Category Archives: Syria

Syrian defector to Trump: Stop Assad’s machinery of death

CNN reports: The Syrian defector who smuggled out tens of thousands of photos of people allegedly tortured to death in Assad regime jails has spoken out in his first TV interview.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the defector, code-named “Caesar,” urged US President Donald Trump to stop what he calls the “criminality” taking place in Syria’s government-run prisons.

“We have shown the killing and torture of so many of the Syrian people,” he said, “and you cannot give back the lives to those that have lost it. But we ask you, out of your humanity, to stop the machinery of death.”

“We are asking to all the officials, to all the policy makers, to President Trump’s White House, which we are hoping will do the right thing, we beg you to stop the machinery of death in Syria.” [Continue reading…]

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A rebel push on Damascus shows that Syria’s war is far from over

The Washington Post reports: An unexpected rebel push on Damascus has brought Syria’s civil war to the heart of its capital for the first time in years, spreading panic among residents and serving as a reminder that the conflict is far from over.

Streets emptied and many shops and schools were closed for a third day Tuesday as battles raged on the eastern edge of the city, where the rebels launched their surprise assault over the weekend. Mortar shells crashed into residential neighborhoods, jets streaked overhead, and the rattle of gunfire plunged Damascus back onto the front lines of a war that has raged since 2011.

The rebel offensive seems unlikely to lead to any sustained ad­vances into President Bashar al-Assad’s most vital and best-defended stronghold. Loyalist forces­ scrambled troops from other areas to defend the capital and appeared to have halted the rebel advance just beyond Abbassiyeen Square, a major gateway just a few miles from the historic Old City of Damascus.

The fighting marked the first time since 2012 that rebel forces­ have advanced so close to the center of Damascus, highlighting the continuing fragility of Assad’s hold on power despite nearly a year and a half of steady gains — aided by Russia’s military intervention — that appeared to have sealed the outcome of the war.

It is now becoming clear that although the rebels lack the capacity to topple Assad, Assad’s forces­ also lack the capacity to defeat the rebels, said Andrew J. Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“This doesn’t mean the regime is going to be defeated. But their forces­ are just too thin,” he said. “They stand in one place, they contract in another, they shift forces­ to another, and this has been going on for years.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s frightening trifecta: ISIS, Erdogan & U.S. nukes

Christopher Dickey writes: Immediately after the coup [last July], which involved some Turkish air force officers, the Incirlik air base used by the United States in the war against the so-called Islamic State was cordoned off and effectively shut down for several days. Its Turkish commander was placed under arrest and frog-marched off the base.

Given the Turkish government’s behavior and the country’s evident instability, it’s of no small concern that under NATO’s “nuclear sharing” program, an estimated 50 to 90 atomic weapons reportedly are located at Incirlik (PDF). Although these B61 munitions are considered “tactical” weapons, each thermonuclear device has a potential blast yield of about 340 kilotons—more than 20 times that of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

In the immediate aftermath of the Incirlik blockade and arrests last summer, spurious reports played up by Russian propagandists claimed the nukes had been moved from Incirlik to Romania. That was not the case. But there remains wide sentiment among security analysts that those nukes should be moved somewhere more secure.

As a Congressional Research Service report (PDF) noted at the time, concerns were based on “both the ongoing political uncertainties in Turkey, including the evolving state of U.S.-Turkish relations, and the base’s proximity to territory controlled by ISIS.”

The Syrian border is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Incirlik. Towns like Al Bab and Dabiq, until recently under the control of the so-called Islamic State, are slightly further.

The argument for leaving the nukes in Turkey was to reassure Ankara against a threat from Russia. But given the obvious and growing rapprochement between Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Erdogan’s increasingly overt hostility toward his NATO allies, leaving thermonuclear weapons on the bomb racks of Incirlik seems to many a pointless and dangerous exercise. [Continue reading…]

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How chlorine gas became a weapon in Syria’s civil war

Dorian Geiger writes: Following the 1,300 tonnes of sarin nerve gas and its precursors being removed from Syria, chemical attacks persist there nearly four years later, but most notably in the form of chlorine, which has emerged as the most heavily used chemical weapon in the war.

