These are children from the Rukban refugee camp which lies in an isolated area within the demilitarized zone between Jordan & Syria. Since 2014, it has been inhabited by more than 60,000 refugees displaced by bombing in other areas of Syria. Starting in June 2018, the Assad regime began implementing a siege & blockade of the camp, including closing all roads leading to the camp to prevent the entry of medical & food supplies. There is almost no medical care & starvation prevails.

Russia & Syria have opened two corridors to force camp residents to relocate to their home towns in regime-controlled areas but most are refusing despite the dire & deteriorating conditions because of fear for their safety. The Assad regime is trying to force residents to regime-help areas by tightening the blockade but they continue to resist & want instead to go to the opposition bastion in Idlib now under aerial bombardment by Russian & Syrian warplanes. Imagine being forced to make the choice of a war zone over a dictatorship which arrests, tortures, disappears, murders. The few thousand who have left the camp have done so primarily because of concerns about their children’s health under the barbarous siege.

Covering for the Assad dictatorship, fascist propagandist Eva Bartlett & Mint Press have been publishing articles calling Rukban a US concentration camp. The US has considerable war crimes to account for in Syria but the blockade of the Rukban refugee camp is entirely the war crimes of the Assad dictatorship & Russia.

End the blockade of Rukban. Stop the bombing of Idlib. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

(Photo from Simona Jeger on Twitter)

We should take a moment to honor “Anas Al-dyab” (a nom de guerre), a volunteer & media activist with the White Helmet rescue workers who was hit in three Russian air strikes this morning while documenting the bombing of Khan Shaikhoun. Anas had been injured several times previously in his years of work with the White Helmets documenting Syrian & Russian war crimes & was one of three witnesses who testified about the chemical attack on the city of Khan Shaikhoun in April 2017.

May he Rest In Peace. Our sincere condolences to his family, friends, & the White Helmets who are mourning his loss.

(Photos of Anas from White Helmets)

Idlib today under Syrian & Russian aerial bombardment, including with barrel bombs & incendiary weapons: or what the corrupted antiwar movement calls a just fight to defend the ‘self-determination of the Assad dictatorship’.

https://www.facebook.com/396145427809819/videos/1569415013193508/UzpfSTE2MjUyMjkwNjE6MTAyMTcwMzQxODg2Mzk5NzA/

I’m alone, walking among the atrocities,
guillotines blood-scorched,
gods stabbed at their altars,
dry wells piled up with bones,
a curfew on ghosts.
Who were these people?

~ Agha Shahid Ali

I still remember when i was in middle school and wrote my first story. My English teacher told me to throw it away. Not because of the language, but because of the content. The story was about Kashmir, because after all what could i write about if not my distorted home. Even now, when i think of something to write; a poem, a story, a random line, there’s Kashmir in it.

I grew up like others did; under the shadow of corpses, bullets and violence. In between all the blood and tears, there was a childhood, astute and frivolous, but worthy to cherish; even now when we still live under the malice of darkness, filled with more dead bodies, more bullets and more violence. Like Shahid, there lives a life inside everyone that craves to be expressed, with sentiments and emotions. And what better way to live and speak in a war zone other than to write?

Cover Photo credits; Adil Abass

PS; Only the cover photo is out yet.

A truly beautiful song for Palestine titled ‘Naci en Palestina’ by Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi, known as the voice of the Tunisian Arab Spring:

She said, “It’s a song derived from the Spanish “Naci en Alamo,” a lament of loss of home, of basic human rights, that I adapted to pay homage to the brave Palestinians, who for decades have endured every kind of deprivation while the world powers only look on from a one-sided stance.

“I hope to one day be able to play it in a free Palestine.”

Naci en Palestina

I have no place
I have no landscape
I have no homeland

With my finger I make fire
and with my heart I sing for you
my heart strings weep

I was born in Palestine
I was born in Palestine

I have no place
I have no landscape
I have no homeland

I have no place
I have no now
I have no country

With my finger I make fire
and with my heart I sing for you
my heart strings weep

I was born in Palestine
I was born in Palestine

I have no place
I have no now
I have no homeland

https://www.facebook.com/GenerationFreePalestine/videos/1759071324368221/UzpfSTE2MjUyMjkwNjE6MTAyMTcwMjk1ODEzNjQ3OTE/

Over the past nearly five years, Turkey has sealed off its border with Syria & ordered its border guards to do massive pushbacks against refugees, injuring & killing many Syrians trying to cross. Between 2011 & May 2018, Turkey had registered nearly four million Syrian refugees, most of whom were attempting to cross from Turkey into Greece for asylum in other European countries. In 2016, Angela Merkel, as delegate for the European Union, brokered a €6 billion deal with Erdogan to prevent refugees from moving on to Europe. As part of that unsavory pact, the EU accepted Turkey sealing its borders with Syria to prevent refugees from crossing.

In July 2018, Turkey stopped registering Syrian asylum seekers, making thousands more undocumented & subjecting them to arrest, incarceration, & deportation back to a war zone. Turkish police increased checkpoints & raids, arresting Syrians without documents or permits to travel outside cities where they are registered. Turkish interior minister Süleyman Soylu told reporters, “We will not take responsibility for a wave of migration that may follow attacks in Idlib.” This is a serious violation of clearly spelled out international law prohibiting refoulement–forcibly deporting refugees back to war zones.

