They’d rather be right

 This was originally written for Muftah Magazine's Syria Collection in 2016, in which a heavily edited version appeared under the title 'Some Leftists Would Rather Be “Right” Than Principled on Syria'.

 If you are in a left-wing group, try this bit of stage magic on your friends. Ask them what they would like to see happen in Syria, and I’ll tell what their answer will be. Half of them will say, “the victory of the revolution”, those are the hacks who think they know something about Syria. The other half will say “peace”, and these liberals have bothered to learn nothing. What you won’t hear any of them say is the answer that most Syrians would give if they could articulate it, “the victory of the rebels over the Assad régime”. And therein lies the gross failure of the left, not even to answer the right question on Syria, but to know what the question is, and that they are failing. Even as they compete with other left-wing groups for who has the best line, each one thinks their organisation has done right by Syrians.

 When the revolution broke out in 2011, I had the good fortune to follow the writing of my friend of 20 years, Robin Yassin-Kassab. From the beginning I see could see the shape of the pro-revolution and the anti-revolution narratives. Free Syrians saw their struggle as a simple one for freedom and dignity, while their enemies presented it as a complicated one we couldn’t hope to understand, based on religious hatred, where the problem was that neighbouring states had turned it into a proxy war by arming the opposition.

 I started writing a blog, News of the Revolution in Syria because I could see that much of the left was accepting the anti-revolution narrative by default, or even, like the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition, actively promoting it. All along I could see that even those on the left who thought they were better than that would accept parts of this reactionary message. As a result, Syrians have been appalled at the behaviour of the left, a process that has gone unnoticed by much of the Western left, and those who have noticed, always think they themselves are immune to the criticism because they have done enough. So I would find myself appalled by the behaviour of leftists, and fear for the future of the left when Syria was such a gaping hole in their conduct. Whenever I thought I might be too hard, I would look at what my friend Robin was saying, and it would inevitably be harsher, and given that most Syrians are not as secular or leftist as he is, I could assume that even his contempt was mild compared to the average.

************************************

 A few weeks ago the BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet said on the news, “We have been told that peace requires that the US and Russia come together.” Yes we have, by her, and by the rest of the Western media. Which has constructed an image of the conflict where the problem is that each side is arming its own proxies, and the role of the Great Powers has to be to bring them to the conference table to talk peace. As Syrians know, the truth is that Russia and Iran have been behind Assad’s efforts to crush them from the first, while the Americans have been stopping any friendly nation from providing Free Syrians with the weaponry they need to defend themselves. It requires some careful analysis to see where the interests of Russia and America differ, as the one benefits from Assad continuing in power while the other is responding to its previous imperial over-reach by handing Syrians over to their oppressors, but the Left (with a handful of exceptions) has nothing of the ability to comprehend this, stuck as it is in a world where everyone is bombing Syria just the same, and we might as well concentrate on stopping Britain bombing ISIS, even if that is almost entirely irrelevant to the life and death of Syrians.

 There are other aspects that the left misses out on. The wave of disinformation that comes directly out of Damascus, Tehran and Moscow, the way this is given prominence in mainstream Western media as a reliable source, whereas opposition sources are always unverified, and all too often it is the US administration’s spin that is presented as the alternative to Damascus. The way supposedly alternative media just laps up or creates its own additions to the Assad narrative, how it is the West that made ISIS what it is, how the Israelis run it, how the Saudis and Qataris fund it. We can see how the left groups fail because their methodology of looking for anti-Western sources to tell them the real story in this case just leads them to those like Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk who present the partially concealed and almost straightforwardly lunatic versions of the Assadist narrative. But those individuals outside the left groups are often no better, thinking that RT or Global research are wakening them to the real powers in the world when they are peddling the least subtle of lies.

*********************************

 Almost all of the left groups have their history on Syria bookended by their support for Hands Off Assad demonstrations in the wake of his chemical attacks in 2013, and their support today for Jeremy Corbyn. Just as then they simply wouldn’t listen to the argument that they were disrespecting Syrians by pretending the threat against them was US action against Assad, they simply won’t hear it when it’s pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn is pro-Assad, he called the SAA the credible and acceptable force without whose support we shouldn’t attack ISIS, pro-Iran, six out of his seven PMQs to Cameron on Syria in 2012-13 were asking for an increase in Iran’s participation in the debate over Syria’s future, and pro-Russia, he welcomed the Russian intervention. 99% of Corbynites simply won’t engage with the facts, including those who shouted down a speaker at yesterday’s Stop the War conference who challenged Corbyn over his inaction over Syria by chanting “No more war.”

 There was a Middle East / North Africa solidarity conference this year at which one speaker pointed out how much the left had failed over Syria, prompting Judith Orr of the SWP to say she didn’t know what he was on about, they had written lots of articles for Socialist Worker on the revolution. The SWP does encapsulate the failure of left groups quite well, as its insularity makes it unaware that it might do anything wrong. Simon Assaf of the SWP went to the first Syrian solidarity conference, and then stayed in the hallway selling books and not engaging with anyone. They have attended no anti-Assad demonstrations, their leader Alex Callinicos has consistently promoted Patrick Cockburn’s views on Syria, Anne Alexander wrote a piece for the International Socialism Journal in which she claimed the Free Syrian Army was seeking an alliance with ISIS. Callincos also defended the Stop the War Coalition leadership over its refusal to allow any Syrians on its platforms, calling its critics “supporters of Western airpower.”

 RS21 split from the SWP in 2013, and initially said even less about Syria. In late 2014 they put an article by Andy Cunningham up on their website that said we shouldn’t support the Free Syrian Army because it might let Islamic extremists win power. In 2015 they discovered the refugee crisis, but only as a way of bashing the Tories for not letting those stuck in Calais into Britain. One of their members Miriam Asfar joined the Syrian Solidarity Campaign Organisers group (I’d been asked to join by the existing organisers, despite my reluctance to get more politically active) on Facebook, and immediately denounced all the supporters of a no fly zone as imperialists. I pointed her to a piece called Blanket Thinkers on my blog where there is a discussion with Robin Yassin-Kassab and a couple of other Syrians in which we discover that if leftists start their pitch to Syrians by telling them how terrible Western imperialism, they are going to be written off as pro-Assad. She responded by claiming I’d called her pro-Assad, and flounced off. The following year she apparently told an rs21 meeting it might have been a mistake to write off all no fly zone supporters. A couple of their members have done some Syrian solidarity work, but the other members seem to think that they can justify doing less than nothing themselves by taking credit for that.

 Socialist Resistance think they are much better, and in having links to Gilbert Achcar, they do have contact with some of the better leftist thinking on Syria. Still they think of it as one issue among many, so when related issues come up, like the abuse meted out to Michael Weiss by supposed pro-Palestinian activist Richard Silverstein, their members are on the wrong side. Or Tony Greenstein, who accuses the rebels of being Israel supported and users of chemical weapons, they defend without ever mentioning his views on Syria. And their support for Corbyn infects everything else they do, so they were on the side of those claiming that the 70,000 moderate rebels were just an invention of David Cameron’s.

 Similarly Workers Power formally have the best position of the small left groups on Syria, demanding the arming of the Free Syrian Army with anti-aircraft weapons. But when I read Marcus Halaby’s pamphlet on Syria, it took the situation and turns it into an apologia for their own narrow splinter of politics. So instead of attacking Stop the War, they attack the same people in their political group guise as Counterfire, because that is who Workers Power compete with for members, while they think Stop the War is a good thing. The pamphlet also attacks unnamed FSA commanders who might want Western intervention, and claims the Syrian National Coalition wasn’t really trying to displace the regime, but would be happy with obtaining some ministerial posts. It has nothing to say about the actual debates going on inside or outside Syria, just promotes Workers Power. And when I talked to other members of Workers Power, the understanding seemed to be very shallow, it wasn’t hard for them to veer off into seeing the US as the main problem in Syria. As a smaller cult, they seem to let one member to write the policy and everyone else to memorise it. This wasn’t so bad on Syria, but when their leader Richard Brenner decided the policy on Ukraine was that the Ukrainians were fascists, it destroyed any credibility they had built up. They used to come to Syrian solidarity demonstrations, but then they got too busy supporting Corbyn, including aggressively attacking anyone in the Labour Party that didn’t support Corbyn’s policy on Syria.

************************************

 Across the Atlantic, the International Socialist Organization has been better. They have organised marches and demonstrations*, and co-ordinated with other Syrian solidarity activists, even if occasionally thinking they can decide who is part of the movement or not. Stanley Heller wrote an excellent piece in Socialist Worker ending with what can be done to show solidarity, from protests to challenging the Assadist narrative wherever it appears. They have enthusiastically picked up on Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami’s book Burning Country, and its message of the Syrian revolution and its betrayal.