“We saw chlorine appearing as a weapon in Syria for the first time in 2014,” said Ole Solvang, the deputy director of the emergencies division at Human Rights Watch.

“The challenge is there are so many horrific things going on in Syria, that this one issue tends to perhaps be overshadowed sometimes by other attacks that are going on.”

In February, Human Rights Watch and Solvang authored a report documenting at least eight instances of chlorine use by the Syrian regime in the battle for Aleppo between Nov. 17 and Dec. 13, 2016. The human rights watchdog verified the attacks through video footage analysis, phone, and in-person interviews, as well as by social media.

The report indicated that the chlorine attacks killed at least nine people, including four children, and injured around 200 people. The attacks, according to the report, constituted war crimes.

“This is, of course, horrific because it is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention that Syria is a part of,” Solvang explained. “It’s horrific for the victims, but also because it really undermines one of the strongest bans on any weapon in international humanitarian law and what we’re really concerned about is that the government’s continued use of chemical attacks will undermine this ban and lower the threshold for other countries to also use it [chlorine].”

The Chemical Weapons Convention, implemented in 1993, constitute the world’s first internationally binding chemical weapon laws. They are enforced by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a United Nations-backed agency.

Following the sarin gas attack in Ghouta in August 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people – more than 400 of them children – according a United Nations Security Council report, Syria joined the convention as part of an international agreement – and to subdue the Obama administration’s threats of military action. It was the 190th country to sign on.

So to what role has chlorine played in Syria’s complex and long civil war? And what has been the human toll?

Human Rights Watch have documented 24 chlorine attacks in Syria since 2014, of which 32 people were killed and hundreds were injured. However, Solvang acknowledged that this is likely a grave underestimate.

“It’s a terrifying weapon to most people,” Solvang said.

Chlorine is a choking agent. Its greenish-yellow clouds of gas cause shortness of breath, wheezing, respiratory failure, irritation in the eyes, vomiting, and sometimes death.

Chlorine’s effects are also largely psychological: the chemical triggers fear, shock, and panic in a way that other conventional weapons don’t. In the case of Aleppo, Solvang suspects the regime strategically used chlorine to force a mass exodus of the city. [Continue reading…]

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Why Raqqa won’t be the end of the road for ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: To understand American policy short-sightedness in the region, look no further than northern Syria today. One can predict with utmost confidence that the policy that Washington insists on pursuing in Raqqa will do two things. It will heat up a secondary conflict in the broader Syrian civil war to a boiling point, and it will reset the conditions for the return of extremist forces.

A common way to deflect the troubling issues with the policy is to make it principally about Turkey. The overarching concern, though, is how a YPG-led campaign to dislodge ISIL from Raqqa will be perceived locally and beyond, and what the YPG seeks to gain from fighting in a predominantly Arab city that ISIL took from the Syrian rebels after the latter expelled the regime from it in 2013.

A YPG commander, Sipan Hemo, told Reuters on Friday that the attack on Raqqa will begin in early April. Everyone should wish the anti-ISIL forces luck, but it should be made clear that the United States is operating below the credit line politically. By that, I mean two things.

First, the win against ISIL would be purely tactical: the removal of ISIL militants from Raqqa will not damage the group’s image, as it should ideally have been designed to do. If policymakers involved in the campaign think the demise of the group in Raqqa in this manner will undermine its narrative, they will be mistaken and out of touch with reality. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian UN envoy: Putin sent message to Israel that its freedom to act in Syria is over

Haaretz reports: Russia has sent a clear message to Israel that the rules of the game have changed in Syria and its freedom to act in Syrian skies is over, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Sunday night.

“Putin sent a clear message,” said Bashar Jaafari, speaking on Syrian television. “The fact is that the Israeli ambassador [to Russia] was summoned for a conversation only a day after he submitted his credentials [to the Russian Foreign Ministry last Thursday], and was told categorically that this game is over.”

Syria’s use of anti-aircraft fire against Israel last Thursday night has changed the rules of the game, too, Jaafari said, adding that Syria will not stand idly by in the face of an Israeli threat.

He also claimed that when the civil war began in Syria in 2011, opposition militia groups sabotaged the anti-aircraft defense systems belonging to President Bashar Assad’s regime, giving Israel freedom to operate.

