Seventy powers demand Syria barrel bombings end

 Veronica Ramadan:

 "Great, another 'outraged' statement to add to four-and-a-half years' worth of 'outraged' statements - heaven forbid any of the powers actually DO SOMETHING to help protect Syrians and stop Assad's genocide..."

Witnesses of Assad's Chlorine Warfare Plea for Help

 'Dr. Annie Sparrow, a pediatrician and health activist who has worked on the Syrian border since 2012, told the committee the Assad regime has only targeted civilian populations with improvised barrel bombs and chlorine gas attacks.

 “I'm a doctor, and I'm very familiar with death. But I have never seen a more obscene way to kill children. I've never watched so many suffer in such an obscene manner,” Sparrow said. “Our preoccupation with ISIS is distracting us from these systematic assaults on civilian homes and neighborhoods and hospitals and schools.” '

Syrian doctors to show the US evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons

 'Recent reports suggest that militant forces in Syria, including Isis, are developing a chemical weapons capability of their own.'

 My apologies if this has already been pointed out, but it is a libel on the Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad that they have done any such thing, just as it was a lie two years ago when it was claimed that such rebel groups attacked themselves with sarin. This libel should not be reproduced in a respectable newspaper.

'Elephant rockets' kill dozens in Damascus suburb

 'The Syrian government has used so-called elephant rockets in an attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma, killing at least 36 people, including children, according to activists.
The rockets, named after the distinctive noise they make when they are launched, are improvised weapons made by attaching rocket motors to much larger bombs - a process that increases their destructive power while greatly reducing accuracy.

 Speaking in the US on Tuesday, John Kerry, secretary of state, said he was confident Assad's government was responsible for a "preponderance" of chemical attacks against his own people.

 "I think everybody's patience is wearing thin with respect to the extraordinary depravity of the weaponry and mechanisms for delivery which Assad has used against his own people," he said.'

 I think the Syrian people's patience with John Kerry's half-hearted condemnations, and double-act with the Russians to do nothing, is wearing thin.

Ecos del Desgarro

 "A self-managed and collective documentary about the activists of the Syrian revolution.
The story of an impossible revolution."

 In English, Spanish and Arabic, with English subtitles.

 "More than 15 kids between 12 to 15 years-old, got arrested because they wrote on the wall of their schools, that the people want to end the regime."

Damascus suburb hit by poison gas remains cut off

 'Dr. Muhammad Kattub, a doctor who last year escaped eastern Ghouta and moved to Gaziantep, a town in Turkey, said that doctors come in contact daily with children who lose consciousness because of malnutrition. He recalled advising a mother to feed her daughter three spoons of yogurt a day.

 
 “The mother said she can’t, because she has two daughters, and she feeds them by turn, one child each day,” he said.'

General Your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle

 Robert Fisk shows how embedding himself in Assad's propaganda machine has completely detached him from reality.

 'The Syrian army, outgunned and at times frighteningly outnumbered by its Islamist enemies, is not about to collapse...The insurgents have hundreds of anti-armour wire-guided TOW and Milan anti-tank missiles...Dr Mekdad spoke of new weapons for the army – it sorely needs them to replace the clapped-out Warsaw Pact tanks that litter Syria.'

 Assad has tanks, the rebels at best have anti-tank weapons, and it is Assad who is outgunned. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr.Fisk? This is a war in which Assad has been armed to the teeth by Russia, has had tens of thousands of Iranian troops and proxy forces like Hezbollah back him up since the popular insurgency had him on the ropes in 2013, not "scattered in twos and threes around the battlefield, learning rather than fighting," as Fisk claims. In fact to take priority over Syrian troops, to give them orders, to have their remains exchanged for prisoners when Syrians can rot where they lie, to be given priority treatment in hospitals. Meanwhile the Syrian rebels have been prevented from getting the most effective defensive measures to Assad's bombing and shelling, and have had to rely on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to survive at all. When they finally got a decent supply of anti-tank weapons they took Idlib quickly, and have had a string of other victories, not because of mythical Turks and Chechens, but because the Syrian Army is a disorganised rabble, only continuing because of the arrest and torture facing them if they do not, so as to keep Assad in power even if it destroys Syria.

 'But here are a few grim facts. Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra are now attacking the Syrian military in rows of suicide trucks.'

 Not facts, things Fisk has been told by his Syrian Army handlers. Jabhat al-Nusra only attack one suicide bomber at a time as far as I am aware. Incidentally, before the anti-tank weapons, suicide bombing was one of the few ways the rebels could attack fortified government positions at all. That's why the lack of support for the Free Syrian Army has led to support going to more jihadi groups, because they had the tactics that could prevail in a war of survival against a genocidal government. Which is again why much of their support and indeed membership can be seen as practical rather than purely ideological, these are people who want to free Syria, and go home when that is done.



 'Rebel logistics are hi-tech and better than the Syrian army’s, and a lot of their communications systems are American.'

 How does Fisk know what rebel communications are like, when he is embedded on the government side? This is by the way the only evidence he has of any American aid to the rebels, which hardly equates to the billion dollars worth a month from Russia that have been arriving throughout the war. If they don't communicate well, it scarecly seems like a financial problem.

 'American “experts” talk glibly now of how the Syrian army will make a “planned retreat” to the mountains of the Alawites.'

 Fisk doesn't bother to name any of them. I suspect he is talking about Joshua Landis, who is more of a fan of the Syrian régime than he is of the opposition. It is indicative that the only debate he acknowledges is over the options for Assad to maintain his power.



 'Syrian “experts” – a lot closer to the battle than the think-tank boyos in Washington – speak of a more political strategy. What the regime must do, they say, is hold on to the major cities in a line from Aleppo south through Hama and Homs to Damascus (Deraa in the south may or may not be included in the plan) and deprive either Nusra or Isis of a potential capital in Syria.'

 Again no names, though Fisk's experts are going to be régime supporters arm deep in the carnage. It is a fantasy that they could hold on to everything they've got given the way the battles have been going, but it's Fisk's job to retail that fantasy. Deraa of course isn't threatened by Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS, but by the Southern Front coalition that fights ISIS and Assad, and has excluded Jabhat al-Nusra until their behaviour improves. But that doesn't fit the Assadist claim that it is Assad or the terrorists, so it isn't relevant to Fisk's mission.

 'Execution is as important to the rebels as the suicide bomb. Army sources in Damascus say that 250 army families were taken for execution when Palmyra fell.'

