Two young girls look on as a veiled woman passes by in Aleppo, August 2014. Syrian magazine Saiedet Souria wants to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Nov 15 2014 (IPS)

For most Syrian women, the war has been a disaster. For some, it has also been liberating.

For Yasmine Merei, managing editor of the Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria, the upset of traditional family roles and the shaking off of a culture of fear have wrought positive effects.

Many Syrian women have unfortunately been forced to become the breadwinners of their families, with their husbands missing, in jail, injured or killed, she told IPS, but while fending for themselves can be a terrifying experience, it can also free women from the traditional bonds placed on them.

Although it [Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria] does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly … [it] wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard
‘’If he [the husband] isn’t the one who pays for everything and has that specific role in society, he no longer has the right to tell you what to do’’, added Mohammad Mallak, the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine, which translates as ‘Syrian Women’, and was founded early this year.

Mallak also runs a partner magazine, Dawda (‘Noise’), from the same office in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep.

Few of the women in the magazine’s photos have their heads covered, and Merei took off her headscarf earlier this year, after wearing it ‘’for about twenty years’’ as part of her upbringing in a poor, conservative Sunni family.

Merei said that she started taking part in the 2011 protests due to the unjustness of Syrian law, especially as concerns women. As examples, she noted a longstanding law against Syrian women giving citizenship to their children and widespread, unpunished honour killings.

A former Master’s student in linguistics, Merei – like many Syrian women – has become responsible for providing for her immediate family, sending money to her mother and her brothers, both of whom were jailed for protesting and released only after large bribes were paid.

Her elderly father died shortly after he, too, had been imprisoned and the family forced to flee their home.

Telling women’s stories does not simply mean female victims recounting the horrors and hardships of their lives, however.

Although it does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly, Merei wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard.

A first-hand account from a woman who was tortured in Syrian regime prisons sits alongside a review of Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ and an interview with a female police officer in opposition-held areas in the pages of the magazine and on its Facebook page.

Articles on how forced economic dependence negatively affects both women and national economies overall, others discussing potential health problems found in refugee camps such as tuberculosis, a regular column by a female lawyer still in regime areas who previously spent 13 years in prison for political reasons and two translated articles from international media give breadth to the magazine’s roughly 50 pages per issue.

Saiedet Souria publishes sections of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – the ‘’international bill of rights for women’’ adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979 – in every issue, and will publish it in its entirety in the next, she said.

The magazine itself only has a print run of between 4,500 and 5,000 copies per issue (with roughly 3,500 distributed inside Syria through one of its four offices), bit its Facebook page where the articles are regularly posted is followed by over 40,000.

For a country where Facebook and Youtube were banned from 2007 until early February 2011, and where internet and electricity are scarce, this is a significant number. Syria has been on Reporters Without Borders’ Internet enemies list since the list was established in 2006.

In addition to offices in Daraa, Damascus, Suweida and Qamishli, another will soon be opened in Aleppo, Merei said.

‘’All of the ten women who work for us inside get a regular salary of 200 dollars,’’ she explained, ‘’and are responsible for distributing the copies as well as bringing women together for meetings and similar initiatives.’’

The copies are given out at markets and local councils, and in at least one location, noted Merei, the women have a system to recirculate the limited copies once they have finished with them.

Reporters Without Borders has held two workshops for the magazine, in April and September of this year, and offered to donate equipment to the magazine, but ‘’ we had basic equipment – regular printers, computers’’ from an initial investment made by Mallak,  she said.

‘’But what we really needed was paper and ink, to get the magazine to as many women as possible. And so RSF made an exception and offered us that, instead.’’

The goal, she said, is to ‘’help Syrian women regain confidence in themselves.’’

A confidence undermined by the war and by the use of ‘religion’ to control women in Islamist areas which, when she last went to them earlier this year, ‘’seemed like the country had gone back to the Stone Ages.”

‘’I am a Sunni Muslim but the Islam there is not like any I know.’’

‘’One of the major problems is that Syria’s intelligentsia are all either in jail, abroad or dead,’’ one Syrian, who has lived most of his life abroad but came back recently to help try to set up university classes in opposition-held Aleppo, told IPS. ‘’There is almost no one to structure anything, no one to put forward ideas.’’

This is what the magazine and it correlated activities are trying to address, as well, Merei said. ‘’We are trying to give Syrians the knowledge they are going to need in the future,’’ she said.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Children in Aleppo forced underground to go to school, October 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
ALEPPO, Nov 6 2014 (IPS)

Winter has not yet hit this nearly besieged city, but children are already attending classes in winter coats and stocking hats.

Cold, damp underground education facilities are less exposed to regime barrel bombs and airstrikes but necessitate greater bundling to prevent common seasonal viruses from taking hold in a city from which most doctors have fled or been killed.

Only one perilous route leads out of the city and northwards to the Turkish border and better medical care, if required.A few of the children in the co-ed primary school seem shell-shocked, but many smile and laugh readily on the crowded wooden benches stuffed into the cramped, cold spaces.

On the way to an underground school IPS visited in late October, the children must necessarily pass by shop fronts blown out by airstrikes, a few remaining signs advertising what used to be clothing, hairdressers’ or wedding apparel shops with the ‘idolatrous’ images spray-painted black by the Islamic State (IS) when they briefly controlled the area, before being pushed out by rebel groups.

The jihadist group is still battling to retake terrain in the area, with the closest frontline against them being in Marea, an estimated 30 kilometres away from opposition-held areas of eastern Aleppo.

They must also witness the destruction wrought by the regime, which is trying to impose a total siege on opposition areas and which would need to take only a few kilometres more of terrain to do so.

Even if they only live a block away, the children are forced to walk by buildings entirely defaced by barrel bombs, floors hanging down precariously above the heads of fruit, vegetable and sweets street vendors. A pink toilet and part of a couch are still visibly wedged between the upper, mutilated and dangling levels of one such building on their way.

A few of the children in the co-ed primary school seem shell-shocked, but many smile and laugh readily on the crowded wooden benches stuffed into the cramped, cold spaces. Two boys at the front of one of the rooms sway back and forth with their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing boisterously.

Some of the rough walls have been painted sky blue or festooned with holiday-type decorations to ‘’brighten the children’s spirits’’, one of teachers says. A few comic-strip posters have been pasted in the corridor.

Children singing in underground school in Aleppo, October 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

The classes run from 9 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon during the week, one of the instructors – Zakra, a former fifth-year university student in engineering – told IPS.

Zakra, who now teaches mathematics, English and science at the school, said that she gets paid about 50 dollars a month. All of the school’s 15 teachers are women wearing all-covering black garments. Some cover their faces as well, some do not. IPS was told not to photograph them in any case, because many still have family members in regime areas.

‘’The school opened last year,’’ Zakra said, ‘’but then stopped between October 2013 and July 2014, as the barrel-bombing campaign made it too dangerous for parents to send their children to school,’’ even to underground ones.

The young teacher said that she plans on leaving at some point to continue her studies in Turkey but was not sure when, primarily due to economic reasons.

Older students are mostly left to their own devices, because this school and others like it only provide for those ages 6 to 13.

The head of the education department of the Aleppo City Council – who goes by the name of Mahmoud Al-Qudsi – told IPS that some 115 schools were still operating in the area, but that most of them were former ground-level flats, basements or other structures.

Only about 20 original school buildings were still operating, he said, from some 750 in the area prior to the uprising.

Syrian government forces have targeted educational and medical facilities in opposition areas throughout the conflict, and efforts are made to keep the locations secret.

Those preparing for the baccalaureate – the Syrian secondary school diploma – study at home, he said. They then come to centres on established dates to actually take the exams in late June and early July. Word is spread of where they will be held via the Aleppo Today television channel, which broadcasts out of Gaziantep, and posters are put up around the city to announce the times and places.

Turkey, Libya and France currently recognise the baccalaureate exams, Qudsi noted, but ‘’French universities only accepted five of our students last year.’’

Most of the curriculum remains that approved by the regime, but ‘nationalistic’ parts praising the Assad family have been cut and religion classes now teach that ‘’fighting against the Assad regime is a religious duty.’’

‘’We also want to change the curricula, but we can’t right now. We want it to be a Syrian-chosen one – one designed and wanted by all Syrians – but we can’t do that now, given the situation,’’ said Qudsi, ‘’and we obviously don’t have the money to print new books.’’

Most of the low salaries the teachers receive are necessarily funded by various international and private associations because the city council just does not have the funds, he noted.

The council, ‘’was only able to pay the equivalent of 70 dollars each for the entire academic year but the teachers were happy about it nonetheless, since it shows that we appreciate what they are doing.’’

Qudsi was also adamant that even the most fundamentalist parents had not interfered with their teaching.  ‘’We are all in this together. Their children attend our schools, too.’’

The barrel bombs stopped entirely for a number of days earlier this autumn after rebel forces closed in on the Aleppo air defence factories where the crude bombs made of scrap metal and explosives are assembled by regime forces. The bombing has since resumed following regime gains.

On arriving at the scene of one such attack in late October, IPS saw a body pulled from the rubble by the civil defence forces before they rushed with flashlights around the block to get to the other side of the collapsed building, where three young children had been trapped underneath the rubble. All were later found dead.

Families were crowded on the steps outside of other buildings down the street, and flashlight beams illuminated the faces of clutches of frightened children, an adult or two nearby in the dust raised by the concrete slabs brought down in the impact.

The schools at least give the children a chance to focus on something other than the destruction and death surrounding them, Qudsi told IPS, and ‘’are the only chance of Syria having any future at all.’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

A young mother approaches a healthcare facility inside the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, mid-September 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
DOHUK, Iraq, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the largest refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, young Syrian mothers and pregnant women are considered relatively lucky.

The number of registered Syrian refugees surpassed 3 million in late August, with the highest concentrations in Lebanon (over 1.1 million), Turkey (over 800,000), and Jordan (over 600,000). In all of the above, serious concerns have been expressed about the availability of healthcare services for expectant mothers.

In Lebanon, for example – which hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees, 76 percent of whom are women and children – the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) last year had to reduce its coverage of delivery costs for mothers to 75 percent instead of 100 percent, due to funding shortfalls.Though some in the Domiz camp live in tents on the edges of the camp with little access to basic sanitation facilities, others reside in small container-like facilities interspersed with wedding apparel shops and small groceries, and enjoy the right to public healthcare

The Domiz camp in the northern Dohuk province houses over 100,000 mostly Syrian Kurds, but is in a geographical area with a 189 percent coverage rate of humanitarian aid funding requests in 2014. The Syria Humanitarian Response Plan (SHARP) has received only 33 percent of the same.

Though some in the Domiz camp live in tents on the edges of the camp with little access to basic sanitation facilities, others reside in small container-like facilities interspersed with wedding apparel shops and small groceries, and enjoy the right to public healthcare.

This does not necessarily equate with quality healthcare, however. Halat Yousef, a young mother that IPS spoke to in Domiz, said that she had been told after a previous birth in Syria that she would need a caesarean section for any subsequent births.

On her arrival at the Dohuk public hospital, she was instead refused a bed, told to come back in a week and that she would have to give birth normally. They also told her she had hepatitis.

Fortunately, she said, her husband realised the seriousness of the situation and took her to the capital, where they immediately performed a C-section and found that she was instead negative for hepatitis. IPS met her as she was leaving healthcare facilities set up in the camp, holding her healthy 10-day-old infant.

Until recently, many mothers would also simply give birth in their tents. On August 4, Médicins San Frontiéres (MSF) opened a maternity unit in the camp that offers ante-natal check-ups, birthing services headed by MSF-trained midwives and post-natal vaccinations provided by staff who are also refugees.

Information on breastfeeding and family planning advice is also provided, according to MSF’s medical team leader in the camp, Dr Adrian Guadarrama.

MSF estimates that 2,100 infants are born in the camp every year, and others to refugees living outside of it.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has long been providing safe delivery kits to healthcare providers. It also works to prevent unwanted pregnancies and provides contraceptives to those requesting them, thereby ensuring that pregnancies are planned, wanted and safer.

The clean delivery kits contain a bar of soap, a clear plastic sheet for the woman to lie on, a razor blade for cutting the umbilical cord, a sterilised umbilical cord tie, a cloth (to keep the mother and baby warm) and latex gloves.

UNFPA humanitarian coordinator Wael Hatahet told IPS that so far the programmes in Iraqi Kurdistan for Syrian refugees had received enough funding to cover the necessary services, and this was why ‘’the situation is no longer an emergency one for Syrians here’’.

Hatahet said that he gives a good deal of credit to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which – despite having seen a major cut in public funds from the central government as part of a prolonged tug-of-war between the two – continues to support Syrian refugees coming primarily from the fellow Kurdish regions across the border.

