There will always be a Syria and a Syrian Revolution

http://therepublicgs.net/2014/02/18/there-will-always-be-a-syria-and-a-syrian-revolution/

By Alisar Iram

Mars the bringer of war

A great deal of what is being written about the Syrian Revolution at this stage is descriptive and diagnostic. In fact the patient is on the verge of extinction because of too much meticulous attention to the sickness and the disease with few attempts at witting prescriptions and recommending treatments to start controlling the illness or healing the ailments. It is not going to work. The politicians in their different factions of the Opposition are trying to formulate road maps, programs or even some few guidelines to help them push their way with those who follow them through the jungle of confusion and the loss of solidified pioneering objectives. The Intellectuals and writers, in the majority of them, are caught in the vortex of ineffectiveness and the inability to connect with the suffering dispersed civilians or the fighters on the ground who, in the absence of a vision of the Syria to be, are creating their own nightmares and helping to destroy that part of Syria which Assad has not destroyed yet. Most deplorably is that the civic activists ­who at the beginning of the Revolution were its beating heart, its very arteries, they who have provided the middle link between the cultural, the educational, the intellectual and the military aspects of the Revolution, are now either in their graves, assassinated or killed, or incarcerated under torture, not to mention kidnapped, or forced to flee into exile.

Lastly, the huge bulk of the fighters now, operating either in the name of the Revolution with the primary aim of defeating Assad, or in the name of an anarchy released and unbound are:

(1) Fighters who essentially owe their allegiance to their country Syria, but who are creating their own scriptures for the Revolution by appropriating, willingly or unwillingly, most of that which is fanatical and fractured in politicized Islam and international Jihadism, while helping themselves to the banal and hackneyed in religious thought. I might be very harsh in such a judgement, but the brigades they belong to are quasi directionless, if not militarily then ideologically. They constitute the Syrian version of the Islamists. Some people put al-Nusra Front amongst them as an example of the more disciplined, more indoctrinated and more purposeful, but those judgements remain controversial. The fighters of this category include what used to be called Takfiris, Salfis in their ranks, yet they also congregate some well meaning, illiterate or semi-literate men who do not have the background or the education to differentiate between the genuine and the contrived, and who are in dire need of leadership. Mostly simple folk, their faith is a simple faith in God which is bound to be left open to indoctrination, exploitation and, probably, corruption.

(2) Fighters who are mostly foreigners, predominantly al-Qaeda affiliates, who have come mainly to dictate their future to the Syrians by implementing their own highly suspect political agendas that have failed elsewhere. They have undisguised, blatant territorial ambitions.

(3) Fighters (represented on the whole by the FSA) who are still mostly defectors from the Syrian army, or armed civilians driven to carry arms because they were forced to do so in order to preserve their lives and those of their relatives, and who are presently being attacked and battered by the regime and al-Qaeda alike for the lack of effective unified leadership or military equipment. Many of the soldiers of the FSA are poor, unlike the armed men of al-Qaeda affiliates, especially ISIS, who are well funded, in addition to having perfected the methods of extortion, embezzlement and unlawful confiscation of Syrian public funds and resources, like the oil fields and their revenue in northern eastern Syria. The FSA, whose soldiers are loyal to Syria and their local communities, the army which might have defended the territorial integrity of Syria better, is not largely favoured by the West and the US for reasons that might seem short-sighted, displaying poor judgement and deplorably lacking in sound strategy.

To tell my honest opinion, the situation on the ground, as it stands now, is a mess.

What worry me most are the black holes that have opened around the Revolution everywhere, threatening to swallow it up. The absence of a unifying dream, a formulated concept of a collective goal on the one hand and the medley of uncouth notions or half notions on the other hand are threatening to unravel the Revolution. The fermenting chaos of unfinished awkward plans and suggestions, in addition to a confusion of opinions and ideas, in many cases naive folkloric or esoteric religious elaborations on glaringly violent and conceptually deficient interpretation of Islam, all these combined have managed to nearly erase from the consciousness of the people the memory of freedom, democracy and the reinstatement of human rights. What all this has resulted in, among a considerable number of the armed fighters, is visions of things to come, like that of al-Qaeda affiliates, wallowing in disruption, ruthlessness and hunger for tyranny and bloodshed, rivaled and matched only by that of Assad.

The violence that unhinges

The terrible violence unleashed by the regime and the policy of the annihilation of cities, habitats and ways of life, together with the means of life, thus emptying Syria of the trappings of civilization, except in the areas controlled by the regime, in addition to the ruthless destruction of the state, in the larger sense, as well as its infrastructure, have all returned Syria in parts to the age of the hunter: marauding males representing the criminal ruthless dreaded killing machines of the regime, the shabiha affiliates, and marauding males bonding together and living by the law of the jungle under a thin veneer of a primitive reductive, patriarchal Islam, stripped of its cultural and historical perspective and disengaged from its rich heritage. Cultural civilization always recedes in times of tyranny and oppression, as has happened in Syria during the rule of the regime over the last 40 years, and it further recedes when untold and systematic methodical violence breaks the body, the spirit and the mind.

One look at the images of the 11 thousand detainees who died under torture in the regime’s prisons, in one area alone, reveals to us how deep the roots of violence that were planted in Syrian society over decades. It does this by holding a mirror to an elaborate doctrine of barbarous cruelty that gave the Syrian security forces the raison d’être, the rationale, for the destruction of life, not mercifully by a bullet but slowly, harrowingly slowly, so that what is left of able healthy bodies are but pitiful, emaciated skeletal apparitions with gaping mouths and staring eyes, stretched on the torture boards with every inch of the dehydrated starved flesh reduced to something akin to ancient mummification.

There is now a severance between culture, history, civilization and the fighting machines operating in Syria, predominantly exemplified by the regime and to a lesser extent by ISIS, al-Nusra and their Syrian counterparts, like –yet to a lesser extent– Ahrar al-Sham and factions of the Islamic Front. This severance is destroying the foundations of national unity and is wiping out all that is inductive to channelling real knowledge and cognition from the past in order to instill coherence and solidity in the Syrian experience.

Since the birth of the Revolution, we have never stopped celebrating it, but we have been more vehement in criticizing it and pointing out its shortcomings and the deplorable shortcomings and sinister intentions of those who have come from the darkness of the mind and the jungles of history to operate in its name. I have been, like many others, a staunch critic of all the official and unofficial murderers of the regime, the army, the security forces and the shabiha, but we have also been vehemently critical of those who have come from abroad to kill, pillage and destroy, pretending to support the Revolution. Never the less, my own discourse has always sprung from a cultural, humanistic and cognitive point of view. The terrible violence enacted against the people these last three years by the regime of Assad, with little resistance from the world at large, and the annihilation of the very fabric of 10,000 of civilization opened up wells of pain and anger in me that are hard to measure or define. If there is something as a cultural wrath at the destruction of culture, combined with what I would like to call humanistic wrath at the senseless destruction of all that lives, that would sum me up.

It is the regression, the stepping back into the primordial and the primitive, into the prehistoric because of the breaking of all taboos, all laws, all ethical prohibitions and imperatives that sickens my soul and the souls of millions of Syrians beyond redemption or salvation. While the land of the birth of civilization is undergoing a terrible horrific process of decivilization, the rest of the world is racing towards the new frontiers of space. The arch criminal who summoned all the forces of evil to lay waste Syria remains the one who has ushered in untold suffering into his country so that he might remain the king. All other evils sprang out of that original sin, the sin of violating the prime law, the sacredness of life and the law attendant on it: the right of life to freedom. A nation, abandoned by the world, yet full of potential, promise, vigour and latent energy, a nation wherein children make the half is made to step outside the march of civilization, to sink into annihilation, and where it survives to step into the futility, the senselessness of obsolete, anachronistic controversies.

Rogue Islamists

This brings me back to the rogue Islamists, as I prefer to call them, and theircity states. For what are they but severed parts of Syria stolen from the main in order to establish pirated centres of power wherein science fictionprincedoms, if not caliphates, are subjecting the Syrian civilians to fanatical forms of the Sharia application, smacking of bigoted interpretations and glaring manipulations. What is happening in Syria is stranger than fiction, an epic genocidal violence released by the regime which has severed the life forces of the nation, arresting its heart or leaving it in a comatose state, which gave the lurking monsters of barbarism the chance to unveil themselves and claim God and religion among their first victims. This is not restricted to the barbarians of Sunnism, wearing the mantle of al-Qaeda, but also to the barbarians of Shiism, wearing the mantles of Hizbullah and the shabiha of Assad and Iran. History is being appropriated, changed, manipulated or reinterpreted for political, regional, religious or territorial gains and ambitions.

There is another kind of occupation or colonialism not usually listed or singled out. I would like to call it religious colonization. For what are ISIS and, to a certain extent, al-Nusra Front doing in bringing foreigners to fight in Syria in the name of international Jihadism? The new settlers seem very anxious to start families by acquiring wives and raising children! In addition, in order to give them religious legitimacy, they are calling them muhajiroun (emigrants), a name given to those who chose to go into exile with the Prophet when he was banished from Mecca, while those among the Syrians who support them are given the name of Ansar (helpers), after the people of Medina who gave refuge to the Prophet. It defies logic and comprehension. It is all this jargon, all this ideological violence emanating from the dogma of reduction and the attempts at diminishing cultural and religious thought and heritage that infuriate and cause indignation, for the violence that imprisons the mind, inspiring people to commit atrocities is also lethal, whether practised by Assad’s supporters of al-Qaeda devotees.

The world is marching towards unravelling the mysteries of the universe, while al-Qaeda and affiliates are marching light years backward in the direction of the void in an attempt to cancel civilization, history, cognition and cultural heritage. If they think that we are going to allow them to destroy our civilization and the priceless treasures of Islamic thought and knowledge, its legacy of philosophy and cognition, we would like to warn them that sooner or later we shall throw them into the dustbin of history where they belong. They are but false prophets.

In Syria Islam is and has been all that is opposite to what ISIS and al-Nusra Front are preaching, not forgetting their quasi imitators in the Islamic Front. What is preposterous, presumptuous and absurd is that you come to a country where Islam has ruled as a civilization, manifesting itself in social norms and behaviour, in learning, in architecture, in art and all the other attributes of civilization, like tolerance and neighbourly co-existence, and decide to rule it by the sword, by ignorance, by death, by oppression and by barbarous methods of punishment. Others tried it before, like the Mongols and the Assadis, and failed and are failing.

