08 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
chemical weapons, conflict, CW, defense, delivery, German, manufacture, middle east, military, policy, political, politics, state, U.S.
Scroll down if you go there:
German manufacturing of lethal chemicals –> via U.S. subsidiaries –> middle east countries with Reagan and Bush era Department of Defense aid and consent.
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01 Sunday Sep 2013
Tags
chemical weapons, conflict, ethics, good society, law, morals, political science, politics, rules of engagement, rules of war, Syria, war
Chemical and biological weapons are absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law. Debates and questions surrounding the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria are not fading away. Robert Mardini, the ICRC’s head of operations for the Near and Middle East, explains the organization’s position.
Tell me about the world in which you would like to live.
Will it be a world that holds itself to time honored ethical and moral standards?
Will it be a world in which self-awareness and the awareness of others inspires an integrating compassion and consideration for the humanity shared?
Will it be a world in which the most notable and powerful of public speakers may be trusted to keep their own laws, to restrain themselves from excessive or unbridled appetites, and to tell the truth whether it becomes them or not?
If you should wish to live in some other world, don’t bother with this blog.
* * *
Unknown to Syrian officials, U.S. spy agencies recorded each step in the alleged chemical attack, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials. Those records and intercepts would become the core of the Obama administration’s evidentiary case linking the Syrian government to what one official called an “indiscriminate, inconceivable horror” — the use of outlawed toxins to kill nearly 1,500 civilians, including at least 426 children.
Bishara, Marwan. “US and Syria: the calculus of war.” Al Jazeera, August 30, 2013.
ICRC. “The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols”. PDF Address: The Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949.
ICRC. “War and international humanitarian law”.
Raum, Tom. “Syria: Conflict, an alleged chemical attack, and fallout.” MPR News, August 31, 2013.
Wikipedia. “Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907”.
# # #
27 Tuesday Aug 2013
Tags
chemical attack, conflict, democracy, free press, information, journalism, money, politics, press, propaganda, subjugation, Syria
Speaking after U.N. chemical weapons experts came under sniper fire on their way to investigate the scene of the attack, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the use of chemical weapons was undeniable and “there is very little doubt in our mind that the Syrian regime is culpable.”
Russia has no evidence of whether a chemical weapons attack has taken place in Syria or who is responsible, Russian President Vladimir Putin told British Prime Minister David Cameron in a telephone call, according to Cameron’s official website.
* * *
Syria stinks.
Not only does Syria stink for Syrians — keep in mind this latest imbecility takes place in a war zone that has killed more than 100,000 and displaced upwards of four million souls — but it envelopes everyone with a hand in it.
Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the US think tank the Heritage Foundation, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Monday that in response to an attack on their Syrian ally, Russia could “expand supply of dual use nuclear technology” to Iran as its nuclear energy company, Rosatom, is anxious to sell more reactors.
Let’s do business, shall we?
* * *
Because that’s what Syria’s about.
I happen to have the audacity to think the west wants to earn back some part of its investment in oil; Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey would seem to want to expand the Sunni side of the Islamic enterprise in the middle east; Israel could do with a weakened Iran-Hezbollah-Syria structure on its flanks; and God bless him, truly, for Christian Russia, President Vladimir Putin wants to use Iran’s errant ambitions to keep an old Soviet Era cash machine (we could call it “Cash Mir”) chugging along, Ayatollah –> Assad and Associates –> Post-Soviet, Neo-Oligarch Russia.
It wasn’t a chemical warhead that took lives in the Damascus suburbs last week.
It was the money.
Follow it from Doha to Moscow on its twinned tracks and you will have the outline of the implosion I might just refer to hereafter as “Syria Dark Star”.
Two of the world’s three most powerful states have a business interest in their relationship with the Assad regime.
Analysts say both China and Russia have their reasons to maintain good relations with Syria.
Russia is one of Syria’s biggest arms suppliers. And China ranked as Syria’s third-largest importer in 2010, according to data from the European Commission.
Yan, Holly. “Why China, Russia won’t condemn Syrian regime.” CNN, February 5, 2012.
What is the effect of that, information-wise?
