News about Syria and neighbours ... October 17 and past few days

Don't miss the blue-eyed Kurds in the DailyMail article.

From News24:
... Rebels fighting President Bashar Assad’s government in southern Syria said on Wednesday the main opposition National Coalition had “failed” and announced they no longer recognise the Western-backed group.
The video statement signed by nearly 70 groups comes after a group of key rebel groups in the north of the country announced their rejection of the National Coalition in late September....

David Ignatius writing at WashingtonPost:
...Turkey blows Israel’s cover for Iranian spy ring.  The Turkish-Israeli relationship became so poisonous early last year that the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to have disclosed to Iranian intelligence the identities of up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their Mossad case officers.
Knowledgeable sources describe the Turkish action as a “significant” loss of intelligence and “an effort to slap the Israelis.” The incident, disclosed here for the first time, illustrates the bitter, multi-dimensional spy wars that lie behind the current negotiations between Iran and Western nations over a deal to limit the Iranian nuclear program. A Turkish Embassy spokesman had no comment.

From Ekurd:
....At least 41 fighters have been killed in violent clashes pitting Kurds against jihadists and Islamist rebels in Western Kurdistan (northeastern Syria), a monitoring group said on Wednesday, and reported by AFP.
Kurdish fighters from several villages in oil-rich Hasake province in Western Kurdistan are engaged in combat against Al-Qaeda affiliated groups the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) and Al-Nusra Front, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“At least 41 fighters were killed, including 29 ISIL, Al-Nusra Front and Islamist fighters,” said the Observatory, adding that one of the dead was a local Al-Nusra leader of Egyptian origin.

Ivan Watson and Gul Tuysuz writing at CNN:
 ..Turkey's top diplomat angrily rejected U.S. newspaper reports alleging the Turkish government leaked Israeli intelligence secrets to Iran.
"This is just a smear campaign. This is not true. It is dirty propaganda," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, according to a ministry spokesman.....

From DailyMail:
 ....Pale eyed portraits of Kurdistan:  Haunting photographs offer insight into the lives of refugees forced from their homes by the conflict in Syria



From TheGuardian:
....Syrian refugees adapt to life in Iraqi Kurdistan – in pictures With limited options, the destinations of Syrian refugees have been concentrated regionally, with Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey each hosting up to half a million. Egypt and Iraq received fewer refugees in the first six months of 2013, but tens of thousands have poured over the border to the Kurdish region of Iraq since mid-August

Benjamin Weinthal writing at FoxNews:
....The brutal, Al Qaeda-linked group rebels invited into Syria to help topple President Bashir Assad has virtually taken over northern Syria, raising fears that its brand of indiscriminate terror could spill into neighboring Turkey, where some 300 U.S. soldiers are based to protect Turkish airspace from Syrian missile attacks.
ISIS — whose name has been translated as “Greater Syria” — joined the Free Syria Army’s bid to oust Assad, but now seeks to turn the embattled nation into a building block in a radical Sunni Islamic empire, or caliphate, across the Middle East. The group has captured towns and swaths of territory along the border with Turkey.
According to a recent analysis from Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence organization, ISIS “has dispatched hundreds of fighters north toward Turkey in response to closure of certain border crossings.” Turkey has a powerful military, but even so, can’t welcome an enclave of radical jihadists on its border, say experts.

Mohamad Ali Harissi
....Iraqi Kurdistan is prepared to strike militants anywhere,    including neighbouring Syria, but the Kurds must avoid being drawn into its civil war, the autonomous region's president Massud Barzani told AFP.
Barzani's remarks came after militants carried out a late-September attack on a security service headquarters in the Kurdish region's capital Arbil, killing seven people -- a rare occurrence in an area usually spared the violence plaguing other parts of Iraq........

