Exclusive: Washington Cuts Funds for Investigating Bashar al-Assad's War Crimes

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The U.S. State Department plans to cut its entire $500,000 in annual funding next year to an organization dedicated to sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities during the country's brutal civil war, according to the recipient of the assistance and a senior U.S. official.

The move, which has not previously been reported, comes as the Obama administration is stepping up funding to collect evidence of war crimes in Iraq by the Islamic State, an extremist Islamist organization that has horrified the world with its mass killings, enslavement of women, and beheadings of ethnic minorities, foreign aid workers, and journalists, including two American reporters who were executed in recent months. The funding shift has raised concern among human rights advocates that the United States and its allies are reducing their commitment to holding the Syrian leader accountable for the majority of Syria's atrocities because the interests of Washington and Damascus are converging over the fight against the Islamic State.

For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict's death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.

The materials are part of a growing storehouse of evidence being collected inside Syria and then transported outside the country for safekeeping in the event that a court is set up at some time in the future for war crimes trials for senior regime officials. The commission has served as a critical plank of an American strategy aimed at assembling enough evidence to hold some of Syria's worst violators of human rights accountable for their crimes at some point in the future.


http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/11/03/exclusive_washington_cuts_funds_for_investigating_bashar_al_assads_war_crimes

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1. Isil 'serious threat' to Assad with new Syrian victories

Jihadis from Isil have seized two gas fields and attacked a major air force base close to the central city of Homs in Syria - threatening the dominance of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in the critical region.

While US-led air strikes have focused on routing a few hundred fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) from the tiny border town of Kobane in northern Syria, the extremist group has pushed south, expanding its grip on terrain that is strategically vital in the battle for control of the country.

Yesterday, Isil posted photographs on social media purporting to show the group's distinctive black flag flying high over Jahar gas field, alongside images of the seized vehicles, weaponry and corpses of Syrian regime soldiers that had controlled the field.

The development follows the group's capture of Sha'ar gas plant last week. In victorious tones, the jihadists declared the conquests part of the "Islamic State", the name the group ascribes to land it controls.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/isil-serious-threat-to-assad-with-new-syrian-victories-30715351.html

[PDJane]

2. So Bashad is going to get away with crimes against humanity, too?

So much for international law and human rights.

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4. Laws just aren't worth much if you can't or won't enforce them.

In this case, if one wants someone to fight ISIS for us, Assad is the man in Syria, with Nasrallah to back him up, and Iran is the country to help Iraq fight ISIS, they can get down on the same level, and they've been engaged with the enemy for years now already. And the Kurds, of course, but they are our friends already.

Anyway, between the three of them, they can probably do the job of containing ISIS to Anbar if we provide proper support, WITHOUT us having to invade and further fuck things up.

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3. Pro-Assad spies within rebels responsible for Turkish border attacks, rebel commander claims

A pro-Assad gang of spies that infiltrated Syrian rebel group Free Syrian Army (FSA) has been identified, according to an FSA commander, who said the network was responsible for two car bomb attacks on the Turkish-Syrian border.

The organization, allegedly linked with Syrian government forces led by President Bashar al-Assad, has carried out a series of attacks on civilians in the name of the FSA, Abu Muhammad, commander of Abu’z-Zuhur Revolutionaries Front operating within the FSA, told Anadolu Agency on Nov. 3.

Abu Muhammad said a member of the secret gang, who is reported with the code name “Ekrem,” has confessed all of the crimes the gang members have committed, which include two car bomb attacks at the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam crossings on the Turkish-Syrian border.

“Ekrem has admitted to bombing the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam gates on the Turkish-Syrian border, along with committing a number of crimes, including conducting car bomb attacks at Seraqip for the al-Assad regime, facilitating bombing FSA posts by enabling the location of rebels through chips embedded in the posts, hijacking and raping under the name of the FSA and calling innocent people ‘Shabiba’ [militia forces of the regime] and seizing their goods,” Abu Muhammad said.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/pro-assad-spies-within-rebels-responsible-for-turkish-border-attacks-rebel-commander-claims.aspx?pageID=238&nid=73851&NewsCatID=352

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5. As U.S. Strikes ISIS, Another Islamist Militant Group Gains Ground

President Barack Obama announced airstikes against the Islamist militant group which calls itself the Islamic State, or ISIS, in September. But before ISIS gained ground in Syria, there was another enemy there: the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Since early 2012, the U.S. and its allies armed militia forces fighting to overthrow his oppressive regime. U.S. airstrikes against ISIS appear to have set off an unfortunate chain of events that leave Syrian militias caught between a rock and a hard place — that is, the Assad regime and another Islamist militant group. As the balance of power shifts, no one knows what will come next for the everyday Syrians who are caught in the crosshairs of this multi-pronged fight.

Jabhah al-Nusra militants, who are affiliated with al-Qaeda, massed beside a major border crossing on the Syria-Turkey border on Monday. Then on Saturday, al-Nusra took control of the last swath of land in Syria’s Idlib province held by Western-backed forces in the Free Syrian Army (FSA), according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“I (want to) clarify why we pulled out of the villages of Jabal al-Zawiya [in Idlib] so that we preserve civilian blood because this group does not hesitate to kill civilians,” Jamal Maarouf, the head a group in the loosely-organized FSA said in a video statement.

Many have long feared that airstrikes carried out by the U.S. and its allies against ISIS targets have freed government forces to renew their fight against the FSA. The New York Times featured analysis from an anonymous official in the U.S. who gave some credence to this point.

http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/11/04/3588215/idlib-syria-fsa/

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6. Nasrallah vows to defeat Syria 'extremists'

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Addressing supporters in Beirut's southern suburbs by video link on Tuesday, Nasrallah said that Sunni radicals, known as takfiris, "have no future".

"These takfiris [Muslims who accuse other Muslims of apostasy] will be defeated in all areas and countries, and we will feel honoured that we played a role in their defeat," he said.

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"Security measures are the most extreme that they have ever been," Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the capital Beirut, said.

"These are sensitive times for Lebanon and, of course, this has to do with the spillover from the war in Syria."

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/11/security-beefed-up-ahead-nasrallah-speech-201411485720811353.html