Category Archives: United Kingdom

Britain: Saudi Arabia’s silent partner in Yemen’s civil war

At a hospital in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, 18-month-old Faisal is treated for severe acute malnutrition. His mother braved a two-day journey to take him to the hospital from her village – a trip that would have taken four hours by bus in peace time.

The Independent reports: If you were told that British fighter jets and British bombs were involved in a Middle Eastern war which has left thousands of civilians dead, you could be forgiven for assuming this referred to Iraq, or perhaps the more recent UK aerial campaign extended to Syria.

What is less likely to spring to mind is another, forgotten conflict in the region – a war sponsored by the UK that is rarely talked about. For the past nine months, British-supplied planes and British-made missiles have been part of near-daily air raids in Yemen carried out by a nine-country, Saudi Arabian-led coalition.

In this conveniently hidden campaign, thousands have died. Bombardments by the Saudi coalition accounted for 60 per cent of the 4,493 civilian casualties in the first seven months of this year. Saudi Arabia waded into what began as a domestic political power struggle between the country’s incumbent president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and his predecessor of 33 years’ standing, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The marginalised, predominantly Shia Houthi militiamen, viewed as an Iranian proxy by the Sunni kingdom, joined forces with Saleh’s loyalists in the military to seize swathes of territory over the past 18 months, eventually forcing Hadi into self-imposed exile in Riyadh earlier this year. [Continue reading…]

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Christmas message in UK will be delivered by father of drowned Syrian boy

Channel 4 News reports: Abdullah Kurdi, the father of the drowned Syrian boy whose body was photographed on a Turkish beach, will deliver Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas message.

The heartbreaking images, which will be shown as part of the broadcast, shocked the world and came to symbolise the horror of the refugee crisis.

They prompted European leaders to do more to tackle the stark reality of the desperate situation facing many refugees. Abdullah lost his wife Rehanna and two sons: Alan, 3 and Galeb, 5, as they attempted to flee the war ravaging their Syrian homeland.

Over 4 million people have fled the country since the start of the civil war. More than 250,000 have been killed. This year alone 500,000 Syrian refugees attempted to reach Europe and North America.

In the Alternative Christmas Message, which will be broadcast on Christmas Day at 3.35pm on Channel 4, Kurdi calls for empathy and understanding for those caught up in the current refugee crisis:

My message is I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians. If a person shuts a door in someone’s face, this is very difficult. When a door is opened they no longer feel humiliated.

Kurdi appeals as a parent, speaking of the desperation of the Syrian people:

At this time of year I would like to ask you all to think about the pain of fathers, mothers and children who are seeking peace and security.

We ask just for a little bit of sympathy from you.

Kurdi’s powerful words are interspersed with footage of the refugee crisis and the dangerous Mediterranean crossings from Libya to Italy and from Turkey to Greece. [Continue reading…]

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The life and death of King Coal

By Ben Curtis, Cardiff University

The reign of King Coal is a story which is central to fully understanding modern Britain. Coal powered the industrial revolution, employed over a million miners at the industry’s height, shaped and sustained communities across the country, and has played a key role in the UK’s political economy. With the closure of Kellingley colliery, the country’s last deep mine, in December 2015, a defining chapter in British history comes to an end.

Although it had been mined in small quantities in Britain since Roman times, the story of coal as a major industry begins with the industrial revolution. From the 18th century onwards, demand for coal began to grow at an increasing rate. Several factors drove this, but its most important uses were as a fuel for steam-powered engines, in ironworks and metal smelting, and for domestic energy consumption in growing cities and towns. Then in the 19th century, coal grew to become the biggest industry in Britain in terms of workforce. It expanded from 109,000 workers in 1830 to nearly 1.1 million in 1913.

The early years of the 20th century proved to be the industry’s zenith, however. The period between World War I and II was one of crisis and catastrophic decline for coal. Its seemingly unassailable position was undermined by a series of economic factors – including the decision in 1925 by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, to return sterling to the gold standard. This had the inadvertent effect of making British coal too expensive in its important, but increasingly vulnerable, overseas markets.

Coal helped fuel the industrial revolution.
Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg

As labour was the biggest cost in coal production, employers’ attempts to cut wages led to a series of bitter industrial relations disputes in the 1920s. The most well-known is the 1926 general strike, called by the Trades Union Congress in support of the miners. Although the general strike itself only lasted nine days, communities around the country’s coalfields held out for a further six months before finally conceding defeat.