 But still, they seem stuck in the same mentality as other far left groups. Indeed their members were shocked to find that the British SWP was so bad on Syria, just about the time they had signed a joint statement on Syria, which equated the Russian and US bombing and told Syrians they shouldn’t accept support from Islamists or anyone who asked for Western arms. I read a piece by Ashley Smith in Socialist Worker, and it starts very well with extensive praise for and quoting from Burning Country, but then it goes on to say that Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to arm the rebels, but they are never going to defy the US, so Syrians have to forget about them and look to the international working class, which seems very detached from reality in the way that left groups are. They also have continued to support the PKK/YPG attacks on Turkey which weaken its ability to support the Syrian revolution against Assad, and conversely deny there is anything progressive about Turkey’s policy at all, as they enable the FSA to retake 1000 sq km around Jarablus. Or they will say that Jabhat al-Nusra as was and even Ahrar al-Sham are just as reactionary as the regime, when Syrians have always seen them as better, even if they didn’t want to be ruled by Islamists, and certainly after they broke the siege of Aleppo, Syrians refuse to fall into the trap of seeing them as a legitimate target. When régime propaganda claimed a massacre had taken place when Islamist groups conquered the Alawite village of al-Zaraa, they condemned them even though it proved not to have happened.

*********************************************

 I haven’t bothered to talk about the worst of the left, the Tariq Alis, the George Galloways. But they will be what is thrown at the left when Syria is done with. The world isn’t forgiving when the Left makes mistakes, it doesn’t have the money to buy good PR. When the Left made the mistake of supporting Stalinist tyranny it produced a generation of anti-communism, which even those like the Trotskyists who opposed Stalin were not immune to. When there is no longer the need to keep quiet about Syria to protect the Obama administration’s disengagement from the Middle East, the association of the left with every aspect of Assad’s genocide will begin. Unless the Left understands they not only have to show proper solidarity, to look at Syria the way Syrians do, to distinguish themselves from not only the grotesquely pro-Assad, but all the clueless leftists who offer nothing but slogans about revolution, then everyone is going to be caught up in the association between leftism, torture, rape and other atrocities. But that isn’t going to happen, because if they were listening to that sort of message, they would have heard it already. I fear for the future, when someone who wants a better world will be perceived as the worst evil. It will make it harder to fight for any sort of freedom and dignity, to defend the rights we have already. Indeed, by failing Syrians, the left has ensured that we are all likely to be treated like Syrians.

*I may have been overpraising the ISO there.

Assad will fall

 In the summer of 2015, the Assad régime forces collapsed in the northwest province of Idlib, town after town falling to the rebels, culminating in the humiliating siege of the Tiger forces led by the star military officer Suheil al-Hassan, in the National Hospital in Jisr al-Shugour.

 You wouldn’t have read this in the media at the time. Taking the lead from régime apologists like Patrick Cockburn, the mainstream narrative was that Assad had defied predictions of his demise and was the strong and stable leadership Syria needed as the only alternative to al-Qaeda and ISIS taking over the country with the aid and acquiescence of the West and its allies. An analysis dishonest in a number of aspects, such as Assad fighting ISIS rather than cooperating with them, but significantly, he had only survived because of the massive foreign intervention in his favour and an equally significant indifference by those powers rhetorically opposed to him. Russia provided a billion dollars of weaponry a month and UN Security Council vetoes against censure for his crimes, Iran provided tens of thousands of troops from its proxy Shia jihadist militias, firstly Hezbollah from Lebanon, but moving on to recruit from as far away as Tajikistan. The US blocked any anti-aircraft weapons that could have stopped Assad’s barrel bombing, and refused to take action to bring him to account even when he blatantly crossed President Obama’s red line by using a whole bunch of chemical weapons in 2013.



 There had been indications already that the Assadist state had shifted the balance in ruling between force and consent dramatically in favour of force. In late 2012, looking at the reporting of an Assadist counter-offensive in Aleppo, I noticed that when the régime advanced, there was no return of the population to their homes. Clearly there was a large section of the population, predominantly Sunni Muslims but including anyone who might be suspected of opposition to Assad, that he intended to kill or induce to flee. As the head of Military Intelligence, Jamil al-Hassan, said this year, “A Syria with 10 million trustworthy people obedient to the leadership is better than a Syria with 30 million vandals.”

 In addition to the deliberate bombing of civilians, attacking schools and hospitals as well as homes, there was the mass torture of detainees, often to death, with the accompaniment of forcing them to declare there is no God but Bashar. The mass use of rape, both in the prisons and in Sunni villages across the country, where parents were raped in front of their children, children in front of the parents, often people forced to rape each other. All this was designed to force the entire population to practice absolute obedience or destroy it.

 But there was more. I discovered the core of it in an article in late 2015 by Ansar Jasim called “The Malice of Power: Arrests in Syria as Part of a Politico-Economic Rationale”:

 ‘ “By now, it is estimated that 90 % of those arrested by the regime or régime militias had nothing to do with the revolution,” says Amer, a former officer in the Syrian military. Free rein when it comes to arrests is one of the ways in which the régime renders it possible for various parts of its security apparatus to enrich themselves. That way, the régime secures support for its actions in times of economic demise. The ones who are left to suffer are the thousands of disappeared Syrians and their families.’

 Assad’s state is more than a sectarian military dictatorship. It is a torture-rape kleptocracy that profits from the destruction of the society it rests upon. As such it is the most unstable state in the world, a black hole that constantly destabilises the world around it as it fights to maintain its existence. There have been other states that resemble it in some ways. Only one government had ever bombed its own cities before - though it is time to stop calling a ruling party a government when it eschews government in favour of murder so blatantly – General Somoza’s in Nicaragua. The only state I can think of that so systematically murdered the professional classes of the population was Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Neither lasted for more than a few years after they began to destroy the foundations of their society.



 The torture-rape state did not come out of nowhere. Its lineage is traced in Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s chapter on the Neo-Sultanic State in The Impossible Revolution. A personality cult was set up around the person and position of the President from the time in power of Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad, and permission for all activity is given by connections to the security state that he heads. A culture of mass murder against threats to the state from the time of the Hama uprising in 1982, when tens of thousands were killed both in the city and in the prisons afterwards, with both an official silence about events, and a message to its enemies that the state would permit no dissent. Those with power, particularly the security branches, were able to derive income from the extortion and robbery of large sections of the population. A system of informing to the security branches kept the nation in fear of their neighbours. And from the accession of Bashar, large parts of the economy were handed over to a few cronies, most notably the President’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

 Stephen Starr in Revolt in Syria records the result. A sclerotic economy, in which many jobs are only available to those with the money and connections to buy their way into them, with then little incentive to perform them properly. In modern capitalist societies there are two contradictory tendencies, towards authoritarianism so that property can be protected from threats from below and abroad, and towards liberalisation so that the economy can maintain efficiency and creativity. Usually when dictators have lost all consent, like Marcos or Duvalier, their exit is arranged. But the Assadist state was peculiarly set up to resist reform, and the international situation was aligned in such a way that it has prolonged its life.

 I think evidence for the extreme nature of the Assadist state can be seen in its relations with two other forces in Syria, ISIS and the PYD offshoot of the Turkish Kurdish separatist organisation the PKK. In the first case I’d highlight that they collaborated with ISIS in many ways, beyond buying oil, gas and wheat from them to deliberately abandoning Palmyra to them with the consequent massacre of many ostensible régime supporters, so that they could be seen to be fighting ISIS with Russian help. There is simply no depravity the régime won’t sink to, or limit to the violence it will unleash, as it has no concern for the people it rules. Something that could be borne in mind when looking at the supposed attacks on civilians by the opposition, whether in Damascus this year (attacks which couldn’t even be located to one area of the Eastern Ghouta), or against empty classrooms in West Aleppo in 2016, right back to the attacks on civilians by unknown gunmen Samar Yazbek records as false flag operations by the régime in 2011 in her diary Woman in the Crossfire, when the reason for thinking that this couldn’t have been done by Assad, nobody would do this to their own supporters, no longer applies. In the second case, I’d highlight that the PYD/YPG has consistently been prepared to offer Damascus a deal where it would retain autonomous rule over Kurdish areas in return for integrating those areas into the Assadist state. Assad’s ministers have consistently rejected it, because Assad’s rule depends on an image of an unchallengeable leader.



 The Assad cult was already a thin one. Lisa Wedeen wrote in Ambiguities of Domination in 1999:

 “The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them ... Assad’s cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader.”

 It must now be much thinner. 20 years ago the Syrian population could be largely denied access to any other picture of their reality. The existence of a large part of liberated Syria for years has meant that must have broken down to the point where it is only a facade to fool foreigners and indicate compliance. I remember the BBC broadcast a film of a woman after the fall of East Aleppo in 2016 declaring, “We will lay down our lives for you Bashar.” Nobody can believe that someone who had been besieged and bombed by Assad for four years would declare such a thing unless it was the only alternative to torture and starvation. As it has taken surrendered areas with much of the population in place rather than simply pushed out, the lack of any real support for the régime can only be hidden partially by keeping many people in prison camps (“processing centres) until they buy their way out, and inviting régime officers and Iranian militiamen to operate as an internal occupying force in the “reconciled” areas.

