On Saturday, the family of Marie Colvin—an American war reporter who was killed in Syria on February 22, 2012—filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in D.C.’s District Court against the Syrian government. Colvin, a longtime correspondent for The Sunday Times was killed in an artillery barrage, along with French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik.
Civil defense groups in Syria have accused Bashar al-Assad of using chlorine gas in at least 35 attacks on civilians since mid-March, the Guardian reports. “Whenever the regime loses an area or a city it arbitrarily takes revenge on civilians,” said White Helmets’ leader Raed Saleh. “It is targeting civilians.”
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons announced this morning that Syria has handed over the last of its declared chemical weapons stockpile. However, OPCW's director general, Ahmet Uzumcu, acknowledged on Monday that Syria may not have declared some of its arsenal. "I can't say that Syria doesn't have any chemical weapons anymore," he said.
The destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal officially began on Sunday. A team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons oversaw Syrian personnel use cutting torches and disc saws to “destroy and disable a range of items, including missile warheads, aerial bombs, and mixing and filling equipment.”
Syrian President Bashar Assad sat down for an interview in Damascus on Wednesday with Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Fox News’ Greg Palkot. When asked by Kucinich whether or not he had chemical weapons, he responded “it’s not a secret anymore” and said his government will follow the agreement reached between the U.S. and Russia to turn over his chemical weapons.
President Obama addressed the nation tonight, saying he will “not put American boots on the ground” in Syria if diplomacy fails. Rather, if necessary, he would authorize a “targeted strike” to deter the use of chemical weapons, noting that the effort would not be open-ended or prolonged as the nation is “sick and tired of war.”
As Congress continues to debate whether to authorize military action, President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to expand their list of targets in Syria. The expansion will reportedly place additional emphasis on the "degrade" part of the potential mission's goal to "deter and degrade" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's ability to use chemical weapons.
In case you needed any further evidence that war, and perhaps particularly the war currently underway in Syria, is a barbaric and soul-sucking swamp of cruelty, the New York Times' C.J. Chivers offers up today a gruesome video of Syrian opposition soldiers executing seven captured members of Assad's forces. The soldiers are on their knees, bent sharply at the waist, shirtless. After a rebel commander known as "the Uncle" recites a religious poem, the men are shot to death by seven gunmen. The Times' video editors mercifully cut to black as the shots were fired.
Early Wednesday morning, someone claiming to be Hafez Assad, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's 11-year-old son, wrote a Facebook post daring Americans to attack Syria. "I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make this huge mistake of beginning something that they don't know the end of it,” part of the post reads. But is the profile real? There's strong evidence that it is.
