Tag Archives: syria

Russia Has Killed Almost 10,000 Syrians in the Past Year, Says a New Report

by aniaxff2 Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Russia’s military has killed almost 10,000 people, including nearly 4,000 civilians, in Syria over the past year, according to a new report from a London-based group that monitors the Syrian civil war.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was able to document the death of 9364 civilians and fighters from the rebel and Islamic Factions, Fath al-Sham Front formerly the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the ‘Islamic state’ in the past 12 months,” the group wrote on its website on Friday. Russian airstrikes have killed more civilians (3,804) than members of ISIS (2,746) or members of rebel and other Islamic groups (2,814), according to SOHR. The civilian death count includes 906 children under the age of 18.

The Russian air force started bombing operations in Syria last September in support of the Syrian government’s military. While the Russian government claimed the strikes were being carried out against ISIS, the air campaign has heavily targeted non-Islamist rebel groups and civilian areas held by rebels. Russian aircraft frequently strike hospitals and other medical facilities and have been blamed for the bombing of a UN aid convoy during a short-lived ceasefire last week.

Russian air support has allowed the Syrian regime to consolidate its battlefield gains and even advance in some areas, despite being short on soldiers and increasingly reliant on allies including Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

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Russia Has Killed Almost 10,000 Syrians in the Past Year, Says a New Report

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

by HoseaO868858 Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced an imminent cease-fire in Syria, government planes bombed a crowded marketplace killing 61 and wounding 100 more. By weekend’s end, at least 90 people had died in regime airstrikes, including 28 children. Today, President Bashar al-Assad publicly vowed to “recover every inch of Syria from the terrorists” and decried those in the opposition who “were betting on promises from foreign powers, which will result in nothing.”

In other words, the long-awaited Syrian cease-fire appears to be off to a great start.

The agreement, which was announced early Saturday morning in Geneva, officially began at sundown today. It comes after 10 months of failed attempts to reach a political settlement to a conflict that’s killed nearly half a million people and spawned the largest refugee crisis since World War II. While some observers argue that the cease-fire is the best opportunity to bring a pause to the violence, the plan has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

If the truce endures for a week and humanitarian aid begins to flow into besieged areas, the United States and Russia say they will put aside their differences over the legitimacy of the Assad regime and work to target two jihadist groups, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the former Al Qaeda-affiliate that recently rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS).

In theory, the cease-fire deal prohibits the Syrian Air Force from flying raids over opposition-held areas, except for those controlled by ISIS or JFS. Kerry called this “the bedrock of the agreement,” labeling the Syrian Air Force the “main driver of civilian casualties.” But as Michael Weiss of The Daily Beast writes, outside of excluding ISIS and JFS, the deal does not clearly define the ideologically mixed groups that make up the Syrian opposition forces.

As part of the agreement, more moderate rebel groups must distance themselves from JFS or risk being targeted. But Syria’s mainstream armed opposition forces, as Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, puts it, “are extensively ‘marbled’ or ‘coupled’ with JFS forces…This is not a reflection of ideological affinity as much as it is merely a military necessity.” Lister wrote on Saturday that “not a single one has suggested any willingness to withdraw from the frontlines on which JFS is present. To them, doing so means effectively ceding territory to the regime, as they have little faith in a long-term cessation of hostilities holding.”

Under the new deal, the Syrian government is only banned from striking areas agreed to by both Russia and the United States, and the Assad regime and Russia are permitted to strike JFS (the group formerly known as Nusra) without prior American consent if it’s in response to “imminent threats.” Weiss asks, “What is to stop Damascus and Moscow from suddenly finding ‘imminent threats’ everywhere against parties they insist are Nusra or Nusra-affiliated before Washington can concur?”

Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake points out that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community are deeply skeptical about sharing intelligence with the Russians on Syria. Even if the first week’s truce holds, he writes, “is it even desirable for US intelligence officers to be sharing the locations of US-backed rebels in Syria with a Russian Air Force that has been bombing them for nearly a year?”

On Sunday, rebel groups sent a letter to the United States agreeing to “cooperate positively” with the cease-fire. But they added that they have deep concerns “linked to our survival and continuation as a revolution.” Among their top concerns: The agreement neglects many besieged areas outside of Aleppo, lacks guarantees or sanctions against violations, and doesn’t ban Syrian jets from flying for up to nine days following the beginning of the cease-fire. It also called the exclusion of JFS, but not Iranian-backed Shiite militias, a double standard. One American-backed rebel faction has already called the deal a “trap.”

