Is Syrian Government using warplanes to bomb civilians?

[Jeremy F Kreuz]

I have noted that the humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres seems to have started a campaign to denounce the Syrian government for using warplanes to bomb civilians. Find below the second press release of the organisation within a week on the topic. The first one, recovered in an article, goes even furhter, saying the Syrian Government ´is using intense and indiscriminate bombing in a "strategy of terror" directed against civilians in the north´.

This seems in contradiction of what has been reported and analyzed on SOTT and this forum about the behavior of the Syrian Government. The sticky issues is that this humanitarian organisation is on the ground and claims to have seen the warplanes doing the bombing - and as far as I know the ´rebels´do not have warplanes - and that they have been treating what they claim to be civilians. So what is up? This seems to me a new tactic, after the massacres, to discredit the Syrian Government. But that would mean somebody else is using warplanes to bomg civilians (the Turkish?).

Has anybody further information on this?

Medecins Sans Frontieres btw has been in the past a source that has seen a lot of respect and credibility by the general population, so channeling this information through this organisation seems a good tactic to augment the ´truth´ of whatever needs to be believed by that general population.

If you compare with their reporting on Gaza, there is a clear distinction: no cries on ´using intense and indiscriminate bombing in a "strategy of terror" directed against civilians´. Suspicious to say the least.

original press release:

Syria: Airstrike on market kills 20, injures 99

January 14, 2013 -. At least 20 people were killed and 99 were injured when warplanes bombed a market in Azaz, northern Syria on 13 January, according to the international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Twenty of the wounded, all of them civilians, were treated in an MSF medical facility.

The attack on the market in Azaz, near the Turkish border, was particularly devastating as it came just two weeks after airstrikes hit the city’s health facilities, making it almost impossible for medical staff to cope with an emergency on this scale.

The injured were transported to medical facilities elsewhere in the region, including an MSF field hospital in the Aleppo area. Five people were dead on arrival at MSF’s field hospital, while 20 wounded, including five children, were treated in the same facility.

“The cars and ambulances kept on coming and patients flooded the hospital,” says Adriana Ferracin, an MSF nurse in Syria. “We received many patients with limb amputations, head injuries and bleeding eyes and ears.” At hospitals elsewhere in the area, including Kilis hospital on the Turkish side of the border, 15 people were dead on arrival and 79 received treatment for their injuries.

The city of Azaz, in the Aleppo region, has been bombed several times in the past few months. In December, warplanes bombed a public hospital, thus diminishing its capacity to provide medical services to the population, and making many people fearful of going to hospital for medical care.

“Even after the airstrikes on medical facilities in the Aleppo region, local doctors and nurses remained committed to providing medical care and are doing their best to help the population,” says Shinjiro Murata, MSF head of mission in Syria.

MSF’s field hospital in the Aleppo region –one of the three it is currently running in Syria- provides emergency, obstetric and primary health care. The focus is on pregnant women, children and the most vulnerable. In the past month, there were 110 surgical operations and 70 deliveries, while 1,500 patients received treatment. MSF witnessed an increase of pathologies with the onset of the winter and remains concerned about the access to treatment for patients with chronic diseases.

Violence is hitting an already vulnerable population with a limited access to medical care and food. The spiralling prices of essential supplies such as bread, wood and clothing are further worsening the population’s living conditions. Many people are unwilling to go to hospital, out of fear that they will be targeted by airstrikes, and prefer to seek medical care in clandestine structures.

MSF staff have also witnessed the consequences of violence in the neighbouring province of Idlib. A team that returned recently from a northern city in this region which was repeatedly bombed over recent months reported that the only medical facility still functioning there is a secretly run clinic, staffed by local people and a few Syrian health workers.

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/syria-directs-strategy-of-terror-against-civilians-msf/

By Katie Nguyen

LONDON (AlertNet) - The Syrian government is using intense and indiscriminate bombing in a "strategy of terror" directed against civilians in the north, a medical charity said on Thursday.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) issued a statement after an MSF team returned from a city in the north of Idlib province, which it says has been bombed repeatedly by government forces in recent months.