In one video appearing in an alternative or dissenting context in World Net Daily (WND), you will see a frame referring to Saudi Arabia’s “Saudi Factory for Chlorine and Alkalais” (Sachlo) in relation to last week’s chemical attack — again: follow the money and do note, please, the production values — the addition of music and titles to what should be as straight as timely documentation gets — on two of the three videos promoted.
What’s true?
What’s not true?
The money is true — and the reportage may be consigned to following state presentations.
The sucker punch is NATO vs. Russia all over again but for no good reason apart from from the ginning of foreign trade receipts.
It’s business.
Conscience has no role in it.
With China perhaps fat, smiling, and unperturbed, that same money will loan out to the United States and others who will happily accommodate this absurd state of affairs between themselves.
As the chips make their way around the Grand and Global Poker Table, all that will be missing comes to (green shades on and lick the nub of the pen) about 355 souls permanently and about 3,245 incapacitated or traumatized souls.
BBC. “MSF-backed hospitals treated Syria ‘chemical victims’.” August 24, 2013.
* * *
One has to ask of conscience and desire: are the worlds now “imaged” by CNN and RT — presented to us with many questions left unasked — anything like a world in which one should want to live?
The early 2010 “Question More” advertising campaign created for RT in Britain by McCann Erickson was highly controversial.[33]One advertisement showed American President Barack Obama “morphing” into Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked: “Who poses the greatest nuclear threat?” The ad was banned in American airports. Another shows a Western soldier “merging” into a Taliban fighter and asks: “Is terror only inflicted by terrorists?”[34] One of RT’s 2010 billboard advertisements won the British Awards for National Newspaper Advertising “Ad of the Month.”[35]
CNNi’s pursuit of and reliance on revenue from Middle East regimes increased significantly after the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the network to suffer significant losses in corporate sponsorships. It thus pursued all-new, journalistically dubious ways to earn revenue from governments around the world. Bahrain has been one of the most aggressive government exploiters of the opportunities presented by CNNi.
Greenwald, Glenn. “CNN and the business of state-sponsored TV news.” The Guardian, September 4, 2012.
The human rights-oriented modifications that may come to autocratic states will neither bring to them nor emulate democracy.
That’s life.
However, bending and twisting it some in journalism to suit The Money — yes, you have just been dragged from chemical weapons reports into international trade and on to integrity in journalism (even from my Second Row Seat to History) — will erode and eventually destroy democracy.
American conservatives know the litany: “Without the First Amendment, all of the others are useless.”
Add to it: without a press free of all but ambitious good conscience and readers, there will be no freedom.
Only political programs and programmers — God give them all the money they want because on this most dismal, obscene, and tragic of today’s war stories, The Money would seem the hidden alpha-omega of all motivation, coverage, and presentation — and the feckless programmed, which would be everyone else.
CBS/AP. “Fearing a U.S. strike, Syria warns of global ‘chaos’.” August 27, 2013.
Corsi, Jerome R. “Evidence: Syria Gas Attack Work of U.S. Allies.” WND, August 26, 2013.
CNN Press Room. “CNN International’s Response to the Guardian — Update.” September 5, 2012.
Whether with CNN or RT, we have journalists working in the vicinity of the wheels of history, which for this BackChannels post seems to be a Qatar-backed Sunni-NATO alliance helped into being by the need to address the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran that is in turn supported, in part, by Syria’s geopolitical view and Russian greed (we know for Putin that cooperation is not about the endorsement of Shiite Islam as laid down by Ayatollah Khamenei). While that plays, the journalism story plays too, for whether in Russia, the United States, or elsewhere in the world authentically or nominally subscribed to open democracy, if one cannot trust the main run of journalists to report “accurately, clearly, and completely” — add “relentlessly” — on the stories of their day, then one returns to subjugation, and whether with such power cloaked in the name of God or for the cause of Gold makes not the least difference.
# # #
15 Thursday Aug 2013
The torture process starts once a demonstrator who opposes President Mohammed Morsi is arrested in the clashes or is suspected after the clashes end, and the CSF separate Morsi’s supporters from his opponents. Then, the group members trade off punching, kicking and beating him with a stick on the face and all over his body. They tear off his clothes and take him to the nearest secondary torture chamber, from which CSF personnel, members of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) are absent.
