Sunday, 8 February 2015

American held by ISIS moved by suffering of Syrian people

Questions, accusations linger in Kayla Mueller's death

 ' "Syrians are dying by the thousands and they're fighting just to talk about the rights we have," the humanitarian worker told The Daily Courier, her hometown paper in Prescott, Arizona, in 2013. "For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal."

 She described helping reunite a man with a 6-year-old relative after their refugee camp was bombed.

 "This story is not rare in Syria," the newspaper quoted her as saying. "This is the reality for Syrians two and a half years on. When Syrians hear I'm an American, they ask, 'Where is the world?' All I can do is cry with them, because I don't know." '

Saturday, 7 February 2015

Newsnight



 Nicholas Burns fills in some of the gaps left by Cockburn and Frum last night. But still it is a former US administration official we hear from, reinforcing the perception that Syria is all about what the US does, not about the killing Assad and his allies are carrying out. If the rebels were really Western backed, we would see representatives of the Syrian rebels of the news putting their case, rather than the victims of this war remaining invisible.

 "I think that everything ISIS has done, against Japan, against Jordan, against the United States, against the Arab countries; has deepened the anger and revulsion of people round the world.

 I think Bashar al-Assad is part of the problem. He is guilty of massive human rights violations against the Sunni population in Syria. He's the one who destroyed Aleppo. He's the one who allowed the climate to be created where Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS could be born, could grow, and could succeed unfortunately. I don't think Assad's the answer.

 Most importantly, greater Western/NATO support to the moderate Syrian militia, who can fight ISIS on the ground inside Syria. That's the first step."

Kayla Jean Muller


 "I am in solidarity with the Syrian people. I reject the brutality and killing that the Syrian authorities are committing against the Syrian people, because silence is participation in this crime. I declare my participation in the Syrian sit-in on YouTube."

 When the Leftists who have abandoned Syria talk about ISIS, they never mention what took the hostages ISIS have killed to Syria, because they all went to show support for the revolution against Bashar al-Assad, and were kidnapped by ISIS, which has no interest in that revolution, thus blowing away the narrative that the Syrian rebels and ISIS are the same.

Amy sends another Valentine to Bashar



 'So why do I say this is pro-Assad propaganda? Because according to a more detailed report from EAWorldView, yesterday was one of Assad's bloodiest. 130 people were killed by the Assad regime while 6 may have been were killed by the rebel rockets Amy chose to highlight. This is typical of Democracy Now's shameful reporting on Syria and why I say "even-handed" Amy's reports on Syria are Valentines to Bashar. As Desmond Tutu famously said "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." '

My people, under the bombs


 'The bombing doesn’t stop until sunset. The government jets target everything. Apartment blocks, mosques, schools, even a hospital. The assault is in reprisal for a major rebel attack that left 10 dead in the capital the day before. As I have taken to doing in such cases, I head down to the makeshift clinic, where I witness the most awful scenes you could imagine.'

The most important thing in the Middle East



 'The most alarming thing about Iran's management and framing of the Syria conflict is that it's actually worked. As Smyth writes, the "battlefield successes" of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra "have effectively caused the Iranian and Assad messaging strategy to appear more like a self-fulfilling prophecy than an advanced operation to alter narratives about the rebels."

 And the secular rebels who Iran and its allies smeared as "takfiris" are barely holding onto what little territory they still control. The war is being fought along Iran's preferred sectarian fault-line, with Sunni extremists fighting a network of Shi'ite religious warriors largely organized from Tehran.

 The US has even "de-conflicted" with the Syrian and Iranian air forces in Iraq and Syria. That isn't tantamount to an endorsement of the Iranian narrative of the war, but it is a sign of how US policy has conformed to the conditions that Iran and Assad have imposed on the conflict.'

Friday, 6 February 2015

Newsnight



 Patrick Cockburn was talking rubbish on Newsnight last night.

 "The Islamic State is very powerful, it stretches from the border of Iran almost to the Mediterranean."[15m38s]

 "They are conscripting there, so this means their armies are getting stronger and stronger. They are conscripting from every family, so they will be able to put very large armies into the field."[15m50s]

 Raising a conscript army from a population you are terrorising does not make you strong. Do you think those frightened young men would be worth anything in a real fight?

 "The main opposition to the Islamic State in Syria is the Syrian Army and Assad. No Syrian Army, no Assad, then ISIS, the Islamic State, have a good chance of taking over the whole of Syria. So there's no-one else."[16m15s]

 We see openly what was once concealed, Cockburn thinks we should support Assad. When it's been suggested that Cockburn was an Assad apologist for the last two years, the answer has come back, no, that's just like the claim that those who opposed the Iraq war were supporters of Saddam Hussein. No, it isn't, because opposing a war for rĂ©gime change is not the same as backing a dictator against a revolution, as Cockburn is doing. No mention of the rebel forces that have actually been fighting against ISIS while Assad has been doing deals with him. No mention of how those being barrel bombed, how the tens of thousands being tortured to death in Assad's prisons are supposed to reach an accommodation with him.



 "The Islamic State, which is slaughtering tens of thousands of people," I think you're talking about Assad mate.

