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By Nick, May 19, 2013 3:03 pm

Amsterdam (AINA) — On Friday two members of the Goran Party, a Kurdish opposition party in North Iraq, met with Ms. Attiya Gamri, an Assyrian member of the Provincial Parliament in North Holland, to discuss cooperation between Assyrians and Kurdish opposition groups in North Iraq. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in North Iraq is dominated by two parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), with a number of smaller opposition parties. The Goran Party holds 25 of the 111 seats in the KRG.

Mr. Kawa Hassan and Mr. Rawaz Halkawt represented the Goran Party, which is dedicated to advancing democratic reforms and human rights in North Iraq. The Goran Party delegates met with Ms. Gamri because of her extensive work in human rights in North Iraq. Ms. Gamri stressed the need for equal treatment of Assyrians in the Kurdish region and emphasized the upcoming provincial elections in September, which are critical to Assyrians. Goran Party members expressed their support for Assyrians and their maltreatment under the KRG.

According to Hassan and Halkawt, Assyrians, Kurdish opposition groups and other minorities are routinely discriminated against by the KDP, and there is fear of speaking out against the KDP. Journalists are afraid of criticizing the KDP for fear of losing their jobs and being blacklisted. Some journalists have been jailed or have disappeared. Civil workers are hesitant to voice their opinions for fear of losing their jobs.

“There is no freedom of speech and writing in the KRG region,” says Mr. Halkawt, “and no democracy under PUK and KDP rule. The minorities have members in the KRG parliament but fear the PUK and KDP — they never ask anything for their communities.”

According to Ms. Gamri, Assyrian members of the KRG are afraid to speak for the rights of Assyrians in the face of institutional intimidation. For example, the issue of an Assyrian administrative area in the Nineveh Plain has been effectively prevented from being discussed in the KRG.

“Kurds and Assyrians should have the same rights in the KRG region,” says Ms. Gamri, “but unfortunatly They do not. If this does not change the national minorities and the intellectuals among the Kurds will leave the KRG region.”

Both sides agreed that pressure from the EU countries is needed to change this situation.

The Goran Party delegates asked Ms. Gamri to be a bridge between Assyrians in Holland and the Goran Party in North Iraq. Goran asked that Assyrians work with Kurdish opposition groups toward a free and democratic KRG for Assyrians and Kurds.

Attiya Gamri was recently reelected in the provincial parliament in North Holland, and appointed to the Central Women’s Council of the Social Democratic Party (Partij van de Arbeid) in the Netherlands.

Assyrian International News Agency

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By Nick, May 17, 2013 12:09 pm

Syria opposition says rebels vying to retake key cities and supply routes east, south of Damascus
By: CBS Zionist Propaganda on: 17.05.2013 [01:32 ] (201 reads)

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By Nick, May 17, 2013 3:59 am

Syria opposition says rebels vying to retake key cities and supply routes east, south of Damascus
By: CBS Zionist Propaganda on: 17.05.2013 [01:32 ] (117 reads)

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By Nick, May 12, 2013 11:26 pm

Video Shows A Member Of The Syrian Opposition Cutting Flesh Of A Corpse, And Apparently Eating It

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By Nick, April 23, 2013 11:59 am

(AP) — The Syrian opposition has called on Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from the country, as activists said regime troops supported by gunmen linked to the Lebanese Shia militant group battled rebels yesterday for control of a string of villages near the Lebanon-Syria border.

Outside the Syrian capital Damascus, activists said they had documented the names of 80 people killed in a government assault on the area over the past five days.

The Syrian National Coalition – the main Western-backed opposition group – warned that Hezbollah involvement in Syria’s civil war could lead to greater risks in the area, and urged the Lebanese government to “adopt the necessary measures to stop the aggression of Hezbollah” and to control the border to “protect civilians in the area”.

The statement, posted on the Coalition’s Facebook page, coincided with a surge in fighting around the contested town of Qusair in Homs near the frontier with Lebanon.

