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U.N. to Deliver Aid to Syria via Iraq Prominent Rights Lawyer Among 4 Abducted in Syria
(about 7 hours later)
GENEVA — United Nations relief agencies are preparing to make their first deliveries of aid from Iraq to Syria this week but it remains unclear whether this will prove a regular channel of assistance, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday. BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Syrian human rights lawyer who was one of the most vocal early leaders of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad was abducted along with three colleagues in a suburb of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Tuesday by masked men, according to antigovernment activists, who pointed fingers at an Islamist rebel faction that she had criticized.
An airlift of 12 flights using Russian-built Ilyushin cargo aircraft is to start on Thursday and last until Sunday delivering food and other assistance from Iraq to Kurdish areas of Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh Province, according to Amin Awad, the director of the Middle East and North Africa bureau at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The abduction of the lawyer, Razan Zeitouneh, came hours after relatives and colleagues of two Spanish journalists kidnapped by Islamist extremist fighters in September in northern Syria made their plight public after months of secret attempts to free them stalled. One of the captives is Javier Espinosa, an experienced correspondent for the newspaper El Mundo, who has taken grave risks to cover the Syrian conflict, returning many times after surviving the government bombardment that killed two fellow journalists, Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, in the central city of Homs in February 2012.
Relief agencies believe there are 50,000 to 60,000 people in need of assistance in Hassakeh, where conflict has obstructed access by humanitarian agencies. “It’s certainly a welcome development for us, the humanitarian conditions there are getting worse” Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the refugee agency, said, citing U.N. estimates that 6.5 million people inside Syria have been driven from their homes by fighting. The two abductions contribute to fears that the most violent side of the Syrian insurgency is silencing advocates of the freedom and political rights that were the original demands of those protesting against the Assad government in early 2011 and playing into the hands of the government, which portrays itself as the only alternative to extremist rule.
In addition to the security challenges in delivering assistance to areas of conflict, international aid agencies have complained of bureaucratic obstacles and delays from the government in Damascus in obtaining approval for relief convoys destined for populations trapped by fighting, and the agencies have pushed for more cross-border access from neighboring countries. Ms. Zeitouneh and Mr. Espinosa are two prominent examples of those who have risked the most to document the Syrian uprising and the government crackdown against it — Mr. Espinosa through his writing, and Ms. Zeitouneh through her organization, the Violations Documentation Center, which compiles data on human rights breaches.
The high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, is to meet Anne Richard, the United States assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, and officials from aid agencies in Geneva on Wednesday at the start of a two-day meeting aimed at bolstering international support for close to 29 million people around the world reportedly displaced by conflict and more than 30 million displaced by other disasters. El Mundo said it believed that the Spanish journalists were being held by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a Qaeda affiliate. Press freedom organizations say at least 30 journalists are missing in Syria, including 20 foreigners.
Mr. Guterres will tell participants the number of people displaced by conflicts has risen in 2013, particularly in Syria, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo and he will warn that climate change is likely to add significantly to the scale and complexity of population displacements. An Iraqi journalist, Yasser Faisal, was fatally shot last Wednesday after being abducted by the Qaeda affiliate while reporting on dissatisfaction with the group, according to colleagues. They said Mr. Faisal had wanted to document Syrians’ struggles with extremists in part because they reflected those of his hometown, Falluja, which during the American occupation of Iraq was for a time dominated by the group Al Qaeda in Iraq, the organization that gave rise to some of the jihadist factions now in Syria.
Antigovernment activists say the figures on missing journalists are dwarfed by the number of Syrian civilians being held by the government, which they place in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
The abduction of Ms. Zeitouneh, a secular advocate of nonviolence who has received numerous international human rights awards, was heavily symbolic for activists who feel as if they are increasingly fighting on two fronts: against the government and against Islamist extremists. Taken with her were her husband, Wael Hamadeh; Samira Khalil, the wife of a prominent activist, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, who recently fled the country after extremists took over his hometown, Raqqa; and Nazem Hamadeh, who was running relief activities in the Damascus suburbs, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, a constellation of civilian councils that administer rebel-held areas, and other activists.
Mr. Hamadeh is considered “one of the first people who joined the revolution,” said Fares Mohamed, an activist in the town of Douma, the rebel-held suburb where the rights advocates had worked.
Activists said the Army of Islam, a rebel group that has come in recent months to dominate the area, had been hostile to Ms. Zeitouneh because of her secular views.
Invoking the memorial service Tuesday for Nelson Mandela, the Local Coordinating Committees issued a statement calling on international leaders to push for her release.
“These activists were inspired and informed by Mr. Mandela’s work, and were promoting concepts of nonviolence and civil resistance in Syria even at a time when the regime is violating every possible tenet of human rights,” the committees said in a statement.
The families and friends of Ms. Zeitouneh, Mr. Espinosa and Ricardo García Vilanova, the photographer abducted alongside him, issued anguished pleas for their captors to remember that they had aimed to help struggling Syrians.
“Javier and Ricardo are not your enemy,” Monica G. Prieto, Mr. Espinosa’s wife and a freelance journalist, said at a news conference in Beirut. “Please, honor the revolution they protected, and set them free.”
She wore a head scarf, apparently to make her speech more likely to be viewed by Islamist jihadists. Ms. Prieto, who, like her husband, reported from Homs during government bombardments there, said they both felt a responsibility to Syrians, and hoped that Syrians would now feel a responsibility toward them.
“I reminded him that our children needed him alive,” she said of Mr. Espinosa, “and he replied by telling me that the children of Syria needed the world’s attention.”
Ms. Prieto said that after many weeks of trying to mediate with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, efforts had reached an impasse. Mr. Espinosa, 49, and Mr. García Vilanova, 42, are believed to be alive and well, and the kidnappers have made no requests for ransom or other demands, advocates said. The journalists were abducted at a checkpoint near Tal Abyad in northern Syria on Sept. 16 along with four fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army and taken to facilities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in the province of Raqqa.
Rebel factions have continued to clash with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in recent days, accusing the group of killing two officers from the loose-knit, relatively secular Free Syrian Army. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria also executed a father of three in the northern Syrian town of Saraqeb for blasphemy, activists said, after he was asked why the diesel fuel he was selling was not pure and he answered: “How would I know? Am I the god of diesel?”
In a rare breakthrough in attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to hard-to-reach areas in Syria, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday that it was preparing to make its first deliveries from Iraq to Syria this week, but it remains unclear whether this will prove to be a regular channel of assistance.
An airlift of 12 flights is to start on Thursday and last until Sunday, delivering food and other assistance to Kurdish areas of Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh Province, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Relief agencies believe that 50,000 to 60,000 people are in need of assistance in Hassakeh, where conflict, primarily in recent months between Islamist and Kurdish fighters, has obstructed access.
In addition to the security challenges in delivering assistance to areas of conflict, international aid agencies have complained of bureaucratic obstacles and delays from the government in obtaining approval for relief convoys destined for populations trapped by fighting, and the agencies have pushed for more cross-border access from neighboring countries.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva, Hwaida Saad from Beirut, and Raphael Minder from Madrid.