 The answer to this is not an American invasion, but to give the actual rebels the weapons necessary to take on Assad and ISIS. A job that would have been much simpler in 2012, when there was no ISIS. But still, the approach of doing nothing doesn't mean that America is protected from instability in the Middle East, but that if the constructive solutions are spurned, then the more destructive solutions are the only ones on the table. And so Newsnight get to oppose Patrick Cockburn David Frum, the man who invented the term axis of evil to describe the enemies of America's neoconservatives. He doesn't argue to help the Syrian rebels, but to stay out of the fight against ISIS because that would strengthen Iran and Assad, and Iran is the main enemy in the Middle East. If the alternatives for Syrians are to be abandoned to Assad or treated as a pawn against the Iranians, it is no sort of a choice at all, though many will see the Frum position as slightly preferable, given that Iran has taken over large parts of Syria and assisted with Assad's genocide. But to argue against deals with Assad does not have to be to support the neo-conservatives, there is a better way.

 Also there is apparent news that Nancy Soderberg supports doing a deal with Assad*, and the former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia exploding the myth that the Saudis are running ISIS.**

*Kirsty Wark: "We spoke earlier to Nancy Soderberg earlier, who said, actually what you have to do is bite the bullet, you have to engage with Assad, Assad is the way we will deal with IS in Syria."[14m38s]
**Sir John Jenkins, "I think the claim that Saudi has been responsible for the rise of Daesh, personally, is absolutely nonsense." [11m25s]

If Saudis aren't fuelling the militant inferno, who is?



 Bashar al-Assad was buying all their oil, but Robert Fisk supports Assad, so he's just going to ignore that, in favour of the testimony of the spooks that got Iraq wrong because they couldn't tell one Muslim from another, and the "I was the 20th hijacker, until I got high" bloke from al-Qaida.

 Like many vile dictatorships, Saudi Arabia has much more use for democracy as a tool to undermine its enemies than it is at employing it at home.

 'When the international community finally decided to launch an international coalition against terrorism, Saudi Arabia once more emphasized that defeating ISIS must be linked to strengthening the forces of moderation, represented by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as well as other moderate rebel factions.'
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20150629000420/http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341171]

Angelina Jolie and the Left



 'Given that so many people around the world admired Angelina Jolie for this work, maybe the Left should consider how those people are likely to view the despicable track record of the Left as the world has watched more than 200 thousand people be murdered and millions made refugees by their own government.

 "I told them that since I’ve arrived here, all I’ve seen on CNN or NBC was news about the Malaysian airplane over and over. With all due respect for it, I think there are much more important things going on in the world – like Assad’s using chemical weapons dozens of times in limited doses during the past few weeks, barrel bombs destroying what’s left of Aleppo and Syria, or how about how Bashar fulfilled his promise that he made in the middle of 2011 and turned Syria into a new Afghanistan, or how Hizballah and Al-Qaeda are getting more experienced and stronger, while both of them are fighting side by side against the free Syrian army, above and below the radar."

 - Syrian refugee mhamou on State Department interview 14 April 2014'

Thursday, 5 February 2015

'Musician of the Syrian Revolution' Debuts at Carnegie Hall

 'Jandali remains focused on using his music to raise awareness and, he hopes, help bring down the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

 “You know, the question is why a Syrian symphony at this time, where people are in need of medicine, food, shelter,” he said. “And I’m envisioning someone a hundred years from today, looking back, saying, 'What did the Syrian people do during their revolution? Ah, here’s a Syrian symphony!' Similar to what Shostakovich did, for example, in his Leningrad Symphony. So what I’m trying to do is preserve and present my culture that is being destroyed today.” '

Syrian government forces kill hundreds of civilians



 At least the Independent is mentioning Assad's war on Syria, but Britain was never going to go to war in 2013.

 'Bombings and chemical attacks like the ones that almost led Britain to war in 2013.'

 Assad is fighting ISIS as little as possible, and the groups actually fighting him are not separate from the anti-government sentiment.

 'President Assad’s forces are fighting a civil war on several fronts – against Isis, other Islamist militias, secular rebel groups and to quash the anti-government sentiment that started in the 2011 Arab Spring.'

 Assad's attacks aren't against the majority of foreign fighters fighting on his side of the conflict.

 'At least 100 fighters, the presumed target of the regime's attacks, were killed in the same strikes, including rebels, Islamists and foreign militants on both sides of the conflict.'

 Nobody but Assad is using barrel bombs.

 'The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is calling on the Security Council to issue another resolution condemning al-Assad’s regime for its “indiscriminate bombing” and to order all parties in Syria to stop using barrels bombs.'

 ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra are not the same thing, the latter fights Assad.

 'The extremist group Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, were responsible for systematic and widespread violations including targeting civilians, kidnappings, and executions.'

Regime security forces executed 60 detainees in rural Damascus yesterday

 Some days they do this. The catastrophe in Syria isn't about what America does, it's about what Assad is doing. It isn't right that the Jordanians killed a couple of prisoners in revenge for their pilot, but it isn't like they're doing it all the time. As all the Western correspondents failed to predict, Jordanian people have turned against ISIS now they know their pilot has been murdered. ISIS aren't criminal masterminds who would spirit away any weapons given to the Free Syrian Army to fight them and Assad.

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Qatari FM: Assad is Root Cause Syria’s Problem














 'Attiyah stresses that people of the region do not sympathize with ISIS or its extremist views, but they are trying to remind everyone of the root cause of the problem, namely the Assad regime’s brutal policies. “The killing of over 300,000 people and the indiscriminate barrel bombing of women, children and the elderly underscores the brutality of this regime." '

Genghis Khan-style cruelty of Isis



 Robert Fisk had always decided that Assad was a moderate and his enemies were more horrible. A liar who was claiming only on Thursday, 'Soon, no doubt, we can expect Isis to have that other necessary accoutrement of modern statehood: an airline. Then it only has to wait for the West to identify the "moderates" in the Islamic State - and I suppose we’ll all be able to go and chat to Caliph al-Baghdadi himself.' This apologist for Assad is a reporter no more.

