Category Archives: Syria

Scenes from inside Aleppo: How life has been transformed by rebel rule

Marwan Hisham writes: I first moved to Aleppo 10 years ago. At that time, the city was the world for me: the glorious past and the present, the bitter and the sweet. I attended university in mid-Aleppo’s wealthy neighborhoods. To get there, I took the bus from my apartment in the crowded Al-Myassar, one of Aleppo’s poorest slums. We rode by the ancient gates of Bab Al-Hadid and Bab Al-Nasr, through which the Silk Road once curved. Old Aleppo’s walls had vanished over the years, but its gates survived as if to remind residents of their history: the city may have been destroyed before, by Mongols and by earthquakes, but every time it got up on its feet again.

Aleppo wore its heritage with pride, but beneath its beauty lurked darker contradictions. Aleppo’s western half was a rapidly modernizing playground for the elite. But inhabitants of the city’s east, who had fled their villages to seek better prospects in the city’s outskirts, stayed mired in poverty. While the government labeled these slums agricultural plains, on the ground they were a maze of concrete cells, run by clans of organized criminals who dealt drugs and extracted “taxes.” The government used these clans as enforcers—especially when the revolution’s wind briefly blew on Aleppo in 2011.

During this time, I was a student at Aleppo University. My classmates and I saw the campus transformed by these enforcers and by the Mukhabarat, or the Syrian secret police. They planted informants amongst students and persecuted student protesters. Hundreds would disappear forever into the Mukhabarat’s dungeons. Despite this, students kept challenging the security forces. Revolutionaries across the country nicknamed the school “The Revolution’s University.”

But most of Aleppo regarded the Arab Spring with indifference. When the revolution broke out in earnest later that year, much of the city distanced itself from the turbulence. Demonstrations remained confined mostly to slums like Al-Saladin, Bustan Al-Qasr, and Al-Marijah. Protests were brief, with demonstrators chanting before running from the security forces. [Continue reading…]

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Syria Qaeda captures five more U.S.-trained rebels: Monitor

AFP reports: Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate captured at least five more US-trained rebel fighters in overnight raids on a village in northwestern Syria, a monitoring group said on August 4.

“Between Monday and Tuesday, Al-Nusra Front seized at least five rebels from Division 30 in the village of Qah, near the Turkish border,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The jihadists already captured at least eight rebels from the same US-backed unit last week, the Observatory reported. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS woos Kurdish attackers in Turkey

The Wall Street Journal reports: Orhan Gonder was a quiet, studious Kurdish teenager who went out of his way to help people, according to those who knew him in this small Turkish city near the Syrian border.

So when he started frequenting a tea house known as an Islamic State recruiting center last year, his parents went to the police and implored them to detain their son before he could do any harm. On June 5, the 20-year old set off a bomb at a Kurdish political rally in the nearby city of Diyarbakir, killing four people and injuring dozens, officials said.

And two weeks ago, another young Kurd from Adiyaman blew himself up in the middle of a rally of student activists, killing 31 people preparing to go help rebuild Kobani, the Syrian-Kurdish town that overcame a long Islamic State assault in January.

The two attacks exposed a troubling phenomenon: Islamic State appears to be successfully wooing young Turkish Kurds, while their kinsmen in Iraq and Syria — for the most part — are taking up arms against Islamic State. Kurdish militants in Syria, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, have become the single most effective fighting force on the ground against the extremist group. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. to defend new Syria force from Assad regime

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Barack Obama has authorized using air power to defend a new U.S.-backed fighting force in Syria if it is attacked by Syrian government forces or other groups, raising the risk of the American military coming into direct conflict with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. officials said the decision ended a monthslong debate over the role the American military should play in supporting its few allies on the battlefield in Syria. Administration officials had been deeply concerned that defending the Pentagon-backed force could inadvertently open the first open conflict with the Assad government, which has denounced the U.S. program.

Though the new rules allow Pentagon strikes to defend the U.S.-allied force against any regime attacks, U.S. military officials played down the chances of a direct confrontation, at least in the near term. The newly trained force has committed to fighting Islamic State, not the regime, and won’t be fielded in areas the regime controls. U.S. officials say they believe the regime won’t challenge the new force. [Continue reading…]

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Report: U.S.-led strikes in Iraq, Syria killed hundreds of civilians

The Associated Press reports: U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria likely have killed hundreds of civilians, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The coalition had no immediate comment.

