No end in sight for Syria

 There is also a review of Thomas Pierret's Revolution and State In Syria, but that bit is hidden behind the paywall.

 'In displaying contempt for his people, their self-esteem and their demands, the President was setting the pattern for the regime’s response to the uprising.

 The result thus far of this brazen refusal to compromise has been the loss of an estimated 160,000 lives and the ascendance of jihadist Islam in large areas of what was a staunchly secular state. The appearance and success of the Islamists, Raphaël Lefèvre explains in Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, is attributable in part to the policies of the Assad regime itself – first under Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar. In a compact and compelling account, the author describes in detail the build-up to an Islamist uprising in the city of Hama in February 1982. The regime’s draconian response, in a foretaste of events after 2011, left tens of thousands of people dead and areas of the city flattened.'

Muslim Brotherhood: The People Will Ultimately Triumph

 'We also see the effects of this in hesitant and wavering attitudes in the face of the ugly killing machine of the Baathists in Syria, who did not hesitate to use even internationally banned chemical weapons in the killing of Syrians. Those Syrians who – even if they escape the chemical weapons and explosive barrels, fall into a painful death from hunger and homelessness, all while the so-called international community watches without moving a finger, justifying this cowardly inaction by feeble claims of extremist elements being present among the ranks of Syrian resistance.'

President Obama can 'bypass Congress

 'Last year, the president abandoned plans for punitive military strikes in Syria following a deadly chemical weapons attack once it became clear that Congress would not give its backing.'

 Or he went to Congress for a vote so that he would have an excuse for not helping the Syrian people at all. Along with never spelling out what these punitive strikes would be, enabling supporters of doing nothing about Assad to paint the most lurid picture of what they would amount to.

Bush, Barack & Bashar BFF to Islamic Extremists in Iraq & Syria

 'The only force that is doing it right, the only force on the ground that is actually fighting ISIS and winning is the Free Syrian Army and its allies and the best course of action for those concerned about the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham is to see that they get the arms and supplies they need to defeat both ISIS and the Assad regime and set Syria on the road to a democratic future.'

Isis breach of Iraq-Syria border merges two wars into one 'nightmarish reality'

 I'd go for the SNC's explanation as the straightforward one. "Take them more seriously" ignores the evidence that he simply wasn't taking them on at all.

 'Last weekend the Syrian air force staged its first raids on Isis bases in Raqqa, Hassakeh and Deir al-Zor. That was noteworthy because Assad's enemies have often accused him of tolerating Isis or tacitly cooperating with it in order to split rebel ranks and present himself as a secular bulwark against al-Qaida and jihadi fanaticism.

 According to reports from Raqqa, Isis fighters inexplicably left their barracks 24 hours before the attack. In Deir al-Zor, planes seemed to fly in and out of Iraqi airspace, perhaps suggesting collaboration with Baghdad.

 The Syrian National Coalition, the main western-backed opposition group, quickly dismissed the raids as "a ridiculous decoy". Assad, it claimed, "aims through this fake air strike against limited Isis administrative centres to send a message to the international community and to rebuild trust with it, after its close relationship with Isis was exposed".

 Another more straightforward explanation, however, could be that developments in Iraq have forced the Syrian president to take the jihadis far more seriously than he appears to have done so far.'

ISIS & the Assad regime: from marriage of convenience

 Owen Jones has just been claiming on Channel 4 News that leaving Syrians at Assad's mercy has done nothing to strengthen ISIS, here's why he's wrong.

 'This memo is just a small sample of testimony from FSA fighters that describe events on the ground where regime forces have been protecting and assisting this group. Accounts go further, saying that regime forces are intimately intertwined with this group, whose objectives are one and the same: to destroy moderate Opposition forces and establish control over as much of Syria as possible. Accounts of this kind are so widespread, most Opposition fighters can add their own personal accounts to this collection. We would encourage those interested to independently reach out to Syrians inside the country to hear their testimonies first-hand.'

Defiance inside Damascus rebel suburb

 "My wife is an Alawite. We want a state of justice and after that eventually to be like Turkey or Malaysia. We'd like the war to finish. We don't like killing and we don't want to be killed."

 There are a couple of good quotes in this piece, though Jeremy Bowen still finishes with the Assad version. I saw recently analysis that opposition support in Syria has risen from 50% to 60%, while that for the régime has fallen from 17% to 9%. Even that underestimates, while the threat of government terror is a reality, a reluctance of those who might find themselves ruled by Assad again to admit their feelings, and is a tribute to a people unwilling to be bombed and starved into submission.

 "This is our home, our country. We have no other place. God willing, the rebels are going to win. The regime is unjust and unfair. History shows that injustice doesn't last."

Hope

 'Increasing support to the FSA may be the most likely Western response, rather than cosying up to Assad.'

 From Newsnight intro. Robin Yassin-Kassab is in the studio.

To Save Iraq, Look to Syria

 I'd only argue with the description "Sunni" applied to rebel groups. They didn't make this a sectarian war, Assad did.

 'Syria’s mainstream Sunni rebel groups – and not the Assad regime – are already fighting and dying in a war on ISIS, with little U.S. support and against tremendous odds, including the regime’s siege and starvation campaigns.

 Only Syrian moderates can stop ISIS. While Maliki deserves his fair share of the blame, ISIS' success in Iraq resulted directly from its control of territory and resources in Syria. Unless Syrian moderates receive more robust U.S. support, including funding, arms and training, ISIS will win in Syria. Its rivals also desperately need relief from constant air strikes by the Assad regime, which make it impossible for them to fight the jihadists effectively.'

