​The “Israel backs Jabhat al-Nusra” fairy-tale

 Michael Karadjis:

 'Thus the “Israel supports Nusra” discourse had simply led to the murder of a member of the FSA. But where does this theory come from? A number of writers in recent months have come up with the proposition that Israel is in some kind of alliance with Nusra in the southern Syrian region bordering the Israeli-stolen Golan Heights. “Why has Israel embraced al-Qaida’s branch in Syria?” asks Rania Khalek in the Electronic Intifada (​https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-has-israel-embraced-al-qaidas-branch-syria/14619). “In the Golan, Israel has cultivated an alliance with Islamist forces it falsely claims to detest: the al-Nusra Front,” claims Richard Silverstein (http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2015/06/25/israels-dangerous-game-with-syrian-islamists/). “Why is the media ignoring Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda?” asks Asa Winstanely (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/inquiry/18855-why-is-the-media-ignoring-israels-alliance-with-al-qaeda).

 Unlike ISIS, Nusra fights mostly against the regime (and against ISIS) alongside other Syrian rebel groups. Therefore, this “Israel supports Nusra” fairy-story is not aimed at claiming that Israel is secretly aiding a sectarian diversion of the revolution, but, on the contrary, the aim is the same old warped conspiracy theory that the mighty Syrian revolution is just a conspiracy orchestrated by a US-Zionist-Gulf-Jihadist-Martian cabal bent on destroying the nice progressive “secular” regime of Assad.

 Quite deliberately, these writers conflate Nusra with the FSA and other rebels; the fact that the UN reports talk about, for example, handing two boxes to members of an “armed group” for these writers automatically means Nusra. Even when it was found out that the wounded fighter murdered by the Druze lynch-mob was in the FSA and not Nusra, these haters declare him an “Islamist” fighter, in order to be as dishonest as is humanly possible without still calling him “Nusra” – for them, Nusra, Islamists and FSA are all the same thing.

 The entire fairy-tale of Israeli support to either Nusra or the FSA in the south is based on nothing. Stupid stories, however, can have deadly results.'

Obama's ISIS policy is backwards

 'The president and his people are intellectually attuned to the fact that Tehran is the principal outside facilitator of mass murder in Syria. They are intellectually accepting of the proposition that the Assad regime mass murder is a recruiting tool for ISIL. People in the administration are not lacking in intelligence, they can connect the dots on these things.

 If the commander in chief, Barack Obama, says, 'I’ve had enough of this … I want you to do something, give me some options that minimize the slippery slope argument, but give me some options that complicate Assad’s ability to launch helicopters with these horrible barrel bombs, including the resumption of chemical warfare.' ... If the president is willing to do that, I am utterly convinced that thousands of lives can be saved starting very quickly.'

Middle East Policy and Combating ISIS

 [01:23:26] Defense Secretary Ashton Carter: "We are trying to recruit and identify people who ... can be counted on ... to fight, to have the right mindset and ideology, and not be aligned with groups like ISIL on the one hand, and on the other hand, as you put it, work towards our goals, and our goal being for them to fight ISIL in the first instance."

 In other words, they are looking for mercenaries who will agree not to fight Bashar al-Assad. The administration's line is that they are weeding out extremists, but we can glean the truth from Fox News' take* on the story:

 'Abdul-Jabbar Abu Thabet, commander of Aleppo Swords Battalion, a moderate faction that is fighting both Assad's forces and IS, said he believes the Americans are more interested in recruiting Syrian army defectors than moderate rebels.

 He said he would no longer give Americans the names of training candidates from his group, after having done so once and not receiving a U.S. response.

 "The Americans are saying they want to train rebels to fight against Daesh only," he said by telephone from northern Syria, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. "The fighting should be against Daesh, the (Assad) regime and everyone who is against the revolution." '

*[https://web.archive.org/web/20150629180343/http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/06/29/us-training-moderate-syrian-rebels-sputtering-limited-by-strict-weeding-out/]

Syrians forced to survive on handouts during Ramadan

 'Nawal Ramadan jokingly quoted one of the most famous Syrian Ramadan series this year, Bab al-Hara, which deals with life in a Damascus neighborhood under the French mandate in the 1930s.

 The director and writer should have focused on our own time “and film how the regime hits the city of Aleppo with barrel bombs and how ISIS is executing people like sheep and lashing women.”

 “It would’ve been better,” she added bitterly.'

Kafranbel

 "Qatar & Saudi Arabia! it seems you need American Decision to help us."

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Aleppo

 Looking for barrel bombs.
 Looking for barrel bombs.
 Looking for barrel bombs.
 I'm hungry.

Isis in Kobani: Why we ignore the worst of the massacres

 'They are desensitised by seeing so many pictures of children killed or maimed by Isis suicide bombers or government barrel bombs.'

 What a hypocrite. Patrick Cockburn ignores the barrel bombs, the sieges, the torture, which Assad daily visits on Syria, to scare us with the dangers of ISIS into backing Assad and his allies as they carry out more bombing, rape and torture,

 'Thus the US, Britain and their allies are supposedly seeking to combat Isis, but they simultaneously oppose the main enemies of Isis such as Iran, Hezbollah, the Syrian army, Shia militias in Iraq, and the PKK in Turkey in the shape of its Syrian branch, the PYD.'

 It's a lie that America and Britain are opposing what Iran and Assad are doing.

 Andrew Marr said this morning, "Patrick Cockburn is one of the people I turn to on the Middle East," Stephanie Flanders echoed Cockburn, "We have to stop our Sunni allies funding groups like ISIS." The British political and business establishment takes their lead from Cockburn, he isn't some anti-establishment figure, but one linking the Western élite to their Middle Eastern counterparts. Two more lies, the states mentioned are not funding ISIS, and the groups they support do not commit atrocities like Assad or even ISIS, but reading Cockburn you would never know that, as there are no moderates in his picture of Syria except for Assad, and all the people fighting him are mad Muslims.

 'Isis and al-Qaeda-type groups that are little different from it, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham in Syria.'

