Category Archives: Syria

Links – Syrian Injured Treated in Israel – More Than 1,600

12 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Syria

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Post to YouTube May 10, 2015.

Related source: Liebermann, Oren.  “Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel.”  CNN, May 11, 2015.

Ben-Yishai reported that since the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) first arranged for the transfer of injured Syrians almost two years ago, some 1,600 Syrians have been treated in Israel. Now that UNDOF has fled its postings after frequent attacks, Israel relies on “trusted intermediaries.”

The Tower.  “Despite Risks to Personnel, Israel Has Treated 1,600 Syrians in Last Two Years.”  May 12, 2015.

Sideways Related Reference

AP.  “US Secretary of State Kerry meets Putin in Russia amid Ukraine, Syria tensions.” U.S. News & World Report, May 12, 2015.

BBC News.  “Syria conflict: Aleppo civilians suffer ‘unthinkable atrocities'”.  May 5, 2015.

BBC News.  “Syria conflict in number – in 60 seconds.”  November 12, 2014.

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Link – Palestinians Slaughtered by the Great Hate

10 Friday Apr 2015

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

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The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky, mainly because they are being attacked and killed by Muslims, and not by Israel. An Israeli attack on the camp would have drawn worldwide condemnation and protests, with Palestinian and Arab leaders rushing to seek the intervention of the UN Security Council and the international community.

The Palestinians in Yarmouk are unlucky because their leaders in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are still busy fighting each other over power and money. This is a power struggle that has been going on since Hamas drove the PA out of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Why Palestinians in Yarmouk Are Unlucky.”  Gatestone Institute, April 10, 2015.

Setting aside the fine points of Islamist rivalry that may exist between Daesh and Hamas, the absurdity and obscenity of the destruction of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp may serve to highlight the sociopathic character of the despots who brought it about: Putin, Assad, Khamenei.

Aboud Dandachi’s observations regarding the perverting of Syria’s Arab Spring into an extremist’s civil war are borne out by the advance of the al-Qaeda spin-off that is Daesh and the more than equal measure of punishment meted to Yarmouk by the Assad (“Or Burn It”) regime.  All of the Arab accusation and handwringing on behalf of the (descendants of) refugees of 1948 have been betrayed as convenient loud mouthiness.  In the pinch, not one militant or military Arab hand stood to defend — to hold dear and keep safe — the larger population of Yarmouk.

If the reader should happen to be thinking like a healthy human being, this might be a good time to put on the mantle of any of a number of malign narcissistic sociopaths and start to think like a ringleader, a showman, a producer of conflict to be delivered, described, and framed in the cause of one’s own self-aggrandizing political theater.

Related Reference

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the mayhem has turned Yarmouk into “the deepest circle of hell.”

“A refugee camp is beginning to resemble a death camp,” Ban told reporters at the U.N., adding that the residents, including 3,500 children, are being used as human shields by armed elements inside Yarmouk and government forces outside it.

Aji, Albert.  “PLO says it won’t be drawn into battle to oust IS from embattled Palestinian camp in Syria.”  U.S. News & World Report, April 10, 2015.

You cannot understand the Islamic State’s assault on the camp or what it means unless you also consider how Bashar al-Assad, as a gift to the Palestinian people, turned a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die. We cannot stop what happened in Yarmouk from repeating itself elsewhere unless we save the 600,000 besieged civilians whom Assad is starving to death.

Zakarya, Qusai.  “The Starving of Yarmouk, Then the Capture: The Islamic State’s attack on the besieged Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus is highly suspicious.  It could only have happened with Assad’s complicity.”  Foreign Policy, April 9, 2015.

At the time, the full scale of the group’s collusion with the Assad regime was not yet well known, and it was perceived as an independent Al-Qaeda group with dreams of a 21st century caliphate, which they started to impose on Raqqa.

Dandachi, Aboud.  “After Conquering Raqqa, ISIS Enters Mosul.  Are the Obamanite Isolationists Happy Now?”  From Homs to Istanbul, June 10, 2014.

In mid-2012, Hezbollah entered Syria, ostensibly to safeguard a regime that was vital in supporting its operations in the region. Once thought of as the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, their intervention, coupled with their ally’s brutal siege on Yarmouk, has damaged the movement’s popularity among Palestinians from Syria.

