Lebanese minister accuses Syria of ‘ethnic cleansing’

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Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour speaks during a press conference at the ministry in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012. Photo: Hasan Shaaban/The Daily Star

June 18, 2013 by Erika Soloman/Reuters

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces have begun ethnically cleansing Sunni Muslims and deliberately pushing refugees across the border into Lebanon, the Lebanese caretaker minister for social affairs said on Tuesday.

Assad is battling a Sunni-led revolt in Syria, which he and his father before him have ruled for four decades. He belongs to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Wael Abu Faour told Reuters that during the 27-month-old conflict Syrian forces had committed what was “tantamount to ethnic cleansing next to the Syrian-Lebanese border”.

“(Assad) is trying to displace all the Sunnis to Lebanon and this is why I expect to have more displaced people,” he said.

The Syrian revolt turned into a civil war after a crackdown on anti-Assad protesters. It has taken on a sectarian hue, with Shiite Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah backing Assad, while Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia support the rebels. The conflict has sharpened sectarian rifts in Lebanon.

The United Nations says 93,000 people have been killed in Syria and 1.6 million Syrians have fled abroad. Lebanon, the smallest of Syria’s neighbours with 4 million people, has taken in more than half a million Syrian refugees.

“What began was a wave of people fleeing from violence to Lebanon, but what is happening now is a completely different matter. What is happening now is organised displacement of the Syrian people - organised based on sectarian and political motives,” said Abu Faour, a frequent critic of Assad.

He made his comments after meeting U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, who said that refugees in Lebanon and their local hosts needed direct support from world powers.

“My very strong appeal is for massive support not only to refugees, not only to local communities, but to Lebanon itself in order to be able to respond to this challenge,” Guterres said, adding that the Lebanese education, health, and social affairs ministries needed financial aid.

The United Nations has asked for some $5 billion in humanitarian aid for Syrians and for Syria’s neighbours before the end of the year, its biggest emergency appeal to date. Of that, $1.7 billion will be required for aid work in Lebanon, including $450 million for the Beirut government, the U.N. says.

Diplomats say that foreign donors are unwilling to give money to Lebanon’s sectarian-based government which they see as deeply divided over Syria’s war and dysfunctional on domestic issues. Some ministers, such as Abu Faour, have been fiercely critical of Assad, while others strongly support him.

“Lebanon needs to formulate a mechanism to create confidence and trust in the government so that donors can increase their funding,” said the Swedish ambassador to Beirut, Niklas Kebbon.

Canadian ambassador Hilary Childs-Adams said her country was seeking reassurances that there was “a mechanism to send aid to Lebanon”. She said it was easier to send aid to Jordan, which hosts 470,000 Syrian refugees. On Sunday Canada pledged 100 million Canadian dollars to help Jordan cope with the burden.

During a visit to a UNHCR registration centre in the southern city of Tyre — where employees say Syrians start queuing at 3:30 a.m. every morning due to the huge influx — municipality workers told Guterres about issues they had dealing with the new refugees and a lack of support from Beirut.

Guterres said he would try to implement some of their suggestions into UNHCR’s work in Lebanon. He drew laughter from attendees when he added, with a chuckle: “As for the Lebanese state, there is not much we can do to fix that.”

Highlighting the difficulty of tackling the refugee crisis in Lebanon, Guterres’s trip was cut short by clashes in the coastal city of Sidon which he had been due to visit later on Tuesday.

Source: dailystar.com.lb

UN human rights council slams Hezbollah’s role in Syria

June 14, 2013 by AFP

The UN’s top human rights forum on Friday condemned the involvement of foreign fighters in Syria’s civil war, singling out the pro-regime forces sent across the border by Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The 47-member UN Human Rights Council backed a resolution from the United States, Britain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with 37 votes in favor, nine abstentions and just one member, Venezuela, against.

The text said that the council “condemns the intervention of all foreign combatants in the Syrian Arab Republic, including those fighting on behalf of the regime and most recently Hezbollah”.

It said that the involvement of foreign forces in the conflict “further exacerbates the deteriorating human rights and humanitarian situation, which has a serious negative impact on the region”.

At a May 29 sitting the council had also condemned the Syrian regime’s use of foreign fighters in the besieged town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, and ordered an urgent probe into the killings there but stopped short of naming Hezbollah.

Friday’s resolution condemned “in the strongest terms all massacres taking place in the Syrian Arab Republic and stresses the need to hold those responsible to account”, as well as “all violence, especially against civilians, irrespective of where it comes from, including terrorist acts and acts of violence that may foment sectarian tensions”.

It also noted the “widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and all violations of international humanitarian law by the Syrian authorities and the government-affiliated Shabbiha militias”.

At the same time it also condemned similar abuses by rebels, but underlined that a UN commission of inquiry had stated that they had not reached the intensity and scale of those committed by the regime camp.

The council also reiterated its demand that Syria admit the commission of inquiry, which was set up in September 2011 but has failed to win entry.

The council vote came a day after new figures from the United Nations showed that at least 93,000 people — including 6,500 — have been killed since the war erupted in March 2011 after protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 1.6 million Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries, and the UN warns that the number could more than double this year.

Source: now.mmedia.me

A wish comes true for Syrian girl who left behind the most important thing

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May’s delight is clear as a UNHCR staff member hands over her new doll , a present from a young British girl. It was brought by UNHCR staff all the way from Thailand. Phtot: UNHCR/N.Prokopchuk

Domiz refugee camp, June 12, 2013 by Natalia Prokopchuk

The pretty young girl looked confused when the aid worker came to her tent and held out a cardboard box. It contained a doll and a card, and when she realized it was for her, nine-year-old May’s face melted into a smile of delight. The thing she had missed most after fleeing her home in Damascus was her doll, Nancy, and now someone on the other side of the world had sent her a replacement. The gesture gave her hope in humanity.

The touching drama took place earlier this week, bringing together Syrian refugee May in northern Iraq and a five-year-old British girl called Mimi Fowler, whose family live in Thailand. By chance, she found out about May’s story in a set of photographs taken by American Brian Sokol for the UN refugee agency and run earlier this year in major media outlets and on the UNHCR global website.

