...Peoples views are divided on the Syrian conflict between those who view it as a revolution, and those who view it as a civil war. Revolution inevitably holds characteristics of civil conflict, there is a aspect of civil conflict that must not be looked at in all revolutions. There is a horrible truth about the Syrian problem which is overwhelming, that there are Syrians fighting and killing other Syrians in Syria. The civil conflict taking place in Syria is not a purely sectarian one. The western media exaggerates the extent to which the conflict can be so described. An arrogant Orientalist set of views refuses to understand the Syrians have a much different life. It revolves around death and pain. Sectarian war is the inevitable the destiny of Syrians. Not every conflict is about discrimination or for religious reason. The Spanish Civil War was a conflict between the supporters of the Republic and the fascist followers of Franco. The situation in Syria is closer to the previous example than sectarian civil war. One of the biggest reason behind civil conflict in Syria is the uprising of Syrians against a new feudal class that had enslaved them in syria. For rxample, the majority of Muslim Sunni rebels are moved by a will towards social justice and revenge against these feudalists, rather than exclusively by a sense of Sunni discrimination. In Syria, Syrians are fighting for different political reasons. Certainly some parties have religion focused political reasons...
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...This conflict, like many others, it has its origins in corruption, political capture, poverty, on the violation of human rights, but also inequality. Social movements, spontaneous groups of people, organizations started to claim their rights to achieve a more egalitarian system. Unfortunately four years later, this crisis has finally become one of the biggest disasters in recent history. More than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives in almost 4 years of armed conflict, that begin with anti-government protest before reaching a catastrophic civil war. In this war the armed forces of the Syrian government faced against to armed rebel groups known in the West as the "Syrian opposition”. At first the protests were not very successful and it seemed...
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...ECPSC- 2013 CURRENT AFFAIRS HANDOUT - 11 SYRIAN CIVIL WAR Gen 1. The Syrian civil war also commonly known as the Syrian uprising is an ongoing armed conflict in Syria between forces loyal to the Syrian Baath Party government and those seeking to oust it. The conflict began on 15 March 2011, with popular demonstrations that grew nationwide by April 2011. These demonstrations were part of the wider Middle Eastern protest movement known as the Arab Spring. Protesters demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has held the presidency in Syria since 1971, as well as the end to over four decades of Baath Party rule. In April 2011, the Syrian Army was deployed to quell the uprising. After months of military sieges, the protests evolved into an armed rebellion. Background 2. The Ba'ath Party government came to power in 1964 after a coup on 1966, another coup overthrew the traditional leaders of the party, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. In 1970, the Defence Minister Hafez al-Assad seized power and declared himself President, a position he would hold until his death in 2000. 3. In 1982, at the height of a six-year Islamist armed insurgency throughout the country, Hafez al-Assad conducted a scorched earth policy against Islamist-held quarters inside the town of Hama to quell an uprising by the Sunni Islamist community, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists and others. This ruthless crackdown became known as the Hama massacre, which left tens of...
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...Annotated Bibliography Spyer, Jonathan. "The Battle for Aleppo; A report from the front lines of the Syrian civil war." The Weekly Standard 8 Oct. 2012. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 25 Oct. 2016 Article Link: Click here for page Summary Annotation: In the old city of Aleppo with a history of religion and the Dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. A reporter named Jonathan Spyer went along with a group called Free Syrian Army (FSA) to the center of Aleppo and what Spyer says “ There is a sharp change in atmosphere as one enters Aleppo city from the surrounding countryside.” The city changes into a rubble streeted place with craters all over from the bombs that struck that spot. As they got deeper into the neighborhood, they people who lived there...
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...Journal II In the country of Syria there is a civil war going on and the war started between two groups, the Free Syrian Army and The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The beginning of this war started with protest in Damascus about government corruption and human rights abuse, then started to grow substantially to other cities,. Then in March of 2011the Syrian government used deadly violence of the protestors in the country. Then the issue escalated when the protestors started to fight back later that year. In an article from the Syrian Arab News Agency they talk about how there army has killed 19 ISIS members in a recent attack they have been through. In the article they talk about how they killed some of ISIS's leaders during the...
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...predecssors. “The Arab Spring” as it was called began in Tunisia and spread across the region (Al Jazeera). The protestors in this revolt wanted a myriad of things. Some wanted democracy, respect for civil rights, and some want Islamization of government and a movement to theocracy. Syria, once a province of the Ottoman Empire, is a small middle-eastern nation between Lebanon and Turkey. In March 2011, pro-Democracy Arab Spring protestors who were marching to decry the arrest and torture of teen graffiti artists were fired upon by police. After the shootings, many more protestors joined the public displays of defiance (BBC ). After nationwide unrest and a refusal by President Assad to abdicate, the protestors began to arm themselves (Semple). The violence in the country escalated so quickly that by June of 2013, 90,000 people had been killed in the fighting and that number moved to 250,000 by August of 2015 (BBC ). Into the fray came the self-stylized Islamic State. This terrorist group which is opposed to Assad is fighting to create a Muslim caliphate throughout Iraq and Syria. In June of 2014, the group claimed that it’s caliphate had been established, which lead to US airstrikes to destroy the group, thus entering another belligerent into the fight (BBC). The Syrian Civil War was killed more than 250,000 people and approximately 11-12 million of the nation’s 22 million people are displaced. Approximately 6.5 million people are displaced inside of the country, with ~4.5...
