Syria war leaves 100 children dead in Aleppo in August

August 21, 2016 By administrator

100 chirldren dead At least 100 children have been killed in airstrikes and combat in Aleppo in August, a monitor reports. On Saturday the older brother of 5-year-old Omran, whose image shocked the world last week, became one of them.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that 448 people have been killed in attacks by the regime and rebel groups in Aleppo since the beginning of August. Government and allied Russian warplanes have attempted to put down a push launched by rebels on July 31 to break a regime siege of districts under their control.

According to the Observatory, a Britain-based operation with opposition sympathies, about two-thirds of the deaths were the results of airstrikes and shelling by regime and Russian forces on rebel-controlled districts. The Observatory, which relies on a network of correspondents within Syria, reported that 163 noncombatants, including 49 children, were killed by shells launched into government-controlled areas.

More than 290,000 people have died as a result of Syria’s multifront war, which started as a series of peaceful protests against the government in March 2011.

On Saturday, the Observatory also reported that 10-year-old Ali Daqneesh had died from injuries sustained in an airstrike on Wednesday. An image that circulated last week of Ali’s 5-year-old brother, Omran, temporarily cast new international attention on the conflict and the siege in Aleppo.

“He was martyred while in hospital as a result of the same bombardment that their house was subjected to,” said Besher Hawi, the spokesman for the local council of Aleppo.

UNICEF calls for action to improve lives of over 100,000 children in Aleppo

August 20, 2016 By administrator

Aleppo has seen intense fighting over the past few months, with the Syrian army and local militia forces having managed to encircle large groups of terrorists in some districts of the city, Sputnik agency reported.

“What human being can see the stunned suffering of Omran Dagneesh, the small boy rescued from a destroyed building in Aleppo, Syria, and not feel an overwhelming sense of empathy? Can we not extend the same empathy to the more than 100,000 children also trapped in the horror that is Aleppo? They are all suffering things no child should suffer – or even see,” UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a Friday statement.

He stressed that action must be taken in order to improve the lives of Aleppo children.

“Children of Omran’s age in Syria have known nothing but the horror of this war waged by adults. We all should demand that those same adults bring an end to the nightmare of Aleppo’s children,” Lake stressed, as quoted by the source.

Children with disabilities give Pope crown of thorns they have woven

June 26, 2016 By administrator

Pope vist 7 The Pope, who today, on June 25, was in Gyumri, visited the Armenian Catholic Holy Martyrs church. The head of the Catholic Church in Armenia the archbishop Raphael Minassian and the senior priest Father Gregor Mkrtchyan greeted the Pope at the church.

The Pope, accompanied by the procession of the clergy entered the church , where he served a short prayer. Outside the church there were waiting for him children with disabilities from Emily Aregak Gyumri center.

They gave him a crown of thorns they had woven and sang a song called June 1 , the words of which they had changed and fit for the Pope’s visit. The pontiff approached and blessed all of them. The church of Holy Martyrs was the Pope’s last stop was in Gyumri. He left for Yerevan afterwards.

Pope Francis hands over crosses to children who welcomed him at Yerevan airport

June 24, 2016 By administrator

Children cross YEREVAN. – Pope Francis handed over crosses to Ani and Robert – children who were the first to welcome his at Zvartnots airport with apricots and lavash.

9-year-old Ani is a pianist and the winner of international competitions. She says it was a great honor to welcome Pope Francis during his visit to the first Christian nation.

“Pope Francis blessed this cross. I like it very much and will never put it aside. I hope that Pope’s visit will bring peace to Artsakh,” Ani said.

Robert also said he was happy to welcome the pontiff.

“I am proud to welcome Pope with Armenian apricots,” he added.

Turkish Refugee Camps Turned into Centers for Raping Children, Selling Refugees’ Body Organs

May 28, 2016 By administrator

A prominent Turkish journalist revealed dreadful facts about the Syrian refugee camps in his country that include raping children and selling the refugees’ body organs and women.

