I have mixed feelings about the story. These “Islamic Small Wars” all involve children in every facet, from indoctrination and training for Jihad to making live weapons of the same (as we saw yesterday with the 8-year-old whose brother put a suicide vest on her) and then children as the recipients of violence, including, beheading. Bombs, whether delivered by drones or on two legs, go off where they go off and do not discriminate against anything in their blast zone. Powers and people who lob bombs do so against the potential and failings of other methods. The drone programs, for example, offset “boots on the ground” and note the failure of paramilitary force or clandestine operations to get at dangerous people: no one wants a wider combat zone and the police are not sufficient for making arrests in some regions. Consequently, family and friends in the vicinity of targets catch the same death. With the Jihad suicide bomber routines, those not involved are perceived as having no value for other than killing for use of the death as a goad for obtaining state concessions.
More than 11,000 children have died in Syria’s Civil War, most from bombing by the Assad regime, but also substantial numbers from snipers on the state’s side. The beheading mentioned, involving eight-year-old, so I recall, involved an al-Qaeda affiliate. Aping Kissinger’s statement, one may hope that both sides will lose. While they’re busy doing that, discriminating between combatants and non-combatants in the conflict areas applies some on the western side (drones often don’t fire given who appears in the target area) and apparently not at all on the jihad side.
I got the zone and age wrong on the beheading of children — it appears the story dates from June last year, involves a 10-year-old and 16-year-old in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
“Al-Qaeda are good!” he told me, with a smile and a double thumbs up. “I hope that they’ll accept me and that one day I can set off a suicide bomb in a regime area.”
I haven’t funds for myself, much less war zone stringers.
Not that harping about conflict from the Internet’s “second row seat to history” warrants funds.
Nonetheless, one wakes to these items passing by on the computer’s screen, and on this one, it appears Reuters engaged a teenage shutterbug to report from within the Syrian Civil War, and not only didn’t the teen make it but on the way to not making it forged some alliance with al Qaeda.
I you have clicked and looked, what is the worth of the young photographer’s death in light of the news value of that 15-item slide show?
The Telegraph notes (fourth frame) that Barakat, in fact, never joined al-Qaeda. The phrase used elsewhere: ” . . . tried to join . . . .”
Whether he joined or not, or was 17 or 18 in combat, we may wonder at ourselves as well as the seasoned pros at Reuters as to the judgment displayed in encouraging so young a soul to stand in harm’s way for a picture.
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On the other hand: how many early illegal sign-up legends have accompanied World War II and other lore all down the line?
How old was “Johnny” when he went to join his brother in the Confederacy, and Hell itself couldn’t and didn’t stop him?
Syria left the League of Low Intensity Conflicts some time ago.
One may wonder if some of the flack heading Reuters’ way hasn’t to do with deflecting attention from the war’s wholesale destruction of children (mostly by Assad’s bombing “strategy”) and of childhood itself.
Despite the injunctions ever present in the minds of journalists — even the youngest — for “clear, accurate, and complete” reporting, also “objective” as possible, and so on, wars come freighted with politics, the variables of which may have an effect on the reception of tips to events as well as access to officials or action. Motives for fudging, not good, or chancing, which leads to glory when it works out and infamy when it doesn’t, may have to with other than underlying alliance or sentiment.
As with other theaters of the Islamic Small Wars, integrity is not welcomed — if it were, such wars would disappear with its presence — and journalists with integrity are generally not welcomed either: the armed sides would rather have favorable PR, the kind promoted by state-sponsored “reporting”.
This post includes a bloody awful clip from, ostensibly, the Kurdish sub-theater of Syria’s “Theater of the Real” complete and irreversible meltdown. At this point, one may presume that fans of either the Assad regime’s combat doctrine or the ways of Al Qaeda affiliates have ice water in their veins where everyone else has a far warmer human spirit.
War news is often a little hard to take, especially where children are involved, but a glimpse of video from a live field after an attack . . . network television, it ain’t.
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Russia has already allocated 10 million USD for the Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. Iraq is also asking for financial aid due to the inflow of immigrants from Syria.
Mysterious purple sacks paid for by Israeli nonprofit IsraAid: “We don’t announce with trumpets that we’re Israeli.”
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With the word “Jewish” removed, the purple bags begin to travel in a human chain down a tight stairwell to the refugees below, almost all of them women wearing long black dresses and matching hijabs. Bags are loaded onto trucks or carried in hand back to wherever they are staying.
How penurious the effort when a state’s involved: Bulgaria may wear its heart on its sleeve for the refugees making their way to its bus stations but it’s wallet today appears to be opening for a fence capable of keeping them out.
Israel has the good fortune of being hated by people both wary of media as well as poisoned by it, so the direct challenge to its own humanity and pocketbook have been about right-sized: it can and has cared for wounded crawling to its tent and , this as it has in a growing roster of the world’s disaster zones — more “natural” than “man-caused” (as the American Administration might have it), its people — Israelis, of course — respond to need across its borders, but feel it / they must do so furtively (even, perhaps, while preparing and publishing the video boast).
Israel’s ethic to respond to need regardless of “race, religion, gender, or national origin” sets the standard for the ethics and morality required by the emergency.
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“It was best thing I have seen in my life,” said 10-year-old Rana Ziad, who fled from her restive southern border town of Daraa with her parents and six brothers and sisters a year ago. “It was very much fun and I loved it.”
