The crossing itself, one of the few between Syria and Turkey that are still functional, remained in the hands of the more moderate Free Syrian Army on Wednesday night, despite reports that Islamic State was mounting an offensive to take it.
Abeheaded little girl, a part of the reference here also earlier this afternoon, a victim denoted Christian, a perpetrator denoted “ISIL” — “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”.
Israeli scholar Phillippe Assouline, among my acquaintance on the social networks, asked in relation to this latest image of decapitation making the rounds, “Can we sit by and watch our enemies murder non enemies for their religion?? Is that not what happened to us? There is a budding genocide of Christians going on…”
War-related events in Syria have gone way beyond “blast and battle” and “NATO rounds” and the known suite of “insurgent methods”, as ugly as all those things may be: the “war” has slipped over into unadulterated and numbing barbarity.
One could list quite a few historic moments of complete cultural degradation, but that would be too easy.
Instead, I think I will close this post with an obituary from yesterday’s Boston Herald: Holocaust survivor, top German lit critic dies | Boston Herald. It seems to me as relevant a remark to make about the latest in barbarism associated with the too familiar clowns parading today, perhaps, in Azaz, Syria.
BBC News – ISIS seizure of Syria’s Azaz exposes rebel rifts 9/19/2013: “As a measure of the grip the jihadis have in Azaz, one eyewitness inside the town said no-one was smoking on the streets – tobacco is forbidden according to strict Islamist doctrine.”
“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.”
