I have never seen so much death in my whole life,� she said, describing people breaking down the doors of houses to find everybody inside dead. Doctors in the few medical centres wept as they vainly tried to treat gas victims with the few medicines they had. She gave a compelling, passionate, wholly believable account of what had happened.
But violent hostility to Shia does not mean that the Salafi-jihadists approve of Sunni or Western states. So far the jihadists have largely targeted Shia or related sects in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan, where they are numerous, and in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia where they are a small minority.
This strategy is working but at a snail�s pace, and it will leave much of Syria in ruins.
Syria is a land of checkpoints, blockades and sieges, in conducting which the government seals off, bombards but does not storm rebel-held enclaves unless they control important supply routes. Walls still standing are so full of small holes from machine-gun fire that they look as if giant woodworms have been eating into the concrete.
Ominously for the Saudi state, jihadist social media has begun to attack the Saudi royal family. There is a picture of King Abdullah giving a medal to President George W Bush, captioned: �Medal for invading two Islamic countries.�
Pilloried in the West for their sectarian ferocity, these jihadists were often welcomed by local people for restoring law and order after the looting and banditry of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), the loose umbrella group to which at one time 1,200 rebel bands owed nominal allegiance. Ideologically, there was not much difference between them and Ahrar al-Sham or the Army of Islam, which also seeks a theocratic Sunni state under Sharia law.
Syria is now like Lebanon during the 15-year-long civil war between 1975 and 1990. I was recently in Homs, once a city known for its vibrant diversity but now full of �ghost neighbourhoods� where all the buildings are abandoned, smashed by shellfire or bombs.
The ICG conceded that there was �an Islamist undercurrent to the uprising� but it was not the main motivation for the peaceful protests that were mutating into military conflict. Cheap imports, often from Turkey, forced small manufacturers out of business and helped to pauperise the urban working class. The state was in contact with whole areas of life in Syria solely through corrupt and predatory security services.
Its most rigorous adherents regard Shia and Sufis as non-believers and polytheists. Those worshipping at shrines or praying at the graves of holy men are denounced as apostates or �takfiri�, against whom it is legitimate to use violence. They need to stop the preaching of hate from so many satellite stations, and not allow a free ride for their preachers of hate on the social media.�
The Saudi educational and judicial system recognises only Wahhabism, the puritanical and literalist version of Islam as interpreted by Abdul Wahab in the 18th century.
Film of atrocities by the other side are a driving force for sectarian and political hatred, although some of these are fabricated. Observers of rebels in Syria notice that they spend much of their time on the internet, from which they get their vision of what is happening (the same is true of pro-government civilians).
Aleppo, once the largest city in the country, is mostly depopulated.
So, as the Syrian army advances behind a barrage of barrel bombs in Aleppo, its troops are mostly fighting the official al-Qa�ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham, backed by Qatar and Turkey. Government success strengthens the jihadists because they have a hard core of fighters who will never surrender. Government forces are advancing but are overstretched and cannot reconquer northern and eastern Syria unless Turkey shuts its 500-mile-long border.
One picture shows seven shelves, as if in a shop, but when you look closely you see that each shelf carries a different type of grenade.
The caption reads: �Anbar�s mujahedeen pharmacy for Shia.� More sophisticated are appeals for money for jihadi fighters by Sunni clergy and politicians, one raising $2,500 (�1,500) for every fighter sent to Syria and claiming to send 12,000 fighters to the country.
The jihadists may yearn for a return to the norms of early Islam, but their skills in using modern communications and the internet are well ahead of most political movements in the world. Looking at a selection of online posters and photos, what is striking is not only their violence and sectarianism but also the professionalism with which they are produced.
Syria was always a less coherent society than it looked to outside observers, and its divisions were not just along religious lines. In July 2011, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote in a report: �The Syrian authorities claim they are fighting a foreign-sponsored, Islamist conspiracy, when for most part they have been waging war against their original social constituency. There is some truth in this, but if the opposition�s aim was to trap the government into a counter-productive punitive response, it succeeded beyond its dreams.
