Nov 14/12 #Syria FSA capture group of men suspected of stealing from homes in Salahdin, Aleppo
Source: youtu.be
#Syria 2 months later, massacre haunts Syrian town
TAFTANAZ, Syria (AP) — The main street of this once-bustling Syrian farm town now stands eerily quiet, its shops charred black from arson, its shoppers replaced by cats roaming the rubble of homes destroyed by tank fire.
At dawn on April 3, Syrian forces shelled the town in the first volley of what residents say was a massive assault after a string of large protests calling for the end of the regime of President Bashar Assad. Soldiers then stormed in, torching homes and businesses and gunning down residents in the streets. By the time they left on the third day, at least 62 people were dead.
Two months later, the destruction remains, but most residents are gone. Locals estimate that about two-thirds of the town’s 15,000 people have left. Most don’t expect them to return.
“There is nothing for people to come back to, and they worry that if they rebuild, the army will destroy it again,” said resident Bassam Ghazzal, who lost more than 20 members of his extended family in the attack. “People don’t want to become refugees twice.”
The destruction in Taftanaz, seen by an Associated Press reporter, provides an on-the-ground example of the huge price paid by Syrian communities that have chosen to defy one of the Middle East’s most brutal autocracies.
Since the start of the anti-Assad uprising in March 2011, the regime has responded to unrest with brute force, dispatching snipers, troops and tanks to quash dissent. Activists say more than 14,000 people have been killed since, many of them civilians.
In general, the violence has not stopped the uprising, emboldening protesters, galvanizing international condemnation and leading many in the opposition to take up arms.
Taftanaz tells a different story. It is a place where overwhelming force appears to have not only crushed a burgeoning protest movement but struck a blow against a community that may never recover.
In many ways, Taftanaz, a jumble of simple concrete homes surrounded by golden wheat fields some 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the northern city of Idlib, tells the story of Syria’s uprising, writ small.
Residents had long complained of state neglect and corruption that left many living in poverty, Ghazzal said. So when protesters inspired by the successful uprisings against autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt took to the streets in Syria, they followed along, first demonstrating for change in April 2011.
Local security officers quickly ended the protest, but the town organized more, sparking further crackdowns and arrest campaigns by regime authorities, Ghazzal said.
The Syrian army raided the village three times in the next four months, Ghazzal said. During a June raid, Ghazzal’s cousin was shot dead at a regime checkpoint while trying to flee, making him the first of the town’s “martyrs.”
Others followed. Some in the town took up arms, and an October clash between the army and local rebels killed five residents. Other residents buried them and held another protest the same day, Ghazzal said.
hen all was quiet until April 3, when tanks shelled the town from four sides before armored cars brought in dozens of soldiers who dragged civilians from their homes and gunned them down in the streets, witnesses said. The soldiers also looted, destroyed and torched hundreds of homes, bringing some down on their owners’ heads.
Videos shot at the time show tanks posted near the town’s entrance and huge columns of smoke rising throughout the area. Photos of the dead show bodies torn apart by shrapnel, charred by fire, crushed under rubble or with bullet holes in their chests, foreheads and temples.
Local activist Abdullah Ghazzal, a university student in English, says 62 people were killed during the attack, four of them burned beyond recognition. Two others have never been found.
Residents are unsure what sparked the assault. The town had only a small rebel presence, though fighters from the area had killed soldiers at nearby checkpoints or destroyed regime tanks, said local fighter Sahir Schaib. Rebels also blew up nine regime tanks as they left the town, mostly with homemade bombs planted along the roads.
He suspects the regime sought to stop the town from emerging as a protest center, especially since it is near a military base.
“There were lots of villages around that had just started protesting and they wanted to say, ‘This is what we can do to you,’” Schaib said. “They committed the massacre to teach the whole region a lesson.”
The Syrian government rarely comments on its military actions and blames the uprising on armed terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy. It bars most reporters from working in the country, and the AP was able to visit Taftanaz only after entering from a neighboring country.