 The régime is left with very immediate threats of violence as its governing strategy, and cannot step back to a more consensual method. Because those who carry it out the arrests, rape torture and extortion, those who profit from it, are the core of the state. Individual militias can sometimes be disbanded by the Russians, but the nature of the state relying on extreme violence for profit cannot be changed while the state remains. For another good reason: the threats of war crimes prosecution. Despite the help of an unprecedented level of genocide denial in the world’s media, particularly leftist and alternative media, the evidence against members of the Assadist state for war crimes and crimes against humanity is at a level never seen before in history.

 To prevent themselves being carted off the Hague, the state from Assad at the top to the torturers and looters at the bottom don’t just need to protect themselves against actual threats. They need an excuse to avoid facing up to justice. They need the war to continue so that they can claim to be stopping chaos. Even if all military activity against them ended, the claim that they were still fighting terrorism would never end. The arrest and torture to suppress all opposition and provide opportunities for profit would never end. Once all opposition eyes were removed from the country, it would likely increase. Because that’s what violently sadistic people do when their violent sadism seems to have produced results.

 And even with the massive aid they have received from Russia and Iran, the $21 billion the Iranians have sunk into Assad being a major cause of the bankruptcy and mass protests in Iran, Assad’s forces have shown themselves incapable of retaking any area without chemical weapons and international agreement to keep other fronts quiet while they concentrate on each opposition area.



 The Western indulgence for the Assad régime does not stem from their direct economic interests, as the support for Assad from Russia and Iran does (or at least the hope of recouping their investment by further impoverishing Syria). Rather it stems from their avoidance of a confrontation with an anti-interventionist public opinion (a point made by Alistair Burt to an All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria in the UK in 2016 when explaining why the government felt it couldn’t help those besieged in east Aleppo) fuelled by the left whether it openly supported Assad or not, and a belief that Assad represented some sort of stability, so the can of what to do could be kicked down the road as Assad returned normalcy once he defeated the rebels. In addition President Obama’s administration saw giving Iran a free hand in Syria to aid Assad’s repression a carrot to get it into a nuclear deal, and other powers lukewarm towards Assad found themselves unwilling to take decisive action without American leadership.

 It didn’t work out that way. Assad’s bombing caused millions to flee, threatening to destabilise the neighbouring countries and Europe too. His enabling of ISIS caused the retraumatisation of an Iraqi nation only just recovering from the US invasion in 2003, and fears of terrorism across the west. The false reporting of his war against Syria as a western plot echoed and reinforced Russian propaganda to justify its actions from the invasion of Ukraine to the chemical attack in Salisbury. Gradually the chickens of seeing Assad as the easy option were coming home to roost.

 A more immediate change of detriment to Assad has been in Turkish policy. Always anti-Assad, but hopeful that the trigger would be pulled by the United States, or at least a shield would be put in place to protect Northern Syria from the régime until late 2015, they decided then that their security required the abandonment of the policy of not fighting the war on the Syrian side of the border. First they cleared ISIS and the PKK/YPG from the northwest – the capture of Afrin making it far harder for the YPG to assist Assad in an Idlib offensive as they had helped him capture Aleppo – and then stopped the Idlib offensive in its tracks by moving the own troops in and threatening to aid the redeployment of tens of thousands of Free Syrian Army troops from North Aleppo.



 Until recently there seemed like one way for Assad to continue the horror while overcoming his inability to revert to a position of ruling with any consent from the people: get new people. The Iranians, along with their Shia sectarian militias from Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, have settled areas of Syria previously occupied by Sunni Muslims who have fled. They’ve taken over areas of Damascus, of towns in the west captured by Hezbollah like Qusayr, Madaya and Zabadani, and more recently in Deir Ezzor.

 But in their confidence of victory, the Iranians have over-reached. From keeping Hezbollah from any real conflict with Israel, with retaliation against attacks on Hezbollah weapons convoys purely against Syrians, they believed they had become strong enough to make their threats against Israel tangible. And Israel has responded by destroying hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian equipment at bases in Aleppo, Homs and Damascus. Without the ability to project force on a national Syrian scale, their settlers are just another group with limited wasta (connections), and unable to determine the future state of Syria. This has been reinforced by the change of administration in Washington, with the US now seeing Iran as more of a hindrance than a help across the region.

 So, we are left with a situation in which 75% of the Syrian economy has been destroyed, and rather than rebuilding, the forces of the state are weighing in the copper piping. As Rafia Salameh writes in al-Jumhuriya of an economy that devours itself:

 “Returning entire neighbourhoods to a state before construction and infrastructure, and destroying what few walls remain standing to extract and pillage what inside them, is a systematic process of impoverishment of the country. It is a process replacing production with property recycling, undercutting its value, swapping its owners, like a rotting carcass devouring what little sign of life remains until it simply vanishes.”

 The statue of Bashar’s father recently erected in Deir Ezzor is a symbol of the Assadist state’s attitude to reconstruction, nothing is important other than its own glorification and consumption. There is no economic multiplier where wages go on goods that pay for further wages that lead to an increase in the circulation of wealth through the economy. Instead as much as can be is taken, and the exploitation is hardly limited to the walls of the lord’s stomach as they were in medieval times so much is never enough, is diverted into the consumption by Assad and the small circle of his relatives. Just as the UN aid for Syria has ended up as supplies for his soldiers or sold in régime areas for the same cronies’ profit, the same would happen to any reconstruction aid, which is why Russia demands the West provide it, and the West is very unlikely to make that mistake. Assad isn’t going to rebuild Syria, he won’t even stop the unbuilding of it.

 If my hypothesis that the Assadist state can be defined by its extreme criminality is correct, it won’t even be able to stop fighting a war. It has imported ISIS into Suwayda in order to drag the province into the militarisation process it had largely avoided (the narrative that the régime has almost won the war and is now safe is belied by its desperate manpower shortage, and a guide that the decentralisation of the violent chaos with a single arbiter of violence to many is likely to continue). It is still shelling Lattakia and Hama, has tried to infiltrate the Turkish backed FSA held area on the Tadef Front this week, organises agents and very probably aids ISIS to commit assassinations in Idlib. As I take a break in writing, the régime bombarded Kafr Hamra in Aleppo and has mobilised a thousand members of the Palestinian Quds force.

 At some point, destabilisation will not be enough. The régime will have to attack either Idlib or Eastern Syria. The latter might seem more attractive because it would hope to get the oil fields back, but the last time it tried it with the help of Russian mercenaries (giving the Kremlin deniability), it lost dozens if not hundreds of fighters to little effect. The régime’s preference is always the cowardly one of attacking the weakest, attacking civilians in the hope that the fighters can be made to surrender. But soon, given its impatience, the need to protect its image as the valiant destroyer of all opposition, the need to give its armed forces something to do and to keep the country unstable so war crimes prosecutions cannot begin, it will have to attack with force, and the indications are that the Turks and others will protect the opposition enough so that Assad exhausts his forces. And although it looks right now as if the conflict is far from his palace in Damascus, if Assad loses his remaining useful troops in a failed offensive, his time left will be short. The Russians will be tempted to back him to the hilt, as it finds such genocidal leaders are the easiest to guarantee will stay within its sphere of influence, but their policy has been to use bluff and the threat of general war to inhibit states from forcing Assad out. If it is faced with the determination to prevent Assad’s violations, they aren’t going to risk their all on a war with states when it can’t even maintain stability in Syria only fighting locals, and will likely scramble to avoid a scenario like the Americans fleeing their embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

 Assad’s régime is a house of cards, glued together with such a system of repression that it cannot be pried apart, only blown over. As long as it stands, it will continue to look for internal and external enemies to butcher, mutilate and violate. If it is not overthrown, it will increasingly see fights between the various armed forces within it over control of resources, as there are no avenues for peaceful resolution of disputes.

 So the first message for the opposition and humanity is one of hope. Assad will fall. You cannot keep a sphere atop a spike indefinitely before it bursts. Patience, and remembering who the enemy is, would seem to be the key. Don't put your faith in foreign aid, but don't think they are all the same either. It is hard to know what better strategy the opposition could have come up with in the face of the international indulgence of Assad up to now, though hanging on to as much liberated territory as possible and refusing any transition that does not mean the downfall of the régime seem to have been the right moves, the first, despite the bombing and other violence they have endured, maintaining the option of the second without a wholly external assault on the régime. I would say also that the rebels need to keep their eyes on the prize and never again be distracted into fighting each other. It may be important to root out the frogs that have tricked other liberated areas into surrender, or to protest against violations of civil liberty by armed groups, but that really shouldn't extend to fighting against other anti-Assad Syrians because they are either too Islamist or too secularist. When rebel groups have fought each other, it has given Assad a new lease of life. When they have united, such as in Idlib in 2015, only the whole world standing against them could stop them advancing against the feeble power of a monster that knows only how to rape and loot.

Rojava is Omelas, Not the Ones Who Walk Away

 "They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery."

