Syria

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Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 22, 2024 1:19 pm

Israel, Not the ‘Liberators,’ Will Decide Syria’s Fate
December 21, 2024

Syria’s future under al-Qaeda spin-off HTS will come in two flavours only, writes Jonathan Cook. Either submit and collude like the West Bank, or end up wrecked like Gaza.

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Opposition forces around an equestrian statue of Bashar al-Assad’d older brother Bassel, who died in 1994, at Al- Basel roundabout in western Aleppo, on Nov. 30, 2024. Later that day the statue was torn down. (Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?” articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.

Western governments and media have been quick to celebrate the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), even though the group is designated a terrorist organisation in the United States, Britain and much of Europe.

Back in 2013, the U.S. even placed a £10 million bounty on its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, for his involvement with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) and for carrying out a series of brutal attacks on civilians.

[The U.S. on Friday lifted the bounty on his head after Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf met with al-Julani in Damascus.]

Once upon a time, he might have expected to end up in an orange jumpsuit in the notorious, off-the-grid detention and torture facility run by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is positioning himself as Syria’s heir apparent, seemingly with Washington’s blessing.

Surprisingly, before either HTS or al-Julani can be tested in their new roles overseeing Syria, the West is hurrying to rehabilitate them. The U.S. and U.K. are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation.

To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 — 18 years after his release from prison.

Similarly, Western media are helping al-Julani to rebrand himself as a statesman-in-the-making, airbrushing his past atrocities, by transitioning from using his nom de guerre to his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Piling on Pressure

Stories of prisoners being freed from Assad’s dungeons and of families pouring on to the streets in celebration have helped to drive an upbeat news agenda and obscure a more likely dismal future for newly “liberated” Syria — as the U.S., U.K., Israel, Turkey and Gulf states jostle for a share of the pie.

Syria’s status looks sealed as a permanently failed state.

Israel’s bombing raids — destroying hundreds of critical infrastructure sites across Syria — are designed precisely towards that end.

Within days, the Israeli military was boasting it had destroyed 80 percent of Syria’s military installations. More have gone since.

On Monday, Israel unleashed 16 strikes on Tartus, a strategically important port where Russia has a naval fleet. The blasts were so powerful, they registered 3.5 on the Richter scale.

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Tartus, Syria, promenade at night, 2008. (Dosseman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

During Assad’s rule, Israel chiefly rationalised its attacks on Syria — coordinating them with Russian forces supporting Damascus — as necessary to prevent the flow of weapons overland from Iran to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.

But that is not the goal currently. HTS’ Sunni fighters have vowed to keep Iran and Hezbollah — the Shiite “axis of resistance” against Israel — out of Syrian territory.

Israel has prioritised instead targeting Syria’s already beleaguered military — its planes, naval ships, radars, anti-aircraft batteries and missile stockpiles — to strip the country of any offensive or defensive capability.

Any hope of Syria maintaining a semblance of sovereignty is crumbling before our eyes.

These latest strikes come on top of years of Western efforts to undermine Syria’s integrity and economy. The U.S. military controls Syria’s oil and wheat production areas, plundering these key resources with the help of a Kurdish minority.

More generally, the West has imposed punitive sanctions on Syria’s economy.

It was precisely these pressures that hollowed out Assad’s government and led to its collapse. Now Israel is piling on more pressure to make sure any newcomer faces an even harder task.

Maps of post-Assad Syria, like those during the latter part of his beleaguered presidency, are a patchwork of different colours, with Turkey and its local allies seizing territory in the north, the Kurds clinging on to the east, U.S. forces in the south, and the Israeli military encroaching from the west.

This is the proper context for answering the question of what comes next.

Two Possible Fates

Syria is now the plaything of a complex of vaguely aligned state interests. None have Syria’s interests as a strong, unified state high on their list.

In such circumstances, Israel’s priority will be to promote sectarian divisions and stop a central authority from emerging to replace Assad.

This has been Israel’s plan stretching back decades, and has shaped the thinking of the dominant foreign policy elite in Washington since the rise of the so-called neoconservatives under President George W. Bush in the early 2000s. The aim has been to Balkanise any state in the Middle East that refuses to submit to Israeli and U.S. hegemony.

Israel cares only that Syria is riven by internal feuding and power-plays. Beginning in 2013, Israel ran a covert programme to arm and fund at least 12 different rebel factions, according to a 2018 article in Foreign Policy magazine.

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2024 Israeli invasion of Syria as of Dec.19. (Ecrusized, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

In this regard, Syria’s fate is being modelled on that of the Palestinians.

There may be a choice but it will come in no more than two flavours. Syria can become the West Bank, or it can become Gaza.

So far, the indications are that Israel is gunning for the Gaza option. Washington and Europe appear to prefer the West Bank route, which is why they have been focusing on the rehabilitation of HTS.

In the Gaza scenario, Israel keeps pounding Syria, depriving the rebranded al-Qaeda faction or any other group of the ability to run the country’s affairs. Instability and chaos reign.

With Assad’s legacy of secular rule destroyed, bitter sectarian rivalries dominate, cementing Syria into separate regions. Feuding warlords, militias and crime families battle it out for local dominance.

Their attention is directed inwards, towards strengthening their rule against rivals, not outwards towards Israel.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

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Israeli military during ground invasion of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 31, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

There would be nothing new about this outcome for Syria in the worldview shared by Israel and the neocons. It draws on lessons Israel believes it learnt in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Israeli generals spoke of returning Gaza “to the Stone Age” long before they were in a position to realise that goal with the current genocide there. Those same generals first tested their ideas on a more limited scale in Lebanon, pummelling the country’s infrastructure under the “Dahiya” doctrine.

Israel believed such indiscriminate wrecking sprees offered a double benefit. Overwhelming destruction forced the local population to concentrate on basic survival rather than organise resistance. And longer term, the targeted population would understand that, given the severity of the punishment, any future resistance to Israel should be avoided at all costs.

Back in 2007, four years before the uprising in Syria erupted, a leading articulator of the neocon agenda, Caroline Glick, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, set out Syria’s imminent fate.

She explained that any central authority in Damascus had to be destroyed. The reasoning: “Centralised governments throughout the Arab world are the primary fulminators of Arab hatred of Israel.”

She added:

“How well would Syria contend with the IDF [Israeli military] if it were simultaneously trying to put down a popular rebellion?”

Or, better still, Syria could be turned into another failed state like Libya after Muammar Gaddafi’s ousting and killing in 2011 with the help of NATO. Libya has been run by warlords ever since.

Notably, both Syria and Libya — along with Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and Iran — were on a hit list drawn up in Washington in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by U.S. officials close to Israel.

All but Iran are now failed or failing states.

Security Contractor

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President Donald Trump with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at arrival ceremony in Bethlehem on May 23, 2017. (White House, Shealah Craighead)

The other possible outcome is that Syria becomes a larger version of the West Bank.

In that scenario, HTS and al-Julani are able to convince the U.S. and Europe that they are so supine, so ready to do whatever they are told, that Israel has nothing to fear from them.

Their rule would be modelled on that of Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the much-reviled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. His powers are little greater than those of the head of a municipal council, overseeing schools and collecting the rubbish.

His security forces are lightly armed — effectively a police force — used for internal repression and incapable of challenging Israel’s illegal occupation. Abbas has described as “sacred” his service to Israel in preventing Palestinians from resisting their decades-long oppression.

The Palestinian Authority’s active collusion was on show again at the weekend when its security forces killed a resistance leader in Jenin wanted by Israel.

Al-Julani could similarly be cultivated as a security contractor. Largely thanks to Israel, Syria now has no army, navy or air force. It has only lightly armed factions such as HTS, other rebel militias like the misnamed Syrian National Army, and Kurdish groups.

