By Sarah Abed Feb 12, 2018 – Reposted
Source: MintPress
Eddie Gaboro Hanna — founder of Patriarchal Relief Care Australia, a group that provides aid to Christian families impacted by wars in Syria and Iraq — stated on January 20th, that a few days prior:

The Kurds started a new operation [whereby] they are taking young Christian boys by force to sign them up for the Kurdish military & send them to the front line at Afrin where a new battle has just commenced with Turkey on the border. … I’m with Sootoro now. That’s who I stay with — the good Sootoro of course, not the Kurdish one (Sutoro). Pretty much the Christians are treated as second-class citizens [here] in their own land. … Just like how ISIS has the Islamic tax they have their own Kurdish one. They’ve replaced ISIS.”

In late January I was able to question Eddie in detail about his role and his view of these events:

Sarah Abed (SA): Can you tell me about yourself, your mission, and why you are in Syria?

Eddie Gaboro Hanna (EGH): I’m the founder of Patriarchal Relief Care Australia. For the past five years I’ve been organizing fundraising events and sending funds to our Patriarchal diocese in Damascus, to be dispersed to the most needy Christians suffering in war zones in Syria and Iraq.

I’m now on my second aid mission to Syria and am working on projects such as repairing damaged and bombed homes of displaced families, in hopes they can return to their homes. I’m also aiding over 400 orphans and over 160 widows, as well as purchasing and supplying medical equipment, allowances and supplies to ill and disabled children.

I made a documentary called “Tears of Another Genocide” to help raise awareness and show the world the persecution and genocide against Christians in the Syrian war.

Watch | Tears of Another Genocide – Official :Trailer
SA: How long have you been in Syria during this trip?

EGH: I’ve been in Syria for exactly five weeks now.

SA: What areas have you visited during your trip thus far?

EGH: I visited Damascus, Saydnaya, Maloula, Homs and villages in the province of Homs, Sadad, Aleppo, Qamishli, Hassakeh, and Khabour.

SA: Did you receive protection from Sootoro or the SAA? If so in what areas? What type of protection?

EGH: Sootoro, as in the Christian Sootoro not the pro-Kurdish fake Sutoro, picked me up and accommodated me for a week in northern Syria. In every other part of Syria I was in, which were all under the control of the SAA (Syrian Arab Army), I didn’t need any protection — only in the Kurdish (controlled) areas of Northern Syria I needed protection.

SA: Have you received any threats while in Syria?

EGH: No, I haven’t received any threats.

SA: Has your life ever been in danger while in Syria? If so where, why, and by whom?

EGH: Yes, my life was in serious danger New Year’s Eve in the Christian town of Bab Toma. I was outside among thousands in a crowd celebrating New Year’s Eve and at exactly 12:02, just past midnight, the Free Syrian Army started firing mortar shells and one landed approximately 30 to 50 meters from me killing two Christians that night.

Watch | Civilians flee mortar fire, video provided by Eddie Hanna
SA: What do Syrians want foreigners to know about the war in Syria?

EGH: Syrians want the foreigners to know that it was never a revolution nor a peaceful protest, because in 2009, two years before the war, the terrorists started digging tunnels and stashing massive arms preparing for this brutal war.

SA: What are some of the complaints you’ve heard from Syrians?

EGH: Non-Kurds are treated as second-class citizens by the Kurds. They are forced to pay special taxes simply because they are non-Kurds. Christian homes have been confiscated. Kurds write on the homes that this property now belongs to the Kurds, exactly like how ISIS writes on homes they take. Syrians complain more about America and the Kurds than anything else. America funded the opposition who started the war and destroyed over a hundred thousand Christian homes, and they’ve also funded the Kurds, who are oppressing the non-Kurds and even some Kurds who disagree with their political ambitions.

Eddie told me that he had “recorded a video of the writing they wrote on the wall of an Armenian home, exactly like how ISIS writes on the properties of Christians when they confiscate them.”

Watch | Christian property in Qamishlis seized by Kurdish forces, video provided by Eddie Hanna

In a more official rendering of the experiences Eddie recounted a World Council of Arameans press release, titled “Kurdish YPG / Asayesh Forces Kidnapped More Aramean Christians in Northeast Syria,” which states:

Local Christian sources, fearing for their lives and speaking on condition of anonymity to the World Council of Arameans (WCA), report that they are facing more and more harassments from the Kurdish YPG and Asayesh (security forces).

On Friday, 19 January, the first grave human rights violations of the new year included the abduction of seven Christians — four Armenians and three Arameans (otherwise known as Syriacs). Nevertheless, following intense negotiations, all of them were released except for the 20-year young Aramean, Saliba A., who was snatched in daylight out of his shop in Qamishli by the Asayesh.

After the threat of ISIS, the current wish of the Arameans is for the nationalist Kurds to leave them, their organizations, schools, churches and their self-defense of Sootoro in peace. The Aramean-led Sootoro even includes Arabs, who are also being seized by the Asayesh and enrolled by the YPG.”

Deteriorating conditions in Kurdish “controlled” areas

Eddie and Qamishli resident Samer, a reliable local source, provided me with further insight into on-the-ground conditions and human rights violations they witnessed in Syria. These included soaring real-estate prices as wealthy Kurds buy up as much property that they can get their hands on, often paying the owners double the property’s value.

Kurds are able to offer more for these properties due to illegal control of Syrian industry – including the oil, transportation, financial sectors — imposing unlawful taxes, and charging fees for everyday things such as renewing licenses or carrying out normal business activities. If one wants to sell a certain good, they are directed to a Kurd who is in charge of collecting a tax on that particular good. They are doing this for almost everything and the local population is suffering as a result.

