PYD Info: PYDs representative to Europe Zuhat Kobani on the latest events in Shêxmeqsû:
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: Aleppo province: Members of the Kurdish Defence Forces (YPG) are now participating in the clashes in the Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood. They are clashing with regime forces in the southern part of the neighbourhood. The YPG have had checkpoints throughout the entrances of this mostly Kurdish neighbourhood and it has been relatively calm; with thousands of civilians who became internally displaced seeking refuge there. Now the residents are fleeing after several days of clashes and shelling. Clashes taking place by the Aleppo civilian airport, by the airforce intelligence branch, and by the Layramoun roundabout. Both sides reportedly suffered losses. Clashes are ongoing in south Reef Aleppo between the towns of Arkan and Jabal Abu Tabah, at a military checkpoint, 1 tank was destroyed and there are losses.
March 2013 the bloodiest month of the Syrian uprising:
Based on the verified deaths documented by the SOHR 6,005 people have been killed in Syria last month alone. This makes March 2013 the most devastating of months since the beginning of the Syrian uprising for Freedom and Dignity, which has since then transformed into a bloody civil war. More people have been killed last month alone than in the first 9 months of the uprising, which started as a civil, non-violent, popular uprising.
Breakdown of the dead this month:
-2,080 civilians including: 298 children and 291 women.
-1.400rebel fighters.
-86 defectors.
-1,464 regular soldiers.
-588 unidentified persons, documented by individual photos and video.As of 31/3/2013, the SOHR has documented the death of 62,554 people killed since the first martyr fell in Der’a on 18/3/2011.
The breakdown of dead:-30,872 civilians including: 4390 children and 2726 women.
-11,238 rebel fighters.
-1,814 defectors.
-15,283 regular soldiers.
-2,097 unidentified people, documented by individual photos and video.
-1,250 unidentified rebel fighters.This tally does not include the thousands of forcibly disappeared persons in the regime’s detention centres, nor the hundreds of kidnapped members of the regular forces and others taken captive by the rebels.
This tally also does not include the killed pro-regime gunmen (shabiha) before they were organised by the central authority into paramilitaries, nor civilians killed under the term “regime informant”, due to the secrecy and difficulty of verifying the reports. We estimate the number of dead to be more than 12,000.
We also expect that the actual number of dead combatants, whether rebel fighters or regular soldiers, to be double the amount we have managed to document, this is because of the secrecy of giving out information of dead during clashes.
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Fresh battles broke out in a flashpoint district of Aleppo on Monday, while violence raged on the road linking the Syrian city to its international airport, a watchdog said.
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Your Middle East: Face to face with Saleh Muslim
So far, Syria’s Kurds are the sole benefactors from the revolt against Damascus. But according to the top Kurdish leader, the opposition’s and outside world’s inability to compromise may result in the survival of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.The stocky man gives me a friendly but penetrating look under the black hair and smiles under his bushy moustache.
“I don’t belong to the strict kind of Muslims. We Kurds are no extremists. Armenians, Assyrians and other Christians, Yezidis, and various Arab Muslims all live in Syrian Kurdistan. And we never have any problems in between us,” says Saleh Muslim, a man who has been called the Syrian Kurds’ Abdullah Öcalan, after the famous – and infamous – PKK leader in Turkey.
Saleh Muslim is in Stockholm to garner support for what he calls a peaceful Kurdish liberation in Syria – peaceful in contrast to the armed Arab-Muslim rebels’ now two-year-old attempt to bring down Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
But despite Saleh Muslim’s advocating of peaceful and tolerant change, his Democratic Union Party (PYD) is the only organised power within the Syrian opposition that has been able to free and set up self-rule on a significant piece of territory.
It happened this summer when the PYD declared the Kurdish dominated strip of land along the border with Turkey an autonomous enclave. “West Kurdistan” has its own judiciary, political and economic organs as well as a defence and police force.
To the surprise of many this Kurdish manoeuvre has been carried out with practically no resistance from government forces. It has lead to accusations from Arab Muslim rebels – both the Free Syrian Army and extreme jihadist groups – that the PYD is covertly collaborating with the al-Assad regime.
Others have instead made the conclusion that the government’s troop withdrawal from Kurdish areas is actually a shrewd tactic by Damascus since the Kurdish self-rule in practise deprives the Arab rebels of potential areas for military expansion.
“There are far too many armed Arab groups, several hundred, who compete between themselves for arms and money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Their division and competition for contributions mean that they get nowhere in the liberation of Syria from the Assad regime.“We Kurds, on the other hand, have only one armed organisation, we take no money from abroad and we collaborate as far as possible to maintain our self-rule in northern Syria,” says Saleh Muslim with a trace of satisfaction.
In other words, entirely in line with Max Weber’s classical formula that a state has monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force over a given territory. But when it comes to Öcalan’s PKK, which is usually called the PYD’s sister organisation among Kurds in Turkey, the demand for a monopoly on violence during almost 30 years of guerrilla struggle has resulted in a very harsh and cruel faith for many Kurdish dissidents.