*
At least one protester was incinerated in his tent. Many others were shot in the head or chest, including some who appeared to be in their early teens, including the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy. At a makeshift morgue in one field hospital on Wednesday morning, the number of bodies grew to 12 from 3 in the space of 15 minutes.
It appears Egypt’s polarized politics knows no language for accommodation, compassion, or compromise, and it may also lack the wherewithal needed to control the amplitude of state violence against constituents on those occasions when riot suppression or the conclusion of a reasonable period of mass protest may be warranted.
* * *
Bishop Anba Suriel, the bishop for the Coptic Orthodox Church in Melbourne, wrote on his Twitter micro blog, “over 20 separate attacks on churches and Christian institutions all over Egypt.”
One correspondent suggested to me this morning that Egypt would follow Syria in its self-destruction, but I’m not so sure considering that Mubarak with his plans to install a dynasty are today long gone (seems like it) and even with the excessive force displayed by Egypt’s military in the latest fighting, the qualities of a Maher al-Assad and his wanton aerial bombing sprees are not in it.
The fascist theocratic ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood have been made plain at every passage since Mubarak’s overthrowing, from lies told to win elections to publicizing the possession and use of the old regime’s torture chambers — a flagrant act of intimidation unsuited completely to the values inherent in the concept of a democratically self-governed and modern state — to, finally, acts of war, of seeming allowance of crime with impunity, against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, not to mention some bold anti-Semitic ranting on the side.
* * *
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Mere mention of “the center will not hold” would summon to the English mind the above poem (in Yeats’s vision, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), but it seems in Egypt at the moment that there is a political center, a broad class of more moderate constituents, i.e., those who turned out by the millions to demand, in essence, Morsi’s resignation or that the army remove him, that seems itself helpless to defend itself against the nefarious methods of the Muslim Brotherhood through other than martial power.
That much is not — indeed, has not been — the fault of the moderate.
Al Aribya. “Egypt police say will use live ammunition to repel attacks.” August 15, 2013.
Al Aribya. “Egypt’s Brotherhood vows to bring down ‘military coup’.” August 15, 2013.
JTA. “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood tops anti-Semitic rhetoric list.” Haaretz, December 28, 2012.
Sabra, Hani and Bassem Sabry. “Morsi is Not Arab World’s Mandela.” Al Monitor, August 12, 2013. This article deals with a serious snit as well as a serious issue involving either perception or integration or both:
However, Karman’s recent comparison of deposed Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi to Nelson Mandela, one of the most influential and inspirational figures of the latter half of the 20th century and whose name is synonymous with courage, struggle and wisdom, is astoundingly wrongheaded. Mandela remains a global moral authority. Morsi is not worthy of such praise — not even close.
I list it here because it conveys what is represented in the pro-Morsi part of Egypt’s turmoil.
Morsi’s infamous November 2012 presidential decree, which established him as above the law and forcefully installed a political ally as prosecutor-general, was ultimately used to ram through a divisive constitution. The bloody clashes that followed and the sequence of events that ensued left Egypt dangerously polarized and the January 2011 revolution in tatters.
# # #
14 Wednesday Aug 2013
Tags
conflict, crime, dark space, Ecuador, FARC, Hezbollah, narcoterrorism
I have been assured by my contact in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that fighting reported in the Miami Herald last Thursday is still ongoing but with one changed note: the hint that Hezbollah has banded with the FARC “to move their operations to neighboring countries, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador, seeking new territory to plant opium . . . .”
That coca and poppy cultivation have taken place, or takes place, in certain areas isn’t news, but whether or not Hezbollah’s is in on that enterprise — or a part of this most recent fighting — that might be something worth the watching.
Sunday, August 11, 2013:
“We are worried about a war against Israel from many terrorist groups, we have information that Mexico and Peru are increased production of cocaine and opium are sowing now, it is likely that drug traffickers with this money can finance violent groups worldwide, in exchange for weapons and as part of the drug trade, then they can make terrorist attacks with Opium money.”
* * *
“This is a battle with two front of war to Ecuador, because the drug traffickers control the jungle between Colombia and Peru, where the government of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador have no presence, the state have no presence with roads, village, school, hospitals in remote places of the country, far away from the Andes mountains all this place remain alone.”