 'There will be ruthless leaders aplenty – Bashar al-Assad of Syria comes to mind, now that we have decided that his enemies are even more horrible than him – who will benefit from the cruelty of the last few hours.

 Our intolerance of the autocrats of the Middle East – of the al-Sissis and al-Assads, of the Hashemite monarchy, of the quivering princes of the Gulf, even of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei – is already mutating in the face of the Caliphate. All must surely become our "moderates" again, those who wish to ‘unite against terror’ now that we gaze upon the fires of hell in Raqaa and Mosul.'

Syrian rebels hope for swap deal


 It should be possible to tell the difference between the actual Syrian rebels, and the incompetent barbarians of ISIS who burn prisoners to death when they don't have a female suicide bomber released on their terms. The Western media narrative has been to present ISIS, Assad and the Russians as strategic masterminds, while the suffering Syrian people are a clueless bunch of farmers and pharmacists who can't have nice things. And their accounts can't be verified, however consistent they've been for the last four years.

 ' "We are questioning him on how Iranians operate in Syria. Our priority right now is a swap (of him) for our prisoners. We have so many women in government prisons and we want to swap him for (some of) them."
Reuters could not independently verify the account.

 The opposition has consistently demanded the release of thousands of women they say have been jailed for involvement in anti-government activism since March 2011, when the war began as peaceful street protests.'

Syria blames Lebanese 'manipulation' for currency slump



 "The Syrian Pound’s weakness will show when it loses all elements of power and stability."

Regime Barrel Bombs Pound Syrian Civilians



 "It is a terror and an anti-civilian tool. Part of Assad’s strategy is to make life as miserable as possible for the civilians living in opposition-held areas. It’s designed to kill many and terrify the rest so they will flee and gradually depopulate the area, to make it harder for the rebels to hang on."

Syria and the left


 Yassin Al Haj Saleh:

 "I think this high-politics, Western-centered worldview is better suited for the right and the ultra-right fascists.What prevents them from seeing the victims of Bashar, when they see perfectly well ordinary people in KobanĂª? Why wasn’t there the slightest interest in the slaughter of 700 people at the hands of ISIS thugs themselves in Deir Ezzor last August? One is forced to ask: Do victims have different values based on who their murderers are? Why, as the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as the rightists?

 Of course, these remarks are not meant to deny the existence of a small number of courageous dissident Western leftists who saved the moral and political dignity of the left in the United States and the West at large."

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Inside Syria’s Jails



 'Torture was routine. Anyone who has been detained in Mr. Assad’s prisons will know these details. There are about 40 documented techniques, including suspending prisoners by their arms from the ceiling, electric shocks, beatings, cigarette burns and pulling nails. The screams of the tortured were unbearable; I nearly lost my mind in there.

 More than 60 men were held in a neighboring cell. Regardless of the charge, the guards called us all terrorists and beat everyone. The number of detainees went down as some died, and up again as more were brought in. Some were forced to sleep next to corpses before the dead were disposed of. Among the living, our exhausted bodies became infested with lice; we got rashes and skin infections.

 I was fortunate not to be harmed physically, unlike a doctor held with me who was falsely accused of kidnapping a Syrian Army soldier. They hung her from her hair instead of her wrists, and kept dousing her body with cold water and shocking her with electricity until she lost consciousness for days at a time.'

The Left's shill for Obama's red-line con



 'Remember the words of that old general that was one of Smiley's People in the John Le Carre novel by the same name, "Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly" The truth is air strikes against Assad for using "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" was never in the offing. It was only put out there, together with the 16 bullets, so that Obama could be in the position of pulling the rug out from under at the critical moment. All that was necessary was for Obama to throw the decision to Congress so that the Left could give him cover and, in fact, take credit for, this Sting, [which 95% of the Left counted a great victory they had won!!??]

 Get the Net: Revolutions cannot be defeated by military might but they can be defeated by betrayal and back stabbing.'

Syria and the Left


 Yassin Al Haj Saleh:

 "I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate.

 So they do not really need to know about us. For them the country is only a black box about which you do not have to learn its internal structure and dynamics; actually it has no internal structure and dynamics according to their approach, one that is at the same time Western-centered and high-politics centered.

 The problem is that their narrow anti-imperialist worldview only sees Obama, Putin, Holland, ErdoÄŸan, Khamenei, Qatari Emir Hamad, Saudi King Abdullah, Hassan Nasrallah, and Bashar al-Assad. Possibly they see also Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. We, rank-and-file Syrians, refugees, women, students, intellectuals, human rights activists, political prisoners … do not exist.

 I think this high-politics, Western-centered worldview is better suited for the right and the ultra-right fascists. But honestly I’ve failed to discern who is right and who is left in the West from a leftist Syrian point of view. And I tend to think that these are the poisonous effects of the Soviet experience, fascist in its own way. Many Western leftists are the orphans of the late father, the USSR."

U.S. intervention is worsening Syria's conflict


 ' “We did not get any weapons from the U.S. to fight the regime for the last three years – only now do U.S. weapons arrive for fighting Daesh,” FSA fighter Omar Waleed told The Guardian.

 The Free Syrian Army's strength has diminished significantly as the war drags on. In addition to battling other rebel and extremist groups for control and influence over Syrian territory, the FSA has also had to fight for its dwindling reputation, amid mistrust that foreign support has turned its members into foreign agents, compromising their credibility among Syrians.