The northwestern province was one of the first areas where peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad's rule turned into armed rebellion.

"Since we're prohibited from working on the side of the government forces, we're not able to take an impartial view on this situation," MSF's emergency operations manager, Dr Mego Terzian, said in the statement.

"But it has to be said that what we're witnessing is a real strategy of terror, orchestrated by the Syrian government, against the people of this area."

MSF, which is working in three hospitals in northern Syria, said the only medical facility still functioning in the city its team recently visited was a secret clinic run by volunteers and local health workers. It did not identify the city for security reasons.

"For a city that has seen a large portion of its residents leave, and displaced people move in from other bombed areas, there's an impressive sense of solidarity," said Dr Adrien Marteau, one of the MSF team that visited the area.

"People are stepping up to act as nurses, or even surgeons, for minor procedures, because there's simply nobody else to do it," he said in the statement. "But faced with the seriousness of the injuries and the risks involved in evacuating patients, many of the wounded are dying because they are not getting treatment or cannot be evacuated in time."

MSF said the city was suffering severe shortages of basics such as drinking water, bread and powdered milk. There was no electricity in the area and gas prices have risen sharply, it said.

Across the country about 1 million people are going hungry because of the difficulty of getting supplies into conflict zones and the fact that the few government-approved aid agencies operating there are stretched to the limit, the United Nations World Food Programme said on Tuesday.

The worst winter storm in two decades hit the eastern Mediterranean this week, bringing death and destruction to Syria, and to neighbouring countries already trying to cope with an influx of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.

An activist from Idlib has said displaced Syrians are sheltering in caves to keep dry, and that some of the thousands of people whose homes had been destroyed by shelling or who had fled the fighting have moved into Syria's Dead Cities, some 700 abandoned settlements from the Byzantine period hundreds of years ago.

The conflict has killed more than 60,000 people in the past 21 months.

 

[Niall]

Notice that they don't actually specify which state the warplanes belong to.

Now consider this piece of recent and generally unknown piece of history:

Turkey has been more or less permanently invading Northern Iraq in brutal pursuit of Kurds. The [former Iraqi] 'No Fly Zone' allows Turkish war planes to operate in Iraq virtually at will. Ankara launched invasions with 20,000 troops in 1992, 35,000 troops in 1995, 50,000 troops in 1997, 10,000 troops in 1998, and 10,000 troops in 2000. Turkish forces have sometimes stayed for months while destroying villages and committing widespread human rights abuses. No other country has conducted so many invasions in recent times, all with the tacit consent of Washington and London. When the US and Britain launched their full onslaught against Iraq in March 2003, Turkey already had thousands of troops in the north of the country and was poised to conduct a deeper invasion.

Britain and the US have been more directly complicit in Turkish actions. An article in the US Air Force Times in December 1994 noted that:

When Turkish bombing missions... are being flown, the Turks ground coalition aircraft... Turkish military officials are privy to virtually all intelligence gathered not only from Americans but from Britain and France... The Turks continue to have access to information from AWACS aircraft... The Turks also review American and British reconnaissance aircraft data compiled during Provide Comfort flights.

RAF pilots protested in 2001 about being ordered to return to their base in Turkey to allow the Turkish air force to bomb Kurds. The Washington Post reported that 'on more than one occasion [US pilots] have received a radio message that "there is a TSM inbound" - that is a Turkish Special Mission heading to Iraq.' The US pilots are then required to return to base. When the pilots flew back into Iraqi air space [ie, to continue their mission of maintaining the No Fly Zone to ensure that Saddam did not 'bomb his own people'] they would see 'burning villages, lots of smoke and fire'. When Turkey invaded in December 2000, for example, most patrols in the NFZ were suspended to allow Turkey to continue bombing.

Added: Source: Web of Deceit, Britain's Real Role in the World, by Mark Curtis.

