Taizz, Yemen. In the foreground, Aschrafiyya Mosque, September 1, 2004. By Bezur, and republished under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, Wikipedia source address: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taizz.jpg.
For years “human rights” groups, aid organizations, other NGOs, and the United Nations have dishonestly claimed that almost every Israeli military action is a war crime. Beginning March 26, 2015, the Saudi-led Coalition fighting to defeat Ansar Allah—the Houthis—in Yemen has also been accused of war crimes. There’s absolutely no evidence that the Coalition is violating international humanitarian law. The reality is that Coalition air strikes are being carried out with nearly supernatural accuracy. But do you know who’s committing war crimes right out in the open? Russia. Where’s the outcry?
The term “war crime” has completely lost its impact through overuse by liars with agendas. Now nobody cares about genuine atrocities.
First, let me reiterate what I determined by adopting the same methodology as Action on Armed Violence (AOAV): I read English-language media reports about the fighting in Yemen. It’s absolutely clear that the Houthis are responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties. When the Coalition carries out major operations against the Houthis, civilian casualties go down.
Damascus, Syria – A delegation from the pro-Assad Syrian National Defense Army visited Yemen last week through Beirut International Airport, private sources told ARA News.
“Such visits are aimed to increase coordination between the Syrian regime and the Houthi group in Yemen and plan to bring the latter’s members to Syria in order to receive military training as well as to exchange security information between the two sides,” a regime-linked source told ARA News on condition of anonymity.
Perhaps there’s more to Yemen’s struggles today than covered by Big Media’s foreign press.
BackChannels hasn’t looked (yet) but while Iranian “war by proxy” appears of evident interest with the March instance of Syrian meddling noted, one may wonder how the middle temperament of the Yemeni people has been either overlooked or inadequately noted and remarked.
What’s Happy Yemens? Happy Yemen, Arabia Felix was the name Romans gave to Yemen. The organization is called Happy Yemens, promoting the interests of South and Central Yemen, two distinct parts of Yemen fighting with the Northern North for the past 800 years that the international community has been trying to silence. The international community is trying to hide our existence, and paint it as a Saudi-Houthi war. They only use voices from Sanaa & the Northern North who have never been to South & Central Yemen, nor do robbers and occupiers understand the reality of whom they have robbed and occupied. Most journalism is “Sanaa journalism” interviewing our occupiers about us. We aim for South and Central Yemenis to speak for themselves rather than our occupiers speak for us.
We are a media collective of South and Central Yemenis around the world. We feel that South ande Central Yemenis are persecuted by the Goebbels style defamation of the “Death to Jews” shouting Houthis who have adopted a neo Nazi ideology and many of its tactics. We want to give South and Central Yemen its own voice
Meanwhile, the three-days of talks on Yemen’s future saw hundreds of politicians and tribal leaders gather in the Saudi capital. The meeting was boycotted by the rebels and their Iranian backers voiced objections to the venue of the talks.
Western countries accuse Shiite power Iran of backing the Houthi rebels, something the Islamic Republic and the rebels deny. The absence of the Houthis at the conference in Riyadh, which is to end Tuesday, means the dialogue is unlikely to end the violence.
Maria al-Masani: “I am a woman from Taiz, please save my family and loved ones, let the world know about the Houthi genocide of South and Middle Yemen and share this video.”
News24 – Posted to YouTube May 17, 2015.
Link rot inside of hours — the same footage may be seen by searching up “Taiz Battle: Heavy fighting erupts in Yemen streets”, and it should be found on RT’s YouTube channel. Date of that posting: April 26, 2015. 😦
As suggested by the now blank “News24” patch in this post, even “newsies” appear to lift material and label it new. BackChannels avoids doing that but until “vetted trusted direct sources” feed up authentic reportage, the view from journalism’s “second row seat to history” may be skewed by what appears and can be accessed in open source online.
Update – 5/19/2015/1251 EDT
SANAA, Yemen — The Saudi-led coalition carried out the heaviest airstrikes near the Yemeni capital since the expiration of a five-day truce with Yemen’s Shiite rebels, hitting weapons depots in the mountains surrounding Sanaa and shaking several residential areas on Tuesday.
