Syrian Freedom

Gunfire from #Syria hits Golan - Israeli army

Nov 26.12

Occupied Jerusalem: Gunfire from Syria hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights overnight close to an Israeli military vehicle monitoring the ceasefire line but causing no injuries, the occupation military said on Monday.

“There was gunfire near an Israeli military vehicle which was driving along the security fence,” a military spokeswoman said, adding the incident had occurred late on Sunday.

But she said troops in the area had not returned fire as they have done on previous occasions.

Such incidents have occurred with increasing frequency in the past few weeks as violence from the civil war in Syria spills across the ceasefire line.

Earlier this month, Israeli troops fired warning shots and tank shells across the UN-monitored ceasefire line in response to Syrian fire, in the first instance of Israeli fire directed at the Syrian military in the Golan Heights since their 1973 war.

Fears of a spillover of the conflict which has ravaged Syria for the past 20 months and left more than 40,000 dead, have widened as violence has spread to Syria’s borders with Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

IDF responds to #Syria gunfire, killing three soldiers

Smoke rises after shells exploded in the Syrian village of Bariqa, near the Israeli-Syrian border, near Alonei Habashan in the Golan Heights, Monday, Nov. 12, 2012. Photo by AP

Israel fired artillery into Syria in response to gunfire aimed at its troops in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing three Syrian soldiers, Israel’s army said on Sunday.

There were no reported injuries on the Israeli side from the shootings, which occurred on Saturday, the third case this month of violence seen as a spillover of civil unrest in Syria that has also alarmed other neighbors such as Lebanon and Turkey.

“There was small arms fire [at Israeli forces], there was a response and from what I hear over Arab media it appears Syrian soldiers were killed,” Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s chief military spokesman, told Army Radio.

He said Israel was trying not to be dragged into battles between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebels.

The chaos of the 20-month-old insurgency often makes independent assessment of casualties within Syria difficult.

“Our trigger finger is very stiff, not light,” Mordechai said. “Under no circumstances do we accept any shooting on the State of Israel’s territory, but nor do we intend to heat up the area.”

Israel captured the Golan area in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognized internationally.

Israel lodged a complaint with the United Nations over Saturday’s incident. The UN has a peace-keeper force in the area monitoring a ceasefire in place since the 1970s.

Syrian gunfire hits northern Lebanese towns

26/10/12

Gunshots fired from Syria hit northern Lebanese towns on Thursday evening, the National News Agency reported.

According to the report, shots fired from a Syrian military outpost in Tallit al-Dabbousiye hit the towns of Wadi al-Hour, Qalqash, Abboudiyeh and Hokr Janine, in North Lebanon’s Akkar region.

It added that no casualties or material damage was reported.

Lebanon is harboring a great number of Syrian refugees on its territory, while cross-border violations and Syrian shellings are almost daily occurrences.

Violence across Syria has killed more than 35,000 people, most of them civilians, since the outbreak of a revolt against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March last year, a watchdog group said.

-NOW Lebanon

16/09/12

#Syria, Qaboun | Damascus | Sound of Gunfire Can Be Heard

#Syria-linked fighting rocks Lebanon’s Tripoli

At least 33 people were wounded in running clashes between pro- and anti-Damascus regime supporters in Lebanon’s second largest city of Tripoli, security and army officials said on Tuesday.

The fighting erupted days after a wave of kidnappings targeting Syrians in Lebanon, in a new sign that violence in neighbouring Syria is exacerbating tensions in the small Mediterranean country.

Lebanon lived under three decades of Syrian hegemony and remains deeply divided between supporters and opponents of Damascus.

Exchanges of gunfire erupted on Monday and continued through the night between Tripoli’s mainly Sunni district of Bab el-Tebbaneh and the largely Alawite area of Jabal Mohsen.

“Clashes are ongoing, and the army is currently intervening,” a military official told AFP.

Several houses caught fire and cars were damaged in the fighting, which has added to fears that the conflict in Syria is increasingly spilling over into Lebanon, destabilising the already fragile security situation.

Ten soldiers were wounded as were 23 civilians, both Sunni and Alawite, security and army officials said.

The violence was centred around the aptly named Syria Street, the symbolic “dividing line” between the rival Tripoli districts, and many civilians have fled the area.

