After Assad loyalists attack the American and French embassies in Damascus, Clinton says Assad has “lost legitimacy.”
“President Assad is not indispensable and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power,” Clinton told reporters on Monday.
“If anyone, including President Assad, thinks that the United States is secretly hoping that the regime will emerge from this turmoil to continue its brutality and repression, they are wrong.”
I’ve never heard of any Arab Israeli students going to the same school as their Jewish compatriots and your statement “I’m pretty sure” as opposed to “definitely sure” would seem to imply that you’ve never known of it either.
Actually, there’s a very obvious solution. Give the schools for Arab Israelis the same funding that’s given to the schools for their Jewish students.
Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon so long as the Arab Israelis are merely viewed as guests(with status similar to the Dhimmis of Islam) and Israel is based on blood and soil nationalism.
Human Rights Watch claims to have proof of Syrian troops being ordered to shoot protesters.
Great. Now the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Assad and he won’t dare budge from power!
Yet another national day of protests; troops shoot still more demonstrators.
Syrian security forces are reported to have shot dead several protesters after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country in the biggest protests so far against Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
Police fired live ammunition and teargas in the capital Damascus, killing five people, and in southern Syria near the Jordanian border, where four people were killed, the Reuters news agency said quoting witnessess and activists.
Three protesters were shot dead in the northern city of Idlib, they said.
“We are in Midan and they are firing teargas on us, people are chanting,” a witness said by telephone from the centre of Damascus.
In the city of Hama, scene of a 1982 massacre by the military, live video footage by residents showed a huge crowd in the main Orontos Square shouting “the people want the overthrow of the regime”.
At least 350,000 people demonstrated in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an independent rights group based in London. said.
“These are the biggest demonstrations so far. It is a clear challenge to the authorities, especially when we see all these numbers coming out from Damascus for the first time,” Rami Abdelrahman, head of the SOHR, said.
Syrian forces shot dead two pro-democracy protesters in Deir al-Zour on Thursday, residents said.
sigh Shoot, shoot, shoot . . . Guys, this is getting boring. Couldn’t you spice things up a little? Flamethrowers, maybe? Or maybe you should work on methods of crowd control that have a little more . . . slapstick in them. Get creative!
Great. Now a Syrian town is under siege.
(Reuters) - Syrian tanks surrounded a town near the border with Iraq’s Sunni heartland on Sunday after thousands of people, emboldened by defections among security forces, took to the streets there denouncing President Bashar al-Assad, residents said.
Assad, from the minority Alawite sect, has sent troops in to towns across the country to try to end four months of protests against his rule. But activists say discontent is growing within the mostly Sunni army rank and file.
Killings, mostly carried out by ultra loyalist units, are leading to limited defections within the military, which is controlled by mostly Alawite officers who ultimately answer to Assad’s feared brother Maher, activists say.
Opposition meets in Istanbul, forms a “National Salvation Council”.
Members of Syria’s opposition in exile met this weekend and elected a council they say will challenge the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. But the group’s plan to hold a video conference with opposition leaders inside Syria, who have been leading an uprising that has now entered its fifth month, fell through after Syrian security forces attacked the neighborhood where the leaders were gathering in Damascus.
The meeting came after a bloody Friday in which Syrian security forces opened fire on large protests around the country. At least 28 people were killed on Friday, according to activists, who also say the regime has killed about 1,600 people since the protests against Mr. Assad and his authoritarian regime began in March.
I don’t think this is going to die down.
Medvedev: “Syria must not go the way of Libya.”
HANNOVER, Germany – An international response to the uprising in Syria should not risk pushing the country toward war, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday.
The Russian leader, who is on an official visit to Germany, said he and Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed “several options” to urge Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop using violence, implement reforms and engage with the opposition.
Medvedev said he believes the no-fly zone approved by the U.N. Security Council in Libya led that country to war. “We do not want that the events in Syria unfold as they did in Libya. That is why we are cautious here,” the Russian leader said through a translator.
Germany, which chairs the U.N. Security Council throughout July, and other EU member states are pushing for a resolution condemning the violent oppression of pro-democracy protests in Syria, but Russia, a permanent Security Council member with veto power, has opposed such a move.
I’m afraid it might be too late, Dmitri.
Government launches major assault on Hama, 121 dead.
"We have seen that the government had intensified its effort to try and end the wave of protesters or contain it over the past two weeks using more severe measures, like mass arrests of activists as well as just regular people who took part in the protests, or sometimes never even went to the streets.
“So it seems that the government is expecting some sort of escalation in the protest movement during the month of Ramadan and they are trying to pre-empt it,” our correspondent, reporting from neighbouring Lebanon, said.
The Syrian government has banned Al Jazeera and many other foreign media outlets from reporting from inside the country, making it difficult to verify reports of fighting.
And now Kuwait and Bahrain join in. And Turkey. Looks like all Syria’s neighbors, regardless of whether their own systems are democratic or not, are turning against Assad on this.
I wonder why? Is the Assad regime really that unpopular in the region?
I guess this leaves Assad with only one ally: Iran.
