Syria has one thing going for it today: the world cares. If it continues on its course, if civil and internecine war continue “building down” Syrian infrastructure and social structure along lines more familiar to Mogadishu than Damascus, the world — the communities of the caring and of the politicos — may shift attention to containing the meltdown while letting the fighting move around in its own wasteland.
The UN had this to say today:
Since fighting began in March 2011 between the Syrian Government and opposition groups seeking to oust President Bashar Al-Assad as many as 100,000 people have been killed, almost 2 million have fled to neighbouring countries and a further 4 million have been internally displaced. In addition, at least 6.8 million Syrian require urgent humanitarian assistance, half of whom are children.
I’ve little to add to that except, perhaps, to call the Syrian Devolution a war between criminals, brigands, liars, and thieves, from the top offices of the state right down to its blood-spattered fields and streets.
Aid groups and United Nations officials are pleading with the Syrian government and armed opposition groups to allow access to unarmed civilians, saying crimes against humanity “are the rule” as fighting rages on in the Syrian civil war.
There are times I wonder why “unarmed civilians” remain unarmed and “moderate rebel units” seem unable to prove themselves as vicious and ruthless as the immoderate forces that have appeared to undermine them.
Politics has found its way back to music and the Information Flyway has just brought you the kick-off of “The Malala Generation”.
Bourgeoisie in a great way, brave, concerned, inclusive, intellectual, liberal, progressive . . . .
Of course, not everyone likes that.
Ignoring the text of her speech, which spoke out for the rights of girls and women and implored world leaders to choose peace instead of war, the naysayers tore down the young woman, her father, and Western nations for supporting her in her quest for education.
As a young Canadian, I admire her. Only 19-years-old myself, I’ve been lucky to have seen some amazing and eloquent speakers in the past, including both Bill and Hilary Clinton and the former Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. Nonetheless, speaking just after the UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon, Malala resolutely took the stand. Not a single of those mentioned could even touch the inspiration coming from this girl from Pakistan.
Malala’s refusal to climb down in the face of death threats from the Taliban not only challenged their gender based discrimination, but broke the ancient code of silence (the ‘shut up and put up’ code) enforced upon girls. Despite the danger, she refused to be unvoiced. Malala demonstrated that nothing is more powerful and influential against the misogynistic and extremist narrative of the Taliban than the voice of a young girl.
7: how many times more that Pakistan invests in military spending than in primary schooling. This coming fiscal year, Pakistan has increased its defense budget by 15 percent, to $6.4 billion, while education spending has decreased from 2.6-to 2.3-percent of GNP over the past decade. Only seven other developing countries in the world spend less than Pakistan does on education.
In less than 20 minutes, Malala Yousafzai has done what few to none of Pakistan’s politicians have ever done: pushed Pakistan to the forefront of ethical and moral progress in the world.
But on July 12, when a young Pakistani woman wowed the entire world by her simple yet powerful views, I let go of trying to look logically at the other view — I saw the tear that fell out of Malala’s mother’s eye and I felt what had caused it. Malala’s mother, purported to be a CIA agent, was crying because the little girl who she had carried in her womb for nine months and nurtured for 15 years was finally able to speak with her characteristic vigour after surviving a bullet to her head.
The look of Syria online is a mess, of course, with the stickiest part becoming the internecine war between rebel forces, one part Islamic moderates, so intimated in coverage, intent on deposing President Bashir al-Assad with help from Saudi Arabia in complex alignment with the west, the other part Jihadists of, roughly, the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” determined to make Syria but a stepping stone in the establishment of a global caliphate.
Throughout the Islamic Small Wars, the collapse of physical fronts, literally physical boundaries, margins, and fixed front lines keep the encounters and road blocks moving around the landscape, which today, so damaged, in places so depopulated, in others so ad hoc and weirdly organized, I would call painted with the fragments of a new frontier.
Still, Assad’s state remains where it has so far managed to remain.
From Al-Akhbar English:
Visitors to Damascus will find that they are not the only ones rediscovering the city. The capital’s own residents are reacquainting themselves with its neighborhoods and geography, trying to keep up morale in the face of a deepening crisis.