Under C.I.A. and Turkish tutelage, HTS could be strengthened, but only enough to repress dissent in Syria.

HTS would have powers but on licence. Its survival would depend on keeping things quiet for Israel, both through a reign of intimidation against other Syrian groups, including the Palestinian refugee population, who threaten to fight Israel, and by keeping out other regional actors resisting Israel, such as Iran and Hezbollah.

And as with Abbas, al-Julani’s rule in Syria would be territorially limited.

The Palestinian leader has to contend with the fact that large swaths of the West Bank have been carved out as Jewish settlements under Israeli rule, and that he has no access to critical resources, including aquifers, agricultural land and quarries.

Off-limits to HTS would likely be Kurdish areas policed by Turkey and the U.S., where much of the country’s oil is located, as well as a swath of territory in Syria’s south-west that Israel has invaded over the past two weeks.

It is widely assumed Israel will annex these Syrian lands to extend its illegal occupation of the Golan, which it took from Syria in 1967.

‘Love’ for Israel

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U.N.-controlled border crossing point in 2007 between Syria and Israel at the Golan Heights. (Escla, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Al-Julani understands only too well the options ahead of him. Perhaps not surprisingly, he appears far keener to become a Syrian Abbas than a Syrian Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October.

Given his clean-cut military makeover, al-Julani may imagine that he can eventually upgrade himself to the Syrian equivalent of the U.S.-backed leader of Ukraine, Volodmyr Zelensky.

However, Zelensky’s role has been to fight a proxy war against Russia, on behalf of NATO. Israel would never countenance a leader of a country on its border being given that kind of military muscle.

Al-Julani’s commanders have lost no time explaining that they have no beef with Israel and do not want to provoke hostilities with it.

The heady first days of HTS’ rule were marked by its leaders thanking Israel for helping it to take Syria by neutralising Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There were even declarations of “love” for Israel.

Such sentiments have not been dented by the Israeli army invading the large demilitarised zone inside Syria next to the Golan, in violation of the 1974 armistice agreement.

Nor have they been damaged by Israel’s relentless bombing of Syria’s infrastructure — a violation of sovereignty that the Nuremberg tribunal at the end of the Second World War decried as the supreme international crime.

This week al-Julani meekly suggested that Israel had secured its interests in Syria through air strikes and invasion and could now leave the country in peace.

“We do not want any conflict, whether with Israel or anyone else, and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks [against Israel],” he told The Times of London.

A Channel 4 reporter who tried last week to press an HTS spokesman into addressing Israel’s attacks on Syria was startled by the response.

Obeida Arnaout sounded as though he was following a carefully rehearsed script, reassuring Washington and Israeli officials that HTS had no bigger ambitions than emptying the bins regularly.

Asked how HTS viewed the attacks on its sovereignty by Israel, Arnaout would only reply:

“Our priority is to restore security and services, revive civilian life and institutions and care for newly liberated cities. There are many urgent parts of day-to-day life to restore: bakeries, electricity, water, communications, so our priority is to provide those services to the people.”

It seems HTS is unwilling even to offer rhetorical opposition to Israeli war crimes on Syrian soil.

Wider Ambitions

All of this leaves Israel in a strong position to entrench its gains and widen its regional ambitions.

Israel has announced plans to double the number of Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Syrian territory in the Golan.

Meanwhile, Syrian communities newly under Israeli military rule — in areas Israel has invaded since Assad’s fall — have appealed to their nominal government in Damascus and other Arab states to persuade Israel to withdraw. With good reason, they fear they face permanent occupation.

Predictably, the same Western elites so incensed by Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity that they have spent three years arming Kyiv in a proxy war against Moscow — risking a potential nuclear confrontation — have raised not a peep of concern at Israel’s ever deepening violations of Syria’s territorial integrity.

Once again, it is one rule for Israel, another for anyone Washington views as an enemy.

With Syria’s air defences out of the way, Israel now has a free run to Iran — either by itself or with U.S. assistance — to attack the last target on the neocons’ seven-country hit list from 2001.

The Israeli media have excitedly reported on preparations for a strike, while the transition team working for incoming U.S. President Donald Trump are said to be seriously considering joining such an operation.

And to top it all, Israel looks like it may finally be in sight of signing off on “normal” relations with Washington’s other major client state in the region, Saudi Arabia — a drive that had to be put on hold following Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Renewed ties between Israel and Riyadh are possible again in large part because coverage of Syria has further disappeared the Gaza genocide from the West’s news agenda, despite Palestinians there — starved and bombed by Israel for 14 months — likely dying in larger numbers than ever.

The narrative of Syria’s “liberation” currently dominates Western coverage. But so far the takeover of Damascus by HTS appears only to have liberated Israel, leaving it freer to bully and terrorise its neighbours into submission.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/21/i ... rias-fate/

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Washington trained, armed extremist groups to topple Syrian govt

Mercenaries from the Syria Free Army received training by US forces at the Al-Tanf base to participate in the lighting assault on Damascus

News Desk

DEC 20, 2024

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(Photo credit: Free Syrian Army/Facebook)

Washington knew in advance about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham's (HTS) assault on Damascus that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government, preparing a mercenary group to join the offensive from the US-occupied zone at Al-Tanf, The Telegraph reported on 20 December.

Militants from the British and US-trained fighters in the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA) claim they were told, “This is your moment,” in a briefing by US Special Forces before the invasion to oust Assad began.

The Telegraph writes that “In the first indication that Washington had prior knowledge of the offensive, the RCA revealed it had been told to scale up its forces and ‘be ready’ for an attack that could lead to the end of the Assad regime.”

“They did not tell us how it would happen,” Captain Bashar al-Mashadani, an RCA commander, told the UK newspaper.

“We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”

Captain Mashadani said that in the weeks before the briefing at the US-occupied Al-Tanf air base on the tri-border area of Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, the US recruited additional mercenaries to join the upcoming invasion.

The RCA’s ranks were “swollen by smaller freelance units like his brought under its command,” Mashadani stated.

The US still pays the militants a salary under the pretext they are fighting ISIS in Syria.

RCA fighters occupying a base in Palmyra said they had been told to prepare for the Syrian government to be toppled in early November, nearly three weeks before the offensive began.

US and Turkish-backed militants from the former Al-Qaeda affiliate HTS launched an assault on the Aleppo countryside on 27 November. They captured Damascus, with help from Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups from Deraa in southern Syria and RCA fighters from Al-Tanf on 8 December.

The RCA now occupies roughly one-fifth of Syria, including pockets of territory in the north of the capital, Damascus.

The fighters’ testimony indicates that Washington knew about the offensive led by HTS and helped to plan and coordinate it.

Also known as the Syrian Free Army (SFA), the RCA appointed a former ISIS chief, Salem Turki al-Antari, as their commander earlier this year.

Antari is from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. According to ASO Network, he joined ISIS in 2014, going by the nickname Abu Saddam al-Ansari. The extremist group appointed him as the Emir of the Badia desert region in Homs.

Between 2015 and 2017, Antari took part in the ISIS takeover of Palmyra and the battles with the Syrian army that ensued. The ISIS assault on Palmyra destroyed some of Syria’s most cherished cultural heritage.

https://thecradle.co/articles/washingto ... yrian-govt

Turkiye demands end of US support to Kurdish militants in control of northeast Syria

Turkish officials have demanded that Kurdish forces withdraw from the Syrian cities of Kobani and Raqqa

News Desk

DEC 20, 2024

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(Photo credit: Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on 20 December that foreign countries should withdraw their support for Kurdish fighters in Syria amid efforts by Turkish proxy groups to expand their control of territory in northern Syria.

