Thirty bodies belonging to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah arrived to Lebanon from Syria, Syrian opposition sources told Al Arabiya on Monday.

The sources added that Al-Quds Brigade commander, whose known by his nickname, Abu Ajeeb, was also killed in Syria in battles against rebels.

Reports have emerged that members of the Lebanese Shiite group were fighting with forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against rebels.

Former Hezbollah chief Subhi al-Tufaili told Al Arabiya in an interview earlier this week that at least 138 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in the Syria fighting.

Tufaili added that Hezbollah, who is backed by Iran and the Syrian regime, was told to fight with the Assad forces in direct orders from Tehran.

However, the Shiite group has repeatedly stated that it was not taking part in the fighting in Syria.

Hezbollah leads fight in Syria’s Qusayr

Hezbollah is reportedly leading the fight against the rebels in a strategic town in Homs province, a rebel Free Syrian Army (FS) commander told Al Arabiya on Friday.

Colonel Fateh Hassoun, who is the deputy chief of Staff and commander of FSA front in the central province of Homs, said the Syrian army is bombarding certain areas to help camouflage Hezbollah fighters.

He added it is the latest military tactic that is being employed by the Syrian government.

Qusayr, a town near a key highway that links Damascus to Syria’s coast, has witnessed fierce fighting between Syrian rebels and Hezbollah fighters, according to activists.

The two-year Syrian conflict, which started with peaceful protests against the president, has morphed into a civil war that has affected its neighboring countries, including Lebanon.

At least 70,000 people have been killed since the start of the Syrian conflict and about 1.4 million left their conflict-ravaged country, the U.N. says.

Source: Al-Arabiya News

One day in the fall of 2012, Syrian government troops brought a young Free Syrian Army soldier’s fiancée, sisters, mother, and female neighbors to the Syrian prison in which he was being held. One by one, he said, they were raped in front of him.

The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent.

Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war, like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are creating a nation of traumatized survivors — everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives.

In September 2012, I was at the United Nations when Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide shook up a fluorescent-lit room of bored-looking bureaucrats by saying that what happened during the Bosnian war is “repeating itself right now in Syria.” He was referring to the rape of tens of thousands of women in that country in the 1990s.

“With every war and major conflict, as an international community we say ‘never again’ to mass rape,” said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, who is co-chair of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. [Full disclosure: I'm on the advisory committee of the campaign.] “Yet, in Syria, as countless women are again finding the war waged on their bodies–we are again standing by and wringing our hands.”

We said after the Holocaust we’d never forget; we said it after Darfur. We probably said it after the mass rapes of Bosnia and Rwanda, but maybe that was more of a “we shouldn’t forget,” since there was so much global guilt that we just sort of sat back and let similar tragedies occur since and only came to the realization later — we forgot.

Could we have forgotten that the unfolding human catastrophe in Syria exists before it’s even over?

Using a crowd-sourced map for the last year, our team at the Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege project, together with Columbia University epidemiologists, the Syrian-American Medical Society, and Syrian activists and journalists, has documented and collected data to figure out where and how women and men are being violated in Syria’s war. And, perhaps most important, by whom.

We’ve broken down the 162 stories we’ve gathered from the onset of the conflict in March 2011 through March 2013 into 226 separate pieces of data. All our reports are currently marked “unverified” (even those that come from well-known sources like Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and news outlet such as the BBC) because we have not yet been able to independently confirm them. Eighty percent of our reports include female victims, with ages ranging from 7 to 46. Of those women, 85 percent reported rape; 10 percent include sexual assault without penetration; and 10 percent include detention that appears to have been for the purposes of sexualized violence or enslavement for a period of longer than 24 hours. (We generally use this category when we hear soldiers describe being ordered to detain women to rape them; we’re not guessing at intent.) Gang rape allegedly occurred in 40 percent of the reports about women.

In mid-March, I was in Michigan, surrounded by Syrians who live here but are helping out their fellow citizens in refugee camps and health centers. Kanawati, the psychologist, told me that day that she had visited with a refugee family in Jordan and listened to one of three sisters describe how a group of Syrian army soldiers had come to their house in Homs, tied up their father and brother, and raped the three women in front of them. The woman cried as she went on to describe how after raping them the soldiers opened their legs and burned their vaginas with cigarettes. They allegedly told the women during this: “You want freedom? This is your freedom.”

The psychiatrist asked one of the three sisters, who was holding a baby, “Is that baby from the rape?” The woman changed the subject.

All the women are having nightmares, Kanawati said; all have PTSD. Now, she said, the two sisters are employed in Amman, but the mother, who does not work, is “consumed by the baby.” The brother will not speak.