The Sunni-majority port city has been the scene of intense and sometimes deadly clashes between Sunni supporters of the anti-Syrian opposition and Alawite Muslims loyal to a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Iran and Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting an increasingly bloody 17-month uprising against his regime, hails from the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The fighting in Tripoli erupted after a wave of mass kidnappings of Syrians in Lebanon, with the opposition Syrian National Council accusing the authorities of failing to act over the attacks.

“Syrians in Lebanon have been abducted by political parties, and subject to arbitrary arrests by security agents, without the authorities so much as lifting a finger,” the SNC said in a statement, implicitly blaming Hezbollah.

Last week, an armed Shiite clan claimed it had kidnapped around 20 Syrians in retaliation for the abduction of a family member by a Syrian rebel group, which accused him of being a Hezbollah sniper.

Many more were reportedly seized as rioters went on the rampage in Beirut, attacking shops and cars belonging to Syrians.

Hezbollah, considered the most powerful military force in Lebanon, has denied any connection with the clan member or the kidnappings.

The SNC also said Lebanese army intelligence on Monday raided the home of a Syrian humanitarian activist and arrested two of his colleagues, and that they also arrested a Syrian lawyer.

President Michel Sleiman on Tuesday urged Lebanon’s judiciary to “issue immediate arrest warrants for the kidnappers” and called on security officials to “act to free those abducted.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch called on the Lebanese authorities to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the kidnappings.

“Lebanese authorities need to enforce the law and end impunity for kidnappings and other violent acts carried out against Syrian citizens in the name of reprisal,” said Nadim Houry, HRW’s deputy Middle East director.

15/08/2012 Damascus, #Syria *GRAPHIC*: Martyrs executed by the regime forces’ direct gunfire in Qaboun

#Syria, Bomb blasts, gunfire in central Damascus

10/08/12

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Gunmen simultaneously detonated two roadside bombs and clashed with police in central Damascus Saturday, causing panic but no injuries or damage in attacks that highlighted the deep reach of rebels in the seat of President Bashar Assad’s power.

On the capital’s edge, Syrian forces pounded a suburb with mortars and artillery shells, a day after rebels operating in the town abducted a pro-government TV crew, activists said. It was the latest attack on pro-regime media and the latest abduction blamed on rebels in Syria’s escalating civil war.

One of the blasts went off in central Damascus’ Marjeh district, when an explosive device planted under a tree was detonated by remote control as a vehicle carrying soldiers passed by, an official at the site of the blast told The Associated Press. The explosion, which caused no casualties, went off about 100 meters (yards) away from the Four Seasons, one of the most luxury hotels in Damascus.

After the blast, gunmen opened fire on civilians “to provoke panic,” the state-run news agency SANA said.

At the same time, the other explosion went off near Tishrin Stadium, less than a kilometer (0.6 miles) away, SANA reported.

The news agency said security agents were pursuing the attackers in both incidents, referring to them as terrorists - the term authorities routinely use for rebels trying to topple President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Residents in Damascus reported hearing a loud explosion followed by gunfire that lasted several minutes Saturday.

Syria’s security forces say they pushed the rebels from the capital after intense, week-long battles last month. But opposition fighters continue to stage hit-and-run attacks and are active in the suburbs around the city. Explosions in the capital have become increasingly common as Syria’s civil war escalates. There has been series of suicide attacks whose perpetrators are unknown, and on Aug. 18 rebels carried out a sophisticated bombing of a regime security building that killed four members of Assad’s inner circle.

The seemingly intractable, 17-month-old conflict in Syria has defied all international attempts to calm the bloodshed which human rights activists say has killed at least 20,000 people.

On Friday, armed men snatched three journalists from the pro-regime TV station Al-Ikhbariya and their drivers while they were coving violence in the al-Tal suburb just north of Damascus, the station’s general manager Imad Sarah said. The station blamed “terrorists” and said efforts were under way to release them.

Rebels deny they target the media and have not claimed responsibility for any attacks against pro-regime journalists. The rebel movement is highly splintered and different groups may have different standards as to whom they consider a valid target. But much of the opposition says pro-government media outlets are legitimate targets as mouthpieces of the Syrian regime.

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army are known to be active in al-Tal and other Damascus suburbs that have witnessed fierce clashes between the two sides on an almost daily basis in recent weeks. At least six people were killed Friday in heavy shelling on al-Tal, causing many residents to flee the area, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists on the ground in Syria.