From AlJazeera:
...Egypt deporting Syrian refugees,  Amnesty says.  An international human rights group on Thursday urged Egypt to end its policy of unlawfully detaining Syrian refugees and forcibly returning them to their homeland where civil war is raging.
Amnesty International said that hundreds who have fled the bloodshed in Syria for sanctuary in Egypt — including many children without their parents — face prolonged detention in poor conditions or deportation, which has separated family members in some cases.
The group said it found 1-year-old Syrian twins among refugees in Egypt's custody. Appalling conditions in detention and the threat of being sent back to Syria are prompting scores of refugees to flee again, Amnesty reported....



Robert Fisk writing at IndependentUK:
....Lebanon has cause for shame    in its treatment of Syrian refugees
They are beaten in the immigration queues and cheated with exorbitant rents.
I stopped to buy walnuts in Sidon last week from a sunburned man sitting on the pavement of the old souk. Like the walnuts – soft, almost creamy inside their iron-hard husks – he came from the Syrian town of Bloudan.
In years gone by, I would take the steam train from the old Haj station in Damascus up to Bloudan and Zabadani, the loco so slow that passengers could sometimes jump out of the carriages to pick fruit and then clamber back aboard. Bloudan was a kind of forested spa, all soft-flowing streams and water melons and crude cement houses and big posters of Hafez al-Assad, the dictator father of Bashar. There were Palestinian training camps in these hills and a regional headquarters for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – Lebanon was only eight miles away – and the smugglers’ trails ran from Bloudan and Zabadani across the Anti-Lebanon range into the Bekaa Valley.
Bloudan is a Christian town – Zabadani is largely Sunni – and they have been on the front lines of Syria’s war; those old smuggling trails now help to bring the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into Lebanon, swelling now to 1.3 million, of whom at least 780,000 have been registered by the UN. This means that one in four of the people of Lebanon are now Syrians. It feels like it, too. The poor beg in the streets of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre, the rich cut in front of me in their smart cars with registration plates showing they come from as far away as Raqqa and Deir ex-Zour and Deraa. A few of the vehicles boast bullet holes – as so many Lebanese cars did during the 1975-90 civil war – and almost half the people I meet in an average day in Beirut are Syrians.........

From JPost:
...Turkey says it fires on al-Qaida-linked fighter positions in Syria. Turkey's army said on Wednesday it had fired on al-Qaida-linked fighters over the border in northern Syria in response to a stray mortar shell which struck Turkish territory.
The military fired four artillery shells at positions of fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Tuesday, the general staff statement said........

From MojahedinNews:
....France on Wednesday committed to taking in 500 Syrian refugees  at the United Nations’ request, the UN refugee agency said.
The announcement followed talks in Paris between French President Francois Hollande and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, the agency’s local representative Philippe Leclerc told AFP.

Dan Pine writing at JWeekly:
....Plan to ‘return’ Jewish artifacts to Iraq sparks outrage.  Who is the rightful owner of a stunning collection of Iraqi Judaica known as the Iraqi Jewish Archives: the descendants of that country’s exiled Jewish community now living in the United States, or the Iraq government that stole the material from its Jewish population in the first place?
That is the question as the National Archives in Washington, D.C. readies an exhibit titled “Discov-ery and Recovery: Pre-serving Iraqi Jewish Heritage.” Originally sch-eduled to open Friday, Oct. 11, it will open once the federal government shutdown ends.
Over several decades, successive regimes in Iraq systematically destroyed the country’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community and expropriated its property — right down to the last ancient prayerbook and Torah scroll....

From HimalayanTimes:
... A series of car bombs hit Baghdad  province on Thursday, killing at least 44 people, while 22 died in other attacks, including two suicide bombings in northern Iraq, officials said.
The attacks come as Iraq witnesses its worst violence since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal sectarian conflict.
The violence, which has included sectarian attacks, has raised fears of a relapse into the intense bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.
Eleven car bombs exploded in eight areas in and around the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 44 people and wounding more than 120, officials said.
More attacks, including two suicide bombings, were carried out in northern Iraq.......