Barrel bombs in Syria leave at least 36 dead

 'The Syrian Revolution General Committee said in a statement that the regime's helicopters attacked a market place where many women and children were among those killed.

 The opposition said that civil defense teams are continuing their rescue operations but the regime's helicopters have bombed other regions of the city too.

 Meanwhile, the Local Coordination Committee of Syria, reported that Syrian warplanes have destroyed a hospital in Tell Rifaat district, in the north of Aleppo, but they did not give casualty numbers.'

Protest at the Home Office

  

 'The Syria Solidarity Movement, Movement Against Xenophobia and No One Is Illegal have called a protest at the Home Office for 6.30pm on Monday 16th June.'

 It can make you angry when people suggest that the problem in Syria is the funding of the 'Western-backed' opposition, rather than the lack of support that allows Assad to kill with impunity. And then such liberal commentators will claim that there is an irony between that support and the closed door to refugees, a further insult to Syrians who can see the lack of support in both cases, especially the ones legally settled in the UK or the US who get stopped as suspected terrorists when they travel outside those countries. The lie that the struggle against Assad is a jihadi quagmire we need to run and hide from is what has left the conflict to fester, and as could be predicted, that has rehabilitated demands for straightforward use of American force because something must be done about ISIS. Wouldn't have this problem if all the whining about how the chemical attacks were just a story to drag us into another Iraq stopped any debate about empowering Syrians to overthrow Assad and rid the country of ISIS.

 The refugee thing also shit in Canada. Pretty much all over if you're a Syrian.

 'The war in Syria has forced more than 2.5 million refugees to flee their homes, and Canada has promised to make room for 1,300. So far, three years into the conflict, only a handful have arrived.

After repeated attempts to get the exact number as to how many Syrians have arrived in Canada under the program, our conversation with the Minister was interrupted abruptly when he appeared to hang up on us.'
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140617120949/http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/features/2014/06/11/chris-alexander-citizenship-and-immigration-minister/]

ISIS’ Iraq offensive could trigger Hezbollah to fill gap left in Syria

 'With the Syrian army decimated by desertions and exhaustion, the regime relies heavily on its allies, chiefly Hezbollah as well as Iraqi paramilitaries. It is estimated that there are around 5,000 Hezbollah fighters in Syria at any one time and the party represents the main offensive force in launching operations backed by Syrian airpower and artillery to recapture territory. There were an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iraqi Shiite fighters serving in Syria before the ISIS offensive in northern Iraq.'

Iraq: three kinds of blowback and the threat of war stoked by western meddling

 John Rees:

 'The most consistent element of Western policy has been support for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This has been diplomatic, strategic, monetary and military, though the arms supply has not included heavy weaponry.'

 The consistent element is not giving them weapons to fight Assad and ISIS.

 'The FSA and their political representatives have been duly supplicatory, repeatedly making pro-American statements, attending the imperial-generated Syrian conferences, in the hope of gaining more aid from the US and its allies.'

 They asked for weapons to defend themselves.

 'The problem with the FSA strategy has been that it undermined their standing inside Syria. The fact that leaders of the FSA often had less standing with Syrians than with the US government undermined their credibility. The fact that they were so cravenly pro-Western further eroded support in Syria where the population, as in many Arab countries, historically contains a wide swathe of anti-colonial sentiment (indeed this is one of the ideological reserves of the Assad regime).'

 This strategy was undermined, because the Americans stopped any heavy weaponry getting through, while Assad's supplies of weapons and foreign troops were unabated. Rees has consistently tried to appropriate the anti-imperialist feeling of those who want to fight Assad with the régime's narrative that it is anti-US.

 'It was this hollowing out of the FSA, a direct result of Western nomination of ‘acceptable’, ‘moderate’ forces in Syria, which created a vacuum which was filled by various Islamic forces, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS)..'

 It was the lack of support to moderate forces that left the more extreme to fill the gap, and the very extreme to take advantage of the vacuum.

 'The arms supplies from the Saudis to ISIS and others may not have been enough to defeat Assad.'

 ISIS has made no attempt to attack Assad, let alone defeat him. The Saudi government has not supported ISIS. Even Rees' link to Robert Fisk, who may be reliable these days in his misreporting, talks only of " the Saudi Wahhabis and Kuwaiti oligarchs". The Saudi government have their own reactionary kingdom, they don't want some idiot to mess up raking it in from oil sales by establishing their own caliphate. That's why the Saudis fight al-Qaida, even though many of us might have trouble telling the difference.

 'Bombing will kill civilians, and so worsen the detestation of the West and produce more terrorists.'

 Assad's bombing of civilians has unsurprisingly killed many civilians, and caused millions to flee. This has worsened the detestation of the western left for refusing to support any action against it, and denying revolution is taking place at all.

World Cup: Qatar Goes to Penalties

 'Its most controversial stance – alarming the White House and infuriating its Arab neighbours – is its continued support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.'

 So it is opposed to the military régime that has killed thousands since the coup? Good.

 Likewise we get a couple of pieces of bullshit about Qatar and Syria, where only the arms it has provided to more secular groups have prevented the extreme jihadis and Assad displacing them entirely.

 'It wants to do its own thing, not to be pushed around. Its support for the Brotherhood reflects its preference for Islamist parties rather than military dictators, as demonstrated in Libya. But it is in danger of over-reaching itself and giving succour to extremists, particularly in Syria...

 It is supportive of Islamists, from Hamas and Hezbollah to rebel groups in Syria. But how much money it channels to which groups and where it draws the line is murky.'

