Category Archives: Syria

Syrian Refugee Camp From the Air

27 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Jordan, Journalism, Middle East, Regions, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Note: Examination of the downloaded clip showed no EXIF (camera) or IPTC (author or editorial) data. Although Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal has been noted as visiting the Zaatari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan on April 22, 2014, whether or not he’s the passenger on the above flight — a pretty good look at the establishment of a new town, at least for a while — could not be ascertained.

Many of the refugees were from middle-income families and communities in Syria.

Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are now selling fruit and vegetables at illegal stands in Zaatari or in communities around northern Jordan. Around five percent of Zaatari’s residents were university students in Syria before coming to the camp.

http://dailysignal.com/2015/08/26/a-lost-generation-where-have-4-million-syrians-fled/ – 8/26/2015 – In the lede, journalist Charlotte Florance reports, “According to United Nations figures, more than 4 million Syrians have fled their homeland, with another 7 million displaced internally within Syria.”

http://observer.com/2015/07/is-saudi-prince-talal-going-to-israel/ – 7/14/2015

https://www.alwaleedphilanthropies.org/alwaleed-philanthropies-supported-300-syrian-refugees-bekaa –

Posted to YouTube 9/7/2013

Posted to YouTube 1/2/2014

Posted to YouTube 2/2/2014

Posted to YouTube 1/8/2015

Posted to YouTube 7/30/2015

I have found this blog a paste-up board for snapshots of time.  Visitors here see a part of a day that I have experienced online, and then longitudinally, over time, the series in events, places, and themes begins to tell the story of a desktop journey through time.

http://blog.worldvisionyouth.org/2014/03/12/syria-6-stories/ – 3/12/2014.

# # #

 

Syria – Assad – “We trust the Russians . . . .”

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

girl-injured-clinic

Injured girl, field hospital, Douma, Syria. The downloaded image itself contained no EXIF or IPTC data.

Related: http://www.citizenside.com/en/photos/politics/2015-07-27/118223/syria-field-hospital-in-douma.html#f=0/1299528 – 7/27/2015.

“. . . we trust the Russians.  They proved throughout the crisis, the last four years, they proved they are honest, transparent, and have principles . . . .”

BBC.  “Syria’s Assad ‘confident’ of Iranian and Russian support.”  Video and news report.  August 26, 2015

Without Putin, Bashar al-Assad as a dynastic leader would have been finished in 2011.  However, instead of appropriately responding to Syrian complaints at the time and the yearning for a voice in their own governance, Assad chose to arrest and torture children.  All that has changed in the past four years has been the scope in breadth and cruelty of the punishment meted to noncombatant Syrians.

At the outset, President Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia presented a block to the start of the erosion of the Assad family’s absolute ruling power; next: Assad cultivated ISIS by selectively not bombing the al-Qaeda Typicals in their infancy, which then dealt to himself a glorious piece — in his warped eyes — of political theater, “Assad vs The Terrorist”.  Putin, Assad, and Khamenei each knew “The Terrorists”, which have largely turned out to be ISIS, although many other and similar organizations exist in the field, would present an even more difficult challenge to the west.

For Khamenei, nothing could sustain an Islamic theocratic tyranny in Iran quite like the prospect and reality of a continuous Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle, for which ISIS would conveniently serve as foil to the further expression and regional projection of Iranian Shiite power.

For the west, perhaps, there is less of “reset” in what has taken place in Syria and more of pressing the collapse of Soviet-style “state capitalism” in the form of an oligarchy — a “new nobility” — brought into existence and managed by Putin.  From that perspective, Russia has stalled in Syria and Crimea — and given the price of oil at the well these days — or the evident callousness of the Russian leadership — it may not want the burden of settling either conflict or reconstructing that which it has helped destroy, both “hot spots” being more effective at bleeding the west of financial resources and focus.  With U.S. President Obama shrugging away much of that form of challenge — or seeming to do that — that tack may not be going so well.

Similar observations may be made in regard to Iran’s position.

Even though it will see immense cash flow for the “nuclear deal”, the regime will have to deal with greater greed around itself as well as its unpopular extension through wars by proxy in the region.

Who knows but that Hezbollah will tire of its men dying for the ambitions of the Ayatollah.

Still, nothing will change all that fast.

While Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together defend “absolute power”, the suffering accompanying that psychology — and what ISIS means to bring to Syrians, i.e., greater tyranny in the name of God, will be even worse — will grow worse: the “Eye Doctor” has lost himself in his own inverted fantasia, a world in which Putin’s Russia has proven “honest, transparent, and principled” (tell that to Ukrainians) and Syrians suffer primarily at the hands of “The Terrorists” and not beneath the barrel bombs dropped on the most helpless of them by Assad’s own air force.

The “additional reference” section may be at this point outmoded by a very good and quick Google search engine.  We can find what we may want to read in flash; whether we can find the conversation we need to have as quickly remains to be seen.

Search string: “Syria, barrel bombs” / news:

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/22/433735915/activists-un-denounce-deadly-syrian-barrell-bombs – 8/22/2015

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/20570-barrel-bombs-fall-on-syrias-douma-killing-50-source – 8/23/2015

http://www.ibtimes.com/syrian-regimes-barrel-bombs-kill-more-civilians-isis-al-qaeda-combined-2057392 – 8/18/2015

http://www.dailysabah.com/nation/2015/08/25/assads-barrel-bombs-cost-syrian-boy-his-family-and-hearing – 8/24/2015

Search string: “Syria, water, war” / news

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/middleeast/water-is-called-casualty-of-syrian-war.html – 8/25/2015 Related: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_82980.html

Search string: “Syria, moderate forces” / news

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11817208/US-failed-to-protect-us-says-commander-of-Pentagon-trained-rebels-in-Syria.html – 8/21/2015

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/19/us-trained-syrian-rebels-we-need-training-be-faste/ – 8/19/2015

Search string: “Syria, New Syria Force”

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/18/middleeast/new-syria-force-fighter-abu-iskander/ – 8/18/2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/middleeast/ahrar-al-sham-rebel-force-in-syrias-gray-zone-poses-challenge-to-us.html – 8/25/2015.

Misc.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/08/246155.htm – 8/17/2015.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/08/25/video-syrian-toddler-rescued-from-under-the-rubble-of-bombed-building/ – 8/25/2015

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/africa/20625-are-we-human-beings – 8/24/2015

# # #

The Big Fade – Or Not? Where Goes the Phantom of the Cold War?

23 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria, Ukraine

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

Yesterday left off with “Putin, Erdogan meet face to face, but don’t see eye to eye” (Al-Monitor, June 19, 2015).

Trouble in “Hellidise” for the world’s most fabulous feudal lords?

Hmm.

Should some friction not attend Syria’s fragmenting implosion brought about by the implied bloody script this blog has referred to as “Assad vs The Terrorists”?

Sanctions have been up for a while; oil prices have been down for a while: such broad conditions brought about by large maneuvers, like “North American energy independence“, may have effects.

As a trading partner, Erdogan may have a little more edge with Putin these days; as a Sunni Muslim looking over the border and watching Daesh and other al-Qaeda-type groups continuing to rough up and tear apart Syria’s landscape, he has cause to let the scouring continue.  The teleology on which he has campaigned pits him against Putin-Assad-Khamenei’s interests on the Hezbollahian (militant Shiite) side of the great divide most immediately applicable to the continuing Great Struggle of Evil Against Evil in Syria, the modern and moderate, whoever they may be (ye shall know them one still distant day by their pro-Semitic / pro-Zionist lingo), having been killed, dispersed, rendered irrelevant, or otherwise sidelined for some years now.

This day appears to be closing (for me) with tomorrow’s news (gotta love the International Dateline): “US to deploy heavy weapons on NATO’s eastern flank” (AFP, Yahoo, June 24, 2015).

From my portion of The Awesome Conversation:

While generally attaching Erdogan to Putin-Khamenei as another medieval-minded autocrat with strong interest in sustaining feudal models of power against the democratic west, there may be some unraveling within this drift as depressed oil revenues (for Russia), other punitive measures (like sanctions), and some military repositioning take place in response to Russia’s aggression in Crimea. For Erdogan, whether he likes it or not (I’m starting to appreciate that phrase), Turkey remains a NATO member with a significant modern constituency. While Erdogan wants his White Palace — I think he’s moved in, I’m not sure — the whole world is watching in an open and robust global information environment. For that, both leaders may have a little less operating room as despots than they may have had 25 years ago.

&

The “big picture” — how the feudal world may change as the modern one moves around it — is easier (for me) to see today than was the case just a few years ago.

