6-Jun-11: What's actually going on in Syria?

Under the heading "Here's What Syria's President Was Trying To Hide When He Shut Down The Internet", a US-based website says:

Syrian officials shut off the country's Internet last week in the face of rising protests and civil disobedience. According to the Internet intelligence firm Renesys, the web is up and fully operational as of yesterday morning. The gap in service did not stop the following clip from being released on satellite phone showing Syrian forces firing on peaceful demonstrators. The shooting begins at :21.

The video clip is here:


Here's some more insight into the blood-letting going on in our northern neighbour's domain.

At about this time yesterday, as several busloads of rent-a-mob Syrians were being bused from Damascus to confront Israeli security forces on the Syria-Israel border, the Syrian authorities (the Assad family and its hench-persons) were engaging in yet another day of armed confrontation and massacre of their own citizens.

35 reported killed in crackdown in northern SyriaSyria uses pro-regime gunmen to crush protests
By ZEINA KARAM - Associated Press
BEIRUT (AP) -- The death toll in a government security crackdown in two northern Syrian towns rose to 35 Sunday, human rights groups said. Exiled opposition figures said any dialogue now with President Bashar Assad's regime would be a joke. Rami Abdul-Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths in the town of Jisr al-Shughour and nearby Khan Sheikhoun included six policemen. The operation is part of a crackdown that began Saturday. Human rights groups say more than 1,200 people have died in the brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters since March.

This past Friday, Reuters - quoting 'activists' - says the Syrian military killed seventy of their fellow Syrians.

You might think that when it comes to a vicious regime like that of Syria's Assad, the great international newsagencies might hesitate before publishing allegations by its various Damascus mouthpieces about Syrian casualties in the clashes on Israel's Syrian border on Sunday. You might think that the Assad regime's credibility would be, at the very least, questioned.

You would be giving them too much credit.

Here's CNN today:

"Israeli troops fired on protesters trying to cross the fortified border between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights on Sunday, with Syrian authorities reporting more than a dozen dead and hundreds wounded."

The San Francisco Chronicle

"Twenty-three people were killed and 350 injured, according to Syrian state-run television."

AFP:

"Israeli troops opened fire on Sunday as protesters from Syria stormed a ceasefire line in the occupied Golan Heights, with Damascus saying 23 demonstrators were killed."

And this sadly-typical contribution from the ever-aspiring The National ("the Abu Dhabi Media company's first English-language publication, has set a new standard of quality English-language journalism in the Middle East" - we have some personal experience of their 'quality')

"20 shot dead as Israeli snipers fire on Palestinians crossing border... Israeli soldiers shot and killed up to 20 protesters trying to enter the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights from neighbouring Syria yesterday. The bloodshed was a repeat of deadly clashes last month when hundreds of Syria's Palestinian residents poured across the disputed border."

Do you think any of the above editors or reporters are interested in reading an article with this title? "Syrian government has a clear interest in exaggerating the number of casualties from Sunday's clashes in order to overshadow Assad's massacre of anti-government protesters".

Might be asking too much, right?