Understanding a Revolutionary Syria

 'As army defections increased and people clamored for weapons to defend themselves with the non-violent resistance suffered one serious blow after another. Two hundred soldiers joined the Free Syria Army within the first three weeks of June. Alawite security forces who harassed civilian Alawites for joining the anti-government demonstrations began to refer to them as “Jews” and “Zionist traitors.” The Syrian people did not expect mainstream allegedly pro-Arab solidarity outlets in the English speaking world to remain sinfully silent even in the face of such gruesome evidence, and they definitely did not expect the likes of staunch Republican John McCain to be the one to reveal these photos to his colleagues on the senate floor, demanding the West to step up to plate and intervene constructively. The American leftist community places itself on a humanitarian pedestal, yet it could not have been less interested in stopping the Ba‟athist killing machine.

 The basics of Syrian history and the long trail of Muslim victims who have perished at the hands of Russian imperialism are unknown to them, whether they be Crimean, Chechnya, or Syrian. The Syrian diaspora in the US who had marched against American aggression in Iraq in 2003 found themselves berated at various liberal gatherings. Syrian, Russian, and Iranian state propaganda was spewed back out at them by bourgeoisie hipsters who had zero awareness of Syria‟s history, people, and their seemingly never-ending struggle against Ba‟athist tyranny.'

Are people really this fucking dumb

 'Or do they like to play dumb?'

New Opposition Umbrella Group in Aleppo

 'An independent, national revolutionary organization that constitutes a legal entity. It unites all the rebels in the city of Aleppo and the surrounding countryside who have taken part in the revolutionary movement since its inception and who have proved that they have not deviated from the principles and goals of the revolution.

 The document says the group’s objective is to “overthrow Assad’s regime and all its symbols, maintain the unity of the Syrian nation and territory and the Islamic identity of the state; and work on the application of tolerant Sharia law in all areas of life.” '

"Assad is only protecting himself"

 Martina Sabra:

 'Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad likes to present himself as a champion of his nation's religious minorities, in particular the Christians. But increasing numbers of Syrian Christians in exile are resisting this narrative.

 "Belief in Christ is for us the source of support for the rebellion against the Syrian dictator and the basis for the battle for freedom and dignity. The regime of Bashar al-Assad was and can never be the guardian of Christian minorities. It only safeguards the interests of the dictatorship's mafia-style structures." '

What Do Syria's Rebels Want From The West?

 'While most people in our sample have favorable views of Turkey (78 percent) and Saudi Arabia (78 percent) and unfavorable views of Russia (91 percent) and Iran (92 percent), the public is divided on its support for the West.'

 I think this is the most reliable result in the survey. When the Assad government started killing a lot of people in 2012, the divide between the way Syrians felt, with deep hatred for the Russians and Iranians and gratitude for those that showed support for them, and the left, which continued to see the US as the real threat in the situation. When 65 percent strongly believe that Western powers deserve blame for the protracted conflict, it isn't because they've helped too much.

 On the question of democracy, the time taken to complete the survey is important. Last year, when the only supporters of the Syrian revolution seemed to be those in the Gulf, the Front issued an Islamic charter that seemed to reject representative democracy. Now that it appears that such policies act as propaganda for Assad, and lessen the chance that the US would allow any proper weaponry to get through, they have issued a much more democratic covenant. I don't see this as cynicism, though a dose of that is good for anyone fighting a war against terrible odds, but as a sign that people change with the political landscape, and the sooner Syria achieves freedom the more likely armed groups are to follow the will of the population as regards the future political set-up rather than the other way round. This is also a simpler way of viewing the conflict, rather than asking who are the rebels, asking who they are fighting.

A Pre-emptive Strike

 'Notice though that the only "intervention" that was seriously proposed was this - basically, hurling a bunch of cruise missiles at Damascus like some kind of expensive, more professional Hamas halal picnic day-out or something.'

 Notice that that was the only intervention Flying Rodent was prepared to acknowledge was proposed, the lying little prick.

In the war on terrorism, only al-Qa'ida thrives

 'Of course, the hypocrisy does not end there. For all his triumphalism over the turnout in Syria, Assad's way of dealing with parts of Syria not under his control is to shell them and drop barrel bombs on them. Nor is the opposition much better when it comes to targeting civilians, except that its means of destruction are much less than that of the state.'

 The hypocrisy starts here. The opposition hasn't engaged in the mass murder of civilians. Anyone not looking at the conflict through thick ideological glasses can see the difference. But Assad is an official enemy of the West , so his crimes could only be an excuse for western crimes, so can't be that bad.

 'A reporter in Aleppo, who writes under the name of Edward Dark for the online magazine al-Monitor, mentions a case that "clearly illustrates the ludicrous nature of this inhumane conflict that happened to the Sheikh Maksud neighbourhood in Aleppo". He relates how, when this district was held by Assad's forces, it was regularly shelled by the rebels who said it was full of pro-government militiamen. When the rebels stormed and captured Sheikh Maksud in March 2013, it was the Syrian army that blazed away indiscriminately into the civilian houses that were still standing.'

 The opposition tried to kill the shabiha, the murder and rape gangs that have filled the gaps in Assad's terror, the Syrian Army targeted civilian dwellings. I don't see the equivalence.

 'The Syrian war has turned into a Syrian version of the Thirty Years War in Germany four centuries ago. Too many conflicts and too many players have become involved for any peace terms to be acceptable to all.'

 Assad goes, major problem solved. ignoring that the demand of the revolution is for an end to Assad's police state, that he clears civilian areas because there can be no compromise on that demand, is of no consequence to Cockburn.

 'Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and training a new "moderate military opposition" that will supposedly fight Assad and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) along with other al-Qa'ida-type groups. But it is not clear that the "moderate" military opposition really exists except as tightly controlled cats' paws of foreign powers.'

