Category Archives: Syria

How the NSA shut down the internet in Syria — by accident

As I have written here before, as much as we should fear the immense power of intelligence agencies such as the NSA, it’s important to recognize that secrecy does not merely function as an instrument of power — just as importantly it functions to conceal incompetence.

The agencies want to sustain their mystique as the valiant and stealthy defenders of national security. What they dread is being seen as over-funded bunglers.

On November 29, 2012, the internet went down in Syria. The following day, the Washington Post reported:

Though the rebels and the Syrian government blamed each other for the prolonged outage, most technology experts believe Syrian authorities caused the blackout to try to impede the rebels’ interactions and online broadcasts of the fighting.

More honest reporting might have said, it’s anyone’s guess what happened, but for what it’s worth here’s some speculation from some so-called experts.

It turns out, apparently, that the experts were wrong and the cause of the outage was a bungled NSA operation.

James Bamford has just done an extended interview with Edward Snowden which includes this:

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO — a division of NSA hackers — had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”

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Syrian forces advance on Aleppo, rebels fear another siege

The Wall Street Journal reports: Syrian government forces have nearly encircled Aleppo, preparing a siege to wrest control of the city from rebels in what would be the biggest blow yet to the three-year uprising.

The fall of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and economic hub before the fighting, could also bolster the ranks of Islamic State militants who continue to make gains across the country, as defeated members of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army switch to their side.

Rebel commanders in Aleppo say they are stockpiling goods as aid groups step up food deliveries—crates of lentils, rice, ketchup and baby formula—seeking to prevent the same kind of mass starvation that forced them to surrender the much smaller city of Homs in May.

Losing Homs, once dubbed the capital of the revolution, was a tremendous blow to the rebels. If they lose the battle for Aleppo as well, it could spell the end of their revolt against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, rebel commanders warn.

Regime forces now surround Aleppo on three sides, having overrun the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City in the east last month, and are trying to seal off the last rebel-controlled corridor, a 4-mile-wide access point to the northeast.

Tuesday, rebels and regime forces clashed in Aziza, on the southern outskirts of Aleppo, while government aircraft stepped up strikes on the old city, activists said.

Simultaneously, extremists with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are encroaching on rebel-held territory north of the city, uprooting the FSA from the countryside.

“We’re about to lose Aleppo and no one cares,” said Hussam Almarie, an FSA spokesman. “We won’t be able to recover the revolution if this happens. And we’ll lose the moderates in Syria.”

Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, agreed. “The net impact of losing Aleppo will be the withering of the mainstream opposition” in six months or a year, he said.

“For the regime, this will be a crushing blow to the opposition as a viable fighting force and to its morale,” he said. “Some rebels may give up and seek a compromise with the regime, or look to join the only viable fighting force left, which is becoming ISIS.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. airstrikes helped, but Kurds from Syria turned tide against #ISIS

McClatchy reports: Victory, they say, has many fathers, and as Kurdish peshmerga militia pushed Islamic State forces from a string of towns near Irbil Sunday and Monday, it was easy to cite two: accurate airstrikes by U.S. aircraft that eliminated artillery positions and convoys and timely deliveries of light arms and ammunition from the CIA.

But a third may have been just as important, though less publicized: the addition of hundreds of fighters from a Turkish group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.

Visits to front-line positions Monday made it clear that an influx of fighters with links to the Kurdish Workers Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, had played a major role in driving the Islamic State from key areas within a 30-minute drive of Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. It was Irbil’s possible fall last week that ended weeks of Obama administration inaction on Iraq.

“The PKK took Mahmour,” a peshmerga fighter at a checkpoint outside Mahmour acknowledged, shaking his head in admiration. Then, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, he offered an explanation: “They’re very experienced from fighting Daash in Syria and are true guerrilla fighters from their time in Turkey. They have more experience and training than we do.”

There was plenty of gratitude for the U.S. intervention, which since Friday has included at least seven announced airstrikes on Islamic State targets near Irbil.

“The strikes came at the last second but, thank God, they came,” said one Kurdish defense official at Kalak, where the peshmerga has set up a defense line that, compared with last week’s ragged look, had developed a formidable array of machine guns mounted on pickup trucks with ample supplies of light ammunition. [Continue reading…]

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How #ISIS made a comeback a year after it looked all but finished in Syria and Iraq

Hassan Hassan reports: The group, which became known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) after it broke away from the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra in April last year, had been driven out of most of Syria, and rebel factions and al-Qaida affiliates threatened to chase it out of Iraq. But the group has made a remarkable comeback, seizing stretches of at least seven provinces in the two countries, and marching steadily into other areas.