From back rooms to board rooms to “secure compartmented information facilities”, any space may be made and kept “dark” in terms related to privacy and the keeping of secrets, but remote rural space affords another dimension in dark space: the opportunity to develop criminal and, in essence, criminal political enterprise with impunity.
Levitt, Matthew. “Exporting Terror in America’s Backyard.” Foreign Policy, June 13, 2013.
Torres, Diego. “Ecuador soldier slain in firefight with Colombians.” Miami Herald, August 8, 2013.
05 Monday Aug 2013
Tags
Assad, conflict, ethics, Obama, obligation, political, politics, Putin, Youssef Abdelki
Hours before his arrest, Abdelke had signed a petition that averred (here’s where Chrome’s translate option comes in handy) “support to the forces of the revolution who advocate the establishment of a pluralistic democracy” and “desire for a peaceful solution to stop the bloodshed and to preserve national unity and territorial integrity, which involves the departure of Bashar al-Assad and pillars of his regime.
http://artfcity.com/2013/08/01/the-web-petitions-to-free-syrian-artist-youssef-abdelke/
Youssef Abdelke — never hard of him before two minutes ago — but as one who has learned the ways of the World Wide Web, the third minute opens on eternity.
(Reuters) – Syrian government forces have detained a dissident left-wing painter in a new wave of arrests of non-violent critics of President Bashar al-Assad, opposition groups said on Friday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/us-syria-crisis-arrests-idUSBRE96I0LP20130719
“A place to share art, uninhibited without a bunch of stupid ass rules. A place to help your fellow page owners grow and succeed. A group to have fun with no dictator shoving shit down your throat and bowing down. A group to be FREE to help as you see fit. A group to rock the fuck on!”
https://www.facebook.com/groups/639798962716250/
It’s a closed Facebook group, one to which I would apply if I were shooting the local downtrodden as opposed, say, to the leisured, business, and community development classes.
Nonetheless, “Art and FREEDOM”, my soul is with you and your author, Youssef Abdelke.
* * *
I really don’t know why Putin darkens his role in history by keeping in his hand with the Ayatollah’s Iran and the Assad’s Syria.
* * *
Novelist Daniel Silva has a great deal of fun with the “Russian President” — in fiction, merely a character, never named, nothing more than coincidental with anything or anyone in reality, in his latest best seller The English Girl.
As a fiction writer, Silva’s actually, probably, one of the very best political analysts on the international stage, and while playing that role through his characters and plots, the Russian President looms large and rightly so for the behind-the-curtain strategy pursued by the post-Soviet oligarchs of the Latest and Greatest in Russian States.
As we know about narcissists and narcissistic hunger and supply, they are ultimately about themselves, and whatever their charms, political and social, may be. Not that Bashir Assad has enjoyed abundance in dimension, but it’s the Russian President who has been most quiet on the obscenity of a state that deploys jets to suppress, at first, a small challenge to its authority.
While the Syria of 2010 has been destroyed, culturally, socially, structurally, one might note that Russia, in her defense, has ferried both the larger part of its civilian and military presence out of the country — not exactly a show of confidence, that, but not exactly either a show of humanist resolve.
The world wonders at the conundrum that has pit a brutal dictatorship against partially but deeply virulent Islamist forces. There is in that aspect of Syria’s agony the “no good dog in the fight” and the “black hole” of the Islamic Small Wars constructed of a contempt, hatred, and self-contempt in the inhumanity that draws in military energy and burns without end.
Nearly one hundred thousand dead and four million displaced in Syria’s furnace and neither of two of the most powerful statesmen of our era either cares to or knows how to shut it down.
Instead of the kumbaya “reset” between the states and the federation (how young is Obama?), Putin appears to be draining the former plus NATO by keeping the oven hot while avoiding, rightly, the imposition of another Chechnya in its sphere of influence. And yet . . . the Assad regime was the Soviet’s monster, and one would think that after 1991 the state would have been concerned with other than filling its pockets in collusion with it for another 22 years.
But that perhaps would have been too caring, too ethical.
Too English.
