Opposition fighters in Syria claim to have kidnapped at least 94 women and children belonging to President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect, according to a video obtained by Al Jazeera. In the video, broadcast by Al Jazeera on Thurday, the rebels said they were holding the hostages to secure the release of opposition supporters from government detention. The civilians were abducted in August from villages in rural Latakia, Assad’s coastal stronghold. Thousands of people are thought to be imprisoned by both sides in the increasingly sectarian civil war, which enters its fourth year this month. The video said the rebels were ready to swap the civilians for 2,000 prisoners who have been detained for more than a year. It stipulated that most of the freed prisoners be from coastal areas of the country and that half of them be women and children. In one scene, three women wearing headscarves and simple clothing address the camera.
Another scene shows dozens of women and children standing outdoors in a walled-in area. Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority has largely joined the revolt against Assad, while minority sects have mostly stood behind him in a conflict that has killed more than 140,000 people. Both sides in the civil war have targeted citizens and attracted foreign fighters and financial support from across the region. A rare prisoner swap was achieved last week, securing the release of 13 Greek Orthodox nuns detained since December by fighters from the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. The government freed at least 25 prisoners in exchange. Qatar said it had played a mediating role in securing the nuns’ release, but Syria denied the allegation.
Late last December, Ahmad Barakat, a tailor turned rebel commander in Aleppo, Syria, buried two sons who died together during a battle with Syrian government troops. The elder son, Mustafa, fought for the Tawhid rebels. The younger son, Molhem, photographed the clash for Reuters. A spike in abductions of Westerners in Syria that started last summer and continuing violence led many news organizations to curtail news gathering in rebel-held territory. Reuters continued its photography operations, often relying on local residents like Molhem, who was 18. Seasoned combat photographers are never immune to the perils of war. But since Molhem’s death, several news media outlets have questioned Reuters’s reliance on a teenage photographer in a war zone. An examination of the events surrounding Molhem’s death has also raised questions about Reuters’s network of local photographers in Syria and their journalistic practices.
Supervising a network of freelance photographers in any conflict is difficult, and the challenges in Syria are so great that few news organizations have had access to a steady stream of images there. Reuters has been the most active over the past year, providing more images to its hundreds of worldwide subscribers — newspapers, magazines and news websites — than its competitors. Interviews with numerous Syrian photographers, most requesting anonymity because they have worked as freelancers for Reuters, said many of the freelancers are activists — in one case a spokesman — who supported the rebels. Three of them also said that the freelancers had provided Reuters with images that were staged or improperly credited, sometimes under pseudonyms. And while Reuters has given the local stringers protective vests and helmets, most said that the stringers lacked training in personal safety and first aid.
REYHANLI, Turkey — Dima* is a confident 21-year-old with pale skin and big brown eyes. Her black headscarf is wrapped loosely around her head above her pink dress. She has two small children and a husband, but he currently works as a cab driver in Lebanon. Every month, Adly sends her money. However, it has been hard to make a living as a refugee, prompting Dima to look for a job as well. A few months ago, Dima found a job in a cotton factory in Reyhanli, a Turkish town near the border with Syria. In the first few weeks, everything went fine — until her Turkish boss, a middle-aged widower, began to sexually harass her. “I told him I didn’t want him to grope or touch me, but he said that if I wanted to work, I should accept it,” she told Al-Monitor while sitting in front of her tent in a small village near Reyhanli. Her boss didn’t listen. A few days later, he groped her again, saying that she could make extra money by “entertaining” him. When Dima refused, he asked her if she could at least work as a matchmaker and find some young Syrian girls for him and his friends, adding, “Those girls can certainly use the money.”
Dima ran out of the factory without her paycheck. She never went back. “A lot of Syrian women need work, and employers know that,” she said, her frustration clear on her face. “Men take advantage of the vulnerability of female Syrian refugees. We left Syria to protect our honor, and now we are being treated like animals.” Before Dima left Syria, she was a marketing student at Tishreen University in Latakia. After she got married and had children, she still took classes every day. Her husband supported her, she said, as he wanted her to succeed in life. “I miss him so much,” she added. Women refugees from Syria are being sexually harassed by employers, landlords and even aid distributors in Lebanon, reported Human Rights Watch Nov. 27, 2013. The organization “interviewed a dozen women who described being groped, harassed and pressured to have sex.” According to Dima, young Syrian women are facing the same difficulties in Turkey, including early marriages, abuse and even prostitution. She personally knows of many Syrian girls who were forced to marry older Turkish men for money. This mainly happens in families where there is no father or older brother to support them financially. Young Syrian women, therefore, are becoming the most vulnerable citizens, many of them having lost everything during the war and struggling to survive.