Yashar Idan, the representative of BirGun newspaper in Ankara, told the Iran-based Arabic-language al-Alam news channel that tens of children have been raped in Nizip camp in Southern Turkey and the body organs of a number of refugees have been sold in the market.

According to Idan, it is a shame for the Turkish government that calls the Nizip camp a role model for other refugee camps that such crimes are committed in there, while these are only the rapists and not the camp’s officials who are tried and punished.

BirGun newspaper had earlier this month revealed that 30 Syrian children were raped for months at Nizip and government authorities failed to notice. It came amid reports that Turkey is not a safe country for asylum seekers.

The 30 boys were raped by a cleaner at Nizip Refugee Camp in Antep, from September 2015 until the beginning of 2016.

The rapist, identified only as E.E., has confessed that he lured children between the ages of eight and 12 to have sex with him in return for 2 to 5 Turkish Lira (US$.70-1.80). He is now in pre-trial detention.

In addition to E.E.’s confession, the children were able to describe in detail how they were raped in the toilets of the camp.

The families of eight children have so far come forward with a legal complaint. The rest of the families have not done so amid fears that they would be deported.

But despite the rapes taking place over the course of several months, they were never detected by the Prime Ministry Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), which runs the camp. Instead, the rapes were only revealed after military personnel noticed the perpetrator taking children to the blind spots of cameras.

In response to the revelations, a high-ranking military officer from the camp told BirGün that the AFAD is to blame for the rapes.

“The AFAD is responsible of the camp and for this disaster,” he said.

But the AFAD wasn’t the only party unaware of the crimes taking place within the camp, which has a capacity of 14,000 refugees.

The site was praised for its standards last month, during a visit from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and various other Turkish government figures.

The shocking news came amid reports of Turkish border control officers abusing and shooting Syrian refugees, prompting Amnesty International and other human rights organizations to say that Turkey isn’t a “safe” place for asylum seekers.

But despite any controversy surrounding Turkey’s treatment of asylum seekers, the country is host to the largest number of refugees in the world, including 2.7 million Syrian refugees.

Source: globalresearch

The original source of this article is FARS News Agency

Female Turkish journo loses custody of children after leaking video from Syria arms smuggling trial

May 18, 2016 By administrator

Arzu Yıldız © Twitter

Journalist Arzu Yildiz was sentenced to 20 months in jail and lost her parental rights after exposing a video related to a weapons-smuggling scandal denied by the Turkish government, in what her lawyer said was “an act of revenge” by Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Nobody can take my children away from me… not even the Sultan himself, let alone the court,” Yildiz told Can Erzincan TV, outside the court in the southern city of Mersin.

The journalist’s sentence is related to a 2014 incident in which prosecutors uncovered trucks belonging to MIT, Turkey’s national security agency, smuggling weapons for rebels across the border to Syria. President Erdogan has insisted that the vehicles were carrying humanitarian aid and accused the prosecutors of “treason and espionage,” as well as of being agents of his US-based nemesis Fethullah Gulen.

The prosecutors were arrested and put on trial before a closed court, before being sentenced to prison terms. Yildiz obtained video of the proceedings, however, and posted the prosecutors’ testimonies, which contradicted the government’s claims, on YouTube. She was later charged with breaching court confidentiality.

She has insisted throughout that she was not the only one to publish the videos and objects to the jailing of the prosecutors.

“I thank everyone for their messages and support. I have no worries. I don’t care about whatever punishment they give me. I’m just doing my job,” Yildiz tweeted after Wednesday’s ruling.

While her two children will not be physically taken away, Yildiz will have no legal authority to make any decisions on their behalf for at least the next two years.

“This was an act of revenge,” her lawyer, Alpdeger Tanriverdi, told Reuters. “There are many cases in which the court does not execute this article of the penal code. They didn’t have to do it.”

source: RT

Syrian children as young as eight sexual harassment and rape at the hands of Turkish camp worker at Refugee Camp

May 13, 2016 By administrator

Children as young as eight living in the ‘Nizip’ refugee camp located in the Gaziantep province in Turkey were subjected to sexual harassment and rape at the hands of a Turkish camp worker. Sputnik’s correspondent got acquainted with some of the testimonies of these young victims.

