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Jihadists Execute Seven in Syria, Two by Crucifixion

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Photo Credit: The Daily Star

Photo Credit: The Daily Star

The jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant announced it had executed seven prisoners in its bastion in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, two of them by crucifixion.

ISIL, which has been disavowed even by Al-Qaeda, said it held the seven responsible for a grenade attack on one of its fighters earlier this month in the Euphrates Valley city of Raqa, which it rules with an iron fist.

“Ten days ago, attackers on a motorbike threw a grenade at an ISIL fighter at the Naim roundabout. A Muslim civilian had his leg blown off and a child was killed,” the group said on Twitter.

“Our fighters immediately set up a roadblock and succeeded in capturing them. They were then able to detain other members of the cell.”

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights posted a photograph of the two prisoners being crucified at the roundabout with passer-by walking past apparently unfazed.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Says Has Indications Toxic Chemical Used in Syria this Month

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / STRINGER

Photo Credit: REUTERS / STRINGER

The United States has indications that a toxic chemical, probably chlorine, was used in Syria this month and is examining whether the Syrian government was responsible, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.

“We have indications of the use of a toxic industrial chemical” in the town of Kfar Zeita, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, referring to a rebel-held area.

“We are examining allegations that the government was responsible,” she told a regular news briefing. “Obviously there needs to be an investigation of what’s happened here.”

Syrian opposition activists reported that helicopters dropped chlorine gas on Kfar Zeita on April 11 and 12. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told ABC television’s “This Week” on April 13 that the attack was “unsubstantiated.”

Psaki said chlorine was not one of the priority one or two chemicals Syria declared to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) under a Russian-U.S. agreement for the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Next Rwanda? Power Rips ‘Industrial-Style Slaughter’ in Syria Civil War

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Power_080113America’s ambassador to the United Nations raised the specter of genocide in Syria, after officials this week sounded the alarm about spiraling violence in that country’s civil war.

Gruesome photos of purported civil war victims were shown earlier this week to the U.N. Security Council, depicting corpses with bones protruding and eyes gouged out. It was a haunting and grisly reminder that, as Ukraine and other trouble spots grab international attention, Syria is crumbling under the weight of a vicious war.

Speaking at a U.N. Security Council briefing on genocide, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power on Wednesday compared the fighting in Syria to the genocide in Rwanda 20 years ago.

She described the photos of Syrian prisoners as showing “systematic, industrial-style slaughter and forced starvation killings” – photos which, she noted, were from just three of the 50 Syrian-run detention centers.

“And to that we can add the Syrian victims of chemical weapons attacks, the children felled by barrel bombs and those being starved to death in besieged towns and villages, or those executed by terrorist groups,” said Power, who has written extensively on genocide. “Twenty years from now, how will we reflect on this Council’s failure to help those people? How will we explain Council disunity on Syria twenty years after Rwanda?”

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Shocking Viral Video Gives a Dose of Realism to Syrian Violence

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Please note that Restoring Liberty’s sharing of this video does not constitute an endorsement of, or support for, the producing organization or its fundraising efforts.

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Photo Credit: Reuters Christians fleeing Syria head to Turkish ‘homeland’

By Ayla Jean Yackley.

When Louis Bandak fled the violence in Syria, he sought refuge in the country his grandfather was forced to abandon exactly 90 years ago this week.

Bandak, his wife and two daughters are part of a small but growing trickle of Christians arriving in Turkey after three years of civil war in Syria killed more than 140,000 people.

“Although I had never been here before, it does not feel strange. This too is my homeland,” says Bandak, sitting in warm winter sun outside the 5th Century Mor Abrohom Monastery in Midyat, 30 miles (50 km) north of the border.

While most Christian refugees are in Lebanon or Jordan, countries with which they share linguistic or cultural ties, several thousand have come to Turkey. For many it is a reversal of their ancestors’ flight around a century ago, when World War One and the subsequent building of the post-Ottoman Turkish state made Turkey a hostile land for millions of Christians.

The sectarian strife that has rent apart Syria’s delicate multi-ethnic fabric has spawned a severe humanitarian crisis and driven 2.5 million refugees into neighboring countries.

Read more from this story HERE.

Under Threat, Syria’s Christians Sign Accord with Islamists

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Photo Credit: ReutersThe city of Raqqa in northern Syria was once the residence of Harun al-Rashid, the famed fifth caliph of the Abbasid empire. That was the golden age of Islam, which produced the poetry, scientific thought and philosophy in which the moderate Hanafi stream flourished. The city subsequently went through centuries of ups and downs, through times of ruin and of prosperity, until last week it seemed to return to days of old, to the era of the great Islamic conquests, when a radical Islamist organization seized control of it.

For the first time in many generations, a dhimma (protection agreement) was signed between the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) – an Islamist branch of Al-Qaida – and leaders of Raqqa’s several thousand Christians. Members of ISIS gave the latter three options: accepting the agreement, converting to Islam, or risking death.

According to the 12 clauses in the accord, the Christians will commit to pay a twice-yearly poll tax of “four gold dinars” – which at today’s rate, comes to about $500 per person – with the exception that members of the middle class will pay half this amount, and the poor will pay a quarter of it, on condition they do not conceal their true financial situation.

The agreement permits the Christians to follow their religious practices, but they are prohibited from building new churches or rebuilding destroyed ones.

Furthermore, the accord states that Christians may not prevent members of their community from embracing Islam if they so desire. They are forbidden from bearing arms, from engaging in commerce involving pork with Muslims, and from acting against Muslim interests – for example, by giving shelter to spies or persons wanted by ISIS. Moreover, if Christians learn of a plot against the Islamic State, they must report it.

