I wonder what the relationship is between expression in social media and policy adjustment in state diplomatic and military operations.
Never before in history has the battle for “hearts and minds” been played through a global system linking individual minds in novel ways. However, the old prediction that cyberspace will wind up looking a lot like real space haunts the conversation.
Are we making a difference, yet?
The theme topic contributing to this post involved a “Syrian Truth – English” (Facebook) plate featuring the slogan, “This is how we used to live” accompanied by a civil enough show of peace between the religious with Bashar Assad at the center of each photo-op, and “and this is how U.S. and its allies want us to live,” with that accompanied by images of beheading, crucifixion, field executions featuring armed soldiers wearing black hoods or black headscarves.
My response to that:
When power extends to power over information, that information becomes part of the control exerted by the malignant narcissist. For a catch-all, one may use the term “totalitarian propaganda”: such information either lies by omission, for example, here, the statistics approaching 11,000 children destroyed by state-side sniper fire, bombing, and torture. In the west, we can independently investigate claims made by journalists; in autocratic environments, one is helpless before presentations of factual data and their spin. The other form of lie asserts the presence of a reality that isn’t present, which includes the “threat” of the Jews (we’re out to drown the world in chicken soup and love is more the reality).
My partner in conversation chatypes from Pakistan.
Together, we cover quite a bit of thematic territory quickly — about information, Wahhabi Islam’s expansion (and the barbarity expressed in its name), about minority security (he is a Shiite Muslim), about Israel, about values — but we neither of us know the effect on others whom we may know or on others who may be lurking over our conversation.
We’re chatting on an open floor hosting a substantial emerging global intelligentsia: how far up the chain do our thoughts go, directly or in aggregate?
While we’re having our conversation in the quasi-public space of a pro-Syrian page, we’re also conversing separately. In that process, I noted the following to him:
This is the “back channel” conversation. The front channel may be feeding back to Syrian Truth’s wall, so we are “in it” in a sense. They’re reading about themselves, whoever they may be.
*
What if the political reality of a place were not manipulated by state and anti-state operations and forces?
And the chat goes on.
Who’s lurking?
What are they thinking?
What is in their hearts?
What is changing?
What is not changing?
What do they believe about power?
Can they isolate or separate their own assumptive habits of mind and behaviors involving loyalties, fears, and accompanying contemptuous thoughts and hatreds and introspectively and in some helpful way — or will it be only to help themselves to what others have? — adjust their own position?
My correspondent said, “It’s world simply, you have check a lot of things.”
True, and I said, “It’s a foundering ship, no captain, not much of a map, and the sea is stormy (but its sailors are on deck in the rain making up their minds about directions). 🙂 ”
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Sometimes, and this a bit tired with age and other nonsense, including immersion in conflict news, I find myself resting with the windows open and the whole place sailing along in the universe with the local wind and rain providing only immediate atmosphere against that immense ineffable space.
The will to dominance is compensatory and occluding.
In the Islamic Small Wars that feature deeply cruel and sadistic behavior (all sides), the psychology revolving around willfulness, a facet of power, is hard to escape. This is where things get ugly and tautological with language both expressing and inventing and reinforcing an emotional narrative in the cultural mind. It’s hard getting the little trains (trained minds) to jump their tracks and get out of it.
Here’s the thing to note about the kind of people who carry out assassinations and drive wars: they’re not representative of the humanity of the humanity surrounding themselves — at least not in the Islamic Small Wars where a very few (in Somalia, about 10,000 fighters at one time affiliate with al Shabaab) can drive a very many (in Somalia, about 2.75 million) out of their homes. On the other hand, the few are possessed of potent weapons plus war making knowledge, and they’re “social grammar” is hard to get to as, I believe, they don’t have access to it themselves.
The regional to international war: Russia (cash hungry or cash mad) — > Iran (well oiled arms buyer) — > Special Assad and Shiite Understanding | Sunni Central Expansion “<” — KSA, Qatar, UAE, etc. semi-independent coffers (the west has placed too much reliance on the state concept where it just barely applies, if at all) “<“– U.S. and NATO alliances, which make themselves deeply discomforting.
