Syrian Freedom

#Syria refugees brave mines, machineguns

A young Syrian refugee who fled the violence - Source: Reuters

Published: 12:07PM Saturday April 07, 2012 Source: Reuters

Syrian forces are pressing a military offensive and laying mines near the border with Turkey in an attempt to block a flow of refugees and supplies for insurgents, rebel activists and a Turkish official at the frontier said.

Syrian army activity, visible across olive groves from the small Turkish border village of Bukulmez, comes days before a ceasefire deadline agreed by President Bashar al-Assad.

The flow of refugees to Turkish camps nearby swelled to 2,800 on Thursday as violence in the bordering Idlib province worsened.

“The whole of northern Idlib has become another Baba Amr,” said Ahmed Sheikh, a law student and activist, referring to a district of the town of Homs devastated by shelling in the past two months.

It was impossible to verify reports from the many refugees fleeing Syria since foreign correspondents’ access to the country is strictly limited by the Damascus government.

A Syrian helicopter could be seen hovering over mountains on the Syrian side of the border in clear view of refugees at a camp. A Reuters television journalist with experience in the area said it was the first time since the crisis began that he was aware of Syrian aircraft flying close to Turkey.

Villagers reported hearing artillery along the border.

A Turkish foreign ministry official touring the camps in the area said there was new activity close to the border.

“The Syrians have been mining the border, especially the southern Idlib part which has been restricting the flow of refugees,” the official said. He declined to give his name.

Activists said mining was concentrated on southerly parts of Turkey’s border with Syria, from the town of Harem westwards to the coast.

“Assad is using the days granted to him by the international community to choke off the refugee movement to Turkey and the delivery of any kind of aid,” said Muhammad Abdallah, a rights campaigner from Idlib.

He said most of the border area from the Mediterranean coast was closed, leaving only a 10 km corridor along a valley near Rehanyi which the rebel Free Syrian Army controls.

“But I don’t expect this to last for long because we have seen nearby villages and towns come under intense helicopter, tank and artillery bombardment,” he said.

Highways cut

Still, refugees were getting through, the flow rising to 2,800 on Thursday.

Assad says his government is under attack from foreign-backed Islamist militants and denies his own troops have targeted civilians. He says support from Western and Arab governments for the rebels is only feeding the violence and obstructing a peaceful settlement.

In Ankara, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu demanded Assad keep his promise to cease military operations.

“At the moment the number of refugees to have entered Turkey is 23,835. If more refugees come then the United Nations and international community must take action,” he told reporters.

Under an internationally backed plan agreed with Damascus, government forces should cease operations and withdraw from settlements by April 10. Rebels should then cease fire within 48 hours.

UN special envoy Kofi Annan said on Thursday he had been told by Damascus that troop withdrawals were underway from Idlib, as well as Zabadani and Deraa. But UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday the conflict was worsening and attacks on civilian areas persisted.

The flow of refugees has been a big concern for Turkey which long saw Damascus as a regional friend but is now in the forefront of diplomatic opposition to Assad and gives refuge to civilian and military forces ranged against him.

Turkey fears that a complete breakdown in Syria would unleash a flood of refugees reminiscent of the half million who descended on Turkish territory from Iraq during the Gulf War in the early 1990s.

Ankara officials have cited such a development as one of the few that might make it consider establishment of a safe zone on the Syrian side. The presence now of Syrian troops so close to the border would make such a move perilous.

Abdallah said government forces were trying as far as possible to cut off refugees and intercept rebel aid well before the border. The two main highways into Turkey from Aleppo and the provincial capital of Idlib had been cut off by army roadblocks.

Control

A member of the FSA who goes under the nom de guerre of Abu Seif said that for government forces “the name of the game is control”.

“The tactic being used to stop the flow of refugees is heavy bombardment of strategic villages or towns on the border with Turkey. Then they mine around these towns and villages.”

An opposition activist said the refugee flow into Turkey varied greatly from day to day because government troops would find open areas and shut them down. Refugees would then probe for new crossings and then pour across until they were blocked.

One particularly dangerous crossing is the Orontes River, which marks the border and is famous for its strong currents. Syrian army tents could be seen pitched amid lush farmland on the other side.

“Behind the tents there are army machinegun positions. If Assad lets the people escape you would see hundreds of thousands of Syrians here,” said Mohammad Hijazi, who was elected as a representative of refugees in Boynuyogun camp, one of several camps Turkish authorities set up right on the border.

“Every time the regime is given a deadline it is a catastrophe. Assad interprets it as a licence for unlimited killing and another deadline is set,” Hijazi said.

#Syria plants mines along Lebanon, Turkey borders

(AFP)

13 March 2012

BEIRUT — Syria has planted landmines near its borders with Lebanon and Turkey, along routes used by refugees fleeing the strife-torn country, Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged on Tuesday.

