Syria's 'Free Police' outgunned by all its foes
'In areas outside state control, Shallaf says he heads a force of over a thousand policemen with U.S., British and Danish backing that has paid for salaries, uniforms, vehicles, generators, computers - but not guns.
That is in line with the broader policy of Western states that form part of a "Friends of Syria" alliance which have shied away from arming the opposition to Assad.
"The problem in the policy of the Friends of Syria is that it prevents support in the form of weapons, even simple handguns." '

U.S. must coordinate with Syrian rebels

By: Mohammed Alaa GhanemI think the civilian deaths have taken an uptick now Assad knows that his airforce isn't going to be interfered with for the time being.
"U.S. air strikes have had important positive impacts. The Islamic State has suffered real losses, and there have been fewer civilian deaths now that Assad’s aerial monopoly is broken. But the dangers are substantial; anti-U.S. sentiment has risen in western Syria, and the Islamic State has continued to creep toward Baghdad. To preserve the viability of its strategy, the United States must complement its air strikes with firm support, in both word and deed, to moderate anti-Islamic State Syrian rebels."

Why the US-led bombing of Iraq and Syria will not save the Kurds

 If you can't see that this is the voice of a pro-Assad stooge, you really don't understand what's been going on in Syria.

 "The Turkish government, along with authoritarian Western allies in the Persian Gulf, was a pillar of support for those forces in the Syrian civil war out of which ISIL emerged. That was part of a wider policy of preventing any progressive outcome of the conflict in Syria – for Syrians and for the wider region."

 The only interest Kevin Ovenden has in the pile of corpses is to forestall any support to those wishing to prevent its increase.

 "The only interest that Washington, London, Ankara and Israel have in the Kurds' suffering in IS-areas is in a mountain of corpses with which to hide their own murderous policies in the region."

Remember Our Syrian Allies

"But even this year, in an effort to defend past hesitation about supporting the moderate rebels, officials have talked about them as some kind of civilian rabble. The moderate opposition and its fighters were never that, but if we’re still saying so, it undercuts confidence within Syria and the region about America’s commitment to implementing our policy now."

A Syrian Revolutionary Speaks Out: Here's What The World Should Know

"We thought that if we fight for the same values that you announce and you pledge for, we thought that you would help us. Because, in the end, if all of us in the world implement the same values of freedom and dignity and equality, that would bring peace for all human beings. But in the end, we were disappointed."

SYRIA: My journey to the land of blessing, and torture ^Featured

Written by Moazzam Begg
From 2012.
"On the outskirts of the city of Aleppo I stayed with a group of pious, well-educated, relatively young and very hospitable fighters. They were as concerned about the country’s future and avoiding a repeat of the Iraqi-style disaster as they were with ridding the country of Bashar al-Assad. They reminded me of the good that still exists in Syria, despite the betrayal they've faced from their own government - and others. Like many of the people leading the rebels several had been imprisoned and survived tragedies like the 2008 Sednaya prison massacre and the “underground tombs” and “graves” of Palestine Branch Military Intelligence (Fara’ Falasteen).
Many western leaders and senior former Syrian ministers have predicted the imminent downfall of the house of Assad. If Palestine Branch is captured by the rebels and intelligence secrets are laid bare, just as they had once been in Tripoli, Scotland Yard will have its hands full- again, and we’ll hear more about British ministers suffering amnesia, instead of justice."

Kerry: Syria’s Assad has violated chemical arms pact by using chlorine gas
Well, he has, for months. There aren't going to be airstrikes on Assad, any more than there were last year, but this does suggest that the US isn't positioning itself to be Assad's friend.

Syrian Kurds paying price of disharmony, Davutoğlu saysDavutoğlu used to be the hero of the anti-imperialists. In reality I think he's committed to the advance of the Turkish state and capital. But rather than encouraging ISIS by giving them guided tours to the Syrian border, they have found themselves unable to co-exist with Assad and so willing to encourage his replacement with a more democratic system; but their first priority has been to keep in with the Americans, which has meant doing as little as possible to help up until now.
'Davutoğlu said the government contacted the Kurdish PYD and the FSA last year and told them to act together to "avert the terror threat and regime attacks in the northern belt."
He added: "If the PYD, instead of cooperating with the regime, had joined forces with the FSA and with the opposition, ISIS would not have found that much opportunity in the field." '

Terrorism can’t be fought effectively without defeating the Assad regime
“The murderer of Damascus will not come out of this crisis with the same opportunities he has had since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution. When the Arab and international coalition began striking [ISIL] in Syria, Al Assad wanted to declare himself an ally of the international community and its partner in the war against terrorism, so as not to lose face before his own community and, above all, before Hizbollah that is fighting against Syrians on his behalf and the Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, who oversees security in Damascus. In the meantime, the international community is fighting ISIL. So, what is Mr Al Assad’s role? What exactly is he doing?”