The price of Taftanaz’s defiance is obvious around town. Homes have been reduced to rubble. Most shops along the town’s main street are shuttered, their thick metal doors scarred by shrapnel and gunfire. Black soot lines the windows of others. Yet others lie collapsed in piles of bricks and mortar.
“They took what they took and burned what they burned,” said Abu Eissa Ghazzal, 75, another member of the extended Ghazzal family. Standing near his torched grocery store on the ground floor of a three-story building, he despaired for the future.
“They didn’t leave me a single nail,” he said.
His younger brother had built the building after working for two decades in Saudi Arabia and lived with his family in the top two floors, Ghazzal said. Now all had been torched, and his brother and family had fled to a refugee camp in Turkey.
His older brother lived across the alley and refused to leave his home when the army came. When the attack was over, rescue teams found the 81-year-old man’s body still in his home, burned to a crisp.
“Now there is nobody left,” he said. “Who is going to rebuild all of this, now that all of those with children have left?”
The army has not returned since the April raid. Local activists still organize protests, though many fewer people attend, and rumors of impending military incursions often terrify residents.
Most of the dead rest in a long mass grave on the village’s east side, their names scrawled in marker on cinder block headstones. Preceding most names is the honorific “hero martyr.” One inscription for the unidentified bodies reads simply “four people.”
“Most of them were my friends,” said Abdullah Ghazzal, the English student, walking among the graves. He pointed out the grave of his 44-year-old brother, shot dead that day.
“They also burned down his house,” he said.
Ben Hubbard spent two weeks inside Syria with a team of AP journalists. Taftanaz was among the hardest-hit areas the team visited, but many other cities and towns also have suffered heavy damage.
Source: Yahoo!
Uprising in #Syria threatens ancient cultural treasures
BEIRUT — On its towering hilltop perch, one of the world’s best preserved Crusader castles held off a siege by the Muslim warrior Saladin nearly 900 years ago.
Lawrence of Arabia hailed the beauty of the Krak des Chevaliers, one of the crown jewels ofSyria’s tourism.
Now the ancient fortress has fallen victim to the chaos of Syria’s uprising against the brutal regime of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Recently, gunmen broke into the castle, threw out the staff and began excavations to loot the site, said Bassam Jammous, general director of the Antiquities and Museum Department in Damascus.
Syria’s turmoil is threatening the country’s rich archaeological heritage, experts warn.
Some of the country’s most significant sites have been caught in the crossfire in battles between regime forces and rebels. Others have been turned into military bases, raising archaeologists’ fears of damage.
The government’s shelling of neighborhoods where the opposition is holed up has smashed historic mosques, churches and markets. Looters have stolen artifacts from excavations and museums.
In one of the most egregious examples, shells thudded into the walls of the 12th century al-Madeeq Citadel, raising flames and columns of smoke as regime forces battled with rebels in March.
Local activists said regime forces carried out the assault and afterward moved tanks into the hilltop castle. Later Internet videos showed bulldozers knocking through part of the walls to create an entrance.
The government and opposition have traded blame for damaging and looting of sites around the country.
Blaming the government
A group of European and Syrian archaeologists tracking the threats through eyewitness reports from the ground blames the government. In several cases, Syrian troops have directly hit historic sites and looted them.
“We have facts showing that the government is acting directly against the country’s historical heritage,” said Rodrigo Martin, a Spanish archaeologist who has led past research missions inside Syria.
An important crossroads, Syria’s rich archaeological treasures extend over millennia.
The capital, Damascus, is often claimed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Archaeologists have uncovered cities dating back 5,000 years to the early Bronze Age, and the country is dotted with hills that likely hide more such cities, still not excavated.
A series of cultures have left their mark - from biblical civilizations toChristian Crusaders and Muslim kingdoms.
“What we know of Syrian heritage has already provided a huge quantity of information, but we can safely say that the part that has not yet been studied is even bigger,” said Mr. Martin.
Each incident of destruction “is like burning a page in the book of history of mankind,” he said.
The heritage also helped fuel tourism, giving a much-needed economic boost before the uprising erupted more than a year ago. More than 8.5 million tourists visited Syria in 2010, 40 percent more than the year before. Now there are virtually none.