“I did not expect to get a doll from Mimi, but I am so happy to hear about a new friend who cares about me,” May told UNHCR staff at Domiz Refugee Camp as she hugged her toy and read the letter from Thailand. “This doll reminds me of my old doll, Nancy, which was left behind in Syria. I will call my new doll Mimi, in honour of my new friend.”

Mimi’s mother Nilufar told UNHCR in Bangkok the story of how they came to send a gift to a total stranger in a foreign land. She recalled that she was watching the TV news one day in March when a segment about the situation in Syria came up. It included images of children in Syria. “Mimi is always interested in hearing about other children’s lives … and started asking questions about who they were and why they looked so sad,” Nilufar said.

The young girl wanted to find out more and so her mother went online and came across Sokol’s acclaimed and powerful photo set, “The Most Important Thing,” about the objects Syrian refugees took with them into exile. It included an image of a sad-looking May, who says she had to leave behind her doll in the rush to escape from Syria last August.

“Mimi kept asking questions about May and whether she was sad that she had left her doll behind, and whether she was going to be able to get another doll, to which the answer was clearly, ‘Probably not,’” Nilufar said, adding that the next day Mimi came to her with her piggy bank “and asked if we could take the money out to buy May a doll.”

The British girl was adamant that they must buy a new doll for May rather than send her one of Mimi’s old ones. Nilufar said it was “heartbreaking to think of this little girl missing her ‘friend’ so much. So if she [Mimi] wanted to do such a nice thing, I felt that I needed to help her make it happen.” Nilufar could also identify with May and her family because her own mother is an ethnic Tamil from northern Sri Lanka’s Jaffna region and had to flee her home several times in the early years of the 1983-2009 civil war in the South Asian island nation.

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This is the photograph of May in Domiz refugee camp, Iraq, that moved British youngster, Mimi Fowler, to buy her a new doll. Photo: UNHCR/B.Sokol

Finding a suitable doll proved quite difficult, Nilufar said. “I was terrified that if we sent something culturally insensitive, May would never get her new Nancy. So it needed to be something obviously child-like – so no Barbies or Disney Princesses – solid, and covered up. It took a while, but we got the right one in the end.”

The doll was handed over to UNHCR’s office in Bangkok at the start of a long journey to Domiz and May. UNHCR Public Information Officer Babar Baloch hand carried the toy to Geneva, attracting some strange looks en route. Then another colleague took the doll to Amman in Jordan, where it began its final journey this week to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where Domiz is located.

May’s own journey to Domiz camp was not as long but it was more dangerous, eventful and traumatic. She was born and brought up in the Syrian capital, Damascus. The war came to their district last year, when their apartment block was hit by a series of explosions.

May, her parents and her three younger siblings dashed for safety before the building collapsed, burying their belongings, including the precious doll, Nancy. She managed to salvage some bracelets, which she told photographer Sokol were the most important thing she managed to take away. The family stayed in a mosque for almost three weeks before deciding to leave Syria.

It took two days by car to reach the border, some 800 kilometres away. They walked for two hours to cross into the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where they were registered and directed to the camp. Being ethnic Kurds helped. “It is very difficult to restart your life after everything is lost, but we finally felt safe and welcomed by the people of Kurdistan,” said May’s mother, Hyat.

In Domiz camp, they shared a tent with three other families for a while, but have had their own for about six months. May’s father works as a driver for a supermarket chain in the city of Erbil, some 170 kilometres away. But he visits once a month, bringing sweets for his adoring children. His salary helps the family. May, meanwhile, attends school in the camp and is doing very well.

Her favourite subjects are languages – Arabic, Kurdish and English. She dreams about becoming a doctor specializing in caring for children. But though she has many friends in the camp of 40,000 people, she did not have any toys – until this week.

That’s why the gift from Mimi is all the sweeter. And to know that someone outside cares for her and her family, is a huge boost to this bright young girl. “I have never met Mimi, but she is so kind and I already like her. I wish one day we could meet and play together,” she said, adding that the new doll and Mimi’s letter were now her most cherished possessions.

Navi Pillay: UN has proof Assad is directly orchestrating murder and atrocities

Geneva, June 7, 2013 by Damien McElroy

The evidence paves the way for a war crime trial if he is ever handed over to face international justice, she said.

Navi Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Assad was deeply implicated in the growing toll of atrocities in Syria as she warned he must not be permitted to “trade justice for peace” in any future negotiations.

Investigators working for the UN teams, including a specialist commission of inquiry to track fighting in Syria, had no doubt that Mr Assad was personally involved in orders issued to the army, and controlled its vicious sectarian allies, the Shabiha militias, she said.

“I am assured on the basis of the evidence my officers have gathered … that the evidence implicates him by the actions of his subordinates,” she said. “It points to commissions of atrocities and human rights violations by his soldiers, his forces and Shabiha. He is very much the commander-in-chief and these are his forces. The evidence points to and implicates him in that way.”

Reports on Mr Assad’s role have been drawn from inside the regime, from survivors’ accounts and from intelligence handed to the UN from outside the country.

The commission of inquiry holds details of chemical weapons attacks, mass slaughter, indiscriminate assaults and widespread torture, for use in war crimes trials.

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High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay (Reuters)

Mrs Pillay will also endorse a claim by the UN General Assembly that the true death toll in Syria had now surpassed 80,000, an increase of more than 20,000 since January. “We are now continuing to verify the information and in a few days’ time we will come out with some certainty on an updated figure,” she said.

While both sides have committed war crimes, the 71-year-old South African judge blamed the regime for the intensifying brutality of the civil war, as Mr Assad increasingly turned to tanks and artillery to crush resistance in areas loyal to the opposition.

“The killings are largely attributable, based on the evidence, to the shelling and use of heavy weapons by the government,” she said.

Today the UN separately predicted that the number of Syrian refugees could almost double to 3.5million by the end of next year as it appealed for $5.2 billion (£3.35billion) to help alleviate the suffering of victims of the conflict. The huge sum is unparalleled in recent times and is a sharp increase on $3billion previously set as the target of its Syrian appeal. The organisation has raised only half that sum to date.

Speaking in her office on the shores of Lake Geneva, Mrs Pillay expressed her fears that Mr Assad could use a new round of peace talks brokered by the US and Russia to escape responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands in his offensives.

