Syria, Libya and Middle East unrest - Friday 12 August

Syria, Libya and Middle East unrest
Friday 12 August

Syria

• Pro-democracy protesters are planning another day of mass defiance, which they are calling the "day of not kneeling". Two people have already been killed today by security forces according to activists. They say troops and tanks stormed the town of Khan Sheikhon in the northern province of Idlib early Friday amid heavy gunfire that killed one woman. Security forces also shot dead one person as they swept into the Damascus suburb of Saqba (Video here, WARNING: GRAPHIC) carrying out raids and arrests. The London-based Observatory for Human Rights and the activist group The Local Coordination Committees have confirmed the deaths.

Photograph: Michael Sohn/AP
• The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has resisted pressure for the US to call on Bashar al-Assad to step down from power (there have been suggestions that Barack Obama is getting ready to make such a statement). In an interview with CBS, she said:

Well, that's going to be up to the Syrian people, but I can tell you that President Obama and I have been working very hard to marshal international opinion ...
What is important is that the Syrian people know that the United States is on the side of a peaceful transition to democracy. We believe that they have the same right as people anywhere to choose their own leaders, to have the kind of democratic institutions that will maximize their individual opportunities ...
So we are building what I think is a much more persuasive case that the international community – not just the United States – wants to see peaceful change in Syria ...
We've sent a very clear message that he should be doing what is necessary to end the violence against his own people. But it's important that it's not just the American voice, and we want to make sure that those voices are coming from around the world.

Here is a clip of the interview and you can read a transcript of Clinton's comments here.
During the interview, Clinton also urged other countries including China, Russia and India to do more to impose sanctions on the Assad regime:

What we really need to do to put the pressure on Asad is to sanction the oil and gas industry, and we want to see Europe take more steps in that direction. And we want to see China take steps with us. We want to see India, because India and China have large energy investments inside of Syria. We want to see Russia cease selling arms to the Asad regime.

• At least 19 people were killed in raids near the Lebanon border and in the country's Sunni tribal heartland on Thursday/Friday, activists said. Activists and rights campaigners said 11 civilians, including a woman and a child, were killed on Thursday when troops and tanks swept into Qusair, 135 km (85 miles) north of Damascus, after overnight protests calling for Assad's removal. In nearby Homs, activists said on Friday that five people, including a nine-year-old boy, were killed in an overnight raid on the Byada residential district after protests in the city.

Libya

• Rebels battling Muammar Gaddafi's troops claim they have captured the key oil terminal of Brega. Rebel spokesman Mohammed al-Rijali said he was with the fighters in Brega, which has repeatedly changed hands in the 6-month-old civil war, when they gained control on Thursday of the strategic port city, 125 miles (200km) south-west of the de-facto rebel capital of Benghazi, after three weeks of intense fighting.
"Brega is liberated," he told the the Associated Press. His claim could not be immediately verified and officials in the Libyan capital Tripoli made no comment on it. Another rebel spokesman, Mohammed al-Zawawi, said earlier on Thursday that two rebels died in the day's fighting in Brega, while 16 others were wounded.
• The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, has expressed concerns about "reports of unacceptably large number of civilian casualties in the conflict". His statement comes after the Libyan government claimed 85 civilians were killed by an airstrike in Zlitan - a cliam denied by Nato, which says those killed were merecenaries and members of Gaddafi's military. He called on "all parties to exercise extreme caution in their actions, in order to minimize any further loss of civilian life."

9.42am: Footage has been posted online of Syrian tanks purportedly entering Khan Sheikhon in the northern province of Idlib today, where one woman has been killed in heavy gunfire.

9.51am: Rania Abouzeid, a journalist from Time, entered Hama clandestinely and has penned a harrowing account of the restive Syrian city:

Em Mahmoud, who has been a nursing veteran for 22 years and who works at a private 30-bed hospital not far from Roundabout 40, says several injured protesters were brought into her facility, too afraid to seek treatment in the main facilities. One was shot in the chest, another in the knee. "Soldiers came into the hospital looking for wounded protesters," she says. "We hid the three that we had. We moved them on gurneys and in wheelchairs toward the back entrance, and from there we drove them to a safe house."
Residents speak of being unable to reach bodies in the streets, of snipers targeting people in their homes, of house-to-house searches, mass indiscriminate detentions, looting and even rape. There are cars in the streets that have been shot up, several with bullet holes that pierced the windscreens on the driver's side, at head level. It's unclear how many people were killed, although residents speak of hundreds dead. In the coming days, there will be an accounting, as families slowly return and the numbers of missing, detained and dead are ascertained.
But perhaps even more painful than the physical damage, residents say, is the humiliation: the graffiti Assad's troops left all over the main streets, much of which is considered blasphemous and deeply offensive to this religiously conservative majority-Sunni Muslim city. "There is no God but Bashar" is scrawled in black paint in Souk al-Farwatiye, across the street from the vast, imposing white stone structure that is the ruling Baath Party headquarters in the city. "God Bashar and Maher Mohammad," reads another sign, referring to Assad's younger brother Maher, commander of the despised 4th Division, responsible for much of the bloodshed over the past five months. The graffiti equates Bashar Assad to God and his brother to the Prophet Muhammad.