In a separate incident, Syrian media reported Sunday that the commander of a militia fighting alongside the regime was killed in an Israeli airstrike around Quneitra, in the Golan Heights.

The Lebanese TV channel Al Mayadeen, which is associated with Hezbollah, identified the casualty as Yasser Assayed, a member of the national defense militia. A source associated with the Assad regime said Assayad was a commander in the Golan brigade, a militia of Druze fighters (from villages in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights) who are fighting with the regime.

Between Thursday night and Friday morning, Israeli fighter jets attacked several targets in Syria, triggering the most serious clash between Israel and Syria since the civil war erupted six years ago. In response to the airstrikes, the Assad regime’s aerial defense system fired several missiles at the jets. Israel’s Arrow anti-missile defense system was launched, shooting down one of the missiles north of Jerusalem. The incident forced Israel to admit for the first time that it had launched an aerial attack in Syria.

Following that, Israel’s ambassador to Moscow, Gary Koren, was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry for talks with Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov – again, an unusual development. Since Russian forces began operating in Syria in 2015, there have been a number of airstrikes that foreign media have attributed to Israel. But the Israeli ambassador had never previously been called in to clarify Israel’s actions. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Fierce clashes broke out in the Syrian capital on Sunday after insurgents infiltrated government-held parts of the city through tunnels overnight in a rare advance after months of steady losses elsewhere in the country.

It was a surprising breach of the security perimeter in Damascus, where the government has effectively walled itself off from opposition forces encamped in two enclaves in the eastern parts of the city.

Bashar al-Assad’s government has endeavoured to maintain a veneer of normality in the capital as his forces bomb opposition areas on the edges and suburbs of the city.

Residents said artillery shells and rockets had landed in the heart of the city. Damascus Today, a Facebook group run by activists, reported government airstrikes in the area where the clashes took place.

Government infantry and tank reinforcements arrived to repel the attackers in the afternoon, the group said. [Continue reading…]

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After six years of war, Syria’s rebels reflect on whether revolution has been worth it

The Independent reports: Almost half a million dead. More than 10.9 million forced to flee their homes, many into the arms of traffickers or graves at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Cities starved into submission by government sieges, tens of thousands disappeared in regime prisons, and the rampant growth of extremist ideology intent on sucking the little life and joy left out of Syria.

An entire generation of children who don’t flinch at explosions or artillery fire in the distance.

Such is the state of the Syrian revolution, six years on since the hopes of the Arab Spring.

No one who took to the streets of Damascus and Aleppo in a “Day of Rage” on 15 March 2011, demanding the release of 15 Deraa teenagers arrested for daubing walls with anti-government graffiti, could foresee the scale of the war to come.

“Your turn, Doctor [Bashar al-Assad],” demonstrators chanted, drawing courage from the recent fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia.

Arrests and beatings did not deter them. After three days of the exceptionally rare protests against authority, the government had had enough. On March 18, four protesters in Deraa – most reports say they were unarmed – were shot by security forces which opened fire on a crowd.

The killings provided the catalyst for a revolution which has morphed into a conflict unlike any other modern war.

Its full repercussions are still yet to be understood.

On the sixth anniversary of the uprising, Syria now shows dangerous signs of descending into an entrenched state of warfare such as that suffered by Iraq and Afghanistan, subject to the whims of internal warlords and proxy powers.

In diplomatic circles, once-strident calls that “Assad must go” are no longer very loud.

Despite round after round of failed peace talks, the UN is adamant a diplomatic solution to the crisis must be agreed, even as Russian and Iranian intervention on the battlefield has once again put a military victory within the Assad government’s reach.

The fall of Aleppo at the end of the last year and election of US President Donald Trump means that 2017 is a turning point for Syria’s opposition.

Most Western players in Syria’s war now operate on the understanding that the best outcome rebel fighters can hope for is free elections in which the embattled ruler agrees to step down.

“The extent to which the West is willing to continue to provide military support for the rebels is uncertain, particularly with Trump so narrowly focused on defeating Isis,” said Tim Eaton, a research fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.

“Without significantly increased backing, which is not forthcoming, the rebels are in a position where they can’t win.

