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TURKISH BACKED JIHADISTS MURDER PRISONERS AND FEMALE POLITICIAN IN SYRIA

  

Category:  World News

Via:  buzz-of-the-orient  •  5 years ago  •  16 comments

TURKISH BACKED JIHADISTS MURDER PRISONERS AND FEMALE POLITICIAN IN SYRIA

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TURKISH BACKED JIHADISTS MURDER PRISONERS AND FEMALE POLITICIAN IN SYRIA

Turkey has used the Syrian Arab fighters as a way to avoid casualties, unleashing them to attack and murder Kurds after US President Donald Trump announced the US would leave parts of Syria.

BY SETH J. FRANTZMAN, JERUSALEM POST, OCTOBER 13, 2019

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Turkey-backed Syrian rebel fighters sit inside a military vehicle near the border town of Tel Abyad, Syria, October 12, 2019. (photo credit: KHALIL ASHAWI / REUTERS)

Turkish-backed jihadist forces in Syria murdered two Kurdish prisoners and shot down a woman politician during Turkey’s offensive in Syria on Saturday. The reports have shocked observers of Turkey, a NATO member, and the increasingly brutal campaign it is waging in Syria.  

In one incident Turkish-backed extremists who are members of an Arab rebel group that is embedded with Turkey’s military operation are accused of murdering Hevrin Khalef, a female politician in eastern Syria. In a second incident the Arab fighters backed by Turkey murdered two Kurdish prisoners, one of them tied up, on a video. Many of the extremists Turkey has recruited to fight in Syria have openly shouted jihadist slogans claiming they are coming to murder the “kuffar” or “infidels.” Their behavior in the fighting has been compared to ISIS.

Turkey has used the Syrian Arab fighters as a way to avoid casualties, unleashing them across the border to attack and murder  Kurds  after US President Donald Trump announced the US would leave parts of Syria and open the airspace for Turkish airstrikes. Since October 9 Turkey has launched devastating airstrikes across northeast Syria, causing 100,000 to flee an area that was peaceful. US forces, sheltering in place near Kobane, even came under artillery fire. Turkey has sought to send a message that nothing will prevent it from continuing its operation and using Syrian Arab forces as cannon fodder to attack Kurdish areas and sack towns and villages.

The cynical ploy is part of Turkey’s attempt to  channel Arab fighters  from Idlib and other parts of Syria to use them against the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces. Turkey has promised them they will be resettled in 140 new towns with 200,000 new homes.

On Saturday the US appeared to also release funds for minorities in eastern Syria, at the same time that the US continued to permit airstrikes on its own SDF partners and in areas where minority Christians and others live. The US has now expressed concern about Turkey’s operation, an operation that it made the way for. NATO has given tacit approval to Turkey, asking only for restraint, and some UN statements have also appeared to approve of Turkey’s attacks, also urging only restraint.


With the videos of executions and murder of a female politician the operation in northern Syria appears designed to sow terror and destruction. Although it has been condemned by some US politicians and some European countries have cut arms sales to Turkey, there appears no clear way to stop the continuing abuses and chaos being unleashed in eastern Syria.




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Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
1  seeder  Buzz of the Orient    5 years ago
"NATO has given tacit approval to Turkey, asking only for restraint, and some UN statements have also appeared to approve of Turkey’s attacks, also urging only restraint."

Can you believe this?  They've asked those fucking savage animals to "exercise restraint".  If it were not so sickening it would be a joke. 

 
 
 
Kavika
Professor Principal
2  Kavika     5 years ago

Turkey is following their script to the letter and sadly we stand by as a witness to another chapter in genocidal behavior. 

 
 
 
Ronin2
Professor Quiet
3  Ronin2    5 years ago

Welcome to war in the Middle East. 

Oh and in case you thought the Kurds and those "moderate" Sunnis we backed were any better.

The report also faulted the rebels, saying that between February and April insurgents relentlessly fired mortar rounds into Damascus and nearby areas, killing and maiming hundreds of Syrian civilians.

