Perhaps nowhere else does the tension between medieval and modern worlds erupt with deadly force so periodically and predictably than in the Middle East Conflict in which the political methods of the feudal world — lies outright; misguidance; misdirection; political suppression; incitements to riot; corruption and exploitation in the “handling” of the main Palestinian population base — come head to head with modern democracy, empiricism, liberalism, and humanism.
From a part of my presence in the conversation on social media —
Palestinian “leadership” would rather see its people battered and impoverished than subject to the economic and political norms of the modern world.
That posture represents feudal-medieval outlooks and relationships, excessive greed and narcissism — the Palestinians are “marks” for Palestinian authorities and thugs — and a complete absence of conscience and empathy but for the purposes of political theater and related blackmail.
“People have been waiting for elections for 15 years, hoping this would be the light at the end of tunnel, especially given the absence of a peace track with Israel,” said Fadi Elsalameen, a Palestinian democracy activist and prominent critic of Abbas, speaking before the announcement. “Closing this window will have severe consequences…I believe it will lead to violence against the Palestinian leadership.”
Israel/Palestine: The EU is dismayed at the large numbers of civilian deaths and injuries, including children. The priority must be to protect civilians.
Israel has declared a state of emergency in the central city of Lod after rioting by Israeli Arabs, as conflict between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants intensified.
Cars were set alight and a father and daughter – both Israeli Arabs – died when a rocket from Gaza hit their car.
”The ISIS elements and al-Qaeda terrorists withdrew from Fallujah to the suburbs, specifically towards the international road that links Baghdad to Fallujah.”
Elements of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) appear to move around according to its own pressure inclines. The above BBC links provides a map representing the zones of conflict and control or strength in the affected areas of Syria. It shows Abu Kamal near the Iraq border as an ISIS primary site.
I really don’t like scraping, so will slow down; however, as the hot spots of the Islamic Small Wars move around, the generalist encounters them as comparatively new.
Of course, Iraq suffered all last year with a rising tide of sectarian violence. That combat involving the army should erupt in Fallujah as the fighting in neighboring Syria spills back into Iraq would seem to come as little surprise to closer watching specialists.
The swings of cultural brutality involve mirroring amplification — as with brothers trading punches and raising the force used as they go, but that’s for fun — and a kind of dumbness as to where brutalization leads, which always is in two directions: the defeat of the human spirit and attendant subjugation or the Great God of War and Fire Without Limit and self-immolation in an orgy of death.
This dynamic seems not well understood in Syria.
Some wars end with an entropic complete expenditure of available energy, i.e., only stopping when there’s none left and some in the destruction of the war making capability of the enemy in its totality: no industry; no money; no projectiles; no weapons; no defenses.
Syria, because the same mentality sits on both sides of the table — it’s not the Wahhabism or the dictatorship separately: it’s the mutual quest for absolute power in the subjugation of others, each with its own political program — has a long way to go. The suffering of civilians and the destruction of moderating force carries no weight with the fighters on either side, even if each may believe he’s the savior of humanity aligned with his side.
The conversation follows from a state-aligned Syrian outlet impugning the character of the United States by portraying her as a terrorist arms supplier.
It’s not true.
The arms are loose Out There and gambling on secular technocrats like General Idris has proven, so far, bad odds. Those Islamic Front fellows are mean: they promise to protect military assets held by more moderate warriors only to steal them for themselves and their immoderate ends (something like that: e.g., US, UK halt aid to Syria after weapons seized – 12/11/2013).
* * *
I hope you read the above “mean” as campy pouting understatement, a remark, in fact, about those trusting, uncertain, or vacillating souls who make deals with ruthless liars and killers.
Well, perhaps the embarrassments of December — perhaps along with some sense of limits that have been exceeded — have done some much needed motivational work:
Even as ISIS, which got its start as al-Qaeda in Iraq back in the days of the American war, regains territory in the Iraqi province of Anbar, it is slowly being pushed out of its northern Syrian strongholds by a broad coalition of moderate and Islamist groups fed up with its draconian interpretations of Islamic law and its abuses of power.
“Al-Qaeda are good!” he told me, with a smile and a double thumbs up. “I hope that they’ll accept me and that one day I can set off a suicide bomb in a regime area.”
I haven’t funds for myself, much less war zone stringers.
Not that harping about conflict from the Internet’s “second row seat to history” warrants funds.
Nonetheless, one wakes to these items passing by on the computer’s screen, and on this one, it appears Reuters engaged a teenage shutterbug to report from within the Syrian Civil War, and not only didn’t the teen make it but on the way to not making it forged some alliance with al Qaeda.
I you have clicked and looked, what is the worth of the young photographer’s death in light of the news value of that 15-item slide show?
The Telegraph notes (fourth frame) that Barakat, in fact, never joined al-Qaeda. The phrase used elsewhere: ” . . . tried to join . . . .”
Whether he joined or not, or was 17 or 18 in combat, we may wonder at ourselves as well as the seasoned pros at Reuters as to the judgment displayed in encouraging so young a soul to stand in harm’s way for a picture.
* * *
On the other hand: how many early illegal sign-up legends have accompanied World War II and other lore all down the line?
How old was “Johnny” when he went to join his brother in the Confederacy, and Hell itself couldn’t and didn’t stop him?
Syria left the League of Low Intensity Conflicts some time ago.
One may wonder if some of the flack heading Reuters’ way hasn’t to do with deflecting attention from the war’s wholesale destruction of children (mostly by Assad’s bombing “strategy”) and of childhood itself.