 In September 2014, the remnants of its central command refused to join a coalition with the U.S.-backed al-Hazzem Movement to fight against the Islamic State on the ground, although the group has accepted weapons and training from the U.S. to fight on their own. "If they want to see the FSA on their side, they should give assurances on toppling the Assad regime, and on a plan that includes revolutionary principles." '

The Free Syrian Army: 4,000 or 60,000?



 'A Wall Street Journal report said American military support for the Syrian opposition had regressed, and that the U.S. only gave the equivalent of 16 bullets a month per fighter.

 Despite the restraints levied against it, the FSA is on the verge of consolidating its control of southern Syria - in Daraa and its surroundings - even though many of the fighters have not received salaries in months.

 Salim Idriss, minister of defense in the opposition government, said the opposition had begun to unite factions to establish a united army that will include 60,000 fighters. Idriss further hypothesized that the world will realize that its only option to confront the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is to topple the Syrian regime and support the moderate opposition which represents all Syrian people of different religions, sects and tribes.'

Monday, 2 February 2015

Removal of Assad first



 'The U.S. Senator added that the situation in Syria is very complex because the plan of arming and training the moderate rebels includes only a few hundred fighters, who bear the responsibility of fighting the Islamic state, while they fight the Syrian regime’s army, and the allied Shiite militias all at the same time.

 He stressed that the United States should provide qualitative weapons to the moderate opposition forces to be able to change balance of the battle on the ground, and that it should seriously work to remove Bashar al-Assad from power.'

Purposed targeting of civilians

1354 people

 'SNHR documented the death of 883 civilians by government forces, including 207 children (seven children a day), no less than 54 women, and no less than 64 victims who were tortured to death (three deaths under torture a day).

 The percent of children and women victims reached 30%, which is a clear indication of the purposed targeting of civilians by governmental forces.'

Sunday, 1 February 2015

Dateline London 31/01/2015



 Mina al-Oraibi owns Owen Jones from the off. She doesn't have time at the end to correct everything he says, but takes on many of his simplifications.

 It might be easier for Leftists to understand that Owen Jones and the Daily Mail are the same side of the coin when it comes to blaming the Saudis for Islamic radicalism by looking at an example from the latter.*

 He admits Mina Al-Oraibi's first point, and then tries to claim it was what he was saying anyway. Not true. He's trying to claim that al-Qaida is just Western oriented, she points out that since the Gulf War in 1991 al-Qaida has been just as opposed to the Saudis, he sidesteps this by talking about their Western target list. Next false claim is that ISIS has focused on overthrowing Arab rĂ©gimes, when they have foregone the struggle of the rest of the Syrian people against Assad to build up their own state in the areas that the actual rebels liberated from Assad. Someone who has gone to fight Assad isn't going to launch terror attacks in the UK, but Owen Jones muddles them all up as "foreign fighters", just as the Daily Mail would. His talk of "many of these" (presumably trying to avoid the use of the word terrorist, which would make him sound as right-wing as he is), obscures all the differences between those fighting Assad and those who don't, those fighting for a secular or a moderate Islamic state are just all labelled as al-Qaida, just as those who fought the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were.

 A tradition the Americans have been happy to continue in Syria, which is why if Hillary Clinton wasn't happy with Qatar over so-called anti-terrorist co-operation, it was because the latter wanted to support the fight to free Syria from Assad, largely through the secular Free Syrian Army, while the Americans wanted to stop the FSA getting the anti-aircraft weapons they needed to stop Assad's bombing, because they were more scared of Islamic extremists than they desired to stop the genocide.



 Incidentally, there was a smear campaign** in the American media against Qatar financed by the United Arab Emirates. The throwing in of the property ownership of Qataris in the UK sounds a lot like complaints that Jewish capitalists are doing as down, and is unpleasant, and seem to have little to do with Qatari policy vis-a-vis ISIS.

 The basic lie is that Gulf funding for ISIS is the problem, falls down when we consider that the autocratic rĂ©gimes and the jihadis may be religiously similar, but are politically opposed, and so while they may have individual donors, mixing that up with the states' policies is an error. It also falls down because states' internal policies differ from their foreign policy needs, which is why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar have funded the Free Syrain Army when the US has allowed them to, because that would get rid of the source of instability in the region Assad, and the client of their rival Iran, which ISIS is not threatening to do, Thirdly it ignores that Assad's genocide is the primary cause for the rise of ISIS in Syria, followed by the lack of support for the FSA as it has battled to keep those areas free from ISIS. And the funding for Assad hasn't been the West, though the West has been happy to see him crush the country for four years while they do nothing but issue condemnations; it is the Russians who have given him billions of dollars of weaponry, the Iranians that have provided tens of thousands of foreign fighters, without which Assad would be gone, Syria would be free, and there would be no ISIS. Owen Jones is kicking sand in our faces to obscure the real problem, just as the Daily Mail would.



 Owen Jones: "Originally the difference between ISIS and al-Qaida, of course, is that al-Qaida focused on Western targets, while ISIS, their position was..."

 Mina Al-Oraibi: "That's not true. They focused on Pakistan, on Saudi Arabia, on Iraq. Their propaganda was different. They focused in their speeches about the West."



