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Opinion
Syria: The odds are against the opposition
On the campaign trail, Assad can only offer an exhausted and bleeding Syrian public a pyrrhic victory.
Last updated: 13 May 2014 08:33


Fawaz A Gerges holds the Emirates Chair in Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of several books, including "The New Middle East: Social Protest and Revolution in the Arab World"
Syrian demonstrators shout slogans and wave portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in support of the president in Damascus on April 28 [AFP]

Campaigning has begun for Syria's June 3 presidential elections. President Bashar al-Assad faces two contenders for the country's top job. By annulling the bids of 21 other candidates, found to be ineligible to run for office, the Syrian Constitutional Court has essentially guaranteed Assad a third seven-year term. In effect, there is only one presidential candidate on the ballot and his name is Bashar al-Assad.

In addition to the difficulties of administering the vote in a time of war, the two nominal challengers - Abdul-Hafiz al-Hajjar and Hassan bin Abdullah al-Nuri - are technocrats unknown to the public and possess no social constituency, turning the election into a predictable referendum on Assad.

From June 4 onward, Assad will present his internal and external foes with a fait accompli, a new mandate which would reassure and consolidate his base at home and maximise his bargaining position abroad. For Assad, the vote is a continuation of war by other means and the ballot box is a more important front than the raging military battles in Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. Assad would have conceded defeat if he had not sought another presidential term. The two battlefields are thus intertwined.

Assad will present his internal and external foes with a fait accompli, a new mandate which would reassure and consolidate his base at home and maximise his bargaining position abroad. For Assad, the vote is a continuation of war by other means and the ballot box is a more important front than the raging military battles in Damascus, Homs and Aleppo.

Mocking the vote as a "farce", the opposition and Western powers would like to wish it away, belittle it and insist on denying Assad legitimacy. Burying their heads in the sand, Assad's enemies react haphazardly and lack a coherent and operationalised strategy to stop his advance. They seem paralysed and powerless to force Assad to change his ways, relying on old tactics that have proven ineffective.

Resourceful and ruthless

While Damascus and its allies - particularly Iran, Hezbollah and Russia - have been resourceful and ruthless in their war game plan, the anti-Assad coalition is deeply divided and suffers from a fatal disconnect between goals, means and ideologies. Beyond Assad's removal from power, there is little unity among the opposition front. In contrast, Assad and his partners share unity of purpose and ranks.

On a visit to Washington for talks with US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, opposition chief Ahmad Jarba said the vote was taking place on "the dead bodies of Syrians" and would give Assad "a licence... to kill his own people for many years to come". He also called on the US to provide the rebels with advanced arms to change the balance of power on the ground.

To show its support, the Obama administration said it would recognise Jarba's Syrian National Coalition offices as a diplomatic foreign mission and announced plans for a $27m increase in non-lethal assistance to rebels.

Designed to reiterate the US position that Assad has lost legitimacy to govern Syria and to strengthen the SNC at a perilous moment for the religious-nationalist organisation, it also underlines Obama's abhorrence for direct intervention in the war-torn country. Although Obama's meeting with Jarba is symbolically important, it does not signal a qualitative shift in US policy towards Syria.

Informed by realism, Obama cautiously and modestly backs the "moderate opposition" and recently supplied anti-tank missiles called TOWS to the rebels, though it has refrained from providing portable anti-aircraft weapons, such as MANPADS that could fall into the hands of al-Qaeda-linked fighters like al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Greater Syria) known by its Arabic acronym, "Daish".

Obama has resisted calls by critics at home and regional allies for a more interventionist approach in order to change Assad's calculation. His reluctance rests on two concerns: 1) US national interests are not directly involved in Syria; and 2) a muscular approach might be counterproductive, triggering a region-wide conflict. The US-Russian rivalry in Syria and Ukraine also imposes constraints on Obama's ability and willingness to intervene actively in the country's killing fields.

Where does this leave the opposition which is overwhelmingly dependent on external support? It is doubtful if the ideologically and sociologically fragmented opposition can level the playing battlefield with the Assad coalition, let alone deliver a decisive blow. As things stand, the odds are against the opposition.

No centralised command-and-control

The lack of advanced weapons is one of the least challenges facing armed opposition groups, which wage battle more like local and regional militias than an organised fighting force. With no centralised command-and-control, the armed factions do not strategically coordinate with one another and, time and again squander important gains that could have turned into a breakthrough. The opposition's loss of the Qalamoun region between Damascus and Homs is a case in point.

More importantly, the war within the opposition, particularly Daish, on the one hand, and al-Nusra Front and ultraconservative Islamists and religious nationalists on the other, has exacted a heavy toll on skilled fighters. The Free Syrian Army is the weakest link in the chain pressed between a rock, Assad’s forces, and a hard place, al-Qaeda-linked militants.

In early May, al-Nusra Front, the official arm of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Qaeda, kidnapped top FSA commander, Ahmed Nehmeh, a former air force colonel, and a few of his lieutenants in Deraa after he had criticised extremist groups.

The opposition's disarray has played into Assad's hands. In the past year, the tide of war has decisively shifted in his favour. He has not only weathered the violent storm but has gone on the offensive. His army, with critical help from Hezbollah and Iran, has regained control of major urban centres in Homs, Damascus, and Aleppo to a lesser extent, consolidating its grip on the western half of the country.

Last week's retreat of almost 1,500 rebels from Homs, the "capital of the revolution" and Syria's third-largest city, is a strategic gain for Assad which will add to his momentum before the presidential vote early next month.

Given inherent structural constraints, the most that the opposition could do is to wage a war of attrition against the Damascus government, a war with unpredictable consequences and prohibitive costs. Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Assad and his supporters will celebrate a new mandate and promise an exhausted and bleeding Syrian public a pyrrhic victory.

A Middle East Tragedy: Obama's Syria-Policy Disaster

"How many more Syrians need to die before Washington rethinks its policy?"
Flynt Leverett Hillary Mann Leverett

May 30, 2014
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For over three years, the United States has sought to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by supporting an Al Qaeda-infused opposition that Washington either knew or should have known would fail. Yet, in his commencement address at West Point on Wednesday, President Obama promised the American people and the rest of the world more of the same.

Obama’s vague pledge to “ramp up” support for selected oppositionists is a craven sop to those claiming that U.S. backing for the opposition so far—nonlethal aid, training opposition fighters, coordination with other countries openly providing lethal aid, and high-level political backing (including three years of public demands from Obama that Assad “must go”)—has been inadequate, and that Assad could be removed if only America would do more. This claim should be decisively rejected as a basis for policy making, rather than disingenuously humored, for it is dangerously detached from reality.

From the start of the conflict, it has been clear that the constituencies supporting Assad and his government—including not just Christians and non-Sunni Muslims but also non-Islamist Sunnis—add up to well over half of Syrian society. These constituencies believe (for compelling historical reasons) that the alternative to Assad’s regime will not be anything approximating a secular, liberal democracy; it will be some version of Sunni Islamist rule. As a result, since the start of the conflict in March 2011, polling data, participation in the February 2012 referendum on a new constitution, participation in May 2012 parliamentary elections, and other evidence have consistently shown a majority of Syrians continuing to back Assad.

Conversely, there is no polling or other evidence suggesting that anywhere close to a majority of Syrians wants Assad replaced by some part of the opposition. Indeed, the opposition’s popularity appears to be declining as oppositionists become ever more deeply divided and ever more dominated inside Syria by Al Qaeda-like jihadis. Just last year, NATO estimated that popular support for the opposition may have shrunk to as low as 10 percent of the Syrian public.

These readily observable realities notwithstanding, the Obama administration, most of America’s political class, and the mainstream media all jumped on, and have stayed with, a fantastical narrative about cadres of Syrian democrats ready, if just given the tools, to take down a brutal dictator lacking any vestige of legitimacy. The administration, for its part, embraced this narrative largely because it desperately wanted to undermine Iran’s regional position by destabilizing Assad and his government. In 2012, Obama compounded his fatally flawed choice by setting his infamous “redline” regarding chemical-weapons use in Syria—ignoring the potentially catastrophic risk that this would incentivize rebels to launch “false flag” chemical attacks, precisely to elicit U.S. strikes against the Syrian military.

The consequences of crafting policy on the basis of such a surreal distortion of political reality in Syria and of strategic reality across the Middle East have, not surprisingly, been dismal.

Given that the popular base for opposition to Assad is too small to sustain a campaign that might actually bring down his government, it was utterly predictable that external support for armed oppositionists could only translate into death and existential distress for Syrians. Over 150,000 have been killed so far in fighting between opposition and government forces, with millions more displaced. How many more Syrians need to die before Washington rethinks its policy?

Supporting an armed challenge to Assad was also bound to invigorate Al Qaeda and dramatically escalate sectarian violence. Well before March 2011, it was evident that, among Syria’s Sunni Islamist constituencies, the Muslim Brotherhood—whose Syrian branch was historically more radical and violent than most Brotherhood elements—was being displaced by more extreme, Al Qaeda-like groups. External support for anti-Assad forces after March 2011 both accelerated this trend and reinforced it with an infusion of foreign jihadis at least partially financed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab American allies. The U.S. Intelligence Community estimates that 26,000 “extremists” are now fighting in Syria, more than 7,000 from outside the country. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warns that many of these militants want not just to bring down Assad; they are preparing to attack Western interests—including the American homeland—directly. It is hard to imagine a more dysfunctional outcome for U.S. interests.

Likewise, picking the losing side in Syria’s externally-fueled civil war has further eroded American standing and influence in the Middle East and globally. Most notably, Washington’s Syria policy has contributed substantially to the ongoing polarization of Western relations with Russia and China. In particular, the Obama administration’s declared determination to oust Assad has prompted much closer Sino-Russian cooperation to thwart what both Moscow and Beijing see as an ongoing campaign to usurp the Middle East’s balance of power by overthrowing regional governments unwilling to subordinate their foreign policies to Washington’s preferences. This collaboration, in turn, has helped to bring Russia and China into broader geopolitical alignment, deliberately working to turn a post–Cold War world defined by overwhelming U.S. hegemony into a more genuinely multipolar order—the opposite of what U.S. policy should be trying to achieve.

The Syrian conflict will end in one of two ways. In one scenario, the Assad government continues to extend and consolidate its military gains against opposition forces. Over time, opposition elements make their peace with the government, in piecemeal fashion. However, because of ongoing external support, enough opposition groups are able to keep fighting that significant portions of Syria’s population will continue to face serious humanitarian and security challenges for several more years. In the alternative scenario, the main external supporters of the opposition (the United States, Britain and France, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states, Turkey) and of the Assad government (Russia, China, Iran) pursue serious diplomacy aimed at helping the government and those opposition elements with some measure of genuine support in Syria reach a political settlement based on power sharing.

The current trajectory of U.S. policy makes the first scenario—with the unnecessary deaths of more Syrians, further revitalization of Al Qaeda, and continued erosion of America’s strategic position—virtually inevitable. The second scenario happens to be favored by Russia, China, Iran, and even the Assad government; it is also, far and away, the morally and strategically preferable scenario as far as America’s real, long-term interests are concerned. But shifting from the first scenario to the second will require fundamental changes in America’s Syria policy.

Above all, U.S. officials need to recognize—and to act as if they recognize—that serious diplomacy means engagement with all relevant parties (even those Washington does not like), with such engagement informed by an accurate understanding of on-the-ground reality (rather than wishful thinking). For Syria, this means acknowledging that resolving the conflict there will require the United States to come to terms with a Syrian government still headed by President Bashar al-Assad.

Flynt Leverett is professor of international affairs and law at Penn State.

Hillary Mann Leverett is senior professorial lecturer at American University’s School of International Service. Their book, Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran, is now in paperback.

Hezbollah leader says war on Assad has failed
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Hassan Nasrallah lauds Syrian president's victory in vote and calls on military opposition to acknowledge defeat.
Last updated: 07 Jun 2014 13:41

Nasrallah said any political solution must 'begin and end' with President Bashar al-Assad [Al Manar]

The head of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah has said opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has failed, after his victory in presidential elections on Tuesday.

Hassan Nasrallah, a staunch ally of Assad, said Syrians had prevented US plans to "confiscate" their will, in a speech broadcast on Hezbollah-affiliated Al Manar TV on Friday.

The leader of the armed group, which is heavily involved in Syria's civil war, denied accusations that Hezbollah had forced Syrians in Lebanon to take part in the vote, saying Syrians had "heavily" participated in the vote.

"The election is a political and popular declaration that the war has failed," he said.

Nasrallah also called on "regional countries" to stop supporting Syrian rebel groups involved in a campaign to oust Assad and for the opposition to "acknowledge their defeat".

The Hezbollah secretary-general called for a political solution to the conflict, but warned talks must "start and end with President Bashar al-Assad," Al Manar's website reported.

Widely criticised election

Assad was re-elected as president in a widely criticised election, capturing another seven-year term in the middle of a bloody three-year-old uprising against his rule that has devastated large parts of the country.

Voting was only held in government-controlled territory and in Syrian embassies in a number of countries.
Inside Story: Will Syria's election affect the conflict?

Assad's victory was a foregone conclusion, despite the presence of other candidates on the ballot for the first time in decades.

Meanwhile, activists reported on Saturday that Syrian military was dropping barrel bombs over a rebel-held district of Daraa al-Balad in the southern city of Deraa.

And in the nearby town of Taseel, activists said that 12 people were killed in a missile strike. There have also been attacks reported in Hama.

The conflict, which began in March 2011 after security forces put down largely peaceful protests against Assad's rule, evolved into an armed uprising that has killed more than 160,000 people, according to activists.

Hezbollah has helped Syrian government forces take back territory previously captured by rebels.

Both Damascus and Hezbollah say Syria is facing a Western conspiracy because of its support for groups opposed to Israel.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

UN says half of Syrians need urgent aid
New report says 10.8 million out of country's total population of 22 million now in urgent need of aid.
Last updated: 21 Jun 2014 01:54
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UN says about five million people are now difficult or impossible to reach [AP]

A new UN report says the humanitarian situation in Syria is worsening and the number of people needing urgent help has now reached 10.8 million - almost half of Syria's population of 22 million.

The finding came as the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on the Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the country.

The report, obtained by Al Jazeera, showed that 10.8 million people were now in need of humanitarian assistance, among whom five million were difficult or impossible to reach.

Reporting from New York, Al Jazeera's James Bays said that Ban Ki-Moon blamed foreign powers for supplying weapons to warring parties and fuelling the three-year conflict.

"I am here to express my anger and disappointment at the cold calculation that seems to be taking hold - that little can be done except to arm the parties and watch the conflict rage," the secretary general said.

“I urge the Security Council to impose an arms embargo. If divisions in the Council continue to prevent such a step, I urge countries to do so individually whatever they can to impose this arms embargo. Syria’s neighbours should enforce a firm prohibition on the use of their land borders and airspace for arms flows and smuggling into Syria,” he said.

The UN chief also reported severe levels of violence including intensified use of barrel bombs by government forces against civilian areas, suicide attacks and reported executions by armed groups.

Meanwhile, the Syrian government cautioned the UN Security Council that delivering humanitarian aid across its borders into rebel-held areas without its consent would amount to an attack, suggesting it would have the right to retaliate against convoys.

"The sole purpose of the initiative is to use United Nations auspices for the delivery of logistical backing to the terrorists, Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said in a letter.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

The Case for Assad

If Assad falls, Al Qaeda, ISIL and other extremist groups would flourish in Syria, just as they have in post-regime Iraq.
Chase Carter

June 20, 2014
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Bashar al-Assad is a malicious dictator. It’s no wonder the Obama administration has repeatedly said that the Syrian regime must go. Assad has used chemical weapons, indiscriminately bombed civilians, and laid siege to Syrian cities to starve and coerce insurgents and noncombatants alike. Assad’s war has cost over 160,000 lives, just so one man can retain power. However, while Assad’s brutal reign is difficult for the United States to stomach, he is likely Syria’s best chance for long-term stability. As Islamic extremists use rebel-controlled land in Syria to stage their campaign for Baghdad, the United States must seriously reconsider its policy of arming the Syrian opposition and its goal of facilitating Assad’s fall. American weapons will almost certainly fall into the wrong hands, and the war will remain a violent stalemate, destabilizing to both Syria and Iraq.

Recently at West Point, President Obama reiterated American support for the elements of the Syrian opposition that “offer the best alternative to terrorists and brutal dictators,”—support that Susan Rice later admitted includes “lethal aid.” But it is unrealistic to expect that the United States can control who receives its weapons, because of the constantly shifting landscape of the Syrian opposition. Despite ideological differences, moderate rebels in Syria often form short-term tactical alliances with extremist groups, like Al Nusra Front, out of necessity. Furthermore, moderate opposition forces have fought and lost battles against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which could result in the looting of advanced weapons. Whether by sharing or looting, reports have already indicated Al Qaeda-affiliated groups have acquired American antitank TOW missiles in Syria: weapons they could use in their fight for Iraq or against Americans in Afghanistan.

