Lebanon crowdfunded ambulances under fire in Israel-Hezbollah war
Updated 17 October 2024
AFP
BEIRUT: Lebanese data scientist and volunteer rescue worker Bachir Nakhal started a crowdfunding effort to buy new ambulances for south Lebanon months ago, fearing Israel’s war in Gaza could spread to his country.
But weeks into Israel’s war with Hezbollah, his worst fears came true when an ambulance he had helped purchase was bombed.
“We were trying to get the number of ambulances up to the bare minimum level,” he told AFP.
“We weren’t expecting the ambulances ... to get directly targeted or bombed,” said Nakhal, who says the vehicle he had raised money for was destroyed in an Israeli strike just four days after the volunteers had received it.
The October 9 strike, which took place in the southern village of Derdghaiya, killed five rescue workers, including the head of the local team and his son, according to the civil defense.
The incident was among what the United Nations says is a growing number of attacks on healthcare in Lebanon, with paramedics, first responders and ambulances increasingly in the firing line.
“More attacks continue to be reported where ambulances and relief centers are targeted or hit in Lebanon,” UN humanitarian agency OCHA said after the Derdghaiya strike.
The Israeli army has accused Hezbollah of using ambulances to transport weapons and fighters, though it has yet to produce any evidence.
“Necessary measures will be taken against any vehicle transporting gunmen, regardless of its type,” Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote in Arabic on social media platform X.
Nakhal said a second crowdfunded ambulance, dispatched to the southern city of Nabatiyeh on Monday, was barely on the road for a day when it had a close call with heavy strikes.
Israel had earlier in the war issued an evacuation warning for Nabatiyeh, where Hezbollah and its ally Amal hold sway.
Palestinian families sue US government over military aid to Israel
Complaint calls for the implementation of the so-called Leahy Law, which the plaintiffs and rights group say Israel has been illegally exempted from
Since the start of Israel’s war against Hamas, the United States has enacted legislation to provide more than $12.5 billion in direct military aid to its strategic ally
Updated 23 sec ago
WASHINGTON: Five Palestinian families on Tuesday sued the State Department over Washington’s billions in military aid to Israel, demanding the enforcement of US rules to curb arms flows due to allegations of human rights abuses. The complaint, filed on Tuesday and to which the State Department has 60 days to respond, calls for the implementation of the so-called Leahy Law, which the plaintiffs and rights group say Israel has been illegally exempted from. The law prohibits the provision of security assistance to units facing credible allegations of human rights abuses. Since the start of Israel’s war against Hamas in October 2023, the United States has enacted legislation to provide more than $12.5 billion in direct military aid to its strategic ally. The war was sparked by an attack by Hamas on Israel that resulted in the deaths of at least 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures that includes hostages killed in captivity. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 45,059 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable. Much of the Palestinian enclave has been reduced to rubble in the process. At a press conference in Washington on Tuesday, Palestinian-American plaintiff Said Assali said his aunt and her six children were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City, alleging US weapons were used to carry out the attack. “Our families paid an unbearable price for the State Department’s refusal to enforce its own laws,” said Assali. Two former State Department staffers told journalists US authorities apply an informal “Israel exception” when assessing the country’s military actions. “The reality is that Israel operates under a different set of rules. The State Department has created this unique, burdensome, high-level process for determining (that) applies only to Israel,” said Charles Blaha, a former State Department official who worked on such determinations. Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department last year in protest of US policy on Gaza, offered a similar assessment. The State Department declined to comment on the filing of the complaint. Earlier this month, rights group Amnesty International accused Israel of “committing genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war. In November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israel’s government vehemently denies the allegations, and has appealed the warrants. Ahmed Moor, a plaintiff in Tuesday’s lawsuit, said seven of his family members in Gaza were living “under a constant fear of bombardment,” and that one had been killed. “My family members are people just like you and me, and their lives have been destroyed by American weapons in direct violation of American law,” he said. “My family’s living a nightmare.”
Syrian mass graves expose Assad's 'machinery of death'
Updated 13 min 32 sec ago
QUTAYFAH, Syria: An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under toppled leader Bashar Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013. Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters: “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine. “I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves.” “We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” said Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials. “From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing,” Rapp said. “We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.” Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against him spiralled into a full-scale war. Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people. Assad, who fled to Moscow, had repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations and painted his detractors as extremists. The head of US-based Syrian advocacy organization the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, who also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of Damascus, has estimated at least 100,000 bodies were buried there alone.