El-Shammah, Hugo.  “Inside the Middle East: Palestinians in Syria lose respect for Hezbollah.”  The Media Line in The Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2015.

Published about a year ago, this piece seems practically quaint by the standards of horror being visited today by Daesh on the beleaguered Palestinians.

Chulov, Martin.  “Besieged and terrified . . . and the food is about to run out for Damascus refugees.”  The Guardian, April 19, 2014.

Reports also say that several Palestinians including an imam have been beheaded by Isis. Grisly pictures posted on social media shows severed heads hung on spikes inside the refugee camps.

Varghese, Johnlee.  “Isis Posts Grisly Pictures of Beheaded Palestinians in Yarmouk Camp (Graphic Images).  International Business Times, April 5, 2015.

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Link – Yarmouk – Word of Torture and Execution – Regime and Opposition Blamed

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Links, Syria

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A man from the Yarmouk camp tortured to death in regime prisons. Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic battalions executed a man in the Yarmouk camp in the charge of insulting “Allah”

http://syriahr.com/en/2015/01/shells-and-casualties-in-damascus-and-air-strikes-on-its-countryside/ – 1/25/2015.

What began in 2011 as an effort to hold a government accountable and to expand administrative power to the people, i.e., a true people’s revolution, has become by design, and one may think Putin-Assad-Khamenei for this, a civil war defined on both sides by despotic and sadistic personalities.  Neither side appears to have an off button, or a noble humanitarian switch, for that matter, and between them, Yarmouk Camp has been played like a poker chip.

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Syria – False Picture – Irrelevant Praise

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Russia, Syria

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UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Jan. 15 that the continued violence in Syria is a “disgrace” and that the Syria conflict is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.” Syrians have replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population, with 7.6 million displaced and 3.3 million refugees, in addition to a death toll estimated at 200,000, and the return of typhoid, measles and polio to the country.

On Jan. 14, de Mistura got a boost from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised UN and Russian efforts to broker a settlement in Syria.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/01/hezbollah-syria-assad-kerry-russia-israel-turkey-yemen.html – 1/18/2015

This blog has supported the notion that yesterday’s communist elite are today’s state capitalists backed and defended by security fascists motivated by money and a new fascist nationalism.  That’s a complicated way of suggesting that “Old Red has met New Brown” — and the old Soviets are today’s New Nationalists.

Add the Old Red-Green Arrangement.

Along that line, and while scanning, collecting, posting, and commenting on news from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, one cannot help but note that certain relationships seem defined by common interest in “political absolutism”: Putin – Assad – Khamenei | Putin – Orban – Erdogan – (Khamenei).  The dry outer skin of the onion wants another story: secular vs religious power; Sunni vs Shiite teleology; Iran vs Iraq. However, lo and behold, as the Internet helps political wonks tear back the layers of the onion, Iran is in Iraq in a large evident way (and given the malignant psychology involved in men who would be as if gods — or just one — themselves, the Russo-Syrian-Iranian alliance may be what was in back of Daesh, for if one is to be as God, one would naturally manage the entire battle, not just one side of it.

As Putin was in the business of spending about $51 billion on the winter olympics in Sochi (the figure is disputed but still well into the tens of billions), he appears to have been thoroughly out of the business of tempering Assad’s response to a moderate, modern, and democratically updating revolutionary “Arab Spring” challenge or, Mr. Nice Guy, offering Russian aid to ameliorate the damage, displacement, and injury brought to millions of innocents.   After all, it really wasn’t his concern, was it, whatever happened to Syrians.

The suggestion that Assad chose to bomb the daylights out of noncombatant zones while holding off on the al-Qaeda-types who came into theater of war may be borne out in the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures created in the monstrosity that is today the deeply polarized and globally signal “Syrian Civil War”, for while NATO and the western world press for classical liberal values in governance, it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together press for immense systems of abuse, coercion, enslavement, and exploitation on the mighty piers of fear and patronage.

Call Syria an “axle of power” 🙂 — if the three dictators get away with driving over the state’s constituents to an inherently fascist conclusion, they might well drive the same anywhere else — and the end of that kind of power: the power to make others suffer capriciously, with impunity, without heart, without justice, without limits.

Still, Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Wednesday that the United States welcomed both initiatives. He made no call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, a notable omission from Mr. Kerry, who has typically insisted on it in public remarks. Instead, he spoke of Mr. Assad as a leader who needed to change his policies.

