The Syrian army has relaunched a campaign to retake the northwestern province of Idlib, which has been under the control of Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate for more than four years. Washington has responded by greenlighting a cache of US-made anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers, and armored vehicles sent from NATO ally Ankara to sectarian Islamist militants in Idlib.
Syria’s ally Russia had negotiated a peace deal with Turkey in September 2018. Ankara is militarily occupying part of northern Idlib, and the NATO member has constructed a dozen military bases in the Syrian province. But after seven months, Turkey and its rebel proxies have still failed to uphold their side of this peace agreement.
Under the deal, the Syrian government was supposed to regain access by the end of 2018 to major highways running through Idlib that were partially controlled by Islamist rebels. But Damascus still does not have authority over these critically important roads.
The peace agreement additionally stipulated that extremist militants in a demilitarized zone on the edge of Idlib were not allowed to launch attacks on Syrian government-held territory. Yet these Salafi-jihadist rebels have continued indiscriminately attacking civilian territories that are controlled by Damascus.
Frustrated with Turkey’s failure to fulfill the peace deal, the Syrian army and Russian military decided to re-initiate their joint campaign to retake Idlib. In April, Moscow began a series of airstrikes; and in early May, Damascus kicked off a ground offensive.
The Trump administration immediately condemned this Syrian-Russian campaign to retake Idlib from al-Qaeda militants. US officials also claimed, without providing any evidence, that the Syrian army was using “chemical weapons” in the offensive. (This unsubstantiated accusation came at the same time when a leaked OPCW report suggested that a previous gas attack in Douma, Syria had actually been staged.)
A US government official also said that Washington “greenlighted” the use of devastating anti-tank TOW missiles by Turkey-backed Islamist rebels in Syria.
Reuters reported on May 25 that Turkey has ramped up its weapons supplies to the al-Qaeda-linked militants that occupy Idlib. The Turkish military has also sent a convoy to a military base in rebel-held territory north of the Syrian city Hama.
Turkish-backed rebels posted videos on social media showing ilitants firing Grad rockets at Syrian army positions near Hama.
Ankara is sending these American-made heavy weapons to sectarian Sunni Islamist rebels from a coalition that calls itself the National Liberation Front. This alliance, which was founded in May 2018 and which purports to be “moderate,” claims to be part of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), and often fights embedded directly within the Turkish army.
This “moderate” FSA coalition is led by commanders from the Salafi-jihadist militias Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Ahrar. It also includes former al-Qaeda ally Nour al-Din Zenki (which is notorious for beheading pro-government fighters, and which was directly armed by the CIA.)
The Turkish-backed National Liberation Front has already published numerous videos on social media showing its militants using anti-tank missiles outside Hama.
This is not the first time American anti-tank missiles have ended up in the hands of Syria’s extremist rebels. In March 2017, The Grayzone published video and photographic evidence that showed rebranded al-Qaeda using U-made anti-tank missiles to attack Syrian government-held territory.
Idlib was first captured by Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusraand other Takfiri allies in March 2015. Al-Nusra immediately proceeded to massacre the Druze minority and besiege nearby Shia-majority villages.
Even the pro-rebel lobbyist Charles Lister admitted in 2017 that Idlib is the "heartland of al-Nusra."
Today, the majority of Idlib remains under the control of a rebranded version of Jabhat al-Nusra that calls itself Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This far-right extremist group, which has imposed harsh sectarian Islamic law on a once diverse and secular region, has skirmished on and off with Turkey and its rebel proxies to the north.
The analyst who runs the Within Syria blog highlighted a recent discussion on a Telegram channel from Idlib in which supporters of the Turkish-backed FSA militants debated with supporters of HTS whether or not they should wage a terror war on the civilian population: “Should we bomb kindergartens, schools in gov areas? or should we poison the drinking water in the coast? or bomb markets and hospitals? or do all of this?"
Netanyahu can answer where it hurts de most, as he is used to hurt the Palestinians everywhere. He is the man who knows everything about causing suffering and pain to an unimagined level.
“Remember this,” he said in a primary debate in New Hampshire. “I’m the only one up here” who said, “‘Don’t go [to Iraq], don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’” And when he ran against Hillary Clinton, he chastised her: “You shouldn’t have been in Iraq, but you did vote for it.”
Candidate Trump said he’s not “one with a trigger.” Yet President Trump has surrounded himself with people who absolutely do have a trigger. And now the U.S. seems to be inching closer to war with Iran.