Many residents expressed dissatisfaction to IPS about what they considered ‘’privileged treatment’’ given to Syrian refugees while the massive influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) that have arrived in the region over the past few months – after the Islamic State (IS) extremist group took over vast swathes of Iraqi territory in June – are seen to be suffering a great deal more.

Even Hatahet, who is of Syrian origins himself, noted that he had seen ‘’Iraqi IDPs wearing the same set of clothes for the past 15 days’’.

‘’We obviously try to support with garments and dignity kits,’’ he said, ‘’but it’s really, really sad.’’

However, he also noted that ‘’almost all the IDP operations are supported by the Saudi Fund [for Development]’’ totalling some 500 million dollars and announced in summer, ‘’which was strictly for IDPs and not refugees.’’

Hatahet expressed concerns that a broader shift in focus to Iraqi IDPs might result in a loss of the gains made in this geographical area of the Syrian refugee crisis, urging the international community to remember that ‘’we have 100,000 refugees scattered within the host community’’ and not just in the camps.

The Turkish office of UNFPA told IPS that, in its area of operations, ‘’it is estimated that about 1.3 million Syrian refugees have entered Turkey, of which only one-fifth of them are staying in camps due to limited space. 75 percent of the refugees are women and children under 18 years old.’’

It pointed out that ‘’women and girls of reproductive age under conditions of war and displacement are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence, including sexual violence, early and forced marriage, high-risk pregnancies, unsafe abortions, risky deliveries, lack of family planning services and commodities and sexually transmitted diseases.’’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

What remains of a street in Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The woman who walked into the Islamic Front (IF) media office near the Turkish border was on the verge of fainting under the hot Syrian sun, but all she cared about was her infant son.

With over half of the country’s population displaced, she was just one of the parents among the more than three million UN-registered Syrian refugees grappling with how to keep their children safe and healthy while dealing with the innumerable dangers inherent in war zones, refugee camps and statelessness.

When IPS met the young woman in early August, she was living in the nearby Bab Al-Salama camp in northern Syria after having been displaced from an area of heavy fighting.Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

The infant was only a few weeks old and needed to be breastfed, but there was nowhere out of the sight of men. And so, wearing a stifling niqab, she asked to use the room that now serves to ‘register’ foreign journalists crossing the border.

The room afforded some shade and privacy in which to breastfeed and, once the twenty-two-year-old former fighter in charge of the office had stepped out, she started feeding her child.

As she blew gently his sweaty forehead, the woman told IPS that she had kidney problems and could not sit – she could only lie down or stand up. She said that she was also having problems accessing medical care, for both herself and her feverish son. And even if the black abaya covering her body and the niqab over her face were hot, ‘’it’s better to use them,’’ she said, ‘’it’s war”.

The area around the Bab Al-Salama camp just across the border from the Turkish town of Kilis has been bombed several times, including a car bomb in May that killed dozens.

On the other side of the border, the camps that the Turkish government has set up for the over 800,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations are said to be able to accommodate fewer than 300,000 of them.

In formal and informal refugee camps throughout the world, women are notoriously at risk of sexual crimes. Alongside economic issues, many parents on both sides of the border cite this as a reason to marry off their daughters earlier, in the attempt to ‘’protect their honour’’ and find someone to provide for them.

The children resulting from these unions are almost always unable to be registered and are thus stateless, joining the ranks of the many Syrian Kurds and others denied citizenship under Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

Mohamed was an officer in the Syrian regime’s army. From a fairly large tribe in Idlib, his family was targeted by the regime once the conflict began and he has fought with different Free Syrian Army brigades over the past few years.

Soon after a number of women were reportedly raped by ’shabiha’ in his area, he moved his young wife, mother and sisters across the border. He now crosses illegally into Turkey to see them when not fighting.

Street scene in rebel-held Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

Mohamed is seeking ways to reach Europe. When IPS first met him in autumn of 2013, he had no intention of leaving. However, since then, his first son has been born, stateless.  The Syrian regime did not issue passports to officers in order to prevent them from defecting even prior to the 2011 uprising, and none of his family possesses one.

As a professional soldier without a salary and with no moderate rebel groups providing adequate wages to support a family, as well as no desire to join extremist groups – many of which would pay better – he feels does not know how else he can provide for his family.

‘’There’ s no future here,’’ he said.

On the Turkish side of the border, Ahmad – originally from Aleppo, Syria’s industrial capital – says he does not want to leave the region.

“I once asked my wife what country in the world she would go to if she could, and she answered ‘Syria’,’’ he told IPS proudly.

However, he added that he had stopped going backwards and forwards as a fixer and media activist as the day approached for his wife to give birth and the situation in Aleppo worsened.

When children approached a table as IPS was having tea with him in a Turkish border town, he somewhat gruffly told a little girl begging that she should ‘’work, even if that means selling packets of tissues on the streets.’’

‘’They have to learn to work and not just ask for money. Turks are starting to get angry that we are here,’’ he said.

Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

Meanwhile, some attempts are being made to raise money for schools inside Syria that would be virtual ‘bunkers’, as Assad’s regime continues to target both schools and medical facilities.

In rebel-held Aleppo, IPS stayed with a Syrian family for a number of days in August as the regime barrel bombing campaign continued and as the danger of an impending siege by government forces or a takeover by the extremist Islamic State (IS) became more likely.

The eldest of the family’s four girls – only eight-years-old – had recently been hit by a sniper’s bullet while crossing the road to one of the few schools still functioning. Although it was healing, the exit wound will leave a very ugly scar on her arm.

Whenever the bombs fell during the night, the occupants of the room would move about restlessly, while the eight-year-old was always already awake, staring into the dark, utterly motionless.

Her father was adamant, however, that – come what may – the family would not leave.

In the late afternoon, little boys could be seen playing outside in the street with scant protection from snipers, only the nylon tarp of a former UNHCR tent hung across the street in an attempt to shield them. Large gaping holes marked the buildings, or what was left of them, in the street around them.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Member of Aleppo civil defence team searches for survivors after barrel bomb attack, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
ALEPPO, Syria / GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Aug 19 2014 (IPS)

Numerous mechanics, tyre and car body shops used to line the busy streets near the Old City of Syria’s previous industrial and commercial hub.

Now car parts, scrap metal, TNT and other explosive materials are packed into oil drums, water tanks or other large cylinders from regime areas and dropped from helicopters onto civilian areas in the same city, in defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2139.

In the days spent inside the city in August, IPS frequently heard bombs throughout the day and night and visited several sites of recent attacks on civilian areas. Locally organised civil defence units could be seen trying to extract survivors from the rubble, but often nothing could be done.

Roughly six months ago, on February 22, the U.N. resolution ordered all parties to the conflict to halt the indiscriminate use of barrel bombs on populated areas. The Syrian regime has instead intensified its use of them.An Aleppo local council official told IPS that of the some 1.5 million people living in the city previously, there were now fewer than 400,000, with most of those who have left in recent months now internally displaced.

Human Rights Watch released a report in late July saying that it had identified ‘’at least 380 distinct damage site in areas held by non-state armed groups in Aleppo’’ through satellite imaging in the period from October 31, 2013 to the February 22 resolution, and over 650 new impact strikes on rebel-held areas in the period since, marking a significant increase.

One of the deadliest days of recent months in the city was on June 16, when 68 civilians were killed by aerial attacks, according to the Violations Documentation Center in Syria. The centre also noted that in the five months between February 22 and July 22, a total of 1,655 civilians were killed in the Aleppo governorate by aerial attacks.

An Aleppo local council official told IPS that of the some 1.5 million people living in the city previously, there were now fewer than 400,000, with most of those who have left in recent months now internally displaced. He said that every month the number of people in the area is re-counted for food supply and other requests to donors given the huge displacement under way.

The only road heading towards the Turkish border in rebel hands is now in danger of falling to the fundamentalist Islamic State (IS) – previously known as Islamist State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – even if the armed opposition groups manage to keep government troops at bay.

Regime forces are trying to inflict a siege on Aleppo’s rebel-held areas to force them into submission, as they have done to other cities in several parts of the country.

The removal of the jihadist IS group from large sections of territory not under regime control has been entirely due to the fighting by the rebel groups themselves, and it is likely that many will face brutal execution if the group enters the city again – a prospect the regime seems to be favouring.

Barrel bombs are not dropped on IS forces or on the territory held by them, and until recently there were few cases of any sort of attack at all by regime forces against IS-held areas.

A local activist from IS-controlled Jarabulus, now living across the border in Turkey – after coming under suspicion of “speaking negatively of IS” within the community – told IPS that since the jihadist group had taken control of the city, ‘’there has not been a single attack on any part of it’’ by the regime.

The TNT-filled cylinders dropped by Syrian government forces have in recent months instead been destroying the few productive activities that had remained in a city formerly known worldwide for its olive oil soap, textiles and other industries.

Aya Jamili, a local activist now living in Turkey, told IPS that the few Aleppo businessmen who had tried to keep their operations up and running through the years of the conflict had in recent months either moved their equipment across the border or just moved whatever capital they had available and started over again.

Much activity needed for day-to-day survival in the city has moved underground. Underground structures have been renovated by civil defence units into shelters, which also served to hold the festivities marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in late July. Any large gathering in the streets would have been likely to attract the attention of the regime.

People who can have moved to basement flats, as have media centres and bakeries, which work at night to avoid being targeted.

Produce is brought in from the countryside and stands sell melons and tomatoes in the streets nearer the regime ones. Because barrel bombs cannot be precisely aimed, there is too large a risk for the regime of dropping them close to its own side, so these locations are deemed ‘safer’.

Nevertheless, there is still the constant risk of snipers and large sheets of bullet-scarred canvas have been hung across some of the streets to minimise their line of vision.

The once bustling, traffic-clogged streets farther away resemble for the most part desolate wastelands.

On the way out of the city, two barrel bombs were dropped in quick succession near the neighbourhood through which IPS was travelling and, just as the driver said ‘’the helicopters only carry two each, so for the moment that’s all’’ and sped onwards, a third, deafening impact occurred nearby, shaking the ground.

Further down the road, signs indicating the way to ‘Sheikh Najjar, industrial city’ are shot through with bullet holes, an apocalyptic scene of crumbling buildings behind them.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

A central Aleppo street after a barrel bomb attack, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
ALEPPO, Syria, Aug 16 2014 (IPS)

Volunteer civil defence units operating here in Syria’s largest city careen through crater-pocked routes of precariously hanging, pancaked concrete where barrel bombs have struck.

Greyish dust blankets the dead, the alive and the twisted steel jutting out.  The panicked confusion immortalised in innumerable photos – with bloodied survivors raking desperately through the rubble for loved ones – is granted a modicum of order by the arrival of the rescue teams, in their distinctive white hard hats and black knee pads and boots.

When IPS arrived on the scene a few moments after the explosion of one such barrel bomb in early August, the men were already there, looking for survivors amid the rubble. One stood ready ear glued to his walkie-talkie, eyes darting between onlookers he was trying to keep at a safe distance and the sky – the first barrel bomb is almost always followed by another within 10-30 minutes, targeting would-be rescuers.One [rescue worker] stood ready, ear glued to his walkie-talkie, eyes darting between onlookers he was trying to keep at a safe distance and the sky – the first barrel bomb is almost always followed by another within 10-30 minutes, targeting would-be rescuers

The Hanano civil defence centre in eastern Aleppo is a repurposed school, its corridors dusty and empty except for a few firemen’s boots airing out, a broom, and a few morale-boosting posters of the civil defence men in uniform.

Body bags and trauma kits sit alongside fuel for Bobcat excavating and rubble-clearing equipment, pickaxes with USAID logos on them, drills and boxes of firemen’s suits, propped up against chalkboards still bearing the marks of lessons once taught in them.

Many of the men are in their twenties, clean-shaven, former university students. Khaled Hijjo, a former law student in his mid-twenties and head of the centre, told IPS that the rescue and fire teams work in two shifts: 12 hours on, 12 hours off.

At the moment there is only one medical specialist at the centre, he said, so this specialist is on call 24 hours a day. The man, who did not give his name, said he had worked for the Syrian Red Crescent even prior to the 2011 uprising and subsequent violence, but that he had no time to train the other men in basic first aid.

Correct carry and extraction procedures prevent aggravating injuries, including paralysing spinal injuries, and the heavy equipment received has proven vital to remove rubble and save those trapped underneath.

For the past four months, the rescue workers have been receiving a salary from the government-in-exile and courses from a number of foreign bodies and governments.

Entry-level first responders are given a salary of 175 dollars, while the heads of the various centres instead receive 200, civil defence chief and former English teacher Ammar Salmo told IPS, adding that 21 members of the team had been killed by barrel bombs while on duty.

When the bombs bring down entire buildings, ‘’many are trapped and nothing can be done. There are five still alive in one area that we know of, but there is no way to get them out’’, one local media activist told IPS, saying he felt helpless, and that taking pictures of the dead and wounded had ceased to make him feel useful

Though many of the local media activists have been given expensive cameras and satellite equipment and attended training programmes funded by Western nations in southern Turkey, virtually none of them seem to have had any basic first aid training.

