US accuses Syrian regime of using 'crematorium' to cover up mass killings

The United States on Monday accused Syria of building a prison crematorium to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered detainees, putting pressure on Russia to rein in its ally.

Warning Moscow it should not turn a blind eye to Bashar al-Assad's crimes, the State Department released satellite images that it said backed up reports of mass killings at a Syrian jail.

"The United States is on record, has stated many times, that we are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime," said Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for the Middle East.

"And these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran."

And he added a message to President Vladimir Putin's government: "Russia must now, with great urgency, exercise its influence over the Syrian regime to guarantee that horrific violations stop now."

Jones' warning came as UN-mediated peace talks between Damascus and the Syrian opposition were about to resume in Geneva, and appeared aimed at maintaining pressure on Assad's backers.

The head of the opposition delegation to the talks welcomed the US statement, but complained it had come too late.

"This is but a drop in the ocean. What happens in the regime's prisons is much uglier than this," Nasr al-Hariri said.

"The time has come for the world -- chiefly the US -- to act to halt these human rights violations."

'Cover up'

One newly released image, a commercial satellite photograph dating back to January 2015, shows snow melting on the roof of a building attached to the Saydnaya military complex north of Damascus.

This, along with an earlier picture allegedly showing heavy-duty ventilation systems on the structure, appears to support earlier claims by rights groups that Saydnaya is an execution center.

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium" built in "an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya," said Jones.

Jones, an acting assistant secretary of state, said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" -- implying that classified evidence beyond the commercial pictures exists.

At Saydnaya, Syria holds up to 70 prisoners in cells that are meant for five, Jones alleged.

"And according to multiple sources, the regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Saydnaya."

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died in the prison between 2011 and 2015.

Assad's regime, he alleged, has detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period -- the first five years of a civil war that has left hundreds of thousands dead.

It was not immediately clear why the United States waited more than two years to present its evidence.

Jones said: "I would say that this information has been developing."

He also said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had raised concerns about Assad's brutality with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to Washington last week.

Sarin attack

Moscow, along with Iran, is Syria's main foreign backer and Washington believes Russian pressure is the only thing that will compel Assad to negotiate a peace deal.

President Donald Trump came to office vowing to focus US efforts in Syria on defeating the Islamic State group, a jihadist force that exploited the civil war to seize the east of the country.

He also said he hoped to work with Putin towards this goal.

But relations with Moscow, already dire under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, have not improved and Assad has continued to bombard civilian areas in his battle with opposition rebels.

Last month, when Assad was again accused of using the banned nerve agent sarin in a strike on his own people, Trump ordered a retaliatory US cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.

When asked whether the Saydnaya deaths could trigger action, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump would never "telegraph the actions he takes."

"When he's ready to act, he will let everyone know," he said.

Ivory Coast mutineers reject deal to end crisis

About 8,400 soldiers took control of Ivory Coast's second-biggest city, Bouake, and blockaded roads across the West African nation [Luc Gnago]

Renegade soldiers in Ivory Coast have rejected a proposal to end a four-day mutiny over unpaid bonuses just minutes after the government claimed a deal had been reached.

President Alassane Ouattara has been trying to restore order after 8,400 mutineers took control of Ivory Coast's second-biggest city, Bouake, closed border posts and blockaded roads across the West African nation. 

Heavy gunfire on Monday also paralysed much of Abidjan, the commercial capital, and the western port city of San Pedro.

Defence Minister Alain-Richard Donwahi said on state television late on Monday: "To end the stalemate and avoid any more bereavement of families, the army chief of staff held talks with the soldiers on Sunday and Monday... The talks have resulted in an arrangement to end the crisis." 

But two spokesmen for the mutineers confirmed the government's proposal had been rejected.

"They proposed 5m CFA francs [$8,360] to be paid tomorrow [to each soldier]. But we want 7m to be paid in one payment and immediately," Sergeant Seydou Kone, one of the spokesmen, told Reuters news agency.