The State of the Revolution now

As I am writing now, my overwhelming feeling is that the Revolution is in serious danger, which is enhanced by the grave perils Syria’s territorial integrity is subjected to by the presence of proxies, clients and foreign fighters in huge numbers on Syrian land. Syria is overrun by a killing regime and a medley of Iranians, Hezbollah soldiers, Russian mercenaries and thousands of al-Qaeda fighters, among them the armed men of ISIS and others from all over the world. It is falling now to the FSA and their supporters to fight al-Qaeda affiliates, while simultaneously having to fight Assad. You might ask:, has the regime ever seriously tried to prevent the infiltration of al-Qaeda affiliates and the foreign fighters into Syria; has the regime ever fought purposely against ISIS instead of levelling the Syrian towns and villages to the ground and annihilating the civilians with barrel bombs and Scud missiles? It would not be farfetched to say that the Syrian government is not fighting against the terrorists; it is fighting its erring citizens and the rebels fighting for freedom and liberation.

The revolution now is like a rudderless ship in the eye of the storm, threatened with extinction from the regime and most radical Islamists. This has resulted in the Revolution losing its best civil activists, its brightest young men, lawyers, human rights campaigners, citizen journalists, protest organizers and civic action planners; in short the potential leaders who might have been able to direct the revolution from within, being flesh of its flesh. Extinguished are the best: kidnapped, incarcerated, tortured to death in the most horrific forms, or just assassinated or murdered in cold blood. In addition there was a huge persecution and constant harassment of the intellectuals and writers who sided with the Revolution, forcing them to flee Syria and go into exile. With their disappearance from the arena, dead, captured or alive, they took with them the very enlightened consciousness and throbbing awareness of the Revolution. The Revolution therefore is rudderless and under attack, but what is more dangerous than the annihilation of so many is the annihilation of the mind and the spirit in consequence of the holocaust visited upon the peaceful Syrian civilians. Do you blame them if they turn to the devil or if the devil turns up to claim dominion over them, over the pitiful traumatized uprooted and brutalized remnants of the Syrian people?

Who is to assume the responsibility now? We are.

Conclusion and the Legacy of the Revolution

Revolutions are great mass movements carrying within themselves the promise to stop time for a while, then perform a jump either into the future or bend upon themselves to leap backwards and revert to a point in time where dichotomies are revealed in all their glaring disruptiveness in order to unravel them. There is no revolution that does not shake and rock the old frames of references, the systems of thought and the sensibilities that prevailed before. Revolutions generate a tornado of dynamism that will inevitably spend itself in rebirth or destruction, but where the revolution moves what it leaves in its wake is a changed landscape, altered beyond recognition. Yet in this altered landscape I would like to see, as an artist and a writer, the intellect and consciousness assert themselves. In order to protect the Revolution we have to ensure the survival of its legacy by means of the creative word and thought. What is the enduring legacy of the French Revolution but the writings of the Enlightenment? A revolution needs to keep its conscience alive for ages to come. A revolution needs to crystallize its struggle in art and literature. Even if the Syrian Revolution fails, what will keep it forever a source of courage, hope and faith for mankind is the body of thought, the legacy of consciousness, awareness and sensibility that is has engendered and will generate. The undying, noble word will be its bequest. Therefore write you who can write eloquently, who can turn insight, vision, dreams and truths into that which will remain alive in the very core of human thinking and sensibility.

The politicians have failed the Syrian Revolution because they are individuals without vision and do not possess the kind of all embracing humanistic compassionate imagination to bond with the simple, downtrodden, and trampled on common people and victims. The gap is immense between the suffering millions and those who are assuming the positions of leadership, while lacking the very attribute of leadership. The Syrian people have lost their direction and their way because they were bombed, burnt, tortured, decimated, plucked out of their land, and because their houses were smashed, their trees torched, their earth looted and their history pillaged, therefore I beseech the persons of vision and intuition, the enlightened of mind and sensibility, the gifted and creative, writers, artists and intellectuals and those who know God in love to stand by the Syrians and return their souls to them before these souls are being captured by the powers of darkness, religious despotism, and the tyranny of ideologies and sectarianism. O for the dreamers, the visionaries, for those who dwell in the kingdom of the conscience and ethics, love and hope, awareness and cognition, O for them to lead the Syrian people and return back their lost souls from where they have migrated into the limbo of horror.

The French Revolution was defeated and its dreams did not come into fruition until about one hundred years later. But it has since then stayed in the collective consciousness and heritage of mankind, in view of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, which predicted and accompanied its birth. Our Revolution might fail and the world might forget about our tragedies, suffering and deaths after a while, but if we strive to immortalize our dreams and crystallize the legacy of this revolution in literature, art and thought and create for it a body of enlightened cultural bequest to be handed down to future generations, it will live in the consciousness of the world and its heritage of conscience. In a few words, the Revolution is in need of a culture of enlightenment which will whet and fuse us all, carrying us over the abyss and closing up the black holes of our minds and souls.

Alisar Iram

Stephen Hawking on Syria

 

It matters, it matters a lot that one of the world’s greatest thinkers, a humanist at heart, is declaring what he thinks of the war in Syria and the failure of humanity to stop it. His point of view is of great importance because he is weighing his arguments against the fate of man and life on earth. Hawking is concerned about civilization and accordingly, he evaluates the Syrian war and the miscarriage of universal ethics to do something about it from this perspective.  Alisar

 

Stephen Hawking

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

Syria’s war must end

 By Stephen Hawking, Published: February 14

Stephen Hawking is the author of “A Brief History of Time” and a former professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the universe had existed forever. The reason humanity was not more developed, he believed, was that floods or other natural disasters repeatedly set civilization back to the beginning.

Today, humans are developing ever faster. Our knowledge is growing exponentially and with it, our technology. But humans still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days. Aggression has had definite advantages for survival, but when modern technology meets ancient aggression the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth is at risk.

Today in Syria we see modern technology in the form of bombs, chemicals and other weapons being used to further so-called intelligent political ends.

But it does not feel intelligent to watch as more than 100,000 people are killed or while children are targeted. It feels downright stupid, and worse, to prevent humanitarian supplies from reaching clinics where, as Save the Children will document in a forthcoming report, children are having limbs amputated for lack of basic facilities and newborn babies are dying in incubators for lack of power.What’s happening in Syria is an abomination, one that the world is watching coldly from a distance. Where is our emotional intelligence, our sense of collective justice?When I discuss intelligent life in the universe, I take this to include the human race, even though much of its behavior throughout history appears not to have been calculated to aid the survival of the species. And while it is not clear that, unlike aggression, intelligence has any long-term survival value, our very human brand of intelligence denotes an ability to reason and plan for not only our own but also our collective futures.We must work together to end this war and to protect the children of Syria. The international community has watched from the sidelines for three years as this conflict rages, engulfing all hope. As a father and grandfather, I watch the suffering of Syria’s children and must now say: No more.I often wonder what we must look like to other beings watching from deep space. As we look out at the universe, we are looking back in time, because light leaving distant objects reaches us much, much later. What does the light emitting from Earth today show? When people see our past, will we be proud of what they are shown — how we, as brothers, treat each other? How we allow our brothers to treat our children?

We now know that Aristotle was wrong: The universe has not existed forever. It began about 14 billion years ago. But he was right that great disasters represent major steps backward for civilization. The war in Syria may not represent the end of humanity, but every injustice committed is a chip in the facade of what holds us together. The universal principle of justice may not be rooted in physics but it is no less fundamental to our existence. For without it, before long, human beings will surely cease to exist.

Stephen Hawking

I commented on the direction  some of the comments in The Washington Post were taking,  the usual inhumane  jargon, by saying:

Stephen Hawking knows what he is talking about. He is talking about civilization and humanity in terms of life on earth, evolution and the terrible perils that might return man to the cave. But some debaters refuse to see that Syria is part of the whole that might place the whole in the vortex of disaster. They cling to platitudes and banalities, thus sinking the debate to the usual level of rotten, stinking,  political debate.  Alisar

Thoughts on love and the Syrian revolution

 

A Prayer

Let love be greater than pain and the terror of suffering.  let it hold pain in its arms and sing it to sleep peacefully. Let love be mightier than hate. Let love softly softly breathe the kiss of life and touch with its lips of compassion the Syrian earth, the Syrian lands and the Syrian people. Let love enfold with its glorious wings of healing the tortured fractured torn lives of the young and give them sanctuary. Let love hold the shaking starving trembling old men and women and give them the warmth of pitying homes. O, let love go deep under the rubble and debris and collect the shattered limbs and broken bodies of our people and bury them in a niche of impregnable mercy. Let love raise our devastated ruined cities, churches, mosques, monuments, houses and dwellings, let love raise them in beauty and peace. O, let love heal my soul and your souls for we have born witness to that which is more than evil, darker than sin, more accursed than hell and more terrible than eternal damnation. Let love be with us, upon us and all enveloping. Let it be Omnipotent, all-powerful. 

Love

صلاة

دع الحب يسمو على الالم وتهاويل العذاب .دع الحب يعانق الالم ويهدهده حتى يستسلم للسلام. دعوا الحب يكون اعظم من الكره.دعوا الحب يهب قبلة الحياة بوداعة وعذوبة ويلمس بشفتيه ثرى سوريا واراضي سوريا وشعب سوريا.  دع الحب يفرد اجنحة  الشفاء ويضم اليه الصغار  ويمنحهم حرما من لديه كي تلتئم جراحاتهم وتندمل اقدارهم. دع الحب يطوق بذراعيه  ارتعاشات المسنين التائهين ويهبهم دفء البيوت الحانية. اواه، دع االحب ينفذ خلال الانقاض والحطام ويجمع اليه الاجساد الممزقة والاضلاع المبتورة ويواريها في محراب من الرحمة لا يمسه فناء،  دعوا الحب يرفع مدننا المقوضة الهالكة، وجوامعنا وكنائسنا وبيوتنا ودورنا  وصروحنا وتاريخنا، دع الحب يحييها بسلام وبهاء.  وآه، دعوا الحب يرمم روحي ويرمم ارواحكم لاننا كنا الشهود على وحاملي الشهادة لما هو اعظم من الشر، واحلك من الخطيئة واشد هولا من اللعنة الابدية وافدح عذابا من جهنم. ليكن الحب معنا وعلينا وحولنا, ليكن القادر والمحيط…..اليسار 

Love

The untouchables
My heart is heavy with love. My heart is sore with love for those whose hearts were forced into the harshness of untimely burials, for they will not be visited by love anymore and will not be able to bless us with theirs. My heart is heavy with love for them, for those whom they are burying alive , for the grey children clothed in dust and and interned in concrete, for the fathers and mothers lost in the belly of greedy death, screaming for their children. My heart is sore within me, choking with smoke and dust but it is growing heavier with love, love of those whom the world has failed to love, the untouchables of Syria.