Given the extremely severe shortage of trained medical staff left in Aleppo after the repeated attacking of medical facilities by the regime, the civil defence teams play an even more vital role in saving lives.

Ambulances donated from abroad and brought in through the sole supply road still under rebel control into the city go with the first responder team in central Aleppo, while those injured in the surrounding countryside are taken in cars to the nearest first aid centre. Communication is possible only via walkie-talkie, because there is no mobile phone reception.

A training centre was recently established inside Syrian territory but outside of the city, where team members were attending 20-day training sessions a few at a time, said Salmo.

He added that more civil defence centres were currently being set up in the Idlib region further to the west, and that it was proving easier to manage them than those in Aleppo, because many of the men ‘’were regime defectors and are more familiar with how institutions work.’’

He said the deputy chief of civil defence was a former regime general, and that four other former generals are currently working with them.

Of the instructors at the training centre, Salmo told IPS,  ‘’five are defectors from Assad’s forces, including a general teaching how to deal with barrel bombs and fire, and two doctors serve as medical experts to train the men in first aid.’’

The group has experienced some minor problems with some of the armed groups. One team member also told IPS that some of the heavy equipment had been ‘’borrowed’’ for a day by a Free Syrian Army group a few weeks earlier, but that they had promised that they would return it soon.

‘’We’re trying to solve the matter through dialogue,’’ he said.

When asked whether the group had had problems with the more extremist groups such as the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra, he scoffed, saying ‘’Jabhat Al-Nusra doesn’t need our things. They already have enough money.’’

No fire engines or other emergency vehicles could be seen in the immediate vicinity of a civil defence centre near a front line where IPS spoke to Salmo, who said that the teams had to be careful.

‘’Once you are seen as more organised,’’ he noted, ‘’you’re also seen as more of a danger to the regime.’’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Syrian boy carries bread back from underground bakery in severely damaged opposition-held area of Aleppo (August 2014). Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
ALEPPO, Syria, Aug 11 2014 (IPS)

The single, heavily damaged supply road remaining into the rebel-held, eastern area of the city is acutely exposed to enemy fire.

All lorries with wheat for the areas’ underground bakeries, soap for hygiene purposes, and fuel for vehicles and generators travel by this route. While snipers focus on this road and other frontlines throughout the city, regime barrel bombing is meanwhile steadily, painfully reducing the rest of the city to rubble.

Although many areas are now under the control of the more moderate Islamic Front, Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra helps provide for basic needs in some areas where the underfunded Syrian National Council-linked administration is unable to do so.While snipers focus on this road [the only remaining supply road into the rebel-held, eastern area of the city] and other frontlines throughout the city, regime barrel bombing is meanwhile steadily, painfully reducing the rest of the city to rubble

IPS watched as members of the armed group handed out metre-long rectangular blocks of ice, after they slid down a metal shaft to armed men waiting to give them to inhabitants waiting nearby who have been without electricity and running water for months.

‘’They’re good people,’’ said one inhabitant of the city, who nonetheless had been arrested by them for undisclosed reasons a few months back. ‘’They’re friends.’’

In private, however, many Syrians will say that they are not happy with the group, though it is ‘’not anywhere near as bad as ‘Daeesh’ (the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS).”

Inside the Aleppo city council offices, bright red filing cabinets and a new coat of white paint mark a sharp contrast with the crumbling buildings and concrete slabs hanging precariously above streets where those left continue to go about their daily affairs as best they can.

‘’We have been hit many times, but we need to show that we will keep rebuilding,’’ one employee said.

Council chief Abdelaziz Al-Maghrebi, a former teacher and manager at a textile factory, walks with a limp from what he says was an injury from a tank bomb never properly treated.

The council has civil registry, education, legal affairs and civil defence directorates – and an office for electricity, water, sewage, and rubbish – but often receives no money from the ‘government-in-exile’, said Mohammed Saidi, financial manager of the council.

‘’The amount of money depends on the month, and no money was received from the SNC in July.’’

However, Saidi stressed, all reports of siphoning off of money by members ‘’are false’’.

Private donors and foundations play a large part in the council’s budget as well, and ‘’funding depends on the project proposals that are accepted’’, he said.

One of the recent proposals was for underground shelters, which the head of the civil defence directorate – established at the council only recently after long acting as an entirely volunteer force – told IPS had been granted four months ago, and 16 of which had since been built.

For medical needs, doctor Ibrahim Alkhalil, head of the Aleppo health directorate for rebel areas, said that as doctors and hospitals continue to be targeted, the location of medical facilities ‘’has to be kept confidential and change frequently’’.

The doctor, who is Syrian but who spent most of his professional career in Saudi Arabia and only came back after the uprising started, noted that everything was in short supply or lacking entirely: antibiotics, water, electricity and trained staff.

He added that the lack of maintenance for vehicles and the terrible road conditions meant that many people were dying simply from being unable to reach the few existing medical centres.

Moreover, the local council can afford to provide funds only to some medical facilities that do not receive any from other donors, council chief Al-Maghrebi told IPS.

Alkhalil pointed out, however, that no amount of supplies would solve the main problem if ‘’the regime isn’t stopped from killing and injuring in the first place.’’

A truck with lights switched off to avoid attracting regime aircraft attention often makes its way through the streets of a central neighbourhood at night, calling out ‘haleeb’, ‘haleeb’ (‘milk’).

A number of children in the area have been hit by snipers while crossing a street now ‘protected’ by a bullet-riddled sheet of canvas meant to reduce visibility.

In another area, Salahheddin – the ‘first liberated area of Aleppo’ and the very name of which retains a sort of mythical status in the eyes of some – children laugh and play soccer in the empty street near the frontline after nightfall. The blood of a boy hit by a sniper recently still stains the ground nearby.

Despite the constant risk of government snipers, IPS was told, near the frontlines was often the ‘’safest place, since it is too close to regime areas for them to drop barrel bombs on.’’

IPS was asked by a freckled, red-haired boy barely out of his late teens now working for a local Muslim, ‘’Why have you come here? What is there left to say?’’

The boy works to get charities abroad to help his organisation provide 50 dollars per month to the neediest widows and orphans of those killed in the fighting and for food packages.

A barrel bomb outside the charity’s offices killed a good friend and co-worker about 15 days ago. Sandbags are now stacked in front of windows and, according to another volunteer, over half of the staff left immediately after the incident, either for other parts of the country or for Turkey – or they simply no longer come to the office out of fear, a niqab-clad woman also working at the organisation said.

The charity has an underground bakery with which it normally provides bread to those in need, but its equipment had broken down a few days prior to IPS’s visit. It was unclear when it would be fixed, whether the spare parts needed could be brought into the city, and whether the regime might soon take the one road left in.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Poster in Lebanon's Beqaa of Hezbollah 'shaheed' killed in Syrian conflict. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Aug 5 2014 (IPS)

Concerns about supporting a national army collaborating with a ‘terrorist organisation’ in Lebanon have in recent times been superseded by threats inherent in growing regional conflict.

The fact that Hezbollah, officially designated as a ‘terrorist organisation’ by both the United States and the European Union, no longer conceals its involvement in the fighting across the Lebanese-Syrian border makes little difference.

When traveling through the eastern Beqaa Valley, posters of Hezbollah ‘shaheed’ (‘martyrs’) of the Syrian conflict vie for space with those of popular Shia imams and the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.The fact that Hezbollah, officially designated as a ‘terrorist organisation’ by both the United States and the European Union, no longer conceals its involvement in the fighting across the Lebanese-Syrian border makes little difference.

In one seen by this IPS correspondent on a recent trip to the area, Nasrallah’s face and that of another Shia political leader flank that of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, with the writing ‘’this is what heroes are’’.

On July 26, the ‘Party of God’ announced in a statement that Nasrallah’s nephew, Hamzah Yassin, had been killed performing his ‘’jihadist duty defending holy sites’’, implying he had lost his life fighting in Syria.

The United States and other nations’ support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has long served as a bulwark against excessive volatility in the small but confessionally-diverse Middle Eastern country. At the same time, care has been taken to prevent it from becoming so strong as to pose a threat to its southern neighbour and strong U.S. ally – Israel.

Hezbollah, sworn enemy of the ‘Zionist entity’ (as it refers to Israel), continues to claim that its more powerful arsenal is for its struggle against Israel, even as ever more of its means and men are directed at fighting rebel groups in Syria.

At the same time, it seems to be gaining ever more influence in Lebanon’s policies and military.

Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told IPS that Hezbollah ‘‘is believed to have a lot of influence on the military intelligence [directorate] in particular –which would make sense as it is the most sensitive agency and the agency that would, potentially, monitor Hezbollah.’’

On the fact that Hezbollah moves fighters and weapons across the border, Sayigh said that ‘’Hezbollah has a lot of de facto power; it acts autonomously on these issues. They must have some sort of agreement that allows them to bring back their dead and wounded, for example,’’ or ‘’it may be that they move them through corridors no one, including the army, is allowed to enter.’’

Sayigh noted that compared with the LAF, Hezbollah ‘’has heavier, longer-range missiles.’’

However, the LAF will benefit, he said, ‘’if the current development programme goes through’’, because ‘’significant quantities of more up-to-date weaponry, transport systems and so on’’ will be available to them.

In January, Saudi Arabia pledged 3 billion dollars in aid and the International Support Group for Lebanon promised at a Rome conference in June to provide more training, among other support.

However, Hezbollah’s key strategic advantage remains ‘’its superior organisation, intelligence, battlefield management and the close relationship between its political and military leaders,’’ which is what the LAF lacks, according to Sayigh. ‘’It is also thought to have a lot of say in the choice, recruitment and promotion of Shia officers in the army.’’

In relation to border control and weapons smuggling in certain areas by Syrian rebel groups, he noted that ‘’once Hezbollah accepted the deployment of the police in its own strongholds in southern Beirut, it became possible for the army to deploy more extensively along the northern and eastern border, and be somewhat more effective.’’

The effectiveness of the LAF is further weakened by such problems as the soldier-to-general ratio, which according to a paper published earlier this year, stands at just under one general for every 100 soldiers, compared with the U.S. army, which in October 2013 had one general for 1,357 soldiers.

The more efficiently organised non-state actor has instead been called a ‘’jihadist’’ organisation, and describes what its fighters dying in the conflict in Syria are doing as their ‘’jihadist duty’’.

Asked to comment on whether Hezbollah is comparable to Sunni jihadist organisations, Sayigh said that ‘’it is an Islamist organisation’’ but ‘’it has accepted that it cannot construct an Islamic state in Lebanon.’’

Sayigh noted that ‘’to the extent that they are mobilising Shia fighters from Iran or from Iraq to go fight in Syria, we do witness a growing form of Shia jihadism, the idea that people are going to fight in defence of the Shia doctrine, to protect Shia shrines. There is a growing sense of, if you like, Shia jihadism,’’ but ‘’Hezbollah stands out for working within a much more careful political and military framework.’’

He said, however, that ‘’they are increasingly recruiting from outside of their own ranks,’’ showing a ‘’higher level of mobilisation among the Shia community. Whether or not these people get paid is unclear.’’

Mustafa Allouch, head of the Tripoli branch of the Future Party and former MP for the city, said instead that ‘’a lot of money is being paid.’’

‘’It is said that Hezbollah provides 20,000 dollars for a ‘martyr’ buried openly, and 100,000 if the parents agree to bury him without a funeral,’’ he said.

In relation to the United States and its financial support for Lebanon overall, Sayigh said ‘’there seems to have been a strategic decision to continue to cooperate with the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, and other agencies even when Hezbollah is in a coalition government.’’

‘’The country is fragile and in deep economic trouble,’’ Sayigh pointed out, ‘’and the U.S. decision has been to ‘’avoid overburdening the Lebanese system to breaking point.’’

However, a local employee of a U.N. agency expressed concerns to IPS – on condition of anonymity – that de facto authorisation in many areas comes from Hezbollah and not the government itself.

Nevertheless, the army can point to some achievements in the past few months. In December 2013, LAF was given a mandate to keep order in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli amid rapidly escalating violence. In a visit to the city in July by IPS, overall calm prevailed and many of the sandbags, tanks and troops deployed earlier in the year were nowhere to be seen.

When asked what the major factor was that led to the calm, Allouch said that ‘’when you have a political agreement to withdraw all gang leaders,’’ citing arrest warrants issued for Alawite community leaders accused of crimes, which led to their escaping across the border to Syria, ‘’you can achieve things. The military is simply imposing what the political agreement was.’’

He noted that, although Hezbollah could be compared in many ways to a ‘’gang’’, there could be no talk of the Lebanese army ‘’confronting Hezbollah militarily’’.