In a statement released by his office on Friday, Erdogan said there was no longer any reason for outside support for Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG), which form the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The SDF occupies areas in north and east Syria, including the country's major oil fields, in partnership with the US military.

Turkiye considers the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it views as a terrorist organization. The PKK has for decades fought the Turkish state to win autonomy and greater rights for Kurds in Turkiye.

“In the upcoming period, we do not believe that any power will continue to collaborate with terrorist organizations. The heads of terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and PKK-YPG will be crushed in the shortest possible time,” Erdogan added.

The US military still has 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria supporting the YPG-led SDF, which holds large numbers of ISIS militants in its prisons.

“Islamic State, the PKK, and its versions which threaten the survival of Syria need to be eradicated,” Erdogan stated.

After the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fell two weeks ago, the Syrian National Army (SNA), a Turkish proxy, took control of the northern Syrian border city of Manbij from the SDF. The US then brokered a ceasefire deal between the two sides earlier this month, which has been extended to the end of this week, according to a State Department announcement on Tuesday.

A Turkish Defense Ministry official said on 19 December, contradicting the State Department, that there is no talk of a ceasefire, according to Reuters.

On Friday, Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Guler announced that Turkiye intends to expel SDF fighters from the northern Syrian cities of Kobani and Raqqa, disarm them, and transfer their weapons to Syria's new government.

“We expect them to give up all heavy weapons and evacuate these areas without causing any unwanted situations for local residents,” the Turkish minister stated.

Kurdish sources speaking with The Cradle say Turkiye is trying to eliminate not only the PKK and its offshoots but Kurds themselves from northern Syria.

The sources stated that the Kurds are prepared to reach an agreement with the new Syrian interim government, led by former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammad al-Julani), to establish a democratic state where the rights of different religious and ethnic groups can live in Syria together.

The YPG took control of Kurdish territory in north and east Syria after the start of the US-backed covert war on the Syrian government in 2011.

In 2015, the US military formed the SDF to conquer Arab territories in Syria previously occupied by ISIS. US planners wished to capture Syria's oil and wheat-producing regions to use as leverage against the government of Bashar al-Assad while at the same time imposing punishing economic sanctions on the country to cause Assad's ouster.

https://thecradle.co/articles/turkiye-d ... east-syria

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Syria: The Hidden Story
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 21, 2024
Lorenzo Maria Pacini

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This article stems from a conversation I had with an old friend who was a commander of the Syrian Armed Forces, whose courage was appreciated and recognised throughout the Middle East. A true socialist from another era, who was never afraid to speak his mind and who, despite contradictions and different political views, never betrayed his country and support for his government.

As he has no pleasure in revealing his name, as he is still engaged in institutional activities abroad, we will call him by his fictional name Ram. Whether one agrees with his words or not, this is the testimony of a Syrian who fought for his country and his people and who now suffers the most terrible defeat in life.

The reunion with Ram

In Ram’s private study there is an air of life lived to the full. Hanging on the walls are various paintings of Syrian landscapes, along with some Koranic invocations and terracottas commemorating the battles he took part in. A few old books in Arabic can be glimpsed on the bookshelf, along with many posters of documents in various languages. Here and there are now faded photographs of men in camouflage uniforms in the desert. Looking towards the entrance, a Syrian flag with Bashar al-Assad’s face still full of dust, dirt and a few rips, as if it had been taken from the battlefield and immediately put on the flagpole. In the centre, a photo of his father, a wise and good-looking Arab man, with a black mourning keffiyeh on top.

We had known each other for years: I was a kid who read the classics of geopolitics and looked at the world with the desire to understand it, he was a fighter who had lived through incredible situations and retired to private life, continuing to work for his country in other ways, out of the spotlight. I loved listening to the anecdotes he would pull out of his memory each time, it was like plunging into a different world, almost improbable for how ‘other’ it was from the West. Above all, a world in which the war, the struggle for freedom and a different political situation were not something decades away, but fresh events whose scars were still open and bleeding.

He has always had great respect for me and my support for the Syrian cause, which is why he allowed me to meet him. He welcomes me with the warmth, respect and depth that belongs to the Syrian people, famous for thousands of years for their ability to welcome and integrate. He offers me a long coffee and we start talking.

‘Ram, what do you think?’ I ask him.

The happiness of our meeting suddenly disappears. His face becomes serious and his head tilts forward as if in deep thought. After a few seconds, he looks up: ‘I have never told anyone. Perhaps the time has come to tell what I knew, what I saw’.

What follows is her testimony, delivered to me with great emotion and palpable pain from the first to the last word.

We already knew everything

‘What happened was not expected by anyone, except those who, like me, had already glimpsed the plot of events as far back as 2011 and perhaps had had anticipations from trusted contacts.’

‘We already knew everything. We knew that Bashar al-Assad was preparing something with the rulers of other countries, arranging his good exit the moment support in the Middle East collapsed or things went bad’. The seriousness of the conversation does not admit of irony or sarcasm. Ram is serious and tries to make me understand the gravity of his words, trusting in my professionalism and the trust that binds us.

The thesis he supports and which he explains to me in many details, some of which I cannot report due to the delicacy of the information cited, is that Bashar al-Assad was too friendly with Westerners: his banker wife, the dinners in the United Kingdom, the smell of Freemasonry, a certain passivity in the face of the corruption of politicians and the high ranks of the armed forces. Too many elements that many Syrians did not like and that already in 2000, when he came to power, had aroused suspicion and disappointment among those who, like Ram, had risked their lives for the revolution.

We have been betrayed twice: as a country, by Russia who let the enemy assault us; as Syrian people, by our president who sold out all of us to save his own skin’.

The events of 2011-2013, the internal uprising, the jihadist terrorism, had all been consequences of previous mistakes. Assad had winked too much at the West…but also at the East. To Russia, for example. ‘I confess I had believed it, I had hoped for it. Putin could really make a difference. I never trusted any other ruler, but I did, because he had really provided essential help in defeating terrorism and had guaranteed Syria at least a minimum of international security,’ he tells me, exploring his many memories. ‘But it didn’t help, because Russia was also involved in the agreement. We have been betrayed twice: as a country, by Russia who let the enemy assault us; as Syrian people, by our president who sold out all of us to save his own skin’. There is anger in Ram’s eyes. A solemn anger that admits of no lies.

‘And I will tell you more: for me, the agreement was signed in concert with Israel and the US. American Jews are interested in the Middle East to realize the Greater Israel project and the construction of the Third Temple, Russian Jews are interested in Ukraine, the old Khazaria. They win either way. Israel won even before sending troops to invade’. Strong and precise words, as befits a commander who has been at war for real.

He then explained to me that information had already been circulating for a couple of months about Assad’s escape and the handover of Syria without effort, but these were not rumors that were given much credence and the versions of events were sometimes contradictory and inaccurate. But it was clear that something was moving.

He tells me some anecdotes of when he was fighting, of the cities he defended and when he also took part in conflicts in other countries: ‘I have seen in my life the enemy arrive in Beirut, in Damascus, in Aleppo, in Hama, in Homs.

I have seen the enemy succeed in making us believe they have won, but then be swept away by the courage of our men. There were times when I thought it was the end, that we were losing the war, but then something happened that gave new impetus to the Resistance. This time – the first time in my whole life – I saw defeat’.

This is the most painful point. ‘We did not lose, we were defeated. This is much worse. ‘Woe to the vanquished!’ said the Latins.’ Defeat is the most terrible thing for a long-standing commander. The Syrian people have always shown heroic resistance, but something went wrong somewhere.

‘Do you know what I saw over there the last time I went? Poverty, hunger. There is no electricity, no water, no food supplies, not even fuel. The army is left to fend for itself in absolutely precarious conditions’. He tells me that some 700,000,000 young Syrians have given their lives to fight against the enemy.

