Thursday, Aug 16, 2012
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
By Sam Dagher and Nour Malas
BEIRUT -- Syria's conflict sent shocks throughout the Middle East on Wednesday, with militiamen in neighboring Lebanon saying they had taken more than three dozen Syrian nationals and a Turkish man hostage, while several regional governments urged their citizens to immediately leave Lebanon.
Inside Syria, government jets razed homes and reportedly killed nearly two dozen people in a rebel-held town in the country's north. In Geneva, a United Nations commission held Syria's government and affiliated militia responsible for crimes against humanity, including for an attack that left scores of villagers dead in May.
In Beirut, Lebanon's capital, Shiite Muslim militiamen said Wednesday they had taken some 40 people -- Syrians and a Turkish national -- into captivity since the previous day.
Dressed in military fatigues and brandishing assault rifles, masked gunmen from Lebanon's powerful Meqdad family demanded the release of a family member it said had been snatched inside Syria on Monday by rebel fighters from the Free Syrian Army. The militia members vowed to target Qatari, Saudi and Turkish nationals as well.
"We have a very wide range of targets and we do not advise anyone to test us," one of the masked gunmen, who identified himself as a member of the Meqdad family's military wing, said in remarks broadcast on several Lebanese stations from the family compound in Beirut's southern suburb.
Syria's conflict, as the kidnappings attest, is increasingly splitting the region along sectarian lines.
Syria's embattled President Bashar al-Assad has surrounded himself primarily with members of his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Most Shiites in Lebanon support Mr. Assad. The Syrian president is opposed largely by Sunnis, the majority population in Syria. As the conflict has deepened, Sunni-majority neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have supported Syria's rebels.
People familiar with the Meqdad family characterized the group as essentially a large family with guns, which has had a contentious history with the far more influential Shiite militia Hezbollah, as well as the Lebanese state. Even so, regional governments appeared to take the Meqdads' threats seriously. The Saudi Embassy in Beirut told its nationals to leave Lebanon immediately after the "public threats" against them. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar issued similar warnings, their state media reported.
Many Lebanese, meanwhile, watched with apprehension as the government and security forces made no apparent attempt to intervene as boasts of mass kidnappings were playing out on national television.
The country was further destabilized by news that Wednesday's Syrian government offensive against Azzaz, a Syrian village where several Lebanese Shiite pilgrims were reportedly being held hostage by rebel fighters. After the attack, angry Lebanese blocked the road to Beirut's international airport.
The strike on Azzaz, which is outside Aleppo, leveled buildings and brought chaos to a town where rebel fighters had begun to experiment with self-governance after having proclaimed the territory liberated from government troops three weeks ago.
Syrian fighter jets conducted two bombing runs that sent civilians fleeing, said Associated Press reporters who witnessed the attack, adding that they saw at least eight dead, including a baby, and dozens wounded, most of them women and children.
At least 23 people were killed and more than 200 were injured, the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a preliminary toll.
Rebels in Azzaz were reportedly holding 11 Lebanese citizens who had been kidnapped in Syria in May. In recent weeks the hostages had made video and press statements-- one broadcast live by a Lebanese station reporting from Azzaz last week-- claiming their Syrian captors were treating them well and they were in good health.
Their whereabouts remained unclear after the attack. One rebel fighter in the city of Aleppo, citing information from fighters in Azzaz, said four of the hostages were missing.
The Azzaz attack came as a U.N. human-rights commission said government forces and pro-government militia had committed crimes against humanity -- including murder, torture, sexual violence and war crimes -- in Syria, and were responsible for the May 25 killings at Houla of over 100 Syrian civilians.
The report on the findings of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria between March and July is the first time a U.N. body concludes that the Syrian government has committed crimes against humanity, a charge that sets the stage for the potential trial of individuals at the International Criminal Court.
Antigovernment rebels have also committed "murder, extrajudicial killings and torture," the report by the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry said, adding: "These violations and abuses were not of the same gravity, frequency and scale as those committed by government forces and the Shabbiha," or pro-government militants.
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Farnaz Fassihi, Nada Raad and Leila Hatoum contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
16-08-12 0417GMT