The bombardment began shortly after midnight Monday, with airstrikes targeting rebel-held military depots in the mountains of Fag Atan and Noqom, where missiles, tanks and artillery are kept, the residents said.
What to say to Pandora: “Don’t open the box! Don’t look!”
The “fast scan” takes about an hour at human speed, ignores specific situations, and gets an “ah hah!” moment when one realizes that for causes that are often neither meaningful nor justifiable by those blowing themselves up, pulling triggers, and waving knives (is that still done?), conflict would seem just another natural cause of death.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, people just plain don’t like other people.
Dress up the hate with poetry or scripture, crude talk, politico talk, lies, or a whole lot of truth, somebody’s got it in for somebody else by clan, class, ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion — no need to get personal: just box it, label it, and tear it apart!
The truth is, as Phuketwan first revealed on October 21, that Thai authorities pretend to deport the Rohingya, taking their names and fingerprints for the record, then actually deliver them into the arms of people traffickers.
I don’t know what the sordid truth is out of Burma, but I know it’s bad and should be — now has — a place on the open source conflict overview circuit.
“If you want to disarm the anti-balaka, it is better to first disarm the Seleka,” said resident Ngaro Nadine. “It is the Seleka who have been massacring and killing. Now it is the anti-balaka who are strong.”
Brig. Gen. Alaa Mahmoud said 33 tourists from South Korea were on the bus and had visited the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s, in the Sinai Peninsula. The bus was headed to Israel and was waiting in line near a border crossing, he said.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A faction of the Pakistani Taliban said Sunday that it executed 23 paramilitary soldiers who have been held captive since 2010, even as other elements of the militant group continue preliminary peace talks with the country’s government.
“They can’t have it both ways,” the senior official said of the Russians. “They can’t say they’re in favor of negotiations in Geneva and a transitional governing body with full executive authority and humanitarian access and have a happy Olympics, and then be part and parcel of supporting this regime as it kills people in the most brutal way.”
The ministry said a National Guard patrol was sent to investigate reports that a civilian and a prison warden had been shot dead at a roadblock set up by armed men in Jendouba.
“Upon their arrival, terrorist elements opened fire,” killing two policemen and wounding another two, it said.
Turkey has spent at least $2.5 billion on serving these guests since the war began and hosts around 600,000 Syrian refugees – around a quarter of all Syrian refugees. While many reside in the camps, a little over half have opted to settle in urban settlers and make their own living.
Earlier this month, the Turkish army opened fire on a convoy of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) – a jihadist group active in Iraq and Syria. This was in retaliation for a series of cross-border strikes that hit Turkish soil. Turkey has also warned of possible terrorist attacks in Istanbul after receiving intelligence that al-Qaeda-linked jihadists were planning to disrupt the Syrian peace talks.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but Yemen is grappling with a growing threat from one of al Qaeda’s most active wings, which has killed hundreds of people in assaults on state and military facilities in the past two years.
From the following compilation alone, I tallied reports to 246 dead (rebels included) by way of Islamist violence in recent days. I’m sure if I have miscounted, the figure is on the low side.
Let’s round up: should “250 dead” in recent days prove high, somehow, we may wait half a day or a day, seldom more than two, and reality will catch up with it and overtake it.
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AL SHABAAB HITS KENYA, HOLDS HOSTAGES
From a report on the heavily armed assault on the very dangerous civilians shopping (like the one in the above video) at Westgate Mall, Nairobi, Kenya:
Gunmen stormed the mall about noon local time armed with grenades and assault rifles. They asked cornered victims if they were Muslim or non-Muslim, witnesses told the Associated Press. Non-Muslims were held, while Muslims were allowed to go free.
The al-Shabab group said the attacks were in response to a Kenyan military push into Somalia in 2011.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan wearing a security forces uniform turned his weapon against foreign troops Saturday, killing three in eastern Afghanistan, NATO and Afghan officials said, in another apparent attack by a member of the Afghan forces against their international allies.
A TWIN suicide bombing has killed more than 70 people at a church service in northwest Pakistan, the attack believed to be the deadliest on Christians in the country.