 

لنبحث عن الترياق

لقد ثرنا وثرنا،فهذه هي ثورتنا الكبرى. نعم ساسميها الثورة الكبرى لانه لم يسبق ان مات هذا العدد من السوريين وشرد كما حدث باسم هذه الثورة اوباسم من عادوها او شوهوها. كانت ثورة الضمير والروح والعقل والاخلاق كما كانت ثورة الفقير والمحروم والمخنوق مكانا ومساحة واملا، كما كانت ثورة المدفون في الذاكرة والنفوس الجاهلة والمريضة والمشوهة, كما كانت ثورة العماء الكامن والتطرف المتحفز, كما كانت ثورة النبل و الجمال والسمو على القبح والوطاوة والذل واالانحلال وعماء العقل. اتركوا الحكم للتاريخ اما الان فدعونا ندفع الموت عن شعبنا، دعونا نثور علي الموت. دعونا نثور على الحقد والكره والسموم وشياطين العقل والروح. علينا ان نختار بين الموت والحياة. لا يستطيع ان يحيا ويستمر من يحمل السم في عروقه ومن ينفث قلبه الثعابين. لقد سمموا الروح منا بالظلم والتعذيب والتدمير فدعونا نبحث عن الترياق، لتكن لكل منا ثورته ورحلته الخاصة للبحث عن الترياق المضاد للسموم وللبحث ايضا عن اكسير الحياة.

I keep feeling there is something we are not doing, thoughts we are not thinking, feelings we are not exploring. We have been destined to witness the death of so many. We have been cursed or blessed to gather the consciousness of those who have experienced untold violence or suffered slowly, awfully slowly. On our shoulders and souls lies a burden rarely laid upon other people. We must ask ourselves day and night how we can best serve. Let us deserve the privilege of our compassion, the gift of our love. Let us not forget the memory of light and the laughter of happy children and the beauty of bodies not torn by starvation or torture. Let us bear witness and hold on to them, the dead, the dying and the living until we can somehow defeat the shadows and shatter the heart of darkness with light.

 ثورة العودة الى الانسان
في بداية طريق الالام وعلى طريق الالام وعند نهاية طريق الالام تعلمت انه لا وجود للطوائف والملل والمذاهب والطرق وان الوجود الوحيد هو للانسان, تعلمت وعرفت ودخل في حدسي وضميري ووجداني وبصيرتي وانار قلبي الواعي وعقلي المغرفي ان البحث الحقيقي هو البحث عن الانسان, وان هذه الثورة كما اراها هي ثورة العود الى الانسان وثورة الانسانية كي تستعيد الاتسان.

At the start of the road of suffering and along the road of suffering and at the end of the road of suffering, I have learnt that sects, creeds, beliefs, ideologies, ethnic, religious and national divides do not really exist because humanity alone exists. I have learnt, and realized; it has dawned on me and illuminated my insight, my consciousness, my intuition and my perceptiveness and discerning heart mind that the true quest is the quest for our humanity, the human in us, that this Revolution as I see it is the rebellion of mankind in order to retrieve their humanity.

© Alisar Iram

The library of the Great Omayyad Mosque in Aleppo, the Waqfiyya library goes up in flames

alisariram

Waqfiyya

I am going to update this posting then reblog it in view of fresh material I was able to collect on the Waqfiyya library before it was set to fire. My old post is immediately below the added material.

The information and images below are  derived from a Facebook page entitled Aleppo Archaeology. I have translated some relevant details from the article in Arabic below which they published on the  Waqfiyya Library.

Aleppo Archaeology 

Waqfiyya before burning

تجمع المكتبة الوقفية في حلب التي تأسست عام 1929 في مقر المدرسة الشرفية بالقرب من الجامع الأموي الكبير في المدينة القديمة المخطوطات والكتب المحفوظة في مكتبات المدارس والمساجد القديمة في حلب كما تؤدي خدمات عديدة للباحثين المتخصصين ويذكر اسمها في فهارس المخطوطات العالمية ويزورها كبار المستشرقين لنفاسة محتوياتها. 

وأغلقت المكتبة لسنوات طويلة ثم تقرر إعادة افتتاحها خلال احتفالية حلب عاصمة للثقافة الإسلامية بعد أعمال الترميم والصيانة التي أجريت للمسجد الأموي الكبير حيث…

View original post 997 more words

Manual in images: How to destroy your cities and annihilate your people by Bashar Al Assad

While Geneva 2 was in progress and Muallem lecturing the world about terrorism, Assad’d army launched some of its most horrific attacks on the Syrian civilians in Aleppo and Daraya (Greater Damascus). Barrel bombs, with unknown varieties of explosives but including T.N.T., were dropped on cities, not sparing mosques, churches or landmarks. The resulting destruction of stone and man is so horrendous and monstrous as to defy the imagination. The trail of untold suffering and destruction left behind, drove me to imagine the existence of such a manual as I mentioned in the title.  It is a methodical destruction, the one launched by Bashar, calculated, premeditated then  executed on an industrial mass scale with the kind of thoroughness that beggars description.

The manual

How to use barrel bombs and others effectively

Note that barrel bombs ,with their inventive  mixture of explosives, create pretty artistic effects when dropped on people and buildings. Anybody can produce death but to produce polychrome death is special.

Daraya: the art of bombing with barrel explosives

 

How to dig up children and others in the aftermaths of the very effective barrel bombs. You can see for yourself how effective they are

After the barrels

How to extract children from under the debris according to the manual

…………………..

Digging people and young children out with the bare hands

The barrel bombs are very thorough

……..

Cities and houses get destroyed , so what ? This is the purpose of the exercise. Annihilate as much and as many as you can. They are all terrorists. Do not spare the children because they will grow up and become terrorists.

There are people under

The barrel survives

The young and the old are in the way

……

Starvation takes longer but it is very effective

Yarmouk Camp

Mercilessly, reduce people to waiting for their daily bread. Below, Yarmouk Camp

Credits:

All images were posted by activists and citizen journalists to

Facebook.

Some images  were taken after earlier bombings.

©Alisar Iram

Cosmic Dance: Dervishes whirl in space

Posted on February 2, 2014by alisariram

I think whoever visits my blog will be quite bewildered because of the intersection between images of loveliness and images of horror, images of the flight of the soul into realms of beauty and peace and images of its descent into hell. I have split in two since the Revolution started: the one is caught up in the relentlessly unfolding tragedy of the Syrian people, living their untold suffering and the unspeakable violence committed against them, while the other desperately and indefatigably attempts to cling to images of of joy, invoking them, remembering and beseeching them not to forsake her  while she  dwells in the valley of shadows and death. These images are the anecdote my soul seeks and has laboured to create in order to be given the courage to yet sink deeper in the abyss of suffering  while retaining my sanity. My soul is made up of the flimsiness of dreams, emanations of fragile and beautiful things, while intimations of the ineffable ushers it into the unknown. These are images I have shored against my ruin.

Like many, I am fascinated by the Sufi teachings, and as an artist, by the whirling dervishes. The dance in general is one of my archetypal , arcane images in both my poetry and my art. It represents life stepping into rhythm and intoning the melodies of creation. The dance is the universe revolving upon itself in an eternal big bang of light, gasses, explosions and whirlpools of cascading stars. To me, all is engaged in the dance, life, death, birth and rebirth, joy and pain. The dance emerges out of the stillness of love and returns to the stillness of love and in between there is the beating heart of the universe weaving the songs of the immeasurable, the unutterable and the fathomless. The dervishes, as they wheel and revolve, according to interpretations, imitate the dance of the spheres round the supreme sphere representing the Throne. With one hand extended to heaven and the other hand extended to earth, the dervish summons the sanctity and beatitude  of the creator to bless the earth.  I am the Lord of the Dance, said He.

Dance with me my friends for I wish to be that lost melody, that missing splendor, that ineffable fleeting essence. Dance with me for my heart is breaking.

When I painted this picture,  I decided to put the dance of the dervishes where it belongd, amongst the stars.

Cosmic Dance, gauche and water colors on paper by ©Alisar Iram

WHERE DID We DANCE?

Where did we dance the dance of dances?

Where did I dance wrapped in a cloud of star dust,                                     

The sun on my right, the moon on my left,

Mercury imparting visions of forms perfected,                                    

Mars yielding the toned clamour of the clash of swords,

Jupiter communing omniscience, Saturn omnipotence?

Where did I dance rhythmically revolving with the revolving spheres

 My eyes two galaxies, my hair threading the Milky Way,                                             

With Venus, a crown, and the Pleiades, a circlet adorning the brow?

Where did I dance seeking the sphere of spheres

Within without, all embracing, all-encompassing,

The fountainhead, the matrix, the essence of all music?

And yet I danced, I danced with my right hand caressing the stars

My left hand touching to the earth, feeling the tree trunks,                                        

Harvesting the myriad hews of flowers?

Tell me in what lost garden did I fall into step

With the majestic foot-falls of the cosmic dancers

Treading lightly, vibrantly upon the floors of the universe,

Unseen, yet ten thousand times seen, unheard, yet eternally heard,

Unfelt, yet penetrating the marrow, reddening the blood, stringing the sinews  

Where did I dance, my beloved rising to meet me

Astride monumental shafts of cascading light,

Amidst the whirlpools of the cosmic wilds

And waste upon waste of star-studded universal meadows,

With meteorites and asteroids sliding off his hands

As his fingers plucked his strings, then paused, to pluck them again?

Where did we dance, in what forgotten age

In which lost kingdom, in which hidden Eden, the moment

The music died, the moment the light went out

Irrevocably lost because irretrievable

Yet only retrieved beyond this life, beyond this time, 

Beyond this our city of the world?

Cosmic Dance 2. Gauche and water colours on paper by ©Alisar Iram

©Alisar Iram

 

Poems by the poet

What is pulling me to poetry more and more as the Syrian trsgedy continues to spiral towards the ultimate, is that poetry invents it own language and speaks with a logic that defies logic in its attempt to confront pain with vision and reality with insight, thus shifting reality to a plane of existence where healing is possible and where the future creates its own imperatives and likelihoods.

When the world fall apart

The Poet

When the world falls apart

When beauty is undone

When love dies

When all feelings are extinguished

When the planet collapses upon itself

When time is shattered and is lost

When fear is upon me

And my soul fragments

When history is expired

And the private and the public are dissolved,

The poet stands atop the ruins of the world

And plucks his kithara

Then he sings

Then he chants

The song of life.

The poet and Ruins of the world

 

الشاعر

                                                                      عندما ينهار العالم                                                                   

عندما يداس البهاء

عندما يموت الحب

عندما يسحق الوجدان

عندما تقف الدنيا هالعة فوق ركامها

عندما ينكسر الزمان ويضيع

عندما ياخذني الروع

وتتفتت روحي

عندما يفنى التاريخ العام والخاص

يركع الشاعر فوق الاطلال

ويشد اوتار قيثارته

ثم يغني ودموعه تضمخ الارض

ثم يغني

ثم ينشد

ثم ينشد انشودة الحياة

 

The poet and the owls

The poet stood and sang to the stars:
“It all started with poetry
And it shall end with poetry
As befits a poet.”
The poet sang and sang
The poet sang to the sea
And to the owls that
Stood in the pines gazing
Gazing with jewelled eyes.
“I did it, the poet cried. I did it
I returned to Syria the wanderer
For I am love the magician
I move my wand of talismans
And the one that was lost is found
The one with the gift of words is saved.
Then the poet bent his head sorrowfully
And walked into the lonely night,
Lonely are those who love
Lonely are those who carry
The wand that conjures life
For those who are laden with gifts
Are destined to be rent
From heart to soul.
Mankind cannot bear too much reality.