 It is not clear to Cockburn because he has been denying that there are any revolutionary forces in Syria, or pretending that those out of arms give no support to those that fight Assad. The fewer the strings on arms supplies the better, the credit for their supply inevitable, but this seems much more like a fear that this will happen than a fear it will fail. It is the flipside of the assumption that any weapons will end up with al-Qaida, how anti-aircraft weapons placed in the hands of those determined to protect Syria from Assad will remain hamstrung or get out of control I really can't see, and all seems like an excuse to get away from the lack of support being the cause of the Syrian disaster.

 'So long as the Syrian civil war continues, it benefits groups such as Isis, which wants to create its own state and not just get rid of Assad, because fanatical armed groups, with fighters prepared to be killed, always benefit from conflict. By the same token, moderates lose out or are marginalised as the situation becomes more and more militarised and Syrian public opinion counts for little.'

 Hypocrite. He doesn't care about the vast majority of Syrians who want Assad out.

Why is Jabhat al-Nusra no longer useful to Turkey?

 One of the commonest untruths used to support arguments by those supposed to be on the Left against the Syrian revolution is that Turkey has been supporting Jabhat al-Nusra, an extreme Islamist group with ties to al-Qaida, though not as extreme as the Assad-collaborating ISIS, which crucified some people recently and is now rampaging across Iraq. We get this from the loony end like Seymour Hersh, who claims Turkey got al-Nusra to launch the chemical weapons attack in Damascus in August, but also from those who are meant to be a bit better like Owen Jones. When I saw Eamonn McCann repeat this in his piece defaming the opposition as possible sarin users, it was obvious that he had swallowed this titbit without any attempt to verify it. It is sad to see Ireland's greatest Trotskyist turn into a gullible fool.

 Turkey had a military government for years, that ruthlessly defended a secular nationalism particularly against Islamists, Communists and Kurds.

 The military is still there, these days co-operating with an extremely moderate Islamist government. The idea that they would choose al-Nusra as a proxy in Syria is ludicrous, when there are so many brigades with a more amenable way of thinking. In fact al-Nusra thrived in Northern Syria was the US was effective in stopping any flow of heavy weapons to the Free Syrian Army or to spontaneously formed rebel brigades.

 Who does fund al-Nusra? I can't precisely say. I understand that it is wealthy donors in the Gulf. What I am fairly sure is that if Turkey was supporting them, some evidence would come out of weapons shipments and the like - the Americans would be the first to blow the whistle - as there is nothing, I think this can be taken to be as much of a fantasy creation as the WMDs in Iraq.

 So here is the statement of the Turkish foreign minister, which I think can be taken at face value.

 “Jabhat al-Nusra is the result of the quagmire there. Continually referring to it is having the effect of making it loom large. While they were a controllable group comprising 500-600 people initially, today they number 5,000-6,000. In other words, declaring them a terrorist organization has resulted in more harm than good. Otherwise, we see Jabhat al-Nusra the way we see al-Qaeda.”

 A false reading of "controllable" would see it as an admission that Turkey is controlling al-Nusra. But I think he's saying that Syria is a mess, and that al-Nusra wasn't the most serious problem. Turkey has the Syrian army to worry about, and any penetration into Turkey of Assad's forces to worry about, and concentrating on weeding out a force that is fighting against Assad was not a priority.

 If Turkey had really been supporting al-Nusra, and getting them to launch chemical attacks, we'd get to hear about that now that turkey is calling them terrorists. But we won't.

 There are a number of distortions in this article I thought I might go through individually.

 "The Erdogan government has no choice at this point but to also accept that as far as the United States and Europe are concerned, the emphasis in Syria has shifted from toppling Assad to combating the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups in that country."

 There never was an emphasis on toppling Assad.

 "Looked at in retrospect, these groups have posed the most important obstacle to Ankara’s policy of pushing for international military action against Assad. They have also prevented the Syrian opposition from being armed with the necessary weapons to fight the Syrian army."

 The last sentence is true, and re-states the implausibility of al-Nusra as a Turkish front. It doesn't help that JAN has grown, especially when lifting the obstacles the West has placed on the rebels getting weapons has impeded the fight back against the massively armed régime. For a long time more secular revolutionaries took the view that with the fight against Assad a life-and-death one, and no support coming from anywhere in the world, stopping the growth of extreme Islamism was too much for them.

 When the Islamists were getting arms denied to more secular groups and with Assad armed to the teeth, there wasn't any option. ISIS has shown itself to be no part of the revolution at all, and so real rebel groups have been forced to attack it, far more succesfully than the Iraqi army in the last couple of days, which tells you who the real bulwark against al-Qaida is.

 JAN is a more complicated question, along with that of the Islamic Front, leaders of which are responsible for kidnapping the activists, the Douma 4* and the involvement of Saudi Arabia. Some revolutionaries think they are reactionary forces who are as equally unwelcome in Syria, which is a position that I think lacks nuance. In the Spanish Civil war the Russian secret police had its own murderous spree on the Republican side, but that didn't make sense to demand that the Soviet Union stop supplying arms. The shift in policy against JAN will only work if it is accompanied by real support to the rebels in Syria.

 "The United States and some Western countries, like France, were not averse at first to arming the Syrian opposition with sophisticated weapons. These countries even appeared willing to start a bombing campaign against Assad’s forces after chemical weapons were used in that country."

 Two untruths. A lot of people fell for the second one.

 "They pulled back, however, not only because it could not be established conclusively who used the chemical weapons, but also because of the fear that jihadist groups could fill the political vacuum left by the Assad regime if it were to be ousted by a military intervention."