Eddie went on to say:

YPG, PYD, SDF, MSF, they are all the same. The SDF have aligned themselves with the Free Syrian Army who openly work side by side with Jabhat Al Nusra [Al Qaeda]. The Kurd[ish militias] have recruited ex-ISIS members.”

I explained that when I had written about the connections between Daesh/ISIS and Kurdish militias, some people were shocked by the association, he responded: “It’s not shocking when you remember the Kurds were the ISIS of 1915, except they slaughtered Christians on a much larger scale then.”

Much of Kurdish culture is borrowed from Assyrians, Armenians, and Aramean culture. In fact, much of the land in Eastern Turkey that the Kurds now claim once belonged to Armenians. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Kurds assisted in the Turkish genocide of Assyrians and the 1915 genocide of Armenians.

Eddie told me that the taxes being charged are similar to what ISIS was forcing civilians to pay in areas it controlled. Samer stated that the prices of food, clothing, etc., are about 25 percent higher than in other governorates in the country, such as in Damascus. Electricity is scarce; people are using generators and have noticed a lot of cars without licence plates. He said it has become a “military society.” Education is also being negatively affected. Samer went on to say “guns are everywhere; people are buying guns like it’s food.”

Property theft by Kurdish militias persists

Eddie Gaboro Hanna told me: “They [the Kurdish militias] are still taking land and property from Christians by force and charging the Christian businesses a tax.” They are also destroying historical sites and claiming Assyrian artifacts to be Kurdish in origin. Historical revisionism is taking place, and the indigenous people are crying out for the world to stop these violations.

An article by reporter Paul Antonopoulos, originally published by the website Fort Russ and republished by AINA, states:

Reports of ethnic cleansing have been consistent in areas controlled by the SDF/YPG, with Arab villages entirely evacuated and re-inhabited by Kurdish settlers.

In the most recent case, … Tabqa, a city made up primarily of Arab Sunnis and a small Christian Assyrian minority, has seen SDF tyranny continue since they captured the site from ISIS in May 2017. Houses that were emptied by people escaping the fighting and SDF rule have seen their houses confiscated and taken over by the SDF-controlled Tabqa Council.

The Tabqa Council says that the newly vacant homes are to be given to the families of SDF fighters who have died in battle.”

Kurdish independence has been falsely portrayed as an ethnoreligious, democratic, feminist, revolutionary cause by mainstream and even some alternative media outlets. However, these media sources completely ignore facts and realities that contradict the romanticized version being publicly displayed. A point they often disregard is that the Kurds are not the original inhabitants of the lands that they now claim. Assyrians, Aramaeans, Armenians and other Christian minority groups are indigenous to the Levant. Aramaic, the language spoken by Arameans, dates back 3,000 years and is the language that Jesus Christ spoke. Many members of the Syriac Orthodox church still speak Aramaic and it’s an important component of their religious liturgy.

Source: Mint Press
Independent journalist Sarah Abed speaks with Aramean Christians about the systematic discrimination and human rights violations they often face in the Kurdish enclaves of northern Syria.

AL QAMISHLI, SYRIA (War Report) — Over the past few weeks, multiple independent on-the-ground sources have provided and corroborated information regarding disturbing events taking place in and around the Al Hassakah governorate in northeastern Syria.

One of the most startling allegations made is that the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been arresting and kidnapping men aged 18 to 40 in the Al Hassakah governorate, which includes Al Qamishli and other towns under their control. They are taking these men against their will to Kurdish militia training camps, where they will stay for some time and receive training before being forced to fight in the so-called “New Syrian Army” or “North Syrian Army.” I was told that some of these men are being taken to the front lines to fight in Afrin as well.

According to RT, in late December:
Russia’s Reconciliation Center for Syria issued a statement accusing the U.S.-led coalition of creating the so-called ‘New Syrian Army.’ The group comprises remnants of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), the Al-Nusra Front and others, and is based at a refugee camp in north-east Syria, which is located 20 kilometers from Al-Shaddadah town. Local refugees, returning to areas freed from IS, say the refugee camp has been used by the coalition as a training ground for militants for over six months.”

Surge in kidnapping by Kurdish YPG and Asayesh
Eddie Gaboro Hanna — founder of Patriarchal Relief Care Australia, a group that provides aid to Christian families impacted by wars in Syria and Iraq — stated on January 20th, that a few days prior:

The Kurds started a new operation [whereby] they are taking young Christian boys by force to sign them up for the Kurdish military & send them to the front line at Afrin where a new battle has just commenced with Turkey on the border. … I’m with Sootoro now. That’s who I stay with — the good Sootoro of course, not the Kurdish one (Sutoro). Pretty much the Christians are treated as second-class citizens [here] in their own land. … Just like how ISIS has the Islamic tax they have their own Kurdish one. They’ve replaced ISIS.”

In late January I was able to question Eddie in detail about his role and his view of these events:

Sarah Abed (SA): Can you tell me about yourself, your mission, and why you are in Syria?

Eddie Gaboro Hanna (EGH): I’m the founder of Patriarchal Relief Care Australia. For the past five years I’ve been organizing fundraising events and sending funds to our Patriarchal diocese in Damascus, to be dispersed to the most needy Christians suffering in war zones in Syria and Iraq.

I’m now on my second aid mission to Syria and am working on projects such as repairing damaged and bombed homes of displaced families, in hopes they can return to their homes. I’m also aiding over 400 orphans and over 160 widows, as well as purchasing and supplying medical equipment, allowances and supplies to ill and disabled children.

