In support of the Syrian and Turkish National Armies, rallies across the countryside of Idlib and Aleppo

 'Popular demonstrations took place in separate areas in the north of Syria, in support of the military operations launched by the Syrian and Turkish national armies against the positions of the Assad régime in Idlib, Hama and Aleppo.

 Demonstrations took place in several cities and towns, most notably in the city of Sarmada and the town of Hazano north of Idlib, and the city of Al-Bab in the northern countryside of Aleppo; in support of Turkish intervention against the régime forces.

The demonstrators thanked the Turkish Army and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for support providing to the Syrians over the past years in confronting the Assad regime, and they also wished for the safety of Turkish soldiers who had come during the past days to attack the régime in Idlib.

 The Syrian and Turkish national armies launched Operation Spring Shield to force the Assad régime to retreat from the areas it had captured in the countryside of Idlib, Aleppo, and Hama. Over the past few days, the two armies were able to achieve broad progress and control over different cities and towns.'

Turkey’s Military Operation in Syria Exposes Former US President Obama’s Weakness

 'Turkey’s devastatingly effective exercise of military power in Syria’s Idlib province has not only provided instant relief to three million Syrian refugees who’ve been bombed mercilessly by Russian warplanes, and stalked by Assad régime forces and Iranian militias on the ground, it has also exposed former US President Barack Obama’s timidity in not enforcing his famed “red line.” Which begs the question: how many lives might have been saved with minimal international military intervention.

 “We have been very clear to the Assad régime,” President Barack Obama said in August 2012, “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

 A year later, Assad called Obama’s bluff in using chemical weapons, specifically sarin gas, to kill more than 1,400 non-combatants in Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Video images of young children, women, and men wreathing on the ground in convulsive fits before eventually choking to death on their own vomit were viewed almost instantaneously by a distraught and shocked global audience.



 If there was ever an ethical justification for the United Nations to invoke a military intervention on the basis of Responsibility-to-Protect (R2P), then the gassing deaths of innocents was most definitively it, but Russia’s seat on the Security Council would never have allowed that to happen. There’s no doubt Syria now ranks as one of the UN’s most humiliating and consequential failures to halt and prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

 Nevertheless, the leader of the world’s sole military superpower had laid bare his “red line.” In no circumstances would the US accept the use of chemical weapons, according to then President Obama, but when the moment came to deliver on his promised threat, he blinked, took a step back and then deflected responsibility to the opposition party controlled Congress, where he knew the request for military force would be denied. The bill died on the floor of the House without coming to a vote.

 There’s little doubt that it was the American public’s opposition to armed intervention, rather than principled or military considerations that was to blame for Obama allowing the Syrian dictator to get away with genocide-scale mass murder. What the besieged Syrian people received instead was further global apathy in the form of excuses, and more bombs and bullets raining down upon them by Russian warplanes and mercenaries.

 In his book, “The World as It Is,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former national security advisor, claims Obama chose against using force to punish Assad, arguing that Syrian air defenses were far too formidable and couldn’t be taken out without a massive US ground force providing support on the ground, and that the Russian military would counter in a way that would risk the outbreak of World War Three.

 Turkey’s successful and punishing military raids in Idlib over the weekend, however, have made a mockery of these assertions and deflections, given Turkish armed drones wiped out a multitude of Syrian air defense systems and fighter jets easily and without cost or consequence within a mere 72-hour period.

 Since the operation began on February 28, Turkey’s military assets have killed 2,212 Assad régime soldiers, and destroyed three Syrian air defense systems, eight helicopters, 103 tanks, and 72 guns/howitzers, according to Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar.

 “We have no intention to confront Russia, but we want to stop the Assad régime’s massacre of civilians. Our target is only régime forces and elements attacking our troops,” he added.



 Syrian rebel groups have taken back more than a dozen towns they had surrendered since Assad and Putin stepped up their bombing campaign on Idlib in December. More significantly, Russia has shown no sign whatsoever that it has any desire to confront or even tangle with Turkey’s Air Force, which makes a further mockery of those, including Obama, that thought enforcing a no-fly zone over Idlib would lead to another world war.

