Syria bombards starving Daraya hours after food aid delivery
Source: CNN
(CNN)The Syrian regime has pounded the besieged city of Daraya with barrel bombs, just hours after food aid was delivered to the area for the first time in almost four years, officials and monitors said.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 68 barrel bombs were dropped on Daraya on Friday as agencies delivered food rations to the city on the brink of starvation.
This comes as the United States is leading airstrikes targeting ISIS extremists. The regime is bombing cities and towns trying to break away from government control, including the very groups armed by the United States to fight ISIS.
The bombardment and fresh twin suicide attacks on Saturday are chilling reminders of the lack of progress in the conflict, which has raged now for almost five years, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, the destruction of towns and mass displacements.
At least 20 people were killed, including 13 civilians, and more than 30 people were wounded in twin suicide bombings outside the Shiite shrine of the Sayyida Zeinab in suburban Damascus area, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/11/middleeast/syria-food-aid-strikes/
Note: 5th paragraph added for clarity.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Patrick L. Smith
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/12/our_syria_policy_is_still_a_mess_these_are_the_dots_the_media_refuses_to_connect/
John Kerry shares a laugh with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during their meeting in Moscow, March 24, 2016. (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)
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One concerns the propaganda that crawls like kuzdu all over official statements and press reporting on the Syria conflict. The two usually coincide, we need to note, though this is not always so.
Barrel bombs (of the kind American deployed against the Vietnamese), targeted hospitals, civilian casualties, blockaded populations pushed to starvation: If you have not read of all this and more you have not been reading the newspapers. Here is our question: How much of this do we know to be so and how much as to the culpable parties? Defending the Assad government is out of the question, of course. Damascus is something short of a Swedish dairy, to borrow a British bureaucrat’s phrase in another context. But condemning it on the basis of what we are told is out of the question, too. One cannot do either with any certainty.
The reality is that most of us are far deeper in the dark than we realize. We are not supposed to recognize this, but the principled position requires us to. Propaganda is an effective device, let there be no question, but our recent wars—in part media wars, as John Pilger, the Australian-British journalist, puts it—are something new. In this environment, propaganda machines eventually over-produce, as if they have exceeded their design tolerances. One is told this, that and the other so incessantly that one ends up accepting none of it at face value.
One of the aims of this column since Salon and I began it just about three years ago is to encourage clear sight—to remove the gauze of exceptionalism that separates us from perfectly obvious realities beyond our shores. It is a defensible intention, I would still say, but it can come to this: We have to see clearly that we are often not permitted to see clearly. It is the only way to proceed sensibly through the swamps of mis– and disinformation that just about drown us.
Where is our information about the war in Syria coming from? This is the obvious, mandatory question we can never forget to ask. Official narratives, various intelligence services and the Pentagon are plainly parts of the answer. So we have one problem straight off the top. Web sites such as Bellingcat.com, whose connections one would be naïve not to question, present another. In different places we are fed material from different sources. In the Syrian case, there is the incessantly quoted Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which operates from an apartment in the English Midlands (as does Bellingcat). Ever have a coherent explanation of just what the Syrian Observatory is, who its people are, how it gets its information and how it checks what it gets? No need to answer. (Its “about us” page says it is not associated or linked with any political group.)
Full story:
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/12/our_syria_policy_is_still_a_mess_these_are_the_dots_the_media_refuses_to_connect/