In the last two weeks alone, Isis has fought on five fronts: against the Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga, the Syrian regime, the Syrian opposition and the Lebanese army. In Syria the group has all but consolidated control of the eastern provinces of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, as it made advances against government forces in Raqqa and subdued most of the rebel forces in Deir Ezzor. It is also advancing into Aleppo, reaching the city’s eastern outskirts, and in Hasaka, and is battling the Kurdish militias in the north-east. In Iraq it has advanced to a point only half an hour’s drive from Irbil, the Kurdish capital.

Yet these advances appear to be only the tip of the iceberg. Away from the publicised gains, Isis is quietly making progress on other fronts. Perhaps the most worrying is the fact that armed groups backed by the US have been co-opted by Isis.

After its sweeping military success in Iraq in June, Isis moved to take over the strategic province in Deir Ezzor, where the rebels controlled lucrative oil and gas resources. To the surprise of many, the group quickly controlled towns and villages that were home to some of the group’s most powerful adversaries, including Jabhat al-Nusra and locally rooted tribal militias. [Continue reading…]

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A piecemeal parochial approach won’t solve the Middle East crisis

Chris Doyle writes: “The lamps are going out all over the Middle East”, to update Sir Edward Grey’s doom-laden warning to Europe a hundred years ago. The areas of calm and stability seem like small oases in a multitude of firestorms. Many areas are literally without lights. Gaza has around two hours electricity a day. The power cuts in Yemen are worse and worse, leading to major protests. But, more worryingly, the lights of the democratic, liberal, pluralistic forces that for many months in 2011 lit up the region are also dimming, overshadowed by the twin forces of brutal dictatorship and brutal religious sectarian extremism.

Syria and Iraq are divided and near ungovernable, in the waiting room for failed-state status. The so-called Islamic caliphate or Isis, which in reality bears no resemblance to any caliphates of the past, covers an ever-expanding area, larger than the United Kingdom, including 35 per cent of Syria. Libya is being terrorised by rival militias. Palestinians in Gaza, for the fourth time since 2006, are at the wrong end of an Israeli military aggression that pits one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries against a captive population inside the world’s largest prison. The collective pile of rubble from these conflicts would grace a mountain range.

Those states and areas that enjoy calm become refugee camps. Lebanon and Jordan host almost two million Syrian refugees between them, as well as 2.5 million Palestinians. Tunisia is confronted with a mass Libyan exodus; while Iraqi Kurdistan is home to more than 300,000 Iraqis displaced only since June, as well as 220,000 Syrian refugees. In each case, the numbers are rocketing up – with the number of Syrian refugees alone expected to reach four million by the end of the year. Each humanitarian appeal is underfunded.

Will it get worse? The signs are worrying. The fighting in Lebanon last week, in Arsal in the north Bekaa valley, is yet another example of why the Syrian crisis threatens to move from spilling over, to swamping, its smaller neighbour. The instability could spread to Jordan. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will not be immune to the regional changes.

Given the epidemic of crises in an area of the world vital to our trade, energy and security interests, the minimal expectation would be an energetic and engaged response. Yet, when asked about Western policy towards the region, my instinctive response is, “There is one?”

The failure is first and foremost one of leadership, at an international and regional level. Who are great international statesmen in the West or in the Middle East? Who do young Arabs, who make up most of the population, look to for inspiration? President Obama has been blasted for his indecisiveness but he is not alone. George W Bush and Tony Blair were decisive over Iraq and destroyed the country. There is no strategy, and often the debate is reduced to a question of to bomb or not to bomb. [Continue reading…]

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The jihadi gift shop in Istanbul

Joseph Dana visited the only known clothing store, located in the suburb of Bagcilar in Istanbul, which specializes in selling ISIS-branded merchandize: The idea of ISIS T-shirts shouldn’t actually be that surprising. For a terrorist organization hell-bent on creating a state based on a puritanical and bigoted form of Islam, ISIS has an incredibly savvy marketing and branding campaign. The group uses social media platforms, especially Twitter, to mold a specific media narrative and recruit funds, as well as fighters, from across the globe. Clothing targeting young men has come to be a central component of the group’s branding. By most accounts, the production and design inspiration of ISIS clothing stems from East Asia.

The Indonesian company Zirah Moslem has emerged as the world’s leading seller of ISIS merchandise. T-shirts are generally priced under $15 and, until recently, could be found on its Facebook page. Before Facebook removed the page for violating its terms of service, Zirah Moslem had more than 9,000 likes. The company still sells clothing on its website and likely acts as a wholesaler to smaller operations around the world, like Istanbul’s Islami Giyim. While it might be easy to buy ISIS T-shirts and other articles of clothing online, to date Islami Giyim is the only brick-and-mortar establishment to receive any press.