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British support for Saudi Arabia wrecking aid to Yemen

The Telegraph reports: David Cameron has been accused of squandering nearly £400 million in taxpayers’ aid to Yemen through its support for the Saudi-led military offensive in the country’s civil war.

The Prime Minister is facing an outcry from aid agencies and a rift in his own government over his continued backing for Saudi Arabia’s role in the conflict, in which nearly 6,000 people have died.

Britain has not only sold Saudi Arabia weapons that have allegedly been used for indiscriminate bombing, but also supports Riyadh diplomatically, despite claims by aid agencies that Saudi forces are making the situation worse.

Ahead of United Nations-sponsored peace talks this week aimed at ending nine months of fighting, senior Tory figures have warned that the Government’s policy has also wrecked more than a decade’s worth of British aid spending in Yemen, where the UK is one of the main donors.

The Department for International Development has spent some £227 million in Yemen in the past five years alone. It spent almost as much there in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, when Yemen was first identified as a failing state.

That entire programme is now in disarray as the civil war has led to the collapse of the government, left more than two million people homeless and pushed the country to the brink of famine. The fighting has even led to British-funded aid projects being directly targeted.

An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a relief warehouse run by Oxfam, while the Save the Children has had two of its bases destroyed. Both charities’ aid efforts in Yemen are funded in part by DFID. Clinics operated by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres have also been destroyed.

The chaos is also helping jihadists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State cement their foothold – the very outcome Britain lavished aid on Yemen to avoid. [Continue reading…]

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Sorry, we can’t negotiate with ISIS

As Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician, once said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

So why not negotiate with ISIS?

Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister who led a revolt of opposition MPs by voting in favor of Britain’s entry into the air campaign against ISIS in Syria, went back to his Leeds Central constituency this weekend to explain his position.

Members of the Stop the War Coalition, challenged Benn, saying that Britain should negotiate with ISIS.

In Britain and elsewhere, a lot of people are going to see an exchange like this as an argument between diplomacy and militarism, remembering perhaps Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Anyone who says we can’t negotiate with ISIS, is easy to cast as being addicted to the use of brute force. This perception gets further reinforced as politicians hammer their podiums declaring, we must destroy ISIS.

So again: why not negotiate with ISIS?

Here’s why: Negotiation requires compromise and the discovery of common ground and for ISIS to negotiate it would have to abandon the goals which are the reason for its existence.

In the latest issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s 65-page color magazine, the possibility of a truce between the West and ISIS is raised and they say that in such an event “nothing changes for the Islamic State… It will continue to wage war against the apostates until they repent from apostasy. It will continue to wage war against the pagans until they accept Islam… Thereafter, the slave markets will commence in Rome by Allah’s power and might.”

Wild rhetoric, no doubt, but what we already know is that on a more limited territorial scale, ISIS practices exactly what it preaches. It has no interest in co-existing with those it opposes. It is engaged in what it regards as a Manichean struggle which allows for no other possibility than the death, subjugation, or submission of its enemies.

The contents of Dabiq might be dismissed as propaganda written merely to appeal to the grandiose fantasies of ISIS recruits, but a newly published translation of an internal ISIS document appearing in The Guardian today shows that the organization is not only earnest in its goals but also in their meticulous application.

As far as foreign policy is concerned, again we see an utterly uncompromising position, modeled, it is claimed, on the example of earlier caliphates.

The objective in relation to “heretic communities” is “dispersing their groupings so there no longer remained any impeding opinion, strength or ability, and the Muslim alone remains the master of the state and decision-making and no one is in conflict with him.”

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#YouAintNoMuslimBruv said it better than Cameron ever could

I can’t decide if this is Vine at its best or worst:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I think that applies to the phrase “bruv” coming out of David Cameron’s mouth.

Still, he meant well:

As Muhbeer Hussain, founder of British Muslim Youth, says, the man who defiantly challenged the Leytonstone attacker, is “a hero for the British Muslim community for speaking out against this.”

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#YouAintNoMuslimBruv — Muslims and non-Muslims stand in solidarity

As a formal exercise, denunciations and condemnations nearly always ring hollow.

“We strongly condemn the recent attacks…”

Blah blah blah… Ya don’t say?

That’s not to suggest these statements are insincere; it’s just that they are generally so predictable they have become a somewhat pointless ritual.