 In 1973 the anarchist science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin wrote a story called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, about the dilemma of the liberal conscience; how do we accept our happiness and prosperity when it is based on the suffering of others? She describes as anarchists those who reject this bargain and walk away.

 Today it seems that those who embrace the "Rojava Revolution", the rule of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) over northern Syria, have accepted this bargain, based as it it is, not on the suffering of one child, but of the torture of millions under the PKK's ally, the Assad régime. I think this defines the PKK, and all its offshoots, as a force that is everywhere the enemy of democracy and freedom.

***************************

 It wasn't until the summer of 2015 that I begin to reach this conclusion. In compiling my blog, News of the Revolution in Syria, it mostly seemed up to that point easier to ignore the Kurdish question, and its flipside the Turkish question, up until then. It was hard to find commentary in English that talked about the relationship of the PYD to the Syrian revolution at all. I can recall at the first (perhaps only) Syrian Solidarity Conference in the UK in London in early 2014, Robin Yassin-Kassab having a sharp exchange with a PYD supporter from the panel explaining that the PYD had acted as quite an authoritarian organisation in its own right. But still the overwhelming message getting to the British left were that the YPG were the good guys, fighting for feminism and gay liberation, with none of the complications of Islamism and supporting Western intervention which were the left's bugbears about the actual Syrian revolution.

 In the summer of 2015, the world had united around the defence of Kobane (rarely being reminded that it also had an Arabic name too, because everything Kurdish was liberatory, and everything Turkish or Arab oppressive), and indeed Free Syrian Army brigades went to fight alongside the YPG against ISIS. And within weeks, there were clashes between the YPG and the FSA, while the FSA was also fight the régime, while the YPG was not fighting the régime at all.

 There were people in Syrian Revolution discussion groups who would present the YPG as the victim in all this. There were good FSA, like Jaish al-Thuwar, who were fighting alongside the YPG. The other side weren't really FSA any more, but were corrupt Islamists. For some reason, some of the worst were not the officially Islamist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, but Turkish affiliated groups like the Sultan Murad brigade. Maybe there were some bad statements by the PYD about co-operating with Assad, but that was forced on them by the attacks from Islamists and Turkey. And the YPG wasn't just the PYD, there was a multi-party military council that ran the YPG.

 People would challenge these assertions. This military council never operated, as other news reports showed. It was Jaish al-Thuwar who were in fact the mercenaries. And the alleged violations covered for the elephant in the room. The YPG accepted régime presences in Hasakeh and Qamishli, and although they had occasional clashes, they worked hand in hand to expel any FSA presence. The PYD area in Aleppo increasingly co-operated with the régime againbst Free Aleppo, culminating in them storming Free areas and butchering rebels and civilians with the Iranian militia the following year. Along with expelling the people of Tel Rifaat in an attack from Afrin with massive Russian bombing, and going on to attack Mare' at the same time the régime was attacking from the south and ISIS from the east. Yesterday a PYD leader announced they are ready to take part in an operation to reassert régime control over Idlib, and they have been in discussions to return régime control to eastern Syria. By now it should be clear to anyone who cares to see that the alliance with the Assad régime is not an aberration, but a fundamental part of what the PYD is about.

***************************

 By August 11th, 2015, Turkey had indicated it wished to set up a safe zone in Northern Syria which Assad would not be allowed to bomb, and all the revolutionary factions in Syria had at least gone along with it. The YPG, by contrast, announced that the Turkish Army had attacked both it and civilians. No follow up to these attacks ever occurred, which finally convinced me that the YPG was a continuous lie factory. This continued through to the Afrin conflict, where the YPG and its supporters claimed Turkey was deliberately attacking civilians, belied by a YPG commander interviewed by RT in Afrin, who said his soldiers dressed as civilians so that Turkey wouldn't attack them. It was claimed the TAF destroyed the Maydanki Dam to stop the water supply to Afrin City, yet pictures seem to support the Turkish claim that the retreating YPG sabotaged the dam, and it was repaired as soon as possible (and no mention was ever made by anti-Turkish commenters about the 6 years the YPG had diverted the water from the city of Azaz). It seemed to me that such a level of propaganda was necessary because there is no other way to cover for allying with such extreme evil as Assad.

 And the same thing was going on on the Turkish side of the border. The PKK abrogated a peace agreement with the Turkish government, and went back to war, while claiming it was the Turkish government that had attack it. Yet the Turkish state had every reason to want to keep peace in Turkey and any conflict on the Syrian side of the border. The PKK on the other hand, see Turkey's difficulty as Kurdistan's opportunity, thinking, especially with Russian and US help, that it could carve out a state for itself from Iraq to the Mediterranean, now that it had US and Russian help in addition to its alliance with Assad. And that Turkey would be forced to come to a deal the more it was destabilised. The more chaos the better. The more misery the better.

 There were suicide bomb attacks, in Ankara and Istanbul, in early 2016, the second entirely against civilians. At first no claim of responsibility was made, but when the bombers' PKK or YPG identity was revealed, the TAK or Kurdish Freedom Hawks came forward to claim responsibility. As if this wasn't already an obvious deflection, the Istanbul bomber's funeral was attended by the entire local leadership of the HDP, the supposedly independent Kurdish leftist political party. At the point it seemed clear to me that those saying the PKK,PYD, YPG, YPJ, SDF, TAK and HDP were all part of one Ocalan cult, directed from the PKK hideouts in the Qandil Mountains of Iraq, were correct. This was strengthened for me when I searched for comments about the peace process with Turkey from the HDP leader, Selhattin Demirtas, and discovered he had said, "It's up to Ocalan." Not the Kurdish people, the HDP, or even the PKK, but just the leader. It's a cult based on support for its leader, as far from anarchism as you can get.

***************************

 Some people present the PKK as the defender of the Kurdish people. Or even if they want to claim they are critical of the PKK's authoritarianism, that it is the Turkish threat of genocide against Kurds that was the real problem dividing Arabs and Kurds. The unreality of this analysis is felt most obviously by the Arabs whose land is occupied (we could also say the division into Arab and Kurdish areas is due to the PYD and régime racialising the struggle), and are then told they most be broken away from their tribal mentality, as one Italian YPG supporter proudly told me. There is the hidden crisis of those Kurds not willing to serve as child soldiers for the YPG, or those, including all other Kurdish political parties, who face frequent arrest and imprisonment in PYD areas, even when they support the PYD line of opposing the Turkish/FSA forces.

 When the YPG was expelled from Afrin, tens of thousands of civilians did flee. Maybe they believed the scare stories of what the Turks would do. Maybe they just worried that bombs would drop on them in a war zone. In any case, when the guns stopped (though not the YPG's IEDs which continue to maim civilians in Afrin), most of the displaced wanted to go back, only to be told by the PYD that they couldn't until they had re-liberated Afrin, as they see it. I can't see it as anything other than a cancer on the Kurdish people as well as other Turks and Syrians. It demands war on the hovels, and peace to the palaces of torture.

 There may have been a time when the PKK was a legitimate national liberation movement. There was historically a real amount of oppression, continuing into the late 20th Century, such as the denial of language rights. But to keep Turkey at peace, the AKP government has offered the best deal to Kurds of any Turkish administration. And as a result, between 25 and 50% of Kurds in Turkey vote for the AKP. It again seems improbable in the extreme that several million Kurds would vote for someone who wanted to massacre other Kurds.

 So I think the PKK is a cancer. Because it has made its raison d'être trying to dismantle the Turkish state in south-east Turkey, and has found an ally in genocide for the purpose. Because the Turkish government knows that the destabilisation it experiences won't stop as long as Assad in power, so that however much it wants others like the United States to act to bring it about, it want to have a peace to which Syrian refugees can return, and knows that won't happen under Assad. So the PKK allies with Assad, knowing that what strengthens him weakens them.

***************************

 There are people who say of the PKK, "We can notably talk of positive policies regarding women’s rights and secularism." You cannot divorce these things from the context in which it occurs, an alliance with a régime that rapes women on a mass scale and tortures Muslims until they declare there is no God but Bashar. You cannot force secularism and communism on people. A half century of Communism in Eastern Europe, after which people want to join NATO to protect themselves from Russian invasion, should be a salutary lesson (instead the left blames the crisis in Ukraine on Russian expansion).

 We are told the PKK has evolved from Marxism or Maoism to anarchism, because Abdullah Ocalan read Murray Bookchin in prison, and so all his followers decided to do so. A group becomes anarchist because the leader tells them to? That's not like any anarchists I've ever heard of.

 The pinkwashing of Israeli occupation by pointing to their record on gay rights as better than in Arab countries would be objected to by all leftists, but it seems to be accepted when it comes to the YPG. Democratic confederalism doesn't seem to amount to any more than the one-party elections that would occur in Communist Cuba or China (and the Cultural Revolution in China is another moment at which many outside leftists mistook Communist fervour for freedom). When there is no freedom at the top, and in this case an alliance with genocide to boot, local elections are a sham democracy.