“That doesn’t mean, though, that they won’t continue to fight, and that there aren’t things to fight for. But six years in, the rebels may be forced to reign in some of their ambitions.”

Most of those either involved in the original peaceful protest movement or the armed resistance to the Assad regime that The Independent spoke to, whether still in Syria or abroad, were initially hesitant to share their thoughts on the country’s future.

Some said they could not possibly put into words what the revolution means to them now.

“I have too much and too little to say,” said one Istanbul-based activist, who asked not to be named. “I was on the side of freedom in 2011, and I am on the side of freedom now. But how many more will have to die? How do I judge that? It’s impossible.” [Continue reading…]

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Syrian defector who documented Assad’s atrocities returning to Washington

Josh Rogin writes: The Syrian defector known as “Caesar,” who brought the world the largest trove of evidence of mass atrocities perpetrated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is returning to Washington this weekend. Three years after he helped expose some of the worst war crimes of our generation, the victims of those crimes are still a long way from getting justice.

From 2011 to 2013, Caesar worked as a military photographer in the Syrian army, forced to meticulously document the torture and murder of thousands of men, women and children inside Assad’s jails. When he fled Syria in 2013, he brought with him over 55,000 images that show the killing of over 11,000 civilians in custody, along with documents detailing the Syrian government’s highly organized system of mass murder.

The photos, some of which were released publicly in 2014, show bodies starved, tortured and mutilated. The Syrian government kept detailed records. Assad’s “machinery of death” was the worst since the Nazis, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes Stephen Rapp said at the time.

Caesar testified before Congress in the summer of 2014 and explained to U.S. lawmakers that the evidence he smuggled out of Syria showed only a small segment of the overall government operation and that tens of thousands of civilians were still being tortured and murdered in Assad’s prisons.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum took up Caesar’s cause and helped build an effort to raise public awareness about the Syrian government’s mass atrocities, working with elements of the Syrian opposition. Caesar’s photos were shown in the halls of Congress, the United Nations and the European Parliament. In 2015, the FBI verified the authenticity of the photos after an extensive forensic investigation.

Now, Caesar is returning to the United States with a simple question: What progress has been made? For those pushing for accountability, justice and a halt to the slaughter, the sad answer is not enough. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military denies reports it bombed mosque in Syria

The New York Times reports: The United States military said that it had carried out an airstrike against a meeting of Qaeda militants on Thursday in Syria and that a number of the extremists had been killed.

The American military statement came as Syria activists reported that a mosque had been bombed and that scores of innocent civilians had been killed and wounded.

A spokesman for the United States Central Command said the American aircraft had struck a nearby building, but did not hit the mosque.

“We did not target any mosques,” said Col. John J. Thomas, a spokesman for the Central Command, which has responsibility for American military missions in the Middle East. “What we did target was destroyed. There is a mosque within 50 feet of that building that is still standing.”

But one local activist, Mohamed al Shaghel, said the people who had been struck had “no affiliation with any military faction or any political side.”

“I passed by the hospital,” he said. “I was told that about 50 were killed and 50 wounded. Rescuers are still looking for bodies under the rubble.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike took place in Al Jinah, a village between the cities of Idlib and Aleppo. It said 42 people had been killed, most of them civilians, and described the attack as a “massacre.” [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda is starting to swallow the Syrian opposition

Charles Lister writes: After six years of conflict, Syria and its people have been completely transformed. The effects of a crisis that has killed nearly a half-million people and forced nearly 11.5 million more from their homes are now etched into the many identities to which Syrians attach themselves. While a majority of Syrians vigorously resist the formal breakup of their country, it is impossible to ignore how the brutal and protracted war has instilled deep divisions in a once-cohesive society.

In many areas of the country, battle lines remain physically drawn among villages that once lived in harmony. And the sectarian dynamic that was once supported only by extremist fringes has started to decisively shape the mainstream opposition.

The origins of this dynamic lie with President Bashar al-Assad, who was quick to label the peaceful protest movement of early 2011 as a “foreign conspiracy.” This conspiracy, Assad claimed in mid-2011, was one being led by Sunni “terrorists” — many dozens if not hundreds of which he had released from prison in March, May, and June 2011. Assad’s sectarian framing of the crisis and his cynical positioning of himself as the protector of Syria’s minorities not only allowed him to bolster his base, but also guaranteed that extremists within the opposition would gradually see their sectarian narrative thrive.