GENEVA/AMMAN – In the last few weeks, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) succeeded in reaching many areas of Syria that were inaccessible for months. But as the conflict enters its fourth year, delivering food to people in desperate need remains a challenge. Over the last few days, WFP reached Al-Houle in rural Homs for the first time since May 2013 and delivered food for 20,000 people. Trucks carrying food rations for another 20,000 people arrived in Ar-Raqqa Governorate for the first time in six months. Locally-negotiated ceasefires allowed convoys into areas of Rural Damascus and rural Dara’a. Five WFP trucks delivered food for 17,500 people in camps for displaced people north of Idlib. Among the camps were some that had not been reached directly by WFP since the start of the conflict in 2011.
However, worsening security is creating setbacks in some areas, such as the Northeast governorate of Deir-Ezzor. Although an inter-agency convoy delivered food and other humanitarian supplies to 27,000 people there last month, a sudden deterioration in security on the roads leading to Deir-Ezzor is preventing the dispatch of more food in March. “One-off convoys into besieged areas can provide temporary relief, but WFP still needs proper and sustained access to people to provide life-saving assistance and also to assess the scale of the needs,” said Amir Abdulla, WFP’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, in Geneva. In February, WFP assisted 3.7 million people in Syria and more than 1.5 million refugees in neighbouring countries. The UN food agency aims to reach as many as 4.25 million people inside Syria every month, but insecurity is leaving half a million people without food assistance. The operations are financed entirely by voluntary contributions, and funding is also a challenge, said Abdulla.
“It would be tragic to secure more access in Syria but to then find ourselves in a situation where we do not have the required funds to assist hungry people who have long been under siege. We certainly hope that donors will step up their contributions and new ones will come forward,” said Muhannad Hadi, WFP Regional Coordinator for the Syria crisis, in Amman. A lack of timely funding has forced WFP to reduce the size of this month’s food basket for vulnerable families inside Syria by 20 percent. As a result, families are receiving fewer nutrients than they require to stay healthy (1,530 kilocalories, compared to the planned 1,920 kilocalories.) This year, WFP has appealed for US$2 billion to feed around 7 million Syrians displaced in their country or who have fled to neighbouring countries. WFP needs US$309 million to cover the food needs of vulnerable Syrians until the end of May. “We are grateful to the generosity of our donors, whose contributions have enabled us to save lives, but our emergency operation is running hand-to-mouth and our funding has now reached dangerous levels,” said Hadi.
Delays in funding have an impact on operations, as it takes close to three months from the moment WFP purchases food until it arrives in Syria and is dispatched for distribution. Funding is also essential for WFP operations in neighbouring countries, where over 1.5 million Syrian refugees depend on the UN food agency’s food vouchers. WFP often uses vouchers to provide assistance where markets are functioning but people cannot afford to buy food. Vouchers provide people with more choice; they can buy fresh foods such as fruit, vegetables and milk that are not normally included in conventional food rations. In 2013, through the voucher programme, WFP injected over US$400 million into the local economies of neighbouring countries. WFP plans to expand its voucher assistance to reach over 2.9 million Syrian refugees this year.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose embattled regime relies on key support from Russia, praised Moscow on Tuesday for restoring balance to international relations, state media reported. “Russia has reestablished balance in international relations, after long years of hegemony” by the United States, SANA quoted Assad as saying as he received a Russian parliamentary delegation. He described Moscow’s role as “essential and vital,” and expressed “the admiration of the Syrian people for Russia’s positions.” Assad accused the United States and other Western governments of “acting to destabilise countries whose policies do not coincide with their own.” Russia is one of the Assad government’s main allies, providing it with diplomatic cover and continued weapons supplies as it battles an insurgency about to enter its fourth year. SANA said the Russian delegation informed Assad he had been accepted into the Russian Academy of Sciences for having “strengthened Syrian-Russian relations.” More than 140,000 people have died in Syria since the conflict began in 2011.
“The photo is an exact replica of reality,” Mr. Gunness said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, where he is based. “I can understand why that reality would beggar belief. But in the 21st century, such a scene exists. People are incredulous because it’s hard to believe.”
A United Nations photograph showing a sea of hungry Palestinians awaiting emergency food amid the detritus of their bomb-ravaged neighborhood near Damascus has been retweeted more than eight million times in the past few weeks, becoming such an arresting image of the Syrian civil war that some blogosphere skeptics have suggested that it was digitally faked. The suggestion provoked a passionate denial on Tuesday by the official responsible for distributing the photo. The official, Chris Gunness, the spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, said he was stupefied by the expressions of doubt about the photo. At the same time, Mr. Gunness said, the skepticism may partly reflect a blindness by many people to what is happening in Syria, which entered its fourth year of war this month.