Over the past two weeks, the Syrian military, supported by a Hezbollah-backed militia, has pushed to regain control of the border area. The region is strategic because it links Damascus with the Mediterranean coastal enclave that is the heartland of Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

The fighting also points to the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict, which pits a government dominated by the President’s Alawite minority against a primarily Sunni Muslim rebellion, and underscores widely held fears that the civil war could drag in neighbouring states.

One amateur video posted online showed seven bodies, some shot in the face, placed in black body bags on the ground.

Assyrian International News Agency

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By Nick, April 14, 2013 5:40 am

(AFP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other G8 foreign ministers will on Thursday hold a second day of talks in London focused on Syria after rebels again appealed for weapons.

The ministers kicked off their gathering over dinner late Wednesday, shortly after Syrian opposition leaders met with Kerry about their repeated calls for arms to fight the Syrian regime forces.

But a top jihadist group’s earlier pledge of loyalty to al-Qaeda deepened Western concerns that weapons could fall into the wrong hands in Syria.

Iran’s atomic ambitions, rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, instability in north and west Africa, and climate change will also be up for discussion, according to Britain’s Foreign Office.

The talks on Wednesday with members of the opposition Syrian National Coalition included its Prime Minister Ghassan Hitto.

The United States said it was mulling ways to step up help for Syria’s rebels. Kerry held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a bid to find common ground with a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on ending the conflict.

However, overshadowing the discussions was a statement on Wednesday by the head of Syria’s jihadist al-Nusra Front pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, which only increases Western doubts about arming the rebels.

A top State Department official confirmed that, during a lunch hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague, the Syrian opposition leaders renewed appeals for lethal aid but Kerry “didn’t promise anything.”

Hague later called the talks “very productive” and stressed the Syrian coalition’s executive arm “will have a vital role to play in delivering governance, services and support to the Syrian people.”

The U.S. and EU are currently providing non-lethal aid such as communications equipment, and are beginning to distribute food and medical supplies to the Free Syrian Army, but have stopped short of providing weaponry.

The announcement by the al-Nusra front is likely to bolster assertions by Assad’s regime that it is fighting “terrorists” who want to impose an Islamic state.

“We are always considering a variety of options, we are going to continue to aid the opposition, working with them in terms of what they need, in terms of what we’re willing to provide,” the U.S. official said.

Wednesday’s talks had focused on ways of changing Assad’s calculations about the outcome of the conflict which is now in its third year and has cost some 70,000 lives, according to the United Nations.

“We need to have this continuing conversation which is why we are going back to Istanbul,” the official said, referring to Kerry’s plans to attend a Friends of Syria meeting on April 20 in the Turkish city.

All sides emphasized “the importance of working together, the importance of them getting themselves more organized, which they said they were in the process of doing,” the official added.

Assyrian International News Agency

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By Nick, March 30, 2013 11:38 pm

BEIRUT — Syria’s opposition coalition was on the verge of collapse Sunday after its president resigned and rebel fighters rejected its choice to head an interim government, leaving a U.S.-backed effort to forge a united front against President Bashar al-Assad in tatters.

The resignation of Moaz al-Khatib, a moderate Sunni preacher who heads the Syrian Opposition Coalition, climaxed a bitter internal fight over a range of issues, from the appointment of an interim government to a proposal by Khatib to launch negotiations with the Syrian regime.

His departure plunged the opposition into disarray at a time when the United States and its Western allies are stepping up their support for moderates opposed to Assad’s regime. Khatib’s coalition was expected to play a key role in identifying the recipients and channeling the assistance.

The coalition later issued a statement saying that its members had rejected Khatib’s resignation and had asked him to continue in a “management” capacity, leaving his status unclear. Though Khatib’s suggestion earlier this year that the opposition should negotiate with Assad’s regime met with fierce resistance from other coalition members, he is widely liked by many Syrians inside the country who desperately want to see an end to the violence.

