Most Syrians killed in unlawful conventional attacks, UN human rights panel says
U.N. News Centre

16 September 2013 – The vast majority of Syrians are killed in unlawful attacks using conventional weapons such as guns and mortars, with children making up a large proportion of the casualties, the United Nations-appointed human rights probe today reported, calling for a halt to weapons being supplied to Government and the rebels.

“Arms transfers should not occur where there is a real risk that they will be used in the commission of crimes against humanity, violations of international humanitarian law, or war crimes. In Syria, this is a tragic reality,” Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of the International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said as he introduced the report to the Human Rights Council.

He noted that failure to bring about a settlement to the conflict has led it to deepen in its intransigence and also to widen “expanding to new actors and to unimaginable crimes”.

As the fighting rages on, civilians continue to bear the brunt. In that context he noted civilians continue to face daily indiscriminate shelling and bombardment by Government forces, and that extremist anti-Government farmed groups have targeted civilians in attacks across the northern governorates.

The UN report on possible use of chemical weapons has not yet been made public, Mr. Pinheiro noted, but the latest diplomatic efforts in Geneva involving Russia and the United States aimed at removing the arsenal “may – may – form the bedrock of a broader negotiation leading to a political settlement of the conflict.”

Mr. Pinheiro, whose leads the Commission comprising of Karen AbuZayd, Carla del Ponte and Vitit Muntarbhorn, said the vast majority of the conflict’s casualties result from unlawful attacks using conventional weapons such as guns and mortars.

“The Government has continued its relentless campaign of air bombardment and artillery shelling across the country,” he said.

Since 15 July, the Commission documented unlawful attacks in 12 of the 14 governorates, with particularly intense shelling in the cities and surrounding areas of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo [....]

Appears that Russia is going to continue with a strong contention that Assad is innocent of war crimes:

In Geneva, Russia’s Foreign Minister Still Claimed Chemical Attack Was ‘Fabricated’
By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com

Last Updated, Tuesday, 10:52 a.m. | Russia’s foreign minister continued to insist that the deadly chemical attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21 “was clearly fabricated” by rebels intent on provoking Western intervention, even as he met with his American counterpart in Geneva last weekend to hammer out a deal to take Syria’s chemical weapons out of the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s generals.

Speaking to Russian state television in Geneva on Saturday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov presented the framework agreement signed that day not as a response to a mass killing by the Assad government, but as a way to prevent Syria’s stockpiles of poison gas from falling into the hands of jihadist rebels.

Mr. Lavrov claimed that Russian investigators had established that “militants” were behind a number of previous chemical attacks in Syria, according to a translation of his remarks published on Monday by the Moscow news agency Interfax [....]

Details buried in a United Nations report indicate the Syrian military launched the chemical attack from the same ridges it used for firing conventional munitions:

U.N. Data on Gas Attack Points to Assad’s Top Forces
By C.J. Chivers, New York Times, Sept. 17/18, 2013

Details buried in the United Nations report on the Syrian chemical weapons attack point directly at elite military formations loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, some of the strongest findings to date that suggest the government gassed its own people.

The inspectors, instructed to investigate the attack but not to assign blame, nonetheless listed the precise compass directions of flight for two rocket strikes that appeared to lead back toward the government’s elite redoubt in Damascus, Mount Qasioun, which overlooks and protects neighborhoods and Mr. Assad’s presidential palace and where his Republican Guard and the army’s powerful Fourth Division are entrenched.

“It is the center of gravity of the regime,” said Elias Hanna, a retired general in the Lebanese Army and a lecturer on strategy and geopolitics at the American University of Beirut. “It is the core of the regime.”

In presenting the data concerning two rocket strikes — the significance of which was not commented upon by the United Nations itself — the report provides a stronger indication than the public statements of intelligence services of the United States, France or Britain that the Syrian military not only carried out the attack, but apparently did so brazenly, firing from the same neighborhoods or ridges from which it has been firing high-explosive conventional munitions for much of the war.

Looming over a tense capital and outlying neighborhoods bristling with anger and fear, Mount Qasioun is Damascus’s most prominent military position. It is also a complex inseparably linked to the Assad family’s rule [....]

Photo with article:

Credit: Kate Brooks

A view of Damascus, Syria, from Mount Qasioun. A report’s data appeared to show a chemical strike originated on the mountain.

Syrian government says war has reached stalemate
Exclusive: Deputy PM says neither side is strong enough to win and government may call for ceasefire at Geneva talks
By Jonathan Steele in Damascus, The Guardian, 19 September 2013 14.07 EDT

The Syrian conflict has reached a stalemate and President Bashar al-Assad's government will call for a ceasefire at a long-delayed conference in Geneva on the state's future, the country's deputy prime minister has said in an interview with the Guardian.