“Even if pro-Government forces are bombing and starving the civilian population of eastern Ghouta into submission, there can be no justification for the indiscriminate shelling of civilian inhabited areas in Damascus”, said Commissioner Hanny Megally. “Such actions by armed groups and members of terrorist organisations also amount to war crimes.”

Syrian state TV said one person was killed and several others wounded when rebels shelled the village of Jaba in the Quneitra region, on the edge of the Golan Heights.

A United Nations report says both Russian-backed Syrian forces and rebel factions committed war crimes in the besieged eastern districts of Aleppo between July 21 and Dec. 22, 2016, when the city was recaptured by the government.

"Parties to the battle for Aleppo committed serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law amounting to war crimes," the 37-page report, issued Wednesday by the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria , said. "As pro-government forces and armed groups fought for control of eastern Aleppo city, civilians caught in the fighting were increasingly left vulnerable to repeated violations by all sides."

The evacuation of the last rebel-held districts of Aleppo in November 2016 amounted to "forced displacement," the report says: The warring sides struck the deal for strategic reasons — not for the safety of civilians or urgent military necessity — making it a war crime.

The city is now under full control of Syrian troops and their allies, though rebels still fire deadly mortars from the countryside. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says many residents have returned to their homes in the eastern districts — if only to survey the damage. The area remains nearly uninhabitable. In January, Syria's parliament allocated roughly $5.1 million to begin restoring electricity and water, clearing rubble and starting reconstruction.

The U.N. commission, which relied on information gleaned from 291 interviews, satellite imagery, photographs, videos and medical records, documented numerous human rights violations committed by Syria's warring sides over the course of the battle for Aleppo last year. Among the most serious: an aerial attack on an authorized U.N.-Red Crescent aid convoy west of the city last November, which saw 14 people killed and critical humanitarian supplies destroyed. The report says that no Russian or coalition aircraft were in the area during the time of the attack and that satellite imagery and forensic evidence implicate Syria's air force.

Inside the city, Syrian or Russian warplanes carried out repeated attacks against critical civilian infrastructure including hospitals, markets and bakeries, the report says. A single attack in September on a bakery cut off almost 6,000 families from critical sustenance and killed eight people, including one of the bakery's owners. A blockade of the area by government troops and hoarding by rebel factions meant supplies grew scarce and food prices skyrocketed.

Armed opposition factions launched a deadly offensive from the countryside over the summer, breaking through government lines and briefly imposing their own blockade. The U.N. commission says that rebels terrorized 1.5 million residents and displaced people living in the government-held districts. Indiscriminate shelling was aimed at areas with no apparent military objective.

Syrian and Russian warplanes launched a new aerial campaign in September, which the commission says killed approximately 300 people in the first four days alone. Doctors in the eastern, rebel-held districts were forced to amputate limbs that might have been saved, had there been sufficient supplies.

As the siege tightened, the commission says rebels prevented civilians from leaving contested districts, both physically and through intimidation: One young woman the U.N. interviewed said opposition fighters killed her husband when he tried to escape in September.

The commission also documented reprisal killings by pro-government forces. In some cases, soldiers killed their own relatives for supporting the armed opposition.

The commission says that the final evacuation deal, hammered out between the warring sides in the final days of the battle, amounted to forced displacement. A spokeswoman for the ICRC, which implemented the evacuation with Syria's Red Crescent, tells NPR that the operation helped avoid an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.

Spokesperson Ingy Sedky, reached in Aleppo via Skype, recounted how residents didn't leave the buses transporting them, even on days when the evacuation was stalled, because they were so afraid to miss their chance to flee.

Sedky says a number of people did stay in their homes, but most had lost everything and were desperate to escape an area with no hospitals, electricity or water supplies. The reality, Sedky says, is that people were simply out of options. "All they wanted," she says, "was to end the suffering at any price."

While the United States-led coalition re-opened investigations into civilian casualties from its strikes and admitted to inadvertently killing civilians, it did not provide transparency around these investigations nor compensation for victims. Although exhumation of mass grave sites began in Raqqa city, little support has been provided to develop clear protocols to preserve or forensically identify the dead. 