The 2,000-year-old Roman ruins of Palmyra - an ancient oasis city more than four centuries old and one of the biggest tourist draws - is deserted.
Government forces have surrounded the ruins and a nearby town and have set up a base in a historic castle on a hilltop overlooking the site, deep in Syria’s central deserts.
Heritage in the crossfire
Besides the break-in at Krak des Chevaliers in March, gunmen have also targeted a museum in the city of Hama. They have stolen antiques and a priceless gold statue dating back centuries, said Mr. Jammous, of the government’s museum agency.
Other sites have been endangered in the crossfire of the daily battles.
Several weeks ago, activists in the northwestern province of Idlib said, troops and dissidents battled near the ruins of Elba, a Bronze Age city where archaeologists in the 1960s discovered a massive trove of cuneiform tables that revolutionized their understanding of the ancient Mideast.
The once-bustling covered ancient market in old Homs - famous for its unusually tall arched roof where people bargained for colorful textiles, rugs, perfumes and clothes - has been heavily damaged. Its walls are now blackened from a fire. Its walkways littered with debris and shop shutters twisted and pierced with shrapnel.
Traditional Homs houses with arched doorways and inner courtyards have also been bombed.
Mosques have served as launching pads for anti-government protests in Syria. Government troops have targeted many of them, particularly in the provinces of Daraa, birthplace of the Syrian revolution.
Early on in the uprising, the government shelled Daraa’s Omari Mosque, built during the Islamic conquest of Syria about 1,400 years ago. Activists say government forces deliberately sabotaged the mosque and hid weapons inside it to prove that armed gangs were sheltering there.
Videos show the bombed-out minarets and shell-pocked facades of several mosques and churches in Homs. They include the Umm el-Zunnar church, which was built underground in 59 A.D.
In January, artillery fire struck the Sednaya Convent north of Damascus, believed to have been build in A.D. 547 A.D. The opposition blamed the attack on Syrian troops.
“They have absolutely no respect for the country’s cultural heritage,” said activist Tarek Badrakhan, speaking from Homs’ battered Khaldiyeh district. “Mosques, citadels, the old city, they spared nothing.”
Source: washingtontimes.com
Syria’s cultural treasures latest uprising victim #Syria
BEIRUT (AP) — On its towering hilltop perch, the Krak des Chevaliers, one of the world’s best preserved Crusader castles, held off a siege by the Muslim warrior Saladin nearly 900 years ago. It was lauded by Lawrence of Arabia for its beauty and has been one of the crown jewels of Syria’s tourism.
But it has fallen victim to the chaos of Syria’s uprising and the crackdown against it by President Bashar Assad’s regime. Recently, gunmen broke into the castle, threw out the staff and began excavations to loot the site, says Bassam Jammous, general director of the Antiquities and Museum Department in Damascus.
Syria’s turmoil is threatening the country’s rich archaeological heritage, experts warn.
Some of the country’s most significant sites have been caught in the crossfire in battles between regime forces and rebels. Others have been turned into military bases, raising archaeologists’ fears of damage. Regime shelling of neighborhoods where the opposition is holed up has smashed historic mosques, churches and souks, or markets. Looters have stolen artifacts from excavations and museums.
In one of the most egregious examples, shells thudded into the walls of the 12th century al-Madeeq Citadel, raising flames and columns of smoke as regime forces battled with rebels in March. The bombardment punched holes in the walls, according to online footage of the fighting.
Local activists said regime forces carried out the assault and afterward moved tanks into the hilltop castle. Later footage showed bulldozers knocking through part of the walls to create an entrance.
The government and opposition have traded blame for damage and looting of sites around the country. But a group of European and Syrian archaeologists tracking the threats through witness reports from the ground says that in several cases, government forces have directly hit historic sites and either participated in or turned a blind eye to looting.
“We have facts showing that the government is acting directly against the country’s historical heritage,” said Rodrigo Martin, a Spanish archaeologist who has led past research missions inside Syria.
What’s happening is reminiscent of Iraq’s chaos in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s 2003 fall, when Baghdad’s major museum was looted, and of Egypt, where looting has reportedly increased at archaeological sites around the country in the turmoil since longtime President Hosni Mubarak was toppled last year.