 To ISIS perhaps, not to the actual rebels Fisk wishes to confuse them with. Daily there are defections from Assad's army to the rebels. And those families were forced by Assad's commanders to stay in Palmyra while they and their families hotfooted it to Damascus, and so are another important way in which Assad and his ruling circle are showing that they protect nobody but themselves.



 'With perhaps 50,000 dead, the Syrian army needs men. Conscripted troops now serve indefinitely. And if that army falters or ceases to exist, no other force is capable of holding Syria together.'

 If you a priori rule out the groups fighting to free Syria from Assad's tyranny.

 'President Assad has not put himself as the No 1. He will work for Syria – and the most important thing is for Syria to survive.'

 An exact reverse of the truth from Dr. Mekdad, but Fisk laps it up.



 'The further you travel from Syria, the more imaginative become the stories to convince you of its destruction. The Americans have done a deal with the Russians to ship Assad off to exile in Moscow. The Iranians will “close down” the Syrian war if the nuclear talks are successful. The Iranians don’t have confidence in the Syrian army. The most extraordinary theory suggests that the “moderate” rebels will destroy both Isis and Assad.'

 Probably not true, ridiculous, probably true, hopefully true.

 'There is no point in romanticising any side in this war. The government militias and the barrel-bombers and the torture chambers eliminate the use of pink eye-shades.'

 So it's alright to support the rape gangs, the barrel bombers, and the torture, as long as you don't romanticise them, or pretend not to. What a scumbag.



 There was a far more reasoned analysis this week of the military situation and the growing dominance of Iran in Syria by Josef Olmert*, though when I read, "No Islamist group in Syria, whether ISIS, al-Nusra, the Fath army, or the Free Syria Army [FSA], will give up on Damascus, the capital of the Umayyad dynasty [661-750 A.D]. The rebels are divided between themselves and fighting each other, which surely something that the regime will be happy to see happening in the areas that are falling under their control, but they are united about one cherished desire: the need for an historic revenge exacted from the hated Nusayris [a derogatory term for the Alawites]," I did think he may have a fairly primitive understanding of the relationship of religion to political action, such as many Western and Israeli political commentators suffer from. Still, unlike Fisk, trying to understand what is going on in Syria, and communicate that understanding.
*[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/syria-is-a-fictionwelcome_b_7552702]

The newspapers will have you hating the oppressed

    

 The subtitle of yesterday's piece by Robert Fisk - 'Our Man in Syria' as the Independent calls him - is, "One glance through the broken windows of this famous old cafe illustrates the Dresden-like ruins – all that remains of Homs." Nobody would think of talking about the destruction of Dresden without mentioning the cause was massive Allied firebombing, or the horrors of Auschwitz without placing responsibility on the Nazis. Fisk however does not see fit to refer to the shelling and bombing by Assad's army and airforce that has reduced Homs to rubble.* Instead we get a suggestion that this was all the rebels' fault, "Many of the streets are roofless facades, the houses undermined by the tunnels which the rebel Farouq Battalion dug amid their ever-shrinking ghetto."

 When a Muslim does something wrong in this country, Muslims are collectively expected to condemn it. When a white person does something wrong, it is the action of an individual. This is the method Fisk takes to Syria. His government-supporting interviewees are just people, although I might guess that Elias sounds like a Christian name, and Rani Khoury is from the Alawite-majority (even more so given the Assad régime's ethnic cleansing) city of Tartous. But the invisible rebels are Islamists, even though they drank and smoked. And that they preserved old newspapers where you can find columns saying that Islam is better than Christianity, and it's bad if people insult Islam, means they are the cause of sectarianism and civil war in the Middle East. Robert Fisk isn't a reporter, he's a racist and colonialist apologist for oppression.

*[http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=return+to+homs]

Inside Assad’s Hospitals of Horror

 ' “The alternate E.R. had four rows of beds with two people in each bed,” al-Abdallah recalled. “They were chained to each other and to the bed, and they were blindfolded. Every night the soldiers would get up on the beds and start walking on the patients. It was a ritual.” Another ritual, he said, was wrapping men’s genitals so tightly with a rubber glove that the pressure would cut off circulation. According to Abu Odeh, intelligence agents would walk up to patients recovering from surgery to repair bone fractures and would literally rip external fixations—used to hold bones in place—from their broken limbs. “So many times we had to do operations twice,” he said. “They weren’t doing this torture to get patients to talk—it was just torture. Sometimes the Mukhabarat guys would pee on the wounds. Other times they would dip a prisoner’s bandages in toilet water and put them back on.” '

'We are the child'

 'People across the Arab world have been expressing solidarity with child victims of barrel bomb attacks in Syria - and opposing President Assad - with the hashtag "we are the child, you are the barrel".

 One of the first people to tweet the hashtag was Mahmoud Owaimer. As a Palestinian living in Gaza, Mahmoud told BBC Trending that the suffering of Syrians reminds him of the recent war with Israel and the shelling of Gaza. "What hurts is that we've seen the war in Syria going on for four years and we can't see any end to it. It would move anyone, wherever they are, to want to speak out." '

Tartus, the Mother of Martyrs

 'Within the city, there is a growing perception that President Bashar al-Assad is intent on staying in power no matter how many Alawite deaths it takes. The Alawites, who in 2011 trumpeted their support for al-Assad, now threaten him with a different chant altogether: "God willing, we will witness the funeral of your sons," they say.'

Rebels say locals in Daraa gave them sweets to celebrate

 'A dawn offensive on Tuesday by Syrian rebels in the Southern Front ended in a takeover of the base and a retreat of Syrian regime forces.'

 From Scott Lucas' more detailed account of the day*:'A Druze activist at the Suweida national hospital said he saw many regime dead and wounded, with soldiers “in a state of terror and panic”. He indicated that Iranians had also been at Brigade 52, saying their injured were being treated before the Syrians.In a series of tweets this morning, Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, saying the Assad regime is “finished”, has called for reconciliation with the Syrian opposition and rebels. He has asked the Druze of Suweida Province to “unite” with their neighbours in Daraa Province.'
*[http://eaworldview.com/2015/06/syria-daily-in-8-hours-rebels-take-1-of-largest-army-bases-in-south/]

Spoils Captured in Idlib Salient and Sahal al-Ghab

 'The amount of war material captured has brought the Jaish al-Fateh coalition and other groups in Idlib into first parity of arms with the SAA as tanks and armored vehicles began to fall and eventually superiority of arms in all categories besides airpower. While the Syrian government maintains a monopoly on the use of air power in the Idlib salient, the opposition forces have gained the equipment, experience, and momentum necessary to overpower remaining government positions and forces without a drastic change in the combat environment. 

