Official Syrian Conflict Thread
Man Goddamn...Israel just handing out L 
thatrapsfan
Superstar
ZoeGod
I’m from Brooklyn a place where stars are born.
The T4 airbase will be rebuilt with Iranian help the next couple of months and the war goes one in Syria. 
thatrapsfan
Superstar
This is an Assad MP. Does this look like a serious attempt at denying culpability or amateurish propaganda?
Stone Cold
Superstar
Israel tryna be on some Tyson/Juelz shyt with Trump 
thatrapsfan
Superstar
For people who doubt the skullduggery of the Assad regime, Im reminded of the Michel Samaha case.
Lebanon ex-minister jailed over plot
Assad proxy in Lebanon who was caught smuggling explosives for Syrian intelligence back in 2012, when the war just started, in order to raise sectarian tensions. He was planning to target anti Assad Christians to scare them into abandoning their position. Even though he was arrested, they
and here is the latest scoop, with clear evidence they intentionally killed journalist Marie Colvin back in 2012 as well:
How the Assad Regime Tracked and Killed Marie Colvin for Reporting on War Crimes in Syria
What she was reporting, before they were assasinated her:
Her final reports detailed the brutal human toll of the indiscriminate violence. On February 21, she did a series of live interviews over Skype with Channel 4 and the BBC in the U.K. and CNN in the U.S. Speaking to Anderson Cooper, she recounted the death of a small child from a blast injury. “We just watched this little boy, his tummy heaving and heaving as he tried to breathe,” she said. “It’s a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists. … The Syrian army is shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
6 years later and theyre still making the exact same claims.
Lebanon ex-minister jailed over plot
Assad proxy in Lebanon who was caught smuggling explosives for Syrian intelligence back in 2012, when the war just started, in order to raise sectarian tensions. He was planning to target anti Assad Christians to scare them into abandoning their position. Even though he was arrested, they
and here is the latest scoop, with clear evidence they intentionally killed journalist Marie Colvin back in 2012 as well:
How the Assad Regime Tracked and Killed Marie Colvin for Reporting on War Crimes in Syria
What she was reporting, before they were assasinated her:
Her final reports detailed the brutal human toll of the indiscriminate violence. On February 21, she did a series of live interviews over Skype with Channel 4 and the BBC in the U.K. and CNN in the U.S. Speaking to Anderson Cooper, she recounted the death of a small child from a blast injury. “We just watched this little boy, his tummy heaving and heaving as he tried to breathe,” she said. “It’s a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists. … The Syrian army is shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
6 years later and theyre still making the exact same claims.
thatrapsfan
Superstar
Key details about how regime picks civilian targets and disseminates propaganda. Also info about their intelligence capabailites:
How the Assad Regime Tracked and Killed Marie Colvin for Reporting on War Crimes in Syria
Unbeknownst to Conroy, he and the other journalists had likely been tracked from the moment their planes landed in Lebanon. Beginning in December 2011, “friendly Lebanese security forces” monitored the arrival of journalists in Beirut, providing their Syrian counterparts with information about those crossing into Syria. This information was distilled into “intelligence reports that journalists from CNN, the BBC, and other foreign media organizations had entered Syria from Lebanon and were in Baba Amr,” according to Ulysses.
The deputy minister of defense boasted that he could “destroy Baba Amr in 10 minutes” if only he knew where it was.
The Baba Amr Media Center had eluded Syrian authorities throughout the Siege of Homs. A local activist, Khaled Abu Salah, formed the center with other citizen journalists in the summer of 2011 to report on the regime’s crackdown and connect to foreign journalists. The media center operated out of several apartments in Homs, eventually occupying two floors of an apartment house on a narrow street. It relied on a portable satellite connection run through Tor and other proxy servers to mask the center’s location from the regime.
A month before Colvin’s killing, an Arab League observer monitoring the hostilities in Homs mentioned to Deputy Minister of Defense Assef Shawkat that he had visited the center. The minister pressed him on the location, boasting that he could “destroy Baba Amr in 10 minutes” if only he knew where it was.