The popularity of ISIS clothing — most notably T-shirts emblazoned with the group’s initials flanked by AK-47s — demonstrates the next phase of ISIS’s international branding campaign. Islami Giyim’s Facebook page already has 6,400 likes and prominently displays a variety of ISIS-related clothing items. Without revealing exact sales figures, the store’s owner said that business was good. So good, in fact, that he plans to open more locations throughout Istanbul in the coming months. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS holds sway for now

The Economist: The key to defeating the Islamic State (IS) could lie in the armed Sunni groups who already oppose it or who might turn against it if the political conditions were right after the formation of a new government in Baghdad. There are a wide variety of such groups, ranging from tribal militias and neo-Baathist remnants of the former regime to Salafi jihadi groups that have a similar ideology to IS but differ with it on tactics or leadership. At the moment IS has the upper hand, and, barring a few recent clashes, the other groups appear to have been largely co‑operating with it since it captured Mosul, in Nineveh province, in June.

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a plethora of jihadi militias emerged, of which al‑Qaida in Iraq, IS’s precursor, was the most prominent. However, despite sharing a similar religious ideology and an opposition to the US occupation and Shia rule, there were frequent disagreements and even clashes between the various jihadi groups, including squabbles over leadership, money and tactics. At the moment, relations with IS are complex and fluid, with some of the militias co‑operating with it in certain areas and clashing with it elsewhere.

Although other jihadi groups see themselves as fighting to establish an Islamic state, IS claims to be that entity, particularly since its declaration of a caliphate on June 29th and its demand that other groups pledge allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. This is the issue on which it broke from al‑Qaida central, led by Ayman al‑Zawahiri in Pakistan/Afghanistan. Its relations with other militant groups in Syria is illustrative. Although it has co‑operated with them at times, it has also clashed with them, particularly in the eastern regions where it is strongest and has been consolidating control. It has clashed not only with secular and non‑Salafi militias, such as the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, but also with fellow Salafi groups. It has even fought with its closest relation, Jabhat al‑Nusra (JN), a group that was formed in 2012 by Syrians who had been fighting in Iraq with IS but who rejected Mr Baghdadi’s demand in April 2013 that all other groups pledge allegiance to IS. One key difference is that JN seems to have a vision of an Islamic government within the Syrian nation state, whereas IS’s vision is transnational. [Continue reading…]

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‘Assad is leading the Alawites to death’

A correspondent for Al-Monitor in Syria writes: Al-Monitor spoke with a young girl during the funeral for her brother, who was killed in a recent battle. She said, “In spite of everything, Assad is our choice and we will not back down on this. The conspiracy against Syria is huge and there is no substitute for Assad, with his political expertise and alliance with Russia and Iran. Without Assad, we will all meet a bad fate and perhaps be killed at the hands of terrorists in the same way that the soldiers of the 17th Regiment were killed in Raqqa.”

This girl summarized the position of many Alawites up until now. However, social media networks show that some supporters of the Syrian regime are growing angry at the corruption and its spread throughout the governmental institutions, while thousands of young men die fighting for their country. One regime supporter wrote on a Facebook page created to protest corruption in Tartus, “The son of a poor man does not own a house, and dies as a martyr in war, while the son of a governmental official builds castles.” So far, their expressions of anger remain limited to Facebook.

In one of the Alawite villages in the countryside of Latakia, sadness and despair are evident on faces everywhere. A village resident in his 60s who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity said, “At least half of the village’s youths are spread among the fighting fronts. Dozens have been killed, and the authorities weren’t even able to recover the bodies of some of them. Assad is leading the sons of the Alawite sect to certain death.” Asked why they fight for Assad and support his authority, even though he is leading them to death, he replied, “Although I believe that Assad is leading the Alawites to death, only a minority of the village residents share this opinion. Even I don’t dare to say this in front of many of them. Most Alawites believe that there is no alternative to Assad, and that they cannot stop fighting alongside him. The extremism of most Islamic opposition brigades pushes [Alawites] to cling tightly to their positions.” [Continue reading…]

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Understanding Syria’s four-front war

Christopher Phillips writes: As the world media has been preoccupied with the Gaza conflict, Syria has just had the bloodiest week of its civil war. Some 1,700 were killed in seven days, with a renewed push from Islamic State (IS) accounting for much of the violence.