Who knows what to think as regards Syria’s fate somewhere between its brutal and disingenuous dictatorship, its seemingly well intended base of rebels willing to support a secular civil democracy, and its AQ-type rovers far gone on their own trip but also powerful in their agility, arms, and ruthlessness in the field?
As I type, I do wonder about “news aggregation” — so here is the snapshot of what I drifted through in information this morning — and I also wonder how long before those of us scanning war reportage from our computers start hooking into live feeds.
Twitter’s coming close, but what I read, of course, is what you read coming off AP, BBC, CNN, Reuters, and other feeds.
The Jihad videos from the field that show up with “0” views are a little different: those could be flying on to the web by phone or laptop at close to real time, but how to vet them without getting further into those labyrinths?
“We will not let them get away with it because they want to target us,” a senior FSA commander said on condition of anonymity after members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant killed Kamal Hamami on Thursday.
“We are going to wipe the floor with them,” he said.
“One has to concentrate on their strongholds and on their dwellings and their infrastructure. If (Alawites) continue living as they’re doing in peace and safety while wedded to the regime they will not be affected. They will not think of abandoning Assad,” said Islamist Sheikh Anas Ayrout.
Since then I’ve spent – I don’t know, many, many times, always undercover, clandestinely, always alone [in Syria]. I don’t keep count, but I was basically spending a week of every month in my home base, Beirut, and the rest of the time I was on the road, in Syria and Turkey.
I don’t use fixers, I don’t use translators. I don’t have anybody giving me tips. It’s just me.
In north-eastern Syria, al-Nusra finds itself in command of massive silos of wheat, factories, oil and gas fields, fleets of looted government cars and a huge weapons arsenal.
I referenced the above a day or two ago. Basically, the greater the chaos introduced to the field, the greater the potential for the armed and ruthless to impose their will in patches, a condition not much different than that familiar to Somalis since Said Barre’s step-down and the ensuing anarchy and conflict latent in the motivations of powers left on the land.
“Go and ask the people in the streets whether there a liberated town or city anywhere in Syria that is ruled as efficiently as this one,” he boasted. “There is electricity, water and bread and security. Inshallah, this will be the nucleus of a new Syrian Islamic caliphate!”
“Out, out, out, the (Islamic) State (of Iraq and Syria) must get out,” protesters shouted at a rally in the northern town of Manbij this week, referring to an Al-Qaeda front group.
The video of the demonstration is one of many showing how civilians and mainstream rebel fighters alike are turning against the more hardline Islamist factions.
Every story that has appeal, whether fact or fiction, has a moral center, and the writer who can tease it out fast has got a hooked reader.
This is about where we started with the Syrian revolt — a little more than two years ago, a sorry fact reflected in the statement, “1300 people have been killed since the protests began”):
At the moment, thereabouts, Arab and Russian media seem to be playing “hot potato” over who has got the chemical weapons, whose side is more brutal, and whose side is more deserving in regard to winning one for modernity.
Again, come forward on the latest toss of the hot potato:
Moscow now appears to have conclusive evidence that it is the rebels who are guilty of the March chemical attack in Aleppo which killed dozens of Syrians. This comes as the United States continues to put the blame on the Assad government. However, Corbyn says that any such proof may not bring the Syrian conflict any closer to a resolution.
The “moral center” in Syria’s unfolding tragedy revolves around barbarism and cruelty, fascism and totalitarianism, and then among those holding up the cash and sending in the weapons, some effort to prove more likely to be kind when the tide turns their way. While Qatari and NATO interests have pointed their fingers at the Assad regime and its chemical weapons stores, Russia, presumably sided with Assad — but it’s hard to tell with the quiet exit that has left Tartus abandoned — and tolerant about Iran, points back at rebel chemists (see, for example, “Syria rebels made own sarin gas, says Russia,” Al Jazeera, July 10, 2013).
In earlier days, the same would have had a perfect villain in Maher al-Assad — I think there’s still on the web a video of him allegedly shooting across a street into a crowd of passersby (found it) — but his presence has been dimmed in the theater, and in his place one may find grand Syrian defense recruiting videos composed in the old muscular Soviet way (the video that ends this post may say more about that than I will here).
In and around Syria, those who may pretend their hands are clean must know that brutality loses, the tyrannical will not be tolerated, and the cruel will not go unpunished.