The conference, due to assemble within weeks in the Swiss city, will attempt to form a transitional government that includes both the government and opposition. Foreign Office officials said today the issue of justice had not been part of the preparations.

“Those who are most responsible must be held to account. As High Commissioner for Human Rights I am particularly watchful that justice is not sacrificed for peace,” said Mrs Pillay.

As a veteran of courts that pursued justice for victims of apartheid and international trials on Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Mrs Pillay said she feared the sponsors of the peace talks — known as Geneva II — would overlook the suffering of Syrians in pursuit of a ceasefire pact. “Peace may be what people probably want immediately. I am saying there has to be accountability — it has to be part of that peace. Victims hunger for justice.”

Source: telegraph.co.uk

U.N.: Nusra Front in Syria gains recruits after announcing tie to al Qaida

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Rebels walk along the frontline in Mayadeen, Syria. Photo: David Enders/MCT

Washington, June 4,2013 by Hannah Allam

The rebel Nusra Front in Syria appears to have gained recruits and equipment since pledging allegiance to al Qaida, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday that depicts a widening and increasingly sectarian conflict.

The more than two years of bloodshed in Syria has “accelerated radicalization,” allowing Nusra in particular to become more influential among Sunni Muslim extremist groups throughout the region, especially now that the Shiite Muslim fighters of Hezbollah are so visibly backing President Bashar Assad’s regime, the report said.

Religious and sectarian extremism is worsening on both sides as tactics grow more savage, the report said, with sharp rises in hostage taking, the use of underage combatants, sexual violence and forced displacement. The report, compiled by an international panel of inquiry on Syria for the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, covers the period from mid-January to mid-May and was based on more than 400 interviews and other evidence.

“The parties to the conflict are using dangerous rhetoric that inflames sectarian tensions and risks inciting mass, indiscriminate violence, particularly against vulnerable communities,” the report warned.

The U.N. report also said there were “reasonable grounds” to think that chemical agents had been used as weapons. But it added that “the precise agents, delivery systems or perpetrators could not be identified.”

The report’s release came only hours before France announced that tests it had conducted on samples from Syria pointed to the repeated use of the lethal nerve agent sarin, but Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius offered no details of where or by whom the gas purportedly was used, and U.S. officials said they still didn’t have enough evidence to draw a definitive conclusion.

“We need more (evidence) and we need to build on it,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

The language in the U.N. report was far more concrete on other aspects of the war, giving grisly, detailed accounts of the now-commonplace brutalities suffered by Syrians. At least 17 incidents that meet the definition of a massacre were recorded in the four-month period the report covers. Both parties to the conflict had carried out those and many other atrocities, the panel found.

On the regime side, there are lurid descriptions of men being rounded up arbitrarily, tortured with electrical shocks and held in vermin-infested prisons so overcrowded that detainees are forced to sleep standing up. The report also notes that the regime and its affiliated militias use sexual violence against their opponents.

Another regime tactic is “forced disappearance,” in which Syrians are seized at random, sometimes never to be heard from again or, for example, turning up among the 200 bodies that were dumped in Aleppo’s Queiq waterway.

On the anti-government side, it’s not just the Nusra Front and its fellow jihadist groups that are blamed for battlefield excesses. The U.N. report noted that rebels in general were using underage fighters in operations; at least 86 children have been killed as combatants, half of them this year alone.

The report offered no good guy-bad guy narrative – indeed, the rebels were blamed for many of the same tactics as the regime, including kidnappings, torture, arbitrary detention, looting seized homes and sectarian targeting, especially of the Alawite religious sect to which Assad and many of Syria’s elite belong.

In February, for example, unidentified rebels abducted a Sunni man in Damascus, mistaking him for an Alawite officer. He was tortured and subjected to sectarian epithets, the report said, before he finally convinced his captors that he wasn’t Alawite. He was released, but he still had to pay a ransom.

The more gruesome sectarian-tinged activity comes, however, from extremist groups such as Nusra, which the State Department has designated as a branch of the group al Qaida in Iraq. A series of recent “trials” by Islamist extremist rebels ended predictably: “Captured Alawite soldiers were consistently found guilty and executed, while non-Alawites were imprisoned or released,” witnesses told the U.N. panel.

Though facing some backlash in Syria, the Nusra Front remains popular among jihadist sympathizers and might be the reason for a noticeable recent influx of foreign volunteers, according to the U.N. report.

“Foreign fighters with jihadist inclinations, often arriving from neighboring countries, continued to reinforce its ranks,” the report said.

The panel’s report squares with the front-line observations of Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, who returned Saturday from spending more than two weeks observing rebel commanders in opposition-controlled Syrian territories.

O’Bagy said she’d noticed two changes in jihadist involvement since her last trip two months ago. The first was that the Nusra Front was far less popular among fellow rebel groups than before, with commanders grousing that it was a foreign-backed organization that was turning out to be more trouble than help.

The second change, O’Bagy said, was a marked increase in the number of foreign fighters – and the fact that they no longer were integrating with and being absorbed into Syrian rebel brigades. That points to the emergence of a more independent jihadist movement that might be much harder to uproot than Nusra, which was known for working in tandem with other fighting groups.

“These were fully compartmentalized units of foreign fighters that seemed to be doing their own thing, not integrating at all with the other groups,” O’Bagy said.

Source: mcclatchydc.com

#Syria refugee tally tops 1.5 million, UN says

More than 1.5 million Syrians have fled their conflict-ravaged homeland, the UN’s refugee agency said Friday, warning that the real figure could be even higher as the tally only reflected those who register with aid groups.

Dan McNorton, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters that close to 250,000 Syrians were being registered each month.

“Refugees tell us the increased fighting and changing of control of towns and villages, in particular in conflict areas, results in more and more civilians deciding to leave,” McNorton said.

“Over the past four months we have seen a rapid deterioration when compared to the previous 20 months of this conflict,” he added.

McNorton underlined that the actual number of refugees was likely to be even higher than 1.5 million.

“This is due to concerns that some Syrians have regarding registration,” he said, explaining that rumors circulating among exiles about the supposed security risks of signing up for refugee status put some people off.

