Syria Live Coverage: Airstrikes Continue Around Damascus

Photo: AFP1942 GMT: Fighting Near Border with Lebanon.

NOW Syria reports from the border village of al-Qasr, just inside Lebanon, where insurgent fire hit for the first time:

Al-Qasr [did not] feel like a place hit by lethal rocket fire just two days ago. Despite an army statement Sunday declaring its increased presence in the area, there wasn’t so much as a routine checkpoint impeding our entrance. In the village center, all shops were open; adults and children alike going about their business as usual. It could have been anywhere in the Beqaa.

Except, of course, for the two crumbled walls near the main mosque, results of an unprecedented series of rockets fired Sunday by Syrian rebels that, for the first time, left one resident dead and up to nine injured (another was killed by the same attack in Hosh al-Sayyid Ali, a nearby village on the Syrian side of the border). The blood of 23-year-old Ali Hassan Qataya, light brown by now, still spans the width of the street where he died.

“He was just visiting,” said a local resident who did not give his name. “He lived in Beirut, and came here to visit his fiancée.”

Why, then, was Qataya killed? The Syrian National Coalition, the opposition body recognized by over a dozen countries as the representative government-in-exile, said Monday that “the Free Syrian Army was forced to respond to [the] repeated aggressions” of Hezbollah, whom it accused of carrying out “military operations on Syrian territory.”

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Syria Live: Mass Deaths from Airstrikes

Sudden demonstration in the Mehdat Basha Souk in old Damascus on Sunday

See also Iraq (and Beyond) Live: At Least 20 Killed in Bombings Across Country
Sunday's Syria Live: Assessing the Insurgency

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2006 GMT: Lebanon. Insurgent commanders have confirmed their forces responded to Hezbollah strikes by firing shells into Lebanese towns on Saturday and Sunday, but said there were no attacks on Monday.

"If we have to, we will target civilians just like they do. Our civilians are not less valuable than theirs. Hizbullah is killing arbitrarily in Syria," one commander said. Yesterday, we responded. We hit back at Hizbullah's positions."

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Syria Live: Assessing the Insurgency

Claimed footage of a "barrel bomb" that killed between 12 and 24 people in Saraqeb in Idlib Province on Saturday

See also Syria Video Feature: The Boys Who Sparked a Revolution
Bahrain (and Beyond) Live: Protests Build Again Before Grand Prix
Saturday's Syria Live: "We Are Stronger Than Those Who Would Divide Us"

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1655 GMT: Protest. A sudden demonstration in the Medhat Basha Souk in Old Damascus:

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Syria Video Feature: The Boys Who Sparked a Revolution (BBC)

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The BBC's Fergal Keane speaks to some of the boys whose spraying of graffiti in Daraa Province, celebrating the Arab Spring, sparked the uprising of March 2011 against the Assad regime.

Keane notes that 15 boys from the school were arrested and tortured, leading to mass demonstrations, with other boys killed or forced into exile.

Syria Opinion: The Danger of Confusing "Islamists" and "Jihadists" (Khan)

Mass demonstration last month in Raqqa, soon after the city was taken by insurgent forces including Islamists

See also Syria Special: The Media Creates the "Al Qa'eda Myth"
EA Video Analysis: The "Al Qa'eda Myth" and Syria

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The commander --- a Dutch dentist of Syrian origin who called himself simply ‘Doctor’ --- was a member of the Ahrar al-Sham, the most powerful Islamist group in the vast array of factions fighting against the Syrian regime. His was a common perspective amongst the Salafi Islamists I met in northern Syria: measured, well-thought out and intellectually consistent, drawing on the realities of a war inexorably descending into factional chaos. Syria is on a knife’s edge, they told me. The regime will fall but most didn’t expect the fighting to end there. They feared a larger sectarian war and were practically begging the international community to help them prevent it.

It was a stark contrast to the few jihadists I encountered, whose only cerebral quality seemed to be their proficiency with weapons. Those men, aligned with the al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al -Nusra, spoke in terms familiar to a Western audience: global jihad, the re-establishment of the Caliphate, and, most frighteningly, perpetual war until their rule over Muslims is achieved.

Conflating the two groups is like mixing Christian fundamentalists with the Amish. And yet, Western governments continually cringe at the thought of Islamists, particularly Salafis, gaining a foothold in the various revolutions playing out in the so-called Arab Spring.

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EA Video Analysis: The "Al Qa'eda Myth" and Syria

>Syria Special: The Media Creates the "Al Qa'eda Myth"

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Complementary to Joanna Paraszczuk's analysis of this week's media coverage of a supposed merger between "Al Qa'eda in Iraq" and the Syrian insurgent faction Jabhat al-Nusra, I offer an eight-minute critique of how the "Al Qa'eda myth" has entrenched itself in US foreign policy and is now being promoted by the media to explain developments in Syria.

Syria Special: The Media Creates the "Al Qa'eda Myth"

One of the pictures accompanying the scare stories of Al Qa'eda taking control of part of the Syrian insurgency (Photo: AP)

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This is the story of a story.

Or, rather, this is the story of the creation of a myth --- the myth that Al Qa'eda has taken over parts of the Syrian insurgency.

This is the story of how that myth --- based on failure to consider sources, let alone evaluate them; built by exaggeration and distortion --- points to the media's failure to responsibly cover important developments. More importantly, it indicates how that failure can have political consequences which are counter-productive and dangerous, contributing to poor decisions by policymakers.

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Syria Live: "Crimes Against Humanity" of 1000s Killed in Airstrikes

1953 GMT: Rising Death Toll. According to the Local Coordination Committees, 90 people have been killed so far today nationwide:

25 martyrs in both Homs and Aleppo; 23 martyrs in Damascus and its Suburbs; 8 martyrs in Hama; 4 martyrs in Daraa; 2 martyrs each in Latakia and Idlib; and 1 martyr in Deir Ezzor

See our note about the casualty figures published by the LCC.

1811 GMT: Key Islamist Brigades Denounce Jabhat Al Nusra's Connections to ISI. There are many misconceptions about Jabhat al Nusra's connection to Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), and also other Islamists operating inside Syria. We've addressed some of those misconceptions in a separate analysis:

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Syria Feature: Regime Attacks Deliberately Target Civilians, Killing 1000s

Raw footage from the Human Rights Watch investigation:

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EA Worldview asked the report's co-author Ole Solvang, who is on the ground in Syria, whether insurgents had been present at any of the sites of airstrikes in which civilians died.

Solvang told us that while there had been some airstrikes targeting opposition fighters, those attacks did not result in the deaths of civilians. According to Solvang, such strikes were extremely rare compared to those attacks on non-combatants: "We did not document any attacks where we concluded that civilian casualties were collateral damage in the sense that they were lawful. In virtually all cases we documented the strikes did not hit any legitimate targets."

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EA Audio Analysis: The G8, Syria, Iran, and North Korea --- Scott Lucas with Monocle 24

I spoke with Monocle 24's The Globalist this morning about today's meeting of the G8, the eight leading nations trying to resolve the world's economic and political difficulties.

Listen from around the 8-minute mark on The Globalist homepage or in a pop=out window.

Topics include Syria, Iran, North Korea, and the economy as well as the general question, "Does the G8 really do anything?"