According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

Nick Turse at Tom Dispatch. “Will You Bring My Dad and Give Me My Hand Back?”

War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

#war #children #gaza #syria #sudan #ukraine #west and central africa

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The jury is still out on President Trump’s prowess in the challenging landscape and bunkers of the Middle East. Trump appears to have honed his short game when it comes to the prudent decision of withdrawing U.S. forces from northeastern Syria. The question remains whether he can combine his short game with his long game to achieve a victory—containing Iran and negotiating a new nuclear deal.

Eric Bordenkircher at Lobe Log. Can Donald Trump Make His Short And Long Game Work In The Middle East?

#americna foreign policy #donald trump #syria #greater middle east #iran

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Öcalan was particularly taken by Bookchin’s 1982 book, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, which proposed the creation of an egalitarian “ecological society.” In 2004, Öcalan wrote to Bookchin, seeking to apply his ideas to the Middle East. What interested Öcalan most was Bookchin’s ideology of communalism, in which central governments would be replaced by loose federations of autonomous communities. Öcalan wrote a new manifesto, Democratic Confederalism, which blended Bookchin’s ideas with those of the growing Kurdish feminist movement. (Bookchin died in 2006.) He also ordered his guerrillas to stop attacking the Turkish government. Rather than agitating for a communist state, Öcalan was now calling for a bottom-up system in which “decision-making processes lie with the communities.”

Shane Bauer in Mother Jones. I Went to Syria and Met the People Trump Just Gave Turkey Permission to Kill

An anarchist revolution—and the Americans volunteering to defend it.

#syria #kurds #american foreign poilicy #murray bookchin

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As if in a frenzy, the public supported their deeds, vile dehumanization spreading through the public discourse shaped by the media. A sea of hate-mongering headlines reduced refugees to a problem that must be resolved for the sake of "our state and our wellbeing". As they were handed over to the regime forces they would immediately be detained to be "cleared" by security. Most of the men aged 18 to 60 who were forcibly returned were never to be seen again. Orchestrated incitement and hate speech defeated international law and humanity.

Seki Radoncic quoted from his book "A Fatal Freedom" in an editorial by Refik Hodzic in Al Jazeera. The spectre of a Syrian Srebrenica

The dehumanisation campaign Syrians are facing is strikingly similar to the one that led to the genocide of Bosnians.

Šeki Radončić

#violence #migration #war #genocide #syria

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This is not about where US troops are stationed. The two thousand US soldiers at issue are a drop in the bucket in terms of the number of armed fighters in Syria today. They have not been on the frontlines of the fighting the way that the US military was in Iraq. The withdrawal of these soldiers is not the important thing here. What matters is that Trump’s announcement is a message to Erdoğan indicating that there will be no consequences if the Turkish state invades Rojava.

An Anarchist in Syria in Crimethinc. he Threat to Rojava

An Anarchist in Syria Speaks on the Real Meaning of Trump’s Withdrawal

#syria #donald trump #american foreign policy #syrian kurds #rojava

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The United States is putting its forces at war overseas to try to overthrow one Middle Eastern regime, to confront a second one, and to do the bidding of a third. None of those objectives involves combating terrorism, and none of them has been authorized as a mission for U.S. armed force by Congress. It’s not clear exactly how this posture on Syria evolved and who had leading roles constructing it. But it is a far cry from the impression candidate Trump once gave that he favored contracting missions for U.S. armed force overseas rather than expanding them.

Paul Pillar at Lobe Log. A New Decision To Go To War In Syria

#american foreign policy #war #syria

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The secret lives of young IS fighters

www.bbc.co.uk

Three young IS militants lie dead on the banks of the River Tigris. They left behind personal photos and documents which reveal the extraordinary story of their private lives.

I used to think that child soldiers were an aberration, but the more I know of war, the more ordinary the use of child soldiers seems in war. Making peace entails special attention to child soldiers.

Red Hand Day

#war #children #child soldiers #iraq #syria #isis

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Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said 222 civilians, including 84 children, were killed in the largely Islamic State group-held province of Deir Ezzor. Another 250 civilians, including 53 children, were killed in Raqa province, where US-backed forces are trying to oust IS jihadists from their bastion Raqa city. He told AFP that the new deaths brought the overall civilian toll from the coalition's campaign to 1,953, including 456 children and 333 women. The previous deadliest 30-day period was between April 23 and May 23 this year that cost 225 civilian lives.

AFP at Yahoo News. US-led Syria strikes 'killed 472 civilians' in past month: monitor

#american foreign policy #syria #donald trump

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CENTCOM, of course, has always been cozy with – and relied on — the region’s Sunni autocrats, whose seemingly insatiable appetite for sophisticated U.S. weaponry has the added benefit of profiting U.S. arms producers (on whose boards retired brass often serve). With Mattis at the Pentagon, Obama’s notion that Washington can help bring about some kind of equilibrium between the Sunni-led Gulf states to begin stabilizing the region is long gone. Washington’s clear alignment with the Emiratis and Saudis in their own catastrophic Yemen campaign since Trump took power makes that particularly clear. And, with Netanyahu publicly boasting about Israel’s growing security cooperation with the Gulfies, especially with the United Arab Emirates, out of their mutual hostility toward Iran, the convergence between the neocons and the Pentagon, at least insofar as the Middle East is concerned, is growing.

