Syrian Revolution

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They haven't done much against Israel, which is surprising, but they have claimed credit for some murders in Israel by Arabs. They have also attacked a number of Jews in other countries. There surely isn't much doubt that there wouldn't be much greater problems if ISIS came to control Syria.

It's not surprising, it's calculated (you need to pause ad blocker to see this page), since 2013:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/201 ... fdfef50000

Rebels in the south (and south-east) of Syria were mostly ISIS, unlike the rebels in the Turkey-backed area in the north.

Israel and ISIS were buddies of convenience (like...MOST alliances in the Middleast), forged by a common enemy.

In the outskirts of Syria’s capital Tuesday, the hope of a country freed from its longtime dictator was muddled with the emerging horrors of the Assad regime.

Thousands of people were rushing to labyrinthine prisons, searching for any trace of loved ones they feared had disappeared into their unseen depths.

The most notorious gulag lies in the barren, rocky hills outside the capital, Damascus. Saydnaya military prison is a dungeon of tiny, concrete cells nicknamed “the human slaughterhouse.” NBC News went there Tuesday and found evidence of barbaric conditions — as well as the desperation of Syrians searching for their loved ones.

During the Assad family’s 50-year rule, a network of facilities like Saydnaya were patrolled by armed guards, ensuring those who went in could not come out. The regime used the prisons to detain, torture and kill tens of thousands of Syrians, some for criticizing the government or other trumped-up allegations, according to rights groups, whistleblowers and global officials.

Now, with Bashar al-Assad and his enforcers gone, the tree-lined entrance to Saydnaya is packed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars. People have come from all over Syria to see if their loved ones are still inside, partly motivated by rumors of a secret wing detaining starving captives.

They came armed with pry bars, pickaxes and their bare hands. At one point a bulldozer showed up, all to hack away at the jail’s edifice in the hope of revealing a hidden cache of abductees.

Outside the building itself — a hulking, brutalist cube in dilapidated off-white — crowds of mostly men gathered, some of them shouting to ask whether anyone had seen their sons, brothers or uncles believed detained by the regime. One of these men, a self-appointed organizer, called out names from a filthy document apparently recovered from one of the administrative rooms.

These documents littered the floor, a concern for international legal scholars who have stressed the importance of maintaining these records for use as evidence of these crimes.

These places were not secret, but well known among Syrians, documented by rights groups and widely reported in the news media. Nevertheless, Tuesday brought a tableau of intense emotions, with people crying and screaming as they saw behind the curtain of their toppled police state for the first time.

Inside, concrete cells with white open bars were large enough to accommodate four people at most — but from the detritus appeared to have been crammed with dozens. Piles of clothes and bedrolls were lit by the smartphone flashlights of civilians combing the decaying maze for clues.

One woman said her son had been missing for a decade. He was accused of being a militant; she said he was a nurse.

In one room stood a large, iron device comprising two flat surfaces, large enough to fit a prisoner, and a mechanism to close them tight. People here called it the “execution press” — used to crush inmates to death or to torture them.

Another room featured a large metal pole stretching from one wall to the other. Prisoners would apparently be handcuffed to this with their feet off the ground and beaten. Outside, a man held at least four nooses, one covered in blood, that he said were used to put people to death.

Rumors that the prison contained a secret underground “red wing” drew crowds of more families, as well as the White Helmets search and rescue organization, which dispatched its crews to look for such a hidden complex.

Around 1:30 a.m. local time (5:30 p.m. ET Monday), the White Helmets said there was no evidence of any hidden chamber or rooms, sharing the “profound disappointment of the families of the thousands who remain missing and whose fates remain unknown.”

Nevertheless, people were still using hand tools to knock through sections of floors and walls, presumably still looking for hatches or doors, when NBC News visited Tuesday.

Saydnaya may be the most infamous but it is far from the only place where Assad and Hafez Assad, his predecessor and father, visited the darkest horrors upon their own people. The dynasty built and operated a network of detention centers scattered across Syria, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an independent scientific human rights organization based in San Francisco, has counted at least 17,723 people killed in Syrian custody from 2011 to 2015 — around 300 every week — almost certainly a vast undercount, it says.

Prisoners in Saydnaya “are regularly tortured, usually through severe beatings and sexual violence,” Amnesty International said in a landmark 2017 report, which drew on survivors’ accounts and other sources. “They are denied adequate food, water, medicine, medical care and sanitation, which has led to the rampant spread of infection and disease.”