The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the extremists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed at least 459 civilians and caused 48 suspected “friendly fire” deaths.

While Airwars noted the difficulty of verifying information in territory held by the Islamic State group, which has beheaded journalists and shot dead activists, other groups have reported similar casualties from the U.S.-led airstrikes.

“Almost all claims of noncombatant deaths from alleged coalition strikes emerge within 24 hours — with graphic images of reported victims often widely disseminated,” the report said. “In this context, the present coalition policy of downplaying or denying all claims of noncombatant fatalities makes little sense, and risks handing (the) Islamic State (group) and other forces a powerful propaganda tool.”

The U.S. launched airstrikes in Iraq on Aug. 8 and in Syria on Sept. 23 to target the Islamic State group. A coalition of countries later joined to help allied ground forces in both countries defeat the extremists. To date, the coalition has launched more than 5,800 airstrikes in both countries. So far, the U.S. only has acknowledged killing two civilians in its strikes: two children who were likely slain during an American airstrike targeting al-Qaida-linked militants in Syria last year. That same strike also wounded two adults, according to an investigation released in May by the U.S. military. [Continue reading…]

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Give me your tired, your poor … the Europeans embracing migrants

The Guardian reports: Judging from the headlines, it sometimes seems no one in Europe wants to help refugees. Record numbers are arriving in Italy and Greece this year, and yet other European governments have agreed to share less than a fifth of them. Hungary is building a wall to keep them out. For the same reason, France has sealed its border with Italy. In Greece, for much of this year there were doubts over the legality of giving a refugee a lift.

But on a local level, there are thousands of people across the continent who are braving the vitriol of their peers, and filling the void left by the politicians. Many Europeans back their governments’ stance but their xenophobia masks another phenomenon – that of a huge drive by ordinary citizens to welcome refugees, rather than reject them. From the Hungarian volunteers providing round-the-clock support to Syrian and Afghani newcomers, to the Spanish priests assisting migrants with paperwork, here are seven movements from across Europe that are fighting for refugees’ rights. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s Kurdish party leader suspects government instigated Suruc bombing as a pretext for war

Der Spiegel reports: Selahattin Demirtas, 42, co-chairman of the HDP, is widely regarded as the winner of the election in early June. His charismatic demeanor was mainly due to the fact that his People’s Democratic Party (HDP) received 13 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first Kurdish party to win a mandate in Turkey’s parliament and deny the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) an absolute majority. For an interview, Demirtas received SPIEGEL in his parliamentary party’s new offices in Ankara. The room is large and bright and his desk is flanked by both the Turkish flag and that of his party.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Demirtas, your success two months ago gave hope to many people in- and outside of Turkey, who hailed it as a milestone for democracy. But today, the country threatens to return to civil war-like conditions. How could it come to this?

Demirtas: The AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has brought about this situation deliberately. Until the elections in June, they had ruled Turkey unilaterally for more than a decade. But they weren’t able to block our ascent to power any longer, so they opted to foment chaos in the country instead. This is the only possible explanation for their war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

SPIEGEL: You go so far as to claim that the attack by the terrorist militia Islamic State in Suruc, in which 32 people were killed, was instigated by the government as a pretext for armed conflict. Do you have any proof?

Demirtas: If by that you mean documents that prove that the state was involved then, no, we don’t. But there are clear indications. Our research suggests that this attack by IS was made possible by the AKP government, which for years tolerated the extremists’ activities in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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An anti-YPG campaign on Facebook

Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes: The Syrian Kurds believe their militia lost its Facebook verification as part of an online campaign by members of the U.S.-recognized nationalist opposition who are based in Turkey and have links with the Turkish government. Ankara dislikes the YPG and the PYD because of their ties to the PKK, a Kurdish militant group that has battled Turkey for decades. Turkish officials have argued for months that the PKK is as great a threat as the Islamic State — and in recent days, Turkey has responded to that perceived threat with a bombing campaign against PKK holdouts in the Kurdish region of Iraq that Syrian Kurds claim has extended into their territory.

That stance explains why the Syrian Kurds believe the Facebook move was part of a concerted effort by Syrian Arabs and their Turkish backers to damage their credibility. They argue that media reports about Kurds targeting Arabs in areas they take from the Islamic State are part of that effort as well. Arab residents of northern Syria have told multiple outlets, including The WorldPost, that they fear ethnically motivated persecution by the YPG.