Trump appointed John Bolton as National Security Advisor and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State just over a year ago. With Bolton and Pompeo, Trump now has a war-hungry national security team happy to go it alone against the wishes of long-time U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere.
Bolton, who served in the Bush administration, was a strong proponent of the Iraq War, a decision he still defends today — despite the war’s horrible consequences, and even after many Republicans have changed their tune.
Since Bolton and Pompeo came on board, the Trump administration has pulled out of the Iran deal (despite Iran’s full compliance), brought back hefty sanctions, and increasingly threatened war.
Now they’re entertaining a plan to send up to 120,000 U.S. soldiers to the Middle East — about as many as were involved in the invasion of Iraq.
One anonymous U.S. official told a reporter that these plans were an effort to “draw Iran into an armed conflict.” And officials are said to be drafting legal justification for war with Iran to bypass congressional approval using the military authorization resolution passed after 9/11 — almost 18 years ago.
Even if Trump says he doesn’t want war with Iran, such escalation risks creating one. Accidents happen. And escalation allows for wars to be manufactured under false pretenses.
It’s happened before. The USS Maine sinking — an accident that some falsely claimed was a Spanish attack — led in part to the Spanish-American War in the 1890s. The Gulf of Tonkin incident — another accident falsely reported as a naval attack — paved the way for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. And, of course, the Iraq War was justified by false claims that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s.
As of last year, by the most conservative estimates, over 182,000 civilians and nearly 5,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq as a direct result of war since the U.S. invasion. The war has cost the U.S. $2.2 trillion, and Iraq has become a failed state.
By all accounts a war with Iran would be more catastrophic, even for the United States. Besides the thousands of Iranians deaths, it would spread chaos it would generate in the only stable country in the region and would reinforce the terrorist groups. The region would fall into further turmoil, with potentially serious repercussions for Syria, Israel, Yemen, and many other countries. It would cost trillions and bring the oil market to a standstill.
Trump and his colleagues in Congress need to hear from the World: We don’t want another war.
In 2016, in part due to candidate Trump’s prodding, many Republicans finally admitted what Trump called the “big, fat mistake” of war with Iraq. If we don’t act now, it isn’t hard to imagine a future debate stage where Republicans finally admit President Trump’s own “big, fat mistake” of war with Iran.
Candidate Trump said he’s not “one with a trigger.” Yet President Trump has surrounded himself with people who absolutely do have a trigger. And now the U.S. seems to be inching closer to war with Iran.
Trump appointed John Bolton as National Security Advisor and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State just over a year ago. With Bolton and Pompeo, Trump now has a war-hungry national security team happy to go it alone against the wishes of long-time U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere.
Bolton, who served in the Bush administration, was a strong proponent of the Iraq War, a decision he still defends today — despite the war’s horrible consequences, and even after many Republicans have changed their tune.
Since Bolton and Pompeo came on board, the Trump administration has pulled out of the Iran deal (despite Iran’s full compliance), brought back hefty sanctions, and increasingly threatened war.
Now they’re entertaining a plan to send up to 120,000 U.S. soldiers to the Middle East — about as many as were involved in the invasion of Iraq.
One anonymous U.S. official told a reporter that these plans were an effort to “draw Iran into an armed conflict.” And officials are said to be drafting legal justification for war with Iran to bypass congressional approval using the military authorization resolution passed after 9/11 — almost 18 years ago.
Even if Trump says he doesn’t want war with Iran, such escalation risks creating one. Accidents happen. And escalation allows for wars to be manufactured under false pretenses.
It’s happened before. The USS Maine sinking — an accident that some falsely claimed was a Spanish attack — led in part to the Spanish-American War in the 1890s. The Gulf of Tonkin incident — another accident falsely reported as a naval attack — paved the way for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. And, of course, the Iraq War was justified by false claims that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s.
As of last year, by the most conservative estimates, over 182,000 civilians and nearly 5,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq as a direct result of war since the U.S. invasion. The war has cost the U.S. $2.2 trillion, and Iraq has become a failed state.
By all accounts a war with Iran would be more catastrophic, even for the United States. Besides the thousands of Iranians deaths, it would spread chaos it would generate in the only stable country in the region and would reinforce the terrorist groups. The region would fall into further turmoil, with potentially serious repercussions for Syria, Israel, Yemen, and many other countries. It would cost trillions and bring the oil market to a standstill.
