The killing of a soldier and his six-year-old son paints a chilling picture of Syria’s war

 'By chance, among the military mourners was Colonel Omar Shaaban.'

 I wonder if he is any relation to Bouthaina Shaaban, the régime's chief propagandist. This is like stories about cycling that ignore the hundreds mown down by car drivers, to focus on one pedestrian who stepped out in front of a bike.

The General’s View

 How low Fisk has fallen. He gives a coded message to his left wing readers that he's not totally taken by the general, "And that, of course, is exactly what the British Army used to say in Northern Ireland when it was also searching people's homes." But it is just a thin veneer over his peddling of every lie the general tells. And there must be a foreign conspiracy against Syria because Robert Fisk has seen Belgian weapons in government hands in Aleppo. He is no longer a journalist, unlike those his friends in the Syrian government have kidnapped and murdered.

The West's kneejerk peaceniks have some explaining to do

 I'm uneasy about the politics of condemnation, and while Bloodworth may be opposed in legacy to the Iraq war, many of those he has politically associated with were gung-ho then, lending credibility to the peaceniks' justification for their cautious approach. Mind you, this is bang on, and a truth often deliberately hidden.

 'This isn’t "collateral damage" either, to use the ugly euphemism. This is the result of a deliberate war being waged against the civilian population of Syria by the thuggish Ba’athist regime. The Syrian government’s position is to make life for those living in opposition areas as difficult as possible. This is why it has been bombing and shelling civilians, denying them access to UN-ordered cross-border assistance and blocking vaccination efforts in opposition held areas.'

Daraa province locked in stalemate

 'In February, as rumors circulated that Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and others would redouble efforts to arm Syria’s rebels with heavier weaponry, local groups announced a slew of unifications. But thus far, says Bardam, rebels are still waiting.

 “Obviously, the main reason [rebels have yet to advance] is that no new weapons have arrived,” he said.

 Instead, they make do with what they can make or capture. Rebel groups “have what are considered ‘individual weapons,’ in addition to whatever they can capture from regime forces,” he said.'

Syria’s secular uprising has been hijacked by jihadists

 'Why has the Syrian uprising, whose early supporters demanded that tyranny should be replaced by a secular, non-sectarian, law-bound and democratic state, so totally failed to achieve these aims?'

 Because Assad has plenty of weapons, but only the Islamic factions have had a regular supply of weapons. Cockburn continues the fantasy that the solution is to end the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Peace will come when Assad is gone, but that's not on Cockburn's agenda for Syrians at all. At least he's not among the genocide deniers, though his use of the kidnap of Razan Zaitouneh to discredit the whole idea of armed resistance is unreasonable.

Ordinary people remain the real victims

 This is a nasty piece, writing off the rebels as "hate-filled fighter(s)" and "various groups that want to kill each other".

Desperate children pretend they go to school, says Latakia housewife

 'This year, we reopened a school with the help of the rebels after the regime destroyed all the schools in our area.'

Syrians must not let the extremists undermine their revolution

 'The negligible support that moderate rebels received from the international community, often in the form of nonlethal aid such as communications equipment and night-vision goggles, at a time when Gulf donors were busy supplying cash and weapons to more extreme factions, proved another crucial factor in the ongoing marginalization of moderate elements from the scene, allowing for the effective hijacking of the revolution by extremists.'

WH orders Syrian embassy and consulates shuttered

 'It’s possible that this report from UN human-rights investigators could have prompted this, but it’s just as condemnatory on Assad’s enemies as the Assad regime.'

 It's not actually. ISIS have committed lesser crimes than Assad, and against actual rebels, not against Assad.

'Jihadist rebels have carried out mass executions of detainees in Syria, UN human rights investigators say. The commission of inquiry’s latest report documents several incidents blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Government forces are meanwhile accused of sharply increasing their use of indiscriminate weapons, such as barrel-bombs, against civilians. …'

 This is on point though:

 'Some might find it a surprise that we still have diplomatic relations at all with Assad, but that’s been a relic of the initial conclusion by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that Assad was a “reformer.” Even after demanding Assad’s resignation, freezing his assets, and threatening to bomb Assad’s forces for crossing the “red line” of chemical-weapons use, the US and Syria have maintained diplomatic relations. Suddenly closing off consular services seems like small potatoes in comparison.'

Syria: The Battle Beyond

 'Educated, middle-class Syrian exiles share their thoughts on the revolution and their determination to return home.

 "I talk a lot about Ghouta because I love it." '

Revolutionary Left Current in Syria: Establishment of the “People’s Liberation Faction” to commemorate the third anniversary of the Syrian Revolution

 'We see that our revolution is part of the struggles of the global toiling masses, of the oppressed and of the marginalized everywhere for freedom, equality, social justice and socialism. We see it in the struggle of the Palestinian people to recover all its land and rights, in the struggle of the peasants without land and labor in Latin America, in the strikes of the miners in South Africa and in other countries, in the struggle of the masses in Europe against neoliberalism and capitalist globalization, in the struggle of the oppressed workers of Southeast Asia, in the struggle of women for their rights and equality throughout the world...