***************************

 That's my opinion of the PKK. It's an anti-democratic force wherever it goes, including Europe where its supporters responded to the Afrin conflict by burning mosques. Other people have a different point of view. That's fine by me. I'm not one of those who say you have to think in the exact same way as me about every conflict, or you are guilty of selective solidarity. I think if there was going to one conflict to be selective about right now, it would be the one against the Assad régime. Not because there is something intrinsically special about Syria, but because the Assad genocide is the most destabilising event in the world today, and the single greatest cause of lies to be introduced into political debate, particularly that of the left. So, if I am for anything first, like Michael Weiss, it is for Syria First. I would judge all politicians first by what they have to say about Syria.

 But for many people it is the opposite, if you support Erdogan, you are as bad as those who support Assad (even by some perverse logic, you support Assad too). I don't support Erdogan. For eleven years when I was a child we had a Prime Minister in the UK, a Conservative called Margaret Thatcher, who I've seen compared to President Erdogan. And we hated her. She shut down the Greater London Council, wouldn't let us here the voices of Sinn Féin MPs, seemed like she was destroying our public services. Yet she did have millions of supporters, and she peacefully gave up power, and her party was voted out. And she wasn't facing a genocide in a neighbouring country, and responding much better than any other political leader.

 I know the Turks have shot Syrian refugees. I know they arrested eleven members of the Turkish Medical Board before releasing them the next day. I know they arrested many journalists, most famously Ahmet Sik, who is now an opposition MP. No they are not perfect, but they have offered refuge to millions of Syrians (and an infinitely more welcoming environment than Lebanon or Jordan, currently trying to throw them out as they Turkish opposition would wish). And have offered free medical treatment to hundreds of thousands of civilians and fighters without which Free Syria would not have survived. There is no justification here for any equivocation about the PKK.

 There are reasons to wish that outside influence was unnecessary for the Assad régime to be defeated. But as the régime threatens to attack Idlib, and the PYD offers to assist, many of those who live in the still liberated area hope Turkey will defend them. It seems wrong for outsiders to attack the FSA as mercenaries, and the SNC as racists, for supporting the liberation of Afrin from Assad's ally. If someone has a strategy for liberating Syria that involves no Turks and no Islamists, let's hear it. If they are saying the military defence of lives and communities against Assad was a mistake, and we should support an ally of that genocide instead, I think that is hopelessly muddle headed.

Everything is going to get worse until you get rid of Assad

 My contribution to a debate on Syria and the Left at SOAS on 15th March, 2018.

 ‘I spent a lot of time in 2013-14 unpacking the concept of intervention. Because you had an awful lot of people, especially on the left, whose entire discussion about Syria would be, “Well I’m not in favour of intervention,” and that would be simply the end of the conversation.

 Partly it’s based on the war in Iraq. Believing that everything is about the war in Iraq. Which is partly an understandable carry forward from having your government lie to you. But is partly instrumentalised by people on the left, who say that was a great success for us, so if we cast everything in those terms, then that will mean everything else is a success for us. So if we say, anyone who says we should intervene in Syria is a right-wing warmonger, then we will be doing a good job for the left. Because we were proved right about Iraq, and you are all now Tony Blair.

 What the intellectual versions of this would be, is to cast any sort of intervention as a full-scale invasion à la Iraq, so that you could steal their oil. Any sort of intervention was a slippery slope on the road to doing that, because that is what happened in Iraq. It was totally to ignore what was specific to Syria.

 So much so that today you get people going, “Oh, Salisbury. Would the Russians really use chemical on people?” Because it’s in Britain it is more obvious that this is a complete pack of lies. This is where getting into the mindset of believing all these conspiracies gets you. But while it has been very successful in building a left alternative consensus in 2013, that what we needed to do was throw Syrians under the tank, and that was done because we’ve learned from experience tells us that staying out of wars is the way to solve them.

 Whenever someone who had previously supported the war in Iraq proposed a solution. Then it would simply be read by what you would now call alt-left commentators as there is someone who wants to go and bomb Syria. Even if what they said was that we should have a No Fly Zone and support for the Free Syrian Army, and various other things that would try to avoid having Western boots on the ground as much as possible, it was simply, “Oh, you want to bomb Syria.” And that was the end of the debate.

 Where Stop the War came in. They developed the belief after about 1991, that there was only one significant imperial power in the world, which was the US. And so everything they did was about saying what was bad was about the US. Even people who came from a tradition of saying Neither Washington Nor Moscow”, still, it’s everything is about the US. So when Russia invaded Georgia in 2009, the problem is that John McCain has been seen in Georgia, and they are going to try and oppress all these people and split up Russia. And we have to oppose all this.

 Stop the War had organised lots of coaches for the Iraq War demo. And then they needed a reason to continue their existence. So they began to get funding because they were a voice opposing American power. And so that’s why they’ve been some of the worst people, because they’ve had a particular in saying this is all about America, this is all about stopping Britain from invading anywhere.

 There are practical solutions that could have worked better five or six years ago. I think still the best way to go is to empower Syrians to fight against Assad.

 I don’t think Syria is that complicated. I think it is essentially a question of Assad staying is such an immense destabilising force, that everything is going to get worse and worse until you get rid of Assad. You have to say what the critical debate is. There are other things you can do about solidarity. You can have solidarity with people under siege. But the fundamental debate about how you make things better, is about how you support Syrians to overthrow Assad, however difficult that looks at the moment.

 I was going to try to avoid the whole Afrin question, because I am generally more positive about it than Leila is, but what can say about it is that there are now tens of thousands of trained Syrian fighters, fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. Who once the operation is over, will want to see a free Syria that is liberated from Assad.

 So while the forces that we would call the Free Syrian Army are now more dominated by foreign states than they ever have been, particularly Turkey, and that’s a problem, of self-determination, they do at least exist.

 You can arm people with anti-aircraft weapons. That will stop the bombing. I remember the last time there was a debate about anti-aircraft weapons in relation to Aleppo, people said, “Oh yes, but MANPADS don’t work against the Russian bombers.” Well, that shouldn’t be the end of the debate then. Why can’t they get BUKs like the Russians are handing out like candy to their forces in the Ukraine to shoot down airliners with, and give them to Syrians to shoot down the Russian airforce? Or the US equivalent. Stinger missiles, whatever it is. Once you have decided the problem is Assad, that there is going to be no democracy, there is going to be no freedom of assembly, while he continues to rule, then the question is what are the practical ways you go about it.

 I also think it is a situation in which you need all the forces fighting Assad to be fighting against Assad, and not fighting each other. There are Islamists who are more extreme than I would ever want to live under, and I’m not saying they should take over the place, but I am saying I don’t think these are the people the more secular forces should be fighting against. They should all be fighting against Assad.

 It is a situation like the 1930s, where the Germans had a question of: you’ve got the Communist Party who are doing everything Stalin tells them, you’ve got the Social Democrats, who are selling out to Hitler in various ways, and selling out to capitalism, and so on. These people have to unite, in order to stop the fascists. And you can argue about what sort of society you create afterwards, but that’s sort of the brutal thing.’

Spain and Syria: Beyond Superficial Comparisons

 I have a lot of respect for Paul Preston. One of my friends was a student of his at the London School of Economics. When I was at the LSE, I took the European Civil War class that he designed. I even rescued a copy of his biography of Franco that had fallen on to the railway track at the local station once. While I spent my teenage years reading a number of the anarchist and Trotskyist accounts of the Spanish revolution, I defer to Professor Preston’s much greater knowledge of Spain.

 However, I feel the reverse is the case with respect to Syria. Having spent the last 51 months following events in Syria on a daily basis, but reporting and analysing the experiences of Syrian revolutionaries, I think he falls for many of the false generalisations our media has made about Syria; that the opposition are undifferentiated jihadis, that the extreme jihadis of ISIS are the opposition to Assad, that the Assad régime is secular, that the West has been supporting the opposition.

 “It is impossible to generalise with any certainty about what has motivated the bulk of the jihadist volunteers from Western countries.”

Certainly without asking them. Let’s give that a go.

 “It was the pictures everywhere, on Sky News that he was watching, of people being raped and children being killed, which inspired him to go,” said Mrs Sarwar. “These images were everywhere. He went to Syria to help the Free Syrian Army.”

[https://notris.blogspot.com/2014/12/police-betrayed-me-says-mother-of.html]

 ‘Many British Muslims share Hussain’s view that Syria’s jihad has blurred lines. Al-Qaeda linked groups are involved – but many people believe that the conflict is closer in character to the civil war in Bosnia. Some compare it to the Spanish Civil War in which international brigades of young men fought against General Franco.

 “My brother was not a terrorist. My brother was a hero,” says Hafeez Majeed. “If I could put it like this, if my brother had been a British soldier and there were British people in that prison, I know he would have been awarded the posthumous Victoria Cross.”‘
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-man-from-martyrs-avenue-who-became.html]

 “Parliament decided not to intervene, but it’s within this context that the two British men I’ve spoken to took it upon themselves to do, they say, what the government couldn’t, to defend the people of Syria. Now they’re back in the UK and living in fear of arrest.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/01/we-were-defending-british-values-say.html]

 ‘Similar motivations led Ibrahim to travel to Syria. He recalls being “horrified by the attacks carried out by the regime” when he saw images of dead civilians and crying children broadcast on the news, and claims that it was his duty to go there to help, because “if you had the means to go and help the oppressed, then you should”.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/06/british-men-who-fought-bashar-al-assads.html]

 “They did not attack unarmed civilians.”

