Syria Opposition Attacked Civilians 'Indiscriminately': HRW
Source: Agence France-Presse
Beirut (AFP) - Syrian armed opposition groups, among them jihadists but also Western-backed rebels, have indiscriminately targeted civilians in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.
In a new report, the New York-based group said it had documented dozens of opposition attacks against civilians in government-held parts of Syria.
The group's deputy Middle East and North Africa director Nadim Houry said there had been a "race to the bottom in Syria, with rebel groups mimicking the ruthlessness of government forces."
"Civilians are paying the price, be it in government or rebel-held areas, with an inadequate international response," Houry said.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/syria-opposition-attacked-civilians-indiscriminately-hrw-143633710.html
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Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Elmer S. E. Dump
(5,751 posts)
Man from Pickens
(1,713 posts)too much foreign money and weapons flowing in - while people are getting rich war will continue
quadrature
(2,049 posts)just a suggestion.
easier situation.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)militias of their choosing in Libya and Syria from the same Soviet and French-made arms stockpiles, and to facilitate arms shipments in both directions across the Mediterranean. That decision was described in a much overlooked NYT article:
By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT DEC. 5, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?_r=0
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
(. . .)
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.
The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.
The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests.
(. . .)
He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if the United States had resisted them, but other current and former administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times over Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior State Department official. The White House and State Department declined to comment.
(. . .)
But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior administration official who had been briefed on the matter. (INSERT: It was at this time that US Ambassador Chris Stevens quietly reappeared in Benghazi, where he took over direction of Eastern Libyan militias and CIA collection of weapons.)
About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American officials. They, like nearly a dozen current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign officials, would speak only on the condition of anonymity for this article.
The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)pampango
(24,692 posts)Some armed opposition groups have indicated in public statements that all means are legitimate to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying that those living in areas under government control may be attacked in retaliation for attacks on civilians in opposition areas, and that populations perceived as associated with or supporting the government are subject to attack.
Such arguments carry no validity under the laws of war. Regardless of the violations committed by Syrian government forces and pro-government militias, which Human Rights Watch has long documented, opposition armed groups are obligated to abide by the laws of war. Respect for the law does not depend on reciprocity – that law only need to be obeyed if the other side does so – but each party to the conflict has its own obligation to act in accordance with the law regardless of the other side’s actions.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/22/syria-rebels-car-bombs-rockets-kill-civilians
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)Its like they're competing against each other when it comes to outdo each other when it comes to human rights violations. I 100% human rights violations justify human rights violations.
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)It is such a huge example of what Houry said.
There is a lot of psychological war going on in addition to all this as well.
Four years on, civilian deaths continue in Syria
As the Syrian conflict enters its fifth year next month, an alarming uptick in violence targeting innocent civilians has once again been unleashed on this devastated nation. The loss of life is not only incidental or a mere side effect of war, but is in many cases a deliberate part of the military strategy of Syria’s major warring camps.
Since a lot of the fighting of Syria’s conflict takes place in heavily populated towns and urban areas, sniper kill zones often dissect neighborhoods and fighters dig in and embed among the civilian population. Effectively, this makes human shields of their inhabitants, and inevitably ensures they suffer disproportionately when those entrenched combatants start to fight and shell each other’s positions. This is made worse by the very nature of this type of urban warfare, which usually produces deadly stalemates, or only excruciatingly slow advances at terribly high cost. This callousness and indifference to the suffering of Syrians by those fighting in their name the Syrian regime and the rebel and jihadist groups opposing it has been a central and dominant theme throughout this messy and brutal war.
Another disturbing aspect in which civilians are caught up in the war is through the heavy indiscriminate bombing of their neighborhoods by the infamous “barrel bombs” dropped by regime helicopters from high altitude on rebel-held areas, the main purpose being to clear out the residents and make the areas easier to capture. Needless to say, the results of such bombing campaigns are catastrophic. This sometimes goes in tandem with crippling sieges that can last for months or even years, causing untold misery and suffering for the people trapped inside, who have to not only contend with a possible quick death from above but also a slow agonizing death from starvation and poverty.
Being in an area that one of the warring camps controls does not necessarily delineate support for that camp, although it is matter-of-factly portrayed as such by the propaganda machine of the other side, seeking to justify its excessive brutality. This divisive “us against them” is a rather peculiar aspect of this conflict, even if not surprising. A terrified populace can easily be polarized against their former friends and neighbors, especially when told that they are now the enemy, with corroboration of that coming in the form of deadly shells and bombs fired from their areas. We have experienced this first hand in Aleppo city, for instance, where rebels shell neighborhoods in the west (the regime-controlled part) on a daily basis, killing and wounding many people, with the justification being that anyone still living there must be “shabiha,” a derogatory term for a regime loyalist.
Thus, the warring camps in Syria seek to consolidate support among “our civilians” while demonizing “their civilians,” which makes mass slaughter of people more palatable and acceptable. In fact, in the tit-for-tat shelling of Damascus city and eastern Ghouta earlier this month, there were calls to wipe Douma out, and everyone in it, by people in Damascus, while those in Ghouta cheered with glee every time rockets were fired into the capital. Of course these sentiments are not universally shared or accepted, but illustrate how quickly desensitized and dehumanized people living through the horrors of war can become. The end result, though, was equally as grotesque as those attitudes, with many deaths and injuries in Damascus, and a disproportionate number of people killed in Ghouta, too, with the unsettling prospect of this mutual slaughter now becoming the new norm as both sides continue to threaten and escalate their rhetoric.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/syria-war-civilian-casualties-regime-opposition-jihadists.html#ixzz3VGEqbk00