 As for the régime’s so-called “formidable defenses,” Turkish drones and jets have so overwhelmed the Syrian Army that it has resorted, out of sheer desperation, to burning car tires in strategic locations to blind Turkish satellite navigation systems and pilots. Car tires! It would be a joke were it not for the catastrophic loss of lives Assad’s war of choice has wrought on his people.

 While one may question Turkey’s actual motives for intervening in Syria, what one cannot do is question its effectiveness in protecting three million mostly Sunni Syrians from being ethnically cleansed by Assad’s death squads and sectarian militias. For the first time in months, Assad-Russian warplanes are not bombing schools, hospitals, bakeries, markets, and mosques in Idlib.

 “Turkish action now offers an opportunity – albeit late in the day – to try to correct mistakes of 2013 to the present, by getting a wider coalition behind an effort to disrupt [the] Assad/Russia military strategy, change calculations and open chance for coerced diplomatic negotiation,” tweeted former British diplomat Reza Afshar.

 Afshar had resigned from his role as coordinator of UK policy on Syria after the British parliament “killed the momentum for action globally,” which he calls the “worst foreign policy decision of our generation.”

 The cost of inaction, and by extension Obama’s pusillanimity, can be measured in upwards of one million dead Syrians, more than six million refugees alongside six million internally displaced people, further chemical weapons attacks, and the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and far-right political parties throughout the Western world—both of whom have leveraged Islamophobia for their respective gains.

 That it has taken almost nine years for Assad’s victims to become the beneficiaries of meaningful and effective international intervention should shame us all, including a former US president.'

DePaul developer reflects on role in Syrian revolution

 'Emad Mahou spends his days writing code and building tools for the university’s various digital interfaces as a software engineer at DePaul. But nine years ago this month, he was building something very different.

 In March 2011, Mahou was building a grassroots movement that helped incite the near-decade of civil war in his home country of Syria. Instead of navigating the halls of DePaul’s administrative offices, he was navigating the streets of Damascus while trying to dodge the wrath of President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces.

 “When I was 23, I was fighting in Syria for freedom. I was leading the revolution 2011, but today I have to do a login for a trustee,” he said.

 Mahou was born in Lebanon in 1989 to a Lebanese mother and Syrian father. His family immigrated to Syria when he was 6, settling down just outside of Syria’s capital, Damascus. Though he began studying architecture at the University of Damascus when he was 20, he never got to finish his degree. Civilian results — which would later be known as the Arab Spring — began three years later in Tunisia and Egypt, forcing the countries’ respective leaders to step down.

 As these unprecedented events unfolded, Mahou said he felt it was time to force a change in Syria.

 Hafez Al-Assad ruled Syria from 1970 until 2000 when he was succeeded by his son, Bashar. Hafez had ruled Syria oppressively, and there was hope the younger Al-Assad would be more humane. However, in the 11 years after his tenure began, Bashar cultivated a reputation as an autocrat just as, if not more, unsparing as his late father.

 He impeded any democratic processes that might result in his removal from office and reared brutality by preventing dissidents from leaving the country, torturing and murdering them.



 Dissatisfaction with the authoritarian leadership, mixed with economic tensions exacerbated by climate-induced displacement and lack of resources, bred fertile ground for Syrians to spark a revolution.

 Political dissent has always been one of Mahou’s guiding principles. He said his father originally left Syria for Lebanon after its regime targeted him for his opposition to it.

 Mahou began organizing by creating a Facebook page titled “The Syrian Revolution Against Assad.” He set up a meeting in February; no one showed up. Then another, with the same result. Finally, on March 15, 2011, about 25 men and women joined him at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. They chanted tunes of protest in the mosque, then trickled outside and marched down the Ottoman-era bazaar that served as a hub of commerce and socialization in the city.

 “Everybody was silent. You could only hear our voices. Everybody was scared to death,” Mahou said. “That’s the most amazing kind of fear that can be instilled, of just witnessing somebody doing something against the government.”

 Only minutes later, Al-Assad’s military stormed through the market and the protest disbanded, Mahou said. Two days later, he and his father joined a demonstration at the Interior Ministry.

 Mahou was horrified by the bloodbath he saw when, again, the police raided the protest and began beating the participants.

 As the protests spread across the country, Al-Assad began to escalate his counterattacks, which in turn drove the desire to oust him from power.

