GCC foreign ministers meet John Kerry in Brussels, relations with Iran on agenda

Foreign Ministers from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)  in Brussels

BRUSSELS- Foreign Ministers from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) met in Brussels the US Secretary of State John Kerry Monday discussing a wide range of issues of common interest with him.
The meeting took place on the sidelines of the 25th session of the GCC-EU joint ministerial meeting.
'The discussions were really very positive,' Kuwaiti Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Suleiman Al Jarallah told the Kuwait news agency , KUNA, after the two-hour long meeting.
The meeting covered the regional issues such as the situation in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and relations with Iran, he said.
Kerry earlier met the 28 EU foreign ministers.
Al Jarallah noted that Kerry came to Brussels after meetings in Russia, and the US official informed the GCC ministers about the US and Russian position on the Syrian crisis and the steps to be taken for a political solution and support the efforts of the special UN envoy Staffan de Mastura to resolve the Syrian conflict .
'The discussions were very frank, open and in depth with the US Secretary of State,' stressed Al Jarallah.
'The situation in Syria regretfully is very complicated and difficult and requires the continuation of efforts and pressure,' he said.
During the meeting, they discussed GCC-US relations, ways of enhancing them in various fields and follow-up of the decisions by the summit meetings held between GCC leaders and President Barack Obama at Camp David in 2015 and Riyadh in 2016, and the findings of the joint working groups.

Top criminal leaves Iraq for Syria as Iranian regime witnesses internal changes

Top criminal leaves Iraq for Syria

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has left Iraq for Syria as the conflicts in Syria heat up, a local news agency reported on Monday.

"Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani rushed to Syria to oversee "Resistance" operations as the fight with "terrorists" takes a violent turn in recent days," semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

Soleimani departed for Syria to join his fellow warriors in the suburbs of Aleppo on Sunday, Xinhua quoted the report as saying.

Asharq Al-Awsat added that Iran’s foreign affairs ministry has introduced changes to its staff, ending the term of Amir Abdul Lahyan – outgoing Iranian assistant foreign minister – who had a major role in Iran’s interference with internal affairs of some Arab states and was publicly supporting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Al-Quds Force.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Sunday appointed Jaberi Ansari as his new deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, replacing Abdul Lahyan, who has been appointed as adviser to the Iranian foreign minister.

Analysts believe that the changes reflect disagreements within the Iranian regime.

Last March, Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted sources as saying that criticisms against Abdul Lahyan, who manages the Iranian policy in the region, have followed U.S.-Iranian negotiations regarding the Syrian conflict. The sources added that these criticisms resulted from deep disputes with the foreign minister regarding the “new trends” of Iran’s foreign policy.

While the Iranian foreign affairs ministry refused to confirm such claims, White House spokesman Mark Toner announced last week that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Syrian crisis with Zarif in Oslo. In this context, sources told Al-Monitor that Zarif, at the Oslo meetings, signaled that he has more authority on the Syrian file than he has had until now, and that Iran may be prepared to show more flexibility to advance a political solution.

Several Iranian media reports had talked about U.S. and Arab pressure exerted on Zarif to remove Abdul Layhan from his position as deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs.

However, Zarif refused to deny or confirm these reports, telling Khorasan newspaper in April that diplomatic arrangements were a normal procedure and adding that the Iranian diplomatic organism was under evolution.

Abdul Lahyan is a close friend of the Commander of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, and he is the first Iranian official to deny Soleimani’s injury in Aleppo. He is also considered a linking point between the Foreign Minister and the Commander of the Revolutionary Guard.

CIA: US very concerned about Iran’s support for terrorist activities in the region

Director of the CIA is very concerned about Quds force

CIA’s director, John Brennan in an exclusive interview with Al Arabiya News Channel on Saturday, 11 June 2016 talked about his concerns of Tehran's support of terrorism and it's meddling inside Iraq, Syria, and other countries throughout the region.
John Brennan said: “I continue to be very concerned about Iran’s support for terrorist activities and terrorist groups, especially the Quds force and their activities inside Iraq, Syria, and other countries throughout the region,”
“Iran still has a long way to go before I’m going to be convinced that they are interested in countering and destroying terrorism,” he added.
Brennan said he is not convinced at all that Ghasem Soleimani commander of the Quds force is trying to take sectarian tensions in Iraq down.
He emphasized that Soleimani who is in the American and European terrorist list “has been taking a leading role for Iran and Quds force inside of Iraq and Syria and other areas.”
CIA’s director told Al Arabiya News Channel that “over the last 15 years, the Saudis have become among our best counterterrorism partners.”
He described Saudi King Salman and his deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “strong partners in this fight against terrorism.”

Aleppo residents still live in 'state of terror'

A Syrian family runs for cover following a reported airstrike

Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2016 - How much fighting has to take place before a shaky truce in Syria is declared to have broken down?
A 'system of calm' announced by the Syrian military may have restored a semblance of normality in some parts of the country Saturday, but in the divided city of Aleppo, residents described a 'state of terror' for the ninth consecutive day.
Pro-opposition activists uploaded horrific videos of shell-shocked people emerging from the wreckage of buildings covered in a film of dust and blood.
'From morning until 1 in the afternoon, you had more than 20 air raids by the Syrian air force,' said Bebars Meshaal, a member of the Aleppo Civil Defense unit, a rescue team that works in rebel-held areas of Syria's largest city.
Moments later, he said he had just heard a jet flying over the city to begin another bombing run.


Airstrike on Aleppo hospital kills last pediatrician in Syria's largest city

'Markets in Aleppo were nearly empty today, and I saw only a dozen people coming out to what is thought to be a safe area of the city,' said an administrator of a pro-government Facebook page that focuses on news from the Aleppo region. 'There are many casualties among the people here, and official state media is downplaying the numbers to reduce the shock among the country's citizens.'
Reached via the Whats-app messaging service, he declined to have his name published for safety reasons.
The sharp spike in fighting in and around Aleppo has killed more than 250 people since April 22, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group. The figure includes 148 people killed in rebel-held areas and 96 in government-held parts of the city.
The main opposition delegation at peace talks in Geneva walked out in protest of the escalating violence. Even the usually optimistic U.N. special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described the cessation of hostilities brokered by the United States and Russia in February as 'barely alive.'
The city's reputation as the one-time industrial heart of Syria's economy has become a distant memory, as the fighting has rendered much of it a charred wasteland. Neither the government nor rebel factions have been able to take control of Aleppo, whose proximity to the Turkish border as well as symbolic importance make it a prize that could help deliver a wider victory.
The government's supporters argue that Aleppo should not be part of the truce because the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, is active there and in nearby areas. However, Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Syrian observatory, lamented the uptick in fighting in Aleppo, which he contrasted with the relatively tranquil day people experienced in other parts of the country.
'There was nothing in Latakia and Damascus,' he said in a telephone interview Saturday. 'But in the case of Aleppo, it appears there is no will by Russia to stop the government's attack.'
Russia, which deployed its warplanes in September to buttress Syrian President Bashar Assad's flagging troops, has worked with the U.S. to push for a political settlement. However, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennadiy Gatilov told the Interfax news agency Saturday that Moscow is not going to put pressure on Damascus over Aleppo because 'the situation in Aleppo is part of this fight against the terrorist threat.'

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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Massacre Files from Syria

Top-secret documents tie Bashar's regime to mass annihilation.

Part one

shocking documents on Syria

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, collecting several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar Assad's prisons and his direct ties on them.

He stars his reviling by:

 "Some half a million people have been killed in Syria’s civil war. An additional five million have fled, emptying the country.

The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.

He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.

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