The mutineers, many of them former rebels who fought to bring Ouattara to power, revolted on Friday when a spokesman for the group dropped demands for bonus payments, promised during negotiations to end an earlier uprising in January.

The soldiers were to be paid bonuses of 12m CFA francs ($19,950) each, with an initial payment of 5m francs that month.

They were due to get the rest this month, but the government has struggled to make the payment with a budget hit by the collapse in the price of cocoa, Ivory Coast's main export.

Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris, reporting from Abidjan, said the "litmus test for the latest deal will be in the next few hours… whether or not we see them [the mutineers] withdrawing from the positions they have occupied and return to the barracks."

The mutiny has "everyone worried" he said, noting Ivory Coast only emerged from a decade of political crisis and violence in 2011.

"Now this mutiny is threatening the business climate here, and people are starting to wonder what will happen to their investment," Idris said. "This is a nation that has seen some of the worst killings over the past decade, and they do not want to go back to that again."

Trump shared 'highly classified' information with Russia, says report

President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials during a meeting last week, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The White House rebutted the story, saying no intelligence sources or methods were discussed.

The newspaper cited current and former U.S. officials who said Trump shared details about an Islamic State terror threat with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. The threat was related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

The anonymous officials told the Post that the information Trump relayed during the May 10 meeting had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement. They said it was considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.

"I was in the room, it didn't happen," H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, told reporters outside the White House late Monday.

"The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries including threats to civil aviation," McMaster said. "At no time, at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed and the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known."

 Suivre

Dan Scavino Jr. 

✔@Scavino45

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster statement on #WaPo story, out front of the West Wing at the @WhiteHouse.

00:28 - 16 May 2017

 
•  3 1193 119 Retweets
 
•  5 6015 601 j'aime

He said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy, remember the meeting the same way. "Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh those of anonymous sources" in the news report, he said.

But while White House officials denied that any intelligence sources or methods were discussed, they did not deny that Trump shared the information about the use of laptop computers on aircraft. The Post story does not claim that Trump revealed any specific information about how the intelligence was gathered.

The story will only heighten Trump's strained relations with intelligence workers and former officials, who have expressed worry about sharing classified information with a former New York business magnate who often shoots from the hip.

It's unlikely that Trump has broken any law.

Subscribe to our videos for free!

A president has wide berth to reveal classified information, but critics already have denounced Trump for having too cozy a relationship with Russia, which intelligence and military officials view as an adversary. If true, the breach was ill-timed, coming a day after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election.

The Post said the intelligence partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russian officials. By doing so, Trump jeopardized cooperation from an ally familiar with the inner workings of the Islamic State group.

Afterward, White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency, the newspaper said.

The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment Monday evening.

Reaction from Capitol Hill Democrats was full-throated.

The story prompted Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to tweet: "Protip: Don't give the Russians classified information. #Classified101."

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., tweeted: "If true, this is a slap in the face to the intel community. Risking sources & methods is inexcusable, particularly with the Russians."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. — who had just had a root canal — read reporters a statement he scrawled out in the dentist's chair after learning about the story.

"These reports, if true, are of the gravest possible concern. It could harm our national security by cutting off important sources of intelligence that protect Americans against terrorist acts," Wyden said.

Subscribe to our videos for free!

Republicans were only slightly more tempered in their remarks.

"We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nation's secrets is paramount," said Doug Andres, a spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. "The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said, "We certainly don't want any president to leak classified information, but the president does have the right to do that."

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that the Trump White House "has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and order."

He said he would have more to say when he knows more about the news report.

"The shame of it is there's a really good national security team in place and there are good, productive things that are under way through them and through others," Corker said. "But the chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline — it's creating an environment that I think makes — it creates a worrisome environment."

Russia bombing triggers crackdown on Central Asians

A suspect is detained after the bombing of a metro train in St Petersburg [Sergei Karpukhin]

Moscow, Russia - Armed police officers broke into Nigora Marupova's rented apartment in southeastern Moscow at dawn on May 5 and took away her weeping and screaming daughters aged two and four. 

