Wednesday 31 August 2016

THE DECAY OF THE SYRIAN REGIME IS MUCH WORSE THAN YOU THINK

Assad-fighters

 'The government’s fighting force today consists of a dizzying array of hyper-local militias aligned with various factions, domestic and foreign sponsors, and local warlords. Aymenn al-Tamimi’s profiles of loyalist militias provide some insight into their diverse backgrounds. Among these groups, only a handful are still capable of anything close to offensive action. Much more so than sectarian or demographic limitations, this fragmentation is the direct result of the interaction between national and local economic and governance pressures. As the once totalitarian Syrian central state atrophies, its constituent parts — be they sectarian, rentierist, or simple brutes — have gained a stunning degree of political and economic independence from Damascus. Contrary to what others have claimed, Assad’s regime has not struck some grand bargain with a large section the Syria’s urban Sunni population. Instead, he has elevated to power the most brutish elements of the country and doubled down on the sectarian, tribal, and thuggish inclinations of its base. In much of the country, loyalist security forces function like a grand racketeering scheme: simultaneously a cause and consequence of state collapse at the local level.

 As an introduction to the Tiger Forces, we can turn to Robert Fisk’s fawning account of his “audience with […] Bashar al-Assad’s favorite soldier,” Suheil Hassan, who leads the Tiger Forces. Hassan is an officer of the regime’s feared Air Force Intelligence Directorate. Besides leading what is said to be the government’s most elite fighting force, he is also thought to be one of the architects of Assad’s scorched earth and barrel-bombing campaign. Hassan enjoys almostcult-like popularity among regime supporters.

 The real story of the Tiger Forces is far less glamourous, yet far more instructive to those trying to understand the regime. During the early days of the uprising against Assad, Hassan coordinated the suppression of protests in Hama, an effort that relied on a collection of ordinary thugs, air force officers, and area tribal leaders. His effectiveness was found in his ability to rally local support rather than depending on the already crumbling state institutions. In due time, this early network of enforcers would evolve into the so-called Tiger Forces. While the unit has since developed a more stable core of permanent quasi-soldiers, Tiger loyalists today still hail from a vast web of militias, criminals, and smugglers stretching across Syria’s central and arguably most strategic province of Hama. Many of his direct subordinates have become notorious throughout the country for brigandage, smuggling activity, and general lawlessness. Earlier this year, Ali Shelly, a powerful thug from the town of Tell Salhab who is directly responsible to Hassan, pushed his abuses to the point where the regime finally had him arrested and thrown in jail. However, within days, Shelly was released and returned to the frontline. Such incidents should be seen as more than mere bureaucratic infighting over corruption. According to interviews I’ve conducted, Hassan loyalist warlords are widely known to smuggle guns, people, and oil to ISIL and opposition territory, directly undermining the regime’s war effort. But the central government has little choice but to look on helplessly.

 This summer, Islamic State militants blew up the last major gas facility still operating in the country, exacerbating the already tenuous situation in the country. Syria’s ever accelerating economic and fiscal tailspin has not only wiped out savings, diminished wages, and thus thrown millions into poverty, but also precipitated a dramatic currency collapse as I have seen from my own collection of black market exchange rates across Syria. Whereas the effect of inflation on military recruitment has been widely documented, currency depreciation has other secondary effects: At current rates, imports of basic goods have become prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, the government price controls and producer monopolies have driven local producers into idleness and raised the incentive for smugglers to traffic what few goods enter the country right back across the border. The resulting price hikes, shortages, and rationing had a debilitating effect across the country, while making some men with the necessary know-how and muscle tremendously wealthy.