 The first is rubbish, we know when and where Assad's forces used their rockets, and when Assad falls, we will hear in detail from those who did it. The second does reflect the fears of Western policy analysts, the truth is that the idea that this was a Sunni sectarian rebellion was always propaganda by the government, and that it is the lack of support for secular opposition forces that let the jihadis thrive.

 "The idea of providing the Syrian opposition with heavy and sophisticated weapons was also overridden by fears that these could fall into the hands of radicals and be turned against the West in the future."

 It was untrue, and there were such weapons in the hands of America's enemies already, but it became a convenient excuse for doing nothing about the mass chemical attack.

 "The main attack of this sort, which concentrated Turkish minds and turned the public even more against the government’s Syria policy, was the Reyhanli twin car bombing on May 11, 2013, which left at least 50 dead. Although the government was quick to blame Assad loyalists, the opposition in Turkey still insists that it was jihadist groups that carried out the attack."

 I think it was Assad loyalists**. Why would jihadists groups do it?

 "Meanwhile, the so-called “Sunni Axis” against Syria, comprising Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, fell apart without having influenced the course of events against Assad."

 There never was a Sunni axis. When it melts into air so easily, it never was a bloc in the first place. It is Assad who created the sectarian conflict, torturing prisoners until they blasphemed against their Sunni beliefs, getting brigades of Iranians into the country to commit sectarian massacres under cover of claiming to protect Shi'ite shrines. The countries of the region have helped the Syrian revolution sparingly and in ill-coordinated fashion. If they hadn't been monarchies liberal and reactionary or moderately Islamist capitalists they might have been more help, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

 "Turkey’s banning of Jabhat al-Nusra is vindication, not just for Iran but also for Russia, of course. Both countries, which support the Assad regime, have been arguing from the start that Syria is under threat from radical terrorist groups that are being aided by outside powers."

 Assad's forces have started dropping a second barrel bomb thirty minutes after a first, in order to kill survivors. That's terrorism, and the radical groups are strengthened by Assad's destruction and the weakness of a real alternative, things will get worse while he stays, unimaginable as that is.

 "All that is left for Turkey to do at this state is therefore to cooperate with the United States and other allies against these groups, and to “ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists,” to use Obama’s words. There is, however, no guarantee that this will expedite Assad's demise, which Erdogan clearly dreams of."

 Supplying anti-aircraft weapons will stop low-tech attacks from helicopters. I don't think Syrians need a guarantee to go for that.

*[http://www.syriauntold.com/en/story/2014/05/27/9592]
**[http://arabsaga.blogspot.ae/…/turkish-bombings-linked-to-ba…]

Why Syria Matters

 'For three distinct but interrelated reasons—rooted in basic ethics, global security and normative political values—the conflict in Syria profoundly matters for our world today. In the absence of global leadership that prioritizes this crisis, the conflict will continue to destabilize the broader Middle East and its ramifications will be felt far and wide for years to come.

 The international community should commit itself to a plan for economic reconstruction and transitional justice in Syria. But in order to get to a point where this peace plan can be implemented, the battlefield conditions will have to change.

 This must involve a serious program to arm and support the moderate Syrian rebels. While doing so by itself will not topple the Al-Assad regime, it might, as the Economist has argued, turn “the tide of the fighting [and it] might shift the negotiations… If the regime is under pressure on the battlefield, it may be more willing to negotiate a proper ceasefire, or even, if people are tired of war, Mr. Al-Assad’s departure.” '

What’s happened to Syria’s protesters?

 There is an untruth that has been running round the world for a couple of years ago, that there was a good peaceful uprising in Syria in 2011, but all those people have been displaced by Islamic jihadis. See the phrase 'rebel-held areas'. Those are the places where Assad has been forced out by force of arms, and will only stay that way if the rebels get some fraction of the support Assad gets from Russia and Iran.

 'Although they are almost invisible to most of us outside of Syria, they continue to oppose the government – and extremist Islamist militia groups who now control parts of the country – and they want a part in leading the country once the fighting is over, she told me while on a recent visit to London.

 Since those days on the streets, the same protesters have been running local services in rebel-held areas. They have kept the schools open, organised health care, distributed water, resettled hundreds of thousands of displaced people, run bakeries, collected garbage.'

Return to Aleppo

 'The bombers now drop one device and then wait 10 to 30 minutes. Then they drop another. The aim is to ensure that those who flooded in to the scene to rescue the victims are then killed.
The barrel bombing -- with all its random callousness -- is a tactic with a goal, it appears. The regime is moving to clear the remaining parts of Aleppo of rebels and their supporters, of all human life it seems, because human life here is opposed to them by ideology or just association. Barrel bombs are an effective way of doing that.'

Right Said Fred Song For Bashar al-Assad

                                                       # You're too awful for this Earth #

Syria becoming warlord-run failed state

 Not a peace envoy, that Lakhdar Brahimi. An envoy for the international system of capitalist states that is always concerned with preserving its order over justice. Syria already is a failed state run by a vicious warlord Assad. It is to enable Assad to hang on that the conflict has been spread, the millions of refugees destabilising the neighbouring countries are down to his bombs; because he cannot hang on otherwise he has dragged in foreign armies from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq; because he needs to present himself as fighting foreigners Assad's forces have engaged in provocations against the Turks. When he says that Arab rulers have supported "the war effort instead of the peace effort", he would prefer they had bullied the rebels into submitting to more torture and murder, rather than providing a fraction of the support that Russia has given to Assad. It is if Assad stays that the country will look more like Somalia, though the idea that the Syrian opposition are all Islamic radicals has obscured the fact that many of them are never going to want that.

