Syria's Aleppo pounded as Assad vows to 'clean' city

Air strikes continue pummelling rebel-held Aleppo as Syrian president says taking city is key to capturing other areas.

 

 

A rescue worker runs at a market hit by air strikes in east Aleppo [File: Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters]

Rebel-held areas of Aleppo have been hit by a new wave of intense aerial bombardment, according to opposition activists, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the capture of the northern city would be a "springboard" to pushing "terrorists" back to Turkey.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday that dozens of overnight air strikes had struck east Aleppo, as fighting continued on the northern and southern edges of the city.

According to The Aleppo Media Centre, a group of opposition activists in the city, the overnight air strikes killed and wounded a number of people, with some buried under the debris.
Since the Syrian army's assault against rebel-held Aleppo began in late September, Russian and government bombardment has killed more than 370 people, including 68 children, according to an Observatory toll.

Over the past three days, as many as 100 people have been killed in the raids, rescue workers said, as the air strikes and shelling of the city's east intensified.
The rising casualties in Aleppo have prompted an international outcry and a renewed diplomatic push, with talks between the United States and Russia planned for Saturday.

'Russia-West conflict'

Aleppo, a constant battlefield in the long-running Syrian civil war, has been divided between opposition control in the east and government control in the west since 2012.
In an interview with a Russian newspaper published on Friday, Assad said taking back the city, once the country's industrial hub, would provide important political and strategic gains for his government.

"You have to keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey, to go back to where they come from or to kill them. There's no other option," Assad told Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Aleppo is going to be a very important springboard to do this move."
Assad also told the newspaper that the Syrian civil war had become a conflict between Russia and the West.
"What we've been seeing recently during the last few weeks, and maybe few months, is something like more than Cold War," he said.
 Assad also said that the actions of Turkey, which is backing Syrian rebels involved in an operation aimed at clearing Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) from its Syria border region, constituted an "invasion" and said that they violated "international law".

Diplomatic push

As world powers prepared for new truce talks at the weekend, Russia announced it was ready to give rebels safe passage out of the eastern sector of Aleppo, where more than 275,000 people are under siege.
"We are ready to ensure the safe withdrawal of armed rebels, the unimpeded passage of civilians to and from eastern Aleppo, as well as the delivery of humanitarian aid there," Russian Lieutenant-General Sergei Rudskoy said in a televised briefing.
Moscow has come under mounting international pressure over the rising civilian death toll from the Syrian army's Russian-backed campaign to take east Aleppo, including Western accusations of possible war crimes.

Analysts said Thursday's safe passage offer was simply a gambit to relieve the pressure by appearing to present diplomatic alternatives.
"There is no change in the Russian strategy: the goal remains the destruction of rebel presence in Aleppo," Syria analyst Thomas Pierret told AFP news agency.
"Blowing hot and cold allows them to reduce the pressure and empower those who want a strictly diplomatic approach to the Syrian question."
Several major international efforts have failed to secure a political solution to Syria's brutal war, which has cost more than 400,000 lives since 2011.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are expected to be joined at talks in the Swiss city of Lausanne on Saturday by their counterparts from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar - all backers of Syrian opposition forces.
Then in London on Sunday, Kerry is likely to meet his European counterparts from Britain, France and Germany.
UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura will also attend the Lausanne talks.

Source: Al Jazeera News And News Agencies

Inside the Legal Struggles of Michigan's Medicinal Marijuana Industry

Last night's episode of VICELAND's Weediquette focused on how police forces in Michigan are using civil asset forfeiture to target legally run medicinal marijuana businesses in the state. We talked to Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu about his reflections after filming the episode; an edited and condensed version of his comments are below.
In Michigan, medical marijuana is legal—but last year, arrest rates were on the rise. Why? It seems like marijuana legalization is meant to at least take the drug out of the realm of the criminal justice system, but while doing research for this season of Weediquette, we found out that there's still a strong incentive for police officers to go after legal marijuana growers in Michigan. The doctrine that the incentive is based off of is called civil asset forfeiture—which means that if a cop busts you, he or she can take your stuff in addition to throwing you in jail and charging you.
Even though medical marijuana growers have cards that say that they're legally allowed to grow, civil asset forfeiture incentivizes police departments in Michigan to pursue really small technical violations—for instance, if there's a lock on a door that isn't secure enough, or a key to a room in your grow house or dispensary is left on a counter when it should've been in a safe space. So law enforcement targets medical marijuana growers, finds enough evidence to justify a raid, takes all the growers' stuff, and then makes an excuse for it after the fact.

 

It's tough for Michigan cops. The state's economy is pretty bad, and a lot of their police departments aren't funded particularly well—so the police are using the doctrine of civil asset forfeiture to target mom-and-pop businesses. One of those businesses was run by the Shattucks, a family we visited who decided to go into the medical marijuana business because they saw people using it and thought it would be a good business to try for a couple of years to raise some capital to go into real estate. They were after the American dream, small business ownership.
However, the St. Clair County drug task force got wind of what they were doing, raided their grow facility, dispensary, and home, and took more than $80,000 worth of their goods. Losing the money and goods was bad enough—but their kids were also at home when the SWAT team came through the door, so their nine-year-old daughter is the one who saw the door broken down and men with guns rushing in.

You could look at the Shattucks and say, "I'm sure they were doing something wrong." But a SWAT team seems like a disproportionate reaction. It's an issue of how you implement medical marijuana legalization, but also of what we ask for in our community policing. What's the relationship between those who are being policed and the police themselves? How do you balance making sure that the marketplace is legitimate while also respecting the people who are already operating legitimately in the marketplace? The Shattucks did everything they could to show the cops that they were doing the right thing—they met with the police department and showed the cops all their paperwork—but that didn't stop the police from going after them two months later.
Another family we talked to, the Fishers, were in a hearing about a similar criminal case against them, and under cross-examination, the police officer who conducted the raid was asked if he questioned the family about whether they had medical marijuana cards—and he said no. There aren't lawmakers who are trying to crack down on this stuff, so in a lot of cases drug task forces have no legislative oversight, meaning it's up to individual cases in court to set any sort of precedent.
On Weediquette, we cover a lot of different stories—stories about medicine and recreational drug use—and this story is about how pot has always made it easy for law enforcement to go after vulnerable communities. We're on a trajectory where medical marijuana and marijuana in general is going to become legal—it feels inevitable and that the war on drugs will also inevitable fade away—but stories like this bring to light that there's a lot to still fight for.