What’s radically different is when the denunciation comes from someone in the moment who in that moment spontaneously uses words to upend the meaning of an act of violence. This is when language grasps its real power.

This is what happened last night at the Leytonstone Underground station in London after a 29-year-old man stabbed a 56-year-old man, while shouting, “this is for Syria.”

I’m going to make some wild guesses and see if I can deconstruct what happened here:

1. The man with the knife was a Muslim (and probably British).
2. He had no idea who he was stabbing other than that he assumed his victim was British and not a Muslim and thus could be held responsible for the actions of the British government following its recent decision to start bombing Syria.
3. The attacker felt like he was standing up for Muslims.

A bystander, a Muslim Londoner, having witnessed what happened, videos the arrest and as a Muslim policemen handcuffs the attacker, the bystander calls out: “You ain’t no Muslim bruv [brother].”

Again, another assumption: he was directing this statement at the attacker, not the policeman.

For good reason, the bystander has received widespread praise.


Echoing the gunmen in the Paris attacks, the attacker in London chose the phrase “this is for Syria,” but in spite of ISIS’s large presence on Twitter, the hashtag that’s trending now is #YouAintNoMuslimBruv — it isn’t #ThisIsForSyria.

Some Muslims aren’t happy about this.


I understand why Muslims feel like they shouldn’t be expected to denounce the actions of extremists — such condemnations inevitably sound like an expression of collective guilt. But this isn’t what happened in London.

At a moment when a guy has posed a threat to everyone around him and he’s claiming to be acting in the name of Muslims, another Muslim deftly cuts down that claim in an expression of solidarity that unites Muslims and non-Muslims, Londoners (who come from all quarters of the globe) and everyone else.

ISIS wants Muslims and non-Muslims to spill each other’s blood in an apocalyptic war, but instead we have to stand together.

#YouAintNoMuslimBruv shows how it can be done.

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Two men armed with knives — one gets arrested, the other gets killed

A shirtless man, armed with a straight razor from a barbershop and suspected of having just attempted to rob a bank, stands surrounded by at least five Miami Beach Police officers. After failing to comply with their commands, the suspect is shot and killed.

Meanwhile, in London a suspected terrorist who is not only armed with a knife but has already stabbed and seriously injured a 56-year-old man, gets surrounded by British police officers. The suspect doesn’t just fail to comply with demands from the police — he continues threatening anyone nearby with his knife. Nevertheless, the police are able use a taser to bring him down, handcuff and arrest him.

Are the British police more courageous than their American counterparts?

I don’t know.

The immediate difference derives from police tactics. But the wider difference is that Britain isn’t burdened by a popular gun fetish or a cartoon culture in which adults talk about “good guys” and “bad guys.”

A commenter on YouTube sarcastically asks: “In America, do you have more chance of being killed by ISIS or the cops?”

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Don’t bomb Syria and don’t listen to Syrians?

As I understand it, the foundational premise of any antiwar movement is that the only way of protecting people who are harmed by wars is to end those wars. In other words, although the named issue is war, the object of concern is the victims of war.

At least I thought that was the issue, but these days if often looks like the victims of war are getting marginalized in the name of standing up for a wider cause: global justice. Indeed, when it comes to the UK’s Stop the War Movement, they profess such a deep interest in righting the world, that they often treat Syrians as an irritant who might undermine the group’s larger objectives. Moreover, when those crying, “Don’t bomb Syria” also welcome in their ranks some who are also calling for support for Bashar al-Assad, it becomes clear that the issue at hand is not actually where the bombs are falling but who is dropping them. Stop the War held no demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy in London when Vladamir Putin launched his bombing campaign on Syria.

Jeremy Cliffe writes: “Do we have Syrians?” interjects a woman. A brief silence. The gathering in Manchester’s Central Library is pondering who might take the microphone at its upcoming protest against plans to bomb Islamic State in Syria. On the list so far: Labour Party MPs, MEPs, councillors, the Green Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, musicians, poets, trade unionists and “definitely a student of some sort”. Phone messages have been left, e-mails fired off and brains racked for names of old-time peaceniks. Only now has the idea of asking a Syrian arisen.

“There’s a big Syrian group,” murmurs one. “But they’re not anti,” continues another, disgusted: “They were lobbying for Britain to bomb Assad.” Those present sigh as one. On to the logistics of the event. It is decided that stewards should guard the mic, poised to fend off any “pro-war Syrians or imperialists”. After all, notes the chairman: “We know what we’re talking about here.” Would that BBC Manchester possessed such discernment. The station is interviewing pro-war Kurds tomorrow, to the group’s distain: “They dig ’em up.” “Amazing how they find them!”