Even if the United States could properly vet and support only moderates, such as the Free Syrian Army, victory would still be unlikely. The balance of power does not favor moderates; they are fighting on two fronts against the militarily superior regime and the intractable ISIL. Over the last few months, Assad has used siege tactics, starvation and ceasefire negotiations to secure most of Syria’s major population centers. Moderate insurgents still cling to control of some towns and even suburbs of Aleppo and Damascus, but their prospects for victory are dimming quickly. Meanwhile, ISIL—a group denounced by Al Qaeda for being too extreme—continues to strengthen its position in Syria at the expense of the moderates. American aid to moderates at this stage is too little, too late.

The fact that multiple ideologically opposed factions are fighting both each other and the regime should gravely concern the Obama administration. It calls into question the logic of wanting to remove Assad in the first place. If recent lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have taught us anything, it is that a peaceful transition from sectarian conflict to democracy is nearly impossible. If the Assad regime falls, there will likely be no other faction capable of militarily defeating the other, and the conflict would truly have no end in sight. Under these conditions, Al Qaeda, ISIL, and other extremist groups would flourish in Syria, just as they have in post-regime Iraq.

American idealism frequently clouds the judgment of our policy makers. We want to promote democracy everywhere, and we have a seemingly nonnegotiable aversion to dictators. But sometimes there simply isn’t a better alternative—toppling a despotic regime often creates more problems than it solves. The United States is certainly creating more problems for itself in Syria by working against Assad. Obama said the United States needs to support moderates in Syria because they are fighting terrorists “who find safe haven in the chaos,” but arming the opposition to topple Assad is only prolonging the chaotic power vacuum that allows those terrorists to thrive.

Instead of prolonging a destabilizing civil war out of protest, the United States needs to show real leadership in Syria. Our focus should be to coordinate with regional partners to combat ISIL, stem the flow of arms to insurgents and negotiate a settlement with the Assad regime. No other solution is permanent, and until the conflict in Syria ends, Iraq cannot be secured.

Chase Carter is a Washington, DC-based military analyst.

Russia Opposed Humanitarian Aid Corridors in Syria Before It Favored Them in Eastern Ukraine

BY Colum Lynch
JUNE 2, 2014 - 05:45 PM

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Syria's bloody civil war has killed more than 160,000 civilians and left millions more in desperate need of food and other supplies. The current unrest in eastern Ukraine has killed a few dozen people, mostly Ukrainian soldiers, and caused no shortages of any vital goods. Russia has vehemently opposed efforts to make it easier to bring humanitarian goods into one country while enthusiastically promoting the idea in the other. Care to guess which country is which?

Moscow on Monday launched a quixotic effort at the U.N. Security Council to create humanitarian corridors that would allow relief aid into conflict zones in eastern Ukraine -- where low-level clashes between Ukraine's army and pro-Russian separatists have escalated in the days following Kiev's presidential elections -- and make it easier for civilians to flee the fighting. Those are exactly the type of measures that Moscow has bottled up when it comes to Syria, despite the exponentially higher civilian death toll there.

The Russian draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by Foreign Policy, "demands the immediate cessation of hostilities" in southern and eastern Ukraine and demands that "the parties establish humanitarian corridors in order to allow the civilian population who wish to do so to leave safely the areas of hostility and ensure the unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population" in the regions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said action by the 15-member council was necessary to avert further bloodshed in Ukraine's predominantly Russian-speaking eastern territory. "Our Western colleagues convinced us for a long time that the situation in Ukraine would calm down immediately after the presidential elections in Ukraine. Everything is the other way round," he told reporters in Moscow. "We want the [U.N.] Security Council to require that civilians be allowed to leave and humanitarian aid [be] delivered to the hostility zones."

Western diplomats and human rights activists immediately dismissed Moscow's gambit as a PR ploy aimed at distracting attention from its own efforts to water down a U.S.-backed draft resolution, currently under consideration at the United Nations, pressing the government of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and Syria's rebels to give U.N. aid workers unfettered access to the country. They noted that the initiative comes on a day when hundreds of separatists stormed a Ukrainian border guard outpost near the eastern city of Lugansk, sparking a fierce gunbattle that left at least five rebels dead.

"It is hypocritical of the Russian leadership to call for an end to violence and the creation of humanitarian corridors when at the same time armed irregular forces are entering Ukraine from Russia, weapons are being brought illegally from Russia into Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists are attacking new targets and holding [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] teams hostage, and Russia is doing nothing to stop these activities," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters. "It would be more effective for them to end those activities."

Philippe Bolopion, Human Rights Watch's U.N. representative, said Russia's case would be more convincing if it exhibited the same degree of concern for Syria's civilians, many of whom have been cut off from aid for more than a year. "Russia's stated concern for local residents allegedly trapped in the fighting in South-Eastern Ukraine would ring less hollow if Moscow was not opposing meaningful measures to improve access for urgent aid to 3.5 million Syrians, some of whom are being starved to death," he said.

The Russian push -- its first since assuming the monthly presidency of the UN. Security Council this week -- reflects Moscow's propensity for justifying its own actions by citing previous Western initiatives that it had strongly opposed.

Last March, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the West's approval of Kosovo's 2008 decision to secede from Serbia -- a move Moscow had fiercely opposed -- to justify Crimea's decision to secede from Ukraine.

"The Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedent -- a precedent our Western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country's central authorities," Putin said in a Kremlin press conference. If that wasn't enough, Putin cited a 2010 ruling by the International Court of Justice that "general international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence." The ruling, Putin added, was "crystal clear, as they say."

In Putin's view, the United States and its European partners are hypocrites who incessantly scold Russia about its conduct in Syria and Ukraine while pursuing military solutions to their own problems around the globe. Washington's willingness to undertake a long string of military interventions without Security Council approval -- from the 1999 NATO air war over Kosovo to the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- drives home the point, Putin argues. "This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism," he said in March. "One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow."

Last week, meanwhile, Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, sought to highlight what Moscow contends are deep-seated Western double standards.

Speaking to the BBC, Churkin noted that while the United States and Britain keep pushing for action against their rivals, they have shown little interest in talking about the misbehavior of their allies, including the recent Thai military coup d'etat.

"It's a question mark. In the U.N. we like to talk about preventative diplomacy," he said. "But in this case, for some reason the United Nations have not shown much interest over the month of the crisis in Thailand. The United Kingdom, or the United States, who have close relations with Thailand after all, have never brought the situation to the attention of the Security Council even though quite often they bring to the attention of the council minuscule details of the situation in various countries."

Lavrov, for his part, accused the West of callously ignoring the plight of the citizens of eastern Ukraine. "We are very concerned about what is going on," he said in Moscow today. "People die every day and civilians suffer increasingly. The army, combat aviation, and heavy weapons continue to be used against them. Residential quarters are under fire, and all these things can be watched virtually live.... Unfortunately, most Western media keep silent."

AFP/ Getty Images

Obama seeks $500m to equip Syria rebels
US president calls on Congress to approve policy that will "ramp up US support to the moderate Syrian opposition".
Last updated: 27 Jun 2014 04:13
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Obama's plan comes as groups like the ISIL are gaining ground in the region [AP]

Barack Obama has called on the US Congress to approve $500m to train and equip vetted Syrian rebels, in what would be a significant escalation of US involvement in the conflict.

Following several signals in recent weeks by the US administration, the White House said it intends to "ramp up US support to the moderate Syrian opposition".

It proposed the funding for "vetted elements of the Syrian armed opposition to help defend the Syrian people, stabilise areas under opposition control, facilitate the provision of essential services, counter terrorist threats, and promote conditions for a negotiated settlement".

Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, has asked staff to develop more detailed plans to train and equip the rebels, Reuters news agency reported.

The funds would allow the US military to "train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition," said John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.

There is no military solution to this crisis and ... the United States should not put American troops into combat in Syria

Caitlin Hayden, National Security Council spokeswoman

The National Security Council's spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the funding "would build on the administration's long-standing efforts to empower the moderate Syrian opposition".

About $287m in mainly non-lethal support has been cleared for the rebels since March 2011, and the CIA has participated in a secret military training programme in neighbouring Jordan for the 'moderate' opposition.

The $500m in aid is part of a proposed $1.5bn "regional stabilisation initiative" to bolster Syrian neighbours Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, and to support communities hosting refugees.

Hayden said US officials "believe that there is no military solution to this crisis and that the United States should not put American troops into combat."

But she said that the request for the rebels would help Syrians "push back against the growing number of extremists like ISIL, who find safe-haven in the chaos, and take their future into their own hands by enhancing security and stability at local levels."

Meanwhile the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has said he "welcomed" air attacks by Syria against ISIL targets on Iraqi soil, after raids on the border town of al-Qaim on Tuesday.

Maliki told the BBC Arabic that Baghdad did not request the air raids.

"There was no coordination involved, but we welcome this action. We welcome any Syrian strike ... because this group targets both Iraq and Syria ... But we didn't make any request from Syria. They carry out their strikes and we carry out ours. The final winners are our two countries," he said in the BBC interview.

Dozens injured in Syria car bomb blast
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group says Saturday's bombing injured or killed dozens in Syrian town of Douma.
Last updated: 28 Jun 2014 12:35
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Photographs and footage online showed the flaming wreckage of a vehicle ['Douma Revolution' activist page]

Dozens of people have been wounded when a car bomb exploded in the Syrian town of Douma, northeast of the capital Damascus, local activists and a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported the bombing on Saturday, saying dozens of people were killed or wounded.

There was no immediate report on Syrian state media of the blast.

Photographs and footage uploaded to the internet showed the flaming wreckage of an overturned vehicle in front of the blackened pillars of a nearby building, which activists said was located in a popular Douma market.

The observatory says that 160,000 people have been killed since March 2011, although this figure cannot be independently verified. The UN stopped counting at 100,000.

The number of refugees are also expected to hit 4.1 million at the end of 2014.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

Human Rights
Syria's war widows fight for survival
Women are head of household for one in four refugee families, struggling to provide food and shelter, UN report says.
Basma Atassi Last updated: 08 Jul 2014 17:41
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The thick black veil that covers Fatima’s slender body from head to toe has done little to stop the constant accusations from her community that she is too open, too audacious and, even, too masculine.

The 36-year-old Syrian who fled a brutal war that ripped through her village of Qusayr, destroying her home and killing her husband, is now facing a lone fight for survival with her two children in one of the poorest villages in Lebanon.

She is one of more than 145,000 Syrian refugee women who, according to UN figures, are the sole breadwinners for their families, struggling to provide food and shelter for their children and often facing harassment, humiliation and isolation.

A report released by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Tuesday, says that one in four Syrian households living in four major countries of refuge - Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt- are headed by lone women.

I was living in dignity, but now no one respects me because I'm not with a man

Zahwa, Syrian refugee in Jordan

Of the dozens of Syrian refugees camps in Arsal, Fatima lives in one of the most densely-populated. The "Mothers of Martyrs" is a complex of 113 concrete, four-by-four metre rooms, where a few hours of electricity is a luxury and the water tank is a 15 minute walk away.

After the death of her husband - who died under torture in a Syrian regime-run jail - she found herself, not only in a fight for survival, but in constant conflict with her new community as she tried to make the ravaged camp a fit home for her children.

"Every time I voice my opinion on how to improve the aid distribution in the camp, the Syrian men in the village shut me up. Because I am a woman, I am being told my opinions are worthless even though I am more educated than most of them," Fatima told Al Jazeera.

"They say I am too open and too manly because I leave the house and speak out, even though my clothing has nothing to do with openness," she said, as her black robe trailed behind her along a muddy and unpaved road.

'Prey to men'

According to the UNHCR report "Woman Alone: The Fight for Survival by Syria's Refugee Women", which is based on the personal testimony of 135 women, one in three female refugees said they were too scared or overwhelmed to leave home, and 60 percent expressed feelings of insecurity.

Many women complain of regular verbal harassment.

"A woman alone in Egypt is prey to all men," Diala, who lives in Alexandria, was quoted as saying.

"I was living in dignity, but now no one respects me because I'm not with a man," Zahwa, in Jordan, said. She said was even harassed by refugees when collecting food coupons.

Om Mohmmad, who now lives in the Mother of Martyrs camp after she lost her husband to the war and was separated from her family, told Al Jazeera that she is even scared to take her children to the outdoor bathroom at night because the men in the village view women who leave the house after dusk with suspicion.

"I do not want to hear hurtful words in the streets on the way", she told Al Jazeera as she sat in her shelter, one of those four-by-four metre rooms.

The 38-year-old mother of five depends solely on a stipend from aid organisations for survival. She breaks her fast during the holy month of Ramadan with her five children over a dinner of crusty bread and canned food, a striking contrast to the long and rich dinner table that her family united over before the war blighted their lives.

In common with Om Mohmmad, one third of the women interviewed by UNHCR said they did not have enough to eat. And only one fifth of them have paid work with many finding it hard to get a job, or simply having too many other responsibilities.

"Many have reached the end of their savings – even selling off their wedding rings," the report says.

"When I was living in Syria, I did not have to even worry about going shopping for bread. My husband brought everything," Om Mohammad told Al Jazeera, tears filling her eyes.

"Now I am running around from one place to another to fetch stuff for my children to eat."

'Humiliated for losing'

Before the conflict forced Syrian women into exile, many of them depended heavily on financial security and protection provided by the men in their families.

In some cases, their lifestyles were such that they did not even go shopping alone. Often they lived in areas where other members of their extended family were nearby – Syrian families are traditionally very tight-knit.

But the civil war has torn those families apart, forcing at least three million people – mostly women and children - to flee the country.

"Syrian refugee women are the glue holding together a broken society," Angelina Jolie, UNHCR's special envoy, has said.

"Their strength is extraordinary, but they are struggling alone. Their voices are an appeal for help and protection which cannot be ignored."

UNHCR has called for urgent new action from donors, host governments and aid agencies.

"For hundreds of thousands of women, escaping their ruined homeland was only the first step in a journey of grinding hardship," Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said.

"They have run out of money, face daily threats to their safety and are being treated as outcasts for no other crime than losing their men to a vicious war.

"It's shameful. They are being humiliated for losing everything."

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Women are the sole providers for one in four refugee families residing in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt [UNHCR]

Middle East
UN authorises cross-border aid to Syrians
Security Council adopts resolution allowing humanitarian access without Syrian government consent at four border points.
Last updated: 15 Jul 2014 01:23
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The UN Security Council has authorised humanitarian access without Syrian government consent at four border crossings into rebel-held areas from Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, although Syria has warned it deems such deliveries an attack.

Monday's unanimously adopted resolution establishes for 180 days a monitoring mechanism for the loading of aid convoys in neighbouring countries, which will notify Syrian authorities of the "humanitarian nature of these relief consignments".

The shipments will travel through four different border crossings - two in Turkey (Bab a-Salam and Bab al-Hawa), one in Iraq (Al-Yarubiyah) and another in Jordan (Al-Ramtha).

All of these border crossings fall outside the control of the Syrian government.
All of these border crossings fall outside the control of the Syrian government

"Aid access has to be authorised by the country receiving it," Al Jazeera's Kristen Saloomey, reporting from New York, said.

"This is a special measure by the UN, amid the growing humanitarian crisis," she said.

Because of the restrictions and ongoing insecurity, 10.8 million Syrians need help, of which 4.7 million live in hard-to-reach areas trapped by the fighting or under siege by government troops or rebels.

The United Nations accuses the Syrian regime of imposing bureaucratic and arbitrary obstacles to the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The Syrian government views aid entering the country without its approval as an "attack" on its sovereignty.

Watered-down language

The council's action on Monday is a follow-up to a resolution adopted by the council in February that demanded rapid, safe and unhindered aid access in Syria. The UN said that resolution failed to make a difference.

"The consent of the Syrian authorities will no longer be necessary," Luxembourg's UN Ambassador Sylvie Lucas told the council after the vote.

Syrian ally Russia, backed by China, agreed to support the resolution after more than a month of negotiations on the text drafted by Australia, Luxembourg and Jordan. A key to winning their votes was a weakening of a threat of further measures, such as economic sanctions, if warring parties did not comply.

The language was watered down to say the council "affirms" rather than "decides" that it will "take further measures in the event of non-compliance."

The 15-member Security Council would need to agree a second resolution to impose any punishments.

"Russia and China have always spoken about the need to keep Syria's sovereignty", Saloomey said. "But it seems that there is now an agreement that the humanitarian crisis has gotten out of control, and that the UN would know best how to address it."

Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted the resolution was not as ambitious as the initial text, which demanded blanket cross-border access.

However, they said the four crossings could allow delivery of humanitarian aid to nearly 2 million people.

