This is the wall between Turkey and Syria that is being built through the Kurdish area. It is being built at a time when Turkey is showing tow faces – this is one, and on the other hand they talk about building good relationships with Kurds. The walls establishes a stronger separation of Kurdish families on either side of the border.
It will serve no positive purpose for the Kurds or for Turkey, and should be pulled down. More information in the RONAHI WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN 26-10-2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYTCbw6z58o:
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PYD Info: According to the latest report from YPG spokesperson Rêdûr Xelîl, they have successfully taken over the Syrian-Iraqi border gate in Til Kocer (al-Yarobiya) from ISIL forces. YPG launched a major offensive in the early hours of Saturday, which took the fighting into the center of the town. Sporadic clashes continue at the moment.
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Syrian Observatory for Human Rights:Summarized final death toll for Saturday 26/10/2013; More than 145 were killed in Syria.
The dead include: 33 civilians, 29 rebel fighters, 39 regular soldiers, 1 YPG fighter, 9 unidentified rebel fighters, 11 NDF combatants, 6 ISIS fighters, 3 al-Nusra fighters and 13 non-Syrian fighters from the ISIS, al-Nusra, al-Khadra’ battalion and rebel factions.
– In Aleppo 6 civilians and 8 rebel fighters were killed.
– In Reef Dimashq 3 civilians and 4 rebel fighter were killed.
– In Deir Izzor 4 civilians and 4 rebel fighters were killed.
– In Homs 11 civilians and 2 rebel fighters were killed. 5 civilians from one family, including 3 women, were killed by a shell that was launched from an unknown source on their house in the Sadad town. 1 child from the al-Hola area was killed by regime bombardment on al-Hola. 1 media activist was killed by regime bombardment on areas of al-Nabek city in Reef Dimashq.
– In Dera’a 5 civilians and 3 rebel fighters were killed.
– In Hama 4 rebel fighters were killed.
– In Idlib 1 civilian and 3 rebel fighters were killed.
– In al-Raqqa 3 children and 1 man were killed by aerial bombardment on the eastern part of the vegetable market in al-Raqqa city.
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—————————— —————————— —————————— ————— – 3 al-Nusra fighters and 1 YPG fighter were killed by clashes between both sides in the Tal Kawjar (al-Ya’rubiya) in Reef al-Hasaka.
– 2 ISIS fighters were killed during their raid on the al-Sha’tha village in eastern Reef Hama.
– Confirmed reports that several ISIS, al-Nusra and rebel fighters as well as several YPG fighters were killed by clashes between both sides in the Tal Kawjar (al-Ya’rubiya) town of Reef al-Hasaka.
– At least 4 ISIS fighters were killed. 3 were killed by clashes with YPG fighters in the perimeter of the Beirkano village in western Reef Tal Abiad city in al-Raqqa. 1 was killed when the car transporting him was targeted between the Sawsak and Yarqo villages in western Reef Tal Abiad city.
– In al-Raqqa 1 rebel fighter was found dead in Wadi Khneifes in the Ma’dan area after he disappeared days earlier.
– 9 unidentified rebel fighters were killed by clashes in several areas.
– 13 non-Syrian fighters from the ISIS, al-Nusra, al-Khadra’ battalion and rebel factions were killed by bombardment on their vehicles and carriers and clashes in several areas.
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—————————— —————————— —————————— ————— – At least 39 regular soldiers, including 4 officers, were killed by rocket attacks on centres, checkpoints, and machineries and IED attacks on machineries in several provinces: 15 Homs, 8 Hama, 6 Damascus and Reef Dimashq, 5 Aleppo, 3 Deir Izzor and 2 in Dera’a.
– 11 NDF combatants were killed by clashes and attacks on checkpoints in several towns and villages.
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Hasakah province: Several sources have confirmed that the YPG has taken over at dawn today the Tal Kojar (al-Ya’rubiya) border crossing with Iraq, as well as on the cement factory, the duty-free area and the farmlands surrounding the town. This came after clashes that began last night with the ISIS, al-Nusra and allied rebels. The YPG also took over heavy and light weapons. Clashes are still ongoing in the town of Tal Kojar itself.
BBC:Syria: Kurds seize border crossingKurdish fighters in north-eastern Syria seize control of an important border crossing with Iraq from Islamist rebel groups.The Yarubiya border post was captured after three days of clashes with groups linked to al-Qaeda, the fighters said.
Officials on the Iraqi side of the border said they could hear heavy gunfire and shelling.
Kurdish groups in northern Syria have tried to stay out of the civil war between the government and rebels.
However as Islamist rebel groups have moved into Kurdish-controlled areas in recent months, clashes between them and Kurdish militias have been increasing.
‘Heavy battles’An Iraqi official told the Associated Press that the Baghdad government had brought Iraqi reinforcements to its side of the border to prevent the violence spilling over.
