Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

[Vrej1915]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

DEBKA often makes non-verifiable claims. Given its conflict of interest against Assad, I don't know if i'd take this as anything more than propaganda at the moment.

You are quite write.
They are as credible, as we regarding events in Baku

Nevertheless, it is worth being mentioned.
And must be read, as every bit of report in conflicting situation with a lot, lot of scepticism, and criticism.
Often analysing blatant disinformation is an information by itself


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Just for the joke: this site already mentioned the would be russian EMRL radar in Armenia as an already operational fact, hampering their plans...
It tells a lot about their credibility.

[Vrej1915]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

ՍԻՐԻԱՅՈՒՄ ԶՈՀԵՐԻ ԹԻՎՆ ԱՃՈՒՄ Է
Լոնդոնում գտնվող Մարդու իրավունքների մոնիտորինգի սիրիական կենտրոնի տվյալներով անցած տարվա մարտին Սիրիայում ծայր առած զինված հակամարտության հետևանքով զոհվածների թիվը հասել է 16.500-ի: Նրանցից 11.486-ը քաղաքացիական անձինք են, որոնց թվում են նաև զինված ընդիմության ներկայացուցիչները, 4.151-ը՝ զինծառայողներ, իսկ 870-ը` դասալիքներ:

Ավելի վաղ ՄԱԿ-ը հայտարարել էր ավելի քան 12.000 զոհերի և 230.000 փախստականների մասին:

http://www.hayzinvor.am/14852.html

[Vrej1915]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Syrian Armenians Struggling To Reach Armenia

http://www.armenialiberty.org/content/article/24634188.html

Հրապարակված է՝ 03.07.2012
Ethnic Armenians keen to flee escalating violence in Syria have limited options of taking refuge in Armenia as all the tickets for a single flight service currently existing between the two countries have been booked until September.

Some of them have had to take a risky journey by bus, crossing three borders before reaching a safer country.

Svetlana Hovannisian, who manages the Yerevan office of Syrian Airlines carrying out Aleppo-Yerevan flights, said a rise in passenger traffic is not unusual for summer months. “Now the number of passengers has also increased in connection with the events in Syria. Many ethnic Armenians are coming from there to Armenia,” she told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).

Armenia’s national air carrier, Armavia, stopped flying to Aleppo at the end of March, citing the escalating situation in conflict-torn Syria. It has decided to resume the service on July 9 following a reported personal request from Catholicos Garegin II, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The Armavia spokeswoman, Nana Avetisova, explained that the company also took into account numerous requests from members of Syria’s 80,000-strong Armenian community.

Meanwhile, ethnic Armenians from Syria have tried to find other ways of returning to their ancestral homeland. An airline manager said many of them cannot afford the more expensive flights to Armenia via third countries, while traveling by land is seen as potentially dangerous.

Ani Melkonian and her husband Mikael Garabed took that risk when they left Aleppo for Yerevan by bus a few months ago. The couple and their three children -- the 13-year-old Levon, 11-year-old Alice and 18-month-old Gevorg -- crossed two borders, with Turkey and Georgia, before arriving safely in Armenia.

“The war in Syria intensified, religious problems emerged. Everyone there started fearing for their lives. People in Syria don’t know what will happen next,” Melkonian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service. “We came from Aleppo by bus, it took us 36 hours to make the journey. We couldn’t afford to buy air tickets… We just wanted to get to a safe place so that our kids could live in a secure environment. We also wanted them to come to their homeland and grow up here.”

Melkonian said their friends and relatives in Aleppo, with whom they remain in touch, continue to live in “a very dangerous situation” amid daily sounds of gunfire and explosions and news of people being kidnapped and held to ransom. She said some of them too want to come to Armenia but are afraid to travel there by bus while affordable air flights are no longer available.

“Those who have money can afford to go abroad, but those who don’t have to stay there. Our journey was a safe one. We managed to escape,” explained the 38-year-old woman.

When Melkonian and her family came to Armenia they were first provided with temporary housing with the help of the Red Cross. They then moved to a hostel located in a northeastern Yerevan suburb where they currently reside.

Life in Armenia is clearly hard for the family. Melkonian’s 41-year-old husband is a professional xxxeler but he is now getting retrained to be able to find a job in Yerevan. In the meantime, Melkonian said, the family has to live off money borrowed from relatives and friends and rely on humanitarian aid from charities.