Mutlu Civiroglu, a Washington-based analyst who closely monitors the Syrian Kurds, told HuffPost that Kurdish sources have identified what they say are two signs of evidence that there is an anti-YPG campaign extending to Facebook. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group flees HQ, seeks refuge in Kurdish-controlled area

The New York Times reports: A Syrian insurgent group at the heart of the Pentagon’s effort to fight the Islamic State came under intense attack on Friday from a different hard-line Islamist faction, a serious blow to the Obama administration’s plans to create a reliable military force inside Syria.

The American-led coalition responded with airstrikes to help the American-aligned unit, known as Division 30, in fighting off the assault, according to an American military spokesman and combatants on both sides. The strikes were the first known use of coalition air power in direct battlefield support of fighters in Syria who were trained by the Pentagon.

The attack on Friday was mounted by the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. It came a day after the Nusra Front captured two leaders and at least six fighters of Division 30, which supplied the first trainees to graduate from the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State training program.

While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.

The Nusra Front said in a statement on Friday that its aim was to eliminate Division 30 before it could gain a deeper foothold in Syria. The Nusra Front did much the same last year when it smashed the main groups that had been trained and equipped in a different American effort, one run covertly by the C.I.A. [Continue reading…]

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Fiasco: The Pentagon’s ill-conceived program to train anti-ISIS fighters

The New York Times reports: A Pentagon program to train moderate Syrian insurgents to fight the Islamic State has been vexed by problems of recruitment, screening, dismissals and desertions that have left only a tiny band of fighters ready to do battle.

Those fighters — 54 in all — suffered perhaps their most embarrassing setback yet on Thursday. One of their leaders, a Syrian Army defector who recruited them, was abducted in Syria near the Turkish border, along with his deputy who commands the trainees. They were seized not by the Islamic State but by its rival the Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda that is another Islamist extremist byproduct of the four-year-old Syrian civil war.

The abductions illustrate the challenges confronting the Obama administration as it seeks to marshal local insurgents to fight the Islamic State, which it views as the region’s biggest threat.

After a year of trying, the Pentagon still struggles to find recruits to fight the Islamic State without also battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, their original foe. The willing few face vetting meant to weed out extremists, so stringent that only dozens have been approved, and they are bit players in the rebellion. The program has not engaged with the biggest, most powerful groups, Islamist factions that are better funded, better equipped and more motivated.

The setback for the American effort in Syria comes just as the United States and Turkey have undertaken a joint plan to create an “Islamic State free-zone” in northern Syria, using warplanes flown from Turkish air bases to take the area with a ground force of Syrian insurgents, presumably including trainees of the Pentagon’s program. [Continue reading…]

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For Turkish president, war may offer political rewards

The Wall Street Journal reports: Turkey’s government — which lost its parliamentary majority last month — bills its new two-front war against Kurdish militants and Islamic State as a much-overdue reaction to terrorism. But, on the third front of domestic politics, this violence could also help President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party regain control.

In the June 7 parliamentary elections, Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, lost its majority for the first time in 12 years, and has been in coalition talks since. If these negotiations fail in coming weeks, Mr. Erdogan has said he will send the country back to the polls.

A rise in nationalist feelings amid the bloodshed and an unfolding crackdown on the government’s Kurdish political foes could bolster AKP’s chances in such a new election, many analysts say.

A two-percentage point shift from the last election could restore AKP’s absolute majority, making concessions demanded by its potential coalition partners on press freedom, corruption prosecutions and foreign policy unnecessary. This could also allow Mr. Erdogan to proceed with controversial plans to turn Turkey into a presidential republic and solidify his personal power.

“Turkey’s domestic policy and foreign policy have become messily mixed together. It’s now very difficult to separate the domestic political considerations from the security and strategic considerations of those who have started the air strikes,” said Soli Ozel, a Turkish political commentator and professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. [Continue reading…]

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Senior Western official: Links between Turkey and ISIS are now ‘undeniable’

The Observer reports: When US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.

The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients.

As a result, the oil trade between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance between the two. It led to protests from Washington and Europe – both already wary of Turkey’s 900-mile border with Syria being used as a gateway by would-be jihadis from around the world.