This family is quietly living with trauma that reaches across generations.

Men are more than just witnesses to sexualized violence in Syria; they are experiencing it directly as well. Forty-three of the reports on our map – about 20 percent — involve attacks against men and boys, all of whom are between the ages of 11 and 56. Nearly half of the reports about men involve rape, while a quarter detail sexualized violence without penetration, such as shocks to the genitals. Sixteen percent of the men who have been raped in our reports were allegedly violated by multiple attackers.

Government perpetrators have allegedly committed the majority of the attacks we’ve been able to track: 60 percent of the attacks against men and women are reportedly by government forces, with another 17 percent carried out by government and shabiha (plainclothes militia) forces together. When it comes to the rape of women, government forces have allegedly carried out 54 percent these attacks; shabiha have allegedly perpetrated 20 percent; government and shabiha working together 6 percent.

Overall, the FSA has allegedly carried out less than 1 percent of the sexualized attacks in our total reports. About 15 percent of the attacks have unknown or other perpetrators.

When it comes to men, more than 90 percent of the reports of sexualized violence have been allegedly perpetrated by government forces, which can perhaps be explained by the fact that most of these attacks occurred in detention facilities. Long used as a weapon against prisoners in Syria as in much of the world, rape appears to be utilized during this conflict in horrifyingly soul-crushing, creative ways. Beyond simply raping detainees, shabiha members or Syrian army soldiers have reportedly carried out the rapes of family members or other women front of prisoners.

Atrocities are inevitably muted when victims die, and perpetrators worldwide know this. Part of the reason we’ve chosen to live-track sexualized violence in Syria is because so much evidence is lost in war. Consider that 18 percent of the women in our reports were allegedly witnessed killed or found dead after sexualized violence. Look at this report from Beirut-based news site Ya Libnan, which describes a confession from a defected Syrian Army soldier who said he was ordered “to rape teenage girls in Homs at the end of last year.”

“The girls would generally be shot when everyone had finished,” the soldier said. “They wanted it to be known in the neighborhoods that the girls had been raped, but they didn’t want the girls to survive and be able to identify them later.”

Because there is a deleterious and under-documented personal aftermath of sexualized violence, we are also tracking its mental and physical health fallout. Ten percent of the women in our reports appear to suffer from anxiety, depression, or other psychological trauma, and that’s clearly a low estimate considering the acts described. Three percent of the women have reportedly become pregnant from rape, and 2 percent suffer from a chronic physical disease as a result of the violence.

When I asked Kanawati how many women she’s spoken to and treated who have survived rape, she said it’s impossible to know. She has interviewed dozens of refugees who may have been raped or otherwise sexually tortured, mostly in Homs. Originally from Damascus, she is currently the medical director of Family Intervention Specialists in the Atlanta area and has been working with Syrian refugees in Amman with the support of the Syrian-American Medical Society.

A 4-year-old girl from Homs drew this for a psychiatrist in Amman. The girl had witnessed her uncle killed by a tank, and kept repeating “Uncle, tank, blood,” according to the psychiatrist. The girl’s mother says their neighbor was raped by Syrian soldiers the same day.

“Syrian families are very conservative and I always tell them: ‘ Rape is a way to break the family. The easiest way,’” Kanawati said. “I tell them, ‘Don’t let this break you–this is what they’re trying to do.’ When I tell that to the women, however, they say, ‘Tell that to our husbands.’”

She described how women have repeatedly told her that their neighbors were raped, usually by more than one man, and how each time the extraordinary detail the women give and the trauma they exhibit tells her that the story isn’t actually about a “neighbor,” but the woman herself. More than that, the storytellers usually go on to describe how the “neighbor’s” husband then left this woman.

Sex outside of marriage, let alone the violation of a woman in an act of rape, said Kanawati, is “completely taboo.”

Erin Gallagher, a former investigator of sexual and gender-based violence for the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria (and before that on Libya), spent months speaking with Syrian women and men in camps in Jordan and Turkey. She said it’s very difficult to get an accurate idea at this point of the scope of sexualized crimes in Syria and that “there are more victims out there than what we are finding.” Getting a true idea of the scope, she said, “is going to take time, trust building, and a broader, holistic approach.”

Kanawati said her sister, an ob-gyn who lives in Damascus, has carefully told her (for fear of eavesdropping), “You would not believe how much rape there is.” Her sister has treated women who say they have been raped by soldiers or shabiha militia members in the rural areas around the city.

Gallagher explained why so few victims of sexualized violence in Syria are coming forward publicly.