 Owen Jones: "Absolutely. They have an extensive target list across the Western world, and that, of course, wasn't originally the case with ISIS. Actually, rather than with al-Qaida, have these great spectacular attacks, what we will do is keep land, we will retain land, and expand and focus on the Arab rĂ©gimes. And, of course now, given the foreign fighters, and so on, which are returning in many cases, it has become far more of a domestic problem; but one of the issues which the West simply has not come to terms with is their relationship with various Arab dictatorships, where internally, obviously a huge amount of funding and ideological support for many of these, not just ISIS, but Jabhat al-Nusra..."

 Gavin Esler: "The realpolitik means that strongmen leaders are the ones the West supports."

 Owen Jones: "But that doesn't mean allowing the continued supply of funding, and ideological export, I mean take Saudi Arabia , for example, I mean take Qatar, as Hillary Clinton herself pointed out, has the worst record of co-operation with Western counter-terrorism in the whole of the Middle East. Where they've failed, where Kuwait, they have these huge charities, so-called, which are perfectly legal, exporting funds to various extremist groups in Syria and elsewhere. So, the problem is, look at Qatar for example. In Britain, last week, they just got this huge new slice of Canary Wharf, they own the Shard, the own a huge chunk of the London stock exchange, and Sainsbury's, yet internally there are huge problems with Qatar, in terms of links between very prominent and very wealthy individuals within Qatar, and these extremist groups, and the West simply turns a blind eye, because they are obviously very convenient allies in the Middle East."

 Mina Al-Oraibi: "It's a huge tangled web that Dateline doesn't have enough time for. However, I will say this: I think there are too many simplifications made, about what is happening in the region, about who supports who, partly because the alliances keep shifting. What we've seen happening in the region, not only from the revolutions of the last four years or so, but even pre-dating that to the Iraq war, and pre-dating that to Afghanistan. You've had different groups, who are non-state actors, who are actually very convenient to fund and give arms for, to push through a strategic goal, and then those arms, those funds, go to different groups, and you lose the thread. That's what has happened with different groups fighting in the region, and that's why it's so scary. States in the region have lost the monopoly over arms, and that continues to cause huge problems, but ISIS is different. ISIS really does represent a threat to the people, and the governments of these countries. I think it's very indicative, we go back to the coalition and why there was a coalition against ISIS, again their first meeting was in Saudi Arabia. It was Saudi Arabia's way of saying, this clearly is a threat to us, as it is to the West. And we see the attacks that ISIS is carrying out, on citizens and people, of the Middle East, of Arabs, and other ethnicities, much greater , for example, than the threat they pose to the West, and outside of the region. And, at the end of the day, there are domestic issues we have to deal with, there are issues of funding, but whether we look at Kuwait for example, there are people the UN Security Council has named, and Kuwait itself has penalised. I think it's also unfair, if we talk about religious leaders, there have been everybody from [unclear] to Saudi scholars, speaking against ISIS. It doesn't get translated into English, that's often the problem."

*[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331789/Sharia-lessons-pupils-aged-BBC-uncovers-weekend-schools.html]
**[https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131733/http://www.albawaba.com/news/qatar-lobbying-campaign-607827]

How books can defeat Isis



 'The outside world may have been astonished by the explosive rise of Isis, but Iraqi politicians had been warning me for several years that, if the war in Syria went on, it would destabilise Iraq and lead to the full-scale resumption of the Sunni-Shia civil war.'

 The Free Syrian Army haven't just warned about the rise of ISIS, they've been fighting against them for several years, in a struggle Patrick Cockburn has deliberately ignored. It isn't war as an abstract that has enabled their spread, but Assad's war on Sunni Muslims and the abandonment of those Syrians resisting his war that has given ISIS the space the thrive and has inflamed sectarian differences.

 Talking about the Independent, Robert Fisk* is far off into the world of fantasy. 'Soon, no doubt, we can expect Isis to have that other necessary accoutrement of modern statehood: an airline. Then it only has to wait for the West to identify the ‘moderates’ in the Islamic State - and I suppose we’ll all be able to go and chat to Caliph al-Baghdadi himself.'
*[https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-hostage-crisis-the-prisoner-swap-has-only-one-purpose-for-the-militants-recognition-its-islamic-state-exists-and-that-foreign-nations-acknowledge-its-power-10012073.html]

Hypocrite world



 'A message from the activists of the #Kafranbel area of Idlib province, who took part in an anti government demonstration calling for freedom and the toppling of regime.'

Saturday, 31 January 2015

The US Strategy In Syria Is A Complete Mess



 'The United States cannot organize and regiment the entire opposition, but it can back any faction that retakes areas from ISIS. The only way to motivate the rebels to do so is to openly support their justified stance against Assad remaining in power.

 Develop a strategy to remove Assad via diplomacy, information messaging, and military/economic power. The longer he is in place, the longer Syria will be divided. Once Assad goes, it will be possible to put the pieces of Syria back together again.'

Friday, 30 January 2015

The Abdication of Moral Responsibility



 'There’s no denying Assad’s extraordinary brutality: Since the Syrian government turned over its chemical weapons, its most notorious weapon has been the barrel bomb — an oil drum or similar container filled with high explosives and metal fragments. Syria’s air force typically drops these bombs from a helicopter hovering at high altitudes, to avoid anti-aircraft fire. From that height, it is impossible to target with any precision. The barrel bomb simply tumbles to earth, making its dreaded swishing sound as its contents shift back and forth, until it hits the ground and detonates.

Barrel bombs are so inaccurate that the Syrian military does not dare use them near the front lines, for fear of hitting its own troops. Rather, it drops them on areas held by rebel groups, knowing that they will destroy apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and other civilian institutions. Some civilians who have not fled the country have moved their families near the front line, preferring to brave snipers and artillery rather than the horror of the barrel bombs.