 I can only find one account of British volunteers participating in atrocities, but fighting for ISIS against Free Syrians.

 ‘In a letter to The Times, Brig-Gen Abdulellah al-Basheer of the Free Syrian Army asks for help in curbing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

 He claims the group attacks opposition forces, not the Assad regime.

 “We the Syrian people now experience beheadings, crucifixions, beatings, murders, outdated methods of treating women, an obsolete approach to governing society. Many who participate in these activities are British. The UK and US governments must support us to defeat terrorism in Syria and prevent it from being exported to Europe and the US.”‘
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2014/05/syria-crisis-britons-accused-of-brutal.html]

 Which brings us to the second point.

 “The rebels are the disparate and fragile coalition.”

 Let’s be clear. ISIS are not a part of that coalition, but are a fifth column used by the Assad régime to undermine the revolution. Here is Nicolas Hénin, who was held as a hostage by ISIS.

 'Take for example, the number of times the Islamic State has actually fought the Syrian army over the course of the bloody war:

 The ISIS fought the Syrian army when they seized the Menagh air base.

 They also fought the army when they captured Division 17 in Raqqa (now capital of the declared Caliphate). Here they also captured a neighbouring airport.

 The IS has also taken part in small-scale battles near Aleppo, Lattakia and Al-Qamishi.

 This is the comprehensive list. And for a war that’s claimed 200,000 lives and displaced half the country, the number of battles remains suspiciously small.

 In fact, as of 2014, ISIS was earning $3 Million every day in the form of oil revenues. And a large portion of this oil is, to this day, sold to Assad. This complicity may be surprising. But it is not necessarily illogical. Because Assad stands to gain from the existence of the ISIS. It legitimizes his position as leader of the Syrian people. The “Assad or chaos” slogan is one he manipulates and brandishes with much success. The ISIS is the bogeyman. And by focusing on the malaise that is the ISIS, we are playing right into Assad’s hands.

 The Syrian people, as well as the Iraqis, would never accept the leadership of the Islamic State. It is an organization fraught with infighting and deceit. It cannot provide a viable Government in either country. It simply does not have the structural efficiency to. Additionally, the fear of the ISIS seems more potent than it is because of their ingenious PR campaign. We find ourselves shaken by their videos. We replay them time and again on television, further feeding into the deliberately cultivated fear. We are concerned that a future fighter of the ISIS may be among us. And in all this, we fail to recognize the sporadic, disorganized violence for what it is.

 The real threat remains Assad. In his absence, the Sunni majority will not feel compelled to align with the fanatic jihadis. The moderates will rise again. The conflicts will begin to resolve themselves. But the first step is to dethrone the ISIS from the status of “super-terrorists”. It’s what they want. And they are not a credible threat to the world.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/11/this-former-isis-hostage-has-unexpected.html]

 Or more concisely from Murhaf Jouejati:

 “Assad has done much to prop up ISIS, first by releasing hard-core jihadis from his prisons under the guise of presidential amnesty to political prisoners (many of them now constitute the leadership of ISIS), then by aggrandizing ISIS financially through government purchase of oil from the fields ISIS controls (the Assad regime currently purchases electricity from ISIS), and now by concentrating most regime fire, in concert with ISIS, against moderate, secular rebels. In return, ISIS largely abstains from battling Assad’s forces.Without a strong moderate Syrian opposition, there is no way to defeat ISIS in Syria or force a real transition in Damascus.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/03/why-syrias-assad-must-go-now-assad-has.html]

 Or Youssef Seddik, director of the press center of Aleppo.

 “There is a secret agreement between the Assad clan and Daesh. Assad leads imaginary battles against Daesh, he leaves arms dumps to them without a fight, as we have seen in rural areas near Homs, and Palmyra. In return, Daesh do not attack Assad’s forces and even blew up Palmyra prison, a symbol of the tyranny of Assad: it had no interest in documenting this and thus erased all trace and record of the torture practiced here for years by the regime.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/12/yousef-seddik-syrian-journalist-there.html]

 Here is the former attorney-general for Tadmur, where the historic ruins of Palmyra are located.

 ‘ “A month before the city fell to Daesh, we had received information that Daesh was planning to attack Tadmur and the adjacent city of Sukhna. We conveyed the information to Assad himself,” said Mohamed Qassim, who formerly served as attorney-general in Syria’s central city of Tadmur. “But instead of laying out a plan to defend the city, Assad ordered military forces to vacate Tadmur in hopes of tempting Daesh to fill the vacuum,” he said.

 According to Qassim, Assad had wanted to give the impression that Daesh had captured Tadmur, from which the group hoped to advance on the central city of Homs to kill Alawites and Christians. “[Assad was confident] that the destruction of ancient monuments in the city would anger world public opinion and thus demonize the revolution,” he said.

 When he was serving as the city’s attorney-general, Qassim said, he had discovered scores of bodies of political detainees in regime-run prisons. “These people’s crime was to oppose the criminal Assad regime,” he said. Qassim added that political detainees had been subject to horrific forms of torture. “Many were beaten, burnt, tortured or crucified to death,” he said.

 “There were atrocities and crimes committed by Russia and the Assad regime that the world never knew about,” he said. He asserted that most of the city’s monuments, for example, had been destroyed by Russian airstrikes or barrel bombs dropped by regime aircraft. “Russian bombardments and regime [attacks] don’t target Daesh; rather, they are killing civilians, rendering thousands of the city’s residents homeless,” he said.

 Qassim went on to note that Russia — which began striking opposition forces in Syria last September — never attempted to retake Tadmur from Daesh. “It’s destroying the city and killing its people and is ultimately working to obliterate Tadmur,” he said.

 Qassim said dozens of Russian military experts had arrived in Tadmur when he was still serving as the city’s attorney-general. “These experts visited oil and gas fields to carry out maintenance and repair operations under the protection of Daesh militants,” he said.
Qassim went on to disclose that regime forces were selling weapons to Daesh militants, asserting that a Syrian officer — named Mohamed Gaber — had been responsible for selling weapons to the militant group. “He [Gaber] smuggled weapons at night to Daesh militants and was paid by middlemen,” he said. Providing a glimpse as to how the weapons were procured by Daesh, Qassim said Gaber used to order extra weapons at one of the army checkpoints under his control. “[Shortly afterward] Daesh militants would attack the checkpoint, from which Gaber would order his troops to withdraw — leaving the weapons to the militants,” he said. “After the militants withdrew from the checkpoint, Gaber and his forces would return to find it emptied of weapons,” Qassim said.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/02/ex-syria-official-tells-of-collusion.html]

 “Others still are driven by the linked issues of inter-Muslim Sunni versus Shia conflict.”

 It is the Assad régime that has made the conflict sectarian. Here is Robin Yassin-Kassab, co-author of Burning Country, the best account of the Syrian revolution and Assad’s genocide.

 ‘Assad has deliberately started this war, he has deliberately made the thing militarised, and he deliberately made it sectarian.

 For a start, it hasn’t become completely jihadised, or Islamised. That’s been overdone. It’s been dramatically overdone in a rather Orientalist way, by commentators of left as much as right. Because there are still all of these democratic councils on the ground, self-organised communities, Free Army militias which a lot of journalists claim don’t exist, but clearly do. So that’s not the whole story. But how did it happen? Well, Assad deliberately provoked a war, because he knew that he couldn’t survive a genuine reform process, that one thing would lead to another, and he and his cohort would end up, at best, in prison, and stripped of their wealth. So as they wrote on the walls, “Assad or we burn the country,” they decided to burn the country, because the people didn’t want Assad. They did this because it worked before.

 In the late 70s, there was a movement of Islamist, nationalists, leftists, Communists, against Assad. Not a massive popular movement like 2011, but a movement nevertheless. It was so ruthlessly suppressed, that by 1982, all that was left of that movement was the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Which then out of idiocy or desperation staged an armed uprising in the city of Hama, at which point the Assad régime said, “Great! They’ve brought guns out, it’s a war situation.” They went in and flattened the historical centre of that ancient city, and killed somewhere between ten and forty thousand people, we don’t know how many, and that kept Syrians terrified and silent for the next decades until 2011. It worked. Then the Algerians did something similar in 91/92, and are still there, that régime is still in power. The Russians did it, from Chechnya I to Chechnya II, you see the same thing.

