Family of U.S. War Reporter Slain in Syria, Sues the Bashar Al-Assad regime

American journalist Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012

BEIRUT - The family of American journalist Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in a U.S. court, accusing the Syrian government of deliberately killing her.
Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in the besieged Syrian city of Homs in 2012 while reporting on the Syrian conflict, now in its sixth year.
The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad targeted and killed US reporter Marie Colvin in February 2012 to stop her from covering government atrocities, according to a lawsuit filed in US court.
The Syrian military intercepted Colvin's communications and unleashed a barrage of rocket fire on her position in the besieged city of Homs, according to documents filed in US district court in Washington.
Colvin, then reporting for the London Sunday Times, was killed with French photographer Remi Ochlik. British photographer Paul Conroy, French reporter Edith Bouvier, and Syrian media defender Wael al-Omar were wounded in the same attack.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington on Saturday and seen by Reuters, said Syrian officials deliberately targeted rockets against a makeshift broadcast studio where Colvin and other reporters were living and working.
The suit alleged the attack was part of a plan orchestrated at the highest levels of the Syrian government to silence local and international media 'as part of its effort to crush political opposition'.
The lawsuit included as evidence a copy of an August 2011 fax which it alleges was sent from Syria's National Security Bureau instructing security bodies to launch military and intelligence campaigns against 'those who tarnish the image of Syria in foreign media and international organisations'.
Advocacy group Reporters With out Borders said it supported the lawsuit.
The group's secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, said the group 'hopes these efforts will help to expose the truth, namely that these journalists were deliberately targeted and killed because they were providing information about the Syrian army's crimes against civilians.'
A murder and attempted murder investigation was launched in France in 2012 into the death of Ochlik and wounding of another journalist, Edith Bouvier, in the same attack.
Reporters Without Borders, as an interested party in the case, said it will submit the Colvin family's U.S. lawsuit to the judge in charge of the French investigation on Monday.

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 Two

shocking report investigation

Massacre Files from 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 Two

In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison.

Upstairs, in a room secured by a metal door, detailed maps of Syrian villages cover the walls, and the roles of various suspects in the Syrian government are listed on a whiteboard. Witness statements and translated documents fill dozens of binders, which are locked in a fireproof safe at night. Engels, who is forty-one, bald and athletic, with a precise, discreet manner, oversees the operation; analysts and translators report directly to him.

The commission’s work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coordinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the CIJA’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”

The case is the first international war-crimes investigation completed by an independent agency like the CIJA, funded by governments but without a court mandate. The organization’s founder, Bill Wiley, a Canadian war-crimes investigator who has worked on several high-profile international tribunals, had grown frustrated with the geopolitical red tape that often shapes the pursuit of justice. Because the process of collecting evidence and organizing it into cases is purely operational, he reasoned that it could be done before the political will exists to prosecute the case.

Only the U.N. Security Council can refer the crisis in Syria to the International Criminal Court; in May, 2014, Russia and China blocked a draft resolution that would have granted the court jurisdiction over war crimes committed by all sides of the conflict. Nevertheless, Wiley told me, the commission has also identified a number of “quite serious perpetrators, drawn from the security-intelligence services,” who have entered Europe. “The CIJA is very much committed to assisting domestic authorities with prosecutions.”

Counting Syria’s dead has become nearly impossible—the U.N. stopped trying more than two years ago—but groups monitoring the conflict have estimated the number to be almost half a million, with the pace of killing accelerating each year. The war has emptied out the country, with some five million Syrians escaping to neighboring countries and to Europe, straining the capacities of even those countries which are willing to provide asylum and humanitarian aid. The chaos has also played a fundamental role in the rise of ISIS, the bloodiest of the jihadi groups that have used Syria as a staging ground to expand the reach of terrorism.

Last fall, Wiley invited me to examine the commission’s case at its headquarters, on the condition that I not reveal the office’s location, the governments assisting with document extraction, or, with few exceptions, the names of his staff.

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Adel Al-Jubeir: Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran to undermine our security or the security of our allies

