SYRIA
500000 Syrians will return to Afrin after fighting ends says Turkeys First Lady
Some half a million displaced Syrians are expected to return to Afrin after fleeing to Turkey during the Operation Olive Branch offensive against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northwestern Syrian province, Turkey’s First Lady Emine Erdogan announced on Friday, it was reported by Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News.
“The aim of this operation is to ensure safety in the region. When security and stability is ensured in the region with Operation Olive Branch, new flows will be stopped and those who are already here [in Turkey] are expected to be able to go back to their country,” the wife of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said during a conference in Istanbul.Despite her husband’s concerted show of political and military might in the region, which many believe to demonstrate his designs for the Middle East, Emine Erdogan stressed Turkey’s humanitarian efforts during the Syrian conflict.
“We face a moral issue in Syria, not a political one. People have been losing their homes, their family members and their health for seven years in Syria. International institutions, non-governmental organisations and states need to come together around alarming problems,” Erdogan said.
“Turkey has been hosting nearly four million Syrian refugees for several years. The government, NGOs and people are all doing their best to improve the situation for these people. There is no other country demonstrating this level of unified effort for refugees anywhere in the world,” she added.
“After Operation Olive Branch, nearly 500,000 people are expected to return to Afrin,” she noted. She did not elaborate further on the process of returning Syrian refugees.
Continued fighting in Syria’s northern provinces has spurred new waves of immigration across the border into Turkey, consisting of tens of thousands of families, according to aid organisations.
Reports that Turkish border forces have been shooting indiscriminately at fleeing Syrians led to Human Rights Watch (HRW) to issue an urgent plea to Turkey to end its use of “lethal force” against Syrian refugees, and to stop forcibly returning them back to the unsafe conditions from which they fled.
“Conditions in Syria are not safe for refugee returns,” HRW’s deputy Middle East director Lama Fakih said.
“With hostilities in Afrin contributing to the growing displacement crisis in the country, Turkey should allow the thousands of desperate Syrians seeking refuge to cross the border,” Fakih added.
Most Notable Violations of Human Rights in Syria in 2017
SNHR: Most Notable Violations of Human Rights in Syria in 2017
How one family’s loss led to a Syrian family’s home in Cape Breton
Before he died, a Baddeck man decided he wanted his house to become home to a Syrian refugee family
By Wendy Martin, CBC News Posted: Feb 18, 2018
Bill Fraser of Baddeck, N.S., passed away last month, but his empty house will now become a home for a Syrian family of six. (Submitted by Lorna Fraser)
Shortly before he entered a care facility a few months ago, Bill Fraser of Baddeck, N.S., was thinking of what might happen to his empty house.
“He said to me, ‘Lorna, what do you think of this family of Syrian refugees? Could that be a nice use of my home?'” recalled his sister, Lorna Fraser.
Bill Fraser thought he would eventually recover from ill health and return to Baddeck. But he died last month.
Now, his sister has arranged to lease his house and has donated most of its furnishings to a Syrian family of six who will arrive in the Cape Breton village later this spring.
The Esmaeels will soon arrive in Baddeck, N.S., from Jordan. (Submitted by Syria to Baddeck Committee)
“Out of sadness comes good things, sometimes,” said Jennifer MacDonald, a member of the Syria to Baddeck steering committee.
She said the committee had been looking for months for a suitable house, but there was little available in the community of 800.
Fraser’s house is ideal, she said, adding that it has three bedrooms and is within walking distance of the school and grocery store.
“It’s also avoided us having to do any sort of major furniture drive,” said MacDonald, “because the house is essentially move-in ready.”
Big relief to have living arrangements
The Syria to Baddeck committee began raising money in November 2015 to bring a family to the island. To date, the group has raised close to $40,000.
MacDonald said there have been a number of delays, due largely to a backlog in the private sponsorship refugee program.
Lorna Fraser says her brother Bill Fraser, pictured here, would be pleased that the Syrian family will be moving into his former home. (Submitted by Lorna Fraser)
The committee now expects the family, which includes four children between the ages of four and 14, to arrive in March or April.
MacDonald said it’s a big relief to know their living arrangements are in place.
A man ‘supportive of community’
Lorna Fraser said she believes her brother would be pleased with the outcome.
“He was very much supportive of community, and what community could do for you, and would really want to be helping this family.”