“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” Mr. Kerry said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/world/middleeast/us-support-for-syria-peace-plans-demonstrates-shift-in-priorities.html – 1/19/2015

Name the tyrants — communist, nationalist, Islamist (red-brown-green) — who have with grace backed away from or stepped down from power.

The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218533/russian-footprints/ion-mihai-pacepa – 8/24/2006

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Ali Khamenei and the Letter from Near Mosul – A Speculation

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Syria

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LetterFromMosul

Governorate of Ninava
Number of copies 751
Dated June, 06, 2014
To all departments of the governorate
Prevention preparations
Due to critical circumstances in the governorate and since we are convinced that army is not capable to face and confront the mujahideen we order all departments and governmental establishments within the governorate to follow below instructions and advices:
1- destroy all contracts and documents relevant to procurements within your department
2- burn all documents with governor’s name or signature
3- employees must not confront the mujahideen and they have to run away
4- don’t move away or hide vehicles, machineries and heavy equipments
5- in case of facing mujahideen it is prohibited to confront them in order to save lives and properties
6- it’s prohibited to have mobile phone under all circumstances
7- minimize night shift surveillance in order to save lives
Those who will not strictly follow instructions will be severely punished, expelled and followed by security committee of the governorate
For immediate execution
Atheel Abdulaziz Alnujaifi
Governor of Ninava

“Mujahideen” is not a word used to describe an enemy.  It’s rather like “freedom fighter”, a word glorifying men at arms.  In the vicinity of Mosul, which is where the above letter was promulgated by Governor Atheel Abdulazziz Alnujaifi, “enemy” would be referred to, as they are elsewhere, as “terrorists”.

The mid-January attempted assassination of Iranian spy chief General Qassem Soleimani, Commander and Chief of the Al Qods Brigades reported by Debka today may have some relationship to the above “stand-down” letter issued to military personnel by the mayor of Mosul shortly before the Islamic State’s lightning assault on Iraq.

Working on the red-brown-green theme and related political psychology in this blog  has been like watching a sea monster rise from the deep.  At first, the waters are obviously troubled and for apparent reasons — the middle east conflict, anti-Semitism, related Solidarity organizations, the calumny of the UN, and so on — but then the black mass of alliances starts to appear — that International Club of Bad Little Boys: Putin-Assad-Khamenei; Putin-Orban; Putin-Erdogan — and then a little later more data starts pushing up through the roiled surface:

In the eyes of most Iraqis, their country’s best ally in the war against the Islamic State group is not the United States and the coalition air campaign against the militants. It’s Iran, which is credited with stopping the extremists’ march on Baghdad.

http://www.businessinsider.com/iran-has-never-been-more-influential-in-iraq-2015-1#ixzz3Ooudrg10

Of course: Iran’s despot may have been holding the reins not only on Shiite extremist interests, like those of Hezbollah, but Sunni extremist operations as well, like those of Hamas, al-Nusra, and the Islamic State.

It has been a complaint out of the Syrian Revolution (2011) cum Civil War (afterward) that while Assad was barrel bombing the hell out of assorted noncombatants — not to mention sniping babies in the womb — his air force was standing off the positions of the al-Qaeda-type organizations, essentially removing the moderate middle from the field and leaving on the field to fights in its place “the terrorists” — the real ones (reference for that thought: Aboud Dandachi‘s The Doctor, The Eye Doctor, and Me, published early in 2014).

Debka has posted another article already this month combing over the Islamic State’s targeting of Iranian top officers in its area of contest and control:

The Al Qaeda-ISIS force was made up entirely of Saudi jihadis.
When these three episodes are examined in context, the Islamic State’s current modus operandi takes shape, as outlined here by DEBKAfile’s military analysts:

It starts with the detailed tracking of the movements of targeted commanders and staff, followed by the penetration of spies, usually locals converted to the jihadist philosophy, to their staffs. These moles keep their bosses in ISIS abreast of the targeted commanders’ movements, time tables, staff aides and the forces assigned to their security.

“ISIS kills Iranian elite Qods unit commander in Iraq, reports deaths of 555 Iranian officers.”  Debka, January 13, 2015.