Anti-Assad footage published today:
The next opens with a title slate claiming, “Syrian women had no choice but to carry weapons and train on using them to defend themselves and families from the Wahhabi Sex Jihadists, they joined the National Defense Forces.”
Described by some foreign relief officials as a ‘”five-star camp”, the Emirati-funded operation is a study in contrasts with Zaatari, the chaotic, sprawling UN-run camp that is home to 120,000 and is described as Jordan’s fifth-largest city.
Jordanian soldiers in riot gear try to keep order in a crowd desperate to get back to Syria. More than 9,000 headed home in June, according to the official Jordanian count.
Deborah Amos reports Jordan as hosting today 500,000 Syrian refugees.
**
The UN says nearly 90,000 Syrians have registered with the High Commissioner for Refugees in Egypt.
But the actual number of Syrians who have sought refuge in Egypt is believed to be much higher, in part because the country did not require Syrians to have visas until this week.
According to figures obtained by Kirisci from government sources, Turkey is currently hosting close to half a million Syrian refugees. As of mid-June, over 200,000 reside in one refugee camp, while nearly 290,000 live outside these camps. Around 100,000 internally placed Syrians are reported to be awaiting entry into Turkey.
Also Monday, the newly elected head of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, Ahmad Jarba, told Reuters news agency he expects advanced weapons supplied by Saudi Arabia to reach rebel fighters soon, strengthening their military position.
The fall last week of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt prompted a defiant Assad to proclaim the defeat of political Islam. The Brotherhood’s Syrian branch, already under pressure from more radical opposition groups, was dealt a psychological blow that comes on top of delays to promised supplies of weapons from Washington.
Qatar and Company, heavily backing the Syrian Revolt (so far — Assad’s still in Damascus and his army is still fighting), have also plunged some money into producing a somewhat comfy, modern, and well administered model refugee camp for families (single men have to drift with the riffraff elsewhere) while remaining confident that some adjustment in the arms mix will hasten the end of the Reign of Assad.
Assad himself seems to remain a believer.
I have much, much less confidence in those confident that they will win . . . something.
Within Islam as al-Nusra and others may have it, “winning” will not lead to freedom but rather the imposition of their own sanguine tyranny.
For most involved in developing and sustaining the abysmal crisis in Syria, their history will not be written by “the winners” but rather by dowdy old historians poring over casualty figures, displacements, communique, rhetoric, bank transfers, arms shipments, manufacturer’s labels, newspaper clippings — or online ones like this one — and weighing within their independent souls the various causes and effects.
Some may stumble upon the role language has played in the nightmare, for Syria, perhaps more than in any corresponding contemporary conflict, points out a failing in language and mind by way of the beliefs and rhetoric driving toward so much suffering: that “content of mind” has had little to do with anyone’s day to day experience in living and the many challenges encountered, from making some money to attending to the happiness and security of children.
Instead, black and white thinking, extraordinary greed, unbridled egotism, and magical thinking all look away from the horror created by their possession or diminish the same — more than 90,000 dead, upwards of four million internally displaced or refugee — by way of language attending deflection of responsibility and the denial of the depth of the misery and depravity involved.
Is the good cause Alewite, Shiite, or Sunni?
Is it about cash in the till for a family and everyone else depending on that family be damned?
Is it about nobility?
What matter the purity of the white robes where the soles of the sandals remain always wet with blood?
The civil war, noble cause, revolt, and revolution — all deeply anachronistic, anarchic, confused, disorganized, and disorganizing — will go on.
“Geneva in these circumstances is not possible. If we are going to go to Geneva we have to be strong on the ground, unlike the situation now, which is weak,” al-Jarba said July 7 after returning from the northern Syrian province of Idlib, where he met commanders of rebel brigades.
But most importantly, the deaths are going to galvanize the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters. Rather than help calm the situation, the incident will almost certainly result in many thousands of Egyptians challenging the military’s authority.
But the military said it was forced to fire when an “armed terrorist group” tried to raid the headquarters. An Interior Ministry statement said two security force members — a lieutenant and a recruit — were shot and killed.
While Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood seeks to restrict the conversation, perhaps to the point where the only voices it hears are the echoes of its own, and the military with its provisional governments seeks to expand the same, so that but a few and manageable voices may come from many, the fight on the street will start to draw in greater energies.