And that is, more or less, what has happened. The Syrian opposition is at its weakest point since 2012, and international trends are moving against it. The United States has distanced itself from the “Assad must go” narrative and seen its attention diverted by its own election; Europe is distracted by refugees and Brexit; and Turkey has done an about-face and, in effect, sold Aleppo to Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow, Tehran, and Hezbollah have methodically enhanced their military commitments to the Assad regime, guaranteeing at minimum its survival.

Amid these challenges, Syria’s opposition has entered into a period of introspection and great internal strain. Placed under concerted pressure — whether by Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the south, or by Turkey and Qatar in the north — and faced with few other options, Syria’s non-al-Qaeda armed opposition demonstrated their pragmatism by agreeing to attend political talks in Kazakhstan and Switzerland, even though their popular base remained deeply opposed to such signals of “compromise,” and few of the attendees expected the talks to succeed.

But Syria’s armed opposition is also changing as a result of internal pressures. Al Qaeda’s Syrian representatives — rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) in July 2016 and then renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) after subsuming several other groups in January — have been relentless, and patient, in pursuing their long-term objective: a merger of all armed Syrian opposition groups under its broad transnational Islamic umbrella. Al Qaeda has commonly called this goal a “uniting of the ranks.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s plain words made clear his intention to ban Muslims

The New York Times reports: Rarely do a presidential candidate’s own words so dramatically haunt his presidency.

For the second time in two months, a federal judge on Wednesday refused to allow President Trump to impose a travel ban, citing his campaign rhetoric as evidence of an improper desire to prevent Muslims from entering the United States.

The judge’s stunning rebuke was a vivid example of how Mr. Trump’s angry, often xenophobic rallying cries during the 2016 campaign — which were so effective in helping to get him elected — have become legal and political liabilities now that he is in the Oval Office.

It is a lesson that presidents usually learn quickly: Difficult and controversial issues can easily be painted as black-and-white during a long campaign, but they are often more complicated for those who are in a position to govern.

That is especially true for Mr. Trump’s bellicose remarks about immigrants, which animated his upstart presidential campaign but now threaten to get in the way of his broader agenda for a health care overhaul, tax cuts and infrastructure spending.

It all seemed so simple before.

Five days after terrorists in California killed 14 people in December 2015, Mr. Trump whipped up his supporters at a rally by vowing to impose a complete ban on entry by Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

The crowd roared its approval.

Later in the campaign, Mr. Trump backed away from calling for a total Muslim ban. But the judge in Hawaii who ruled on Wednesday appears to have concluded that Mr. Trump’s true motivations could be found by looking at his earlier remarks.

“These plainly worded statements,” wrote Judge Derrick K. Watson of Federal District Court in Honolulu, “betray the executive order’s stated secular purpose.” [Continue reading…]

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Study describes the ‘weaponisation’ of healthcare in Syria

The Guardian reports: The “weaponisation” of healthcare in Syria, involving the targeted destruction of medical facilities and the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, is unprecedented and has profound and dangerous implications for medical neutrality in conflict zones, according to an authoritative study.

“Syria has become the most dangerous place on earth for healthcare providers,” say the researchers involved. Their study of the attacks on healthcare in Syria since 2011, published by the Lancet medical journal, reveals that the death toll among medical workers is at least 814. Some of those health workers were tortured and executed.

There were nearly 200 attacks on healthcare facilities in 2016 alone, say the researchers in their first report for the Lancet Commission on Syria, led by the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut.

The authors define what they call the weaponisation of healthcare in Syria as a situation “in which healthcare facilities are attacked, workers are targeted, medical neutrality is obliterated and international humanitarian laws are violated to restrict or prevent access to care as a weapon of war”.

They criticise UN agencies and the international community for failing to hold the aggressors, who are breaking international conventions, to account. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian military, not rebels, severed Damascus water supply, UN finds

The New York Times reports: Syrian military airstrikes on rebels were responsible for severing water supplies to 5.5 million people in the Damascus region for weeks starting last December, the United Nations said on Tuesday, rebutting government claims that insurgents were to blame.

