Bharat Rakshak

Antigovernment activists and doctors working in eastern Aleppo have corroborated, through Skype and WhatsApp, that Bana and her mother are who they say they are. But Bana’s Twitter account has also drawn an inordinate number of trolls and voices sympathetic to the Syrian government and its Russian backers, who assail Bana as a fraud.

But in an era of internet hoaxes, fabrications and the increased use of fake news around the world to further political agendas, Bana’s Twitter account has also raised some questions of veracity and authenticity

Y. Kanan wrote:Does there seem to be a general belief among Iraqis that the US has been stringing them along, refusing to use its vast firepower against ISIS and thus getting so many thousands of Iraqis killed over the past few years? Or a general belief that the US created ISIS in the first place? Or do Iraqis pin most of that blame on Saudi, Qatar, etc? Just curious as we don't hear much about what the Iraqis think of all this as no one seems to care.

Syria: Assad loyalists take Aleppo's Old City as rebels plead for ceasefire
Pro-government forces are closest they have ever been to seizing entire city as rebels beg for five day ceasefire to allow civilians to leave

Smoke over Aleppo during fighting between Syrian regime forces and rebel fighters earlier this month. Photograph: Youssef Karwashan/AFP/Getty Images
Martin Chulov in Beirut and Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul
Wednesday 7 December 2016
Forces loyal to the Syrian regime have ousted rebel groups from Aleppo’s Old City as an increasingly battered opposition pleaded for a five day ceasefire to allow remaining civilians to be evacuated. *(They really mean themselves!)

The advances were the most significant of the past week and edged the fighting in Syria’s second city towards a final showdown in neighbourhoods where it all began for the besieged rebel groups four and a half years ago. Bashar al-Assad’s forces, backed heavily by militias that have been instrumental in shifting his fortunes in the war, are now the closest they have ever been to seizing the entirety of east Aleppo – a city central to the fate of the war.

The battlefield advances came as the US, Britain, France, Italy and Canada released a statement condemning both Russia and Syria for the “humanitarian disaster taking place before our very eyes” in Aleppo. There was no immediate response from either country, both of whom had rebuffed earlier demands for a ceasefire while vowing to crush the remaining opposition and claiming that any lull would allow rebels to regroup.

The Old City had remained a centre of gravity for the opposition since its fighters, a combination of Aleppo locals and residents of the surrounding countryside, overran security forces in July 2012. Its proximity to Syrian army positions and the ancient Citadel that stands at its heart had made it less of a target for Russian and Syrian jets that have bombed much of the rest of east Aleppo into ruins in preparation for the ground offensive.

The advance, which has been led by Iraqi groups and Hezbollah from Lebanon, both backed by Iran, has laid waste to much of the Old City’s approaches and cut off opposition routes to elsewhere in the east, which has seen fierce fighting this week. Up to 75% of east Aleppo is now under the control of loyalist forces, who say they could claim the rest of the city within one week.

The conquered areas are a crumbling mess of largely uninhabitable neighbourhoods of 4-6 storey apartment blocks, which have collapsed on to the roads beneath them. The damage is worst at the eastern edges of the city, from where the ground offensive was launched. Towards the centre, where the Old City and Citadel stand, destruction is less obvious, but even there, shops and homes have crumpled in the face of concussion waves from enormous explosions, as well as direct hits.

The battle for eastern Aleppo in maps: how rebel territory is shrinking

As their fortunes diminished, opposition leaders again refused regime demands that they abandon Aleppo, insisting that they remain as guarantors of the safety of civilians who have stayed behind. Rebel fighters have bunkered down in the hull of what was once Syria’s industrial heartland, forming underground basements in husks of apartment blocks, and running the war by the light of car batteries.

“What Aleppo has witnessed in the past five months is nothing short of a war of extermination against its civilian population,” the opposition leadership said in a statement. “Hundreds of innocent young men have been detained and their future is uncertain. Women, who have been hardest hit by the realities of the siege, have been raped in despicable acts of revenge.