Basically, imho, Syria is Assad’s war within Putin’s sphere of influence, a part of the wreckage of neglected post-Soviet problems, and Putin, quick to relieve Khodorkovsky of aspirations involving political matters, especially corruption, essentially signaled interest in resurgent kleptocracy, at least for a while, long enough to separate Russia from the west and return Russians to the shadows of some former imperial glory. At that, Putin has succeeded, but we must note that it is neither in NATO’s or Russia’s interest to develop an Islamic island in Syria. I’d say we’re heading into the second of at least three acts in Syria — nowhere near the end of the book.
I’m calling it like a see it, and to hell with it!
🙂
Syria continues to become visible in terms suited to political science.
It’s morphed from an Arab Springy “people’s revolution” into a dynamic geopolitical blast furnace and whatever’s in it is still melting down, the best top layer either killed or siphoned off to soup lines and refugee camps, the next layer sucked in from the global Jihad and melding with whatever’s left into some deeply fractured substance boiling up death, suffering, and wreckage wherever it seeps, and the rest of the container adjusting to so many unpalatable upsets.
While President Putin trades a few political prisoners into freedom for the sake of Peace at Sochi in Time for the Games, it may be what’s happening in and to Syria that dogs him through that event.
Within the Syrian Civil War and a little bit without, the same mentality occupies chairs on either side of the board: it’s the despot Assad vs. the despotic al-Qaeda affiliates (now that they’ve disarmed more moderate forces with the combined powers of the Qur’an and “trust me trust me” wink wink over a couple of warehouses loaded with war materiel). Everyone has lost that war, partially because vacuous “winning” will turn out about being lost — as lost as the Assads with Maher and the first whiff of atrocities and war crimes to come.
In fairy tale terms, the good child, prince of his kingdom, has had to watch himself become a monster, in name or by assent or by his own orders, and everything he does, everything he tries, only draws the blood from the floor, a little bit at first on the shoes, and that washes off, but then it’s up around the ankles, and every step out of it means another splash into it, then it’s up around his waist, the family is screaming bloody murder, mad at the world, at themselves, at the puppet master with the greater civilization, which is at peace within itself at least, and their hand wringing and remonstrances notwithstanding, the horror continues rising up to the neck and seeping into their mouths, preventing them from talking straight, if ever they could, and up it rises before their eyes.
By now, it’s an everyday matter, the blood dimmed tide a familiar site, the once-thrilling uncertain exigencies of war routinized.
* * *
“The level of human sufferings that I am witnessing with the Syria crisis is indeed without a parallel with anything else I have witnessed in my own life,” says Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“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”.
Nineteenth-century radicals loathed Russia above all other states because it had a quasi-religious mission to preserve autocracy at home and promote reactionary regimes abroad. To true believers, the “Third Rome” of Christian tsarism defended the divinely ordained old order against the threats of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and modernity.
After reading Nick Cohen’s relay of Pat Buchanan’s words about Vladimir Putin, it turns out that I am a part of a movement characterized as the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
* * *
Ya ha!
I have found my place.
You know my lowest common denominator standards:
— Compassion | Humility | INCLUSION | Integrity —
Buchanan, if he’s now enamored of Putinism, and Putin, who would seem by the show of affection proffered in weapons deliveries and benevolent shadowing, remains committed to Bashar (The Butcher) Assad may be counted on for the grossest callousness, pride, exclusion, and — no secret where so many secret and nepotist arrangements would seem to be involved — corruption.
The same as (gasp!) Al Qaeda.
OUR problem, me hearties, me droogies, me Facebook best buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, is that whether having to do with Assad vs. the Islamist Edge or Putin vs. Obama, it would seem similar mentalities wish to occupy the same space or shine in the same lights — not exactly atypical of “malignant narcissists” — while driving everyone else into misery or just plain out of their mirrored spheres!
THEIR problem, Mr. Obama, Mr. Putin, may have to do with escaping their own glorious selves. Of the two, Obama, being of the Christian compassionate honest humble and generously inclusive democratic and open society west, may lay claim to having done less harm in the short term than his superpower counterweight; Putin, however, would do well to look over the Assad combat doctrine and its effects on once disinterested Syrians who have by the effects of extensive bombing and indiscriminate fire been turned out of their homes or cheated of their lives while the Al Qaeda affiliates’ advance seems to have remained out of range and sight of the same.