©Alisar Iram

 

Some diverse thoughts and reflections inspired by the Syrian Revolution

Sensibilities

The only thing that brute force and armed tyranny cannot defeat is the intellect and the soul. Even if they kill and destroy many of us the word will live, the thought will live, the creative energy of the Revolution will live. How can they defeat the light of the mind and the might of the soul? We are a multitude. Our numbers are greater than they will ever count. And we shall multiply and outlive the darkness. And there will be freedom. And there will be justice and the rule of the law will dominate. January 8

 Beware of image making and the image makers

The problem with the image makers on the social media is that they end by making themselves and the people whom they are promoting slaves to the image. Image makers have only two colours, black and white, at their disposal and with this limited palette they try to draw a portrait for life. Such images are misleading to all specially to the people whose images are distributed on the social media. Life is much richer, much deeper, much more glorious, a lot more heart rending and tragic, a lot more brimming with multiplicity and complexity than in their dull limited uniform images. The process of image making does not tell the whole truth, manipulates the truth and confines itself to the selective. The worst that can happen is that the image becomes the prison within which the soul of the person with the made image is imprisoned.  7 Jan.

At the end of the road

What we find at the end of the road is ourselves and all that makes this self, the earth that bore us and the dreams that have sustained us and all those who have cherished us. 
All people whoever they are will be what they make of themselves. There is nothing static in being human: either walk forward and evolve or stagnate. The Arabs came to the verge of extinction many times, including the Syrians when they believed their prophets of doom belittling them and telling them they were failures, thus parodying the theories of a hostile and suspicious world. Alisar Iram 
At the end of the road the Syrians will find themselves and perhaps discover them for the first time

Abolish all pain

I went to see 12 years of slavery and I wish I hadn’t. It was too evocative, too reminiscent of the enslavement of a whole nation. Simply, it became unbearable to me to watch the film because every lash on the bare flesh reminded me of thousands, millions of lashes on the bodies and minds of the Syrians. It is the ruthless cruelty of man to man. it took the abolitionists years and indefatigable efforts to eventually prevail and convince countries to put an end to slavery. I t made me reflect and compare for what is the Syrian revolution but an abolitionist movement in many of its aspects. There are many forms to enslavement but withholding freedom for any reason is the main attribute of slavery.

There was pain throughout the movie as bodies and souls were broken in the name of property and ownership. Chaining human beings, incarcerating them then breaking them, demolishing all their human rights, even the most basic of them, is a momentous act because it takes away their humanity from them and reduces them to animals except that animals do not have emotional and mental awareness, I say it reluctantly. 28 Jan.

-Nobody has the right to stretch human beings beyond their endurance, inflicting terrible pain. Pain makes people lose their souls so that they become irresponsible for their actions. Stretching people on wheels of fire, physically, mentally or emotionally is to unleash with the physical or emotional lashes that which our efforts cannot control or stop. 28 Jan

-We cannot hide, erase from our memories, silence, dim or change the essence of beautiful and splendid truths. They will manifest themselves whether we want or not in all the great things we do, in all the meaningful things we say, in all the remarkable things we write. 28 Jan

Injustice

Feeling subjected to injustice consumes  those who feel it, shredding their minds and souls. It consumes one’s courage, faith and hope. Most of all it destroys that innocent thing that dwells in light and beauty in us for innocence is the child in us, the freshness of our beings. We have a nation consumed by injustice, a nation which has lost its innocence because pain unravels the souls. How easy for the personal to blend with impersonal, the public with the private. So that when we cry we do not know whether we are crying for ourselves or for all those others whom injustice has withered into shadows. I cry for them; they cry for me. I do not whose tears it is. 28 Jan

Iconoclasm (the breaking down of icons)

There will be no freedom in the Arab world as long as clinging to the worship of the one leader, the immortal leader, the forever leader, the infallible leader lives in the Arab psyche. It is because our people are undergoing a second infancy of the spirit and the intellect in their masses and as individuals no matter how sophisticated they are that they put all faith, hope and will in the figure of the worshiped figure. Adulation and idealization overcome reason and the faculty of judgement. Does the idea of the one God inspire the tendency hunger for the one leader? Perhaps the Arab Spring even in its possible failure will help them to come out of age, to reach a kind of maturity they have never known before, social, political and intellectual. The road to freedom begins with iconoclasm, even on the personal private level. When we get rid of our idols, health becomes a feature of our beings. the public and the private. No human being can achieve all perfection, no human being can become the universal all enlightened man. We must drill this into our consciousness ans conscienceless so as not to revert to the worship of idols, surrendering our will, self possession and freedom.. 29 Jan.

The Opposites

With so much death and disregard to life, I have become more concerned about the inviolate right to life; with so much lying clogging the roads to clarity and reason; I have become more concerned about the truth and the nature of truth; with so much horror ant the rule of the terrible I have become more concerned about the joyous and the uplifting and with so much cruelty I have become more concerned about mercy, grace and compassion. 29 Jaqn.

Truths

-We cannot hide, erase from our memories, silence, dim or change the essence of beautiful and splendid truths. They will manifest themselves whether we want or not in all the great things we do, in all the meaningful things we say, in all the remarkable things we write

 -The infantile in us sometimes reveals itself in a deplorable loyalty to that which chains us emotionally and confines us to immaturity

Men and Women

I have seen so much cruelty between men and women. Cruelty terrifies me. Some gentle, good, ethical people are capable of so much cruelty in relations with the opposite sex, so that ethics are waived aside and compassion is completely disregarded. It is a strange world and we, the human spices, are still light years away from the perfection of being. We are so uncouth, so unfinished.  28 Jan

 

This is the war of extremes

 This is the war of extremes, extreme savagery and extreme compassion; extreme sacrilege and extreme sanctity; extreme breach of human ethics and extreme refinement of the moral imperatives; extreme overflow of love and extreme eruptions of hatred. It is as if the world is standing on the intersection of heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. Innocence is desecrated yet a yearning to restore innocence is informing the souls with visions of indestructible profundity. As death stalks and predominates, life fights back with the indestructible strength of the seed that must sprout, must push its roots deep into the good earth and rise up to to gleam in the sun. 11 Jan.

Metamorphosis

All we do as a spontaneous, instinctive, insightful aesthetic, ethical and sincere expression of ourselves and our love does not demean us, but ennoble us. How can overflowing pure love demean us? How can generosity of the spirit demean us? How can giving demean us? How can the flowering of our being into expressions of beauty demean us? Whether the others can appreciate, treasure, reciprocate, value or fully understand us is not important or that important. Somewhere in the consciousness of humanity that which is of the essence of beauty and love will blossom into never fading creative energy.  8 Jan

The time is now

Now is the time to give Syria and the Revolution all we have got. Now is the tome to rally around our dreams, our aspirations and our allegiance to freedom and democracy. It is the time of make or break, the point of no return. Let us grow larger than ourselves, brighter than ourselves, nobler than ourselves. let us absorb more, contain more and understand more. Let us open our minds wide to differences and variations in religion, beliefs, creative thinking, nation building endeavors and deep assessments, Let us celebrate the miracles of love and the gifts of compassion. The time is now to embrace Syria , to love ourselves and love the other. We have to deserve the sacrifices of the dead, the uprooted, the kidnapped, the starving and the people walking in the darkness of imprisonment and torture. The time is now.  7 Jan

On time

-Do you have the same feelings that somehow time has acquired a different structure and it is running at a strange speed, that it has somehow acquired an enigmatic new dimension, a profound added depth and intensity? What I have written a week ago seems to me to have been written ages ago, as if somebody else wrote them so that what I am reading is what another self in another time wrote.   Perhaps this happens to people in times of great upheavals when time becomes fluid and intersects, bringing the  past into the present into the future, while the present becomes the past. My only hope is that this disassociation in time will bring a jump into a future beyond the normal future, not a regression into a past beyond the past.    7 January

–What poets and writers do and others might not be able to do is to arrest time and order it to stillness so that they might recollect and record in an emanation of crystal clear consciousness that which is undying and overwhelming in human experience. Life drags us into the common and the ephemeral, but what we save from life and from ourselves is the very essence and secret of things. That is why art, literature, poetry and music are the only things that remain of us and are passed down to posterity because they have the power to resurrect us, or more correctly, resurrect moments of eternity. that we have stolen from the ephemeral and the vanishing.  3o Jan.

الزمن المفقود هو الزمن الذي نخشى استرجاعه لاننا نخاف اذ تذكرناه ان نتذكر اللحظة التي فقدنا فيها ارواحنا

-Time lost is the time we are afraid to recall because we fear that in remembering it, we might remember the moment we have lost our souls.        30 Jan.

The Trojans

In the Iliad, it is Hector, Priam and Cassandra and  Andromache who emerge as the real heroes. They are the stuff of tragedy and immortality. Starting from Euripides, the Trojans have always been part of the conscience of humanity.  6 Jan.

Freedom

 

Freedom, bless us with your presence once more
Now that the people have found their courage and dignity once more , now that they have remembered that the first and the last cry is freedom, we must press ahead with fighting the one enemy we rose against whatever name he chooses. Our enemy is tyranny, our enemy is injustice, our enemy is the absence of the same law for all, our enemy is crime and murder, our enemy is the disregard to human rights, our enemy is the absence of democracy and the civil rights in deicing the future of the country, our enemy is ignorance, intolerance, reduction and exclusion in the name of the state or religion, our enemy is silencing the voices of conscience, the mind, our humanity and our compassion. No military or ideological tyranny should ever be tolerated on Syrian land ever again.   5 January

What the Syrian Revolution is doing  to me?

The Revolution created an explosion in my being, an eruption and an earthquake followed by a tidal wave. My landscape has changed forever. Fresh mountains rose and soared embracing the skies; lakes sprang into being stretching wide and deep until they became unfathomable. A sea came into my being where there was none before. Most of all love flooded my continent and I bent in humility while its sacred light baptized me in compassion, patience and endurance. As I expanded and expanded, covering this new landscape, I broke all remits, boundaries, barriers and limitations. My agony mounted reaching out to the impossible, quickly waiving aside my human limitations as the revolution multiplied its demands on me then multiplied them again. I started to do things I have never done before, I started to feel feelings I have never felt before. New skills came to me, new aesthetics overwhelmed me, cognition flooded my consciousness and opened up my subconscious. Deeper ethics governed me; I became wiser, more knowledgeable and more adept at overstepping my physical weaknesses.Does the world know or care to know what the Syrian revolution is doing the the Syrian man and woman?  Jan 4

Where is the cry for freedom?

