A guide to the worst refugee crisis since WWII

[polly7]

Last edited Mon Sep 21, 2015, 01:26 PM - Edit history (5)

By Ben Norton
Source: Mondoweiss
September 19, 2015

The world is witnessing the largest refugee crisis since the horrors of World War II.

Today there are close to 60 million war refugees, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—“an all-time high as violence and persecution” around the world are on the rise.


CREDIT: UNHCR

In all of 2014, approximately 219,000 people tried to cross the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe. In just the first eight months of 2015, over 300,000 refugees tried to cross the sea, according to the UNHCR. More than 2,500 died.

Human rights organizations warn the Gulf states, Israel, Iran, and Russia—all of which have taken zero refugees—along with the US, Canada, and Europe—which have taken few—are not doing enough to provide refuge to the asylum-seekers.

Most of the refugees from Syria are youths. Middle East Eye reports 51% of Syrian asylum-seekers are under age 18, and 39% are under age 11. In other words, two out of every five Syrian refugees are children under age 11.

The vast preponderance of Syrian refugees have been taken by Syria’s neighbors.

CREDIT: Mercy Corps

Turkey has taken the most, close to 2 million.

The tiny nation of Lebanon has accepted over 1.1 million Syrian refugees, who now comprise almost one-fifth of its entire population.

Jordan has accepted around 630,000. Approximately one in every 13 people in Jordan is a Syrian refugee.

Lebanon and Jordan now have the most refugees per capita in the world.


Credit: Statista

The US has fueled the conflicts in all five of the nations from which most refugees are fleeing, and it is directly responsible for the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

The US’ over a decade-long war in and occupation of Iraq resulted in the deaths of at least a million people, greatly weakened the government, brought al-Qaeda into the country, and led to the rise of ISIS. Over 3.3 million people in Iraq have been displaced because of ISIS.

The struggles of refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere, for the moment, seem to not be given much attention as the media focuses on refugees from Syria and as the international community tries to grapple with the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

Full article with many more links: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/a-guide-to-the-worst-refugee-crisis-since-wwii/

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Refugees refuse to be broken

By Caoimhe Butterly
Source: redpepper.org
September 19, 2015

After being rescued from a sinking dinghy, a group of refugees has faced racism, detention and abuse – but they refuse to give up. We spent last night in Belgrade’s main train station with these families, from Damascus, Aleppo, Deir al Zor, Afrin and Kobane, and a group of fellow travellers that they had befriended along the way. They (and we) had tried unsuccessfully to convince various hostels to rent them rooms and instead they slept on the benches and ground of the empty station.

Shadia, a single mother of two young boys, stayed up chatting to us while her exhausted sons slept next to her. ‘They want to go home,’ she told us, ‘and they are angry with me because I keep on telling them this will get easier, and it doesn’t. They don’t understand why we have to sleep in the street, why people insult us. They are trying to be strong, for me, but I can see how confused they are.

‘Everything that they knew is gone, they miss our home and their friends and our life. In Syria they had learned to recognise the sounds of war, to differentiate between the sounds of artillery shelling and gunfire, and there was fear there, but this experience, this journey, has also been so difficult. We have been treated like animals and I can’t protect them from that – they can see it and feel it – and it is damaging them, every day. I thought that things would get easier but now I really doubt that I did the right thing by leaving Syria.’

They had been rescued at sea on their way to Kos when the overcrowded dinghy they were huddling in sank. After having evaded drowning, they had hoped that every step away from the proximity of that lonely death would be easier. They had spent the night before, however, detained by seemingly intoxicated Macedonian border guards. They were verbally abused, Shadia kicked in the back when she didn’t stand up quickly enough, denied adequate food or water, called animals and cowards for leaving Syria

.

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/refugees-refuse-to-be-broken/


Mental health of Syrian refugees: looking backwards and forwards

Mohammed T Abou-Saleh, Peter Hughes
Published Online: 14 September 2015

The conflict in Syria, now in its fourth year, is almost unprecedented in the magnitude of humanitarian and public health catastrophe. More than 220 000 people are estimated to have been killed, most of whom were civilians with a high proportion of women and children. An estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that more than 4 million have fled to Syria's immediate neighbouring countries.

Mamoun Mobayed is a UK psychiatrist based in Qatar and vice president of the Syrian Association for Mental Health (SAMH): he shared his experience. “We established SAMH as a multidisciplinary, non-profit, mental health organisation in 2012. Many members of SAMH have been working on various psychiatric and psychosocial programmes inside Syria and the neighbouring countries (especially in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon), providing training workshops for young Syrian mental health trainee professionals from inside Syria and the refugee camps. We saw many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in children and adults, severe depression of wives following the death of their husbands, addiction to prescribed medicines, and children who were very sad that they have missed schools. The situation has been very difficult for women and children, people with mental illness and survivors of rape or sexual abuse. Family support has been very important and faith has played a major role with many people.”