“PLACE OF HORRORS“ The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague separately said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria. More than 157,000 people have been reported missing to the commission. Commission head Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters its portal for reporting the missing was now “exploding” with new contacts from families. By comparison, roughly 40,000 people went missing during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. For the families, the search for the truth in Syria could be long and difficult. A DNA match will require at least three relatives providing DNA reference samples and taking a DNA sample from each one of these skeletal remains found in the graves, Bomberger said. The commission called for sites to be protected so that evidence was preserved for potential trials, but the mass grave sites were easily accessible on Tuesday. The United States is engaged with a number of UN bodies to ensure the Syrian people get answers and accountability, the State Department said on Tuesday. Syrian residents living near Qutayfah, a former military base where one of the sites was located, and a cemetery in Najha used to hide bodies from detention sites described seeing a steady stream of refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers. “The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave. There were security vehicles with them, and no one was allowed to approach, anyone who got close used to go down with them,” Abb Khalid, who works as a farmer next to Najha cemetery, said. In Qutayfah, residents declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of the retribution, saying they were not yet sure the area was safe after Assad’s fall. “This is the place of horrors,” one said on Tuesday. Inside a site enclosed with cement walls, three children played near a Russian-made military satellite vehicle. The soil was flat and levelled, with straight long marks where the bodies were believed buried.
SATELLITE IMAGERY Satellite imagery analyzed by Reuters showed large-scale digging began at the location between 2012 and 2014 and continued up until 2022. Multiple satellite images taken by Maxar during that time showed a digger and large trenches visible at the site, along with three or four large trucks. Omar Hujeirati, a former anti-Assad protest leader who lives near the Najha cemetery, which was used until the larger Qutayfah site was created because it was full, said he suspected several of his missing family members may be in the grave. He believes at least some of those taken, including two sons and four brothers, were detained for protesting against Assad’s government. “That was my sin, what made them take my family,” he said, a long, exposed trench behind him where the bodies were apparently buried. Details of Syria’s mass graves first emerged during German court hearings and US congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023. A man identified only as “the grave digger” testified repeatedly as a witness about his work at the Najha and Qutayfah sites during the German trial of Syrian government officials. While working in cemeteries around Damascus at the end of 2011, two intelligence officers showed up at his office and ordered him and his colleagues to transport and bury corpses. He testified that he rode in a van adorned with pictures of Assad and drove to the sites several times a week between 2011 and 2018, followed by large refrigeration trucks filled with bodies. The trucks carried several hundred corpses from Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to Najha and Qutayfah, he said in the trial. At the sites deep trenches were already dug and the grave digger and his colleagues would unload the corpses into the trenches, which would be covered with dirt by excavators as soon as a section of the trench was full, he said. “Every week, twice a week, three trailer trucks arrived, packed with 300 to 600 bodies of victims of torture, starvation, and execution from military hospitals and intelligence branches around Damascus,” he told Congress in a written statement. The grave digger escaped from Syria to Europe in 2018 and has repeatedly testified about the mass graves, but always with his identity shielded from the public and the media. (Reporting by Timour Azhari in Qutayfah and Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam; Additional reporting by Reade Levinson and Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Alison Williams)
Assad’s fall clears way for expanded US strikes on Daesh militants
“Terrorist groups like Daesh love a power vacuum, and so there is a risk that Daesh can exploit the chaos of a post-Assad Syria to resurface to an even greater extent,” said Raphael Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation
Updated 18 min 53 sec ago
AFP
WASHINGTON: Bashar Assad’s overthrow has cleared the way for US strikes against the Daesh group in areas previously shielded by Syrian and Russian air defenses — but the terrorists may also try to exploit the vacuum left by his fall.
The militant group, often referred to as Daesh, rose out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war to seize swathes of territory there and in neighboring Iraq, prompting a US-led air campaign starting in 2014 in support of local ground forces who ultimately defeated the insurgents.
Washington — which has troops in both Iraq and Syria — has for years carried out periodic strikes and raids to help prevent a resurgence of the brutal militant group, but stepped up its military action since Assad’s fall earlier this month, hitting dozens of targets.
“Previously, you had Syrian regime and Russian air defenses which would preclude, in many cases, our ability to — or desirability to go into those areas,” Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder told journalists this week.