They told the confounded woman from Uzbekistan who lived in Russia for 14 years without legal trouble that they would place the children in an orphanage because Marupova had ties to "terrorists" that masterminded the April 3 subway bombing in St Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city and President Vladimir Putin's hometown. 

"They took the kids by force," Marupova, a 30-year-old brunette with a pale, haggard face, told Al Jazeera. "They did not want to return the smaller one, wanted to keep the child as a hostage, said she was their insurance." 

No ties whatsoever were found after interrogations, but the children were released days later only after Memorial, one of Russia's oldest and most respected human rights groups, stepped in with a squall of complaints and a threat of legal action. 

"This was an abduction," Memorial's Bakhrom Khamroev told Al Jazeera, adding the raid on Marupova's apartment was part of a sweep on at least 25 buildings in the area where ethnic Uzbeks rented apartments. "One of her girls was registered like she had been found at a junkyard."

Moscow city police and children's protection services refused to discuss Marupova's case. 

The sweep was part of a nationwide crackdown on nationals of three ex-Soviet nations of Central Asia - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan because the subway bombing that killed 15 and wounded dozens was the first attack carried out in Russia by a Central Asian. 

Investigators and security services said Akbarjon Jalilov, a 22-year-old suicide bomber was behind the attack. An ethnic Uzbek man born in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, he became a Russian national and worked as a sushi chef and auto mechanic. The bespectacled man sported a stylish goatee, not a full beard, and never had ties to armed groups, his friends and relatives told Russian and Kyrgyz media. 

Russian investigators claimed he was part of a "sleeping cell" of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but the only group that claimed responsibility for the attack was ISIL's sworn enemy. Only three weeks after the attack, the Imam Shamil battalion - a previously unknown, al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria - said Jalilov was its member, according toSITE Intelligence Group, a US company that tracks attacks.

Unwanted migration

Russia sees Central Asia, an arid region strategically stretched between China, Iran and Afghanistan, as its "soft underbelly". Its five nations broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and now have a population of more than 60 million. 

Three of them - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - flooded Russia with millions of labour migrants since the early 2000s. The nations also are the homelands of two dozen suspected accomplices of Jalilov that have been arrested after the bombing, investigators say. Two more were killed while resisting arrest. 

Jalilov and his presumed companions are Muslims below 40 who can't boast university degrees or fluent command of Russian and have blue-collar jobs that pay several hundred dollars a month. They also are the living images of Central Asian labour migrants many Russians don't want to live with but the Russian economy can't live without, according to a survey by the Moscow-based Institute for Social Analysis published in mid-May.  

"We won't survive without Uzbeks," demographer Yulia Florenskaya wrote in the survey because Russia is losing about a million people of working age a year and has a barely visible growth of the general population of 143 million. 

This demographic trend makes the arrival and long-term presence of millions of guest workers inevitable if Russia wants to secure the recovery of its economy hobbled by Western sanctions over Crimea, low oil prices, and cancerous corruption.

Skinheads and cops

Unlike Slavic labour migrants from Ukraine or Belarus that blend in with ethnic Russians, Central Asians have darker skin and hair, different fashion habits and cultural background - including their Muslim faith.

Unsurprisingly, they often attract negative attention - from xenophobic or racist remarks from passersby or neighbours to targeted violence by ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis. Racially motivated attacks that targeted non-Russians peaked in 2008, when 97 people were killed - including 49 Central Asians - hate crimes monitor Sova said.  

One of them was Salokhiddin Azizov, a 20-year-old Tajik labor migrant who was gunned down and then beheaded by a gang of skinheads who took a photo of his severed head and sent it to journalists. But his brother Jamsheed, who was shot twice by the same gang, returned to Russia after recovering from his wounds.

"There are no jobs to be found in our village," his uncle Rakhmatsho Azizov told this reporter in 2008. 

The Kremlin's perennial crackdown on neo-Nazis diminished the number of hate crimes – seven people, including two Central Asians, were killed in 2016, Sova said.  

But there is another scourge Central Asians face – the corruption and brutality of police officers who routinely detain them to extort money, rights groups and migrants say. 