Trump and his colleagues in Congress need to hear from the World: We don’t want another war.
In 2016, in part due to candidate Trump’s prodding, many Republicans finally admitted what Trump called the “big, fat mistake” of war with Iraq. If we don’t act now, it isn’t hard to imagine a future debate stage where Republicans finally admit President Trump’s own “big, fat mistake” of war with Iran.
Robert Fisk: From the Middle East to Northern Ireland, Western States are All Too Happy to Avoid Culpability for War Crimes
PALESTINA
In open letter to UN secretary general António Guterres, a group of 21 NGOs say all perpetrators should be held to the same standard and UNSG should list all parties that violate children's rights in his upcoming report.
"May 24, 2019
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
We are writing regarding your annual report on children and armed conflict and its annexes. As a diverse group of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on alleviating humanitarian suffering and protecting human
rights, we strongly support the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1612 Monitoring and Reporting
Mechanism (MRM). As a key tool for gathering timely, accurate, and credible information on grave violations of
children’s rights, the MRM plays a vital role in informing the work of the UN Security Council on children and
armed conflict, as well as your annual list of child rights violators. The listing process serves as a foundation for
the United Nations to engage with parties to conflict, secure concrete commitments through UN action plans, and
create real change for children affected by war.
In order to preserve the integrity of the children and armed conflict agenda, we urge you to publish a complete
and accurate list of perpetrators in your upcoming annual report.
Over the past year, we have continued to note with concern the streamlining of mandates, cuts to the budgets of
UN peace operations, and the impact of these actions on child protection. These measures continue to diminish
the UN’s ability to monitor, report, and respond to grave violations, and thus weaken implementation of the
Security Council’s children and armed conflict agenda. Such cuts also seriously undermine your ability to report
on an ongoing basis to the UN Security Council and its Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict. With
this in mind, in addition to our continued calls for credible, complete, and accurate listing of perpetrators in your
annual report’s annexes, we urge you to advocate for the allocation of staff and budgetary resources needed to
carry out specialized child protection functions, namely through dedicated Child Protection Advisers, in key UN
peace missions. Your 2019 annual report provides a significant opportunity to highlight these concerns to
Member States and inform key budgetary decisions.
2
Furthermore, for the past two years, the annexes of your report have split listings for violations against children
into two sections – A and B – to distinguish between those parties to conflict that have and have not put in place
measures to improve the protection of children. Your last report stated that parties would be put into the former
category where “significant progress was achieved and measures taken” to protect children (A/72/865-
S/2018/465, para. 4). We continue to advise against making such distinctions, and instead urge you to identify,
unequivocally condemn, and list those parties to conflict that have committed grave violations against children.
In the spirit of Security Council Resolution 1612, listing decisions should be based upon evidence that is
documented and verified by the UN. This evidence base provides strong backing for your impartial decisionmaking. Conversely, the reasons behind your decision to allocate parties to one section of the list or another have
lacked clear, transparent criteria; this threatens to undermine the listing process. In a similar vein, we urge you to
avoid prematurely delisting parties that continue to violate children’s rights in conflict. Premature delisting
undermines the power of the listing mechanism to effect changes in behavior. Further to the 2010 annual report on
children and armed conflict (A/64/742-S/2010/181, paras. 178-179), the signing and timely implementation of
action plans is the formal and only path for delisting. Indeed, once a party has signed an action plan, regular
reporting on its implementation by you or your Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict can serve
to continue to stimulate positive measures to protect children and end violations.
For example, last year the “Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen” was included in Section B as a party that
had put in place measures to improve the protection of children (Annex I, Section B). The Coalition was also
delisted altogether for attacks on schools and hospitals (para. 263), despite the fact that your report found that it
was responsible for 19 out of 20 UN-verified attacks on schools, and 5 out of 11 UN-verified attacks on hospitals
in 2017 (para. 208). Throughout 2018 and into 2019, the Coalition has continued to carry out well-documented
attacks on schools and hospitals despite signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Special Representative
on Children and Armed Conflict in 2019, as well as other grave violations against children in Yemen. The Saudi
and Emirati-Led Coalition (SELC) should be listed for all relevant violations, and given that these continued
unabated in 2018, it should not receive undue praise by being included in Section B. Other perpetrators in the
conflict, including the Houthis/Ansar Allah, should continue to be listed appropriately in Section A.
We believe that an evidence-based approach is vital to ensuring that the credibility of the mechanism is upheld
and is central to avoiding any sort of politicization of the list, which would inevitably damage its credibility and
weaken its impact in protecting children in conflict.