Is this what the world wants? Turn the Syrians into a nation of beggars, into a nation of starving children and the pitiful old, into lines of people waiting in the freezing cold and the scorching heat for their daily bread, into dwellers of tents and refugee camps in no man’s land. Is this what the world wants? Turn the Syrian children into urchins clad in rags, clothed in dirt, wandering ignorant, homeless, orphaned, bereft, lost? Is all that preferable to helping them stay at home, assist in the creation of a civic democratic state for them, guard them from the warlords and the hyenas of the world, stay between the super powers and their political and regional spoils.
Ultimately this is an ethical issue; our failure to develop a fairer global system to help the weaker and smaller nations and support their quest for freedom against tyranny. It means that as humans we have learnt nothing or very little from epochs of wars and Armageddons. Syria has been devoured by every major power and every war lord and every thief on this earth.Where is the pure original cry for freedom in all this din and calmour, in all this butchery and annihilation? January 2

-Negotiating with the regime is like negotiating with the Antichrist.

-There is a kind of a sick fascination with the poisonous, the sinister, the evil, the immoral in the Western media. This perhaps can explain the fascination with Bashar. Today I heard on TV that it is impossible for the poor barelegged king of Syria to know the truth because he is surrounded by a circle of flattering “courtiers” who make it impossible for the poor guy to catch a glimpse of reality… Bly me !! 25 Jan

-They like their Jack the Ripper in Western media !!!

 –The hypocrisy of the Western media !!!!!!! Parading the Syrian delegation as if they were in a circus and listening patiently to their drivel? If officials would speak like this in the West, their people will lynch them (figuratively speaking). Why is it alright for murderers of their people to preach from the highest Western media pulpits to an apathetic global audience who mostly do not even know where Syria is? I call this brainwashing by consent. What a farce!!! The press should be kept out of the negotiations. Report results but not run out a contest of favorites or Bug Brother episodes. 25 Jan

-It has always been our question which we have repeating again and again, why is the regime not fighting terrorism, not fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS and instead annihilating the civilians, their cities and towns? WE do hope that the Opposition delegation will continue to raise this question in the negotiations. Is this not a meeting point between the two delegations? Kicking Qaeda affiliates out of Syria?

–Morality

The Arab individual, Muslim or not, is suffering to the schizophrenic level of claustrophobia: intellectual, religious, emotional, social and political. These factors alone ask for a revolution. Even as I child, I was able to perceive that the morality of the people around me was lacking. It does not need great intelligence to realize that we are in trouble morally, cognitively and religiously. If one relies on prohibitions and stern religious injunctions alone, one will never mature into a moral being. Religion when practiced by autocrats cancels the mind and the ability to take independent moral decisions; We acquire independent coherent morality by practicing it in freedom, by exercising free ethical will. Anything that comes from without only lacks truth and continuity. March

–Syrian Intellectuals

There are many justified complaints about the silence and lack of participation from some or many grey Syrian intellectuals. In this case, we have to forget about them and muster our resources to fill in any shortages. One of us should work as one hundred while we dedicate ourselves to writing, research, active engagement and unrelenting creative participation. It can be done, I know it can. Because some of us are doing just that. This is the time of miracles, the time of making the impossible possible.    March 3, 2014

©Alisar Iram 

Where to Syria of the Sorrows?

( I consider the following article as one of my most important articles on the Syrian Revolution)

I started this article 2 weeks ago, before the convening of Geneva 2 in Switzerland on the 22^nd of January. This fact does not affect much of what I am writing, or have written, about the state of the revolution because it is looking that the Conference is going to be a lengthy process, so that the more we strive to help the Syrian revolution on every level, the more we attempt to unravel the mistakes committed in its name with the aim of trying to correct them, the better it will bode for the future of Syria.

 Mars the bringer of war

Most of what is being written about the Syrian Revolution at this stage is descriptive and diagnostic. In fact the patient is on the verge of extinction because of too much meticulous attention to the sickness and the disease with few attempts at witting prescriptions and recommending treatments to start controlling the illness or healing the ailments. It is not going to work. The politicians in the different factions of the Opposition, apart from squabbling and tearing at each other, keep issuing the most confused and confusing of platitudes. The Intellectuals and writers are caught in the vortex of ineffectiveness and the inability to connect with the suffering dispersed civilians or the fighters on the ground who, in the absence of a vision of the Syria to be, are creating their own nightmares and helping to destroy that part of Syria which Assad has not destroyed yet. Most deplorably is that the civic activists who at the beginning of the Revolution were its beating heart, its very arteries, they who have provided the middle link between the cultural, the educational, the intellectual and the military aspects of the Revolution, are now either in their graves, assassinated or killed, or incarcerated under torture, not to mention kidnapped, or forced to flee into exile.

 Lastly, the huge bulk of the fighters now, operating either in the name of the Revolution with the primary aim of defeating Assad, or in the name of an anarchy released and unbound are :

( 1) Fighters, who essentially owe their allegiance to their country Syria, but who are creating their own scriptures for the Revolution by appropriating willingly or unwillingly most of that which is fanatical and fractured  in politicized Islam and International Jihadism while helping themselves to the banal and hackneyed in religious thought. I might be very harsh in my judgement, but the brigades they belong too are quasi directionless, if not militarily then, ideologically. They constitute the Syrian version of the Islamits. Some people put the Nusra Front amongst them as an example of the more disciplined, more indoctrinated and more purposeful.  They have what is called Takfiris, Salafis in their ranks, yet in their ranks also congregate some well meaning, illiterate or semi literate men who do not have the background or the education to differentiate between the genuine and the contrived and who are in dire need of leadership. Mostly simple folk, their faith is a simple faith in God which is bound to be left open to indoctrination, exploitation and corruption.

(2) Fighters who are mostly foreigners, predominantly Qaeda affiliates, who have come mainly to dictate their future to the Syrians by implementing their own  highly suspect political agendas which have failed elsewhere. They have undisguised, blatant territorial ambitions.

(3) Fighters (represented on the whole by the FSA) who are still mostly defectors from the Syrian arm, or armed civilians driven to carry arms because they were forced to do so in order to preserve their lives and those of their relatives, and who are presently being attacked and battered by the regime and the Qaeda alike for the lack of effective unified leadership or military equipment. Many of the soldiers of the FSA are poor, unlike the armed men of the Qaeda affiliates, specially ISIS, who are well funded, in addition to having perfected the methods of extortion, embezzlement and unlawful confiscation of Syrian public funds and resources, like the oilfields and their revenue in northern eastern Syria. The FSA, whose soldiers  are loyal to Syria and their local communities, the army which might have defended the territorial integrity of Syria better is not favoured by the West and the US for reasons that might seem short-sighted, displaying poor judgement and deplorably lacking in sound strategy.

 If you want my honest opinion, my answer would be that the situation on the ground, as it stands now, is a mess.

What worry me most are the black holes that have opened around the Revolution everywhere, threatening to swallow it up. The absence of a unifying dream, a formulated concept of a collective goal on the one hand and the medley of uncouth notions or half notions on the other hand are threatening to unravel the revolution. The fermenting chaos of unfinished awkward plans and suggestions, in addition to a confusion of opinions and ideas, in many cases naive folkloric or esoteric religious elaborations on glaringly violent and conceptually deficient  interpretation of Islam, all these combined have managed to nearly erase from the consciousness of the people the memory of freedom, democracy and the reinstatement of human Rights. What all this has resulted in, among a considerable number of the armed fighters,  is visions of things to come, like that of Al Qaeda affiliates, wallowing in disruption, ruthlessness and hunger for tyranny and bloodshed, rivalled and matched only by that of Assad.

 The violence that unhinges

The terrible violence unleashed by the regime and the policy of the annihilation of cities, habitats and  ways of life, together with the means of life, thus emptying Syria of the trappings of civilization, except in the areas controlled by the regime, in addition to the ruthless destruction of the state, in the larger sense, and its infrastructure have returned Syria in parts to the age of the hunter: marauding males representing the criminal ruthless dreaded killing machines of the regime , the Shabiha affiliates, and marauding males bonding together and living by the law of the jungle under a thin veneer of a primitive reductive, patriarchal Islam, stripped of its cultural and historical perspective and disengaged from its rich heritage. Cultural civilization always recedes in times of tyranny and oppression, as has happened in Syria during the rule of the regime over the last 40 years, and it further recedes when untold, systematic methodical violence breaks the, body, the  spirit and the mind.

 One look at the images of the 11 thousand detainees who died under torture in the regime’s prisons, in one area alone, reveals to us how deep the roots of violence that were planted in Syrian society over decades are dug in. It does this by holding a mirror to an elaborate doctrine of barbarous cruelty that gave the Syrian security forces the raison d’être , the rationale, for the destruction of life, not mercifully by a bullet but slowly, harrowingly slowly, so that  what is left of able healthy bodies are but pitiful, emaciated skeletal apparitions with gaping mouths and staring eyes, stretched on the torture boards with every inch of the dehydrated starved flesh reduced to something akin to ancient mummification.*

I posted to my blog:

We thought it was bad, terribly bad, nightmarishly bad, absolutely unequivocally bad, but not this bad, O God, no, not this bad….I think we should all be treated for shock. I close my eyes and I see nothing but pitiful emaciated skeletons crying: Eli, Eli, why have you forsaken me? 

 There is now a severance between culture, history, civilization and the fighting machines operating in Syria, predominantly exemplified by the regime and to a lesser extent by ISIS, Nusra and their Syrian counterparts, like Ahrar Al Sham and factions of the Islamic Front. This severance is destroying the foundations of national unity and is wiping out all that is inductive to channelling real knowledge and cognition from the past in order to instil coherence and solidity in the Syrian experience.

 Since the birth of the Revolution, we have never stopped celebrating it, but we have been more vehement in criticizing it and pointing out its shortcomings and the deplorable shortcomings and sinister intentions of those who have come from the darkness of the mind and the jungles of history to operate in its name. I have been, like many others, a staunch critic of all the official and unofficial murderers of the regime, the army, the security forces and the Shabiha, but we have also been vehemently critical of  those who have come from abroad to kill , pillage and destroy , pretending to support the Revolution. Never the less, my own discourse has always sprung from a cultural, humanistic and cognitive point of view. The terrible violence enacted against the people these last three years by the regime of Assad, with little resistance from the world at large, and the annihilation of the very fabric of 10000 of civilization opened up wells of pain and anger in me that are hard to measure or define. If there is something as a cultural wrath at the destruction of culture, combined with what I would like to call humanistic wrath at the senseless destruction of all that lives, that would some me up.