"If they don't pay up, the police officers get offended and get them deported," Valentina Chupik, head of Tong Jahoni, a Moscow-based human rights group that works with Central Asians, told Al Jazeera. "There is no oppression, there is only a conception of easy prey." 

Kremlin's scapegoats?

Under Putin, Russia has seen several waves of government-orchestrated hate campaigns against the nationals of countries that fall out with the Kremlin.

In 2006, after ex-Soviet Georgia declared a pro-Western course, Kremlin-controlled media responded with weeks of hysteria that triggered arbitrary arrests, dismissals, deportations and beatings of ethnic Georgians. In the following years, people from Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus and Ukraine faced similar abuses in Russia every time their governments disagreed with Moscow.  

Russian nationals from the Northern Caucasus region have for years been a magnet of police scrutiny and abuses outside their mostly Muslim region. For more than two decades, Russia has been battling fighters from the Caucasus who were first linked to Chechen separatists and are now joining ISIL. 

Several thousand Central Asians have also joined ISIL and other armed groups in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, officials say, and some were labour migrants recruited in Russia. But it was the St Petersburg bombing that made their compatriots a subject of persecution and abuses. 

Hundreds, if not thousands, have been deported after the attack, according to Memorial and other rights groups. Official data on 2017 deportations will only be available early next year. 

Some employers suspend or refuse to pay their wages. Some migrants face threats and are told to leave for good. A makeshift mosque was destroyed in a village in the central Tula region, the groups say. 

A Kyrgyz national ended up in a diabetic coma after two days of detention without food and water, and police deported him after he got out of a hospital. An Uzbek woman in labour was not allowed into a maternity ward in the city of Tver and had to give birth at home. 

Police did not let another detained Uzbek, a single mother, to get in touch with her underage children and locked her up for a night in a basement with bedbugs. A sober Tajik man who does not own a car was sentenced to 10 days in jail for drunk driving. 

Some observers think that this is a tried-and-tested Kremlin strategy of diverting attention from domestic problems such as the economic crisis, corruption, opposition and labour protests that multiplied in recent months. 

"This is Kremlin's strategy - 'we're always looking for enemies,'" said Memorial's Khamroev, an ethnic Uzbek whose apartment was searched twice recently and whose laptop was confiscated by police. "Russia faces enormous problems so the public attention is being directed away from them."

Russia: Deadly blast rocks St Petersburg metro

Nakba forever internalised among exiled Palestinians

At least 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between the years of 1947 and 1948, as more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns were demolished [Mohammed Asad]

by

Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author.

When I ask Tamam al-Assar about her memories of the 1967 war, she is confused. 

Tamam al-Assar has lived in the same refugee camp since 1948 [Mohammed Asad]

At 76, Tamam lives in the same refugee camp to which her family fled after their exile from Palestine during the Nakba in 1948. At least 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1948, as more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns were demolished to make room for Jewish settlers.

Tamam still talks about what befell her family, reliving the dramatic and bloody events.

Only a few years of her life were peaceful. Despite her failing memory, every recollection she manages to conjure up from her childhood - before the establishment of Israel upon the ruins of villages such as her own - is repeated with joy.

She can still taste her first chocolate bar, one that her brother, Salim, had tried to confiscate, foiled only by the timely intervention of her older brother, Ismail.

Salim disappeared during the joint French-British-Israeli war on Egypt in 1956, the aim of which was to reclaim the nationalised Suez Canal, to tame Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, and to occupy parts of the Sinai desert.

WATCH: Born in '48 (47:02)

During that time, Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip. Salim ran away with a group of teenagers, hoping to cross the Gaza border through southern Israel into the Naqab desert and eventually go into Jordan. Their calculation tragically misfired, and they all disappeared.

Tamam and Ismail spent years looking for Salim, to no avail. An elderly woman who claimed to communicate with the spirit world finally told Tamam that her brother was trapped in an earthy prison, deep underground; they assumed he was dead and buried.