Samar Yazbek: ‘Syria has been hung, drawn and quartered’

 ' “I was not frightened for myself. Not at all. Why should I be so? This was my homeland. This is where I had grown up. I spoke the languages, I knew the people. What did frighten me as time went on, and as I made more trips, was the way everything I had once known in Syria was being turned into something else, something I didn’t quite recognise. This had once been a cosy place, a place of traditional loyalties and hospitality. But now the people have been scarred and mutilated. I don’t know whether it will ever go back to what it was. That is what Assad has done.”

 She is especially angry with young Muslim women who have travelled from the west to join Isis. “Of course I am a feminist,” she says, “and what they are doing is sending the condition of women in Syria back to some terrible place. But also what they are doing is to ‘Orientalise’ Syria – these young girls are Muslims but they are creatures of the west. They know nothing of Syria and its ways. But they love the fantasy of the virile Arab warrior on a horse with a gun. This is a cliche and a fantasy and they come because it’s erotic and exotic – they are bored in the west and they need to rebel. But they do not understand Islam or Syria and that they are making things worse for the women who live here.” '

Syria’s Alawites: The People Behind Assad

' “We are witnesses to the country’s unraveling,” a 56-year-old Alawite public servant told me last summer in Latakia, the western coast’s main city. “Many people I know—especially those who have lost loved ones—are fed up, but few dare speak out because this would contradict the facade of defiance,” he said.'

Munther Khalil was killed in Majdal Shams

 Sam Charles Hamad:

 "Pro-Assad Druze pulled this fellow out of an ambulance and murdered him as the IDF watched on. He was slandered by Israeli Jews and Israeli Druze, for absolutely no good reason, as being a member of Jabhat an-Nusra, yet his name is Munther Khalil and he was a fighter with the Free Syrian Army. In fact, right-wing Israelis are still slandering him and justifying his murder because some injured Syrian fighter being treated in Israel made sectarian statements in an interview with some Israeli TV channel, which apparently means that murdering any Syrian fighter is perfectly understandable."

 Note 8/5/25, original Facebook link unavailable.

Syrian rebels take over regime headquarters in Daraa

 'The fall of Daraa city in the hands of rebels makes it the third Syrian city that is completely free of Assad forces after Raqqa (held by ISIS) and Idlib (held by Syrian rebels).'

The Civil War in Syria Is Invisible

 'Abounaddara—the name translates to “the man with the glasses,” which is to say the man who, through his lenses, can see clearly—has been able to maintain a steady stream of production since April 2011, when the regime of Bashar al-Assad upped their wanton killing of protesters. Since then, Abounaddara has released a new short film on Vimeo every Friday. And as the Syrian uprising turned into a revolution and then morphed into a gruesome civil war, the film collective—the majority of whose members are women—has managed to capture the social and human dimensions of war with an intimacy that is almost never seen in any conflict, let alone in Syria today.

 This is no small feat. Merely getting images from Syria is treacherous. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 17 journalists were killed in Syria in 2014, making it the deadliest place for journalists for three years running, and more journalists have been forced into exile since 2010 from Syria than any other country. The result is that we see very little of what’s really happening in Syria, enabling ISIS to promote its high-gloss terror pornography and the Assad regime to hide its crimes from view.'

Civilians Pay the Price

 'Ideally, those under arms who oppose the Assad regime would not take the poisoned bait of collective punishment and sectarian targeting spread promiscuously by the regime over the past four years. But some have, thereby imposing on their external supporters and suppliers an obligation to secure immediate corrective action. ISIL, of course, is beyond the pale and is not in any event part of the Syrian Revolution. Yet those seeking to draw Nusra away from its murderous al-Qaeda origins might concentrate first on stopping its war crimes.

 It is, however, the Assad regime that runs circles around “anti-Government armed groups” in terms of gross criminality. Consider some of the Commission’s more striking passages:

 “ . . . the Government continues to direct attacks towards locations where civilians are likely to congregate, among them, bus stations, marketplaces, and bakeries.”

 “In particular, the continuing use of barrel bombs in aerial campaigns against whole areas, rather than specific targets, is in violation of international humanitarian law and, as previously documented, amounts to the war crime of targeting civilians.”

 “The larger strategy [of the regime] appears to be one of making life unbearable for civilians who remain inside armed-group controlled areas.”

 “The previously documented pattern of attacks indicating that Government forces have deliberately targeted hospitals, medical units, and ambulances remains an entrenched feature of the conflict.”

 “Government sieges are imposed in a coordinated manner . . . [I]n particular, Government forces have refused to allow aid deliveries of essential medicines and surgical supplies . . . [G]overnment authorities act in direct breach of binding international humanitarian law obligations to ensure that wounded and sick persons are collected and cared for, and to ensure the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief.”

 “Everyday decisions—whether to go visit a neighbor, to send your child to school, to step out to buy bread—have become, potentially, decisions about life and death. Large numbers of children have been killed in bombardments of their homes, schools, and playgrounds.”

 The Obama administration is operationally indifferent to all of this. This is not to say it is at a loss for words when describing the depredations of Bashar al-Assad, a person it stubbornly continues to recognize as the President of the Syrian Arab Republic. Yet its strategy for degrading and destroying ISIL—notwithstanding effective military-humanitarian interventions at Mount Sinjar in Iraq and Kobane in Syria—is operationally silent on protecting Syrian civilians from the regime. This despite its intellectual acceptance that Assad’s program of mass homicide produces recruits for ISIL from around the world and convinces increasing numbers of Syrians that ISIL may be their best bet for protection against regime atrocities.'

Hashem Alsouki risks his life crossing the Mediterranean

 'He isn’t particularly political. He’s just a 37-year-old civil servant at the regional water board. He runs the computer department, and it’s his job to print the bills every month for the residents of Damascus and the surrounding countryside. He focuses on the water business, and minds his own.

 But today, none of that will matter. The regime is going from house to house, rounding up all the men they find. Whether it’s because they’re Sunni, living in a country run by Alawites, an offshoot of the Shia, Hashem can only speculate.

 Hashem’s children watch him as he goes to open the door. Outside stand 20 men. Whether they’re from the army, the police, or a pro-regime militia, Hashem doesn’t know. But they’re here for him, and half the people on his street.