He said aid agencies were working to encourage waivers to register in order to be able to receive official help, even as UNHCR struggles to keep up with the rising numbers and needs.

“The increasingly widening gap between the needs and resources available is a growing challenge,” he said.

“UNHCR continues to respond to the emergency needs of those in desperate need inside Syria and neighboring countries,” he added.

Syrians have surged out of their country since March 2011, when a crackdown on protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad heralded the start of an armed rebellion.

Numbers ballooned as the conflict morphed into an increasingly sectarian civil war, and the total topped a million in March this year.

Most have fled to neighboring Jordan, where close to 474,000 have been registered by UNHCR or are waiting registration, and to Lebanon, with over 470,000.

Some 347,000 are in Turkey, over 147,000 in Iraq and close to 67,000 in Egypt, according to UNHCR’s latest data.

In addition to the refugees, the United Nations has said that more than 4.25 million Syrians are displaced within their homeland.

That means that, all told, over a quarter of Syria’s pre-war population of 22.5 million have been forced to quit their homes since the conflict began.

The death toll has surpassed 90,000, according to the UN.

AFP - 05/17/2013

Humanitarian operations in #Syria disrupted due to insecurity: UNHCR

GENEVA, Nov. 13 — The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on Tuesday said the delivery of basic supplies to displaced families in Syria has become extremely difficult because of insecurity on the ground.

Humanitarian operations were disrupted on at least two days in Damascus last week, said UNHCR spokesperson Melissa Fleming.

The emergency packages contain non-food humanitarian supplies ranging from blankets and clothing to cooking kits and jerry cans.

Similar difficulties were also experienced by staff working in Aleppo, and the agency is temporarily withdrawing staff from north-eastern Hassakeh governorate, she said.

Insecurity over the past few weeks has resulted in loss of aid supplies, including some 13,000 blankets that burned in a Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse in Aleppo that was apparently hit by a shell.

In spite of this, UNHCR continues its efforts and successfully delivered nearly 5,000 mattresses and 500 hygiene kits to Aleppo, Hassakeh and Adra.

The agency’s statistics showed that the total number of internally-displaced Syrians stands at 2.5 million and those registered in surrounding countries exceeds 400,000.

Source: nzweek.com

#Syria strife tests Turkish Alawites

21/10/12

Turkey’s small Alawite minority reacts warily as Ankara backs armed groups seeking to topple Syrian government.

Matthew Cassel


The Alawites who stayed behind became part of the Turkish state founded on secularism [Matthew Cassel/Al Jazeera]

Antakya, Turkey - The mountains melt away into the waters of the Mediterranean outside the Turkish-Alawite city of Samandag, nestled just beside the border with Syria.

Beyond the peaks is Latakia province, the ancestral homeland of the Assad family that has ruled Syria for more than four decades.

But on this side lies Hatay, Turkey’s southernmost province, which is home to most of the country’s Alawites. At around one million, they represent a small but vocal minority leading the opposition to the government’s role in the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

“When something is happening in Syria we feel it,” said 31-year-old Kemal sitting in a park in central Samandag. “We have Turkish citizenship, but our origins are Arab.”

He spoke in a Syrian dialect of Arabic, like most Turkish Alawites are able to. Although ethnically Arab, the community leaves little doubt about its strong patriotism for the modern Turkish state and its secular model of government.

When asked whether he felt more loyal to Syria or Turkey, Kemal presented his upturned forearms: “Cut open my veins and I assure you Turkish flags will pour out.”

Kemal, who declined to give his surname, was on a brief break from work as a barber in Saudi Arabia. Because of their common language, many Alawites from Turkey travel to the oil-rich Gulf for work.

Kemal says he hates living in what he described as Saudi Arabia’s ultra-conservative Muslim society. Most members of the Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shia Islam, are secular.

Opposing the opposition

But even more than living in Saudi Arabia, Kemal dislikes the country’s arming of opposition movements inside Syria. His criticism also extended to other Gulf and western governments he believes are partaking in a larger “American game” to exert further control over the Middle East.

As the effects of the Syrian conflict spill across its northern border into Hatay and other neighbouring provinces, Kemal’s views largely reflect those held by the larger Alawite community in Turkey.

The situation is even tenser 20 minutes down the road in Antakya, Hatay’s main city. Pointing to the Orontes river that runs through the city’s heart, a colleague said, “It flows north from Syria, just like the refugees.”

What began as a popular uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has since turned into a bloody conflict that has created a refugee crisis as large numbers of Syrians flee to neighbouring countries.

According to the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), almost 350,000 Syrian refugees have registered or are waiting to register with the organisation. Turkish authorities recently said more than 100,000 Syrians have sought refuge within its borders.

When the refugees first started arriving in mid-2011, Selim Matkap, an Alawite emergency room doctor and one of the heads of the union of medical workers in Hatay, said he and other Turkish human rights organisations tried to help by requesting permission to enter the refugee camps, which are all under tight control of the Turkish army.

“We wanted to go to the camps as associations from Hatay, because if people come here [in such circumstances] then we have responsibility to take care of them,” Matkap said.

For months he said that the groups repeatedly tried to gain access to the camps through the local government, with each refusal spawning more suspicion as to why the government seemed determined to keep them out.

Outrage

Soon after, residents of Hatay were outraged when the Free Syrian Army, the main umbrella organisation fighting against the Syrian government, on its website claimed its main base to be “Hatay, Turkey”. After complaints to Turkish officials, it was later changed to “Damascus, Syria”.

The Apaydin refugee camp near Antakya houses dozens of former Syrian army generals and hundreds of army defectors, and is the suspected location of FSA commander Riad al-Assad.

“The Turkish government is not supporting a democratic transition in Syria, it’s supporting armed groups,” Matkap said.
“We believe the Syrian regime is not democratic, but using weapons and the tactic of war is not a legitimate method to oppose it.”

“It’s the poor people who will suffer from this war, not the regime.”

As time progressed, Maktap and others began organising protests in Antakya against the government’s support for the armed opposition in Syria. He admitted that the overwhelming majority of the thousands of protesters were Alawites.

Matkap said Alawites have faced persecution since the time of Selim I, a 16th century Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and today still feel marginalised in Turkish society.

When Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, took power in Syria in 1970, Maktap said Turkish Alawites began to feel more confident.

“It’s natural for Alawites in Hatay to think, ‘If something bad happens to me, then there is the Syrian government behind me’,” Matkap said.

After a number of large demonstrations in early September, the local governor banned all protests in Hatay as reports started to emerge of sectarian tensions between Alawites and Sunni Muslims in Antakya.

As the war in Syria drags on, fears have risen that the conflict has become increasingly sectarian, pitting Syria’s minority Alawites against the majority Sunni population.

But Ali Yeral, the head of an Alawite cultural organisation in Antakya, dismissed this characterisation.

“[Syria] doesn’t have a Sunni-Alawite problem,” he said, adding that he considers armed groups to be “terrorists” for taking up arms against the state.

“Like Turkey has the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], Ireland has the IRA [Irish Republican Army], Syria also has this problem.”

Yeral said that at first, he was excited upon hearing calls for more democracy in Syria.

Alarmed Alawites

But he said that Alawites became turned off from the uprising when videos showed Syrian protesters chanting not only against the regime, but also against Alawites more generally.

He also pointed to the sectarian rhetoric of exiled Syrian Sheikh Adnan al-Arour. The radical Sunni cleric, who hosts a popular satellite TV show in Saudi Arabia, infamously said that Alawites should be put through the meat grinder once the regime is toppled.

Syrian opposition activists in Hatay told Al Jazeera that these views do not represent the majority of their movement, which opposes sectarianism and sees the decision to take up arms as one of self-defence.

But as the battle for Syria continues with little end in sight, reports have increased of radical Islamist fighters, including many non-Syrians, taking part in the war.

Many people in Antakya, the main hub for foreigners travelling to opposition-held areas of northern Syria, say in recent months, they have seen a greater number of Arab and other Muslims who they suspect of being foreign fighters.

“Antakya is peaceful,” Yeral said. “But now we have foreign fighters turning up on the streets.”

Yeral feels that if any anti-Alawite backlash in Syria were to spill over into Turkey, it would not only include the relatively small Alawite community, but the much larger Turkish Alevi population believed to number some 20 million.

Because they share the same name in Turkish (Alevi), Arab Alawites and Turkish Alevis are often thought to be the same religion, despite the fact that members of the respective faiths observe different religious practices and beliefs.

However, they both consider themselves followers of Ali, the prophet’s relative, from whom their name derives, setting them apart from Turkey’s Sunni-dominated ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). 

But while Turkish Alevis are spread throughout the country and harder to define as a coherent political group, Alawites are mostly concentrated in Hatay, a region with its own unique history.

‘Betrayed’

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed during WWI, France, then in control of Syria, helped Turkey gain control over Hatay in the 1930s. The region had been considered part of Syria, but France was eager to win Turkey over to the allies’ side in WWII.

Furious by what they felt was the theft of much of their Arab territory, many Alawites and other Arabs left the area for Syria.

The Alawites who stayed behind became part of the Turkish state, founded on the strong secularism of Kemal Ataturk, its first president, whose ideology they still subscribe to.

But today, Alawites in Turkey feel betrayed by a government they say is acting against their interests by supporting armed groups.

“We are Turkish citizens and the owners of this land, we have to ask why we’re not getting support from our government [like the Syrian opposition is],” Maktap said.

“Instead we see rebels firing bullets at the government that has supported us.”

When asked what would happen to Turkish Alawites if the Assad regime in Syria falls, Matkap replied, “It’s going to be difficult.

“We never really felt we belonged to this state. It will be the same way if the regime goes.”

Source: aljazeera.com

Displaced #Syrians in Lebanon near 94,000 threshold, UNHCR says

16/10/12

Around 94,000 displaced Syrians are currently receiving protection and assistance in Lebanon through the efforts made by the Lebanese government, in addition to the UN and non-governmental groups, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) weekly report. 

The report added that out of the aforementioned number of displaced Syrians, 64,836 people are registered with the refugee agency, while 30,000 other individuals have contacted the UNHCR for registration.

Also the report said that more than 4,000 displaced Syrian were registered this week at the UNHCR’s offices in North Lebanon’s Tripoli, the Beqaa town of Arsal and Beirut.

The UNHCR added that most of the Syrians who were registered this week entered Lebanon “via unofficial border crossings,” since the official ones located near the Syrian town of Jousiyeh have been closed for three months.

Currently, 35,474 Syrians are present in North Lebanon; 27,320 in the Beqaa Valley and 1797 people in Beirut, according to the report.

Most of the displaced Syrians hail from Homs, Hama, Idlib, Aleppo and Damascus, the report added. 

Violence in Syria has killed at least 33,082 people, most of them civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. 

The Lebanese political scene is split between March 14 supporters of the Syrian opposition and the March 8 backers of the Syrian regime.

-NOW Lebanon

Source: nowlebanon.com

Alive or dead? Boy in #Syria bloodbath has leg amputated on hospital floor, and is then sent home on the back of a truck… but the outside world will never know his fate

13/10/12

A boy lies on the hard tile floor of an overwhelmed hospital in Aleppo, Syria, his right leg heavily bandaged below the knee after surgeons have performed an emergency amputation.

His eyes, full of fear and pain, are fixed on the man taking his photograph, while surrounding him are discarded surgical instruments, other medical staff and desperately wounded civilians - and his severed right foot.

The unidentified boy was among scores of civilians treated today by overstretched staff at the blood-soaked Dar al Shifa Hospital, a seven-storey building that was itself extensively damaged by shelling two months ago.


Doctors and volunteers treat a Syrian boy wounded by Syrian Army shelling at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo


Flatbed truck turned ambulance: The boy, with his seriously injured father lying next to him, about to be driven back through the war-torn streets of Aleppo to what remains of their home

A Syrian volunteer carries a child wounded by Syrian Army shelling at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo

The wounded boy lost part of his leg in a Syrian Army artillery shelling, and he was brought to doctors in the back of a flatbed truck with his badly injured father.

After being treated, the boy and his father - still covered in their own blood - were taken back in the same truck to the remains of their home and an uncertain future.