Post-Soviet Syria was post-Soviet Putin’s to influence and transform.
Well, some, I suppose, both milk the cow and starve it until it keels over.
______
In Putin, the past fights mightily with the future.
______
In my own recurring themes, Putin and I might share the appreciation of what I call “19th Century Modern”, an aristocratic and noble notion reinforced by the appearance of affluence and wealth. Living in the 19th Century with 21st Century appointments and appliances seems to me pretty cool, although I’ve had to stuff my mansion into a cabin (or cottage) based in about 1,000-sq.ft. of garden apartment walk-up, and things are not looking so good for drives in the country and claret before one or another of the ever glowing electronic hearths.
Still, the situation here is 19th Century (Modern), and it’s pretty good but for the worry.
For the narcissist, reparative or malignant (guilty, I confess, of one or the other or a bit of both), there’s much to recommend it and one may bet on the intelligentsia’s buy-in, Georgian brick, ivy, tweed, and elbow patches and all.
So is the fighting about castle and keep?
It could be so, at least symbolically.
It takes a castle, a manor, a very many of them to create and sustain a great language and culture. If perhaps in his mind, his peacock charm, ambition, dreams at night, and hail fellow well met — and now and then stabbed! — President Putin has had to step back a century, the same may serve to remind of the magic of that era as well.
* * *
It’s almost Christmas.
Winter returns tonight to my home in western Maryland — ice and snow, wool blankets and sweaters, steaming pots of tea (someone else in the family got the samovar) — so I may offer this bit of in-solidarity to my unknown Muscovy doppelganger, reasonably appointed and of good temper: let’s enjoy the show because, sooner or later, for Christianity or fashion designers, for the Jews who work harder for humanity than anyone else, and for humanity served, we’re going to have to do something about Syria and soon, and we don’t want it to be either of the two pariahs busying themselves this evening with the other’s destruction.
Those hunting for war porn may find it on Live Leak.
The variety of insults to humanity evident in the Syrian theater have horrified and numbed this observer, albeit not in the action immediately — although throwing civilians into baking ovens would seem as bad as it gets: from there, the numbers subject to similarly depraved behavior may climb, God rest their souls, but the character of the crime could not be worse, well, perhaps with the exception of being boiled in exploding nuclear plasma — but in the consideration that this dive down into the criminal depths has been going on, and one may say this today with a straight face, for years.
While Putin and Obama may try to keep at their own arms length the depravity exhibited by the Assad regime (from the outset) and the Al Qaeda affiliates that have carried into the fray their own intellectual poisons as well as a demonstrated lack of self-restraint, the two remain visible at the outer boundary of the melee, would that either could untie themselves from what keeps them in an opposition fast losing its equilibrium.
The Syrian Civil War as a furnace, in the larger sense, continues drawing fuel from Islamist ranks worldwide. In fact, as we head into the New Year, Syria would seem the go-to place for fighting to establish the global caliphate, to chat freely about offing the Jews, once and for all, and for throwing innocents into baking ovens.
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Syria today is a country of blurred facts and wild rumors, but the abduction and in some cases murder of Christian clerics is real enough.
It is believed that more than 30 journalists are currently being detained in Syria.
Many kidnappings have been downplayed in the hope of aiding negotiations.
On Tuesday the Spanish newspaper El Mundo decided to publicise the abduction of two journalists in Syria in September after indirect communications with their captors led to “no result”.
The “fog of war” descended on Syria a long time ago.
That process began with a despotic and reactionary state eschewing talk with its challengers and leaping to air power to bomb the daylights out of its own constituents — city blocks, suburbs, towns, villages, schools — free of discrimination regarding noncombatants.
The same seems to have picked up with the fractured assembly of the Free Syrian Army and to have accelerated with the incursion of the Al Qaeda affiliates and their ability to steal The Revolution, redefine The Cause, and confuse the comparative loyalties and purposes of the patchwork of anti-Assad forces.