Article from:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/baddeck-home-syrian-family-bill-fraser-1.4539430
Surviving as a child in the longest military siege in modern history
15-year-old Muhammad Najem from Eastern Ghouta (Twitter: @muhammadnajem20)
The Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, Syria is home to more than 350,000 people. Once renowned for its fertile soils and rich agricultural production, Eastern Ghouta is now better known for the Assad regime’s brutal Sarin attack in August 2013, killing more than 1,500 people, and for being home to the longest military siege in modern history. As of February 2018, Eastern Ghouta has been besieged by forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for four years and 10 months, a full year longer than the siege of Sarajevo.
During that time Eastern Ghouta has suffered from chemical weapons attacks and intense bombardment at the hands of pro-regime forces, with hundreds killed in the first few days of February alone. Amnesty International have condemned the Syrian government and its allies, saying that its ‘surrender or starve‘ policy amounts to a crime against humanity.
Half of Eastern Ghouta’s population are estimated to be children according to UNICEF. A recent survey of 27 locations in East Ghouta conducted in November 2017 has found that the proportion of children under five years old suffering from acute malnutrition was 11.9 per cent.
15-year-old Syrian boy Muhammad Najem inspects the damage at his school in Eastern Ghouta following regime bombardment. (Twitter @muhammadnajem20)
My name is Muhammad Najem and I am from eastern Ghouta in the Damascus countryside, I am 15-years-old I live here with my mother and siblings.
I am in eighth grade but I stopped studying three months ago because of the constant bombardment of the place in which I live.
My school was bombed by warplanes more than once but after each raid, we would return and try to complete our studies. But my school was bombed until it was completely destroyed and I no longer have a classroom within which to study or a playground to play in.
Schools destroyed
The other schools in Eastern Ghouta have also been targeted and destroyed.
I want to tell the world what is happening to us today and convey my suffering, which I live through every day because of the bombings and the siege.
I want to tell the truth and to tell people what is happening to us. We are besieged, we are hungry, we are under constant bombardment, we are exhausted from the displacement and the killing.
This war is not ending, but we are forced to grow up in these conditions and no one has done anything to protect and support the vulnerable here. Conferences and meetings and false peace talks fail while the Arabs and the rest of the world are still silent.
In this war we have already lost everything, and we are still losing more, every single day, every single one of us has lost something precious.
Losing my home and my father
I lost my house, which my father built with hard work and the sweat from his forehead. Then my father was killed two years ago after a shell landed on the mosque where he was praying.
Many of the children here have lost their fathers or their mothers, many of us have lost siblings and many of us have lost our homes.
We have been dismembered, we have lost parts of our bodies, our hands, our feet and our eyes.
The world will not be able to compensate us for anything that we lost. We have lost sight of the sky and the sun because of the war planes that fly over us day and night in order to bomb civilians.
Muhammad Najem studies by candlelight in the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta (Twitter: @muhammadnajem20)
The siege surrounds us. The specter of death and starvation hovers over us.
Last week the regime began to escalate its violent campaign against us. Planes indiscriminately drop bombs of hatred and destruction on us.
On Thursday, warplanes mounted yet more raids on residential buildings. Everyone went down to the cellars and we could hear the roar of the jets above us as we held each other’s hands.
muhammad najem @muhammadnajem20 One of my friends was killed and the other was injured. This is the picture of my friend Salim after leaving the hospital yesterday after the violent raids on his house near my house. I love you so much and wish you and all the children of the world peace and safety❤ #saveghouta
I was walking in the street with some of my friends, including my friend Salim who lives next door to us when we heard the sound of jets approaching. We fled to the cellar, but Salim ran to his home to hide with his family and uncle. He did not know that at that moment six missiles were on their way to his house.
Smoke and black dust
Smoke and black dust filled the cellar, choking us and filling the cellar with darkness. Children cried and the women screamed as they tried to check on their terrified children.
When the dust settled, we saw that Salim’s house was completely destroyed and the Civil Defense teams were attempting to rescue the people, including Salim and his family, trapped under the rubble.
After hours of searching through the rubble, I found out that Salim had miraculously survived. But his younger sister had died, his mother suffered life-changing injuries and his younger brother is still missing. Salim’s little cousins Mohammed, Majid and Raghad were also killed in the air strike.
I find it hard to believe the life we are witnessing here in Ghouta. Today I am reassured at least because Salim has left the hospital, but he is unable to move because of his injury. We do not know what tomorrow will bring.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/world/surviving-child-longest-military-siege-modern-history/
Stories from Syria – Difficulties for a doctor
Published on Mar 8, 2017
Dr Moheeb is a doctor working inside Syria, despite the constant challenges he has faced over the past few years.