An important crossroads, Syria’s rich archaeological treasures extend over millennia. The capital, Damascus, is often claimed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Archaeologists have uncovered cities dating back 5,000 years to the early Bronze Age, and the country is dotted with “tells,” or hills, that likely hide more such cities, still not excavated. A series of cultures have left their mark — from Biblical civilizations, Alexander the Great’s successors and the Romans to Christian Crusaders and Muslim kingdoms.
“What we know of Syrian heritage has already provided a huge quantity of information, but we can safely say that the part that has not yet been studied is even bigger,” said Martin. Each incident of destruction “is like burning a page in the book of history of mankind.”
The heritage also helped fuel tourism that was steadily rising before the crisis, giving a much-needed economic boost. More than 8.5 million tourists visited Syria in 2010, 40 percent more than the year before. Now there are virtually zero.
The nearly 2,000-year-old ruins of Palmyra, an ancient oasis city that was one of the biggest tourist draws with towering Roman colonnades and a temple to the god Baal, stand deserted. Government forces have surrounded it and the nearby town and have set up a base in a historic castle on a hilltop overlooking the site, deep in Syria’s central deserts.
In a report to the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO and the EU conservation group Euromed Heritage, Martin and the other archaeologists warned that the troops’ fortifications have damaged parts of the ruins. They say there are also reports of looting under the troops’ noses — raising the possibility they were involved.
“Many groups have attempted to conduct secret excavations, starting by the security forces,” their report said, referring to looting around the country. The archaeologists, who have set up a Facebook page to track reports of damage, say illicit digs have taken place at a number of unexcavated tells and other sites.
Besides the break-in at Krak des Chevaliers in March, gunmen have also targeted a museum in the city of Hama, making off with antiques and a priceless gold statue dating back to the Aramaic era, said Jammous, of the government’s museum agency.
Jammous denied that the army had attacked any archaeological sites and said armed rebels caused any damage.
Other sites have been endangered in the crossfire of the daily battles.
Several weeks ago, activists in the northwestern province of Idlib said, troops and dissidents battled in and around the ruins of Elba, a Bronze Age city where archaeologists in the 1960s discovered a massive trove of cuneiform tables that revolutionized their understanding of the ancient Mideast.
Government assaults on opposition stronghold cities and neighborhoods — often with shelling and heavy machine-gun fire — have also caused extensive damage.
The once bustling covered ancient souk in old Homs, famous for its unusually tall arched roof where people bargained for colorful textiles, rugs, perfumes and clothes, has been heavily damaged. Its walls are now blackened from a fire, its walkways littered with debris and shop shutters twisted and pierced with shrapnel.
Traditional Homs houses with arched doorways and inner courtyards have also been bombed.
Mosques have served as a launching pad for anti-government protests in Syria, and many have been targeted, particularly in the provinces of Daraa, birthplace of the Syrian revolution, and Homs, an opposition stronghold 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of Damascus.
Early on in the uprising, the government targeted the Daraa’s Omari Mosque, which was built during the Islamic conquest of Syria in the days of Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab. Activists say government forces deliberately sabotaged the mosque and hid weapons inside it to prove that armed gangs were sheltering there.
Videos show the bombed-out minarets and shell-pocked facades of several mosques and churches in Homs. They include the Umm el-Zunnar church, which was built underground in A.D. 59.
In January, artillery fire struck the Sednaya Convent north of Damascus, believed to have been build in A.D. 547, in an attack the government blamed on armed groups.
“They have absolutely no respect for the country’s cultural heritage,” said activist Tarek Badrakhan, speaking via Skype from Homs’ battered Khaldiyeh district. “Mosques, citadels, the old city, they spared nothing.”
Source: google.com
HAMA, #SYRIA: Video leaked by an honourable soldier of the looting and destruction of Shops by Assadi Thug Forces during the dignity Strike yesterday, a threat and process which was carried out throughout Syria yesterday, with entire factory burned down in Aleppo in retaliation for the strike.
