Middle East and North Africa | World news

Civilians fleeing east Aleppo turned back by gunfire
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/civilians-fleeing-east-aleppo-turned-back-by-gunfire

Aleppo // Hundreds of civilians trying to flee heavy regime bombardment and fighting in rebel-held east Aleppo were forced back by gunfire, a monitoring group said on Wednesday as the government pressed its offensive to control the whole city.

“On Tuesday night, around 100 families gathered near a passage from the Bustan Al Basha district to cross to Sheikh Maqsud,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“But when the civilians tried to cross to the other side, gunfire broke out,” he said, without specifying who was responsible.

Sheikh Maqsud is a northern neighbourhood controlled by Kurdish forces, allied with neither the regime nor the rebels.

The governorate running western Aleppo city said 10 people who had managed to crossed from the east on Tuesday evening had accused rebels of preventing people from leaving, but gave no details on how or where the civilians crossed over.

The government has long accused rebels of using residents in the east as human shields. Rebel groups deny any coercion and say the regime is lying.

“This has nothing to do with reality,” said Yasser Al Youssef, from the rebel group Nureddine Al Zinki.

“The regime is spreading rumours to try to undermine the resolve of the rebels and those who support them in Aleppo,” he said.

#civils #Syrie #Alep

Death of a Syrian arms salesman | The National
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/20160808/death-of-a-syrian-arms-salesman#full

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Un aspect rarement évoqué par nos experts préférés en jihadisme : le business de la guerre, à travers le parcours (bien documenté apparemment) d’un trafiquant local.

#syrie

When a refugee fled in the other direction

As Europe balks at the influx of refugees from the Middle East, one woman recalls fleeing from the horrors of Stalin.

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Jordan to allow 200,000 Syrians to work legally | The National
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/jordan-to-allow-200000-syrians-to-work-legally
Un changement d’approche assez radical : la Jordanie autorise les réfugiés syriens à travailler, notamment dans les zones économiques spéciales où les droits des travailleurs sont très réduits. Ils devraient remplacer des Indiens et des Egyptiens.

A new trade deal with Europe, a rush of foreign investment and public works are to put 200,000 Syrians to work in Jordan in what has been described as a radical new approach to tackling the biggest refugee crisis in decades.
[...]
Jordan is the main testing ground for job creation. Under the new pact, it will allow up to 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally, an idea it rejected in the past because of high domestic unemployment.

In exchange, Jordanian products would win easier access to European markets, meant to create new investment and jobs. Jordan would also receive hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and cheap loans for development projects.

If successful, the scheme would probably mean replacing some of Jordan’s hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, mostly from Egypt or Asia, with Syrians.

A key element is a promise by the European Union to ease its “rules of origin”. This would allow Jordanian factories to bring in raw materials from other countries and still label the finished products as Jordan-made to qualify for duty-free trade.

#Ambulance workers brave #Gaza #dangers
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/ambulance-workers-brave-gaza-dangers-20147157215230440.html

Ambulance drivers in Gaza have been working non-stop in extremely difficult conditions throughout the Israeli military offensive. According to the United Nations, one doctor has been killed and 19 medical staff have been injured in Gaza since July 7, while two hospitals, four clinics, one treatment centre, and four ambulances have sustained damage in Israeli air strikes.

The emotional impact has also taken a toll on medical workers in the besieged coastal enclave. Abuelkas told Al Jazeera that one of the worst calls he responded to was to help the al-Batsh family; eighteen members of the same family were killed by an Israeli missile in Gaza City on Saturday.

When he got to the site of the bombing, he didn’t know what he would find. At the house, he met women, children and old men; everyone was either screaming, crying or silent, in shock. He said the most difficult part was collecting dismembered body parts to identify the dead and prepare them for burial.

“This was a terrible, emotional mission - we found all types of injuries: light [and] medium to critical, body parts blown off, amputated limbs, and other dead bodies,” he says.

