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February 23rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
There are three contrains and one is that there is not a UN resolution the
second that this is a much more complex situation because it sits next to
Israel, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan. A military intervention would have to be on a
vastly greater scale than in Libya.”
Mr Hague’s assessment came as Syrian
gunners pounded the opposition stronghold where veteran American-born war
correspondent Marie Colvin chronicled her last dispatch, just hours
before an intense morning barrage killed
her and a French photojournalist.
Their deaths were two of 74 reported Wednesday in Syria.
“I watched a little baby die today,” Marie Colvin told the BBC from
the embattled city of Homs on Tuesday in one of her final reports.
“Absolutely horrific, a two-year old child had been hit,” added Ms
Colvin, who worked for Britain’s Sunday Times. “They stripped it and
found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said, ‘I
can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”
Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik were among a group of journalists who had
crossed into Syria and were sharing accommodations with activists, raising
speculation that government forces targeted the makeshift media center,
although opposition groups had previously described the shelling as
indiscriminate. At least two other Western journalists were wounded.
Hundreds of people have died in weeks of siege-style attacks on Homs that have
come to symbolize the desperation and defiance of the nearly year-old
uprising against President Bashar Assad.
The Syrian military appears to be stepping up assaults to block the opposition
from gaining further ground and political credibility with the West and Arab
allies. On Wednesday, helicopter gunships reportedly strafed mountain
villages that shelter the rebel Free Syrian Army, and soldiers staged
door-to-door raids in Damascus, among other attacks.
The bloodshed and crackdowns brought some of the most galvanizing calls for
the end of Assad’s rule.
“That’s enough now. The regime must go,” said French President
Nicolas Sarkozy after his government confirmed the deaths of Colvin, 56, and
Ochlik, 28.
The US and other countries have begun to cautiously examine possible military
aid to the rebels. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton heads to
Tunisia for a meeting Friday of more than 70 nations to look at ways to
assist Assad’s opponents, which now include hundreds of defected military
officers and soldiers.
“This tragic incident is another example of the shameless brutality of
the Assad regime,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said
of the killing of the journalists.
In Saudi Arabia, the state news agency described King Abdullah scolding
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – one of Assad’s few remaining allies –
for joining China in vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution this month
condemning the violence.
But even Moscow said the ongoing bloodshed adds urgency for a cease-fire to
allow talks between his regime and opponents.
Washington had strongly opposed arming anti-Assad forces, fearing it could
bring Syria into a full-scale civil war. Yet the mounting civilian death
tolls – activists reported at least 74 across Syria on Wednesday – has
brought small but potentially significant shifts in US strategies. It
remains unclear, however, what kind of direct assistance the US would be
willing to provide.
The toppling of Assad also could mark a major blow to Iran, which depends on
Damascus as its main Arab ally and a pathway to aid Iran’s proxy Hezbollah
in Lebanon.
“We don’t want to take actions that would contribute to the further
militarization of Syria because that could take the country down a dangerous
path,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “But we don’t
rule out additional measures if the international community should wait too
long and not take the kind of action that needs to be taken.”
The UN estimates that 5,400 people have been killed in repression by the Assad
regime against a popular uprising that began 11 months ago. That figure was
given in January and has not been updated. Syrian activists put the death
toll at more than 7,300. Overall figures cannot be independently confirmed
because Syria keeps tight control on the media.
On Wednesday, the UN said that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would dispatch
Valerie Amos, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, to Syria
to assess the situation. No date was set.
Twenty of the deaths reported on Wednesday were in Homs, where resistance
forces include breakaway soldiers. Homs has drawn comparisons to the Libyan
city of Misrata, which withstood withering attacks last year by troops loyal
to Muammar Gaddafi.
“It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and
burst of gunfire,” Colvin wrote in what would be her last story
published Feb 19. “There are no telephones and the electricity has been
cut off. Few homes have diesel for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in
the coldest winter that anyone can remember.”
She described shrinking supplies of rice, tea and cans of tuna “delivered
by a local sheik who looted them from a bombed-out supermarket.”
“On the lips of everyone was the question, ‘Why have we been abandoned by
the world?'” she wrote.
Syrian activists said at least two other Western journalists – French reporter
Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the
Sunday Times – were wounded in Wednesday’s shelling.
Amateur video posted online shows the two injured journalists in a makeshift
clinic. The French journalist, Bouvier had her left leg tied from the thigh
down in a cast. A doctor in the video explains that she needs emergency
medical care. Conroy appears in the video and the doctors say he has deep
gashes in his left leg.
In one tragic image, a man with a bandaged head is shown mourning his son, who
was purportedly killed by government shelling in Homs on Saturday. The video
was released by activists Wednesday and the details could not be confirmed.