For one thing, we media focus on it.
I could be writing about Egyptian basic services, tourism, history, and food, but benign and charming as those may be, they’re not quite as stimulating: with conflict, we don’t want to see its development, but we do want to watch.
The other question is how to let something go.
A slight is a slight, and one can shrug that off; a light injury may increase the insight but also provide for bragging rights — ask the 1960s kids around here about that; but a death in combat, Republican Guard vs. Pro-Morsi Protesters, may not be seen that way.
*****
“Before they had used any kind of teargas they resorted to live fire.”
Three days ago, BBC reporter Jeremy Bowen seems to have caught a few pellets of “bird shot” as a crowd got rowdy toward the end of a day of demonstrating.
Where were those Republican Guard tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and water canons and such so familiar to other policing forces and spoilers and rioters worldwide?
The answer is that through all the Mubarak years involving the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, the state appears not to have prepared for violent dissent on its streets by the constituents it claimed to represent.
“If a given state lacks the means, the doctrines, and the training for homeland defence and internal security missions, that government is more likely to use lethal means that are disproportionate,” said Steven Adragna of US defence consultancy Arcanum.
Actually, we didn’t clear up anything: how was it possible that so common a policing concern as “riot control” should not have been of concern in this middle east state?
The attenuation of violence or control of a “violence spectrum” may become of interest when a state balances its want of defense against the well being of its internal challengets, i.e., when it doesn’t want to kill those expressing their opposition but rather prefers to stall them in their tracks and channel the same for arrest on the spot or dispersal altogether.
Crowd and riot control would seem arts, specialties, perhaps, within the “art of war”, which in the Islamic Small Wars becomes also the art of managing, for the most part, popular protests and myriad bands of deadly fighters.
This next comes from the earlier anti-Morsi rally days (remember those?):
Near daily, the demonstrations have turned into clashes with police, resulting in the killing of around 70 protesters. Each death has increased public anger against the security forces.
Some protests have turned into stone-throwing attacks on security agency buildings, and many protesters accuse Morsi of giving a green light to police to use excessive force. Their outrage has been further stoked by reports of torture and abduction of some activists by security agents.
Of course, those 70 deaths were attributed to Morsi-backed police!
The devil’s probably grinning.
For sure, I am.
If “deadly force” — a catch-all term for a suite of military technology and lethal methods — is what one has at hand, “dead” are what will be found “down range”.
With riot controlling technologies widely distributed elsewhere around the world, the absence of the same on the roiled Egyptian street may point to a distinct lack of concern for others.
Where was the love when precinct quartermasters were drawing up budgets and wish lists to protect their troops and their public and control the level of violence that might take place — and now has — on the streets around them?
When a phalanx of Ohio National Guardsmen marched shoulder to shoulder up Blanket Hill 40 years ago to break up an antiwar rally at Kent State University, they carried basic battlefield gear and a military mindset.
Their World War II-era M1 rifles were tipped with bayonets and loaded with .30-caliber bullets that could fly nearly two miles.
Compassion leads to “Kevlar vests and plastic shield . . . bean bags and canisters of stinging pepper gas.”
In those attempting an assault on an Egyptian Republican Guard property and those repelling the same with “live fire”, this concern for others — whatever mix of affection, compassion, empathy, and imagination might comprise and express that virtue — would seem to have been missing, and “barbarism”, which is always a conclusion, obscures the story of the evolution or stalling within the language culture and behavior leading up to it.
In consideration of the previous post, the binary choices for Egypt should seem clear.
If the economic benefits and humanism of modernity suit, the medieval complex in self-concept and tyrannical rule will cease; if not, Islam, as “Islamists” would have it, goes so against the grain of humanity that Egypt will suffer as every region has that has hosted, tolerated, or succumbed to this deeply programmed form in political narcissism: from Afghanistan to Somalia, Islamism as Al Shabaab or Boko Haram and others install it serves primarily themselves . . . until it just does not and they are booted by all of the forces they are most accustomed to blaming, this always excluding their own contribution to their own fate (” . . . and do not exceed the limits, surely Allah does not love those who exceed the limits . . . .’).
However I may continue with this blogging, I’m inclined to become increasing informal with it in the interest of becoming more timely and, in some respects, more flexible with these hot summer days.
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