Such is the eye-swivelling world of Stop the War, the organisation that, though not the same as the anti-war movement (dominated by decent, mild-mannered types), is its main organising force and has a record of sidelining the very peoples in whose interest it professes to act. Rethink Rebuild, the Syrian society in Manchester, requested a speaking slot at its Don’t Bomb Syria meeting there in October, but was ignored. It claims: “The Syrian voice was marginalised throughout the event.” Other Stop the War gatherings have followed that pattern. At one in Westminster Syrians criticising the unrepresentative panel were jeered at and the police called; in Birmingham a Syrian invited to speak was disinvited and branded a supporter of imperialism for backing a no-fly zone. This knack for alienating its notional beneficiaries goes all the way back to Stop the War’s foundation in 2001 by (among others) the Socialist Workers Party, an authoritarian far-left outfit. At one of its first conferences Iraqi and Iranian delegates quit when their motion condemning “Islamic terrorism” was defeated.

That is the thing with Stop the War. It is not anti-war so much as anti-West; a permanent howl of relativist anguish at NATO and its members. For example, the group could hardly be more indulgent of Vladimir Putin’s wars. It defended the invasion of Georgia as a reaction to “the ambition of the USA to exercise global hegemony”, called many of the Maidan protesters in Kiev neo-Nazis and excused Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. Tellingly, at its “anti-war” demonstration in London on December 1st a poster emblazoned with Syrian flags and the slogan “Support For Bashar Al-Assad” was brandished above the crowd. [Continue reading…]

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Yes, the rebels can defeat ISIS — and the UK’s increased involvement in Syria will help

Hassan Hassan writes: The US has thus far focused on working with particular forces in limited areas to battle Isis, while persistently striking the group’s bases and economic routes inside its heartlands. The tagetting of bridges and oil facilities and trucks is paralysing the economy in Isis-controlled areas. This sometimes pushed people to join the only employer in town to generate income for their families. Others have emptied their household of young members by sending them overseas as refugees.

Meanwhile, Isis embeds in residential areas to evade the airstrikes while still making money through taxation, extortion and other means that enabled it to take most of the areas now under control before it laid its hands on the oil infrastructure. It is also quietly expanding in less strategic but vulnerable areas such as the areas between Palmyra, the city of Homs and southern Syria, to avoid intensive bombardment or heavy military deployment.

Britain should not exacerbate the situation by merely deploying jets to fly more sorties onto Isis areas. Instead, most of the time and effort should be used to encourage and prop up local forces to fight ISIS. That requires a strategy that is independent from the one currently led by Washington. The focus for the UK should be to work mostly in the background through existing and new channels to advise, network, train and provide non-military services to armed fighting groups in different parts of the country.

For example, the UK has until recently sponsored an ambitious and unique programme to appoint moderate imams in an area controlled by various rebel forces, instead of extremist clerics affiliated to jihadi organisations. Part of the moderate clerics’ focus was to educate worshippers about the danger of takfir — or pronouncing fellow Muslims as infidels or apostates. According to a field commander of the faction overseeing the programme, the “culture of takfir” is a major impediment to getting fighters to combat groups such as Isis, especially if the faction is backed by western countries. [Continue reading…]

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UK Syria vote: Who MPs should (and should not) be listening to

Alex Rowell writes: In Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set in February 2003, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is discussing the day’s big event — the million-strong march in Hyde Park against the coming invasion of Iraq — with his “newly adult” daughter, who’s just returned, flushed with righteous vivacity, from the jubilant scene.

The liberal Henry doesn’t, in fact, support the war, but when his daughter asks, slightly too judgmentally, why he hadn’t joined the enlightened masses on the streets, a friendly argument breaks out that then turns into a less-friendly argument, eventually leading Henry to realize what it is that makes him uneasy about the demonstrators:

“Let me ask you a question. Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn’t see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam?”

“He’s loathsome,” she says. “It’s a given.”

“No it’s not. It’s a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?”