 “I lost fear when the revolution started. When they killed people, we weren’t scared; it was fuel. They made us more angry,” Mahou said.

 As the conflict grew from weeks into months and from hundreds of people to thousands, Mahou continued to organize. He said he was contacted by the United States government to help them understand and verify the situation and identify rebel groups that weren’t too radical to work on common efforts with.

 Cécil Shea, senior fellow on Global Security and Diplomacy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said this was a frequent measure taken during that time.

 “One of the things the U.S. government was trying to do was bring some of the groups that were not so extreme, that the U.S. would have liked those to come to power, together to have meetings with the leaders and to have them coordinate,” Shea said.

 Mahou pledged to himself to always remain nonviolent.

 “We’re not killing Assad, we’re killing each other,” Mahou said, reflecting on his thoughts at the time. “If I met my maker I wanted to say I tried, I put all my might and power into this without causing more harm.”

 His conviction was compounded by personal loss. During one march, he was walking next to a friend when the man was shot by police.

 “He died in my arms,” Mahou said. “I’ve seen a life be taken away. I cannot put that pain on somebody else.”

 Three thousand miles away in England, foreign news correspondent James Longman’s life was about to be altered by the stirring strife in Syria. Longman has now traveled to countries around the world for his work with ABC and The BBC. But in 2011, he was just a student studying the Middle East.

 Longman went to Syria to do research for his thesis, but began freelancing for British press after realizing that as a student, his presence wouldn’t alert authorities like credentialed reporters would. He was connected with Emad through a Syrian academic living in London. He said the reason he’s a journalist today is because of the work he did in Syria — which he said was made possible by Mahou.

 “Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” Longman said. “He was someone who I could trust because in that very hectic environment, you know, you never know who you’re with.”

 Mahou connected Longman with sources and got him from town to town, safehouse to safehouse — all the while making sure they weren’t being trailed by the government.

 As rebellion turned into full-out war, Mahou essentially became a spokesperson for the rebellion. Because he was fluent in English, active online and had information from the ground, he became a source for journalists overseas, giving accounts of the turmoil happening around him. In one such interview with SkyNews, the journalist ended the segment by thanking Mahou, attributing him with his first and last name.

 That mistake gave the regime a face and a name to attach to the movement.

 About a week later, he was apprehended by police. He said he was then imprisoned for over 100 days. He was tortured for many of them.

 “They zip tied me to a small bar and left me standing there for two days,” Mahou said, illustrating one of the more painful stretches of his imprisonment.

 He said he doesn’t know why he was released, but guessed that because he didn’t crack under torture, the police thought he’d provide them more information on the rebels if they let him go and surveilled him.

 Instead, he went into hiding, harbored for two months by a family to whom he said he owes his life. During that time, his father was arrested and four of his cousins were killed. He knew he couldn’t openly organize anymore without risking rearrest or endangering others. He had to leave Syria.



 With aid, he illegally crossed into Jordan, and reached the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Ar-Ramtha. After five days in the camp, he went to Amman, where he stayed for six months until obtaining status as a political asylee, making it possible for him to immigrate to the U.S.

 At the time, Mahou knew of three U.S. cities: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. He deemed New York too big and Los Angeles too crowded, so he settled on Chicago. He ignored state department officials who warned him that Chicago might be too cold.

 While transitioning into his new life, Mahou was also assisting people in their transition from place to place. His first job was driving people between gates at the airport. In 2014, he went back to school, this time for computer science, knowing it was an education that could make him a living. He was hired at DePaul after graduating.

 “In 2012, I was pushing people from gate to gate in O’Hare Airport,” Mahou said. “Six months before that, I was leading a revolution in the heart of Damascus. Today, I am building sites for the DePaul trustees. In 10 years, I could be a DePaul trustee.

 “You’re the captain of your soul; you shape your future.” '

Rebels vow to retake Kafranbel, Syria's revolutionary stronghold

 'For many years, the town of Kafranbel in Idlib province was a centre for displaced Syrians fleeing government forces from different parts of the war-torn country.

 But now the residents of Kafranbel have become displaced once again after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces took control of the small town earlier this week, destroying many of its homes during the fiercest escalation in the northwest of the country.

