Air Raids in Central Syria Kill 26

Activists said that air campaigns across Syria killed 26 people on Monday, just two days after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for an end to such indiscriminate aerial attacks.

Reuters reports that “two women and 10 children were among the dead in government air raids on the town of al-Neshabieh, in the eastern outskirts of Damascus, near a railway marking the frontline between Islamist fighters and Assad’s forces backed by Lebanese Hezbollah militants, and in the province of Homs to the north.”

Activist Abu Sakr told the wire that “two simultaneous raids hit Neshabieh first. People were pulling the bodies of a women and her two children from one house when the planes came back and hit the crowed, killing another nine.”

And in Homs province, “activists reported air raids on al-Hosn, a Sunni town near the Crusader castle of Crac des Chevaliers in a valley mostly inhabited by Christians, who have mostly stayed on the sidelines in the conflict between Assad and rebels.”

A Day at Yarmouk Refugee Camp

The BBC’s Lyse Doucet traveled to Yarmouk, the besieged Palestinian refugee camp outside of Damascus where starvation is reported to be widespread.

“”Please, please take us out, we are dying here,” 60-year-old Wafiqa pleads with Doucet, who says the woman is “sobbing uncontrollably as she cradles her lined face in rough gnarled hands.

“She stumbles toward us in her grief, toward anyone she thinks can rescue her from the punishing eight-month siege of Yarmouk, a devastated Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus.

“Just behind her, a tide of hundreds of people presses against a security barrier. Armed men struggle to contain a crowd desperate to reach a U.N. food distribution point at the end of a narrow rutted road that cuts through a desolate wasteland of utter ruin.

“‘I’m so tired, so tired,’ one woman says.”

It was as if, Doucet says, “she was a self-appointed spokesperson for the suffering. So many were in tears – old men bent over in wheelchairs, exhausted women with vacant stares, distraught children of every age. Many show signs of malnutrition.

“‘We had to eat local herbs boiled with spices,’ one mother told me. One of her daughters in a pink push chair was inconsolable. Her little scuffed black patent shoes and a fraying tweed coat may have been the last remnants of a better life lived long ago.”

Syria War Stirs New U.S. Debate on Cyberattacks

Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times reports that “not long after the uprising in Syria turned bloody, late in the spring of 2011, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency developed a battle plan that featured a sophisticated cyberattack on the Syrian military and President Bashar al-Assad’s command structure.

Now, he says, “the Obama administration has been engaged in a largely secret debate about whether cyberarms should be used like ordinary weapons, whether they should be rarely used covert tools or whether they ought to be reserved for extraordinarily rare use against the most sophisticated, hard-to-reach targets. And looming over the issue is the question of retaliation: whether such an attack on Syria’s air power, its electric grid or its leadership would prompt Syrian, Iranian or Russian retaliation in the United States.

“It is a question Mr. Obama has never spoken about publicly. Because he has put the use of such weapons largely into the hands of the N.S.A., which operates under the laws guiding covert action, there is little of the public discussion that accompanied the arguments over nuclear weapons in the 1950s and ’60s or the kind of roiling argument over the use of drones, another classified program that Mr. Obama has begun to discuss publicly only in the past 18 months.

“But to many inside the administration, who insisted on anonymity when speaking about discussions over one of America’s most highly classified abilities, Syria puts the issue back on the table. Mr. Obama’s National Security Council met Thursday to explore what one official called ‘old and new options.’”

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