This has always struck me as an insight of the highest moral clarity, and it bears revisiting as the British parliament meets today to vote on extending Royal Air Force strikes against ISIS in Iraq (already approved by parliament last year) to include ISIS targets in neighboring Syria as well. Today, as in 2003, any serious consideration of whether or not to intervene must begin with the acknowledgment that both options are terrible. MPs voting against the motion put forth by David Cameron’s cabinet must understand that they are doing a favor to the rapists of children, the tyrannisers of Arab and Muslim civilians generally, and the butchers of British tourists, French concert-goers, and Egyptian Christians, just as MPs voting for the motion must concede that opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is probably right to say “we are going to kill [innocent] people in their homes by our bombs.”

Both options entail further horror and misery for civilians. There will be blood on British MPs’ hands whether they vote for or against. Neither course should be taken, then, without the requisite degrees of discomfort and remorse — there can be no singing and dancing in the park. The people who must be morally distrusted right away, in other words, are those for whom the decision comes easily.

These include, on the (purported) left, the anti-war absolutists, who care not the slightest for the welfare of Syrian civilians, or even for their opinions. Perhaps best represented in Britain by the questionably-named Stop the War Coalition, they made this clear last month when they prevented Syrian activists from speaking at a panel discussion on intervention in Syria, heckling and then calling the police on a small group who turned up hoping to have a say on the fate of their own country. To call these groups ‘anti-war’ is in fact much too kind, for they have no problem with war in Syria per se as long as it can be used against Downing Street. They are the sort who would have told you (as indeed they might still) that the most dangerous man in Europe in 1939 was Winston Churchill.

A closely related faction are those who actively support war in Syria — who expend column inches and public speaking hours defending and advocating it — when it’s carried out by regimes Britain opposes. Of these there could be no better example than Patrick Cockburn, the journalist Corbyn invited to give Labour MPs a final pep talk before parliament opened this morning. When 10 weeks ago Russia began its own intervention in Syria — which has since killed a number of rebels and a higher number of civilians, but conspicuously few ISIS fighters — Cockburn penned an op-ed titled ‘Why We Should Welcome Russia’s Entry Into Syrian War.’ Moscow’s air strikes on rebel positions and residential homes “could have a positive impact,” Cockburn explained, even helping in “de-escalating the war.” Needless to say the prospect of Britain following Russia’s lead, however, is another matter entirely.

“Based on wishful thinking and poor information,” Cockburn said in his briefing Wednesday, Britain is stumbling into the unknown “without a realistic policy to win” against ISIS. What might a realistic policy involve? “If ISIS is really going to be destroyed, it is difficult to see how the US and UK can avoid having some degree of co-operation with the Syrian army,” Cockburn wrote two weeks ago. He further applauded the “clear-sighted” remarks by former British Army head Gen. David Richards that Assad and even “Hezbollah and their Iranian backers” should be welcomed into the Coalition’s fold. In this, the ostensibly left-wing Cockburn is on common ground with such right-wingers as UKIP leader Nigel Farage and the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, MP Crispin Blunt, both of whom have opposed fighting ISIS without an accompanying entente cordiale with Damascus.

If these are some of the voices MPs would do well to ignore when voting Wednesday, where might they turn instead for valuable insight? A sensible starting place would surely be those Syrian civilians who stand to be most directly affected by the dispatch of Tornado GR4s to the skies above the caliphate. [Continue reading…]

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Where is the outrage on David Cameron’s scandal in the Gulf?

Nicholas McGeehan writes: Whether it’s ‘cash for questions’ or ‘homes for votes’, there is often a tawdry quid pro quo at the heart of a good British political scandal. So it’s worth asking why there has not been more public outrage about explosive revelations that David Cameron was offered lucrative arms and oil deals for British businesses if he helped reign in the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in the UK.

Leaked emails obtained by The Guardian revealed that in June 2012 the United Arab Emirates tried to influence the UK to take steps against the Muslim Brotherhood in return for keeping or getting lucrative contracts. The emails suggest that the UAE government is supremely confident of its ability to influence British policy, which in turn begs the wider question as to what the UK’s priorities are in the UAE, and the rest of the Gulf.

In 2013, during a Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry into the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, MP Rory Stewart quite reasonably asked whether there is any proof that the UK can exert a positive influence over its foreign allies, where governance and the rule of law are concerned. Increasingly, the behaviour of the UK suggests that a more pertinent question is whether the UK’s Gulf policy is actually strengthening repression and emboldening authoritarian rulers in the region. [Continue reading…]

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Bob Fisk’s fact-free polemics on Syria

Robert Fisk — or to mirror the style of his latest missive, let’s just call him Bob — is convinced there aren’t 70,000 “moderate” opposition fighters in Syria, contrary to the recent assertion of Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron.