Blood, blood, blood. Is it possible that the Middle East has to be constantly bathed in blood?

Then he explains to me the corruption he has seen, from checkpoints where the military took bribes without checking up on them to high officials bought with the luxury of private cars, villas, Western souvenirs.

‘Once when I was driving out of Damascus towards Homs, I met two very young boys in uniform along the road. They were thin and were smoking. I stopped them and asked them what they were doing there in that condition. They replied that they had no money to go to Homs, to spend the 24 hours of leave they had, nor did they have money to eat. I loaded them into the car with me and we left. During the journey we talked, they told me about the misery they lived in at the base. Their daily ration of food was a tomato and a potato. Once a week they were given a chicken to share among eight people. In my time there was food and the troops had to be well fed to be ready to fight. How can this happen? In the last 13 years, the government has completely destroyed the army: corruption of officers, lack of supplies, disengagement in the fight for the national cause’.

Soleimani, Raisi, Nasrallah – betrayed

‘When General Soleimani – whom I knew as a young soldier – was killed by the American demon in 2020, I immediately sensed that something was starting to go wrong.

He was much more than a General, he was a real Man, a leader, a living example. After him, unfortunately, the Resistance did not have another soldier capable in the same way of coordinating thousands of men from different countries, religions and ethnicities. This was an enormous strategic disadvantage’. We briefly reviewed the history of the Axis of Resistance and reasoned together about the geopolitical implications for the entire Middle East.

‘When I heard about Raisi’s death, I didn’t want to believe it. It seemed impossible. From that moment on, everything went downhill. Every day I watched the news with the fear that something even more terrible might happen. And so it was: one after the other, they took out all the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas’. A tragic truth, which I could only confirm.

The speed with which the enemy exterminated the military leaders of the Lebanese resistance one after the other was unbelievable, proving that agencies like the CIA, MI6 and Mossad did a great job. This is an incontrovertible fact. In the space of a few months, the entire political geography of the Middle East underwent a mutation that had not succeeded in years of trying.


‘Who knew the coordinates of Nasrallah’s bunker? Maybe three people in the world: Khamenei, Soleimani, Assad. Khamenei rather than betray would be ready to die with rifle in hand. Soleimani has already been taken out. There is only one left…’. At these words I stand open-mouthed: the commander had never spoken ill of his president, although I knew that politically he was not a supporter of him in everything, but had always supported his leader’s battle, for the good of the whole country. Anger, disappointment and pain brought out the truest words. A gamble, but still true.

Because one of the big questions that remain open is ‘who’ revealed Nasrallah’s exact location: an intelligence tracker? A spy? A paid-for piece of information? Or a traitor? The fact is that Nasrallah is no more and this, in Ram’s words, means that Lebanon will be the next to fall and Palestine, consequently, will no longer exist except in the memories of the last Arabs scattered around the world.

‘Syria fell in a matter of days because it had already fallen to the will of its rulers who had sold it out. 70,000 soldiers migrated within hours, taken in taxis (which cost a lot of money), not military vehicles, to the border with Iraq. It was all planned. Not a single bullet was fired in this invasion. This is not the Syrian army I know. This ‘thing’ is a perversion without dignity’.

He points to a photo behind him, I catch a glimpse of a soldier in uniform, one of those postcard photos you send to your parents when you do your military service: ‘Look at that boy there, 22 years old. Slit his throat’. He froze for a few moments, his eyes swollen with tears. It was the son of a close friend of his.

What will happen now?

Ram does not feel like talking about the coming days or weeks or months. Arab and secular Syria no longer exists. The word of the defeated has little value.

‘Something unthinkable is happening these days. There is no information in the media about it because it would be something terribly raw. Imagine 70 years of ethnic, cultural and religious hatred: they are getting even. There is almost fear in uttering these words. I remember that he has a brother in the Islamic clergy and several nieces and nephews, and with some concern I ask him what about them, so he replies: ‘I am trying to get my relatives out of Syria, but since 8 December I cannot even get in touch with them. A tragedy that is the common sentence of too many thousands of people in those lands.

In concluding our conversation, which lasted about an hour, Ram ventures an almost ‘prophetic’ projection: ‘I say it: yesterday Palestine, today Syria. Tomorrow Lebanon for good. Then Yemen. Once Yemen and Lebanon have fallen, Iran will be next. In between there is nothing left, Iraq is a gas pump surrounded by American gunmen, it will fall soon. President Trump is ready to destroy Iran, the intelligence community already knows this. If Khamenei dies, Iran collapses’. A few seconds of silence. Khamenei is the last remaining ‘global’ Islamic authority and the last patron of the Resistance.

‘Then it will be Russia’s turn. Millions of Sunni Islamic immigrants in the odor of extremism are already on the streets of Russian cities. They let in indiscriminately, they will pay the consequences. Then it will be Rome’s turn. Then Beijing’s. I await the day when the ‘long beards’ will come marching into Red Square and St. Peter’s Square. I hope to die before that terrible day’.


Here ends our conversation. A deep silence that lasts a few minutes. We stand up to say goodbye. Sighing, I take my formal leave and look one last time at the relics of the patriotic war Ram fought. I try to ask myself if I too would be ready to give my life as so many heroes and martyrs did who are no longer here today, but whose example will remain forever.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... own-syria/

Don't want to disparage the guy but I've read plenty of accounts of soldiers on the losing side of a war and the finger pointing and accusations of betrayal are a constant. While these accusations and predictions might have some merit it is usually problems at a higher level which make the result of going to war pretty predictable, at least in hindsight. To wit, Syria might have survived had they been able to pay their troops adequately but US sanctions and occupation prevented that. Score one for the think tanks.
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 24, 2024 11:57 am

Syrian Kurds Launch Counterattack on Tishrin Dam

Image
Armed clashes near the Tishrin Dam, Syria, Dec. 23, 2024. X/ @zoomnewskrd

December 23, 2024 Hour: 9:51 am

The dam holds 2 million cubic metres of water and supplies electricity to much of the north-east of the country.
On Monday, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an armed alliance led by Syrian Kurds, launched a counterattack to repel Turkish-backed rebel factions from the vicinity of the strategic Tishrin Dam in northern Syria.

The SDF reported that fighters from one of its member factions, the Manbij Military Council, discovered ten bodies of “mercenaries of the Turkish occupation” and captured a Turkish-backed rebel. Additionally, they destroyed five military vehicles during the counterattack, which is ongoing across several fronts.

It was also noted that the counterattack is taking place around the Tishrin Dam, a facility located in the city of Manbij in Aleppo province. The dam is considered strategic as it serves as the primary source of electricity for the entire area.

On Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the SDF had advanced into three villages near the dam following twelve days of continuous clashes with Turkish-backed factions.


“There were violent clashes today, with heavy weapons, following two simultaneous attacks by Turkish-backed factions near the Tishrin and Qara Qozak dams in eastern rural Aleppo,” said the UK-based NGO. It added that the fighting continued for hours, with reports of casualties on both sides.

The Manbij Military Council announced earlier on Monday that its fighters had thwarted a new attack by Turkish-backed rebels near Tishrin and had “initiated a clearing operation in several villages close to the dam.”

The Tishrin Dam, holding 2 million cubic meters of water, supplies electricity to much of northeastern Syria, where areas are under SDF control. This force captured the dam in 2015 with the support of the U.S.-led international coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS).

The recent clashes between the SDF and Turkish-backed rebels erupted after December 8, when an insurgent alliance led by the Levant Liberation Committee, the successor of the Nusra Front (formerly Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate), ousted President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.



https://www.telesurenglish.net/syrian-k ... shrin-dam/

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The “king-makers” pull the rug from Syria, yet again… A “Greek tragedy” begins

Alastair Crooke

December 23, 2024

Syria has been disintegrated and pillaged in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians from the threat of ISIS, which they – Washington – had installed in the first place.