All perpetrators of grave violations need to be held to the same standard regardless of whether they are
government security forces, government coalitions, regional forces, non-state armed groups, or even UN
peacekeepers. We look forward to the publication of your annual report and reaffirm our call for a complete and
accurate list of perpetrators of grave violations against children.
Yours sincerely,
1. Action Against Hunger
2. Amnesty International
3. CARE
4. ChildFund Alliance
3
5. Child Rights International Network (CRIN)
6. Child Soldiers International
7. Defence for Children International (DCI)
8. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P)
9. Global Justice Center
10. Human Rights Watch
11. International Bureau for Children’s Rights (IBCR)
12. International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
13. Médecins du Monde-France
14. Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)
15. Oxfam
16. The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative
17. Save the Children
18. Terres des Hommes International Federation (TdHIF)
19. Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict
20. Women’s Refugee Commission
21. World Vision International
Cc: Ms. Virginia Gamba, Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict
Ms. Henrietta Fore, Executive Director, UNICEF
Mr. Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond, Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Coordination
What does it feel like to be led away from your home by foreign occupiers soldiers, while blindfolded?
What happens when a military occupation looms over an entire childhood?
Last Thursday, a 15-year-old Palestinian was yesterday sentenced to four months in jail and fined 3,000 shekels ($830) for stone-throwing.
Israel’s Salem military court in the north of the occupied West Bank, issued its verdict against Abdul-Jaber Yasin 25 days after he was arrested on 3 May in Asira al-Qibliya.
Palestinian children are subject to a different set of legal rules than Israeli children in the Israeli justice system: longer periods of detention without charge, a lower minimum age for custodial sentences, and a lack of access to their parents or legal representatives during questioning, amongst others.
Recently, a 16-year-old Israeli teenager who was convicted of killing Palestinian mother of eight Aisha Al-Rabi was released to house arrest, avoiding jail time with a maximum sentence of 20 years. The settler teen – who cannot be named due to a court-imposed gag order – was charged in January with manslaughter, aggravated stone throwing and intentional sabotage of a vehicle “in the context of a terrorist act”.
Meanwhile, throwing stones is the most common charge against Palestinian children, and it carries a maximum penalty ranging from ten to 20 years.
According to B’Tselem, “from the beginning of 2005 to the end of 2010, at least 835 Palestinian minors were arrested and tried in military courts in the West Bank on charges of stone throwing”. In addition, as of the end of April 2019, 205 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including 2 administrative detainees.
Defense for Children International (DCI) Palestine adds that “each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing”.
Você vale mais do que uns milhares de dólares sujos de sangue.
Diga NÃO ao apartheid!
Israel’s Salem military court in the north of the occupied West Bank, issued its verdict against Abdul-Jaber Yasin 25 days after he was arrested on 3 May in Asira al-Qibliya.
Palestinian children are subject to a different set of legal rules than Israeli children in the Israeli justice system: longer periods of detention without charge, a lower minimum age for custodial sentences, and a lack of access to their parents or legal representatives during questioning, amongst others.
Recently, a 16-year-old Israeli teenager who was convicted of killing Palestinian mother of eight Aisha Al-Rabi was released to house arrest, avoiding jail time with a maximum sentence of 20 years. The settler teen – who cannot be named due to a court-imposed gag order – was charged in January with manslaughter, aggravated stone throwing and intentional sabotage of a vehicle “in the context of a terrorist act”.
Meanwhile, throwing stones is the most common charge against Palestinian children, and it carries a maximum penalty ranging from ten to 20 years.
According to B’Tselem, “from the beginning of 2005 to the end of 2010, at least 835 Palestinian minors were arrested and tried in military courts in the West Bank on charges of stone throwing”. In addition, as of the end of April 2019, 205 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including 2 administrative detainees.
Defense for Children International (DCI) Palestine adds that “each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing”.
Daily Life Under Occupation
2018 Hebron
2017
2019
2018 Hebron
2017
2019
BRASIL
Milton, cancele seu show em Tel Aviv!
Você vale mais do que uns milhares de dólares sujos de sangue.
Não suje seu nome e sua carreira no lodo sangrento dos israelenses.
Diga NÃO ao apartheid!
Diga NÃO à ocupação da Palestina!
Diga NÃO à exterminação paulatina dos palestinos!
VENEZUELA
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