Peter Ventevogel, senior mental health officer with UNHCR, remarks that the effects of the armed struggle on the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of people are profound, but warns that mental health professionals should not focus unilaterally on post-traumatic stress disorder: “I personally think that loss and grief are central issues for most refugees. They may grieve for deceased family members but also for emotional, relational, or material losses. The emotional problems related to the past are often compounded by daily stressors of living in chronic adversity due to forced migration and lack of basic needs. On top of that, the social fabric is torn apart by the conflict, and many Syrian families have become isolated from their usual support structures such as family, friends, and community.” He adds that this has important consequences for the way that mental health care for Syrians is organised: “Mental health and psychosocial support services need to go beyond clinical services and include efforts to strengthen community support mechanisms and non-clinical interventions to strengthen coping mechanisms”. To assist Syrian clients, mental health workers need to develop competence in understanding local illness models and idioms of distress.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00419-8/fulltext


ISIS is US: The Empire and the Evil Genie It Released

By Paul Street

September 18, 2015

ISIS as Imperial Blowback

Let’s look instead at Trump’s suggestion that the Pope would do well to stop mouthing off about the profits system because he needs to get under the protective umbrella of the U.S. against the Islamic State. Trump’s balderdash aside, the notion that the U.S. is the leading and true enemy of ISIS is widely assumed across the U.S., thanks in part to the properly working propagandistic mechanisms of dominant U.S. corporate war, election, and entertainment media.
The notion is false. In reigning US mass media, ISIS is presented as a great cloud of Islamo-extremist evil that mysteriously and shockingly arose out of thin air last year. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That ISIS a grisly and terrible threat cannot be seriously doubted. With its horrifying snuff films, its genocidal practices towards Shiite Muslims, Christians, and “polytheists,” and its arch-reactionary social codes imposed through whippings, limb-chopping, beheadings, stoning, eye-gouging, the shooting of children for minor infractions, and its sexual enslavement of women, ISIS is most definitely extremist and perversely evil. The danger has reached critical mass. As Diana Johnstone notes:

“Armed by leftover U.S. military equipment in Iraq, enriched by illicit oil sales, its ranks swollen by young Jihadis from all over the world, the Islamic State threatens the people of Lebanon and Jordan, already struggling to take care of masses of refugees from Palestine, Iraq and now Syria. Fear of the decapitating Islamic fanatics is inciting more and more people to risk everything in order to get to safety in Europe….The Islamic State is truly the horrible enemy caricature of the ‘Jewish State.’ another political entity based on an exclusive religious identity. Like Israel it has no clearly defined borders, but with a vastly larger potential demographic base.”

Whence this stark and borderless evil, driving a massive refugee crisis that has Western media up in moral arms? ISIS is, among other things, a predictable “blowback” consequence of United States wars on Iraq and Syria. Had the United States and its partners in imperial crime not illegally attacked and invaded Iraq in 2003, more than a million people would be alive today and ISIS and other al Qaeda offshoots would not be terrifying millions into fleeing the Middle East and North Africa. As the British foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn notes, “the movement’s toxic but potent mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the U.S. invasion of 2003 and the war in Syria since 2011.” The first war collapsed Iraq state authority and took the lid off the nation’s fierce ethno-religious and sectarian divisions. The U.S. fueled those divisions and Sunni uprisings against the corrupt and sectarian Shia government it set up in Baghdad. It produced droves of martyrs killed by US “Crusaders” in places like Fallujah, a Sunni city the US Marines targeted for near destruction (replete with the bombing of hospitals and the use of radioactive ordnance that created an epidemic of child cancer and leukemia) in 2004 – a town ISIS took over last year. Funny how Western media never seemed terribly upset about the millions of refugees created by U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

But just as the sectarian war that fed ISIS’s horrific emergence was retreating in Iraq, it was reignited when al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS, found new soil in which to blossom in neighboring Syria. The US, Europe, and their Middle Eastern allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates) kept a vicious civil war going against Syria’s Assad regime though it was clear from 2012 on that Assad was not going to fall anytime soon. The US-sponsored war in Syria became the fertile, blood-soaked breeding ground for ISIS’s expansion on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, something the crooked and incompetent US-backed government in Baghdad was powerless to prevent.