“The reality is that they have much to lose and little to gain by doing so at this point in time, for many reasons,” she said. “It takes a lot of courage and strength for a victim to speak up and they may be on their own with little support as they do it. In addition to the shame and isolation a victim may feel, they now are in an insecure environment due to the war. They may now be living in a large refugee camp with no privacy, surrounded by people they don’t know or trust.”

With no clear future for Syria in sight, refugees are understandably cautious about who they speak to and trust with sensitive and personal information. “If they tell someone, to whom and where does that information go?” Gallagher said. It may be hard to put their trust in a stranger when, time and again, there has been little justice for victims of wartime rape.

Add to all that the physical, psychological, and emotional trauma that victims are suffering from the war and displacement, and “it’s not surprising that victims are reluctant to come forward,” she said.

Hearing this I can’t help but think of the preface to Night, in which Elie Wiesel writes: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the living… .To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive.”

“The security forces and the shabiha took whole families outside after destroying their homes,” a woman named Amal told the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat in June 2012. “They stripped my girls from their clothes, raped them then killed them with knives. They were shouting: ‘You want freedom? This is the best brand of freedom.’”

It’s nearly word-for-word the sentences spoken in the story above about the women raped and then burned with cigarettes.

Coincidence? Maybe. But repeated phrasing is exactly the kind of thing that helps build international cases for human rights violations. Language can indicate whether mass rape has been coordinated and systematic. Recently, a U.S.-based group called AIDS-Free World successfully petitioned to have South Africa investigate mass rape allegedly carried out by the ruling ZANU-PF party in Zimbabwe against opposition supporters in 2008. Part of their case was built on the fact that they heard that similar phrases were being uttered during rapes across the country–women were called “traitors to Zimbabwe” or told they were being “sent a message,” according to Paula Donovan, co-director of AIDS-Free World.

Gallagher, who also investigated rape in Libya, said she’s heard about such phrases being used during rape in both countries.

“I don’t think it necessarily means it was an order,” she said of Libya, “but certainly a common belief among the soldiers. They knew they had free reign. I can’t conclude if [Bashar al-] Assad and his command ordered it or have just given his men free reign. What is clear is that he and his commanders are doing nothing to stop their soldiers from committing such crimes.”

For a year, I’ve sat in circles of high-level advisors from the International Criminal Court and elsewhere debating what might tip Russia’s hand and prevent it from vetoing a vote to send Syria’s human rights crimes to the court. But now with the success of AIDS-Free World’s use of a concept called universal jurisdiction, which crosses borders to try crimes that are so heinous that they call for a sense of greater justice, perhaps it is time to consider alternatives to the ICC. Jody Williams, known for rousing the slumbering world when it came to banning landmines, has some ideas.

“We don’t need more research or more proof, we need a plan,” said Williams. “And the plan should be to ensure that there is coordinated international action to ensure survivors get help, justice is served against those perpetrating the sexualized violence, and we are all working together to prevent further rape. This will take men, women, communities, national governments, and the international community–everyone.”

Personally, I’m hoping this is the last report I’ll have to write parsing data from a map that shouldn’t have to exist in the first place. Somehow, though, I don’t think that will be the case.

Source: The Atlantic

Broadcasters including the BBC are under increasing pressure to allow an emergency appeal for victims of Syria’s civil war.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella fundraising body for Britain’s leading humanitarian organisations, has formally approached the BBC about airing a nationwide appeal which could raise tens of millions of pounds for efforts to help nearly four million people caught up in the conflict. About 70,000 people are thought to have died.

Key charities including Islamic Relief and Oxfam are convinced of the need to combine fundraising efforts into a DEC appeal as the fighting across Syria reaches a deadlock and refugees both inside the country and across its borders struggle for accommodation and basic needs.

The Red Cross has also spoken of an urgent need to increase the aid operation inside Syria.

Broadcasters would play a vital role in disseminating the DEC’s message about the humanitarian situation in Syria, but The Independent understands that discussions are continuing between NGOs and the networks about whether key criteria for launching an appeal have been met.

Concern has been raised about whether the appeal would be successful, and about the difficulty of obtaining footage to show the perilous conditions faced by the estimated two million people trapped inside Syria, where journalists have been regularly targeted.

With media coverage often focused on the military confrontation or diplomatic failures, there is debate within the DEC about whether the third of three criteria for an appeal – the need to prove existing or likely “public sympathy for the humanitarian situation” – has been fulfilled.

The BBC confirmed tonight that it had received a request from the DEC to air an appeal and that the matter was under consideration. A spokeswoman said: “The BBC has now received a formal request to broadcast a DEC appeal. We are looking at the details and will be making a decision shortly.”

One NGO source said: “The situation with the appeal is ongoing. Some reservations have been expressed by broadcasters but also within some charities about whether everything is in place to get this right.”