‘’It would end in civil war. And the Lebanese army itself would not hold, given the situation in the region. Hezbollah is not a local issue, it is a regional one.’’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Syrian refugee schoolchildren being taught in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

The Shatila Palestinian camp has no library, nor does adjacent Sabra or Ain El-Hilweh in the south. And, after recent statements by Lebanon’s foreign minister, some fear that the thousands of Syrian refugee children within them will soon have even slimmer chances of learning to read and write.

The United Nations stated earlier last month that Syrian refugees would total over one-third of Lebanon’s population by the end of 2014, and that at least 300,000 refugee children were not enrolled in school.

In early July, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil said that no assistance should be given to Syrian refugees as “all this aid – be it food, shelter or health care – encourages Syrian refugees to stay in Lebanon, while what we want is to encourage their speedy exit.”“The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the [Lebanese-Syrian] border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes

During his time as energy minister in the previous government, Bassil had said that Syrians should be seen as a “threat to the safety, economy and identity of the country.”

Tangled electrical wires droop dangerously low and posters of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad are prominent alongside those of Palestinian ‘resistance’ leaders and ‘martyrs’ in the Lebanese capital’s camps, where refugees are said to have initially been welcomed.

Lebanon’s security forces do not enter the 12 officially registered Palestinian camps in the country despite withdrawal from a 1969 agreement granting the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) control over them.

Several Syrians told IPS they feel more comfortable there than they would in areas controlled by Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside the Syrian regime and whose political wing is part of the government.

With 10,000-20,000 having arrived since the conflict began, refugees from Syria now outnumber the original inhabitants of Beirut’s Shatila camp, set up in 1949 to shelter stateless Palestinians.

The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes.

There than the capacity of the public school system capacity, the most obvious hurdle for refugee children, says Fadi Hallisso, co-founder and general manager of the Syrian-run NGO Basmeh & Zeitooneh which works in the camp, is that Syrian public schools teach in Arabic while their Lebanese counterparts use either French or English.

Destitute or missing parents leading to the need to work or beg to survive, transport costs and war-induced trauma are other factors at play, and the problem is compounded by nutritional deficiencies.

A UNICEF study found earlier this year that severe acute malnutrition had doubled in certain parts of the country between 2012 and 2013. It noted that almost 2,000 children under the age of five were at risk of dying if they did not receive immediate treatment, while even milder states of malnutrition stunt children’s physical and mental growth.

Basmeh & Zeitooneh has set up a school in Shatila for about 300 students using the Lebanese curriculum taught by Syrians and Palestinians, who are paid between 400 and 700 dollars a month, according to Hallisso, “which no Lebanese teacher would be willing to work for.”

The facilities have been newly renovated and are in a building with a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic and dispensary on the second floor.

The organisation is trying to get funding for a small library where the children can come, read, consult reference works, use computers and find a space open to them with generator-powered electricity.

Maria Minkara, who works with Hallisso, told IPS that it would be open to both Palestinian and Syrian schoolchildren and that not a single library exists in the entire area housing tens of thousands of inhabitants.

Many of the children, she noted, live in dark, unhealthy environments, cut off from the power grid with no physical space in which to study. A walk through the crowded camps makes this obvious.

The Joint Christian Committee for Social Service in Lebanon, another organisation working with refugees, recently succeeded in obtaining permission for about 120 Syrian refugee children from its school in the Ain El-Hilweh camp near Sidon to return to Damascus for their 9^th grade and Baccalaureate exams, Executive Director Sylvia Haddad told IPS. Over 83 percent of them passed, she said.

Haddad admitted that several students’ families had refused to allow their children to go back to Syria out of fear of the regime, but said that “’they are regretting that decision very much now.”

Stressing that all politics and religion were kept out of the instruction of refugee children, Haddad said that questions on the curriculum being used by the group were referred to Abu Hassan, a Palestinian inhabitant of the camp who in the manner of militia fighters in the region uses an alias preceded by ‘Abu’ (‘father of’).

Abu Hassan said he had fought in the Palestinian ‘resistance’ in the past but declined to say with which faction, and denied that any pro-regime rhetoric was contained in the textbooks.

Abu Hassan was allowed to accompany the students to Damascus and back, but recent changes in Lebanese law make it harder for Palestinians fleeing Syria to enter Lebanon. Amnesty International published a report last month denouncing the restrictions, which require ‘pre-authorisation’ from the government or a residency permit.

Regulations regarding Syrian refugees also changed at the beginning of June, limiting entry to those coming from areas near the Lebanese border where fighting is under way and stipulating that refugees who cross back into Syria forfeit the right to return.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Syrian mother and child near Ma'arat Al-Numan, rebel-held Syria, in autumn 2013. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Jul 19 2014 (IPS)

Gaunt, haggard Syrian children begging and selling gum have become a fixture in streets of the Lebanese capital; having fled the ongoing conflict, they continue to be stalked by its effects.

Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

By the end of January, almost 40,000 Syrian children had been born as refugees, while the total number of minors who had fled abroad quadrupled to over 1.2 million between March 2013 and March 2014.Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

Lack of proper healthcare, food and clean water has resulted in countless loss of life during the Syrian conflict, now well into its fourth year. These deaths are left out of the daily tallies of ‘war casualties’, even as stunted bodies and emaciated faces peer out of photos from areas under siege.

The case of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp on the outskirts of Damascus momentarily grabbed the international community’s attention earlier this year, when Amnesty International released a report detailing the deaths of nearly 200 people under a government siege. Many other areas have experienced and continue to suffer the same fate, out of the public spotlight.

A Palestinian-Syrian originally from Yarmouk who has escaped abroad told IPS that some of her family are still in Hajar Al-Aswad, an area near Damascus with a population of roughly 600,000 prior to the conflict. She said that those trapped in the area were suffering ‘’as badly if not worse than in Yarmouk’’ and had been subjected to equally brutal starvation tactics. The area has, however, failed to garner similar attention.

The city of Homs, one of the first to rise up against President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, was also kept under regime siege for three years until May of this year, when Syrian troops and foreign Hezbollah fighters took control.

With the Syria conflict well into its fourth year, the U.N. Security Council decided for the first time on July 14 to authorize cross-border aid without the Assad government’s approval via four border crossings in neighbouring states. The resolution established a monitoring mechanism for a 180-day period for loading aid convoys in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.

The first supplies will include water sanitation tablets and hygiene kits, essential to preventing the water-borne diseases responsible for diarrhoea – which, in turn, produces severe states of malnutrition.

Miram Azar, from UNICEF’s Beirut office, told IPS that  ‘’prior to the Syria crisis, malnutrition was not common in Lebanon or Syria, so UNICEF and other actors have had to educate public health providers on the detection, monitoring and treatment’’ even before beginning to deal with the issue itself.

However, it was already on the rise: ‘’malnutrition was a challenge to Syria even before the conflict’’, said a UNICEF report released this year. ‘’The number of stunted children – those too short for their age and whose brain may not properly develop – rose from 23 to 29 per cent between 2009 and 2011.’’

Malnutrition experienced in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life (from pregnancy to two years old) results in lifelong consequences, including greater susceptibility to illness, obesity, reduced cognitive abilities and lower development potential of the nation they live in.

Azar noted that ‘’malnutrition is a concern due to the deteriorating food security faced by refugees before they left Syria’’ as well as ‘’the increase in food prices during winter.’’

The Syrian economy has been crippled by the conflict and crop production has fallen drastically. Violence has destroyed farms, razed fields and displaced farmers.

The price of basic foodstuffs has become prohibitive in many areas. On a visit to rebel-held areas in the northern Idlib province autumn of 2013, residents told IPS that the cost of staples such as rice and bread had risen by more than ten times their cost prior to the conflict, and in other areas inflation was worse.

Jihad Yazigi , an expert on the Syrian economy, argued in a European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR) policy brief published earlier this year that the war economy, which ‘’both feeds directly off the violence and incentivises continued fighting’’, was becoming ever more entrenched.

Meanwhile, political prisoners who have been released as a result of amnesties tell stories of severe water and food deprivation within jails. Many were detained on the basis of peaceful activities, including exercising their right to freedom of expression and providing humanitarian aid, on the basis of a counterterrorism law adopted by the government in July 2012.

There are no accurate figures available for Syria’s prison population. However, the monitoring group, Violations Documentation Centre, reports that 40,853 people detained since the start of the uprising in March 2011 remain in jail.

Maher Esber, a former political prisoner who was in one of Syria’s most notorious jails between 2006 and 2011 and is now an activist living in the Lebanese capital, told IPS that it was normal for taps to be turned on for only 10 minutes per day for drinking and hygiene purposes in the detention facilities.

Much of the country’s water supply has also been damaged or destroyed over the past years, with knock-on effects on infectious diseases and malnutrition. A major pumping station in Aleppo was damaged on May 10, leaving roughly half what was previously Syria’s most populated city without running water. Relentless regime barrel bombing has made it impossible to fix the mains, and experts have warned of a potential humanitarian catastrophe for those still inside the city.

The U.N. decision earlier this month was made subsequent to refusal by the Syrian regime to comply with a February resolution demanding rapid, safe, and unhindered access, and the Syrian regime had warned that it considered non-authorised aid deliveries into rebel-held areas as an attack.

Syrian anti-regime fighters in the mountains of the Latakia region. Credit Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
JABAL AL-AKRAD (SYRIA), May 20 2014 (IPS)

In the mountains east of the coastal port of government-held Latakia, three years of regime bombardment has left swaths of blackened stumps in the mountain forests and crumbling concrete structures in Sunni villages, most of whose inhabitants support opposition forces.

Efforts by an alliance between moderate rebel groups and Islamists essentially cleared the area of the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) in an operation launched in early January. ISIS, a brutal Al-Qaeda splinter group disavowed by the global jihadist conglomeration’s leader, still holds extensive territory in the eastern part of the country.

Many forced to flee the country told IPS that they would support a truce if it might stop the killing.
Several thousand inhabitants from the mountainous area near the Syrian coast have left for Turkey or other regions. Many have fled here from areas under government siege – the United Nations estimates that some 250,000 people across the country are trapped in besieged areas – or ones subject to more unrelenting regime air strikes. Others are Sunnis fleeing persecution from the nearby Alawite stronghold of Latakia.

Ideological tendencies vary among the remaining fighting groups, some of which voice views barely distinguishable from those of ISIS. No precise figures exist for specific groups, but nationwide, the Islamic Front – which rejects secularism and a civil state – is thought to have over 40,000 men and Al-Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra reportedly has some 6,000.

On the road to the highest peak in Jabal Al-Akrad, a building with armed fighters patrolling its balcony was pointed out to IPS as housing Moroccans from the jihadist Sham al-Islam, a small Islamist group established in August 2013 in the coastal area by a former Guantanamo detainee. The IPS correspondent was told that the North African jihadists are “just staying there, not doing anything at the moment.’’

Some heavily armed fighters from the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra are also present in the area.

The Farouq Brigades, which claims to directly control at least half of the roughly 50 villages in Jabal Al-Akrad and have 17,000 men nationwide, espouses a non-ideological stance and is one of the major rebel factions that continue to counter ISIS in other areas of the country.

It has lost men in clashes against Jabhat Al-Nusra in the past as well, but for the time being seems to coexist warily alongside it on this front for the purposes of fighting regime forces. The group’s leader, a former lawyer from Homs known as Abu Sayeh, stressed to IPS that the group was fighting solely for Syrians’ right to choose.

Farouq was created in 2011 in the flashpoint area of Homs, the country’s third largest city and ‘cradle of the revolution’. Some 140 kilometres northeast of Damascus, Homs is also known as the ‘Stalingrad of the 21^st century’ due to the massive destruction and devastating siege suffered at regime hands.

Relatively well-organised with a large number of defected officers, Farouq has lost ground over the years to the better-funded extremist factions. Its role in the recent months’ anti-ISIS campaign alongside the other largest group voicing a strictly non-religiously-affiliated agenda, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF), has enabled it to regain some ground. SRF, based in the Idlib region east of the Jabal Al-Akrad mountains, claims to have 18,000 fighters on call across the country.

Farouq’s leader told IPS that it relies exclusively on individual donations and weaponry and ammunition won in battle, unlike the regular support from Saudi Arabia that the SRF is said to receive.

Commanders are adamant that their fight is entirely non-sectarian and say Christian inhabitants of the area continue to be helped by the community. On the issue of Alawite hostages from villages in the mountains temporarily taken by rebel fighters and then lost again in the late summer of 2013, one local commander said they were being treated well.

A request by IPS to meet with the hostages was denied out of concern that “regime troops would target the location if they knew where it was and then say that we killed them.’’

IPS was told that ‘’even an Alawite sheikh’’ was among the hostages but that the regime had thus far refused to countenance an exchange, in marked contrast to those like the early 2013 exchange of over 2,000 rebel prisoners for 48 Iranians.