“He said that the media was his main problem,” Abdelmalek Nouar, an Algerian observer with the Arab League, said in his testimony. “He insisted that foreign media like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and CNN collaborated with terrorists. He even referred to the New York Times and the Washington Post as ‘terrorist newspapers.’”
The next morning, Colvin and Conroy had been scheduled to depart shortly after 5:00 a.m. to report on conditions at a local hospital. But their guide overslept, delaying their departure. The barrage began shortly after 9:30 a.m., with the media center taking accurate rocket fire while a drone buzzed overhead. The journalists and activists scrambled to evacuate, clambering for their shoes, as rockets fell around them. Conroy, who had served in the British Royal Artillery, could tell that the rounds were not indiscriminate; his testimony indicates that the journalists’ position was being “bracketed,” with strikes being walked toward their target by a forward observer. Colvin and Ochlik ran for safety in a neighboring building, which was immediately struck by a rocket. The blast sprayed shrapnel across those standing in the entryway, gravely injuring Bouvier, Conroy, and Wael al-Omar, Colvin’s translator.
The Syrian officials celebrated news of Colvin’s death, according to Ulysses.
“The blind bytch was Israeli,” an unnamed official reportedly said.
The commander responsible for the strike, referred to in the documents as Shahadah, replied: “Marie Colvin was a dog and now she’s dead.”
The regime sent al-Fares, the leader of the informant ring, a new black Hyundai Genesis. It was a gift from Maher al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother, according to Ulysses.
Three factors came together to create the conditions for the attack: the regime’s intent to target journalists, its access to powerful surveillance capabilities, and an absence of international political will to prevent atrocities in Syria.
Even before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Assad regime had developed technological capabilities to assert control over the country. In 2009, when just 17 percent of the Syrian population had access to the internet, the government both monitored and censored online activities, according to State Department reporting on human rights. By 2010, the censorship expanded, with the nation’s three major internet service providers blocking access to more than 180 websites, including those related to Kurdish opposition groups and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as Facebook, YouTube, and Skype.
In early 2011, the regime lifted the ban on Facebook and YouTube. But instead of an attempt at reform, reopening the social platforms provided a powerful tool for regime repression and disinformation. Memos obtained from military intelligence units of the General Command of the Syrian Armed Forces detail deliberate efforts to use Facebook to monitor and interfere with protests. One memo orders security forces to “summon anyone who has a role inciting over the Internet and interrogate him/her and take legal action against them.” The same directive, coming from the National Security Bureau, also ordered government operatives to spread pro-Assad Facebook pages (“Dr. Bashar Al Assad is the Symbol of resistance and steadfastness”; “A great nation gives birth to great men: From Hammurabi to Bashar Al Assad”) “with the aim of flooding the website’s pages which call for demonstrations in Syria.”
The security services also used arrests of influential journalists to advance the regime’s message. A State Department cable from April 6, 2011, details the detention of journalist Khaled Ekhteyar, who, “when he was released, his Facebook account was spamming pro-government propaganda.”
The regime’s information war policy “identified three threat levels. Media activists were considered to be the highest level of threat, followed by organizers of demonstrations (as second) and people who attended demonstrations (as third),” said a defector from the Central Crisis Management Cell, a military-security council set up by the regime to confront the uprising, in a declaration to the court. “The CCMC considered media activists and creators of YouTube videos more dangerous than protesters.”
Syrian journalists and activists support that assessment. “Everyone who opposed the government was targeted for arrests and killing, to be honest — whether you were a media activist or not — but it was clear that the regime saw local journalists as an even bigger threat to itself than those who took up arms,” Aziz Asaad, a Syrian opposition activist who fled in 2015 and now lives in exile in Germany, told The Intercept. “When you were arrested by the regime, it was far better that they regard you as an armed fighter rather than as someone who was working to document and broadcast the crimes that were being committed in the country. It was better, far better, in jail to have been accused of holding a rifle than holding a camera.”
“It was better, far better, in jail to have been accused of holding a rifle than holding a camera.”