“The Syrian regime is trying to prevent people from going in and from fleeing the country,” said Nadim Houry, deputy director of the group’s Middle East and North Africa division.

“And they are doing it in a way that is going to be lethal because these roads are used by people fleeing and also to evacuate the wounded.”

The New York-based watchdog published the accounts of witnesses and deminers who claimed that the Syrian army has been placing landmines for months, and reported resulting civilian casualties.

Houry said the latest casualty was on March 5, when a young Syrian man crossing back into Syria from Turkey stepped on a landmine and lost his right leg.

HRW also quoted a 15-year-old boy from Tal Kalakh who lost a leg in February as he was trying to help a wounded family friend fleeing the Baba Amr rebel stronghold in central Homs cross into northern Lebanon.

“We were sure that no landmines were planted in the area filled with thorn bushes,” he said.

“I was less than 50-60 metres (54 to 65 yards) away from crossing the border when the landmine exploded.”

Steve Goose, arms division director at HRW, said it was “unconscionable” for countries to continue using the deadly weapons.

“There is absolutely no justification for the use of these indiscriminate weapons by any country, anywhere, for any purpose,” he said.

Syria, which along with Lebanon is not signatory to the international Mine Ban Treaty, first began laying mines along its border with Lebanon in November, HRW said.

It is last believed to have used anti-personnel mines during the 1982 conflict with Israel and Lebanon. Its stockpile of landmines consists mainly of Soviet/Russian-manufactured mines, HRW said.

Human Rights Watch urged the Syrian regime to stop planting landmines which, it warned, would continue to maim people for years to come.

“The threat is not just in the now, it’s also a danger for the future”, Houry told AFP.

According to the United Nations, more than 8,000 people have been killed in Syria, the majority of them civilians, in a brutal crackdown on an anti-regime revolt that erupted a year ago.

HRW condemns #Syria’s planting of landmines along borders

BEIRUT: Syrian forces have been planting landmines along Syria’s borders with Lebanon and Turkey in recent weeks, resulting in civilian casualties, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released Tuesday.

“Any use of anti-personnel landmines is unconscionable,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at HRW. “There is absolutely no justification for the use of these indiscriminate weapons by any country, anywhere, for any purpose.”

The NGO is urging Syria to cease using anti-personnel and anti-vehicle landmines, which deminers say are of Russian/Soviet origin.

These mines, HRW says, are “militarily ineffective weapons that kill and injure civilians.”

A total of 159 countries have joined the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, production, trade, and stockpiling of anti-personnel mines. Syria has not joined the treaty.

Syria is the fourth government reported to have used anti-personnel mines since January 2011, joining Libya (under Muammar Gaddafi), Israel, and Myanmar (Burma).

Syrian defectors call for international help #Syria

By Alice Fordham,

AKKAR, Lebanon — Under cover of darkness, in a shabby rented house in the northern Lebanese mountains, a dozen Syrian men huddle round a wood stove, candlelight flickering on their drawn faces.

All of them claim to be defected soldiers, who were forced to conduct operations against a widespread protest movement before fleeing the army. They said they escaped over the border into the relative safety of Lebanon, where they joined the Free Syrian Army.

This loose collection of defectors and armed civilians claims thousands of members and posts footage of attacks on military infrastructure on Facebook. But the men in north Lebanon, all of them Sunni Muslims, said that they lived in poverty and secrecy, numbering a few hundred at most, and had limited access to weapons, prompting questions about the capability of the organization to have a substantial impact on well-armed and organized Alawite-led Syrian security forces.

“The arms we have are what we defected with, or things that we steal from the other side,” said one, who added that he had been a private in the army. They receive no international help and had been visited by no military attaches, they said, although they would take arms, money or supplies from almost anyone if they offered it.

The defectors have won grudging support from the Syrian National Council, the most prominent political group calling for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. The council recognized the FSA’s “honorable role in protecting the peaceful Revolution of our people” in a statement last month.

And they have garnered more enthusiastic approval from other Syrian dissidents — who carry banners with the group’s name at demonstrations and chant for them, calling on them to protect civilians from security forces, and hoping the group could one day present a challenge to the military.

One defector, who said he had been a second lieutenant and showed military identification, said that there were about 500 defected soldiers in north Lebanon, working with about 200 on the other side of the border. He said the men took turns to cross the border on foot, along old smuggling routes through newly-laid minefields into Syria.

They do not carry weapons across the border, he said, because to do so would risk execution if they were captured. But they do collect weapons from family and clan members over the border, he said, and spend a few days or weeks in the country, attending protests in the town of Tal Kalakh and surrounding villages to provide some protection from the heavy presence of security forces.

