Battle Between ISIS and Kurds Kills 49 People

AFP reports that a “fierce” battle between Syrian Kurds and militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has killed 49 fighters from both sides in Ayn Al-Arab, with the Kurds seizing several ISIS positions.

Wednesday’s fighting killed 14 members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and 35 jihadists, the wire says. Dozens of fighters were wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-backed monitoring group, said the area was now “calm” after the fighting, which took place in the northern province of Aleppo on the border with Turkey. In the battle, at adds, Kurdish fighters took several hills on which ISIS had set up positions.

In Homs, a “Moonscape” of Destruction

Ian Black of the Guardian reports from Homs on the scope of destruction in Homs, which is now back under the control of the Syrian government. “Buildings are battered and pockmarked or floors pancaked on top of each other. There are only dark, charred spaces where windows used to be,” he writes.

“Slogans scrawled on walls tell fragments of the story: ‘Welcome the people of Jihad,’ reads one. Others advertise al-Farouq – one of the first brigades of the Free Syrian Army, the mainstream rebel alliance. In the moonscape of the Bab Hud neighborhood, on the frontline by the Homs Citadel, a commander signed himself Issam Abu al-Mout – a nom de guerre that is a chilling reference to a man boasting of facing death.

“Still, milestones of recovery are being marked. This month the first wedding since what Assad loyalists call the liberation was celebrated in the quarter’s first-century Syriac Orthodox church, Umm al-Zennar. And Bayt al-Agha, the nearby Ottoman-era restaurant, its distinctive alternating black and white stone structure now half-destroyed, was open for business during the football World Cup in Brazil. But after dark, the alleyways are eerily deserted, ghostly figures emerging from security checkpoints as vehicles approach. It will be many years before it is picturesque again.”

Syria “Torture” Photos Shown To U.S. Congress

The BBC reports that a forensic photographer who smuggled images of Syrians he says were killed and tortured by those working for the Assad government has spoken publicly for the first time, on Capitol Hill.

Using the pseudonym Caesar, the man wore concealed his identity in dark glasses and a hood, telling members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee about “maimed bodies, people with eyes gouged out and skeletal remains, a litany of horrors that defy the imagination.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal adds that the Obama administration “is fashioning a new strategy to prosecute Syrian war crimes” based on Caesar’s trove of photos.

Because Russia, Assad’s primary patron, “has blocked an international prosecution, the U.S. and its allies are focusing on possible crimes where individual countries already have jurisdiction—those involving their own nationals or dual citizens who may have been victims or perpetrators in Syria,” it says. “The 50,000 photographs that catalog Syria’s grim civil war make that possible because many of the victims can be named.”

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