Now it’s reported that thousands of Syrian refugees deported back to Syria are being surveilled, arrested, falsely accused of connections to opposition militias, incarcerated, tortured, or disappeared by the Assad regime. Assad promised reconciliation to returning refugees but according to human rights activists, at least a thousand returnees who thought they’d reconciled with the regime have disappeared out of the estimated 4,000 who returned.

Photo is Syrian refugees in Istanbul from 2014 since there is almost no published photojournalism from the current crisis.

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Someone actually dared come to my wall & comment that “Feminism is a cancer to the International Communist Movement.” When he says ‘International Communist Movement’, does he mean the hundreds of little deranged sects, Lilliputian cults, & half-baked grouplets who cite the mass murderer Stalin as their guru, are guppies to the Assad dictatorship & support Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians, believe Jews are behind every evil in world politics, deny the Tiananmen Square massacre, denounce all the Arab Spring uprisings, Hong Kong protests, Venezuelan protests as fascist uprisings orchestrated by Mossad & the CIA, are torn between denying or defending the Rohingya & Uyghur genocides, support Duterte’s vigilante war against the urban poor? Since feminism is the ideology of women & children’s freedom from violence & degradation, opposition to feminism is on a continuum of stupidity & corruption that eventually leads to political irrelevancy.

There’s been a spate of articles in Indian media posted on FB recently about social problems like domestic violence in Kashmir. Anyone above the age of reason would know that Kashmir, like every other human society, has social problems. Anyone with half a brain ought to have the good sense to know that Kashmiris don’t need anyone’s help in addressing those issues. When those articles come from India, we should smell a stinking propaganda rat, not just meddling where they don’t belong & are certainly not welcome.
The US, India, & every other country have enough social problems to keep their citizens busy for several decades. So why are they so damn concerned about Kashmiri problems? The only social problem in Kashmir that Indian writers should be concerned about is Indian colonialism & military occupation & building a social movement to oppose that.

It’s not that social problems like domestic violence in Kashmir or anywhere else are not all our concerns. But when those articles are about Rohingya refugees, Palestinians & Kashmiris under occupation, Central American refugees in the US, & there are no spates of articles about the oppression they sustain, the intention can only be malicious to cast aspersions suggesting they are unworthy of political defense & solidarity.

Stuff the sociological analyses. Focus political energies on building movements to oppose the abuse & vilification of those sustaining war, occupation, genocide. If at any time Kashmiris, Rohingya, Palestinians, or Central Americans solicit outside advice, it’s likely to be a cold day in hell.

Socialist Action (SA), a cult around the figure of a blowhard named Jeff Mackler, has just announced his candidacy for US president 2020. In the 2016 elections, I endorsed all the other socialist candidates running, not seeing them as competition but, despite our differences, on the same side. But I will not be endorsing this loser in 2020 since he is instrumental in the corruption of the US antiwar movement into an Assadist guppy cult which supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. He’s the political schmuck who toured fascist propagandist Eva Bartlett as an “independent journalist” & coined the aberration calling for self-determination for the Assad dictatorship.

Let me tell tales out of school: I once attended an SA national convention where Mackler was scheduled to give a 1-1/2 hour presentation on Venezuela. He blithered on for 1-1/2 hours without notes & then had the undisciplined temerity to ask for a 1-1/2 hour extension to blither on some more. That extra 1-1/2 hour was subtracted from time allotted for membership discussion. Not a peep of objection from his cult because in a cult kissing the ass of the grand Poobah is the norm. Another time, I was speaking to him on the phone for several minutes when he informed me he had to be quick since Hugo Chávez, then alive & president of Venezuela, was on hold to consult with him about Venezuelan politics. Really!? You want that kind of corrupt blowhard to represent socialism?

(Photo of Bartlett with Mackler (standing) & two other Assadists, February 2017, from SA newspaper)

A White Helmet rescue worker after early morning bombing by Russian war planes on the city of Jisr al-Shughour: the British TV network Channel 4 video documented how Syrian & Russian war planes are targeting White Helmets & ambulances in double tap strikes in Idlib although they have been using that tactic since the siege of Aleppo in 2016. In the attack on Jisr al-Shughour, a hospital & essential medical equipment were damaged.

A double tap strike is a military tactic launching two successive strikes against the same target. The first strike is to damage or destroy the ambulance & the second is to injure or kill medics & other first responders. Assadist propagandists & their guppy cult denounce the White Helmets as “al-Qaeda affiliated Salafi-jihadi terrorists” & we won’t ask them to explain how bombing ambulances fits into that scenario. They’ll just blow another Islamophobic justification out their ass. At this point they’re beyond hope.

End the bombing of Idlib. All foreign military forces & mercenaries out of Syria.

Channel 4 documentation of double tap strike on White Helmet ambulance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=lFCC3W1uNDw

(Photo by Mustafa Al-Ahmad)