Despite the injunctions ever present in the minds of journalists — even the youngest — for “clear, accurate, and complete” reporting, also “objective” as possible, and so on, wars come freighted with politics, the variables of which may have an effect on the reception of tips to events as well as access to officials or action. Motives for fudging, not good, or chancing, which leads to glory when it works out and infamy when it doesn’t, may have to with other than underlying alliance or sentiment.
As with other theaters of the Islamic Small Wars, integrity is not welcomed — if it were, such wars would disappear with its presence — and journalists with integrity are generally not welcomed either: the armed sides would rather have favorable PR, the kind promoted by state-sponsored “reporting”.
LONDON — An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria’s widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far more casualties than rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, while civilians accounted for more than one-third of the overall fatalities, the biggest single category.
Perhaps the old days were better after all: assemble the armies on an open plain, send the warriors into it, and leave the noncombatants of both sides for the spoils of the winner.
Just kidding.
*****
“As always, numbers like these gloss over the many people who have been so grievously wounded, physically or psychologically, that they will never again live productive lives. What the latter figure amounts to in Syria is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that it’s even larger than the death toll.”
Rajan Menon’s report on the suffering goes on to note 1.7 million refugees on top of 4 million Internally Displaced Persons, or 5.7 million displaced souls altogether, about 25 percent of Syria’s total population before the onset of serious hostilities (but I’m not sure I’m getting consistent numbers from any source published within the past two years).
*****
“In one trailer we meet 13-year-old Najwa. She curls back in the corner next to her husband, 19-year-old Khaled, and her mother, hardly saying a word.
Najwa is the youngest of three, her two older sisters in their late teens are also recently married.”
Evidently, grim statistics don’t tell a whole story, or not much of whatever is to be told at all.
*****
“The head of the International Terrorism Observatory think tank, Roland Jacquard, told Reuters Television the group appeared to be sending fighters abroad, likely to Syria.”
“Special informed sources from London revealed to the Palestinian al-Manar newspaper that the British security forces arrested early June a group of 11 terrorists in London who had come back from Syria where they were involved in the fighting there.”
While Israel’s cardinal military defense rule seems to remain, “Do not intervene; do not interfere” (DM Yaalon), Israel’s first virtue would seem to remain compassion to the extent that it may provide that.
“The two boys, 9 and 15 years old, were transferred to Ziv Hospital in Safed for treatment. The 9-year-old suffered moderate injuries from shrapnel wounds across his body and lost his right eye, according to a report by Maariv. The 15-year-old was listed in serious condition, according to the report.”
Every wounded Syrian is guarded by either an IDF soldier or by a civilian security guard in an attempt to isolate them from speaking with anyone unauthorized to do so who might photograph them or pass on their information to Syria, potentially harming them or their families upon their eventual return to Syria.
As stated, more than a 100 wounded Syrians have crossed the border in recent months. Some 70 of them have been taken to Israeli hospitals, and two have passed away as a result of their injuries.
After 2,000 years or so, Hillel’s negatively stated dictum seems to hold. “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another” — and certainly, the choice between enabling or denying access to hospital services related well to that.
*****
“The request came in a letter handed to Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Harel Locker at a meeting with Druze leaders on the Golan Heights Thursday. The letter included an unprecedented request for Israel to take in Druze students who had left the Golan and settled in Syria, Maariv reported.”
Druze along the Golan have served both in the IDF and in Syria’s defense forces according to their decisions about citizenship and location, and with the fighting as I’ve described — “Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — Israeli Druze are seeking sanctuary for their relatives.
God knows God would seem to give Jews the toughest ethical and survival challenges.
Both.
At the same time.
Providing infirmary to wounded to be turned back into the field — and who want to be returned to their land — is one thing.
Affording sanctuary to those endangered by this war that only loosely respects boundaries and seems absent of compassion and conscience both in relation to innocents, noncombatants, neutral parties, and so on makes for a more difficult decision.
As mentioned yesterday, the natural drift of Syria’s bitching sectarian and factional conflict into the Lebanese sphere has both clarified and amplified the same tensions in Lebanon and those may not be quelled in a day or two. In fact, the resentments and rivalries and perceived stakes have been building for years, and the passions surfacing into a hail of bullets do so distinctly absent of reason.
The maverick cleric was little known until few years ago and his growing following was a symptom of the deep frustration among Sunnis who resent the Hezbollah-led Shiite ascendancy to power in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies dominate Lebanon’s government.
“The army has tried for months to keep Lebanon away from the problems of Syria, and it ignored repeated requests for it to clamp down on Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir’s group,” the military command said in a statement.
“But what has happened today has gone beyond all expectations. The army was attacked in cold blood in an attempt to light the fuse in Sidon, just as was done in 1975,” it said, referring to the year that Lebanon’s own 15-year civil war began.
Reported yesterday by Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times:
“Every Muslim population must protect their brothers in Syria,” said Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a popular Egyptian-born cleric who lives in Qatar and appears frequently on TV. “The nation is ready for sacrifice and jihad and we must call for jihad to defend religion and God’s law.”
If the superpowers engaged in Sumo wrestling over the fate of Syria think they’re in control of the region, they may have some surprises coming. Syria is a crucible with many holes in it, and, as mentioned, it draws the engines of war into itself, but this week, especially, it has promoted sectarian violence beyond its borders and done so in local ways not likely to recede in the next day or two.
But to the traditional prayers and chants — praising the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America — the mourners added a new barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”
The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding conflict with Israel.
Anne Barnard’s intimate coverage of the Syrian conflict developing a Lebanese cast takes the reader through the onset of war. Businesses close; once trusted relationships become suspicious; political arrangements that sufficed for peace and security start to come apart.
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