 The Desert Hawks were founded by the brothers Mohamed and Aymen Jaber, who personify the rise of smugglers to power. The two had made their first big money as ordinary criminals in the Iraqi oil-for-food smugglingbonanza of the late 1990s and then prudently invested their newfound wealth into state-granted monopolies on the Syrian coast during Bashar’s first privatization wave. In August 2013, under pressure from outside sanctions and rebel advances, Assad signed a decree allowing private businessmen to raise their own militias in defense of their capital assets. With the stroke of a pen, the regime thus armed its own kleptocrats. During the much publicized Palmyra offensive in March, tensions between the Desert Hawks and other loyalists came to a head, after Jaber accused the Tiger Forces of deliberately firing onto one of his positions, killing nine and wounding two dozen more. According to multiple sources, including since deleted social media accounts, the militiamen were said to have drawn their guns at Hassan’s men and threatened to depart. In the end, Damascus dispatched a high-ranking delegation to reconcile the warlords and bring the offensive back on track. The units have not shared a frontline since.

 Rather than attempt to capture resource monopolies, certain armed groups have taken to making a profit by exploiting the suffering population directly. Consider the town of al-Tall, just north of the capital Damascus. Technically under a truce agreement with the regime, this small opposition community now houses hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who have fled there from around the capital. Despite guarantees by the government, local loyalist militias tasked with manning the checkpoints in the area have recently begun leveraging a tax of 100 Syrian Pounds per kilogram on all incoming food products. Even a conservative estimate would put the monthly revenue of such a levy into the millions of U.S. dollars.

 Assad’s men have long begun feeding off the land and the civilian population. Today, the larger part of loyalist fighting formations no longer rely on the regime for the majority of their income, equipment, or recruits. While strategically valuable to Assad, it is by no means certain that the regime is fully in control of upholding a number of sieges, especially in rural Damascus, Homs, and the Qalamoun mountains. A local source who moves regularly between Damascus and Ghouta by way of smuggling tunnels, told me of local rebel battalions run by Syrian Arab Army officers. As the country’s economy and governance institutions continue to falter, these “ghosts,” as Syrians colloquially refer to regime-aligned criminals, have come back to haunt those in power. Despite what color-coded “control” maps show, Bashar al-Assad retains very little meaningful authority over much of the territory he is said to rule. As the war progresses, these dynamics will inevitably lead to divergence of interests among local fighters and the regime, as well as Damascus and its foreign backers.

 This April’s parliamentary “elections” further indicated the structural transformation of the regime from a centralized state to a loose hodgepodge of warlord. A number of long-serving Ba’athist rubberstamp bureaucrats and local dignitaries, pillars of the regime’s traditional rentier system, lost their seats in favor of upstart smugglers, militia leaders, and tribal chiefs. The old guard took note: After results were announced, the supplanted agents of the regime in Hama dispatched an urgent delegation to the capital to warn Assad’s inner circle of the character and disposition of the men they had chosen to elevate. But for lack of alternative, Assad needs to keep these men close by.

 Assad’s kleptocratic maternal cousins, the brothers Makhlouf, have built a militia network of their own through their Al-Bustan Association, a private foundation, created before the war that funds both humanitarian relief efforts as well as armed groups. This spans the width and breadth of regime-held territory and is carefully kept outside of state control. At the same time, the Ba’ath party’s earliest political nemesis, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), has reemerged on the scene and already made tremendous inroads among the country’s Orthodox Christian and Druze communities, recruiting for their own growing military wing. Considering the historical role the Makhlouf family played in the SSNP, many in Damascus have cause to worry about centrifugal forces tearing the regime apart even further.

 Assad’s foreign sponsors are not much help either. Iran appears perfectly content with the muddled situation on the ground, having put great resources into developing its own client network across the country. Russia meanwhile, the country arguably most concerned with regime stability, appears to be oblivious to the entire situation. Its officers and soldiers are regularly photographed fighting and fraternizing alongside a wide range of tribal and sectarian militias.

 Over the past three years, despite foreign military aid and support, the regime under Assad has continued to atrophy at an ever increasing pace. If these trends continue, the Syrian president will soon find himself little more than a primus inter pares, a symbolic common denominator around which a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms can rally. Thus, with the slow decay of the once powerful state, military, and party establishment, the person of Bashar al-Assad himself has increasingly come to embody the last remaining pillar not of a state but of “the regime” and its brutal war against its own citizens.