This photo of Palestinian refugees lining up for food aid in Syria has drawn wide attention online. Credit UNRWA, via Associated Press
Mr. Gunness, who has expressed personal outrage at conditions at the Yarmouk camp, chose the photograph to represent the suffering in Syria as part of a social media campaign known as a Thunderclap. The campaign, by 130 humanitarian relief organizations, including major United Nations agencies, is pressing for access to Syrian civilians trapped in fighting between President Bashar al-Assad’s loyalists and insurgents. Organizers of the campaign are planning to display the photo on a giant screen in Times Square when the number of retweets reaches 23 million — matching Syria’s prewar population — which is expected to happen next week. The organizers are also planning a flash-mob event in Times Square to coincide with the display, in which participants dressed in black will hold loaves of Syrian pita bread aloft in a symbolic gesture to the suffering people shown in the image.
WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) – The head of the United Nation’s refugee agency said on Tuesday it must be ready in case Ukraine’s crisis causes refugees to flee Crimea, but his biggest worry is that “a total disaster” could occur if the international community diverts its attention away from Syria’s conflict. Antonio Guterres, the head of the U.N.’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), said in an interview that little progress was being made in efforts by the United States and Russia, now at loggerheads over Ukraine, to bring Syria’s warring sides together after the collapse of talks in Geneva last month. “In the moment in which we need the most relevant countries in the world to be able to come together to narrow their differences and to try to find a way to move into peace for Syria, this tension around Ukraine will obviously not help,” Guterres told Reuters while visiting Washington to discuss Syria’s refugee crisis. “I hope that those that have the most important responsibility in world affairs will be able to understand that forgetting Syria will be a total disaster,” he said.
Tensions between Washington and Moscow have risen over Russia’s bloodless seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, which has brought U.S.-Russian relations to one of their lowest points since the Cold War. The United States and European allies have threatened sanctions against Moscow, which has said people in Crimea, a small majority of whom are ethnic Russians, should have the right to secede by voting in a referendum to be held on Sunday. Guterres said his agency was preparing for the possibility of refugees from Crimea and had moved teams inside Ukraine to monitor the situation. “We are preparing ourselves for any movement of population that might occur,” said Guterres. “Until now it has not happened in a significant way, and we hope that it will be avoided,” he said. “Our hope is that things will not evolve in a way that will force large numbers of people to be displaced. We have enough problems of refugees and displaced people in the world, we can live without a new massive displacement,” he added.
“They are the children of a war that never ends. Their three years enduring it is a lifetime for any child.”
DAMASCUS, Syria — They live in a wooden box at the side of a road: six children, their mother and father. The children’s shoes are broken, their hands dirty, their faces smiling but tired of a life lived on the edge, almost literally. They don’t have money. They don’t go to school and they haven’t for two years. They eat food handouts to survive. It’s not the way life used to be for the children of the Al Kilzi family. They had a house, not fancy, but theirs. Their father worked. And their older sister, 14-year-old Hayat, lived with them. Then Syria’s war smashed their lives apart in the dangerous Yarmouk district of the capital, Damascus. They were driven from their home. Hayat was kidnapped by armed men, and their father had a stroke because he couldn’t raise the ransom to get her back. He now lies virtually paralyzed on the matted floor of the wooden box. Doctors have told his wife Feyrouz that he will never recover. Three of his children stroke his hair and his arms as Feyrouz laments her lost life.
“Before we had freedom,” she tells me, “now it is like living in an open prison.” She weeps, recalling her lost daughter, showing me her passport-sized photograph. “I think of her all the time; if she’s hungry, or thirsty, or cold. My heart is broken.” Watching her cry amid the wreckage of her life, in a wooden box, her husband at her feet, was pitiful. Her eldest son Muhammed is a serious-looking boy, and no wonder. “I had a real home,” he tells me. “Now we live in this hut, covered in plastic. It leaks when it rains.” He glances at his father. “I love him so much” he says quietly. Every week he collects the medicine his father needs from the United Nations. His younger brother, keen to be heard, says, “God knows when this will end.”
Yarmouk has seen heavy fighting for two years and is now under the control of the Nusra Front, a branch of Al Qaeda. Once I could get to its entrance. Now noone can, especially not the U.N. workers who distributed food for a few days last month. This is now the reality of life for seven of Syria’s children, the children of Yarmouk; lives lived on the street or in the hands of kidnappers, childhoods brutalized, all innocence lost. And yet they rank among the lucky ones. At least 10,000 Syrian children have been killed in the war. Tens of thousands more have been injured, many severely, with limbs lost, spinal injuries, whole body burns and all the many horrific legacies of war. It is little wonder that the U.N. says this is perhaps the most dangerous place on earth to be a child, with the highest casualty rates for children ever recorded in the region. Millions of children, like those of the Al Kilzi family, need outside help to survive. They are the children of a war that never ends. Their three years enduring it is a lifetime for any child.