I made a documentary called “Tears of Another Genocide” to help raise awareness and show the world the persecution and genocide against Christians in the Syrian war.

SA: How long have you been in Syria during this trip?

EGH: I’ve been in Syria for exactly five weeks now.

SA: What areas have you visited during your trip thus far?

EGH: I visited Damascus, Saydnaya, Maloula, Homs and villages in the province of Homs, Sadad, Aleppo, Qamishli, Hassakeh, and Khabour.

SA: Did you receive protection from Sootoro or the SAA? If so in what areas? What type of protection?

EGH: Sootoro, as in the Christian Sootoro not the pro-Kurdish fake Sutoro, picked me up and accommodated me for a week in northern Syria. In every other part of Syria I was in, which were all under the control of the SAA (Syrian Arab Army), I didn’t need any protection — only in the Kurdish (controlled) areas of Northern Syria I needed protection.

SA: Have you received any threats while in Syria?

EGH: No, I haven’t received any threats.

SA: Has your life ever been in danger while in Syria? If so where, why, and by whom?

EGH: Yes, my life was in serious danger New Year’s Eve in the Christian town of Bab Toma. I was outside among thousands in a crowd celebrating New Year’s Eve and at exactly 12:02, just past midnight, the Free Syrian Army started firing mortar shells and one landed approximately 30 to 50 meters from me killing two Christians that night.

SA: What do Syrians want foreigners to know about the war in Syria?

EGH: Syrians want the foreigners to know that it was never a revolution nor a peaceful protest, because in 2009, two years before the war, the terrorists started digging tunnels and stashing massive arms preparing for this brutal war.

SA: What are some of the complaints you’ve heard from Syrians?

EGH: Non-Kurds are treated as second-class citizens by the Kurds. They are forced to pay special taxes simply because they are non-Kurds. Christian homes have been confiscated. Kurds write on the homes that this property now belongs to the Kurds, exactly like how ISIS writes on homes they take. Syrians complain more about America and the Kurds than anything else. America funded the opposition who started the war and destroyed over a hundred thousand Christian homes, and they’ve also funded the Kurds, who are oppressing the non-Kurds and even some Kurds who disagree with their political ambitions.

Eddie told me that he had “recorded a video of the writing they wrote on the wall of an Armenian home, exactly like how ISIS writes on the properties of Christians when they confiscate them.”

In a more official rendering of the experiences Eddie recounted a World Council of Arameans press release, titled “Kurdish YPG / Asayesh Forces Kidnapped More Aramean Christians in Northeast Syria,” which states:

Local Christian sources, fearing for their lives and speaking on condition of anonymity to the World Council of Arameans (WCA), report that they are facing more and more harassments from the Kurdish YPG and Asayesh (security forces).

On Friday, 19 January, the first grave human rights violations of the new year included the abduction of seven Christians — four Armenians and three Arameans (otherwise known as Syriacs). Nevertheless, following intense negotiations, all of them were released except for the 20-year young Aramean, Saliba A., who was snatched in daylight out of his shop in Qamishli by the Asayesh.

After the threat of ISIS, the current wish of the Arameans is for the nationalist Kurds to leave them, their organizations, schools, churches and their self-defense of Sootoro in peace. The Aramean-led Sootoro even includes Arabs, who are also being seized by the Asayesh and enrolled by the YPG.”

Eddie and Qamishli resident Samer, a reliable local source, provided me with further insight into on-the-ground conditions and human rights violations they witnessed in Syria. These included soaring real-estate prices as wealthy Kurds buy up as much property that they can get their hands on, often paying the owners double the property’s value.

Kurds are able to offer more for these properties due to illegal control of Syrian industry – including the oil, transportation, financial sectors — imposing unlawful taxes, and charging fees for everyday things such as renewing licenses or carrying out normal business activities. If one wants to sell a certain good, they are directed to a Kurd who is in charge of collecting a tax on that particular good. They are doing this for almost everything and the local population is suffering as a result.

Eddie went on to say:
YPG, PYD, SDF, MSF, they are all the same. The SDF have aligned themselves with the Free Syrian Army who openly work side by side with Jabhat Al Nusra [Al Qaeda]. The Kurd[ish militias] have recruited ex-ISIS members.”

I explained that when I had written about the connections between Daesh/ISIS and Kurdish militias, some people were shocked by the association, he responded: “It’s not shocking when you remember the Kurds were the ISIS of 1915, except they slaughtered Christians on a much larger scale then.”

Much of Kurdish culture is borrowed from Assyrians, Armenians, and Aramean culture. In fact, much of the land in Eastern Turkey that the Kurds now claim once belonged to Armenians. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Kurds assisted in the Turkish genocide of Assyrians and the 1915 genocide of Armenians.

Eddie told me that the taxes being charged are similar to what ISIS was forcing civilians to pay in areas it controlled. Samer stated that the prices of food, clothing, etc., are about 25 percent higher than in other governorates in the country, such as in Damascus. Electricity is scarce; people are using generators and have noticed a lot of cars without licence plates. He said it has become a “military society.” Education is also being negatively affected. Samer went on to say “guns are everywhere; people are buying guns like it’s food.”
Eddie Gaboro Hanna told me: “They [the Kurdish militias] are still taking land and property from Christians by force and charging the Christian businesses a tax.” They are also destroying historical sites and claiming Assyrian artifacts to be Kurdish in origin. Historical revisionism is taking place, and the indigenous people are crying out for the world to stop these violations.