If one is a child of the public left scribbling with crayons, “Saudi jihadis” conflates Baghdadi’s operation with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but all who track these wars know that “Saudi jihadis” are as much after the Saudi king as anyone else who gets in their way, and with that in mind, they are leagued naturally with the Ayatollah.  One then might ask, what keeps them, if anything, from taking Ali Khamenei’s money when offered?  And in the medieval mode: they may not know where the influence and money are coming from if the same presenting before them are agents provocateur.

While in a healthy society, the sacrifice of one’s own officers would be anathema — and cause for revolution, bloody housekeeping, or dissolving of an entire army — in a state commanded by a piratical malignant narcissist, such a sacrifice for the greater cause of the leader’s aggrandized image — objective: glorification and immortality — might seem but a small thing, another little bit of political theater and show business.

Over the past year, Iran sold Iraq nearly $10 billion worth of weapons and hardware, mostly weapons for urban warfare like assault rifles, heavy machine-guns and rocket launchers, he said. The daily stream of Iranian cargo planes bringing weapons to Baghdad was confirmed at a news conference by a former Shiite militia leader, Jamal Jaafar. Better known by his alias Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis, Jaafar is second in command of the recently created state agency in charge of volunteer fighters.

Some Sunnis are clearly worried. Sunni lawmaker Mohammed al-Karbuly said the United States must increase its support of Iraq against the extremists in order to reduce Iran’s influence.

“Iran now dominates Iraq,” he said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/iran-has-never-been-more-influential-in-iraq-2015-1#ixzz3Ooudrg10 – 1/12/2015.

Again: I know it sounds absurd: why build or control an enemy?

However, if and as one ventures into the bizarre and perverse aspects of political behavior as tyrants display it — why child soldiers?  Slavery?  Trafficking? — then one may turn on the lights and raise the curtains on the Theater of Realpolitik — and doesn’t this look glorious and good?

Arab commentators believe that recent attacks attributed to Iran against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) positions in Iraq show a significant strengthening of Tehran’s efforts to help its allies in Baghdad and Damascus and maintain its regional influence through the fight against the threat of radical Islamists.

Images of Iranian air strikes in eastern Iraq provided the first concrete evidence of direct involvement by the Iranian air force in the military campaign against ISIS. The US military believes that Iran has conducted air strikes against Isis targets in Diyala province in recent days, although the Defense Department insists that it is not co-ordinating any military action with Tehran.

http://www.thetower.org/1354-iran-attacks-isis-in-iraq-to-protect-its-regional-influence/ – 12/8/2014.

What’s being argued is control — not God, not the fate of humanity, not good deeds: control — and what power greater than that to bring out the chessboard, invite a friend to play — provide him with hospitality and sweets or other reward for the pleasure of doing some combat — and play with and against the same at the same time?

Of course, what’s going on with “Daesh” ain’t chess.

At about this place, the appropriately leisured reader — you’re here — may wish to look up “VEVAK, Iraq, Mumford”.

Worlds may be moved from behind curtains and by staged plays – and what is a leader of a totalitarian mission and system if not a master storyteller and producer?

Along the axis I’ve referred to as “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” bring to this story Karen Dawisha’s analysis of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” (in Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who owns Russia?): inside job, KGB manipulation of public perception, useful “false flag”.

News outlets report broadly attacks against two Iranian generals: Mehdi Norouzi on January 12, 2015 and Hamid Taghavi around December 28, 2015.

How does that happen — two in a row?

How does Daesh (IS, ISIS, ISIL) know who is going to be where and when?

The Debka article also says, “According to our military and intelligence sources, ISIS forces have been able to wipe out 555 Iranian officers in the four months since last October, most of them by means of jihadist hit squads.”

Holy moley!

The news has been disseminated widely but not recapitulated: would another western intelligence service publication please weigh in?

If the figure is not near to true, one may think that Daesh got lucky twice with perhaps an expected complement of “moles”, those untrustworthy others with access to operational plans.

If it is true and Daesh has made casualties of “555 Iranian officers in the four months since last October”, that sounds to BackChannels like ducks in a shooting gallery: the information on their whereabouts has been loose and broad — has to have been — and the moles could be anywhere, possibly everywhere, even at the top.