According to information provided, about 30 Syrian boys aged 10 to 14 years experienced sexual violence and abuse for four months in the Nizip camp. Incidentally, it is the same Turkish asylum center which was hailed a huge success by German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her visit on April 23.

The news about the sexual abuse in this camp first appeared in the local newspaper BirGün.

In their testimonies, the children talk openly about the sexual harassment that they went through and in exchange for their silence they were offered money.

According to information received by Sputnik, only 8 out of 30 children who were sexually harassed by the 27-year-old Turk, a camp cleaner named E.E., told their parents about their sexual abuse.

Many of the affected children after being raped were in need of psychological support. As it turned out, some of them following the incident left the camp with their parents.

It is reported that the accused cleaner E.E abused children in the camp from June to September 2015. He was detained by law enforcement agencies back on September 5, but the blatant incident has become known to the public only now. The case has been transferred to the Criminal District Court of Nizip.

The detainee is currently in prison in Gaziantep and according to the Turkish law he could face up to 230 years in prison on charges of sexual harassment and numerous cases of raping of minors. In his testimony, the sexual offender, E.E, admitted to abusing the children, but he said that he did not know five out of the eight victims who filed a case against him.

Furthermore, he accused one of the child victims of inviting him to the restroom to join in sexual intercourse for money.

Meanwhile, in his testimony at the prosecutor’s office and in court the 12-year-old victim A.D. told a different story.

“He beckoned me and took me to the bathroom and offered me [$o.5o] to have sex with him. I refused. Then he hastily pulled my pants down and raped me. It wasn’t too painful. In several days, he called me over again but I ran away. However, the next day he grabbed me dragged me into the bathroom and did it all over again.”

Another victim, a 12-year-old M.H., described what he experienced. “During the month of Ramadan E.E. called me into the shower and said that he would give me 5 lira ($ 1.5) so I went after him. First he stroked me in different places, then he began to touch my genitals, but there was no rape. 15 days after Ramadan, he took me to an empty room in the camp and did the same thing.”

During a testimony another young boy, H.E., said that “E.E called him to the toilet and said that he wants to have some fun with me and promised to give me 10 lira ($ 3).”

“Then he said that he needs to bring something and left. At this point, I ran away. I went to my father and told him everything. Then we went with his father to the police station and told them about what had happened.”

The victim, M.I., recalling the incident said, “E.E. from time to time called me and my friends to the toilet. He offered me 5 lira for intimacy with him, but I refused and ran away. Later I told this to my uncle’s son H.E. and to the other guys. They confirmed that the same thing had happened to them as well.”

Source:sputniknews.com

Sultan’s Family? Erdogan’s Children ‘Walking in Golden Slippers’

May 7, 2016 By administrator

While Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s annual income stands at the modest level of €50,000,($57,000) his children appear to walk in golden slippers. At the same time, there are no official statistics that appear to explain where all that money originates from, the German newspaper Bild reported.

According to the report, Erdogan’s children occupy luxurious villas and have businesses that are far from transparent. Bilal Erdogan, the Turkish leader’s younger son, for instance, has been suspected of several accounts of money laundering. He has been also spotted engaging in the 2013 corruption scandal along with his sister Esra, the paper notes.

Moreover, it was revealed last year that Bilal has long been covering up Turkish businessmen that close underground bargains with the Daesh extremist group with an annual value of up to $500 million. All attempts to investigate alleged crimes by the president’s son within Turkey had been “swept under the carpet,” Aykut Erdogdu, member of opposition People’s Democratic Party (HDP) told earlier Sputnik Turkiye.

The Russian Defense Ministry published last December satellite images that laid bare oil smuggling from Daesh-controlled territories in Syria to Turkey. Despite the country’s establishment’s denial of the allegations of involvement in the dirty business, the trade went on until at least till last February, the RT investigation unveiled.”In fact, Bilal Erdoğan is up to his neck in complicity with terrorism, but as long as his father holds office he will be immune from any judicial prosecution,” Gursel Tekin HDP vice-chairman told Turkish journalists in August.

