The toll of dead and wounded continued to rise for Hezbollah, which is fighting its biggest battle yet on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.
As the Arab world’s bloodiest conflict grinds on, Qatar has emerged as a driving force: pouring in tens of millions of dollars to arm the rebels. Yet it also stands accused of dividing them – and of positioning itself for even greater influence in the post-Assad era.
Talk about hubris. The Financial Times reports that Qatari ministers have already built a Syrian embassy to host the emmisaries sent by Assad’s opponents.
Not so fast, Tehran might say, having put its billions behind the bloody and dismal Syrian chip that seems “in play” on the middle east’s poker table:
Iran has paid the salaries of the Syrian regime troops for months, in addition to providing Assad with weapons and logistic support, The Times reported citing members of the Syrian opposition.
The price tag on that across time: billions of dollars.
When the above quoted article was written, it noted the death toll in Syria as 30,000.
A year-and-one-half (or so) later: 92,000 dead; 3.4 million homeless.
“The fear is that both the Saudis and the Qataris are competing for influence in Syria by pouring in support to rival groups of jihadist fighters, and that Syria is descending into the depths of hell as a result,” said Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a US research group dedicated to improving American strategy in the Middle East.
The is where Obama, the “Muslim Socialist” as some characterize him, gets into the Benghazi muck that continues to suck down his shoes.
Glenn Beck reported that Glen Doherty, the former Navy Seal who was killed alongside Ambassador Christopher Stevens, told ABC News that he was looking for weapons in Libya. Middle East expert Barry Rubin has said U.S. intelligence confirms that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate for the return of an American weapons’ system.
This much I know is true: Syria, so left to roll along with Russian business and military arrangements in the Post-Soviet Era, has deteriorated to the point where there is press right now discussing partition (France 24. “Battle for Qusair raises threat of Syria partition.” May 20, 2013).
Syria’s central government has been seriously damaged.
The combined displaced persons and refugee situations are becoming as untenable as they are substantial (BBC reports “Syrian refugees’ situation is ‘desparate’, warns Oxfam” – May 20, 2013).
Related from the BBC: “Syria conflict: Fierce battle for key town of Qusair.” May 20, 2013: “State television said that the army had set up a protected corridor for civilians to escape the fighting, but activists said many people feared persecution and torture once they entered government-controlled areas.”
While Russia protects its existing contracts with the Assad regime and positions war ships in the area, the “fog of war” — even in the Electronic Information Age, perhaps more so — prevails and within it fighters lose their lives, as do civilians, and civilians lose their homes and there way of living in relation to them.
All that commotion, destruction, and general misery costs a bundle.
From last year on the The Independent site, Paul Conroy, a journalist casualty of the war, describes Assad’s war as a massacre of Homs residents: Fisk, Robert. “The fearful realities keeping the Assad regime in power.” The Independent, March 4, 2012. In the text following the video, Robert Fisk characterized Homs this way:
Once a Roman city, where the crusaders committed their first act of cannibalism – eating their dead Muslim opponents – Homs was captured by Saladin in 1174. Under post-First World War French rule, the settlement became a centre of insurrection and, after independence, the very kernel of Baathist resistance to the first Syrian governments. By early 1964, there were battles in Homs between Sunnis and Alawi Shia. A year later, the young Baathist army commander of Homs, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Tlas, was arresting his pro-regime comrades. Is the city’s history becoming a little clearer now?
Earlier this month, CNN reported on Homs: “Eight hundred families and nearly 500 wounded people in the Old District now fear for their lives and many worry they will become victims of reprisal attacks and even sectarian killings, the Revolutionary Council of Homs said.”
Abdelazziz, Salma. “Syria government reclaims parts of Homs.” CNN, May 2, 2013.
If you were an attentive reader going down this column, you caught the message twice as regards common trust of the Assad regime: from these reports, it ain’t there.
Syria’s Civil War is a big ugly animal that gets around, and today its interests are not those of any its path nor, for the most part, of those it has swept into arms.
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