* * *
The fighting in Maaloula is part of a wider struggle between Al-Qaeda linked fighters of the Nusra Front and the Syrian army for control of the strategic Damascus-Homs highway, which passes close by the town.
Maaloula was the scene of heavy fighting in September. It is considered to be one of the birthplaces of Christianity and is home to a number of shrines and monasteries, which are listed as UNESCO world heritage sites.
Activists and residents say Syrian rebels have again taken control of parts of Maaloula, an ancient Christian town near Damascus.
A spokesman for the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a local resident said on Monday that rebels were steadily seizing swathes of the town which they have occupied on previous occasions as fighting has ebbed and flowed in the rugged Qalamoun region near Damascus.
In a statement relayed by the Lebanese National News Agency, Qabbani said that “kidnapping and physical abuse go contrary to the teachings of Islam, and are offensive to the essential teachings of tolerance especially at a time of conflict and war.”
It was not immediately clear whether the nuns had been kidnapped or merely evacuated for their own safety.
Oh, please, oh sponsored press: the Islamist front has retaken a critical position in the Syrian theater, picked up in the weird way of the religious world a dozen useful assets that it may use to forestall the next Assad airstrike, or, if the jets fly anyway, use as anti-regime PR (by way of their obliteration by the air force of the despot) even while a few of their own are dispatched to Paradise.
The Syrian terrorists abducted 12 nuns from Mar Takla monastery, which lies in the historic town of Maaloula in Damascus, and movedNuns them form to the nearby town of Yabroud.
While America’s lopsided right-side conservatives excoriate President Obama for this mess, it may dawn on some to take a second look at the weight and singularity of the emerging rebel arsenal. Neither the weapons launched in the above attack or very good zoom video used to record the attack arrived out of thin air. As with all film and television productions, especially today the real ones, there would seem to be a lot of treasure involved.
Whose?
When?
Through what channels?
I don’t think I’m going to find the answers to those questions on the World Wide Web.
This post includes a bloody awful clip from, ostensibly, the Kurdish sub-theater of Syria’s “Theater of the Real” complete and irreversible meltdown. At this point, one may presume that fans of either the Assad regime’s combat doctrine or the ways of Al Qaeda affiliates have ice water in their veins where everyone else has a far warmer human spirit.
War news is often a little hard to take, especially where children are involved, but a glimpse of video from a live field after an attack . . . network television, it ain’t.
______
Russia has already allocated 10 million USD for the Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. Iraq is also asking for financial aid due to the inflow of immigrants from Syria.
Mysterious purple sacks paid for by Israeli nonprofit IsraAid: “We don’t announce with trumpets that we’re Israeli.”
*
With the word “Jewish” removed, the purple bags begin to travel in a human chain down a tight stairwell to the refugees below, almost all of them women wearing long black dresses and matching hijabs. Bags are loaded onto trucks or carried in hand back to wherever they are staying.
How penurious the effort when a state’s involved: Bulgaria may wear its heart on its sleeve for the refugees making their way to its bus stations but it’s wallet today appears to be opening for a fence capable of keeping them out.
Israel has the good fortune of being hated by people both wary of media as well as poisoned by it, so the direct challenge to its own humanity and pocketbook have been about right-sized: it can and has cared for wounded crawling to its tent and , this as it has in a growing roster of the world’s disaster zones — more “natural” than “man-caused” (as the American Administration might have it), its people — Israelis, of course — respond to need across its borders, but feel it / they must do so furtively (even, perhaps, while preparing and publishing the video boast).
Israel’s ethic to respond to need regardless of “race, religion, gender, or national origin” sets the standard for the ethics and morality required by the emergency.
* * *
“It was best thing I have seen in my life,” said 10-year-old Rana Ziad, who fled from her restive southern border town of Daraa with her parents and six brothers and sisters a year ago. “It was very much fun and I loved it.”
Scarred by the horrors of war, they suffer from psychological distress, live alone or separated from their parents, receive no education or are thrown into illegal child labor, the agency said.
“Our lives are destroyed,” the report quoted 14-year-old Nadia, a newly arrived refugee in Jordan.