 Assad, at the same time that he was locking up and torturing to death tens of thousands of peaceful non-violent non-sectarian protesters, he was also releasing salafist jihadists from prison, and a lot of these people went off and founded these organisations, Jaish al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, and even worse, went of to join the upper ranks of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Qaida franchise) and so on. He did this deliberately, he organised a series of sectarian massacres in 2012, on the plain between Homs and Hama, because he wanted a sectarian backlash. In order to terrify two constituencies. Firstly minorities in Syria, religious minorities, bourgeois secularists in Syria, who may have sympathised with the aims of the revolution, but when they saw angry Sunni Muslims threatening vengeance, as you do after massacres and children being tortured to death and a mass rape campaign, they suddenly thought, well if the alternative to this guy is people who may kill us just because of who we are, just because we aren’t Muslims in the way they are, then we have no choice but to stick to this guy. And secondly, the West. He’s done it very effectively. He’s convinced people that don’t know much about Syria, or don’t want to know much about Syria, in the West, that yes, this guy is the lesser evil. But he’s actually the source of the problem, him and his backers.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/04/syria-21st-century-disaster.html]

 “Estimates vary wildly, although it seems clear that in Syria more foreign Sunnis are fighting with the rebels than there are foreign Shias fighting in defence of the Assad regime. Franco made an absurd claim that there were no foreigners among his troops.”

 This is absurd. Foreigners fighting with the non-ISIS opposition number a few thousand at most, Assad’s forces have almost entirely been replaced by transnational Shia jihadis.

 Ahmed Rahal:’When Assad’s army started to crumble, Assad had to form the so-called Shabiha squads. Shabiha were not proper military; they were armed gangs killing Syrians. When Shabiha could no longer hold back the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime invited mercenaries from abroad. First, they invited Lebanese Hezbollah; later, they brought Iraqi brigades and invited Qasem Suleimani with the Iranian Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (IRGC) and the Failak Al Quds corps. They also released and trained convicts from Tehran’s jails to send them as mercenaries to Syria. That was how control over the military passed from Bashar Assad into Iran’s hands, with Qasem Suleimani becoming Syria’s supreme warlord.

 But even after the Hezbollah and Iranian-Iraqi incursion, Assad continued to lose ground, having to seek the backing of the Russian air force to continue the extermination of the Syrian people. Today, Russian warplanes bomb Syrian civilians under the pretext of combating ISIS. Over 95% of all air strikes are made against Syrian civilians and the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Assad’s regular army is history now. Let’s count foreign mercenaries. Hezbollah: 15 to 20 thousand fighters from Lebanon.

 Iraqi mercenaries: the al-Nujaba militia, Abu Fadl Al-Abbas, and others (approximately 36 Iraqi brigades), 20 to 30 thousand men, all Shiites.

 Iran sent IRGC’s advisors Failak Al Quds: the so-called “army of volunteers” who “volunteered” to fight in Syria. Iran also sent Afghani convicts and junkies. All in all, 20 to 30 thousand people.

 There are also mercenaries from Chechnya, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. 3 more thousand people have been recently brought from Nigeria.

 All in all, there are about 100 thousand people fighting for Assad. This is not counting the Russian troops.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/02/general-ahmad-rahal-there-are-some.html]

 On the other side, the rebels’ secularism and ecumenism has been hidden.

 “By 2012, the Assad regime intensified its armed crackdown against the unarmed protesters in Daraya. A terrible massacre occurred there on Aug. 24, 2012, as Assad’s regime sent troops, secret police, and members of the elite 4th Division to prevent residents from fleeing the city by any means necessary. Families were executed in their homes, whole buildings of women and children were machine-gunned in the streets, and residents were even decapitated — long before the so-called Islamic State even existed.

 The state-run media launched an aggressive propaganda campaign claiming Muslims were massacring Christians, aiming to stoke fear of the opposition in the Christian community. As regime soldiers went door to door, searching for people to murder, it was the Christian community of Daraya that opened theirs to protect those fleeing the atrocities. One Catholic church treated the injured and prepared food for them.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-syrian-revolution-is-not-holy-war.html]

 “I am afraid for no one,” he said. “It’s the people’s revolution, we are one people. The Christians are our brothers.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/04/civilians-in-syrian-rebel-controlled.html]

 ‘If most rebels acted out of religious zeal, how did they earn support from members of Syria’s minorities? Salamiya, a majority-Ismaili Shite town of105,000, which held its first protests against the Assad regime in April of 2011, has hosted massive anti-regime protests deep into the Revolution’s armed phase. The Free Syrian Army head in Salamiya is himself Ismaili. Is he acting out of Ismaili religious zeal? Syrian Christians have also established multiple anti-Assad brigades . Did they raise arms out of passion for Jesus? Just two weeks ago, a group of 30 armed Alawi draft-dodgers urged others to join them because “We are shooting at [other sects] for Bashar al-Assad…Enough.” Were they acting out of love for Ali?

 We know why Syrian Christians, Ismailis and even Alawis have taken up arms against Assad, because they tell us why in their defection videos: the regime is “corrupt” and “tyrannical.” It “perpetrates massacres” and “destroys houses onto the heads of children.” These were the same reasons given by most Syrian Sunnis who defected. They are related to simple dignity and humanity, not religious zeal.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/01/why-assad-still-must-go-if-most-rebels.html]

 It is suprising that Syrians have not become more sectarian, given the sectarian murder the régime has rained down on them.

 ‘ “The regime wanted me to use excessive and unimaginable force against unarmed civilians and innocent people. … I felt I could not protect my family anymore… That is the reason why I defected and I’m proud of it. I refuse to kill my own people and destroy my own country.

 Sectarian hatred was evident from the beginning of his superiors’ involvement: “The Alawite pilots often bragged [openly] during my time at Ksheish and Kweiress airport about how they dropped bombs and killed ‘Dirty Sunnis’. Sometimes we’d ask them: ‘Did you hit the target (rebels)?’ He’d say ‘No, I dropped it on a village or on fishing boats….who cares they’re all Sunnis let them burn.’ I swear on everything valuable that was their response.” In another instance, when a Colonel from Homs did not react to a newscast with screams of ‘terrorist,’ “he was handcuffed and a bag was placed on his head in front of me by the moukhabarat. He was then taken and tortured for a week before he was returned.” ‘
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/07/asking-syrian-airmen-anything.html]

 “And now in Syria, shifting international allegiances and diplomatic hostilities between the many countries engaged in the conflict, along with the hesitant and indecisive role played by decision-makers in Britain, France and the United States understandably concerned only with their own foreign policy goals, has further inflamed an already volatile situation.”

 This hesitant and indecisive sentence tells us nothing about the reality of foreign intervention in Syria. What has happened is that the Russians have provided billions of dollars worth of weaponry, the Iranians tens of thousands of troops, while the West has provided little other than rhetoric in support of the opposition; and yet Assad is still losing, as he has lost all support in the country, and now rules only by fear and by the consent of his patrons.

 ‘President Obama: “It would be a mistake for the United States, or Great Britain, or a combination of Western countries to send in ground troops and overthrow the Assad regime. But I do believe that we can apply international pressure to all the parties, including Russia, and Iran, who are essentially propping up Assad; as well as those moderate opposition that exist and may be fighting inside of Syria, to sit down at the table and try to broker a transition.”

 It’s a straw man. Nobody asked President Obama to send in ground troops to overthrow Assad. The only variation he allows for in this schema is that other countries might also invade. There are other options. In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg¹ he mentions that John Kerry asked for missiles to be fired at specific régime targets. Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination to be the next president has come out in favour of a no fly zone, while Bernie Sanders is opposed. He could have called for the Syrian National Coalition to be recognised as the legitimate government. He could have supported the establishment of the FSA as the national army. He could have exerted diplomatic pressure on Iran and Russia to give up support for Assad and his régime, and pressured them to allow an immediate transition to a democratic and accountable government.

 Instead he did none of those things. He recognised the SNC as the “legitimate opposition”, allowing the US to pretend to be a friend and keep its leaders beholden to the West. He sent the CIA to Turkey’s borders to act as gatekeepers to ensure that weapons that might stop Assad’s massacres like anti-aircraft missiles were kept out, and the flow could be shut off if it looked like the rebels were advancing too fast. This isn’t an inevitable policy for the US, but it is one that the dead weight of their previous choices has tied this administration to.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/04/who-knows-where-time-goes.html]

 ‘Two Syrian aid workers said they approached Kerry at a donor conference drinks reception and told him that he had not done enough to protect Syrian civilians. He then said they should blame the opposition.

 “He said that basically, it was the opposition that didn’t want to negotiate and didn’t want a ceasefire, and they walked away,” the second of the aid workers told MEE in a separate conversation and also on the basis of anonymity.

 “‘What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?’” the aid worker said Kerry told her.