 Until now the war has largely avoided Haran al-Awamid, a place of around 15,000 a few miles south-east of Damascus. It’s a quiet town with a lot of government employees. But in recent days, tensions have been raised. The regime killed two young men, tied their corpses to a car, and dragged them around town. Not everyone dared to react, but the pair’s friends and family did – they protested and chanted in the street.

 And now, as Hashem is shoved into the back of a van, his children watching from their front room, the regime is getting its revenge. It’s a long revenge, too. First Hashem and his neighbours are taken to a secret network of cells, dug deep beneath the nearby Damascus airport. Three days later, they’re moved on – to the headquarters of aviation intelligence in Damascus.

 Here, hundreds of men are crammed into single cells, deep underground. Every day, four or five of them are dragged to torture rooms. Single men are electrocuted with shocks to their genitals. Husbands like Hashem are sometimes spared that humiliation, but instead are hung from their wrists. Hashem spends 12 hours like this, the cords cutting into his skin. Others spend even longer and their hands later have to be amputated.

 After several weeks, he’s moved to some kind of airport hangar. It’s a vast space, capable of holding a few planes. But there are so many prisoners crammed in here that they have to take it in turns to lie down. With no watches or natural light, they have no way of telling the time.

 One day, months later, the prisoners are driven in vans to the centre of Damascus, where they’re tossed out into the street. They have no idea that it’s now late October, or that today is the festival of Eid al-Adha. They emerge blinking into the bright sunlight wondering what kind of Syria awaits them.

 For Hashem, the future is immediately bleak. While he was away, two of Hayam’s brothers were shot by the same sniper on the same day. The second was trying to retrieve the corpse of the first.'

"I must save my life and not risk my family’s safety!”

 'Karima (40) is not the type of Syrian heroine that the mainstream media would like to interview. She did not participate in the Syrian Uprising. She did not lead a demonstration.'

 I don't think this is the case. The media is not looking for revolutionaries, it is looking for people who will blame the rebels as much as Assad, to reflect the same sort of balance it imagines it can impose on the conflict. That Assad's has been a war against civilians, not just or even mainly a war against those actively resisting, has been an unfamiliar theme in most press and TV, when they talk about the rest of Syria at all and not only about ISIS.

 'On March 12, 2012, Karima’s life would change forever. Around noon she heard that a mission from the Syrian Army is searching the houses in her neighborhood for armed men. She prayed that they would not take her boys and husband because they were not involved in any military activities. Around 2.00 p.m. the mission entered their apartment asking them to surrender their weapons. Her husband declared that they had no weapons. The officer ordered his fellows to take her husband out. Another officer took her eldest son Mahmmod (18) and he forced him to prostrate himself to Bashar al-Assad photograph in front of his mother and siblings. Then, they commanded Karima and her smaller children (a girl and two boys) to stay inside while they took the father and the son Mahmmod with them. In few minutes, Karima and her children heard gunshots. Karima held herself together because she was worry about the safety of her younger children.

 Her husband’s dead body was left next to their flat door, and her son was left dying on the stairs after they shot him in the head. Karima remembered how his flesh and blood had dispersed and adhered to the walls around him. Her daughter Lama (15) tried to give Mahmmod water before he died because he was muttering “water,” but he could not drink it. Karima told me this with a big sigh that even her son last wishes did not come true: “My daughter came back inside, her hands were covered with Mahmmod’s blood. I kissed her hands and I smelled my son scent.” When the army mission finished investigating the building, they came again to Karima’s apartment. She locked the door. They unlocked it by shooting it.

 It was winter and dark, and Karima, who has no experience in public spaces, felt scared and decided to stay the night at one of her neighbor’s houses. When they entered her neighbor’s house, they saw another dead body of a stranger. Karima learned that the regime forces killed all men in her neighborhood, and they randomly threw all the dead bodies into neighbor’s houses. They do so to ensure that the rest of the families are terrorized and humiliated and other anti-regime regions would look at this example of consequences for rebelling against the regime. Once again Lama covered the dead body with a sheet, so the small children would stop looking at the body exploded by bullets. Karima continued her story:

 At 6:30 in the morning we left the neighbor’s houses, the regime forces were shooting toward our feet and screaming at us to go back. I gestured with my hand that it is impossible to go back. We kept running through the shooting, and sometimes we hid in some buildings, but there were dead bodies in every building. When we passed our neighborhood, we met armed rebels. I expressed my disappointment with the rebels because they did not confront and fight the regime troops. But the rebel leader told me to thank my god because no one touched my daughter or me and we had escaped with our honor. He said in the nearby neighborhood most women were raped.'

The "Gang of Girls" Risks Their Lives to Report

 ' "We're the gang of girls. [Assad] would kill us, but he can't find us," Waleed says. The "gang of girls" she refers to are her colleagues at Enab Baladi; a little more than half the staff are women. Many of them are now refugees, in Turkey and Lebanon, and the rest are in hiding in Syria—reporting over sporadic Internet connections, giving new and urgent meaning to the phrase working remotely.

 Of the 24 founding staff members, three top editors have been killed in separate attacks. Eight reporters have been detained and tortured, and 12 have fled the country.



 Waleed and her girlfriends joined the crowds of hundreds of thousands forming across Syria, singing the anthem of the revolution, the title of which translates as "Come On, Bashar, Leave." They used Twitter and Facebook to coordinate more rallies, calling for democratic re- forms and expecting that the government—which over the past 40 years had built up one of the world's worst human rights records, crushing dissent, torturing prisoners, detaining and spying on critics, fostering endemic corruption, and creating widespread poverty—would fall or make concessions under pressure from the international community.

 But their calculations were wrong, and backing from the United States was weak. The Assad regime immediately cast the protesters as dangerous Islamists and foreign terrorists. Within weeks of the first demonstrations, government tanks rolled into city centers, opening fire on the people. Journalists and artists were detained or killed. The man rumored to have written "Come On, Bashar, Leave" was found dead in a river, his vocal cords ripped out. Assad controlled the airwaves, which spouted only propaganda.