Bob doesn’t present a conflicting data set — a different analysis of the makeup of the opposition. Instead, his position rests on two pieces of reasoning.

Firstly, Bob asserts, if such a force did exist, “it would already have captured Damascus and hurled Bashar al-Assad from power.”

Assad is still in power. It therefore follows that the 70,000 fighters don’t exist. Impeccable reasoning, some might say.

Secondly, “Who’s ever heard before of a ‘moderate’ with a Kalashnikov?” This he presents as a rhetorical question on the basis that “moderates” would be “folk who don’t carry weapons at all.”

Bob declines to label all those opposition fighters who by virtue of carrying weapons, can’t as far as he is concerned be called moderates, but the obvious antonym would be extremists. Since his father, Bill, gun in hand, fought in the trenches in World War One, would that have made him an extremist too?

I guess not, because the terms “moderate” or “extremist” apparently only apply to people fighting without close direction from their own government. A government, however little political legitimacy it possesses, can apparently deploy “ground troops” — a “regular force” that meets Bob’s approval. Approval of what, I’m not sure. Men in government-issued uniforms?

There are few problems with the logic here — problems that I hope many readers would see as glaring.

Firstly, as even the most casual observers should have long been aware, throughout this war the Assad regime has maintained uncontested rule throughout Syrian airspace.

The U.S.-led air campaign against ISIS, once it expanded inside Syria, did so without objections from the Syrian government and thus there have been no clashes between what are ostensibly rival air forces. Likewise, Russian jets now support Assad’s forces and their allies on the ground.

The fact that not a single component of the opposition possesses an air force and neither do any possess surface-to-air missiles in any significant numbers, is precisely what has allowed the Assad regime to conduct its air operations using one of the crudest methods of warfare: dropping barrel bombs from helicopters.

These assaults, along with bombs dropped by air force jets, along with its use of the bulk of heavy weapons on the ground, are the reason Assad has not been driven out of Damascus.

Secondly, if the defining characteristic of an extremist is that he carries a Kalashnikov, wouldn’t that also make Assad’s own troops extremists since they too carry the same Russian weapons?

As a veteran war reporter, Robert Fisk enjoys an international reputation built on a career of fearless journalism — such as his account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. But these days, unfortunately, his interest in reporting seems to have waned as he coasts along, buoyed by the authority which derives from his earlier work.

Still, when it comes to this question about the numerical strength of the so-called moderate opposition in Syria, it’s predictable and understandable that Fisk would choose to frame this as a debate between a seasoned Middle East journalist and a British prime minister.

We all know perfectly well that Cameron is, as the English would say, batting on a sticky wicket. Who can fail to have suspicions that this PM might be drawing his information from yet another “dodgy dossier”?

Fortunately, there’s no reason to reduce this issue to a question about who you want to believe: Cameron or Fisk?

Unlike early in 2003, when the war in Iraq had yet to be launched and its alleged necessity was based on the sketchiest intelligence, the situation in Syria can be analyzed without relying solely on deductive reasoning, wild speculation, and dubious sources.

There are well-informed, independent analysts who have neither a political ax to grind, nor a journalistic image to sustain, nor cozy relations with senior government officials to maintain, and far from dismissing Cameron’s claim, they say it’s accurate and flesh out their position in detail.

Charles Lister acknowledges that at the core of this debate is the question of how “moderate” is defined. He identifies 105-110 factions who in combination amount to 75,000 fighters who are “explicitly nationalist in terms of their strategic vision; they are local in terms of their membership; and they seek to return to Syria’s historical status as a harmonious multi-sectarian nation in which all ethnicities, sects and genders enjoy an equal status before the law and state.”

Lister argues:

Had the West more definitively intervened in Syria early on, we would undoubtedly have more moderate, more cohesive and more natural ally-material opposition to work with. Unfortunately, things took a different path. Our subsequent obsession with the extremists and refusal to tackle Syria’s complexity has clouded our vision. A ‘moderate’ opposition in culturally attuned terms does exist in Syria, we need only open our eyes to it. Only these groups – and certainly not Assad – will ensure the real extremists such as ISIL and Al-Qaeda eventually lose their grip on power in Syria.