Read more this story HERE.

UN: ‘Unspeakable Suffering’ for Syria’s Children

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Manu BraboChildren in Syria have been tortured, sexually abused and subjected to “indiscriminate” attacks by President Bashar Assad’s forces, and recruited for combat and terror operations by the rebels fighting to topple him during the country’s nearly 3-year-old conflict, a new United Nations report said.

The report to the U.N. Security Council by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon highlights the plight of children in the conflict from the beginning of the uprising against Assad in March 2011 until Nov. 15, 2013. It was given to the council this week and posted on the U.N. website Tuesday.

Ban said Syrian children have been subjected to “unspeakable and unacceptable” suffering during that time. “Violations must come to an end now,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Syrian government missed another deadline for destroying its chemical weapons Wednesday, but pledged to complete the process by June 30 as promised.

Under a timetable set up by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Syria was to have given up its entire stockpile of chemical weapons by Wednesday. Last week, a U.S. diplomat said Syria had only removed 4 percent of its most deadly chemicals so far. All should have been removed by Dec. 31 under the framework.

Read more from this story HERE.

Child Soldier: Shocking Video Surfaces of Purported 4-Year-Old Jihadist in Syria

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Photo Credit: YouTubeAl Qaeda fighters in Syria may have sunk to a new low with a video that appears to show a four-year-old boy squeezing off rounds from an AK-47 as jihadists exhort him on with cries of “Alahu Akhbar.”

The little tyke, whose father stands proudly behind him, is dwarfed by the heavy automatic weapon, and props the barrel up on a street barricade in the stomach-turning clip. The gun’s recoil knocks him back, and his father helps him hold it, offering encouragement in Arabic. International experts say the use of child soldiers is a disturbing trend previously seen in the bloody Syrian civil war, but the use of such a young boy is a new depth.

“Syria is unique to any other conflict we’ve worked in over the last 20 years,” Kate Adams, policy and advocacy manager at London-based charity War Child told FoxNews.com. “Children do seem to have been targeted by both sides, more than we might necessarily see in other conflicts. Children are being used almost as pawns of the war and not just as collateral damage.”

The child, identified as “Muhammad,” wears a black mask as he fires the gun, then removes it to reveal the chubby cheeks of a boy who should be playing harmless games with friends. Local reports say he arrived in Syria with his father from either Uzbekistan or Albania, along with the thousands of foreign fighters who are now answering the call for Holy War in the key Middle East nation.

The original video of the boy carried the title, “A message from one of the cubs of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” an Al Qaeda-linked group bent on establishing a terrorist state spanning Iraq and Syria. The video was removed from YouTube, but copies of the brief 30-second clip had already been released onto the web.

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MIT Analysis: Obama Called for War Based on Bogus Intel

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A just-published report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirms earlier reports by WND that the Syrian government could not have launched the sarin poison-gas-laden rocket last Aug. 21 into a Syrian suburb of Damascus that killed hundreds of civilians, many of whom were children.

At the same time, the report disputes continued U.S. insistence that the Syrian government was at fault, a position that almost prompted the United States to launch military attacks on Syrian chemical depots.

The chemical attack, in which some estimates of deaths from the attack approached 1,800 people, occurred in the Ghouta area then under Syrian opposition control in the midst of the Syrian civil war.

The report concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered the sarin was too short to have been fired from Syrian government locations, even though the Obama administration, based on what it says was technical intelligence, said – and still insists – the gas attack was from the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The report said a large canister to hold the chemicals was placed on top of the rocket, limiting the capability of the rocket.

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Al Jazeera Host Asks Why Can’t Arab Armies Be More Humane, Like Israel? (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

An Al Jazeera Arabic anchor recently asked his audience why Arab armies, and, in particular, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, in Syria, can’t behave more humanely towards civilians, like the Israeli and French armies do?

In a clip uploaded to YouTube this week and flagged by Mideast Media Analyst Tom Gross, the anchor asks, “Why don’t they learn from the Israeli army which tries, through great efforts, to avoid shelling areas populated by civilians in Lebanon and Palestine? Didn’t Hezbollah take shelter in areas populated by civilians because it knows that Israeli Air Force doesn’t bomb those areas? Why doesn’t the Syrian army respect premises of universities, schools or inhabited neighborhoods? Why does it shell even the areas of its supporters?”

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Syrian Mufti Gives Permission For Army Soldiers To Rape Rebel Women

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Photo Credit: Inquisitr

Photo Credit: Inquisitr

Reports of thousands of rapes in the Syrian civil war have been documented by human rights groups who are monitoring the situation on the ground. A deputy of the Chief Mufti of Syria has issued a religious decree that it is permissible and even encouraged to rape the daughters and wives of rebel troops and supporters.

The Syrian civil war, which has already entered its third year, has left more than 130,000 dead and millions of people homeless or displaced. This new edict issued by Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Ali al-Dala, aide to the chief mufti of Syria, who is loyal to President Bashar Assad, will only make matters worse.

When asked about how Syrian soldiers should treat rebel women, Al-Dala said that soldiers loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad have permission to marry unmarried and married women who are sisters and mothers of rebel soldiers. He said that the Syrian soldiers are not required to perform any type of official ceremony to be considered “married” to the women. Al-Dala said that the edict of rape is intended to serve as the women’s punishment for not reporting the rebels to the government. Now rape has religious approval, as well as secular.

Read more from about the Syrian Mufti’s actions HERE.