From an amateur’s perspective, the smaller pictures might require country specialization and language ability. It’s just easier following heads of state than the numerous personalities, agencies, and committees involved in producing the world’s political landscapes and their narratives.

The long diplomacy and now evident maneuvering have been dangerous, of course, but even portrayed as playing poker against Obama’s chess, Putin’s own programming has a predictable aspect to it.  Via the day’s e-mail feed, World Affairs promoted “Imperial Ambitions: Russia’s Military Buildup” (May/June 2015):

In September 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that he could, at will, occupy any Eastern European capital in two days. This apparently spontaneous utterance reveals, probably more than Russia’s new official defense doctrine, Moscow’s true assessment of NATO’s capabilities, cohesion, and will to resist. In an echo of Soviet tactics, it also reflects Putin’s reflexive recourse to intimidation—e.g., unwarranted boasting about Russian military capabilities and intentions—as a negotiating strategy. In 2014 alone, Moscow repeatedly threatened the Baltic and Nordic states and civilian airliners, heightened intelligence penetration, deployed unprecedented military forces against those states, intensified overflights and submarine reconnaissance, mobilized nuclear forces and threats, deployed nuclear-capable forces in Kaliningrad, menaced Moldova, and openly violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.

Much of Putin’s tenure has been about a Russian feudal revanche complete with “New Nobility” and a $51 billion winter spectacle (Sochi, while Syria’s Assad was barrel bombing millions of Syrians out of their lives and homes to make way for The Terrorists by refraining from doing the same to them at the time).

As noted in passing, while Khamenei may be going gangbusters with wars by proxy, one may wonder today how much the same have cost him by way of the continuing faith and loyalty of those patronized.  The public talk-and-walk by Nasrallah may not change much, and, indeed, if the enemy nearby is Daesh or another of the type, the situation demands that he inspire and prepare his community for greater challenges to come, and that he keep his backers happy, but the same now take place in an atmosphere of stalemate over a wartorn landscape.

Such combat proves not a fast game but an agonizingly slow grind.

Where the finger-pointing takes place — how could it not be taking place offstage? — some portion must point back to Moscow and Tehran — Putin and Khamenei — for perverting a mild people’s revolution in Damascus to hold together the Ghosts of the Soviet and the maintenance of old and new privileged through time-honored and familiar but perfectly despicable feudal practices.

Sideways and Forward

Laub, Karin (AP).  “New think tank in Jordan watching Israel shows discreet, growing ties between countries.”  U.S. News & World Report, June 22, 2015.

# # #

FTAC – Summation – Syria and Red Brown Green

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

The schematics I feel I’ve observed over the years:

Post-Soviet –> neo-feudal Russia that has been quietly addressed (by sanctions; by a precipitous drop in oil prices and related revenues) as an extension of the former era.

“Putin-Assad-Khamenei” as an arc of power in the region and “Putin-Khamenei” as a hub for the greater development of political absolute power elsewhere.

“Syndicate Red Brown Green” — Putin’s Russia, KGB-to-FSB; new national socialist movements (Hungary); Islamists.

The cultivation of Daesh, self-generated but perhaps manipulated by Khamenei to serve as a Sunni foil for his regime’s Shiite expansion, serves narrative artifice that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” — an horrific piece of political “theater of the real”.

All of that may be breaking up through the fragmenting of Syria, but nothing is near over, and, indeed, the anarchy and chaos developed in the space will have to be addressed on multiple levels, from combat and counterterrorism effort to some kind of refugee management and resettlement. Count out “Putin, Assad, Khamenei” as being of any help at all.

I had just seen a group of pictures featuring starved Syrian children, the latest in “war porn”, and it had featured an image of a starving adult man bearing a resemblance to President Obama.

Agitprop?

Not only agitprop, but propaganda from what appeared to me to be an anti-western, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist “news agency” promoting victimization on one hand while isolating itself on the other.

BackChannels has been to this evil place before: “It’s Hard Helping You When You’re Anti-Semitic, Among Other Things” (March 19, 2014).

Written about the “Obamastarvingman” and the more evidently starved youngsters:

I don’t like the top figure’s resemblance to Obama — it smacks of propaganda, an attempt at not quite subliminal suggestion.