I tell Saleh Muslim that I won’t even ask him about the relationship between PYD and PKK. He and his colleagues’ never swaying standard answer to this is that PYD (which was formed in 2003) has no “organic” or “operational” collaboration with PKK (which was founded in 1978 and started its war against Ankara in 1984) but that “we have the same philosophy and ideas as Öcalan.”
Instead I ask him what it will mean for PYD and the conflict in Syria that Öcalan recently (on Newroz day, March 21) announced a truce and indicated that the PKK will withdraw their guerrilla soldiers from Turkey. Saleh Muslim begins by noting that both the PKK and the Turkish army are yet to change their positions on the ground. But then he allows himself to freely speculate on a more hopeful future:
“If now Öcalan and Prime Minister Erdogan agrees, if Ankara stops oppressing the Kurds, and if Turkey stops supporting Syrian Islamists – yes, then it could result in an end to the conflict between us Kurds and the armed rebels in Syria…And then we have a chance to unite our forces to bring down the Assad regime together.”
But then Salah Muslim begins to talk about the latest meeting between Syrian opposition groups in Cairo, which in his view was both a fiasco (since the opposition again displayed its disunity) and a setback for Syria’s Kurds (since they once again did not gain any hearing for their demands as an ethnic minority).
And with a long line of argument he says that from the very start there has only been one possible solution to the Syrian crisis: a political compromise where the Assad regime in some way shares power with the opposition, at least during a period of transition. In other words, more or less what the UN’s super mediators Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi have said for over a year, and what both the foreign powers and Assad as well as some opposition voices have admitted but then in action not dared or wanted to act on. And here, after two hours of coffee drinking and apple eating, Saleh Muslim reveals himself as a seasoned, but perhaps realistic, pessimist:
“Within PYD we never really thought that Assad was going to be brought down anytime soon, which many – most – people believed two years ago. Neither did we count on any foreign military intervention to support the opposition. And if no political compromise is brought about, well, then Assad can stay in power forever.”
Per Jönsson is an Associated Editor at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. For 30 years, he worked as a reporter at the foreign desk of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning newspaper.
Translated from Swedish by David Hedengren.
Per Jönsson
Last updated: March 30, 2013
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NOW! Syria: Fresh clashes rage in Syria’s Aleppo
“Fierce clashes raged between troops and rebels in the east of Sheikh Maqsud district,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a day after a major rebel advance in the predominantly Kurdish neighborhood.
Regime tanks fired shells at other parts of the neighborhood, whose residents fled the area in large numbers for a second straight day.
Southeast of Aleppo, fresh clashes broke out near the city’s international airport, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers across Syria for its reports.
The airport has been closed since January.
Aleppo city has been scene of some of Syria’s fiercest violence since battles first broke out in the northern city in July last year.
Much of the city has since been destroyed, and residents suffer constant power cuts and frequent water shortages.
To the west of the city, an air strike on rebel-held the town of Maaret al-Numan killed at least one child, said the Observatory, which reported several others injured.
Located in the northwestern province of Idlib, Maaret al-Numan has been under rebel control since October last year.
Elsewhere, a blast caused by an explosive device hit the Rokn Eddin district in northern Damascus, said the Observatory, which also reported renewed shelling by government troops on rebel-held districts in the central city of Homs.
Monday’s violence comes a day after at least 181 people were killed across Syria, among them 57 rebels, 67 civilians and 57 loyalist troops, the Observatory reported.
The UN says more than 70,000 people have been killed in Syria’s two-year war.
BEIRUT – March was the bloodiest month yet in Syria’s two-year conflict, with more than 6,000 people killed, a third of them civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday…
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Telegraph: Syria suffers ‘deadlist month’
Syria has suffered its deadliest month so far in the two-year conflict, with more than 6,000 people killed in March, a third of them civilians.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes President Bashar al-Assad but has monitored human rights violations on both sides of a revolt, has documented a total of 62,554 dead in the conflict.
Rami Abdelrahman, the head of the group, said the number was probably much higher.
“We estimate it is actually around 120,000 people. Many death tolls are more difficult to document so we are not officially including them yet.”
As in previous months, around a third of those killed in March were civilians, the Observatory said. Almost 300 children died, taking the number killed in the conflict to around 4,390.
The United Nations says more than 70,000 people have died in Syria. Mr Abdelrahman said both sides have found ways to minimize their dead to keep morale high among their followers.
“There are some groups where it took us longer to get access to sources. For example we started counting deaths much later among the shabbiha,” he said, referring to pro-Assad militias that have fought alongside security forces.
His group has a rough count of 12,000 dead shabbiha fighters but has yet to include those in its toll.
Also unknown is the number of dead among the tens of thousands jailed by Mr Assad’s forces since the conflict began. There was also no way to count the number of Syrian soldiers killed after being captured by rebels. Activists believe those are also likely to number in the thousands.
Some 2,250 dead opposition fighters are unknown, and the Observatory said it believed most of those are fighters from abroad who joined the rebels in Syria, which has become a site for jihad, or “holy war”, to many Islamic militant groups.
Mr Assad has long accused his opponents of being “terrorists” funded by Gulf and other foreign powers.
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