 One morning in late August, she was having breakfast at her family's apartment in Darayya when the house shook. She rushed to the balcony to see her neighbors pouring into the alley. Minutes later, in almost the same location, there was another explosion. Waleed had grown accustomed to the occasional sound of rockets or mortars landing, as the rebels were hiding close by, on farms in the outskirts of the city. This was different. The shelling intensified, and the next morning the Waleed family fled to a relative's apartment, but as they arrived, a mortar hit the building, sending them all sprawling. The city was under attack. They ran for their cars, driving to the home of a family friend outside of town.

 For the next three days, one of the worst massacres of the Syrian war took place inside Darayya. According to reporting from Enab Baladi, which still had staffers there, the regime's soldiers sealed off all roads entering and exiting the city shortly before mortars landed.
Then, according to first-person accounts reported by Enab Baladi, soldiers went door to door, lining up men in mosques and shooting them execution style and burning homes and schools. In one particularly gruesome example, neighbors told Waleed that they'd found an entire family dead in their basement, where they had presumably been hiding. During the rampage, Waleed stayed out in the country, along with 100 others sleeping side by side in a crowded house. With no electricity or Internet access, she had no idea of the whereabouts of her team. This was the only time Enab Baladi missed an edition.'

 This is the massacre Robert Fisk lied about in the Independent, after riding into town with the very troops who had carried it out.*
*[http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/free-syria-responds-to-robert-fisk_1989.html]

We Need to Stop Giving Da’esh the Attention it Craves

 Ben Davies:

 'Suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam, as is the killing of innocent people. These monsters know this, but they use this appalling brutality because they know it will get our attention; our attention will gain them more fanatical supporters and more notoriety, enabling them to expand. There’s a reason that they’re commonly known as khwaarij. In so many words, ignorant extremists.

 Our indulgence of their gruesome publicity stunts is literally killing people, each murder more horrific than the next. We need to stop painstakingly documenting their atrocities on live TV, and instead go after them by going after the one who brought their strength into being through secret oil deals, and directly aiding them on the battlefield. Bashar al-Assad and his regime.

 Bombing Da’esh and ignoring Assad (as per Obama’s pro-Iran strategy) is only giving him the space he needs to bomb liberated areas with greater impunity and intensity. Both must be silenced to end this bloodshed. The dictator who claims he’s the solution to the extremists, and the extremists who claim they have a monopoly on Islam. In reality, all they do is harm and defame it.'

Note 8/5/25, original link to post unavailable.

British Who Fought Assad Are Hiding From Government

 'Shaam and Ibrahim fought with militias linked to Ahrar al Sham, which loosely translates as the “Islamic Movement of the Free Men”. The group is considered one of the largest official opposition forces fighting in Syria. Although it aims to implement an “Islamic government” in Syria, its members have largely considered getting rid of Assad their main priority.

 In late 2012, Shaam joined an aid convoy in the Syrian town of Atmeh, where he helped deliver essentials to Syrian families displaced by the war. After seeing the aftermath of an attack by regime forces, he felt compelled to take up arms.

 “I had witnessed an attack in a city about 20 miles away from Atmeh – we were eating on a porch of a local house at around midday on the second day I arrived,” he says. “Some barrel bombs went off nearby, and I remember seeing two little girls, dressed almost identically with blue ribbons in their hair, starting to cry, and an old man who could no longer stand up after his knees had gone cold with fear.”

 Similar motivations led Ibrahim to travel to Syria. He recalls being “horrified by the attacks carried out by the regime” when he saw images of dead civilians and crying children broadcast on the news, and claims that it was his duty to go there to help, because “if you had the means to go and help the oppressed, then you should”.

 “You have all these groups talking about why young people are becoming radicalised and joining groups like ISIS, and there’s no one who can really tell them why what they’re doing is wrong. The groups who are currently talking about deradicalisation have no credibility – you need someone with on the ground experience of the conflict, and people who also believe in the idea of proper jihad … so that you can tell young people what they’re doing isn’t Islamically authentic.” '

British woman held by al-Nusra Front freed in Syria

 'The 31-year-old from from east London was detained in territory controlled by the al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaida’s franchise in Syria. She was freed after negotiations with al-Nusra, who agreed to let her go because of her history of mental illness, those involved with the negotiations said.

 Tasnime Akunjee said the woman’s release was unlikely to offer hope to the families of Britons who have fled to Isis-controlled Syria: “Nusra are easier to deal with than Isis.” '

Syria'a Economy - Picking up the Pieces

 

 'The question arises as to whether a dramatic worsening in the economic situation might be the catalyst for the regime’s military collapse or for an externally imposed political settlement against Assad’s wishes; or whether further military setbacks might be the trigger for the government’s economic collapse.'

Assad Will Lose Damascus Before Years’ End

 Hard to say how accurate this is.

 'The source, who declined to be identified, said that the international coalition has accurate information about the status of Assad's forces and the terrorists, adding that no extremist groups will be allowed to seize the Syrian capital.'

A teen's tale of torture and death in an ISIS town

 'When the Islamic State took control of her hometown of Minbaj in northern Syria she was just 17. Before then, she had organized and participated in scores of protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. After the IS takeover Ms. Alif, a devout Muslim, was horrified by the group's approach to the faith, its draconian dictates, and its rules prohibiting girls from studying. Alif and a group of friends decided to take action, which was when her nightmare of beatings, stress positions and other forms of torture began.

 “We formed this small team to fight IS,” recalls Alif, who works in a cramped, overheated tissue factory in southern Turkey. "We wanted to send the message that we are against them, that we don’t want them in our town. That they are disfiguring Islam.” Mostly they spray-painted anti-IS slogans around town. Alif is still haunted by the image of a 15-year-old boy crucified on a tree and left to rot for days.

 On a crisp morning in May 2014 Alif unfolded the tricolor flag of the Syrian revolution in front of the Islamic State court as her friends documented the act and kept an eye out for IS militants. She tried to mask her identity — donning a black niqab, wearing high heels and speaking in a raspy voice. It all lasted a few seconds.'