 The great majority of forces in Syria today, particularly among the regime’s minority supporters, fight an increasingly localized war for the protection of their particular communities. It is only through the continued existence of the regime — personified in Assad — that these defensive goals have been tied to an aggressive, national vision which we know to be unacceptable to a great majority of Syrians, disastrous to its supporters, and militarily unrealistic. While removing the tyrant may spark in-fighting among the surviving warlords, it would likely not mean a collapse of their forces and the slaughter of their villages. Latakia is being protected not by Assad’s largely imaginary “4th Corps” of the Syrian Arab Army, but by Mohamed Jaber and his merry men of the Desert Hawks. If indeed there is no strong bureaucratic and military class left that could salvage and revive the state and if loyalist militants have developed an increasing degree of self-reliance, then the situation is not as Western policymakers assume. Syria’s president has become not only perfectly expendable as guarantor of the state, but ought to be considered the last remaining obstacle to a peace process based on local ceasefires and return to displaced peoples to their home communities.

 This makes those calls heard in Western capitals, as well as Moscow, that Syria’s state institutions must be preserved ring hollow. All this suffering — to preserve what precisely?

 It is the fiction of a national regime upheld by Assad that drives the worst abuses of this war, that obliges Alawite kids from the coastal mountains and the plains of Hama to fight their own countrymen in distant corners of a country long fractured into smaller fiefdoms beyond the reach of the state. The United States should not be complicit in this pretension. The Syrian state is gone for good. At this point, a quick decapitation might be preferable to a drawn-out implosion.

 When Syrians first rose up, they demanded not just the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, but of the “nizam.” Commonly translated as “regime”, it more closely means “system”. Humanitarian suffering, state failure and — yes — terrorism in Syria are not competing concerns that need to be balanced, but symptoms of a singular disease: The mis-rule of Bashar al-Assad and his clients, cronies, and the petty criminals it has elevated to power.'

Tuesday 30 August 2016

Rebels capture strategic town in Syria's northern Hama province

Smoke billows from Atshan after pro-regime forces captured the village as part of their offensive across central Hama province, on October 11, 2015

 'Syrian rebels captured the strategic town of Halfaya in northern Hama province in an overnight offensive that overran several army and pro-government checkpoints. "We are now cleansing the town after liberating it from the regime and will have more surprises in store," said Abu Kinan, a commander in Jaish al Ezza, a rebel group that fought in the town.'

 'Fighters meet up with their relatives again after the liberation of Helfaya.' [https://twitter.com/CombatChris1/status/770307349802287104]

'1000s of civilians fleeing from Helfaia to rebel areas further north, fearing Russian & Assad airstrikes.'
[https://twitter.com/worldonalert/status/770551640244031488]

Saturday 27 August 2016

This is what good guys look like



"The FSA slept on the street in Jarabulus."

Rather than occupy the houses of the displaced residents.

Thursday 25 August 2016

Daraya is lost



Abdurahman Hark:
 "The besieged city fought off regime elite forces of 4th Division for 4 years. 1000s of Assadis were killed at its walls."

 
Sami:
 "Daraya civilians (who regime said never existed) will be evacuated to Sahnaya & Ma'araba tomorrow, rebels will follow the day after to Idlib. Daraya will always be the symbol of our revolution. Don't ask why they surrendered, but ask how they resisted & survived all these years."
[https://twitter.com/Paradoxy13/status/768848178795913217]
[https://twitter.com/Paradoxy13/status/768847307106377728]