An article by reporter Paul Antonopoulos, originally published by the website Fort Russ and republished by AINA, states:

Reports of ethnic cleansing have been consistent in areas controlled by the SDF/YPG, with Arab villages entirely evacuated and re-inhabited by Kurdish settlers.

In the most recent case, … Tabqa, a city made up primarily of Arab Sunnis and a small Christian Assyrian minority, has seen SDF tyranny continue since they captured the site from ISIS in May 2017. Houses that were emptied by people escaping the fighting and SDF rule have seen their houses confiscated and taken over by the SDF-controlled Tabqa Council.
The Tabqa Council says that the newly vacant homes are to be given to the families of SDF fighters who have died in battle.”

Kurdish independence has been falsely portrayed as an ethno-religious, democratic, feminist, revolutionary cause by mainstream and even some alternative media outlets. However, these media sources completely ignore facts and realities that contradict the romanticized version being publicly displayed. A point they often disregard is that the Kurds are not the original inhabitants of the lands that they now claim. Assyrians, Aramaeans, Armenians and other Christian minority groups are indigenous to the Levant. Aramaic, the language spoken by Arameans, dates back 3,000 years and is the language that Jesus Christ spoke. Many members of the Syriac Orthodox church still speak Aramaic and it’s an important component of their religious liturgy.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. She covers a broad range of issues relating to the Syrian war, Kurdish issues in Iraq and Syria, as well as U.S policy in the Middle East. The following is an account of Sarah’s conversations with Aramean Christians living under Kurdish rule in occupied northern Syria, as well as her personal take on the issues surrounding those conversations. MintPress News could not independently verify the information given by Sarah’s sources.

By Prof. Tim Anderson
Source: Global Research
Over April-May dozens of people were murdered across Aleppo as civilian areas and major hospitals were bombed by the NATO-backed ‘rebel’ groups.

They were even filmed firing their ‘hell cannons’ and saying “throw it on the civilians”

Meanwhile, western media ran fantasy stories about the besieged city.

If you believed the western corporate media you might think that the Syrian Government, for some unknown reason, has been bombing its own hospitals, and had killed Aleppo’s only paediatric surgeon. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Aleppo faces a large operation by the Syrian Army, after the liberation of Palmyra on 28 March, to reclaim those sections of the city held by Islamist fighters since 2012. Almost half Aleppo’s population has been displaced because of the fighting, but there are still about 1.8 million residents.

The withdrawal of the Saudi-backed ‘High Negotiations Committee’ from the Geneva peace talks on 21 April was followed the very next day by a pre-emptive counter-offensive. Many hundreds of rockets were fired into government-held areas by a coalition led by the internationally banned terrorist organisation Jabhat al Nusra.

These attacks came mostly from ‘hell cannons’, which shoot large gas canisters filled with explosives and at times chemicals. They caused havoc, killing and wounding many people in the streets, residential areas, schools and hospitals. The Syrian Army responded by shelling the al Nusra hideouts.

Aleppo Doctor Dr Nabil Antaki Information Clearing House estimates that 1.5 million live in the government controlled western parts of the city, with another 300,000 in the Islamist controlled mostly eastern areas. Dr Antaki complains bitterly that the western media “only talk about loss of life in east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by al Nusra. The three quarters of Aleppo under Syrian Government control, where numerous paediatricians are practising are of no consequence”.

He was referring to the string of NATO-Islamist bomb attacks on major state hospitals including Ibn Rushd, al Dabbit and al Razi. Many dozens of people were killed and injured. Those attacks were filmed by Syrian and Russian people on the ground, but very little of this reached the western media.

Photo caption: Aleppo Medical Association doctors stand with Syrian soldiers, demanding an end to the western mis-information about Aleppo attacks.

Dr Antaki wasn’t the only Aleppo doctor who was upset. The Aleppo Medical Association, on its Facebook page denounced the western propaganda campaign Facebook Album

Twenty doctors in front of the heavily damaged al Dabbit Hospital declared their support for the Syrian Army. Their signs – in English, Italian and German as well as Arabic – read: ‘Syrian Arab Army represents me’, ‘Long live Syria, long live Aleppo’, ‘Terrorists are killing our children’, ‘Armed opposition is destroying our civilisation’, ‘No for armed opposition’.

Yet the story of Russian or Syrian air attacks on the ‘al Quds hospital’ gained prominence in the western media. Stories were fuelled with information from the French group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders) and the US Government funded group the ‘White Helmets’ (who you can see celebrating their ‘revolution’ with Jabhat al Nusra here: White Helmets). CCTV showed people leaving this ‘hospital’ before an explosion.

The building is in the southern al-Sukkari district, which has been a stronghold of Jabhat al Nusra for some years. Many Aleppans had never heard of ‘al Quds hospital’. Dr Antaki says: ‘This hospital did not exist before the war. It must have been installed in a building after the war began”. MSF reports seem to confirm this.

This facility was not a state run or registered facility. Nevertheless, MSF representatives Pablo Marco and Muskilda Zancada claimed: “Al Quds hospital has been functional for more than 4 years so it was basically impossible that this information was not known … the facts are pointing to this being a deliberate attack” (Dissident Voice).

Photo caption: NATO-GCC backed terrorists in Aleppo load their weapon of choice, a ‘hell cannon’

Indeed, MSF-backed medical facilities in Syria have almost exclusively been in al Nusra held areas, such as Douma, north east of Damascus. Often they provide money but not doctors.

There is some debate as to whether clinics or hospitals run to service banned terrorist organisations have protection under international humanitarian law. Certainly US law does not allow it. A few years back the US jailed US doctor Rafig Sabir for 25 years after it emerged he had been ‘on call’ to treat al Qaeda fighters in Saudi Arabia (Caselaw).