In a bombing campaign to drive rebel forces from the Barada Valley north of Damascus, Syrian air force jets launched multiple strikes on their positions around the al-Feijeh spring, which supplied water to the capital, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring the conflict in Syria said in a report.

The airstrikes amounted to a war crime, the commission said, because the effect of the attack — denying water to so many people — was “grossly disproportionate” to the military advantage that the government could have anticipated or achieved.

When water supplies to the capital were halted in late December, the government blamed rebels, first saying that they had poisoned the water and later that they had damaged the infrastructure. Water service was not restored until February.

The United Nations investigators said video of the bombings, witness testimony and satellite imagery showed the water supply system had been damaged in at least two airstrikes using high-explosive bombs. [Continue reading…]

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Russian-backed Syria talks derailed as rebels boycott

Reuters reports: Russian-led peace talks on Syria were derailed on Tuesday as rebels backed by Turkey boycotted a third round of meetings in Kazakhstan and the Kremlin indicated there were international divisions over the process.

Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally, said the rebels’ reasons for staying away were unconvincing and their decision came as a surprise. Describing the rebels as Turkish proxies, the Syrian government envoy said Ankara had broken “its commitments” to the Astana process.

The rebels said on Tuesday they would not attend the talks, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, because of what they called Russia’s unwillingness to end air strikes on rebel-held areas and its failure to get the Syrian army and Iranian-backed militia to abide by a ceasefire. [Continue reading…]

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For Russian TV, Syria isn’t just a foreign country — it’s a parallel universe

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: With the world relapsing into old rivalries, disinformation is emerging as the continuation of war by other means. Propaganda has always been used by authoritarian states to control populations at home — but technological advances are allowing them to also neutralize enemies abroad. None has been more aggressive and resourceful in this regard than Russia. And nowhere has this weaponized information been more lethal than in its coverage of Syria — vividly exemplified by RT, the Kremlin’s international broadcaster.

There is a virtual consensus among multinational bodies and human rights organizations that together, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russia hold the balance of responsibility for the killing and displacement in Syria. But hewing to the official Kremlin line, RT has cast Assad as the victim, his opponents as jihadists and his repression as a “war on terror.” The aim is less to persuade than to obfuscate. RT doesn’t have to tell a credible or coherent story as long as it can cast doubt on competing ones.

“There is no objectivity,” says RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, “only approximations of the truth.” Complete objectivity is indeed unachievable — yet it is a standard to which most journalists aspire. RT’s innovation is to dispense with objectivity altogether and make approximation of the truth its aspiration. News doesn’t have to be true as long as it feels true — and with truth thus relativized, fact becomes one with alternative fact. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda now leads the fight against Assad

Shiraz Maher writes: On 9 February, a grey-bearded and balding Syrian rebel commander wearing military dress appeared in an internet video calling for greater unity among the forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad. This was unremarkable. Syria’s rebel groups frequently issue unity statements, merge units and create umbrella groups – many of which, like the fruit of the medlar tree, turn rotten before they turn ripe.

Yet the message from Hashem al-Sheikh – a native of Aleppo imprisoned by Assad in 2005 for his jihadi beliefs and then released along with other Islamist prisoners in 2011 in an attempt to poison the nascent uprising against the regime – was hugely important in the context of the Syrian Civil War: it signalled the potential subsuming of the entire Syrian opposition to radical and reactionary forces, and to al-Qaeda in particular.

In the video, Hashem al-Sheikh announ­ced the creation of a powerful, extremist-dominated entity known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), or the “Committee for the Liberation of the Levant”.

One of the main groups that joined the new committee is Nur al-Din al-Zenki, a corrupt and brutal Islamist movement that was once backed by the CIA as a “vetted organisation”, though this designation was later revoked. In July last year, five months before Aleppo fell to Assad’s forces, the group’s members were filmed beheading Abdullah Tayseer in the eastern part of the city. Tayseer was a 13-year-old boy whom they accused of fighting for the regime.

Far more significant was the folding into HTS of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), which until July was known as Jabhat al-Nusrah – and which represented al-Qaeda on the ground in Syria. JFS, comprised mainly of local fighters, had earned a degree of popular support among civilians because of its fighters’ valour and lack of corruption. The rebranding was an attempt by its leaders to recast it as a broader part of the overall uprising, and to capitalise on ordinary Syrians’ hatred of Islamic State (IS), which is widely seen as having usurped the revolution and diverted its aims.