The regime reserved its harshest treatment for Syrians “who knew how to use the internet and broadcast media,” Aziz Assad said, “because they saw those people as the ones capable of organizing against them and delivering information to the rest of the world about what was happening in Syria. The regime felt that if it could stop information from getting out, it could do whatever it wanted to crush this revolution.”
Gilmore, of the Center for Justice & Accountability, said the regime’s targeting of Colvin and other Western journalists was concomitant with its focus on information warfare and communications technology. The internet can be used to “spread information and organize social movements, but at the same time it had an incredible potential to be a tool for persecution, a tool for authoritarian governance,” Gilmore said. “That duel edge component of it was really striking in the killing of Marie.”
A case in point was an official regime media post from February 26, 2012. Dated four days after Colvin and Ochlik were killed, the release refers to them and other Western journalists who were in Baba Amr as spies planted by Western governments. The West “cannot expect Syrians to be sad over or condemn the death of spies who crossed our borders in the dead of night to spread corruption and destruction,” reads the post, which was published by the General Organization of Radio and TV, a state-run broadcaster. The post details Colvin and Ochlik’s work in Libya, accusing Ochlik of painting a rosy picture of the Libyan rebels though his photography, for which he won a World Press Photo award, and says Colvin’s reporting from Libya was full of lies. “Perhaps Marie deserves an award for being the best propagandist in the world,” the post says. The piece also refers to journalists Conroy, Bouvier, Arwa Damon, Ivan Watson, and others as spies.
As dissent was exploding inside Syria, the Assad regime’s technological ability to surveil and stifle any opposition was expanding at a similar rate. Telecommunications inside Syria are highly consolidated and kept close to Assad, making it relatively easy for the regime to monitor internet and satellite use inside the country. A 2016 Privacy International report on the Syrian state surveillance apparatus notes that from 2007 until 2012, when Colvin and Ochlik were killed, the Assad regime spent millions of dollars to build a “nationwide communications monitoring system” capable of collecting conversations from services like Skype. Part of this surveillance push included the purchase and installation of intercept technologies that could trace satellite communications. According to the report, the Assad regime used equipment that could re-route satellite communications inside the country, and once collected, a “Syrian intelligence analyst could either archive the material for offline analysis at a later point, or follow a target live, as long as he/she was connected to the internet.”
The coupling of online and other forms of surveillance with targeted government attacks escalated in response to the uprising. One memo detailing an intercepted call between two men discussing anti-regime combat operations in the Deir Baalba neighborhood of Homs ends with an order to “circulate to all security agencies and army units through Branch 261 to take the necessary security and military measures.” Another court filing describes an incident in which a Syrian journalist reporting on wounded civilians believes he inadvertently revealed his position. “While standing outside the clinic, I took a call on my mobile phone from a reporter with Al Jazeera. During the call, the area around the field clinic came under fire from multiple rockets: on the spot three were killed and three others were injured,” the reporter said.
Based on information gathered from former Syrian intelligence defectors, Gilmore said some of the regime’s surveillance equipment in Homs had been installed by “a group of East Asians” who had been brought in from Damascus. “There were two types of surveillance systems that were installed in the local intelligence offices in Homs,” Gilmore told The Intercept. “One of them was fixed surveillance that was installed on the rooftop, and then there were a number of vans that had some kind of mobile interception capabilities,” able to intercept “some satellite phones and portable satellite internet uplinks.”
Syrian intelligence units also relied on networks of informants. When an informant told officials that rebel fighters were receiving treatment at al-Berr hospital in Ar-Rastan, Branch 261, the intelligence unit, forwarded it to the Homs Military and Security Chief with a blunt suggestion: “Recommendation: influence them with artillery or aircraft.”
“Toward the end of 2011, there was an uptick in cameramen and other journalists actually being killed while filming protests” in Syria, said David Kaye, the United Nations rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The regime had previously targeted journalists with detention and torture, Kaye said; going after journalists covering protests “coexisted with these other attacks on journalists.”