DEC appeals have often been highly successful, raising huge sums for emergency relief operations. The last appeal, in 2011 for the crisis in east Africa, raised £79m while the 2005 appeal following the Asian tsunami raised £372m.

But they have also previously proved controversial for broadcasters, which have to balance ongoing coverage of the conflicts behind many humanitarian disasters with their ability to elicit large numbers of donations by providing air time for charities.

The BBC and Sky were criticised in 2009 when they refused to broadcast a DEC appeal during Israel’s military operation against Gaza. They said the appeal risked undermining public confidence in their impartiality. Other broadcasters, including Channel 4 and ITV, did air the appeal.

The BBC has also refused to broadcast other appeals, including for victims of the Israel Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon in 2006.

The violence convulsing Syria has claimed 70,000 lives and led to more than 750,000 fleeing to neighbouring countries, where many are crowded into emergency accommodation. Inside the country, millions are facing hunger, medicine shortages and the privations of a harsh winter.

Source: The Independent

Henry Kissinger allegedly said of the Iran-Iraq war that raged so bloodily in the 1980s that “it’s too bad they both can’t lose.”

Though that’s far from the US position on the Syrian civil war, the tepid support the US has promised for elements of the Syrian opposition in the past couple of days bring Mr. Kissinger’s comments to mind. The half-hearted backing will likely lead to an opposition that is harder to defeat, but still lacking the strengh to win the war.

After almost two years of fighting and 70,000 dead, Syria is as polarized a nation as could be imagined. There are strong sectarian overtones to the fighting, with the core of Bashar al-Assad’s strength lying in the Alawite minority he hails from, and the oppositions strength lying in the Sunni community that is the country’s majority. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group and political party, has taken up arms for the regime while some Lebanese Sunnis, including jihadis, have fought alongside the rebels.

The prospects of major sectarian reprisals if one or the other side wins decisively are high – and allegations of sectarian butchery against both rebels and Mr. Assad’s army have already been made with alarming frequency. Further afield, Assad’s staunchest backer is Shiite Iran, while its old opponent for regional supremacy, Sunni Saudi Arabia, has been providing arms to the rebellion.
So this does not appear to be a situation where either side is in a mood for the compromises that would be required for a negotiated settlement.

But that appears to be what the US is hoping for by making the rebels stronger, but not too strong. Secretary of State John Kerry said today in Rome the US would supply “non-lethal” aid – food, medicine, and possibly things like communications equipment – directly to the Free Syrian Army and a further $60 million to the political wing of the uprising.

Earlier in the week, there were rumors that the US was considering providing military training to rebel units, but those failed to materialize today. On Feb. 25, citing “American and Western officials,” The New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia began directly arming rebels in December. The Times report said Saudi Arabia was purchasing large quantities of rifles, machine guns, mortars, and other infantry weapons from Croatia, and delivering them to rebels in Syria via Jordan. The Times asserts that the weapons went primarily to secular groups and side-stepped the jihadi militias like Jabhat al-Nusra, which was added to the US terrorist list last year.

Jordan and Saudi Arabia are two of the Arab militaries closest to the US, and relying as they do on US arms (and in the case of Jordan, US aid) it’s safe to assume their activities have the tacit approval of the US.

All of this remains far short of the massive intervention by NATO and others in Libya in 2011, in which weapons and trainers flowed to Libyan militias fighting Muammar Qaddafi and NATO airpower paved the way for their march on Tripoli, the capital.

The light weapons and the aid from the US will certainly help the rebels. The blogger Brown Moses, who closely tracks the Syrian civil war, started reporting in mid-January on the growing numbers of weapons from the former Yugoslavia (which Croatia was a part of) turning up in videos from the Syrian battlefield. He’s noticed Yugoslav-made rocket launchers, recoilless rifles, and grenade launchers.

By early February, James Miller of EAWorldView, another analyst who follows the war intensely, argued the new weapons were having an impact, writing:

Someone – a current player? a new one? – was giving a big boost in weapons to the insurgents.

Since then, the Free Syrian Army has succeeded with a series of surprise attacks, capturing several towns, border crossings, and roads. They then repeled tank convoys, airstrikes, infantry invasions, and even paratroopers…

The weapons are being brought in from outside Syria and put into the hands of Free Syrian Army units, rather than the Islamist Jabhat al-Nusra or other factions distrusted by the international coalition supporting the opposition.

Mr. Kerry told reporters after his meetings in Rome that “I am very confident from what I heard in there from other foreign ministers that the totality of this effort is going to have an impact on the ability of the Syrian opposition to accomplish its goals.”

But not everyone was convinced.

Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, leader of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), complained at a joint press conference with Kerry of an “international decision to prevent arming Syrian rebels with quality arms” and said, “Plenty of people focus more on the length of a fighter’s beard than on the scope of the regime’s massacres.”

That’s a reference to the fear that jihadis, kissing cousins of Al Qaeda in Iraq that caused so many problems for the US occupation there, are a major component of the fight against Assad, and could come out on top after his eventual defeat. Those are people who, while they may be fighting Assad, the US decidedly does not want to see win.

It appears for now that the Obama team, with Kerry in the lead, is hoping to shift the balance of military power and fear in Syria sufficiently that Assad is convinced to make concessions and that some of his backers abandon him. While Iran, locked in its own nuclear standoff with the US and with few friends in the region beyond Assad’s Syria, is unlikely to call off its support, Russia has also been a steadfast supporter of Assad, but has far less to lose if he goes down.

The AP reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled a possible shift away from support for Assad today, telling reporters at a joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande, “We should listen to the opinion of our partners on some of the aspects of that difficult problem.” France has been a major proponent of removing Assad from power.

Will this war and its truly horrific casualty rate continue to grind on, making all Syrians inevitable losers? Or is the cautious approach of the US, and the Saudis, enough to nudge all this to a faster conclusion? Time will tell – but it has been more than two years so far of false dawns.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

A mosque ravaged by bombing, a hospital destroyed after months of fierce fighting and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. These photos have been posted to this Facebook page called “Lense of a young Homsi”: administered by a group of young amateur photographers based in Homs, in central Syria: images testifying to the destruction in and around this hotbed of opposition activity caused by heavy shelling from Bashar al-Assad’s army.

In this video members of the group say they are also responding to requests from former residents who have fled the violence. Refugees have asked them, amongst other things; to upload photos of the street where they used to live to see if their house is still standing.

And these amateur photographers aren’t just focusing on gutted buildings and debris ridden roads. They have also posted numerous pictures of locals. Scenes of everyday life that illustrate the growing humanitarian crisis in Syria: civilians have been facing shortages of bread, medical supplies and fuel for months now. And of course children are the most vulnerable; even if for them life appears to be carrying on as normal.

Source: France24

At least 141 people, half of them children, were killed when the Syrian military fired at least four missiles into the northern province of Aleppo last week, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

The international rights group said the strikes hit residential areas and called them an “escalation of unlawful attacks against Syria’s civilian population.” The statement from the New York-based group followed a visit to the area by a HRW researcher.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the civil war pitting President Bashar Assad’s regime against rebels fighting to oust him.

Rebels quickly seized several neighbourhoods in an offensive on the city in July, but the government still controls some districts and the battle has developed into a bloody stalemate, with heavy street fighting that has ruined neighbourhoods and forced thousands to flee.

A Human Rights Watch researcher who visited Aleppo last week to inspect the targeted sites, said up to 20 buildings were destroyed in each area hit by a missile. There were no signs of any military targets in the residential districts, located in rebel-held parts of Aleppo and its northern countryside, said Ole Solvang, the HRW’s researcher.

“Just when you think things can’t get any worse, the Syrian government finds ways to escalate its killing tactics,” Solvang said.

Human rights watch said 71 children were among the 141 people killed in the four missile strikes on three opposition-controlled neighbourhoods in eastern Aleppo. It listed the names of the targeted neighbourhoods as Jabal Badro, Tariq al-Bab and Ard al-Hamra. The fourth strike documented by the group was in Tel Rifat, north of Aleppo.

“The extent of the damage from a single strike, the lack of (military) aircraft in the area at the time, and reports of ballistic missiles being launched from a military base near Damascus overwhelmingly suggest that government forces struck these areas with ballistic missiles,” the report said.

Syrian anti-regime activists first reported the attacks last week, saying they involved ground-to-ground missiles, and killed dozens of people. The reports could not be independently confirmed because Syrian authorities severely restrict access to media.

Human Rights Watch said it compiled a list of those killed in the missile strikes from cemetery burial records, interviews with relatives and neighbours, and information from the Aleppo Media Center and the Violations Documentation Center, a network of local activists.

The rebels control large swaths of land in northeastern Syria. In recent weeks, Assad’s regime has lost control of several sites with key infrastructure in that part of the country, including a hydroelectric dam, a major oil field and two army bases along the road linking Aleppo with the airport to its east.

A key focus for the rebels in the Aleppo area is to capture the city’s international airport, which the opposition fighters have been attacking for weeks.

Opposition forces have also been hitting the heart of Damascus with occasional mortars shells or bombings, posing a stiff challenge to the regime in its seat of power.

