Protesters ended their sit-in demo in Iraq’s Green Zone

Followers of Iraq’s Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are seen in the parliament building

 (With Reuters, AFP)

 

Iraqi protesters, most of them supporters of  Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, started on Saturday a sit-in demonstration in Ihtifalat Square, located in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone after they stormed the parliament.

An AFP photographer said the protesters were leaving the parliament building they stormed earlier in the day.

Members of the Sadrist militia group Saraya al-Salam could be seen ordering protesters to move out of the compound, some six hours after they broke into the fortified Green Zone area where the government is headquartered.

An emergency state was declared in Baghdad after hundreds of Sadr's supporters stormed the Green Zone and some entered the parliament building. The protesters stormed the parliament after lawmakers failed to convene for a vote on overhauling the government.

Iraqi security forces fired tear gas at one entrance of the zone but appeared to be largely standing down as protesters marched through the area, chanting and waving Iraqi flags. Hundreds were still pouring into the Green Zone as night fell.

The protesters, who had gathered outside the heavily fortified district housing government buildings and foreign embassies, crossed a bridge over the Tigris River chanting, “The cowards ran away!” in apparent reference to lawmakers leaving parliament, one of the witnesses said.

Iraqi protesters storm parliament in Baghdad

A guard at a checkpoint said the protesters had not been searched before entering. TV footage showed them waving Iraqi flags and chanting “Peaceful, peaceful!.” Some were standing on top of concrete blast walls that form the outer barrier to the Green Zone.

The protestors, many of whom were seen waving Iraq's national flag, were responding to calls made by Sadr.

This week, lawmakers again failed to approve new cabinet ministers. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had been seeking to replace the previous cabinet, which had been marred by allegations of corruption and patronage.

In a press conference Sadr denounced Iraqi political circles who are obstructing Abadi’s reforms that would see current ministers replaced by technocrats with no party affiliation to tackle systemic political patronage that has enabled bribery and embezzlement. Sadr also called for a one-million man “peaceful” demonstration.

“The political sides want to suppress the reform movement,” he said, describing the “reform movement as having only the interest of people in its core.”

He added: “[The reform movement] is for God, the will of people and Sadr has zero interest in it.”

Instead those who are trying to cling to the status quo are those who want to keep the “quota system” to keep “their interests intact,” he said.

Observers have criticized Iraq’s quota system, which divides power between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. The quota which keeps the presidency post for a Kurd and the premiership for a Shiite are blamed for political corruption, and weakening the state and its army.

Sadr is so far the main Iraqi political figure, who is lending his weight to push for Abadi’s reforms, stressed that the reform movement’s protests “will continue to be peaceful.”

Last Friday, Sadr warned political party leaders that they would face street protests if they obstruct Abadi’s government overhaul to fight corruption.

“You are not staying here! This is your last day in the Green Zone,” shouted one protester as thousands broke into the fortified area in central Baghdad.

EU condemns Iraq parliament protest

EU foreign affairs commissioner Federica Mogherini on Saturday criticized the storming of the Iraqi parliament by protesters as potentially destabilizing the country.

“The reported attack today on the Iraqi Parliament and the violent protests in Baghdad risk to further destabilise an already tense situation,” Mogherini said.

“It appears a deliberate disruption of the democratic process. A rapid restoration of order is in the interest of the Iraqi people, who have been suffering for too long for the lack of stability in their country, and is in the interest of all the region, confronted by many threats.”

“It’s crucial that all Iraqis and all the regional and international actors contribute to build a cooperative environment and a democratic, inclusive political process to stabilize the country,” Mogherini concluded.
 