 Furthermore, the amount of material captured, particularly the logistical abilities and tremendous amount of munitions, equate to enough material to sustain an understrength SAA tank battalion, understrength SAA mechanized regiment, several artillery batteries, tremendous anti-tank assets, and small arms to equip a tremendous amount of new defectors/foreign fighters/local recruits. The balance of power in north west Syria has shifted tremendously and the coming months are likely to see offensives commensurate with this shift.'

Rebels seize major army base in Deraa

 "This base was one of the main lines of defence for the regime forces. It was a nightmare, because they used it to shell all the areas to the east of the province."

Conspiracy theories that “the US fuelled the rise of ISIS”

 Michael Karadjis:

 'I can say with confidence that Milne’s assertion that Britain had been involved in the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale” to Syrian rebels is entirely made up; actually no evidence of any arms being supplied by the US, let alone Britain, appears anywhere. But to the extent any kind of “training” or logistical help occurred, or to the extent that the US allowed other countries to supply a certain amount of light arms, in every case it was to some described as secular or defected Syrian military with the specific objective of blocking any Islamist forces, and especially al-Qaida.

 When the FSA rebels said their current priority was fighting the regime, the US agents told them they had to fight Nusra now, and worry about the regime later.

 In the awkward world of anti-Syrian revolution conspiracy theory, the FSA and other Syrian rebels are “US-backed jihadists.” To deal with the “US-backed” part first, while they are entitled to try to get arms from whoever they can, it is notable that the FSA rejected this US condition for getting arms, understanding it to be what it was: not an expression of US preference for secular rebels, nor any honest move to arm them, but rather an attempt to get the democratic-secular and jihadist wings of the uprising to slaughter each other while the Assad regime laughs.

 Most of this conspiracism is not motivated by showing that imperialist powers tried to derail the revolution by backing ISIS, but on the contrary, they want to claim that the US and the West “backed ISIS” in order to overthrow the Syrian tyranny, a laughable idea.

 In particular, this leads them into these grossly dishonest and fact-free amalgam between ISIS and its arch-enemies among the Syrian revolutionary forces; and hence the continuous assertion, backed by the flimsiest of evidence or none at all, that the US and the West have backed other parts of the Syrian rebellion (something regarded to be bad) is also described as part of the how the West allegedly helped “fuel the rise of ISIS,” as if the FSA, the force in the region that has most successfully beat back ISIS, is in some way related to ISIS or gave rise to it.

 Yes, the US created ISIS alright – by invading Iraq and launching an apocalyptic occupation and then bolstering a Shiite-sectarian regime allied with Iran which launched a sectarian war against the Sunni population. Why is it so difficult to see that exactly the same dynamic occurred in Syria, not from some non-existent US invasion, but due to the similar apocalyptic sectarian war the Assad regime waged against the Syrian revolution and also specifically against the Sunni majority, precisely in order to turn the non-sectarian uprising into a sectarian war?'

Rebels strike biggest blow against Assad since 2011

 'Rami Dalati, a member of the armed opposition group the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) Military Command Higher Council, told Asharq Al-Awsat the rebels, comprised of the Jaysh Al-Fatah, a coalition of Jihadist groups, had successfully captured a number of strategic checkpoints used by the Syrian army on the Latakia–Aleppo highway.

This had now left a total of 25,000 government troops “essentially trapped” inside Aleppo, he said, adding that “this counts as the biggest military loss for the government in Syria since the beginnings of the conflict in 2011.”

Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict via a series of correspondents on the ground, said that Jaysh Al-Fatah had captured Syrian government troop positions around the city of Idlib, which lies roughly halfway between Latakia and Aleppo.

Al-Nusra posted on its Twitter account that it had successfully captured the positions, posting pictures of its fighters and those of others in the Jaysh Al-Fatah in the locations, with others of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts.

The official pro-government Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) quoted a military source saying that Syrian troops had indeed withdrawn from the positions around Idlib, but only to redeploy in areas more “appropriate for fulfilling their military objectives.” '

Now refugees fear IS will target their families

 'Ali had been travelling through Syria in a bid to cross the Turkish border when he was caught by IS at Deir al-Zour. The teenager's death sparked protests in his home town of Jasim, which Alkhalef said prompted the distribution of leaflets warning residents that IS would take over the area.

 "They [residents] said, 'It's not fair, a child of 17 was killed with no crime,'" said Alkhalef, through a translator. "It really confirmed to people that IS was criminal. In the flyers it said: 'We're going to rule Daraa, we're going to overcome, and we're going to apply Sharia law - Islamic Law - on you."

 She said the Free Syrian Army, which was set up by officers and soldiers who defected from the Syrian Armed Forces during the country's civil war, gathered the leaflets and asked people to hand them in.

 Alkhalef believes IS fighters tried to shoot her eldest brother in March. She said clashes between IS and the Free Syrian Army also took place in April.

 "The reason we know it's Daesh is as the Free Syrian Army caught the men who tried to shoot my brother," said Alkhalef.'

People are still dying in the besieged Al Ghota

 'In Ghouta... Bodies are turning into skeletons... Three years of siege are destroying everything.'

Syrian Rebels Give Shout-Out to Caitlyn Jenner

 "We would be free, and liberate Syria from Assad and ISIS."

As the militant threat grows

 Patrick Cockburn is a magician, he has made Bashar al-Assad disappear. After a year of telling us the only way to defeat ISIS¹ was to ally with a régime bombing, raping and torturing its people to the max, this latest fantasy ignores him altogether. Even in Hasakah, where Assad's army has been holding the town and a few surrounding villages, we get this,

 'Isis routed the Syrian army and captured Palmyra and has since struck at Syrian opposition units north of Aleppo and at the north-eastern city of Hasaka.'

 Maybe it is the awkward fact that the Syrian Arab Army barely exists now, and exists "for a single man's benefit."². Maybe it is that the Syrian airforce has been bombing rebel positions in support of an attempted ISIS advance in Aleppo province³, while the US ignores ISIS there in favour of bombing those fighting Assad in Idlib. Meanwhile Assad carries out a massacre by bombing a town centre in Idlib⁴, as much a barbarian as the barbarians of ISIS Cockburn used to present him as the alternative to.