James Jeffrey, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, in a March 2021 interview with PBS Frontline, laid out very plainly the template for what has just happened in Syria this month:

“Syria, given its size, its strategic location, its historical importance, is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region … And so you’ve got this general alliance that is locked in with us. But … the stress point is greatest in Syria”.

Jeffrey explained (in the 2021 interview) why the U.S. shifted its to support to Jolani and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS):

“We got Mike Pompeo to issue a waiver to allow us to give aid to HTS – I received and sent messages to HTS” -The messages coming back from HTS were: “We [HTS] want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad””.

The PBS Frontline interviewer asks: The U.S. was “supporting indirectly the armed opposition”? To which Jeffrey responds:

“It was important to us that HTS not disintegrate … our policy was … was to leave HTS alone … And the fact that we haven’t targeted [HTS] ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them — in fact, I used this example the last time I was talking to very senior Turks – when they started bitching about this relationship we [the U.S.] have with the SDF [in eastern Syria]”.

“I said to them, “Look, Turkey has always maintained that you want us in northeast Syria, which they do. But you don’t understand. We can’t be in northeast Syria without the platform, because we only have hundreds of troops there”; … I said: “It’s just like you in Idlib …”.

“We want you to be in Idlib, but you can’t be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, unlike the SDF, HTS is a UN-designated official terrorist organisation. Have I ever, or has any American official ever, complained to you about what you’re doing there with HTS? No …”.

David Miller, a British academic, has noted that in 2015, prominent Syrian Sunni Muslim scholar, Shaykh al-Yaqoubi (who is anti-Assad), was unconvinced by Jolani’s efforts to rebrand Al Qa’ida as Jabhat al-Nusra. Jolani, in his al-2013 Al-Jazeera interview twice confirmed his allegiance to al-Qa’ida, saying that he received orders from its leader, Dr Ayman [al-Zawahiri] … and those were to not target the West. He confirmed his own position as being that of hardline intolerance toward those who practiced a ‘heretical’ Islam.

Miller comments:

“While ISIS put on suits; allowed Syria to be carved up by the U.S.; preach peace with the Zionist state; want free markets; and cut gas deals with their regional patrons – their ‘true-believers’… in the Sunni identitarian diaspora haven’t yet clocked that they’ve been sold out – as was always the plan”.

“In private, the planners of this war in NATO states laugh about sending young Salafi cannon fodder from around the world into a meat grinder. The $2000 salaries are a mere speck of sand compared to the gas and construction wealth that is expected to be returned to Turkish, Qatari, Israeli and American coffers. They killed Palestine for this, and they’ll spend the next 30 years justifying it, based on whatever line the very expensive PR firms hired by the NATO and Gulf states shill to them…The Syrian regime change operation is the rug pull of the century”.

Of course, James Jeffrey’s account was nothing new. Between 1979 and 1992, the CIA spent billions of dollars funding, arming, and training Afghan Mujahideen militia (like Osama bin Laden) in an attempt to bleed the USSR dry by pulling it into a quagmire. It was from the ranks of the Mujahideen that al-Qa’eda emerged.

“And yet, by the 2010s, even as the U.S. was ostensibly at war with al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan – it was secretly working with it – in Syria on a plan to overthrow Assad. The CIA spent around $1 billion per year training and arming a wide network of rebel groups to this end. As Jake Sullivan, told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a leaked 2012 email, “AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria”, as Alan Macleod observes in Consortium News.

Turkish press accounts largely confirm this Jeffrey scenario was the current gameplan: Ömer Önhon, former senior Ambassador and Deputy Under-Secretary in charge of Middle East and Asia at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, writes that:

“the operation to overthrow Assad’s regime in Syria was meticulously planned for over a year, with coordinated involvement from Turkey, the United States, and several other nations. Through various statements it has become clear that Assad’s departure resulted from an intricate web of agreements between virtually all stakeholders. Whilst HTS is actively working to rebrand itself – this transformation remains to be proven.”

This HTS story has a precedent: In the summer following Israel’s 2006 (unsuccessful) war on Hizbullah, Dick Cheney sat in his office loudly bemoaning Hizbullah’s continuing strength; and worse still, that it seemed to him that Iran had been the primary beneficiary from the U.S. 2003 Iraq war.

Cheney’s guest – the then Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince Bandar – vigorously concurred (as chronicled by John Hannah, who participated in the meeting) and, to general surprise, Prince Bandar proclaimed that Iran yet could be cut to size: Syria was the ‘weak’ link that could be collapsed via an Islamist insurgency. Cheney’s initial scepticism turned to elation as Bandar said that U.S. involvement might be unnecessary. He – Bandar – would orchestrate and manage the project: ‘Leave it to me’, he said. Bandar separately told John Hannah: “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria”.

Well … that first effort did not succeed. It led to bloody civil war, but ultimately President Assad’s government survived.

So, Jeffrey was simply reiterating in 202 its sequel: the original Wahabbi-led ‘rug pull’ on Syria by the Gulf was simply to be reverse engineered into a HTS hit by a rebranded amalgam of various militia made up primarily of former fighters (many not Syrian) from al-Qaeda/al-Nusra and ISIS, directed – in this second iteration – by Turkish Intelligence and financed by Qatar.

Syria thus has been disintegrated and pillaged in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians from the threat of ISIS, which they – Washington – had installed in the first place, and which the U.S. then used to justify the north-east of Syria’s occupation by U.S. forces. In the same mode, the unspoken part of this plan is to make secular Syria – with its legal system taken from France – ‘Islamic’ (“we will implement Islamic law”) to justify the Israeli attacks and land grabs, which are being presented as ‘defensive measures against jihadists’.

Of course, it is correct that there is likely money to be made from these events. It was never proven, but seismic surveys before the first Syria war began in 2011, seemed to show that there may well be substrata deposits of oil or gas in Syria, beyond the relatively small fields in the north-east. And yes, re-construction will be a bonanza for Turkey’s languishing construction sector.

Syria’s ailing military was no direct military threat to Israel per se. So you may wonder, why are they tearing the place apart? “Israel’s goal here is to basically wreck Syria”, Professor Mearsheimer opines. “It’s not in large part because of Israel, by the way. I think the Americans and the Turks played a much more important role than Israel did – in wrecking Syria”. “The country is wrecked and I don’t know anybody who thinks that the rebels who are now in control in Damascus are going to be able to restore order in that country … From Israel’s point of view, this is a perfectly fine situation”, Mearsheimer adds.

U.S. anti-Russia hawks also hoped that Russia might take the bait of a wrecked Syria to get enmired into a widening Middle East quagmire.

All of which takes us directly back to Jeffrey’s statement: “Syria, given its size, its strategic location, its historical importance, is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region …”.

Syria has been from the outset – from 1949 – ‘the balancer’ to Israel in the region. That is now over, leaving only Iran to balance the Israeli thrust to a ‘Greater Israel’. It is no surprise then that the Israelis are agitating for the Americans to join with them in another orgy of destruction – this time to be visited on Iran.

Did Russia have foreknowledge of what was afoot in Idlib, and the orchestration of a transition of power? Of course! The very effective Russian services must have known, as this Syria project has been ongoing since the mid 1970s (through the Hudson Institute and Senator Scoop Jackson).

Assad had been signalling over the last four years, his desperate plan with Saudi, UAE and Egypt to a move towards a more pro-Israeli/pro-Western stance, in the hope of normalising with Washington and thereby gaining some sanctions relief.

