De volgende artikelen komen van Anti-Media en ANTIWAR, in het eerste schrijft Darius Shahtahmasebi over de luchtaanvallen van de VS op Raqqa en de steun aan de reli-fascistische dictatuur in Saoedi-Arabië, die in het buurland Jemen een genocide uitvoert op de sjiitische bevolking van dat land……… Overigens bombardeert de VS bij tijd en wijle ook doelen in Jemen, dit nog buiten de terroristische drone aanvallen van de VS op verdachten in dat land, aanvallen waarbij meer dan 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens verdacht is (veelal vrouwen en kinderen…)… Jammer dat Shahtahmasebi dit niet noemt in zijn artikel.
In Raqqa heeft de VS hele families uitgemoord, middels haar barbaarse bombardementen…… Uiteraard zijn daar een groot aantal kinderen omgekomen….. De reguliere westerse media en het grootste deel van de westerse politici schreeuwen moord en brand, bij het eerste gerucht dat er kinderen zijn omgekomen bij bombardementen van het Syrische leger of de Russen, echter als er bij wijze van spreken stapels lijken van kinderen liggen, lijken van kinderen die wel bewezen door VS terreur zijn omgekomen, of zijn vermoord in dergelijke acties van haar bondgenoten, doet men er in het westen meestal het zwijgen toe……
Het is meer dan duidelijk dat de reguliere westerse (massa-) media liever ‘fake news’ brengen, dan de waarheid te vertellen….. Zo was de hysterie in diezelfde media (en bij die politici) enorm tijdens de bevrijding van Oost-Aleppo door het reguliere Syrische leger en de Russen, waar men de leugens van de ‘gematigde rebellen’ (lees: psychopathische moordenaars en verkrachters), verwoord door het SOHR en de White Helmets, als waarheid oplepelde…..
Dit terwijl diezelfde Russen en Syriërs al 2 maanden voor de uiteindelijke bevrijding van Aleppo besloten te stoppen met luchtbombardementen, dit om zoveel mogelijk burgerslachtoffers te voorkomen….. Iets dat amper of meestal niet de westerse massamedia haalde….. Dezelfde media die nu niet melden, dat de VS de oproep van meerdere landen en VN inspecteurs heeft genegeerd, oproepen te stoppen met het bombarderen van Raqqa, ook dit om zoveel mogelijk burgerslachtoffers te voorkomen……
Mad dog Mattis, de psychopaat die onder Trump minister van Defensie mag spelen, zei nadat een VN inspecteur van oorlogsmisdaden de VS waarschuwde voor de vele doden die het maakt in Raqqa en de VS regering opriep te stoppen met het bombarderen van het dicht bewoonde Raqqa: “Zo is het leven…..” Daarmee gaf hij aan er niet aan te denken te stoppen met die bombardementen……..
Shahtahmasebi spreekt ook nog over Amnesty International, lullig genoeg is AI niet te vertrouwen als het om Syrie gaat, ook zij hebben zich in het recente verleden verlaten op rapporten van het SOHR en de bewezen terroristische White Helmets. Dat AI nu eindelijk ook de VS aanklaagt voor oorlogsmisdaden (die wel bewezen kunnen worden) is hooguit een verbetering te noemen……..
Zoals al vaker op deze plek gevraagd: waarom wordt de VS niet aangeklaagd voor het Internationaal Strafhof?? Een land en de verantwoordelijken (inclusief Obama) aanklagen voor grootschalige oorlogsmisdaden (zoals het bombarderen van burgerdoelen en ziekenhuizen), kan ook zonder dat zo’n land het Strafhof erkent!! Uiteraard zal ook de reguliere westerse pers eindelijk eens met de waarheid op de voorpagina’s moeten komen, echter de kans daarop is uiterst klein……….
U.S. Airstrikes Are Wiping Out Entire Families in Yemen and Syria
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — The United States is killing entire families in Raqqa, Syria, and enabling Saudi Arabia to do the same in Yemen.
In June of this year, the U.S. led a campaign to retake the city of Raqqa from ISIS fighters while the Russian and Syrian militaries were also attempting to do the same thing. In the first week of fighting, U.N. war crimes investigators warned that the U.S. had already killed 300 civilians from air strikes alone in that seven day period.
Rather than heed that warning, the U.S. has continued the same strategy of pounding Raqqa into the ground despite the likelihood of civilian casualties. Pentagon chief James “Mad Dog” Mattis has dismissed this horror as a mere “fact of life” — a very easy decision to make when the fighting doesn’t concern one’s own relatives. Not to mention that Donald Trump relaxed the rules surrounding air strikes earlier this year, meaning military generals on the ground (including Iraqi forces, for example) can call in airstrikes from the ground with zero oversight.
The result, the Intercept reports, is that entire families are being massacred by U.S.-led air strikes.
“We have seen incidents in which entire families have been wiped out. The scale of things is increasing significantly,” said Alex Hopkins, a researcher at AirWars.
According to Hopkins, there has been a “worrying increase in the rate of mass casualty incidents” in recent weeks, and disproportionate numbers of children are being reported killed in U.S.-led air strikes.
As the Intercept noted, Raqqa is home to very few die-hard ISIS supporters who are fighting to the death to defend its de-facto capital, whereas an estimated 160,000 civilians remain trapped in the crossfire of the city’s fighting.