 It is a disgrace that Patrick Cockburn, and indeed Robert Fisk⁵, are still employed by the Independent, without their output being clearly labelled as fiction.


1. As Muhammed Idris Ahmad wrote in his exposure of Cockburn's lie about witnessing an alleged massacre of Christians in Adra, 'For Cockburn, the situation in Syria is stark: you are with the regime or you are with the terrorists. He is an enthusiast for the war on terror—Bashar al-Assad’s war on terror. He criticizes the U.S. for excluding from its anti-ISIS coalition “almost all those actually fighting ISIS, including Iran, the Syrian army, the Syrian Kurds and the Shia militias in Iraq.” “The enemy of our enemy”, he insists, “must be our friend”—and those who reject this formula are “glib” and “shallow”.' [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/whos-lying-about-syrias-christian.html]

2. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/syria-armys-weakness-exacerbated-by.html]

3. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/u.html]

4. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/bodies-were-everywhere-on-tables.html]

5. See the first link, 'Cockburn is only following the precedent of his illustrious colleague Robert Fisk who, in August 2012, after a massacre of 400-500 people in Daraya, rode a Syrian Army armoured personnel carrier to the scene, interviewed survivors—“in the company of armed Syrian forces”—and concluded that, contrary to initial reports, “armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops” were responsible for the massacre.' [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/whos-lying-about-syrias-christian.html]

Syria Army's Weakness Exacerbated by Draft Dodgers

 'That weakness was most apparent during recent defeats in the northwest province of Idlib and the city of Palmyra; rebels and opposition groups said regime forces withdrew quickly rather than fight a prolonged battle...

 "Every man in Syria...tries his best not to serve in the army," the young engineer said. "He can't imagine himself being a part of what's happening, part of a long war that doesn't seem to have an end."

 "I don't want to be a part of a conflict which is for a single man's benefit," said a 29-year-old who has a good job in Damascus but is making plans to flee the country anyway. "This is a conflict that we, the normal people, have nothing to do with." '

Syrian intelligence hospitalizes Deir Ezzor militia leader

 The traditional English football chant, "You're going home in a fucking ambulance," now seems to be the way disputes are settled between Syrian régime commanders.

Hezbollah's media machine changes gears

 “Hezbollah is combating Syrian rebels. It's true a portion of them are extremists but we know the majority want a free country. Hezbollah’s media arms are trying to show the dark face of the revolution in Syria while there are many bright faces that they intend to cover,” he said. “The worst thing is that western media is becoming affected by the Hezbollah rhetoric. They want us to believe that all the Syrians are Al-Qaeda and [Islamic State].”

Bodies were everywhere

 'In the afternoon of 04 June 2015, a horrific missile strike devastated a town centre in Idlib Governorate, Syria. The wounded arrived in wave after wave at a nearby small makeshift hospital that is supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). MSF immediately started organizing a major resupply of essentials for the hospital. The hospital director, who requested to remain anonymous for security reasons, describes the situation.

 "At around 3pm we heard a deafening sound as a result of 3 rockets exploding in a town nearby. A town overwhelmed, desperate locals living alongside many displaced people from other areas in Syria.

 Apartment buildings and shops, demolished in a few minutes, all turned to rubble.

 Bodies ripped apart, flesh everywhere. This is a massacre. This is carnage.

 Total destruction that is hard to describe; a state of hysteria took over, first among the families looking for their loved ones, neighbors searching for their neighbors, and then it spread to us medical staff." '

Don’t mention the war

 'Anti-war activists have a duty of solidarity to the Syrian people. It is not enough to oppose US/UK intervention, while remaining silent about the governments of Iran and Russia intervening on the side of Assad. Refusing to support activists on the ground who continue to organise and fight for the the original goals of the revolution is a terrible betrayal. The abandonment of Syrians is a primary reason for the growth of extremist factions like the Al-Qaeda linked Jabhat Al-Nusra.

 Syria is complex, but complexity is not a worthy excuse for inaction or silence. Understanding Syria starts with talking to Syrians and Syrian civil society.Saturday’s Stop the War event is yet another anti-war conference without a Syrian activist or speaker talking about the situation in Syria. This shameful stance must be corrected, or Stop The War will be forever known as the organisation which turned its back on Syria.'

A stream of relief to Syria

 'When Assad’s forces brutally attacked antigovernment demonstrators in 2011, Nadia Alawa was outraged — and sickened by their torture and murder of a 13-year-old boy. She forced herself to study the macabre photos on Facebook documenting the ensuing violence.

 NuDay volunteers collect donations in mosques, churches, and clinics across New England. They sort and pack the items into shipping containers and send them to Turkey, where a NuDay employee drives them to the Syrian border. Syrian partners pick up the goods and distribute them in areas of northern Syria controlled by rebel groups — and never in regions under the sway of the Islamic State or the Assad regime, Alawa said.'

No-Fly Zone: A dangerous illusion

 The Syria Solidarity Movement UK is hosting a debate on the merits of a No Fly Zone for Syria. Most are in favour, I tend to sympathise with the argument against by Mark Boothroyd, one of the most active of the few Syrian solidarity activists in the UK, so not one of the numpties claiming the West is the main enemy in Syria, but just that they are not coming to help protect Syrians from Assad. The picture is one Mark tweeted, showing Peter Tatchell holding a placard calling for a NFZ.

 'While this demand would be supportable if those countries [Britain, France and the US] were honest and pure in their intentions towards Syria, they are not. They are imperialist powers whose history of interference and reactionary policy in the region goes back to the Sykes-Picot agreement and before.

 Their actual intentions can be gauged by their actions towards the Syrian revolution so far, and particularly their actions in the last few months as the demand for a NFZ has been raised in earnest by the White Helmets and other campaign groups.

 Throughout the entire course of the Syrian revolution these countries have refused to give the armed opposition anti-aircraft weapons to protect themselves and civilian areas against air attack. A number of spurious reasons have been given for this, none of which stand up to much scrutiny.

 The argument was raised that the weapons might fall into the wrong hands (meaning Da’esh or Al-Nusra), yet far more weapons have been taken by Da’esh from the Iraqi army—armed and funded by the US—than have ever been taken from Syrian armed opposition groups. And it was the refusal by the US, Britain and France to arm the nationalist and secular opposition forces loosely organised in the Free Syrian Army, which lead to these groups becoming marginalised due to lack of weapons and resources, leading eventually to what little arms and fighters they had being taken or absorbed by better funded and armed Islamic rebel groups.'

