via Louisa Loveluck: The Syrian government and affiliated forces have launched more than 300 attacks using chemical weapons during the country’s nearly eight-year conflict, a report said Sunday. The findings by the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute offer the most comprehensive record to date of presumed chemicals weapons use in Syria, where the long war… Read More Syrian Military Linked to More than 300 Chemical Attacks
via the Washington Post: As Syria’s government consolidates control after years of civil war, President Bashar al-Assad’s army is doubling down on executions of political prisoners, with military judges accelerating the pace they issue death sentences, according to survivors of the country’s most notorious prison. In interviews, more than two dozen Syrians recently released from… Read More Assad Regime Using Mass Murder to Empty Prisons of Political Opponents
Overall, Syrian democracy activists were ecstatic about President Donald Trump’s strikes on the base from which the Syrian regime launched its latest chemical attacks. After years of impunity, the Assad regime paid a price (however tiny) for their crimes against humanity. Western proponents of the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine, the enforcement of international law… Read More Critical Questions Remain Over Trump’s Missile Strikes and Syria Policy
A historic conference recently wrapped up at the Vatican that addressed the continued relevance of the traditional Catholic doctrine of just war theory. Just war theory outlines the moral requirements surrounding the decision to use force and the ethical limits on using force justly. The decision to use force requires a just cause, right intention,… Read More Replace Just War Theory with Nonviolence—What about Syria and Genocide?
After nearly five years of civil war, precipitated by Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, and perhaps 470,000 deaths, the US House of Representatives passed a war crimes resolution aimed at holding Assad and his allies accountable for their war crimes, as well as a genocide resolution that identifies Christians as victims of ISIS’s… Read More In Response to the Crimes of Assad and ISIS, the House Passes Genocide and War Crimes Resolutions
While a number of prominent Christian leaders have backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as he engages in the mass murder of Syrian men, women, and children, it is important to remember that many Syrian Christians have been brutalized and murdered by the regime because of their courageous commitment to freedom, democracy, and human rights. And,… Read More Assad’s Victims Include Syrian Christians
NBC News describes a new report from the United Nations on crimes against humanity in Syria: Thousands of civilians are being secretly imprisoned, raped, tortured and exterminated by Syria’s government as it wages a bloody civil war, a United Nations commission found Monday. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria lifted the lid on what… Read More UN: Assad Regime Guilty of Extermination, Crimes against Humanity
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