Many forced to flee the country told IPS that they would support a truce if it might stop the killing. The Assad regime continues to reject the idea and insists on calling all those in rebel areas “terrorists’’, subjecting vast areas to mass starvation and relentless bombing, and is continuing reportedly continuing chemical attacks with ammonia and chlorine. It also claims to be winning the war – albeit with ever more substantial support from Iraqi Shia militias, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and Iran.

The regime has called presidential elections on June 3, but a law requiring a registration card newly issued by the authorities makes voting virtually impossible for those in rebel-held areas and for the over nine million displaced out of a pre-war population of 22.4 million. Many residents of starved and besieged areas who have agreed to raise the Syrian regime flag in exchange for an alleviation of their circumstances have since been imprisoned.

Abu Jihad, a former regime officer who defected to return to his home territory in the mountains overlooking the Alawite homeland after ‘’seeing too much regime killing’’, told IPS that neither he nor his men would consider anything less than total victory.

As another bomb struck in the distance, he added that ‘’it just takes time.”

IDPs in Jabal Al-Akrad, in Syria's Latakia region. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
REYHANLI (TURKEY), May 19 2014 (IPS)

As once-eliminated diseases resurface and barrel bombs and alleged chlorine attacks target civilians, doctors in rebel-held areas and across the border struggle with issues of how best to serve their profession.

Up to 70 percent of Syria’s health workers had fled the country as June last year, according to the World Health Organization, and many of the country’s medical facilities have been destroyed or heavily damaged by regime air strikes.

‘’Even blood bags are controlled by the ministry of defense...You go to jail if they find you with one" -- Dr. Omar
Though regime and opposition fighters are often said to share the blame for obstructing access to medical care for civilians, Dr. Omar, who works with the Syrian Expatriate Medical Association (SEMA), said that his organisation has not experienced problems with any rebel groups while working in Syria. However, he stressed that his work ended when the patient – whether rebel fighter, regime soldier or civilian – had been treated.

“My work stops there. What they do with them afterwards is not my business,” he said, stressing the need for neutrality in order to continue operating in areas even when they change hands from one group to another.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has long been known for the same code of ethics, but nevertheless had five of its expatriate staff taken hostage in early January, most likely by the fundamentalist group Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS). More moderate factions have pushed the extremist group out of much of rebel-held territory in the north in recent months but the medical workers’ whereabouts remain unknown.

MSF decided to pull all foreign staff from Syria after the incident but continues to operate several makeshift clinics and mobile facilities in the country using Syrian personnel. It also supports local hospitals.

The international NGO – which, Dr. Omar notes, was ‘’the first group to send us money and support in 2011’’ – has not been able to register with the Turkish government and is thus unable to establish official offices across the border.

He said that he had recently been in Kasab, part of a coastal area seized in late March by rebel fighters, to set up medical facilities for ‘’damage control and sending them elsewhere. That’s all we can do right now’’.

Save the Children recently reported cases of doctors forced to give children unnecessary amputations and patients choosing to be knocked out with metal bars rather than undergo surgery without anaesthesia, which is in short supply. There have been outbreaks of vaccine-preventable measles and polio that have begun to spread across the country’s borders.

Dr. Omar initially left regime territory in early 2012 to avoid arrest, after working as one of the first to coordinate clandestine treatment to those injured in protests across the country. The work involved considerable risk, because ‘’even blood bags are controlled by the ministry of defence, not by the health ministry.”

‘’You go to jail if they find you with one,’’ he said.

He was later one of four doctors working inside the country who met secretly with Syrian expatriate medical staff in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli in November 2011 to start working alongside the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations (UOSSM).

Of the other three doctors, “one has been killed under torture, Mohammad Osama Baroudi, one has been in prison since 2012, and one is working at a field hospital inside.’’

At least 440 medical personnel have been killed in the ongoing conflict, reports Physicians for Human Rights, while many hundreds of others continue to be held in regime detention facilities.

The border town where Dr. Omar works when he is not inside Syria has changed dramatically since this IPS correspondent’s first visit in 2012. A few makeshift care facilities and injured fighters propped up on porches under ‘internet café’ signs or treated in disused hotels and homes have been replaced by a more organised system.

Several medical facilities cater to the masses of injured, amputees and patients with spinal cord injuries who have made it to this side of the border, and ragged-looking Syrian children begging in the streets are a common sight. A clinic specifically for prosthetics, the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs (NSSPL), has been set up on its outskirts, and short courses are held for would-be physical therapists, many of whom are medical students forced by the conflict to abandon their studies.

A 29-year-old physiotherapist working here told IPS that he had been arrested in early 2011 on terrorism charges and briefly joined a rebel group after being tortured in jail. He found, however, that he was unable to make himself kill anyone. He claims to be one of only a few fully trained and medically certified Syrian physiotherapists now in the town, as he graduated from the faculty set up in 2006 in Homs that closed only a few years later when war broke out.

He and his younger brother were taken from his house in the middle of the night, and he spent ‘’34 days, 6 hours and 28 minutes’’ in detention. His family eventually found a trusted contact to whom they paid 30,000 dollars to have him released. His brother, who worked with the Red Crescent, is still in prison. His family has meanwhile paid several thousand dollars to get him moved to detention facilities where they can occasionally visit him and refuse to leave the area unless his brother comes with them.

The physiotherapist feels he can be more useful here than inside, but admits: ‘’I am afraid of myself. If I go back inside I know I won’t come out again. My old friends would like me to work with them again. But I am still wanted by the regime and would put my family in even more danger than they already are.’’

Three boys in the Moqattam area look out over Cairo, the growing population of which is rapidly depleting already scarce water resources. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
CAIRO, Feb 6 2014 (IPS)

Heavy reliance on water intensive crops, a major upstream dam project for the Nile basin, and rising groundwater levels pushing at pharaoh-era monuments will be pressing issues for the next Egyptian president – whether military or civilian.

As criticism continues over the military’s heavy-handedness to quell protests, little attention is being given to the late January announcement by Egypt’s minister of irrigation and water resources on the growing severity of the country’s water shortage: share of water per citizen stands at 640 cubic metres, compared with an international standard of 1,000.

The minister said he expected this amount to decrease to 370 cubic metres by 2050 due to a rapidly growing population.“Many people need to start measuring how much water they use, but it’s hard to break traditions here.”

A scientist working in the water resources sector expressed cautious hope to IPS that “the military is one of the few institutions that can actually get things done.” But he added: “That said, they were in power for a long time and didn’t do anything.”

Improving irrigation practices and countering the demographic explosion are some of the most commonly cited actions to be considered, as well as reducing the use of pesticides and improving sewage and waste disposal systems to prevent contaminating the limited water supplies available.

Attempting to lessen the population’s consumption of sugar would also be beneficial, experts say, not only in terms of water supplies but also public health.

Hugely popular juice pressed from water-intensive sugarcane can be found on street corners across Egypt, with inhabitants swearing by its “kidney-cleansing” properties. Ubiquitous coffee and tea gets steeped in sugar.

Diabetes levels have risen by 83 percent over the past 15 years, but little attempt is made to inform the public of the health-related risks or stem the preponderance of sugarcane production.

Egypt’s agriculture sector consumes well over 80 percent of the country’s annual water resources and sugarcane accounts for a large portion, alongside rice and cotton.

Rice production has been banned by the government in some areas for its heavy water requirements, though it commands a high price on the international market, is a staple for the population, and a certain quantity helps control soil salinity and limits saltwater intrusion in the Delta.

Egypt is instead the world’s largest importer of wheat and buys over half of its requirements from abroad, much of which goes into subsidised bread for the quarter of its 84 million people who live below the poverty line of 1.65 dollars a day.

A serious issue is that outdated irrigation practices are still in use, Hussein Jeffrey John Gawad, a hydro-geologist working as a consultant in Egypt, told IPS.

“Because there was always an abundance of water before, they just continue flooding the farms,” he said. “Many people need to start measuring how much water they use, but it’s hard to break traditions here.”

In certain areas of the country, it is instead an excess of water that is causing problems. The most traditional face of Egypt to the world – and its main magnet for tourism, a sector that accounted for more than a tenth of Egypt’s GDP prior to the 2011 uprising – may be in danger as well, Gawad noted, due to rising groundwater around the country’s ancient monuments.

As the population swells, agriculture increasingly encroaches on areas near important monuments, bringing with it artificial irrigation channels to which chemical fertilisers are added, thereby increasing salinity levels and seeping into limestone foundations, weakening them.

A rise in the water table around the Osireion – the only remaining visible tomb in Abydos, one of Egypt’s most important archaeological sites – has made it largely inaccessible due to inundation of sand and flooding.

Gawad said that at one point the government had tried to install a “dewatering” system, “but now there is literally zero government attention to this.”

At some sites, pumps and drainage pipes have been set up, with varying levels of success. An international rescue effort led by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in the 1960s saved the enormous blocks of the Abu Simbel temples from being submerged by relocating them onto an artificial hill during the construction of the Aswan Dam.

However, the more gradual but relentless weakening of temple foundations and steady erosion of carvings and ancient paintings has not drawn similar attention.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s diversion of the Blue Nile as part of its massive Renaissance Dam project looms large over any discussion of Egypt’s future water supplies.

As part of colonial-era agreements, Egypt long held rights to the vast majority of the Nile’s waters. In mid-2010, however, five upstream countries – Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda, with Burundi joining in the following year – signed a treaty to share the dam’s resources, formally launching the project in April 2012.

“Ethiopia has the right to use the water flowing through their lands,” Gawad said, “but the policy of the Egyptian government is to not grant them that right. They stick by colonial-era mandates when it is convenient, and throw them by the wayside when it is not.”

A study by the International Fund for Agricultural Development found in 2005 that 98 percent of Egyptian agriculture was irrigated with Nile water or pumped from aquifers renewed by the Nile River flow. Under former president Mohammed Morsi, there was talk of “going to war” if the dam project were to be completed, but officials have since said this option has been ruled out.

Journalists have been arrested for questioning the merits and funding of the dam in Ethiopia, and the country shows no willingness to consider alternative options. Few reliable studies have been carried out on the potential effects of the project, but reducing the amount of water flowing into the water-strapped nation further downstream will inevitably pose risks to its economy and, as a result, its stability.

Heavily damaged and destroyed buildings on the frontline in Tripoli's Jabal Mohsen area. Credit: Shelly Kittleson /IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

In northern Lebanon’s largest city, Tripoli, Syria Street cuts through neighbourhoods that back opposite sides of the war raging in Syria, 30 km away. Clashes between them resumed this weekend after a cross-border rocket attack.

The frontline of the Jabal Mohsen area, overlooking the rival Bab Al-Tabbaneh, has been heavily scarred by 18 rounds of clashes since 2008. The area bears brutal signs: burnt shops, buildings pockmarked by mortar shelling, sheets of canvas riddled with bullet holes that have been hung across streets for protection from snipers.

Past checkpoints manned by the military, which was given control of security for six months after late November clashes left several dead and scores wounded, numerous schoolboys can be seen roaming Jabal Mohsen’s streets.“But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”

While Bab Al-Tabbaneh is predominantly Sunni, the majority in Jabal Mohsen is Alawite.

Lebanese from the Alawite sect, the same minority group and offshoot of Shia Islam that Syria’s Assad regime belongs to, account for approximately 11 percent of the population.

“There are no elementary or high schools here and it isn’t safe for the boys to cross into Sunni areas,” said one shop owner.

Emad Salman, a 28-year-old house painter, told IPS he had been unable to leave the area for work since November and even those requiring medical care needed army escorts to get out.

“They’re all Al-Qaeda down there,” he said. “Fifteen men who left Jabal Mohsen to go to work were stopped and shot in the legs.”

The latest round of hostilities seems to have been sparked by attacks on two Sunni mosques, allegedly by members of the Jabal Mohsen community, in late August. Two car bombs exploded in front of the mosques, killing at least 47 people and injuring over 400.

Ali Eid, founder of the community’s Alawite Arab Democratic Party, did not comply with an Oct. 30 summons to answer to charges of smuggling a key suspect in the case across the border into Syria. His son and the party’s political leader, Rifaat Eid, then allegedly made inflammatory statements against the Lebanese security services.

A number of episodes targeting Alawites ensued, followed by clashes. The city was put under the control of the army for six months on Dec. 2.

On a visit to the area, IPS found the walls of Jabal Mohsen plastered with graffiti hailing the Syrian regime. A popular “trinity” poster showing the smiling faces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, his father Hafez and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah were ubiquitous.

In impoverished Bab Al-Tabbaneh, a group of adolescents told IPS with an air of defiance that two Alawite men had been stabbed as part of a “family” feud with the Sunni community.

In the cold wintry air, boys in their early teens warmed themselves in a garage that would be invisible from the hilltop of Jabal Mohsen. They said they were “getting ready for the revolution.”

A Sunni woman wearing a headscarf showed her torched shop, in front of which soldiers stood. The woman placed much of the blame on caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati.