UN again refuses food, aid to Moadamiyeh

 Dani al-Qappani:

 'A senior UN representative visiting Moadamiyeh today as part of a delegation in the company of regime officials, told residents of the town that the UN “can’t in any way bring any food or medicine” to the besieged civilians, despite rising illness, endemic malnutrition and increasing numbers of deaths from starvation due to the continuing regime siege.

 The UN’s latest visit to the town is widely viewed by residents as yet another piece of political theatre by the regime and the UN, with one resident saying, “The visit’s only meant to save Assad by misrepresenting the so-called truce in Moadamiyeh as perfect in order to sell de Mistura’s ‘political solution.’”

 The UN’s and Assad regime’s continuous attempts to force the Syrian people into accepting a ‘political solution’ allowing Assad to stay is flatly rejected by the people of Moadamiyeh as by most of Syria. In the words of another resident of the town speaking after the latest UN visit, “We refuse any political solution that doesn’t force Assad to leave and doesn’t break the siege of Moadamiyeh. We’ll fight again if we’re forced to do so.” '

Israel contemplating life without Assad

 It would be more accurate to say that ISIS has joined the fight against the anti-Assad forces around Aleppo.

 'ISIS isn’t part of the rebel coalition operating in Idlib, but has joined the fight against Assad’s forces around the major cities of Homs and Aleppo. The Arab media is full of speculation that
the rebels are also planning a new offensive in southern Syria, near the city of Daraa.

 In response to the recent defeats it has suffered, the regime has stepped up its airstrikes – including a massive use of barrel bombs, which cause heavy civilian casualties. Speaking at a conference in Tel Aviv, Golan said that from Israel’s perspective, the strategic situation on the northern border “may be better than ever before,” despite the many potential threats, because thousands of Hezbollah fighters are busy in Syria and the Syrian Army has effectively ceased to exist.

 Nevertheless, he added, this convenient situation is unlikely to last. Meanwhile, Hezbollah “has acquired operational capabilities that no terrorist organization ever had in the past.” And while Syrian rebels aren’t currently targeting Israel from the Golan Heights, that, too, could change, he warned.'

U.S. accuses Syria of backing Islamic State's advance

 'Some rebels have questioned why U.S.-led forces bombing Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have not focused on bombing the jihadists around Aleppo city.'

 Good question.

The Pietà of Syria

 'The massacres perpetrated by the Assad regime against his people -- Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians and others -- touch him deeply and he tries to convey their pain and suffering to the international community, which he said, “did nothing to help the Syrians.”

 But Omar also wants to leave a note of hope that a better Syria will emerge from all the destruction and death – which is why a dove appears in many of his paintings: “The blood of the youth that was shed will not go to waste. It will lead to freedom, dignity and peace.” '

Assad’s Barrel Bombs Have Us Fearing the Sun

 ' “People now, in Syria, consider the sun as a hateful thing,” the doctor, referred to in the video by the name Majed to protect his safety, says. “Because a sunny day means that the military jet can move freely, and can hit more targets, and kill more people.”

 Majed then describes the terrifying 30-second span spent watching the bomb drop from a helicopter to the ground: “It will be horrible.” '

Key Rebels Ready to Quit U.S. Fight Vs. ISIS

 'The news comes as ISIS is marching on the suburbs of Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city. Rebels currently fighting the jihadists there told The Daily Beast that the U.S.-led coalition isn't even bothering to respond to their calls for airstrikes to stop the jihadist army.

 “[My men] don’t want to be beholden to this policy because it can be used against them in Syria—that they’ve betrayed the revolution and now they’re just mercenaries for the coalition forces,” Sejari said.

 Sejari has worked for years with the so-called "joint operations command" in Turkey, where the CIA and a host of Western and regional spy agencies have coordinated with vetted moderate rebels—sometimes arming them, although without the stifling proscription on whom they couldn’t fight. “In the past, we got some support through the [Western-backed] Friends of Syria group. Very small amounts. We were hoping there would be more support from the Americans,” Sefjari said.

 “The American intelligence services have a fair idea who the good guys and bad guys are in Syria and they know which groups are fighting both extremism and dictatorship,” Sejari said. “If the Obama administration were sincere in putting an end to the suffering of the Syrian people, they could do that in three months.”

 “The Syrian-American community asked the Obama Administration for airstrikes on ISIS near Marea many months ago,” complained Mohammed al-Ghanem, the senior political advisor for the Syrian American Council, a Washington, D.C.-based opposition group in constant contact with the Aleppo Military Council. “We were rebuffed for the astounding reason that aiding the rebels in Aleppo would hurt Assad, which would anger the Iranians, who might then turn up the heat on U.S. troops in Iraq. The rebels are the only ones who can fight ISIS in northern Syria—Assad forces are losing ground rather quickly now—so I hope President Obama will reconsider his willingness to compromise the ISIS fight for the sake of an Iran deal.” '

Absolutely remarkable

 "Jaish al-Fateh captured the major Idlib city of Ariha in 2hrs."

Even the cats are traumatised by Assad's barrel bombs

Who’s Lying About Syria’s Christian Massacre?

 Muhammad Idrees Ahmad:

 ' “In Adra on the northern outskirts of Damascus in early 2014, I witnessed [Nusra] forces storm a housing complex by advancing through a drainage pipe which came out behind government lines, where they proceeded to kill Alawites and Christians.” Cockburn was witnessing a war crime.

 But there is a problem. The atrocity might or might not have happened but Cockburn certainly didn’t witness it.

 Long before he placed himself at the center of the episode, Cockburn wrote about it in his January 28, 2014 column for The Independent. By his own account, he arrived in Adra after the alleged massacre and he was told the story about rebels advancing through a drainage pipe and massacring civilians by “a Syrian [regime] soldier, who gave his name as Abu Ali.”

 For Cockburn, the situation in Syria is stark: you are with the regime or you are with the terrorists. He is an enthusiast for the war on terror—Bashar al-Assad’s war on terror. He criticizes the U.S. for excluding from its anti-ISIS coalition “almost all those actually fighting ISIS, including Iran, the Syrian army, the Syrian Kurds and the Shia militias in Iraq.” “The enemy of our enemy”, he insists, “must be our friend”—and those who reject this formula are “glib” and “shallow”.

 He even gets to speak to “a local FSA commander” (at that point, Cockburn was still acknowledging the FSA), who tells Cockburn that he changed sides “because of general disillusionment with the uprising.”

