Syrian army and rebels clash as Geneva peace conference begins
22 January 2014, 19:02
Fightings between Syrian army and rebels begin across the country as a peace conference in Geneva began to put an end to a three-year long bloodshed. More than 130,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, and more than a quarter of the population of 23 million now live as refugees, either within Syria or in neighboring countries.
As Associated Press reports, government forces gain ground day by day and even the first civilian flights from Damascus to Aleppo began some time ago. The international airport had been closed since December 2012 due to fighting and repeated attacks by rebels.
Government troops have been on the offensive for days near the Aleppo International Airport and a nearby military air base. The airport's director Bassem Mansour said it was opened after 'sacrifices by the Syrian Arab army' who secured an area of 5 kilometers (3 miles) around the facility.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists around Syria, confirmed that a civilian plane had landed.
The Observatory reported clashes Wednesday between government forces and opposition fighters in the suburbs of Damascus, Daraa in the south, Idlib and Aleppo in the north and the central province of Homs.
State news agency SANA says government forces battled 'terrorists' around the country - including in the northern province of Idlib where fighters from Chechnya, Egypt, Turkey, Bosnia and Iraq were killed. State media always refers to opposition fighters as 'terrorists.'
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened the peace conference Wednesday in the Swiss city of Montreux, saying challenges ahead are 'formidable.' Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said in a speech at the opening session of the conference that 'Syria will do all it can to defend itself by all means available.'
Gruesome photos of Assad's mass tortures in Syria fake - Damascus
The Syrian Justice Ministry has flatly denied Wednesday all the accusations set forward in a new report (Caution: 18+), released by CNN on Monday, suspecting the Assad regime of systematic torture and killing, including starvation, violent beatings, and strangulation of thousands of inmates and detainees in Syrian prisons. The statement described the report as 'politicized and lacking in objectivity and professionalism' and undermining "the efforts to bring peace in Syria and put an end to the international sponsored terrorism in the country'.
The Syrian authorities asserted that the released images are a pure and simple fake, having no relation to prisoners held in the Syrian government custody. Besides, some of the photos were said to be of «foreign terrorists.'
The Justice Ministry's official statements explained that, apart from the photos of 'foreign terrorists,' other individuals' dead bodies, which can be seen on the pictures, belong to 'civilians and military personnel who were killed as a result of torture by armed terrorist groups because they were accused of being pro-state".
The report was prepared by a team of internationally renowned legal and forensic experts and is based on the scrutiny of thousands of digital pictures provided by a Syrian defector, claiming to have been a photographer at a military hospital that received dead bodies from detention centers.
However, Ministry officials seriously doubt the credibility of the photographer who said that he was 'a fugitive who fled Syria and who was already facing legal action,' and raise a question of how, if that is the case, he would have got the necessary documents to leave the country.
The government of Qatar was partly sponsoring the experts' investigation by providing the British law firm Carter-Ruck with funds to write the report. It's worth mentioning that Qatar and Saudi Arabia provide most of the outside support for Syria's rebel forces.
The Syrian Justice Ministry accused the law firm of a lack of professionalism and reminded it was 'known to have direct ties with countries that are hostile to the Syrian Arab Republic since the start of the crisis.'
The Justice Ministry's response, coming in just ahead of the Geneva-2 conference, also suggested that the timing of the publication of the report and photos was chosen by no accident, unveiling their 'true purpose" – that of undermining the peace talks starting in Montreux, Switzerland, on January 22.
Voice of Russia, AP
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