Lebanon’s Tripoli is the birthplace of Miqati, a Sunni in the Hezbollah-dominated March 8 political coalition and the richest man in Lebanon, who made much of his wealth through a telecommunications company that works in Syria and emerging markets. Lebanon has not had a government since late March when the one under Miqati resigned.

Mustafa Allouch, head of the Tripoli section of the Future Movement that is part of the March 14 political coalition, holds the Syrian regime and its decades-old interference in Lebanon responsible for the unrest.

Syria maintained a military presence in the country for around 30 years until 2005, when it was forced to pull out after massive protests and international pressure following the assassination of then prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Hezbollah, allied with the Assad regime and heavily funded by Iran, has never been forced to lay down its weapons, and is generally deemed more powerful than the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Allouch, chief surgeon at a local hospital, noted that Hezbollah had long openly admitted to taking part in the Syrian Civil War.

Acknowledging that a number of figures from the March 14 Coalition had also been accused of sending weapons into Syria to back the rebels, Allouch said he, too, had been accused of it – by his own cousin.

“My mother is Alawite,” he said, “and I have an uncle who is a general in the Syrian regime. He told his son this, and he believed it. I just laughed and told him that if I had the means to do so, I would,” said Allouch, who as a teenager fought as a Marxist with the Palestinian forces early in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).

In any case, the amount of arms entering Syria from Lebanon is nowhere near that coming in from Syria’s other borders, he said. “But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”

Sheikh Khattab heads an Islamic court in Syria. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
IDLIB PROVINCE, Syria, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Concerns are rising that courts run by Islamic clerics in many of Syria’s rebel-held areas may serve as a prelude to Taliban-style justice in what was long a violently repressive but secular state.

Many on the ground counter that they are the sole viable option in the present circumstances and should not be confused with the more extreme form that the Al-Qaeda-affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, or ISIS, attempt to impose on the areas under their control.

Former judges trained by the regime are distrusted even if they now express support for the uprising, IPS was told by residents of several small towns in the Idlib province in northwestern Syria. A large portion of the Muslim clerics running the courts, on the other hand, have served time in jail under the Assad regime or have relatives that have, a view that confers a certain degree of ‘legitimacy’ on them in the public’s and fighters’ eyes."Islam is democracy. Under the regime, everything was about money. You could just pay to get a murder ruled to be ‘in self-defence’.”

Leaders of many of the major rebel factions, including the Suquor Ash-Sham, Al-Tawheed and Ahrar Ash-Sham Brigades, have spent time in the notorious Sednayah prison near Damascus, known for housing mainly political and Islamist prisoners. Former imprisonment under the regime is seen as evidence of a pro-revolutionary position.

The Muslim cleric Sheikh Hamdan Khattab, who heads a local court with jurisdiction for part of the Idlib province, told IPS that he hadn’t seen his brother in over 30 years due to his suspected links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Syrian law has prescribed the death penalty for membership of the group since 1980.

Sheikh Khattab told IPS that according to sharia law, “until we have a president no rulings can be enforced,” and sentences must be suspended during times of war. This does not seem to apply to certain ‘war crimes’ in the present circumstances committed by fighters, however.

A Palestinian detained for belonging to one of the regime-linked irregular militias, the shabiha, and charged with multiple rapes and murders, has since IPS spoke to him in September been executed following a trial at a court in Bab Al-Hawa near the Turkish border.

The local Suqour al-Sham leader, Maher, whose men captured and interrogated the man before handing him over to the larger court, said most of the arrests his men made were for stealing. This came especially after he was ordered by the local sharia court to crack down on growing lawlessness and looting by thieves from an area nearby over which tribal clans hold sway.

Sentences of between six months and one year in detention are commonly given for theft, he said.

On issues of fighting between tribal clans, however, sharia courts refuse to adjudicate, much as the Assads long have, Sheikh Aid Hussein, leader of the Al-Damaalkha clan, told IPS on a recent visit to one of his homes not far from Maarret An-Nu’man, a city in rebel hands but almost entirely destroyed by government shelling.

He said that the regime had always allowed them to settle their own disputes and feuds, with the amount of blood money to be paid for murders and specific conditions of settlements decided by tribal leaders and elders.

Many Muslim clerics say they make recourse to the Unified Arab Code, a sharia-inspired code agreed upon by Arab League justice ministers in 1996. They say those trained solely in sharia law are often flanked by lawyers acting as legal advisors in rebel-held areas.

Islamic fiqh is cited as the main source of legislation in both of the constitutions introduced by the Assad family, in 1973 and 2012. However, secular penal and commercial codes have long been used under the Baath regime, leaving only civil (personal status) law based on sharia.

Women have long suffered unequal status under Syrian law, and what remains of Islamic norms in regime law books typically weighs most heavily on them. If a rapist marries his victim then no crime has officially been committed, for example. Sentences are reduced for ‘honour killings’ of female family members.  Syrian law considers women legal dependents of their fathers and husbands.

In both the tribal and sharia systems and in most of the civil administration councils, women are entirely excluded from decision-making.

Though discriminated against under the regime, there were active women lawyers across the country prior to the uprising. Heba, a lawyer involved in documenting the torture of women and girls in regime detention and the reported chemical attack in Saraqeb, a city in the northwestern part of the country, told IPS that “women were just never promoted; they stayed in the same entry-level position for decades, while men moved up.”

But “we don’t need a new legal system,” she said.

Currently staying in southern Turkey’s Hatay region out of concerns for her safety, Heba – wearing a hijab and a threadbare coat she hugs around herself in the crisp autumn air – said that “the problem was never the legal system. It was the arbitrary arrests, the systematic torture used by the regime, the corruption.”

What the international community fails to recognise – she implied in discussing the case of a girl who reportedly had had both legs amputated and been raped repeatedly in detention – was that ‘sharia justice’ had not been behind the many atrocities etched in Syrians’ collective memory.

Islam is also viewed by many of the fighters as more egalitarian, as in theory all are supposed to be “equal before god” under it.

“I just want to be treated with dignity,” one rebel fighter told IPS.

“And Islam is democracy. Under the regime, everything was about money. You could just pay to get a murder ruled to be ‘in self-defence’,” he said.

Civilians near Ma'arrat An-Numan. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
IDLIB/ALEPPO Provinces, Syria , Oct 9 2013 (IPS)

Free Syrian Army fighters stand guard over the state cable company premises to avoid looting in Khan Al-Assal, a district 14 kilometres west of Aleppo. Much of the rest of the place seems a nightmarish ghost town.

Not far away from this town taken by rebel forces in July is the sniper frontline at Al-Rashideen on the outskirts of Aleppo, the country’s largest city and pre-conflict industrial hub. The rebel headquarters are on the lower level of an abandoned, inconspicuous and mostly destroyed building.

Outside are some 20 pairs of shoes, while inside men sit and rest, Kalashnikovs at their sides except when in the room used for prayer. Then the guns are laid to the side next to a mosquito net hung to sleep under.

Almost all the men were civilians before the war; none would be considered so now.
Rebels have blocked off the road leading to Aleppo with chunks of rubble to prevent civilians in vehicles “getting lost and ending up in the line of fire of a sniper,” an FSA soldier told IPS. The same type of “temporary roadblock” was seen in a number of other locations.

Some buses still ply between major cities but generally use back roads to avoid being targeted. As they pass through both regime checkpoints and FSA ones, civilians must be ‘clean’ in the eyes of both sides – or resort to fake IDs, which can fairly easily be procured for the right amount of money, IPS was told.

Fuel can be found either originating from Iraq, the makeshift oil refineries across rebel-held areas, or smuggled from regime-held ones. The three varieties are of different qualities and different prices, but all are much more expensive than before, leading to knock-on effects on other products.

The lack of bread, fuel, and healthcare weighs heavily on the Syrian population in rebel-held areas. Bakeries and hospitals have repeatedly been targeted by the regime, which refuses to grant Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) and other international medical assistance organisations humanitarian access. MSF nevertheless runs a number of clinics at undisclosed locations in rebel-held areas.

At a local field hospital IPS visited in Maa’rrat An-Numan in the southern part of Idlib province on the key highway linking Hama (about 200 km north of Damascus) and Aleppo (about 150 km away), “fighters don’t pay, but civilians pay half the price of medical treatment,” a doctor working on the premises said.

Initially Damascus residents had sent money clandestinely to keep it going, but since this became too dangerous it has been funded by money sent from individual donors in the United Arab Emirates.

The facility regularly sees 30-40 patients a day and previously used its own car to take seriously injured patients elsewhere for treatment. The car has needed fixing for the past month and a half, and the centre currently relies on a combination of “other people’s cars, bicycles, whatever” to get patients to the Turkish border crossing when necessary, the doctor said.

Mosquito nets can be found in homes that can afford them. The incidence of mosquito-borne diseases like leishmaniasis has risen sharply since the war began due to water and fuel shortages, lack of public services and poor sanitary conditions.

Electricity is available in some rebel-held areas but not in Ma’arrat An-Numan. The heavily polluting buzz of diesel-powered generators brings relief to the few that have them.

A home this correspondent was invited to a few kilometres from the Wadi Al-Daif military airport nearby bears the markings of snipers’ bullets on the walls, with one window blown out. Four small children live there with their parents and the father’s younger brother.

Previously a student of English literature at Aleppo University, the 20-year-old brother was forced to abandon his studies, as his area of origin – marked on Syrian student ID cards – was known for rebel activity. He too has now taken up arms.

Similar stories were frequently heard in the days this IPS correspondent spent inside the country. Another man in his early twenties who had lived in Dubai for several years was banned from travelling abroad by the regime on his first trip home after the uprising started. Now fighting with a small rebel brigade that has its headquarters next to his family’s home, he is trying to find a way to get to Europe.

In early September, the United Nations reported that the number of Syrian refugees had risen to more than two million. Many have fled to the bordering nations of Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and northern Iraq – into which over 40,000 crossed in only 10 days in August.

Others have gone further abroad: over 400 travelling in two crowded boats were taken ashore in a single day in September by the Italian coast guard.

Down the road from the family’s home is a mosque, with one side blown off and a crater alongside left by a regime rocket.

“The attack happened on a Friday during the weekly community prayer,” an inhabitant of the area said. “Luckily, the mosque-goers were all in the basement as a precaution anyway, so only one child died.”

A ten-year-old boy runs a stand alone on the main road, selling cigarettes, while just outside of town three women with sunbaked, reddened faces and five small children sit under a precarious lean-to. A makeshift ‘petrol station’ is alongside, with its jerry cans, funnels and large plastic jugs, which the women run while their husbands smuggle fuel from government-held Hama.

IPS was told that no schools are open in the area around Ma’arrat An-Numan. No internet access or cell phone signals can be picked up in the area, and the few former school buildings visited by IPS there are now partially destroyed by regime shelling, with some used by rebel forces.

The regime is known to target educational institutions as well as hospital facilities and bakeries in areas out of its control.

Rebel fighters in northern Syria. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
MA’ARRET AN-NU'MAN (Idlib Province, Syria), Sep 30 2013 (IPS)

The prisoner is led, handcuffed and dirty, into what until last year served as a school. “A shabiha,” said one of the anti-regime rebels in the room. “We found him two days ago at a checkpoint.”

A white board with a few Arabic words written in blue hangs on the wall behind a desk. The man is brought into the centre of the room and made to sit on the well-worn carpet. A local Free Syrian Army ‘intelligence’ officer stands behind him, together with the commander of a local division of the Suqour Al-Sham Brigade.

An FSA fighter in his mid-twenties is also present. A number of armed men stand guard outside a door leading into the former school courtyard, partially reduced to rubble after regime shelling.

‘Shabiha’ is a word long used in Syria to refer to the mafia-like militias originating in Alawite crime syndicates in the Latakia region in the early 1970s – when current President Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez, became Syria’s first ever president from the minority.An Assad loyalist captured by rebels tells IPS he was forced to rape and kill under the influence of drugs.

Long allowed to engage with impunity in smuggling, extrajudicial torture, rape and killings, the regime in turn expected the gangs of armed ‘thugs’ to serve its purposes when required. They have long been blamed for some of the worst acts of brutality perpetrated against civilians.

Since the 2011 uprising, the term has become more widely used to refer to the various paramilitary organisations known to commit massacres and spread terror with the support of the Syrian regime.

The local Suqour Al-Sham commander, Maher, a former taxi driver who before the uprising had only fired a gun during his compulsory military service and now commands some 400 men, told IPS that the detainee had confessed to multiple killings and rapes in the Hama area about 200 km north of Damascus. All of these, he claims, were carried out for intimidation purposes to get procure fuel, supplies or pharmaceuticals, or by way of indirect pressure. IPS was allowed to ask the man a number of questions.

‘Mustafa’ as he gave his name to be, said he is from a Palestinian refugee community near Hama. He said he was driven to joining an irregular militia connected with the regime out of poverty exacerbated by the war.

