AFP reports: War-torn Syria on Sunday advised its citizens to avoid travel to neighbouring Turkey, where massive protests have rocked several cities, because of “a deterioration in the security situation.”

The warning issued by the foreign ministry comes as a civil war that has killed tens of thousands ravages Syria, pitting rebels backed by Turkey and other countries against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The foreign ministry advises Syrian citizens to avoid travel to Turkey for their own safety because of a deterioration in the security situation in a number of Turkish cities,” it said in a statement carried on Syrian state television.

Edward Dark is the pseudonym for a Syrian currently residing in Aleppo. He writes: So what went wrong? Or to be more accurate, where did we go wrong? How did a once inspirational and noble popular uprising calling for freedom and basic human rights degenerate into an orgy of bloodthirsty sectarian violence, with depravity unfit for even animals? Was it inevitable and wholly unavoidable, or did it not have to be this way?

The simple answer to the above question is the miscalculation (or was it planned?) of Syrians taking up arms against their regime, a ruthless military dictatorship held together by nepotism and clan and sectarian loyalties for 40 years of absolute power. Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford specifically warned about this in his infamous visit to Hama in the summer of 2011 just as the city was in the grip of massive anti-regime protests and before it was stormed by the Syrian army. That warning fell on deaf ears, whether by design or accident, and we have only ourselves to blame. Western and global inaction or not, we are solely responsible for our broken nation at the end of the day.

Nietzsche once said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” That has proved to be very prophetic in the Syrian scenario. Away from all the agendas, whitewashing, propaganda, and outright lies of the global media stations, what we saw on the ground when the rebel fighters entered Aleppo was a far different reality. It hit home hard. It was a shock, especially to those of us who had supported and believed in the uprising all along. It was the ultimate betrayal.

To us, a rebel fighting against tyranny doesn’t commit the same sort of crimes as the regime he’s supposed to be fighting against. He doesn’t loot the homes, businesses and communities of the people he’s supposed to be fighting for. Yet, as the weeks went by in Aleppo, it became increasingly clear that this was exactly what was happening.

Rebels would systematically loot the neighborhoods they entered. They had very little regard for the lives and property of the people, and would even kidnap for ransom and execute anyone they pleased with little recourse to any form of judicial process. They would deliberately vandalize and destroy ancient and historical landmarks and icons of the city. They would strip factories and industrial zones bare, even down to the electrical wiring, hauling their loot of expensive industrial machinery and infrastructure off across the border to Turkey to be sold at a fraction of its price. Shopping malls were emptied, warehouses, too. They stole the grain in storage silos, creating a crisis and a sharp rise in staple food costs. They would incessantly shell residential civilian neighborhoods under regime control with mortars, rocket fire and car bombs, causing death and injury to countless innocent people, their snipers routinely killing in cold blood unsuspecting passersby. As a consequence, tens of thousands became destitute and homeless in this once bustling, thriving and rich commercial metropolis. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: The Syrian political opposition, in its current form, is a hopeless case. Members of the opposition have been holding intensive talks to expand the National Coalition for nearly a week, with little progress.

The meetings in Istanbul are meant to discuss the inclusion of more members, mostly moderates, in the coalition to make it a more representative and balanced political body. As it stands now, the political body is controlled by one group that has a tenacious monopoly over the decision-making process.

On Monday, the coalition’s general assembly announced that eight new members have been added, after they won 42 votes from existing members. But the coalition has deep structural issues that render the inclusion of new members almost meaningless.

The principle sticking point involves voting. Existing members of the coalition insist that the inclusion of new members must be based on balloting by existing members only. But this would change little in a monopoly that was made possible by interference from regional countries to begin with, rather than based on consensus among Syrian opposition. The existing members were not chosen by the people to decide whether certain opposition figures should be members or not. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: The beefy Libyan revolutionary field commander turned politician rose from the beige couch to greet his new Syrian guest, who pulled up a chair to join the two other Syrian men seated in a semicircle around the couch in the café of a hotel in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, near the Syrian border.

The Libyan had traveled from Zintan, in northwest Libya, while a fellow countryman, a former militia commander from Benghazi, had traveled from that port city to hold court in this Turkish hotel and meet some of the rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. (Both Libyans requested anonymity, because of the nature of their mission.)

The Syrians seated around the Libyans on this warm night in mid-May were all from Islamist military units that operate outside the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which claims to represent most of Syria’s rebels. The night before, the Libyans said, had been the turn of the FSA, which is generally less Islamist than the rebels now seated at the hotel: the Libyans had met a colonel in the FSA who had sat on the same beige couch. He had defected relatively early in the now more than two-year conflict, and had nominally held a senior position in the coterie of exiled FSA officers in southern Turkey who at one point claimed to speak for the armed opposition but who have since been sidelined by other, newer defectors.

It’s a common sight to see clumps of Arab men, mainly Syrian but sometimes speaking in other Arabic dialects or accents, huddled in meetings or milling about in certain Turkish hotels not only in Antakya but also in other border cities adjacent to crossings into Syria. The meetings usually don’t start until at least the late afternoon, or more commonly in the evening, and can continue well into the early hours of the morning. Some of the men are making deals to buy or sell weapons and ammunition, or are trying to secure financing to do so by meeting with wealthy financial patrons — either Syrian or foreign — who want to contribute to the war without joining the front lines. And then there are the foreign fighters, the men with the long beards and the short pants worn above the ankle in the manner of the Prophet Muhammad, who are waiting for Syrian rebels to take them into Syria. [Continue reading…]

GlobalPost: Much like downtown Beirut, the skyline in this city’s southern reaches, where the militant group Hezbollah is strong, is dotted with new apartment blocks built atop the ruins of past wars.

But with the conflict in Syria grinding next door, less than 40 miles to the east, south Beirut could again be at the epicenter of another armed conflict in Lebanon. The Western-backed leader of the Free Syrian Army, Gen. Selim Idriss, this week issued a deadline for Hezbollah to leave Syria or face attacks on its home turf.

In a televised speech Sunday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the group would fight alongside the Syrian regime, one of its primary backers, “until the end.” Hours later, two rockets crashed into the outskirts of the group’s traditional powerbase in south Beirut, injuring several people.

Hezbollah — a powerful Lebanese Shia militant and political group — has thrown its weight behind Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, putting an already fragile Lebanon in the crosshairs of a spiraling regional conflict.

Hezbollah fighters are suffering losses in battles inside Syria, sectarian rhetoric is on the rise in Lebanon, and Israel has said it is willing to carry-out more strikes on Syrian soil to keep advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah.

In a taped interview on Hezbollah’s television station Al-Manar, Assad said on Thursday that Russia had delivered the first shipment of the sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile system. Israel has previously said it would again strike targets in Syria if the regime acquires them.

“We are worried that the war in Syria is coming to Lebanon,” said Ibrahim, a resident of the Hezbollah stronghold, Dahiyeh, in Beirut’s sprawling southern reaches. Many of the young men that fill Hezbollah’s ranks come from this area.

“But more than that,” Ibrahim, a staunch Hezbollah supporter, said, “the young people around here are angry and want to fight.” [Continue reading…]