All of the soldiers who had gathered in the Lebanese mountains said they were from the town of Tal Kalakh. They had been deployed across the country, but all fled to their home town when they defected. Thus far, they said, relatively few soldiers had joined the group, simply because they were afraid of the consequences.

Under orders from their superiors, the men said, the defectors have suspended offensive operations over the past two weeks, during a visit to Syria by a monitoring team from the Arab League. They receive orders via a commanding officer from defected Col. Riad al-Asaad, who leads the group from southern Turkey.

The Arab League mission had been to oversee the implementation of an agreement by the government to end the use of deadly force against protests, withdraw soldiers from cities and free political prisoners. On Thursday, however, Col. Malik Kurdi, an assistant to Asaad, said the defectors would now escalate their operations because the Syrian authorities were continuing their military operations.

The soldiers in Lebanon expressed frustration with the work of the Arab League mission, pointing out that activists have reported hundreds of people have died in protests and clashes across the country, despite the presence of observers.

Sectarian divisions dominated the armed forces, they said. All of the men there were Sunni, and they had been closely watched in their work by soldiers and informal militias, known as shabiha, from the Alawite sect of the president’s family. It was these Alawites who ensured that soldiers followed orders, which included shooting on protesters with live bullets.

Their accounts matched more than 60 interviews with defectors in a recent report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which provided detailed evidence of high-level orders to fire on unarmed civilian protesters, said the group’s Middle East director, Sarah Leah Whitson.

“What we hear from soldiers is fear, fear of retribution,” she said, citing an incident in Jabal Zawiya in Idlib province on Dec. 20 in which more than 100 soldiers were reportedly killed after attempting to defect.

“I hear — not just from soldiers, but also from diplomats — that we’re not seeing defections because the Assad regime has made sure that their family members always remain in the country,” and people fear their families will be harmed if they desert their posts, Whitson said. Although they are relatively safe in Lebanon, the men fear being caught and deported by Lebanese security forces, so they move about only at night.

Unlike in an uprising in Libya that eventually swept Moammar Gaddafi from power, she added, where large parts of the armed forces defected en masse and fled to the opposition stronghold of Benghazi, there is no safe area for Syrian soldiers easily to escape to.

The Free Syrian Army and parts of the Syrian opposition have called for the swift creation of a safe zone, patrolled by an international military force along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. If soldiers had somewhere to go, large chunks of the army would defect, the men in north Lebanon said.

However, that remains a distant prospect, said Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who said that Turkish authorities believe that Assad will fall, but are unwilling to intervene directly.

“The Turks see [the Free Syrian Army] as a useful tool,” Barkey said. “They assume that these guys are part of the ultimate picture that is going to emerge,” as shown by Turkish authorities allowing the group’s commander to remain in Turkey. “But they don’t want to get involved too deeply because it’s too risky for them at the moment.”

For now, the defectors continue on their missions. As some of them spoke animatedly, a few others excused themselves, saying that they were heading across the border later that night. At least two had been killed in minefields in the last week, they said, offering names and military identification numbers as proof.

“But when we have funerals for the martyrs,” said the second lieutenant, “we don’t grieve, but we congratulate each other on the honor. This is what makes the soldiers so determined.”

#Syria laying mines at border with #Jordan

The Syrian army has laid mines at the border with Jordan in order to “restrict access to humanitarian asylum in Jordan for Syrians,” according to an “informed source” speaking with Jordanian daily Al Ghad.

The source told Al Ghad that the mines were laid specifically to block access to citizens in the Deraa governate - the site of some of the earliest anti-government protests that took place this year - and the city of Al Ramtha.

“[Syrians] are fleeing the deteriorating security situation in their country,” the source said according to Al Ghad.

More than 19,000 Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring Turkey since violence began eight months ago between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and anti-regime activists, according to the New York Times. An estimated 6,000 evacuees are also residing in Lebanon, according to Dubai-based Al Arabiya.

#Syria mines its land, tortures and guns down citizens

BEIRUT — Syrians snatched from their homes turn up dead, often mutilated. Soldiers gun down former comrades who defected to the opposition. A human rights group reports that electric shocks and hot iron rods are used to torture detainees.

November is shaping up to be the bloodiest month yet in Syria’s 8-month-old uprising. More than 250 Syrian civilians have been killed in the past 11 days as the regime besieges the renegade city of Homs and the conflict takes a dangerous turn, stoking fears of civil war.

The U.N. estimates some 3,500 people have been killed in the crackdown since mid-March, when the uprising began. The latest figures would push that number closer to 4,000.

The bloodshed has spiked dramatically in recent weeks amid signs that more protesters are taking up arms to protect themselves, changing the face of what has been a largely peaceful movement. Many fear the change plays directly into the hands of the regime by giving the military a pretext to crack down with increasing force.