Registered hospitals certainly do have such protection, and it is a crime to attack them. However this protection disappears when the facility becomes militarised. ‘Civilian objects are protected against attack, unless and for such time as they are military objectives’ (icrc).

Nevertheless, all three air forces that claim to be bombing terrorist groups in Syria – Russia, Syria and the USA – denied involvement in the ‘al Quds hospital’ incident. The US has engaged in bombing some areas around Aleppo (RT), but is not known to have carried out attacks on Jabhat al Nusra. That group is well embedded with the proxy armies Washington likes to call ‘moderate rebels’.

Photo caption: ‘al Quds hospital’: not quite a pile of rubble, nor a designated hospital

There were other serious discrepancies in the ‘al Quds hospital’ story. Pablo Marco for MSF told CNN and PBS that “there were two barrel bombs that fell close to the hospital … then the third barrel bomb fell in the entrance”. Barrel bombs are dropped by helicopters. Yet the MSF press release spoke of an “airstrike … [which] brought down the building … leaving a pile of rubble”. Reports of the death toll ranged from 14 to 50.

However that building is not a pile of rubble. As Rick Sterling pointed out in his 7 May ‘Open letter to MSF’ (Open Letter to MSF), photos show that the facility is still standing and it appears to be a heavily sand-bagged residential building, “a medical clinic in the ground floor of an unmarked and largely abandoned apartment building” ().

Even more damaging for the MSF story is the report that Russian satellite imagery shows the damaged building was in much the same state back on 15 October last year. If this is correct, the MSF-backed ‘al Quds hospital’, apparently a field clinic for al Nusra fighters and their families, suffered no attack on 27 April.

The scale of coverage of the ‘al Quds hospital’ story obscured the ugly fact that several much larger, real public hospitals in Aleppo were actually being bombed by the al Qaeda groups. The former story covered up these poorly reported massacres. It is not that there was no western coverage of the real hospital attacks, the coverage was just removed to the very margins of western headlines.

Take the devastating bombing of al Razi hospital, which Al Alam reported as killing 4 and wounding 38 (http://en.alalam.ir/news/1812988), in days of ‘rebel’ shelling which left 57 dead and 150 injured. The Wall Street Journal mentioned western Aleppo casualties and al Razi in an article which led by blaming Russia for the alleged ‘airstrike’ on ‘al Quds hospital’. The WSJ spent the next 28 paragraphs on that incident. Buried at paragraph 30 was this reference, from an anti-Syrian source: “shells had [also] hit the Al-Razi Hospital, a facility in a government-held neighbourhood where many wounded were being treated” (Airstrike on Hospital).

The bombing of al Dabbit hospital did make it into the UK Independent. This hospital was said to be in ‘regime controlled Aleppo’; apparently it pains them to say ‘Syrian government’. The report opened: “At least 19 civilians have been killed at a hospital and other parts of government-controlled Aleppo in shelling attributed to Islamist rebels” (Aleppo Bombing).

The Syrian news agency SANA reported on 3 May that the death toll from the bombing of al Dabbit hospital had risen to 16 dead and 68 injured (SANA).

Hardly mentioned in the western media was the bombing of the large Ibn Rushd hospital, but the Russian TV channel ANNA filmed the actual bombing and Latin American media ran that video (Ibn Rushd Hospital).

The attacks on Aleppo were extensive, well beyond hospitals. Vicar of Aleppo Mons. Georges Abou Khazen said “we have been under continuous bombardment over the past few days in Aleppo with civilian deaths, injuries and destruction”. He pointed his finger at the front backed by the West, along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, saying that “These bombings … are from the front of the so-called ‘moderates’ and … in reality [they] are no different from other jihadists [Islamic State (IS) and the Nusra Front]” (Asia News).

I wrote back in January 2014 (Global Research) that the al Qaeda groups’ attacks on Syria’s health system were far more systematic that any one incident could explain.

In just the first three years of this war, before ISIS came to Syria, the NATO and Gulf monarchy-backed armed groups had systematically attacked more than two thirds of Syria’s public hospitals, and had murdered, kidnapped or injured more than 300 health workers.

When an Australian delegation met Syria’s then Health Minister Dr Sa’ad al Nayef on 22 December 2013 he told us that foreign backed terrorists had just detonated two truck bombs, completely destroying Aleppo’s al Kindi hospital, one of the biggest anti-cancer centres in the Middle East. All health workers inside were killed in the blast. Dr Malek Ali, Syria’s then Minister for Higher Education added that Al-Kindi was a functioning educational hospital co-managed by his ministry. You can see one of the suicide truck bomb attacks here, proudly cheered on in the Jabhat al Nusra video: al Nusra

In an Orwellian revision of events the BBC (21 December 2013) reported the destruction of Al-Kindi with the headline: “Syria rebels take back strategic hospital in Aleppo”. The introduction claimed the “massive suicide lorry bomb” had managed “to seize back a strategic ruined hospital occupied by Assad loyalists.” Al-Kindi was said to have been “a disused building” and “according to an unconfirmed report, 35 rebels died in the attack”.

In fact, these ‘rebels’ were a coalition of Free Syrian Army and Jabhat al Nusra, while the ‘Assad loyalists’ were the staff and security guards of a large public hospital.

Dr al Nayef told us that, since March 2011, 67 of the country’s 94 national hospitals had been attacked and damaged, with 41 out of service. 174 health workers had been killed, 127 wounded and 33 kidnapped. Further, 1921 primary health centres had been damaged, and 678 were out of service. 421 ambulances had been lost or were out of service, and 197 support vehicles had been damaged, with 169 out of service.