He said he is married, in his early thirties and has three children, for whom he “couldn’t even buy bread any more” after he was forced to close his shop.

He was given 45 days training with about 50 other Palestinian recruits and provided a salary every three months when he began going on “missions”, he said.

After one man refused to give him and the men working with him free fuel, they raped the man’s wife as an intimidation tactic, he said. This IPS correspondent could not ascertain whether this was a confession made only under pressure after capture.

He also confessed to raping a female pharmacist in Hama who refused to sell sedatives used by the militia after she found out it was a false prescription.

‘Mustafa’ said he was forced to take part in rapes and killings and had been forced to rape his brother’s wife to get her to persuade her husband to join the irregular militia. The detainee said he had threatened to tell her husband about the rape if she didn’t persuade him to join. The brother did, according to Mustafa’s account.

The FSA fighter present spat angrily at the man at this point, and left the room.

Asked by IPS what might have happened if his brother had found out, ‘Mustafa’ brushed off the question, seemingly annoyed by it. The ‘intelligence officer’ said her husband would have killed her, it would have been a question of family honour.

The detainee claimed he was not responsible for his actions because he had been under the influence of drugs given to the fighters of the irregular militia without their knowledge.

After ‘Mustafa’ is led out of the room, the local Suqour Al-Sham commander told IPS that the man would be judged by a court consisting of three judges who had defected from the regime’s justice system, assisted by two religious advisors versed in Shariah law. The court would decide, and not the FSA brigades. If sentenced to execution, he would be shot.

Justice is rudimentary in rebel-held areas. Many of the initial demands of the uprising stemmed from the notoriously corrupt justice system under the Syrian regime, and many say that to expect rebels to observe due process is unrealistic.

Some measure of justice is provided, however, by local courts, many of which are staffed at least in part by former regime judges. Four of the largest anti-regime battalions – including the large Islamist group Ahrar Al-Sham and the Suqour Al-Sham Brigade – have recently begun cooperating in the justice sector across Idlib province, Maher told IPS.

Cooperation is made difficult, however, by the fact that Ma’arrat An-Nu’man and the surrounding area is virtually cut off from the world. The Internet is inaccessible and there are no cellphone signals. Fighters speak via walkie talkies  – incidentally, according to one fighter, on the same frequency as those of the regime.

“We sometimes say things just to scare them,” an Ahrar Al-Sham fighter told IPS.

“Most of the so-called suicide bombings were actually remotely-detonated bombs,” he claims. His group had found that calling them suicide attacks was a useful tactic to get regime recruits to abandon checkpoints more easily, he said.

An FSA fighter has to look out on many fronts now. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
AD-DANA, Idlib Province, Syria, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

Scorching flames from a makeshift oil refinery sting eyes and the fumes choke throats near the top of a hill in northwestern Syria, where Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters gather for fuel, coffee and phone calls as darkness falls.

The population of the nearby town Al-Dana has swelled by “tens of thousands” over the past two years, one FSA fighter from the area told IPS, as many fled closer to the border from areas under more frequent attack.

This hill had been covered with trees before last winter, when inhabitants and the internally displaced were forced to cut them for fuel to keep warm. It now bears only rocks and stumps, but remains one of the few places in the area where a cell phone signal can be picked up.

A shopkeeper from the area who is active in the Farouq Brigades, one of the largest units of the FSA, said that when the Islamic State of Iraq, an Islamist group active in Iraq and Syria and Al-Sham (ISIS), an al-Qaeda linked organisation, set up checkpoints in the town and took over the area, all the shops were forced to shut down at prayer times. Punishments for crimes had grown in severity, he said.

He stressed, though, that we have “bigger problems to deal with right now.”“They kept us under the table for so long, but once you see what is on the table, you will fight.”

Another local person mentioned that the fundamentalist groups tended to occupy areas already taken by other anti-regime brigades, implying that they leave the tougher battles to others.

Many FSA fighters IPS spoke to in the Aleppo and Idlib regions in recent days said that their plan was that after the Assad regime fell, the more fundamentalist groups would be dealt with. A few even said they expected a full-blown war against them afterwards.

An early sign of this came on Sep. 18, when heavy fighting broke out in the northern town of Azaz between an FSA brigade and ISIS, reportedly after one of the Al-Qaeda affiliate’s fighters was filmed in a clinic by a German aid worker.

When this IPS correspondent crossed the town north of Aleppo a few days before, rubble from over two years of shelling and strikes was visible on the streets. Several armed foreign fighters locally known simply as ‘muhajiroun’ were clearly around.

However, this female correspondent – travelling in a vehicle with the commander of a small fighting unit – was easily waved through an ISIS checkpoint just outside of town.

As air strikes and shelling by the regime continue unabated, fighting between anti-regime factions is siphoning off ever more time, attention and manpower from FSA forces stretched preciously thin. Following the outbreak of fighting in Azaz, Turkey closed the nearby Oncupinar border gate indefinitely, thereby choking off the lifeline that had previously enabled humanitarian aid in, and refugees out.

In Ad-Dana, one fighter noted that until four months ago he had continued to go to regime-held Idlib city using a fake ID to pass regime checkpoints in order to pick up his government cheque as a secondary school English teacher. He still teaches part-time, but it has now become too dangerous to cross enemy lines to gain much needed cash, while basic goods grow ever more scarce.

Despite soaring costs, unremitting shelling and the over 100,000 deaths in some two and a half years of fighting, the FSA rebels gathered nevertheless expressed guarded optimism.

“We’re flying,” said Aref Najjar, a former government employee. He told IPS he had spent five years in prison on trumped-up charges after refusing to travel to join the funeral of former president Hafez Al-Assad.

“They kept us under the table for so long, but once you see what is on the table, you will fight.”

Given the danger, many of the fighters especially from the southern reaches of the province have moved women and children in their families across the border into Turkey.

Mohammad’s 19-year-old wife initially stayed with him in his family home, which has been half destroyed by regime shelling, but she joined his family who had crossed the border into Turkey after the rape of women in neighbouring villages by regime troops and Assad’s irregular shabiha militias became more frequent.

The 25-year-old anti-aircraft expert faulted the rebels for not taking advantage of defected officers’ experience, and for making numerous mistakes as a result. He also noted that of the 80 men he had under his command only 40 currently had Kalashnikovs, and that only fundamentalist groups were able to attract funding.

A few months earlier he decided to grow a beard in the Salafi manner in a bid to raise funds, but continues to smoke and eagerly whips out a picture of himself from earlier this year: shaved and smiling, sporting sunglasses, jeans and a bright red t-shirt.

He told IPS he admired the fundamentalist groups for their “bravery”, citing a number of important gains they had made such as taking the strategic Menagh air base in August after a year-long siege by FSA brigades had proved inconclusive.

Alarm has been brewing for some time among activists, however, and one Syrian journalist noted that “the safest place during an air strike on the ‘liberated areas’ is the ISIS headquarters. People run there because they know the regime won’t hit them,” implying that the most fundamentalist groups are actually collaborating with the regime.

Fighters on the ground, though, tread more carefully. “If foreign fighters come to help Syrians,” said one, “I’m thankful to them.”

Students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
KABUL, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Despite impressive advancements in enrolment rates, media reports of gas attacks on girls’ schools, shoddy books, and a lack of classroom facilities continue to mar the reputation of the education system in Afghanistan.

Many locals feel that landmark developments such as the enrolment of roughly eight million children – 37 percent of whom are girls – compared to the 900,000 exclusively male students enroled under the Taliban go largely unreported.

Other, less obvious changes, such as the gradual removal of references to war and violence from school textbooks, have also escaped media attention, said former human rights commissioner Nader Nadery.

Nadery, current chairman of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, told IPS that between 1996 and 2001, boys-only schools functioning under the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan studied material that actively promoted violence.

In mathematics classes, for example, he said word problems included such scenarios as: “If you shoot a gun and the bullet travels at X speed towards a soldier standing 500 metres away, how long does it take to kill him?”

According to Nadery, tireless work by human rights bodies led to a revision of these texts between 2006 and 2007 to include, among other things, gender-sensitive references that replaced such passages as: “The boy was playing football while the girl was carrying water and washing dishes.”

Education Minister Spokesman Amanullah Eman told IPS that youth now learn about hitherto taboo subjects like tolerance and the dangers and diseases associated with drug-use.

English and computer skills are also taught in government–funded religious schools, which Eman says about two percent of children attend, including some 15,000 girls.

And whereas “religious instruction was given in Arabic under the previous regime, we have now translated all the books into the two national languages: Dari and Pashto,” he added.

The past few years have also seen rapid growth in the number of private institutes of both basic and higher education.

One of the best known is the Kardan Institute of Higher Education, which was founded in 2003 by four Afghans in “a single room when there were no other private institutions in the country,” said Hamid Saboory, a legal expert and consultant to the university.

This alternative to traditional institutions like Kabul University offered short courses in finance, management and business administration and is now one of the most highly respected of the “over 70 private institutions registered with the ministry,” he told IPS.

In rural areas, however, educational facilities and services can be difficult if not impossible to access. Some remote areas rely on lectures transmitted through TV to compensate for the lack of qualified vocational trainers, Nadery said.

Meanwhile, in the northeastern province of Kapisa, at Al-Biruni University, a number of girls in the law faculty complained to IPS of frequent power outages, and going days without running water in the dormitories.

Still, the presence of so many young women in the law faculty, hailing from such far-flung provinces as Farah in the west to Jowjzan in the north and in many cases coming with the blessings of their fathers, is an encouraging sign of slow but sure change.

Payvand Seyedali, former executive director of Aid Afghanistan for Education (AAE), echoed this observation, but stressed the need to change a law that bans anyone who is married from enroling in the public school system.

“This has serious implications,” she pointed out, “for girls who are married at 13,14, 15…who are essentially (forced) to drop out of school.”

However, AAE schools that cater specifically to this population found that many husbands, brothers and fathers were often the ones encouraging their female relatives to stay in school, “sometimes even making that a condition of the marriage,” she told IPS.

A researcher on ethnic bias in Afghan textbooks who asked not to be named sounded a word of caution about the complexities of creating an “inclusive” education system in a country of 35.2 million people, of whom 42 percent are thought to be Pashtun, 27 percent Tajik, nine percent Uzbek and nine percent Hazara.

He found that 100 percent of the references to people, groups or dynasties in eighth-grade textbooks are all Pashtun, a pattern that is repeated in other grades as well.

Other inconsistencies in the curriculum include gaping holes in national history. For instance, the last 40 years of the country’s history were left out of high school social science textbooks, a decision supposedly motivated by the desire to “promote national unity”, according to the government.

Asked about this move, Technical Education and Vocational Training (TVET) Deputy Minister Mohammad Asif Nang said that all parties to the bloodiest part of Afghan history could be impacted by mention of the 32 years of war.

“People from the Communist regime, from the Taliban regime, from the Mujahedeen” are still alive, and their children could end up fighting one another, he said.

The deputy minister stressed, “Every day we build five schools. Every day we have activities for teachers (to gain more skills).”

He lambasted an overly critical media that jumps on flaws in the system and exaggerates their impact.

What the country needs during this phase of state-building, he said, is more support, correction of mistakes and adjustments to and reform of the system, a process that risks being derailed by negative media.

The Hasht-e Sobh newspaper is now offering cheap SMS news-alerts to over 15,000 subscribers across Afghanistan. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
KABUL, May 31 2013 (IPS)

As Afghanistan prepares for the 2014 withdrawal of foreign forces that have occupied this country for over a decade, investors are already beginning to bid a hasty retreat amid rumours that “chaos” and civil war will replace NATO’s boots on the ground late next year.

Among those most fearful of this approaching financial drought are journalists and media organisations who have long relied on international support to stay afloat.

Najiba Ayubi, director of the independent Afghan media group known as The Killid Group (TKG), described the last 10 years as the “golden decade for Afghan media”, which saw the establishment of 175 FM radio stations, 75 television stations and hundreds of print publications that have taken up the cudgels on everything from rural girls’ right to education to the public’s right to information.

The radio stations in particular have been very effective in developing a strong civil society and there is “a serious danger of losing all that if funding dries up,” Ayubi told IPS.

But fear breeds innovation, and as the drawdown approaches, media practitioners are finding creative solutions to the post-NATO quandary, including the creation of a new journalists’ federation, efforts to build a culture of investigative journalism and the drafting of a “code of conduct” for the press.

Media practitioners close ranks

One of the first responses to the threat of a funding shortage has been a heightened sense of solidarity in times of distress.

When the independent daily Hasht-e Sobh decided to take the Afghan ministry of mines to task in a special edition in late March for “irregular tender procedures” and the squandering of resources on so-called advisors who were paid as much as 107,000 dollars per month, the paper’s editor-in-chief Parwiz Kawa was promptly summoned to the attorney general’s office.