There also have been reports of intense battles between soldiers and army defectors, setting the stage for even more bloodshed. Although the crackdown has led to broad international isolation, President Bashar Assad appears to have a firm grip on power.

The most serious violence has been in Homs, the epicenter of the uprising, which the regime has been fighting to contain all month.

“We have seen urban warfare in some areas where army defections occurred,” said Hozan Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, an activist coalition. “The soldiers are having a hard time advancing. They often come under attack from the defectors and this explains why they are shooting more.”

He said the regime is more often using tanks, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, because they are fighting army defectors as well as the unarmed protesters.

Syria has largely sealed off the country from foreign journalists and prevented independent reporting, making it difficult to confirm events on the ground. In a desperate measure, the regime has begun planting land mines along parts of its border with Lebanon, further closing itself off from the world and showing just how deeply shaken Assad’s regime has become.

An Associated Press journalist saw Syrian soldiers planting more mines Friday along the border with Lebanon. A Lebanese man lost his leg Friday after stepping on a mine; another man had a foot amputated on Nov. 1 in a similar accident.

Syria says the mines are aimed at stopping weapons smuggling into the country during the uprising.

However, the verdant hills along the frontier are used by refugees fleeing Syria’s military assault and by Syrians who have jobs and families on the Lebanese side. The decision to plant mines — terrifying weapons that often maim their victims if they don’t kill them — suggests the regime is trying to contain a crisis that is spinning out of its control.

Mass protests after Friday prayers, followed by swift and deadly crackdowns by security forces, have become a weekly cycle throughout the uprising. On Friday, Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters and conducted sweeping raids that killed at least 16 people in Homs and elsewhere in the country, activists said.

The toll adds to a shockingly bloody November.

The Local Coordination Committees said 250 Syrians have been killed since the start of the month, most of them civilians. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also documented more than 250 civilian deaths, but reported that 100 soldiers were also killed.

In the absence of firsthand reporting, key sources of information have been amateur videos posted online and details gathered by witnesses and activist groups. Amateur video released Friday by the Shams News Network showed government troops dragging a man’s body in the streets of Damascus as fighting raged in the capital a day earlier.

Human Rights Watch said in a 63-page report released Friday that Syrian forces have tortured and killed civilians in Homs in an assault that indicates crimes against humanity. The rights group said former detainees reported torture, including security forces’ use of heated metal rods, electric shocks and stress positions.

Hozan Ibrahim, the Local Coordination Committees spokesman, said the attack on Homs has been severe, but the regime still has not been able to crush the dissent there.

“The vicious attack on Homs has been relentless,” he told the AP. “The martyrs are falling, one after the other.”

The bloodshed is, in many ways, tied to Syria’s potentially volatile sectarian divide.

Assad, and his father who ruled Syria before him, stacked key security and military posts with members of their minority Alawite sect over the past 40 years, ensuring loyalty by melding the fate of the army and the regime.

The power structure means the army will protect the regime at all costs, for fear they will be persecuted if the country’s Sunni majority gains the upper hand. Most of the army defectors, at least so far, appear to be lower-level Sunni conscripts.

Still, the crackdown is exacerbating long-standing sectarian resentments in Syria, and in Homs in particular.

A predominantly Sunni city located 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Damascus, Homs also has a mix of Alawites and Christians, both of whom generally support the regime. The communities have lived side-by-side — however uneasily at times — for decades. But a recent explosion of sectarian reprisal killings has left scores dead, activists say.

On Saturday, the Arab League will convene an emergency session on Syria after chiding Damascus for its failure to end the bloodshed. Syria agreed last week to a peace plan brokered by the 22-nation league, but the violence only accelerated.

Frustrated protesters across the country called Friday on the Arab League to suspend Syria’s membership — a powerful symbolic blow to a nation that prides itself on being a powerhouse of Arab nationalism.

“The people want (Syria’s) membership suspended,” protesters shouted in Homs and the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising began in mid-March.

The international community is limited in what it can do to help solve the Syrian crisis. NATO has ruled out the kind of military intervention that helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. Sanctions are chipping away at the regime, but the economy has not collapsed.

The unrest could balloon into a regional disaster. Damascus’ web of allegiances extends to Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah movement and Iran’s Shiite theocracy. And although Syria sees Israel as the enemy, the countries have held up a fragile truce for years.

Assad already has warned the region will burn if there is any foreign intervention in his country. On Friday, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah backed up Assad and his allies in Iran, saying any war in either country would take down the Middle East.

“Who would dare wage war on Iran? A war on Iran or a war on Syria will not stay in Iran or Syria, but will snowball and engulf the entire region,” Nasrallah warned.