More than 20 different methods of torture used against detainees by Assad regime
I have their blood with me
‘I have their blood with me’: new documentary charts plight of Syria’s many missing men, women and children
By James Macintyre 14 March 2017
Mansour Al-Omari, one of many detainees in Syria under President Bashar Assad, who wrote the names of fellow prisoners in blood on pieces of cloth. Monsieur features in a Channel 4 documentary next week
President Bashar Assad has dismissed their stories as ‘fake news’, but a hard-hitting documentary broadcast next week will lay out the damning case of Syria’s missing: tens of thousands of men, women and children who have been disappeared into secret detention centres.
Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad tells this horrendous story through the powerful personal testimonies of three survivors alongside damning evidence smuggled out of Syria. The film follows victims, family members and international war crimes investigators as they campaign with increasing desperation for the release of the disappeared and fight to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The background to the documentary is the Arab Spring, which swept through Syria in 2011. Since then, tens of thousands have disappeared into Assad’s secret detention centres, with vast numbers having been tortured and thousands dying inside.
The programme focuses in on three cases.
Mazen Alhummada is from a left-wing family who had long opposed the Assad regime. He protested in his home city of Deir Ezzor, videoing the demonstrations. Mazen fled to Damascus after twice being arrested. He describes his third arrest in a cafe: ‘We were drinking tea and joking with each other, he tells the Radio Times. ‘Suddenly we were raided by the security forces. They put our shirts over our heads and put me in the trunk of the car.’
Held at a detention centre run by Airforce Intelligence, Mazen recalls being subject to appalling torture before being forced into a false confession.
Taken to a military hospital on account of his injuries, Mazen made a terrible discovery. ‘You go into the bathroom and you find three dead bodies on the floor. Stacked on top of one another. You close the door and open the other bathroom and find another two bodies. Hospital 601 [where he was taken] is really a slaughterhouse.’
Mariam Hallaq, a head teacher from Damascus, was a member of the ruling Baath Party and supported Assad. But her youngest son Ayham, a dentistry student, joined the protests and eventually she was converted to his cause thanks to his enthusiasm for change and for free elections.
Ayham began working with another key figure in the film, Mansour Al-Omari. The pair documented the disappearances for a Syrian human rights organisation, but their offices were raided by the security forces and they were detained and tortured. Ayham was released after three months.
But Mansour remained imprisoned, denied all contact with the world outside.
It was then that he and four of his cellmates came up with their extraordinary plan: to record the names and details of their fellow prisoners so that if one of them were released, they could inform their families where their loved ones were being held. They tore off pieces of their shirts, found a fragment of chicken bone to write with, and used rust and their own blood as ink.
Mansour explains: ‘We were worried that somebody could leak this news to the jailers. You could be hanged for it if they knew about it. One of us was a tailor and he said I can put it inside the hem of the shirt and collars – nobody will suspect it.’
Mansour was eventually chosen for release and he wore the shirt out and then contacted the families. Of his group of five detainees, only one other survived. ‘When I look at those shirt pieces, written with blood, blood of people who are still there, some of them I knew, I got news they are dead – I have their blood with me,’ he says. ‘These pieces of shirt are filled with their souls.’
The film also features Stephen Rapp, the former US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice. Rapp has prosecuted some of the worst mass atrocity crimes in recent history, and he says the evidence against the Syrian regime is the strongest he has ever seen. That evidence includes over 600,000 pages of regime documentation smuggled out of Syria and into Europe, by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
Yet extraordinarily, action through the International Criminal Court has been blocked at the UN. Now, Rapp is working to open criminal cases against the Syrian regime in European national courts. The film shows the first case filed in Spain.
Assad’s Troops Are Raping Children to Silence Dissenters
By Khaled Rawas On 11/12/15 at 5:17 PM
Children, who live in the rebel-held neighborhood of Jobar in Damascus, Syria, are pictured July 18. The Assad regime utilizes the incredibly harmful effects of rape on the victim and her society to suppress any form of dissent, the author writes. Bassam Khabieh/Reuters
This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council site.
“I will not forgive him, nor will I let God’s mercy descend onto him,” uttered a woman activist working to support rape victims at a secret humanitarian organization in Damascus.
The activist leveled this charge not against the regime and its Shabiha militias—which use this most cruel weapon of war systematically to intimidate, suppress and humiliate Assad’s many opponents—but in reference to the father of a twelve year-old girl who was brutally gang raped by pro-Assad factions in her own home in front of her family.
Rape is a brutal and despicable weapon in any context, capable of tearing individuals, families and whole communities asunder. In Syria, rape not only brutalizes the victims and strips them of their humanity in their own eyes but also in the eyes of their families and society.