10.20am: Supporters of the Syrian pro-democracy protesters are trying to launch a campaign on Twitter to draw attention to their plight. They want to get the hashtag #SyriaBleeds to trend. To maximise the impact they have set a time of 11am BST (1pm Syrian time) for people to start tweeting using #SyriaBleeds.

10.41am: Turkey has taken the extraordinary step of calling in every officer retired from its military in the past five years to help staff its provinces bordering Syria, Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reports.

Turkish officials said on Thursday that the number of Syrians taking refuge in Turkey had reached 7,239 and there are reports suggesting another 17,000 are on their way, according to Today's Zaman.
It adds:

Turkey is also concerned about a possible Nato intervention in Syria. The government believes that such an intervention would hurt Turkey the most and hopes that the situation is resolved without the need for an international intervention. Turkey also fears that a Nato intervention might spark a backlash in the Muslim world.

11.04am: Gunmen attacked a Yemeni military patrol in the southern city of Taiz, killing a soldier in a resumption of clashes between loyalists and opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's state news agency said (via Reuters).

The agency called the attackers "anarchic, lawless elements", without specifying their identity. Two other soldiers were wounded, it said.
Taiz has been the scene of months of popular protests demanding the removal of Saleh, who is now in Saudi Arabia where he went for treatment of wounds suffered in an assassination attempt in June.
The protests in Taiz, 200km (120 miles) from the capital Sana'a, have split the city into halves controlled by government forces and those aligned with tribesmen who want him gone and side with anti-Saleh demonstrators. Several ceasefires have collapsed, including one that was to have taken force this week.
Saleh said this week he would cooperate with Yemen's opposition and international powers to revive a plan to ease him from office brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of Yemen's wealthier Gulf neighbours. His renewed interest in the plan, which he previously agreed to only to back out three times, follows prodding from US envoys to hand over power.

11.15am: Pepe Escobar has written an article for the Asia Times called "Why the Syrian regime won't fall" (although, the Syrian opposition can take heart from the fact that Escobar wrote 12 days before the 9/11 attacks that Osama bin Laden was a "minor character" and that al-Qaida was "split and in tatters"). Here's some of what he has to say:

The Assad regime has done the math and realised it won't fall as long as the protests don't reach the capital Damascus and the major city of Aleppo - that is, convulse the urban middle class. The security/military apparatus is fully behind Assad. All Syrian religious minorities make up at least 25% of the population; they are extremely fearful of Sunni fundamentalists. Secular Sunnis for their part fear a regime change that would lead to either an Islamist takeover or chaos. So it's fair to argue the majority of Syrians are indeed behind their government - as inept and heavy-handed as it may be.
Moreover, the Assad regime knows the conditions are not ripe for a Libyan-style North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in Syria. There won't even be a vote for a UN resolution - Russia and China have already made it clear.
Europe is melting - and it will hardly sign up for added ill-planned adventurism. Especially after the appalling spectacle of those dodgy types of the Libyan transitional council killing their military leader and fighting their tribal wars in the open - with the added ludicrous touch of Britain recognising the "rebels" the same day they were killing and burning the body of their "commander".
There's no reason for a Western "humanitarian intervention" under R2P ("responsibility to protect") because there's no humanitarian crisis; Somalia, in fact, is the top humanitarian crisis at the moment, leading to fears that Washington may in fact try to "invade" or at least try to control strategically-crucial Somalia.
So the idea of the Barack Obama administration in the United States telling Assad to pack up and go is dead on arrival as a game-changer.

11.21am: Troops loyal to the Libyan leader, Gaddafi, are still in control of the oil terminal and refinery of the strategic eastern port of Brega despite rebel advances, a spokesman for rebel forces has told Reuters.

Rebels said they had captured a residential area of Brega on Thursday (here's a picture purportedly from Brega, link provided by @BrownMoses). But spokesman Mohammed Zawawi told reporters it was still not safe to go into the city. The oil terminal is about 15kms (about 10 miles) from the residential district. He said:

Now we're trying to clear that area. There are some Gaddafi troops still there. Gaddafi troops are shooting rockets into the city.