During the clashes, rebels targeted a tank during the clashes in al-Tal, setting it on fire, the Observatory said. The report could not be independently confirmed.

Mohammed Saeed, an activist in al-Tal, said government forces had been attacking the district since Thursday. He said they were using helicopters to strafe the town have bombarded it with mortars and artillery shells, adding that two hospitals in the area were targeted.

“The situation is very grave and the town is completely besieged,” he said, adding that many of the residents of al-Tal were refugees from nearby suburbs that have been hard hit from the government crackdown.

Kidnappings have become increasingly common as the civil war escalates in Syria.

Syrian rebels last week intercepted a bus carrying 48 Iranians in a Damascus suburb and seized them. Rebels claimed the men are military personnel, including some members of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, who were on a “reconnaissance mission” to help Assad’s crackdown.

Iran, however, says the 48 were pilgrims visiting a Shiite shrine in Damascus.

In Paris, an Iranian opposition group challenged Tehran’s account by claiming Saturday at least seven of the captives as active members of the Revolutionary Guard. The statement by the People’s Mujahedeen Organization gave names and ranks - ranging from brigadier general to colonel - for those it claims are part of the group held by the Syrian rebels. The list describes all the alleged Revolutionary Guard members as being from Iran’s West Azerbaijan region along the borders with Iraq and Turkey.

The opposition group’s claims could not be independently verified. Iranian authorities had no immediate comment.

The overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim rebels have also seized 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims who have been held in northern Syria since May.

Media close to the state have also become a target. Al-Ikhbariya is privately-owned but strongly supports Assad’s regime.

In June, gunmen raided Al-Ikhbariya’s headquarters south of Damascus, killing seven employees. In a separate incident, a reporter and a cameraman for the station were wounded when bullets hit their car while covering violence in central Syria.

On Tuesday, a bomb blast ripped through the headquarters of Syrian state TV in Damascus, wounding several employees and causing heavy damage.

A Syrian-based Sunni militant group posted on jihadi web forums that it had kidnapped and executed a prominent Syrian television broadcaster, who had been reported missing since July 19. The al-Nusra Front announced that the presenter for the Syrian “Talk of the Town” program, had been captured and put on trial before being executed.

Dark images of horror and despair smuggled out of #Syria

Beirut, Lebanon (CNN) — The corpses lay strewn in the restive Syrian city of Douma, all slain in what residents there call a government-backed “massacre.”

The scene in the aftermath of the assault, punctuated by images of grief-stricken people and blood-covered pavement, was recorded last month by opposition activists who braved the wrath of Syrian security and slipped into the suburban Damascus city to bear witness to the tumult with their cameras.

The three-man media team moved about the pockmarked urban battleground in shadows and whispers. Edging step-by-step and block-by-block, they hugged buildings’ walls to avoid catching the eyes of rooftop snipers. But they would pick up the pace amid bursts of gunfire.

That was at the end of June. The intense bombardment of Douma bySyrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in the days that followed trapped the activists for more than a week, with government forces blocking the routes out of town and shelling forcing them to take shelter.

Bracing for a Syria showdown

The footage — just delivered to reporters in Lebanon — also highlights the resolve of a guerrilla force of activist-journalists: brave souls who’ve risked their lives since March 2011 to record examples of the regime’s actions.

The carnage is the latest example of what activists say is relentless abuse against civilians by al-Assad’s security apparatus over the past 16 months.

Douma, a major city in the province of Rif Damashq — meaning Damascus countryside, which includes the suburbs that surround the capital city — has been consumed by bloodshed since the protests last year morphed into a nationwide uprising against the regime.

These latest sights, recorded by the activists at a dingy building in the dark of night, bear witness to the grim conflict in cities, towns and villages across Syria.

The people seen dead in the scene were among 45 people killed in an attack. Residents say Syrian security forces raiding a building in search of weapons wiped out members of several families.

One image shows a little girl sprawled among the dead, many of the bodies covered in bloody funeral sheets.

A man points to a body and says “he was executed, a civilian.” He points to a second corpse and says, “This is his cousin, shot because he tried to save him.”

Another man said security forces ordered men and women into two rooms and executed them, one after the other.

CNN cannot independently verify these accounts.

But the aftermath rings true for Syrians caught in the maelstrom of what is now called a civil war and the sight has become routine in areas where resolute residents have not buckled under to regime soldiers and their militia allies.