Confident after its victories in Iraq and deploying newly looted military hardware, IS’s sudden charge and the reaction to it in Syria and outside, has tilted the conflict on its axis, challenging various assumptions and shifting dynamics. Increasingly, we can talk about a war being fought on four overlapping fronts by four groupings of actors: the Assad government, IS, the mainstream rebels and the Kurds.

The first front is between IS and President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Assad facilitated IS’ rise by cynically releasing jihadists from prison to radicalize the opposition and then deliberately avoiding military confrontation. Its growth has helped him. IS alarmed the West, prompting some to suggest a rapprochement with Damascus is the least bad option; it terrified his own population, reinforcing the government’s message that it was their only defense; and it physically attacked his enemies in the mainstream rebels while avoiding his own troops. Any implicit alliance was shattered this month, however, when IS stormed three separate government targets in Homs, Raqqa and Hassakeh, killing hundreds of government troops, then gruesomely videoing their heads on spikes afterwards.

Such heavy losses have rocked Assad’s domestic supporters, provoking rare outrage and criticism on social media. Most accept the government’s characterization of all the opposition as sectarian jihadists and many, especially Alawis, have sent thousands to die to defeat them.

IS seem the most brutal of all, especially to another core constituent, Syria’s Christians who have been aghast at the recent expulsion of their coreligionists from Mosul. Yet these defeats challenge the government’s ability to actually defend its supporters. [Continue reading…]

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#Syrian defector: #Assad poised to #torture and murder 150,000 more

The Daily Beast reports: The regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad is holding 150,000 civilians in custody, all of whom are at risk of being tortured or killed by the state, the Syrian defector known as “Caesar” told Congress on Thursday.

According to a senior State Department official, his department initially asked to keep this hearing—in which Caesar displayed new photos from his trove of 55,000 images showing the torture, starvation, and death of over 11,000 civilians—closed to the public, out of concerns for the safety of the defector and his family. Caesar smuggled the pictures out of Syria when he fled last year in fear for his life. Caesar’s trip had been in the works for months.

There was no audio or video recording allowed at the hearing; the House Foreign Affairs Committee said that decision was made in consideration of Caesar’s safety. He sat at the witness table disguised in a baseball cap and sunglasses, with a blue hoodie over his head. “We recommended to Congress a format for today’s briefing that would have allowed press access while addressing any security concerns,” said Edgar Vasquez, a State Department spokesman. A committee staffer alleged State had tried to prevent the hearing from happening at all.

The packed committee room sat in silent horror as new examples of Assad’s atrocities were splashed on the large television screens on the wall and displayed on large posterboards littered throughout the hearing room. Caesar spoke softly to his translator, Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian American Task Force, a Washington-based organization that works with both the Syrian opposition and the U.S. State Department.

“I am not a politician and I don’t like politics,” Caesar said through his translator. “I have come to you honorable Congress to give you a message from the people of Syria… What is going on in Syria is a genocidal massacre that is being led by the worst of all the terrorists, Bashar al Assad.” [Continue reading…]

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Thousands flee as #Lebanon battles #Syrian militants

The Associated Press reports: Thousands of Lebanese civilians and Syrian refugees crammed into cars and pickup trucks fled Monday as Lebanese artillery pounded a border town that had been overrun by militants from neighboring Syria.

The civilian exodus came in the early morning hours during a relative lull in fighting and just a few hours later the bombardment around the town of Arsal had reached an intensity of three shells every minute.

The fighting is the most serious spillover of violence from Syria’s civil war into Lebanon, compounding fears that tiny Lebanon is fast becoming a new front in its neighbor’s conflict, now in its third year. The government has rushed reinforcements to scene, including dozens of armored personal carriers and tanks.

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#Syria: Barrage of barrel bombs

Human Rights Watch: The Syrian government is raining high explosive barrel bombs on civilians in defiance of a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution, Human Rights Watch said today. Resolution 2139 of February 22, 2014, ordered all parties to the conflict in Syria to end the indiscriminate use of barrel bombs and other weapons in populated areas.

The Security Council will meet on July 30 for its fifth round of reporting on the resolution. Since it was passed, Human Rights Watch has documented over 650 major new damage sites consistent with barrel bomb impacts on neighborhoods of the city of Aleppo held by non-state armed groups. Non-state armed groups participate in indiscriminate attacks as well, including car bombings and mortar attacks in pro-government areas.