He described the fighting as “heavy battles in which all types of weapons were used”.
The border crossing was under the Syrian government’s control until March, when it was taken by Islamist rebels.
Syria’s Kurdish minority makes up around 10% of the population and is largely concentrated in the country’s far north-east, near the borders with Turkey and Iraq.
The fighting between jihadist rebels and armed Kurdish militia – both of whom are anti-government – adds another layer to Syria’s complex civil war.
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Guardian: What’s going on in Syria is about a lot more than chemical weapons
Lauren Wolfe: In the third year of this war, we know that people are in agony and rape and torture are widespread. We cannot ignore it
We’re off talk of “intervention” in Syria, and on to trying to get everyone to the negotiating table. It’s not going very well.
The head of the Syrian opposition has made it clear that they will not attend talks in Geneva unless President Bashar Al-Assad is removed from office. Scheduled for 23 November, the peace conference may not even occur unless all parties get to the room. In the meantime, atrocities are continuing daily in a kind of vacuum – it’s as if there is no war unless we are talking about chemical weapons.
The thing is, this war is so horrifying, so brutal, that it is hard to hold the constantly occurring atrocities at the forefront of our minds. But they exist, they are happening every minute, and we have to face them squarely if we are ever going to stop them.
Here, then, are just a few of the stories I’ve come across in my reporting. They are painful, but I think you should know about them.
There is a 14-year-old girl in southern Turkey who won’t speak to the press. Having been abducted, raped, burned, and otherwise tortured in a house run by shabiha (plainclothes militia) members in Idlib, Syria, this girl has suffered “a nervous breakdown”, a family friend told me. I know she is there because I have spoken to the hospital treating her, and the United Nations has documented her case.
There is a 12-year-old girl in a house in Lebanon who will only speak to ask for her mother. About 10 days after the girl was first arrested, the family received a video of a man in a uniform raping her from behind in a cell-like room. The girl is completely naked in the silent video. I know this because a family friend has seen the video and described it to me; I have not seen it personally.
There is a woman in her 30s locked in her father’s house in Idlib. Upon returning home from eight months’ captivity in two separate shabiha-run houses in Syria, her husband turned her away, saying, “Now that all these men have been in and out of you, you are not fit to be the mother of my children.” This is why she now lives with her father, who occasionally tells her, “I wish you’d died.” I know this because an activist named Raiefa Sammei has gathered details of this story from multiple sources and relayed them to me in person.
There is a 20-something-year-old woman in Aleppo pregnant after being raped at the city’s military security branch. I know this because I was asked if I could help find her someone to carry out an abortion. I also know she is not following through with it because she will no longer talk about what happened and will no longer accept that she is pregnant.
These are just a few of the many stories I know like this. In each, a girl or woman or boy or man has been raped, tortured, and psychically torn apart, usually by a member of the Syrian regime. In each, the details are given to one or two family members and then passed on – or not. Many if not most of these stories are languishing in the hearts of those who survived.
Syria has been called “the great tragedy of this century” by the United Nations. There were 2 million refugees registered with the UN Refugee Agency as of September. There are rumored to be a million more unregistered. More than 115,000 people are estimated killed in the conflict, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. And that too is considered by many to be a conservative estimate. What we don’t have is a clear count of women and men raped and tortured. All we have are stories like those above.
My organization, Women Under Siege at the Women’s Media Center, is doing its best to aggregate whatever reporting exists on sexualized violence in a live, online crowdmap. But stigma and shame and the murk of war have done their best to obscure what is already opaque.
What I do know is that there is tremendous suffering.
I know that the Syrian refugees I have met in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon are carrying the burden of horrors they’ve witnessed and are wending their way through poverty, racism, and hopelessness. I know that too many people in the region have little or no medical or psychological help. I know that the groups I have met with treating rapeand torture survivors have few resources.
I know there are women said to be sitting in houses dotted throughout the Middle East with no hope of a future because their bodies have been forcefully violated, and I know that a culture that fetishizes these women’s purity is shutting down any possibility of redemption.
In the third year of this war, we know that people are in agony. Temporary refugee camps and stalled peace talks are not enough. It is beyond time for a flood of humanitarian aid to deluge the region and for all countries to make bringing peace to Syria a priority. We need to remember the humanity of these women and men, even if we can’t see their faces clearly in what has become more than a fog of war in Syria. It is truly a shroud.
Lebanon suffers under the strain of a refugee crisis now out of control
As you come through the military checkpoints on the way into Wadi Khaled, local mobile phones bleep with an unsolicited text: “The Ministry of Tourism welcomes you to Syria.”
This part of northern Lebanon, which juts like a knucklebone into Syria, is so close to the war that the villagers can watch the rockets land and palls of smoke rising across the hillsides. Children have swarmed up on to the first floor of the shell of a half-built house and are pointing excitedly to where the outlying villages of Homs begin. “I can see our house,” shouts Satash, six.