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...Although the war in Syria begun over 6 years ago, it continues to fill the headlines of news reports around the world. This civil war, a conflict between citizens of the same country, started in 2011. Syrian citizens took to the streets, demanding democracy and opening showing their disapproval of the government and president, Bashar al-Assad. The Assad family has held power in Syria for generations, many citizens blamed them for their lack of freedom, high unemployment rates, and economic woes. When President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2011, the citizens of Syria started a peaceful uprising to show their discontent and insisted on change. Their protests and demonstrations quickly turned violent. Assad’s government used deadly...
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...“Conflict is often indiscriminate”. I think that the statement means that sometimes wars and other various types of conflict occur regardless of who you are and just at random. My gut reaction regarding the statement is that conflict can be very indiscriminate equally to how conflict can be discriminative. For example, 9/11 was indiscriminate as the attack targeted multiple groups of people and was an attack just to psychologically damage the confidence of US Homeland Security and the US government; as well as other countries around the globe which saw the news broadcasts and thought that their country was going to be attacked next. However, conflicts like the Stonewall Riots, were discriminative, violent conflicts that attacked innocent people...
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...To what extent is security a necessary precondition for development? Introduction It is put forward that security is not necessarily a precondition for development, but rather, both concepts of security and development are inextricably linked. With neither one being predominant over the other; rather the influence of both oscillate, dependent upon the individual circumstances within the State or region. In essence, what this answer will aim to illustrate, is the extent of this link, the theories which explain it, and whether or not security underpins development. Before we begin however, it would be prudent to first, define the concepts of ‘security’ and ‘development’. From the obvious, national security dimension, to the more human-centred, holistic definitions, finding a simple definition for the concept of security is a complex task, due to the variety of ways in which it can be defined. For the purposes of this essay however, the definition provided by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as security being “the prevention of any threat to individual or national security irrespective of that threat being political or economic in its nature, as such threats would threaten the process of development”[1] would be an appropriate fit, as it incorporates both the traditional State-centric element, and also the more holistic, human security definition.. Traditionally, the definition of development has been one that has been predicated upon a mainly economic...
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...Revolution to Civil War By Maya Bhardwaj Abstract: social movements and regime change across the Middle East and North Africa. While interconnected, uprisings in each nation took different forms and reached out distinctions and interactions between uprisings, revolution, and civil war. standing scholarly debate. The presence or absence of civil war is examined in examinations of civil war: the nature of the governmental regime, territoriality complete understanding of what constitutes civil war and provides a framework 76 Introduction the Middle East, authoritarian regimes thought invulnerable to protest and impossible to oust began to cede to massive protest. Attacks on governmental institutions and elite leaders ensconced from public opinion developed divergently in each nation, employing tailored strategies to mobilize the public and reap key support. This paper focuses on the nature and development of these Arab Spring further use these distinctions to illuminate the conceptual, instrumental, and semantic nature of civil war in general. - exacerbated the grievances felt by rebel forces and smoothed over ethnic, religious, and tribal ten- trastingly, in Syria, instances of mild reform under Bashar al-Assad, popular concerns for security, kept civil war at bay. Conceptual Isolation of Civil War presence or absence of civil war. However, the scholarly distinction between civil war and other insurgency and counter-insurgency, uprisings, genocide or genocidal...
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...of the majority-Christian Phalange Party Pierre Gemayel declared “Neither the present government or any other could shut down a single training camp,” in reference to bases created by several parties to train their armed factions. A year later, Gemayal’s Phalange Party was one of several Lebanese militias embroiled in a war where fighting remained confined within Lebanon but the power struggle transcended borders and involved both regional and international combatants. While April 13, 1975, is often cited as the start date that sparked the 15-year conflict, which has been termed a civil war, a host of factors, including international affairs, economic and social inequality and the sectarian make up of the Lebanese government were responsible for the violent outburst and the war’s duration. The Phalange Party’s April 13 attack on a bus carrying Palestinians, reprisal for a shoot out at a church where Phalange members had been in attendance, was not even mentioned in the relevant chapters on the civil war in Struggle Over Lebanon by Tabitha Petran. Instead, Petran documents the factors that contributed to the setting of the stage for and provoking the civil war. Fear over the increase in sectarian militias had been on the national radar as early as May 1973, when President Suleiman Franjieh convened a special cabinet meeting to discuss possible reforms to curb the militias. Petran begins by listing the increased demands of the Sunni population of Lebanon, which began clamoring...
