Middle East meltdown: protests over Syria turn deadly in Lebanon – growing chaos in Turkey6/10/2013 Lebanese troops blocked streets in Beirut with tanks and barbed wire for several hours on Sunday after the killing of a protester outside the Iranian embassy raised factional tensions already inflamed by the war in Syria. The man died during a clash between rival groups of Shi’ite Muslims after militiamen from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement opened fire when protesters drew up at the embassy, the latest sign of Syria’s violence spilling over to its neighbors. In Syria itself, fighting intensified in the north, where rebels said President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies were preparing an offensive after success last week in seizing a strategic town further south. In the past week Assad’s forces and Hezbollah captured the town of Qusair, which controls vital supply routes across Syria and with Lebanon, a sign of reversing momentum after the rebels seized swathes of the country in the second half of last year. Battles raged on Sunday near Al-Nubbul and Zahra, two rural Shi’ite Muslim enclaves outside the commercial hub Aleppo in Syria’s north, and intensified in Aleppo itself. “The aim is to use the two villages as forward bases to make advances in Aleppo and its countryside,” said Brigadier General Mustafa Al-Sheikh, a rebel commander and former senior officer in Assad’s military, referring to government tactics. “The regime considers that it has received a shot in the arm after the Qusair battle, but they will find that it will not be easy to advance in Aleppo,” Sheikh said, speaking from an undisclosed location in northern Syria. The civil war now pits Assad, from the Alawite offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, and Shi’ite Hezbollah against mainly Sunni Muslim rebel groups. Assad is backed by Shi’ite Iran and armed by Russia. The rebels are armed by Sunni Arab countries Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and backed by Turkey and the West. Much of the north near the Turkish border has been held by rebels since last year and frontlines inside Aleppo itself have been largely static for months. An article in the semi-official Syrian al-Watan daily said the Syrian army was “deploying heavily in the countryside near Aleppo in preparation for a battle that will be fought inside the city and on its outskirts. Besieged areas will be freed in the first stages and troops which have been on the defensive will go on the offensive,” the article said. Activists said at least ten rebel fighters and six loyalist troops were killed in intensifying combat in the last 24 hours in Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolis, which has been divided into rebel-held and loyalist controlled sectors for a year. Sheikh said the army has been using helicopters to re-enforce Nubbul and Zahra with loyalist troops including Hezbollah fighters and recruits from Iraq. There was no independent confirmation of any Hezbollah presence near Aleppo. Hezbollah has pledged to fight alongside Assad until victory in the Syrian war, in which at least 80,000 people have been killed. It does not comment on the specific activities of its fighters in Syria. Hezbollah’s participation raises the prospect of fighting spreading to Lebanon, which has never fully recovered from its own 1975-1990 civil war. In Beirut, the Lebanese army, which has limited means to impose itself on armed factions, deployed armored vehicles and set up roadblocks to cordon the city center and neighborhoods controlled by Hezbollah. Traffic was restored toward evening. Demonstrators from a variety of groups, including Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims and Christians, in protest against Hezbollah’s newly prominent role supporting Assad. When protesters from a small Shi’ite party opposed to Hezbollah arrived at the Iranian embassy in a bus, a Reuters journalist saw them clash with black-clad Hezbollah militiamen, who opened fire. Lebanese security officials said one of the protesters, who was unarmed, was killed and several people were hurt. “What happened today makes us feel there is a very difficult period ahead. We are bringing disasters upon ourselves by interfering in others’ affairs,” said hotel owner Ali Hammoud. “No one will come to Lebanon now; our concern now is just to stay alive.” –Reuters
0 Comments
Drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 1,000 civilians, activists say, while the US maintains they only target terrorists. Victims of drone warfare and their families live in constant fear of another strike, and say they are “angry and want revenge.”
A review of classified US intelligence records has revealed that the CIA could not confirm the identity of about one-quarter of those killed by drone strikes in Pakistan during a period spanning 2010 and 2011. In a review of 14 months of classified records, 26 out of 114 attacks designate fatalities as “other militants,”and in four other attacks those killed are described as “foreign fighters.” The CIA is reluctant to reveal information on its drone program, Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism told RT. “With so many civilians reported killed, and yet the CIA reporting that it’s killed no more than 50 or 60 civilians I think there is need for an open, not only an open inquiry, but also for the CIA to share the information it has on who it believes it’s killed in places like Pakistan. President Obama’s speech the other week did seem to promise more openness but unfortunately we’re not seeing signs of that just yet,”Woods said. In his post-election address to parliament, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for an end to US drone attacks in the country’s northern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. "This daily routine of drone attacks, this chapter shall now be closed," Sharif said to enthusiastic applause. "We do respect others' sovereignty. It is mandatory on others that they respect our sovereignty." “Most of the strikes in Pakistan these days are really not related to Al-Qaeda or those terrorist activities but really to the war across the border in Afghanistan. The drone war has changed quite significantly over the ten years or so it’s been running. We see the US talking about using drones in Syria for example; we have had calls from Iraq and Rwanda recently for the US to use drones there. So there’s a concern among some that the US wants now to use these drones as an easy plank in their view of foreign policy,”Woods explained. Pakistani protesters from the United Citizen Action torch a US flag as they shout slogans during a protest in Multan on May 30, 2013.