Int'l Red Cross: Syria in civil war

[editor]

Int'l Red Cross: Syria in civil war

UPI
July 16, 2012

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Declaring Syria is in civil war means international humanitarian law applies "wherever hostilities take place," the Red Cross said Monday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross officially describes the situation in Syria as a "non-international armed conflict" and does not use the term "civil war," but spokesman Alexis Heeb said the ICRC's legal term "appears in the Geneva Conventions to describe a civil war," CNN reported.

"What is new is the fact that in April ... we referred to three specific locations" of internal conflict that now has expanded elsewhere, Heeb said. "Rather than to limit the non-international armed conflict, we say that IHL [international humanitarian law] applies wherever hostilities take place."

More violence was reported Monday, opposition activists said, as regime forces fired machine guns on civilians' houses in Aleppo, while in Homs, "several houses have been destroyed and other caught on fire" during mortar and missile attacks.

Damascus also sustained another day of clashes between regime and rebel fighters, the Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.

Meanwhile, international envoy Kofi Annan was in Russia to meet with Russia's president and foreign minister Monday to try to break the deadlock on Syria, which has seen escalating violence since pro-democracy demonstrations against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011. . . . [More]
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