Islamic state killed 270 during Syrian gas field takeover: monitor
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Militant Islamist fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province, June 30, 2014.
Reuters 3 hr ago By Reuters


BEIRUT (Reuters) - Militant group Islamic State killed 270 soldiers, guards and staff when they captured a Syrian gas field on Thursday in the bloodiest clash yet between the al Qaeda offshoot and President Bashar al-Assad's forces, a monitoring group said on Saturday.

The anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Thursday that 90 people had been killed and that many were missing after the attack against the Sha'ar gas field east of Homs in central Syria.

But on Saturday, the Observatory, which monitors violence in Syria through a network of sources in the country on both sides, quoted "trusted sources" as saying that the Islamic State had "killed and executed" 270 people during the assault. It said at least 40 Islamic State fighters were killed in the offensive.

Islamic State has made rapid gains in Syria, mostly by seizing territory from rival rebel groups, using weaponry brought in from Iraq where last month it managed to take large areas from government forces.

It was not immediately possible to verify the Observatory's report. Syrian state media made no mention of the attack.

About 30 people had managed to escape to the nearby Hajjar field, the Observatory report added.

Activists say the Syrian air force has in recent weeks stepped up attacks on positions held by Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Islamic State fighters have previously taken control of oilfields in Iraq as well as in Syria's eastern Deir al-Zor province. The group was once the Iraqi affiliate of al Qaeda, but al Qaeda disowned it in February after tensions mounted over its expansion into Syria.

Islamic State has declared a "caliphate" in the areas where it operates in Iraq and Syria. There the group has imposed Islamic law, carrying out harsh penalties including several executions.

In Raqqa in eastern Syria, two women were stoned to death for adultery, the Observatory said. One was killed on Friday and one on Saturday, according to the report, which could not immediately be corroborated.

More than 170,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict, which started as a peaceful protest movement in 2011 but descended into a multifaceted civil war after a government crackdown.

(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Reports: Syria trying to retake gas field
Government forces in push to seize facility in Homs seized by Islamic State group as hundreds are killed in violence.
Last updated: 19 Jul 2014 15:38
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Islamic State group's fighters have seized a huge chunk of territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border [AP]

Syrian government forces have launched a counterattack to recapture a gas field seized by the Islamic State group, activists say, even as the death toll from three days of fighting there rises to 270.

The intense fighting in the Shaer field, which lies in the desert region of Palmyra in the central province of Homs, has been among the deadliest battles between government forces and the Islamic State group since the start of the Syrian uprising more than three years ago.

Al Jazeera cannot independently verify the Syrian Observatory's statement due to reporting restrictions inside Syria.

Fighters from the Sunni-led rebel group have in the past few weeks seized a huge chunk of territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border, where they declared a self-styled caliphate. They also have captured much of Syria's oil-rich eastern province of Deir Az Zor.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian special forces launched an attack late on Friday on the Shaer field and have regained parts of it.

A Homs-based activist who goes by the name of Beibares Tellawi confirmed that troops attacked fighters from the group.

"The fighting today is mostly hit-and-run attacks," Tellawi said via Skype. "Large numbers of [President Bashar] Assad's forces are attacking the field."

The Syrian Observatory said that the number of troops, guards and workers killed in the gas field since it was captured on Thursday has risen to 270, adding that some were captured and killed by Sunni rebels. Tellawi said the death toll was at least 200.

Workers' fate unknown

The Observatory said Friday's clashes alone left 51 soldiers either dead or wounded. It said at least 40 Islamic State fighters were killed so far, while Tellawi said the number was more than 30.

The fate of 90 other gas field workers and guards is still unknown, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria.

In the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma, a car bomb exploded on Saturday, killing at least nine people and wounding others, the Observatory said.

The area has been struck by several car bombs in the past month that killed and wounded dozens.

The Syrian Observatory and Ahmad al-Masalmeh, an opposition activist in the southern province of Daraa, also reported intense shelling and air raids by government forces in the region that borders Jordan.

Syria's state news agency SANA said the army "hit terrorist dens", killing and wounding scores of fighters in several villages and towns in Daraa, including the villages of Tafas, Inkhil, Atman and Dael.

An unnamed Jordanian military official quoted by Jordan's state news agency said that border guards had received 411 Syrian refugees over the past three days. The official said 46 of them were seriously wounded and were admitted to field hospitals and that 12 had died.

The Syrian uprising began in Daraa in March 2011 with anti-government protests. The revolt later turned into a civil war that has killed at least 170,000 people and displaced up to nine million, a third of the country's pre-war population.

Also on Saturday, the UN children's agency said it was able to reach the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh for the first time since 2012.

Moadamiyeh has been under a government siege that activists say killed a number of people because of lack of food and medicine.

On Monday, about 13 Syrian Arab Red Crescent lorries loaded with 1,000 food parcels crossed into Moadamiyeh.

UNICEF estimates there are 9,200 children in the suburb who are in desperate need of aid.
Source:
Associated Press

Assad in Eid appearance as violence rages
No let-up in fighting in northeast and other parts of Syria as state TV shows president at prayer in Damascus mosque.
Last updated: 28 Jul 2014 09:50
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Bashar al-Assad has made his first appearance in public after being sworn in as Syria's president for a third term, attending prayers at a Damascus mosque to mark the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid.

Assad was filmed by Syrian TV on Monday at the prayer in al-Kheir mosque in the capital with Syria’s grand mufti, Mohammad Hassoun, and senior officials in the government.

Muslims around the world are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, a three-day feast that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Despite a war that has raged on for more than three years now, residents in Damascus are trying to maintain the traditions of Eid, when people wear new clothes and children get new toys.

Traditional sweets shops were open in Damascus' business district to sell Eid specialties such as kunafa, maamul and baklawa, while Whirling Dervishes performed at the opening of a bazaar offering foodstuffs and clothes.


Locals say that prices at the bazaar were lower than in general markets in a bid to help people shop for Eid. Prices have risen sharply in the country as a result of the war.

Protests against Assad and explosions have rocked central Damascus on numerous occasions during the conflict, and heavy sounds of shelling continue to resound night and day across the city as the regime battles rebels in the suburbs.

But the city itself has mostly stayed out of the rebels' reach, sparing it the deadly clashes and heavy destruction that ravaged the commercial hearts of Syria’s two other major cities, Aleppo and Homs.

Raging clashes

In Syria's north and east, Eid celebrations were overshadowed by clashes between Syrian troops and self-declared jihadist fighters.

The Syrian army on Sunday recaptured a gas field east of the central city of Homs that was seized by fighters from Islamic State group earlier this month.

Activists told Al Jazeera the recapture of Shaer field dealt a blow to the Islamic State.

"The Shaer field is an important military base that the army used to protect nearby villages that are loyal to Assad," opposition activist Mahmoud al-Homsi told Al Jazeera via Skype from Homs.

In Syria’s northeast, the Islamic State seized an army position in the Syrian city of Hasakeh, following three days of battle, where at least 85 regime troops were killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At least 1,100 soldiers and pro-Assad fighters have been killed since the Islamic State intensified its attacks against government forces this month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

On another front, Syrian rebels in the central Hama province captured Khattab and Rahbeh villages, taking over arms depots, activists reported.

Amateur video posted by activists on YouTube showed some of the weapons seized by the rebels in Hama, including rockets, ammunition, and mortars.

Syria's war has killed more than 170,000 people since it broke out in March 2011, and forced nearly half the population to flee their homes.

La olvidada Siria aún se desangra
Existen cuatro frentes tras 41 meses de guerra durante los que han muerto 170.000 personas
Natalia Sancha Alepo 16 AGO 2014 - 22:17 CEST
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Fuerzas leales a Bashar el Assad levantan sus armas en señal de victoria en Mleiha, cerca del aeropuerto de Damasco. / OMAR SANADIKI (REUTERS)
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Atravesar media Siria desde Damasco a Alepo por carretera permite contemplar un contradictorio paisaje en el que se alternan imágenes de localidades arrasadas hasta los cimientos con tierras cultivadas. En las zonas habitadas, sus vecinos se esmeran por mantener una burbuja de normalidad. Han transcurrido 41 meses desde que estallaron las primeras protestas populares y pacíficas contra el régimen de Bachar el Asad en Deraa, en el sur del país. Buena parte de la región —Túnez, Egipto, Libia, Bahréin— estaba en pleno fervor de la primavera árabe. Lejos de abrir la puerta a nuevas reformas, la respuesta marcial por parte del régimen y la consiguiente proliferación de grupos opositores armados y financiados por potencias extranjeras sumieron el país en una guerra civil devastadora y ahora estancada. Una confrontación que, a medida que se agravaban los conflictos en Ucrania y Gaza, ha ido cayendo en el olvido.
más información

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La guerra siria se cobra 170.000 vidas en 40 meses
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El Asad escenifica sus avances bélicos en las presidenciales sirias

Poco queda ya del Ejército Libre Sirio (ELS), el primero en levantarse en armas contra el régimen de El Asad, que heredó el cargo al fallecer su padre en junio de 2000. Ha quedado hoy relegado a un segundo plano por la miríada de brigadas de corte islamista, y facciones mayores como el Frente Al Nusra (vinculado a la red Al Qaeda) o el de más reciente aparición Estado Islámico, que rápidamente ha tomado partes del vecino Irak. El popularizado y mediatizado discurso yihadista de la oposición armada ha acallado las voces tanto de activistas como de opositores pacíficos.

La estrategia bélica del Ejército sirio se centra en afianzar su control sobre las metrópolis y las grandes arterias de conexión con la capital, Damasco, empujando a los insurgentes a la periferia de las urbes al tiempo que asedian las bolsas de combatientes dentro de las ciudades. “Mi batallón se encargó de cercar la ciudad de Homs. Hoy intentamos hacer lo mismo en Alepo. Se trata de expulsar a los hombres armados de las ciudades para combatirlos más tarde en campo abierto, donde se dañan menos las infraestructuras y se pierden menos vidas civiles”, explica desde el frente de Alepo el general del Ejército sirio Abu Ahmed.

A varios centenares de metros, los rebeldes se afanan a su vez por mantener un corredor entre las ciudades y las áreas periféricas. Recurren a ataques con mortero en las zonas limítrofes y hacen de los túneles y los francotiradores su mejor baza para compensar sobre el terreno su inferioridad ante la aviación siria. Unos 23 millones de civiles intentan sobrevivir entre los frentes forjando una ilusoria normalidad.

Los rebeldes controlan el campo; y el Gobierno, las ciudades y carreteras

Mientras que el Ejército sirio se muestra unido bajo un mismo liderazgo político que reivindica desde el primer día la lucha contra lo que califica de “terrorismo”, los frentes rebeldes están descoordinados. “Nosotros hace más de un año que no tenemos contacto con las brigadas del norte. Nos centramos en nuestra zona y [nos relacionamos] con otras brigadas de aquí”, explicaba pocos meses atrás Abu Husein, líder rebelde del oeste del país.

Ni Qatar ni Arabia Saudí, principales financiadores de los rebeldes, han logrado hasta ahora unir a los opositores en un frente único. El resultado sobre el terreno es una atomización del campo rebelde en multitud de brigadas que reúnen pocas decenas de hombres bajo un líder. El Estado Islámico (EI), con mayores recursos que el resto, parece tomar el relevo a Al Qaeda en la región controlando vastas zonas desde el noreste de Siria (Raqqa y Deir Zor) hasta acechar las puertas de Erbil en Irak, en el Kurdistán iraquí. El pulso lanzado por el Estado Islámico, con la declaración de un califato, ha logrado unir en la dialéctica “antiterrorista” a las potencias regionales e internacionales —Estados Unidos, Irak, Siria, Líbano, Arabia Saudí— que, simultáneamente, se oponen en el tablero sirio.

“El conflicto sólo acabará con un pacto internacional”, dice un general

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Seis millones de sirios son desplazados internos; tres millones, refugiados en otros países. Según el Observatorio Sirio para los Derechos Humanos con sede en Londres, 170.000 personas han muerto, un tercio de ellos civiles. El Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo cifraba el pasado mayo en 520.000 las víctimas entre mutilados, heridos y fallecidos en la contienda. En cuanto al coste económico de la guerra, la mayoría de los expertos estima que oscila entre 90.000 y 130.000 millones de euros.

El país está divido en cuatro frentes donde los alzados contra El Asad controlan mayoritariamente el campo abierto; y el Ejército sirio, las ciudades y grandes carreteras. Algunos de los frentes en las urbes no han variado más de 300 metros en dos años. “La guerra no terminará hasta que no haya una solución política entre potencias internacionales y regionales. Hasta entonces podemos continuar años así”, asegura el general Abu Ahmed.

En el sur, el frente se encuentra en la ciudad de Deraa y sus alrededores hasta la frontera con Jordania. En la capital, los combates se centran en la periferia este de Damasco y el anillo exterior que lo circunvala. Al este del país, las hostilidades son en la región de Calamún, en la frontera con Líbano. El frente más amplio se extiende desde el noroeste del país hasta el noreste, en la frontera con Irak. En los tres primeros frentes, el régimen combate simultáneamente a diferentes grupos opositores como el Ejército Libre de Siria, el Frente al Nusra o el Frente islámico; en el noreste el Estado Islámico se impone como único enemigo del Ejército. Y a estos combates con las tropas regulares de El Asad, se suman las guerras internas entre los que se oponen al régimen sirio: principalmente entre el Estado Islámico y otras facciones. Esta disensión favorece al régimen sirio y provoca constantes desplazamientos de población.

Los yihadistas en Siria avanzan por el noreste de Alepo
El Estado Islámico arrebata localidades a otras fuerzas alzadas contra el régimen

Alepo, la ciudad de las tres batallas

Natalia Sancha Alepo 18 AGO 2014 - 21:41 CEST

Un soldado del ejército sirio en las afueras de Alepo / Natalia Sancha
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El frente decisivo de Alepo está entre canteras de piedra y cuevas. A 20 kilómetros al norte, en Manasher, las fuerzas especiales de la inteligencia aérea siria y los rebeldes se enfrentan en campo abierto. Morteros y cañonazos de tanques contrastan con la relativa calma del frente urbano.

Decenas de soldados aferrados a las rocas disparan hacia el norte. A pocas decenas de metros, los insurrectos mantienen sus posiciones y responden a su vez con un sinfín de descargas ensordecedoras. “Cada noche intentan avanzar por aquí. Cada noche los repelemos a veces hasta a 10 metros de distancia”, explica Neser, un joven alto y con larga barba que se antoja el líder del comando. Les llaman los tigres, nombre que heredan de su coronel S. H., convertido hoy en héroe de guerra por romper el cerco de los rebeldes sobre Alepo.
más información

Alepo, la ciudad de las tres batallas
La olvidada Siria aún se desangra
El Ejército sirio gana terreno en el frente de la periferia de Damasco
La guerra siria se cobra 170.000 vidas en 40 meses

Entrenados en la lucha antiterrorista, los tigres son la punta de la lanza que abre camino contra los opositores en este frente. Milicianos llegados de Líbano les apoyan. “Los amigos de Hezbolá (milicia libanesa chií) aseguran algunas posiciones una vez que las tomamos”, afirma Neser.

Las tropas intentan romper el asedio de los rebeldes, que controlan norte, este y parte del sureste de la provincia de Alepo, con lo que dominan algunas conexiones estratégicas como la del aeropuerto internacional con la ciudad industrial de Sheij Nayar junto con la prisión central. En esta última, 400 soldados resistieron durante año y medio el embate de los rebeldes hasta dos meses atrás. Solo 250 salieron con vida. “Los rebeldes querían liberar a decenas de compañeros presos. Nos rodearon. Solo recibíamos comida cuando nuestros helicópteros podían lanzarla desde el aire”, relata un exhausto Hamzi Haidar, soldado de 30 años que sobrevivió al cerco. Con ambos bandos inmersos en la lucha durante meses, los yihadistas del Estado Islámico (EI) avanzan por el noreste. “Se está haciendo más fuerte mientras que Al Nusra (antes aliado del EI) y el Frente Islámico se debilitan. No veo colaboración entre el Ejército sirio y los rebeldes en el norte contra el EI”, dice Hasan el Nuri, candidato a las últimas elecciones. “Nosotros no hemos creado al EI. No los hemos combatido porque no nos hemos cruzado en el frente. Cuando llegue la hora lo haremos”, asegura Neser.

Y la hora parece estar cerca. Hace dos días, los combatientes del EI arrebataron las localidades de Ajtarin y Mare (a 25 kilómetros al norte de Alepo) al Frente al Nusra y al Frente Islámico. Contradicciones de la guerra, el norte de Alepo puede convertirse en la primera batalla que una en un mismo barco a rebeldes y Ejército sirio contra el Estado Islámico. “Los diferentes líderes de las brigadas rebeldes se han reunido para crear una coalición capaz de hacer frente común. Son miles los que se dirigen hasta aquí para frenar el avance”, asevera el opositor Abu Ramzi vía Skype y apostado en la periferia de Alepo.