Residents prepared the bodies for burial by unceremoniously wrapping up the dead in funeral sheets and removing them from the building where they were found.

It is only now that the activists who filmed the grisly scenes were able to get the footage to Lebanon.

The risk, the activists say, is worth it. Syrians activists say the world needs to get one more glimpse of the horror and despair engulfing Syria.

#Syria crowd blocks UN vehicles

Angry crowds have blocked UN observers from reaching an embattled rebel-held town in Syria, hurling stones and metal rods at the monitors’ vehicles.

Their vehicles came under fire as they drove away from Haffa, but the source of the gunfire was not clear, the UN said. None of the observers was injured.

Meanwhile, Syrian forces pounded the eastern city of Deir el-Zour with mortars as anti-government protesters were dispersing before dawn, killing at least 10 people, activists said.

The situation in Haffa has raised alarm over the past eight days, and there are concerns civilians are stuck in the area while the regime and rebel fighters battle for control.

Washington said that regime forces may be preparing a massacre in rebel-held Haffa - a village about 20 miles from President Bashar Assad’s hometown of Kardaha.

It is not clear why the crowd wanted to prevent the observers from entering, but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said earlier that residents of a nearby village were trying to block the observers.

The offensives were part of an escalation of violence in recent weeks that has brought more international pressure on Mr Assad’s regime over its brutal tactics against the opposition.

The UN accused the government of using children as human shields in a new report. It said children have been victims of detention, torture and sexual violence.

06/08/12 #Syria Sounds of gunfire and shelling in Damascus

06/02/12 #Syria Heavy gunfire in Douma, Damascus

05/22/12 #Syria Heavy gunfire in Hama

05/03/12 #Syria Security forces chanting for shabiha and firing heavily and randomly in eastern Ghouta, Damascus

#Syria Inside Syria’s broken city of Homs

Inside Syria's broken city of Homs those left behind berate the West

Children play on the destroyed streets of Baba Amr

The neat blast hole in the ceiling of one family’s dining room was sufficient explanation for the broken furniture and rubble with which it was filled. Wires dangled loosely. Against one wall stood a chest, its glass front shattered. But inside, the neat row of inverted Turkish coffee cups, eight red and eight yellow, sat unmoved and undamaged. There was even an intact light-bulb sitting on top.

The chest could be a symbol of the whole city of Homs, the focal point of the Syrian uprising. Parts are in good enough order, apart from painted-over graffiti. The five-star hotel that is the new base of the United Nations monitors is empty but smart and functioning.

Yet from a few hundred yards’ distance comes the sound of automatic gunfire, and a two-minute drive away you are on what remains a hot front line despite the dominance of regime forces and despite the ceasefire the monitors are here to observe.

And in this compact town, the destroyed streets of Baba Amr, scene of one of the conflict’s heaviest and deadliest bombardment, are a short walk away.

Along the main thoroughfares, the blackened holes of the apartment buildings stare down at the piles of broken bricks and burned out cars. Each building has its own sign of war – the smashed shutters of the shopfronts, the collapsed roof, the bedroom exposed to the daylight.

Stepping inside stirred a further eddy of dust from the crumbling concrete.

At first, it seemed like an empty film set. But we walked on, among the first journalists allowed in since the end of one of the most fearsome sieges of modern times, the few hundred residents who have not fled peered out from their broken walls.

A handful of black-clad women clustered around an outpost of the Red Crescent. A few more gathered around a man who had been allowed by the army to bring in a small selection of vegetables.

Children pointed excitedly to the ruins, their new playground, running in and out of the piles of detritus.

Few people were prepared to talk, but one man was upset enough on learning he was talking to a Briton to damn the perfidy of David Cameron, who had seemed to want to help but had “done nothing”.

“He is a liar, a liar,” he said. “It was just talk, talk, talk. Nobody helped us. The whole world was against us.”

Another man described how he had been held in prison for 50 days – though not long enough to avoid the savagery of February’s bombardment that finally drove the Free Syrian Army’s Farouq Battalion from the suburb. It was a humiliating retreat which may have marked the turning point of this war.

“Every day for thirty days the shells came. They started at six in the morning and ended at eight at night. In between, there was not a minute’s peace.”