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir

Jeddah, Arab News, 19 January 2016 - “Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran to undermine our security or the security of our allies. We will push back against attempts to do so,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Tuesday.
“The world is watching Iran for signs of change, hoping it will evolve from a rogue revolutionary state into a respectable member of the international community,” he said, adding that Tehran had a hostile policy toward its neighbors that would only cause more violence in the region.
“But Iran, rather than confronting the isolation it has created for itself, opts to obscure its dangerous sectarian and expansionist policies, as well as its support for terrorism, by leveling unsubstantiated charges against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Al-Jubeir said Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies had no option but to continue resisting Iran’s expansionist ideology and responding forcefully to its acts of aggression.
“Superficially, Iran may appear to have changed … Certainly, we know that a large segment of the Iranian population wants greater openness internally and better relations with neighboring countries and the world. But the government does not,” he said, adding that its behavior has been the same since the 1979 revolution.
“The constitution that Iran adopted states the objective of exporting the revolution. As a consequence, Iran has supported violent extremist groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and sectarian militias in Iraq,” said the foreign minister.
He said Iran or its proxies have been blamed for terrorist attacks around the world, including the bombings of the United States Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the assassinations in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992. And by some estimates Iranian-backed forces have killed over 1,100 American troops in Iraq since 2003.
Iran uses attacks on diplomatic sites as an instrument of its foreign policy, he said, citing the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran and the embassies of Britain, Denmark, Kuwait, France and Russia. The most recent incident involved Saudi Arabia’s missions in Iran, he said.
Touching on the Syrian crisis and the Iranian intervention in the war-torn country, Al-Jubeir said: “It is clear why Iran wants Bashar Assad of Syria to remain in power: In its 2014 report on terrorism, the State Department wrote that Iran views Syria ‘as a crucial causeway to its weapons supply route to Hezbollah.’”
“The report also noted, citing United Nations data, that Iran provided arms, financing and training “to support the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown that has resulted in the deaths of at least 191,000 people.”
The same report for 2012 noted that there was “a marked resurgence of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism,” with Iranian and Hezbollah’s terrorist activity “reaching a tempo unseen since the 1990s.”
He also underlined the Iranian support of Houthi militias for the takeover of Yemen. A process he described as having caused the war that has killed thousands. The minister said while Iran claims its top foreign policy priority is friendship, its behavior shows the opposite is true.
“Iran is the single-most-belligerent-actor in the region, and its actions display both a commitment to regional hegemony and a deeply held view that conciliatory gestures signal weakness either on Iran’s part or on the part of its adversaries,” he said.
Moreover, Al-Jubeir said Iran continues to violate international agreements. “In that vein, Iran tested a ballistic missile on Oct. 10, just months after reaching an agreement on its nuclear program, in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. In December, an Iranian military ship fired a missile near American and French vessels in international waters,” he said.
“Saudi Arabia has been a victim of terrorism, often at the hands of Iran’s allies. Our country is on the front line of fighting terrorism, working closely with our allies. Saudi Arabia has arrested thousands of terrorism suspects and prosecuted hundreds. Our fight against terrorism is continuing as we lead multinational efforts to pursue those who participate in terrorist activities, those who fund them and those who foment the mind-set that promotes extremism,” he said.
“The real question is whether Iran wants to live by the rules of the international system, or remain a revolutionary state committed to expansion and to defiance of international law. In the end, we want an Iran that works to solve problems in a way that allows people to live in peace. But that will require major changes in Iran’s policy and behavior. We have yet to see that,” he said.

Children: Caught in Syrian vortex

Syrian refugee children on the streets

About one-half of the refugees streaming out of Syria are children, making this an enormously difficult matter. Many of the refugees racing towards the European Union are unaccompanied minors, including many very young children. There are reports of 3-month old infants being put on inflatable boats in this desperate exodus from the vortex of destruction that was once Syria, The Hill reported.
Indeed, Syria is no more. It is a Humpty Dumpty that fell off the wall and then was crushed by Hama rules. Hama rules were developed by Bashar Al Assad’s father. When the city of Hama in Syria started an Islamist rebellion Hafez sent troops in, killed thousands, and cemented them over. Bashar has proven to be much worse than even his murderous father. Bashar drops barrel bombs, essentially oil barrels filled with explosives on anyone that is walking, sleeping, praying, having a rare family dinner, dreaming and about to be dead.
Much of the world is joint and severally liable and culpable for this ethical and moral nightmare. We have failed the Syrian children in the worst sort of ways: from neglect, from lack of backbone to stand up for what is right, and from the moral turpitude that often passes as strategic thinking.

The U.S. did little when it could have done much early in this nightmare.  It has been generous with aid money, but has been parsimonious with real strategic and moral thinking.
The Russians blocked any real attempts to solve this issue early on in an attempt to keep a Navy Base, their people on the ground and their weapons still flowing, and Syria was one of Russia’s biggest arms markets. They are now sending aircraft, advisors and more to Syria to support the mass-murdering, nation-destroyer, Assad.

The Iranians are supporting Shia militias, sending some of their own people, and are sending Afghan fighters from Iranian camps to fight on the side of Assad. Iran also supports Hezbollah of Lebanon, which is also in the fight beside Assad.
ISIS is the spawn of the Iraq wars of the last decades, the collapse of Syria and Iraq, the vernal selfishness of many of the outside and inside parties involved, money coming from various parts of the world to support them, and also a lot of sociopathy and psychopathy. The 10 percent rule applies to this group.

Turkey has done much for the refugees that it has taken in. It has been one of the most generous countries to them.
Lebanon is being overrun with refugees. The last time that happened, then with Sunni Palestinians and this time with Sunni Syrians, the demographics of the country went topsy-turvy and a civil war broke out that cost almost 200,000 lives. Jordan is facing a flood of refugees to add to the Palestinians and others it has taken in. Its future is at risk. The entire region is at risk from the spread of an ideology or murder and revenge that could take down many more places if it is not stemmed now.

The EU is looking at one of the worst refugee crises in its modern history. The entire EU experiment is at risk as border, economic and other tensions mount. Ultra-right wing extremist groups are also growing in the EU as their economies continue to stagnate and people are looking for scapegoats.
The refugee children, some of them very young, are caught in this dangerous, swirling vortex. What would you feel like as a young child of 5, 10 or even 15 running from such violence and fear and then into the unknown?

The average time a refugee is a refugee in 19 years. Can the Middle East and the EU deal with that one? What will these children of war and exodus be like when they grow up?
Where are the world’s strategic and moral leaders on this? Where are the creative leaders who can turn this around?
Sullivan is a professor of Economics at the National Defense University and an adjunct professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. The opinions expressed are his own.