The Kurds are the second biggest ethnic group in Syria. Azaz is located in the province of Syrian Kurdistan. Senior Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Cemil Bayik stated in November 2011 that if Turkey were to intervene against Assad, the PKK would fight on the Syrian side. So I think it's very likely that indiscriminate bombing of civilians taking place in northern Syria is being carried out by Turkey, with the cooperation of its NATO allies of course.

 

[Jeremy F Kreuz]

here an article of the Washington Institute - one of those PTB think tanks - proposing what Turkey should be doing in Northern Syria.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-right-way-for-turkey-to-intervene-in-syria

The Right Way for Turkey to Intervene in Syria

Soner Cagaptay

New York Times

October 11, 2012

The cost of intervention in Syria may be high now, but the price will only increase for all nations if civilian massacres continue unabated. If Syria radicalizes, becoming a jihadist safe haven, normalizing it could become a Sisyphean task.

Turkey was the first country to take direct military action against the government of Bashar al-Assad since Syria’s uprising began in the spring of 2011. And tensions are escalating further: earlier this week, the Turkish government sent 25 F-16 fighters to an air base near the border with Syria and on Wednesday it forced a Syrian passenger plane to land in the Turkish capital, Ankara, where suspected military aid shipments were taken off the plane.

The shelling along the Turkish-Syrian border is a critical development. The Assad regime is already busy fighting the Free Syrian Army near the Turkish border, where it has been bombing towns and villages. Precision artillery targeting is difficult, and the Syrian military is not known for its accuracy. What’s more, many rebel-held areas lie right next to the Turkish border. Hence even if the Syrians try not to shell Turkish territory, they are quite likely to cause inadvertent damage, potentially killing Turkish citizens — as happened on Oct. 3, when Syrian artillery landed in Akcakale, a Turkish border town.

As long as Syrian shells continue to fall on Turkish territory, Turkey will respond in kind. As Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “although Turkey does not want war, it is close to war.” If the situation continues to escalate, Turkey’s history suggests that it is likely to follow one of three paths: continued low-intensity shelling, cross-border strikes or an actual invasion.

The first response for Ankara would be to continue the current pattern of shelling across the border every time Syria targets Turkey. This would weaken Syrian forces in some areas near the Turkish border, letting the F.S.A. fill the vacuum. This wouldn’t create a contiguous safe haven, but it would lead to pockets of F.S.A.-held territory inside Syria under a de facto Turkish security umbrella.

The second would combine shelling with cross-border raids to target Kurdish militants in Syria. Turkey’s policy, after all, is not just about Syria. It also depends on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., and its Syrian affiliate, the Party for Democratic Unity, or P.Y.D. Turkey views the P.K.K. as an existential threat, and the P.Y.D. is reportedly already active in Syrian towns near the Turkish border, though the group has said it does not plan to fight Turkey. If Turkey believes that Kurdish militants are turning Syria into a staging ground for operations against Turkey, the Turkish military would strike decisively, as it did against Kurds in northern Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s rule effectively ended there in the 1990s. Ankara might go for the “northern Iraq option” once again to prevent Kurdish militants from taking control of northern Syria.

Finally, if things get worse along the border, causing more Turkish casualties, Turkey may go even further, staging a limited invasion to contain the crisis as it did in Cyprus in the 1970s. At that time, Ankara waited patiently for the United States and the international community to come to its aid in Cyprus. When such help did not materialize, Turkey took matters into its own hands, and landed troops on the island.

NATO has already issued a statement that it will defend Turkey against Syria. Yet if Turkey decides that the international community is not going to actually help stave off the Assad regime’s aggression, it may choose the Cyprus option. The Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, has suggested that Ankara may be getting closer to its threshold, declaring on Oct. 8 that “worse-case scenarios” are looming in Syria and calling upon the international community to act.