“Civilians should either be protected, or evacuated to a safe area, where they will not be under the mercy of Assad and his henchmen.”

Some rebel factions acknowledged that they were considering abandoning the city, which was at the time of its seizure meant to have been an epicentre of the push to oust Assad as leader. How to flee, if such a decision is made, remains a dilemma, with no roads open to the north or south, and the east remaining a stronghold of the forces that are attacking them. Humanitarian corridors, except two into west Aleppo, have been killing zones for the past three months, rebel groups say.

The rebellion, which started as a revolt against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, spawned by popular uprisings across the Arab world, has waned elsewhere in Syria, leading to increasing calls for a managed political settlement.

Civilians were being steadily bussed to regime-held west Aleppo on Wednesday, with hundreds more displaced by fighting that has already driven thousands out of their homes in recent weeks. More than 30,000 people are reported to have crossed the frontline that has separated both sides, with more than 500 military-aged men taken by Syrian troops from conquered neighbourhoods, or at checkpoints. Unicef estimated that 51% of the recent refugees were children.

Aid groups also backed ceasefire calls. The International Rescue Committee said: “Medical evacuations would be a lifeline for the 400 gravely ill and seriously injured people in urgent need of treatment. The UN must be allowed to oversee a ceasefire that also guarantees the first food and medicine deliveries to enter east Aleppo since it was besieged in July, as well as fresh staff to relieve the small number of doctors and nurses providing medical care of a quarter of million people. There must not be any military preconditions attached.”

East Aleppo’s few remaining physicians said they can no longer treat patients. A blitz by Russia and the Assad regime has destroyed all of east Aleppo’s hospitals over the last two months, when systematic attacks on the city’s healthcare system intensified.

The latest offensive seized the M10 hospital in the Sakhour neighbourhood of the east, which had been heavily damaged by airstrikes. Staff had managed to use some rooms for basic treatment in between attacks, but have not been able to perform complex surgeries for much of the past month.

“We are completely paralysed and cannot treat anyone,” said one doctor. “We are suffering what we have to suffer under this vicious campaign and this extermination and invasion. The civilians are worried and horrified, everyday people are getting displaced from one street to the next.”

Aleppo’s unrelenting misery has exposed the powerlessness of the international community to stop the suffering and Monday’s statement marked a rare attempt by global leaders to collectively shift debate about the conflict outside of the UN Security Council, where permanent members Russia and China have blocked measures aimed at Assad over the past five years.

his is why everything you’ve read about the wars in Syria and Iraq could be wrong
It is too dangerous for journalists to operate in rebel-held areas of Aleppo and Mosul. But there is a tremendous hunger for news from the Middle East, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand

Patrick Cockburn in Beirut @indyworld
Friday 2 December 2016 11:15 BST

Syrian rescue workers and residents try to pull a man out from under the rubble of a building following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Salhin in the northern city of Aleppo AFP
The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month.

Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different.

In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be used as human shields.

Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.

One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom.

At least 45 Syrian refugees killed by regime missile while trying to flee Aleppo
These are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000 fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.

Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. A number of intrepid correspondents who tried to do eyewitness reporting from rebel-held areas swiftly found themselves tipped into the boots of cars or otherwise incarcerated.

Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.

It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.

For instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the 10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.

None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.

Some of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting the Americans to do so for them.

Much the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

Atrocity stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations, were ra
The Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand from people who could in practice only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant jihadi opposition groups.

It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.

A word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is not much they can do about it.

Thus, in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the world.

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all”.

We have to accept that Assad will win in Syria
The quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.

Overall, government experts did better than journalists, who bought into simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was always on the verge of being overthrown.

Phillips records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011, when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that “Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of the population.”

The French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”

Philip wrote:What missile system was used? Good demo by the Russians of their capabilities and that they're now top dog in the Middle East...along with the Iranians.