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, reports of alleged cease-fire violations emerged within one hour of its official start on Monday night, as the Assad regime launched artillery strikes on Al-Hara and dropped a barrel bomb on Aleppo.

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

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Donald Trump Lies Endlessly About His Foreign Policy Positions

by RoxanaAVKV Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post practically runs out of room this morning fact-checking Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech on Monday. I didn’t listen to the speech, but it sounds like there was barely any room between the lies for him to have said anything that was true.

What’s remarkable about Trump’s Middle East position is that he doesn’t just exaggerate or cherry-pick; he flatly turns things 180 degrees. He supported the Iraq War in 2002-03. He favored a quick withdrawal in 2007. He supported the Libya war. He opposed getting involved in Syria. These are all the things he says have contributed to the rise of ISIS and the destabilization of the Middle East.

In other words, by his own admission, everything he would have done as president would have been a disaster. Except that he doesn’t admit it. He just lies about what his positions were. It’s an amazing performance.

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Donald Trump Lies Endlessly About His Foreign Policy Positions

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The Rise of Syria’s Brutal Chemical Attacks on Civilians

by TawannaAraujo Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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For the third time in just two weeks, chemical weapons were reportedly used against civilians in northern Syria. The United Nations is investigating the most recent case, which came Wednesday when barrel bombs thought to contain chlorine gas dropped on the rebel-controlled neighborhood of Zubdiya in eastern Aleppo, killing at least four people, including a mother and her two children, and wounding around 60 more.

Both the Assad regime and opposition forces have denied responsibility, but several witnesses and monitoring groups have said that helicopters dropped explosive barrel bombs on the affected neighborhood. Opposition forces, it bears noting, do not have helicopters.

Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy for Syria, told reporters yesterday that there is “a lot of evidence” that the attack took place, and if confirmed, would amount to a war crime. Images from the alleged attack, showing men and young children being fitted with oxygen masks, circulated widely on social media.

A doctor in Aleppo told Amnesty International that the victims “were all suffering from the same symptoms, mainly coughing and shortness of breath. I could easily smell chlorine on people’s clothes.” And Hamza Khatib, the manager of Aleppo’s Al Quds hospital, told Reuters on Wednesday that he was preserving fragments from the bombs and pieces of clothing to submit as evidence.

Chlorine gas is classified as a choking agent, and when inhaled, fills the lungs with liquid and can lead to asphyxiation. Using it in a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Assad regime agreed to join after a 2013 UN investigation found that the nerve agent Sarin was used against civilians in Eastern Ghouta, killing 1,429 people, more than 400 of them children. The Syrian government subsequently turned over thousands of tons of chemical agents, but chlorine, because of its necessary and legal use in other areas, was not among the chemicals that had to be destroyed. Since then, there have been dozens of chlorine gas attacks that have not been countered with any repercussions from the international community.

This latest example comes shortly after rebel forces—led largely by hardline jihadi groups including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly known as the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra)—broke the Syrian government’s siege of Aleppo. The siege had cut off the city’s last supply lines, subjecting the 250,000 residents remaining in the rebel-held east to a lack of food, water, and medical supplies. Shortly after the siege broke, doctors warned of revenge air strikes, including a fear that the regime would resort to chemical weapons.

“Looking at the regime’s track record, they are ready to do anything to try to win back power,” Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American doctor who was recently in Aleppo, told the Telegraph. “We expect more bombing…They know that the world will not respond.”

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The Rise of Syria’s Brutal Chemical Attacks on Civilians

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Donald Trump’s Top Ten Giveaways to Vladimir Putin

by jefferylasley9 Posted on July 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The number of pro-Putin positions that Donald Trump has taken has assumed quite remarkable proportions:

  1. He wants to reduce America’s commitment to NATO and reorient its activities to the Middle East. This is perhaps Vladmir Putin’s greatest foreign policy desire.
  2. Says America has no moral standing to complain about human and civil rights violations.
  3. Welcomed Russia’s incursion into Syria.
  4. Considers Putin a great leader.
  5. Would consider eliminating sanctions against Russia and recognizing their annexation of Crimea.
  6. Wants to weaken American ties to its allies by insisting that he will walk away from them unless they pay us more for our military protection.
  7. Never mentions Russia in his otherwise endless litany of countries that are taking advantage of us.
  8. Opposes sending arms to Ukraine.
  9. Is pro-Brexit.
  10. Isn’t sure he would defend the Baltics if Russia attacked them.