The world cannot let Aleppo be slaughtered before our eyes

The slaughter of Aleppo is underway

The slaughter of Aleppo is underway. At least 212 civilians have been killed, including at least 57 children, since April 18. The bloodshed is certain to increase in the coming weeks as the regime and allied forces launch a major offensive to attempt to retake rebel-held territory in the city. The past several days have proved utterly brutal in Aleppo and a number of videos show footage of all too familiar scenes: Dust covered babies and tiny children being pulled from rubble, horrifically mangled bodies, and devastated civilian infrastructure. In one especially barbaric attack, the Assad regime intentionally targeted Al Quds hospital, massacring at least 55 people. Among the dead at the Doctors without Borders-supported facility was one of Aleppo’s very last pediatricians. Meanwhile, reports indicated rebels have intensely shelled government-held areas of the city, killing at least 71.

As the Assad regime and its allied forces continue carrying out war crimes with impunity, the international community must reflect on how history will look back at this period of bloodshed. Amid the devastating surge in violence, the United States and Russia brokered a nebulous “regime of calm,” agreement, which calls for a cessation of fighting in areas of Damascus and Latakia for 24 and 72 hours, respectively. Excluding Aleppo from the agreement - where a halt in fighting is most desperately needed – is a tragic mistake.

Extermination

The past several days in Aleppo have further demonstrated a particularly poignant truth: Syria is perhaps one of the most well-tracked conflicts in history, with shaky camera footage emerging only minutes after an airstrike and consistent real time coverage of rebel and regime battles. Yet, despite the overwhelming amount of information made available almost instantly about war crime after war crime, the atrocities have continued. The US has waged a justified war against ISIS but the chief orchestrator of the entire conflict remains untouched; the war in Syria will never end so long as the perpetrator of the worst violence enjoys impunity for his crimes. Just months ago in February, the United Nations indicated that the Assad regime is guilty of carrying out the war crime of “extermination” against his own people. A government guilty of such a campaign cannot be dealt with in civil negotiations.

Aleppo cannot be the stage for the latest unforgiveable crimes against humanity that we watch unfold like helpless spectators. This devastating conflict has been punctuated by multiple opportunities for the US to more broadly intervene; they have not been seized. As the slaughter of Aleppo begins, the impetus for the US to act is nearly as strong as it was after Assad massacred his own people in the worst chemical weapon attack since Halabja. With the help of Turkey and Arab allies, the US should implement a No-Fly Zone (NFZ) and ensure the protection of Syrians by force. The regime and Russia cannot continue dictating the role of the US in Syria while at the same time carrying out horrific attacks against civilians.

Aleppo cannot be the stage for the latest unforgivable crimes against humanity that we watch unfold like helpless spectators
Brooklyn Middleton

When the very last airstrike is launched and the last barrel bomb dropped, no party can look back and claim they were ignorant of what exactly the situation on the ground in Syria was during its hellish war. No one can deny that the world knew thousands of Syrians died from torture at the hands of government forces. Summaries of the conflict will note that regime defector Ceaser smuggled 55,000 photographs into the west, showing the world images of detainees whose eyes had been gouged out and whose rib cages and hip bones appeared to be on the verge of breaking through their pale and yellowed skin. “History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed,” wrote Wislawa Szymborska in her devastating poem “Hunger Camp At Jaslo.” In Syria, the dead that haven’t been disappeared continue to be counted daily but only after the war will the real death toll come to be known.

Until the international community acts to protect Syrian civilians, Aleppo will continue burning. And more photos of dust covered tiny bodies will surface. And the world can look forward to one day counting more and more skeletons in round numbers.

UN: More than 80% of Syrians live below poverty line

A mother and her children react after two rockets hit the Turkish town of Kilis near the Syrian border,

The number of Syrians living below the poverty line has almost tripled after five years of conflict, according to a report published this week.

Around 83.4 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line compared with 28 percent in 2010, the report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and the University of St Andrews said.

An estimated 13.5 million people in Syria needed humanitarian aid by late 2015, and more than 4 million of these were in Damascus and Aleppo provinces.

“According to one estimate, life expectancy dropped from 70 in 2010 to 55.4 in 2014,” the report said.

Around half of Syria’s 493 hospitals in 2010 have been seriously damaged in the war, it added.

“The deliberate targeting of doctors and pharmacists has forced many to flee the country, at a higher rate than that of the average population.