‘Barbarism’ with chlorine gas goes unchecked in Syria

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

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

 No matter: “I don’t have any specific measures here that I can lay out for you” to stop the chlorine attacks, said State Department spokesman John Kirby. Tell that to the families of the children whose lungs are being burned away.'

Angelina Jolie makes brief, unannounced visit to Lebanon

 "Their memories of Syria are fading. They have stopped counting the days in displacement. Nothing is certain and they feel abandoned."

Civilians call on rebels to focus efforts on airports

 'If a small demonstration in a small town in Syria’s north is any indication, citizens are openly beginning to demand action to stop air raids, or else be considered complicit in them. As one child’s sign at the Maarat A-Numan protest read: “If you can strike the airport and you don’t, you’re a partner in our killing.” '

Worst Month Yet for Attacks on Hospitals in Syrian Conflict

 'The Syrian government’s dramatic spike in the number of attacks on medical facilities appears to be in retaliation for recent advances by opposition groups across Idlib and Hama governorates.

 “After losing territory to opposition forces, Assad responds by attacking civilians and the health care system – killing the very people who strive to save lives in the midst of war,” said Brown. “Assad is punishing people who are beyond the reach of his repressive security forces.” '

Children’s drawings offer insights

 “Syria is not always drawn as a place of cruelty, but as a green space, with water and tranquility, as if they have remained attached to the ‘before’ in the hope of going back, as if nothing had disturbed that harmony.”

Syria’s remaining hospitals under bombardment

 It is Assad who is bombing hospitals, not the rebels. Why then does Alex Thomson blame unnamed external superpowers for prolonging the conflict, as if it were all sides that are doing this, rather than that backed by Iran and Russia?

Is Iran paying Afghan mercenaries to fight in Syria?

 'From there, some have joined the fight against IS.'

 Half a minute in, James Lobel uses these words, which ruin his report. The Iranians are recruiting Shi'ites wherever they can to prop up Assad's sectarian régime fighting against the real rebels, but according to this account, they are going to fight the people who chop people's heads off and make sex slaves of Yazidi women. Not cool. Maybe not anti-Muslim in intent, but all the claims that Muslims in Syria are all crazy jihadists, if you give weapons to so-called moderates they will only end up with ISIS, have the same effect.

 Note too that the video of captured Afghans, from the Revolutionary Forces of Syria media office, is labelled as "couldn't be independently verified", like every demonstration of the facts from the rebels opposed to both Assad and ISIS since the revolution (or bitter civil war if you will) began. Assad's pronouncements are not labelled, "could not be independently verified", just the occasional vague doubt expressed when he comes out with the most blatant lies, such as there being no barrel bombs. This is how the anti-Syrian media narrative is created, by allowing confusion to prevail, making it all about ISIS, with it looking like Assad and the Iranians are fighting them.

 I see that rs21 have a new magazine out tomorrow, with a picture of migrants in a boat, and the headline "Borders Kill". I would hope that it would point out that the largest group of refugees trying to get to Europe are Syrians, that they are overwhelmingly fleeing from Assad, not from "the conflict in Syria", and that the reason they have to flee is that the US has refused to allow the Syrian rebels the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons that could have brought Assad's rain of terror to an end. But I don't expect it to say anything of the kind.

Seventy powers demand Syria barrel bombings end

 Veronica Ramadan:

 "Great, another 'outraged' statement to add to four-and-a-half years' worth of 'outraged' statements - heaven forbid any of the powers actually DO SOMETHING to help protect Syrians and stop Assad's genocide..."

Witnesses of Assad's Chlorine Warfare Plea for Help

 'Dr. Annie Sparrow, a pediatrician and health activist who has worked on the Syrian border since 2012, told the committee the Assad regime has only targeted civilian populations with improvised barrel bombs and chlorine gas attacks.

 “I'm a doctor, and I'm very familiar with death. But I have never seen a more obscene way to kill children. I've never watched so many suffer in such an obscene manner,” Sparrow said. “Our preoccupation with ISIS is distracting us from these systematic assaults on civilian homes and neighborhoods and hospitals and schools.” '

Syrian doctors to show the US evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons

 'Recent reports suggest that militant forces in Syria, including Isis, are developing a chemical weapons capability of their own.'

 My apologies if this has already been pointed out, but it is a libel on the Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad that they have done any such thing, just as it was a lie two years ago when it was claimed that such rebel groups attacked themselves with sarin. This libel should not be reproduced in a respectable newspaper.

'Elephant rockets' kill dozens in Damascus suburb

 'The Syrian government has used so-called elephant rockets in an attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma, killing at least 36 people, including children, according to activists.
The rockets, named after the distinctive noise they make when they are launched, are improvised weapons made by attaching rocket motors to much larger bombs - a process that increases their destructive power while greatly reducing accuracy.

 Speaking in the US on Tuesday, John Kerry, secretary of state, said he was confident Assad's government was responsible for a "preponderance" of chemical attacks against his own people.

 "I think everybody's patience is wearing thin with respect to the extraordinary depravity of the weaponry and mechanisms for delivery which Assad has used against his own people," he said.'

 I think the Syrian people's patience with John Kerry's half-hearted condemnations, and double-act with the Russians to do nothing, is wearing thin.

Ecos del Desgarro

 "A self-managed and collective documentary about the activists of the Syrian revolution.
The story of an impossible revolution."

 In English, Spanish and Arabic, with English subtitles.

 "More than 15 kids between 12 to 15 years-old, got arrested because they wrote on the wall of their schools, that the people want to end the regime."

Damascus suburb hit by poison gas remains cut off

 'Dr. Muhammad Kattub, a doctor who last year escaped eastern Ghouta and moved to Gaziantep, a town in Turkey, said that doctors come in contact daily with children who lose consciousness because of malnutrition. He recalled advising a mother to feed her daughter three spoons of yogurt a day.

 
 “The mother said she can’t, because she has two daughters, and she feeds them by turn, one child each day,” he said.'

General Your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle

 Robert Fisk shows how embedding himself in Assad's propaganda machine has completely detached him from reality.