A reason for this failure is that, in seeking to disrupt the secret infrastructure of jihadists, security services neglect the public-support systems of the movements which are as important as their covert backing. The ideas, actions and aims of fundamentalist Sunni jihadists are broadcast daily through satellite television stations, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. n�Half of Jihad is Media� is one slogan posted on a jihadist website, which, taking media in its broadest sense, is wholly correct.
�I still have things I want to do to prove myself and the day-to-day is blimmin� tough enough in an era of cheap supermarket food and tight margins,� he says, �but I do feel for Will because opportunities for him to have an enterprise of his own on the farm are hard to come by.�
Like most farmers� children, Will doesn�t earn a salary, but rather something David describes as �more than pocket money�. He pays no rent and like his father �loves the life�, but doesn�t want to be living at home when he�s 30.
Crucial to making peace is bringing an end to the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran which is intertwined with the vicious conflict between Shia and Sunni. Russia and the US need to be at one in ending the war, as they briefly seemed to be at the end of last year.
And, according to a new report, this reticence on the delicate issue of �succession� is just one of the problems faced by young farmers trying to break into what they are told is a recovering industry with an �optimistic and positive� outlook. Sadly, for his 23-year-old son Will, discussing exactly how the 160-acre farm will pass down the generations isn�t a high priority.
Bodies were being tipped, 15 to 20 at a time, into mass graves. But on 8 December, gunmen burst into her office in Douma and kidnapped her, along with her husband, Wael Hamada, and two civil rights activists, Samira al-Khalili, a lawyer, and Nazem al-Hamadi, a poet. She contemptuously dismissed any idea that the rebels might be behind the use of sarin, asking: �Do you think we are crazy people that we would kill our own children?�
Ms Zaitouneh, 36, had been defending political prisoners for a dozen years and was the sort of credible advocate that won the Syrian opposition so much international support in its first years.
When the al-Khalifa royal family crushed pro-democracy protests by the Shia majority in Bahrain in 2011, the first act of the security forces was to destroy several dozen mosques, shrines and graves of Shia holy men, on the grounds that they had not received the correct building permits.
Syrians have to choose between a violent dictatorship in which power is monopolised by the presidency and brutish security services, and an opposition that shoots children in the face for minor blasphemy and sends pictures of decapitated soldiers to their parents.
Another more menacing photo on a Twitter account is taken in the back of a pick-up truck. Today the Levant and tomorrow al-Qurayat and Arrar [two cities in northern Saudi Arabia].�
But the propaganda tap cannot be switched off so abruptly because the jihadist cause has too many genuine adherents in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. It shows armed and masked fighters and the caption reads: �With God�s will we�ll enter the Arabia Peninsula like this. Saudi second thoughts have come too late because jihadist movements such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) and Jabhat al-Nusra are well-established and have their own revenues.
READ MORE:PART 4: SYRIA'S SECULAR UPRISING IS HIJACKED BY JIHADISTSPART 3: THE SUNNI REVOLT IN SYRIA HAS GIVEN AL-QA'IDA MORE POWERPART 2: IS SAUDI ARABIA REGRETTING ITS SUPPORT FOR TERRORISMPART 1: WHY THE 'GLOBAL WAR' ON TERROR WENT WRONGHow far will the flood of Salafi-jihadist propaganda, most of which emanates from or is paid for by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, be restrained by the recent Saudi turn against the jihadists?
While, like all prisoners they are likely to say what their captors want them to say, their accounts in interviews on Iraqi television ring true. There is additional evidence about the impact of satellite television and jihadist websites from prisoners taken in Iraq.
The group suspected of being behind the kidnapping is the Saudi-backed Army of Islam, although it denies being involved. Ms al-Khalili�s husband, Yassin al-Hajj Saleh, told the online publication al-Monitor: �Razan and Samira were part of a national inclusive secular movement and this led them to collide with the Islamist factions, who are inclined towards despotism.� None of the four has been heard from since.
There is no doubt that well-financed Wahhabi propaganda has contributed to the deepening and increasingly violent struggle between Sunni and Shia. A study published last year by the directorate-general for external policies of the European Parliament is called �The involvement of Salafism/Wahhabism in the support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world�.Just after the sarin poison gas attacks on rebel-held districts of Damascus in August last year, I appeared on an American television programme with Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation Centre, who was speaking via Skype from the opposition stronghold of Douma in East Damascus.