 Both aid workers said Kerry told them that he anticipated three months of bombing during which time “the opposition will be decimated”.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/02/kerry-blames-opposition-for-continued.html]

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 “One reason the rebels, the opposition militias have collapsed recently, is because the Americans have told the Saudis and others to stop delivering weapons. Not one anti-aircraft weapon, which is what the civilians need to defend themselves from this scorched earth and depopulation, not one of them has come through. So the Americans, who present themselves as Friends of Syria, certainly aren’t friends with the Syrian Revolution. They’ve just done a deal with the Iranians, at the same moment the Iranians are sending Shia jihadist militants to Syria and Iraq, which is making the Sunni Islamist backlash so much worse. When the Russians wanted to bring their own opposition team, so-called opposition team, to Vienna, the Americans said that’s OK. When the genuine Syrian opposition team said they wanted United Nations resolutions, that the Americans and Russians had already agreed on, implemented; for example, a ceasefire, and end to the aerial bombardment in civilian areas, John Kerry told the opposition that this was a precondition they shouldn’t be talking about at this stage. So whatever the rhetoric coming out of the Americans, their actions suggest they have handed this over to Russia and Iran. So in the name of disengagement, the Americans, back in 2013 when sarin gas was used, Obama’s red line over chemical weapons disappeared, they in effect handed Syria over to Russia. It hasn’t brought about stabilisation, it’s brought about an absolute disaster. It has dragged the West back in. This year, the pressure of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, it will be more than last year, and I wish the Europeans would stop waiting for the Americans, for American leadership on this, because it clearly isn’t coming.”

 ‘Kerry has specifically adopted Moscow’s two primary positions:

 The First, making the “war on terror and extremism” the basis of any international approach in Syria. The Second, putting off for the time being any discussion of the fate of Assad, rather than making it the first step in any discussion of a political settlement, as the Syrian opposition has been demanding since day one. Kerry has now made it clear Assad does not have to leave anytime soon when he said: “It doesn’t have to be on day one or month one. There is a process by which all the parties have to come together and reach an understanding of how this can best be achieved.” ‘
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/09/opinion-what-does-settlement-in-syria.html]

 ‘When the first attacks occurred in March, Mr. Kerry issued an angry statement declaring that “the international community cannot turn a blind eye to such barbarism.” But the Security Council, paralyzed by Russian obstructionism, has taken no action. And Mr. Kerry and his spokesman made it clear that the Obama administration has no plans to do anything other than remonstrate with Vladi­mir Putin’s powerless foreign minister.

 It is well within the power of the United States to put a stop to the horrific attacks. It could impose a no-fly zone in northern Syria, where Idlib province lies, or simply shoot down the slow-moving Syrian helicopters carrying out the attacks. As former ambassador to Syria Robert Ford testified to the House committee, a failure to act won’t affect only Syria: “The international consensus against CW use forged after the horrors of World War I is being eroded with each new chemical attack,” he said. “This is a risk to our own soldiers’ safety and our broader national security.”

No matter: “I don’t have any specific measures here that I can lay out for you” to stop the chlorine attacks, said State Department spokesman John Kirby. Tell that to the families of the children whose lungs are being burned away.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2015/06/barbarism-with-chlorine-gas-goes.html]

 “After all, from September 1939 onwards, despite the class prejudices of the ruling class and senior military officers, the fight of the volunteers in Spain had become was the fight of the majority of British and French citizens. There will be no equivalent whatever the result of the war in Syria.”

 That’s a shame, because it there is much to support in the Syrian revolution, and it is the right-wing forces in Europe that benefit from stigmatising the refugees and those still fighting for their freedom.

 Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 “Living conditions are absolutely unbearable, in some places people are actually starving to death. There’s constant barrel bombing, etc., etc., chemical weapons, and so on. Having said that, the inspiring thing, and the thing the media really hasn’t covered very well, is that there are over 400 democratically elected local councils in Syria.

 Now this is something that is quite amazing, and I can’t understand why we’re not talking about it much more, because in the previous decade the West was invading the Middle East, to bring them democracy supposedly, on the back of tanks, and that didn’t really work out. Now, out of necessity, in places where the state has collapsed, or has been driven back; people have got together, they’ve organised elections, and they’ve got local councils that are trying to keep life going in the most difficult of situations. These people should be part of the solution.

 They’ve done it in different ways in different places, but in some ways they are elections as we would recognise here. So, for example, in the south, where the dominant militia is the Southern Front, a group of Free Army militias, they have refused to enter into alliances with Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida group, they have had no problem at all with people organising elections in the south. The leaders of militias were not allowed to stand, so we’ve got civilian councils.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/01/syrias-real-life-stories.html]

 “Well, there’s something really beautiful about Manbij and many other cities like it in Syria in that the people have a sense of responsibility that has been pushing them to organize the city for almost- Manbij has been liberated for a year and three months almost – right now. And you find people in local councils, people in the police force, for example, the brigade and other organizations that are working completely without pay, without any form, not even a political agenda. It’s just that feeling of duty towards the country that’s keeping them there. Manbij has changed in many ways; we’re free. For the first time ever, the Syrian people are experiencing this freedom where they’re allowed to be politically active, where they’re allowed to look at the future from a completely different angle.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-interview-with-abou-maeb-well-theres.html]

 “While traveling with some of these Free Syrian Army battalions, I’ve watched them defend Alawi and Christian villages from government forces and extremist groups. They’ve demonstrated a willingness to submit to civilian authority, working closely with local administrative councils. And they have struggled to ensure that their fight against Assad will pave the way for a flourishing civil society. One local council I visited in a part of Aleppo controlled by the Free Syrian Army was holding weekly forums in which citizens were able to speak freely, and have their concerns addressed directly by local authorities.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2013/08/elizabeth-obagy-on-front-lines-of.html]

 Kenan Rahmani: ‘The “free” in “Free Syria” was palpable: talking to kids in the street, or to armed rebels who were protecting the city, or the representatives of the local administrative councils.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2013/02/syria-witness-getting-into-spirit-of.html]

 “Something struck me almost immediately about these two men; both broadcast something like hope. As we talked further, I realized it was something deeper than that; pride. A pride that I have never experienced. When they speak about their journey to Europe and of their brushes with death, they do so knowing that they stood on the right side of history, that they did exactly what they would want themselves or anyone to do in their situation; they stood and pushed forward when the Arab world was trying to rid itself of the regimes and dogmatic political doctrines that oversaw the repression of their generation.

 Though they carry trauma and scars from Syria, and while their families and friends are scattered, dead, or in prison, neither regret their role in the Syrian revolution. But Sami and Tariq have hope as well, a hope in knowing that perhaps the revolt in Syria will be a building block toward some better future. It had to happen, they stress, and once it had started, they had to push it as far as they could.

 Such hope does not come from blind faith, but from knowing that something could work, from a sense of potential and possibility. That is what Tunisia and Egypt taught the world in late 2010 and early 2011, and it’s what drove people like Sami and Tariq to the streets of Damascus a month later. They live now knowing that they were among the millions who tried.”
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-long-journey-of-two-syrian.html]

 ‘As in a number of Arab countries, many of Syria’s women were largely confined to traditional roles before the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the outbreak of war. Now, however, more and more women are at the forefront of new efforts to solve local problems and counter the death and destruction that has engulfed the country.

 One of the ways they’ve done this is by starting their own independent magazines and radio stations, such as Jasmine Syria, Sayedet Souriya, Radio Souriyat and Nasaem Radio, which focus on highlighting the daily struggles of Syrian women amid the conflict.”The stereotypical image of women presented in media reflects a patriarchal society,” said Reem al-Halabi, director of Nasaem Radio, which is based in the northwestern city of Aleppo. “Women’s interests are not limited to fashion, beauty, cooking, family and children. This image does not reflect the real interests or concerns of Syrian women or how hard they are working to take part in building their country.”

 More women are also launching community initiatives, such as Women Now for Development, a center formed by women in 2012 in the besieged town of Hazza in the Damascus countryside to provide training in new skills. The initiative focuses on young women who have had to quit school due to the security situation and widows who need to generate income to support their families. Layla, the manager of Women Now for Development, said the conflict had paradoxically “opened new horizons” for some Syrian women. “They are more self-confident and not afraid to express their opinions anymore, and this is reflected in the way they raise their children and deal with their husbands and the society around them,” said Layla, who asked that her real name not be used for security reasons.Layla added that Women Now’s workshops about women’s rights have contributed to increasing the number of women who voted in local council elections in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/05/women-emerge-as-changemakers-in-war.html]

 ‘They beat me. They beat me with a strap, kicked me with their boots, they beat me with everything they could. They broke my fingers. I am a surgeon and they broke all my fingers. They would lift me by my shoulder and leave me hanging like this for 3 hours. But the worst of all the torture I endured was cold (it was wintertime and I had no clothes on) and hunger: we were starving; they would not let us eat. They tortured me mentally threatening to rape my mother and daughter; they humiliated me as a human being and as a doctor. When they questioned me, I was standing before them stark naked, blindfolded, with my hands tied. It all lasted for 7 months.

 All this will end if the whole world continues its pressure and starts using all available means to stop the dictator, the murderer.

 Even if the regime succeeds in making Syria fall apart into several states, this will mean nothing: we will continue to fight no matter what. We’ll fight for a hundred years if we have to. Syria must be one country. After Assad goes, we will start building a new, free Syria: a democratic, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional country.’
[https://notris.blogspot.com/2016/01/doctor-hissam-saad-we-will-start.html]