While “Syndicate Red Brown Green” put together the political theater that may be titled, “Assad vs The Terrorists”, the children shown, and of course noncombatant adults as well, were the kind of Syrians killed or punished by, in essence, their own feudal lords.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights may have additional information on the casualties of the breathtaking disaster that has taken place in Syria in the post-Soviet and now feudal context managed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Obama watched; NATO watched; we watched. However: the continuing promotion of anti-Semitism, anti-westernism — basically hateful and undemocratic rhetoric (because it’s dishonest and disingenuous speech) — leaves the Syrian victims of Assad’s grandiose play (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) disenfranchised, helpless, and isolated.

No surprise: no one has yet “Liked” the comment.

# # #

Assad or Burn It? Assad Burns It.

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

The United States has accused the Syrian military loyal to President Bashar Assad of carrying out air strikes to help Islamic State fighters advance around the northern city of Aleppo, messages posted on the US Embassy in Syria’s official Twitter feed said.

Reuters via YNet News.  “US accuses Assad of backing Islamic State’s Aleppo advance.”  June 2, 2015.

Related on BackChannels: “Ali Khamenei and the Letter from Near Mosul – A Speculation.”  January 16, 2015.

Reminder with reference to how the Syrian Revolution began:

Syria is burning — scorched for nearly a year by tenacious political resistance, a merciless security crackdown and cries for democracy.

The spark that lit the flame began about a year ago in the southern city of Daraa after the arrests of at least 15 children for painting anti-government graffiti on the walls of a school.

The community’s blunt outrage over the children’s arrests and mistreatment, the government’s humiliating and violent reactions to their worries, and the people’s refusal to be cowed by security forces emboldened and helped spread the Syrian opposition.

Sterling, Joe.  “Daraa: The spark that lit the Syrian flame.”  CNN, March 1, 2012.

Related.  Human Rights Watch.  “Syria: Crimes Against Humanity in Daraa: Killings, Torture in a Locked-Down City Under Siege.”  June 1, 2011:

“For more than two months now, Syrian security forces have been killing and torturing their own people with complete impunity,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “They need to stop – and if they don’t, it is the Security Council’s responsibility to make sure that the people responsible face justice.”

Fat chance then and no better now.

Twice elsewhere today, the editor has been online noting the perversion of the 2011 Syrian protest movement against absolute power into an immensely aggrandizing narrative that one might title, “Assad vs The Terrorists.”

How did “The Terrorists” get to play such a large role in the region?

Evidently, the Assad regime — this with the cooperation of Moscow and Tehran — simply prefered to barrel bomb the living daylights out of business districts, hospitals, schools, residential housing, and the like rather than impede the development al-Nusra (early Syrian Civil War) and Daesh (late Syrian Tragedy).

In this blog’s laziest short form:

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-what-its-like-to-have-the-assad-regimes-barrel-bombs-dropped-on-your-city-2015-5 – 5/5/2015.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/30/syria-children-killed.html – 4/30/2014.

http://www.businessinsider.com/barrel-bombing-in-syria-graphic-2014-3 – includes video of a bombing – 3/11/2014.

http://www.aawsat.net/2015/05/article55343292/major-hospital-in-syrias-aleppo-shuts-because-of-bombing – 5/5/2014.

Point made?

Granted, the field has been a mess from very near the Assad regime’s initial show of brutality with the arrest and torture of children.  The response to the outrage plus the deflecting of a people’s revolution drew from the population and from around the world drew a world of volunteers into a mixed bag of Islamic / Islamist warrior bands.

While Bashar al-Assad’s Syria remains in power, the damage wrought to the state has been profound.  In addition to dead, injured, and refugee and added to the insults done to business, cultural, and religious assets, the Assad regime appears to have lost control of about a third of the country.

Related: Charron, Guillaume.  “Syria: Forsaken IDPs adrift inside a fragmenting state.”  Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, October 21, 2014.

Does Bashar al-Assad even have a state?

Has Syria not been burned?

The growth of The Terrorists and their expansion in conceptual and real presence in the Syrian and Syrian-Iraq theaters has deflected attention from other failures in the regimes involved, served to redefine Assad’s challenge from 2011 children’s protest movement (in part) into a fight in 2015 as dramatic as it has been heartbreaking and absurd: “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and there remains no near end in sight.

On Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Isis was now in control of all six border crossings between Iraq and Syria – even with the constant presence of US air force jets. Nearly 1,000 miles of frontier is now out of the control of either country, with Isis enjoying complete freedom of movement, except when the warplanes are around.

Though 20 of its 43 top-tier officials have been picked off by US drones and jets, Isis leaders can still travel freely across the large tract of land, roughly the size of Jordan, that they now call an Islamic caliphate.

Chulov, Martin.  “Amid the ruins of Syria, is Bashar al-Assad now finally facing the end?”  The Guardian, May 23, 2015.

Additional Reference

AFP.  “Iraq allies vow support for plan to regain ground from ISIS.”  Al Arabiya, June 2, 2015.

BBC News.  “Syria: The story of the conflict.”  March 12, 2015.

Charron, Guillaume.  “Syria: Forsaken IDPs adrift inside a fragmenting state.”  Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, October 21, 2014

Chulov, Martin and Julian Borger.  “Syria: Isis advance on Aleppo aided by Assad regime air strikes, US says.”  June 2, 2015:

“It has become a matter of fact since 2013 that the Syrian regime has bombed us to stop us fighting Isis properly. Isis have never attacked Syrian planes. They owe their success to the regime.”

A second opposition leader from the Suqr al-Sham group said: “They have hit us with Grad rockets, artillery, air strikes and everything else since Sunday. They have not hit an Isis position.”

Coalition for a Democratic Syria via Daily Mail: map of ISIS land gains, reposted by Daily Mail, January 17, 2015.

Drury, Flora.  “Revealed – how the threat of ISIS is spreading: Extremist groups has DOUBLED the land it controls in just a few months despite more than 800 coalition airstrikes.”  Daily Mail, January 17, 2015.

Harris, Shane and Jamie Dettmer.  “Spies Warned White House: Don’t Hit Al Qaeda in Syria.”  The Daily Beast, November 6, 2014.

Reuters.  “Satellite images show 290 heritage sites in Syria damaged by war: U.N.  December 23, 2014.

Sommerville, Quentin.  “Islamic State militants ‘filmed torturing Syrian boy'”.  BBC News, June 1, 2015.

Strategic Culture Foundation.  “100,000 militants, fragmented into 1,000 bands, are fighting in Syria: Study.”  September 16, 2013.

The Economist.  “Creeping toward Damascus.”  April 11, 2015.

Update – FTAC – Latest News – June 4, 2015

The Assad regime is in bad shape in every way: it has established its reputation for being murderous and sadistic at breathtaking scale — hundreds of thousands dead; millions displaced by its own bombing and other (including chemical weapons) actions; in the passion play “Assad vs The Terrorists”, it has had to call in Hezbollah’s troops and move them to meet al-Nusra and Daesh and others; it has lost control of about a third of Syria’s former land space; and having laid siege to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp and through fighting with Daesh worked it into a state of destruction, it has reduced itself altogether to the status of an embattled feudal kingdom. Adrift in time today, where is Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to go?

Related Reference: Ginsberg, Mitch.  “Assad regime in its ‘most grave predicament’ – 
Syrian army defunct, rebels 100 yards from Israel border, senior officer says: 
Hezbollah has lost 100 men in past two weeks, says officer; terms non-conventional threat from Iran as ‘in decline’ in short term.”  The Times of Israel, June 4, 2015.

Link – Criticism of Patrick Cockburn Also Tells About A Post-Soviet “Theater of the Real”

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)

Ahmad, Muhammad Idrees.  “Who’s Lying About Syria’s Christian Massacre?”  The Daily Beast, May 27, 2015.

Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.

BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.

Additional Reference

Amazon.com: The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict.  eBook: Aboud Dandachi: Kindle Store – Kindle Edition, 94-101, 2/17/2014.

BackChannels.  “From Syria – The Doctor, the Eye Doctor, and Me – A Damning Statement.”  February 28, 2014.

Pulse.  “Syria: Beyond the Red Line” — “An important discussion on Syria, hosted by the Frontline Club, featuring Jonathan Littell, Orwa Nyrabia, Laila Alodaat, and Nerma Jelacic.”  Video featured.  May 28, 2015.

# # #

2012 Report – Watching the Horror Born

27 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Politics, Syria

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

From recent correspondence — so recent, it hasn’t even been sent!

You may wish to wonder at the goodness of your country in its domestic ideals. China and Russia work differently, and what they do has probably long “leaked” into our own analyses and options.