His mother, Maro, 28, stands back with her eyes cast down. “The older girls come up here and spend hours and hours sitting and looking out atSyria. I cannot even look.”
Satash’s home is, in reality, long gone. He now lives in Lebanon, in what used to be a shed for slaughtering chickens, with his parents and grandparents, his three-year-old sister and six orphaned cousins. The cousins’ mother was killed by shelling that stopped the delivery of medicines to treat her sickness; their father died from shrapnel wounds.
After fleeing in the middle of the night when a shell landed in their yard, taking only the clothes they stood up in, the family walked south for seven hours before crossing into Lebanon. They wandered for several months looking for help and accommodation, and ended up in the village of Knaisse in Wadi Khaled, only three miles from their Syrian home.
The family live in a shed, the rent waived by a kindly Lebanese. They have one blanket between five people, and plastic bags stuffed along the flimsy roof to stop the rain coming in. The grandmother lies on a scrap of matting, suffering from afflictions for which there is no money to buy treatment.
Maro and family live on a small monthly cash handout from a UN agency. Like most of the 1.3 million Syrian refugees now in Lebanon, a country of just 4.2 million people, they are worried about the snow that will start falling on the hills of Wadi Khaled within weeks. This will be their second winter here. “The room becomes like a refrigerator in the winter, the water floods like a lake all around and the wind is so cold,” said Maro’s husband, Ahmad, who is clearly under strain. He shouts again and again: “The people who stayed are dead under the rubble!”
He is worried, Maro told me, especially about the safety of the two teenage girls, who he doesn’t want to go outside the tiny room.
“There is no work for him to do,” Maro said apologetically. “We feel so humiliated. People tell us to thank God we have a roof. They look at our poor clothes and how we eat poor food, and they think we are used to being like this. They didn’t see our houses in Homs, our gardens. Yes, thank God we are alive. But it is hard: we lost everything, in one minute. Not the building, but the home my husband and I had spent our lives making for our family. The girls go into the village and look at the clothes shop, like any teenage girls, but they have one set of thin clothes and they are wearing them.”
Lebanon remains in relative peace, but the influx of Syrians is putting a strain on its resources, and tensions are rising. The little nation has not finished rebuilding after its own civil war and its factions are many. The country remains vulnerable to the demographic changes that the influx of mainly Sunni Muslim Syrians is bringing.
A permanent demographic shift could imperil fragile religious balances that are currently in political limbo. Run by an interim government and with elections overdue, Lebanon operates a confessional system – key government offices are reserved proportionally for representatives of religious factions.
Last week the country’s second city, Tripoli, rang with gunfire. Deaths were reported every night in its suburbs as Alawite fought with Sunni in violence that mirrors the ferocity within Syria.
This time last year some 300,000 Syrians had crossed into Lebanon; so many more have arrived since March this year that one in four residents are Syrian refugees. The UNHCR registration centre in Tripoli, which is struggling to process all the newcomers, expects the number to rise to two million by early next year. Syrians can still cross the border easily, although there are growing political mutterings in Beirut about closing it, and opinions are becoming inflamed by Lebanon’s rising crime rate – it has rocketed by 30% in the past year.
The cost of living in Lebanon is far higher than in Syria. There are water and electricity scarcities and even refugees who managed to bring savings with them have seen their money disappear at a terrifying rate.
Burned by bitter experience with Palestinian refugees – 400,000 of whom remain in the country in desperate conditions of deprivation and violence – Lebanon has refused to follow Jordan’s example and allow the provision of refugee camps. No shelter can have more than a basic timber-and-plastic structure; more robust building by refugees is prohibited.
While there are widespread reports of extraordinary acts of generosity and kindness by Lebanese towards Syrian refugees, many people here are making money from Syria’s war. Landlords are getting rents for barely habitable properties, stables and outhouses. There are hefty profits to be made in the gun-running business, and refugees are easily exploited as cheap labour. The government is getting military resources from America and Europe, which are keen to see it able to protect its borders. But many others are losing out – those who are trying to house and feed large families along with their own. Resentment is rising.
Meanwhile, at the border more and more checkpoints are going up, guns are going in and refugees are coming out. The sparks are all here for Lebanon to catch Syria’s fire.
Bar Elias is a town on the refugee corridor through Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Its population was 50,000 before the crisis. Now it is 100,000, doubled by Syrian refugees who live in tents, in half-built houses, in garages, in spare rooms. Mayor Saad Maita mourns his pet projects: two new municipal parks – “refugees moved in before a Lebanese family had set foot inside” – and a bypass on which work has stalled since the refugees arrived.