 A quick break to note the false editorialising, common to Western media, that equates the tiny efforts in support of the Syrian people with support for their oppression. In a line about events at the UN, you would assume that Western powers had been pressing for military action against Assad, rather than trying to get basic legal protections of civilians respected. "Assad's western foes have pressed for action against Syrian authorities, but Russia and China have vetoed draft resolutions against Syrian authorities."

 Brahimi's comparison to Afghanistan only makes sense if you see the world divided into good states and bad non-state actors. The valid lesson I can see is that if a country needs sorting out, sending in ground troops and taking over the country is not the answer, which is why nobody has proposing that for Syria, and those who claimed we were being dragged into a war there went along with a lie.

 And then, despite the evidence that only those with access to the government's stockpile of chemical weapons could have done so, accuses the rebels of one of the earlier chemical attacks. You might have thought that the government bunging chlorine bombs out of helicopters might make the denialists realise that it was Assad all along, but they'll probably carry on saying it long after Assad's henchmen appear on TV ridiculing the West's gullibility in falling for Assad's lies. If we can't be sure of anything, we can be sure that we know absolutely nothing.

 It is nice to see this morning that Owen Jones is now clear on the August gas attacks, "Last year, days after the Assad regime's heinous gas attacks had killed hundreds"*, though he's still peddling nonsense about the opposition being foreign backed sectarian forces last time I looked.
*[http://www.theguardian.com/…/2014/jun/08/cia-first-tweet-to…]

Art is a luxury in Syria

 "Some musicians, for example, write songs that are influenced by traditional Syrian music, but they mix it with rock – especially Pink Floyd. We love Pink Floyd! They wrote revolution songs."

Like a Child Looking into a Candy Store

 'Eventually, the blackouts were officially blamed on a cat getting into an electric transformer. Turks on social media had a lot of fun with jokes about the “Kedi Lobisi”, the sinister cat lobby that had tried to derail the elections. The highlight of my week was the very serious statement on the part of the Turkish Union of Electrical Engineers, to the effect that it was impossible for a cat to get into an electric transformer and cause a blackout. Turkey, one can’t help but love it.

 Three months later, there would of course be nothing funny about the charade of an election held in Syria. It was the typical Assad-orchestrated made-for-TV spectacle that Syrians had seen played out time and again for over forty years, and it would neither enhance the regime’s position or solve the country’s conflict. It was a lesson the Assad family had yet again failed to learn.

 But for me personally, watching the Turkish elections would be an education I would never forget, and seeing a democracy in action only made me want it that much more for my own society. Someday, the war in Syria will be over, and Syrians will have the luxury of complaining about the loud election-vans blaring out music and slogans.

 And I’ll be there to remind them of what it was like before we had the vans.'

George Butler draws the Syrian refugees in Lebanon

 'The family that brought these belongings from Syria arrived in Lebanon from the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk. George had drawn one leg on the doll and, before he could draw the second leg the youngest girl asked: “Why does my doll only have one leg?” She then asked the room if the missing leg had been lost during the war. No adults present had any response. Children regularly express confused and troubled notions about the war and parents express deep concern regarding the effects of the prolonged and extreme trauma children are suffering.'

Amnesty says ISIS killed seven children in north

 'The al-Qaeda-linked group is currently battling rival rebels in the north, as well as the Syrian government.'

 It isn't battling the Syrian government, but is fighting those actually rebelling against Assad, so perhaps this report should commence, "Seven children were among 15 civilians killed by jihadist allies of Assad." That might make things clearer.

The Betrayal of the Intellectuals on Syria

 Louis Proyect:

 'Now in its bloody third year of warfare against its own population, the Ba‘athist dictatorship in Syria has reached a level of criminality that demands comparison with Franco’s Spain. How and why some of the West’s most prominent intellectuals continue to make excuses for Bashaar al-Assad demands an answer. Here I hope to provide such an answer, as well as to recommend an alternative intellectual and moral approach.'

After Assad’s poll victory, fear grips Syrians who didn’t vote

 'Those who know how much I oppose Assad already know that I didn’t go, and those who don’t know can keep their illusions,” he said.'

 That's the truth of these elections, that most Syrians won't vote, and many of those who do do only because they are scared of torture and murder by a state that does so all the time. Not so Robert Fisk*. He thinks that those who voted are good Arabs who are Western democrats like us, while the bad Arabs are scary in their Islamic clothes. I've seen a lot of people write a lot of ignorant things about Syrians, that those who are fighting Assad are jihadists and proxies for America, but this is one of the most blatantly racist things I've seen in the mainstream media.

 'Is it by chance that the Arab peoples who were influenced by European politics over the past 150 years - the ones who generally wear Western clothes rather than Arab robes and whose forefathers read Voltaire and Rousseau and the great Victorians - imbibed the ideals of representative government? And does this explain why the Gulf Arabs, proud in their 'abayas', largely - but not entirely - show little interest in parliamentary democracy?'

The Independent did at least print this letter** from the Chief of Staff to the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition,

 'Assad caused the negotiations in Geneva to collapse by refusing to accept political transition as per the Geneva Communiqué road map. Since it seems that he only understands force, the West should help the moderate opposition with arms and training.

 If Assad is not tackled, he will end up ruling over a brutalised and devastated section of Syria, and continue with his war, causing the escalation of a historic-scale humanitarian catastrophe, and also the strengthening of extremists, as moderates are frustrated and weakened.'

*[http://www.independent.co.uk/…/syria-election-bombs-and-the…]
**[http://www.independent.co.uk/…/letters-breakaway-london-goo…]

Has Iran prevented the Syrian regime's collapse?