 'The Syrian army, outgunned and at times frighteningly outnumbered by its Islamist enemies, is not about to collapse...The insurgents have hundreds of anti-armour wire-guided TOW and Milan anti-tank missiles...Dr Mekdad spoke of new weapons for the army – it sorely needs them to replace the clapped-out Warsaw Pact tanks that litter Syria.'

 Assad has tanks, the rebels at best have anti-tank weapons, and it is Assad who is outgunned. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr.Fisk? This is a war in which Assad has been armed to the teeth by Russia, has had tens of thousands of Iranian troops and proxy forces like Hezbollah back him up since the popular insurgency had him on the ropes in 2013, not "scattered in twos and threes around the battlefield, learning rather than fighting," as Fisk claims. In fact to take priority over Syrian troops, to give them orders, to have their remains exchanged for prisoners when Syrians can rot where they lie, to be given priority treatment in hospitals. Meanwhile the Syrian rebels have been prevented from getting the most effective defensive measures to Assad's bombing and shelling, and have had to rely on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to survive at all. When they finally got a decent supply of anti-tank weapons they took Idlib quickly, and have had a string of other victories, not because of mythical Turks and Chechens, but because the Syrian Army is a disorganised rabble, only continuing because of the arrest and torture facing them if they do not, so as to keep Assad in power even if it destroys Syria.

 'But here are a few grim facts. Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra are now attacking the Syrian military in rows of suicide trucks.'

 Not facts, things Fisk has been told by his Syrian Army handlers. Jabhat al-Nusra only attack one suicide bomber at a time as far as I am aware. Incidentally, before the anti-tank weapons, suicide bombing was one of the few ways the rebels could attack fortified government positions at all. That's why the lack of support for the Free Syrian Army has led to support going to more jihadi groups, because they had the tactics that could prevail in a war of survival against a genocidal government. Which is again why much of their support and indeed membership can be seen as practical rather than purely ideological, these are people who want to free Syria, and go home when that is done.



 'Rebel logistics are hi-tech and better than the Syrian army’s, and a lot of their communications systems are American.'

 How does Fisk know what rebel communications are like, when he is embedded on the government side? This is by the way the only evidence he has of any American aid to the rebels, which hardly equates to the billion dollars worth a month from Russia that have been arriving throughout the war. If they don't communicate well, it scarecly seems like a financial problem.

 'American “experts” talk glibly now of how the Syrian army will make a “planned retreat” to the mountains of the Alawites.'

 Fisk doesn't bother to name any of them. I suspect he is talking about Joshua Landis, who is more of a fan of the Syrian régime than he is of the opposition. It is indicative that the only debate he acknowledges is over the options for Assad to maintain his power.



 'Syrian “experts” – a lot closer to the battle than the think-tank boyos in Washington – speak of a more political strategy. What the regime must do, they say, is hold on to the major cities in a line from Aleppo south through Hama and Homs to Damascus (Deraa in the south may or may not be included in the plan) and deprive either Nusra or Isis of a potential capital in Syria.'

 Again no names, though Fisk's experts are going to be régime supporters arm deep in the carnage. It is a fantasy that they could hold on to everything they've got given the way the battles have been going, but it's Fisk's job to retail that fantasy. Deraa of course isn't threatened by Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS, but by the Southern Front coalition that fights ISIS and Assad, and has excluded Jabhat al-Nusra until their behaviour improves. But that doesn't fit the Assadist claim that it is Assad or the terrorists, so it isn't relevant to Fisk's mission.

 'Execution is as important to the rebels as the suicide bomb. Army sources in Damascus say that 250 army families were taken for execution when Palmyra fell.'

 To ISIS perhaps, not to the actual rebels Fisk wishes to confuse them with. Daily there are defections from Assad's army to the rebels. And those families were forced by Assad's commanders to stay in Palmyra while they and their families hotfooted it to Damascus, and so are another important way in which Assad and his ruling circle are showing that they protect nobody but themselves.



 'With perhaps 50,000 dead, the Syrian army needs men. Conscripted troops now serve indefinitely. And if that army falters or ceases to exist, no other force is capable of holding Syria together.'

 If you a priori rule out the groups fighting to free Syria from Assad's tyranny.

 'President Assad has not put himself as the No 1. He will work for Syria – and the most important thing is for Syria to survive.'

 An exact reverse of the truth from Dr. Mekdad, but Fisk laps it up.



 'The further you travel from Syria, the more imaginative become the stories to convince you of its destruction. The Americans have done a deal with the Russians to ship Assad off to exile in Moscow. The Iranians will “close down” the Syrian war if the nuclear talks are successful. The Iranians don’t have confidence in the Syrian army. The most extraordinary theory suggests that the “moderate” rebels will destroy both Isis and Assad.'

 Probably not true, ridiculous, probably true, hopefully true.

 'There is no point in romanticising any side in this war. The government militias and the barrel-bombers and the torture chambers eliminate the use of pink eye-shades.'

 So it's alright to support the rape gangs, the barrel bombers, and the torture, as long as you don't romanticise them, or pretend not to. What a scumbag.



 There was a far more reasoned analysis this week of the military situation and the growing dominance of Iran in Syria by Josef Olmert*, though when I read, "No Islamist group in Syria, whether ISIS, al-Nusra, the Fath army, or the Free Syria Army [FSA], will give up on Damascus, the capital of the Umayyad dynasty [661-750 A.D]. The rebels are divided between themselves and fighting each other, which surely something that the regime will be happy to see happening in the areas that are falling under their control, but they are united about one cherished desire: the need for an historic revenge exacted from the hated Nusayris [a derogatory term for the Alawites]," I did think he may have a fairly primitive understanding of the relationship of religion to political action, such as many Western and Israeli political commentators suffer from. Still, unlike Fisk, trying to understand what is going on in Syria, and communicate that understanding.
*[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/syria-is-a-fictionwelcome_b_7552702]

The newspapers will have you hating the oppressed

    

 The subtitle of yesterday's piece by Robert Fisk - 'Our Man in Syria' as the Independent calls him - is, "One glance through the broken windows of this famous old cafe illustrates the Dresden-like ruins – all that remains of Homs." Nobody would think of talking about the destruction of Dresden without mentioning the cause was massive Allied firebombing, or the horrors of Auschwitz without placing responsibility on the Nazis. Fisk however does not see fit to refer to the shelling and bombing by Assad's army and airforce that has reduced Homs to rubble.* Instead we get a suggestion that this was all the rebels' fault, "Many of the streets are roofless facades, the houses undermined by the tunnels which the rebel Farouq Battalion dug amid their ever-shrinking ghetto."

