Pope Requests Middle East Leaders To Work For Peace

BEIRUT — Pope Benedict XVI prayed on Sunday that Middle East leaders work toward peace and reconciliation, stressing again the central theme of his visit to Lebanon, whose neighbour Syria is engulfed in a civil war.

"In a world where violence constantly leaves behind its grim trail of death and destruction, to serve justice and peace is urgently necessary," Benedict said in his homily at an open-air mass on Beirut's waterfront.

"I pray in particular that the Lord will grant to this region of the Middle East servants of peace and reconciliation, so that all people can live in peace and with dignity," he added.

An estimated 350,000 people were gathered under a bright warm sun to join the pontiff as he celebrated a solemn mass on the final day of his three-day visit to Lebanon.

In his homily, the pope said service is key to the practice of a Christian life, noting that Jesus Christ came into into the world not to be a powerful political leader, but a servant.

"Service is a foundational element of the identity of Christ?s followers. The vocation of the Church and of each Christian is to serve others, as the Lord himself did, freely and impartially."

On Saturday, the frail, 85-year-old pontiff urged Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims to forge a harmonious, pluralistic society in which the dignity of each person is respected and the right to worship in peace is guaranteed.

Those who desire to live in peace must have a change of heart, Benedict said, which involves "rejecting revenge, acknowledging one?s faults, accepting apologies without demanding them and, not least, forgiveness."

He said the universal yearning of humanity for peace can only be realised through community, comprising individual persons, whose aspirations and rights to a fulfilling life are respected.

Lebanon is a multi-faith country in which Muslims make up about 65 percent of the population and Christians the balance.

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The pope came with a message of peace and reconciliation to Lebanon and to the wider Middle East, which have been torn by violence, often sectarian, over the years.

He said the conditions for building and consolidating peace must be grounded in the dignity of man.

Poverty, unemployment, corruption, addiction, exploitation and terrorism "not only cause unacceptable suffering to their victims but also a great impoverishment of human potential. We run the risk of being enslaved by an economic and financial mindset, which would subordinate 'being' to 'having'."

Without pointing fingers, he said "some ideologies undermine the foundations of society. We need to be conscious of these attacks on our efforts to build harmonious coexistence."

Benedict noted that Christians and Muslims have lived side by side in the Middle East for centuries and that there is room for a pluralistic society.

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"It is not uncommon to see the two religions within the same family. If this is possible within the same family, why should it not be possible at the level of the whole of society?

"The particular character of the Middle East consists in the centuries-old mix of diverse elements. Admittedly, they have fought one another, sadly that is also true. A pluralistic society can only exist on the basis of mutual respect, the desire to know the other and continuous dialogue."

Central to that, the freedom "to profess and practise one?s religion without danger to life and liberty must be possible to everyone."

Echoing his words Lebanon's Sunni mufti, or spiritual leader, Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, said the events rocking the Arab world "bring us Muslims and Christians a light that shows us the path to a better tomorrow, though they also bring many dangers that are a threat to us.

"But just as we made our history together in the past, we will also make our future together, based on coexistence."

The pope's outreach to Muslims is particularly poignant as the region is rocked by the deadly violence over the anti-Islamist film that cost the lives of the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans on Tuesday.

On Saturday, the pope met with thousands of youth, urging Muslims and Christians to "live side by side without hatred, with respect for the beliefs of each person, so as to build together a free and humane society.

Addressing a number of Syrians among them, he said: "I want to tell you how much I admire your courage," adding that he was "sad because of your suffering and your bereavement."

The pope returns to Rome on Sunday evening.

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17 Beheaded In A Ghastly Nightmare Across Afghanistan

KANDAHAR — Seventeen civilians were beheaded, 10 Afghan soldiers killed and two NATO troops shot dead in a new insider attack in a bloody few hours across Afghanistan, officials said Monday.

The civilians, including two women, were beheaded in a southern Afghanistan village in a region plagued by the Taliban insurgency.

"Last night 17 local villagers, two women and 15 men, were beheaded by unknown people in Kajaki district," Daud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial administration, told AFP.