The US assisted the SDF in northern Syria to detain hundreds of foreign ISIS suspects, and has begun  returning suspected fighters to their countries , without transparency, raising human rights concerns.

The Syrian Democratic Council, a civilian authority operating in areas retaken from ISIS, and the Kurdish-majority Autonomous Administration overseeing displacement camps in the northeast, confiscated identification documents of displaced persons and arbitrarily prevented them from leaving the camps and moving freely. In a positive step, in September, the Syrian Democratic Forces pledged to stop recruiting children.

Since January, the Autonomous Administration and the Asayish, the local police, detained at least 20 members of the Kurdish National Council, a coalition of opposition Kurdish parties, and in some cases appear to have forcibly disappeared them.

What part of bloody proxy Civil War don't people understand. All sides have been documented repeatedly of war crimes and human rights violations. Before you say anything, yes, the majority have been ISIS/ISIL and the Syria government. That doesn't excuse those done by US backed forces- including the Kurds. 

We never should have gone into Syria to begin with. We have no assets to protect there, and we have no legal standing. The War on Terror is not recognized outside of the US. There is no UN Security Council Resolution permitting our presence in Syria. It also doesn't help that Obama worked to have Assad removed, nor that we only sided with anti Syrian government rebels.

The United States has been inspired by the Syrian peoples’ pursuit of a peaceful transition to democracy. They have braved ferocious brutality at the hands of their government. They have spoken with their peaceful marches, their silent shaming of the Syrian regime, and their courageous persistence in the face of brutality – day after day, week after week. The Syrian government has responded with a sustained onslaught. I strongly condemn this brutality, including the disgraceful attacks on Syrian civilians in cities like Hama and Deir al Zour, and the arrests of opposition figures who have been denied justice and subjected to torture at the hands of the regime. These violations of the universal rights of the Syrian people have revealed to Syria, the region, and the world the Assad government’s flagrant disrespect for the dignity of the Syrian people.
 
The United States opposes the use of violence against peaceful protesters in Syria, and we support the universal rights of the Syrian people. We have imposed sanctions on President Assad and his government.  The European Union has imposed sanctions as well.  We helped lead an effort at the UN Security Council to condemn Syria’s actions. We have coordinated closely with allies and partners from the region and around the world. The Assad government has now been condemned by countries in all parts of the globe, and can look only to Iran for support for its brutal and unjust crackdown.
 
The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people.  We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way.  He has not led.  For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
 
The United States cannot and will not impose this transition upon Syria. It is up to the Syrian people to choose their own leaders, and we have heard their strong desire that there not be foreign intervention in their movement. What the United States will support is an effort to bring about a Syria that is democratic, just, and inclusive for all Syrians. We will support this outcome by pressuring President Assad to get out of the way of this transition, and standing up for the universal rights of the Syrian people along with others in the international community.
 
As a part of that effort, my Administration is announcing unprecedented sanctions to deepen the financial isolation of the Assad regime and further disrupt its ability to finance a campaign of violence against the Syrian people.  I have signed a new Executive Order requiring the immediate freeze of all assets of the Government of Syria subject to U.S. jurisdiction and prohibiting U.S. persons from engaging in any transaction involving the Government of Syria.  This E.O. also bans U.S. imports of Syrian-origin petroleum or petroleum products; prohibits U.S. persons from having any dealings in or related to Syria’s petroleum or petroleum products; and prohibits U.S. persons from operating or investing in Syria. We expect today’s actions to be amplified by others. 
 
We recognize that it will take time for the Syrian people to achieve the justice they deserve. There will be more struggle and sacrifice. It is clear that President Assad believes that he can silence the voices of his people by resorting to the repressive tactics of the past. But he is wrong. As we have learned these last several months, sometimes the way things have been is not the way that they will be. It is time for the Syrian people to determine their own destiny, and we will continue to stand firmly on their side.
Kind of throws the whole "War on Terror" BS right out the window.
 