This, then, is the new banality of evil. When the Syrian government attacked civilians with chemical weapons, the United Nations Security Council pressured Assad to stop and to surrender his weapons. But as the Syrian government kills countless more civilians by indiscriminate attacks with conventional weapons, the Security Council, blocked by Russia, has largely stood on the sidelines. A number of states have condemned the slaughter, but have done little more to generate pressure to end it.

This selective concern is a gift to extremist recruiters who portray themselves as the only ones willing to stand up to Assad’s atrocities. Simply attacking the Islamic State is not going to end its appeal — a broader concern with protecting Syrian civilians is required.'

Mobilization efforts on the rise in Syria’s war of attrition



[Pictured: A young Kurdish girl in Amouda denounces the PYD for behaving like the Syrian regime]

 Given a chance, and Syrians choose the revolution. We are many, they are few.

 ' “There are fighters who defect from the FSA and join the hard-liners,” he said. “But there are also cases when Nusra Front [Syrian] fighters defect and join FSA-aligned groups, because they end up becoming suspicious of what Nusra is up to, and their priority is to fight the regime.”

He said the FSA militias continue to be hampered by the low salaries that they pay, meaning their fighters regularly face the temptation to join the better-financed Islamists. For White, the regime faces the “fundamental problem that it is a minority regime with minority allies, whose willingness to keep paying the ‘butcher’s bill’ is uncertain.” '

Syria: Civilians living under the constant fear of sniper fire

syria sniper

 'Civilians in many parts of Syria live under the constant fear of sniper fire. Children play on the
streets behind makeshift barricades to protect them from snipers loyal to Syria's President
Bashar al-Assad. The ancient city of Aleppo has become a battleground, with government
snipers occupying the historic Citadel. Many residents are trapped in their homes, caught in the
cross-fire. The Free Syrian Army have put up signs warning people to walk on a certain side of the street to avoid snipers' line of fire.'

 Not two sides as bad as each other, the Free Syrian Army doesn't murder civilians as Assad's
forces do. And regardless of the way the doomsayers put it, there still is a Free Syrian Army.

Thursday, 29 January 2015

Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat turns spotlight on UK’s failure



 'In a brazen act of defiance in 2011, his award-winning caricatures depicted President Assad as a broken dictator, sitting on a broken armchair over a broken country. The regime’s response was rapid and brutal; he is now living in exile in Kuwait after masked gunmen, who he describes as “Assad’s thugs”, attempted to silence his sharp satire by pulling him out of his car, shattering his hands and leaving his fingers broken.'

Militant group stands strong as its numerous enemies fail to find a common plan



 Some of Patrick Cockburn's nonsense has been amended, he's not pretending Turkey is encouraging ISIS and al-Nusra since he interviewed the Turkish prime minister. The reason ISIS have been able to get through to the Qalamoun from Eastern Syria is that Assad's forces let them through, something that never enters Cockburn's worldview where they are deadly enemies.

 'Isis has been advancing towards the city of Homs as well as gaining strength south of Damascus and at al-Qalamoun, close to eastern Lebanon.'

 He takes an American general as the authority to say that the time to arm moderate rebels has passed. He conflates ISIS and the rebels against Assad, and asserts that they and al-Nusra dominate the opposition without ever saying what other forces they are. The Syrians wanting to overthrow Assad with a democracy and those fighting to enable that dream are invisible to him.

 'Retired US General James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that in the war against Isis, the US has a “strategy-free” stance. He said that in Syria, America’s political objectives were uncertain and the time for supporting “moderate” Syrian rebels had passed. The Syrian armed opposition is increasingly under the control of Isis and its rival, the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.'

 Cockburn doesn't repeat his call for an alliance with Assad, it is increasingly implausible as Assad has done so little to fight ISIS since Cockburn said they couldn't be stopped without a deal with Assad. He restricts himself here to saying that only the jihadists would benefit if the bombing and torture stopped. It is meaningless to say the Americans want rid of Assad if they plan to do nothing about it. It is not the Syrian Army that maintains the Assadist state and its terror now, but foreign soldiers and the shabiha gangs, noone should mourn the death of such a state.

 'The aim of the US and its allies is to defeat Isis, but also to get rid of Assad, though his fall would probably lead to the break-up of the Syrian army and benefit Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra.'

Information that the Syrians may not know


 'Four months before the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, intelligence officials summoned a number of opposition figures to meetings where they were addressed by Tawfiq Younes, the Head of Internal Security in Damascus. He threatened them by telling them that he had strict orders from the president to shoot any Syrian who goes onto the streets to protest. The regime, he said, was ready to face any revolution, even if it had to destroy the country and kill hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Others have said that this means killing half of all Syrians if necessary.

 Advocates of a political solution at this point do so because the plan to crush the revolution has failed miserably, and the regime is facing defeat. Any negotiations from hereon are intended to save Al-Assad. Do not forget, though, that Bashar Al-Assad and his allies wanted to crush the revolution from the first day and end it through a military option, but failed; so why do some people want to save them from failure?'

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Hezbollah is Flogging a Dead Horse



 'No amount of false, face-saving, cynical “resistance” to Israel by means of occasional, patchy attacks on groups of IDF men will atone for the fact that Hezbollah is now flogging a dead horse. Nobody sees it as a “resistance” organisation anymore. In fact, they see it for what it is, and always has been: a tool of Iran that is guilty of taking part in a genocidal war against the Syrian people. Four dead IDF soldiers will never, and can never, justify the precious lives of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. The morally-selective “resistance” supporters who pander to their line would do well to remember that.'