Colvin described seeing a two-year-old child killed on Tuesday and it did
not appear to be related to that video.
A Homs-based activist, Omar Shaker, said the journalists were killed when
several rockets hit a garden of a house used by activists and journalists in
the besieged neighborhood of Baba Amr. Shaker said tanks and artillery began
intensely shelling at 6.30 am and was continuing hours later. He said the
room used by journalists was hit around 10 am.
Amateur video posted online by activist showed what they claimed were bodies
of the two journalists in the middle of a heavily damaged house. It said
they were of the journalists. One of the dead was wearing what appeared to
be a flak jacket.
The intense shelling in parts of Homs – with blasts occurring sometimes just a
few seconds apart – appeared to have had no clear pattern over the past
week, hitting homes and streets randomly. Some have suggested that the house
used by the journalists and activists was pinpointed by Syrian gunners,
perhaps by following the signals from satellite phones and other
communication equipment.
The French culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, claimed the journalists were “pursued”
as they tried to find cover but he did not elaborate. A campaigner for
online global activist group Avaaz, Alice Jay, said the group was “directly
targeted.”
Another Avaaz activist, Alex Renton, alleged that seven Syrians trying to
reach Baba Amr with medical supplies and a respirator were found shot to
death with their hands tied behind their back. Two other activists,
including a foreign paramedic, traveling with the seven are missing, he
added. The claims could not be immediately confirmed.
Many foreign journalists have been sneaking into Syria illegally in the past
months with the help of smugglers from Lebanon and Turkey. Although the
Syrian government has allowed some journalists into the country their
movement is tightly controlled by Information Ministry minders.
Colvin, of East Norwich, NY, was a veteran foreign correspondent for the
Sunday Times for the past two decades. She was instantly recognisable for an
eye patch worn after being wounded covering conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001.
Colvin said she would not “hang up my flak jacket” even after that
injury.
“So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner
party I went to last night,” she wrote after the attack. “Equally,
I’d rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no
offense to desk jobs
Ochlik, who had set up a photo agency IP3 Press, won first prize in the
general news category of the prestigious 2012 World Press Photo contest for
his 12-photograph series titled “Battle For Libya.”
“I just arrived in Homs, it’s dark,” Ochlik wrote to Paris Match
correspondent Alfred de Montesquiou on Tuesday. “The situation seems
very tense and desperate. The Syrian army is sending in reinforcements now
and the situation is going to get worse – from what the rebels tell us.”
“Tomorrow, I’m going to start doing pictures,” he added.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the killings of
the journalists, calling them an “unacceptable escalation in the price
that local and international journalists are being forced to pay” in
Syria.
A statement by Information Minister Adnan Mahmoud said there was “no
information” about Colvin, Ochlik and other foreign journalists in Syria
who entered without official permission, the state-run news agency SANA
reported. It warned all foreign journalists to come forward to “regularize
their status.”
In London, British diplomats summoned Syria’s ambassador to the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, asking Syrian officials to facilitate immediate
arrangements for the repatriation of the journalists’ bodies and for help
with the medical treatment of the British journalist injured in the attack.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had no
information that the bodies of the two slain journalists had been carried
out of Homs.
On Tuesday, a Syrian sniper killed Rami al-Sayyed, a prominent activist in
Baba Amr who was famous for posting online videos from Homs, colleagues
said.
On Jan 11, award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in
Homs. The 43-year-old correspondent for France-2 Television was the first
Western journalist to die since the uprising began in March. Syrian
authorities have said he was killed in a grenade attack carried out by
opposition forces – a claim questioned by the French government, human
rights groups and the Syrian opposition.
Last week, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an apparent
asthma attack in Syria after he sneaked in to cover the conflict.
Elsewhere in Syria, the military intensified attacks.
In the northwestern province of Idlib, a main base of the Free Syrian Army,
the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that Syrian military
helicopters fitted with machine guns strafed the village of Ifis. Syrian
combat helicopters are primarily Russian-made, though they also have a
number of French choppers.
Another opposition group, the Local Coordination Committees, said troops
conducted raids in the Damascus district of Mazzeh district and the suburb
of Jobar, where dozens of people were detained. In Jobar, the group said
troops broke down doors of homes and shops and set up checkpoints.
The group also said troops backed by tanks stormed the southern village of
Hirak and conducted a wave of arrests.
In the Gulf nation of Bahrain, some anti-Assad protesters at a Syria-Bahrain
Olympic qualifying football match waved the rebel flag and threw shoes at a
small group of pro-regime supporters.
Source: agencies
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