Jim Lobe at LobeLog. Syria: Neocons Get Almost Giddy

#donald trump #war #syria #neocons

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The disturbing part of the interventionist consensus is that it has shaped US strategy and foreign policy to disastrous affect, a fact seemingly lost on that same foreign policy establishment. The last 25 years of US foreign policy have seen a landscape littered with failures around the world resulting from ill-conceived military interventions that have helped destabilize the very international order that the foreign policy establishment supposedly seeks to preserve. The latest calls for more bombs away in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East represent a doubling down on failure.

James Russell at LobeLog. Bombs Away! America’s Latest Misguided Strategic Fad

#american foreign policy #war #syria

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“The U.S. position on the status of the Golan Heights is longstanding and is unchanged,” the State Department spokesman, John Kirby, told reporters. “Every administration on both sides of the aisle since 1967 has maintained that those territories are not part of Israel.”

John Kirby quoted in an article by Rick Gladstone in The New York Times. Israel’s Vow to Keep Golan Brings ‘Deep Concern’ at Security Council

#american foreign policy #israel #syria #golan heights #UN

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Dr Hatem, director of the nearby children’s hospital, said his former colleague was among those killed in air strikes that destroyed Al Quds Hospital. Much of the building was reduced to rubble in Wednesday night’s attack, with footage showing children’s bodies being pulled from the rubble as distraught rescuers attempted to save survivors.

Dr. Hatem quoted in an article by Lizzie Dearden at the Independent. Syria war: Doctor posts heartfelt tribute to leading paediatrician killed in Aleppo hospital bombing Colleagues said Dr Muhammad Waseem Maaz was rebel-held Aleppo's most qualified paediatrician

#war #syria #crimes against humanity #facebook

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Many people’s most urgent fear is for their loved ones: children who have lost years of schooling, family scattered among Syria and several other countries, and relatives who have been arrested and never heard from again. A Syrian colleague articulated this fear in reaction to the January 2014 revelation of photographs evidencing systematic torture in regime prisons. “The most difficult part of the torture pictures,” he told me, “is not the decomposed flesh, the starved bodies … or even the knowledge that the torture is both widespread and systematic. These things have always been elements of our Syrian reality. What is so difficult that I do not think we have the strength to overcome is the fear that some of these pictures may show us the body of someone we know and we hope is still alive.”

Wendy Pearlman at Monkey Cage in The Washington Post. The surprising ways fear has shaped Syria’s war

#syria #fear #torture #resistance

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Bakeries are the center of city and village life in the Arab Mediterranean; they symbolize cooperation, the social contract. Bread is synonymous with food, as in the Biblical daily bread, and even with life itself. Because of these dual roles—of symbol and sustenance, body and spirit—bread is also an excellent tool for controlling a hungry and impoverished population.

Annia Ciezadlo in The New Republic. The War on Bread How the Syrian regime is using starvation as a weapon

#bread #syria #war #starvation

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Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said that until the past week, he had been in touch with officials close to the Assad regime in Damascus who expressed “a constant drumbeat of confidence that they’re going to take back every inch of Syrian soil, and Russia is their partner.” But those communications abruptly fell off earlier this month. “No one was answering the phones in Damascus. That leads me to believe they were thrown for a loop.”

Paul McLeary and Joh Hudson reporting in Foreign Policy. Russian Withdrawal Could Set Stage for Assad’s Exit Putin’s troops helped Damascus beat back Syria’s rebels. Now that Russia is on its way out, will Assad follow?

#russia #syria

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Two-and-a-half years later, the situation has changed – but the game is the same. Through his diplomatic and military steps, Putin continues to put Washington in a position of reacting to, rather than seizing the initiative.

Scott Lucas at War in Context (original in The Conversation). Russian Syria withdrawal: Vladimir Putin is the consummate political gambler

#syria #russia

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Syrian War

Making sense of the news from Syria is really hard. Pat Lang’s blog Sic Semper Tyrannis is very worthwhile. Colonel Lang refers to the blog as “A Committee of Correspondence.” In the right column under Categories are various authors, Patrick Bahzad is especially worthwhile for gaining a military perspective of events on the ground.

Together with comments the blog is an extremely valuable information resource, but it’s worth noticing, especially before leaving a comment, that there are “community standards” which probably take reading over some time to get the flavor.

In reading about war, I hear a quiet howl that seems to emanate from my low chest or belly. It’s not really a sound, but turns of phrase like, “the encircled IS people should be easy meat “ make me flinch. Many of the commentators at Sic Semper Tyrannis have experienced the horrors of war first hand. Talking about war isn’t easy, few of the correspondents are glib, even if on first reading may seem so.

#pat lang #syria #war #Patrick Bahzad