“As a result, the number of persons per doctor in the country rose from 661 in 2010 to 1,442 in 2015.”

Around 12.1 million Syrians lack adequate access to water, sanitation and waste disposal, the report said.

Destruction of housing and infrastructure was estimated at around $90 billion.

Damaged pumps and pipelines led to the loss of almost half of potential drinking water supply in 2015, the Syrian General Establishment for Drinking Water and Waste Disposal was cited as saying.

Drinking water per capita dropped from 72 cubic meters to 48 cubic meters between 2011 and 2015.

The numbers were just as bleak in education, with around 2.7 million children of school-age out of school both inside and outside Syria, the report said.
The economy contracted by 55 percent between 2010 and 2015, when it had been expected to grow by 32 percent.

Massacre Files from Syria -Part Five

Syrian military victims

Top-secret documents tie Bashar

regime to mass annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Five

THE INVESTIGATORS

One day in October, 2011, while Bill Wiley was visiting a Libyan exile in Niger, he received a phone call from a friend, relaying a request from the British government: as the crisis in Syria spiralled into civil war, it was looking for someone to train activists to document human-rights violations. Wiley told the caller that plenty of groups were already cataloguing the abuses. But he had a counter-proposal: he could train Syrians to collect the type of evidence that would better serve a prosecution, tracing criminal culpability up as high as it went. It was a novel approach—instead of raising awareness of crimes, he intended to pin them on state actors, whether or not the international community sanctioned the investigation. The British government approved of the idea.

Wiley’s career had intersected with a resurgence of the field of international criminal law; since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, there had been no major international investigations until the atrocities in the Balkans, in the nineteen-nineties, led to the Yugoslavia tribunal. Wiley, who had completed a Ph.D. in international criminal law at York University while serving in the Canadian Army—he wrote his dissertation on war crimes and the evolution of international humanitarian law—became an analyst at the tribunal. In 2002, he traveled to Kigali to investigate war crimes in Rwanda, and the following year he moved to the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he was the first investigator retained by the International Criminal Court.

Wiley, who considers himself “a field guy, not an office guy,” is tall, with reddish-blond hair, and handles the considerable stress of his profession with Cuban cigarillos, gallows humor, and exercise. (At the age of fifty-two, he bench-presses more than three hundred and fifty pounds.) While working for the I.C.C., he came to believe that the international court system was often afflicted by upper-management “incompetence.” Since its launch, in 2002, the I.C.C. has opened nine investigations, spent more than a billion dollars, and secured convictions against three men: two warlords and a former politician, all from Congo. After two years, Wiley became disillusioned, and he applied to become a human-rights monitor for the United Nations, in Iraq.

On October 19, 2005, Wiley sat in a hangar at a military base in Amman, Jordan, awaiting transport to Baghdad. A television showed Saddam Hussein in a heated exchange with a judge, insisting that he was still the President of Iraq. It was the former dictator’s first day on trial. “I paid no attention to it whatsoever,” Wiley recalled. The multinational coalition had established a special tribunal, staffed by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, to hold legal proceedings in accordance with international standards. But the Iraqi government replaced judges who seemed sympathetic to the defense, and, days after Saddam’s lawyers appeared in news broadcasts, two of them were assassinated.

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Massacre Files from Syria -Part Four

mass destruction in Syria 

Top-secret documents tie Bashar regime to mass
annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Four

On March 30, 2011, Assad addressed the nation from the rotunda of the Syrian parliament building. He had just sacked his cabinet, and many people expected him to announce liberalizing reforms. Instead, he declared his intention to suppress dissent in the brutal tradition of his father, Hafez al-Assad. “Syria is facing a great conspiracy, whose tentacles extend” to foreign powers that were plotting to destroy the country, he said. “There is no conspiracy theory,” he added. “There is aconspiracy.” He closed with an ominous directive: “Burying sedition is a national, moral, and religious duty, and all those who can contribute to burying it and do not are part of it.” He emphasized, “There is no compromise or middle way in this.”