U.S. and NATO officials have previously said that Syria has a significant ballistic missile capability and is believed to have a few hundred missiles with a range of some 700 kilometres (440 miles) that could hit targets deep inside Turkey, a NATO member and one of the harshest critics of the Assad regime.

NATO has in recent weeks deployed Patriot missile systems along Turkey’s border with Syria.

The missile attacks have outraged the leaders of the exiled opposition who have accused their Western backers of indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people.

Source: CTV News

The Fifa president has expressed his sadness at the death of Youssef Suleiman in a letter to the war-torn nation’s Football Association

Sepp Blatter has expressed his deepest condolences after Syria youth international Youssef Suleiman was killed by a mortar attack in Damascus that also injured four other individuals.

Suleiman played for Al Whatba of Homs and was caught in an explosion just outide the team’s hotel as they were about to head to training at the Tishrin stadium.

The 19-year-old died from his injuries in hospital and the Fifa president, like many others, has expressed his sorrow at what is a truly tragic event.

“I was very shocked and saddened to learn of the tragic incident on Wednesday that claimed the life of a Syrian football player and left four other people wounded,” Blatter wrote, in an open letter to the nation’s Football Association president Salah Edeen Ramadan.

“Both personally, and on behalf of Fifa and the worldwide football community, I wish to extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the young footballer, to you and to everyone at the Syrian Football Association.”

“The football community stands by their side at this time of sorrow. I hope that the other four wounded people are in a stable condition and wish them much strength and courage and a speedy recovery. My thoughts are also with them and their families.”

Source: Goal

Fledgling efforts to promote peace talks in the Syrian conflict appear to have stalled, even as the death toll rises daily and the rebellion nears its second anniversary.

The major exile opposition group, irate over what it calls a “shameful” global silence about the bloodshed, has announced that it will not attend several planned international gatherings on Syria, spurning invitations to visit Russia and the United States. Both nations have said that they favor negotiations as a means to end the violence in Syria.

The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces has also opted to “suspend” its participation in a meeting in Rome next month of the so-called Friends of Syria alliance, which includes the United States and dozens of other nations that have bankrolled the opposition.

The coalition’s protest moves — combined with its demand that any talks lead to the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad — would seem to scuttle already faint hope of negotiations. The Syrian regime has categorically rejected any talks that mandate Assad’s removal from power.

The opposition bloc assailed what it called international inaction in the face of recent attacks by government-launched Scud missiles on the northern city of Aleppo.

“Hundreds of helpless civilians are being martyred due to [being] bombed with Scud rockets,” the coalition said in a statement Friday.

Unverified video said to be from an Aleppo district hit by a Scud on Friday showed residents desperately trying to find survivors in the wreckage of a flattened building. Elated rescuers finally pulled a dazed boy in a blue shirt from the debris. The attack killed 29 civilians, 19 of them children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition group.

The dissidents’ denunciations of what they characterize as global dithering seem designed to pressure the West to acquiesce to demands for stepped-up arms deliveries to the rebels. But many experts see such an outcome as unlikely.

“The opposition has every reason to be frustrated with an international community that has endlessly expressed concern about the killing while doing virtually nothing to bring it to an end,” said Peter Harling, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. “But in international affairs, sulking rarely is a successful strategy.”

The White House has resisted arming the rebels, fearing that more weaponry may only exacerbate the chaos in Syria. Israel, which shares a border with Syria, and the United States are also concerned that sophisticated weaponry, such as shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launchers, would fall into the hands of Al Qaeda-linked extremists who have emerged as key combatants in the rebel ranks.

Russia, a close ally of Assad, has been trying to broker peace talks in conjunction with the Arab League. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem is scheduled to lead a delegation to Moscow this week to discuss possible negotiations.

Russian authorities have also extended an invitation to visit Moscow to Moaz Khatib, who heads the opposition coalition. Last month, Khatib stunned many when he said he was ready to meet with Assad’s men to talk peace, opening a potential window to a negotiated settlement.

Russia and the United States applauded Khatib’s proposal. But many in the exile-led coalition balked at his suggestion, and the group has since moved to torpedo the solo initiative.

Last week, the coalition reiterated its position that any talks must result in Assad’s removal. In its latest declaration, the opposition group also excoriated Russia, Assad’s ally and chief arms supplier, as “morally and politically responsible” for Syria’s bloodshed. The statement would seem to rule out Moscow as peace broker.

Despite the muddled scenario, the opposition coalition says it aims to proceed with plans to name a provisional government to oversee rebel-held areas of Syria. How that idea will play out remains unclear.