Syria: Assad loyalists concerned by rise of paramilitaries

By Lina Sinjab
"Only a just deal that prevented reprisals and brought to justice those responsible for war crimes would allow the dust to settle."
Exactly, but the idea of negotiating an Iran friendly deal that sends the Assads off but keeps the rest of the criminal régime intact is not going to help Syrians forget, or even escape the genocide, as the régime would still be asserting its legitimacy by Assad's bloody methods. Reports from inside régime held areas have dominated what news coverage there is of Syria, when you face torture for saying the wrong thing, that isn't usually a good way to get an objective picture. But the inability to control the activities of the gangs of thugs who organise the reign of terror in the government held areas seems like another sign of how this hollowed out state cannot go on for long, can never govern Syria as a state authority again; and the pretence that this is a sectarian civil war rather than a revolution should be exposed. Not helped by the killing of several dozen schoolchildren* yesterday, I would tend to guess by Jabhat al-Nusra, in Homs, which has led each Russia Today news broadcast since. I expect it will be condemned by most opposition groups, and that will go unreported, and I hope those responsible are brought to justice, just as those in Assad's forces who commit such crimes day in, day out, should be.
I'm not sure I agree with everything in this piece** by Ben Allinson-Davies. I think it may be a little too conspiratorial about the US administration, that Obama doesn't read his intelligence briefings does suggest blundering rather than calculation drives the policy. The point is well made that Syrians are being forever asked to prove that they are moderate Muslims (even if they aren't sectarian the religious label is imposed on them. A woman who says she is against the Assad régime, and her baby is Sunni but the mama is Shia, popped up on my Timeline this morning. How are we supposed to pigeonhole her?) while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is allowed automatic membership of the moderate club. And this is bang on:
"The way to “defeat” a group that espouses Salafist-jihadism is never to bomb it. It will just legitimise its uncompromising message, and gain it a stronger following; bombing these groups will give them legitimacy. The key is to ARM the Free Syrian Army wholesale; with anti-tank weapons to defeat Assad’s armour, anti-aircraft weapons to blow his helicopters and jets out of the skies, and weapons and ammunition to sustain them in battle. Half the reason why so many FSA members left for al-Nusra is because al-Nusra has everything the FSA doesn’t have, from money to weapons. The key is to take that power OUT of their hands. If the FSA had everything it needed, and more, much of Nusra’s power would significantly weaken: why them if the FSA has everything you need?
If only we lived in a parallel universe in which Obama realised that he would gain firm, long-lasting allies in Syria if he armed the revolutionaries from the start, eradicated terrorism in Syria at its roots by helping them to overthrow the regime (which has created the jihadist threat in order to undermine the revolution) and tried not to use the heroic Syrian people as anti-ISIS cannon fodder."
*[http://www.aljazeera.com/…/children-killed-homs-double-blas…]
**[http://unfetteredfreedom.wordpress.com/…/obama-can-read-wh…/]

Hama maintains its calm amid Syrian storm'Soumar Ali (a pseudonym), a member of the pro-regime National Defense Forces, told Al-Monitor, “The city’s residents are peaceful; we know they are opposed to the regime and they may hate us, but they did not use their arms against us. The city is a big opposition bloc and certainly, if residents are given the chance, they will fill the squares as they did before. We are trying to win them over to our side since we are in daily contact with them. However, the fact that authorities allowed some foreign fighters from among those who participated in the battles of the countryside to come to the city foretells the failure of all our efforts.” '

Time running out to save Syria’s soul
"No bombs have hit the assets of the Assad regime, the largest purveyor of death and chaos in Syria. As a result of this omission, the Syrian people are starting to feel a sense of betrayal. The United States and its international coalition can correct this path by taking steps to eliminate Assad’s ability to kill civilians and to empower moderate opposition forces and local governance to fill the vacuum as ISIS retreats."

Radio Free Syria

2,375 people were documented killed in Assad's Nakba in September 2014, including 20 killed by the US-led coalition.

The full report (in Arabic) from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, documenting the death toll, is available here: http://sn4hr.org/arabic/2014/10/01/2153/
There won't be a Stop The War demonstration this weekend against Assad's bombing of Syria.

Moazzam Begg to be freed as prosecutors drop terror chargesNot thanks to all the socialists who shy away from anything to do with Syria.

Deluded and deplorable

"It is about time Assad’s regime admitted it has absolutely no concern for the borders or sovereignty of Syria. It has demonstrated clearly over the last three years that it cares about the survival of the regime, and only the survival of the regime, even if that means the whole country is destroyed in the process.
Moallem went on to say Damascus was committed to a political solution to the crisis, while at the same time regime aircraft are raining down barrel bombs on Aleppo and elsewhere across the country. It is hard to imagine a single person in the audience at the U.N. could have taken his words seriously.
He also urged refugees – now half the Syrian population, if we count internally displaced people – to return to the country, without mention of why they were forced to leave in the first place, and while ignoring the fact that the situation on the ground has only worsened, and that he was actually inviting them back to their likely deaths."

Bashar Al-Assad is the main Syrian terrorist

 Yassin Al-Haj Saleh (physician, intellectual and Syrian oppositionist, imprisoned by the regime in Damascus for sixteen years):

 "Obama confirms his inability to provide an adequate policy when he reduces the situation to a Sunni-Shiite confrontation instead of mentioning the socio-political dimension of the conflict and the exceptional injustice that permeates the area. By assigning our struggle a meaningless old feud, this powerful man robs us of our cause, anything that has to do with justice, freedom, equality and human dignity."