Alepo, la ciudad de las tres batallas
Las tropas sirias tratan de arrebatar a los rebeldes el centro de la metrópoli más grande
Natalia Sancha Alepo 18 AGO 2014 - 21:18 CEST

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Un sargento del Ejército sirio se mantiene apostado en un edificio del barrio de Karmel el Jebel, en Alepo / Natalia Sancha

La batalla de Alepo se libra en dos frentes: calle a calle, en el frente urbano, y a campo abierto, en la periferia. En la mayor metrópoli de Siria y corazón económico del país, el Ejército de Bachar el Asad —la entrenada y equipada Guardia Republicana— avanza lentamente cercando a los rebeldes en el este de la ciudad. Pero en el noreste de Alepo y en el norte de sus alrededores, los roles se intercambian y son los insurrectos quienes controlan la mayor parte del terreno, mientras las fuerzas de élite sirias luchan por mantener sus posiciones. Y todavía puede nacer un tercer frente: el Estado Islámico (EI) avanza hacia Alepo por el noreste.

Para llegar al último puesto en el frente del barrio de Karmel el Jebel, los uniformados sirios han de cruzar callejuelas expuestas a la mirilla de francotiradores y tramos a través de boquetes abiertos en las paredes que conectan internamente las viviendas. Donde antes habitaba una familia, de cuyas vidas no quedan más que fotos de boda y ropas calcinadas, ahora hace guardia el soldado Alí Ismain Ozman, de 21 años y oriundo del barrio. Desde su posición tiene vistas a su casa, pero si asoma la cabeza sobre los sacos de arena para mirarla, le llueven los disparos y solo atisba a ojear varias banderas de Al Nusra, del Estado Islámico y de la Brigada Al Tauhid.
más información

La olvidada Siria aún se desangra
El Ejército sirio gana terreno en el frente de la periferia de Damasco
La guerra siria se cobra 170.000 vidas en 40 meses
El avance yihadista desestabiliza la región y arrastra a Líbano al caos

En la operación en la que el Ejército logró hacerse con la posición que defiende Alí, el soldado recogió entre los muertos el cuerpo de Hasan, su compañero de pupitre del colegio. “Hay extranjeros que luchan, pero muchos son sirios del barrio que tomaron el mal camino. Les han comido la cabeza”, concluye el joven militar.

Para entrar en Alepo hay que rodear el sureste, en manos rebeldes, y tomar la ruta de Janaser. Es el único camino medianamente seguro bajo control del régimen para aprovisionar la ciudad y el hilo de conexión con Damasco.


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El curtido general Abu Hasan, en la cincuentena, lidera a sus hombres de la Guardia Republicana. Llegaron a Alepo hace dos años tras afianzar el control sobre la ciudad de Homs. Ahora intentan dominar el frente urbano para centrarse en la periferia. Entrenados para combatir a otros Ejércitos, las tropas sirias han tenido que enfrentarse a métodos de guerrilla urbana. Después de 41 meses de conflicto, empiezan a mimetizarse con los rebeldes y a adoptar sus técnicas.

Las fuerzas de El Asad han copiado las técnicas de guerrilla de los opositores

Con el fin de cerrar el cerco a los opositores, las tropas sirias parecen haber optado por una guerra de desgaste. El general Abu Hasan admite que en dos años han avanzado 500 metros. “La estrategia clásica de guerra no funciona. Se producen muchos destrozos y pérdidas de vidas civiles. Mantendremos posiciones hasta que llegue una solución política”, resume el general.

Desde Karmel el Jebel se divisa también la ciudadela de Alepo, centro de la ciudad antigua, patrimonio de la humanidad por la Unesco (Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura). El sargento Hasan Haidar, de 36 años, lleva uno apostado allí. Transita a diario el corredor que une Bab el Faraj, una de las siete puertas de la ciudad vieja, con la ciudadela, el único punto, aunque el más alto, bajo control del Ejército sirio. “Es difícil luchar entre callejuelas y proteger monumentos. Aquí el francotirador es el rey de la calle. Basta un solo hombre para provocar muchas bajas. Las cosas han cambiado cuando los americanos les han proporcionado ametralladoras Dushka y rifles Shtayer con un alcance de hasta tres kilómetros”, protesta Hasan. La presencia de francotiradores crea zonas grises en las que ningún bando tiene control. Hasan asegura que la mezquita Omeya, de la que dice que no quedan ni minarete ni fuente, es una de ellas.

Mientras continúan los combates entre rebeldes y leales, dos millones de habitantes prosiguen su vida. Los que huyeron a la capital han sido reemplazados por los que escapan de las afueras. La mayoría ha abandonado la parte este, donde los barriles bomba lanzados por el régimen han borrado barrios enteros del mapa.

Los habitantes parecen haber pactado una ilusoria rutina para poder continuar con sus vidas. Mujeres y niños hacen cola en las fuentes públicas cargados con bidones de plástico. Cuando llega la electricidad, los vecinos se avisan y aprovechan para darse una ducha mientras funcione la bomba de agua o para cargar los móviles. En las líneas de frente que dividen los barrios, mujeres cargadas con cestas de verduras caminan entre controles militares y edificios derruidos, a pesar de la presencia de francotiradores en algunas calles.

Una solución de doble filo
Entregar armas a los kurdos puede crear a la larga un problema mayor en Irak
El País 19 AGO 2014 - 00:00 CEST


Sobre la crisis iraquí, igual que sobre las demás, la Unión Europea avanza con desorden mientras trata de cubrir sus desacuerdos con un velo de consenso. Reunidos con urgencia el pasado 15 de agosto a petición de Francia e Italia, los ministros de los 28 se han felicitado... por que cada uno haga lo que quiera. En resumen, cada uno es libre de enviar, o no, armas a los kurdos de Irak para combatir a los yihadistasdel Estado Islámico.

Como de costumbre, Francia ni siquiera esperó a la reunión para anunciar que iba a entregar “armas sofisticadas” a los líderes del Kurdistán iraquí autónomo; los mismos que se quejan amargamente de no estar debidamente equipados para hacer frente a los insurgentes que se apoderaron de los recursos estadounidenses del Ejército iraquí. Reino Unido, Italia y la República Checa han seguido el ejemplo de París. Por el contrario, Suecia prefiere atenerse a su credo neutralista y pacifista. Finalmente, Alemania se ha visto una vez más dividida entre su deseo de influir en la dirección de los asuntos mundiales y su no intervencionismo heredado de la II Guerra Mundial. Y no sólo eso. La inquietud alemana es la siguiente: las armas entregadas a los peshmergas no deben servir, un día, para hacer la guerra al Estado iraquí dirigido desde Bagdad. (...)

Mediante la entrega de armas sofisticadas a los kurdos, y comprándoles directamente el petróleo, Occidente, al igual que Estados Unidos, asume el riesgo de solucionar un problema de forma inmediata mediante la creación de otro aún más difícil.

París, 18 de agosto

Jihadis capture major Syrian air base in northeast
An Islamic State militant uses a loud-hailer to announce to residents of Taqba city that Tabqa air base has fallen to Islamic State militants on Aug. 24, 2014. Reuters: Stringer
An Islamic State militant uses a loud-hailer to announce to residents of Taqba city that Tabqa air base has fallen to Islamic State militants on Aug. 24, 2014.
AP 1 hr ago By RYAN LUCAS of Associated Press



BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic State fighters captured a major military air base in northeastern Syria on Sunday, eliminating the last government-held outpost in a province otherwise dominated by the jihadi group, activists and state media said.

Tabqa airfield — home to several warplane squadrons, helicopters, tanks, artillery, and ammunition bunkers — is the third military base in the area to fall to the extremists since last month. Those victories are part of the Islamic State group's aggressive push to consolidate its hold on northern and eastern provinces, while also expanding the boundaries of its self-styled caliphate straddling the Syria-Iraq border.

The jihadis launched their long-anticipated offensive last week to seize the sprawling Tabqa facility, located some 45 kilometers (25 miles) from the extremists' stronghold in the city of Raqqa along the Euphrates River.

After several failed efforts to breach the walls in recent days, Islamic State fighters managed to punch through and storm the air base Sunday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Government warplanes carried out waves of airstrikes to try to beat back the attack, but those ultimately proved unable to stem the assault.

"Some of the Syrian regime troops pulled out, and now the Islamic State is in full control of Tabqa," said Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman. "This makes Raqqa province the first to fully fall out of government hands."

Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, also said the extremist group was in control of Tabqa.

The SANA state news agency confirmed that the government had lost the air base, saying troops "are successfully reassembling after evacuating the airport." It said that the military was still "striking terrorist groups, inflicting heavy losses on them."

The government had made significant investments in both weapons and manpower to try to hold onto Tabqa, making its fall both a symbolic and a strategic blow.

Islamic State fighters had been closing in on the base for weeks. When the fight finally came, it was bloody.

The Observatory said that at least 100 Islamic State fighters were killed and another 300 wounded in the fighting, numbers that exclude casualties from the final assault. It said more than 170 government troops also were killed Sunday alone, and there were reports that another 150 may have been captured.

Tabqa is the latest in a string of bases to fall to the Islamic State group as it strengthens its hold over a vast swath of territory in northern and eastern Syria. Last month, the extremists overran the sprawling Division 17 military base in Raqqa, killing at least 85 soldiers. Two weeks later, they seized the nearby Brigade 93 base after days of heavy fighting.

The group's trademark brutality was on full display after those victories. They killed army commanders and pro-government militiamen, decapitating them before putting their bodies and heads on display. The Observatory reported similar acts following the fall of Tabqa Sunday.

In the neighboring province of Deir el-Zour, Islamic State fighters also have overwhelmed outposts held by Syrian rebels, systematically picking off towns and villages one by one through force and intimidation.

Their slow and steady push in northern and eastern Syria, as well as their lightning advance across Iraq, has brought under their control a stretch of territory running from Syria's northern border with Turkey as far as the outskirts of Baghdad in central Iraq. The group has declared a self-styled caliphate in those lands to be governed under its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Early this month, the United States began launching airstrikes against the group in northern Iraq. Those operations mark the first American military involvement in the country since the last U.S. forces withdrew in 2011.

The mainstream Syrian opposition, which is fighting President Bashar Assad as well as the Islamic State group, has called for similar air raids against the extremists in Syria. The Obama administration has so far refused, wary of getting dragged into a bloody and complex civil war that the U.N. says has killed more than 190,000 people.

With Tabqa now in hand, the Islamic State group could focus on the battlefront in neighboring Aleppo province. The extremists have already captured at least a dozen towns and villages there in recent weeks, crushing mainstream Syrian rebels and advancing toward the city of Aleppo.

In the central Syrian province of Homs, however, the Islamic State group reportedly was withdrawing its fighters after handing over its headquarters to the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, the Observatory said. It did not provide a reason for the move, or more details.

The extremist group's offensive since June has sent tremors across the region, particularly in countries that share a border with Iraq and Syria.

Also Sunday, an American held hostage in Syria by an al-Qaida-linked group was released, a relative and the U.S. government said.

The U.S. identified the freed American as Peter Theo Curtis, and said he now was safe and outside of Syria. The United Nations said it helped with the handover to U.N. peacekeepers in a village in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights and that Curtis was released to American authorities after a medical checkup.

The administration provided no details about the circumstances of his abduction or his release. It was not known what prompted Curtis' release, which comes days after militants beheaded a U.S. journalist abducted while covering the Syrian conflict.

Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan met in the Red Sea city of Jiddah, the official Saudi news agency said without providing details.

But Egypt's Foreign Ministry said ahead of the talks that the group would discuss the security threat posed by the Islamic State group and search for ways to bring about a needed political solution to the Syrian crisis.

___

Associated Press writers Mariam Rizk in Cairo and Aya Batra

El Asad intenta rehabilitarse gracias al avance del terror del yihadismo
El presidente de Siria busca legitimidad internacional para seguir en el poder
Natalia Sancha Damasco 26 AGO 2014 - 21:31 CEST

La reinserción política de Bachar el Asad en el tablero internacional queda lejos, pero la aparición del Estado Islámico (EI) y su sangriento avance en Siria e Irak ha cambiado las tornas, brindándole una oportunidad de oro. Hoy, el régimen sirio, condenado por Estados Unidos, Reino Unido y la mayoría de la Liga Árabe por la brutal represión de su población durante la guerra civil que vive el país desde hace tres años, aparece como un mal menor y el socio necesario de la comunidad internacional para combatir al enemigo común que representa el EI.

Damasco juega hábilmente sus cartas, dentro y fuera de sus fronteras. Estados Unidos ha bombardeado posiciones del EI en Irak y la Administración Obama ha empezado a desplegar vuelos no tripulados a Siria, paso previo, según varios medios, a una intervención aérea, una medida para la que no ha pedido permiso a las autoridades. En una rueda de prensa en Damasco, Walid Al Mualem, ministro de Asuntos Exteriores sirio, aseguró el lunes que Siria da “la bienvenida a cualquiera, incluido Reino Unido y Estados Unidos, para realizar acciones contra el EI y el Frente al Nusra [filial de Al Qaeda en Siria]”. Pero también advirtió de que toda intervención debía coordinarse con Damasco. Washington rechaza siquiera informar al Gobierno de sus misiones en Siria.

Un año después de haber amenazado con bombardear el país, puede ser el mismo Obama, empujado por la amenaza yihadista, quien reabra el diálogo con el presidente sirio. Una decisión con efectos negativos a largo plazo en la política estadounidense en la región. “EE UU sólo bombardeará en territorio sirio si hay un acuerdo informal. Toda colaboración formal violaría la legislación estadounidense que ha culpado al régimen sirio de cometer crímenes contra la humanidad”, dice Thomas Pierret, profesor del departamento de Estudios Islámicos y de Oriente Próximo de la Universidad de Edimburgo.
más información

El reino de la barbarie yihadista
El avance del EI favorece la retórica y consolidación del régimen sirio
La ONU acusa al EI de "limpieza étnica y confesional" en Irak
El último golpe del califato del terror
El avance yihadista desestabiliza la región y arrastra a Líbano al caos

La oposición armada, que se enfrenta tanto al EI como a los uniformados sirios, ha quedado en un segundo plano. Las potencias regionales e internacionales han hecho un paréntesis en su apuesta por suministrar armas a los rebeldes ante el temor de que esa ayuda acabe en manos yihadistas. “Los servicios secretos de media Europa y EE UU están ya en Damasco rogando colaboración”, aseguran fuentes sirias.

Asad gana aliados en su batalla retórica contra el terrorismo donde mete en el mismo saco a yihadistas y rebeldes opositores, justo cuando el EI se ha convertido en la mayor amenaza a su poder y cuando se han borrado las fronteras entre Irak y Siria. La oposición laica denunció en muchas ocasiones que Asad no sólo permitió, sino que incluso alimentó a los yihadistas porque le venía bien para combatir a sus detractores, que empezaron siendo pacíficos.

El horror impuesto por las milicias islamistas también empuja a parte de la población a cerrar filas con el discurso oficial. “Cuando los rebeldes convivan un tiempo bajo ocupación terrorista, se unirán al régimen. Como ha ocurrido en Deir Zor, donde los clanes locales han padecido la barbarie del EI y se han alzado en armas contra ellos”, asegura un coronel. También se produce el efecto contrario. En las filas islamistas, combatientes cansados de bregar con arcaicos fusiles, hambrientos e incapaces de reinsertarse en la Siria de El Asad, ven en el EI una fuerza capaz de desafiar a Damasco. El Observatorio Sirio para los Derechos Humanos (OSDH) con sede en Londres, apuntaba el 19 de agosto que 6.300 insurgentes islamistas se habían pasado a las filas del EI.

En el frente doméstico, el Ejército sirio avanza en su control sobre las grandes urbes, alejando a los insurgentes y, con ellos, la lluvia de morteros. Es en las ciudades donde se concentra la mayor parte de los leales al régimen, unos seis millones. Las instituciones sirias se esfuerzan, con apoyo iraní y ruso, en abastecer a sus fieles con lo mínimo: pagan los salarios de los funcionarios, mantienen las subvenciones de productos básicos como el fuel y el pan, y asisten a los desplazados.

Pese a ello, en las tropas sirias abundan las deserciones y las bajas en un conflicto que ya se ha cobrado 191.000 vidas de civiles, según datos de Naciones Unidas, y las de otros 65.000 soldados en la contienda, según el OSDH. “No tenemos suficientes hombres para cubrir todos los frentes. Estábamos preparados para luchar contra Israel. Sufrimos hasta un 30% de deserciones de suníes desde el inicio del conflicto sobre medio millón de efectivos. Tenemos que establecer prioridades factibles: mantenernos en las ciudades”, admite un coronel de la Guardia Republicana siria.