Consequently, al-Qaeda has pursued an audacious line of messaging that seeks to portray the group in Syria as a responsible actor that follows a “middle path” between acquiescence and extremism. The corollary is clear: that it is both authentic and organic. “JFS is not a fringe group that exists on another planet,” wrote a spokesman, Mos­tafa Mahamed, shortly after it rebranded in 2016. “It is deeply embedded in society, made up from the average Syrian people.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. troop presence in Syria now at its highest. But how long will they remain for and why?

Time reports: The Trump Administration is intensifying America’s involvement in the ground war in Syria, having announced on March 9 that it is sending 400 more troops to join the fight against ISIS there.

The new deployment of Army Rangers and a U.S. Marine artillery unit raises fresh questions about the scope and timeline of the U.S. mission in Syria, where the number of American troops is now approaching a high of around a thousand (Washington has not disclosed an exact number). The U.S. is also sending another 2,500 troops to a staging base in Kuwait, awaiting possible deployment to Iraq or Syria.

Recent comments from U.S. officials suggest that the military is contemplating a deployment in Syria that extends far beyond the defeat of ISIS as a conventional armed force. In his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 9, Army General Joseph Votel, who leads the U.S. Central Command, said additional forces may be needed in the future to help with “stability and other aspects of the operations.” The Pentagon is also considering lifting a formal cap of roughly 500 U.S. troops permitted on the ground in Syria, a limitation imposed by former President Barack Obama, according to the Washington Post.

The near doubling of the U.S. military deployment in eastern Syria, along with Votel’s comments, suggest a shift toward a more open-ended commitment of forces to Syria, echoing the prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the escalation is also prompting calls to define the objectives of the mission over the long term in order to avoid a costly occupation both in terms of lives and resources. [Continue reading…]

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Gangster paradise: Assad’s control erodes as warlords gain upper hand

Der Spiegel reports: On a cool morning, an elderly man is standing at his espresso machine on a street in eastern Aleppo. It’s shortly after 8 a.m., and this part of the city — destroyed in the war and reconquered by the regime in December — is waking up. Green grocers arrive and set out their boxes of produce on the rubble piled in front of their stores. Others are shoveling debris from the roads.

The name of the man with the espresso machine must go unmentioned, otherwise he would soon be dead. A fire is burning in a metal drum next to his improvised coffee counter, and he is using it to periodically warm his hands. Several weeks ago, just after the neighborhood was retaken, he returned to the small workshop where he had run a motorcycle repair shop — but it was already too late. He immediately saw that someone had shot open the lock.

Inside, he found uniformed fighters from a militia affiliated with the regime. They were in the process, he says, of removing a motorcycle, his German tools and all replacement parts from the garage. Two of the militia members, he says, silently threatened him with their Kalashnikovs, leaving him no choice but to leave as the men loaded his belonging into a pick-up truck.

As he relates his story, other civilians approach the fire and begin nodding. One of them, the owner of a general store, says that regular army soldiers had hardly left before militia members began emptying out his store. Another relates the story of how militia members murdered his brother. The brother had been lying wounded in bed when five fighters forced their way into his apartment. “Bring him out,” the fighters ordered before claiming the apartment as their own. The man protested, saying his brother was unable to walk — whereupon one of the militia members pulled out his gun and shot the brother in the head. Then the fighters looted the apartment.

More and more men from the neighborhood assemble at the coffee machine and tell their own stories of looting, but suddenly, the men at the fire fall silent. A militia fighter can be seen walking down the street with a golden hawk on his uniform, the emblem of the Desert Hawks, one of the two most powerful militias in the territory controlled by Syrian President Bashar Assad.

For months, Assad’s army has been on the advance across Syria. But its military success has only been possible due to the significant assistance the president’s troops have received from Iran and Russia — and from local Syrian militias. Now, these fighters are taking over control in many areas, committing murder, looting and harassing civilians. And nobody can stop them, not even Assad himself. Indeed, the militias are now more powerful than even the country’s leader and have become the real holders of power in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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