* * *
While the superpowers dick around with trivial issues like Snowden, Syria, in part, draws to it the “worst of the worst” — or just the most spirited — of fighters representing Shiite and Sunni Islam, those two angry wasps someone left in a bell jar separating their concerns from the much, much greater world surrounding.
On a portion of that, I would blame the west.
We’ve done business, haven’t we, for how many years?
And barely a word, most certainly few, if any, of outrage in regard to humanity and human rights in the contained but also dark medieval quarters of the globe.
So why not leave them — today in Syria, tomorrow perhaps in Egypt or somewhere else — in their own mess?
Whether the President of the Free World or that of the Russian Empire, is it incumbent on either to reorganize a middle east state as a pet humanitarian project?
There are, of course, other ambitions in the mix, much including Iran’s and Qatar’s, but one may one wonder between them whether either will wake up from their dream or with history pass away into it.
* * *
Prestige matters.
As a Jew, I may wonder how global memory will treat of today’s powerful in the days beyond their reclamation by the earth.
Additional Reference
Official Site of the Bureau International des Expositions.
World Bulletin News Desk. “Erdogan, Putin discuss Syria and Egypt.” August 5, 2013.
# # #
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Syria has one thing going for it today: the world cares. If it continues on its course, if civil and internecine war continue “building down” Syrian infrastructure and social structure along lines more familiar to Mogadishu than Damascus, the world — the communities of the caring and of the politicos — may shift attention to containing the meltdown while letting the fighting move around in its own wasteland.
The UN had this to say today:
Since fighting began in March 2011 between the Syrian Government and opposition groups seeking to oust President Bashar Al-Assad as many as 100,000 people have been killed, almost 2 million have fled to neighbouring countries and a further 4 million have been internally displaced. In addition, at least 6.8 million Syrian require urgent humanitarian assistance, half of whom are children.
I’ve little to add to that except, perhaps, to call the Syrian Devolution a war between criminals, brigands, liars, and thieves, from the top offices of the state right down to its blood-spattered fields and streets.
Aid groups and United Nations officials are pleading with the Syrian government and armed opposition groups to allow access to unarmed civilians, saying crimes against humanity “are the rule” as fighting rages on in the Syrian civil war.
VOA News. “UN Officials: War Crimes Now ‘The Rule’ in Syria.” July 16, 2013.
Salim Idris may be the one decent presence on the ground in Syria, but he is bucking atop a wild horse badgered or infiltrated by Al Qaeda / Taliban-type (“Islamist”) fighters.
There are times I wonder why “unarmed civilians” remain unarmed and “moderate rebel units” seem unable to prove themselves as vicious and ruthless as the immoderate forces that have appeared to undermine them.
I’ve updated reference at the top of a recent post, “Syria Taliban–Brief Aggregation,” (July 15, 2013) as the more stable governments involved seem to be missing intelligence, or trying to catch up, within the Syrian theater.
Dettmer, Jamie. “WFP Seeks More Money to Cope with Syrian Crisis.” VOA, July 16, 2013.
Euronews. “UN: Syrian conflict is the worst humanitarian crisis in nearly 20 years.” July 16, 2013.
Tutu, Demond. “We are all shamed by Syria’s suffering.” The Elders, March 25, 2013.
# # #
15 Monday Jul 2013
Tags
conflict, Islamic Small Wars, journalism, numbers, Syria, Taliban, war
Officials will catch up with the war just as soon as it moves farther away from them and far into the Twilight Zone of Language in which lying may tell more about states of affairs — and the character of motives involved — than truth telling.
* * *
Al Jazeera. “Pakistan Taliban says its fighters in Syria.” July 16, 2013.
PTI. “Pakistan verifying reports of Taliban fighting in Syria.” DNA, July 16, 2013.
VOA. “Pakistan Denies Local Taliban Has Sent Hundreds of Fighters to Syria.”
* * *
So awful has the Syrian melee become, but this precisely in the manner of the Islamic Small Wars’ “hot zones”, that even eagle-eyed satellites probably can’t tell much about who (from where) is fighting whom (from where).
Send in the spies and wish them luck because if any get out information — much less survive — on behalf of any of the interests involved, that data has to come from either direct witness or a additional primary sources that may well be lying themselves.