 Only later are we told: “Listening to [the FSA rebel] impassively were Syrian army officers.”

 Cockburn gives no indication that he is troubled by the officers’ presence while he interviews a surrendered soldier. Far from it. The trip leads him to conclude: “The only way to bring the political temperature down is by local ceasefires and peace deals.” Syria would be at peace, in other words, if all Syrians just re-submitted to regime rule.

 Cockburn is only following the precedent of his illustrious colleague Robert Fisk who, in August 2012, after a massacre of 400-500 people in Daraya, rode a Syrian Army armoured personnel carrier to the scene, interviewed survivors—“in the company of armed Syrian forces”—and concluded that, contrary to initial reports, “armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops” were responsible for the massacre.

 Veteran war correspondent Janine di Giovanni, however, visited the town unaccompanied and interviewed survivors without the menacing presence of the Syrian Army. They told di Giovanni that the massacre was carried out by the regime, a conclusion corroborated by Human Rights Watch.

 At their best, journalists exhume truth, as Seymour Hersh did after the massacre in My Lai. At their worst, they try to bury it, as Seymour Hersh did after the massacre in Eastern Ghouta. Six months after a clumsy attempt at mass-crime revisionism, Hersh blurbed Cockburn’s book. Generous praise from Hersh would once have counted as an honour; after Syria, it has turned into an indictment.'

Assad: The beginning of the end?

 'Assad has lost much of his power when he failed to deter or scare people into submission in the first few months of the uprising.

 And once he used force and failed to defeat his enemies, and then failed again when using terrible and illegal violence against civilians and fighters alike, it all signalled that his time was up, and the countdown had started for his demise.

 If he survives at all, Assad will be a tidbit militia leader for a bit longer.'

 Pretty much. There is renewed reporting that the régime would accept a partition of the country*, but it has no basis in reality; If the régime were to abandon Western Aleppo to the threat of terrorist massacres, then how can it pretend to be the protector of Syrians, one of its few remaining claims to legitimacy? Especially when those massacres don't take place.
Hassan Nasrallah is in trouble**, 'Hezbollah’s war in Syria is an Iranian war, and a lost cause too. Hezbollah’s fighters will later see that Tehran will have to sell them out.' The War Nerd*** is still providing the educated but stupid with an analysis that says Assad can go on, because the Alawite community are right behind him.
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20150526014104/https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/May-25/299191-syria-regime-likely-to-accept-de-facto-partition-of-country.ashx]
**[https://web.archive.org/web/20150527132851/http://www.aawsat.net/2015/05/article55343619/opinion-morons-and-traitors]
***[https://web.archive.org/web/20150524235438/http://pando.com/2015/05/23/the-war-nerd-doing-the-math-on-alawite-casualty-numbers/]

I saw massacre of children

 Three years ago now, this was the first major massacre of Assad's war against Syria. Assad sent his soldiers door-to-door to massacre Sunni Muslims, with the message that either Bashar stayed in power, or they would burn the country.

 The régime lied, said it was the Free Syrian Army's work. And the world watched not sure to believe*. And when the truth became irrefutable, it was said to be just another massacre in a war where atrocities are committed by all sides. This is a pattern that was already well established by the time of Assad's chemical attacks of August 2013, throw sand in the world's face to obscure Assad's responsibility, and then congratulate yourselves for preventing a war by the lack of response. That's been what much of the left, abetted by much of the Western media, has done, and it has enabled Assad to intensify his war, and spread the catastrophe to neighbouring countries. The subtitle of this piece, "As UN envoy warns of all-out war", is in that vein, as if Assad's war to keep himself in power will relent as long as we don't over-react.
*[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-look-back-at-the-houla-massacre-in-syria-a-845854.html]

How did Hamas' expertise end up with Syria's rebels?

 ' "Today Hamas is in a tough spot. It made moves towards reviving ties with Iran and Hezbollah but they (Tehran and the Lebanese movement) have responded with coolness, demanding a high political price," said Khader.

 "Hamas is asked to publicly back Assad," said Khader, adding that such a U-turn could not be contemplated by the Palestinian movement, which wants its "stances to be based on principles, not opportunism".

 "Besides," Khader said, "the vast majority of people in Gaza are with the Syrian uprising, save a minority of leftists and some others who switch sides to what benefits them at any given moment." '

 Sadly, this is like many leftists everywhere, who have chosen blind opportunism over solidarity, which will put left-wing politics on the defensive around the world, when Assad falls, the full extent of his crimes becomes obvious, and people turn away from those associated with the politics of denial.

Syria: The Imperative of Protecting Civilians

 I don't think you can lump the Gulf Arabs and the Turks in with the Russians and Iranians, the latter have provided intermittent support to those fighting Assad's genocide, while the latter have facilitated it, but the rest is to the point.

 'Some two years ago, a senior White House official told visitors from Capitol Hill that there were no attractive parties in Syria: that there was merit in simply allowing the fire consuming the country to burn itself out. That civilians—many of them women and children—would be disproportionately incinerated in the resulting inferno seems not to have struck the official as morally relevant or policy pertinent. Yet now, as reports of regime shakiness begin to accumulate, some additional practical, policy consequences of having done virtually nothing to protect Syrian civilians from an Assad regime campaign of mass homicide come into focus.

 To put the matter succinctly, the willingness of the Obama administration to make do with moralistic rhetoric about Assad regime war crimes and crimes against humanity has led it to an astounding analytical conclusion: he who has authorized acts of mass homicide on a daily basis—Bashar al-Assad—ought not be removed from power too quickly lest Islamist rebels take Damascus and conduct massacres in communities involuntarily implicated by regime criminality. The barrel bombing, starvation sieges, chemical attacks, and door-to-door atrocities have been so widespread, so intense, and so unopposed by a hollowed-out West that now the specter of additional mass atrocities—perhaps genocide—transcending Arab Sunni Muslims presents itself.

 President Barack Obama continues to insist that the only alternative to leaving people utterly unprotected—the alternative he insists his critics favor—would have been the invasion and occupation of Syria. The President has misleadingly made it a matter of all or nothing, thereby justifying his choice of nothing.

 Whatever use a straw man argument might have as a here-and-now excuse for inaction or as an alibi for future historians, it fails the test of truth telling. No one has advocated invading and occupying Syria. Even the most dedicated advocates of protecting human beings from mass murder have not recommended such a step. Ways and means that are much more modest are available to an administration willing to transcend talk and do actual things. Examples abound.