 The time has come, at that particular moment of the revolution, for the revolutionary left current to play its role in the popular armed struggle through the establishment of the People’s liberation faction without giving up for a single moment all forms of peaceful mass struggle that allow us to confront both the violent fascist regime and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces. This is the road for the victory of the popular revolution, in rooting its nature in democracy and socialism from below, in defending the immediate and general interests of the popular classes, in securing the independence of the will of the people from any imperialist or regional intervention from any foreign power, and in recovering our occupied territories of the Golan by all means possible.'



Note 4/3/25, their armed group was stopped at a Jabhat al-Nusra checkpoint in Aleppo, refused to surrender their arms, lost one of their members in a firefight, and disbanded.

Syrians mark uprising anniversary with arts festival

 'Matar acknowledged the risk of holding public events in a town that still comes under shelling, but said the festival was an important "demonstration from Syrians to the world that the revolution is still a revolution".'

Why Yabroud Fell

 'Russia, which is now occupying parts of Ukraine, has torpedoed every effort by the international community to prevent "foreign intervention" in Syria, the type of foreign intervention that is unpalatable to Western leftists and not to be confused with the foreign intervention of Russia in Ukraine or Iran in Syria. But that is alright because the West is backing these rebels according to the conspiracy theorists, and they are being told to cut off people's heads and incite sectarianism, not the sectarianism of a regime that shells mosques and slits the throats of children in Sunni villages.'

Britain to tackle big rise in Syrian refugee girls forced to marry

 We could provide refuge and jobs. Crazy idea I know. I don't know how true these figures are, but I know that the reason there are millions of refugees is because Assad is deliberately making them so to stay in some sort of power. And Britain appears to be doing nothing to change that. There was a guy on Inside Syria on al-Jazeera who suggested that sanctions against those with banking links to those fueling conflict now being considered over Russia's actions in Ukraine could be transferred to the Syria situation. There is a question of hypocrisy, Cameron was just this week promising to defend Britain's arms exporting business.

How Syria’s rebels lost the plot

 'The higher profile of the jihadists was much in the interests of the government, which had long claimed that the opposition was dominated by al-Qa’ida (true to the spirit of Middle East conspiracy theories, the opposition then claimed that Isis was in league with the government, asserting, against much evidence to the contrary, that the Syrian army and Isis seldom fought each other).'

 Cockburn and Assad are the conspiracy theorists. Cockburn has claimed consistently that the insurgency was predominantly Islamic radicals fighting a sectarian war (on behalf of the West and the Gulf Co-operation Council, of course) all along, whatever the evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the régime has backed away from any fight with ISIS [http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/…/memo-isis-assad-regime-f…]

 'By the end of 2012 it was clear that the rebels could not win without full-scale foreign military intervention. But to many, this was not obvious at the time because government forces pulled back from outlying positions and concentrated on holding strategic areas. A problem for the opposition was that the whole purpose of their exiled movement was to provoke a Libyan-type intervention.'

 Two more lies, the rebels wanted arms to finish the job themselves, not to rely on a foreign invasion, and as they had fought the régime to standstill with virtually no weapon supplies, it is not at all clear that granting those requests would not bring an end to the war and victory.

 'Its main tactic is to seal off rebel-held enclaves and bombard them with artillery and from the air, so that people are forced to flee. This is hardly a way to win the hearts and minds of the population, but the rebels have not found an answer to it.'

They have, it's the anti-aircraft weapons that Cockburn denies would have any effect.

 'In Syria the opposition has already been fighting its own bloody civil war since 3 January. This tends to discredit all the armed opposition and is, in any case, unlikely to produce a clear winner.'

The rebels take on the al-Qaida elements, and they are simply discrediting themselves. Pathetic from Cockburn.

 'President Assad remains ruler of a ruined land and does not have the resources to win a decisive victory. But unless the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and their allies are prepared to fight a long war in order to exhaust the government in Damascus, there is no reason he should not stay in power.'

Quite the opposite. As Assad can no longer rule Syria, he remains eternally a burden to his allies. It was suggested on al-Jazeera's Inside Syria today that the prospect of Assad re-taking the Qalamoun mountains and prolonging the war may finally induce the Saudis the provide heavy weaponry to the Free Syrian Army. It is to the world's shame that it is left to the most reactionary state to do the right thing.

Aleppo is now rubble, after waves of bombing

 'Nobody knows why the regime chooses this makeshift device – a crude container packed with up to half a ton of TNT and shrapnel – normally just unloaded from the back of helicopters. It may be it is running short of its Russian-made missiles, or that it wants to save them for military rather than easy civilian targets.

 But the group calculates that 4,000 people have been killed, of which 2,600 have been identified. Others, like Mr Ali's neighbours, were simply incinerated. At one point in January, up to 30 barrels were dropping a day. The suburbs hit are a roll-call of the poorer, Sunni Muslim districts, previously a magnet for people from the countryside seeking work.'