“Month after month, the Security Council has sat idly by as the government defied its demands with new barrel bomb attacks on Syrian civilians,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “Russia and China need to allow the Security Council to show the same resolve and unanimity it brought to the issue of humanitarian aid to call a halt to these deadly attacks on civilians.” [Continue reading…]

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#Syrian city of #Homs shows signs of life amid moonscape of devastation

Ian Black reports: Baba Amr, the rebel-held suburb where the journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed by government rocket fire in February 2012, is devastated and looks eerily deserted. A militia roadblock bars access. Other parts of the city are in surprisingly good shape. In Inshaat, where rows of gleaming white UN vehicles clog the car park of a state-run five-star hotel, the streets are clean and orderly, restaurants bustling for the Ramadan Iftar meal.

No one knows exactly how many Homsis have fled abroad, or how many are displaced inside Syria. But last month the UNHCR still counted more than 352,000 people from the city registered as refugees, the majority in neighbouring Lebanon – a quarter to a fifth of the prewar population. Rumours abound of abandoned property in pro-opposition areas being taken over by Alawite loyalists and looting by the widely disliked, Iranian-trained National Defence Army. Statistics are not available.

Opposition activists now living elsewhere reject the government’s upbeat narrative. “Homs is a city of horror,” said Razan, whose Sunni family was involved in the mass protests of April 2011 and suffered in the subsequent army offensive and repression. “If there had been a real solution people would be able to go back, but hundreds are still in prison. The government is removing some checkpoints and trying to show that everything is fine. But it’s crazy how they’ve managed to cover it all up and brainwash people just by saying, ‘Let’s move on.’”

Samer, a wealthy businessman, puts it bluntly: “The whole thing is designed to snuff out the rebellion.”

At al-Waer, a couple of miles to the west, a war of sorts continues. Like other rebel-held areas across Syria, this part of Homs is still under siege. The top flats of several tower blocks are burned out – hit by government artillery taking out snipers. But it is a mostly static and curiously intimate sort of conflict. Residents, including state employees, commute in and out of the suburb every day to work or study, going past army and rebel roadblocks that are just a couple of hundred yards apart. Skinny boys scamper to and fro earning a few pounds carrying shopping across the space between them. Negotiations on the terms of access, and perhaps an eventual old city-type evacuation deal, are continuing sporadically.

“It’s hard, especially for the children, and the main worry is their psychological welfare,” says Afra, a law student, glancing warily at the uniformed security officer loitering nearby as she describes the situation inside. “As an adult you can cope, but the little ones don’t understand what’s happening. They are afraid of sudden noises and if a door slams they jump.”

Omar, a middle-aged shop owner, says the fighters in al-Waer are Syrians, many of them locals – not the foreigners who are vilified in state media – and mostly keep themselves to themselves. “Two days ago they started shooting at each other. When that happens it’s scary and we want the army to go in. We are tired. I bought a new house and it’s lost its value. We want to get this over with.” That sense of weariness is widely shared – in Homs and beyond.

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Gaza and Syria: Mutual struggle, mutual solidarity

leilashrooms writes: I spent a lot of time in Gaza during the first two years of the Syrian revolution. Unlike in other social contexts, where I often hesitated to talk about Syria fearful of having to deal with stupid reactions or banal analysis, in Gaza this wasn’t an issue with people I met. People in Gaza who experience terror on a daily basis never failed to ask me how my family in Syria was doing, or express their solidarity with the Syrian uprising against the terror of the Assad regime. Through their own experience, they empathized with the suffering of the Syrian people, understood their desire for freedom and supported their resistance to tyranny.

The news that well over a thousand people have been killed in Israel’s latest onslaught on Gaza is sickening. One of the most advanced militaries in the world is raining down bombs on 1.8 million people, over half of them children. There is no place for Gazans to escape or to seek shelter and protection with their families. They are under blockade, locked into an open air prison, in one of the most densely populated places on earth. Whole families have been massacred; houses destroyed; hospitals, schools and essential services such as water and electricity supply have been targeted. It is horror beyond words.

Once again the Zionist State continues its onslaught with the acquiescence, or worse, the direct complicity of regional powers who have never done anything better than voice empty rhetoric in support of the Palestinian resistance. In fact, they have done far worse. Sisi’s regime in Egypt collaborates with Israel to maintain the blockade, and with both Israel and Saudi Arabia to pressure the Palestinian resistance to submit to a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. Meanwhile, Sisi sends weapons to support Assad’s tyranny in Syria and crushes political opposition at home. The Assad regime, that supposed bastion of the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation, has not fired one rocket in the direction of its border with Israel since 1973. Currently it busies itself with crushing the Palestinian people in Yarmouk Camp, Damascus, with its own crippling blockade, and raining bombs down on civilians in Aleppo. And the Palestinian Authority, with its illusory quasi-state trappings, has once again shown it’s nothing more than an Israeli and Western stooge contracted out in the service of the occupation and the Ramallah elite. [Continue reading…]

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