Two days later, protests across the country grew larger. Assad had already formed a secret security committee, called the Central Crisis Management Cell, to coördinate a crackdown. Its chairman was Mohammad Said Bekheitan, the highest-ranking official in the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the other members—who were all Assad-dynasty confidants—were routinely shuffled among the top positions in the military, the ministries, and the security-intelligence apparatus.

Every night, the Crisis Cell met in a drab office on the first floor of the Baath Party Regional Command, in central Damascus, and discussed strategies for crushing dissent. This required detailed information about each protest, so the cell requested reports from security committees and intelligence agents in the most rebellious provinces. The group decided to hire someone to process all the paperwork.

One of the applicants was Abdelmajid Barakat, a twenty-four-year-old with slicked-back hair. Barakat, who had recently finished a master’s degree in international relations, was working for the education ministry. At his interview, in April, a high-level official named Salaheddine al-Naimi examined his résumé and asked whether he could use a computer. Next, Naimi asked how he would resolve the developing crisis. Barakat replied that, in order to avoid an armed response, the government should make some concessions and enact moderate reforms.

Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends were involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest, he had joined one of Syria’s first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in the regime’s haste to make the Crisis Cell more efficient, it was employing a member of the opposition to process confidential security memos from all over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages arrived at Barakat’s desk, cataloguing the minutiae of perceived threats to Assad’s rule—graffiti, Facebook posts, protests—and, eventually, actual threats, like the existence of armed groups. Barakat read everything and drafted summaries, which Naimi delivered to the members of the Crisis Cell to guide each meeting.

Barakat was never allowed into the meeting room, but he saw the members walk in, and Naimi kept detailed minutes on Baath Party letterhead. Occasional guests of the group included high-ranking Baathist officials, Syria’s Vice-President, and Assad’s younger brother, Maher, a short-tempered military commander, whom the European Union identified in a sanctions list as the “principal overseer of violence against demonstrators.”

At the end of each meeting, the Crisis Cell agreed on a plan for every security issue. Then Bekheitan, the chairman, signed the minutes, and a courier delivered them to Assad at the Presidential palace. Barakat learned that Assad reviewed the proposals, signed them, and returned them to the Crisis Cell for implementation. Sometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new ones. He also issued decrees without consulting the Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made without Assad’s approval.

Shortly after Barakat began working for the Crisis Cell, he started leaking documents. Though the regime publicly claimed that it was allowing peaceful demonstrations, security memos showed that intelligence agents were targeting protesters and media activists, and shooting at them indiscriminately. Barakat photographed the memos in the bathroom, and sent the pictures to contacts in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded them to Arabic news organizations. His plan was to steal as much information as possible and then leave the country. But each leak heightened suspicion within the office, increasing the chances that, sooner or later, the regime would discover that he was the mole...

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Massacre Files from Syria-Part Three

Top-secret documents tie Bashar regime to mass annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Three

Damascus countryside

THE INSURRECTION

In December, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old fruit seller in rural Tunisia, fed up with a life of harassment and extortion by venal government officials, doused himself in paint thinner, struck a match, and unwittingly ignited the Arab Spring. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Middle East and in North Africa, sharing his rage and despair, rose up against an assortment of autocrats and kings. They demanded democratic reforms, economic opportunities, and an end to corruption. In late January, 2011, Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal, “What you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease.” Syria remained stable, a fact that Assad attributed to his attention to the “beliefs of the people.” He added, “This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.”

In fact, Assad’s confidence was likely rooted in the proficiency of Syria’s security-intelligence apparatus, which had kept his family in power since 1971. Other autocrats in the region placed similar trust in their own security forces. Then Egypt’s dictatorship collapsed, and the U.N. Security Council voted to refer the situation in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi had ruled for forty-two years, to the International Criminal Court. In March,

 NATO forces launched a bombing campaign in Libya. In Syria, people began calling for concessions by the government—timidly, at first. The country had spent forty-eight years under martial law, and the notion of public demonstration was unfamiliar. The protests were met with tear gas and bullets, but were soon attracting tens of thousands of people.

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