Assad’s ploy failed – and Syria likely will emerge as ‘Greek tragedy’ whereby tragedy evolves as actors play out their own natures. Quiescent ethnic and sectarian tensions likely will re-kindle; wildfires will catch. The lid is off. And Russia was never going to take the bait of plunging in.

The U.S.-Israeli alliance has long wanted Syria. And now, they have got it. Any concomitant mayhem is down to them. Yes, the U.S. – in theory – may applaud itself for achieving more of “an American managed security [and energy dominant flow] system”.

But the U.S. ruling strata, however, were never going to let Europe be energy independent. The U.S. needs West Asia’s energy assets for itself – to collateralise its debt-overload. European states are left to tumble, as the fiscal crunch bites and European growth tails away.

Others may see a collateral scenario – that a conflicted and possibly re-radicalised Middle East will inflict further strain onto the already ‘livid’ domestic social tensions in Europe.

Israel nonetheless is relishing its ‘win’. Winning what? Former IDF Chief of Staff and Defence Minister ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon puts it this way:

“The current Israeli government’s path is to conquer, annex, commit ethnic cleansing … and to establish Jewish settlements. Polls show some 70% of Israelis, sometimes more, support this – AND for Israel to be a liberal democracy”.

“This [contradictory] path will lead us to destruction”, he concludes.

What other can be the final end to this Zionist project? There are more than seven million Palestinians between the ‘River and the Sea’. Are they all to vanish from the map?

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... dy-begins/

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Israel threatens residents of south Syria as troops expand occupation

Residents of the town of Baath in Quneitra were told to ‘surrender all weapons’ or face an invasion'

News Desk

DEC 22, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: AFP)

Residents of the town of Baath in the southern Syrian governorate of Quneitra – currently under occupation by Israel’s military – have been ordered by Israeli forces to surrender all weapons present in the town or face invasion.


Israeli troops ordered Baath City's residents to give up all arms within two hours on 22 December, according to a report by Israel’s Maariv newspaper.

The army has “issued an ultimatum to residents of Baath to surrender their weapons within two hours, threatening to enter the city,” the report says. It is unclear what weapons or military infrastructure are in Baath.

This came as part of a large-scale deployment across southern Syria.

Israel continues to solidify its occupation of southern Syria after expanding its presence beyond the occupied Golan Heights and strategic Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh) following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December.

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in Syria reported on Sunday "the entry of tanks and mechanized patrols of the occupation army from Al-Hamidiya in the Quneitra countryside towards the center of the governorate. "The entry of Israeli forces coincided with search campaigns that included some homes and farms in the villages of the central countryside."

According to Al Mayadeen, Israeli troops also opened fire indiscriminately towards the forests of Al-Hamidiya and Al-Hurriya in the Quneitra countryside.

Israel has set up seven permanent outposts along the UN-monitored buffer zone, which Israeli forces expanded in the aftermath of Damascus’ fall.

Two of these outposts in Mount Hermon overlook Damascus and all its western suburbs. Since 8 December, Israeli forces have illegally occupied nearly 500 square kilometers of southern Syria.

Israel's recent expansion has seen invading troops seize precious water sources such as the Al-Wahda Dam on the Yarmouk River Basin. Syrian and Israeli sources, including Carmel News citing an Iranian source, reported earlier this week that Israel now controls 30 percent of Syria's water supply and 40 percent of Jordan's.


After recently taking control of the freshwater basin of Yarmouk, Israeli troops have now reached three new bodies of water: Sheikh Hussein, Sahm al-Julan dam, and the western Baraka.

The Israeli army recently opened fire at protesters near the Yarmouk Basin as they were demonstrating against Tel Aviv's occupation in Syria. At least one was injured.

The UN has expressed “deep concern” over Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty and the 1974 border agreement signed indirectly between the Syrian and Israeli governments. After the fall of Assad’s government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced the end of the agreement.

Israeli airstrikes have decimated the majority of Syria’s military capabilities in a brutal aerial campaign launched after the government fell to extremist groups.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said that Israeli troops will occupy the recently seized territory in Syria for the foreseeable future.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-th ... occupation

Syrian Christians march in Damascus to protest burning of Christmas tree by HTS militants

The former Al-Qaeda branch has condemned the incident and has promised harsh punishment against the foreign militants responsible

News Desk

DEC 24, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: X)

Hundreds of Syrian Christians protested on the streets of the capital, Damascus, on 24 December in condemnation of the recent burning of a Christmas tree in the central governorate of Hama by extremist militants affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – the group that took over Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government earlier this month.


Carrying wooden crosses and the new Syrian flag, the demonstrators marched through the capital towards the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy in the Bab al-Sharqi neighborhood.

“We demand the rights of Christians,” the protesters chanted.

Protests had been taking place the night before across the capital. Some Christians have decided to carry rifles to defend themselves from HTS – under which several extremist factions are incorporated, including foreigners who illegally traveled to Syria to fight Assad’s government after the war began in 2011.

Protests led by Syrian Christians also took place in Sahnaya, Jaramana, Hama, and other areas of the country.

Video footage that circulated on social media on 23 December showed a large Christmas tree burning in Hama’s Suqaylabiyah – a Christian neighborhood. The tree was set ablaze on Monday by foreign militants under HTS’s command. Some reports said the militants were from Chechnya, while others said they were Uzbeki fighters.

HTS deployed a military official to the scene of the burning to condemn the incident and vow punishment for those responsible.


“This act was committed by people who are not Syrian, and they will be punished beyond your expectations. The Christmas tree will be fully restored by this evening,” the official said.

HTS has repeatedly issued apologies and condemnations over several “isolated” incidents of the sort, vowing protection for all minorities and their rights.

Last week, militants shot at and attacked the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in the city of Hama, vandalizing statues and desecrating graves. HTS apologized for the incident. Executions of Alawites and ex-Syrian army soldiers have also been reported.

HTS’s leader, now the de facto ruler of Syria Ahmad al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has been meeting with western and Arab officials to discuss the transitional political process in the country – which his government has vowed will be inclusive.

Under its previous name, the Nusra Front – which was Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria – HTS was responsible for numerous war crimes and atrocities against minorities, including the execution of Alawites and people from other sects, as well as the kidnapping of nuns.

Sharaa himself was a member of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), which became ISIS after crossing from Syria back into Iraqi territory in 2013.

The Nusra Front was formed in 2012 before taking on other names in the years that followed until it became HTS in 2017.

https://thecradle.co/articles/syrian-ch ... -militants
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 25, 2024 12:31 pm

Israelis Invade Syria: Who Will Stop Israel?
Posted on December 24, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post describes the rising opposition in the US and around the world to Israel land grabs. Yet it is clear that anything other than the use of raw force against Israel, and ultimately the US, could turn the tide. Sadly only the plucky Houthis seem up to the challenge.

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, and, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, with an updated and expanded edition due in March 2025

The United States, Turkey and Israel all responded to the fall of the Assad government in Damascus by launching bombing campaigns on Syria. Israel also attacked and destroyed most of the Syrian Navy in port at Latakia, and invaded Syria from the long-occupied Golan Heights, advancing to within 16 miles of the capital, Damascus.

The United States said that its bombing campaign targeted remnants of Islamic State in the east of the country, hitting 75 targets with 140 bombs and missiles, according to Air Force Times.

A long-standing force of 900 U.S. troops illegally occupy that part of Syria, partly to divert Syria’s meagre oil revenues to the U.S.’s Kurdish allies and prevent the Syrian government regaining that source of revenue. U.S. bombing badly damaged Syria’s oil infrastructure during the war with the Islamic State, but Russia has been ready to help Syria restore full output whenever it recovers control of that area. U.S. forces in Syria have been under attack by various Syrian militia forces, not just the Islamic State, with at least 127 attacks since October 2023.