Witnesses say that places such as bread lines, hospitals and schools - where women, children and the elderly take refuge - are daily targets for Syrian Army snipers and artillery shelling. 

Experts and observes say about 90 per cent of the wounded and the dead in Aleppo are civilians.


Nurses and doctors treat men, wounded by the Syrian Army shelling


A wounded woman is treated by doctors at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo

Syrian rebels claim to have completely cut off the highway linking Damascus with the city, preventing government troops from mounting anything more serious than artillery salvos and sniper attacks.

Rebels battled to hold onto Syria’s main northeastern highway on Friday as government forces fought insurgents on several fronts across the country.

The rebels captured an air defense base east of Syria’s biggest city, Aleppo, and government forces unleashed air strikes and artillery bombardments on the western city of Homs, activists said.

On the Turkish-Syrian border, Turkey scrambled two fighter jets after a Syrian military helicopter bombed the Syrian border town of Azmarin.

The incident was the latest sign that tension between Ankara and Damascus is surging at a time when the 19-month-old conflict is deepening with no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough and growing concerns that it could spread across the Middle East.

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a death toll for Thursday of more than 260 people, including civilians and combatants on both sides, in violence in the capital and the north, west and east of the country.

It said 92 soldiers had been killed on Thursday, one of the highest daily tolls on the government side since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad broke out in March 2011.


Buildings in Homs damaged by what activists said was shelling by forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad

The official SANA news agency also reported fighting nationwide and said dozens of rebels, which it called ‘mercenary terrorists’, had been killed.

The reports could not be independently verified but they indicate an intensifying conflict, with the daily body counts of the past several weeks far exceeding previous months.

The British-based Observatory, which has a network of monitors in Syria, said fighting was taking place at a military barracks close to Maarat al-Nuaman, a town on the highway from Homs to Aleppo in the northwest.

Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub, has been contested since July and the rebel capture of Maarat al-Nuaman this week cut the main route for Assad’s military to resupply and reinforce it.

Opposition sources said rebels on Thursday halted an armored army column at Khan Sheikhoun which had been sent from Hama to retake Maarat al-Nuaman, 70 km (40 miles) south of Aleppo.

They also reported artillery barrages along the highway between Khan Sheikhoun and Maarat in the past 72 hours.

SANA said government forces were trying to clear Aleppo’s Karm al-Jabal area of rebels on Friday.

More than 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which started out as a popular uprising against four decades of Assad family rule and domination by their Alawite sect and then spiraled into civil war.

Fighting has also spilled over its borders into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, stoking fears that the war could drag in its neighbors.

Since Syrian bombardments hit Turkish villages last week, Ankara and Damascus have squared off militarily and rhetorically, with Turkey moving troops up to the border and threatening to retaliate if there is further cross-border bloodshed.

Two Turkish fighter planes scrambled on Friday after a Syrian military helicopter bombed the Syrian border town of Azmarin, where there has been intense fighting between rebels and government forces this week.

A Syrian rebel fighter stands guard in torrential rain at the entrance to the old city in Aleppo during fighting with Syrian government forces

Turkey infuriated Syria on Wednesday when it forced a passenger plane flying from Russia to Syria to land in Ankara.

The Turkish authorities said it was carrying Russian-made munitions for the Syrian army, a charge denied by Damascus and Moscow.

Turkey allows rebels sanctuary on its soil and has led calls, along with Western powers and Gulf Arab states, for Assad to step down.

The Syrian president counts on the support of Russia and Iran.

Despite the bluster, most analysts believe that neither Syria nor Turkey want matters to get out of hand.

The United States and European powers have also shown no desire to intervene militarily, despite much hand-wringing over the bloodshed.

Assad’s forces also intensified air strikes and artillery barrages against Homs on Friday, a day after they took heavy losses trying to overrun the rebel-held Khalidiya district, opposition activists said.

‘There are 50 bodies of soldiers and shabbiha (militia) on the streets in Khalidiya and regime troops cannot retrieve them,” said Ahmad Tarkawi, a local opposition leader.

‘The situation remains tough. The regime is now using a multiple rings tactic to surround Homs.’

Syrian rebels took partial control of an air defence battalion on the highway connecting Aleppo to Raqa province and near the Kweris military airport

Homs, 140 km (90 miles) north of Damascus, was the focus of world attention in February when a government siege pulverized rebel-held districts and killed hundreds of fighters and civilians.

It is also a gateway to the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean, heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite sect.

Video footage showed a six-storey building in Khalidiya flattened by an airstrike.

Shelling and aerial bombardments were also hitting Sunni Muslim towns near Homs to prevent rebels in the countryside from joining the battle for Homs, opposition activist Abu Yazan said.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis grew ever more acute, with the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR saying that between 2,000 and 3,000 people were fleeing across borders every day from Syria.

The total number of refugees now stood at more than 340,000, Melissa Fleming, a UNHCR spokeswoman, said in Geneva.

‘And now into the winter months, more and more of these people are going to be living in camp situations. So more and more of these people are going to be spending the winter in tents,’ she said



Source: Daily Mail

UN: #Syria pushes global refugee count toward 21st-century record

02/10/12


Rada Hallabi, 4, who is sick with diabetes, lies on a blanket in a refugee camp on the border with Turkey, near Azaz village, Syria, Sunday

By Reuters

GENEVA — With tens of thousands fleeing Syria every month, the number of refugees worldwide in 2012 is set to be the highest this century, according to a senior United Nations official.

Antonio Guterres, the body’s High Commissioner for Refugees, told his UNHCR agency’s executive committee Monday that its ability to cope was being stretched to the limit.

“Already in 2011, as crisis after crisis unfolded, more than 800,000 people crossed borders in search of refuge — an average of more than 2,000 refugees every day,” the former Portuguese prime minister said.

That total had been the highest since the turn of the century “and so far this year more than 700,000 people have fled from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Sudan and Syria”, Guterres said.

Source: worldnews.nbcnews.com

Exclusive: UN Still Has Ties That Bind With Bloody Assad Regime

11/09/12

As the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad accelerates its ferocious military campaign against its own people, the United Nations Development Program, the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency, is still intimately linked to institutions that keep the Assad family’s grip on power — and that conduct surveillance and may be conducting cyber-warfare against those protesting the brutal regime.