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syria’s state TV is reporting that President Bashar Assad has made a rare public appearance, visiting people displaced by the war in a Damascus suburb. The TV says the visit took place on Wednesday in the suburb of Adra but gave no further details. Syrian troops have been on the offensive in Adra, just northeast of Damascus, after rebels captured parts of it in December, which displaced thousands from the area. Syria’s civil war, now entering its fourth year, has killed more than 140,000 people. According to U.N. figures, the conflict has also forced about 2.3 million Syrians to seek shelter in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq. Also, a July U.N. estimate said 6.5 million have been uprooted from their homes and displaced within Syria.
Rebels in Syria have freed more than a dozen Greek Orthodox nuns, ending their four-month captivity in exchange for Syrian authorities releasing dozens of female prisoners. The release of the nuns and their helpers, 16 women in all, is a rare successful prisoner exchange deal between Syrian government authorities and the rebels seeking to overthrow the rule of President Bashar Assad. But it is unlikely to soothe the fears of many Syrian Christians that their ancient minority is in danger should rebels come to power. A convoy of 30 cars delivered the nuns to the Syrian town of Jdeidet Yabous, which lies close to the Lebanese border. A photograph published on Lebanon’s official news site showed soldiers assisting a middle-aged nun out a vehicle. “We arrived late, and we arrived tired,” said Mother Superior Pelagia Sayaf, the head of the Maaloula convent.
Behind her, women ululated in celebration on footage broadcast on Syrian television. They were then ushered into an honorary guest room by Syrian officials. Approximately 150 female prisoners are to be released in exchange for the nuns’ freedom, said the head of Lebanon’s General Security agency, Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, who oversaw the deal, speaking to Syrian television. Gen Ibrahim said the deal nearly collapsed at the last minute after rebels demanded more prisoners be released. Syrian rebels, including members of the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, seized the 13 nuns and their three helpers from the Mar Takla convent when fighters overran the Christian village of Maaloula, north of Damascus, in December. Sayaf said the nuns were treated well, although they did not feel comfortable wearing their crosses and crucifixes. The nuns, who are believed to be mostly Syrian and Lebanese, worked in the convent’s orphanage.
Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar Assad have committed war crimes by deliberately starving civilian inhabitants of a Palestinian refugee camp during their bloody three-year war against an armed uprising, a leading human rights group says. Amnesty International also accuses security forces of targeting doctors and medics, while at the same charging rebel groups of looting vital medical equipment in the sprawling Yarmouk camp, in the south-side of Damascus, the Syrian capital. The 40-page report, Squeezing The Life Out of Yarmouk: War Crimes Against Besieged Civilians, paints a harrowing picture of life inside a camp whose population has plunged to between just 17,000 and 20,000 after having been home to180,000 Palestinians and several hundred thousand Syrians before the conflict. In total, two-thirds of Syria’s Palestinian refugees – who numbered 530,000 before the country’s civil war – have been displaced, with tens of thousands being dispersed to other countries.
Of 200 deaths highlighted between last July and last month, 128 died of starvation, Amnesty’s report asserts, after an existing siege of the camp was intensified to completely cut off food and medical supplies. With 60 per cent of the population suffering from malnutrition, residents reported not having eaten fruit or vegetables for months. The price of one kilogram (2.2 ibs) of rice has soared to £60. Many have been reduced to eating leaves and weeds, while others have been targeted by snipers as they foraged for food. Some have suffered severe allergic reactions such as bloating after eating a plant knows as bird’s foot trefoil that is usually consumed by cattle and other livestock. Other medical complications have arisen for desperate residents reduced to eating carcasses of cats and dogs. At least 12 medical workers have been arrested during the siege, six of whom remain unaccounted for. One doctor reportedly died after being tortured in detention.
Starvation tactics against civilians are being used as a weapon of war by the Syrian government, Amnesty International says. The rights group says at least 128 refugees have died at the besieged Yarmouk camp in Damascus as a result. It says thousands of people still trapped there face a “catastrophic humanitarian crisis”. Amnesty says families have been forced to forage for food in the streets – risking being killed by snipers. There were reports of fresh fighting on the edge of the camp earlier this week. Yarmouk camp, which is estimated to house around 17,000-20,000 Palestinian and Syrian refugees, has seen some of the worst fighting in the capital. It has been without electricity since April 2013 and most of the hospitals have closed after running out of even the most basic medical supplies.
“Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war,” says Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East director. “The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialised in Yarmouk.” Mr Luther described the siege as “collective punishment” of the civilian population and called on the Syrian government to allow humanitarian agencies immediate access to the camp. Residents told Amnesty that they have not eaten fruit or vegetables for months and at least 60% of people in Yarmouk are said to be suffering from malnutrition.
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