Other recent U.S. policies have fed the extraordinary growth of extreme jihadism modeled on al Qaeda and ISIS. The US-led NATO bombing of Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a breeding ground for ISIS and related jihadist movements. Thanks in no small part to Obama’s deadly drone, bomb, and other attacks around the Muslim world (the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has bombed at least seven Muslim countries so far), the US has helped advance civil war and Sunni, al Qaeda- and ISIS-inspired jihad across the Middle East and North Africa. Washington has generated an expansion of Salafist terror and extremism beyond the wildest dreams of Osama bin-Laden, who was irrelevantly killed by Obama’s beloved Special Forces in May of 2011. As Johnstone notes:

“The results of this madness are washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Images and sentiment have replaced thinking about causes and effects. One photo of a drowned toddler causes a media and political uproar. Are people surprised? Didn’t they know that toddlers were being torn to pieces by U.S. bombing of Iraq, by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen? What about the toddlers obliterated by NATO’s war to ‘free Libya’ from its ‘dictator’? The current refugee crisis in Europe is the inevitable, foreseeable, predicted result of Western policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi’s Libya was the wall that kept hundreds of thousands of Africans from migrating illegally to Europe, not only by police methods but even more effectively by offering them development at home and decently paid jobs in Libya. Now Libya is the source both of economic migrants and of refugees from Libya itself, as well as from other lands of desperation. In order to weaken Sudan, the United States (and Susan Rice in particular)-championed creation of the new country of South Sudan, which is not a country at all but the scene of rival massacres driving more and more fugitives toward unwelcoming countries.”

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/isis-is-us-the-empire-and-the-evil-genie-it-released/

Again ....... I know that it is not just the U.S. at fault. I wish these articles would name every country involved in it. I swear though, reading this is deja-vu Libya all over again, and every country the rulers of the world economy determine is next for these actions and the horror, loss of life and suffering mostly by the most vulnerable.

[polly7]

1. Migrant Crisis & Syria War Fueled By Competing Gas Pipelines

Don’t let anyone fool you: Sectarian strife in Syria has been engineered to provide cover for a war for access to oil and gas, and the power and money that come along with it.

By Mnar Muhawesh @mnarmuh | September 9, 2015

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect recent Wikileaks revelations of US State Department leaks that show plans to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Syrian government as early as 2006. The leaks reveal that these plans were given to the US directly from the Israeli government and would be formalized through instigating civil strife and sectarianism through partnership with nations like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and even Egypt to break down the power structue in Syria to essentially to weaken Iran and Hezbolla. The leaks also reveal Israeli plans to use this crisis to expand it’s occupation of the Golan Heights for additional oil exploration and military expansion.

While there’s certainly a conversation taking place about refugees — who they are, where they’re going, who’s helping them, and who isn’t — what’s absent is a discussion on how to prevent these wars from starting in the first place. Media outlets and political talking heads have found many opportunities to point fingers in the blame game, but not one media organization has accurately broken down what’s driving the chaos: control over gas, oil and resources.

Indeed, it’s worth asking: How did demonstrations held by “hundreds” of protesters demanding economic change in Syria four years ago devolve into a deadly sectarian civil war, fanning the flames of extremism haunting the world today and creating the world’s second largest refugee crisis?

This “civil war” is not about religion

Foreign meddling in Syria began several years before the Syrian revolt erupted. Wikieaks released leaked US State Department cables from 2006 revealing US plans to overthrow the Syrian government through instigating civil strife, and receiving these very orders straight from Tel Aviv. The leaks reveal the United State’s partnership with nations like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and even Egypt to use sectarianism to divide Syria through the Sunni and Shiite divide to destabilize the nation to weaken Iran and Hezbolla. Israel is also revealed to attempt to use this crisis to expand it’s occupation of the Golan Heights for additional oil exploration.

According to major media outlets like the BBC and the Associated Press, the demonstrations that supposedly swept Syria were comprised of only hundreds of people, but additional Wikileaks cables reveal CIA involvement on the ground in Syria to instigate these very demonstrations as early as March 2011.

But it’s important to note the timing: This coalition and meddling in Syria came about immediately on the heels of discussions of an Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline that was to be built between 2014 and 2016 from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria. With a possible extension to Lebanon, it would eventually reach Europe, the target export market.

Perhaps the most accurate description of the current crisis over gas, oil and pipelines that is raging in Syria has been described by Dmitry Minin, writing for the Strategic Cultural Foundation in May 2013: ..........

Note the purple line which traces the proposed Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline and note that all of the countries highlighted in red are part of a new coalition hastily put together after Turkey finally (in exchange for NATO’s acquiescence on Erdogan’s politically-motivated war with the PKK) agreed to allow the US to fly combat missions against ISIS targets from Incirlik. Now note which country along the purple line is not highlighted in red. That’s because Bashar al-Assad didn’t support the pipeline and now we’re seeing what happens when you’re a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done. (Map: ZeroHedge.com)

Divide and conquer: A path to regime change: ( ........... read more.)


Refugee’s assist a fellow Refugee holding a boy as they are stuck between Macedonian riot police officers and refugees during a clash near the border train station of Idomeni, northern Greece, as they wait to be allowed by the Macedonian police to cross the border from Greece to Macedonia, Friday, Aug. 21, 2015. Macedonian special police forces have fired stun grenades to disperse thousands of refugees stuck on a no-man’s land with Greece, a day after Macedonia declared a state of emergency on its borders to deal with a massive influx of refugees heading north to Europe. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

http://www.mintpressnews.com/migrant-crisis-syria-war-fueled-by-competing-gas-pipelines/209294/