The estimated $1m-$4m per day in oil revenues that was thought to have flowed into Isis coffers over at least six months from late 2013 helped to transform an ambitious force with limited means into a juggernaut that has been steadily drawing western forces back to the region and increasingly testing state borders.

Across the region, violence has been spreading across borders, scattering huge numbers of refugees and contributing to the turmoil in neighbouring regimes. Few countries – from Turkey to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel – remain unscathed by the tide of chaos spreading out from Syria.

Despite one year of air strikes aimed at crippling the group’s spread, Isis remains entrenched in northern and eastern Syria, in control of much of western Iraq and camped on Lebanon’s eastern border. Its offshoots are gathering steam in north Africa and now, more than at any time since the latest incarnation of Isis emerged, its leaders claim to be positioning the group for strikes well outside the territory that it now controls.

In the wake of the raid that killed Abu Sayyaf, suspicions of an undeclared alliance have hardened. One senior western official familiar with the intelligence gathered at the slain leader’s compound said that direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now “undeniable”.

“There are hundreds of flash drives and documents that were seized there,” the official told the Observer. “They are being analysed at the moment, but the links are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey opens up old wounds with a new campaign against the PKK

By Cengiz Gunes, The Open University

The recent surge of violence in Turkey following the massacre of socialist activists in Suruc has brought Turkey perilously close to an all-out conflict with the Kurds.

Turkey has begun regular air strikes targeting the bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrillas as part of its broader “war on terror”, which has also included action against Islamic State (IS) and the left-wing Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKPC). So far, more than 1,000 people have been detained in Turkey. That number includes many trade unionists – and there are growing fears that non-violent dissidents will be targeted.

Turkey’s effort to tie its campaign against the PKK to the international campaign against IS is widely seen as a ploy to make its actions against the Kurds more internationally legitimate. Turkey seems to have convinced the US of the need to create a de-facto safe zone on the border with Syria, a long-held Turkish plan to prevent Kurdish autonomous regions from joining one to another. The Kurds view that plan with deep suspicion, seeing it as a push to undermine their achievements in Syria.

While the trigger points of Turkey’s conflict with the PKK in the past year have all been connected to the developments in Syria, it’s worth remembering that the conflict has a much deeper history.

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Turkish gov’t not ready to restart peace talks with Kurds, continues airstrikes on PKK in Iraq

The Associated Press reports: Turkish jets hit Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq overnight and the government said strikes would continue until the rebels lay down their arms, despite calls Wednesday by the pro-Kurdish opposition for an immediate end to the violence and the resumption of peace efforts.

Turkey’s air raids against the Kurdish rebels, which came at the same time as Turkey began cracking down on the Islamic State group, are reigniting a 30-year conflict with the insurgents and leave a two-year-old, fragile peace process in pieces.

The airstrikes on IS follow intense U.S. pressure on Turkey to more actively join a coalition against the extremists, but Turkey’s actions against the Kurdish rebel group pose a conundrum for U.S. President Barack Obama, who is relying heavily on the insurgents as allies in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Coalition must seek a common goal in Syria

Hassan Hassan writes: For Turkey, defeating ISIL remains a lower priority than preventing Syrian Kurds from establishing the infrastructure for a future state in the north and the downfall of the Assad regime. Ankara is unlikely to change its priorities on ISIL unless there is understanding about these other issues. Also, the West is more interested in fighting ISIL than the Assad regime. But they require the help of Syrian rebels, who have the reverse priorities.

With such a divided coalition, who needs enemies? ISIL will continue to reap the benefits of such confused priorities until all the parties agree to work towards one goal under one strategy. That is possible and it starts in Aleppo.

Over the past few months, a momentum has been building among the Syrian rebels to fight ISIL: for the first time since it was established in early 2014, the usually-quiet Syrian Islamic Council issued a fatwa in June to fight ISIL. In the same month, a large coalition of rebels on the ground met in Antakya and concluded that fighting ISIL was a priority for all the rebels. Even Jabhat Al Nusra’s leader made it clear that ISIL was an enemy in an interview with Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey launches fresh airstrikes on PKK camps

Rudaw reports: Turkish jets launched fresh attacks on military bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Kurdistan Region on Tuesday, a Rudaw reporter on the scene said.

The attacks on Tuesday again targeted the PKK’s Qandil Mountain base in the Kurdistan Region. Turkey carried out airstrikes on the base on Saturday and Sunday, and pounded the positions with artillery on Monay.

