Yearbook 2010
Syria. According to
COUNTRYAAH,
Syria has a population of 16.91 million (2018). The country's rapprochement with the United
States, which began in 2009, halted since Syria tried to
persuade Lebanon not to cooperate with the UN tribunal that
investigated the assassination of Lebanon's former prime
minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005 and after it emerged that
Syria had provided the Shiite Muslim Hizbullah Lebanon with
long-range missiles, possibly of the Scud type, that would
make it possible to attack both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Syria cultivated other relations instead. Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited President Bashar al-Asad in
Damascus on February 25, where they both met with Hizbullah
leader Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, leader of the militant Hamas
movement Khaled Meshal and other Islamist leaders. The
Russian Federation's President Dmitry Medvedev visited the
country on May 10-11, then spoke with al-Asad about
cooperation in the oil and gas sector, among other things.
The day before, Medvedev had met with Israeli President
Shimon Peres in Moscow.
Two lawyers and human rights activists, Muhannad
al-Hassani and Haitham al-Maleh, were sentenced at the
beginning of the summer to three years in prison each, among
other things, for "weakening the national feeling". In
September, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch
criticized the arrest of 19-year-old spy-accused female
student Tal al-Mallohi. She had been kept locked up for
eight months since she blogged about the difficult situation
of the Palestinians.
In July, the government issued a ban for women to wear
niqab, a veil that covers everything except the eyes, at all
universities and colleges.
A high-ranking Syrian diplomat in Stockholm was expelled
from Sweden in May after police revealed that he planned to
kidnap his own daughter and drive her out of the country.
The background must have been that the diplomat wanted to
break her relationship with her boyfriend.
The UN estimated that 800,000 people are fleeing drought
and starvation in the country's northeastern region, which
continued for the fourth year. The UN Food Program WFP
distributed food to 200,000 people who have stayed in the
area and the Red Cross provided drinking water.
In the first half of August, IS launched a new thrust
into Iraqi Kurdistan, where it captured Sinjar and
subsequently killed 500 of the city's inhabitants. Sinjar
was the capital of the Yazidi religion and 50,000 of
Sinjar's population fled up Mount Sinjar where IS besieged
them. In the shelter of the humanitarian disaster, it was an
excellent opportunity for the West to intervene. The United
States launched aerial bombardment of IS positions at the
foot of the mountain. However, it was not the United States
that broke the blockade, but rather Kurdish partisans who
drove the IS forces to flight.
In the following weeks, more and more countries joined
the United States aerial bombings in Iraq and Syria. On
September 26, the Danish Folketing also decided to
contribute aircraft and soldiers. The bombing war was
launched without a UN mandate. Formally, it could be said
that the bombings in Iraq happened at the request of the
Iraqi government, but this was not the case in Syria, where
Assad declared that the country would regard foreign
bombings in the country as a violation of its national
sovereignty. Now it was only a short time during the cold
war of the 20th century that the West has at all respected
the national sovereignty of other countries, and therefore
the West launched bombardments of especially IS positions in
northern Syria. A full breach of the UN Charter and a crime
against peace.
IS received support from Turkey for its siege of Kobanê.
On June 11, IS captured Turkey's consulate in Mosul,
capturing 48 Turks. These include the Consul General, women,
children and several members of the Turkish special forces.
On September 20, IS and Turkey signed a secret agreement,
after which the hostages were released and sent back to
Turkey. Although the deal was secret, it was not difficult
to see what IS got in return. Turkey released hundreds of
Islamist prisoners, a large number of whom traveled to Syria
where they joined IS. Turkey also committed to helping IS
occupy Kobanê on the Turkey-Syria border. While Turkey
bought oil from IS and freely allowed supplies and partisans
to pass from Turkey into Syria to IS and other Syrian
opposition groups, Turkey completely shut down the Kurds. In
September, Turkish border guards fired Turkish Kurds who had
traveled to the border to help their ethnic communities in
Kobani. Kurdish refugees from Kobanê were most often treated
as prisoners of war in Turkey, and Turkey effectively
prevented reinforcements and weapons from reaching the
besieged Kobanê. Turkey had two rationales. First, the
country was not interested in a Kurdish autonomous area
along the border with Turkey. It would give the large
Kurdish minority in Turkey blood on the tooth to also demand
autonomy in the Kurdish areas there. Then IS was a minor
evil in Turkish optics. The second rationale was that Turkey
was outraged by the US's "betrayal" in the fight against
Assad in Syria. In Turkish optics, the US bombing of IS
weakened opposition to Assad, and Turkey had made every
effort to overthrow Assad. Therefore, Turkey had no problems
giving IS more or less open support. In advance, opinion
polls in Turkey showed that approx. a quarter of the Turkish
population voted positively towards IS.
The United States and a number of Western countries had
by this time launched aerial bombardments of IS, and the
United States was not happy about the strategic alliance
between Turkey and IS. At the same time, Western propaganda
had difficulty explaining why the West should fight IS, but
not help the only people who actually fought IS on land -
namely the Kurds. On September 27, the United States
therefore, for the first time, bombed IS positions around
Kobanê. Several hundred bombings followed, but they had a
limited effect. A war cannot be won from the air. The
bombings happened only during the day, and the IS partisans
only hid when bombers were reported in the area.
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