Hanging Dates Under Aleppo's Citadel

"The people in my film are [Muslim]. If you look at the names of all the brigades, they're all [Muslim]. But they're not Al-Qaeda or Nusra or whatever. If you listen, they're trying to declare and hide at the same time. 'I'm not against someone drinking alcohol in his own home. But it's haram.' 'I'm not the one to prosecute him. That's the government's job.' They want to be just but they cannot hide being Muslim. If I were to make a film suggesting that these fighters are communists, then I'd be fabricating things.
"They want the world to understand that ... every time you say 'jihad' you don't mean Al-Qaeda. That whenever you say, 'I don't drink alcohol,' you don't mean 'I'm violent.' They want to be rewarded for their moderation.
"If you don't listen to them, eventually they will be lured by Al-Qaeda-like organizations. They have lots of money. They can secure services for people, but in return, they'll make their lives hell.
"I'm biased toward the revolution." Soueid said. "I hope I'll always be able to defend the revolution as I do now."
[http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/…/documenting_a_revolution_…]

Syrian Brotherhood criticises
attempts to discredit opposition

"Those concerned by your revolution have learned their lessons and believe that killing the revolution from its birth will be to their benefit. Dear Syrians, I assure you, no matter how many assurances you give them, they will never accept your democracy project, not the Americans not the Russians not the Europeans nor the Iranians. They do not object to your revolution but to you, to your humanity and to your democracy, liberation and justice."
The Muslim Brotherhood may not have covered itself in glory with its level of leadership in the Syrian revolution, but that they are talking about revolution when many socialists are not, conveys a certain cubic capacity.

Were We Wrong about Syria?
"We should have provided political and military support for the first generation of rebels—the “good guys” who described themselves as secular democrats. We should have done this before jihadi militants flocked into the country and before Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah were fully engaged. We should have aimed at a rapid transition to a non-sectarian state, where the Sunni majority would come into its own but religious minorities—Alawites, Druse, and Christians—would not feel threatened."

Insight: Starvation in Syria: a war tactic

At an army checkpoint that separates government-held central Damascus from eastern suburban towns earlier this month, a thin, teenage boy on a bicycle circled a soldier and begged to be allowed to take a bag of pita bread, a staple food, into the eastern suburbs. The soldier refused but the boy kept begging for "just one loaf".
The soldier finally shouted: "I'm telling you, not a single morsel is allowed in there. I don't make the rules. There are those bigger than me and you who make the rules and they're watching us right now. So go back home." The soldier, visibly upset, exhaled quietly and deeply when the boy slipped out of sight.

Profiles in Politics: Senator Lindsey Graham

“We need to be backing people who would replace Assad who are not radical Islamists and that’s most Syrians.”
There are many things I'd disagree with Lindsey Graham about, but this isn't one of them.

Syria: the land of broken promises
  "There is no other solution than go back to square one: arm the FSA with weapons that can stop airplanes and long distance missiles.
The West has been defeated on the Russian diplomatic chessboard. After the chemical weapons deal Assad feels victorious. Most of the world’s attention is now going to the so-called terrorists and is hardly reporting his atrocities anymore. Assad is more than happy that we will try to find a political solution on the same chessboard he and his Russian friends have won the last game."

What's going on in Syria is about a
lot more than chemical weapons

CraigSummers >ATrueFinn
27 October 2013 12:51pm

".....The US and UK
have a history of wars of aggression and violent crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations. It is amazing how you defend these countries......"
Changing the subject is fine - if you have nothing to counter the argument for your support of Syria. Your hatred of the US/UK is not an argument on why you support Assad - because there are no good arguments. If all of this was happening in Bahrain where the US has a military base, you would be beside yourself condemning the US and their complicity in the murder of people in Bahrain to protect US interests. Instead nothing about Russia. Nothing about Hezbollah/Lebanon. Nothing about Iran.
Your problem is that the US has had absolutely nothing to do with the war in Syria so you bring up irrelevant history. Anti-Americanism is really easy to distinguish from somewhat who is REALLY concerned about "crackdowns" on innocent civilians.

Give Syria peace, not a process

Rime Allaf
"Real friends of Syria would break Assad's siege, neutralise his air power, and convince Syrian people and revolutionaries alike that there is hope in Geneva, that a transition is imminent, that the nightmare is ending. Anything less than that merely pushes Syrians into further despair, and the region into even greater instability."

Strolling the Champs-Élysées with 120,000 Syrian Refugees

 This is quite sad.

 'There is a school at Za’atari, but it’s sparsely attended and many kindergarteners have forgotten the alphabet. They want to play “revolutionary games” instead. “My five-year-old tells me every day that he dreams of carrying a machine gun,” she said, “and going back to Syria.” '

Syria: Is it Too Late To Do Anything?