I don’t now the acronym or name “ANHA” and was not able to ferret the meaning quickly from web-borne articles or stations associated with it. If you know the four words, I would like to hear them and know their translation.
The number of Syrian refugees in Iraq’s Kurdistan region has reached 200,000. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) expects that the number may exceed 500,000 by the end of 2013.
There are about 80,000 refugees currently living in the Domiz camp, 20km southeast of Dohuk city and about 60km from the Syria-Iraq border.
The conflict between the Kurds and Arab jihadis highlights how some “liberated” zones of Syria have become battlegrounds between various armed factions with distinct agendas and varying views on what a future Syria should look like.
Since Thursday, more than 20,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, have fled from northern Syria into the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, according to the United Nations. [Updated, 2:05 p.m. PDT Aug. 19: Later Monday, the U.N. revised the number of recent refugees to almost 30,000.]
On Tuesday, Kurdish groups announced the formation of an interim autonomous government in Syria’s Kurdish region, with elections to follow. The announcement comes on the heels of battle successes against Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), among the most powerful of the myriad homegrown and foreign forces fighting the Assad regime.
So far, according to the report, there is little evidence of any comprehensive strategy or investment in providing a humanitarian communication strategy. Various agencies are employing piecemeal tactics to communication through counseling lines, SMS and face-to-face outreach, yet all of these have their limitations.
Furthermore it is clear from Internews research presented here that all current outreach tactics are fundamentally undermined by a profound lack of trust and/or understanding on the part of the refugees about what they are being told, and by whom. Syria has a long history as one of the most media-oppressed countries in the world and the Syrians have a mistrust of media and officialdom in general.
As a resettlement caseworker with UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in Cairo, I saw firsthand how resettlement can provide a new lease on life to refugees trapped in risky and difficult circumstances. I am proud to have helped resettle hundreds of Somali refugee women and children to the United States, where many are now flourishing as employees, entrepreneurs and students. But I also saw the unintended negative consequences that often accompany resettlement programs. Inevitably, there are not enough resettlement places to go around. In 2012, 88,600 of the world’s 15.4 million refugees were resettled – less than 0.6 percent
Greece has enough problems of its own. The anti-immigrant Golden Dawn is now the third largest political party in the country, on track to become the second. The party wants “Greece for Greeks” and blames economic troubles on refugees and immigrants. Supporters routinely attack refugees in the street, beating them, spitting on them, and calling the authorities to collect them.
There is a catch. Officials at the reception centre in Marsta take fingerprints to see whether asylum-seekers have already been registered in other EU countries.
Syria is the greatest refugee crisis of our time. The numbers are shocking. More than two million refugees have spilled into neighbouring countries, over half of whom are children. And with no end to the conflict in sight, we expect the crisis to deepen as we head into the winter months.
The UK’s response to date has been serious and substantial. David Cameron has pledged that Britain is not a country that will stand by and fail to act, and the Government has committed £500million in humanitarian aid.
Some might say that this protest shows the tragic impact of the civil war in Syria. But that is to draw entirely the wrong lesson. For what the Calais stand-off really shows is how Britain is viewed as a soft-touch right across the globe. Thanks to lax borders, the human rights industry, the state’s obsession with multiculturalism and our obscenely generous welfare system, our country has become the world’s capital for freeloaders. The group at Calais is a symbol, not of Syria’s inhumanity but of Britain’s utterly chaotic, self-destructive immigration policy.
JERUSALEM — Israel acknowledged for the first time Tuesday that it is providing humanitarian aid to victims of the civil war inside neighboring Syria, saying it has funneled food and other emergency supplies to embattled villages just across the frontier.
In sum, Syria embodies multi-layered “spider web-like “ networks of Sunni and Shia militias and paramilitary forces, and this can only continue to plunge Syria into violence and chaos not unlike the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), although Syria’s war is at least 100 times worse and intense and potentially will last a lot longer.