Wednesday 24 August 2016

Aleppo's Children: What One Father Lost to Syria's Civil War



 'Ali Abuljud's children ran through the archways of Aleppo, toy guns in hand.
They took pretend shots at each other across the courtyards. One child poked at his brother's back with a plastic rifle.
 "Come on and walk with us," he said, leading his brother away to a fake jail.
 It's a version of the cruel scene they had grown accustomed to seeing in the war-torn Syrian city.
 "We are the children of the Syrian Revolution," one of the kids said. "We're recreating everything happening in the city, and the things people are doing."
 Chants of "Allahu Akbar" — or "God is great" — followed.
 But only a few days later, there would be no more games.
 A barrel bomb struck around 3 a.m. on Saturday, killing the four siblings: Aysha, 12, Mohammad 11, Obeida, 9, and Afraa, 7.
 Abuljud implored his friends not to focus on his children's death.
 "Don't look at this generation like this," he said. "This generation looks up in the sky and sees these Russian airplanes [backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], just looking up in the sky as they drop bombs. This generation is going to be titans! I swear they will never be afraid of anything, thank God!"
As Abuljud walked back to what was left of his home, he said he did not want the world to feel sorry for him.
"I want our voices — not just my voice — but for all of our voices to reach the entire world," Abuljud said.'

Image: Afraa Abuljud

Tuesday 23 August 2016

Yes, do compare atrocities!

a scene from the sectarian massacre in al-Bayda, May 2013

 Michael Neumann:

 
'Why then is there such surprise that, despite all reports of régime atrocities in Syria, no people of no nation seem able to work up enduring outrage?  Report what you like, and soon you will get the reaction inculcated in us for decades:  well yes, but doesn't the other side commit terrible crimes?  Won't atrocities always be with us until we learn to respect international law?  Isn't it suspiciously hysterical to scream about this one offender?

 Policy analysts refashion this into a mantra replete with adolescent wisdom:  there are no good guys in Syria.  This slides easily into:  let's just back whoever we like, however much we like, for our own interests.  "Our own interests" means, for US governments, what won't upset the voters.  That in turn means no serious commitment in Syria, because that would entail either American deaths and great expense, or arming 'Arabs'.  So already the moralizing has important effects on policy.

 There is another, equally damaging effect:  the almost universally accepted convention that when it comes to atrocity, we don't need to know the details.  It's all criminal, isn't it?  Why wallow in sadism and cruelty?  This is why, for instance, the Caesar archive of photos, widely distributed, has had no impact - and why so many see no reason to view them.  They are supposed to force people to confront Syria's realities but the fact is, they don't.  They are supposed to present details but the fact is, they do no such thing.  We see emaciated corpses, some with injuries.  That doesn't tell us how these people died, and zero tolerance tells us:  "well, aren't people dying all over in this terrible conflict?   Don't people die terrible deaths worldwide?  Why then should these pictures tell us anything about what should happen in Syria.? After all, isn't it just a question of backing one bad guy rather than another?  After all, why should Americans die to clean up a mess created by a bunch of bad guys running around killing each other?  Can we really change the sort of society that generates these crimes?  Is it really our job to do so?"
 Imagine that people did actually examine and compare the record of the various parties to the Syrian conflict.  They might find reasons why it is not only morally permissible but morally obligatory, at times, to give full military support to people who commit war crimes and violate human rights.  That realization can occur only when people stop saying it's all the same and really look at the details of atrocities.

 The worst atrocities are almost never reported.  Incredibly, the latest Amnesty International account of torture in Syrian jails specifies the details of only of cases which are mild by Assad's standards.  Perhaps here again, to report worse is thought merely prurient by an agency known for its 'even-handedness', that is, its refusal to compare.
 For Assad, barrel bombs are a mere convenience.  Before the barrel bombs, his forces didn't kill children from the sky.  They took knives and slit the throats of babies and toddlers.  There are photographs and well-confirmed reports of this for anyone who takes the trouble to find them.

 The refusal to compare and its consequent avoidance of details conceals uncomfortable facts.  ISIS' beheadings that so shock the world take moments; they are humane compared to the slow deaths Assad's torturers have inflicted on victims as young as 11.  Bombing hospitals is indeed terrible:  before the bombings, régime troops invaded the hospitals on foot and tortured people in their hospital beds.  And the tortures of Abu Ghraib are love pats compared to what Assad inflicts on human flesh.