The scale of destruction of health facilities, combined with attacks on pharmaceutical factories, schools, universities and civilians shows the armed groups have been intent on destroying a functioning state, with no interest in trying to win public support.

The Health Minister showed us a video of the FSA (Farouk Brigade) blowing up Homs National Hospital in April 2012, another of damage to Al- Salamiyeh National Hospital (in Hama) after an attack in January 2013 and a third of the damage to Al Zahrway Hospital (in Damascus) after yet another terrorist attack in May 2013.

He also gave us details of the 26 November 2013 terrorist attack on Deir-Ateya Hospital in Rural Damascus, where 11 medical staff (2 Anesthesiologists, 3 Resident doctors, 4 Nurses and 2 Drivers) were stabbed to death.

The al Qaeda attacks are often accompanied by skilled social media campaigns, assisted by western created agencies such as the White Helmets. In her article titled ‘The storm of lies surrounding Syria’s humanitarian crisis: Aleppo Is Burning campaign calls for Syria no-fly zone’, investigative journalists Vanessa Beeley has compiled some of those campaigns in the ‘Aleppo Hospital’ smokescreen.

Warning: The following article contains graphic description of violence and/or its effects.
By Adam Larson
Source: Monitor on Massacre

Dr. Mohammed Tennari is the Idlib province Coordinator the Washington DC-based Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a group opposed to Syria’s government and allied with the competing “transitional government” in Turkey. Not far cross the Turkish border in northern Syria, Tennari set up his Field Hospital in the city of Sarmeen (alt. Sarmin – clinic logo at left), southeast of the regional capitol Idlib. This reportedly was started in 2011, supported with funding to hire staff, secure supplies, etc. from SAMS (SAMS), as well as Doctors Without Borders/MSF (MSF), and it continues running today with an unusually transparent and public medical process (see the clinic’s Facebook page for intensive surgery documentation).

He obviously spends some time in Turkey and, recently anyway, transiting to and from points west. Dr. Tennari was in New York on April 16 to address a closed-door session of the UN Security Council said to move everyone to tears. (BBC) Most recently he addressed a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives foreign relations Committee, on June 17 (PDF “transcript” from house.gov). He’s always urging foreign military intervention or, in June, asking alternately for help in “reinforcing and rebuilding secure underground hospitals” to withstand the onslaught, if no one has the fortitude to stop it like they should.

Tennari’s main thrust and selling point in these lobbying efforts has been relating his direct experience with the government’s intolerable chlorine barrel bombs. He came on the national spotlight after his clinic hosted the deaths of three young children, aged 3, 2, and about 1, on March 16, 2015. It was the first and worst of the new round of alleged chlorine attacks in Idlib. These deaths were exactly what he showed to move the UN to tears and, apparently, short-circuit their analytical skills.

This info-offensive with dead babies and calls for war against a Baath party government in the Middle East has been frequently compared to the 1990 Iraq incubator babies disinformation fiasco (many examples in the Guardian’s comments, for example). That dictator-killing-babies story boosted support for the 1991 war on Iraq and was a fiction hatched by the Kuwaiti royal family and PR firm Hill and Knowlton. One big difference is here there undeniably are babies being killed by someone who either has bad aim or very bad morals. But otherwise, the propaganda power of the dead baby should be noted as one reasons to suspect this might be just that – but hatched by a different kind of PR group…

We know Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, was at the time of the incident the leading force deciding who lives and who dies in the Sarmin area. The area would still, even after all the running so many have done, contain some religious enemies – Shi’ites from the nearby and vulnerable village of Fu’ah, Sunnis who they think support the infidel government, etc. These might wind up dead in fits and spurts as soon as there’s a good cover story and some fake names lined up.

As that situation might suggest, the stage Dr. Tennari rose to fame on is troubling one. At right is one sign of serious problems with Tennari’s clinic in al Qaeda territory; Mohammed al-Taleb (as given), the youngest victim of that inaugural attack. On the left is a stray view of him in the general treatment area, sat upright, receiving oxygen by a mask, and having injections at least considered, if not performed. He lived long enough to get to the emergency room. On the right is the more famous view from there. He’s left on his back, apparently vomiting or exuding mucous, depending, and given no breathing assistance, even as he tries once to draw a breath on his own and fails. “Assad” was blamed for his inevitable death, but “Assad” could not stop them from continuing oxygen support, nor from making the other errors that may have helped finish off his sisters Aysha and Sara as well. Please see the explanation at What Killed the Talebs? : “A disturbingly unsuccessful medical effort”)

Exactly one month later, director Tennari spoke to the Security Council session, describing his version of the night’s events with himself at the center of the medical drama. New York Times reports Dr. Tennari “said he tried to save the three children” seen in the videos. Elsewhere he’s said “as quickly as we worked, we could not save them,” (AFP) and – while the grandmother died before arrival – “we tried to treat the others. The children were foaming at the mouth, they were suffocating, then their hearts stopped.” (HRW) Later, he told The Guardian:

“The children who came to us were suffocating and we couldn’t do anything because they had breathed too much chlorine,” Tennari told the Guardian from Idlib, describing the most difficult cases he had to handle. “It’s very distressing to see children suffocating in front of you and you cannot do anything.”