Even during these torture sessions, total “silence is enforced,” it said, contributing to “many detainees” developing “serious mental illnesses such as psychosis.” All of this seemed “designed to inflict maximal physical and psychological suffering. Their apparent goal is to humiliate, degrade, dehumanize and to destroy any sense of dignity or hope,” it said.

Hafez Assad began this policy of systematic and secretive state violence in the 1980s, making an estimated 17,000 Syrians disappear between then and 2000, Amnesty said. But the “government’s violations against detainees have increased drastically in magnitude and severity” since 2011, it added.

That was the year Syrians began peacefully protesting against the regime as part of the younger Assad violently crushed the demonstrators, leading to the armed uprising that became the civil war.

Following a major 48-hour bombing campaign in Syria, the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday said it had destroyed most of the former Bashar al-Assad regime’s strategic military capabilities, in an effort to prevent advanced weaponry from falling into the hands of hostile elements.

In a statement, the IDF said that its Air Force and Navy had carried out over 350 strikes against “strategic targets” in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime over the weekend, taking out “most of the strategic weapons stockpiles in Syria.”

The military estimated that it had destroyed 70-80 percent of the former Assad regime’s strategic military capabilities.

The operation was dubbed “Bashan Arrow” within the military, after the biblical name for the Golan Heights and southern Syria region.

The IDF released footage from the campaign, during which it said over 320 targets were struck across all of Syria.

The strikes began late Saturday, first taking out Syrian air defenses to give the Israeli Air Force more freedom.

Wave after wave of airstrikes carried out by IAF fighter jets and drones then hit Syrian airbases, weapon depots and weapon production sites in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia and Palmyra, according to the military.

The military said the airstrikes destroyed many long-range projectiles, Scud missiles, cruise missiles, coast-to-sea missiles, air defense missiles, fighter jets, helicopters, radars, tanks, hangars and more.

The IAF also targeted several chemical weapons sites in Syria during the waves of strikes, Israeli officials have said.

Meanwhile, on Monday night, Israeli Navy missile boats destroyed 15 naval vessels belonging to the former regime at the Minet el-Beida bay and Latakia port on the Syrian coast, the military said.

The tomb of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez was torched in his hometown of Qardaha, AFP footage taken Wednesday showed, with rebel fighters in fatigues and young men watching it burn.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor told AFP the rebels had set fire to the mausoleum, located in the Latakia heartland of Assad’s Alawite community.

AFP footage showed parts of the mausoleum ablaze and damaged, with the tomb of Hafez torched and destroyed.

The vast elevated structure atop a hill has an intricate architectural design with several arches, its exterior embellished with ornamentation etched in stone.

It also houses the tombs of other Assad family members, including Bashar’s brother Bassel, who was being groomed to inherit power before he was killed in a road accident in 1994.

Hafez al-Assad, then-defense minister, seized power in Syria on November 13, 1970, in a bloodless coup. He was elected president in a vote asking citizens to either approve or reject his candidacy months later.

Assad was particularly hated for a vicious crackdown on an armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in February 1982. Between 10,000 and 40,000 people died at the hands of the Syrian army.

Syrians wonder around Assad’s home
Roaming the opulent Damascus home of the ousted Syrian president, Abu Omar said he felt a sense of giddy defiance being in the residence of the man he felt had long oppressed him.

“I am taking pictures because I am so happy to be here in the middle of his house,” said the 44-year-old, showing photographs he took on his mobile phone.

He was among the dozens an AFP correspondent saw Sunday entering Assad’s home after Assad fled the country.

“I came for revenge. They oppressed us in incredible ways,” Abu Omar added from the compound of three six-story buildings in the upscale al-Maliki neighborhood.

Jubilant men, women and children wandered the home and its sprawling garden in a daze, the rooms stripped bare except for some furniture and a portrait of Assad discarded on the floor.

Residents in the Syrian capital were seen cheering in the streets, as the rebel factions heralded the departure of “tyrant” Assad.

Sale! Sale!’
On Sunday, video circulating online showed crowds peeking into the bedrooms in the Assad residence, which was previously off-limits to ordinary citizens.

They could be seen snatching clothes, plates and whatever belongings they could find including a Louis Vuitton cardboard shopping bag.

In one video, a man could be heard yelling that everything was on “Sale! Sale!”

Umm Nader, 35, came with her husband from a nearby district to tour the residence that once inspired fear and awe, and which one visitor now described as a “museum.”

“I came to see this place that we were banned from, because they wanted us to live in poverty and deprivation,” she told AFP.