There nonetheless seems to be little doubt that an initiative launched last fall in the Qatari capital, Doha, to create an inclusive and representative opposition body is falling apart, said Amr al-Azm, a history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who is Syrian and supports the opposition.

“The coalition is on verge of disintegrating,” he said. “It’s a big mess.”

The trigger for Khatib’s departure was the selection last week of Ghassan Hitto, a relatively unknown Syrian-born U.S. citizen, to head a proposed interim government. Khatib and his supporters had opposed the creation of an interim government at this time, as had the United States, whose diplomats argued against the move on the grounds that it created an unnecessarily divisive distraction from the goal of bringing down Assad’s regime, according to Syrian opposition members.

Hitto’s candidacy was backed, however, by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the push to install him as Syria’s first opposition prime minister was widely seen as an effort by the Brotherhood to claw back some of the influence lost when the original Syrian opposition body, the Syrian National Council, was absorbed into the wider Syrian coalition.

A dozen members last week suspended their membership in the coalition to protest Hitto’s appointment, and on Saturday, the defected general who heads the Supreme Military Council of the mainstream Free Syrian Army also rejected the choice, saying the rebels would accept only a “consensus” candidate for the job.

“We unequivocally declare that the Free Syrian Army, in all of its formations . . . conditions its support and cooperation on the achievement of a political agreement on the name of a prime minister,” Gen. Salim Idriss said in a videotaped statement.

Khatib’s resignation came hours after Qatar, which has close ties to the Brotherhood and also supported Hitto’s appointment, formally invited Hitto to represent Syria at an Arab League summit in Doha next week. Khatib referred only obliquely to the furor over Hitto’s appointment, saying he had resigned “so that I can work freely,” something that is not possible “within the official institutions.”

He also hinted at his frustration with the international community, which has failed to offer wholehearted support to the Syrian revolution even as individual countries compete to secure influence over the different factions opposing Assad’s regime.

“Who is ready to obey, [those countries] will support him,” he said. “And those who refuse to obey endure starvation and siege.”

The upheaval is indeed as much an indictment of splits within the international community over whom to support within the opposition as it is of the divisions among Syrians themselves, said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. With the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others each favoring different factions, it is hardly surprising, he said, that the opposition is failing to unite.

“We cannot continue trying to forge these kind of coalitions with these kinds of tactics,” he said. “In this case, it has brought about a very serious crisis in the Syrian opposition.”

Meanwhile, Shaikh added, the Islamist groups that have emerged as the most effective fighters in the battle for control of Syria also are stepping up to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of governance in areas captured by the rebels, a role the West had been hoping the new coalition would fulfill.

“The irony is that it’s the Islamists and the extremists who are assuming more and more control,” Shaikh said.

By Liz Sly,
Washington Post

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By Nick, March 24, 2013 7:25 pm

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Moaz al-Khatib, the president of the main coalition of the Syrian opposition in exile, declared on Sunday that he was resigning, and complained bitterly about foreign powers that he said were withholding aid from the Syrian rebels while trying to control their every move.

The resignation of Mr. Khatib, who has pushed for talks between the Syrian government and its armed opponents, came five days after the coalition elected an interim prime minister, Ghassan Hitto, who rejects any such dialogue.

The announcement threw the Syrian Opposition Coalition into disarray. It underscored the challenges that the group still faced in establishing legitimacy and effective leadership, evn though it was recognized by dozens of countries four months ago as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Adding to the confusion, the coalition’s media office said later on Sunday that Mr. Khatib had agreed to stay on, while a spokesman for Mr. Khatib said that he had not.

Mr. Khatib is a prominent imam who formerly preached at the revered Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the Syrian capital; he sided early on with the revolution against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. His departure from the leadership of the coalition could set back the opposition’s efforts to broaden its appeal and to reach a political resolution to the two-year-old conflict. Some in the coalition have criticized him for being willing to talk with some members of Mr. Assad’s government, while others saw him as a moderate, ideally suited to reach out to Damascus residents who support the government or who fear the rebels. Though he is outside the country, Mr. Khatib had begun to build respect among some fighters inside Syria.