The Intercept also spoke to witnesses and activists by phone who explained incidents of widespread civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. air strikes. These activists oppose ISIS and are based in Raqqa, according to the Intercept, and their identities remain confidential.
“The planes hit the street where he [father] was walking to go home. There were no ISIS members or headquarters in that street, my father was only 50 meters from home. I wished that he had hurried home that night, but he was too old and it took him time,” one activist said of his father’s death in June.
Drawing on research from Amnesty International and Airwars, the Intercept describes many other instances in which entire families were wiped out:
“For instance, a coalition airstrike in Raqqa City on August 14 killed a mother, Nahla Hamoud Al-Aran al-Shehab, and her three children, Marwa, Ahmed, and Mariam. Three days later, another strike killed 30 members of the al-Sayer family, including several children. On August 21, yet another attack killed eight members of the Al-Aliwi family, internally displaced refugees who had previously fled from fighting in their home city of Palmyra.
“Amnesty International researchers also visited a farmhouse in the Hukumya-Salhiya area northwest of Raqqa, where 14 people were reportedly killed in a coalition attack before the campaign to take the city officially began. Amnesty found fragments of GPS-guided American munitions, and judged that ‘from the pattern of destruction there seems little doubt that the house was destroyed by air strikes.’” [emphasis added]
In its most recent report, Amnesty International also explains a scenario in which one Syrian lost her mother, sisters, nephews and nieces “for no reason at all.”
“The planes were circling all night, and we could not even approach the house to get the two injured children out from under the rubble until the following day,” said another member of the family who witnessed the attack. “The bodies were in shreds. We recovered body parts hundreds of meters away.”
Up until the beginning of June, the U.S. only had two personnel investigating casualties in Iraq and Syria full-time. As the Intercept notes, the U.S. military rarely conducts interviews with survivors and regularly discounts the majority of reports on civilian deaths as “non-credible.” This makes it incredibly difficult to verify the exact number of civilian deaths, but it also demonstrates America’s shockingly non-existent commitment to international law. The U.S. military may boast that it takes the utmost care to protect civilians, but are we just supposed to take their word for it?
One should also bear in mind that when Amnesty International releases evidence condemning a U.S. arch rival, such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the U.S. government jumps all over it. When the tables turn, suddenly these reports of civilian deaths are “non-credible.”
And make no mistake – as horrifying as the terror being inflicted on Raqqa is, what is occurring in Raqqa right now is not taking place in isolation. The U.S. is delivering this disturbing criminality all over the world. In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition, which is armed, trained, and protected by the United States and the United Kingdom, is doing the exact same thing.
A recent airstrike in Yemen saw an entire family murdered; only one four-year-old girl survived. The New York Times reported the story with the headline “Young Yemen Girl Is Sole Survivor After Airstrike Topples Her Home.” The word “topple” suggests an NFL sports-like scenario. In comparison, when reporting on Russia’s bombing of Aleppo in 2016, the New York Times regularly used terms like “scorch” and “brutal,” words that were conveniently not employed this time around.
Just days ago, the Saudi-led coalition struck a hotel near Yemen’s capital, killing at least 60 people with two dead bodies hanging from the upper floor. These kinds of attacks seem to be occurring daily, and no target is off-limits for the coalition.
The U.S. has already been warned that its support for the war in Yemen could attract serious legal consequences, and despite this, Yemen is clearly not the only location where the U.S. is rolling out this criminal strategy.
One of Trump’s campaign pledges was that he would not only bomb the shit out of ISIS via attacking their oil fields but that he would kill their families too. Even if every single family member documented above was related in some way, shape, or form to a member of ISIS, these acts are still legally and morally repugnant and should be condemned in the strongest terms. As such, the only evidence at hand shows these civilians were completely innocent, which makes their deaths wholly inexcusable — particularly when they occur on such a large scale.
Unfortunately, one can’t rely on the mass media or governmental institutions to do their job and hold their militaries to account, especially when the media is more concerned with what Trump tweets as opposed to how many hundreds of children he is killing in the Middle East.
In that regard, it is probably quite time for the media to review its priorities.
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US Killing Hundreds of Civilians in Syria’s Raqqa
August 25, 2017 at 7:36 am
Earlier this week, at least 100 civilians were killed in a span on 48 hours in Raqqa. Observers put the figure at 168 in the past 10 days, and 458 in US airstrikes against the city since June, including 134 children.
These strikes are meant to support the Kurdish invasion of Raqqa, but the fact that they are pounding residential districts in a war-torn city means that a lot of what they’re hitting are buildings packed with civilian bystanders.
The Pentagon has continued the defend the practice, insisting they are the most careful military in history about civilian casualties, and pointing to their own official bodycounts, which are usually less than 10% of the number documented by NGOs.
Perhaps even more importantly, these strikes really aren’t doing much to support the Kurdish invasion, as the Kurdish forces have been described as holding about 45% of the city for the last several weeks, and despite a marked increase in US strikes and civilian deaths, don’t seem to be making any progress.
The UN is even pushing the US to halt its airstrikes against the city indefinitely, saying another 20,000 civilians should be allowed to flee without fearing being a target of US airstrikes. There is, as yet, no indication that is being seriously considered.
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