“We don’t have the money: sometimes we don’t have the money to pay all our employees,” said the mayor. “Imagine, we had problems with refuse collection and sewage systems before; now we have double the demand and no new trucks or staff. Drinking-water consumption has tripled and refugees are breaking pipelines to get water. We have only three policemen, so every time there is a dispute between our populations I have to go myself to deal with the tensions.
“The irrigation channels and small rivers to our farms are being blocked by the refugees. Overcrowding in homes is a problem and rents have doubled and tripled, even for businesses. Wages are being driven down. The Lebanese people were already suffering. They give everything they can to the refugees, but it is exhausting for everyone. I ask for help, but from the government and the UN we get only promises. We hope this will have a happy ending, but I fear it will lead to the collapse of two countries.”
Like many towns in Lebanon, Bar Elias has started running night shifts at schools to teach some of the Syrian children, who are not allowed into the state schools and have no money for the private ones. Education is becoming a cause of despair for Syrian parents. Many of their children have now been out of school for three years. The Lebanese government is dragging its feet on whether or not to start educating their Syrian guests, aware that it would lead to an overwhelming and immediate doubling of their 300,000 school population. But the risk is that if the war grinds on and they don’t provide education, those kids become Lebanon’s next problem – a generation of disaffected, unemployable young misfits.
Sonia Zambakides is country director for Save the Children in Lebanon, which is aware of possible resentments building up among Lebanon’s poor towards refugees and is trying to run projects open to both communities. “It’s a huge challenge that we are trying to meet with a combination of accelerated learning programmes, extra tuition and non-formal education to ensure children keep learning,” she said. “By the end of this year, we’re aiming to have 70,000 refugee children in education programmes. We’re working with the Lebanese ministry of education to ensure that by the start of the 2014 school year, every Syrian child is back in education.
“These children’s lives have been torn apart. Most of them have been out of school for two years or more. Many are traumatised and have witnessed unspeakable horrors. Education brings a sense of normality and structure. If we don’t get them back into education they face a lifetime of deprivation. They run the risk of becoming militarised, exploited and working as child labourers. The girls may be forced into early marriages. If we don’t get them back to school now, it will be too late for many.”
NGOs are struggling to find funding for the crisis. Save the Children has less than half of the money it needs and is already working on the biggest “winterisation” programme ever attempted – an effort to try to reinforce the flimsy shelters with sheets of plastic and plywood.
Uppermost in every refugee’s mind is winter. Snow will blanket this area within weeks. In one of the tented settlements in Bar Elias, people are salvaging anything they can to insulate their ramshackle tents. There are 120 tents here: people are digging their own latrines and the place is infested with rats and snakes.
Abu Fadi was building a flimsy structure for his family of 11. “I don’t have enough wood yet,” he said. “I need more and I will pack the floor up with sand. It’s weak though: the weight of the snow will bring it down. I am lucky as I worked in construction in Syria, so I have a rough idea what to do. I just hope to survive until we can go home.”
In Knaisse, Maro is fretting that her younger children are playing in the dirt. “They will get disease. I try to make them stay inside, but it is cold and they have no toys. They fight. I worry they will never attend school. I get angry. I even smacked them once. I am ashamed: in Syria I never did this. I wish we’d stayed in Syria. I wish we didn’t leave. Even in war, we had dignity. We want to go home.”
? For details of Save the Children’s Syria appeal, seesavethechildren.org.uk/save-syria-children
CASE STUDY
Eight months pregnant, Fatima, 35, left Syria with her six other children six months ago. Her husband had disappeared and her street was bit by bit being reduced to rubble. Her home was being used as a field hospital and her eldest son leapt from roof to roof by night as a runner bringing in medicines.
They left the besieged city of Homs in the night as the Free Syrian Army hoisted a plastic sheet across the road to shroud the fleeing people from snipers. “The journey is a blur, the children were so frightened their skin was inflamed. All I know is that we have reached somewhere where they will not be shot.”
They live in the concrete shell of an unfinished building in Machta Hammoud, north Lebanon, that was being used to house sheep. There is no sanitation or running water and at first the Lebanese landlord wanted $200 a month for rent. “Then he saw how we had nothing and he gave us this space for free. He put in an electric light and gave us a plastic covering for part of the concrete floor. His wife brings us food and gave us sheets. She goes without water herself some days so that we can have enough.”
Snakes, yellow scorpions and big spiders are visitors through the gaps in the cold, damp walls. There is no door, or windows. “The children do not wander, in Syria they had to stay indoors for two years, so they are scared to go outside. They have seen the blood, the dead people, the terrible things.”
Another two Syrian families have now moved in to other rooms. “it wasn’t made for living, but they have done their best to get it clean,” said the owner’s wife, Um Ahmad. “We have to help. Our water tank is not enough for my family of 11, but we get by. We are Lebanese, they are Syrian, we are under God and all trying to give them what we can for free. How could we not?”