Colvin was not the only journalist the Assad regime targeted for assassination, according to the documents. On January 11, 2012, about six weeks before Colvin’s death, the award-winning French war correspondent Gilles Jacquier and other journalists attended a pro-Assad rally in Homs. During the demonstration, in the New Ikrema neighborhood, the journalists were caught up in an attack. Reports at the time said a rocket-propelled grenade or mortar round was fired into the crowd. Several Syrians were killed, and so was Jacquier. He was the first foreign journalist to die in the conflict.
The Assad regime claimed that a “terrorist group” was responsible and said the incident showed that opposition forces in the country were “armed and dangerous.” But those were lies, according to Ulysses, the former Syrian intelligence officer. In the court documents, Ulysses alleges that the entire demonstration was staged, and that the Syrian regime had mapped out the route of the march in advance. Members of an Assad-supporting militia known as the shabiha “launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the demonstration from a nearby school called Quteiba,” Ulysses says. In the chaos that followed, Jacquier and the other reporters, accompanied by Syrian government spies, tried to document the attack. When Jacquier was brought to a prearranged location, Ulysses alleges, “regime forces fired a mortar at his position.”
How the Assad Regime Tracked and Killed Marie Colvin for Reporting on War Crimes in Syria
Unbeknownst to Conroy, he and the other journalists had likely been tracked from the moment their planes landed in Lebanon. Beginning in December 2011, “friendly Lebanese security forces” monitored the arrival of journalists in Beirut, providing their Syrian counterparts with information about those crossing into Syria. This information was distilled into “intelligence reports that journalists from CNN, the BBC, and other foreign media organizations had entered Syria from Lebanon and were in Baba Amr,” according to Ulysses.
The deputy minister of defense boasted that he could “destroy Baba Amr in 10 minutes” if only he knew where it was.
The Baba Amr Media Center had eluded Syrian authorities throughout the Siege of Homs. A local activist, Khaled Abu Salah, formed the center with other citizen journalists in the summer of 2011 to report on the regime’s crackdown and connect to foreign journalists. The media center operated out of several apartments in Homs, eventually occupying two floors of an apartment house on a narrow street. It relied on a portable satellite connection run through Tor and other proxy servers to mask the center’s location from the regime.
A month before Colvin’s killing, an Arab League observer monitoring the hostilities in Homs mentioned to Deputy Minister of Defense Assef Shawkat that he had visited the center. The minister pressed him on the location, boasting that he could “destroy Baba Amr in 10 minutes” if only he knew where it was.
“He said that the media was his main problem,” Abdelmalek Nouar, an Algerian observer with the Arab League, said in his testimony. “He insisted that foreign media like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and CNN collaborated with terrorists. He even referred to the New York Times and the Washington Post as ‘terrorist newspapers.’”
The next morning, Colvin and Conroy had been scheduled to depart shortly after 5:00 a.m. to report on conditions at a local hospital. But their guide overslept, delaying their departure. The barrage began shortly after 9:30 a.m., with the media center taking accurate rocket fire while a drone buzzed overhead. The journalists and activists scrambled to evacuate, clambering for their shoes, as rockets fell around them. Conroy, who had served in the British Royal Artillery, could tell that the rounds were not indiscriminate; his testimony indicates that the journalists’ position was being “bracketed,” with strikes being walked toward their target by a forward observer. Colvin and Ochlik ran for safety in a neighboring building, which was immediately struck by a rocket. The blast sprayed shrapnel across those standing in the entryway, gravely injuring Bouvier, Conroy, and Wael al-Omar, Colvin’s translator.
The Syrian officials celebrated news of Colvin’s death, according to Ulysses.
“The blind bytch was Israeli,” an unnamed official reportedly said.
The commander responsible for the strike, referred to in the documents as Shahadah, replied: “Marie Colvin was a dog and now she’s dead.”
The regime sent al-Fares, the leader of the informant ring, a new black Hyundai Genesis. It was a gift from Maher al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother, according to Ulysses.
Three factors came together to create the conditions for the attack: the regime’s intent to target journalists, its access to powerful surveillance capabilities, and an absence of international political will to prevent atrocities in Syria.