The attacks signal a breakdown of peace talks between the Ankara government and the PKK.

The airstrikes coincide with nationwide raids inside Turkey against the PKK, as well as Islamist groups such as the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: Last week, the Turkish government announced it was joining the war against ISIS. Since then it has arrested more than 1,000 people in Turkey and carried out waves of air raids in neighboring Syria and Iraq. But most of those arrests and air strikes, say Kurdish leaders, have hit Kurdish and left wing groups, not ISIS.

They say Turkey is now hindering, rather than helping, the fight against ISIS. “Most of our forces that have been targeted were forces that were preparing themselves to go to fight against ISIS,” says Zagros [Hiwa, a spokesman for the Kurdish PKK forces]. [Continue reading…]

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Falling back, fighting on: Assad lays out his strategy

Aron Lund writes: The meat of the speech [Bashar al-Assad gave on Syrian public television on July 26] was neither the attempt to co-opt Western-inspired “antiterrorist” discourse nor the nationalist rah-rah. Far more interesting was Assad’s lengthy discussion of the recent setbacks suffered by his army. After advancing for much of 2014, the government ran out of steam over the winter, as the economy started to sputter and rebels received additional support. This spring, Assad’s fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse.

In March, Assad’s troops were forced to surrender the provincial capital of Idlib to Islamist rebels, as well as the southern city of Bosra al-Sham. In April, the army’s last real foothold in Idlib was lost with Ariha and Jisr al-Shughur. Then the last remaining border crossing into Jordan went the same way, which slashed overland trade. In May, the extremist group known as the Islamic State took Sukhna and the strategic city of Palmyra, isolating the city of Deir Ezzor. It then began to seize or destroy parts of Syria’s energy infrastructure. In June, more moderate rebels took out an important army base in the southern Daraa Governorate, although the ensuing offensive to capture Daraa City then seemed to stall. The Islamic State jihadists have also given Assad’s forces a bad bruising in Hasakah, although the army has so far held out thanks to an alliance of convenience with local Kurdish fighters.

The government has advanced in the Syrian-Lebanese border region of Zabadani, where it is backed by the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, but the situation now looks quite grim for Assad. Much of the official Syrian Arab Army has been supplemented or replaced by militias, but even then, pro-Assad forces are spread dangerously thin on the ground. Iran, now flush with confidence after its nuclear deal, recently signed on to a $ 1 billion credit deal to aid the Syrian economy—but as things stand, Assad simply seems to be trying to hold more territory than he can defend. [Continue reading…]

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The self-government revolution that’s happening under the radar in Syria

Frederic C. Hof writes: With Iran circling the wagons around an ever-shrinking Syrian statelet nominally headed by Bashar al-Assad, a key question is coming into sharp focus: Who might ultimately replace the ruling clan if Tehran cannot keep its clients afloat? The answer is both complex and hopeful: Self-government at local levels is taking root in Syria and forms the basis for what should come next.

One of the few uplifting experiences to be had in any Syrian context these days is to meet with young Syrian activists, as I recently did in Gaziantep, Turkey. A young lawyer said something striking: “This is not just a revolution against Bashar al-Assad. It is a revolution for self-government. Replacing Bashar with someone else issuing decrees from Damascus — even someone much better than Bashar — is not acceptable.”

From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, unarmed activists have formed, under the worst security conditions imaginable, local councils to provide governmental services to their neighbors. This is revolutionary. For 40 years the Assad family had concentrated in its own hands, in Damascus, the direct governing of all Syrians. Officials assigned to Syria’s outback were, at best, order-taking clerks. At worst they were active members of a clan-dominated police state and terror network. Unless Iran helps its client re-subjugate Syria, the days of Damascus-dominated governance are done.

There are today hundreds of local councils throughout non-Assad parts of Syria. Some operate clandestinely in areas overrun by the so-called Islamic State. Some operate in areas where the Assad regime — with Iran’s full support — unloads helicopter-borne “barrel bombs” onto schools, hospitals and mosques. Some operate in neighborhoods subjected to Iranian-facilitated starvation sieges. These local councils are supported by a vast network of civil society organizations — the kinds of voluntary professional associations that undergird Western democracies. All of this is new to Syria. It is the essence of the Syrian Revolution. [Continue reading…]

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