Para mantener el grueso del Ejército, se ha prorrogado hasta en 28 meses el servicio militar. Las condiciones de vida en el frente dejan mucho que desear. Los combatientes duermen en colchones esparcidos por el suelo y montan barricadas en las puertas de las casas que hacen las veces de dormitorio para evitar que las ratas les muerdan durante el sueño. Un soldado raso en servicio obligatorio cobra 725 libras sirias mensuales (cinco euros). Una bolsa de pan vale 50 en el mercado.

El coronel asegura que cerca de medio millón de civiles han sido contratados convirtiendo la llamada Defensa Nacional en casi un segundo Ejército. También hay mujeres voluntarias que ayudan a sus compañeros en los múltiples controles militares y en el cacheo de transeúntes. Ninguna está en primera línea de fuego.

12.000 combatientes extranjeros luchan en las filas del Estado Islámico
Publicado: 28 ago 2014 | 23:40 GMT Última actualización: 28 ago 2014 | 23:40 GMT

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© REUTERS Osama Al-dulaimi

Unos 12.000 combatientes extranjeros de 81 países de 5 continentes, entre ellos estadounidenses y europeos, han ido a luchar a Siria del lado del Estado Islámico desde el comienzo del conflicto.
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Soufan Group, una organización que proporciona servicios de inteligencia a gobiernos e instituciones, estima en un informe que entre estos 12.000 combatientes extranjeros que engrosaron las filas de la organización terrorista que opera en Siria e Irak, 3.000 proceden de países occidentales.

El comunicado, que se basa en los datos oficiales gubernamentales, sugiere que entre ellos hay 51 ciudadanos de España, cerca de 100 de EE.UU., 120 de Países Bajos, 250 de Australia, unos 250 de Bélgica, unos 400 del Reino Unido y más de 700 de Francia. Mientras tanto, la mayoría de los 12.000 combatientes son representantes del mundo árabe, gente de Oriente Medio y el Norte de África: más de 3.000 tunecinos, 2.500 saudíes, 1.500 marroquíes, unos 400 turcos, 200 argelinos, entre otros.

Según el reporte, la edad típica de un combatiente extranjero es entre 18 y 29 años, y la mayoría de ellos no tienen formación militar ni conocimiento del islam. Una parte de ellos son representantes de la segunda y tercera oleada de inmigrantes en Occidente. Así, la mayoría de los combatientes belgas tienen origen marroquí. Y el 6% de los provenientes de los países de la Unión Europea se convirtieron al islam más tarde.
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FUERTES IMÁGENES: Terroristas del Estado Islámico ejecutan a 250 soldados sirios
Publicado: 28 ago 2014 | 16:53 GMT Última actualización: 28 ago 2014 | 16:54 GMT

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Los militantes del Estado Islámico (EI) ejecutan a más de 250 militares sirios y publican el video de la matanza, según informa Reuters.
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   Estado Islámico
       EE.UU. podría haber gastado 100 millones en bombardear al EI
       12.000 combatientes extranjeros luchan en el Estado Islámico
       Atacar al Estado Islámico en Siria será difícil para EE.UU.
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Según el video, 250 soldados del Ejército sirio fueron secuestrados después de que el grupo yihadista se apoderara este fin de semana de la base aérea Taqba, situada en la provincia de Raqqa, en el norte del país. En el video se aprecian los cuerpos de los rehenes en ropa interior alineados en una fila de decenas de metros de longitud, informa Reuters. Cerca de la fila de los cuerpos sin vida de los soldados pueden verse también otros cadáveres.

El Observatorio Sirio para los Derechos Humanos informó hoy a la agencia AFP de la muerte de 160 soldados sirios "asesinados en tres lugares diferentes en la región de Raqqa esta madrugada" después de que trataban de escapar de la base.

Un miliciano del EI confirmó a Reuters que el grupo ha ejecutado a todos los soldados.

Advertencia: Siguientes imágenes pueden herir su sensibilidad.

https://youtu.be/zknea3w99H8

Obama enfría los planes para ampliar a Siria la intervención contra el califato
“Todavía no tenemos una estrategia”, admite el presidente para justificar su cautela
Marc Bassets Washington 29 AGO 2014 - 00:49 CEST



Obama, en la rueda de prensa en la Casa Blanca. / EVAN VUCCI (AP)

Barack Obama enfrió este jueves los planes para ampliar a Siria la actual intervención militar en el vecino Irak contra los yihadistas del Estado Islámico (EI). En una rueda de prensa en la Casa Blanca, el presidente de Estados Unidos dijo que antes de atacar quiere disponer de una estrategia clara que incluya a los aliados de la región y a la débil oposición moderada, atrapada entre el régimen de Bachar El Asad y los islamistas radicales. “No quiero poner el carro antes de los bueyes. Todavía no tenemos una estrategia”, admitió Obama.

Tras la difusión, la semana pasada, de las imágenes de un miembro del EI —un grupo yihadista asentado en Siria e Irak— degollando al periodista norteamericano James Foley, la Administración Obama indicó que EE UU sopesaba un ataque a los yihadistas en Siria. Algunos medios de comunicación alimentaron la idea de que el ataque podía ser inminente.
más información

El Estado Islámico impone su terror
El Estado Islámico asegura haber matado a 250 militares sirios
Obama busca aliados contra los yihadistas del Estado Islámico

Obama rebajó en la rueda de prensa la idea de que la intervención ocurriría en seguida. Él y sus colaboradores en la Casa Blanca, en el Pentágono y en el Departamento de Estado debaten cómo y dónde podría bombardear EE UU al Estado Islámico en Siria. La base legal, y la necesidad de buscar la autorización del Congreso, también son motivo de discusión.

“Debemos asegurarnos de que tengamos planes claros. Y entonces consultaré con el Congreso y me aseguraré de sus voces se escuchan”, dijo el presidente. Una acción “inminente” sin informar al Congreso —de vacaciones hasta septiembre— queda descartada, añadió.

Hace un año, Obama lo tenía todo preparado para lanzar un operación aérea contra el régimen de El Asad. Entonces pidió un voto en el Congreso que al final nunca se celebró: un plan ruso para retirar las armas químicas de Siria permitió al presidente de EE UU evitar el ataque.

La operación que ahora se estudia no es contra El Asad sino contra el Estado Islámico, enemigo de El Asad. Pero Obama descartar colaborar con el régimen sirio. “Seguiremos apoyando a la oposición moderada dentro de Siria, en parte para darle al pueblo de Siria la posibilidad de elegir entre el EI o El Asad”, dijo.

La decisión de atacar no es fácil. Al no colaborar con El Asad, EE UU carece de información de primera mano sobre las posiciones del Estado Islámico en Siria. El fin de semana el presidente autorizó vuelos de vigilancia sobre este país para recopilar información.

La prioridad, dijo Obama, no es Siria, sino Irak. Los ataques aéreos de EE UU desde principios de agosto en Irak han intentado contener al Estado Islámico, que amenazaba intereses norteamericanos, y prevenir la matanza de la minoría yazidí.

Obama describió la batalla por estabilizar Siria como una segunda etapa, en el que EE UU deberá contar con países de la región, preferiblemente suníes como el Estado Islámico. “El tema de Siria", dijo, "no es simplemente un tema militar: también es un tema político”.

Los extremistas ganan terreno en Siria
El Estado Islámico controla el noreste del país y dispone de unos 50.000 combatientes
Natalia Sancha Beirut 2 SEP 2014 - 22:19 CEST


Un miembro del Estado Islámico blande un cuchillo junto a un grupo de soldados sirios capturados. / AP
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El Estado Islámico (EI) avanza en Siria al tiempo que el presidente Obama templa su discurso sobre posibles ataques aéreos contra posiciones del EI en el país. El régimen sirio se ha mostrado receptivo a una colaboración área contra efectivos del EI a condición de que sean coordinadas.

Los expertos cifran en 50.000 los yihadistas que combaten bajo la bandera negra del Estado Islámico. De ellos, 20.000 serían extranjeros. El pasado mes de junio, el EI anunciaba la creación de un califato que se extiende por territorio sirio e iraquí. En Siria, los yihadistas han optado por una estrategia de reagrupación, desafiando a la atomizada oposición rebelde y unificando las posiciones del EI hasta conquistar todo el nordeste del país, las provincias de Raqa y Deir Zor.
más información

El Asad intenta rehabilitarse gracias al avance del califato yihadista
El avance yihadista rediseña el tablero de Oriente Próximo
El Estado Islámico dice haber decapitado a otro periodista de EE UU

En su avance han logrado expulsar a otras facciones rebeldes como el Ejército Libre Sirio, y grupos islamistas antes aliados, como el Frente al Nusra o el Frente Islámico. El norte del país está prácticamente bajo el dominio de los yihadistas. El pasado domingo, tras cinco días de duros enfrentamientos, lograron hacerse con la base aérea de Tabqa en Raqa y último puesto controlado en la provincia por el Ejército del régimen sirio. Un vídeo publicado en Internet por los yihadistas mostraba la ejecución sumaria de 250 uniformados sirios tras la captura de la base. En la provincia de Deir Zor, las tropas sirias tan sólo mantienen dos posiciones bajo su control, hacia las que se dirige el ejército negro.

Tras asentar el control en el nordeste del país, el EI avanza hacia Alepo, donde se enfrenta a los militantes islamistas opositores tomando las localidades de Akhtarin y Maree a tan sólo 30 kilómetros al norte de la segunda metrópoli siria, la primera gran ciudad que acechan los combatientes del Estado Islámico.

Ante una atomizada oposición y un rápido progreso en el terreno, hasta 6. 000 combatientes islamistas sirios habrían abandonado el bando rebelde para sumarse a las filas del EI. Un efecto más notorio incluso en la región de Calamún —fronteriza con Líbano—, donde el EI apenas contaba con unos 70 seguidores hace cinco meses y hoy los expertos los cifran en unos 5.000.

El EI amplia sus frentes a escala regional incluyendo a Líbano en su mapa. Ayer, el soldado libanés Ali al Sayyed, capturado junto con otros 29 compañeros en la frontera este con Siria, fue decapitado por grupos yihadistas vinculados al EI. La prensa libanesa se hacía eco de un inminente ataque de miles de combatientes yihadistas en territorio libanés como represalia por la participación de la milicia chií libanesa Hezbolá en apoyo del régimen de Bachar El Asad. El comandante de las Fuerzas Armadas libanesas aseguraba que sus tropas estaban preparadas para un eventual ataque.

Tanto en Líbano como en Irak o Siria, el Estado Islámico intenta buscar aliados aprovechando las pugnas internas de cada país. En Irak logró el apoyo de las tribus suníes del norte, enemistadas con el Gobierno chií del depuesto Maliki. En Siria intenta desangrar las filas de los rebeldes islamistas cansados de 41 meses de lucha sin mayores avances en el frente. Igualmente buscó apoyo en las tribus suníes del norte de Siria resentidas tras ser dejadas por los planes económicos del Gobierno de Damasco. Tras una alianza temporal, los Ashaitat, una de las mayores tribus del norte de Siria, se han sublevado en armas contra el EI. En Líbano, pretende encontrar apoyos entre los salafistas suníes enfrentados a la milicia chií Hezbolá que controla la frontera este con Siria y combate junto a las tropas de El Asad. Conforme avanzan los yihadistas, el flanco rebelde se ve debilitado. Las tropas sirias se preparan para un primer enfrentamiento de magnitud contra el EI mientras bombardea sus posiciones en el norte.

La OTAN, contra el Ejército islámico
Una coalición de democracias liberales tiene que responder a la nueva amenaza
Matt Browne / Brian Katulis 4 SEP 2014 - 00:00 CEST


Las tensiones con Rusia podrían dominar la inminente cumbre de la OTAN. Pero la Alianza tendría que dedicar una parte considerable de su programa en el sur de Gales a las amenazas que, después del asombroso recrudecimiento de las hostilidades de este verano, plantea el Estado Islámico (EI) en Irak y en Siria.

La OTAN debería desarrollar un triple plan de acción para pasar a la ofensiva frente al EI, fortalecer las defensas colectivas contra posibles ataques terroristas en nuestros propios territorios y preparar una estrategia a largo plazo que sirva para gestionar en los años venideros las transiciones en materia de seguridad, política y economía que tengan lugar en Oriente Próximo.

El EI supone una amenaza inmediata para la estabilidad de esa zona, ya que, al tomar y controlar territorios en Irak y Siria, ha cometido crímenes atroces contra la humanidad que en toda la región se han llevado vidas por delante. Los espectaculares avances de ese grupo terrorista, amplificados por una horrenda estrategia mediática destinada a contribuir al reclutamiento de más adeptos, suponen un gran peligro en medio de Oriente Próximo.

Por desgracia, es muy probable que lo que ocurre en Irak y Siria no vaya a circunscribirse a esa zona y es inadmisible dejar que el conflicto se consuma solo. Según los servicios secretos y expertos externos, en Irak y Siria habrían penetrado entre 7.000 y 12.000 combatientes extranjeros, de los cuales unos 3.000 proceden de países occidentales; entre ellos, quizá más de 500 del Reino y Unido y otros tantos de Francia.

En ambas orillas del Atlántico, la reacción ha sido reducida; y en la mayoría, de meros espectadores

En agosto, los avances del EI han llevado a la Administración de Obama a lanzar operaciones militares limitadas en Irak, y algunos importantes países europeos se han precipitado también a ofrecer asistencia en materia de seguridad y humanitaria a sus socios de Irak, entre ellos a los kurdos. En tanto que el Ejército Islámico continúa su avance dentro de Siria, Estados Unidos ha comenzado a realizar misiones de vigilancia aérea sobre ese país, con vistas a preparar posibles ataques aéreos contra el EI en dicho territorio. Pero los ataques aéreos limitados, por sí solos, no reducirán la amenaza que supone el Ejército Islámico. Lo que se necesita es que, desde la unidad, la OTAN tome medidas más enérgicas.

En primer lugar, la OTAN tiene que pasar a la ofensiva contra el EI, pero creando una coalición más organizada con los socios de Oriente Próximo. La activación de la Iniciativa de Cooperación de Estambul, creada por la OTAN en 2008 para fomentar la colaboración en materia de seguridad con ciertos países de Oriente Próximo, proporcionaría a la Alianza un mecanismo con el que conceder a sus aliados en esa zona un papel destacado en la gestión del conflicto. Lo primero que hay que hacer es posibilitar que socios fiables y capaces asuman directamente la lucha contra el EI. Eso es lo que está ocurriendo con las fuerzas kurdas en Irak y es lo que debería ocurrir en Siria con una tercera alternativa que se opusiera tanto al régimen de Asad como al Ejército Islámico. Los ataques aéreos en Irak y los que podrían llevarse a cabo en Siria no acabarán con la amenaza que supone el EI: para terminar con ella será preciso que los países de la región y los socios con presencia sobre el terreno asuman el combate directo contra ese enemigo.

En segundo lugar, los países de la OTAN deben fortalecer sus defensas ante posibles ataques terroristas en su territorio. El gran número de europeos y estadounidenses que lucha en Siria representa una posible amenaza para la seguridad de sus países de origen, cuyo combate debería centrarse principalmente en fomentar los dispositivos policiales y la coordinación de los sistemas de información de los miembros de la OTAN. Los obstáculos burocráticos de las épocas de normalidad dificultan esta tarea, que se vuelve especialmente ardua después de la desconfianza que han sembrado los escándalos de espionaje en los últimos años. Pero la cumbre de la OTAN debería fomentar el mantenimiento de la cooperación y una mayor coordinación de los cuerpos policiales que conserve la protección frente a cualquier futura amenaza terrorista.

En tercer lugar, la OTAN debe preparar una estrategia más coherente para gestionar y conformar los elementos políticos, económicos y de seguridad de las transiciones en Oriente Próximo y el norte de África. Las crisis de Siria e Irak tienen que ver con los grandes cambios que se están produciendo en todo Oriente Próximo, y que antes conocíamos como primavera árabe. La situación no parece tan alentadora como en 2011, pero las ingentes presiones económicas, sociales y demográficas que acucian a todos los países de la región conllevan que en el futuro el marco político y la seguridad sufran más turbulencias.

En ambas orillas del Atlántico, la reacción ante los cambios ha sido reducida, y en la mayoría de los casos hemos sido meros espectadores. La llamada Asociación de Deauville para Oriente Próximo, aprobada en 2011 por el G8 con amplio apoyo, no ha tenido resultados económicos e institucionales tangibles. Iniciativas como la Unión para el Mediterráneo, que pretendía promover la integración económica y la reforma democrática en el norte de África y Oriente Próximo, no han estado a la altura de sus posibilidades.

Ahora que la OTAN está a punto de poner fin a su presencia en Afganistán —su primera operación realmente extraterritorial—, la seguridad tiene ante sí toda una gama de nuevos desafíos. La cumbre de esta semana constituye una oportunidad histórica para que la OTAN reformule sus objetivos, dirigiendo una coalición de democracias liberales que dé una respuesta mundial al Ejército Islámico. Cuanto más esperemos, más difícil será la tarea.