(AFP Photo / S.S Mirza) Residents of Pakistan say they are living “in constant fear of another strike.” Amin Ullah was on his way to work at a mine near his village when a drone struck the area. He lost his leg in the attack, and three other miners were killed. "The Americans should be able to tell an ordinary person from a Taliban leader. They should know who they're killing. What did we do to deserve this?" Ullah told RT. “We are simple villagers who are stuck in a war that we didn’t ask for. It’s a hopeless feeling. Death is above our heads all the time,” he added. Another victim of the drone attack, Nek Bahadar, lost part of his hearing and nearly his foot: “The drone’s shockwave was so intense that it threw us outside far from the place where we were sleeping. After several minutes there was another strike and it killed many more people.” “Of course this has made me hate the Americans. We are angry and want revenge. They’ve destroyed our lives. My parents, my wife my children – we all see America our worst enemy now,” Bahadar said. Pakistani human rights lawyer Shahzad Mirza Akbar has sued both the US and Pakistan on behalf of civilian victims in Waziristan, a mountainous region in northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. “I simply call it a concentration camp, that you've built a wall of military and militants, and behind this wall you are keeping more than 800,000 people who are not allowed to come out and no one from the rest of the country is allowed to go in. And that is kind of laboratory that US is using to use test its drone program,” Akbar told RT’s Lucy Kafanov. Evidence of drone strikes is difficult to gather; fragments of the attacks were collected by a local journalist Noor Behram, who spent years documenting the civilian toll of drones, especially on children. “Whenever my 3-year-old daughter hears the plane she runs inside and won’t sleep that night. The children here have been traumatized by the drones. The sound of a door banging shut is enough to terrify them,” Behram said. There are fears that the US campaign to eliminate terrorists could end up creating more. “By carrying out drone strikes, killing innocent people who are not part of the conflict, you are just widening the conflict. You are giving the reason to people who were not part of the conflict here to become part of the conflict,” Akbar explained. Breakthrough advances in unmanned aircraft technology have also sparked concerns at the UN. The UN’s rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, is calling for a worldwide ban on "killer robots"that could attack targets autonomously, without a human having to pull the trigger. According to the report, the US, Japan, South Korea and Israel have developed various types of fully- or semi-autonomous weapons. “It’s important to say there’s no particular day we’ll be able to say, now we have fully autonomous robots. But there are already very high levels of autonomy available, and full autonomy may be available within a few years. It’s important to emphasize the distinction between drones and lethal autonomous robots (LARs). With drones you have a human in the loop with somebody sitting behind the computer and taking the decision to pull the trigger. With robots there’s no human being in the loop, it’s a computer that takes a decision,” Heyns explained. Syria's war has reached "new levels of brutality", the UN says, with evidence of fresh suspected massacres, sieges and violations of children's rights. Children have been taken hostage, forced to watch torture and even participate in beheadings, it says; others have been killed while fighting. It says it suspects there are "reasonable grounds" to believe chemical weapons have been deployed. It urges foreign powers not to increase the availability of arms in Syria. The issue of arms has been high on the international agenda of late, with the EU lifting an embargo on the sale of arms to Syria while Russia has insisted it is going ahead with the sale of an advanced S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system to Syria. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the contract had not yet been fulfilled and Russia did not want to "disturb the balance in the region". He said he was "disappointed" by the EU move. Meanwhile, a civilian died when shells exploded near the Russian embassy in Damascus, according to the UK-based activist group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Russia is an ally of President Bashar al-Assad and Syrian rebels have targeted the embassy several times since the uprising against his regime began two years ago. The international powers are struggling to set a date for a peace conference on Syria, where the conflict is believed to have cost at least 80,000 lives. - BBC NEWS
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A man arrested fleeing from an Anchorage home wearing boxer shortshas been charged with beating an elderly couple to death and sexually assaulting their 2-year-old great-granddaughter — a case that officials say has shaken investigators for its brutality Touch Chea, 71, and his wife, Sorn Sreap, 73, were found dead Saturday night from significant blunt force injuries. Police said Sreap and the toddler were raped. Officers arrested Jerry Andrew Active, 24, as he allegedly fled the east Anchorage homicide scene. He was later charged with first and second-degree murder, sexual assault and burglary. Investigators were affected by the brutality and the ages of the victims, police department spokeswoman Anita Shell said. "They said this was the worst thing they had ever seen in their lives, and these are seasoned detectives," Shell said. Police Sgt. Slawomir Markiewicz said Sunday that there are no indications that the victims were connected to the suspect. "It doesn't appear that he knew them," he said. "It looks like a totally random act." The victims were part of an extended family that lived in a ground-floor, east Anchorage apartment with their granddaughter and her husband, who are the parents of the toddler and her 4-year-old brother. The younger couple's 90-year-old great-grandmother also lives in the apartment and was at home during the incident. Police said the younger couple, who are in their 20s, went to a movie Saturday night with their son and left the 2-year-old in the care of Chea and Sreap. The parents of the child and their son returned shortly before 8 p.m. and found the door locked from the inside.They told police they forced their way in through a window and discovered the bodies of Chea and Sreap. A man in his 20s, they said, was naked in a bedroom with their daughter.The woman called 911and police dispatchers heard screaming over the phone. The woman reported a man had broken into her home and killed her grandmother, Sreap. The woman described the man as naked with several tattoos.The woman, who is pregnant, and her husband tried to keep the suspect from leaving and a struggle began, Markiewicz said. The suspect, by then wearing boxer shorts, was able to get away after a few minutes of fighting, Markiewicz said. Officers found Active about a block away.
|
Daughters of Tsiyon |
|