Kyle Orton provides some more granular detail:

In southern Syria, there are more than 30,000 fighters between the Southern Front, Al-Ittihad al-Islami li-Ajnad a-Sham, and Faylaq al-Rahman. And in western/northern Syria the vetted FSA-branded groups, Asala, The Levant Front, Zanki, and the other, largely Aleppine units add up to another 35,000. The other 10,000 fighters are in these smaller groups of strategic value.

In spite of the media and political focus on ISIS, both Lister and Orton see the larger threat in Syria emanating from al Qaeda. Orton writes:

Without a clear commitment to Assad’s ouster and meaningfully bolstering the moderate elements of the insurgency, Al-Qaeda is marching toward erecting a base of operations that is wholly integrated into the local terrain in Syria from which to wage its global holy war.

Commentators such as Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and others who these days sound indistinguishable from the Israelis and the neoconservatives, may well say, al Qaeda or ISIS — what’s the difference? They’re all terrorists. They’re all fed by “the octopus” of Saudi Arabia.

What is strange and disturbing about this current of opinion is that it buttresses a sentiment which separates clarity from discrimination.

Supposedly, we can have a clear view of the situation in Syria without needing to understand any of the details. Questions about the size, strength, and nature of the complex array of forces fighting in Syria can be waved away with an air no less regal than Assad’s own dismissive gestures when he claims his enemies are all “terrorists.”

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Raqqa exiles don’t support UK bombing ISIS: ‘The Assad regime is the main problem for us’

The Guardian reports: The cafe and everyone inside were exiles from Raqqa – the same chefs serving up Friday roast chicken and sweet tea, the same shishas and hubbub of politics – but all carried a gloss of tragedy and exhaustion.

The place had been moved wholesale, staff and menu, across the Turkish border to the city of Gaziantep after Islamic State cast its long shadow over their home town and their lives.

Most of the customers were graduates of the extremists’ brutal jails and the rest had fled Isis in fear or disgust. The arrival of a stranger triggered unease; a few weeks earlier two of their number had been murdered at home by a spy posing as another refugee.

“If we were not wanted by Isis, why would we be here?” said one fortysomething businessman, who asked to go by the name Abu Ahmad as both his sons are on the other side of a border; for him, that might as well be an ocean away. “We are here, but our hearts are there.”

With homes and families still in Isis’s de facto capital, few have more at stake in the fight against the extremist group. Yet most are wary about the prospect of Britain joining the air campaign against their bitter enemy after a year in which Isis fighters have been unsettled but not dislodged by hundreds of bombing raids.

“Can someone really be happy if his city is bombed by everyone? No,” Abu Ahmad said, with the bleak humour that many exiles share. “Everybody bombed Raqqa. Anyone who was just annoyed by their wife decided to come and bomb Raqqa. Jordan, UAE, US, Russia, France.”

They fear that more bombs will cost more innocent lives in a city where the civilian population is now held prisoner by Isis to serve as a human shield. Many are baffled and frustrated that the city’s fate is being decided in distant capitals and conference rooms where the people of Raqqa have no presence, in debates where they have no voice. [Continue reading…]

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Yes, there are 70,000 moderate opposition fighters in Syria. Here’s what we know about them

Charles Lister writes: Yesterday David Cameron told Parliament that there are ‘about 70,000 Syrian opposition fighters on the ground who do not belong to extremist groups’ who could help fight Islamic State.

The Prime Minister’s number was the result of an internal assessment made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), backed up by serving British diplomats overseas whose jobs focus on the Syrian opposition. Such a large number struck many as political exaggeration. The chairman of the Defence Committee, Julian Lewis, said he was ‘extremely surprised’. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may issue a formal demand for clarification. So do these fighters exist and who are they?

Of course, the debate primarily centres around the issue of what it means to be a ‘moderate armed opposition group’ in Syria. Notwithstanding the storm surrounding this morning’s statement, this question has become particularly pertinent in recent days, as international diplomats discuss who should – and should not – be involved in a future Syrian peace process.

As diplomatic efforts for Syria gain pace and as Saudi Arabia prepares to host a major conference bringing together 60-80 representatives of a broad spectrum opposition, the definition of “moderate” has been shifting. The most effective definition now must be based upon a combined assessment of (a) what groups are acknowledged as being opposed to ISIL and (b) what groups our governments want, or need to be involved in a political process.

Having studied Syria’s armed opposition since the first months of the country’s uprising in mid-2011, I can say with confidence that the Prime Minister and the JIC are about right. [Continue reading…]

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