Matt Browne y Brian Katulis son investigadores del Center for American Progress.

Traducción de Jesús Cuéllar Menezo

Francotiradores en la vieja Alepo
Varios de los seis sitios de Siria declarados patrimonio de la humanidad presentan daños irreversibles por culpa de la guerra

La arqueología como daño colateral

Natalia Sancha Alepo 6 SEP 2014 - 23:18 CEST


Militares del rebelde Ejército Libre Sirio, ante La Gran Mezquita Omeya en Alepo. / molhem barakat (reuters)


Varios de los seis sitios de Siria declarados patrimonio de la humanidad por la Unesco presentan daños irreversibles por culpa de la guerra. Alepo ha sido el lugar más castigado y Damasco el menos. La capital aún preserva sus sitios históricos casi intactos pero se teme por su futuro y por el de las insustituibles colecciones del museo nacional.

En el camino de Hama a Alepo uno se cruza con las ruinas saqueadas durante la guerra de las denominadas “ciudades muertas”, 40 poblados de la antigüedad tardía agrupados en ocho grandes parques arqueológicos y que incluyen la iglesia de San Simeón el Estilita, el famoso anacoreta. Por las calles de la ciudad vieja de Alepo, durante siglos recorridas sucesivamente por hititas, asirios, árabes, mongoles, mamelucos y otomanos, hoy solo transitan, o más bien corren, soldados y rebeldes esquivando las balas de francotiradores. La impresionante ciudadela del siglo XIII solo puede ser avistada a lo lejos entre sacos de arena y soldados. La Gran Mezquita Omeya, datada en el siglo XII, no ha logrado sobrevivir al XXI. “Parte de las paredes están destruidas, el minarete de mil años ha volado por los aires y la fuente interna está medio derruida”, asegura un militar apostado en la zona.

Parte de los 13 kilómetros con los que contaba el zoco medieval de Alepo, considerado el mercado cubierto más extenso del mundo, están hoy calcinados. En sus callejuelas uno apenas podía colarse entre las tiendas y el gentío. Hoy el olor a pólvora reemplaza el de incienso y especias que se mezclaba con el de los famosos jabones de Alepo.

Imágenes recientes muestran varios muros y columnas con impactos de morteros en las ruinas de Palmira (siglo I), que fue uno de los centros culturales más importantes del mundo. Cerca de la frontera con Jordania, se erige el magnífico teatro romano de Bosra, datado del siglo II, y antaño capital de la provincia romana de Arabia. Tampoco ha escapado ileso a los bombardeos ni al fuego con artillería pesada.

En 2010, 8,5 millones de turistas visitaron Siria. Sus ingresos contribuyeron con el 9% del PIB. Ya hace tiempo que se fue el último y hoy apenas se avista un puñado de peregrinos camino a la mezquita de Sayeda Zainab, en Damasco, donde yace la tumba de la nieta del profeta Mahoma.

Syria's Generation in Waiting
Syria's lost generation: Refugees: Syrian refugees sit in a Lebanese Army truck after fleeing the violence in Arsal, in Al-Labwa in eastern Bekaa Valley. Reuters: Hassan Abdallah
Syrian refugees sit in a Lebanese Army truck after fleeing the violence in Arsal, in Al-Labwa in eastern Bekaa Valley.
The Atlantic 6 days ago By Lauren E. Bohn of The Atlantic

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For many young Syrians displaced by war, there's no going back to school.

Syria’s protracted political crisis — more than three years of debilitating ruin and elusive compromise — has ripped families from their homes, their country, and each other. There are now more than 3 million Syrian refugees registered in the region, with around 100,000 more added each month. The number of refugees in neighboring Lebanon, more than 1.1 million, exceeds a quarter of the country’s own pre-war population. Lebanon now has the highest per-capita concentration of refugees worldwide, many of them having fled their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs.

For Syria’s displaced youth, often described as a "lost generation," education has become a pipe dream. Public schools in already choked host countries often lack the capacity and resources to accommodate the teeming refugee population, around half of which is under the age of 18. According to UNICEF, two-thirds of Syrian refugee children are out of school. Many who had been enrolled in a Syrian university when they left the country fall behind and can’t find the means to catch up.

“Each day out of Syria gets both easier and harder,” says Hani, a gifted 21-year-old Syrian refugee living in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, whom I spoke to along with a number of other young Syrian refugees in July. “Easier because you get used to living outside of Syria ... but harder because you don’t want to accept that.”

In the midst of one of modern history’s worst humanitarian disasters, one that has turned people into numbers, meet Syria’s generation in waiting—waiting for normalcy, waiting for a green light, waiting for any light.

They’re not a lost generation; they know where they are. They just can’t go home.

* * *

When shrapnel tore through Mostafa’s home in the city of Homs two years ago, he couldn’t move for minutes, he says, maybe even hours. Time froze. Before even opening his eyes, he knew life would never be the same.

“I didn’t want to see what I knew had happened,” he says, blinking anxiously as he recounts a living nightmare.

When he finally opened them, he saw what can never be unseen: the bodies of his mother and young brother lying lifeless, almost unrecognizable. He and his father, along with his younger brother, had survived the shelling.

With barely any time to arrange a proper burial, the family fled to Lebanon. Once a promising engineering student at Aleppo University, Mostafa now works odd jobs (“I’ve cleaned, I’ve cooked, I’ve played music, I’ve taught ... everything and anything”), struggling to find a way to continue his education. Most engineering programs at Lebanese universities are simply too expensive.

His father, still enveloped in grief, is barely able to get up some mornings. Mostafa has become a second father to his younger brother, nudging him to do his homework and scolding him when he watches too much SpongeBob SquarePants on a small television set they got second-hand from a Lebanese neighbor.

To “make better use” of his time—the only thing Mostafa really has—he began volunteering at a school run by Jusoor, a non-governmental organization started by Syrian expatriates to educate the country’s displaced youth. He sings and dances with the children, who follow him around with perma-smiles. On his breaks, he practices his English through an app he downloaded on his Droid, a device he long saved up for and calls his “best friend.”

Spending time with the children has served as a kind of therapy for Mostafa, exposing him to a world outside his own of unbearable loss.

“These are my people,” he says, walking into a room of young Syrian refugees, all huddled in a circle, vibrating with energy even before Mostafa picks up his drum.

“When I look into their eyes, I see my pain,” he says, grabbing the hand of a five-year-old boy who lost his father in Syria last year. “But I also see my country.”

* * *

In what she describes as a “dark flash,” Bayan fled the city of Aleppo with her family two years ago. She still remembers the gray, foggy morning they left. They were woken up at 5 a.m. by neighbors notifying them of a ceasefire in their restive neighborhood—a chance to escape after being under siege for weeks with barely enough to eat. They quickly packed some belongings—a few days’ worth of clothes, some books, and an old family Koran—and fled. On their way out of Aleppo, the Syrian army held them for two hours at a checkpoint and took all their suitcases.

Bayan’s face folds into tears when she recalls how the soldiers took her schoolbooks. “They were just books,” she says. “I’m just a student.”

Adjusting to life in Lebanon has been impossible, she says. She and her younger sister Rawan complain of harassment from Lebanese teachers and students; one of her schoolmates, she says, taunts her by repeating “Bashar,” the name of the embattled Syrian president. Bayan’s new home, a small two-room apartment in northern Lebanon, is caked in dust and squalor, lit by a single blade of sun peeking in through the apartment’s only window. Her father, once a successful tailor in Syria, can barely find enough work to pay their monthly rent, the equivalent of around $200.

“We’re hanging on by a thread,” her mother says, nursing Rawan’s baby brother. Before she’s able to set the baby down for a nap, the apartment goes black. They weren’t able to pay the electricity bill this month. It’s not the first time and it probably won’t be the last. As she does most months, Rawan rushes outside to lift the lock that the electricity company has placed on their fuse box to prevent them from switching the power back on. The tactic has worked in the past, but this time the lock is too tight.

Rawan gives up and hurries back upstairs to flip through her journal, adorned with images of flowers and rainbows, the stuff childhood is supposed to be made of. On the first page, she has sketched out verses from a song she says she heard long ago, but only now understands: “To live through the pain of alienation that no one knows until they’ve lived through it.”

* * *

Almost every day, and often in the same powder-blue trench coat, Manal takes a 20-minute bus ride to a small community center for Syrian refugees in southern Lebanon. She brings nothing but two journals. In their pages are crushed flower petals, now browned, from her favorite garden back in Damascus. “It’s quiet here ... I can think,” she says, sitting in a corner of the center. “There’s too much noise at home, too much noise everywhere.”

Manal and her family fled their Damascus suburb two years ago after two of her relatives were thrown into prison and brutally beaten. She had planned to enter university and study business, but like most young Syrian refugees, she’s been struggling to find a way to finance her studies in Lebanon. She and her family work as grocers at a local market, living paycheck to paycheck.

People at the center say she’s mysterious. She lingers around the doorway before she enters a room. And when she talks, she pauses between sentences as if she’s traversing dim corridors in her mind.

“She’s sensitive, very childlike,” says an English teacher at the center. “She has experienced a world of trauma.”

But it’s not only a brutal war that has worn her down. In the midst of adapting to an undersized life in Lebanon, Manal says she decided it was finally time to lift “the dark cloud that has always been over my eyes.”

A few months ago, she disclosed to her mother and a psychologist at the center that for most of her childhood, male relatives raped her. She and her mother have been undergoing therapy, but her father still doesn’t know. Her dream is to write a book about her experience and to counsel other women around the region.

“I want to be a bridge of hope over a sea of desperation,” she says, reciting poetry she’s written in her journals. “I want to help other women who’ve been through the same horror. They need to know it’s not their fault ... please tell them I said it’s not their fault.”

Staffers at the center say she’s progressed dramatically, but it’s a wound that’s slow to heal and is compounded by displacement from war. Manal says she has sought solace through writings by Gandhi and Mandela, learning that everyone has a power inside of them, and that life is ultimately about sharing that power.

“I’ve learned that no situation is permanent ... the sexual abuse, even the war, none of it is permanent,” she says. “After every darkness, there is a sun.”

But even in the darkness, she quickly clarifies, “There’s a moon. And sometimes there are even stars.”

* * *

Hani is something of a rock-star refugee. His near-perfect English (which he taught himself in part with translated Paulo Coehlo books) and unflappable charisma have made him a go-to for humanitarian aid agencies. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees even visited his family’s makeshift home, barely more than tarp draped across a wooden frame, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley last spring.

“I don’t mind the attention ... it’s good for me to remind people that I’m here, I still exist ... I still dream,” he says, squinting uncomfortably. He suffers from a congenital cornea defect and is barely able to open his eyes outdoors. “But there’s only so much you can talk about your past. I’m no longer Syria Hani ... I’m figuring-it-out Hani.”

Back in Homs, Hani was a star student whom his teachers and classmates affectionately called “the robot” for his ability to answer questions quickly and almost always correctly. He won several writing and chess competitions, and played in a band called The Dreamers. A voracious reader, he’s read almost all of Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s books (“I could eat them”) and has even incorporated the word “code” into his email address and online user names. He had plans to study engineering at a top Syrian university on a full scholarship. That was before his home was looted and burned, and before his cousins were murdered, their throats slit.

“Hani was and is our dream child,” his father says, covering his face in his hands. “His destiny is so much more than this.” Hani’s parents are desperately trying to procure enough funding, through either their salaries or scholarships, for him to study engineering at a private Lebanese university, but they can barely afford to maintain their home in a tented settlement. Still, the boundlessly jovial 21-year-old refuses to wallow in the widening gap between himself and the person he was meant to be.

“I have so much energy, so much life ... I know I’m a star,” he says. “Even if my light is dim right now, I’m still in the sky.”

* * *

In an abandoned onion-processing plant in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, newlyweds Mohammed and Hanaa sit on the floor of what they jokingly call the “best mansion in the land.” Their two-room makeshift apartment in what is now an impromptu garlic-storage and sales facility is a source of pride for the couple. Before their marriage last month, Mohammed gathered his life-savings, the equivalent of some $300, to rent the best accommodation for them. Most of their friends and relatives live in tents.

Mohammed and Hanaa arrived last year from Raqaa, Syria, now a stronghold of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “They stole our country,” says Hanaa. “But none of the sides are thinking about the Syrian people, so none of them will win what’s left of it.”

Mohammed had been studying social sciences at Aleppo University, where he was on track to begin his Ph.D. Hanaa had been studying humanities at Raqaa University, with plans to become a history teacher.

“I want to teach young people about Syria’s rich past,” she says. “The present is so ugly, but the past ... the past has beauty.”

The couple hopes to open an informal school in their settlement, but for now their days are filled with often-failed attempts to find well-paid day labor to maintain their home and save up for something better.

“Every day, we die a hundred deaths here. Just look at my face,” Hanaa exclaims, before heading out to work the potato fields with a gaggle of refugee women. “I didn’t always look so tired. I’m only 18!”

Her older sister, Zainab, lovingly pokes her. “You’re so dramatic,” she teases. “Don’t be lazy.”

“I never thought I’d spend my days picking potatoes,” Hanaa retorts, laughing uneasily. “This is my new life ... the Syrian Queen of Potatoes.”

She covers her hair, squeezes Mohammed’s hand, and sets off into the fields.

* * *

“Four,” Asma answers, staring blankly into the dusty distance. Since fleeing to Lebanon from the city of Idlib two years ago, Asma and her family of eight have lived in four different locations. She can’t even bring herself to call them homes. The family is currently nestled in northern Lebanon in a tiny three-room shed where her father has found semi-consistent work at a small cement business.

She has settled into her corner of the musty space as best she can, arranging the few belongings she owns—a pink brush, a red-beaded bracelet, and a few neon notebooks. But settling in is something to be avoided. Her father just received word from his boss that the family must move again by the end of the year. They have no idea where they’ll go.

Asma has always been a top student. Back in Idlib, her uncles and cousins were engineers and doctors. Many of them have died in the fighting.

“If I continue my studies, I can find a way to help rebuild my country,” she says. “That’s why I stay up late ... to practice my writing, to practice anything.”

But since fleeing to Lebanon, she’s barely been able to stay in school. For the past five months she’s been enrolled in a UNHCR-funded school, but she fears the education won’t be enough to get her back to where she was: “able to think normally, to dream normally.”

For a recent homework assignment, her teacher asked her to write about a favorite film or friend. She says she wrote instead about the only thing she really knows—her home on a hill back in Syria, surrounded by white flowers and tall trees.

“Our home in Syria is an abandoned castle,” she says in a near whisper, reciting lines from memory. “We lived in it like kings. Now we’re abandoned and humiliated. We have no crowns, but our hearts still wear them.”

This reporting was made possible in part through support from UNHCR.

Buried in a Dell computer captured in Syria are lessons for making bubonic plague bombs and missives on using weapons of mass destruction.

BY Harald Doornbos , Jenan Moussa
AUGUST 28, 2014

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[Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver esa imagen]
ANTAKYA, Turkey — Abu Ali, a commander of a moderate Syrian rebel group in northern Syria, proudly shows a black laptop partly covered in dust. "We took it this year from an ISIS hideout," he says.

Abu Ali says the fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which have since rebranded themselves as the Islamic State, all fled before he and his men attacked the building. The attack occurred in January in a village in the Syrian province of Idlib, close to the border with Turkey, as part of a larger anti-ISIS offensive occurring at the time. "We found the laptop and the power cord in a room," he continued, "I took it with me. But I have no clue if it still works or if it contains anything interesting."

Read more from FP on the Islamic State

The Complex:Is the ISIS laptop of doom an operational threat?
Meet Lady al Qaeda: Why does every jihadi group want the U.S. to free Aafia Siddiqui?
Inside the Bureaucracy of Evil: From electricity to sewage, U.S. intel warns the Islamic State has gotten pretty good at running a country.


As we switched on the Dell laptop, it indeed still worked. Nor was it password-protected. But then came a huge disappointment: After we clicked on "My Computer," all the drives appeared empty.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Upon closer inspection, the ISIS laptop wasn't empty at all: Buried in the "hidden files" section of the computer were 146 gigabytes of material, containing a total of 35,347 files in 2,367 folders. Abu Ali allowed us to copy all these files -- which included documents in French, English, and Arabic -- onto an external hard drive.

[Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver esa imagen]
A screenshot of material found on the computer. The files appear to be videos of speeches by jihadist clerics. (Click to enlarge.)

The laptop's contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organizations -- and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State's deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while traveling from one jihadi hot spot to another.

But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop's owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

The information on the laptop makes clear that its owner is a Tunisian national named Muhammed S. who joined ISIS in Syria and who studied chemistry and physics at two universities in Tunisia's northeast. Even more disturbing is how he planned to use that education: The ISIS laptop contains a 19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons and how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals.