 It is the regression, the stepping back into the primordial and the primitive, into the prehistoric because of the breaking of all taboos, all laws, all ethical prohibitions and imperatives that sickens my soul and the souls of millions of Syrians beyond redemption or salvation. While the land of the birth of civilization is undergoing a terrible horrific process of decivilization, the rest of the world is racing towards the new frontiers of space. The arch criminal who summoned all the forces of evil to lay waste Syria remains the one who has ushered in untold suffering unto his country so that he might remain king. All other evils sprang out of that original sin, the sin of violating the prime law, the sacredness of life and the law attendant on it: the right of life to freedom.  A nation, abandoned by the world,  yet full of potential, promise, vigour and latent energy, a nation wherein children make the  half is made to step outside the march of civilization, to sink into annihilation, and where it survives to step into the futility, the senselessness of obsolete, anachronistic controversies.

 Rogue Islamists

This brings me back to the rogue Islamists, as I prefer to call them, and their city states. For what are they but severed parts of Syria stolen from the main in order to establish pirated centres of power wherein science fiction princedoms, if not caliphates, are subjecting the Syrian civilians to fanatical forms of the Shariaa application, smacking of bigoted interpretations and glaring manipulations. What is happening in Syria is stranger than fiction, an epic genocidal violence released by the regime which has severed the life forces of the nation, arresting its heart or leaving it in a comatose state, which gave the lurking monsters of barbarism the chance to unveil themselves and claim God and religion among their first victims. This is not restricted to the barbarians of Sunnism , wearing the mantle of Qaeda, but also to the barbarians of Shiism, wearing the mantles of Hizbullah and the shabiha of Assad and Iran. History is being appropriated, changed, manipulated or reinterpreted for political, regional, religious or territorial gains and ambitions.

 There is another kind of occupation or colonialism not usually listed or singled out. I would like to call it religious colonization. For what are ISIS and, to a certain extent the Nusra Front, doing but bringing foreigners to fight in Syria in the name of International Jihadism?  The new settlers seem very anxious to start families by acquiring wives and raising children ? In addition, in order to give them religious legitimacy, they are calling them muhajiroun (emigrants), a name given to those who chose to go into exile with the Prophet when he was banished from Mecca, while those among the Syrians who support them are given the name of Ansar (supporters) after the people of Medina who gave refuge to the Prophet. It defies logic and comprehension. It is all this jargon, all this ideological violence emanating from the dogma of reduction and the attempts at diminishing cultural and religious thought and heritage that infuriate and causes indignation, for the violence that imprisons the mind, inspiring people to commit atrocities is also lethal, whether practised by Assad’s supporters of the Qaeda devotees.

 I wrote: The world is marching towards unravelling the mysteries of the universe, while the Qaeda and affiliates are marching light years backward in the direction of the void in an attempt to cancel civilization, history, cognition and cultural heritage. If they think that we are going to allow them  to destroy our civilization and the priceless treasures of Islamic thought and knowledge, its legacy of philosophy and cognition, we would like to warn them that sooner or later, we shall throw them into the dustbin of history where they belong. They are the false prophets.

 On Facebook, I commented:

In Syria Islam is and has been all that is opposite to what ISIS and the Nusra Front are preaching , not forgetting their imitators in the Islamic Front. What is preposterous, presumptuous and absurd is that you come to a country where Islam has ruled as a civilization, manifesting itself in social norms and behaviour, in learning, in architecture, in art and all the other attributes of civilization like tolerance and neighbourly co-existence and decide to rule it by the sword by ignorance by death by oppression and barbarous methods of punishment . Others tried it before, like the Mongols and the Assadis, and failed.

 The State of the Revolution now

As I am writing now, my overwhelming feeling is that the Revolution is in serious danger, which is enhanced by the grave perils Syria’s territorial integrity is subjected to by the presence of proxies, clients and foreign fighters in huge numbers on Syrian land. Syria is overrun  by a killing regime and a medley of Iranians, Hezbollah soldiers, Russian mercenaries and thousands of Qaeda fighters, among them the armed men of ISIS, Da’ish and others from all over the world. It is falling now to the FSA and their supporters to fight the Qaeda affiliates, while simultaneously having to fight Assad. You might ask: has the regime ever seriously tried to prevent the infiltration of the Qaeda affiliates and the foreign fighters into Syria; has the regime ever fought purposely against Da’ish and ISIS instead of levelling the Syrian towns and villages to the ground and annihilating the civilians with barrel bombs and Scud missiles? It would not be far fetched to say that the Syrian government is not fighting against the terrorists; it is fighting its erring citizens.

 The revolution now is like a rudderless ship in the eye of the storm, threatened with extinction from the regime and the radical Islamists. This has resulted in the Revolution losing its best civil activists, its brightest young men, lawyers, human rights campaigners, citizen journalists, protest organizers and civic action planners; in short the potential leaders who might have been able to direct the revolution from within, being flesh of its flesh. Extinguished are the best: kidnapped, incarcerated, tortured to death in the most horrific forms, or just assassinated or murdered in cold blood. In addition the persecution and constant harassment of the intellectuals and writers who sided with the Revolution, forced them to flee Syria and go into exile. With their disappearance from the arena, dead, captured or alive, they took with them the very enlightened consciousness and throbbing awareness of the revolution. The Revolution therefore is rudderless and under attack, but what is more dangerous than the annihilation of so many is the annihilation of the mind and the spirit in consequence of the holocaust visited upon the peaceful Syrian civilians. Do you blame them if they turn to the devil or if the devil turns up to claim dominion over them, over the pitiful traumatized uprooted and brutalized remnants of the Syrian people?

 Who is to assume the responsibility now? We are.

 Conclusion and the Legacy of the Revolution

Revolutions are great mass movements carrying within themselves the promise to stop time for a while then perform a jump either into the future, or bend upon themselves to jump backwards and revert to a point in time where dichotomies are revealed in all their glaring disruptiveness in order to unravel them. There is no revolution that does not shake and rock the old frames of references, the systems of thought and the sensibilities that prevailed before. Revolutions generate a tornado of dynamism that will inevitably spend itself in rebirth or destruction, but where the revolution moves what it leaves in its wake is a changed landscape, altered beyond recognition. Yet in this altered landscape I would like to see, as an artist and a writer, the intellect and consciousness assert themselves. In order to protect the Revolution we have to ensure the survival of its legacy by means of the creative word and thought. What is the enduring legacy of the French Revolution but the writings of the Enlightenment? A Revolution needs to keep its conscience alive for ages to come. A revolution needs to crystallize its struggle in art and literature. Even if the Syrian Revolution fails, what will keep it forever a source of courage, hope and faith for mankind is the body of thought, the legacy of consciousness, awareness and sensibility that is has engendered and will generate. The undying, noble word will be its bequest. Therefore write you who can write eloquently, who can turn insight, vision, dreams and truths into that which will remain alive in the very core of human thinking and sensibility.

 The politicians have failed the Syrian Revolution because they are individuals without vision and do not possess the kind of all embracing humanistic compassionate imagination to bond with the simple, downtrodden, trampled on common people and victims. The gap is immense between the suffering millions and those who are assuming the positions of leadership, while lacking in the very attribute of leadership. The Syrian people have lost their direction and their way because they were bombed, burnt, tortured, decimated, plucked out of their land, because their houses were smashed, their trees torched and their earth looted, their history pillaged, therefore I beseech the persons of vision and intuition, the enlightened of mind and sensibility, the gifted and creative, writers, artists and intellectuals and those who know God in love to stand by the Syrians and return their souls to them before these souls are being captured by the powers of darkness, religious despotism, and the tyranny of ideologies and sectarianism. O for the dreamers, the visionaries, for those who dwell in the kingdom of the conscience and ethics, love and hope, awareness and cognition, O for them to lead the Syrian people and return their lost souls from where they have migrated to the limbo of horror.

 The French Revolution was defeated and its dreams did not come into fruition until about one hundred years later. But it has since then stayed in the collective consciousness and heritage of mankind, in view of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment which predicted and accompanied its birth. Our Revolution might fail and the world might forget about our tragedies, suffering and deaths after a while, but if we strive to immortalize our dreams and crystallize the legacy of this revolution in literature, art and thought and create for it a body of enlightened cultural bequest to be handed down to future generations, it will live in the consciousness of the world and its heritage of conscience. In a few words, the Revolution is in need of a culture of enlightenment which will whet and fuse us all, carrying us over the abyss and healing the black holes of our minds and souls.

©Alisar Iram

 

* Report into the credibility of certain evidence with regard to Torture and Execution of Persons Incarcerated by the current Syrian regime.                     

 http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1390226674736/syria-report-execution-tort.pdf

 

Report into the credibility of certain evidence with regard to Torture and Execution of Persons Incarcerated by the current Syrian regime.

Warning: Graphic tragic images which viewers might find painful to watch

We thought it was bad, terribly bad, nightmarishly bad, absolutely unequivocally bad, but not this bad, O God, no, not this bad….I think we should all be treated for shock. I close my eyes and I see nothing but pitiful emaciated skeletons crying: Eli, Eli, why have you forsaken me? Alisar

Syria war crimes’ evidence

The Report

http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1390226674736/syria-report-execution-tort.pdf

Syria’s alleged ‘killing machine’

 

Editor’s note: Read this story and more on CNN.Arabic

(CNN)

A team of internationally renowned war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts has found “direct evidence” of “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the lawyers on the team say in a new report.

Their report, based on thousands of photographs of dead bodies of alleged detainees killed in Syrian government custody, would stand up in an international criminal tribunal, the group says.

CNN’s “Amanpour” was given the report in a joint exclusive with The Guardian newspaper.

“This is a smoking gun,” said David Crane, one of the report’s authors. “Any prosecutor would like this kind of evidence — the photos and the process. This is direct evidence of the regime’s killing machine.”

Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, indicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor went on to become the first former head of state convicted of war crimes since World War II. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photographs, documents and testimony referenced in the report, and is relying on the conclusions of the team behind it, which includes international criminal prosecutors, a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist and an expert in digital imaging.

How will Syria react to torture allegations?

The bodies in the photos showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing, according to the report.

In a group of photos of 150 individuals examined in detail by the experts, 62% of the bodies showed emaciation — severely low body weight with a hollow appearance indicating starvation. The majority of all of the victims were men most likely aged 20-40.

A complex numbering system was also used to catalog the corpses, with only the relevant intelligence service knowing the identities of the corpses. It was an effort, the report says, to keep track of which security service was responsible for the death, and then later to provide false documentation that the person had died in a hospital.

One of the three lawyers who authored the report — Sir Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone — likened the images to those of Holocaust survivors.

The emaciated bodies were the product of starvation as a method of torture, “reminiscent of the pictures of those [who] were found still alive in the Nazi death camps after World War II,” he said in a CNN interview.