"In the end the much maligned and often ridiculed Sarah Palin may be speaking accurately for what is left of a morally hollowed-out West when she suggests that we avert our gaze from the horror of Syria and “let Allah sort it out.” The Obama administration’s version of the “leave it to God” approach characteristically reflects lawyerly deliberation and close attention to strategic communication."
Also much of the hollowed-out Left.

Solidarity With The Syrian Revolution
 From The Teachers' Strike
In Spanish.

Rebels find care packages
destined for top army officers

"The captured supplies are a stark indication that the regime’s army, which is making gains elsewhere in the country, has all but abandoned such isolated posts and their troops to their fate."

Syria: Ghouta Residents Live in Fear of More Chemical Attacks

 'The paramedic who designed these makeshift gas masks makes them in yellow to persuade local children that they are dressing up as the cartoon character Sponge Bob Squarepants. Abu Salah is unconcerned about the international community’s shifting policy.

 “With no electricity or TV news, it’s easy for us not to care what decisions are being made, and to focus on our work. No one really cares about us,” he said.'

Malek Jandali Ya Allah (Oh God)

Malek Jandali: “I thought: what can I do? How can I help? All I have is music.
When the world abandoned the Syrians, forsook them, they had nothing left to do – they went back to their creator, and asked ‘Ya Allah, please help us.’ This song was a way to translate their chant through my orchestra and piano into a universal language.”
[http://www.theguardian.com/…/malek-jandali-syrian-composer-…]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad:
On Monsterphilia and Assad

'If a boy cries “wolf!” while being set-upon by a wolf pack, then fixating on his propensity for lies will not conjure away the threat. Memory can distort sight; it can’t override it. Where skepticism hardens into cynicism and dogma precludes context, ignorance and apathy parade as virtues. Bromwich and the anti-imperialists forget that in Iraq only the possession of unconventional weapons was being alleged; in Syria they have actually been used. In Iraq pretexts had to be manufactured for intervention; in Syria their abundance has done little to encourage action. It is one thing to distrust the government and quite another to extend this skepticism to the supposed objects of its humanitarian concern.'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is no accident that Syrians have received such little sympathy. Western citizens usually sympathize with perfect victims; moral ambiguity dissuades many.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
'The threat of a US intervention was momentary; it passed. But the people who had shown little concern for protecting Syrians from Assad went to unusual lengths to protect Assad from the US. Though only a handful openly embraced Assad, many opted for a subtler approach, focusing exclusively on the opposition, caricaturing it, amplifying its failings and erasing its suffering. They manufactured doubt to exculpate the regime. Uri Avnery has derided this tendency as “leftist monsterphilia” – one that, in times of crises, turns otherwise sensible people into apologists for tyrants.'

Bombs And Bottles

 An explosion near the airport in Syria's capital, Damascus, has been followed by a blackout in parts of the country, state media say.

 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24647808]

Syria Spotlight: “Regime Attempted Ground Invasion Of Moadamiyyah Via Humanitarian Route”

 “At least we managed to embarrass the U.S. government into saying something,” Zakarya said. “But it’s not enough. We can’t print out that statement and eat it.”

 The starvation is the second story here. The first is that those who entered the town, including nuns from the same monastery as régime propagandist Mother Agnes, may have told the government troops where to attack.

Debating Syria

Corey Oakley:
 "The revolution is undeniably messy, contradictory, ideologically and socially variegated. Given the history of Syria and the region, it is utopian to think it could be anything but. Nonetheless, for all its weaknesses, the Syrian opposition has fractured the regime to an extent that virtually no one believed possible. The regime has lost territorial control of large swathes of the country, and faces both armed and civil opposition in almost all the areas it still controls. If this is simply a “popular struggle” and not a revolution, it is a non-revolution of a quite unique kind."

A poster in Yabroud, Damascus: We want a Syria like this ______. Not this ______.

 "This family has been living in utter misery for close to 3 years. They survived everything Assad threw at them. From gas attacks, to daily shelling, to murderous raids and of course now, the starvation. Yet today, their luck ran out. 

 In the suburbs of Damascus some may call this family “lucky”. They all had their heads blown off together. The parents did not have to watch their child die. The boy did not have to become an orphan and starve. Welcome to Syria. The way Assad always wanted it to be."
[http://www.therevoltingsyrian.com/…/graphic-an-entire-famil…]

Syria snipers 'shoot at pregnant
 women,' UK doctor claims

"Who were these snipers, which side?"
"I don't really know, but I would imagine, and I was told many times, that it was from the régime side, so presumably it's from the Assad government."
You have to watch the video to find out this bit of the truth, shorn of that, this story can seem to back the narrative that they are all as bad as each other. The people of Syria are fighting to overthrow a horrible dictatorship.

