U.S. Drops Anti-ISIS Leaflets Over Raqqa

The U.S. has dropped some 60,000 leaflets over Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, aimed at dissuading recruitment, Reuters reports.

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the leaflet campaign was intended to discourage potential ISIS recruits from joining the group.

The leaflets depict conscripts to the Islamic State being fed into a meat grinder. A room is identified by a sign with an arrow as a “Daesh Recruiting Office,” and the meat grinder is labeled “Daesh.”

“The message of this leaflet is that if you allow yourself to be recruited by Daesh (Islamic State), you will find yourself in a meat grinder,” Warren said. “It’s not beneficial to your health.”

“It’s trying to set the stage for an internal uprising against ISIS,” Nicholas Heras, an expert on ISIS at the Center for a New American Security, told USA Today.

The campaign adds a new element to U.S. efforts to curb the influence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It is the first of its kind that the U.S. military has launched in Syria, though the use of leaflets by the U.S. military dates back generations.

“The military appears to be attempting to exploit reported problems within the ranks of foreign fighters who have flocked to Raqqa in the last year to fight for ISIS,” said Jennifer Cafarella, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

President Assad Says Syria Open to Dialogue with U.S.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he is open to dialogue with the U.S. However, he stated in an interview with CBS that there can be no “pressuring of the sovereignty of his country,” AFP reports.

The president said such dialogue would have to be based on “mutual respect,” adding that there had been no direct communication between the U.S. and Syria so far.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to suggest this month that his country would have to negotiate with Assad for a political transition in Syria. However, the State Department quickly clarified that Kerry was not suggesting the U.S. would negotiate with Assad himself.

“By necessity, there has always been a need for representatives of the Assad regime to be a part of this process,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

“It has never been and would not be Assad who would negotiate – and the secretary was not saying that,” she added.

The U.S. has long said that it wants a negotiated settlement to end the conflict.

U.N. More Than Doubles Its Count of Besieged in Syria

“The United Nations has more than doubled its estimate of Syrians who are living in besieged areas – and risk death by starvation, dehydration and the lack of medical care – to roughly 440,000,” AP reports.

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos announced the updated estimate while addressing the U.N. Security Council on Thursday on what she described as the “breathtaking levels of savagery” that continue to take place inside Syria as it enters its fifth year of war.

Amos told the council that the situation inside Syria had dramatically deteriorated since the council approved resolutions last year aimed at improving humanitarian access to millions of Syrians in need.

Describing the conditions inside Syria, she said, “Today, a Syrian’s life expectancy is estimated to be 20 years less that when the conflict started. Unemployment is around 58 percent, up from around 10 percent in 2010; nearly two-thirds of all Syrians are now estimated to be living in extreme poverty.”

She urged the Security Council to hold the Syrian government and opposition groups accountable to the resolutions.

“Time is running out,” Amos told the council. “More people will die.”

She later added that $8.5 billion is needed this year to address the crisis inside and outside of Syria.

An international pledging conference for Syria will be held in Kuwait next week.

The news comes following a report by the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which claims that the number of Syrians living under siege is three times higher than documented by the U.N., with over 640,200 Syrians currently living under long-term siege.

As of February 2015, the U.N. OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) officially recognized 11 besieged areas in Syria with a combined estimated population of 212,000.

The SAMS report “Slow Death” identified 38 additional communities that meet their definition of besieged but have not been designated as such by OCHA.

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• Reuters: OPCW to Investigate Syria Chlorine Gas Attack Claims
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