And despite the National Farmers Union trumpeting economic growth in the sector of 54 per cent between 2008 and 2012, he is still worried about the future. nWill admits that he is still young, but says the survey �rings true�. There is little sign, though, that many of them are willing to hand over the keys to the combine harvester just yet. One of the biggest issues for tenant and landowning farmers is succession, with the age of the average British farmer at older than 50.
In 24 hours, a million pounds was raised. Why not donate instead?While many people thought that a close-up was sufficient action, some also shared pictures of their receipt from donating to Cancer Research. Read more: The �no makeup selfie� craze seems like narcissism masked as charity.
For now, though, the word and deed are at their peak.
These were the �No Make-Up Selfies�, a viral outbreak in which women took bare-faced photographs of themselves, posted them on Facebook and then nominated various other female friends to follow suit. This week there was a new surge, this time of more bashful self-portraits, many taken first thing in the morning or last thing at night, often featuring dressing gowns and duvets. The nation is drowning in duck faces and artfully angled cheekbones. Like Neknominate, but instead of ordering your friends, via smartphone, to drink a potentially fatal pint of vodka and Lambrini, you order them, via smartphone, to take the enormous social risk of appearing online without make-up.
He speaks as if it was matter of course that his own group, al-Ahfad, was funded by one or other of the Gulf monarchies: �At the beginning of the Syrian revolution, the file was handled by Qatar.
The degree to which the armed opposition at the end of 2013 was under the thumb of foreign backers is well illustrated by the confessions of Saddam al-Jamal, a brigade leader in the Ahfad al-Rasoul Brigade and the former FSA commander in eastern Syria. In Afghanistan in the 1990s the iron rule of the Taliban had at first been welcomed by many for the same reason.
A fascinating interview with Jamal, conducted by Isis and translated by the Brown Moses blog, was recorded after he had defected to Isis and appears to be reliable, ignoring his self-serving denunciations of the un-Islamic actions of his former FSA associates.
The Islamic State sent a suicide bomber who killed Abdullah Muhammad al-Muhaysani, the official al-Qa�ida representative in Syria, and also a leader of Ahrar al-Sham (evidence of how al-Qa�ida has links at different levels to jihadi organisations with which it is not formally associated).
The third shows a group of Iraqi soldiers holding a regimental banner, but the words on it have been changed to make them offensive to Sunni: �God curse Omar and Abu Bakr� (two early Sunni leaders). The second picture shows two armed men beside two bodies, identified by the caption as members of the anti-al-Qa�ida Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq�s Salah ad-Din province.
By late 2013, the war was stalemated and the armed opposition was dominated by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), the former official al-Qa�ida affiliate now displaced by Jabhat al-Nusra. Compare this analysis of the situation in the summer of 2011 with that two and a half years later.
And, as David explains, �the recession meant people put their money in farmland and sent rent for farmers soaring�. There is no easy way ahead, though, because the price of farmland is at a record high after rising 11 per cent to �6,882 per acre in 2013, according to the Knight Frank farmland index.
n�When everyone else was studying for their GCSE exams,� James says, �I was spreading slurry on the field, milking cows and driving tractors. After support from other farmers online and his local Young Farmers Club in Land�s End, James is now working at a nearby farm and rebuilding his life. We had to sell.�
At one stage, it was so bad, with the third generation Cornish farm sitting empty of cattle for the first time, that James parked on the edge of a cliff and considered driving off. But the farm was losing money hand over fist. That was the case for James Hosking�s family, who had to sell their dairy herd three years ago, amid plummeting milk prices and a series of family tragedies that left the 21-year-old suffering from depression and even contemplating suicide.
This bleak picture of young people worried about the future, poor pay and access to land is painted by the latest report from National Federation of Young Farmer�s Clubs (NFYFC), one of the largest youth organisations in the country. Half of young farmers questioned are reportedly so worried that they seriously doubt their chances of forging a career in farming.But, given the spectacular expansion of such groups over the past 12 and a half years, the efforts by these institutions are demonstrably failing. At the same time, the US Treasury has made great efforts to detect and block financial donations to al-Qa�ida-type movements across the world.