 'Iran’s giving up on Bashar al-Assad, who gave up all Arab relations for Iran’s sake, is difficult. But what’s even more difficult is for Iran to win its Syrian bet. This is unlikely for the simple reason that the sweeping majority of the Syrian people don’t want Iran. If it had been possible to eliminate the Syrian people, their revolution would not have lasted for over three years and despite all the injustice and backstabbing practiced against them from inside and outside Syria.'

Syria: Remains of a State

 "Where in the world do you butcher people with a saw?"

 "The régime is all lies. Even Israel would not do this to us."

 "Nobody is giving any support, not the Arab countries or the West. They support lip service, nothing more."

Supporting grassroots movements in Syria

 Leila Al Shami:

 'Our failure to engage in social struggles as we find them leaves them open to being monopolized by reactionary forces. Practical solidarity with the Syrian revolution has come mainly from political Islamists and this of course raises broader issues as to what the left can learn from political Islamists as to the meaning and nature of solidarity, why the left complains about the dominance of Islamists when it has left the stage wide open to them and why the left continues to believe that fighting a tyrannical regime is somehow the exclusive domain of secular leftists. The left will have no voice if it does not engage to actively support comrades in the struggle instead of limiting its activities to criticizing those who do.'

David Cameron: Syria terror threat 'more dangerous' than Afghanistan

 "We should be backing the legitimate democratic opposition not with weapons but with support, advice to try to help them get both sides to the negotiating table."

 Forcing Syrians to accept Assad's continuation is what creates the despair of terrorism. I heard the hollow phrase, "Western-backed opposition", from Jeremy Bowen on the BBC again this morning.

Syria’s ‘western-backed’ rebels? Not in weapons

 'After the Geneva peace talks floundered this year, rebel leaders say Washington began training small groups of carefully vetted mainstream rebel groups in Qatar and supplying them with TOW anti-tank missiles, but these have done nothing to offset the regime’s air power.

 In the meantime, rebel groups have continued to all sorts of captured and homemade weapons, including something as crude as medieval-style catapults and trebuchets, to launch explosives at regime targets.'

 It has been said many times that those who identify themselves as anti-imperialists have nothing to say about the billions of dollars of weaponry the Assad régime has received from its backer Russia, with which it has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, by contrast with the US airstrikes, which were never going to happen, and were a convenient way to salve Western liberal consciences with the idea that they were saving Syrians from war.

Syria, Sy Hersh, and the Art of Mass-crime Revisionism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad:

 'Before looking at Hersh’s evidence for these claims, his editors should have asked the obvious questions: If Assad’s opponents are in possession of sarin and ballistic missiles, why have they never used them for battlefield advantage? If the opposition were determined to trigger Western intervention by any means, including fratricide, wouldn’t the likely agent be the West-friendly Free Syrian Army (FSA) rather than the intransigent Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that is itself in Western crosshairs? (The United States has designated it a foreign terrorist organization.) If the United States were determined to intervene, as Hersh insists it was, would it confine itself to a doubtful chemical pretext when there were so many indubitable humanitarian ones to avail? If the regime was innocent, why did it deny UN investigators access to the site for four days and subject the area to unrelenting artillery fire?[i] Why would Turkey, a country that has no chemical weapons program, risk its membership in NATO — and, potentially, future membership of the EU — by manufacturing sarin, and do so specifically for a clumsy false flag operation?

 For the London Review of Books, it appears, the Syrians are proxies in an ideological battle. Far easier to entertain a conspiracy theory, however far-fetched, than to accept that Obama and the intelligence community might be right about the Syrian people’s tormentor. The magazine has now published four articles laying Assad’s crimes on his victims. Yet it hasn’t allowed a single Syrian to write about the conflict. It might, for example, have considered speaking to the first responders; it could, for instance, have allowed the survivors to tell their stories. But this might cause cognitive dissonance. Accepting that Assad might be responsible for his own crimes means questioning, or at least qualifying, the axiom that the United States is the exclusive font of all evil.

 By now even the most dogmatic among Hersh’s publishers must have realized that they were hoaxed. Their ideological proclivities and eagerness for clicks made the deception easier. They got played — they relayed what is in effect pro-fascist propaganda. If they have any concern for their credibility, they would reveal the name of their source — or be forever associated with a monstrous hoax.'

Syria's refugee exodus

 'The first waves of refugees began leaving Syria amid a government crackdown on
street protests. Anti-government demonstrations began in March in the southern city
of Deraa following the arrest and torture of a group of teenagers who painted
revolutionary slogans on a wall. By July, hundreds of thousands were taking to the
streets. Government forces responded with large-scale military operations...
The beginning of 2013 saw growing numbers of people flee. Deraa, Homs, Aleppo
and Damascus saw most leave. Government forces, boosted by fighters from the
Lebanese Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias, recaptured key
areas and reports emerged that chemical weapons had been used.'

Father's plea for six-year-old British boy trapped in Syria

 Like millions of Syrians, he is held hostage by the Assad régime.

 'He has not spoken to his son for four months, but was told he was living out in the open under olive trees, after their neighbour's home was struck by a bomb.

 He said Muadh was "absolutely traumatised", had stopped speaking and clings to his mother's side, too frightened to leave her.

 He also believed his son had developed a squint in his right eye, which required urgent medical treatment.

 Daraa is a 15 minute drive away from the border with Jordan, but it is closed.'

Syria's Election May Be a Sham, But Assad Survival Still Surprising

 This sort of " I'm not pro-Assad, but...", is very like, " I'm not a racist, but...". The rebels who were starved out of Homs have relocated to fight on other fronts. I could go through Bill Neely's talking points, seeing a pro-Assad bias in all of them.

 'The rebels who vowed to fight until he fell are retreating and his opponents are in disarray across the country.