Meanwhile, Turkiyë is conducting airstrikes, drone strikes and artillery fire as part of a new offensive by a militia it formed in 2017 under the Orwellian guise of the “Syrian National Army” to invade and occupy parts of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish enclave in northeast Syria.

Israel, however, launched a much broader bombing campaign than Turkey or the U.S., with about 600 airstrikes on post-Assad Syria in the first eight days of its existence. Without waiting to see what form of government the political transition in Syria leads to, Israel set about methodically destroying its entire military infrastructure, to ensure that whatever government comes to power will be as defenseless as possible.

Israel claims its new occupation of Syrian territory is a temporary move to ensure its own security. But while Israel bombed Syria 220 times over the past year, killing about 300 people, Syria showed restraint and did not retaliate for those attacks.

The pattern of Israeli history has been that land grabs like this usually turn into long-term illegal Israeli annexations, as in the Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. That will surely be the case with Israel’s new strategic base on top of Mount Hermon, overlooking Damascus and the surrounding area, unless a new Syrian government or international diplomacy can force Israel to withdraw.

Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Russia and the UN have all joined the global condemnation of the new Israeli assault on Syria. Geir Pedersen, the UN Special Envoy to Syria, called Israel’s military actions “highly irresponsible,” and UN peacekeepers have removed Israeli flags from newly-occupied Syrian territory.

The Qatari Foreign Ministry called Israel’s actions “a dangerous development and a blatant attack on Syria’s sovereignty and unity as well as a flagrant violation of international law… that will lead the region to further violence and tension.”

The Saudi Foreign Ministry reiterated that the Golan Heights is an occupied Arab territory, and said that Israel’s actions confirmed “Israel’s continued violation of the rules of international law and its determination to sabotage Syria’s chances of restoring its security, stability and territorial integrity.”

The only country in the world that has ever recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights is the United States, under the first Trump administration, and it is part of Biden’s disastrous legacy in the Middle East that that he failed to stand up for international law and reverse Trump’s recognition of that illegal Israeli annexation.

As people all over the world watch Israel ignore the rules of international law that every country in the world is committed to live by, we are confronted by the age-old question of how to respond to a country that systematically ignores and violates these rules. The foundation of the UN Charter is the agreement by all countries to settle their differences diplomatically and peacefully, instead of by the threat or use of military force.

As Americans, we should start by admitting that our own country has led the way down this path of war and militarism, perpetuating the scourge of war that the UN Charter was intended to provide a peaceful alternative to.

As the United States became the leading economic power in the world in the 20th century, it also built up dominant military power. Despite its leading role in creating the United Nations and the rules of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, it came to see strict compliance with those rules as an obstacle to its own ambitions, from the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force to the Geneva Conventions’ universal protections for prisoners of war and civilians.

In its “war on terror,” including its wars on Iraq and other countries, the United States flagrantly and systematically violated these bedrock foundations of world order. It is a fundamental principle of all legal systems that the powerful must be held accountable as well as the weak and the vulnerable. A system of laws that the wealthy and powerful can ignore cannot claim to be universal or just, and is unlikely to stand the test of time.

Today, our system of international law faces exactly this problem. The U.S. presumption that its overwhelming military power permits it to violate international law with impunity has led other countries, especially U.S. allies but also Russia, to apply the same opportunistic standards to their own behavior.

In 2010, an Amnesty International report on European countries that hosted CIA “black site” torture chambers called on U.S. allies in Europe not to join the United States as another “accountability-free zone” for war crimes. But now the world is confronting a U.S. ally that has not just embraced, but doubled down on, the U.S. presumption that dominant military power can trump the rule of law.

The Israeli government refuses to comply with international legal prohibitions against deliberately killing women and children, by military force and by deprivation; seizing foreign territory; and bombing other countries. Shielded from international accountability behind the U.S. Security Council veto, Israel thumbs its nose at the world’s impotence to enforce international law, confident that nobody will stop it from using its deadly and destructive war machine wherever and however it pleases.

So the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable for its war crimes has led Israel to believe that it too can escape accountability, and U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes, especially the genocide in Gaza, has inevitably reinforced that belief.

U.S. responsibility for Israel’s lawlessness is compounded by the conflict of interest in its dual role as both Israel’s military superpower ally and weapons supplier and the supposed mediator of the lopsided “peace process” between Israel and Palestine, whose inherent flaws led to Hamas’s election victory in 2006 and now to the current crisis.

Instead of recognizing its own conflict of interest and deferring to intervention by the UN or other neutral parties, the U.S. has jealously guarded its monopoly as the sole mediator between Israel and Palestine, using this position to grant Israel total freedom of action to commit systematic war crimes. If this crisis is ever to end, the world cannot allow the U.S. to continue in this role.

While the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for this crisis, U.S. officials remain in collective denial over the criminal nature of Israel’s actions and their instrumental role in Israel’s crimes. The systemic corruption of U.S. politics severely limits the influence of the majority of Americans who support a ceasefire in Gaza, as pro-Israel lobbying groups buy the unconditional support of American politicians and attack the few who stand up to them.

Despite America’s undemocratic political system, its people have a responsibility to end U.S. complicity in genocide, which is arguably the worst crime in the world, and people are finding ways to bring pressure to bear on the U.S. government:

Members of CODEPINK, Jewish Voice For Peace and Palestinian-, Arab-American and other activist groups are in Congressional offices and hearings every day; constituents in California are suing two members of Congress for funding genocide; students are calling on their universities to divest from Israel and U.S. arms makers; activists and union members are identifying and picketing companies and blocking ports to stop weapons shipments to Israel; journalists are rebelling against censorship; U.S. officials are resigning; people are on hunger strike; others have committed suicide.

It is also up to the UN and other governments around the world to intervene, and to hold Israel and the United States accountable for their actions. A growing international movement for an end to the genocide and decades of illegal occupation is making progress. But it is excruciatingly slow given the appalling human cost and the millions of Palestinian lives at stake.

Israel’s international propaganda campaign to equate criticism of its war crimes with antisemitism poisons political discussion of Israeli war crimes in the United States and some other countries.

But many countries are making significant changes in their relations with Israel, and are increasingly willing to resist political pressures and propaganda tropes that have successfully muted international calls for justice in the past. A good example is Ireland, whose growing trade relations with Israel, mainly in the high-tech sector, formerly made it the fourth largest importer of Israeli products in the world in 2022.

Ireland is now one of 14 countries who have officially intervened to support South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the others are Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Libya, the Maldives, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain and Turkiyë. Israel reacted to Ireland’s intervention in the case by closing its embassy in Dublin, and now Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has smeared Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) Simon Harris as “antisemitic.”

The Taoiseach’s spokesperson replied that Harris “will not be responding to personalized and false attacks, and remains focused on the horrific war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza, standing up for human rights and international law and reflecting the views of so many people across Ireland who are so concerned at the loss of innocent, civilian lives.”

If the people of Palestine can stand up to bombs, missiles and bullets day after day for over a year, the very least that political leaders around the world can do is stand up to Israeli name-calling, as Simon Harris is doing.

Spain is setting an example on international efforts to halt the supply of weapons to Israel, with an arms embargo and a ban on weapons shipments transiting Spanish ports, including the U.S. naval base at Rota, which the U.S. has leased since it formed a military alliance with Spain’s Franco dictatorship in 1953.

Spain has already refused entry to two Maersk-owned ships transporting weapons from North Carolina to Israel, while dockworkers in Spain, Belgium, Greece, India and other countries have refused to load weapons and ammunition onto ships bound for Israel.

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) has passed resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza; an end to the post-1967 Israeli occupation; and for Palestinian statehood. The General Assembly’s 10th Emergency Special Session on the Israel-Palestine conflict under the Uniting for Peace process has been ongoing since 1997.