With Iran, “War by Proxy” is obvious everywhere the regime sows chaos, death, and sorrow. This week: Yemen.

With Russia, those criminals make war and lie about it. As much has been the story of the invasion of Crimea from the start.

The Chinese: they have built islands on the sly!

Darned Earthworkers!

🙂

This news appeared on Fox nine days ago:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/18/military-intel-predicted-rise-isis-in-2012-detailed-arms-shipments/

Who OWNS that monster Out There in Syria-Iraq (“Syriaque”?*).

That it has served Putin-Assad-Khamenei, that person that has managed to pervert a a popular people’s protest into an ineffable tragedy one might title, “Assad vs The Terrorists” (mission accomplished), points to the forbearing of barrel bombing old terrorists positions when the districts of Homs proved so much more convenient and harmless and helpless for doing so.

This month (merry one of May) has brought an example of active observation but passive response to a challenge that has morphed from a negligible horror into a military and political scourge calling to mind the possibly more gentle manners of Attila the Hun.

The story released by Fox has been picked up on the Blogosphere, and the report itself may be located and downloaded as a PDF.

Additional Reference

Always on Watch.  “The DIA: ISIS “A Strategic Asset”?  May 26, 2015.

Hoff, Brad.  “2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document: West will facilitate rise of Islamic State “in order to isolate the Syrian regime”.  Levant Report, May 19, 2015.

Judicial Watch.  “Pgs. 287-293 (291) JW v DOD and State 14-812”.  Download site for the report pdf file (uploaded May 18, 2015).

*“Syriac” is a language and “Syriaque” it’s French spelling.

While on the subject of the dismantling of Syria-Iraq boundary points, BackChannels has taken note of the strength of “nominal affiliation” and “sectarian teleology” in producing and sustaining brutal conflict in the region.  The gamble on the favor of God and related glory appears to overmatch the promise of social cooperation and cohesion across sectarian lines that would produce a more sound freedom, peace, and prosperity while intellectual and social habits related to the experiences of fear and security prevail: Our People vs Those People, Sunni vs Shiite, appears to remain primary across population to some extent.

# # #

Link – Yarmouk – Played

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics, Syria

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

The Islamic State’s recent conquest of Yarmouk—a once thriving Palestinian suburb with the formal status of a refugee camp that lies on the outskirts of Damascus—provides far more than just insight into which aspects of the Palestinian plight get editorial privilege and which do not. Since the strangulation of Yarmouk began in 2012, the fate of its people has offered a bald reminder that within the Arab world, Palestinians still encounter an ambivalence that can spill into open contempt. Just as instructive, and certainly more novel, is the realization that the global Palestinian solidarity movement, by not holding mass demonstrations highlighting the slaughter and starvation in Yarmouk, has become complicit with the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the beheaders of IS.

Cohen, Ben.  “Yarmouk and the Failure of Palestine Solidarity.”  The Tower, Issue 26, May 2015.

Related on BackChannels:

I am an Arab Canadian, an organizer of small 2006 Gaza/Lebanon protests, and I am concerned on the rise of antisemitism.

The massive Gaza protests this year, organized by the Workers World Party, were about promoting antisemitism rather than concern for Palestinians. These protests excluded Arab voices so they could be free to demonize Israel. Worldwide, almost each time Syrian Palestinians brought a Free Syrian flag to protests, they were met with harassment, and, in some cases, violence. As one Palestinian woman from the Yarmouk Ghetto of Syria said, “We have been used.”

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-1/ – by Maria Al-Masani – 10/21/2014.

The truth, however, is Israelis have been quietly giving food to Jordan-based Syrian refugees while Jordan continues to strand them in the desert. While Hezbollah has been beating and even lynching Syrian Palestinians, the Lebanese army bombed refugee tents. Yet, Israel has, in the meantime, been medically treating and saving the lives of Syrians in Israeli hospitals assembled at the Syrian border. The Holocaust Museum hosted the photos of Cesar on the Syrian concentration camps. When the whole world abandoned Syrian Palestinians, Israel was there for them and Turkey took in millions of refugees. Even the Canadian opposition leader, Thomas Mulcair, referred to Assad as a genocidal maniac, but “Save Gaza” activists were silent.

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-2/ – by Maria Al-Masani – 10/22/2014.

# # #