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Geopolitics

Syria: Fighting Intensifies In Aleppo, Turkey Closes Border

REUTERS, BBC NEWS, THE GUARDIAN (UK), HURRIYET (Turkey)

Worldcrunch

Troops loyal to Syrian president Bashar al- Assad converged on Aleppo on Wednesday as fighting between rebel and governmental forces intensified, signaling a shift of the uprising against the regime that began last year to a full-blown insurgency.

BBC News and Reuters reported that the regime is moving thousands of troops as well as armored vehicles away from the Turkish border to focus on Aleppo, a commercial hub and Syria's second city, where violent clashes broke out five days ago. Turkey sealed its border with Syria in response to worsening security conditions after several border checkpoints were captured by rebels earlier this week.

The Syrian regime appears to be consolidating its stretched out troops in an effort to concentrate on fighting insurgents in Aleppo and capital city Damascus, as the holy fasting month of Ramadan started last week.

Activists and residents who spoke with Reuters said gunship helicopters were firing missiles in Aleppo, where the fighting is now the heaviest after government forces repelled a rebel assault on Damascus.

This video published by the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights purports to show police headquarters in Aleppo set on fire by rebel forces. The BBC also reported that government fighter jets were strafing and bombing rebel positions in the city.

Hürriyet and Reuters reported that an official from the Turkish Customs and Trade Ministry announced that all border gates with Syria were closing on Wednesday. Only three were still open before the announcement. Trucking has become increasingly dangerous along the trade routes that link the two countries and the closed border could cripple Syria's economy. . Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has called for Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a senior regime official who defected earlier this month, offered to lead a transitional government in a video statement on Al Arabiya, according to The Guardian. "Allow me to serve Syria after President Bashar al-Assad's era. We must all unite to serve Syria and promote stability in the country, rebuilding a free and democratic Syria," he said.

The new head of the United Nations monitoring mission in Syria also arrived on Wednesday. The mission was extended for 30 days last week.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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