Today�s ruling elite has forgotten its roots.�
In the four years of drought before 2011, the United Nations noted that up to three million Syrian farmers had been pushed into �extreme poverty� and fled the countryside to squat in shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities. Middle-class salaries could not keep up with inflation. When it first came to power, the Assad regime embodied the neglected countryside, its peasants and exploited underclass.
If the millions of patients who suffered from diabetes, had a heart condition, or breathing problem could be cared for in the same way the savings could be, in theory, enormous. However, Parkinson's is just one of the less common long-term conditions. The Dutch researchers estimated that ParkinsonNet has saved up to 20m euros: a small amount in the context of the NHS' budget, which exceeds �100bn.
Belfies, vadering, planking - most online photo crazes are just frivolous trends that are unlikely to be taken seriously, and even less likely to spark heartfelt debate.
But now, #nomakeupselfie is dividing the internet.
Since the beginning of the week, newsfeeds on social media websites have been littered with photos of women without even a stroke of mascara on to raise awareness in support of Cancer Research UK.
In the internet age, the best way to do that, is to have a doctor on a computer, signed in to a network of patients in the same way we are connected to our Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
In the British Medical Journal today, researchers from the Netherlands have reported on the success of a scheme which is being hailed as a trailblazer for the era of telehealth.
nInterestingly though, there�s no shortage of young farmers trying to join the industry, with applications to the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire up 40 per cent compared with 2012, while other colleges and Young Farmers Clubs are reporting a similar boom. The farm still has debts and Will can�t even get a credit card, so a deposit on a home is out of the question.
These rants could be dismissed as being addressed to a small, fanatical audience, but the numbers of viewers show them to be immensely popular. Muhammad Ali Haji, of the Centre for Academic Shia Studies, points out that �the 3.9 million Saudi Facebook users use it much more than in the US or UK�.
The jihadist civil war has made life easier for the government militarily, since its enemies are busy killing each other, but it does not have the resources to eliminate them. In any case, Jabhat al-Nusra has always sought mediation with Isis and does not want a fight to the finish.
It is not just Twitter and Facebook accounts that are used but two television stations, Safa and Wesal, based in Egypt but reportedly financed from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, with journalists and commentators who are vocally hostile to the Shia. Wesal TV broadcasts in five languages: Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Indonesian and Hausa.
Given that any act of charity that does not involve simply going to a website and quietly typing in a credit card number is an act of vanity to some extent, the no make-up selfie is probably the vacant high point of modern giving. Cancer Research did not come up with the selfie campaign, but it was probably only a matter of time.
It is not enough to do good; one must be seen to be doing good. It used to be the lone privilege of celebrities on Comic Relief to show the world how they were doing their bit; now everyone can share their charitable work, whether it is growing a moustache or running a marathon. Point, click, hashtag, share, feel good.
This doesn�t surprise Poul Christensen, president of the NFYFC. I�ve never believed that, rather there�s not enough old buggers who want to get out of it. For a long time there�s been a plaintive cry that there are not enough youngsters wanting to come into farming,� he says.
I�ve been to farms where 50-year-old sons are still working for their fathers, but have never even signed a business cheque.�
Christensen also points out that the recent farming boom that the NFU has talked up �hasn�t filtered through to many smaller, traditional farmers�.
ParkinsonNet is a dedicated website which links Dutch Parkinson's disease sufferers with doctors and nurses who specialise in their disease. The professionals communicate and collaborate on the website, where patients can also find information about treatment, about the professionals themselves and what they do and can also, if they want, request an at-home consultation via video link in their homes. It acts, in effect, like Facebook for Parkinson's patients.
It begins by saying: �Saudi Arabia has been a major source of financing to rebel and terrorist organisations since the 1980s.� It adds that Saudi Arabia it has given $10bn (�6bn) to promote the Wahhabi agenda and predicts that the �number of indoctrinated jihadi fighters� will increase.Since 9/11, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain�s GCHQ have justified their mass interception of their citizens� private communications by claiming that this helps them to identify �terrorists�.