He doesn’t explain why he could not get that mask back on Mohammed’s face, for one thing. Maybe it’s part of the (Islamist?) “fate” concept Civil Defense (“White Helmets”) chief Raed Saleh talked about; referring to one of Mohammed’s sisters, probably Sara Taleb, he said “we did what we could to save her, but dying in silence was her fate. Death in silence before the whole world.” Why is this their “fate” in anti-government hospitals? Why the combination of preventable death, and a global audience for it? The answer can perhaps be sensed in the accompanying calls to “stop the death” – not by enforcing proper medical procedures in this or other rebel clinics, but by starting an air war against the religious enemies of the people the clinic managers are allied with.

There are a number of possibly shifty details Tennari has offered casting some doubt on his true knowledge of the events of March 16. But after that inflammatory introduction, these are best considered in a section below, so we can get to the main question.

Was He Even On the Stage?
As the New York Times related, Dr. Tennari “tried to save the three children shown with their grandmother’s body in the video that he said was taken that night.” From this, there’s little reason he should not be seen in that same video, or set of two videos rather, filmed mainly right around the children as they died. These show everyone who was that close to the central drama, but Dr. Tennari does not seem to be one of them. It’s all but impossible to prove a negative like his not being at the clinic, but from the available video, we can see that he probably wasn’t there, and he almost certainly wasn’t in the emergency room at the crucial time.

The question was first raised and considered in this section of the ACLOS event talk page. Here, you can check for yourself if you like, or have the time. Dr. Tennari looks like this: (see photo).

And here are the emergency room videos, apparently what was shown at the UNSC and for the HFRC, as Dr. Tennari sat there claiming his central involvement in this drama. Can anyone spot him actually in that drama? I can’t: [The following videos contain disturbing images]Video 1: Idlib Civil Defence & Video 2: Jabat al-Nusra

In the first one, we can see only Mohammed is there at the start – anyone helping prior to this wouldn’t be treating “children,” just the one child. Mohammed is alive at the beginning, the girls are brought in halfway through the video, and one person says Aysha is alive (breathing) near the end. In video 2, they all increasingly seem dead. There’s little to no gap between the videos, which show the time when the children died. Any life-saving efforts on them would happen in this span I estimate at 4-6 minutes long. And we see life-saving-type efforts, just poorly done, and mainly after the kids are dead.

Dr. Tennari is not the cameraman for either video, we can presume, so should be one of the people seen, eyes burning or not, hunched over the victims at least part of this time.

There are 7 people of medical relevance outlined here at ACLOS, numbered in order of appearance. Two of these – M1 (right, wearing the Taqiyah cap favored by some Islamists) and M6 (below, on the left) seem to be – or be considered as – qualified doctors. Neither of these men is Dr. Tennari; M1 is too old and lean, while M6 is younger and has all his hair. Is he one of the rescue workers whose faces we can’t fully see? Visually, M4 or M5 (on the right below, holding Aysha so gingerly) could be him, but the director isn’t likely to be working with the rescue teams like that. Is he hiding under a hijab as the one female nurse, M2? Is he one of the other, less relevant, people here? Or is he simply not in the room?

Consider M6, the young doctor (on the left in the image at right). For most of video 1, he’s consistently not seen or sensed in the room, until he appears from the back at 1:34. From there on, he’s clearly in the action through both videos. Dr. Tennari seems to be missing in that same way, but for the whole time.

A less thorough scan of videos from other parts of the filed clinic also failed to reveal any matches. He may have been on-site, just out of frame at times, maybe he is visible and we just can’t see it yet, or he may simply not have been there.

It’s a valid question, then: where was Dr. Tennari?
* Was he there after all? Can anyone out there locate a possible match? Comments below are open.
* He would have less reason to be in New York or Washington before he and his clinic delivered their chlorine attack and dead-babies story – but he is with SAMS, if not a Syrian-American himself. So maybe he was in the US.
* Maybe he was off in Turkey, or even Qatar for example, securing support.
* Maybe he was working elsewhere in Idlib, or elsewhere in Syria, or was at home like he says, but passed out drunk, or something embarrassing.
* Consider: he works and lives mainly in an area run by known terrorist groups and their ideological allies. For all we know he was briefly arrested that night so others could manage the clinic for a while – maybe he had nothing to do with the crime spree (see below), but can’t say anything or they’ll brand him a regime collaborator, execute him, and his children will be the next random victims of “Assad shelling.” That’s an overly-imaginative scenario, but there are a lot of possibilities in that direction, tainting his reliability as a witness. All we know is he flew out of this terrorist-held area to the UN and Capitol Hill and issued some softened demands, something about delivering explosives to kill the religious enemies of those terrorists. All pure coincidence, right?

Crime and Punishment, and Evidence
On June 17, Dr. Tennari presented alongside former ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, and border doctor Annie Sparrow (her “voice cracking with emotion”), who also happens to be the wife of Human Rights Watch CEO Kenneth Roth. All three were quite clear and professional on the point that that the government and its helicopters were behind these chemical attacks, and ideally at least, they should be stopped with some sort of aerial solution. None of them makes note of the unprofessional medical care that contributed to the deaths.

Consider; including the six who died on March 16, the death toll from 30+ alleged chlorine attacks is said to be ten, as of mid-June. Dr. Tennari swears everyone in Idlib is hopelessly terrified anyway, for whatever reason no one can change, and this is both why “Assad” does it and why it must be stopped (see Why Chlorine?). As allegedly used, chlorine counts as a chemical weapon and may well cross Obama’s “red line.” So Tennari has some alleged reason to press for direct U.S. military intervention in Syria. But after the hearing, a report in ABC News passed on signs that the audience was perhaps not as moved as it was hoped.:

Rep. Ted Yoho, R-FL, told the witnesses the committee was introducing a resolution condemning the chlorine attacks that included a “strong recommendation” to the international community requesting no-fly zones to be implemented. However, he said military fly zones shouldn’t be seen as a solution, but a military operation. “I just want to remind everyone that a no fly zone is an act of war,” Yoho said. “We’re attacking a sovereign nation that has not attacked us. They are not a direct threat to the United States.”