Nader said the former inhabitants of the residence had left without cutting off the heating and electricity, “meanwhile our children are getting sick from the cold.”

Daily power outages that last for hours have been a fact of life in Syria, reeling from successive economic crises after more than a decade of war and Western sanctions.

Most of the population has been pushed into poverty, according to the United Nations.

Syrians stream back home through Turkish border
Syrians continued to flow back into the country after the longtime dictator had fled, speaking of their expectations for a better life following what was for many a decade of hardship in Turkey.

“We have no one here. We are going back to Latakia, where we have family,” said Mustafa as he prepared to enter Syria with his wife and three sons at the Cilvegozu border gate in southern Turkey. Dozens more Syrians were waiting to cross.

Mustafa fled Syria in 2012, a year after the conflict there began, to escape conscription into Assad’s army. For years he did unregistered jobs in Turkey earning less than the minimum wage, he said.

“Now there’s a better Syria. God willing, we will have a better life there,” he said, expressing confidence in the new leadership in Syria as he watched over the family’s belongings, clothes packed into sacks and a television set.

Turkey, which hosts three million Syrians, has extended the opening hours of the Cilvegozu border gate near the Syrian city of Aleppo seized by rebels at the end of November.

A second border gate was opened at nearby Yayladagi in Hatay on Tuesday.

Around 350-400 Syrians a day were already crossing back to rebel-held areas of Syria this year before the opposition rebellion began two weeks ago. The numbers have almost doubled since, Ankara says, anticipating a surge now Assad has gone.

Turkey has backed Syrian opposition forces for years but has said it had no involvement in the rebel offensive which succeeded at the weekend in unseating Assad.

Around 100 trucks were waiting to cross the border, carrying goods including dozens of used cars. Security forces helped manage the flow of people, while aid groups offered snacks to children and tea and soup to adults.

It's really depressing how people are still trying to defend Israel. It was like a day from well Assad was deposed to when the ghouls running Israel started to bomb the area trying to create what amounts to a buffer zone for their buffer zone.

There's been a bunch of Syrian refugees returning, so this could get extremely ugly, extremely quickly. Not to mention that while a bunch of the prisoners being released are probably legitimate political prisoners, some of them are also legitimate terrorists and fighters.

IIRC, It wasn't really that long ago that people were making false accusations about Assad using chemical weapons on his own people that turned out to be regular bombs. Still not good, but it should lead people to question what other bits we were being lied to. Not to mention that Assad was being fought by both the US and ISIS for a while. As in, the US viewed Assad as being worse than ISIS and that got hardly any coverage.

Lots of bias there.

It wasn't really that long ago that people were making false accusations about Assad using chemical weapons on his own people that turned out to be regular bombs.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan defended Israel's operations in Syria since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, saying on Thursday it had a right to defend itself from risks to its security.

“What Israel is doing is trying to identify potential threats, both conventional and weapons of mass destruction, that could threaten Israel, and, frankly threaten others as well," Sullivan told a press conference in Tel Aviv following a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Potential for fracture
Sullivan said the situation in Syria presented a range of risks "including the potential for fracture in that state." He added that power vacuums could give room for terrorist groups to grow and said the new power in Damascus could be hostile to neighbors including Israel.

"All of those are possibilities," he said.

Speaking in Jordan on Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed the administration's backing of Israel's campaign in Syria.

The Israelis have been clear about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it," Blinken said to reporters from the King Hussein International Airport. "I think across the board when it comes to any actors who have real interests in Syria, it’s also really important at this time that we all try to make sure that we’re not sparking any additional conflicts."

Blinken reiterated Israel's claim that its incursion into Syria is temporary.

Countries including France and the United Arab Emirates have condemned Israel's move into the buffer zone but Sullivan said the United States had "every expectation" the move would be temporary.

Israel has no authorization to be acting on Syrian soil or Lebanese soil .......
So when does the understanding part start ? When the bombs drop or after no weapons of mass destruction are found?
Or could they just send in observers to confirm and disable any weapons that might feel threatening to them .
Oh yes thats right , their presence in those areas are violations of international conventions ?

Israel's reputation is such s**t no matter what they do it is assumed it is for nefarious reasons, that is the way it is going to be at least for as long as we live. It is assumed this is the first step toward building Jewish settlements. In this instance, Israel is doing what most countries would do. There are all sorts of weapons nobody has control of and no idea who is going is eventually going to control them right next door to them and to what end. The revolution has created a power vacuum. Power vacuums are filled by whoever can.