Additional Reference

The fall of Mosul, allegedly to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is not the military victory it has been made out to be. For a start, as the New York Times and Agence France-Presse report, ISIS gunmen (who faced an army outnumbering them fifty-to-one) were able to occupy strategic positions around the city only after Iraqi commanders ordered their troops to stand down and retreat . . . ISIS, it must be understood, is a nebulous entity with three distinct faces. The first face belongs to the ISIS that exists solely in the media, propagated by a scaremongering Iraqi government on the one hand and a grandstanding ISIS on the other. The second is that of ISIS proper, the very real and ultraviolent successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The third is no face at all, but reportedly a mask worn by the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

http://clarionproject.org/analysis/three-faces-isis-who-behind-war-iraq – 6/17/2014.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/08/inside-chechnya-putins-reign-terror – 8/29/2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheel_al-Nujaifi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usama_al-Nujayfi

Daragahi, Borzou.  “Biggest bank robbery that ‘never happened’ – $400M ISIS heist.”  Financial Times, July 17, 2014.

Choose which to trust: the closed information system or the open one:

“Major General Suleimani is in Iran and in good health and the news that he is wounded is false,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was quoted as saying on Thursday.

The Iranian statement was in response to a report about Suleimani’s injury that first surfaced in the Israeli website DEBKAfile, citing reports from military and intelligence sources in the Gulf. Ya Libnan published a report on the same issue on January 14.

http://yalibnan.com/2015/01/16/iran-denies-that-major-general-suleimani-was-injured-in-iraq-by-isis/ – 1/16/2015.

The Islamic Republic has, for all the blood and treasure shed to date in Iraq and Syria, invested heavily in the managed instability of both countries. Even the meteoric rise of ISIS cannot not significantly alter Tehran’s policy of forging both unity and disunity simultaneously, depending on the local context.

http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2015/01/12/two-brigadier-generals-in-death/ – 1/12/2015.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Sunday announced the death of Brig. Gen. Hamid Taghavi, who had been training the army and Iraqi volunteers in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

One jihadi forum posted an image of the officer standing next to three others, with a red circle around his head and the caption: “A photo of the miscreant Hamid Taghavi who was killed by the men of IS in the region of Samarra.”

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/12/30/world/islamic-state-claims-killing-of-iranian-military-adviser-in-iraq/#.VLlSGdLF98E – 12/30/2014.

Basiri, Amir.  “When it Comes to ISIS, Iran Isn’t The Solution — It’s Part of the Problem.”  Forbes, October 1, 2014.

Update – February 26, 2015

The more powerful ISIS grows, the more they are useful for the regime

The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has long had a pragmatic approach to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), says a Syrian businessman with close ties to the government. Even from the early days the regime purchased fuel from ISIS-controlled oil facilities, and it has maintained that relationship throughout the conflict. “Honestly speaking, the regime has always had dealings with ISIS, out of necessity.”

Baker, Aryn.  “Why Bashar Assad Won’t Fight ISIS”.  Time.  February 26, 2015.

Update – August 7, 2015

Westcott, Lucy.  “U.S. Accuses Assad of Aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes”.  Newsweek, June 2, 2015.

Update – October 15, 2015

Sumeri, Haider.  “The Speicher Massacre and Its Legacy in Iraq”.  1001 Iraqi Thoughts, June 12, 2015:

Other survivors swear that they were betrayed. Several theories have risen from the ashes of the catastrophic Speicher episode, many of them pointing to collusion between commanders at the base and local Tikriti tribes. Survivors say that officers at Camp Speicher told recruits to leave the base and head back home on a short vacation, reassuring them that the area was safe and dispelling any doubts they had.

Down the road, local Sunni tribesmen and Da’ish militants were waiting.

The “Speicher Massacre” piece was reblogged — WordPress shares a teaser plus a link back to the article cited —  on BackChannels on June 18, 2015.  The citation belongs here as the field reports synch with the “stand-down” letter from near Mosul.

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PSA – Syria – U.S. Holocaust Museum

31 Friday Oct 2014

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Washington, DC – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has continued its recognition of the suffering of the Syrian people by opening an exhibit focused on the regime war crimes documented by Caesar. Earlier this year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted defected regime photographer ‘Caesar,’ for a small meeting with USHMM executive staff and journalists. Caesar’s photos of systematic torture and killing in the Assad regime’s prisons will be featured in a special exhibit within the USHMM, which is the United States’ official Holocaust memorial. Since its opening in 1993, USHMM has received nearly forty million visitors, including over 3,500 foreign dignitaries from over 130 countries. Additionally in 2013, the museum’s website, which also now features a Syria section on its main page, received over 16.5 million visits. Visit http://www.ushmm.org/ to learn more about their online exhibit.

http://www.sacouncil.com/united-states-holocaust-museum-opens-exhibit-on-regime-war-crimes-in-syria-based-on-caesar-photographs/ – 10/20/2014.

