As the death toll in the Syrian uprising surpasses 100,000, here are some recent developments worthy of attention:
• The Associated Press reports:
Fighting in the [Palestinian Yarmouk] camp [in Damascus] broke out earlier this week. It has been mostly under rebel control since late last year.
Anwar Raja, a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, said Friday the Palestinian Popular Committees want to “cleanse” the camp of “terrorist gangs.”
The PFLP-GC is close the Syrian government.
Khaled Abdul-Majid of the Popular Struggle Front, another pro-government faction, said Popular Committees have captured nearly a third of the mostly empty camp. Thousands of refugees have fled.
“Cleanse,” of course, means “kill.” “Terrorist gangs” means Palestinians who support the uprising against the Assad regime.
• Haaretz reports:
Jewish humanitarian organizations are due to launch an aid program for refugees from the Syrian civil war living in Jordan within the coming weeks. The program will focus on children in the Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan, where close to 150,000 refugees have arrived over the last year.
A coalition of 14 Jewish organizations, mainly from the United States, have established the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief in an effort to aid the victims of the Syrian Civil War, which has been raging for over two years. International aid organizations estimate that over one million Syrian citizens have already fled the country and their number is growing by the day. Around a third of the refugees have crossed over into Jordan and similar numbers are now in Lebanon and Turkey.
The Jewish coalition, which is being coordinated by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) from its New York headquarters, initially considered focusing its activities in Turkey, but the Ankara government responded that it did not need external help. (The possibility of working in Lebanon was ruled out for security reasons).
The Jordanian government, which is already hosting several international organizations, was more responsive. Over the past two months, the coalition has been finalizing planning and raising funds for its welfare program for children in Zaatari, the largest camp for Syrian refugees.
You can donate here (as I have done).
• Amnesty International reports:
Last weekend 13 members of the same family in al-Baydah were killed, with the bodies of three brothers found with bullet wounds just outside their home and four female relatives and six children between the ages of two and 13 found dead inside the house. The killings took place shortly after pro-government forces clashed with opposition fighters close to the family’s home.
In a new ten-page briefing, Amnesty says that more than 250 civilians in the same village and the nearby city of Banias were also killed in May, with eyewitnesses describing bodies piled up in the streets in the Ras al-Naba’ district of Banias, and civilians being rounded up by pro-government forces.
Can anyone explain why anti-interventionists on both the Left and the Right were far more appalled by the Syrian rebel who was recorded on video biting the heart of a dead government soldier than they ever have been by the routine and ongoing massacres carried out by Assad’s forces?