United States has a role and responsibility in Syria
"In the eyes of the regime, no rules of war exist. Thus hospitals, residential areas, mosques, and churches, have all been targeted and the security branches are overflowing with stories of people dying under torture. Thus, we find the Syrian people struggling for the three past years not just to maintain their resistance, but, more importantly, their coherence against a policy that aims to break them.
Syria today is undergoing a transition. Large swathes of Syria are liberated and beyond the reach of the government. Bashar al-Assad has turned from the president of a country into the mayor of Damascus and some of its suburbs. He is unable to leave his palace without being preceded by his military. Also al-Assad’s loss of control over the border crossings with Turkey and Iraq means, in a political sense, that he has lost the ability to establish his rule over strategically important geographical areas. Though he certainly can shell and burn these places, he cannot regain control over them.
Nonetheless these liberated areas, at the same time, are mostly disconnected geographically and can be easily targeted from the air, which prevents them from becoming safe zones. The absence of a central authority makes it difficult and complicated to manage them. Basically, the more Assad stays in his palace, the more painful the transition becomes.The U.S. has a responsibility and role to help the Syrian people end this nightmare and open a democratic future for them. Of course, the air strikes against ISIL announced by President Obama are a good step. But much more important, the Obama Administration needs a strategy to end the Assad government which allowed ISIL to rise."

U.S. doesn’t face much threat from Syria’s air power – rebels aren’t so lucky

"The Assad regime has dropped thousands of so-called “barrel bombs” — oil drums packed with explosive fertilizer that flight crews literally pick up and hurl out of helicopters. It’s a brutal and indiscriminate method of warfare. Russia and Iran play a large role in keeping the Syrian Air Force in the fight. Moscow is Syria’s largest arms supplier and has been for years."

Syria, an analysis of the International coalition intervention led by the USA

"We must support and express solidarity with all the democratic and progressive forces in Syria and Iraq as well as the Kurdish democratic forces that resist against the two actors of the counter revolution: the Assad regimes on one side and the jihadist and Islamic reactionary forces on the other side.
In this perspective it is necessary to defend a local dynamic of self-defense rather than increasing stranglehold of imperialism and therefore we should also support the provision of weapons and arms to these democratic forces in the region to combat both counter revolutionary forces. These are important element that could empower the democratic forces on the ground and give them the tools to defend them.
This does not mean of course that we are uncritical of the leadership of the PKK and FSA democratic sections, which do not have a socialist leadership, but neither were the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the National Liberation Front in Algeria and this did not stop revolutionaries supporting them.
As a fundamental principle of revolutionaries, we first need to support these forms of liberation and emancipation struggle unconditionally, before we are entitled to criticize the way they are led."

"REPENT, HARLEQUIN!" SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN 
Cameron's been very good in an Andrew Marr interview on Syria. He did call the Syrian National Coalition the Syrian National Opposition at the start, but he'd corrected himself by the end. But he'd got his talking points fairly straight, Assad is the cause of the rise of ISIS, we need to support the SNC and the FSA. Marr repeated Galloway's lie that the FSA doesn't exist, which Cameron wasn't confident enough in his material to reply directly to, but repeated that Assad's army had only made things worse. The actions of the government aren't likely to be that helpful, and in Iraq may not be at all, but at least there is some pressure on the government as a result of this prognosis to ensure that some shoddy deal to keep Assad in power is not made.
Just to make this clear once again, I'm not a fan of Cameron or his politics. I'd tend to agree with Henry David Thoreau that those who serve the state best, "necessarily resist it for the most part; and are commonly treated as enemies by it."

Isis and Syria: ‘Western hypocrisies have been driving support for extremism’

There's a lot wrong with Nick Cohen. But this is right.

"The root cause of Islamic State is Shia sectarianism in Iraq and sectarian mass murder in Syria. Mohammed Antabli, a leader of Syrian exiles in Britain, told me how he took British and European politicians to Turkey’s border with Syria at the start of the war and warned them that Islamism would flourish if the west did nothing for the moderate opposition. And so it has.

You will remember hearing, or perhaps said yourself, that we must not alienate “the Arab street”. Kassem Eid, an opposition activist now in exile in the US, said what streets were left in Syria were alienated beyond measure. The democratic world has done nothing. No no-fly zone. No attempt to slow Assad down, even for a day, even when he crossed Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons. Every Syrian activist I spoke to repeated his assertion that western hypocrisies were driving support for Islamism.
A great evil has been done to Syria. I cannot see how any western project against Islamic State can prosper until the “conscience of the world” provides redress by saying it will not tolerate the continuation of the Assad regime. At present, however, the world won’t even acknowledge evil’s existence. We must expect evil in return."
And much preferable on Syria to idiots who say things like this:
"So in one year, Cameron has proposed bombing all warring factions in Syria, with the exception of the secular liberal one that doesn't exist."
[https://twitter.com/flying_rodent/status/515437838805258241]