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.
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