 The West will have to live with a leader who is popular with significant sections of the Syrian people, not only his own Alawite sect, but Christians and many Sunni Muslims who now fear the rise of al-Qaeda linked militias and see Assad’s iron fist as, ironically, the only way of preserving a more tolerant Syria.'

No Holds Barred

 'Syria is the victim of a Western conspiracy, masterminded by the USA, Israel and the Gulf states. Some 160,000 dead, the destruction of almost the entire infrastructure, the disintegration of the country, the uprooting of half the population – all this is presented as self-defence by the heroic Syrian regime in its battle against ruthless imperialists.

 This may seem absurd, yet the Syrian regime's strategy of turning facts on their head for propaganda purposes has been remarkably successful to date.

 The Assad regime is currently doing all it can to present itself as the lesser evil or the secular alternative.

 Some Western media makers, experts and politicians would be happy to believe that it is – especially as the Syrian opposition is no stranger to propaganda either and it is becoming increasingly clear that many of Assad's opponents are not in favour of democracy. Yet the fact remains that the main responsibility for the emergence of the conflict, for the mass destruction and murder in Syria, lies with the Assad regime. On 3 June 2014, what's at stake in Syria is not "sawa", not jointly repairing the country, but whether the Assad clan will maintain its grip on power.'

Talking to Qusai Zakarya

 "Bashar al-Assad is the cancer. We cannot keep giving bandages; we need to operate and take the cancer out, and we need more support for the FSA."

Syria War SITREP After the Kerry-Lavrov Deal

 'The price Assad's side has paid for these limited gains has been so high that I don't see how they can endure much more to defeat a rebellion that does not lose its will to fight.

 And with our external arms and training and other support, there is no reason for the rebels to give up before the government does.'

Syrian Regime Hunts Down Men Dodging Mandatory Army Service

 'Across the country, an increasing number of would-be soldiers are ducking Syria's mandatory 18-month military service requirement.

 In most cases, the young men are either hiding out — or taking up arms for the opposition.

 Hossam, a 26-year-old from Hama, has been summoned by the Syrian army to fulfill the compulsory 18-month service required of all young men here. But three years into a conflict that has killed more than 62,800 fighters from all sides, he is refusing to comply.

 "The Syrian army is no longer the nation's army, and nothing motivates me to join it," he says.'

 And that's why Assad isn't going to win, however many bombs he drops trying. This fracturing for society is ignored by those who have looked at the balance of weaponry held by Assad and the opposition and assumed inevitable victory for the former.

Reading Between the Lines

 'Within the currently prevailing dynamics, in which moderate insurgent forces remain comparatively weak man-for-man, it could be argued that it is too soon for Friends of Syria states to encourage moderates to actively oppose Jabhat al-Nusra on the ground. In the immediate term, doing so would also pose a significant risk to the prospects of ongoing battles with the government. Like it or not, FSA-branded groups are coordinating dozens of ongoing operations with Jabhat al-Nusra across the country.

 The unrivalled ability of Jabhat al-Nusra suicide operatives to break through established military defenses makes it a force that the insurgency as a whole would struggle to live without, for now. After all, the recent gains in Idlib between 23-26 May were only made possible by at least six large suicide vehicle bombings, all by Jabhat al-Nusra fighters (including an American national, "Abu Hurayrah al-Amriki"). Without more sophisticated heavy weaponry, moderate insurgent forces have simply proven incapable of exerting anything matching equal force.

 This may be a controversial thing to admit, but without doing so, one risks further jeopardizing the prospects of the military opposition to one day attain at least a favorable political solution. The West's sustained failure to sufficiently support the moderate Syrian opposition means we are now faced with dynamics that cannot be overturned at the click of a finger.

 Recent coverage regarding President Obama's purported decision to establish a military program for training moderate insurgent forces is a much-needed first step on this road ahead. But make no mistake, much more will ne necessary to turn the tide of the conflict. Patience is wearing thin within moderate insurgent circles and without a genuine qualitative and quantitative enhancement in military support, it is only a matter of time before the West loses any of its remaining leverage over internal conflict dynamics.'

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Whitewashing of Obama’s Syria Policy

 'After more than three years of genocidal slaughter in Syria, it is time to face the fact that Barack Obama was never serious at all in seeing Assad deposed. Not only has the Obama administration never contemplated getting involved in Syria the same way it did in Libya, it has done everything in its power to make sure the Syrian opposition never got the kind of arms and assistance that would have changed the balance of power on the battlefield.'

‘Friends’ of #Syria: Right Direction, Wrong Speed

 ' "[The opposition] need[s] the force they have now, which is trying to protect local villages and try to harass the regime and level the playing field. They need something that eventually will be able to hold ground. And they need a counterterror capability – all of which is responsive to Syrians. And we are not on a path currently to provide that. … That’s the conversation that we [West and its allies — NGS] need to have."

 This is good news for the revolution but it is too little help and too slow in coming. It is a positive development compared to their previous policy of imposing a heavy arms embargo on the Free Syrian Army but negative compared to what can and should be done to the save the Syrian people and their revolution.'

Obama: Not every problem has military solution

 The BBC just had the strapline, "Obama Says There Is No Military Solution In Syria". Not quite true.

 'The president also discussed ways to provide more help for rebels in Syria battling Bashar al-Assad's government.'

Syrian pianist pursuing dream at UW-Eau Claire

 "I quickly got involved and was very enthusiastic about the revolution," said Hanana, who also worked as a music theory teacher at a Damascus music school. "In addition to teaching, I worked in community service just like everybody else because a lot of people needed help. But then friends started disappearing. Friends were kidnapped and tortured and many wouldn't come back. It was intense."

Britons accused of brutal killings

 '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." '