If people would like to choose to support our work to beat cancer sooner, they can visit cruk.org." Carolan Davidge, director of communications at Cancer Research UK said in a statement: "The #nomakeupselfie Twitter trend isn't something Cancer Research UK started � but it's great to see so many people getting involved to help raise awareness of cancer amongst their friends and family.
A medical student in the US is auctioning her virginity online, having been inspired by the figures offered to Natalie Dylan, who received bids of $3.7 million dollars (�.2.2 million) for hers in 2009.
Raine's website includes detailed information about her and bidding details �There are truly all sorts of prostitutes (sadly many are very oppressed, but some like me are not) and lumping them all together and condemning them all equally serves no right purpose,� she explains on her website. She denies being concerned that her auction will be considered tantamount to prostitution, instead countering that �prostitute is a very simple and stigmatised label for a complex and diverse profession".
It is hard to argue with a sum like that. Imagine how much more might have been raised had the campaign not effectively excluded more than half of the population - most men, not to mention the women who go out bare-faced every day, some without even realising their bravery.
The country is beginning to move beyond �pilots� to �large scale� uses of remote consultations with doctors and therapists, he said. The answer is yes.�
In Scotland, a dedicated Centre for Telehealth and Telecare has been set up, with �patient-centred, at home care� a key part of the country's plans to �transform� the NHS by 2020.
�It�s always been my ambition to take over the family farm,� he says. Life on a family farm is non-stop, struggling to make it work, so it can be hard to find time.
I�ve studied new methods in sheep genetics and seen them in practice, but dad doesn�t seem to want to let me put them into practice.�
Will and his father have gone as far as discussing a partnership (during shouting matches in the sheep shed) but, as David explains, it is an emotionally charged issue, and planning what to do with the arable lamb and beef farm near Presteigne isn�t easy. And I went to Aberystwyth University to study agriculture, but it can be hard to bring up the subject with dad.
Not that people who slather it on should be made to feel guilty. It is up to individuals what they do or do not put on their face, but the notion that this choice is courageous, or useful, in this or any other context, is nonsense. And like The Sun�s �Check �em Tuesday� breast cancer campaign, which lately encouraged readers to �cop a feel of their boobs�, it titillates with women�s faces and bodies, while glossing over the unlovely reality of cancer.
Patients also appreciated being linked to genuine experts on their condition, rather than having to visit generalists and endure referrals and lengthy waits to see a specialist. The researchers concluded that the model could be used just as successfully by patients with other long-term conditions like diabetes and breathing problems.
But Cancer Research itself has said that while it is appreciative of the trend, it is not a campaign it orchestrated itself.
Some of the posts are dedicated to loved ones who have died from the disease, while others are taken by survivors supporting the charity. The bare faces are usually accompanied by the hastags #nomakeupselfie and #cancerawareness, as well as nominations for their friends to follow suit and continue the chain of photos.
Evidence presented by the researchers, from the Radboud University Medical Centre, suggests that the website �empowers patients, improves the quality of care, shifts care away from institutions and into the community and lowers healthcare costs.� Since it was introduced in 2004, ParkinsonNet has expanded into 66 regional networks and links nearly 3,000 professionals from 15 different disciplines to Parkinson's patients all over the Netherlands.
Awareness matters, but at this point it is money that makes the difference. And if equating breast cancer with cosmetics sounds banal, well, I didn�t start it. Or to put it another way, being aware of the latest must-have L�Or�al BB Cream is not the same as having enough cash in your wallet to go and buy it.
And just like that, the selfies took on a humanitarian hue. More than one in three people will develop some form of cancer during his or her lifetime. If it has not affected you physically, cancer will more than likely have affected you personally. In the UK, someone is diagnosed with cancer every two minutes. They became a means to raise awareness of cancer, the nominations spreading the word like an old-fashioned chain letter. nNot too much wrong with that, but �raising awareness� is a quaint concept.For anyone waiting to see their GP in today's cash-strapped NHS, and with doctors already working at full tilt to provide the universal healthcare we all depend upon, it seems like the realm of science fiction.