 To these qualitative comparisons must be added quantitative ones.  Assad murders and tortures many times more people than any other participant in the conflict.  To first preach about the awfulness of atrocities, and then assign no weight to how many human beings suffer them, is nothing short of bizarre.

 It's hardly a surprise that honest comparisons are avoided: the conclusions they compel are so unwelcome.  But they loom large because they point to a crossroads of morality and political realism.  The fact - it is a fact - is that ISIS, which conducts massacres, beheads people, blows up civilians, executes by burning alive and throws homosexuals off buildings - is, according to all reports on the scale and nature of the atrocities, much less brutal than the Syrian government.  That is not a world it is in anyone's interest to legitimate and therefore to perpetuate.  Before Assad we already lived with fine declarations masking pathetically low real standards governing how we treat one another.  To let Assad remain in power - or his entire régime minus the man himself - is to lower standards even more.  The fact that many prefer ISIS' horrible rule to his own is clear evidence what dangers lie in the refusal to compare.'

Monday 22 August 2016

Assad is terrified of the children


 Aleppo man who lost his entire family

in Assad régime barrel bomb attack: "I'm not going to even bother calling on the UN, or Arab or western leaders. My message is to the people, your turn will come. To all the people of the world if you don't protest, the same thing that happened to us will happen to you. My children have gone to paradise, and our revolution will succeed regardless if the powers that be said yes or no. Assad is terrified of the children because he knows this generation will fight & defeat him."

Saturday 20 August 2016

Syrian Genocide Memorial Day



 Tomorrow, the civilised people of the world will mark Syrian Genocide Memorial Day. I hope that you will be among them. In the future, I expect many people will be guilt-tripped into marking this day. Schoolchildren will be forced to remember the facts, to look at the pictures, to wonder how we can have been so callous to watch a people massacred before our eyes.
 It is three years since Bashar al-Assad fired rockets full of sarin gas into two rebel-held neighbourhoods of Damascus. 1500 people died, many of them children, because they were sleeping on the ground floor of their homes for fear they would not survive a bomb attack by Assad on the upper floors. It is the worst single massacre of this century.
 Someone asked on TV the other day, as Assad continues day-by-day to attack defenceless people with chlorine gas, why we are more concerned about death by chemical weapons than other sorts of murder. In a better world we wouldn't be. But it is one of the worst excesses of criminal war fighting, an identifiable weapon that cannot be used discriminately, and something any just world must have prohibitions against.
 This was also why it was President Obama's alibi for doing nothing to protect the Syrian people. In 2012 he declared it was a red line if Assad used a whole bunch of chemical weapons, presumably thinking that Assad would use all other methods to kill people, and he would be off the hook. But Assad's rule is never going to be stable again, and every time his grip on power is threatened, he needs to up the ante, to make people scared that this would turn into a confrontation between him and the United States. So he used a whole bunch of chemical weapons, and President Obama did nothing.
 And the use of chemical weapons were the occasion for the greatest lie of the century, that it wasn't Assad, but the rebels who used chemical weapons. There has grown up a media industry, some for the political benefit of Russia and Iran, some seemingly for the smug contrariness, that went into overdrive to cast doubt upon the victims of these chemical attacks. The same sort of invention as Holocaust denial, the creation of spurious doubt, the invention of alternative scenarios, the deliberate ignorance of what the victims had to say, but rather being the province of just a few fascist cranks, widespread among those who think themselves in some way progressive. Along with a constant stream of other lies about the Syrian revolution, that it is a NATO invasion, that it is all for Israel's benefit, that the rebels are the same as ISIS and are just as bad, and so on. These lies will come back to haunt us.
 There is a article in the Daily Mail three days ago, with an appropriately hysterical headline, "Former prisoners held in Assad's Syrian jails reveal how guards made the men rape one another to avoid execution… and regularly tortured or beat them to death".* Only it isn't hysteria, it's the truth. And when nobody has an interest in covering for Assad's crimes, when no-one has an interest in pretending the real crime would be to try and stop it, they will look for everyone on the left who said we should be Pharisees rather than Good Samaritans. And every word uttered by those left wing politicians who said the real problem was the rebels and our funding of them, will be used as evidence that the left are in love with genocidal dictatorship, and even those of us who have stood in solidarity will not escape the backlash.
 Please mark Syrian Genocide Memorial Day tomorrow. Please do not share articles by genocide deniers like Sam Kriss, Tariq Ali and Ray McGovern, just to mention a few I have seen recently. Please support those who would propose action that would stop Assad committing genocide, and oppose those who do not. And then you can tell kids in the future that you stood against Assad's genocide when it counted, while it was still going on, and while there were people who could be saved.