Have I missed anything? I probably have. It’s hard to keep track.

Most of these are defensible positions on their own. I don’t support sending arms to Ukraine, for example. Plenty of conservatives are pro-Brexit. And plenty of lefties would like to see us reduce our military footprint worldwide.

But even if you personally agree with an item or three on this list, the whole thing adds up to something unprecedented for an American candidate for president. Donald Trump considers America at odds with virtually the entire world. He’s based his entire campaign on this. At various times he’s mentioned China, Mexico, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, and the entire Pacific Rim. But never Russia. On the contrary, his list of positions toward Russia is basically Vladimir Putin’s dream foreign policy. For a guy suffering under crippling sanctions, a tanking economy, low oil prices, and a demographic time bomb, Donald Trump is offering him everything he could possibly want. And what does Trump want in return? For Russia—and only for Russia—he wants nothing.

As much as I loathe Putin, I’m not among those who now think Mitt Romney was right when he listed Russia as our #1 geopolitical threat. Conservative fearmongering on the subject leaves me cold. Nonetheless, this list is not a coincidence. There’s something behind the scenes guiding it. But what?

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Donald Trump’s Top Ten Giveaways to Vladimir Putin

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A War Reporter’s Family is Suing the Assad Regime Over Her Death

by scormeciurilive Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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As the Syrian government launched a scorched-earth siege of Homs in early 2012, the American war reporter Marie Colvin holed up in a clandestine media center inside the city, sending out live broadcasts on the attack’s heavy civilian casualties. “There are rockets, shells, tank shells, anti-aircraft being fired in parallel lines into the city,” she said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the pre-dawn hours of February 22, 2012. “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

It was Colvin’s last call to CNN. Later that morning, the Syrian military fired directly at the makeshift media center. Using a targeting method called “bracketing,” rockets and mortars landed on each side of the center, the rounds inching closer until eventually, a rocket struck outside the front door as Colvin and her colleagues attempted to evacuate. Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed immediately, and shrapnel and debris severely injured the French reporter Edith Bouvier and Colvin’s colleagues, Paul Conroy and Wael al-Omar.

At the time, the Syrian Information Ministry said that the government was unaware that Colvin and Ochlik were in the country. However, a federal lawsuit filed over the weekend on behalf of Colvin’s family alleges that the Syrian government targeted the media center “with premeditation” to silence Colvin and other media critics of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The civil complaint claims that Colvin was deliberately assassinated by high-ranking officials within the Assad government. “Marie Colvin was killed for exposing the Assad regime’s slaughter of innocent civilians to the world,” said attorney Scott Gilmore of the Center for Justice and Accountability, which is representing her family, in a statement. “The regime wanted to wage a war without witness against the democratic opposition. To do that, they needed to neutralize the media.”

The case, which is the result of a three-year investigation that draws on captured government documents and statements from defectors, seeks unspecified financial damages from the Syrian government. The suit alleges that Syrian intelligence officers got a tip that foreign reporters were staying at the media center in Homs and tried intercept Colvin’s broadcast satellite signal. After pinpointing her location, Syrian forces shelled her position with artillery strikes, the complaint states.

Colvin, who was 56 at the time of her death, had a reputation for courageousness while covering some the world’s most violent conflicts over the two decades that she reported for the London-based Sunday Times. She wore an eye patch after suffering an injury in an explosion while covering Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2001.

Her family’s suit is the first case yet that aims to hold the Assad regime responsible for war crimes. It was filed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a relatively obscure federal law that allows Americans to sue nations that are designated as sponsors of terrorism. “It’s very hard to hold a foreign state accountable for war crimes,” says Dixon Osburn, the executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. But with the Colvin case, says Osburn, “we had the jurisdictional perfect storm of being able to have the plaintiff and defendant that both fit the statute.”

Previously, FSIA has been invoked against the Vatican in cases involving clergy sexual abuse. It also protected Saudi Arabia when families and victims of the 9/11 attacks filed a lawsuit alleging that Saudi leaders had financed Al Qaeda. In 1980, plaintiffs used FSIA to successfully sue the government of Chile for the assassination of its former ambassador to the United States, and in 1992, the act was cited in a torture suit against Argentina.