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...but this figure, provided by the Lebanese government, does not include Palestinian refugees and foreign workers, mainly Syrian. History : In conquering Lebanon, the Muslims fought the Christian armies of Byzantium, whom they called the Roumis. The Byzantines were defeated, and retreated further north. Lebanon was made part of the Sham territory of the Islamic Empire. Islam became the Law and official religion of the land. Christians and Jews were allowed to worship as long as they paid taxes to the Muslims, and obeyed their laws. Arabic became the official language of the region The privileging of Christians in governmental positions was one of the main reasons for the civil war, when the population percentage shifted in favor of the Muslims The first Arab-Israeli war broke out, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes as Israeli troops advanced on them. About 150,000 Palestinians became refugees in Lebanon. The Palestinians come to play an important, if indirect, part in Lebanese politics. Outgoing President Amine Gemayel appoints an interim military government under Maronite Commander-in-Chief Michel Aoun in East Beirut when presidential elections fail to produce a successor. Prime Minister Selim el-Hoss forms a mainly Muslim rival administration in West Beirut. Politics : Hizbo lah The United States has declared that Hezbollah (Party of God) is a major terrorist organization, but public officials in Lebanon, where the group is based...
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...the high seas, but never over territorial sea of another state -Art.1 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation: “every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the space above its territory” -It is a serious breach of international law for a state to order to violate the air space of another state (for e.g. USA military aircraft attacked, forced to land or shot down by Hungary, USSR, Czechoslovakia-a number of incidents) -Does the states have an unlimited right to attack intruding aircraft in all circumstances? -Lissitzyn principle (from 1953)-important (book!) -Some states support Lissitzyn principle and that flexible approach to civil aircraft as well as military craft, but other states including ICAO-International Civil Aviation Organization, believe that civil aircraft must never be attacked in such circumstances -The rule that (it is not indeed a rule) trespassing civil aircraft must never be attacked does not mean that they have a legal right to trespass -Assembly of ICAO in 1984 adopted an amendment to 1944 Chicago Conv. On the Int. Civil Aviation which confirms that “every state, in the exercise of its sovereignty is entitled to require the landing at some designated airport of a civil aircraft flying above its territory without authority.” and that “every state must refrain from resorting to use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight and that, in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must...
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...Evaluating the role of ethnic identity in explaining the occurrence of contemporary civil conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. High hopes for many newly independent states of Africa became diminished as the 1990s saw over a quarter of the continent's states facing armed insurgencies within their borders (Young, 2002: 534). Commentators often point to pathological, deep-seated hatreds in an African tribal mosaic as the bases of such conflict. The fact is, however, that the continent is awash with political grudges, ethnically-framed and otherwise, but civil wars rarely break out. Thus this essay seeks to take a more nuanced approach to understand the analytical challenge posed by such disorder. Starting out by countering the centrality of ethnic identity, it firstly seeks to demonstrate that ethnic identities do not exist primordially, but that they are constructed on weak foundations. Secondly it endeavours to show that where cleavages do exist along lines of cultural difference, simple heterogeneity is insufficient to account for the outbreak of conflict. Next, it moves to underline the fact that more important in explaining civil conflict is whether such conflict is feasible. This is understood both in terms of the perceived capacity of the state and in terms of the viability of insurgency for would-be rebels. A final conclusion will then be expounded that ethnicity is not a central factor, but that it is simply one of a number of strategies under which conflict may be framed...
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...Monrovia Civil War Massina Ballah Strayer University English 090 Professor Delicia Battle August 10, 2012 Monrovia Civil war Many years of war that suffered thousands of people, and many dead. As a result of this, there were no food or medication. Moreover, a war that many thought will never come to an end. Monrovia war, a war that started early Monday morning april 6, 1990. A bright sunny day. Women and children running to save their lives. From a distance, I heard a very big sound of machine guns, bullet flying all over the place. We all ran for safety. As a got dark, it was a terrible night I didn’t know what to do. I felt stomach sick, because of the heavy guns sound. After many hours sitting in the house, I felt that this is the end of our lives. The next day the rebels told us to get out of the house. While working out there, there were many dead bodies in the street. I was afraid, especially my first time looking, and working over dead bodies. We walked for many hours. When it was night time, we slept in a school building. Women were taken from their husband by rebels. I knew that it was not safe for us. No one to protect us. We didn’t have safe drinking water. We drank from the creek, or the riverside. After many day of struggles, we had no food to eat, or medication. My elder brother got ill. We needed medicine. There were no medicine. My brother sickness got worst and he died. I felt so bad. My brother and I were so closed . He was everything...
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