"We don't know who was behind the killings at this time. We're investigating," Ahmadi said.

A senior police official in the province, Mohammad Ismael Hotak, confirmed the incident, giving a similar account.

Taliban insurgents are active in the troubled region and they have in the past been blamed for beheading local villagers, mostly over charges of spying for Afghan and US-led NATO forces.

Haji Musa Khan, a tribal elder in the neighbouring district of Musa Qala, said the region had seen a surge in such killings in recent months.

"We had three people beheaded during the month of Ramadan. Another person, the son of a tribal elder, was beheaded recently," he said.

Khan said the killings followed major military operations by Afghan and NATO troops in the area.

Hours later, an Afghan army soldier killed two NATO troops in a new "green-on-blue" insider attack, the US-led International Security Assistance Force said.

"A member of the Afghan National Army turned his weapon on ISAF forces, killing two ISAF service members in (eastern) Laghman province today," a spokesman told AFP.

"ISAF soldiers returned fire and killed the attacker."

The latest deaths take the toll from insider attacks this month alone to 12 and to a total of 42 this year, making up around 13 percent of all NATO deaths in 2012.

NATO has struggled to stem the attacks in which uniformed Afghans turn their weapons against their international allies and they have become a major issue in the Afghan war, eroding trust between the two forces.

Taliban insurgents claim responsibility for many of the attacks, but NATO attributes most to cultural differences, stress and personal animosity between Afghan troops and their international allies.

In a pre-dawn attack Monday, 10 Afghan soldiers were killed when Taliban insurgents overran their post in the troubled southern province of Helmand in what one official said was an insider attack.

Four soldiers were wounded and six others were missing following the attack in the province's Washir district, the senior police official Hotak told AFP.

Ahmadi, the Helmand provincial administration spokesman, confirmed the incident and said the attack was an "insider" plot in which some army soldiers helped the rebels attack the post.

"The Taliban attacked a post in Washir and killed 10 soldiers. Four other soldiers were wounded and five others have gone with the Taliban with their guns," he said.

Hotak could not confirm Ahmadi's account but said an investigation was underway.

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More Than 320 People Killed In Dariya,Syria

Covered bodies fill a mass grave reported to be in Dariya, Syria, where hundreds of people have been killed.

BEIRUT — Bloodied bodies lay strewn in the streets, in basements and even in the cemetery in the besieged Damascus suburb of Dariya, site of what may be the largest mass killing to date in more than 17 months of fighting in Syria, according to opposition and pro-government accounts Sunday.

Video posted Sunday on the Internet purported to show groups of victims in Dariya being buried in a mass grave, a deep trench several yards long.

"We are finding bodies everywhere. What has happened in Dariya is the most appalling of what has happened in the revolution till now, what has happened in Syria till now," said an opposition activist who goes by the name Abu Kinan for security reasons. "The smell of death is everywhere."

At least 320 people have been killed in Dariya, a working-class town southwest of the capital, since the military launched an assault on the suburb five days ago, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group opposed to President Bashar Assad.

The killings reported in Dariya contributed to a death toll Saturday that topped 400 throughout Syria, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition umbrella coalition. It appears to be the largest single-day death toll reported to date in the conflict. The group reported more than 200 people killed Sunday.

The numbers could not be independently confirmed. The government has accused the opposition of exaggerating death tolls and inventing massacres in a bid to discredit the armed forces.

According to United Nations figures, at least 17,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Syria since antigovernment protests broke out in March 2011. The opposition puts the death toll at more than 20,000.

Verifying casualty counts in Syria has become more difficult with the departure of United Nations monitors, who had visited some previous massacre sites and provided confirmation of the numbers killed and injured. With the U.N. monitoring mission over, there was little prospect Sunday of any independent investigation into the killings in Dariya. The Syrian government places severe restrictions on media coverage.

Opposition advocates blamed government troops and plainclothes militiamen for the killings. The government blamed "terrorists," its usual term for armed rebels.