Most travellers (STET) must have a visa to enter Syria; the only exceptions are citizens of Arab countries. Obtain a visa before arriving at the border, preferably in your home country, well before your trip. Avoid applying in a country that’s not your own or that you don’t hold residency for as the Syrian authorities don’t like this.
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/syria/practical-information/visas#ixzz2Z94ewuqn
Ahmed Ressam, the focus of this FRONTLINE report, was somewhat of an expert in fake passports. He used a counterfeit French passport to enter Canada and apply for political asylum. While living there, he supplied fake Canadian passports to other Algerians. And he used a fake Canadian passport under the alias of Benni Noris in his failed attempt to enter the United States and bomb Los Angeles International Airport.
Apparently, the lawful go to the bother of obtaining authentic passports and entry visas while the unlawful do much the same in pursuit of inauthentic passports and visas.
🙂
As with proposed firearms laws in the U.S., the lawful are to have the registered and traceable weapons, leaving the unlawful with unregistered and less traceable weapons.
No news here, huh?
😦
The appearance of the Taliban in the Syrian theater underscores the notion (mentioned here several times) that Syria is “dark energy”, an imploding star, the black hole of the Islamic Small Wars: it sucks in energy and plainly burns without end in sight.
* * *
However, one may ask, who has gotten out?
Russia has evacuated the last of its personnel from Syria, including from its Mediterranean naval base in Tartus, in a move that appears to underline Moscow’s mounting concerns about the escalating crisis.
Of course, the figures of who has been trying to get away from combat in Syria hovers around four million in combined internally displaced and refugee persons.
If the dead may be considered those who also left, then add about 100,000 to whatever the total figure may be of persons unavailable for fighting.
At the moment, there seem to be about 200 civilians trapped in a Damascus mosque (e.g., Sky News, “Syria: 200 Civilians ‘Trapped in Mosque’,” July 15, 2013).
Gulf News / Retuers reports, “In Qaboun, Republican Guards troops detained hundreds of people in public places to prevent rebel fighters from hitting government troops as they breached rebel defences and entered the district, activists said” (“Syria: Bashar Al Assad’s forces advance on rebel-held Qaboun,” July 15, 2013).
If the above sentence said to you other than “Assad’s forces use human shields,” please remark on the alternative reading.
* * *
Ye know the co-producers by their music!
What happens in Syria should stay in Syria.
Update 1/22/2014: the music was Russian, grand, so I recall. Evidently, the suggestion has been removed. I’ll leave the pulled-abandoned tiles up for a while. / I believe Mr. Putin holds the keys to Syria, an old Soviet client, now a potential New Russia Secular state because Russians, foremost, and most everyone else have no want of who’s been laying down the law lately in some Syrian enclaves:
Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists impose Islamic rules, ban music, shisha in Syrian province — RT News – 1/21/2014.
* * *
But it doesn’t.
The wounded refugees were kicked out of the hospital by force, thrown on the side of the adjacent roads, despite the presence of seriously wounded and paralyzed individuals.
Nmsyria. “Wounded Syrians Kicked Out of Lebanese Hospital.” July 15, 2013.
Related video:
* * *
While many clearly oppose the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his security forces, others appear indifferent. Abu Hamza, a driver, now lives with his family in a dusty canvas tent. “I didn’t go to protests. I’m not political,” he says. “We left because of the shelling and the sniping”.
* * *
Syria has become a death camp.
It has become the place between a decayed Soviet-Era dictatorship and a boisterous but malignant and deeply narcissistic global totalitarian religious assault.
Syria has become the place where fighters go to fight — nationalist, Islamists, Sunni rebels, Shiite militants — and the place of catastrophe for four million lives disrupted and uprooted “because of the shelling and the sniping.”
# # #
AP. “Pakistan’s religious extremists leave for ‘greener pastures’.” Dawn, July 15, 2013.
Leigh, Karen. “War Comes to a Damascus Private School.” Syria Deeply, July 1, 2013.
Roggio, Bill. “Pakistani Taliban establish ‘base’ inside Syria.” The Long War Journal, July 12, 2013.
RT. “Syrian rebels’ Damascus chemical cache found by Assad army – State TV.” July 14, 2013.
BackChannels 