The bombers struck at the end of a service at All Saints Church in Peshawar, the main town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province which has borne the brunt of a bloody Islamist insurgency in recent years.
The death toll figure has risen to 78 in many reports:
(Reuters) – A pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a 130-year-old church in Pakistan after Sunday Mass, killing at least 78 people in the deadliest attack on Christians in the predominantly Muslim South Asian country.
Five rebels and a 71-year-old woman were killed Saturday as fighting dragged on in a southern Philippine city between government troops and Muslim insurgents holding out with about 20 civilian hostages, officials said.
Hundreds of fighters under the command of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) have reportedly switched allegiance to al-Qaeda-aligned groups, in a move described as a huge blow to moderate rebel forces.
Activists and military sources have told Al Jazeera that the 11th Division – one of the biggest FSA brigades – has switched allegiance to the al-Nusra Front in Raqqah province, a border province with Turkey.
Two suicide bombers, one in an explosives-laden car and the other on foot, struck a cluster of funeral tents packed with mourning families in a Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad, the deadliest in a string of attacks around Iraq that killed at least 96 people on Saturday.
Iraqi officials say two separate bombings, including a suicide car bomb attack, have killed two security force members and wounded 37 people in the country’s north.
(CNN) — Militants killed 18 soldiers and eight police officers in south Yemen Friday morning, security officials said.
The attacks targeted installations in Shabwa province on Friday morning, the officials said. They said the attackers used car bombs and heavy artillery.
The shoot out took place near the main residential compound for lawmakers in Abuja on Friday and was the first clash involving Islamist militants in the capital this year.
A downloaded copy of the photograph accompanying the claim yielded no IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data, and continued web searching led me to what I considered a reliable debunking.
However, with credit extended to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), not only the picture but a video clip of the same appeared in relation to a spy caught having betrayed an Islamist group in Yemen.
A subscription is required to view it — same or different, but same category — on the MEMRI site, and I’m looking into that.
The flip with dates (August 22, first round; August 27, posted by MEMRI; by August 30, well along in the anti-Jihad industry) I take as indicative of how information continues to crawl off the street and up to the web from the world’s most remote locales.
In the meantime, the Blogosphere seems to have picked it up and gotten its facts straight — “Sheik Yer Mami” (Winds of Jihad) notes a Jihad source on YouTube as a primary location (see “Crucifixion in Yemen,” August 30, 2012 for the video plus that detail).
I suspect most believe the “War on Terror” involves neutralizing a number of violent moral entrepreneurs and their networks, but to my mind that’s a small part of a much, much larger story having to do with the development, installation, and continuing support of certain critical and laudable values and virtues worldwide, starting with the definition of “good conscience” (it’s not mapped the same for everywhere, one reason I’ve launched this blog)) and then the possession by persons and groups of credibility and integrity within themselves and in relation to other persons across a world rapidly integrating its communicating and information resources and content.
War may be called deception; taqiyya may be advised: evil, however, begins with such easily digested lies and the lies to come from having swallowed both.
In war, deception may be a tactic, but wars are about other things — e.g., the possession of resources; the displacement, modification, or termination of cultures and their customs and languages — and “taqiyya”, ever loosely accessed (one well may lie to save life — for the western mind, there’s not much need to put a label on that), seems only to serve to make liars out of people who would otherwise be forthright.
When an overzealous, special interest press chooses to copy a photograph appearing in one context or application in an event alleged to have taken place elsewhere, it corrupts, dishonors, and sabotages itself.
Yesterday in Eritrea; yesterday in Somalia; yesterday in Waziristan; yesterday in Gaza: aggressive spoilers, parties to war, parties to cultural imperialism or annihilation (both) in the name of one cause or another, could, would, and did, with impunity, fabricate stories a very few or none could check. Their common intention (never mind ends): power through the manipulation of perception in line with mercenary agendas.
For the more remote regions of our planet, that thing called “yesterday” is closing, swept away by camera phones, tablets with recorders, and the World Wide Web.
It may go shaking its fists.
It may go slowly.
However difficult it may be to see it; however short our lives in comparison to such processes — and this across a frontier unique in recorded history, i.e., a frontier about mind globally — the past that has been past for some time will recede.