“Sure,” Dr. Sparrow might as well have responded, “just get that protective solution in place so the death can stop, like we did in Libya.”

To the commission drafting that request, or those reviewing the request, anyone who reads this … not only is it an act of war, it’s one being requested based on the provided evidence we just looked at parts of. And while we have this case open before us, people of Earth, another important feature of the events of March 16:
the victims in this deadliest chlorine attack were visibly not killed by chlorine at all.
As best explained in the previous article What Killed the Talebs? the children, especially Mohammed, show signs consistent instead with an overdose on some CNS depressant drug, most likely some kind of opiate. This is seriously the best visuals-based assessment anyone has yet made (but open to review). A drug overdose of course would not come from a barrel bomb, but from a person in this Islamist rebel-administered area.

In the case of the girls anyway, and likely with Mohammed as well, the drugging happened before they were brought into Tennari’s clinic. But it was probably done by friends or overlords, and still perhaps using drugs supplied to him by MSF or SAMS and somehow “loaned out.” There was a chemical murder in the area, and a staff that had chances to stop it, but let these pass. Why save a life if the plan is to end it? But why would the same plan hold into the clinic, past its ethical gates?

This really should be considered carefully, and as Tennari and his allies ask, with an eye to some kind of punishment for the perpetrators. It’s a at least as hideous a crime as they say, besides being an elephant-in-the-living-room insult to our collective intelligence. If the facts are as the visual evidence suggests, Dr, Tennari is complicit in these murders and the cover-up. And it’s not even a very good cover-up, just one that the ruling elite is very hungry for.

Further Red Flags
Some noted possible inconsistencies between Dr, Tennari’s various accounts – mostly to be expanded on later – there may be others I forgot.

Fumes Off Victims Clothes?
From NYT report on UN session, April 16:

… Even treating the patients was harmful. Dr. Tennari said his eyes itched, and he felt nauseated. One of the nurses fainted from the chlorine fumes off the injured.” (NYT)

First, No one is seen fainting in the videos. Next, it’s unlikely chlorine gas will drift or even rub back off a patient’s skin or clothing enough to do anything, in the war Sarin easily could. It changes to hydrochloric acid on contact with water (so eyes, airways, maybe skin), so surface particles could irritate, even float up into one’s eyes, maybe, off the clothes of a freshly exposed victim. But from what I’ve read, passing out would come only after severe exposure to an air-borne cloud of the stuff, after coughing violently for a while.

Human Rights Watch April 14 report, using a different name spelling, “Tirani”:

Mohamed Ghaleb Tirani, the director of the field hospital in Sarmin who treated many of those affected by the attacks, told Human Rights Watch that the patients’ clothes smelled strongly of chlorine – “like the detergent.” … Tirani said that four of the paramedics at the hospital were affected by second-hand exposure, including burning eyes and shortness of breath and dizziness.

The problem with this, as anyone who’s reviewed the videos or who was there should know, is the children at least had been stripped and washed before arriving in the clinic, as anyone can see looking at the videos he presented. Most other victims, if not all, seem to be similarly stripped (usually to underwear) and washed with water out in the street, then given a civil defense blanket and taken inside. It’s true grandmother Ayosh is not processed, and seemingly remains in her clothes, but she’s also wrapped in a blanket that would greatly mute any vapors – only her face and one arm are exposed.

Dr. Tennari should probably know what makes basic sense, and even if he wasn’t there himself, he should have seen the videos and thought it out before the UN session. But what he says about “fumes” rising off clothes causing symptoms that secondary chlorine exposure would not cause makes very little scientific sense.

Later, just ahead of the June 17 congressional hearing, the Guardian reported a different story, or an unknown twist in the same one. Given a copy of his planned testimony (apparently the same one released by the House as a PDF “transcript”):

As he left his house to head to the hospital, he could smell bleach. “When I arrived at the hospital, a wave of people had already begun to arrive. They were all experiencing symptoms of exposure to a choking agent like chlorine gas. Everyone was decontaminated with water before coming into the hospital, and their clothes were taken off of them.

This now is clearer in matching what the video shows, as if he had watched it. But he insists he was affected anyway, and still blames the children – just not their clothes. In the full testimony (transcript) he says “As I worked, my chest became tighter and tighter, my throat burned, and I had a hard time breathing. The young nurse who took care of baby Mohammed had symptoms of a critical level.”

Perhaps it’s this tenacity in holding to his first story regardless of the holes in it that’s got so many influential people willing to believe everything he says.

Friend of the family?
(to be expanded) Dr. Tennari says the father of the killed family, Waref al-Taleb, was a friend of his. “Their father was a friend of his, he said, and ran an electronics repair shop in town.” or “He ran an electronics repair shop in town, and recently helped to fix my phone.” Our research (not conclusive but worth noting) …

Talebs Gassed Through a Vent?
(to be expanded) app. changing story of the attack details – gas seeped in the vent, or now the barrel crashed down through a ventilation shaft – that could be a simple mix-up based on what he heard, or a red flag.

Children’s Symptoms
(to be expanded)
Foaming at the mouth: false.
Pale sickly color: true
difficulty breathing/suffocating: sort of true

No Beds for Grandma
(to be expanded)