"The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge," the document states.

The document includes instructions for how to test the weaponized disease safely, before it is used in a terrorist attack. "When the microbe is injected in small mice, the symptoms of the disease should start to appear within 24 hours," the document says.

The laptop also includes a 26-page fatwa, or Islamic ruling, on the usage of weapons of mass destruction. "If Muslims cannot defeat the kafir [unbelievers] in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction," states the fatwa by Saudi jihadi cleric Nasir al-Fahd, who is currently imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. "Even if it kills all of them and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the Earth."

When contacted by phone, a staff member at a Tunisian university listed on Muhammed's exam papers confirmed that he indeed studied chemistry and physics there. She said the university lost track of him after 2011, however.

[Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver esa imagen]
A photo of Muhammed S. found on his laptop. This image has been digitally altered.

Out of the blue, she asked: “Did you find his papers inside Syria?” Asked why she would think that Muhammed’s belongings would have ended up in Syria, she answered, “For further questions about him, you better ask state security.”

An astonishing number of Tunisians have flocked to the Syrian battlefield since the revolt began. In June, Tunisia’s interior minister estimated that at least 2,400 Tunisians were fighting in the country, mostly as members of the Islamic State.

This isn't the first time that jihadists have attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even before the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda had experimented with a chemical weapons program in Afghanistan. In 2002, CNN obtained a tape showing al Qaeda members testing poison gas on three dogs, all of which died.

Nothing on the ISIS laptop, of course, suggests that the jihadists already possess these dangerous weapons. And any jihadi organization contemplating a bioterrorist attack will face many difficulties: Al Qaeda tried unsuccessfully for years to get its hands on such weapons, and the United States has devoted massive resources to preventing terrorists from making just this sort of breakthrough. The material on this laptop, however, is a reminder that jihadists are also hard at work at acquiring the weapons that could allow them to kill thousands of people with one blow.

"The real difficulty in all of these weapons ... [is] to actually have a workable distribution system that will kill a lot of people," said Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College. "But to produce quite scary weapons is certainly within [the Islamic State's] capabilities."

The Islamic State's sweeping gains in recent months may have provided it with the capacity to develop such new and dangerous weapons. Members of the jihadi group are not solely fighting on the front lines these days -- they also control substantial parts of Syria and Iraq. The fear now is that men like Muhammed could be quietly working behind the front lines -- for instance, in the Islamic State-controlled University of Mosul or in some laboratory in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group's de facto capital -- to develop chemical or biological weapons.

In short, the longer the caliphate exists, the more likely it is that members with a science background will come up with something horrible. The documents found on the laptop of the Tunisian jihadist, meanwhile, leave no room for doubt about the group's deadly ambitions.

"Use small grenades with the virus, and throw them in closed areas like metros, soccer stadiums, or entertainment centers," the 19-page document on biological weapons advises. "Best to do it next to the air-conditioning. It also can be used during suicide operations."

Photoillustration by FP/Image by Jenan Moussa and Harald Doornbos

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/09/what_we_found_on_the_islamic_state_laptop_of_doom

Exclusive
Recipes From the Islamic State's Laptop of Doom
How to make ricin, Semtex, and banana mousse.

BY Harald Doornbos , Jenan Moussa
SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

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Syria
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ANTAKYA, Turkey — The black Dell laptop found in an Islamic State safe house inside Syria not only contains instructions for how to weaponize the bubonic plague, it also includes thousands of files that provide a window into how would-be jihadists become radicalized, and how they learn to carry out their deadly craft.

Read more from FP on the ISIS Laptop of Doom


[Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver esa imagen]
Photos: Screenshots from a jihadi's personal computer.
Part 1: Found: The Islamic State's Terror Laptop of Doom
The Complex: Is the ISIS laptop of doom an operational threat?


The laptop of Muhammed S., a Tunisian chemistry and physics student who joined the Islamic State, contains an eclectic mix of speeches by jihadi leaders, neo-Nazi screeds, and U.S. Army manuals on specific aspects of warfare. It also contains glimpses of the 24-year-old jihadist's former life, showing that he once had a weakness for the music of Celine Dion and a desire to find a good recipe for banana mousse.

The files from the laptop show that, once committed to jihad, Muhammed left Celine Dion behind and became more focused on how to poison people. One 21-minute clip, featuring former American Nazi Party member Kurt Saxon, offers instructions for how to obtain the deadly toxin ricin from castor beans. Saxon provides a detailed description of the process, producing the ricin on camera. "Now you really have some lethal stuff here!" he exclaims, once he is finished. "Now this is fan-tas-tic stuff!"

This is just one example from the massive amount of data discovered on Muhammed's laptop. The computer contains 146 gigabytes of material and 35,347 files, almost all of which were added between 2009 and May 2013. All the files opened without a password, except for seven. Six of these password-protected files are in a folder titled "Sheikh Usama CD."

The vast majority of the files are downloaded from the Internet, and contain practical or ideological instructions for waging jihad. A small percentage of the files, meanwhile, were produced by Muhammed himself. These include scanned copies of his chemistry exams at his university in Tunisia, and pictures of him and his family attending a wedding of an unknown female family member.

The laptop's contents make it clear that its owner has one huge passion: destruction. The folders are meticulously organized: In one folder marked "explosives" -- a sub-folder within another marked "terrorist," which is itself in a sub-folder marked "Jihadi" -- Muhammed had gathered 206 documents. They include publications by Western authors for commercial sale, such as How to Make Semtex, Chemistry and Technology of Explosives, CIA Improvised Sabotage Devices, and The Car Bomb Recognition Guide. Also among the documents is A Guide to Field-Manufactured Explosives, which American author William Wallace begins by writing, "This book is for academic study only."

As the titles above show, Muhammed did not limit himself to jihadi videos or publications. He appears to have consumed material from extremists of all stripes, downloading The Terrorist's Handbook, The Anarchist Cookbook, and a neo-Nazi e-book called The White Resistance Manual. He wasn't even averse to turning to the hated American military for practical instruction: In a folder marked "military," he collected 51 U.S. Army publications that are available online, such as Sniper Training: U.S. Field Manual and U.S. Army -- Psychological Operations Process Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.

Muhammed also got his hands on two obscure English-language jihadi publications, The Mujahideen Explosives Handbook and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. In the preface to the latter work, the author, who gives his nom de guerre as Abdel Aziz, dedicates his publication to the jihadists in Afghanistan, "who lit the flame of jihad in the hearts of every sincere Muslim throughout the world."

Abdel Aziz warns his audience to be cautious while preparing deadly toxins. "It is much, much more dangerous than preparing explosives!" he writes. "I know several [jihadists] whose bodies are finished due to poor protection etc. On the positive side, you can be confident that the poisons have actually been tried and tested (successfully, he he!)."

The laptop also contains extensive research on previous jihadi terrorist attacks. One compressed file named "Al-Qaeda Airlines" includes videos of the July 7, 2005, attacks in London and the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Another 206-page document, titled "al Qaeda hallmarks," contains extensive jihadi analyses of the terror group's deadly strikes in Bali, Madrid, London, and the failed 2001 shoe bombing attack aboard an international flight bound for Miami, Florida.

Muhammed appears to have been a voracious consumer of speeches by jihadi ideologues. Most popular is Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American religious leader linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011. There are also speeches by al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and former al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Muhammed also compiled speeches by 112 other jihadi leaders. They include Juhayman al-Otaybi, who led the attack on the Kaaba in Mecca in 1979; Sayyid Qutb, an important ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood; Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden's mentor and one of the main ideologues of al Qaeda; and Abdullah al-Nafisi, a Kuwaiti professor notable for calling for massive anthrax attacks within the United States and saying on Al Jazeera Arabic that he hopes American white supremacists succeed in attacking a nuclear power plant. "May Allah grant success to one of the militia leaders," he said.

A series of documents on the laptop also advise jihadists on how to fly under the authorities' radar while preparing for holy war. They include tips on how to travel from one jihadi hot spot to another without attracting attention, how to dress, and how to fake passports. One particular preoccupation is the danger of using cellphones, which one paper describes as the equivalent of "carrying a moving spy with you."

Not all of the files on the Islamic State laptop are recipes for jihad, war, killings, explosions, or poisonings. Some of the files show that Muhammed once lived a far more normal life, before being consumed by the desire to fight a holy war.

The laptop includes pictures of Muhammed in 2009 and 2010 dressed in Western clothes and without a beard while attending a wedding in Tunisia, playing soccer, and joking with his friends. There's also evidence that Muhammed has a sweet tooth: The laptop contains recipes for baking a cake, making banana mousse, and for the preparation of caramel. He even kept some screen shots of a music playlist he listened to in January 2010, which included the songs of Celine Dion, as well as Shaggy's "Hey Sexy Lady."

Muhammed appears to have changed radically around 2011, however. After that date, the only songs he added are anasheed -- arrhythmic, a cappella Islamic music.

The laptop also contains evidence that Muhammed's family and the Tunisian government were aware of his radical turn, and that he was a growing threat. A handwritten statement dated April 22, 2013, was found on the laptop, signed by Muhammed's father and stamped by the Tunisian Interior Ministry.

The document suggests he already knew his son had been seduced by the path of destruction. It reads: "I am committed on behalf of my son Muhammed S. to pay the price of any damages he causes, wherever he is."

Image Courtesy al-Aan TV

Syrian rebels said to control most of the border with Israel
UN evacuates equipment from main HQ into Israel as insurgents capture two more towns; Qatar reportedly paid high ransom for release of Fijian troops
By Times of Israel staff September 13, 2014, 1:11 pm

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Smoke rises following an explosion in Syria's Quneitra province as Syrian rebels clash with President Bashar Assad’s forces, seen from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, on August 28, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Ariel Schalit, File)


Syrian rebels are in control of almost the entire Syrian border with Israel, a monitoring group and the Al-Arabiya news network reported Saturday.

According to the report quoted by Israel’s Channel 10, rebel forces on Friday gained control of two additional villages near Quneitra, the war-torn nation’s solitary border crossing with Israel, leaving only one village in the Syrian army’s hands

The report added that the towns of Rawadi and Hamidiyah were taken after heavy fighting between the rebels and the army, loyal to President Bashar Assad.

“The regime is on the retreat before the advancing rebels,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. “The regime has now lost control of about 80 percent of towns and villages in Quneitra province.”

On Friday night a mortar shell exploded on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, in what authorities believe was a stray from fighting across the border. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

Meanwhile Israel Radio reported that UN peacekeepers were evacuating the equipment from Camp Faouar, their main headquarters in Syria, to Israel. UN troops were bringing their gear over the border via special gates opened for them by the IDF, according to the report, and not through Quneitra which is now under rebel control. Only a small Fijian force is expected to remain at the base in a few days.

A-Sharq al-Awsat, quoting Syrian opposition sources, reported Saturday that the Qatari government paid a heavy ransom to rebels for the release of 45 captive UN peacekeepers freed Thursday.

According to the report Doha paid somewhere between $20-$45 million to the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front which had held the troops since August 28. Qatar took credit for negotiating the release on Friday, though it made no mention of a ransom.

Fighters from the Nusra Front group captured the Fijian troops late last month in the Golan Heights, where a 1,200-strong UN force monitors the buffer zone between Syria and Israel.

In exchange for the Fijians’ release, Nusra Front had demanded removal of the group from the UN terrorist list, the delivery of humanitarian aid to parts of the Syrian capital of Damascus, and compensation for three of its fighters who, it claims, were killed in a shootout with UN officers.

The capture of the 45 came during heavy fighting between rebels groups and Syrian army soldiers around the Quneitra crossing. Dozens of other peacekeepers from the Philippines managed to escape the group during a firefight.

The Nusra Front has accused the UN of doing nothing to help the Syrian people since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011. It said the Fijians were seized in retaliation for the UN’s ignoring “the daily shedding of the Muslims’ blood in Syria” and even colluding with Assad’s army “to facilitate its movement to strike the vulnerable Muslims” through a buffer zone in the Golan Heights.

Last week, several mortar shells exploded in an open area in the Golan Heights, apparently the result of inadvertent spillover from fighting in Syria, according to the IDF. Israel responded by firing a Tamuz missile at the origin of the attack. An IDF spokesperson said the strike was successful.

Artillery from Syria has landed frequently on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights for the past few weeks as regime and rebel forces fight over the Quneitra crossing.

AP and AFP contributed to this report.

EU y aliados inician bombardeos con misiles Tomahawk contra EI en Siria
Redacción 24 HORAS Septiembre 22, 2014 8:55 pm

Este ataque supone una nueva etapa de la ofensiva por ser la primera contra blancos en el país que gobierna Bashar al Assad; utilizan también cazas, bombarderos y bombas de precisión guiadas
Imagen de archivo de los bombardeos aliados contra ISIS en Irak. Foto: ESPECIAL | Archivo

Estados Unidos y sus aliados iniciaron bombardeos com misiles Tomahawk y bombas de precisión guiadas contra blancos yihadistas del Estado Islámico (EI) la madrugada del martes en Raqqa, Siria, ciudad considerada su bastión, a 400 kilómetros al noroeste de Damasco, en la porosa frontera con Irak.



“Fuerzas de Estados Unidos y de naciones aliadas han comenzado los ataques contra EI en Siria usando una combinación de cazas, bombarderos y misiles Tomahawk”, anunció en Twitter el portavoz del Pentágono, el contralmirante John Kirby.



US military & partner nation forces have begun striking ISIL targets in Syria using mix of fighters, bombers and Tomahawk missiles.

— Rear Adm. John Kirby (@PentagonPresSec) septiembre 23, 2014



En este enclave, Raqqa, los yihadistas derribaron el pasado 16 de septiembre un avión de combate de la fuerza aérea de Siria.



john_kirbyDe acuerdo con The New York Times, la ofensiva anunciada hace dos semanas por el presidente estadunidense Barack Obama, se implementa con aviones de combate Predator y drones Reaper que volaron junto a aviones de guerra de varias naciones árabes aliadas a esta ofensiva contra los yihadistas.



Un alto funcionario militar reportó a CNN que los aliados que participan en la ofensiva son naciones árabes.



El Departamento de Defensa de Estados Unidos informó que en esta nueva ofensiva participan cazas, bombarderos y misiles Tomahawk lanzados desde buques de la Mariana desplegados en la región.



Fuentes militares estadounidenses reportaron que los blancos incluyen almacenes de armas y suministros, cuarteles y edificios que los yihadistas utilizan para sus operaciones.



ESPECIAL_Ataque_USA-Siria-ISISEstos ataques abren una nueva etapa para la campaña militar estadounidense. Hasta ahora, EU sólo había bombardeado objetivos de EI en Irak, y había sugerido sería aún faltaban semanas o hasta meses antes de iniciar una campaña contra objetivos en la nación que comanda Bashar al Assad.



“He dejado claro que vamos a cazar a los terroristas que amenazan a nuestro país, donde quiera que estén”, dijo Obama en un discurso del pasado 10 de septiembre. “Eso significa que no voy a dudar en tomar medidas contra ISIL en Siria, así como Irak. Este es un principio fundamental de mi presidencia: si amenazas a Estados Unidos, no encontrarás ningún refugio seguro”



El Estado Islámico ha asesinado a miles de personas, decapitado a periodistas estadounidenses y británicos y mantiene retenidos a ciudadanos franceses.



ISIS tiene bajo su dominio una enorme franja de territorio desde el interior de Siria hasta el norte y el oeste de Irak, en donde ha anunciado un califato. NS (Con información de AP, EFE y The New York Times)

Middle East
ISIL pushes into Syrian town despite US raids
ISIL fighters continue to advance on Ain al-Arab despite US air strikes and fierce resistance from Kurdish forces.
Last updated: 27 Sep 2014 20:31

Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have continued to advance into the Kurdish-dominated town of Ain al-Arab in Syria, despite the US-led air campaign against the self-declared jihadist group.

More than 15,000 residents have fled the northern Syrian town as ISIL fighters pushed deeper, fighting fierce battles with Kurdish armed groups on Saturday.

Ain al-Arab, which the Kurds call Kobane, is close to the Syrian-Turkey border.

Turkish officials said that four mortar shells from the fighting in Syria landed in Turkey on Saturday, injuring two people.

Earlier on the day, US coalition-led warplanes struck ISIL positions near Ain al-Arab, as well as targets that included wheat silos in the country's east.

Fighting have been raging in the north for two weeks as ISIL captured dozens of villages around Ain al-Arab and tried to push into the town itself.

Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the Turkish side of the border, said smoke could be seen from the eastern side of the town after what sounded like an explosion.

Kurdish sources inside Ain al-Arab, where fighters had been preparing for street battles should ISIL manage to penetrate their defences, said they had been informed of the strikes in advance so that they could pull back from some frontlines.

Locals said the village of Alishera, just a few kilometres from the border and held by the ISIL, had been hit by one of the four strikes on Saturday morning.