Speaking on behalf of the government, Qadri Jamil said that neither side was strong enough to win the conflict, which has lasted two years and caused the death of more than 100,000 people. Jamil, who is in charge of country's finances, also said that the Syrian economy had suffered catastrophic losses.

"Neither the armed opposition nor the regime is capable of defeating the other side," he said. "This zero balance of forces will not change for a while."

Meanwhile, he said, the Syrian economy had lost about $100bn (£62bn), equivalent to two years of normal production, during the war.

If accepted by the armed opposition, a ceasefire would have to be kept "under international observation", which could be provided by monitors or UN peace-keepers – as long as they came from neutral or friendly countries, he said.

Leaders of Syria's armed opposition have repeatedly refused to go to what is called Geneva Two unless Assad first resigns [....]

This is why Russia is fighting to keep him from being labeled a war criminal. I still do not see a whole lot of logic in that, though, because keeping him and his circle in power will be a flashpoint for terrorist attacks by groups outside of a ceasefire, would be worse than Iraq is now. I don't see how keeping him or his circle around could work out well, unless it would be within a heavily walled ghetto for Alawites.

A Nun Lends a Voice of Deniability to Syria on the Use of Poison Gas
By Ben Hubbard, New York Times, September 21/22, 2013

ADONIS, Lebanon — When Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, wanted to bolster his argument that rebels had carried out the poison gas attacks near Damascus on Aug. 21, he pointed to the work of a 61-year-old Lebanese-born nun who had concluded that the horrifying videos showing hundreds of dead and choking victims, including many children, had been fabricated ahead of time to provide a pretext for foreign intervention.

“Mr. Lavrov is an intelligent person,” said the nun, Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross, with a wide smile in a recent interview in this Lebanese mountain town. “He will never stick his name to someone who is saying stupidities.”

Mother Agnes, who had lived in Syria for years, has no expertise or training in chemical weapons forensics or filmmaking, and although she was in Damascus at the time of the attacks, she did not visit the sites or interview victims. Still, her assertions — she does not say which side made the videos — have significantly raised her once modest profile as the longtime superior of the Monastery of St. James the Mutilated, a Melkite Greek Catholic monastery in central Syria.

Now, she is lauded by supporters of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for championing narratives that resemble his own, and vilified by opposition activists who suspect the government supports her work as an unofficial ambassador.

International rights groups see Mr. Lavrov’s reference to the work of an untrained nun as a sign of desperation.

“The fact that the Russian government is relying on this woman’s assessment of what happened just shows the lack of evidence for their case,” said Lama Fakih, a Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch. “She is not a military expert.”

There are other shadows around Mother Agnes. She has helped foreign journalists obtain visas, suggesting trust by the government. The widow and two colleagues of Gilles Jacquier, a French journalist killed in Homs last year, published a book in which they suggest that she conspired in a lethal trap set by the government.

She has sued them for libel, denied any link to the government and has not spoken out in support of Mr. Assad himself. She criticized Syria for its occupation of Lebanon that ended in 2005 and said that government helicopters had struck near the St. James monastery three times, causing damage. Her only interest, she said, was what is best for Syrians — she said that would be for outside powers not to interfere so that Syrians can solve their problems.

“It is not politics,” she said. “This is humanitarian.”

She refused to say who she thought had made the videos she called fakes, or who she thought had carried out the attacks [....]

Reporter Denies Writing Article That Linked Syrian Rebels to Chemical Attack
By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Sept. 21, 2013

Updated, 7:58 p.m. | Three weeks after an obscure Internet news service claimed that Syrian rebels had admitted responsibility for the deadly chemical attack outside Damascus in August, a veteran foreign correspondent whose name and reputation lent credibility to the story has denied writing the article.

The journalist, Dale Gavlak, is an American freelancer based in Jordan whose work has been published frequently by The Associated Press. In a statement sent first to the British blogger Eliot Higgins, who writes the highly-regarded Brown Moses blog, Ms. Gavlak insisted that her byline should never have been attached to the article, which was published on the Web site MintPress News on Aug. 29 under the headline, “Syrians in Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack.”

In a subsequent e-mail to The Lede, Ms. Gavlak said [....]

The dispute over the article has caused even some contributors to MintPress to ask questions about its mission and how it is financed. Steve Horn, an investigative reporter based in Madison, Wis., said in an e-mail that he has decided to cut ties to the news site as a result of Ms. Gavlak’s objections to how her name was used. “I departed because I feel I was misled about the credibility of the article — which I trusted largely because Dale’s name was on it — and because of that, I no longer feel it’s a credible outlet. Frankly, I’m not sure it ever was.” [....]