 When a Muslim does something wrong in this country, Muslims are collectively expected to condemn it. When a white person does something wrong, it is the action of an individual. This is the method Fisk takes to Syria. His government-supporting interviewees are just people, although I might guess that Elias sounds like a Christian name, and Rani Khoury is from the Alawite-majority (even more so given the Assad régime's ethnic cleansing) city of Tartous. But the invisible rebels are Islamists, even though they drank and smoked. And that they preserved old newspapers where you can find columns saying that Islam is better than Christianity, and it's bad if people insult Islam, means they are the cause of sectarianism and civil war in the Middle East. Robert Fisk isn't a reporter, he's a racist and colonialist apologist for oppression.

*[http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=return+to+homs]

Inside Assad’s Hospitals of Horror

 ' “The alternate E.R. had four rows of beds with two people in each bed,” al-Abdallah recalled. “They were chained to each other and to the bed, and they were blindfolded. Every night the soldiers would get up on the beds and start walking on the patients. It was a ritual.” Another ritual, he said, was wrapping men’s genitals so tightly with a rubber glove that the pressure would cut off circulation. According to Abu Odeh, intelligence agents would walk up to patients recovering from surgery to repair bone fractures and would literally rip external fixations—used to hold bones in place—from their broken limbs. “So many times we had to do operations twice,” he said. “They weren’t doing this torture to get patients to talk—it was just torture. Sometimes the Mukhabarat guys would pee on the wounds. Other times they would dip a prisoner’s bandages in toilet water and put them back on.” '

'We are the child'

 'People across the Arab world have been expressing solidarity with child victims of barrel bomb attacks in Syria - and opposing President Assad - with the hashtag "we are the child, you are the barrel".

 One of the first people to tweet the hashtag was Mahmoud Owaimer. As a Palestinian living in Gaza, Mahmoud told BBC Trending that the suffering of Syrians reminds him of the recent war with Israel and the shelling of Gaza. "What hurts is that we've seen the war in Syria going on for four years and we can't see any end to it. It would move anyone, wherever they are, to want to speak out." '

Tartus, the Mother of Martyrs

 'Within the city, there is a growing perception that President Bashar al-Assad is intent on staying in power no matter how many Alawite deaths it takes. The Alawites, who in 2011 trumpeted their support for al-Assad, now threaten him with a different chant altogether: "God willing, we will witness the funeral of your sons," they say.'

Rebels say locals in Daraa gave them sweets to celebrate

 'A dawn offensive on Tuesday by Syrian rebels in the Southern Front ended in a takeover of the base and a retreat of Syrian regime forces.'

 From Scott Lucas' more detailed account of the day*:'A Druze activist at the Suweida national hospital said he saw many regime dead and wounded, with soldiers “in a state of terror and panic”. He indicated that Iranians had also been at Brigade 52, saying their injured were being treated before the Syrians.In a series of tweets this morning, Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, saying the Assad regime is “finished”, has called for reconciliation with the Syrian opposition and rebels. He has asked the Druze of Suweida Province to “unite” with their neighbours in Daraa Province.'
*[http://eaworldview.com/2015/06/syria-daily-in-8-hours-rebels-take-1-of-largest-army-bases-in-south/]

Spoils Captured in Idlib Salient and Sahal al-Ghab

 'The amount of war material captured has brought the Jaish al-Fateh coalition and other groups in Idlib into first parity of arms with the SAA as tanks and armored vehicles began to fall and eventually superiority of arms in all categories besides airpower. While the Syrian government maintains a monopoly on the use of air power in the Idlib salient, the opposition forces have gained the equipment, experience, and momentum necessary to overpower remaining government positions and forces without a drastic change in the combat environment. 

 Furthermore, the amount of material captured, particularly the logistical abilities and tremendous amount of munitions, equate to enough material to sustain an understrength SAA tank battalion, understrength SAA mechanized regiment, several artillery batteries, tremendous anti-tank assets, and small arms to equip a tremendous amount of new defectors/foreign fighters/local recruits. The balance of power in north west Syria has shifted tremendously and the coming months are likely to see offensives commensurate with this shift.'

Rebels seize major army base in Deraa

 "This base was one of the main lines of defence for the regime forces. It was a nightmare, because they used it to shell all the areas to the east of the province."

Conspiracy theories that “the US fuelled the rise of ISIS”

 Michael Karadjis:

 'I can say with confidence that Milne’s assertion that Britain had been involved in the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale” to Syrian rebels is entirely made up; actually no evidence of any arms being supplied by the US, let alone Britain, appears anywhere. But to the extent any kind of “training” or logistical help occurred, or to the extent that the US allowed other countries to supply a certain amount of light arms, in every case it was to some described as secular or defected Syrian military with the specific objective of blocking any Islamist forces, and especially al-Qaida.

 When the FSA rebels said their current priority was fighting the regime, the US agents told them they had to fight Nusra now, and worry about the regime later.

 In the awkward world of anti-Syrian revolution conspiracy theory, the FSA and other Syrian rebels are “US-backed jihadists.” To deal with the “US-backed” part first, while they are entitled to try to get arms from whoever they can, it is notable that the FSA rejected this US condition for getting arms, understanding it to be what it was: not an expression of US preference for secular rebels, nor any honest move to arm them, but rather an attempt to get the democratic-secular and jihadist wings of the uprising to slaughter each other while the Assad regime laughs.

 Most of this conspiracism is not motivated by showing that imperialist powers tried to derail the revolution by backing ISIS, but on the contrary, they want to claim that the US and the West “backed ISIS” in order to overthrow the Syrian tyranny, a laughable idea.