Mr. Khatib said the Syrian government had ignored his overtures, and he assailed foreign nations that he did not name for placing too many conditions on aid to the rebels and for trying to manipulate events for their own interests.

“They support whomever is ready to obey, and the one who refuses has to face starvation and siege,” Mr. Khatib said in his statement. “We will not beg to satisfy anyone, and if there is a decision to execute us as Syrians, so let it be.”

It was not clear which of the opposition’s many frustrations Mr. Khatib, who is often cryptic in his public statements, was referring to: the reluctance of Western countries to deliver arms that they fear will fall into extremist’s hands, or meddling in the choice of an interim prime minister, or both.

A coalition member who is familiar with Mr. Khatib’s thinking and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss politically sensitive matters said that Mr. Khatib resigned because of interference from Saudi Arabia, a key backer of the Syrian uprising. The member said that Saudi Arabia threatened to cut off financing and divide the coalition if its favored candidate for prime minister, Assad Mustafa, was not chosen. That demand enraged coalition members, who responded by quickly choosing Mr. Hitto, who was backed by Qatar and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the member said.

Mustafa Sabagh, another member of the coalition, denied that the Saudis had interfered, and said that he believed that Mr. Khatib had resigned over Western countries’ conditions for supplying aid the uprising.

Mr. Khatib promised to keep working for the rebels’ cause outside official channels. “The door to freedom has opened and won’t close,” he said, “not just in the face of Syrians but in the face of all peoples.”

Another group of Syrian dissidents in exile, many of them Alawites — the same minority as Mr. Assad, his family and his inner circle — held a rare public gathering in Cairo to try to persuade more Alawites in Syria to abandon the government. One of the meeting’s aims was to dispel the widely held notion that Syrian Alawites, who make up roughly 13 percent of the Syrian population, all march in lock step with Mr. Assad.

Alawites at the conference said that the mainly Sunni opposition coalition had failed to reassure Alawites that they would be safe if Mr. Assad fell, and had done little to persuade Syria’s neighbors to shelter Alawites who decided to flee, several participants said.

Fears that the conflict in Syria would spill across borders widened Sunday when the Israeli military said that it had hit a Syrian military position. The strike came after two Israeli patrols came under fire from across the decades-old cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, the Israelis said, adding that the two patrols suffered no casualties.

Israel’s new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, warned in a statement that “any violation of Israeli sovereignty and fire from the Syrian side will be answered with the silencing of the source of fire,” and added, “The Syrian regime is responsible for every breach of sovereignty. We will not allow the Syrian Army or any other groups to violate Israel’s sovereignty in any way.”

The Israelis did not say whether the Syrian position that was hit — a machine gun emplacement — belonged to Syrian government forces or to rebels.

By Anne Barnard and Hala Droubi
New York Times

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Cairo.

Assyrian International News Agency

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By Nick, March 17, 2013 6:45 am

Obama administration is providing the Syrian opposition with $ 114 million in aid. Change, you can believe in!
By: Bulov on: 17.03.2013 [01:21 ] (62 reads)

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By Nick, March 15, 2013 7:24 am

Within the past fortnight Syrian government forces have indiscriminately bombed civilians with internationally-banned weapons, flattening entire neighbourhoods, said Amnesty International, as it released two new briefings on the Syrian crisis today.

Amnesty, which has just returned from a research mission inside Syria, also said that detainees held by Syrian government forces are being routinely subjected to torture, enforced disappearances or extra-judicial executions.

The organisation also warned that armed opposition groups in the country are increasingly resorting to hostage taking, and to the torture and summary killing of soldiers, pro-government militias and civilians they’ve captured or abducted.