This raised fears that he might be fated to a similar end as the many Afghan journalists who have been killed on the job in the last decade, including two in the past few weeks.

But local media organisations just as promptly issued statements denouncing the violation of the right to free speech. Hasht-e Sobh, winner of Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’s 2012 Press Freedom Award, says the matter is currently on hold.

This spontaneous reaction came partly in response to the paper’s daily struggle for survival: while in 2011 it was able to employ some 125 staff across the country, its bureau has since dwindled to 70, axing crucial correspondents in the eastern city of Jalalabad and the southern Kandahar province.

“We had to let them go when donors cut the funding,” Kawa told IPS, adding that 50 percent of Hasht-e Sobh’s budget comes from international donors, with less than 30 percent coming in from advertising, sales and subscriptions.

The group is now scrambling to secure loans from supporters and began offering a low-cost SMS news alert service through an agreement with telecommunications provider Etisalat two months ago.

The service has already attracted 15,000 subscribers and hopes to eventually reach at least 100,000 of Afghanistan’s estimated 30 million inhabitants, according to Kawa.

Ayubi is similarly concerned about the future of TKG, which achieved full self-sufficiency in 2005 but took a hit after the announcement of the 2014 military pullout. With advertisers’ pockets growing shallower, Killid has once again resorted to seeking grants in order to maintain its operations.

According to Ayubi, it is particularly important for media organisations to remain functional in the lead up to the April 2014 presidential elections so that the population can make informed decisions.

Nader Nadery, former human rights commissioner of Afghanistan and current executive chairman of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, highlighted the crucial role the media plays in nurturing a vital society, pointing out that news sources have become much more critical of the government’s failure to deliver on its promises.

This initially caused the government to dig in its heels and adamantly refuse to release even the most innocuous information on the grounds that it is classified and that releasing it would pose a “national security risk.”

But after extensive lobbying by media and civil society groups, the government published a draft Access to Information law earlier this year.

Though the Centre for Law and Democracy has criticised the draft on a number of points – such as the restricting of access to “information that serves a right or brings ease to performing of the relevant duties’’ – Nadery believes the government’s overture to civil society represents an “important step forward” for press freedom and the right to information.

With these newly won rights come responsibilities, Afghan National Journalists’ Union (ANJU) Chief Fahim Dashti noted, drawing attention to the recent collaboration between more than 30 media organisations over a seven-month period that resulted in a draft Code of Practice, designed to ensure media quality.

The code calls for journalists to pay greater attention to the psychological and social impact of news reports, especially those covering delicate issues like child abuse and rape, and aims to “sensitise” the public by, for example, refraining from using the word “criminal” for those not yet convicted of crimes. Dashti believes this will also strengthen the public’s trust in media outlets.

Though his own widely respected publication ‘Kabul Weekly’ folded in 2011 due to financial difficulties, Dashti is hopeful about the overall future of journalism.

Meanwhile, the newly established Afghan Journalists’ Safety Committee has embarked on efforts to alleviate some of the risks journalists incur in their work, offering first aid training, medical treatment, and legal advice. A 24-hour hotline offers a lifeline to distressed journalists by connecting media practitioners with a vast network of civil society activists, as well as local and international media.

In a country where the literacy rate is estimated to be hovering close to 28 percent, though, print publications will find it the hardest to survive.

Burqas fail to shield many Afghan women from daily harassment, both in the street and at the workplace. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
KABUL, May 17 2013 (IPS)

While global attention is fixed on the scheduled pullout of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014, women here have a much more immediate concern: how will they survive another day at work?

Having a job is now considered a routine aspect in the lives of many women around the world, but here, female employees are forced to navigate entrenched sexist and patriarchal attitudes, dodge sexual advances, and live with memories of harassment, abuse and even rape.

Last month, the international watchdog Human Rights Watch drew attention to the plight of Afghan policewomen who were being raped and harassed on the job due largely to a lack of gender-segregated bathroom facilities.

A flurry of press coverage ensued, drawing the ire of the Interior Ministry, which grudgingly promised to take action but has yet to implement any concrete safety measures or bring the perpetrators to justice.

In the face of apparent indifference on the part of many officials to a growing trend of sexual abuse in the workplace, one branch of the government has stepped up, drafting a set of anti-harassment guidelines that, if enforced, all employees will be required to abide by.

Spearheaded by 26-year-old Matin Bek, deputy director of Afghanistan’s Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) and the youngest deputy minister in the country, the draft regulations acknowledge that workplace safety is a fundamental right and provide women with mechanisms to seek redress should this right be violated.

The son of a mujahedeen leader credited with fighting to keep girls’ schools open in his northern Takhar province during years of civil strife from the late 1970s until the end of the Taliban era in 2001, Bek is well aware of the challenges that lie ahead.

In a country where most women languishing in prison are there for committing so-called “moral crimes” – such as having been raped, leaving abusive marriages or choosing their own partners  – he recognises that attempts to improve workplace safety may be perceived by some as “quixotic.”

But, as Bek tells IPS, he grew up in an “entirely different environment” to the urban patriarchal landscape. Since his father’s untimely death in a bomb blast in late 2011 he has been helping to dismantle the patronage networks that have traditionally been responsible for appointing district governors.

The IDLG now promotes a professional, merit-based body of civil servants accountable to the constitution.

This year, his ministry chose the date of Mar. 13, in honour of International Women’s Day on Mar. 8, to institute the anti-harassment guidelines as a national commitment to stop “treating women as commodities,” Bek said.

The guidelines define harassment as either verbal or physical intimidation, including unnecessary physical contact or drawing attention to an employee’s “sex appeal’’. Employers are obliged to follow up on complaints made via email or telephone and take disciplinary action against the perpetrators.

Economic benefits of workplace safety

The threat of rape, harassment and the “loss of honour” are thought to play a bigger role in keeping Afghan women at home than religious motivations.

Sexual harassment is pervasive in the country’s larger cities, like the capital Kabul, the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif and the western city of Herat. One NGO worker who did not wish to be named told IPS the harassment she faced in the capital was so extreme that she left the country in search of work elsewhere.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.

A large part of the female workforce is employed in the government sector, but even here women are far outnumbered by their male counterparts: last year the Reuters news service reported that out of a total of 363,000 state employees, only 74,000 were women.

According to a report by the World Bank, the labour participation rate of women over the age of 15 years was 14.4 percent in 2012, compared to 80 percent for men.

Increasingly, even this small portion of women who are able to secure jobs are being forced by their male relatives to stay home, or are doing so out of fear of being attacked on the job.

This trend, according to Bek, is a dangerous one, as a result of which entire communities suffer significant economic losses: in a country where per capita GDP is about 1,000 dollars, a woman’s salary can mean the difference between healthy and malnourished children, or between sending youth to school versus forcing them into child employment.

Thus the new anti-harassment regulations, implemented in hundreds of local government offices under the IDLG’s beat, aim not only to raise respect for individual rights within Afghan society but also to foster economic growth, Bek said.

Various studies show that women’s participation in the workforce and in leadership positions play a vital role in economic and overall development.

One such report claims that if female employment rates were to match male rates, Japan could see a rise in GDP of nine percent, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of 12 percent and Egypt of 34 percent.

If women were allowed to concentrate on their jobs instead of looking for ways to avoid harassment, molestation and violence, their potential to the Afghan economy could be “vast,” Bek noted, adding that women’s participation in economic activities could also contribute to overall stability in the region, as fears of “chaos” and even civil war proliferate ahead of the 2014 departure of Western troops.

Entrenched sexism

Despite ample evidence on the need for such guidelines, enforcing them will not be easy. Reports of misconduct by public officials often meet with accusations that such claims by women or their advocates “insult the honour’’ of the alleged perpetrators or the public institutions to which they belong.

For example, the Apr. 25 HRW report on the need for safe bathroom facilities for Afghan policewomen provoked the wrath of the Interior Ministry, which demanded the rights group “apologise” for its findings.

HRW Afghanistan Researcher Heather Barr told IPS that the ministry “seems determined to claim that there have never been any cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape of female police officers by male police officers.”

The government of President Hamid Karzai had set itself the goal of recruiting 5,000 women into the Afghan National Police (ANP) before 2014 to boost the miserable one percent female participation rate that currently exists.

Barr says this move is crucial, since most Afghan women are too frightened to report rape to male officers and cannot be searched by them. But, she said, the Interior Ministry’s attitude towards reports of rape and harassment could “harm efforts to recruit female police.”

A member of the Free Syrian Army at the entrance to Sarmeen. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
SARMEEN, Syria, Dec 3 2012 (IPS)

As the death toll in Syria tops 40,000 and some 400,000 have taken refuge beyond the country’s borders, a dearth of funding for civilian projects in areas under Free Syrian control risks undermining efforts to keep inhabitants united and the limited lines of communication flowing.

A number of young Syrian activist groups travel between Istanbul and cities under Free Syrian Army (FSA) control to set up local administration councils, racing to provide essential services to the population before another winter arrives amid scant electricity, dwindling access to basic necessities and continued shelling of civilian areas. The groups coordinate with medical workers in the border area and FSA members, and maintain regular contact with embassies, individual donors and local populations.

Abdullah Labwani, 27-year-old nephew of well-known dissident and physician Kamal Labwani works with the Istanbul-based NGO Civil Administration Councils (CAC). In “another life”, as he called the period leading up to the revolution, he worked as an architect and taught at the University of Damascus.

From Istanbul he maintains contact with those inside Syria while trying to convince Western diplomatic representatives to send funds for medical, communications and food needs as managed by the councils.

This IPS correspondent travelled with Labwani to Sarmeen in the northwestern Syrian province Idlib in early November. With just over 20,000 inhabitants before the uprising, several thousand had fled the town amid continuing conflict in the area.

In March of this year, some 318 houses, 87 shops and numerous warehouses, pharmacies and mosques were destroyed in attacks by Syrian government forces on the town.

Human Rights Watch found that regime troops had killed at least 95 civilians, many by summary execution, in the assault on the eastern and southern parts of the province. Three brothers from Sarmeen’s Hajj Hussein family, for example, were taken out of their home, had their hands tied behind their backs and were killed and burned in front of their mother as a “lesson” to the town’s inhabitants.

Sarmeen has been under Free Syrian Army control since late March, but regime shelling near the town can be heard frequently. In the days spent there, helicopters were spotted flying overheard a number of times. The regime has reportedly engaged in extensive dropping of barrel bombs and cluster munitions on towns in the province.

Residents use flashlights, candles, oil lamps and generators, and are fortunate to get an hour or two of power a day – an hour when everyone hastens to turn on television sets to see the news and to recharge phone batteries.

To the background noise of generators whirling, a meeting was held on my first night there in the basement of a building by the members of the community selected to form the council.

The 20 to 25 local men who took part were enthusiastic over the possibility voiced by Labwani of sending some of them to Istanbul for training courses if CAC manages to raise funding. Sugary tea and Turkish-produced cola drinks were brought round whenever attention started to wane.

A few wore the traditional red and white keffiyeh, and an imam and a doctor were in long flowing robes, but most of those in their twenties sported jeans and the older men were dressed in more formal Western-style trousers and shirts. The ruddier, worn expressions of those with walkie-talkies by their sides marked those among them most heavily involved in the FSA.

The major point of contention was whether or not FSA members could be included in such initiatives and their role in the civil administration, as embassies potentially willing to put up the funds require a clear distinction between helping civilian initiatives and aiding military ones. FSA commanders feel they deserve the right to positions of authority in the town administration.

In the following days this correspondent visited the nearby village Ta’um, not far from the military base in Taftanaz. Of some 7,000 inhabitants before the conflict, less than 2,000 are said to remain.

Mostly only FSA members have chosen to stay on in this village filled with rubble, the remains of exploded and unexploded ordnance, and a few stray cats. It continues to be bombed, as do approximately 60 to 200 other towns across Syria every day.

FSA fighters repeatedly call for more weapons, and claim that if they get them soon enough they could “prevent the need for large amounts of food aid and other assistance,” one of them, Abu Yassir, told IPS.

Given the fallout resulting from funneling weapons to non-state actors in recent decades, though, it is unlikely that arms will be supplied in any substantial amounts directly to the FSA by Western nations unless the Syrian National Coalition receives recognition as a government in exile, and until the FSA is seen as being under its command structure.

The Syrian National Coalition was founded in Doha on Nov. 11 to replace the Syrian National Council, and has thus far been recognized as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Syrian people by the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, France, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Whether those doing the fighting will be willing to relinquish control to those who are not remains to be seen. That said, with the exception of the commanders, all of the FSA members IPS spoke to had other hopes for the future – to return to their studies, to open a business, or attend a military academy “to get some real training”, as the fighter and former university student Abu Yahia put it.

In the meantime, civil administration councils seem one of the few ways to keep communities organised, make sure outside funding goes towards providing essential services, and establish a structured channel for communication and coordination between those inside and those outside the conflict area. (End)