What parents in Aleppo tell their children about war

Image result for What parents in Aleppo tell their children about war

 'I try very hard to explain to my kids, especially those who were born after the war began, what is going on around them, but it's not easy. So I spin tales about battles in the neighborhood between right and wrong and tell them about our revolution and our demands for freedom.

 I told them about the demonstrations that swept the streets demanding (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad go, and how he and his army came with tanks and warplanes so more than half of the people fled.

 After five years of war, children are not surprised by the sound of the planes. Some of them scream in fear and some of them cry and some of them laugh. They bombard me with a stream of questions. Who is bombing? And why? And how long they will continue? Where do the planes come from and who pilots them?

 My daughter, who is five years old, was born in this war and does not know anything about normal life. She is used to seeing the streets in ruins, full of debris; houses without walls or ceilings; and trees broken or burned. She has never once asked to go to a park or a playground or the theater, because all of that ended in Aleppo before her birth. All she knows is that people are dying because of the bombing. She cannot even understand a natural death. When one of the neighbors passed away she asked if he died because of the shelling. I said no. Then barrel bombs? I said no. Then shrapnel? I said no. So she sat, puzzled, and asked, "Then how did he die?" It was difficult to explain to her how people normally die.

 My oldest son, Ibrahim, who is 10 years old, was injured in the legs and abdomen and it almost cost him his life. To this day he fears every strange sound or loud noise, whether it's a plane or a motorcycle or a speeding car. Every sound for him appears to be caused by the bombing he was exposed to. He once jumped from the motorcycle I was driving when he heard a loud sound and thought he was being bombed again.

 A single hour does not pass without me communicating with my family so I may be reassured of their safety. Existence in Aleppo means that you are always in danger. When my son nearly lost his life and his legs, he had only gone to a shop on our street. The shop was hit by an airstrike while Ibrahim was there. I learned that the raid targeted our neighborhood. I hurried home and learned that Ibrahim did not return from the store. I continued to search for more than an hour, under the rubble of collapsed walls but was unable to find him. Then we started to search the local hospitals where we found him in the emergency department.

 I could not believe I found him alive. He was lying covered with dust mixed with blood that filled the wounds on his body and wounds on his legs and abdomen. A few hours after he entered the operating room, he was out of critical condition and began waking up from the anesthesia. He was crying and repeating unintelligible sentences. We tried to console him, to tell him it's OK and tell him he's a hero to overcome this ordeal. When he woke up totally he did not ask me who bombed him -- he knows quite well that it was the Assad regime. He did not know why and did not care. He had seen many children before in his same situation. 

 He was only concerned with the fate of his leg because he could not feel it. He didn't dare ask the question because he was scared we would answer, "Yes, they amputated your leg." We tried to convince him this was not true, that he would not lose his leg, that it was fine. He wouldn't accept it. The only solution was to take a picture of his leg on my mobile and show it to him so that he could be sure it was OK.'

Friday 19 August 2016

Amid deafening silence, growing screams for no-fly zone in Syria



 Words will not stop Assad and Russia’s bombs from killing us,” Hamood Jneid, a local from Kafranbel, Syria tells Al Arabiya English, adding that the Syrians blame “anyone” who has the authority to stop the killing and doesn’t. According to Jneid, most people in his village, Kafranbel, point fingers at America, which has done “absolutely nothing” and used only “meaningless words” despite the atrocities being committed by Assad and Russia. Jneid and the residents of the village are not the only ones bitter about the international community not creating safe buffer zones in Syria.