“The Colvin family recognizes that they’re in a unique position to bring this lawsuit, and there are so many others who have lost sons and daughters who don’t have the same kind of opportunity,” says Osburn. “The hope is to provide some voice about what’s happening in Syria, about what happened at the siege of Homs, and to shed light on the atrocities that have been committed.”

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A War Reporter’s Family is Suing the Assad Regime Over Her Death

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Alleged Killer of British MP Jo Cox Had Ties to a Neo-Nazi Party

by MarshaBracewell Posted on June 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jo Cox, a member of Britain’s parliament and a “rising star” in the Labour Party, was shot and stabbed to death on Thursday. According to eyewitnesses, the alleged killer, Thomas Mair, shouted “Britain first” as he attacked Cox, a possible reference to the country’s far-right nationalist party. Now, receipts and invoices have emerged connecting Mair to the US-based, neo-Nazi National Alliance, as well.

According to records published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mair was a longstanding supporter of the group, and purchased literature and periodicals from National Vanguard Books, the Alliance’s publishing arm. The receipts, which date as far back as the 1990s, show Mair spent hundreds of dollars on titles ranging from “Ich Kampfe,” an illustrated handbook of the Nazi Party, to the “Improvised Munitions Handbook,” which furnishes DIY instructions on how to build, among other things, a “pipe-pistol for .38 caliber ammunition” out of household items. The National Alliance’s political ideology calls for the eradication of Jews and the creation of an all white homeland.

Courtesy SPLC

The extent of Mair’s allegiances with white nationalist groups continues to come to light. The Telegraph reported shortly after the attack that Mair was a subscriber to S.A. Patriot, a South African magazine published by the pro-apartheid White Rhino club. The Telegraph cites a 2006 blog post that names Mair as one of the publications earliest subscribers.

Cox was known for her extensive work with Oxfam, her humanitarian advocacy for Syria, and her opposition of Britain leaving the European Union.

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Alleged Killer of British MP Jo Cox Had Ties to a Neo-Nazi Party

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Kansas Becomes the Latest State To Freak Out Over Syrian Refugees

by IssacG42rrwyqu Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback announced on Tuesday that Kansas is withdrawing from the federal government’s refugee resettlement program over concerns that Syrian refugees could be security threats.

“Because the federal government has failed to provide adequate assurances regarding refugees it is settling in Kansas, we have no option but to end our cooperation with and participation in the federal refugee resettlement program,” Brownback said in a press release.

Brownback had already issued an executive order in November stating that “no department, commission, board, or agency of the government of the State of Kansas shall aid, cooperate with, or assist in any way the relocation of refugees from Syria to the State of Kansas.” Tuesday’s announcement would apply to refugees from any country. But while the move sounds drastic, it’s mostly a symbolic act that will have little on-the-ground impact for refugees or public safety.

For one, pulling out of the federal resettlement program doesn’t mean refugees won’t be allowed to live in Kansas. While Indiana and other states have tried to bar Syrians from entering their borders, they aren’t actually able to do so. Like any other visa holders, refugees are able to go anywhere the United States they’d like. It also doesn’t mean that support for refugees who are currently living in Kansas or may move there will dry up. The funds that state agencies use for refugee aid are almost entirely federal money, and the Department of Health and Human Services retains control over the funds even if state employees or agencies don’t take part. In those cases, Health and Human Services simply appoints another organization to administer the money. “This is the situation in some other states, usually because their resettlement program is very small,” says Stacie Blake, the director of government and community relations at the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, one of the nonprofit groups that resettles refugees. “The money is not ‘lost.'”

According to data from the State Department, only five Syrians have settled in Kansas since October of last year.

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Kansas Becomes the Latest State To Freak Out Over Syrian Refugees

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Hillary Clinton Really Loves Military Intervention

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s what’s in the New York Times Magazine this week:

How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk

But…no. This piece doesn’t really tell us how Hillary became a hawk—and that’s too bad. It would be genuinely interesting to get some insight into how (or if) her views have evolved over time and what motivates them. Still, even if he doesn’t really tell us why Hillary is so hawkish, Mark Landler makes it very, very clear that she is, indeed, a very sincere hawk:

Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

For all intents and purposes, Landler says that Hillary has been the most hawkish person in the room in almost literally every case where she was in the room in the first place. For example:

Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea….Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier.