 Is there a diplomatic strategy aimed specifically at persuading Tehran and Moscow to pressure their client into abandoning mass homicide? Has President Obama wrung from his military advisors every conceivable option—short of invasion and occupation, and even short of bombing airfields—to stop (or at least complicate) the barrel bombing and (if necessary) neutralize possible mass murder alternatives such as Scud missiles and field artillery trained on residential neighborhoods? Is there an ongoing diplomatic offensive aimed at binding regional partners to the creation of safe havens inside Syria? Is there a move afoot to transcend an anemic train-and-equip program by creating an all-Syrian national stabilization force capable of protecting Syrian civilians? If patriotic Syrians cannot find ways to overcome their divisions and unite against both Iran and ISIL while themselves pledging to protect civilians, they will lose their country forever. If Iranians, Russians, Turks, and Gulf Arabs see civilian vulnerability merely as an inevitable cost of doing business, Syrians should rise up against the lot of them.

 Giving the protection of Syrian civilians operational priority as opposed to lip service can save lives, build a foundation for political conflict resolution, and prevent ongoing mass homicide from assuming the additional dimension of genocide. Yet it will take more than words. It will take this President changing course. For as bad as Syria and its neighborhood are today, they can be immeasurably worse twenty months from now.'

Regime’s Idlib front collapsing

 What Assad has left are not supporters, but hostages. Hopefully many more will get the chance to escape when the pocket around Ariha closes.

 'Five regime troops in the hospital reportedly handed themselves over to rebels on Thursday afternoon.

 According to pro-opposition outlet Siraj Press, the surrendered servicemen told the rebels that morale among regime troops still under siege had collapsed due to a lack of food and water after attempts to air drop supplies failed.

 The servicemen also said that a number of soldiers who tried to defect had been shot by the officers present, which made the remaining servicemen fear making a similar attempt.'

Islamic State seize historic Syrian city

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 "It's terrible that they do control half of Syria, but of course most of the area they control is desert. So they don't actually control much of the populated areas, so it's over-exaggerated. It's very sad that minds are focused on Syria, whenever these horrific pirates, these strange people with their black flags in ISIS, do something very photogenic, when they cut the head off an American, or when they destroy some heritage, then immediately everybody pays attention, but people haven't been paying attention to what's been going on otherwise, which is much more significant.

 Recently, a combination of the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front, and Jabhat al-Nusra, which is a jihadist group, have defeated the Assad régime in Idlib, in Jisr al-Shugour, in the Mastoumeh military base, at the Nasib border crossing in the south, at Tel Kurbi just outside Damascus; so there's a string of defeats for this régime, which has been propped up by Iran , mainly; Iranian occupation forces and Lebanese and Iraqi Shia militias backed by Iran; and the régime is now in the biggest trouble that it's been, that despite all of these Iranian forces, Lebanese and Iraqi forces, on its frontlines, it's losing battle after battle after battle. ISIS, the "Islamic State", has also been defeated by the rebels. The media rather lazily seems to equate ISIS with the opposition, but ISIS is really a third force which is exploiting the chaos in Syria to come in and expand where it can. It's really very unpopular amongst Syrians, as is the Assad régime.

 ISIS has been defeated by the rebels, who are at war with it, in the Qalamoun region, in Quneitra, in the Damascus suburbs, just in the last couple of months. On the other hand, ISIS is defeating the Assad régime in Palmyra, and a couple of days ago it defeated the US-backed Iraqi army in Ramadi. So at the moment the strongest player on the ground seems to be a combination of the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front.

 Recently, it seems that things have changed around. I think one reason for this is just the exhaustion of Assad's forces. He's really down to the foreign powers that will help him, and his very narrow sectarian base. The vast majority of the Syrian people have deserted him, his economy is collapsing, and he's running out of men. I think that's the crucial factor. The second factor is that the Islamic Front groups, that's different groups as well, and the Free Army groups, have recently been able to work together much better than they had ever been able to do so before. They've become much better organised, and much more cohesive. They've formed new alliances, one called the Army of Conquest, which has been winning so many battles in the north. So it's a sign, I think, of various things; it's a sign of the new cohesion of the rebel groups, a sign of the exhaustion of the Assad régime, and also a sign that Saudi Arabia and Turkey have put aside their differences, and Qatar as well, the regional powers have recognised the huge threat of Iranian troops in Iraq and in Syria, and how this is just expanding the Sunni jihadist appeal, and they've decided to give much more anti-tank weaponry to the Free Syrian Army."

 Before that, Jim Muir had said, "It seems that the bulk of the population has fled, certainly that's the government narrative." It isn't true*, just as they left the lower ranks to be massacred when they lost Tabqa airbase**, but it is easier to report the Assad version as the plausible Syrian narrative, rather than point out it has been a lie from Day One, which would involve more careful reporting.
* "The official line of the Syrian military and State media is that President Assad’s forces evacuated all civilians as they fled on Wednesday. However, residents have said only high-ranking military officers and their families, as well as some “collaborators”, were able to leave." [http://eaworldview.com/2015/05/syria-daily-civilians-trapped-in-palmyra-after-islamic-state-takeover/]
**[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2736764/Marched-deaths-Sickening-ISIS-slaughter-continues-250-soldiers-captured-Syrian-airbase-stripped-led-desert-mass-execution.html]

Western leaders must heed Syrian concerns

 "Return to the cause of all this evil, which is having a dictator that is terrorising his citizens and preventing them from having a free life. We must clean this wound before closing it."

 "Where is the revolution [in the media’s reporting]? It’s not our fault. The Syrian people keep fighting the regime but nobody cares about that now because they (the media) don’t want [to show] that."

 "Most of them (JN) are Syrians [so] when you (the West) fight them … when you bomb them, they get more supporters."

 "When America blacklists, the Syrian people [are starting to] whitelist."

 "Obama can cover the whole world in red lines. Who cares? We are dying here. And Ban Ki Moon? He is ‘worried’ all the time. Ban Ki Moon is worried, Obama is drawing red lines, everybody is talking and nobody is doing anything."

 "The regime are killing people [with barrel bombs] … and they (the West and its allies) didn’t stop them. But they moved the whole world to destroy [Islamic State] in Kobane."

The moment civilian crops began burning in Daraa

 'In this video, one civilian shows us around the southern Syrian city of Daraa, where he says government forces began burning precious crops in retailiation to rebel gains there.'