The Cyprus scenario is the least desirable for Turkey. Full-scale war is not in its interest, especially if Turkey launches such a campaign without American backing. And NATO support under Article 5 of the alliance’s charter, which calls for all NATO members to come to the defense of any member that is attacked, would be harder to muster. Article 5 has been activated only once in NATO’s history and that was after the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, European nations like France haven’t in the past been keen to come to Turkey’s defense. A unilateral war against the Assad regime would also irritate the United States and anger Russia and Iran, Ankara’s rivals in Syria -- a serious concern because Moscow and Tehran have a track record of supporting Kurdish militants.

The northern Iraq option would not necessarily raise America’s ire, but it would expose Turkey to further P.K.K. attacks, including ones backed by Iran. Tehran already appears to be encouraging the P.K.K. to punish Turkey for its stance in Syria. Major attacks could hurt Turkey’s economy and erode Mr. Erdogan’s popularity.

This leaves Turkey with the status quo -- retaliating to Syrian artillery fire by shelling across the border. Yet this will not solve the Syria crisis. Only an effective arms embargo and a multilateral intervention to create safe havens for civilians will stop the slaughter.

The cost of intervention in Syria may be high now, but the price will only increase for all nations if civilian massacres continue unabated. Currently, Syria looks eerily similar to Bosnia in the early 1990s. When the world did not act to end the slaughter of Muslims there, jihadists moved in to join the fight, and they sought to convince the otherwise staunchly secular-minded Bosnian Muslims that the world had abandoned them and that they were better off with jihadists. In Bosnia, the international community intervened before it was too late. If Syria radicalizes, becoming a jihadist safe haven, it could become a Sisyphean task to normalize it. Afghanistan is a case in point.

 

[Jeremy F Kreuz]

found this by a think tank Executive Analyis - has anybody els heard about that?

The use of chemical weapons, if confirmed, would not increase the likelihood of direct foreign intervention in Syria's civil war.

Event: On 18 March 2013, opposition social media users claimed that a village southeast of Damascus, Otaybah, had been hit by a chemical weapons strike. On 19 March, Syrian government media claimed that the opposition had fired a rocket with a chemical warhead on Aleppo, while the opposition denied any such capability and blamed the government.

Analysis: We have been unable to corroborate either report of the use of chemical weapons. There is no evidence to suggest that the rebels have the expertise required to use these kinds of weapons, or that they have captured ready-to-use chemical weapons. Therefore, if chemical weapons have indeed been used, it would be far more likely to have been done by the Syrian government. It is likely that, with the ever-increasing flow of weapons to the opposition, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assesses that he needs to highlight the escalation options at his disposal. These potential options include chemical weapons or, as occurred on 18 March 2013, launching air strikes on Lebanon and increasing Lebanon's involvement in the civil war.

Implications: If confirmed, that use of chemical weapons was probably intended to demonstrate the high cost of further Western involvement in Syria's civil wara. Widespread use of chemical weapons is unlikely at this stage. This would change if President al-Assad's military situation in Homs deteriorates significantly, or if he assesses that the fall of Damascus is imminent. Under this scenario, Homs, Hama, Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus would be at highest risk. The use of chemical weapons would also be likely if the pro-Assad Alawis were surrounded along the coast. Under this scenario, the plains south of Tartous, Homs, Hama and Idlib's Jisr al-Shughour would be the most likely targets.

Even if the use of chemical weapons is confirmed, it is unlikely to lead to immediate moves towards direct foreign intervention, for example via an air campaign against the Syrian Army. There is no indication of political will for such action, and this is unlikely to change significantly as a result of this incident or similar ones going forward.

 

[Niall]

"Chemical weapons" is the same as WMDs - a propaganda tool. It's all nonsense to further whip up hysteria in Syria and take Western support for the dirty war to the next level.

 

[light worker]

Hello!

We have lots of information from Western media which show us that Syria government are killing own people. One thing is sure: western countries are trying to kick off Assad from Syria, to put new government something like in Libya. They wont control and money. Because they are controlling media, they will show us only things which are positive for them. In Syria is a war, and war means blood, bombs, tears - nothing good. Chess Game is playing whole the time, but with real human lives. Sad but true.

Have a nice day!

light worker