Even before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Assad regime had developed technological capabilities to assert control over the country. In 2009, when just 17 percent of the Syrian population had access to the internet, the government both monitored and censored online activities, according to State Department reporting on human rights. By 2010, the censorship expanded, with the nation’s three major internet service providers blocking access to more than 180 websites, including those related to Kurdish opposition groups and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as Facebook, YouTube, and Skype.
In early 2011, the regime lifted the ban on Facebook and YouTube. But instead of an attempt at reform, reopening the social platforms provided a powerful tool for regime repression and disinformation. Memos obtained from military intelligence units of the General Command of the Syrian Armed Forces detail deliberate efforts to use Facebook to monitor and interfere with protests. One memo orders security forces to “summon anyone who has a role inciting over the Internet and interrogate him/her and take legal action against them.” The same directive, coming from the National Security Bureau, also ordered government operatives to spread pro-Assad Facebook pages (“Dr. Bashar Al Assad is the Symbol of resistance and steadfastness”; “A great nation gives birth to great men: From Hammurabi to Bashar Al Assad”) “with the aim of flooding the website’s pages which call for demonstrations in Syria.”
The security services also used arrests of influential journalists to advance the regime’s message. A State Department cable from April 6, 2011, details the detention of journalist Khaled Ekhteyar, who, “when he was released, his Facebook account was spamming pro-government propaganda.”
The regime’s information war policy “identified three threat levels. Media activists were considered to be the highest level of threat, followed by organizers of demonstrations (as second) and people who attended demonstrations (as third),” said a defector from the Central Crisis Management Cell, a military-security council set up by the regime to confront the uprising, in a declaration to the court. “The CCMC considered media activists and creators of YouTube videos more dangerous than protesters.”
Syrian journalists and activists support that assessment. “Everyone who opposed the government was targeted for arrests and killing, to be honest — whether you were a media activist or not — but it was clear that the regime saw local journalists as an even bigger threat to itself than those who took up arms,” Aziz Asaad, a Syrian opposition activist who fled in 2015 and now lives in exile in Germany, told The Intercept. “When you were arrested by the regime, it was far better that they regard you as an armed fighter rather than as someone who was working to document and broadcast the crimes that were being committed in the country. It was better, far better, in jail to have been accused of holding a rifle than holding a camera.”
“It was better, far better, in jail to have been accused of holding a rifle than holding a camera.”
The regime reserved its harshest treatment for Syrians “who knew how to use the internet and broadcast media,” Aziz Assad said, “because they saw those people as the ones capable of organizing against them and delivering information to the rest of the world about what was happening in Syria. The regime felt that if it could stop information from getting out, it could do whatever it wanted to crush this revolution.”
Gilmore, of the Center for Justice & Accountability, said the regime’s targeting of Colvin and other Western journalists was concomitant with its focus on information warfare and communications technology. The internet can be used to “spread information and organize social movements, but at the same time it had an incredible potential to be a tool for persecution, a tool for authoritarian governance,” Gilmore said. “That duel edge component of it was really striking in the killing of Marie.”
A case in point was an official regime media post from February 26, 2012. Dated four days after Colvin and Ochlik were killed, the release refers to them and other Western journalists who were in Baba Amr as spies planted by Western governments. The West “cannot expect Syrians to be sad over or condemn the death of spies who crossed our borders in the dead of night to spread corruption and destruction,” reads the post, which was published by the General Organization of Radio and TV, a state-run broadcaster. The post details Colvin and Ochlik’s work in Libya, accusing Ochlik of painting a rosy picture of the Libyan rebels though his photography, for which he won a World Press Photo award, and says Colvin’s reporting from Libya was full of lies. “Perhaps Marie deserves an award for being the best propagandist in the world,” the post says. The piece also refers to journalists Conroy, Bouvier, Arwa Damon, Ivan Watson, and others as spies.