 “Why us? Why is it our children that are dying? Why do children anywhere else in the word have the right to live, and our children are being killed? All this, because we demanded our freedom?” he lamented.

 Khaled Salame, an aid worker from northwestern Syria, said that he can’t understand how an army can kill its own people. Salame explained how he watched Russian jets fly over the village of Saraqeb, Idlib, on Monday and drop “several” bombs. He said he can’t get “the screams of children and women out of his head”.
 “I felt hysterical. The hardest thing is to see an old man running around and crying like a child… I’m used to seeing children cry, not old grown men,” he said.
 Mostafa Saroot, a photographer with Aleppo’s Media Center, and the man behind the shocking footage, expresses his puzzlement towards the popularity of this single shot, since pictures like this are coming out every day.
 “There are dozens of Omrans every day in Aleppo, I wish they would implement a no fly zone so children can keep safe.”
 The dazed, dusted, and bloodied face of Omran is only a minuscule window into the horror, atrocities, and nightmare of Allepo. With 400,000+ death and millions more displaced, Syrian conflict has stretched on for years.
 “Our children are becoming mentally disturbed,” Saroot continues. “Omran’s silence spoke for the all the Syrians suffering.” Shrouded head to toe in a blanket of dust and caked on ruble and debris, Omran was captured in a dead end, numb daze, his reaction to his own bloodied face chillingly indifferent and anesthetized.
 “I hope this picture reaches the UN and the international community and they understand that our children have developed psychological problems due to the heavy bombardment on Aleppo,” he said.
 US President Barrack Obama ruled out a no-fly zone over Syria for several factors, calling it “counterproductive” since ISIS does not have planes and carries out attacks on the ground. US Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said even if there were areas in Syria where planes could not fly over it, the killing would not stop, because ISIS would still be able to carry out massacres. He also mentioned that a no-fly zone would require an “enormous” amount of US resources, when America’s main focus is to wipe out ISIS.
 “A no fly zone might create some additional ability to manage some of the refugee flows and brush back some of the Syrian regime’s air attacks on civilians, but frankly that violence could just manifest itself in different ways on the ground or migrate to different areas,” Rhodes said in a podcast on “The Axe Files”.
 Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, senior political adviser, government relations director, and strategist for the Syrian American Council in Washington DC, said that not only would a no-fly zone in Syria “stem the flow of refugees by protecting civilians” but also “increase” the possibility of a political solution by proving to the Syrian regime that Assad “cannot” win militarily. He said he believes the only backlash is the risk of “increased US-Russia tensions”.
 According to Ghanem, top ex-US generals have told him that such a solution would be feasible, in spite of Russia’s heavy involvement, and that Obama’s decision to abstain is “political”.
“Most likely, at the start of his administration, President Obama was motivated mainly by the desire to avoid another Iraq. But once Iran got seriously involved on the regime side, Obama likely felt the need to avoid targeting Assad in order to preserve the nuclear deal,” he explained.
 Mohammed said he believes a “no-fly zone would tilt the scales in favor of moderation and stability in opposition-controlled areas while providing Syrians with a chance to build up a real alternative to Assad's dictatorship.”
 Ghanem says that the constant air raids on obvious civilian targets are “designed” to create havoc in opposition areas, preventing a real alternative to Assad and to create conditions “so desperate that extremism is a natural reaction for many”.
 Shiyam Galyon, a Syrian-American writer and researcher has been advocating a no-fly zone for a long time.

 
“So many people around the world want to stand in solidarity with Syria. And that’s great: The Syrian revolution is based on principles that no doubt will elicit solidarity from anyone who values human and civil rights. However, when people are being brutalized, I no longer want to stand in solidarity with them. For those people, I will shout loudly for intervention,” Galyon said. She says that is why it is vital for anyone who believes in freedom and dignity to “shout for a no-fly zone”.
 Earlier this month, children in besieged Aleppo were hailed “little heroes” all over the media after they burnt tires to create “no-fly zones” by raising smoke to confuse the planes bombing them, hospitals, and markets.
 “When Aleppo’s children burned tires to blacken the sky, they proved that there is a clear Syrian will for a no-fly zone. That children in a war zone did more to avert planes coming to bomb them than the international community ever did is a sign that they are dysfunctional,” Galyon said.'

