfire in Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood, they said. Footage posted on the Internet by activists showed holes in buildings and rubble strewn in alleyways.
Hajar al-Aswad is home to many Syrians who fled the Golan Heights in 1967 during the Six-Day War with Israel and many have now fled violence in the capital to return to villages near the border, 35 kms (22 miles) to the southwest.
The neighborhood is one of a series of Sunni Muslim districts on the edge of the capital that have been at the forefront of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, who belongs to the minority Alawite sect.
“Rebel operations from Hajar al-Assad had stopped, but today we saw the heaviest bombardment on the district in two months,” said activist Abdallah Golan, from the opposition Damascus Media Center, speaking by phone from the scene.
Shelling was also reported on the southern Tadamon district, where rebels had pulled out, and the southern Damascus suburb of Yalda, other opposition campaigners said.
Government forces, backed by armor, artillery and air power, have attacked a dozen Sunni districts on the outskirts of Damascus in a campaign to put down the rebellion in the capital.
Activists and residents say the assaults have killed at least 2,000 people in the last two months and many were summarily executed after government troops made incursions in residential districts following ground and aerial bombarding.
(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Amman newsroom; Editing by Angus MacSwan
Syrian Rebel Video Appears to Show 20 Executed Soldiers
11/09/12
FSA soldiers scan for targets from within a bombed building in Saif Al Dula district in Aleppo, Syria, Monday, Sept. 10, 2012.
Syrian rebels have posted an Internet video that appears to show the bodies of 20 soldiers whom they executed in the northern city of Aleppo.
In the video published Monday, the bodies of men dressed in military fatigues can be seen lined up on a pavement with their heads bloodied. The men were blindfolded and handcuffed. Rebels also can be heard calling the dead men “dogs.” The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the incident happened within the past few days.
U.N. officials have accused both Syrian government and rebel forces of committing atrocities in the country’s civil war. Speaking in Geneva Monday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay urged the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, to ensure that all perpetrators of rights violations do not escape justice.
Also in Geneva, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rebuked the Security Council for failing to take a unified approach to ending the Syrian crisis. He said he is “deeply troubled by the aerial bombardments of civilians by government forces” in Syria, and he expressed concern at increasing sectarian tensions and the deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Ban urged nations and Syrians to support the diplomatic efforts of the new U.N.-Arab League envoy for the Syrian crisis, Lakhdar Brahimi. The envoy met with Egyptian and Arab League officials in Cairo on Monday.
Brahimi said his mission is “very difficult,” but he promised he will give whatever assistance he can to the Syrian people. Asked if he would meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Brahimi said: “I hope to, but I don’t know.”
In another development, one of the most prominent defectors from the Syrian government said he opposes foreign intervention in Syria. In an interview broadcast Monday on French television network BFM, former general Manaf Tlass said he believes Syrian rebels can topple the Assad government with the help of foreign supplies rather than direct intervention.
Tlas has been in exile in France since his defection in July. Some Syrian opposition figures remain suspicious of him because of his long service to Assad.
04/09/12
#Syria, 17 unidentified bodies of men, shackled executed then thrown on the ground, by assad’s thugs!
#Syria army destroys houses in “collective punishment”
03/09/12
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Syrian army bulldozers razed houses in western Damascus on Monday, pursuing what activists called collective punishment of Sunni Muslim areas hostile to President Bashar al-Assad.
In northern Syria, 18 bodies were found in the rubble of a house bombed by a Syrian warplane in the rebel-held town of al-Bab and 13 more are missing, an opposition watchdog group said.
Bulldozers backed by combat troops demolished buildings in the poor Tawahin district, near the Damascus-Beirut highway, activists and residents said.
“They started three hours ago. The bulldozers are bringing down shops and houses. The inhabitants are in the streets,” said a woman who lives in a high-rise building overlooking the area.
Syrian authorities restrict independent media access, making it hard to verify accounts of the conflict from both sides.
Troops forced residents to erase anti-Assad graffiti and write slogans glorifying the president instead, activists said.
“This is an unprovoked act of collective punishment. The rebels had left, there are no longer even demonstrations in the area,” said Mouaz al-Shami, a campaigner collecting video documentation of the demolitions.
“The regime can’t stop itself from repeating the brutality of the 1980s,” he said, alluding to mass killings and wholesale destruction in the city of Hama in 1982 under Assad’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for 30 years.
The Assad family and most members of the ruling elite belong to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.
“The regime has not changed. It will not,” Shami said.
Activists also reported the razing or burning of at least 200 houses and shops in the old part of the southern city of Deraa in the last few days. Army shelling had largely emptied the area, prompting 40,000 people to flee to Jordan.
WAVE OF DEMOLITIONS
The latest wave of demolitions follows the destruction of dozens of buildings in an area next to Tawahin in Damascus on Sunday and in the Sunni district of Qaboun last month.
“I visited Qaboun yesterday. It is no longer a dense neighbourhood. I could see from one end of the neighbourhood to the other because so many buildings have been razed,” said another Damascus activist who gave her name only as Yasmine.
The army, which appears to have regained control of Damascus proper after an insurgent offensive that began in July, shelled outlying southern and eastern districts overnight to try to drive out rebels still operating there, opposition groups said.
At least two people were killed in the southern neighbourhood of Qadam, they added.
Troops also made forays into eastern suburbs battered by artillery and air power in recent weeks, arresting and summarily executing young men, the opposition groups said.
Video footage from the eastern suburb of Irbin showed the bodies of three young men shot in the face inside a house, their blood spattered on the walls and floor
“This is the latest massacre of Assad’s army in Irbin,” an activist speaking in front of the camera said.
The air raid in which at least 18 people were reported killed in the northern town of al-Bab, in Aleppo province, was another sign of the Syrian military’s increasing use of its planes and helicopters to attack rebel-held areas.
Five women and two children were among the dead, according to Rami Abdulrahman of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “People in al-Bab say there are 13 more people trapped under the building after one big attack.”
He said five people had been killed and 27 wounded by a car bomb blast in the Damascus district of Jaramanah.
Syria’s state news agency SANA said earlier that the wounded included women and children but did not give details on fatalities. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
A bomb killed 12 people in the same district a week ago in a what state media called a “terrorist” attack. Opposition sources said the security forces were behind it.
More than 20,000 people have been killed in Syria since initially peaceful protests against Assad erupted in March 2011. (Editing by Alistair Lyon)