The exile leadership holds limited sway over the scores of militias that are now the de facto rulers of vast swaths of “liberated” Syria. Rebel commanders in Syria often openly scoff at the exile opposition leadership, saying members spend too much time at five-star hotels without accomplishing anything.

The coalition’s decision to spurn international peace efforts may be meant in part to boost the group’s credibility with rebel chiefs leery of the West and opposed to any kind of deal with Assad.

“We are under huge pressure from our people inside Syria, because they are not seeing any tangible results from our discussions with the international community,” Anas Abda, an opposition coalition member, told the BBC on Saturday.

The Syrian conflict, which began with antigovernment street protests in March 2011, has cost almost 70,000 lives, according to the United Nations. The war has also battered the nation’s economy and infrastructure and forced about 1 million Syrians to flee the country. An additional 2 million in Syria have been displace from their homes.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks are spreading. At least 70,000 people are dead, and there are 850,000 refugees. After covering the battle for Damascus for a month, my colleague – photographer Goran Tomasevic – declared the situation a “bloody stalemate” this week.

“I watched both sides mount assaults, some trying to gain just a house or two, others for bigger prizes, only to be forced back by sharpshooters, mortars or sprays of machine-gun fire,” Tomasevic, a gifted and brave photographer, wrote in a chilling first-hand account. “As in the ruins of Beirut, Sarajevo or Stalingrad, it is a sniper’s war.”

The Obama administration’s policy toward Syria is a failure. Bashar al-Assad is hanging onto power. Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are funneling him more aid, armaments and diplomatic cover than ever. And Syrian rebels who once hailed the United States now loathe it.

In an incisive essay published this week in the London Review of Books, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist with the Guardian, described the continued atomization of the Syrian opposition. Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who covered the dissolution of his own nation, freely admits that “we in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism.” But then he delivers a damning description of how prevarication in Washington creates deepening anti-Americanism among the rebels.

“Why are the Americans doing this to us?” one rebel commander demands. “They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse?”

In the meantime, hard-line jihadists and their funders in the Persian Gulf are filling the void.

“Maybe we should all become jihadis,” the exasperated commander declares. “Maybe then we’ll get money and support.”

The time has come for the Obama administration to mount a new policy in Syria. But don’t expect one anytime soon.

In an interview on Thursday, a senior administration official played down a report in the The New York Times Monday that President Barack Obama might reconsider arming Syria’s rebels. The official confirmed that Obama rejected a proposal last year from four of his top national security advisers that the U.S. arm the rebels.

But he said a subsequent review by American intelligence officials had concluded that only a large infusion of sophisticated weaponry would tip the military balance in favor of the rebels.

“We have to assess what it would take to change the calculus,” the official said, “and hasten the transition.”

Repeating prior arguments, the official said the administration opposed supplying the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles out of concern that the weapon could fall into the hands of jihadists.

“God forbid a U.S. weapon be used to strike an Israeli passenger plane or land in Israel,” he said.

The problem, though, is that jihadists are growing increasingly well-armed and powerful inside Syria. The London Review of Books essay, “How to Start a Battalion in Five Easy Lessons,” begins with a description of a rebel commander withdrawing his fighters from an important rebel defensive position in Aleppo because a donor in the Gulf is willing to provide him with more money and weapons.

“He says he will pay for our ammunition and we get to keep all the spoils of the fighting,” the rebel commander says. “We just have to supply him with videos.”

And a recent New Yorker piece described stepped-up assistance from Hezbollah.

“If Bashar goes down,” one Hezbollah commander told the magazine, “we’re next.”

And the White House official confirmed that Iranian assistance to the Assad regime is rising.

“The extent of Iranian support is stunning,” the official said. “They are all in. They are doing everything they can to support the Assad regime and putting in enormous amounts of arms and individuals.”

Why, then, isn’t the United States even partly in? In the London Review piece, rebels complained that the United States was blocking countries in the region from providing anti-aircraft missiles as well. The White House officials denied that was true and argued that surface-to-air missiles were finding their way into Syria.

But he said the administration was trying to learn lessons from the past, particularly Iraq.

“The United States has a long history of picking winners and losers based on the guy who speak English well,” the official said. “It’s just trying to learn the lesson and be humble.”

Learning is important, but we should do better than this. Our fear of radical Islamists is paralyzing our efforts. And we are missing a strategic opportunity to weaken Iran and Hezbollah.

We must take risks. If we do not wish to arm groups ourselves, we should at least allow countries in the region to do so. Sophisticated anti-tank missiles and other conventional weapons, not surface-to-air missiles, could help turn the tide.

We must trust Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to sort out a confusing situation on the ground. And if we are serious about a diplomatic effort, we must redouble our efforts instead of deferring yet again to false Russian promises.