One of the UNDP’s partners in its elaborate development schemes for the battered nation — now suspended due to Assad’s onslaught — is the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), an organization created by Assad’s older brother and run by Assad himself until he assumed the presidency in 2000. In a 2007 U.N. report, the society was hailed as “the main and most widely used private provider of Internet services” in the country — and a participant in major collaborations involving information and communications technology (ICT) with the Assad government dating back for years.   

The computer servers and other (ICT) installed in U.N. offices in Syria, which operate at www.un.org under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP),  are hosted at an Internet address owned by SCS. 

Sharing the same Society-owned  IP address as  www.un.org  are a flock of Syrian government departments, clearly identified by their “.gov.sy” listings, many of which have also worked in close partnership with UNDP for years.

CLICK HERE FOR THE IP ADDRESS INFORMATION

Other U.N. organizations, including the U.N. relief agency known as UNHCR — which is deeply involved in aiding refugees from the Assad reign of terror — are hosted at another website address also owned by the Society.

According to a UNDP press spokesman, the agency’s relationship to the Syrian Internet provider is purely routine: “We contracted SCS services because it was the only organization with the required infrastructure and technical support able to provide Internet services.” He added that “servers hosted at UNDP’s Country Office in Syria are protected by a firewall system.”

Similar points were made by a spokesman for UNHCR.

In fact, in at least 79 of 166 UNDP country offices around the world, the organization bypasses local Internet services by using private — and more secure —VSAT satellite transmissions for its Internet communications . The Syria office is not among the 79, though such services are readily available in the Middle East.

According to the UNDP spokesman, UNDP “has moved” to a VSAT system, but according to information on UNDP’s procurement website, the bidding for such a global system for UNDP seems to be ongoing.

CLICK HERE FOR UNDP’S VSAT BIDDING NOTICE

Despite the claims that the relationship with SCS is nothing out of the ordinary, a cloud of puzzles still surround it, starting with the different and directly contradictory answers provided by the same UNHCR spokesman on two consecutive days when asked to explain a financial riddle. 

Why, according to U.N. procurement records for 2010 and 2011, did the relief agency uniquely show the “location of the supplier” — meaning the location of the payment – for “computer services” from  SCS  not, as other U.N. agencies did, in Syria but in Switzerland?

According to the first answer, the payments were merely made through UNHCR’s Swiss headquarters bank to “save costs and improve efficiencies.”  The next day the spokesman added an update: forget that.

“UNHCR pays SCS locally in Syria and not through HQ Bank accounts in Switzerland as UNHCR complies with the necessary restrictions on international banking transactions,” the spokesman said.  “There were no payments via Switzerland.”

The fact that two separate annual compilations of U.N. spending for two separate years showed the SCS supplier payments going to Switzerland, in computer-assembled statistical reports that also record numerous UNHCR payments — in Syria — for other goods and services used in Syria, is apparently “an error.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE PROCUREMENT RECORDS

Similar mind-bending might be required to consider SCS as no more than an ordinary Internet services provider.

As far back as 2009, the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders,  which has called Syria “one of the world’s most repressive countries toward Internet users,” put SCS on a list of “Internet enemies,” and charged that SCS  “can intercept emails and therefore monitor dissidents,” something that the regime had been doing for at least two previous years, tracking cyber-protesters  through their IP addresses.

Also in 2009, in confidential State Department cables later published by the rogue website Wikileaks, U.S. diplomats relayed concerns from American relief organizations that unauthorized SCS employees were being placed in their offices without permission, in order, the diplomats said, to “keep tabs” on the grassroots aid groups as popular hostility to the Assad regime deepened.

More recently, allegations have surfaced in the human rights blogosphere that members of the so-called Syrian Electronic Army — pro-regime hackers who have taken down or defaced news websites with cyber-attacks, or used them to spread disinformation about Assad’s opposition — might have ties to SCS. These ties have never been fully demonstrated, says Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security.

“Plausible. Likely,” he told Fox News. “Can you call it proven? No.”

The main point, though, he notes, is that “everything in Syria is under the government’s thumb.”

For his part, a UNDP spokesman said, in reply to questions from Fox News, that “UNDP has not been officially informed of any complaints by NGOs regarding surveillance activities by SCS.  SCS does not have free access to UNDP premises.”

But there are connections between the Syria Computer Society and other Syrian institutions that are accused of more sinister intentions than spying and prying.

Also hosted at the IP address shared with UNDP is the Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS), a state-owned financial institution that has been under U.S. Treasury sanctions since 2006 for terrorist-related money laundering. On its website, www.cbs-bank.sy, CBS denies the money-laundering charges.

For the past year, however, CBS  has also been under U.S. Treasury sanctions for something even more alarming: alleged financial ties to Syrian and North Korean  organizations involved in ballistic missile production and creation of  “unconventional” weapons of mass destruction, as well as ties to Iranian banks linked to that country’s own nuclear proliferation program.

 CLICK HERE FOR THE 2011 U.S. TREASURY ANNOUNCEMENT 

Additional sanctions against CBS were levied by the European Union in October 2011,  in a bid — so far unsuccessful — to stem the “appalling and brutal campaign the Syrian regime is waging against its own people,” according to the European Union’s top foreign affairs official, Catherine Ashton.

Along with electronic ties, there is a human link between the sanctioned bank and the Syrian Computer Society.

According to website information obtained by Fox News, a  computer expert named Ghassan Fallouh, who is also a prominent academic at Syria’s International University for Science and Technology, has served on the boards of both institutions since 2010, and on the board of the Syrian Computer Society since 2006.

Fallouh’s university resume says that he also served from 1999 to 2004 as a “consultant to the UNDP for the [Syrian] Central Bank.”

CLICK HERE FOR FALLOUH’S RESUME

Questions to Fallouh about the Syrian Computer Society, sent by Fox News on August 16, had not been answered by the time this article was published.

According to UNDP’s spokesman, “UNDP has no commercial relationship with CBS.”

Whatever the connections between SCS and other organs of the regime, experts argue, the Syrian Computer Society is much more than an Internet host for the U.N., the Assad government and alleged financiers of weapons of mass destruction.