Scarred by the horrors of war, they suffer from psychological distress, live alone or separated from their parents, receive no education or are thrown into illegal child labor, the agency said.
“Our lives are destroyed,” the report quoted 14-year-old Nadia, a newly arrived refugee in Jordan.
I don’t now the acronym or name “ANHA” and was not able to ferret the meaning quickly from web-borne articles or stations associated with it. If you know the four words, I would like to hear them and know their translation.
The number of Syrian refugees in Iraq’s Kurdistan region has reached 200,000. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) expects that the number may exceed 500,000 by the end of 2013.
There are about 80,000 refugees currently living in the Domiz camp, 20km southeast of Dohuk city and about 60km from the Syria-Iraq border.
The conflict between the Kurds and Arab jihadis highlights how some “liberated” zones of Syria have become battlegrounds between various armed factions with distinct agendas and varying views on what a future Syria should look like.
Since Thursday, more than 20,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, have fled from northern Syria into the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, according to the United Nations. [Updated, 2:05 p.m. PDT Aug. 19: Later Monday, the U.N. revised the number of recent refugees to almost 30,000.]
On Tuesday, Kurdish groups announced the formation of an interim autonomous government in Syria’s Kurdish region, with elections to follow. The announcement comes on the heels of battle successes against Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), among the most powerful of the myriad homegrown and foreign forces fighting the Assad regime.
So far, according to the report, there is little evidence of any comprehensive strategy or investment in providing a humanitarian communication strategy. Various agencies are employing piecemeal tactics to communication through counseling lines, SMS and face-to-face outreach, yet all of these have their limitations.
Furthermore it is clear from Internews research presented here that all current outreach tactics are fundamentally undermined by a profound lack of trust and/or understanding on the part of the refugees about what they are being told, and by whom. Syria has a long history as one of the most media-oppressed countries in the world and the Syrians have a mistrust of media and officialdom in general.
As a resettlement caseworker with UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in Cairo, I saw firsthand how resettlement can provide a new lease on life to refugees trapped in risky and difficult circumstances. I am proud to have helped resettle hundreds of Somali refugee women and children to the United States, where many are now flourishing as employees, entrepreneurs and students. But I also saw the unintended negative consequences that often accompany resettlement programs. Inevitably, there are not enough resettlement places to go around. In 2012, 88,600 of the world’s 15.4 million refugees were resettled – less than 0.6 percent
Greece has enough problems of its own. The anti-immigrant Golden Dawn is now the third largest political party in the country, on track to become the second. The party wants “Greece for Greeks” and blames economic troubles on refugees and immigrants. Supporters routinely attack refugees in the street, beating them, spitting on them, and calling the authorities to collect them.
There is a catch. Officials at the reception centre in Marsta take fingerprints to see whether asylum-seekers have already been registered in other EU countries.
Syria is the greatest refugee crisis of our time. The numbers are shocking. More than two million refugees have spilled into neighbouring countries, over half of whom are children. And with no end to the conflict in sight, we expect the crisis to deepen as we head into the winter months.
The UK’s response to date has been serious and substantial. David Cameron has pledged that Britain is not a country that will stand by and fail to act, and the Government has committed £500million in humanitarian aid.
Some might say that this protest shows the tragic impact of the civil war in Syria. But that is to draw entirely the wrong lesson. For what the Calais stand-off really shows is how Britain is viewed as a soft-touch right across the globe. Thanks to lax borders, the human rights industry, the state’s obsession with multiculturalism and our obscenely generous welfare system, our country has become the world’s capital for freeloaders. The group at Calais is a symbol, not of Syria’s inhumanity but of Britain’s utterly chaotic, self-destructive immigration policy.
JERUSALEM — Israel acknowledged for the first time Tuesday that it is providing humanitarian aid to victims of the civil war inside neighboring Syria, saying it has funneled food and other emergency supplies to embattled villages just across the frontier.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group opposed to the Syrian regime, says Mohammad Qataa was shot in the mouth and neck a day after being seized.
The Taliban have denied involvement in the beheading cited in the above report, but there seems no question that the crime took place. False flag or true deed, one would be hard pressed to find a more deliberately monstrous crime.
Contempt for an enemy’s life should have limits.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired 12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb cut into his head and neck.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 58 children (23 girls and 35 boys between 2 and 17 years of age) were abducted by LRA in 2012. In contrast to previous years, they were used mainly as porters to carry looted goods, rather than to participate in attacks. Children continued to be victims of LRA attacks, however. In two separate LRA attacks, a girl and a boy were killed and a girl and three boys injured in Haut Uélé prefecture between January and May 2012. A case in which a girl was raped by LRA was documented in May 2012, while two other girls who escaped from the group in 2012 reported having been raped while in captivity. In total, 41 children (19 girls and 22 boys) escaped or were released from LRA during the reporting period. Between January and October 2012, LRA also attacked two health centres and three schools.
Meanwhile, New York-based Human Rights Watch said that evidence has emerged that an airstrike using cluster bombs on the village of Deir al-Asafir near Damascus killed at least 11 children and wounded others on Sunday. Cluster bombs have been banned by most nations.
Yesterday’s news or today’s, the picture is more than grim, for the image of war in this dimension reflects most directly on the adults whose decisions failed to protect innocents, whether their own or others.
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