As dissent was exploding inside Syria, the Assad regime’s technological ability to surveil and stifle any opposition was expanding at a similar rate. Telecommunications inside Syria are highly consolidated and kept close to Assad, making it relatively easy for the regime to monitor internet and satellite use inside the country. A 2016 Privacy International report on the Syrian state surveillance apparatus notes that from 2007 until 2012, when Colvin and Ochlik were killed, the Assad regime spent millions of dollars to build a “nationwide communications monitoring system” capable of collecting conversations from services like Skype. Part of this surveillance push included the purchase and installation of intercept technologies that could trace satellite communications. According to the report, the Assad regime used equipment that could re-route satellite communications inside the country, and once collected, a “Syrian intelligence analyst could either archive the material for offline analysis at a later point, or follow a target live, as long as he/she was connected to the internet.”
The coupling of online and other forms of surveillance with targeted government attacks escalated in response to the uprising. One memo detailing an intercepted call between two men discussing anti-regime combat operations in the Deir Baalba neighborhood of Homs ends with an order to “circulate to all security agencies and army units through Branch 261 to take the necessary security and military measures.” Another court filing describes an incident in which a Syrian journalist reporting on wounded civilians believes he inadvertently revealed his position. “While standing outside the clinic, I took a call on my mobile phone from a reporter with Al Jazeera. During the call, the area around the field clinic came under fire from multiple rockets: on the spot three were killed and three others were injured,” the reporter said.
Based on information gathered from former Syrian intelligence defectors, Gilmore said some of the regime’s surveillance equipment in Homs had been installed by “a group of East Asians” who had been brought in from Damascus. “There were two types of surveillance systems that were installed in the local intelligence offices in Homs,” Gilmore told The Intercept. “One of them was fixed surveillance that was installed on the rooftop, and then there were a number of vans that had some kind of mobile interception capabilities,” able to intercept “some satellite phones and portable satellite internet uplinks.”
Syrian intelligence units also relied on networks of informants. When an informant told officials that rebel fighters were receiving treatment at al-Berr hospital in Ar-Rastan, Branch 261, the intelligence unit, forwarded it to the Homs Military and Security Chief with a blunt suggestion: “Recommendation: influence them with artillery or aircraft.”
“Toward the end of 2011, there was an uptick in cameramen and other journalists actually being killed while filming protests” in Syria, said David Kaye, the United Nations rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The regime had previously targeted journalists with detention and torture, Kaye said; going after journalists covering protests “coexisted with these other attacks on journalists.”
Colvin was not the only journalist the Assad regime targeted for assassination, according to the documents. On January 11, 2012, about six weeks before Colvin’s death, the award-winning French war correspondent Gilles Jacquier and other journalists attended a pro-Assad rally in Homs. During the demonstration, in the New Ikrema neighborhood, the journalists were caught up in an attack. Reports at the time said a rocket-propelled grenade or mortar round was fired into the crowd. Several Syrians were killed, and so was Jacquier. He was the first foreign journalist to die in the conflict.
The Assad regime claimed that a “terrorist group” was responsible and said the incident showed that opposition forces in the country were “armed and dangerous.” But those were lies, according to Ulysses, the former Syrian intelligence officer. In the court documents, Ulysses alleges that the entire demonstration was staged, and that the Syrian regime had mapped out the route of the march in advance. Members of an Assad-supporting militia known as the shabiha “launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the demonstration from a nearby school called Quteiba,” Ulysses says. In the chaos that followed, Jacquier and the other reporters, accompanied by Syrian government spies, tried to document the attack. When Jacquier was brought to a prearranged location, Ulysses alleges, “regime forces fired a mortar at his position.”
These pieces of shyt need to be dealt with, and not with bullshyt words, sanctions, or inspections. They need to be taken off this planet. Enough of these innocent people being killed with chemical weapons. Going after and killing fukking children?! People bytch about the U.S. all the time, but this is the type of shyt that reminds you how damn lucky we are to live here.
Futuristic Eskimo
All Star
The US is not a position to dictate terms in Syria now after passing up the opportunity in 2011 / 2012. With a complete fool in charge incapable of strategic thought and flip-flopping his policy in Syria depending on the day's headlines, as well as a committed Russian presence in the country, the downside risk of escalation is probably too high to reverse course and push for full regime change now.
Unfortunately, the best course of action is to let it be for now and learn from mistakes going forward. It's a shame because Assad is a monster.