Let us be clear

Image result for syria revolution


Loubna Mrie:

 
'I have long shunned away from the immensely frustrating practice of sharing videos of atrocities from Syria, particularly ones produced by western news outlets. ًThese videos have not only grown more abundant and grotesque over the years, but also, with the vast majority of them showing the aftermath of airstrikes against civilian structures in the opposition-held areas, they present an indisputable evidence for who is responsible for the killing: The regime and its allies.
 The other side does not have an air force.
 Yet, commentary in the videos and underneath them never fails to divert attention from this very obvious fact. Generic talk of "war is bad", with endless variants, runs amok, almost always neglecting to name the actual criminal involved. Worse yet, many use this very same footage--sincerely or maliciously, it hardly matters--to advance their own misplaced agendas.
 So, just in case this is not obvious, let us be clear:
 The vast majority of suffering in Syria is NOT a direct or indirect byproduct of the 2003 intervention in Iraq, as much as you hate and hated that war.
 It is NOT a case of "America needs to stop bombing Muslims," as true as this could be elsewhere.
 It is NOT because the Saudi state exports Wahhabism, as terrible said state and ideology are.
 It is NOT because Turkish AKP has turned its back as Jihadists trickled through the border in 2013, as appalling and narrow-sighted you might think that was.
 It is NOT because global warming led to a drought in pre-war Syria, catalyzing an economic and political crisis, as sexy and convenient this theory seems.
 It is NOT because of ISIS, who is responsible for but a small fraction of the death and destruction that has befallen Syria, and for an even much smaller fraction of the country's recent history, as much as you might be horrified by their actions and tempted to blame it all on that magnet of resentment.
 And, most certainly, it is NOT because of any one state, not the least the US, having the wrong refugee policy. The US has admitted less than 10,000 refugees as of date, which is less than 0.1% of all people displaced in Syria, and, with the wildest improvement imaginable, would not hit 1%, as much as democrats and progressives think it easy to score points against Trump et al on this issue and feel better about their stance on Syria.
 Important as any one issue of the above may be, to blame Syria on any or all of them is wrong and intellectually lazy, if not offensive.
 Rather, what is happening in Syria is first and foremost the doing of a brutal, totalitarian government, simply put--and simply it should be. The Syrian air force has been operational for the last 4 years, on a daily basis. It has targeted hospitals, vegetable markets, bakery lines, gas stations, and schools, on purpose, and repeatedly. It is directly overseen and micromanaged by the Commander of the Armed Forces, who also happens to be the sitting president of Syria. He also has the "rights" to dissolve the Syrian parliament and control the highest judiciary body in the country, based on a constitution first put in place by his dear father. He, like his father, was "elected" by 99% of the vote for the longest presidential term on earth. Over the past half-decade, he has overseen the collective punishment and destruction of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, primarily because he has not been able to reign it into submission. In the process, he has instigated a war that killed half a million humans and displaced more people than in WWI. His name is Bashar al Assad, and he wants you to talk about everything and everyone but what HE did.
 Please do not help him.'

Tuesday 16 August 2016

How the BBC silences Free Syrians



  By changing sentences from active to passive, so perpetrators and victims are replaced by an unfortunate conflict.

 Mohammed: "Because of the rockets that Bashar al-Assad, and the Russians, and their allies, are throwing over our Free City of Aleppo."
 BBC subtitles: "There are barrel bombs and rockets."

 Wissam: "The régime/Russia are targetting every hospital, and all neighbourhoods."
 BBC subtitles: "Hospitals are being targetted."



Image result for Syria Conflict - Voices from Aleppo - BBC News - 15th August 2016