#ambulanciers #anonymes #braves #Palestine #Israël

Al Qaeda expands influence in Syria’s southern front
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/al-qaeda-expands-influence-in-syrias-southern-front

Col Nehmeh is unpopular even among supposed allies within the FSA, like the Yarmouk Brigade, who have long complained that his loyalties are to money and foreign intelligence agents, not the Syrian revolution.

He was also an ally of Gen Selim Idriss, the former head of the FSA, who was sacked in February for being ineffective. With him gone, Col Nehmeh’s influence was dramatically curtailed.

Col Nehmeh recently launched a new rebel coalition in southern Syria in what was widely interpreted as an effort to shore up his own power base, at the expense of an already tenuous unity among rebel factions. 

Rivalries within the FSA also mean some officers are happy to see Col Nehmeh taken out of the picture, in the hope they can take over his role at the DMC and build up their own client networks through distributing weapons and cash.

Al Nusra must have calculated that FSA commanders on the ground, and at the FSA headquarters in Turkey, would not be willing to start a war over a man they all dislike.

Captured Syrian rebel colonel ‘confesses’ to foreign hand in rout | The National
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/syrian-rebel-colonel-confesses-to-foreign-hand-in-rout

Ahmed Nehmeh, a former Syrian air force colonel who defected to become a key link between Western and Arab intelligence agencies and moderate rebels in southern Syria, said the defeat in the strategic town of Khirbet Ghazaleh, last May, was deliberately arranged by the rebels’ international backers.

Col Nehmeh, head of the Free Syrian Army’s Derra Military Council (DMC), was taken prisoner by Jabhat Al Nusra after an ambush in Deraa on Saturday, and is to stand trial in a rebel court on charges of treason.

He appeared on Tuesday in the video confession uploaded to a Facebook site and on YouTube, looking tired and bruised after three days of interrogation. He had clearly been beaten.

It was not possible to verify whether the confession was extracted under torture.

(...)

According to Col Nehmeh’s confession, “the donor countries” – a reference to Western and Gulf states that have poured billions of dollars into the war – contacted him and he enacted their orders to pull rebel units out of the town.

The rationale for the move, he said, was that Al Nusra forces were playing a major role in the Khirbet Ghazaleh attack and stood to increase their influence on the southern front.

Rather than allow Al Nusra to make gains, Western and Arab intelligence agencies engineered a victory for forces loyal to the president, Bashar Al Assad.

That explanation dovetailed with rumours that have swirled around the Khirbet Ghazaleh debacle since it happened. The defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory, was widely seen as suspicious by rebels and opposition supporters in Deraa. It sparked serious divisions within what had been broadly united groups.

Bashar Zoubi, the leader of the Yarmouk Brigade, a powerful rebel unit ostensibly under Col Nehmeh’s command publicly called for him to face trial for mismanagement.

Col Nehmeh specifically named Jordanian intelligence, with which he was closely affiliated, living in Amman in a building protected by government agents. Jordan hosts the secretive Military Operations Command (MOC), an operations room staffed by Western and Gulf intelligence units dealing with the Syria crisis. Jordan officially denies the MOC’s existence.

Syria’s western-backed rebels get helping hand from Islamist fighters
▻http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/islamist-militants-secret-role-in-syrian-rebels-successes

Many FSA commanders and secular opponents of Mr Al Assad and his regime refused to talk about Al Nusra, saying the group was irrelevant in Deraa, a tribal area with a tradition of moderate Islam. But others admitted that Al Nusra’s role in fighting in southern Syria is far greater than publicly acknowledged.

“The FSA and Al Nusra join together for operations but they have an agreement to let the FSA lead for public reasons, because they don’t want to frighten Jordan or the West,” said an activist who works with opposition groups in Deraa.

“Operations that were really carried out by Al Nusra are publicly presented by the FSA as their own,” he said.

A leading FSA commander involved in operations in Deraa said Al Nusra had strengthened FSA units and played a decisive role in key rebel victories in the south.

“The face of Al Nusra cannot be to the front. It must be behind the FSA, for the sake of Jordan and the international community,” he said.