 Kafranbel was one of the largest revolutionary strongholds where anti-Assad demonstrations began at the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Images of its residents holding up witty banners were seen across the world.

 The town's symbolic status has made it more vulnerable to revenge.

 The Syrian army invaded the town with tanks in 2011 seeking to suppress popular unrest and prompting activists and civilians to flee, but Syrian rebels gained control of the town in late 2012.

 Following a series of successive defeats since December, rebels have lost the town of Kafranbel along with other strategic revolutionary areas such as Khan Sheikhoun, Maarat al-Numan and Saraqeb.

 Under Russian air cover and with the help of Iranian, Lebanese and Iraqi militias, Syrian government forces have launched continuous attacks to retake the Idlib province, the last stronghold of the rebels.



 Omar Nuzhat, a displaced activist from the outskirts of Damascus, remembers the moment he arrived in northern Syria in late 2016, when the people of Kafranbel welcomed his family and helped him settle into a furnished home.

 Nuzhat was displaced alongside other civilians and fighters who refused to surrender to Syrian government forces when the latter regained control of various suburbs of Damascus.

 "Kafranbel is my second home. The people of the town greeted us with great generosity, to the point that I did not feel like a stranger or displaced," Nuzhat said.

 "The people told us: ‘Our homes are yours. You can stay in them for years until you return to your cities without paying any rent’," he said.

 "There was no displaced person who entered the town of Kafranbel and stayed in tents. The town received displaced people from all over Syria," Nuzhat added. "Today its people are displaced in tents. They are not treated the same way they treated the displaced."

 The escalation in northern Syria has forced nearly a million civilians out of their homes towards the border with Turkey. Most of them live in the open and in difficult conditions, according to the United Nations.

 As one of the birthplaces of Syrian revolution activists, Kafranbel was home to mass demonstrations for years due to its geographical location.

 The town was the meeting place for demonstrators from northern Hama and the villages of Jabal al-Zawiya, south of Idlib. It was also where banners bearing revolutionary phrases in several languages were created.

 The banners were written by Raed Fares, a student of medicine who became a prominent local activist and a symbol of solidarity for rebels across the country, drawing the attention of the outside world to the violations taking place in Syria.

 Fares also established Kafranbel Radio Fresh, which became the first local Syrian radio station to broadcast from an opposition region. It continues to operate today despite having lost its main office.

 The town’s residents often disagreed with Islamist rebels, who have accused Radio Fresh of letting men and women interact at its headquarters, and argued that broadcasting women's voices on the radio should be prohibited. Fares in retaliation began to broadcast the sounds of birds and animals on the radio.

 Fares and fellow activist Hamoud Jneed were gunned down by unknown assailants in November 2018.

 “Kafranbel promoted the thought of the revolution among the Syrian youth, and was the incubator of all classes of the revolution,” said Mahmoud Fares, Raed's son.

 "It is one of the most important locations of the revolution in Syria," said Mahmoud, who moved from Kafranbel to Turkey and then France after his father was killed. “Kafranbel brought the voice of the revolution to the whole world, but the world has abandoned it, and now Idlib is described as a stronghold of terrorism.”

 "In normal circumstances, people live in cities, but Kafranbel is the compassionate town that lives in the hearts of people and the sons of the revolution," he added.



 During the initial years of the Syrian revolution, a large number of soldiers defected from the Syrian state army, as they rejected the idea of invading cities and arresting protesters.

 In cooperation with the residents of Kafranbel, many former soldiers established the Knights of Justice Battalion, one of the first battalions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

 “The Battalion expanded, increased the number of members in its ranks, and participated in the battles of the countryside of Hama, Aleppo and Homs,” said Tariq al-Nahar, one of the battalion’s founders.

 The battalion later became known as the Northern Division.

 "The sons of Kafranbel fought against the Islamic State [group]," Nahar added.

 "The town was the centre of export of national thought for the Syrian revolution, so it has been subjected to continuous air strikes for seven years," he said

 Air strikes destroyed Nahar’s house and the Radio Fresh building before government forces took over the town.

 But the rebel fighter remained determined to fight for Kafranbel.

 "We lost the town previously and then regained control of it, and we will regain control of it again, God willing." '