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    Senior Member European Knight's Avatar
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    Syria conflict: Massive power blackout across country

    3 March 2016 Middle East

    Syria has suffered a massive power blackout across the country due to "unknown reasons", state media said.

    Officials were cited as saying power had been cut in all provinces and teams were trying to determine the cause.

    The electricity ministry said power was being restored and service would resume by midnight (22:00 GMT), TV reported.

    In most parts of war-torn Syria, electricity is already available only two to four hours a day, if at all. However, nationwide blackouts are rare.

    Meanwhile, the UN's special envoy said a partial truce that began on Saturday was holding but remained fragile.

    Staffan de Mistura told reporters in Geneva that violence had been "greatly reduced", despite incidents in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Latakia and Damascus. "Success is not guaranteed but progress is visible," he added.

    Both the opposition and the government have accused each other of violating the cessation of hostilities agreement brokered by the US and Russia, which does not include the jihadist groups Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra Front.

    Mr de Mistura also said that while he planned to reconvene talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict in Syria next Wednesday, their format was flexible and some parties might turn up days later.

    UN humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said progress had been made in getting aid to besieged areas of Syria, and that there would be further attempts at air-drops of aid over the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, where 200,000 people are surrounded by IS militants, within days or weeks.

    Internet services 'halted'

    The official Sana news agency cited a source at the ministry of electricity as confirming that "there is a power cut in all provinces of Syria".

    "Engineers and technicians are working on finding out why this sudden power cut happened in order to fix it promptly and restore electricity in the next few hours," the source added.

    The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that monitors the Syrian conflict through a network of sources, also reported power cuts in the "vast majority" of provinces, while Damascus residents told the AFP news agency that there had been a cut in the capital since 13:00 (11:00 GMT).

    Sana also quoted the state-owned Syrian Telecommunication Establishment as saying internet services were partially halted "as a result of sudden damage to one of the network hubs and repair teams have been sent to fix it".

    The government has blamed previous blackouts on rebel attacks, while the UN has also noted that access to electricity has been restricted as a weapon of war.

    Hospital attacks

    Earlier on Thursday, Amnesty International said Russian and Syrian government forces appeared to have been deliberately and systematically targeting health facilities in the northern province of Aleppo in the past 12 weeks.

    The human rights group reported that it had gathered "compelling evidence" of at least six deliberate attacks on hospitals, medical centres and clinics.

    They killed three civilians, including one medical worker, and injured 44 others.

    Amnesty said the attacks, which it said were flagrant violations of international humanitarian law, appeared to be aimed at paving the way for government ground forces to advance in the weeks before the cessation of hostilities took effect.

    "Hospitals, water and electricity are always the first to be attacked. Once that happens, people no longer have services to survive," one doctor in the town of Anadan was quoted as saying.

    Syria conflict: Massive power blackout across country - BBC News



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    Museum of Lost Objects: The Lion of al-Lat

    Two thousand years ago a statue of a lion watched over a temple in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. More recently, after being excavated in the 1970s, it became an emblem of the city and a favourite with tourists. But it was one of the first things IS militants destroyed when they moved in last year.

    It's said that there are more than 300 words for lion in Arabic. That's a measure of the importance of the lion in the history of the Middle East. For Bedouin tribes, the lion represented the biggest danger in the wild - until the last one in the region died, some time in the 19th Century.

    The animal was feared and admired and this must explain why a statue of a lion twice as high as a human being, weighing 15 tonnes, was fashioned by artists in ancient Palmyra.

    With spiralling, somewhat loopy eyes, and thick whiskers swept back angrily along its cheek bones, the lion was clearly a fighter, but it was also a lover. In between its legs, it held a horned antelope. The antelope stretched a delicate hoof over the lion's monstrous paws, and perhaps it was safe. The lion was a symbol of protection - it was both marking and protecting the entrance to the temple.

    But no-one could protect the lion when IS arrived and wrecked it in May 2015.

    "It was a real shock, because you know, in a way, it was our lion," says Polish archaeologist Michal Gawlikowski, whose team unearthed it in 1977.

    Museum of Lost Objects: The Lion of al-Lat - BBC News






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