Tamam's grief never dissipated over the loss of Salim. Still, she noted: "God was generous, as He always is with poor people." He blessed her with three boys and three girls.

Tamam's middle son was Kamal, a rebel with socialist ideas about the proletariat and social justice. He joined the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987 as a protest organiser, working with underground units of equally rebellious youth. They threw rocks at Israeli soldiers, burned tyres and refused to quell their uprising, despite the death and destruction wrought upon them by Israeli forces.

Kamal was eventually detained and tortured severely. A thin, pale young man who was an obsessive smoker, he was left permanently weakened and scarred, and he died a few years later. For years, Tamam has awaited her "reunion" with Salim and Kamal in heaven.

Dates confuse Tamam. For her, war is war, and from her home in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp, it seems that her life has been a permanent war - not the kind aimed at simply conquering an enemy, but one that has defeated her emotionally and broken her spirit.

Although events of various wars are all muddled up in Tamam's memory, she remembers what matters to her most: her father's love, her mother's faith, Salim's courage and what Kamal whispered in her ear the last time she saw him. "Don't worry, mother," he said. "I will be fine."

For Tamam, as for many Palestinian refugees, memory is an ongoing experience that she continues to live and relive daily [Mohammed Asad ]

For Tamam, as for many Palestinian refugees, memory is not a mere accumulation of past events, but an ongoing experience that they live and relive daily. Neatly composed timelines and conveniently structured academic classifications of history do not define Tamam.

Indeed, Tamam has been defined and redefined numerous times over the years.

In the Zionist narrative, she did not exist, and still does not. Israel and its supporters insist that Palestinians are not people, and thus not entitled to a homeland. At best, they were roaming nomads with no connection to the "desert" that "bloomed" thanks to the "miraculous" efforts of the Jewish people.

Tamam's father was a peasant in Joulis, owning a small patch of land, a few cows and a donkey, and a house made of bricks and hardened mud. After he was uprooted from Joulis, he died heartbroken, leaving Tamam still weeping for Palestine after all these years.

If ever her memory waned, her years of destitution and harshness in a refugee camp would bring it back - a constant reminder. In fact, sometimes unwittingly, alternative narratives of Tamam's life have in some way fed into the Zionist depiction of Palestine and the Palestinians.

Tamam's village, Joulis, exists only in her mind and in the memories of the peasants who were brutally uprooted [Mohammed Asad ]

Per United Nations' terminology, Tamam was initially seen as part of a larger "refugee problem", and her people's fate was precariously described as the "question of Palestine". Her "problem" was supposedly humanitarian, devoid of any political meaning. Her "question" was meant to be resolved, even if outside international law and basic human rights.

But after nearly 70 years of talking, debating, "resolving", "affirming" and "reaffirming", Tamam is still in the same refugee camp to which her family was exiled in 1948.

Her village, Joulis, exists only in her mind and in the memories of the peasants who were brutally uprooted from their simple yet enchanting Palestinian paradise. Each family was assigned to a blue tent and given a ration of food to prevent starvation.

For Tamam, the Nakba is not a date. It is far more encompassing than a single event, however tragic. Everything that existed before that date is the life that she was unfairly denied, leaving her with lasting scars. The Nakba, in some way, has become her identity.

Now, Tamam's grandchildren are embarking on a life of their own. They are getting married, having babies, adding to the family's old home and mapping out their futures. They have inherited Tamam's eternal sadness, but also her legendary resolve.

When Kamal died, Tamam declared that all the children in the refugee camp were her sons and daughters. She fought soldiers on many occasions to free frightened boys from imminent arrest and was beaten in the process; her bruises have only intensified her sense of purpose.

While her grandchildren do not relate to the Nakba in the same way that Tamam does, for them - and for many among the new generation of Palestinians - the Nakba has been forever internalised. It now exists beyond the boundaries of memory, geography and trauma. It is a focal point in the genesis of their ongoing tragedy.

Not talking about the Nakba, or determining that some other date - such as the June 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem - as the start of the Palestinian story is both thoughtless and a waste of time.