 
 
Kavika
Professor Principal
3.1  Kavika   replied to  Ronin2 @3    5 years ago

Actually I think that the Kurds are much better than human beings than frickin Turks. One the thing that the Turks are better at is genocide.

This is a photo of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Turks, 1915/19.

As you can see from this photo (one of many) the Turks stripped and crucified Armenian women.

7849d990.jpg?1493264223

 
 
 
Ronin2
Professor Quiet
3.1.1  Ronin2  replied to  Kavika @3.1    5 years ago

Yes, the Turks suck. Which does nothing to diminish the war crimes committed by the SDF and other US backed forces in the area. 

Read the part where they finally stopped recruiting children to fight for them? The rebels we are supporting are almost as bad as the ones were fighting. Morale high ground- there is none.

This is why you stay out of Civil Wars. Especially ones where the factions change sides so often; and fighters can easily drift from one group to another. 

 
 
 
Drakkonis
Professor Guide
3.1.2  Drakkonis  replied to  Kavika @3.1    5 years ago

Wow. I just got through reading the Wiki entry about the Armenian genocide. I simply don't know what to say. Such a thing is so foreign to my way of thinking. 

I don't know how many times I've heard some people say that we are so much more advanced than our ancestors in the ancient world. I'm completely at a loss as to how they can come to such a conclusion. 

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
3.1.3  seeder  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  Ronin2 @3.1.1    5 years ago

Watching from a afar, I see the pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump, liberals vs. conservatives, right wing vs. left wing, Democrats vs. Republicans in the USA as being on the edge of being a kind of civil war, including the shooting of those one considers adversaries.  Maybe, as an outsider, I shouldn't get involved in it.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
4  seeder  Buzz of the Orient    5 years ago

They should boot those bastards out of NATO.   Erdogan can fill those Trump Towers with the first bunch of refugees and send the rest of those millions of them to Europe - they deserve them.

 
 
 
Ronin2
Professor Quiet
4.1  Ronin2  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @4    5 years ago

You have no arguments out of me that Turkey should be kicked out of NATO; they are playing NATO off against Russia. NATO doesn't have the balls to do it. Turkey has the luxury of prime geographical location. NATO can't risk them joining a Russian alliance.

Funny how Europe criticizes the US on illegal immigrants; but doesn't want a billion plus more refugees out of the Middle East.  Europe should get what they deserve.

 

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
4.2  Paula Bartholomew  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @4    5 years ago

After what they did to the Armenians, they never should have been allowed in to begin with.

 
 
 
bbl-1
Professor Quiet
5  bbl-1    5 years ago

What ever.  And well, it is the Middle East where religious doctrine or anti-doctrine seems paramount.

None the less.  Assad, Putin and Iran have a more secure standing and control in the regions thanks to Trump's----uh----what ever that is----buckling to the demands or desires of Turkey.

On an side, I wonder if this ( event ) was one of the items agreed to at Helsinki?

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
5.1  seeder  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  bbl-1 @5    5 years ago

There could be some logic to what Trump did. It could put Russia in a position with pro-Syrian forces to confront Turkey and protect the Kurds, driving a wedge between Putin and Ergodan - if Turkey's being in NATO doesn't do so.

 
 
 
bbl-1
Professor Quiet
5.1.1  bbl-1  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @5.1    5 years ago

Sure.  And the Trump kids have condos to sell you in Malaysia.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
6  seeder  Buzz of the Orient    5 years ago

(deleted accidentally  LOL)  I was suggesting to bbl-1 that I had a toll bridge in China I could sell him.  Can make lots of Yuan. 

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
6.1  Paula Bartholomew  replied to  Buzz of the Orient @6    5 years ago

Trump is responsible for what Turkey did and now he wants sanctions against them?  Seriously?  Those sanctions should include his hotel there.

 
 
 
Buzz of the Orient
Professor Expert
6.1.1  seeder  Buzz of the Orient  replied to  Paula Bartholomew @6.1    5 years ago

Yeah, I suggested that it be filled with non-paying refugees.

 
 

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