….After 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.

….Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues….Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan….The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East.

….Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did….He advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.

….The Afghan troop debate….Her unstinting support of General McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option….“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates says….“She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.”

And Landler doesn’t even mention Libya, perhaps because the Times already investigated her role at length a couple of months ago. It’s hardly necessary, though. Taken as a whole, this is a portrait of a would-be president who (a) fundamentally believes in displays of force, (b) is eager to give the military everything they ask for, and (c) doesn’t believe that military intervention is a last resort, no matter what she might say in public.

If anything worries me about Hillary Clinton, this is it. It’s not so much that she’s more hawkish than me, it’s the fact that events of the past 15 years don’t seem to have affected her views at all. How is that possible? And yet, our failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere apparently haven’t given her the slightest pause about the effectiveness of military force in the Middle East. Quite the opposite: the sense I get from Landler’s piece is that she continues to think all of these engagements would have turned out better if only we’d used more military power. I find it hard to understand how an intelligent, well-briefed person could continue to believe this, and that in turn makes me wonder just exactly what motivates Hillary’s worldview.

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Hillary Clinton Really Loves Military Intervention

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following the terrorist attacks at a subway station and airport in Brussels on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz renewed their calls for Syrian refugees and other immigrants to be banned from entering the United States.

“We need to immediately halt the president’s ill-advised plan to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees,” Cruz said during a Tuesday press conference in Washington, DC. “Our vetting programs are woefully insufficient.”

“I would close up our borders,” Trump said on Fox News. “Look at Brussels, look at Paris.”

This time, they may have some backing in Congress. After the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, more than 30 states mounted efforts to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their communities—issuing executive orders, proposing state-level legislation, and even filing lawsuits. These efforts failed because the Constitution mandates that immigration policy be set by the federal government. Now Congress is considering a bill that would tweak federal law to make this sort of refugee obstructionism a whole lot easier.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved the Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act, paving the way for a vote on the House floor. The bill, co-authored by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), would give state and local governments the opportunity to reject the resettlement of refugees in their communities—as was proposed by more than half of states after Paris—and it would shift the responsibility from the president to Congress of setting an annual ceiling on the number of refugees. The ceiling is currently at 85,000 refugees, after a September 2015 order from President Barack Obama, but Congress could set it as low as 60,000 refugees and block the president from raising it without congressional approval. In September 2015, Obama pledged that the United States would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016.

The measure would also allow “recurrent background security checks” of US refugees, a provision that critics say amounts to “continual surveillance” of refugees. It would also delay how soon refugees can obtain their permanent green cards—changing it from one year after their arrival to three years. The bill also requires that the Department of Homeland Security prioritize claims from refugees who fear persecution based on their religion, as opposed to those who face persecution due to other circumstances, like their race, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. Religious persecution would be an unlikely claim for most Syrian refugees coming to the United States: the vast majority of them are Muslim, and Sunni Muslims are Syria’s religious majority. This is one way the bill “clearly discriminates against Muslims as the intended target,” said the Rev. John McCullough, president of the Church World Service, on a press call with reporters last week.

In advance of the House Judiciary Committee vote last week, 234 organizations—including the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—sent a letter to Congress opposing the legislation. They noted “the current vetting process for refugees is incredibly rigorous and includes screening by U.S. federal law enforcement and national security agencies.” Giving state and local governments a veto on refugee resettlement, they wrote, wouldn’t enhance security and would instead “codify discrimination against refugees.” They concluded: “It is simply un-American to treat persecuted individuals, who want nothing more than to start a new life in safe and welcoming communities, as criminals.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Labrador, a former immigration lawyer, is convinced that current vetting processes aren’t sufficient for screening refugees from Syria. “Compared to countries where US intelligence has strong footing, many current refugees are coming from failed states such as Syria, where there is very little US intelligence presence,” he said when introducing the bill before the House Judiciary Committee last week. “The simple fact is that we do not know who these people truly are.”

If the bill reaches the Senate, it will face an uphill battle. Following the Paris attacks in November 2015, the House passed another piece of legislation that would have effectively halted the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. In January, the Senate blocked the measure.

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

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