CIA’s Effort To Arm Syrian Rebels Plagued By Red Tape

 It is a delusion that Western intervention is what's killing Syrians. From the Wall Street Journal.

 ' “We walk around Syria with a huge American flag planted on our backs, but we don’t have enough AK-47s in our hands to protect ourselves,” a leader of the Hazzm Movement, among the most trusted of the trusted commanders, told U.S. lawmakers in a meeting after Nusra’s advances.'

Will photos turn US opinion?

Display at Holocaust museum

 'The regime caused all of this but now they seem to be the angels fighting the bad guys. Who cares anymore about 200,000 people who got killed or hundreds of thousands who are in prison or ten millions of people [made] refugees who lost their houses?

 It seems no one really cares.'

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Obama Cuts Off Syrian Rebels’ Cash

 'In Syria, few rebel fighters want to join a force focused only on ISIS. They argue that Assad is responsible for considerably more deaths among them and their extended families than ISIS, which is able to draw defectors from their ranks because it pays much higher salaries to its fighters and because it is able to exploit distrust of American intentions toward the Syrian revolution.

 U.S. officials now acknowledge difficulties recruiting from insurgent ranks, conceding it is a serious challenge finding enough recruits willing to put off fighting the Assad regime.

 Aleppo-based rebels say they have no choice but to work with al Nusra and the Islamic-Front-aligned factions that are among the strongest armed groups in the war-torn city. Without them, Assad’s forces would overwhelm the rebels.

 “What do the Americans expect us to do?” asks a commander in the operations room. “Al Nusra is popular here. It is a perilous time for us—Assad is pushing hard.” '

Claims of arms transfers to Syria by Turkey are exaggerated



 “Do you know the number of people who have crossed from Iran to Syria to fight? Some 40,000. I’m not just talking about volunteers, I’m talking about uniformed soldiers of the regime - the revolutionary guards. That’s why I am angry about this. No one talks about them, but everyone keeps talking about Turkey.”

Bitter Lake: Adam Curtis



 I'd agree that the Western ruling classes create stories, but they aren't the only ones, and especially it is the other imperialist narrative of Russia and Iran that has become the default position of the Western media when it comes to Syria. When Curtis says [2h14m], "Western politicians are having to accept that the simple division between good and evil doesn't exist. By bombing ISIS they are allowing the evil President Assad to remain in power," they are actually following the same policy as in Afghanistan of bombing jihadis and ignoring oppression, but here he approves of it.

 Linking all the jihadi groups to the Saudi ruling family seems to assume that similarities in ideology are all, and differences in political context mean nothing, so that they've been at each others throats since Osama Bin Laden declared war on the Saudis is ignored, in favour of the idea that they are really on the same side. It reminds me of Daily Mail stories which blame the 7/7 bombings on crazy Saudi educational materials imported into Britain. I think it might be a bit racist, but don't know enough about the subject to say for sure.

Insurgents Celebrate Victories Across Country



 There's a shifting reality in Syria.

The Islamic State Has Lost Kobane

kobane

 On 4th January, Patrick Cockburn* wrote, "Above all, Isis is strengthened in Syria by the fact that the West, Turkey and the Sunni Arab states are seeking the fall of Assad, Isis's main opponent, as well as the overthrow of Isis itself." It doesn't seem to have done them any good. 

 The surprising thing isn't that his pro-Assad prognosis is wrong again, but would be if any of Cockburn's fans on the left noticed.

*[http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/war-with-isis-the-west-is-wrong-again-in-its-fight-against-terror-9955853.html]

Syrian Rebels Want To Fight Assad


 'In his meetings with Americans, he says he explains that stopping terrorism requires stopping it at the source. He says Assad allowed ISIS to grow by releasing extremists from prisons and not conducting military operations against the group.

 Like the others, Zaabi wishes the coalition would try to defeat Assad and ISIS. The U.S. says it's seeking to pressure Assad to step down, rather than routing him militarily.

 But Zaabi says if Assad doesn't fall, a whole, brutalized generation will grow up to be extremists.'

Monday, 26 January 2015

Journalist Goto aims to tell world of Syrians’ suffering


 'In a report he filed for NHK in 2012, Goto reported how the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad tortured its people. His dispatch showed how the torture hardened anger against the Syrian government and recruited people to the side of the rebels. The report also included mostly mosaicked footage of citizens tortured by government forces after taking part in a peaceful demonstrations.'

 Also see, 'Two or three years ago he was held captive by al-Qaida-linked forces, but he was released after explaining his intentions to the captors. He said he had the advantage of being a journalist from Japan, which, unlike the U.S. or the U.K., has never participated in air strikes;' that would be al-Nusra I guess, who aren't very nice people, but aren't the same as ISIS, wanting to get rid of Assad rather than just act as barbarians in his wake.

The intimacy of tyranny


 There is a refugee crisis because of Assad's use of terror to cling on to power, he's still there because foreign powers protect him, and we don't hear this explicitly because so many of the refugees rely on not being identified by this terrorist state.

 'As empirical evidence of this, the Syrian refugees I interviewed across Lebanon from 2011 to late 2013, predominantly coming from the areas of the political opposition, suggest that the Syrian government’s legitimacy has been maintained through the diplomatic moves of the foreign powers, as well as the need of Syrians themselves to preserve their own life chances, professional achievements, personal satisfactions - their desire to remain “legal citizens” despite their aversion to the government. Everyday life, sometimes sees no other alternative.'