“We have lots of needs – we need food, money, furniture for this place… It is good that we are all in our homeland. If we have proper conditions… it is a good city, a beautiful city. If we can earn a living, it’ll be alright,” said Ani Melkonian.

Ani’s children are also trying to get a new start in Armenia. Levon, the elder son, said he has no trouble overcoming the difference between the Western and Eastern dialects of the Armenian language and is, in fact, doing well at school in Armenia. He said he likes Yerevan more than Aleppo because “all here are fellow Armenians”.

His sister Alice, however, still misses her Aleppo friends and relatives. “It was better there. We had more relatives, more friends there. Here we are all alone,” said the girl, adding that she would like to go back to her native city one day.

Ani, Mikael and their children are just one of many Syrian Armenian families who have come to Armenia in recent months. While it is still unclear what steps the Armenian government is taking to help many Syrian-Armenians caught in the conflict, a senior government official assured RFE/RL that “all options are being considered.”

“The authorities of Armenia are ready to do everything within their power to be maximally helpful to our compatriots,” said deputy parliament speaker Eduard Sharmazanov. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government in general are not talking publicly about their efforts all the time. But it is important that this matter is at the center of our attention, that the state considers using its resources in order to be as helpful as possible to our fellow Armenians from Syria.”

[Vrej1915]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Syria -Turkey tension: Conflicting arguments on Phantom
By Jonathan Marcus
BBC Defence & Diplomatic Correspondent

Shooting down of a Turkish F-4 plane heightened tensions between Syria and Turkey
Continue reading the main story
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The shooting down of a Turkish Phantom jet by Syrian air defences has prompted a battle of two narratives.

The Syrians say the plane had penetrated Syrian air space at low level, using an air corridor utilised in the past by the Israeli Air Force. They say it was engaged without using radar and shot down.

Turkey insists that the aircraft was attacked in international air space, though the Turks do accept that the plane - which they say was on a routine training mission - did stray briefly into Syrian air space, but that Turkish controllers alerted the crew and they left.

A subsequent meeting of Nato ambassadors that was given a detailed briefing from the Turks strongly backed Ankara's story. But perhaps surprisingly there was no detailed public presentation of the evidence.

So is there more in this than meets the eye? What was going on and what questions still need to be answered?

'Irreconcilable'
Sean O'Connor is a leading analyst of Soviet-style air defences. A former intelligence analyst with the US Air Force, he now teaches physics in a US college.

But in his spare time he has taught himself the skills needed to interpret satellite imagery and using open source pictures, he has built-up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sorts of air defences used by a country like Syria.

Continue reading the main story
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Start Quote

Carrying out normal training activity on the borders of a state using its military to try to suppress rebel forces inherently carries risk”

Douglas Barrie
Senior fellow, IISS London
In his view "the Syrian and Turkish accounts do not appear to be wholly irreconcilable. If Syria initiated the engagement process as soon as an airspace violation was detected then there is every possibility that the Turkish aircraft did in fact leave the area prior to being shot down," he explains.

Syria's willingness to engage an unidentified intruder was a warning, he says, "a direct message towards Western states contemplating action against the Assad regime".

But was this just a routine training mission that went badly wrong as the Turks suggest?

Douglas Barrie of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London says: "Given that Syria is effectively riven by a civil war, then suggestions that the Turkish activity was a 'routine training mission' does raise questions.

"Carrying out 'normal' training activity on the borders of a state using its military to try to suppress rebel forces inherently carries risk."

'Alternative mission'
Mr Barrie is also intrigued by the type of Turkish aircraft that was involved.

"Reports, as yet unconfirmed, that the variant of the F-4 Phantom aircraft shot down was a reconnaissance model, could also be interpreted as indicating an alternative mission," he told me.


Syria's Bashar al-Assad says the Turkish jet was flying in an area used by Israel's air force
"Some of Turkey's RF-4E aircraft have comparatively recently been upgraded to provide a long-range oblique photograph capability - the camera is mounted in a pod - with a radar pod also capable of being carried," he said. "Such sensors would be of use in trying to build up a picture of activity of ground forces."

But given that the Turkish plane did enter Syrian air space, however briefly, was it really necessary to shoot it down?