Two years after Syrians rose in peaceful protest against their government on 15 March 2011, the country is mired in a bloody conflict with both pro- and anti-government forces responsible for war crimes, said Amnesty. Amnesty’s new briefings – one on government force abuses, one on opposition groups’ abuses – are the organisation’s latest “snapshot” documents on the situation.

Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director Ann Harrison said:

“While the vast majority of war crimes and other gross violations continue to be committed by government forces, our research also points to an escalation in abuses by armed opposition groups.

“If left unaddressed such practices risk becoming more and more entrenched – it is imperative that all those concerned know they will be held accountable for their actions.

“Children in Syria are being killed and maimed in increasingly large numbers in bombardments carried out by government forces. Many have seen their parents, siblings and neighbours blown to pieces in front of them. They are growing up exposed to unimaginable horrors.

“With every passing hour of indecision by the international community, the death toll rises. How many more civilians must die before the UN Security Council refers the situation to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court so that there can be accountability for these horrendous crimes?”

Government forces’ use of cluster munitions and ballistic missiles:

On 1 March, an Amnesty researcher in Aleppo found nine cluster bombs that had been dropped from a fixed-wing aircraft onto a densely-populated housing estate. More than a dozen residents were killed and scores injured, many of them children. A resident from the al-Dik family told Amnesty how his relatives were killed in the attack: “Inas, two, Heba, eight, Rama, five, Nizar, six, Taha, 11 months, and Mohammad, 18 months. They were all killed; why? Why bomb children?”

As always with such attacks, the site was left littered with unexploded bomblets, which will continue to kill and maim those who pick them up – often children.

Nearby, the arm of a child was recovered from beneath the rubble of a neighbourhood flattened by a long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile fired from government forces hundreds of kilometres away. Hundreds of residents, many of them children, were killed and injured in three such recent attacks which wiped out entire families. Sabah, a 31-year-old woman who survived the carnage, told Amnesty about her loss: “My daughters, Isra’, Amani and Aya, aged four, six and 11, my husband, my mother, my 14-year-old sister Nour, and my other sister’s three sons, Ahmad, Abdallah and Mohammad, aged 18 months, and three and four years. They were all killed, what is left for me in this life?”

Thousands have perished across the country in recent months in similar attacks by government forces with weapons which should never be used in civilian areas.

Meanwhile in Aleppo, the bodies of men and boys – shot in the head, hands tied behind their backs – are being recovered almost daily from a river running through the city. The bodies float downstream from a part of the city under the control of government forces. Among the victims found in the first week of March were a 12-year-old boy and his father; they, like others identified so far, had disappeared in a government-controlled area of the city.

According to the UN, more than two million civilians have now been internally displaced. Having fled their homes, many now face renewed shelling and bombing in the areas in which they sought shelter and have been displaced a second time. Turkey has partially closed its border, leaving thousands of internally-displaced people stranded on the Syrian side in appalling conditions.

Opposition force abuses

Opposition force abuses recorded in Amnesty’s briefing includes an “execution video” showing a boy – apparently aged between 12 and 14 – holding a machete standing over a man, later identified as Colonel ‘Izz al-Din Badr’. He lies prostrate on the ground with his hands behind his back. A voice in the background shouts: “He doesn’t have the strength.” The boy brings the machete down on the man’s neck, cheered on by members of an armed opposition group.

Meanwhile, in an area in southern Damascus, witnesses have described a “hole of death” – where armed opposition forces are believed to have dumped the executed bodies of pro-government fighters or those suspected of being informers.

In another case, an Amnesty researcher was told how the body of a man accused of being a collaborator was found after he was killed by an opposition group. A neighbour told Amnesty: “We immediately went there and found him on a heap of waste, with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, a firearm injury to the shoulder … His knee was broken … A brown card hung on him with the words ‘collaborator (awayni), Colonel Helal Eid’.”

http://www.amnesty.org.uk

Assyrian International News Agency