It is an important “tool of the regime,” according to David Schenker, head of the program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a prominent bipartisan think tank, and a former adviser on Syrian affairs to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“When Assad came to power, he was the Internet president,” Schenker says.  “He was setting the stage for how enlightened he would be. He made an effort to burnish the modern nature of the new regime,” with SCS as part of the effort.

Now, Schenker says, “we know he had no intention whatsoever of doing this.”

In the now-savage environment of Syria’s expanding  civil war, the relationship between the U.N. and its cyber-host raises additional questions about UNDP’s long relationship with Assad, and the organization’s strategy of “national execution” of its programs in dangerous corners of the developing world.

That strategy makes the government itself the chief implementer of social programs created with UNDP technical assistance and supervision, and builds intertwining financial and work relationships between the world body’s representatives on the ground and key ministries and institutions that ultimately help to ensure the regime’s control.

It also apparently made UNDP consider the Syrian Computer Society  as a “partner” of UNDP and a formal member of Syrian “civil society” in a planned six-year program  to help transform Syria under Assad, from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a “people-centered social-market economy,” in UNDP’s phrase.

A version of a so-called “country program document” for Syria covering 2007-2011 (and later extended to 2012), was distributed to UNDP’s 36-country supervisory Executive Board on April 26, 2006, prior to their June meeting . A record of  Executive Board decisions posted after the group’s subsequent  meeting in September 2006,  show that the body “took note” of the report — U.N.-speak for passed it without making changes.

SCS  is listed in an appended “results and resources framework” to that document as a private sector partner in two central UNDP initiatives, to improve “structures and climate for trade, investment and competitiveness,” and likewise improve “employment environment and opportunities for skills enhancement for the under- and unemployed, especially women and youth.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE RESULTS AND RESOURCES FRAMEWORK.

According to the country program itself, the plan had also been approved by the Syrian government in February 2006.

According to UNDP’s spokesman, however, “although it was mentioned in UNDP’s results and resources framework, no agreement was made with SCS. Accordingly, the UNDP Syria country office has never had any development-related agreement with SCS.”

Source: foxnews.com

#Syria war refugees tell tearful Angelina Jolie of burnt bodies

11/09/12


By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

ZAATARI, Jordan | Tue Sep 11, 2012 8:22am EDT

(Reuters) - Syrian refugees stuck in a dust-blown camp in Jordan gave gruesome accounts of civilians incinerated in their country’s civil war to U.N. special envoy and actress Angelina Jolie on Tuesday, moving her to tears.

The United Nations is in the process of registering more than 250,000 refugees from the 17-month-old conflict in four neighboring countries, with more than 100,000 arriving in August alone - 85,000 of those in Jordan.

On average around 2,000 Syrians arrive each day in Jordan and the country has already declared the influx is beyond what it can deal with and appealed for international help.

“Little children who were asked what they saw described body parts separated and burnt people being pulled apart like chicken. A little 9-year-old girl said that,” Jolie told reporters after a two-day visit to Jordan’s Zaatari camp.

“It’s been a very heavy experience because often at times you come to these camps … and rarely do you come when meet them as they cross the border and get to know people the moment they become a refugee,” she said, stopping to compose herself.

“They will say: ‘As the months go on there will be no more of us, our homes are gone are families are gone’.”

Escaping an escalating military campaign by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, refugees languish in an unfinished camp where aid agencies and authorities are struggling to provide the most basic shelter and facilities.

At Zaatari, 28,000 people live in searing late summer heat with limited facilities and choking, dust-filled winds.

“The world is watching as though they mean to humiliate the Syrian people. We feel we are in a big detention center and zoo, fenced around where everyone comes to capitalize on our suffering,” said Musa Awadat, a father of six. “We didn’t flee from Syria to come here to another prison.”

APPEALS NOT MET

U.N. refugee chief Antonio Guterres, who toured the camp with Jolie and Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, said their visit was a message to the world “to help us and the Jordanian government in order to massively invest in improving the living conditions of the refugees in this camp”.

Jolie travelled to Syria in 2007 and again in 2009 to meet Iraqi refugees with her partner, actor Brad Pitt. During one trip they met Assad and his wife Asma, who later told Vanity Fair magazine that the couples lunched in the capital.

Jolie, dressed in a black T-shirt with her hair tied back, said that all appeals for international funding to tackling the refugee crisis had “not been met.”

Syrian opposition groups say more than 27,000 people have died in an uprising that has lasted more than 17 months and has descended into outright civil war in the pivotal Arab state.

“The complexity of this crisis is one of the aspects that sets it apart, and the speed at which people have fled Syria,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva on Tuesday.

“With 100,000 having fled to neighboring countries in the space of a single month, August, that makes it an extraordinary acceleration of this crisis,” he told a news briefing.

He said that almost 200,000 Syrians had crossed into Jordan, although not all were registered as refugees.

In April, Jolie was promoted from serving as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador to a special envoy.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Source: reuters.com

#Syrian refugee influx ‘too much’: Jordan

AMMAN: Prime Minister Fayez Tarawaneh said on Thursday the growing influx of Syrian refugees to Jordan was “beyond our capabilities,” expecting even more to join the exodus.

“The numbers (of Syrian refugees) are becoming beyond our capabilities, beyond even our expectations and we expect more as things deteriorate in Syria,” he told a joint news conference with visiting Cyprus President Demetris Christofias.

“We are shouldering a big burden in so many fields, especially water.”

Jordan has said it needs $700 million in international aid to cope with an influx of 240,000 refugees from the conflict across the border in Syria.

There are currently 185,000 Syrians in Jordan, with around 26,000 in Zaatari refugee camp, north of Amman, that the UNHCR opened five weeks ago, according to the prime minister.

“I got some messages yesterday and today from our friends regarding the Syrian crisis and the daily needs for the refugees. I promised that I will convey them very soon to the leadership of the European Union for additional assistance to our friends in Jordan,” Christofias told reporters.

Cyprus currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

“Jordan has already received a large wave of refugees from Syria. The international community, particularly the EU, should extend every possible support to Jordan,” said Christofias. (AFP)

Source: thenews.com.pk