Reporters’ nightmare

The difficulty of reporting in rebel areas has let the regime tell its own narrative"Television footage of the relatively calm centre of the capital, Damascus, makes the regime look more in control, while recent rebel advances in the north are barely reported. The government recently facilitated reports on the presence of ruthless Islamist fighters in Maaloula, a town of Christians, whom the regime depicts as under threat from the rebels. Meanwhile, thousands of Syrian civilians mass in camps in the north, unseen on Western television screens, as they flee from salvoes of regime rockets."

People Are Strange

 Saudi Arabia turns down UN Security Council seat
     ---------------------------------------------------------

 It said the Security Council had failed in its duties towards Syria.

 Russia's foreign ministry called the move bewildering, and said Saudi Arabia's criticism of the UN Security Council about its actions over Syria "is particularly strange".

 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24580767]

A response to Slavoj Zizek:
Syria a pseudo struggle

"A Marxist treats with contempt the innumerable renegades of the revolution who shout to him: “We are more progressive than you, we were the first to renounce the revolution! We were the first to submit to the monarchistic constitution.” Tony Cliff added to this citation that a revolutionary cannot accept the defeat of the revolution until objectives facts leave no room for doubt. The revolutionaries are the last to leave the battlefield."

Aziz’s StoryRobin Yassin-Kassab
"When I met Aziz Asaad, an activist from Selemiyyeh, across the Turkish border in Antakya, I asked him why the community was so revolutionary, why it hadn’t been scared into fencesitting or even grudging support for Assad by the Islamist element of the opposition. His answer: “We read a lot. We’ve always read books.” "

The London Review of Books on SyriaRobin Yassin-Kassab
"I agreed with novelist Hisham Matar when he called ‘shame’ on Hugh Roberts’s very long Libyan piece which at no point attempted to see things from a Libyan perspective. Rather, it cast the Libyans as passive agents, pawns in the hands of the devilishly clever white man. And on Syria, commentary has been statist-leftist, as if this were an amusing chess game between regional and super powers rather than a struggle for freedom and a genocide, with only one side receiving sustained imperialist aid."

New York, New York

 Top Syrian army general killed in battle
     ---------------------------------------------

 General Jameh Jameh killed in fighting with rebels in Deir Ezzor where he was head of intelligence, state TV says.

 [http://www.aljazeera.com/…/top-syrian-army-general-killed-b…]

Too late for US to win Syrian hearts

"It is not enough; but for now, it will have to do."

Free Syrian Army chief on ISIS,
Geneva and Syria’s civil war

"If we were able to neutralize the enemy’s air force, even in spite of his of rocket weaponry and long-range weapons, I think that the field would tilt in favor of the revolutionaries."

Syrian sniper says rebels must fight

He says he'll fight until Syrian President Bashar al Assad is gone. He calls on the West to support the Free Syrian Army. "Of course, we don't expect them to fight for us. We are responsible for our country, we can defend our country, we can end the regime," he adds.
But, like rebel military and political leaders, Mermet says the rebel fighters need anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons.
"Kalashnikovs, sniper weapons and other small weapons can do nothing," he says. "We need [the West] to support us and we will do the rest. We will finish Bashar al Assad."

Why the West is Wrong on SyriaRazan Zaitouneh

"The West, from the very beginning, has rejected everything the Free Army asked for, starting by refusing to deliver effective weapons or to create a no-fly zone and safe areas for civilians. Then it blamed the FSA for being divided and weak, and for the spread of the extremists.
What does the West really want from Syria? The wish to destroy the regime’s chemical weapons and to secure Israel’s borders is completely understandable. But the West should also listen to what Syrians want. Turning a blind eye to the Syrian people’s needs will only lead to the failure of all its plans as no unified opposition – as was recognized – can impose what the “superpowers” agree upon. And the rebellious Syrians are not willing to accept half-solutions after all they have suffered."

Syria's minorities: Caught in the middle?

"I think the biggest threat to minorities in Syria and in general in any country in the world is dictatorship and tyranny - simply because it destroys the social, political and economic ties and relationships that connect the components of society together. We have seen this in many other countries and Syria is not an exception."
Anas al-Abdah, a member of the Syrian National Coalition

Who are the British jihadists in Syria?

'But another British jihadist, who calls himself Abu Islam, says Britain has nothing to worry from him: "For me personally I was born and raised there, that's my home.
"If I wanted to do something in UK I wouldn't have come here. If I did want to do something in UK I would have already done it by now, but I'm here. "
Abu Muhadjar also denies they will be a threat: "That's slightly surreal to go back to UK and start a jihad there. I do understand their concern but you cannot paint everyone with the same brush.
"As to the global jihad - I couldn't tell you if I'm going to be alive tomorrow let alone future plans." '