Our Man in Damascus

Image result for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

 'Assad and Iran also aren’t doing all that much to defeat Islamic State, which continues to hold major chunks of Syria. Instead they have focused on defeating the non-jihadist rebels that Mr. Obama has said the U.S. supports. This makes strategic sense for Assad, who wants to become the only alternative to ISIS so the West will have nowhere else to turn.

 How this helps America’s long-term interests is hard to see. The U.S. would have degraded one radical jihadist threat, ISIS, in return for empowering another one, Shiite radicals backed by the bomb. Congress should ask the Administration to clarify if Assad really is Mr. Obama’s man in Damascus.'

Syria rebels overtake strategic base in south



 'The south is the last major stronghold of the mainstream, anti-Assad opposition, who have been weakened elsewhere by the expansion of the ultra-hardline Islamic State group in the east and north, and gains by the Nusra Front in the northwest.

 However, Nusra is fighting in the south alongside the Western-backed groups, who have proved more united there than in other parts of Syria.'

 Here we see that Nusra and ISIS are not the same thing (though there was a worrying report that Nusra has ordered Ansar al-Islam (FSA) in the Eastern Ghouta to disarm), and that there are moderate Syrians wherever they receive some support.

Shifting Realities in Syria



 Repeating common untruths, the New York Times comes out for working with Assad. No it would not take direct US intervention to unseat Assad, but allowing the Free Syrian Army the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons necessary to stop his depredations. The US and Assad ostensibly share a common enemy in ISIS, but in reality it is in Assad's interests for ISIS to dominate the areas liberated from his rule, as the only legitimacy he has left is that he is (debateably) better than they are. It's unclear how plausible is any Russian-backed deal that keeps Assad murdering and torturing, but we can state with certainty that the idea of such as John McCain that moderate Syrians can overthrow Assad is a fantasy. Because we don't know a lot about Syrians, but what we can be certain of is that they aren't moderates.

 'A recent study by the RAND Corporation, which does research for the government, says the collapse of the Assad regime, while unlikely now, would be the “worst possible outcome” for American interests — depriving Syria of its remaining state institutions and creating more space for the Islamic State and other extremists to spread mayhem.'

Sunday, 25 January 2015

The Policy Cul-De-Sac



 'No one, not even regime apologists, can argue convincingly that this civilian-centric policy of mass murder and mass terror provides stability in an otherwise chaotic country.'

 There are idiots who say that it is the opposition, composed of Saudi proxies, and "Western colonialism", that are destabilising Syria. I don't find them convincing, but they manage to convince themselves.

West neglects suffering of Syrian people



 'Seida also pointed out that the Syrian revolution, according to the majority of Western citizens, has now been diverted by the extremists and radical groups. “Therefore, Assad remaining in power seems the lesser evil, according to the West. This explains why Hezbollah fighters and Iranian Revolutionary Guards supporting Assad troops are seen as better than Islamists who fight on the other side. The majority of Western citizens, who constitute the prevalent public opinion there, do not have time and willingness to make the effort and thoroughly seek the actual reality of the complexity of the Syrian situation. Western governments usually take advantage of public opinion, especially if it is in favor of their interests and consistent with their agendas.” '

 From 2nd January. I'd say that the simplicity of the situation is obscured by the mainstream media narrative, and that those Western leftists who imagine they are opposing Obama and Cameron's warmongering in Syria are simply following their agenda in avoiding providing the necessary help to Syrians fighting for their freedom because of the establishment fear of Islamists.

Syrian cartoonists lampoon Assad and Islamic State

The cover image, by Amjad Wardeh, of a book called Art of Resistance: Collected Cartoons from the Syrian War features Syrian President Bashar al-Assad snorting building dust as if it were cocaine.

 "The destruction of Syria was beyond our imaginations," says Wardeh. "Assad was addicted to turning our cities to dust. That was his cocaine."

The secret world of Isis training camps

Isis members in Aleppo, Syria

 I wish the lies about ISIS and the FSA, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all being on the same side to overthrow Assad, would stop, but they won't.

 “Why do we fight the Free Syrian Army? We spread our message by proselytisation and sword. Ibn Taymiyyah said ‘the foundation of this religion is a book that guides and a sword that brings victory’. We guide and the sword brings victory. If someone opposes the message of the prophet, he faces nothing but the sword. As the prophet spread the message across the Earth, we are doing the same. When al-dawla [ISIS] first fought the Free Syrian Army, it was a problem for many. They did not believe the accusations. But later, one thing after another began to unfold and people started to accept them.”

Betrayal, Obama style



 'Obama was asked whether his decision not to intervene in Syria has attracted foreign fighters, he answered that this ‘mischaracterizes our position. We haven’t been standing on the sidelines. It’s true we did not invade Syria…’ as if an invasion was ever a serious option. These fake protestations don’t hide the fact that the Obama administration sees Iran now as a valuable if unofficial ally in the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

 The cause of helping the Syrian people free themselves from the tyranny of the Assad regime is no longer urgent or a priority. President Obama would have been in a much better position, morally, had he not betrayed his own commitments and promises to the Syrian people. Obama will try to cover his betrayal by claiming that he is still helping the Syrian people. He may be immune to any moral anguish, because of his betrayal and because of his actions or inactions in Syria. But he cannot escape Syria’s sorrows being part of his legacy.'