Disappointment among refugees

Surrounded by dozens of Kurdish refugees from Syria, Dekker said that those who left their homes seemed to be disappointed by the US-led air campaign.

"Many of the people we have spoken to do not see the usefulness of the strikes as the ISIL continues to push into their areas," she said.

The US, backed by Arab allies, launched its first air strikes on ISIL targets in Syria on Tuesday after hitting hundreds of targets in neighbouring Iraq, where the group has also captured large swathes of territory.

In Syria, the group has established its headquarters in the northern Raqqa province, which it fully controls.

The group, which has declared an Islamic "caliphate" that has not been widely recognised, has killed hundreds of Syrian and Iraqi soldiers and also civilians, making gruesome beheadings their trademark killing method.

The US-led coalition said on Saturday that it had struck several ISIL positions in the province, killing dozens of fighters.

Several attacks targeted the Tabqa air base, which the self-declared jihadists captured from the regime last month. An ISIL training camp was also hit, as well as one of the group's checkpoints, the activists said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported strikes for the first time in Homs province, east of the desert town of Palmyra, famed for its ancient ruins.
Source:
Al Jazeera
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Fierce fighting rages in Syria's Kobane
Kurdish fighters repel ISIL advance on Kobane, as besieged border town witnesses its most "intense clashes in days".
Last updated: 19 Oct 2014 13:54
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Tens of thousands of Kurds have fled Kobane to neighbouring Turkey [AP]

The Syrian border town of Kobane has been hit by the fiercest fighting in days as Kurdish forces repelled advancing fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group monitoring the violence has said.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 48 mortars had been fired at Kurdish areas in the past two days with two car bombs hitting Kurdish positions on Saturday evening leading to casualties.

"We had the most intense clashes of days, perhaps a week last night. [ISIL] attacked from three different sides including the municipality building side and the market place," Abdulrahman Gok, a local journalist, told the Reuters news agency.

The Observatory also said 70 ISIL fighters had been killed in the past two days, according to sources at the hospital in the nearby town of Tel Abyab, where bodies are taken.
Pinpointing military and humanitarian aid from nations in the international struggle against the armed group.

Al Jazeera cannot independently verify the group's report.

"Last night there were clashes all across Kobane ... this morning the clashes are still ongoing," a Kurdish female fighter said.

Al Jazeera's Bernard Smith, reporting from the Syria-Turkey border, said US-led air strikes on Saturday allowed Kurdish fighters to recapture territory from ISIL, but street-to-street and building-to-building clashes were still raging.

The coalition has been bombing ISIL targets in Iraq since August and extended the campaign to Syria in September after the group began making huge territorial gains

The month-long battle for Kobane has ebbed and flowed. A week ago, Kurds warned the town would fall imminently and the US-led coalition stepped up air strikes against ISIL, which wants to take Kobane to consolidate its position in northern Syria.

At least 186,000 people have fled the town and crossed the border to Turkey, according to the government, and are now sheltering in refugee camps.

El callado exilio de la oposición siria
Tres líderes de la revuelta contra el régimen de El Asad relatan desde su destierro cómo el yihadismo ha alejado la esperanza de una solución democrática en su país
Natalia Sancha Beirut 19 OCT 2014 - 22:50 CEST
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Michel Kilo (izquierda) y Faes Saara, en casa del primero en Damasco en 2011. / natalia sancha


La oposición política laica siria, líderes religiosos y jóvenes activistas se volcaron en mantener una férrea oposición contra el régimen sirio en los meses que siguieron al 15 de marzo de 2011, cuando comenzaron las revueltas contra el régimen de Bachar el Asad en el sur de Siria. Se consumieron con la misma chispa que dio paso a las primeras manifestaciones pacíficas desatando una revolución hoy en decadencia tras más de tres años de guerra civil.

Michel Kilo, reconocido miembro del Partido Demócrata Sirio; Mouaz El Khatib , influyente jeque (autoridad religiosa) y ex presidente del Consejo Nacional Sirio (CNS-Coalición de grupos de oposición que han formado un Gobierno paralelo en el extranjero); y Shahin Mrawed, joven activista sirio, han compartido en los últimos tres años un mismo destino. Los tres pasaron por cárceles sirias. Hoy, los tres viven desperdigados en un exilio político. Sin conocerse, se han visto relegados a un segundo plano de una oposición descompuesta donde las armas han desterrado a las palabras y el radicalismo de grupos como el Estado Islámico (EI) ha copado el protagonismo mediático.

A sus 74 años, el reconocido intelectual y opositor sirio Michel Kilo lleva tres exiliado en Francia. En 2005 firmó la Declaración de Damasco, donde un grupo de opositores pedían la apertura del régimen. Su firma le valió tres años y seis días en las cárceles sirias. “Un general me invitó a tomar un café a pocos metros de mi casa. Se levantó y leyó un papel que decía: la institución de seguridad siria le arresta por trabajar contra el régimen. Fue muy cómico”, relataba a finales de marzo de 2011. Entonces una inusitada actividad reinaba en la casa de Kilo en Damasco. Rodeado de libros y acompañado del también opositor Faes Saara, el timbre no paraba de sonar. Entusiastas, decenas de opositores iban y venían, discutiendo los pasos a seguir, los apoyos a conseguir. “La revolución ha comenzado”, gritaban unos extasiados Kilo y Saara puño en alto. Pero el fervor se transformó en decepción con una rápida militarización de la oposición. Pocos meses después, un preocupado Kilo visitaba a la oposición laica libanesa en Beirut. “De seguir armándose la oposición, vendrá una guerra civil. La solución debe ser política. El régimen usa las armas para obligar al pueblo a responder por la vía armada, la que más conviene a su discurso”, advertía el demócrata.

Michel Kilo lideró el Comité de Mediación constituido por una veintena de personalidades religiosas, intelectuales y activistas para negociar las reformas con el régimen. Hoy, rechaza de pleno todo diálogo con Asad. “Sigo trabajando por derrocar al régimen, por la resistencia y por la libertad. Queremos crear una unión demócrata, negociar con el Ejército Libre Sirio y con aquellos dentro del régimen capaces de expulsar a Bachar”, aseguraba el sábado en una conversación telefónica desde París.
más información

La coalición internacional bombardea el feudo del EI en Siria
Un año después, Obama sí ordena atacar a Siria, con otro enemigo
Propaganda de película para el califato del Estado Islámico

Kilo estima entre 250.000 y 300.000 los opositores políticos sirios en las cárceles del régimen. Otras fuentes consultadas consideran esas cifras bastante ajustadas a la realidad: los cálculos de diversas organizaciones oscilan entre los 100.000 y 500.000.

“Una compañera liberada hace un mes me ha dicho: ‘Michel, olvídate de los presos, están muertos”, relata Kilo. Su compañero Faes Saara vive hoy exiliado en Estambul tras haber perdido a su hijo, muerto entre rejas.

En diciembre de 2011, Mouaz El Khatib antiguo imán de la Mezquita Omeya de Damasco vivió una detención que cambió para siempre su vida personal y política. “Me encerraron en un cuarto durante dos días. Atado con esposas metálicas a la cama por la noche no podía parar de pensar en mi familia o en qué me harían. Durante el día me interrogaban. Al final gente influyente pujó por mi libertad”, relataba entonces un nervioso Mouaz. “Hoy los jeques tenemos un 70% de posibilidades de parar las revueltas, en dos semanas tendremos el 60% y tras un mes el 30%. Llegará un momento en el que será imposible parar los enfrentamientos”, admitía en Damasco El Khatib.

Un año más tarde, Mouaz presidía el CNS. Al poco dimitió. Exiliado en Qatar, el jeque prosigue su labor de negociación pero a título personal y sin diálogo con el régimen. “Dimití del CNS porque pensamos diferente”, aseguraba el sábado en una conversación telefónica. “El sirio no es radical, pero tras la brutal represión del régimen muchos han aceptado al EI como la mejor opción para preservar su seguridad y la de sus familias. Hoy la situación es muy complicada”, concluye Mouaz.

Las protestas de marzo de 2011 vieron nacer una generación de jóvenes activistas que proponían un nuevo lenguaje de oposición. A finales de abril de ese año, Shahin Mrawed, en la treintena, escapó de milagro a una redada de los servicios secretos en Damasco. Al día siguiente cruzó la frontera rumbo al Líbano con una tarjeta de identidad y el miedo en el cuerpo como equipaje. “Después del libro rojo y del libro verde, tenemos el azul: Facebook”, aseguraba en plena efervescencia revolucionaria en un café de Beirut.

Los cafés de la capital libanesa siguen hoy repletos de activistas que sin posibilidad de regreso a Siria, intentan viajar a Europa. “Seguimos viviendo, o más bien sobreviviendo un sueño de cambio que cada día está más lejos e interesa a menos gente”, admitía un desmotivado Shahin tres años después, el pasado sábado, en el mismo café de Beirut.

EE UU y Turquía alteran su estrategia para frenar el auge del Estado Islámico
Ankara permite el paso de los ‘peshmergas’ y Washington lanza armas en Kobane

Los kurdos resisten mientras Turquía insiste en no intervenir

José Miguel Calatayud / Yolanda Monge Estambul / Washington 20 OCT 2014 - 21:26 CEST

Bombardeos estadounidenses en Kobane / Reuters-Live
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Hasta que Barack Obama llamó a Recep Tayyip Erdogan, el sábado por la noche, Turquía mantenía cerrada su frontera e impedía que las milicias kurdas de Irak, los peshmergas, accedieran a Kobane desde Turquía. Tras la llamada del presidente de EE UU a su homólogo turco, la ciudad siria fronteriza con Turquía, que resiste un mes de asedio del grupo yihadista Estado Islámico (EI), recibía en la madrugada del domingo al lunes suministros por vía aérea —armamento y ayuda médica donados por los kurdos iraquíes— lanzados por el Ejército de EE UU. Y se concretaba la garantía de que los peshmergas podrán acceder a Kobane desde Turquía y unirse a la milicia kurda local, las Unidades de Protección Popular (YPG en sus siglas kurdas).

Por parte de Ankara, el cambio de política es significativo al dar vía libre a las fuerzas de seguridad del Kurdistán iraquí para que refuercen la lucha contra los extremistas suníes del EI y abandonar la razón que esgrimía para denegarles la entrada: que el YPG es la rama siria del Partido de los Trabajadores del Kurdistán (PKK, en kurdo), considerado una organización terrorista tanto por Turquía como por la UE y EE UU.

“Vamos a ayudar a los peshmergas a cruzar a Kobane, los debates aún están en marcha”, confirmaba el lunes en conferencia de prensa Mevlut Cavusoglu, ministro turco de Exteriores. “No tenemos ningún deseo de que Kobane caiga [en manos del Estado Islámico]”, añadió Cavusoglu, que ratificaba a los periodistas la noticia adelantada por medios kurdos iraquíes citando a fuentes anónimas.
más información

Erdogan advierte de que Kobane está a punto de caer en manos del EI
Los milicianos del EI penetran en la ciudad de Kobane
EE UU entra en la guerra civil de Siria

También Washington alteraba su postura y pasaba en menos de dos semanas de considerar Kobane como “objetivo no estratégico” a asegurar que hubiera sido “una irresponsabilidad, además de moralmente muy difícil, dar la espalda a una comunidad que lucha contra el Estado Islámico”. Ambas citas son del secretario de Estado, John Kerry. La primera, del pasado 8 de octubre. La última, del lunes durante un encuentro con la prensa en Yakarta.

Conocedor del importante giro —es la primera vez que el Pentágono entrega armas a los defensores de Kobane, con lo que esto indica sobre la importancia estratégica de la ciudad—, Kerry declaró que se trataba de “una emergencia ante un momento de crisis” y matizó que la medida era “momentánea”. El matiz tiene sentido ya que el 8 de octubre Kerry aseguraba que “por muy horroroso que sea contemplar en tiempo real lo que está sucediendo en Kobane, hay que dar un paso atrás y entender cuál es el objetivo estratégico”.

Kerry informaba de que él mismo había hablado con dirigentes turcos y que también lo había hecho Obama, para “dejar muy, muy claro” que no había un “cambio de política”. Viraje de rumbo o no, la semana pasada el Departamento de Estado informaba de que el fin de semana anterior había habido por primera vez una reunión oficial entre un diplomático de EE UU y las milicias kurdas en Siria, a las que hasta ahora Turquía veía con reticencia por sus posibles nexos con el PKK. Según Reuters, serían esos mismos milicianos kurdos los ojos del Pentágono a la hora de atacar las posiciones del EI en Kobane, que ya ha vivido 135 ataques aéreos contra posiciones de los extremistas suníes.
De Mosul a Kobane

9 de junio. Los yihadistas del Estado Islámico (EI) lanzan una ofensiva relámpago en Irak y toman Mosul.

8 de agosto. EE UU bombardea al EI en Irak. Es su primera operación en el país desde la retirada en 2011.

15 de agosto. La UE autoriza el suministro de arma a los kurdos.

19 de agosto. El EI anuncia la decapitación del periodista James Foley.

5 de septiembre. Barack Obama anuncia una “coalición internacional” contra el EI.

16 de septiembre. Una ofensiva del EI en Siria provoca 300.000 refugiados.

21 de septiembre. El EI comienza el asedio de Kobane.

23 de septiembre. Cuatro días después de Francia, cinco países árabes se suman al bombardeo contra el EI. 10 días después lo hace Londres.

2 de octubre. Turquía se une a la coalición.

6 de octubre. El EI comienza a combatir dentro de Kobane.

El lunes se produjeron seis nuevos bombardeos contra los yihadistas y también para destruir uno de los contenedores con armas que los aviones de EE UU habían lanzado de madrugada, ya que cayó en una zona controlada por los yihadistas por lo que había riesgo de que las armas acabaran en sus manos, explica el Mando Central estadounidense en un comunicado.

Kobane (Ayn el Arab, en árabe) está defendida solo por la milicia kurda local, que ha conseguido resistir el empuje de los yihadistas, más numerosos y mejor armados, en parte gracias a los ataques aéreos de la coalición internacional contra los yihadistas liderada por EE UU.

El avance de los radicales del Estado Islámico hacia Kobane desplazó a cerca de 200.000 personas, que cruzaron al lado turco como refugiadas, y provocó que kurdos turcos acudieran a la zona para ayudar a los desplazados y también para intentar cruzar a Kobane a unirse a la lucha junto con la milicia local YPG.

La presencia de un enemigo común encarnado en los yihadistas del EI ha acercado a las diferentes facciones kurdas, que por ejemplo ya han combatido juntas contra el Estado Islámico en el norte de Irak. Ahora, y gracias al permiso de Turquía, la misma situación podría reproducirse en Kobane.
Ankara distingue entre kurdos

J. M. C., Estambul

El pueblo kurdo, formado por unos 30 millones de personas, se reparte sobre todo entre Siria, Irak, Irán y principalmente Turquía. Aquí viven unos 15 millones de kurdos, concentrados en el sureste del país y que mantienen una relación complicada con el Gobierno de Ankara.

Tras décadas de reclamar sus derechos, en 1984 la milicia del Partido de los Trabajadores del Kurdistán (PKK, en kurdo) se alzó en armas contra el Estado para demandar la independencia. Desde entonces, más de 40.000 personas han muerto en el conflicto. Actualmente el PKK —considerado una organización terrorista por Turquía, la Unión Europea y Estados Unidos— sólo pide más autonomía para la región kurda. En los últimos años el Gobierno ha ampliado los derechos de la esta minoría y en octubre de 2012 inició conversaciones de paz con el PKK.

A pesar de todo esto, la desconfianza mutua se mantiene. Y la situación en Kobane (Ayn el Arab, en árabe), una ciudad kurda en Siria que los kurdos turcos consideran "hermana", ha tensado al máximo el proceso de paz. El Gobierno turco no quiere apoyar a la milicia kurda siria enfrentada al Estado Islámico (EI) en la defensa de Kobane. Para el presidente turco, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, las Unidades de Protección Popular (YPG, en kurdo) son "lo mismo" que el PKK. Además, una de las condiciones que Ankara ha puesto para implicarse más en la coalición internacional contra el EI, liderada por Estados Unidos, es que los kurdos sirios renuncien a su deseo de autonomía.

Sin embargo, el Gobierno turco sí mantiene buenas relaciones políticas y comerciales con el Gobierno Regional del Kurdistán (KRG, por sus siglas en inglés), como se llama la administración kurda en Irak. Los kurdos iraquíes tienen autonomía desde 1992 y una gran cuota de autogobierno desde 2005. El KRG tiene unas reservas petrolíferas estimadas en 45.000 millones de barriles, que ha empezado a exportar este año desde el puerto turco de Ceyhan (al sur del país). Es esta buena relación la que ha conllevado que Ankara haya dado permiso a las fuerzas de seguridad kurdas iraquíes, los peshmerga, para cruzar a Kobane desde el lado turco.