The opposition says many victims in Dariya, previously a stronghold of rebels seeking to oust Assad, were executed after pro-government forces entered the town Friday. Others were killed in shelling or shot by snipers, the opposition says.

Opposition activists said many victims were taken prisoner by government forces and executed in basements. In one grisly discovery Saturday, more than 120 bodies were found in one basement, activists said.

According to opposition activists, more than 100 additional bodies were discovered Sunday as government forces withdrew to the town's outskirts and residents were able to begin searching more thoroughly.

Most victims were men, but many women and children were also among the dead, the opposition said.

Even the pro-government Syrian TV channel Addounia showed images of residents who had apparently been killed in the midst of seemingly routine daily activities. The station aired footage of a girl killed on a street, a man fallen from his motorcycle, and several bodies at a cemetery.

"As we have become accustomed, every time we enter an area that has terrorists, they have committed crimes and killings in the name of freedom," the Addounia reporter said in her report.

As the camera scanned behind her and got closer on a man shot to death in the driver's seat of a blue pickup truck, she added, "This is their doctrine and this is how they think."

The Addounia footage from Dariya that aired Sunday showed bloodied bodies on streets, in homes and scattered in a cemetery. Many victims appeared to be women and children. The members of one entire family executed in their home were shot because they didn't support the "terrorists," a soldier told the station's reporter.

On Sunday, the army returned to some Dariya neighborhoods that had been raided the day before, leading to the deaths of additional residents, said Abu Kinan, the opposition activist.

The government onslaught against Dariya began last week when regime forces began shelling from tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, according to opposition activists. It was the latest in what the opposition calls a methodical attempt to retake and punish rebel-held neighborhoods in Damascus and surrounding suburbs. The assault on Dariya and other suburbs followed an uprising last month that saw intense combat in many parts of the city.

The Syrian military eventually crushed the rebellion in the capital districts. The army then moved its focus to outlying areas such as Dariya.

After fighters with the Free Syrian Army, the rebel umbrella group, withdrew from the town Friday night, soldiers accompanied by shabiha militia members stormed in, opposition groups said. They raided homes and arrested many, taking prisoners to the basements of empty buildings where they were shot execution-style, according to opposition accounts.

Before Dariya, the opposition said, dozens were killed in Moadamyeh al-Sham, another Damascus suburb, and on Sunday military forces were reported to be moving toward the nearby town of Ajdaideh, the opposition said.

The pro-government Addounia channel, reporting on the violence in the Damascus suburbs, aired a surreal sequence in which a reporter, standing in the cemetery where fresh corpses were tossed about, announced the discovery of a woman shot but "clinging to life." The camera cut to a woman lying on the ground, her head resting on a shattered stone grave marker, her hands bloody from her wound.

"I was heading to Damascus with my husband and children and suddenly I found myself like this," explained the wounded woman, who said that her husband worked for state security and that she didn't know what had happened to him or her three children.

"Who hit you, ma'am? Tell us," the reporter said.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't remember anything, I don't remember, except that I was shot."

Once the brief interview was over, army soldiers arrived and took the wounded woman away on a stretcher.

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Syrian Forces Use 'Hit And Run' Strategies In Damascus

James Lawler Duggan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Syrian youths ran for cover on Tuesday as a rebel fighter returned fire from a loyalist sniper in the Bustan Pasha area of Aleppo, the country’s largest city.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Gunfire and shelling rocked Damascus, Syria, and its suburbs on Wednesday as opponents of President Bashar al-Assad reported a widening campaign by the military to sow fear and death in neighborhoods where the rebels are strong and the government is too weak to assert full control.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group in Britain that maintains a network of contacts in Syria, said the latest government raid on Wednesday morning in Kafar Soussa — with tanks backed by infantry soldiers — left at least 24 people dead. In the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun, activists said, Syrian forces executed dozens of others.

Opposition groups described both as “hit-and-run” assaults. Similar attacks have been reported in several areas ringing the capital in recent weeks, as troops and shelling intensify then fade and as the government kills and leaves.

This week, activists reported finding 40 bodies in one suburb; last week, 60 others were discovered in a landfill, many of them believed to be civilians as attacks continued even on day of Eid.