Mr Barrie says that "an incursion into another nation's air space would not normally result in a shoot down, with other less drastic steps sufficing - such as the intercept of the target aircraft and its identification by fighter aircraft".

He notes, however, that "Syrian air defences were embarrassed by the ease with which the Israeli air force mounted a successful attack on its [suspected nuclear] reactor site in 2007. The defection on the MiG-21 pilot to Egypt in June may also have resulted in a more aggressive approach to dealing with unidentified aircraft."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said that the Turkish jet was shot down by a soldier who did not have access to radar. Syrian accounts suggest the plane was downed by gunfire.

'Logical weapon'

Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls Syria a "clear and present threat"
However Mr O'Connor notes that the Turks say the plane was some 13 nautical miles (24km) off the Syrian coast (just outside Syria's 12 nautical-mile territorial limit) when engaged. If this distance is accurate, he says, then a radar-guided surface-to-air (SAM) system is the only possibility.

"This could be a radar-guided SAM operating under optical guidance," he notes, as Turkish reports indicate that there was no radar warning indication.

"In this case, the Russian Pantsyr-S1E would be the logical weapon involved, although the 13-mile range represents the very outer limit of the system's capability".

The Pantsyr-S1E is a relatively modern Russian air defence system that has been delivered to Syria in recent years.

But Mr O'Connor says that another weapon may have been involved.

"The dark horse is the newly acquired Russian Buk-M2E system, but Israeli reporting suggests that they are deployed near the border with Lebanon, far outside the area of interest."

'Depth of coverage'
So what does this episode tell us about the capabilities of Syria's air defence network overall?


The Kafar Buhum radar complex is located 9km south of Hamah covering airspace over north-western Syria. There is evidence of a Chinese-supplied Type 120 radar and a JYL-1 located here, both indicative of Syria's desire to upgrade its air defences.
Mr O'Connor says: "The Syrian air defence network's primary strength lies in its depth of coverage. While relying on older, Soviet-era SAM systems for the most part, there are a significant number of sites positioned to provide overlapping fields of fire and complementary engagement capabilities.

"The dense coverage is one likely reason behind Israel's choice to skirt Syrian airspace and enter through Turkey to attack the suspected reactor complex a few years ago," he told me.

"The drawback to the Syrian network, as shown recently in Libya, is that these older systems can be electronically and physically defeated by a modern Western air force," although he notes that "no solution should ever be judged to guarantee 100% effectiveness".

The recent import of advanced Russian SAM systems and Chinese radar systems, he explains, provide evidence that Syria is attempting to address some of these weaknesses.

"The level to which Syria has managed to improve its situational awareness and weapons capability", he asserts, "will ultimately have an impact on the success of any potential future air action against the Assad regime."

Downed Turkish jet: the two accounts

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18689037

[UrMistake]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

I say xxxx armavia and its expensive tickets , sent military planes like other nations has done lets say Greece in case of Libya and help the Armenians while they at it they can unload some nasty stuff for the al-quaeda lovers and help our Syrian and Russian friends.

[arakeretzig]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

I say xxxx armavia and its expensive tickets , sent military planes like other nations has done lets say Greece in case of Libya and help the Armenians while they at it they can unload some nasty stuff for the al-quaeda lovers and help our Syrian and Russian friends.

2 way IL-76 trip costs alot for armenia. They'll probably just give some nice words of support instead..
Also, if it was not for Red Cross, armo refugees would be homeless in armenia.

[UrMistake]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

2 way IL-76 trip costs alot for armenia. They'll probably just give some nice words of support instead..
Also, if it was not for Red Cross, armo refugees would be homeless in armenia.

Stop'the cost'bullxxxx we are not talking about one house portofolio ,one nation can operate 2 god damn planes,with proper goverment all can be done.its not money its the will and program

[arakeretzig]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Stop'the cost'bullxxxx we are not talking about one house portofolio ,one nation can operate 2 god damn planes,with proper goverment all can be done.its not money its the will and program

Armenia is no Greece dude. you know that right? Maybe they can send a few planes, but, no way they can mass evacuate thousands of people.

[UrMistake]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Armenia is no Greece dude. you know that right? Maybe they can send a few planes, but, no way they can mass evacuate thousands of people.

Well armenia use this two planes all day ,russian made gun comming into armenia . What is not enough?
Again the matter is of political will and planning not money.

[Federate]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people