well if Russia has managed to exert pressure not to use sarin on rebels then the west has nothing to worry about do they?Originally Posted by Camera
personally I think Jerusalim post is speculating and talking BS.
It appears that Assad has ungrounded his jets, at least partially.
From today's Washington Post:Facing a resilient opponent, the government responded Tuesday with attack helicopters to pound rebellious neighborhoods, and fighter jets circling overhead periodically roared down and broke the sound barrier in an apparent attempt to cow the rebels.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...y.html?hpid=z2
With terrorists like the Assad gang, no one can should assured for sure.
Anyway. the usage of CWs is banned by an international treaty to which Syria is abided. The moment they use them, against anyone, they will sign their own death sentence.
CWs are of little effectiveness against modern troops that are equipped with defensive measure. They can only badly harm civilians.
I'm not sure Syria signed the CW treaty.
They didnt;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemica...#Member_states
You are right.
I see they're still using the Assad is waging war against civilians theme.
It does not change what you wrote however. The CW threat is more a "bark" than a probable "bite".
Sure.
There's something wrong in the statement of the Russian FM,which said Syria ratified in 1968 the 1925 protocol (which bans the use of CW). But when checked, Syria is not a signatory state of the protocol.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...l_war?page=0,0
PAPHOS, Cyprus – In Jdaydieh Artouz, a town 11 miles southwest of Damascus that is home to a mix of Sunnis, Christians, and Alawites, protests have been taking place almost daily for well over a year. Yet the security forces, centered at a police station a few hundred yards up the street from where the protesters regularly gather, have largely ignored them. One wet, cold January night while out to pick up some sharwama sandwiches, I watched cars with Bashar al-Assad's face emblazoned across the rear window pass within inches of the indomitable demonstrators. Neither side appeared perturbed. With the exception of isolated incidents in which several protesters were killed, the town remained peaceful throughout the uprising -- that is until Thursday, July 19, when rebel fighters fired RPGs at the police station, killing five officers.
Living in this town for the first 11 months of the uprising, I tried, and failed, to get articles published questioning why the regime tolerated protests or allowed free assembly in some areas, but not others. These incidents didn't fit the narrative that all protests were being violently quashed. The majority, of course, were -- and often brutally -- but the full picture was unnervingly complex.
Yet because anti-regime activists succeeded where I did not, the story of Jdaydieh Artouz has been distorted, almost beyond recognition. Hundreds of videos uploaded to YouTube present the outside world with the idea that the town was in open rebellion, that it was united in its opposition to the Syrian government.
But ask the Christian, Shiite, and Druze families whom I lived among in Jdaydieh if they support the revolution, and the vast majority will answer, in private, that they do not. Today, Christians fear that their churches will be tightly controlled by what would likely be a conservative Sunni government, should the rebellion succeed. They wonder if women will be told how to dress.The truth gets muddled when media outlets are forced to resort to YouTube videos to tell the world what's happening inside Syria. Though often authentic, such video clips are extremely difficult to verify. Most damningly, though, they lack the nuance afforded by context -- something that can only be achieved by reporters on the ground. Yet it is activists' videos appearing on television stations around the world that have shaped our thinking and opinions on Syria. The conflict becomes black and white when viewed through such a lens: Assad's regime is wrong and the rebels are right. The truth, of course, is more complicated than that.The complicated nature of the Syrian conflict, coupled with the obstacles faced by reporters, has favored a simplistic portrayal of events. But the reality is that many Syrians back neither the regime nor the revolt. They are Syria's silent majority, and they will likely pay a heavy price for the uprising that has been billed as a showdown between good and evil. The Assad regime instigated this revolt -- it chose guns over dialogue -- but its legacy of divisiveness has since taken on a life of its own. Too often now, it is Syrians killing Syrians, but reading the news you might never know.
Information about Syrian ratification
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/Pays?ReadForm&c=SY
More specifically
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebSign?...rm&id=450&ps=S
Does this mean they never ratified the agreement, only signed it? Not quite sure how that works, someone would chime in please
The Russian statement said Syria ratified the 1925 Protocole.
Wiki says Syria is not signatory of the protocol.
Wiki is wrong.
Syria is signatory of the 1925 Protocol (which interdicts the first usage of CW, but allows their production and storage. It also allows to retaliate with CW, if the signatory state was attacked with CW): http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/diab51.pdf
But Syria is not signatory of the 1993 CWC (which bans the production and storage of CW and BW): http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/syria/chemical/
This was the source of the confusion.
The Russian warning was right. Syria signed and ratified the 1925 Protocol.
Therefore, Syria has no right to retaliate with CW if attacked with conventional weapons.
The defector general Tlas in a first public expression denounces the regime and calls the army to reject the regime's crimes: http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=278787
Take this with grain of salt, but Mustafa Tlass should announce his defection within a week.
Searching for the Truth Behind the Houla Massacre
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-845854.htmlInitially, the United Nations was convinced that the Syrian government was behind the brutal Houla massacre. But then, some began to have doubts. SPIEGEL traveled to the town to interview survivors and witnesses -- and was able to reconstruct the horrifying slaughter.
Nothing is going to happen, Muawiya Sayyid, a retired police officer, reassured his family on the afternoon of May 25. They were afraid to leave the house, but Sayyid reminded his family that he had been a colonel and troops with regime connections had remained unharmed in previous raids.
It was a fatal miscalculation, as Colonel Sayyid was forced to realize during the last few minutes of his life. According to statements by his surviving wife and daughter, he was in his room on the second floor when he overheard the murderers in front of the house as they agreed bring out the women first and then kill everyone. He told his wife and children to run. "I'll try to stall them," he said. He succeeded, but paid for it with his life.
The Houla massacre at the end of May, which claimed the lives of 108 village residents, according to the United Nations, including 49 children and 34 women, most of them murdered with hatchets, knives and guns, shocked the world. UN observers were able to gain access to the site of the carnage, where they could see the bodies and independently confirm what had happened there. The Syrian ambassadors to the UN and 12 countries, including Germany, were expelled. On June 1, the UN Human Rights Council condemned the Syrian regime and its shabiha militias for the massacre, with Russia and China voting against the resolution. The government in Damascus, however, blamed the incident on "terrorists" and denounced what it called a "tsunami of lies" over the massacre.
But then views began to shift. As time passed, the UN began to question its original findings. On June 27, the Human Rights Council discussed a report prepared by its Syria commission, which concluded that there was insufficient evidence to determine who had committed the massacre.
On June 8 and 14, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading German daily, published two reports based on the statements of anonymous eyewitnesses, who claimed that members of the armed opposition had committed the massacre and then blamed it on the regime. According to the reports, 700 members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had come to Houla from various towns to kill families that had converted to the Alawite or Shiite faiths and had not joined the rebellion. At the beginning of June, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a member of German parliament for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), pursued the matter and sharply criticized the rebels for what he called "massacre marketing."
Spiegel vs. FAZ.
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