“This evidence could underpin a charge of crimes against humanity — without any shadow of a doubt,” de Silva told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “Of course, it’s not for us to make a decision. All we can do is evaluate the evidence and say this evidence is capable of being accepted by a tribunal as genuine.”

Throughout the civil war in Syria, al-Assad’s regime has denied accusations of human rights abuses and blamed “terrorists” for the deadly violence.

The report draws its evidence from the testimony of a Syrian government defector codenamed “Caesar” and almost 27,000 photographs he provided; in all 55,000 such images were brought out of the country.

According to the report, Caesar worked as photographer in the military police. Once the war broke out, his work consisted entirely of documenting “killed detainees.”

He claimed to have photographed as many as 50 bodies a day.

At one point he took the unusual step of photographing a group of bodies to show that it “looked like a slaughterhouse,” according to the report.

The fact that all the bodies were photographed, the report’s authors say, strongly suggests that “the killings were systematic, ordered, and directed from above.”

“It’s a callous, industrial machine grinding its citizens,” Crane said to CNN. “It is industrial age mass killing.”

The killings may have been so thoroughly documented as a way of proving each person’s death without allowing the deceased’s family to see the body, the report suggests. Also, it may have been aimed at proving that “orders to execute individuals had been carried out.”

It is also possible that, far from being a systematic plan to document human rights abuses, the photographing was simply the way it had always been done — a little-thought-out continuation of a long-time practice.

The report was authored by de Silva, Crane, and Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice, former lead prosecutor against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Its release comes just days ahead of the Geneva II conference, the latest push for a diplomatic solution to Syria’s bloody civil war.

The lawyers were hired to write the report by the British law firm Carter-Ruck, which in turn was funded by the Government of Qatar, de Silva told Amanpour.

“Ultimately, the validity of our conclusions turn on the integrity of the people involved,” he said. “We, the team, were very conscious of the fact there are competing interests in the Syrian crisis — both national and international. We were very conscious of that.”

“We approached our task with a certain amount of skepticism, bearing that in mind.”

CNN was referred to Carter-Ruck, and this report, by a Qatari government official, and a CNN producer met in the Qatari capital Doha with the report’s authors.

Mountains of data

The report says “Caesar” brought from Syria photographs of thousands of people who had been killed, he says, by the regime.

The lawyers and the three forensics experts with whom they worked were given 26,948 images on a laptop computer. They, in turn, did a “formal analysis” of images of 835 and then a much more detailed examination of 150 individuals.

The images given to CNN paint a horrific scene.

Stomachs, faces and even legs are concave — sunken, rather than convex. On some torsos, bruising and bleeding is so severe that the victims’ skin is a mosaic of black, red, purple and pink.

Oblong and parallel wounds, a mix of bruises and torn skin, line one man’s chest and torso, covering every inch of the victim’s body from neck to pelvis.

“This is not just somebody who is thin, or who maybe hasn’t had enough food because there’s a war going on,” Dr. Stuart Hamilton, a forensic pathologist who examined the evidence, told Amanpour. “This is somebody who has been really starved.”

The forensics team identified the neck bruising as consistent with strangulation with a rope, piece of rubber, or other such object, as opposed to the marks that would be left by a hanging.

“Strangulation of this kind is also consistent with strangulation being used as a method of torture,” the report reads.

Digital imaging expert Stephen Cole also offered his assessment that the images were not digitally altered or manipulated.

Haunting images of Syria’s abandoned homes

Evidence allegedly shows process ‘line by line’

So why do the lawyers think that they were given “smoking gun” proof of murders by the al-Assad regime?

“In Sierra Leone I had 1.2 million human beings that were destroyed but I could not match them to names and incidents,” David Crane said. “Here we have the photographs, the photographer and the reports with documents, stamps, signatures and dates.”

Each body in the photographs seen by CNN had a number written on it; a person’s hand can often also be seen holding a piece of paper in the frame of the photograph with the same number written on it.

Those numbers are obscured in the report released to CNN to protect “Caesar’s” identity and to hide the location of the military hospital where the photos were taken. However a CNN producer in Doha viewed the unobscured, original images.

When a detainee dies in custody, the body is sent to a military hospital where it is numbered and photographed as part of a bureaucratic record-keeping process.

This detailed numbering system, the lawyers say, is compelling evidence of the government’s deadly intent.

When a detainee was killed, the report says, the corpse was assigned a number that corresponded to the “branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death.”

The body was then taken by the security service to a military hospital.

There, the body would enter the Syrian government’s bureaucracy.

Caesar told the lawyers that he, a doctor, and a member of the judiciary would examine the corpse.

The doctor would then fill out internal paperwork, to document that he had seen the body, as well as an official death certificate, which would often list a false cause of death — like “heart attack” or “breathing problems” — to be given to the deceased’s family.

At this point, a second number would be assigned to the body, documenting its false cause of death, according to Caesar, the report says.

“As a prosecutor I have to prove a process,” Crane said. “And evidence like this, though not unusual, is rare in modern international law.” He added that he could walk a tribunal or jury through the process “line by line.”

Nice, in an interview with Amanpour, agreed. The number of bodies, the systematic way in which they were cataloged, and the effort given to obscuring their causes of death point in one direction, he said.

“You can reasonably infer that this is a pattern of behavior, which has to have higher authority,” he said.

Refugees starving to death in Syrian camp

The source

Ever since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq — bolstered by false evidence provided by a source codenamed “Curveball” — there has been deep skepticism in both the intelligence community and the press about believing single-source defectors like “Caesar.”

The lawyers who interviewed Caesar, including Crane whose background also includes experience in military intelligence, said they found him to be “a truthful and credible witness.”

Part of the report reads: “He revealed no signs of being ‘sensational,’ nor did he seem partisan. Although he was a supporter of those who opposed the present regime, the inquiry team is satisfied that he gave an honest account of his experiences.”

Caesar’s evidence, they say, “could safely be acted upon in any subsequent judicial proceedings.”

The report says that Caesar claims taking the photos inflicted “psychological suffering” on him and his colleagues

In September 2011, about seven months after the Syrian civil war broke out, Caesar was contacted by a man, a relative by marriage, who had fled the country just days after the uprising began.

This man is referred to in the report as “Caesar’s contact,” whom the lawyers also interviewed for the report.

The contact was working with what the report calls “international human rights groups,” and saw “Caesar” as a reliable source of information from within the country.

Soon Caesar was sending his contact thousands of images. When Caesar became concerned for his safety, his contacts in the Syrian opposition to whom he had leaked the photos arranged for him and his family to be smuggled out of Syria.

The lawyers have remained mum on how that was done, but the report says the process took four months, and that Caesar left the country before his family.

“If he wished to exaggerate his evidence it would have been very easy for him to say that he had actually witnessed executions,” the report says. “In fact, he made it quite plain that he never witnessed a single execution.”

It is unclear where Caesar and his family are currently living; the lawyers say only that they carried out their investigation in the Middle East.

The next step

Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court. The only way the court could prosecute someone from Syria would be through a referral from the United Nations Security Council.

Because of Russia’s support for the Assad regime, and because it has veto power on the council, such a referral seems unlikely, at least for the time being.

But if, one day, the court were to take up Syria’s case, this report would almost certainly be entered into evidence.

“All we can do is put the ammunition in the pistol,” said de Silva. “It is for others to aim it and pull the trigger.”

http://www.aa.com.tr/en/u/276936–syria-war-crimes-evidences

ISTANBUL

The Inquiry Report as reviewed by

By Kemal Ozturk

A former member of the military service for the Syrian government for thirteen years was set to photograph and document the dead bodies of military soldiers brought from their places of detention to a military hospital during the civil war in the country.

The bodies brought to the hospital, fully consisted of detained-Syrian opposition members, which showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation and other forms of torture and killing. It became routine for the military service to take photographs of the bodies and faces of people in detention after designating those with a ‘numbering system’, who had been brought to the hospital after being tortured and killed.

These images of bodies and faces of the dead with handwritten codes on each, have been accepted as ‘documents’ of a systematic torture and killing of people under the ‘execution-orders’ within the Syrian army. The military police, having photographed 55,000 photos within two years, who was fed up with the killing policies by torture, has built confidential contact with Syrian oppositions.

The military police regularly recorded and sent the copies of these photographs secretly to a trusted contact using a ‘flash drive’ (memory stick).

With attempts of the Syrian opposition, an inquiry team of international lawyers has been set up of experts of forensic medicine and forensic imaging in vast experience in the prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other crimes contrary to international law.

The team included the former lead prosecutor of ex-President Milosevic of Yugoslavia before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and prosecutors and lawyers of the special Court for Sierra Leone.

To confirm whether these images were real or not, the images were uploaded directly to a secure server at a laboratory in the United Kingdom for assessment. It was confirmed to the inquiry team that all of these images were not digitally altered.

The team has examined 26,000 of 55,000 photographs.

Upon the material, it was revealed there was clear evidence of systematic torture and killing of the people in photographs, who were tortured while their limbs were tied and strangled with ligatures and cable ties.

Another attracting point of the inquiry is that emaciation was used as a torture method.

The team estimated that there were some fifty-five thousand (55,000) photographic images of some eleven thousand (11,000) detained persons who had been tortured and killed by agents of the current Syrian regime since the beginning of the uprising against the Assad regime in March 2011.

The members of the team also heard evidence from the contact of the military soldier. The team concluded that all material were acceptable ‘clear evidence’, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law.

Such ‘clear evidence’ would support findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and also support findings of ‘war crimes’ against the current Syrian regime, the team has decided and put those into report form. The report was signed by all commission members.

While listening to a Syrian military policeman who carried out one of the most intriguing works in the world, renown war crimes prosecutors and forensics experts have decided to codename him “Caesar” for his safety.

Together with his colleagues, “Caesar” documented with 55,000 photographs the crimes against humanity committed by the regime during the civil war in the country. Being a witness who will be mentioned most often in the future, “Caesar” explained to Inquiry Team all the details he saw. In the report, the inquiry team did not mention any information excluding the codename and profession of the military policeman.

“Caesar” had worked at military police unit in the Syrian army for 13 years. Originally his job had involved the taking of photographs related to ordinary criminal matters and sending them to “the judiciary”. In short, he was a scenes of crime investigator.

“Caesar” told the team that since the civil war against the current regime began, his job changed from taking photographs of crime scenes and accidents to “taking pictures of killed detainees”. “Caesar” together with his others in his section photographed and documented bodies of detainees who had been killed for two years.

-How does the systematic killing work?

According to the report, the procedure was that when detainees were killed at their places of detention their bodies would be taken to a military hospital to which he would be sent with a doctor and a member of the judiciary, “Caesar’s” function being to photograph the corpses.

Each murdered detainee was given two numbers with only the intelligence service knowing the identities of the corpses.

The report says the procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death.

When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital.