 In particular, this leads them into these grossly dishonest and fact-free amalgam between ISIS and its arch-enemies among the Syrian revolutionary forces; and hence the continuous assertion, backed by the flimsiest of evidence or none at all, that the US and the West have backed other parts of the Syrian rebellion (something regarded to be bad) is also described as part of the how the West allegedly helped “fuel the rise of ISIS,” as if the FSA, the force in the region that has most successfully beat back ISIS, is in some way related to ISIS or gave rise to it.

 Yes, the US created ISIS alright – by invading Iraq and launching an apocalyptic occupation and then bolstering a Shiite-sectarian regime allied with Iran which launched a sectarian war against the Sunni population. Why is it so difficult to see that exactly the same dynamic occurred in Syria, not from some non-existent US invasion, but due to the similar apocalyptic sectarian war the Assad regime waged against the Syrian revolution and also specifically against the Sunni majority, precisely in order to turn the non-sectarian uprising into a sectarian war?'

Rebels strike biggest blow against Assad since 2011

 'Rami Dalati, a member of the armed opposition group the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) Military Command Higher Council, told Asharq Al-Awsat the rebels, comprised of the Jaysh Al-Fatah, a coalition of Jihadist groups, had successfully captured a number of strategic checkpoints used by the Syrian army on the Latakia–Aleppo highway.

This had now left a total of 25,000 government troops “essentially trapped” inside Aleppo, he said, adding that “this counts as the biggest military loss for the government in Syria since the beginnings of the conflict in 2011.”

Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict via a series of correspondents on the ground, said that Jaysh Al-Fatah had captured Syrian government troop positions around the city of Idlib, which lies roughly halfway between Latakia and Aleppo.

Al-Nusra posted on its Twitter account that it had successfully captured the positions, posting pictures of its fighters and those of others in the Jaysh Al-Fatah in the locations, with others of Syrian government troops fleeing their posts.

The official pro-government Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) quoted a military source saying that Syrian troops had indeed withdrawn from the positions around Idlib, but only to redeploy in areas more “appropriate for fulfilling their military objectives.” '

Now refugees fear IS will target their families

 'Ali had been travelling through Syria in a bid to cross the Turkish border when he was caught by IS at Deir al-Zour. The teenager's death sparked protests in his home town of Jasim, which Alkhalef said prompted the distribution of leaflets warning residents that IS would take over the area.

 "They [residents] said, 'It's not fair, a child of 17 was killed with no crime,'" said Alkhalef, through a translator. "It really confirmed to people that IS was criminal. In the flyers it said: 'We're going to rule Daraa, we're going to overcome, and we're going to apply Sharia law - Islamic Law - on you."

 She said the Free Syrian Army, which was set up by officers and soldiers who defected from the Syrian Armed Forces during the country's civil war, gathered the leaflets and asked people to hand them in.

 Alkhalef believes IS fighters tried to shoot her eldest brother in March. She said clashes between IS and the Free Syrian Army also took place in April.

 "The reason we know it's Daesh is as the Free Syrian Army caught the men who tried to shoot my brother," said Alkhalef.'

People are still dying in the besieged Al Ghota

 'In Ghouta... Bodies are turning into skeletons... Three years of siege are destroying everything.'

Syrian Rebels Give Shout-Out to Caitlyn Jenner

 "We would be free, and liberate Syria from Assad and ISIS."

As the militant threat grows

 Patrick Cockburn is a magician, he has made Bashar al-Assad disappear. After a year of telling us the only way to defeat ISIS¹ was to ally with a régime bombing, raping and torturing its people to the max, this latest fantasy ignores him altogether. Even in Hasakah, where Assad's army has been holding the town and a few surrounding villages, we get this,

 'Isis routed the Syrian army and captured Palmyra and has since struck at Syrian opposition units north of Aleppo and at the north-eastern city of Hasaka.'

 Maybe it is the awkward fact that the Syrian Arab Army barely exists now, and exists "for a single man's benefit."². Maybe it is that the Syrian airforce has been bombing rebel positions in support of an attempted ISIS advance in Aleppo province³, while the US ignores ISIS there in favour of bombing those fighting Assad in Idlib. Meanwhile Assad carries out a massacre by bombing a town centre in Idlib⁴, as much a barbarian as the barbarians of ISIS Cockburn used to present him as the alternative to.

 It is a disgrace that Patrick Cockburn, and indeed Robert Fisk⁵, are still employed by the Independent, without their output being clearly labelled as fiction.


1. As Muhammed Idris Ahmad wrote in his exposure of Cockburn's lie about witnessing an alleged massacre of Christians in Adra, 'For Cockburn, the situation in Syria is stark: you are with the regime or you are with the terrorists. He is an enthusiast for the war on terror—Bashar al-Assad’s war on terror. He criticizes the U.S. for excluding from its anti-ISIS coalition “almost all those actually fighting ISIS, including Iran, the Syrian army, the Syrian Kurds and the Shia militias in Iraq.” “The enemy of our enemy”, he insists, “must be our friend”—and those who reject this formula are “glib” and “shallow”.' [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/whos-lying-about-syrias-christian.html]

2. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/syria-armys-weakness-exacerbated-by.html]

3. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/u.html]

4. [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/bodies-were-everywhere-on-tables.html]

5. See the first link, 'Cockburn is only following the precedent of his illustrious colleague Robert Fisk who, in August 2012, after a massacre of 400-500 people in Daraya, rode a Syrian Army armoured personnel carrier to the scene, interviewed survivors—“in the company of armed Syrian forces”—and concluded that, contrary to initial reports, “armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops” were responsible for the massacre.' [http://notris.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/whos-lying-about-syrias-christian.html]

Syria Army's Weakness Exacerbated by Draft Dodgers

 'That weakness was most apparent during recent defeats in the northwest province of Idlib and the city of Palmyra; rebels and opposition groups said regime forces withdrew quickly rather than fight a prolonged battle...

 "Every man in Syria...tries his best not to serve in the army," the young engineer said. "He can't imagine himself being a part of what's happening, part of a long war that doesn't seem to have an end."

 "I don't want to be a part of a conflict which is for a single man's benefit," said a 29-year-old who has a good job in Damascus but is making plans to flee the country anyway. "This is a conflict that we, the normal people, have nothing to do with." '