Related:

http://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=Syria

http://www.ushmm.org/syria.

http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/cases/syria/syria-photo-galleries/evidence

Mohammad Khair al-Wazir, director of the organizing committee of the “Inside Syria Forum”, which concluded today, said that this conference, aimed at greater coordination between activists and politicians, is not the first and will not be the last in a series of activities supervised by the Syrian Coalition and leaders in the of civil movement in Syria.

http://en.etilaf.org/all-news/news/syrian-coalition-everyone-s-participation-in-political-decision-making-is-the-safest-way-to-build-a-state-of-law.html – 10/31/2014.

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FTAC – Syria – A Note on Beyond the Burning

12 Friday Sep 2014

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The foundations of the invisible wall surrounding Assad start about here:

“In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/110423/syria-assad-protests-daraa

And then it builds to about here:

“But there is something legitimately scary about the weapon’s do-it-yourself ethos and its new systematic deployment against the neighborhoods of Aleppo. It speaks to the regime’s single-minded focus on finding new ways to kill, its narrow and obsessive pursuit of mayhem and destruction as seemingly official strategy in the conflict that has run for nearly three years now.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/24/what-makes-syrias-barrel-bombs-so-scary/

Being a merely “bloody dictator” in a conflict cauldron that has in it argument over despotism, democracy, egotism, goodness, God, morality, and narcissism (finally) is not merely a bad position.

The condemnation backed by astounding imagery and numbers to match may not be overcome with exigent maneuvering.

I know: faced with Hitler, one might be eager to bargain with Stalin.

Call that yesterday.

This day with Assad having produced a war that has brought al-Qaeda affiliates and such to his doorstep and that has incubated and loosed ISIS on the world, may be different.

How happy should one be to be led by Assad today?

That’s not my question to answer.  It’s a question for Syrians to answer for themselves in whatever condition and place the war now finds them.

If “Assad or Burn It” was the slogan, it has been working a long time, and once burned — in whatever portion — what then?

What now?

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As Regards ISIS: On Video — TWI’s Michael Knights and Michael Eisenstadt

22 Friday Aug 2014

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“In this new video series, Washington Institute experts assess the current state of military operations in Iraq and evaluate Abadi’s ability to extricate his country from deadlock, defeat, and disintegration.”

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/confronting-isis-and-the-future-of-iraq-video-series – 8/21/2014.

From the looks and sound of the productions, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI) has launched a DIY-AH (do-it-yourself-at-home) effort to promote its fellows’ analyses.  May the TWI powers that be give them an upgrade in audio-visual recording technology.

What follows is an incomplete relay of the series, but in the way of the web, whether the viewer starts out with e-mail (as I did) or on TWI’s web page or YouTube, all routers lead back to some kind of primary media content.

Of course, if you heard it from me first — after I’ve heard it from them — in the older fashioned way of news, good!

“They are very good at using psychological operations to very quickly establish the sense that they control areas, putting up their flags on all key administrative buildings, cross-roads, wide visibility locations, and they’re very good at pursuing what they want in the mergers and acquisitions model of growth whereby they ruck into an area and immediately try to recruit the most like-minded insurgent group in the area to become part of ISIS.”  (1:28 – 1:59).

“First, you can’t address the ISIS threat in Iraq, without addressing the ISIS threat in Syria. Secondly, you can’t address the ISIS threat in Iraq and Syria without addressing the foreign fighter problem. And third, the U.S. really cannot “solve” the region’s problems, because they are rooted in issues of religious and political identity and legitimacy, and this is a problem that can only be worked out among Muslims themselves. ” (2:18 – 2:41)

My “big picture” thought, which might make sense of an $11 billion arms sale): what ISIS scours Qatar will devour.

One day.

However, there are many days between this day and that one, and the Ummah, bloodied from Afghanistan to Yemen, has been pushed by the ambitions and behaviors of its own subscription into a larger global conversation about rightful power, despotism, barbarism, and democracy.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/08/21/qatar-terrorist-refuge-and-financial-platform/ – 8/21/2014.

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