Now, “it’s a much more permissible environment in that regard,” Ryder said.
On December 8 — the day Syrian rebels took the capital Damascus — Washington announced strikes on more than 75 Daesh targets that the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said were aimed at ensuring the group “does not seek to take advantage of the current situation to reconstitute in central Syria.”
And on Monday, CENTCOM said US forces killed 12 Daesh militants with strikes it said were carried out “in former regime and Russian-controlled areas.”
While Assad’s overthrow has eased access for US strikes, the Syrian leader’s departure could also provide an opening for Daesh militants.
“Terrorist groups like Daesh love a power vacuum, and so there is a risk that Daesh can exploit the chaos of a post-Assad Syria to resurface to an even greater extent,” said Raphael Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
There is also a danger that Washington’s Kurdish allies — who have previously been targeted by Turkiye — may have to shift their focus to countering their neighbor to the north.
“That’s a particularly acute risk since they are functionally guarding Daesh detainees, so if they are released, that would obviously have negative effects on the counter-Daesh fight,” Cohen said.
The United States currently has some 900 troops in eastern Syria as part of its efforts to counter Daesh, but that could potentially change after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month.
“Trump — during his first administration — signaled that he wanted to withdraw American forces from Syria. I can easily imagine a second Trump administration making a renewed push to do so, especially now that Assad is gone,” Cohen said.
Trump could also reduce US military commitments in the Middle East to let regional allies deal with challenges there, Cohen said, noting that “if that would happen, US counterterrorism strategy would look very different as a result.”
Syria Kurdish leader proposes ‘demilitarised zone’ in northern town
Mazloum Abdi: ‘Reaffirming our firm commitment to achieving a ceasefire across all of Syria, we announce our readiness to propose the establishment of a demilitarised zone in Kobani’
Announcement comes amid fears of an assault by Turkiye on the Kurdish-held border town of Kobani, also known as Ain Al-Arab
Updated 19 min 41 sec ago
AFP
BEIRUT, Lebanon: The leader of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces on Tuesday proposed a “demilitarised zone” in the northern town of Kobani as fighting with Turkish-backed groups grips northern Syria.
“Reaffirming our firm commitment to achieving a comprehensive ceasefire across all of Syria, we announce our readiness to propose the establishment of a demilitarised zone in the city of Kobani, with the redeployment of security forces under American supervision and presence,” Mazloum Abdi wrote on X.
The announcement comes amid fears of an assault by Turkiye on the Kurdish-held border town of Kobani, also known as Ain Al-Arab, a week after Turkish-supported Islamist rebels toppled Syrian strongman Bashar Assad.
Earlier Tuesday, the United States said it had brokered an extension of a ceasefire between pro-Turkish fighters and Syrian Kurds at the flashpoint town of Manbij, and was seeking a broader understanding with Ankara.
The Manbij truce, which had recently expired, “is extended through the end of the week, and we will, obviously, look to see that ceasefire extended as far as possible into the future,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
In a statement earlier on Tuesday, the SDF had accused Ankara of plotting an attack on Kobani.
“Turkiye has mobilized large numbers of its forces and militias with heavy weaponry around Kobani,” the statement said, adding that Ankara was “ready for an attack.”
Turkiye accuses the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), of being affiliated with Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants at home, whom both Washington and Ankara consider a “terrorist” group.
Ceasefire between Turkiye and US-backed SDF extended, State Dept says
Washington brokered an initial ceasefire last week but it had expired, Miller said, adding that Washington would like the ceasefire to be extended for as long as possible
Updated 17 December 2024
Reuters
WASHINGTON: A ceasefire between Turkiye and the US-backed Kurdish Syrian forces (SDF) around the northern Syrian city of Manbij has been extended until the end of this week, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.
Washington brokered an initial ceasefire last week but it had expired, Miller said, adding that Washington would like the ceasefire to be extended for as long as possible.
“We continue to engage with the SDF, with Turkiye about a path forward,” Miller said.
“We don’t want to see any party take advantage of the current unstable situation to advance their own narrow interests at the expense of the broader Syrian national interest,” he added.
SDF commander Mazloum Abdi expressed on Tuesday the group’s readiness to present a proposal that establishes a demilitarized zone in the northern city of Kobani with the redeployment of security forces under US supervision and presence.
He said in a statement on X that the proposal aims to address Turkiye’s security concerns and ensure permanent stability in the area.