In taking his decision to come to Iraq to fight, he said, �I was deeply influenced by al-Jazeera TV channel�. Together with 13 other volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Yemen, he had no difficulty in making his way to Fallujah. Waleed bin Muhammad al-Hadi al-Masmoudi from Tunisia, the third-largest supplier of foreign jihadists to Syria, said he was a driver in his home country.
Both wholly reject other types of Islamic worship as well as non-Muslim beliefs. Isis has a tax system in Sunni parts of Iraq and both movements have control of oil wells in north-east Syria.
A deep-seated problem is that the Wahhabi variant of Islam, the creed which is at the heart of the Saudi state, is not so different from the ideology of al-Qa�ida-type groups.
A foreign journalist in a Syrian refugee camp in south-east Turkey noticed children watching a video of what was claimed to be Alawites cutting off the heads of Sunni prisoners with a chainsaw. He recognised the film as in fact coming from Mexico, where a drug lord had decapitated some of his rivals and posted a film of it to intimidate others.
�It's not about replacing face to face care with technology,� said Professor George Crooks, medical director of NHS 24, who has overall responsibility for the project. Technology can make face-to-face care more accessible: such as accessing specialist opinion remotely from remote rural or island communities.
In a population where more and more people, often the elderly, have long-term health problems such as heart disease, obesity, breathing problems or diabetes, the greater part of a doctor's work can be done in the home, advocates of telehealth say. But telehealth, bringing care into the patient's home, is now one of the buzzwords of the modern NHS.
England already has an online psychological therapy service operating in some parts of the country. Dr Martin McShane, NHS England director for long-term conditions told The Independent that the NHS in England was developing similar models of care for more conditions and called ParkinsonNet �a very clear signal of the potential� of telehealth.
Instead of modernising Syrian society in a progressive and democratic manner, the Salafi-jihadists want a return to the norms of early Islam and are prepared to fight a holy war to achieve this. Syria has descended into a nightmarish sectarian civil war as the government bombs its own cities as if they were enemy territory and the armed opposition is dominated by Salafi-jihadist fighters who slaughter Alawites and Christians simply because of their religion.
Why has the Syrian uprising, whose early supporters demanded that tyranny should be replaced by a secular, non-sectarian, law-bound and democratic state, so totally failed to achieve these aims?
Hate preachers, likewise, have enormous followings on YouTube. Another sermon entitled �Oh Syria, the victory is coming,� says President Bashar al-Assad is �seeking help from these Persians, the Shia, the traitors, the Shia criminals.� For instance, Sheikh Mohammad al-Zughbi in Egypt calls God to protect Egypt from �the criminal traitors and the criminal Shia,� as well as from the Jews and Crusaders.
They spread so rapidly because of over-reaction by state security forces firing on peaceful demonstrators, thereby enraging whole communities and provoking armed resistance. The government insists that protests were not as peaceful as they looked and from an early stage their forces came under armed attack. The first protests happened when they did because of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. The degenerate state of the Syrian revolution stems from the country�s deep political, religious and economic divisions before 2011 and the way in which these have since been exploited and exacerbated by foreign intervention.
Her reasons for deciding to lose her virginity in such a dramatic fashion are detailed in a biography, but she summarises them as: �money, the adventure, the eroticism, the scandal, the absurdity�.
�My primary motivation remains financial,� she admits, �and I can�t insult you by pretending otherwise.
�I have never viewed myself to be a materialistic person, at least no more than is natural, but the potential sums involved are too large to be dismissed.�
However, she also discusses the possibility of somehow "being led into the arms of a gentleman" in the form of the winning bidder, who Raine hopes will have "similar appreciation for these unique circumstances, and make my first time worthy of both the wait and lasting memory."
Thankfully, Will�s relationship with his father is �good, most of the time�, but many other sons (and increasingly daughters) aren�t so lucky and some are suffering from depression amid fears that they may never follow in the agricultural footsteps of their parents.
If you cherished this short article and you would like to receive much more data regarding gagner de l'argent kindly check out our site.