‘They killed us from the inside’: An investigation into the August 4 Beirut blast (Human Rights Watch)
“Following decades of government mismanagement and corruption at Beirut’s port, on August 4, 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history pulverized the port and damaged over half the city. The explosion resulted from the detonation of tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a combustible chemical compound commonly used in agriculture as a high nitrate fertilizer, but which can also be used to manufacture explosives. The cargo of ammonium nitrate had entered Beirut’s port on a Moldovan-flagged ship, the Rhosus, in November 2013, and had been offloaded into hangar 12 in Beirut’s port on October 23 and 24, 2014.” Read more
For Syrian victims of the Beirut port explosion, a year of grief and rage
03 August 2021
From Ottoman Syria to Argentina
02 August 2021
‘Parents are dressing up their children to be buried’: Syria’s war on young escalates (The Guardian)
“The family tried to build a new life despite the fact that war still raged around them: for Hussein, there was respite in football, and helping the local artist Aziz al-Asmar with his famous political murals. But the teenager’s dreams of being a painter ended last month when regime forces targeted a swimming pool in the town of Fua with artillery shelling. Hussein, along with his 17-year-old brother, 23-year-old uncle, and three more civilians, was killed.” Read more
What we lost that day: Personal reflections from victims of the Aug. 4, 2020 explosion at the Beirut port (The New York Times)
“In Lebanese Arabic, there is a saying: ‘The world stood up and sat back down.’ It’s meant to describe chaos — a world turned upside down. This is what happened on that day almost one year ago, when Beirut was devastated by an explosion at a port warehouse. Everything slid out of place, and we’ve been unable to return anything to where it belongs.” Read more
Syrian government forces clash with opposition in Daraa (Al-Monitor)
“Last month, Syrian government forces and allied militias imposed a siege on the Daraa al-Balad area, the old town of the city of Daraa and home to 40,000 people in southern Syria, after rebels refused to hand over their light weapons. The government forces subsequently beefed up their presence on the outskirts of Daraa and forces of the 4th Division mobilized hundreds of members with heavy weapons.” Read more
Once, they were symbols of promise. The Beirut blast turned them to monuments of despair (LA Times)
“The day Beirut exploded, the silos remained. For 50 years, dozens of white, 157-foot-tall cylinders presided over Beirut’s port and held much of Lebanon’s grain — landmarks in a city that had lost many of them to civil war or pitiless development.
For Lamia Ziade, an illustrator and visual artist, they were the touchstone she would glance at every time she looked out the window of her grandmother’s house on Pasteur Street.” Read more