Ask where the FSA went, and there is a nervous silence. Some things still can’t be discussed. “We lived here, they killed us, and they will kill us,” said one resident, succinctly. The army SUVs and pickup trucks come in threes, driving without stopping down the centre of the road.

But it is no secret where the “armed groups” went. Many went to Khaldiyah, which touches on the city centre and which, though heavily shelled, seems a tougher nut to crack.

Walk up from the clock tower in the central square, between the governor’s offices and the Lord Suites Hotel – “spotlessly clean and modern” according to the Lonely Planet guide, a comic thought now – and soon the bullets are cracking. From a side street comes the thud of a rocket-propelled grenade.

It is not clear why: there is no advance on either side, and regime officials may be right in claiming some of the firing is for show, to herald the monitors’ arrival.

The heaviest shooting, though, is at night, long after the monitors have retreated to their hotel.

An army major reckons there are 4,000 fighters holed up in the suburb.

That, too, contradicts the official line that the FSA is nothing more than a handful of criminals, bolstered by foreign fighters and jihadists.

But then the official line is flexible, and perhaps has to be now the monitors are here to see for themselves. The government is now prepared to admit it shares in the responsibility for the disaster that has befallen a city where now smashed open-air cafés and rooftop restaurants speak of a more relaxed past.

The governor of Homs, Ghassan Abdul-Al, looked embarrassed as he claimed the army’s treatment of Baba Amr was proportionate to the rebels’ use of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and small arms.

But he was only appointed a year ago, after his predecessor was sacked because of his initial response to the protests, and he was prepared to go beyond the standard formula that “some mistakes were made”.

He hoped things might have been different if he had been in charge. “I think I might have been less aggressive,” he said. “Because we see – and as you find – there is a big reason for this uprising. We did not serve the people, not as they should be.”

For Syria to serve the people of Homs now seems almost impossible. Mr Abdul-Al said there were plans to redevelop Baba Amr – the reason, he said, pictures of a brieze-block wall along one side of the suburb have circulated the internet. It is not a “New Berlin Wall”, he said, but merely a replacement for a protective barrier by the railway line.

Baba Amr certainly looks like a place that needs to be levelled. But before anything new can rise from the ashes, its people must be reconciled to those who reduced it to this state. That task lies beyond the building of walls.

#Syria: The Battlefield Of Homs

Despite heavy losses in the Bab Amr district of Homs the Free Syrian Army (FSA) still controls large areas of the city.

The FSA stronghold is the Khaldia district but it manages to keep the Syrian army out of other quarters as well.

The area is devastated. High rise buildings have collapsed, their floors pancaked one on top of the other.

Shops and houses have also been destroyed by artillery fire. Rubble is strewn everywhere, and there appears not be a single building which is not in some way damaged.

There are still hundreds of civilians living in Khaldia among the FSA fighters who say they are there to protect them.

The Syrian Government calls the FSA terrorists and insists it needs to push them out of Homs in order to liberate the city.

The sound of gunfire is constant. The clatter of small arms fire mingles with that of heavy machine guns and the occasional explosion.

To get from one district to another the locals use a variety of routes including clambering through the wreckage of peoples’ houses to get from one place to another whilst avoiding gun fire.

In many streets, sheets of tarpaulin hang from one side to the other to prevent army snipers from having a clear line of sight into Khaldia.

To cross some smaller streets, which the snipers can see clearly, people break into a sprint to cross.

The Homs National Hospital is now in the hands of the FSA.

They took it from government forces a few weeks ago after an assault through the streets involving dozens of fighters attacking from two directions.

They say they lost several men in the attack but it has dislodged the Government troops from what was a strategically important vantage point.

The FSA commander in Homs, Abdul Razzack Tlas, told Sky News that the Government responded by shelling the hospital.

It is so badly damaged that it can never be used as a hospital again without being completely rebuilt.

The remains of 80 bodies, which had been lying in a hot makeshift morgue for months, have only just been removed.

The stench of death around the hospital remains overwhelming. Even hardened fighters were covering their faces with cloth and retching at the smell.

Abdul Razzack Tlas claimed his men are heeding the UN ceasefire but said; “The Government is not respecting any of Kofi Annan’s six points. The FSA is abiding by the plan and we are only here to protect the people.”

The Government says the opposite and that it only responds to acts of violence by “armed terrorist gangs”. The UN has said that neither side is completely abiding by the ceasefire.