The supporters of these proxy rebel groups, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE , and other GCC states on the Sunni jihadists’ side, and Iran on the Shia side, have no regard for the innocent civilians suffering horrifically in Syria and also as refugees in neighboring countries. These proxy supporters are as guilty of atrocities as Bashar al-Assad. All sides are guilty of war crimes
In the order encountered in the above article: The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS); Free Syrian Army; Ahrar al-Sham; Jaysh al-Islam; Suqour al-Sham; Liwa al-Tawhid; Liwa al-Haqq; Ansar al-Sham; Kurdish Islamic Front; Hezbollah; Revolutionary Guard Corps.
_____
“I want to say to the clerics to fear Allah. They have destroyed people. They have destroyed families. They have destroyed all people. They have destroyed young people. They lie to them and lure them. For what? For Jihad for the sake of Allah. All this is nothing but slander and brainwashing.”
We can thus say with high confidence that at least 1,200 European Muslims have gone to Syria since the start of the war. This is a remarkable figure; we are talking about the largest European Muslim foreign fighter contingent to any conflict in modern history.
Hey, guys, let’s put on a war and see who shows up!
The Mohammad Must Off Ya Club, partially invited by the Old Soviet Boys Network and the Shiite Propeller Beanies — everyone’s making money but the fighters, and some of those are making money too — have found their calling in Syria:
Explosive weapons, including bombs, killed seven in 10 of the more than 11,000 Syrian children under the age of 17 who have died in Syria’s brutal civil war, according to a report released on Sunday . . . Most often, they were killed by explosives, but also from executions and torture. Since March 2011, 113,735 civilians and combatants have been killed in the Syrian conflict.
Exercise your imagination with this factoid from the above cited Al Jazeera piece:
Small arms fire from guns and rifles accounted for 2,806, or 26.5 percent, of the children killed, with 764 children who were executed and 398 killed by fire from a sniper. And among those children who were executed, 112 were tortured, including some infants.
______
Upon arrival in Syria, the mercenaries were told that their employers were private individuals, not the Syrian government, and the weapons they were told they’d be given, including T-72 tanks, were replaced by antiquated tanks that didn’t run, and by makeshift armored vehicles with machine guns. Also, they soon learned that instead of guarding oil fields, they were supposed to be recapturing them from jihadists.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when what we do best is set out to murder and deceive.
For money.
* * *
St Petersburg newspaper Fontanka interviewed some mercenaries who said that they were lured by a promise to get $4,000 per month and a solemn oath that the first salary would be transferred within days.
They were taken on a flight to Beirut, Lebanon and from there they were transferred by cars to Damascus. When they reached the Syrian border they traveled with a convoy of local guardsmen. In Damascus they were taken to a local hotel. The following day they were transferred by a plane to Latakia, and from there to a Syrian military base.
The Islamic Small Wars are no longer about infidels, Islam, or states: they’are about kinds of persons, sometimes the absolute autocrats one feels comfortable referring to as “malignant narcissists”; sometimes common bandits, murderers, psychos, and thieves taking the opportunity to cloak themselves in patriotism or religion; sometimes nothing more than young men in the hormonal sway of grandiose messianic delusions.
Perhaps it will turn out a good thing to have had them gathered so in one bloody place.
They’re all easier to see that way — and what a spectacle they make of themselves.
While the malignancies do the chop-chop and Kalashnikov war dances, Oxfam on Syria notes the following:
The UN estimates that almost 7 million Syrians inside of Syria are in need of assistance, including 4.25 million internally displaced.
Thousands continue to flee Syria daily.
The total number of refugees in neighboring countries is now more than 2.2 million.
It is estimated that the population of Lebanon has increased by more than 25% and the population of Jordan by 6%. This is putting extreme pressure on local infrastructure.
“One 24-year-old man, suspected of organising journeys to Syria, was in touch with several “fixers” who facilitated travel between Turkey and Syria, while another previously fought with an Islamist group in Syria, the sources said.”
In casual and often jocular language typical of messages on social media, the authors paint a rosy picture of life on the front, stressing the pious atmosphere and the sense of brotherhood-in-arms shared by the fighters. They note that recruits may come with their wives and children, and stress the practical advantages of joining the jihad community in Syria, such as the prospect of finding a bride and the low cost of living.
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