Now Recep Erdogan is looking into opportunities to expand both the financial and political influence of his “clan,” Bild noted. After the resignation of current prime-minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the president has started to promote for that post Minister of Transport Binali Yildirim or Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, who is Erdogan’s son-in-law. Albayak is convenient to Erdogan, as he has proven his loyalty multiple times.

source: sputniknews.com

Turkistan Islamic Party continues to train children in Syria

March 7, 2016 By administrator

Photo purportedly showing the TIP training children in weapons in northwestern Syria

BY CALEB WEISS

Photos released by social media accounts linked to the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), a Chinese Uighur jihadist group that is part of al Qaeda’s international network, show the group training children in Syria. The photos are unconfirmed and undated, but the TIP is known to operate training camps for children in northwestern Syria.

The three photos show children, many of which are Uighur, attending a Sharia school ran by the group and participating in weapons training. Last September, the TIP released a video showing the training of what it called “little jihadists.” The children are shown posing with AK-47 assault rifles, attending Sharia classes, and partaking in weapons training. In July, the group first publicized a training camp in Idlib, which appears to be in the same area. Several of those photos depict the children learning how to operate AK-47s, sub-machine guns, and handguns. (See LWJ report, Uighur jihadist group in Syria advertises ‘little jihadists’.)

The TIP is not the only foreign al Qaeda ally in Syria known to train children. In December, the Imam Bukhari Jamaat (also known as Katibat Imam Bukhari), an Uzbek group in Syria loyal to the Taliban, released an 18-minute video showing the group training dozens of children. The children, who range from under 10 to mid-teens, are seen taking part in physical exercises and lessons on how to handle and fire weapons. (See LWJ report, Uzbek group in Syria trains children for jihad.)

The popular Saudi cleric Abdullah al Muhaysini’s Jihad Callers Center also released a video last September showing native Syrian children training at a camp ran by the group. Muhaysini is closely tied to al Qaeda and the Al Nusrah Front. Additionally, the Chechen-led Junud al Sham, led by US-designated terrorist Muslim Shishani, is known to have ran training camps for children in the past. The Islamic State, which gets most of the media attention on its training of children, has also published several videos from many of its proclaimed provinces showing its “cubs” being trained for jihad.

Caleb Weiss is an intern at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributor to The Long War Journal.

Charles Aznavour and Real Madrid support 13 homeless families of Armenia’s Gyumri

March 3, 2016 By administrator

6550-charles-aznavour-637x0-1 YEREVAN. – Armenian-French world-renowned singer Charles Aznavour has responded to the fundraising initiative by SOS program director Hayk Barseghyan on helping Gyumri’s homeless families in buying apartments for them.

On his Facebook page, Charles Aznavour posted the video by Hayk Barseghyan telling about the 13 homeless families and describing the disastrous earthquake in the second largest city of Armenia.

President of Gyumri’s Journalists Club “Asbarez,” Levon Barseghyan, told Armenian News – NEWS.am that Charles Aznavour didn’t provide financial support to the Gyumri homeless: he expressed his support through reposting the link telling about the fundraising.

In his words, the fundraising initiators have also got in touch with Real Madrid. According to the preliminary agreement, the team leaders will send their T-shirts with signatures and inscriptions in support of the Gyumri homeless. The sale of the T-shirts will take place at the charity auction to be held on March 19.

The “Barcelona” flag with the signatures of Lionel Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Thierry Henri and 10 team stars will also be presented during the auction.

Famous musician Serj Tankian, who is lead singer of the world-renowned American Armenian rock band System of a Down (SOAD), has also joined the ongoing fundraiser to purchase apartments for thirteen homeless families in Gyumri

On February 28, Gyumri’s famous jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan gave a charity concert in one of Gyumri’s shack-filled districts in support of the homeless.

The initiator of this project is photographer Hayk Barseghyan.