And lastly, the current approach is clearly a failure. The death count today in Syria is rapidly approaching the levels of the wars in Iraq and Bosnia. While it may not have a political cost in Washington, the White House is sending a clear message across the Middle East: American and Israeli lives matter, not Syrian ones. The figure is 70,000 and counting. That number will come back to haunt us.

Source: Reuters

First there is the ongoing civil war. Now freezing winter weather is further threatening the health of hundreds of thousands of Syrians driven from their homes by the fighting and forced to take shelter in the nation’s mosques, empty schools and abandoned construction sites.

A resident of Bustan al-Qusr complains about trash left in her home by Syrian soldiers who took over her house during summer fighting in Aleppo

Even without the worst winter in 20 years, the health of women, children and the aged has already been compromised by failed health and sanitation systems brought on by the two years of fighting. For a country that once graduated hundreds of physicians and produced more than 90 percent of its own pharmaceuticals, the war has destroyed much of the nation’s medical infrastructure. Cancer patients and children with diabetes no longer receive life-saving treatment.

There have been no major outbreaks of disease yet, health experts agree — only sporadic cases of hepatitis B. But as the war continues, chances of survival for the nation’s displaced are likely to worsen because of rapidly dwindling medical supplies and a diminishing corps of doctors and nurses.

Public health reporting uneven

Public health reporting in Syria is spotty – and often contradictory – says Dr. Elizabeth Hoff, who monitors the country for the World Health Organization (WHO). The difficulty, she says, is access in the ongoing fighting.

Despite that, Hoff and two other doctors visiting separate regions of Syria report a kaleidoscope of health problems that vary from city to city. One sees serious threats in the water of the Euphrates. Another notes the proliferation of rats in the streets of Aleppo’s Kalaffa district. A third worries about the nation’s cancer patients and the children with diabetes whose life-saving treatments have been ended.

All three look at a brutal winter as a defining moment for the health of a nation of 22.5 million facing the prospect of a lengthening civil war.

Hoff describes a grim picture of life for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians.

“What I have seen — and I traveled around the country in cities like in Homs, and in the Rif Damascus (suburban) area where there are a large number of internally displaced — is that they have actually taken refuge in buildings that are missing windows and the doors are open,” Hoff said.

“And at this time of year – today we have snow on the ground in Damascus and in many of the areas the temperature has fallen to below zero – they don’t have the right equipment to stay warm,” she said. “There is no heating in their homes and the price of fuel has gone up tremendously … if they can find it at all.”

Danger lurks in Euphrates River waters

Dr. Mohammad Trad spent several weeks in November working in the region near Deir Azzour, once a regional capital with about 600,000 residents and now almost abandoned. Trad said he saw large groups of homeless people camping along the shores of the Euphrates River.

“Now, that river is known to be contaminated with schistosomiasis, which is endemic in those waters,” Trad said, adding that the homeless were reporting increasing cases of diarrhea among children using Euphrates water.

Another chronic problem in the area is a high rate of Thalasemmia, a blood condition that can cause anemia and can lead pneumonia, bone deformities and cardiovascular illness.

A pediatrician warns of plague potential plague in Aleppo

Dr. Yahiya Rahim is a pediatrician who lives in Florida, but volunteered to help in his hometown of Aleppo. He couldn’t visit the Saif al-Dawla neighborhood where he grew up because of the threat of sniper fire, but he worked in one of several underground hospitals in another neighborhood, Kalaffa, a frequent target of rockets attacks.

“I was there because I was the only pediatrician in that area, which is more than a million people.”

While in Aleppo, Rahim says he treated about 60 patients a day: one-third had hepatitis, another third suffered from chest infections.

“I was able to see rats freely during the daytime, which is unusual because they don’t usually come during daytime. They come more at night.”

Rahim said his brother was with him at the time and that they helped out at six makeshift medical centers treating the wounded.

“My brother was working in a hospital where 70 victims of a bakery bombing were delivered,” Rahim said, explaining that treatment was impossible because the diesel generator had run out of fuel and the center had no electrical power for light or heat. He said 10 of the wounded Syrians died of hypothermia.

Rahim said his brother, also a surgeon, performed three Caesarean sections by candlelight. The mothers survived, but the babies – all near full-term- died of hypothermia.

Later, he said outside donations made it possible to buy 26,000 liters of diesel fuel and buy two new generators for the treatment centers.

Now, Rahim says, he is trying to organize a campaign to prevent a possible outbreak of bubonic plague in Syria, which he said could occur in the spring if steps are not taken to remove trash and deal with rat and mosquito infestations in the coming months.

Source: Voice of America