Analysts said the effort — in which the government invades but does not hold an area — underscores the challenge that Mr. Assad faces as he tries to defeat an insurgency that often slips away, only to resurface. It is an effort that experts describe as the opposite of the “winning hearts and minds” model and is based instead on the Arabic saying “rule is based on awe.”

“Terror is the basic approach,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Center for the Middle East. “From the beginning of the uprising the logic was hit and hit hard, punish and scare, and that would be the way to do it.”

But he added, “It’s a crazy logic, and it has not served them well.” While the approach worked when the Syrian government suppressed a revolt in Hama in the 1980s, he said, the current effort to intimidate the country into calm is increasingly showing signs of failure.

The opposition throughout Syria has not broken; it has scattered and regrouped. In many areas, from north to south, the government has claimed that its mission has been accomplished, or would be quickly, only to have the rebels resurface to fight again with help from local residents.

In Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, the government has tried nearly everything, including missile strikes from fighter jets, but while rebel brigades have retreated temporarily from some areas, they have created what amounts to formal rotation schedules in others.

They have also completed their own successful hit-and-run ambushes on the military airport that is the main base for government troops, and on the city center, while food and other supplies have been provided by wealthy residents.

In the region around the southern city of Dara’a, where the uprising began, the pattern has been similar. On Tuesday, rebel leaders said they were retreating from several areas because of an ammunition shortage, but on Wednesday, they reported reoccupying some of the places they had fled.

There are also many areas, more distant from the most concentrated fighting, where the government’s forces have retreated as rebels have made incremental gains.

Deir al-Zour is one example. An area deep into the east of the country, about 300 miles from Damascus, it has seen intense fighting at various times during the nearly 18-month-old conflict, but in recent weeks, the battle has taken on what rebels there described as a familiar pattern: government troops based outside the city, and with little knowledge of the area, use air power and shelling, but not much else.

“The Assad forces are afraid to enter the towns and villages, so they started with this new strategy of bombardment from long distance and from helicopters,” said Abu Khalaf, 40, a fighter sitting at a rebel base in Deir al-Zour. “We can succeed because we know the land, while the Assad forces are coming from outside the province.”

On Wednesday, an activist in another section of Deir al-Zour said rebels had seized two checkpoints near the Iraqi border, taking over government buildings as officials fled.

The dynamic, Abu Khalaf said, has changed: the government has become the equivalent of a foreign power. “We are fighting to liberate our country from the Assad occupation army,” he said. “We don’t have a government that runs the country; we have an occupation army.”

Deir al-Zour is also where rebels said last week that they had shot down their first fighter jet, using an antiaircraft weapon seized from the military.

The fighter who claimed to be responsible, Abu Allawi, has become a hero among the rebels, and he says he has also become a target for the government. His commanders denied requests to make him available for an interview.

Another fighter who said he was with Abu Allawi when the jet crashed said that most of the fighters in the area were defectors and that they had been using purloined military weapons — including antiaircraft weapons — to gain an advantage. He described the attack on the fighter jet as a mix of luck and talent.

“We deploy these antiaircraft guns around the villages and among trees and houses, so the regime didn’t expect us to use them like we did,” said the fighter, who identified himself with the nickname Abu Mohammed. “The surprise played a key role in downing this MiG fighter, which was flying in low; the pilot was feeling relaxed as he bombed, and when he flew in really low, Abu Allawi shot it and was able to target the body of the plane. That set it on fire.”

The Syrian government has contended that the aircraft crashed because of a mechanical problem.

The rebels’ account, which is consistent with earlier unverified reports of the downing of the plane, suggests that any strike against Syrian aircraft would not be easy to repeat.

Abu Mohammed, 35, said the initial claims that the rebels were on their way to creating their own no-fly zone, without international support, seemed far-fetched, at least until the rebels could seize or buy stronger weapons.

He said the fighters were trying to acquire Stinger missiles “from some ‘friends’ in Iraq.”

“We hope to get them because that will change everything in our region,” he said.

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