 Assad does this every year, as part of his "kneel or starve" policy.

Reporters on Syria's war

 ' “Usually barrel bombs come in the morning when you have a blue sky, so we wake up to this,” says Fouad, a media activist with a trim beard and flannel shirt who has worked four years in Aleppo.

 So why doesn’t he leave?

 “Because it’s our cause. It’s not a civil war, it’s a revolution and we are not terrorists,” says Fouad, who asked not to be identified further. “We lost so many friends and relatives, and this forces you to stay. If we leave, the regime will take over, or the extremists will be in charge.” '

Fears for Palmyra's ancient treasures

 'Even Syrian rebels were resting their hopes in the régime forces,' said Channel 4 News just now. It's a lie.

 “We’re trapped between a rock and a hard place. In me there’s a sense of deep resentment that this binary narrative that the regime has worked so hard to impose on Syria has actually finally paid off.

 They succeeded in fostering and encouraging and allowing to emerge such a horrible entity that when you put the regime next to them, the regime seems to be a more benign option than them.”

 21:40 Sky News, "In Syria, various militia are fighting each other."

"The Will to Survive" Documentary

Raed Fares:

 "While Assad continues his mad efforts to destroy Syria just because its people asked for freedom, the Syrians, with unbeatable will, continue building what that criminal destroys."

Syria's First Responders Say They Need a No-Fly Zone

 ' "The Syrian people have lost confidence in all the international community,
the Syrian people have been killed for 4 years and nobody acted seriously to stop the killing."

 Asked about the perpetrators of the chlorine attacks, Saleh laughed. "There are two options," he said. "Either it's the regime or the international coalition. We believe that the recent escalation from the regime comes as a reaction to the victories of the revolutionaries on the ground," said Saleh. "The regime applies a collective punishment policy to make revenge on the population that are supportive of the revolution." '

Syrian Rebels to Rohingya: Invitation for 500 Families Trapped at Sea

 ' “We know full well what it is like to suffer from hunger and anxiety. We can barely maintain what we have but as the Prophet said: ‘Food for 2 is enough for 3′. Hopefully we can stretch it bit more, but we can’t sit by and watch our brothers and sisters die at sea and do nothing.”

 Their plan is to convince Malaysian or Indonesian authorities to allow 500 families to come ashore and be escorted directly to the airport on a chartered flight to Istanbul wherein Turkish authorities would be asked to escort several chartered buses to the Turkish-Syrian border where they would be met and taken to a refugee camp on the Syrian side.'

Around-the-clock torture

 'Most prisoners of the Assad regime are referred to as "the vanished". These are people who were arrested at checkpoints, border crossings or in house searches and whose subsequent fate is unknown, says the Syrian lawyer Z. He estimates their number at 150,000.

 Conditions are particularly dire in the underground torture chambers operated by various intelligence services to which no one is given access, says the lawyer Z.

 He and several colleagues have been documenting the conditions in Syria's prisons for years. "About 100 prisoners are crowded together in cells measuring four by four metres. They can neither crouch nor sit, but must in some cases remain standing for weeks. The lucky ones are able to lean their backs against the wall," says Z. The prisoners are driven to the very limits of their physical and mental endurance. Some of them break down; others end up going mad. "There are prisoners who beat their head against the wall until they're dead." '

‘The whole school shook and I heard the kids screaming’

 "The regime wants to empty the opposition-controlled areas of Aleppo and punish those who continue to live there. Civilians have always been targeted. Every time the opposition controls a new area, civilian areas are bombed. The regime has bombed many schools."

Do we value stones more than flesh and blood?

 Yvonne Ridley:

 'The real story to emerge this week is about the heroic team of "Syrian Truth Smugglers" who have risked their lives to gather and preserve documents that provide evidence of war crimes committed by the Assad regime, but apart from one story in the Guardian newspaper in London it has been largely ignored.

 To date, nearly a quarter of a million people are thought to have been killed in the Syrian civil war, more than double the death toll of the war in Bosnia two decades ago. Eyewitness accounts tell us that barrel bombs are still being dropped on residential areas and the torture dungeons are still jammed with men, women and children who are being starved to death, as well as being beaten and abused.

 And while the cruel axis of evil – Assad and ISIS – forge ahead with their continually crossing paths of destruction it seems that the media and politicians can only express their outrage over the threat of what amounts to a few stones.

 Yes, Palmyra is beautiful and we should be angry at its wanton destruction, but I put the life of one Syrian child above any ancient city; so should you if you value human flesh and blood above stone.'

 Palmyra is the location of one of the Assads' most notorious prisons*. You can see some pictures of Palmyra, as well as other parts of Syria's heritage, in this video.**
*[http://uk.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/09/the-50-craziest-prisons-and-jails-in-the-world/tadmor-military-prison]
**[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx4-hwVzoE4]

Tide of Syria civil war turns against Assad

 I don't know about 'warlords', and ISIS would lose any remaining legitimacy if there was no longer a worse alternative in the form of Assad, but generally the Telegraph is more accurate than the more liberal papers.

 ' “The Syrian regime is much more hollow at its centre than one might think,” said a well-connected Syrian businessman, who asked not to be identified. “It’s a house of cards surviving on the projected image that it can still win the war. But the officials I know have already packed their bags, ready to run should that impression collapse.”

 These developments spell neither the certain end of Mr Assad, nor the victory of his rebel enemies. But they reveal how four years of civil war have reduced the government to a shell. Power is concentrated in the hands of an inner circle of security chiefs - and their grip may not be as firm as the propaganda suggests.

 The setbacks also show how Mr Assad has been forced to rely on his regional ally, Iran, for men and money - at a cost of relinquishing much of Syria’s sovereignty.

 A diplomatic solution to the conflict would involve Mr Assad’s departure - probably to Moscow or Tehran - and a change of leadership, but the preservation of the regime’s institutions, including the deeply repressive security system that led many Syrians to join the first protests in 2011.

 Under this scenario - which may pass as the best case - the debilitating war of attrition would grind on even after Mr Assad’s removal. Power would continue to slip out of the hands of whoever occupied the presidential palace in Damascus, flowing towards the rebel warlords who now control large expanses of Syria.

 The insurgents would tighten their grip on their fiefdoms in the north and south, while Isil would hold on to the eastern region along the Euphrates valley. The slow and bloody disintegration of Syria would continue - with or without Mr Assad.'