The purpose of documenting the corpses was to ensure that none had been released by the security services and to inform the families of murdered detainees in due course that the cause of death in each case was either a “heart attack” or “breathing problems” and to satisfy the authorities that executions had been performed.

“Caeser” informed the inquiry team that there could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph which required fifteen to thirty minutes of work per corpse.

Once the bodies were photographed by “Caesar” they were taken for burial in a rural area.

-“Caesar”: “The place looked like a slaughterhouse”

Stating that the place “looked like a slaughterhouse”, Caesar said he had someone in his section take photographs of a group of bodies to show that the place “looked like a slaughterhouse”. The excuse he gave for group photographs to his colleagues was that in case they had missed a body they could go back to the group photograph.

“Caesar” told the inquiry team that he did all this “for the sake of Syria and the Syrian people so that the killers could be prosecuted to achieve justice”.

This witness informed the inquiry team that “Caesar” was working with his group from an early stage, the witness having contacted “Caesar” for this purpose in or around September 2011.

The witness also confirmed that he was Caesar’s relative and that he had left Syria five days after the civil war against the current Syrian regime had begun and established contact with international human rights groups.

– Confidential Inquiry Team

A confidential inquiry team has been established by the firm of Carter-Ruck and Co. in the City of London in a result of efforts of Syrian opponent human rights activists.

– Members of the Inquiry Team

The Right Honourable Sir Desmond de Silva QC (Chairman)
: A former Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Appointed personally by the Secretary General of the United Nations. In that capacity he brought about the arrest of President Charles Taylor of Liberia.

Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC
: The former lead prosecutor of ex-President Milosevic of Yugoslavia before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Professor David M. Crane: 
The first Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Appointed personally by the Secretary General of the United Nations. In that capacity he indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia.

Dr. Stuart J. Hamilton. Forensic pathologist on the United Kingdom Home Office Register.

Professor Susan Black. 
Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology and certified forensic anthropologist.

Stephen Cole. Technical Director for Acume Forensics and Forensic Imaging expert.

The members of the inquiry team travelled to a country in the Middle East and started to examine the photographs. Samples from the photos were tested in the London-based Acume Forensics Center.

The center has guaranteed that there was no alteration in the digital forms of the photos and that they were real.

The witness codenamed “Caesar” and his family, whose life safety was under danger, was removed from Syria through confidential ways. The defector, who was codenamed “Caesar” for his own protection, was interviewed by the team on the 12th, 13th, and 18th January 2014 and answered each kind of question. The team has marked down to the report that ‘Ceasar’ revealed no signs of being ‘sensational’ nor did he seem partisan and was reliable.

In fact, it was an attracting point that ‘Ceasar’ made it quite plain that he never witnessed a single execution but only photographed the images of dead people.

The inquiry Team examined the photographs carefully and confirmed the methods of murdering.

The legal team was further informed that there were some fifty-five thousand (55,000) photographic images of some eleven thousand (11,000) detained persons who had been tortured and killed by agents of the current Syrian regime.

The vast majority of the images were of young men most likely between the ages of twenty and forty.

It was confirmed that all of the detainees were killed.

Many several were killed with rope, plastic cable tie, timing belt cover that is used for vehicles. These objects were photographed as they were around detainees’neck. Instead of execution they were choked by hand.

Overall there was evidence that a significant number of the deceased were emaciated and a significant minority had been bound and/or beaten with rod-like objects.

As the report showed, there was a high level of emaciation and images of many of the individuals showed evidence of discoloration and ulceration primarily on the bodies. Indeed the emaciated bodies of those killed may well tell a story of starvation used as a means of torture.

“There appear to have been many forms of torture used by those responsible for those in detention,” the report said.

“For example there was evidence of injury by electrocution on some of the bodies.” The bodies were photographed as unclothed or minimally clothed.

– Inquiry Team Conclusions

“The inquiry team is satisfied that upon the material it has reviewed there is clear evidence, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law, of systematic torture and killing of detained persons by the agents of the Syrian government,” the report said at the conclusion.

“Such evidence would support findings of crimes against humanity against the current Syrian regime. Such evidence could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime,” the detailed report said.

New evidence of war crimes allegedly carried out by the Syrian government was released on Monday, in a report carried out leading by a London-based inquiry team of leading legal and forensics experts for international law firm Carter-Ruck.

The report relied on the evidence of photographs of dead detainees which had been provided by a Syrian defector. They  were verified by Stephen Coles, an imaging forensics expert who has worked with the UK’s Ministry of Defence and West Yorkshire Police.

The conclusion that the photos could potentially support charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes was made by a legal team of experts who have all led major international human rights cases.

Professor David M. Crane and Sir Desmond de Silva were both former Chief Prosecutors of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and were respectively responsible for the indictment and arrest of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

Professor Sir Geoffery Nice QC led the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević’s trial at The Hague and was responsible for linking Milošević to atrocities committed in former Yugoslavia.

The injuries themselves were inspected by forensics experts Dr Stuart Hamilton and Professor Susan Black – who in 1999 led the examination of bodies found in mass graves in Kosovo to verify reported massacres of Kosovan Albanians by Serbs.

englishnews@aa.com.tr

As reported by the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2014/jan/20/torture-of-persons-under-current-syrian-regime-report

Syria crisis: evidence of ‘industrial-scale killing’ by regime spurs call for war crimes charges

• The Guardian, Tuesday 21 January 2014

Calls for Assad or other officials to face justice at the international criminal court in The Hague have foundered on the problem that Syria is not a member of the court. Photograph: Reuters

Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the “systematic killing” of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.

The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.

Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.

The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad‘s government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.

One of the images contained in the report, purpotedly showing ligature marks across the neck of a prisoner. Photograph: The report

The three lawyers interviewed the source, a military policeman who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group and later defected and fled the country. In three sessions in the last 10 days they found him credible and truthful and his account “most compelling”.

They put all evidence under rigorous scrutiny, says their report, which has been obtained by the Guardian and CNN.

The authors are Sir Desmond de Silva QC, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, and Professor David Crane, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court.

The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was a photographer with the Syrian military police. He smuggled the images out of the country on memory sticks to a contact in the Syrian National Movement, which is supported by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups, has called for the overthrow of Assad and demanded his prosecution.

The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors acting for Qatar, is being made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Its publication appears deliberately timed to coincide with this week’s UN-organised Geneva II peace conference, which is designed to negotiate a way out of the Syrian crisis by creating a transitional government.

Caesar told the investigators his job was “taking pictures of killed detainees”. He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture. But he did describe a highly bureaucratic system.

“The procedure was that when detainees were killed at their places of detention their bodies would be taken to a military hospital to which he would be sent with a doctor and a member of the judiciary, Caesar’s function being to photograph the corpses … There could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph which require 15 to 30 minutes of work per corpse,” the report says.

“The reason for photographing executed persons was twofold. First to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body, thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out.”

Families were told that the cause of death was either a “heart attack” or “breathing problems”, it added. “The procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death.

“When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital. Once the bodies were photographed, they were taken for burial in a rural area.”

Three experienced forensic science experts examined and authenticated samples of 55,000 digital images, comprising about 11,000 victims. “Overall there was evidence that a significant number of the deceased were emaciated and a significant minority had been bound and/or beaten with rod-like objects,” the report says.

“In only a minority of the cases … could a convincing injury that would account for death be seen, but any fatal injury to the back of the body would not be represented in the images …

“The forensics team make clear that there are many ways in which an individual may be killed with minimal or even absent external evidence of the mechanism.”

The inquiry team said it was satisfied there was “clear evidence, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law, of systematic torture and killing of detained persons by the agents of the Syrian government. It would support findings of crimes against humanity and could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime.”

De Silva told the Guardian that the evidence “documented industrial-scale killing”. He added: “This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn’t have before. It makes a very strong case indeed.”

Calls for Assad or others to face justice at the international criminal courtin The Hague have foundered on the problems that Syria is not a member of the court, and that the required referral by the UN security council might not be supported by the US and UK or would be blocked by Russia, Syria’s close ally.

Nice said: “It would not necessarily be possible to track back with any degree of certainty to the head of state. Ultimately, in any war crimes trial you can imagine a prosecutor arguing that the overall quantity of evidence meant that the pattern of behaviour would have been approved at a high level.

“But whether you can go beyond that and say it must be head of state-approved is rather more difficult. But ‘widespread and systematic’ does betoken government control.”

Crane said: “Now we have direct evidence of what was happening to people who had disappeared. This is the first provable, direct evidence of what has happened to at least 11,000 human beings who have been tortured and executed and apparently disposed of.

“This is amazing. This is the type of evidence a prosecutor looks for and hopes for. We have pictures, with numbers that marry up with papers with identical numbers – official governmentdocuments. We have the person who took those pictures. That’s beyond-reasonable-doubt-type evidence.”

A US administration official told the Guardian on Monday: “We stand with the rest of the world in horror at these images which have come to light. We condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of the regime and call on it to adhere to international obligations with respect to the treatment of prisoners.

“We have long spoken out about mistreatment and deteriorating prison conditions in Syria. These latest reports, and the photographs that support them, demonstrate just how far the regime is willing to go to not only deny freedom and dignity to the Syrian people, but to inflict significant emotional and physical pain in the process. To be sure, these reports suggest widespread and apparently systematic violations of international humanitarian law.

“The regime has the ability to improve the atmosphere for negotiations in Geneva by making progress in several areas. However, this latest report of horrific and inhumane prison conditions/actions further underscores that if anything, it is tarnishing the environment for the talks.

“As we have for over two years, and again today, we call on the Syrian government to grant immediate and unfettered access to all their detention facilities by international documentation bodies, including the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

“We have long said that those responsible for atrocities in Syria must be held accountable for their gross violations of human rights. The United States continues to support efforts to promote accountability and transitional justice, and we call on the international community to do the same.”

William Hague, the UK foreign secretary, said: “This report offers further evidence of the systematic violence and brutality being visited upon the people of Syria by the Assad regime. We will continue to press for action on all human rights violations in Syria, and for accountability for those who perpetrate them.”

Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch said his organisation had not had the opportunity to authenticate the images. But he added: “We have documented repeatedly how Syria’s security services regularly torture – sometimes to death – detainees in their custody.

“These photos – if authentic – suggest that we may have only scratched the surface of the horrific extent of torture in Syria’s notorious dungeons. There is only one way to get to the bottom of this and that is for the negotiating parties at Geneva II to grant unhindered access to Syria’s detention facilities to independent monitors.”

Channel 4 Report

http://bcove.me/98fqqao7

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid601325122001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAEabvr4~,Wtd2HT-p_Vh4qBcIZDrvZlvNCU8nxccG&bctid=3086947844001

The article below contains videos documenting starvation in Yarmouk Camp and other places

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/starvation-a-twisted-example-of-the-assad-regimes-terrorism/