The Assad regime utilizes its incredibly harmful effects on the victim and her society to suppress any form of dissent. Clearly, a 12-year-old girl was no threat to the regime, but raping her in front of her family was a means to repress the opposition and callously silence those who long for freedom.
“When I heard about this incident from members of the community, I managed to track down the phone number of this young girl’s father, who had come to represent a crime against humanity itself,” says the female activist. The activist learned that the girl was in the third month of her pregnancy, but in keeping with Muslim tradition, the girl’s father refused to allow her to abort the child.
When the activist attempted to speak with the father about the incident, he angrily declined to discuss the matter and quickly hung up the phone. After the young girl gave birth to the child, the activist received additional reports that she and her baby were physically assaulted by her father for bringing dishonor upon the family. Again the activist attempted to make contact with the father, but he rebuffed her.
In the end, the young girl took her newborn child and fled from her home, prompting the activist’s earlier comment of the father who mercilessly forbade his daughter from aborting the child of a Shabiha -rape, but then displayed no mercy toward the child of that rape. Already stripped her of her humanity, her family’s shame and humiliation stripped her of it a second time.
Regrettably, the girl’s story is hardly unique. Thousands women and girls have been victims of the regime’s institutionalized campaign of sexual and gender-based violence. The roots of this epidemic do not stem from the 2011 revolution, but rather extend from Syria’s legal and religious tradition set long before the revolution.
Syria’s constitution—still in force today—contains several laws pertaining to “honor crimes” and sexual assault, including the crimes of rape, seduction, licentious behavior and violations of women’s private chambers (pursuant to Section 7, chapter 1, clauses 498-507).
Article 192 of the penal code considers the perpetrator of an honor crime under the influence of passion caused by the victim’s lack of scrupulousness. Additionally, the penal code allows judges to exercise great discretion when determining how to convict and sentence perpetrators of honor crimes, calling for all factors that may mitigate the penalty to be considered when applicable.
The Syrian constitution also derives certain components of its legal code from particular interpretations Islamic law (sharia). The regime codified the narrow-minded religious precepts regarding rape and honor crimes to extend its authority into people’s personal lives. In the process it empowered a certain brand of religious men: those willing to align themselves with the government to gain influence.
Any criticism of these precepts became a challenge to the political system, silencing moderate voices of Islamic jurisprudence, which take as their basis natural law and a respect for human nature. Religious discourse and Friday sermons were further used to guide the public toward the regime’s perspective and away from any critical thought.
A woman who was a former regime prisoner said, “During my detention, I saw many female detainees whose families refused to recognize them on the assumption they had been raped, even if that wasn’t true. For example, the regime forced one activist [detainee] to conduct an interview on national television and claim that twenty-one Free Syrian Army fighters gang raped her to spread its false version of who revolutionaries are by playing on the religious and social tension of regime supporters.
“This was not the only injustice that she faced. After being transferred to the Adra civilian prison, her father visited her and disowned her, ordering her never to return to her community. Even if she was ever released from prison, she could never go back home.”
The regime’s detention of the activist was not enough; by forcing her to lie, she was crushed between the brutality of the regime and the shame of her family.
Syrian society has failed to deal with mass rape and other sensitive gender issues in a fair and just manner—incidents that only increase in frequency. For example, one common solution is for a man to volunteer to marry the victim, as though it were an act of mercy; often the man is much older than the victim and possibly already married.
As though society has not done enough damage at this point, some of these men publicly declare that the marriage is intended to protect the victim. Those who engage in this practice act as though they are committing a holy act, without pausing to consider the emotional, mental and psychological damage done to the wellbeing of the victim.
As a Syrian, I hope that the revolution will not only fight the Assad regime, but also the damaging traditions and mores that oppress our society. The fight for freedom calls for us to think and act logically, not to listen to overzealous religious leaders and a brutal regime.
Syria’s honor does not depend on the female hymen, but in eradicating the ruthless Assad regime and its cruel system of gender-based oppression. This is the revolution that we need.
Khaled Rawas is a mechanical engineer, civil society activist and member of Damascus’s Revolution Leadership Council.
Article from: http://www.newsweek.com/assads-troops-are-raping-children-silence-dissenters-393202
Assad The Doctor Who Kills Doctors
Published on Feb 11, 2017
The Doctor Who Kills Doctors
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is waging war on the very same health system that trained him.
At least 750 medical personnel have died in Syria since the beginning of the conflict more than five years ago, according to Physicians for Human Rights.
Collateral Damage 