RIP Frans van der Lugt, died today amongst the people of Homs he loved and worked for during the last 50 years. He was the international shield for his Christian parishioners and Muslim residents of this war-torn place. Fifty years of his life spend for peace, dialogue and reconciliation between ancient religions in the city of Homs. He build bridges between opposing views, went mountain climbing with young people, Christians and Muslims alike. He helped to build a village for the handicapped and got support from President Bashar al Assad. Someone found it necessary to smother the last burning light of hope in the Old City of Homs. So many have been killed during three years of madness, a proxy war between Western powers, Sunni Arab states and Shia state of Iran. The West and Turkey found it necessary to fund and deliver arms, ammunition, provide intelligence to opposition forces aligned to one of many Jihadist groups, some from Al Qaeda supported by US allies Qatar, UAE, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

In Memory of A Shepherd Leading His Flock

“This is the worst news that we can read since the beginning of this war, one of the few people who can give us hope, love and patience to see it till the end is gone, but with everything he left behind we will keep on going for his sake and the sake of his memory/teachings, amen, may your soul rest in peace beloved father.”
Aurora Hanna

Gunman in besieged Syrian city shoot to death well-known priest

HOMS, Syria (DailyNewsEgypt) –  A masked gunman assassinated a well-known, elderly Dutch priest, shooting him in the head in the garden of a monastery where he lived in the central Syrian city of Homs, a fellow priest, an activist group and Syria’s state-run media said.

Father Francis Van Der Lugt — a Jesuit, the same order as Pope Francis — had lived in Syria for decades and had refused to be evacuated with other civilians from the battleground city of Homs.

The motives for the attack were not known, and no one immediately claimed responsibility for the killing, which took place in Bustan al-Diwan, rebel-held neighbourhood of Homs that has been blockaded for over a year by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

But the fact that Van Der Lugt was gunned down in a rebel-held area will likely underscore fears of many in Syrian Christian and Muslim minorities for the fate of their communities should Assad’s government be overthrown by the rebels. Over the past year, hard-line rebel groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front have become more influential and dominant among the opposition fighters in the city.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the 75-year-old Van Der Lugt, was “a man of peace, who with great courage, had wanted to remain faithful, in an extremely risky and difficult situation, to the Syrian people to whom he had dedicated, for a long time, his life and spiritual service.”

The Red Line and the Rat Line  by Seymour Hersh

Continued below the fold …

Dutch Jesuit in Syria battles war, hunger and fear

ROME (VaticanInsider) Oct. 1, 2013 – Dutch priest Fr Frans Van der Lugt has given dramatic testimony of his experience in Bustan al-Diwan, Homs’ oldest neighbourhood in Syria, which has been controlled by the rebels since June 2012 but is surrounded by Syrian government forces.

“For the past fifteen months we have been surviving off the emergency supplies we had in our basements and in abandoned houses throughout the neighbourhood. All we have left is a load of bulgar which is slowly running out. And we don’t know for how much longer this siege is going to go on.”

In June 2012, when Homs’ population fell from a million to a worrying 200,000 inhabitants within the space of just a few days as a result of the war, Fr Van der Lugt decided to stand by the side of those who were unable to flee from Bustan al Diwan – one of the toughest fronts in the Syrian conflict. The priest has been living alongside innocent victims of the conflict in this besieged rebel stronghold for fifteen months.

The Latakia Front: An Interview on the Rebel Side

(Syria Comment) – The interview I have translated below comes from Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a division of the Moroccan muhajireen group Harakat Sham al-Islam, which has played an important role in the ongoing rebel offensive on Latakia and whose founder and leader- Abu Ahmad al-Muhajir/Maghrebi [aka Ibrahim bin Shakaran, the ex-Gitmo detainee and 1990s Afghan jihad veteran] was recently killed.

In the infighting between the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham [ISIS] and other factions, Harakat Sham al-Islam officially- as an “independent” group- took an anti-fitna stance, but as one Syrian contact of mine in the group told me, the organization is closer to Jabhat al-Nusra than ISIS, even as all three share the same ideological program of establishing a Khilafa [Caliphate] over the entire world.

    Was Harakat Sham al-Islam leading the battle?  
    – Ahrar ash-Sham [Salafists funded by Kuwait and GCC states] held the leadership of the Burj, under their commander, then he was gravely wounded, then leadership was handed over to the Maghrebi commander, so he and his soldiers took up positions on the Burj and fought heroically, with the support of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ansar ash-Sham.

    Whom have the mujahideen faced in Burj 45?  
    – The mujahideen have faced all the National Defense Force, the Assad army, the militias of Hizb ash-Shaytan, the [Abu] Fadl al-Abbas battalions, and Iranian special forces, but also Chechen soldiers*: your brothers saw them on the Burj. Many of the dogs were masquerading in Afghan clothing and were calling out to brothers: `Brother, advance, we are brothers’. God fought them.

Turkey ‘hosts’ Armenians from Syria

(Turkish Weekly) Apr. 5, 2014 – Syrian rebels and their jihadist allies, the al-Nusra Front, launched a major offensive on Latakia nearly two weeks ago and have since seized several positions and villages including the Kasab area, home to a border crossing into Turkey.

Authorities in Yayladağı told daily Hürriyet 60 artillery shells and rockets hit the area in the past week. Opposition fighters who now control Kasab are accused of attacking Armenians, who consist of two-thirds of town’s population.

The Armenian diaspora blames Ankara, too, for its alleged role in permitting jihadists to freely traverse the border at Yayladağı and for shooting down a Syrian plane that was conducting operations against the Islamists.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and senior officials who spoke to Hürriyet denied the allegations. Turkey also conveyed to the Armenian community and to the United Nations its willingness to help in the evacuation of Armenians in Kasab. [Ethnic cleansing by Erdogan? – Oui]

Armenian community in Kesab – Genocide in 20th century and the Syrian Civil War

The signs have been telling and Seymour Hersh unleashes an attack on the Obama and Erdogan administrations …

The Red Line and the Rat Line  by Seymour Hersh

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. `We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

Today’s Zaman: US, Turkey reject Hersh article on sarin gas attack in Syria

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