The General Assembly should urgently use these Uniting For Peace powers to turn up the pressure on Israel and the United States. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has provided the legal basis for stronger action, ruling that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories Israel invaded in 1967 is illegal and must be ended, and that the massacre in Gaza appears to violate the Genocide Convention.

Inaction is inexcusable. By the time the ICJ issues a final verdict on its genocide case, millions may be dead. The Genocide Convention is an international commitment to prevent genocide, not just to pass judgment after the fact. The UN General Assembly has the power to impose an arms embargo, a trade boycott, economic sanctions, a peacekeeping force, or to do whatever it takes to end the genocide.

When the UN General Assembly first launched its boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa in 1962, not a single Western country took part. Many of those same countries will be the last to do so against Israel today. But the world cannot wait to act for the blessing of complacent wealthy countries who are themselves complicit in genocide.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... srael.html

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The Big Happening

Weeks where Decades Happen

Big Serge
Dec 23, 2024

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There is an oft-quoted remark from Vladimir Lenin, which in its English formulation usually reads something like: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

This is one of those aphorisms which has been exercised practically to death, but there are rare occasions where it perfectly fits the chaotic tempo of world events, and few cases fit the bill better than the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic and its embattled (former) President, Bashir Al-Assad. Syria was first plunged into Civil War by an escalating insurgency in 2012, and more than a decade of grueling positional fighting and sieges, including a maddening four-year siege of Aleppo, saw the frontlines in the country coagulate into an uneasy quasi-stasis.

The Assad regime’s endurance (with timely and crucial assistance from Russia and Iran), which saw government forces claw back from the brink beginning in 2015, became something of a running joke, spawning the infamous “Assad Curse”, in reference to Assad’s proclivity to politically outlast western leaders calling for his removal. Having survived more than a decade of Civil War and successfully recapturing Syria’s crucial urban corridor from Damascus to Aleppo, few people saw what was coming next.

In this case, Lenin’s comment about “weeks where decades happen” is almost literally true. On November 27, insurgent forces led by the Tahrir al-Sham paramilitary group launched a shock offensive towards Aleppo which captured the city in only a few days. Regime forces melted away as they swept down the urban corridor, capturing Hama and then Homs. On December 8, the Syrian Arab Republic functionally ceased to exist and Assad evacuated to seek asylum in Russia amid rumors that his plane had been shot down. From November 27 to December 8: 12 days from uneasy stasis to the total collapse of Assad’s government and army. In this case, two weeks sufficed to achieve a decisive outcome which had been bloodily and indecisively contested for more than a decade.

As a brief editorial aside - I have been intending to produce both some thoughts on the remarkable collapse in Syria as well as a situation report on the Russo-Ukrainian War, where there have been important developments both in the frontlines and in the meta-strategic sphere. I had contemplated amalgamating them into a single article, but chose not to because I do not wish to contrive a unifying narrative structure. I know that it is popular to depict Syria and Ukraine as different fronts in a coherent “third world war”, but I think this is rather overwrought and needlessly induces panic. Events in Damascus and the Donbas are not as cleanly connected as people would like them to be - if there is a connection, as such, it is simply that these are frontier zones of Russian power. However, Ukraine will always matter much more to Moscow than Syria will, and for the Russians it is their western frontier that forms their most pressing strategic concern. Thus, this entry will focus on the implosion of Syria, and an update on the front in Ukraine will come shortly in a separate offering.

The Fall of Assad: Long Awaited, Unexpected
With only the space of a few weeks to consider developments in Syria, a fair bit of reservation and restraint is warranted. We have the general shape of the rebel offensive, which rolled out of Idlib into Aleppo in the opening 48 hours before beginning a sweep south down Syria’s urban corridor along the M5 arterial highway, but the broader political situation in Damascus is still in flux and extremely murky.

What deserves emphasis, however, is the totality and speed of the collapse of the Syrian Arab Army and the Assad government. There was perhaps a 24 hour window, around November 30, where it looked like the SAA was going to fight - there were reports of reserves being scrambled into Hama with local counterattacks, and the Russian Air Force began heavily bombarding Tahrir al-Sham’s stronghold around Idlib. The near instantaneous loss of Aleppo was clearly the nucleus of an emerging military catastrophe, but few could have anticipated that regime resistance would simply evaporate.

The SAA’s broader performance throughout the civil war deserves a whole host of asterisks. It is a simple matter of fact that Assad would have likely lost his grip on power many years ago in the absence of Russian and Iranian assistance, but the basic premise was never challenged that the regime and the army were willing to fight - until now. SAA defenses were systemically melting down by the first of December, never reconstituted, and that - as they say - was that.

What we witnessed in Syria was, at its heart, systemic state rot that had been concealed by a tenuous ceasefire in the north, and it is clear that during this ceasefire Assad’s government was both unwilling and unable to address the problems that plagued the SAA during the earlier phases of hot fighting. We can enumerate the basic problem as follows.

The crisis of the SAA was first and foremost a crisis of revenue, with the country decaying to bare economic subsistence. Syria is a tenuous economic entity in the best of times. It can be thought of broadly as a patchwork of four different geospatial regions: the Alawite stronghold in the coastal mountain range (with urban centers like Tartus and Latakia), the corridor of the ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus), the Euphrates valley in the east, and the Turkish hinterlands along Syria’s northern border.

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The problem, not just for the Assad regime but for any would-be ruler of Syria, is that knitting these geographic regions together is a very difficult military-political task, but one that is essential to the economic and fiscal coherence of the country. Syria’s primary grain growing regions are in the east, particularly in the Euphrates basin. The Northeast in particular is Syria’s predominant source of both cereal staples like wheat and export crops like cotton. For more than a decade now, these growing regions have been lost to Damascus and are under pseudo-autonomous Kurdish control.

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Furthermore, the loss of the northeast to the Kurds (along with a de-facto American occupation around Al-Tanf) cut off the Syrian regime from its most productive oil and gas fields - although Syria has never been a major oil exporter by global standards, this dried up yet another revenue stream for the regime. When one factors in the physical damage caused by a decade of war and continual strangulation from western sanctions, the total economic hollowing of the Syrian regime was largely predestined.

With Syrian GDP at a paltry $18 billion in 2022 (a meager ~$800 per capita), it’s no surprise that the SAA had become a hollowed out, corrupt, and unmotivated force. Salaries for soldiers were abysmal, and officers become accustomed to supplementing their income by taking bribes and shaking down travelers at roadside checkpoints. It’s the classical corruption motif of armies in bankrupt states, and it bends the army towards a “paper” existence, with an ORBAT that seems adequate on paper but in reality consists largely of virtual or skeletal units led by officers who are more interested in supplementing their salaries with bribes than maintaining baseline combat effectiveness.

Thus, in almost every account of the rebel offensive from the SAA’s perspective, the same signature emerges: underpaid and unmotivated conscripts, receiving no meaningful direction from their superiors, chose to simply shed their uniforms and flee. One can hardly blame them - this was in the end an exhausted regime with few remaining who were willing to fight for it, and amid the centrifugal chaos of regime collapse men tend to begin thinking about themselves and their own fates. Hence, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Hossein Salami commenting: “Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian army. Is it logical… to take on full responsibility while Syria’s army merely observes?”

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The grand story of the Assad regime is going to be one of an over-reliance on foreign backers and an unwillingness (or inability) to grapple with the bureaucratic rot and systemic corruption in the Syrian Army. Assad proved far too willing to solicit foreign powers to fight his battles for him, and with his regime choked of revenue he allowed the SAA to languish as a skeletal, third class fighting force in its own country, and in the end it collapsed into a heap of bones as skeletons are wont to do.

To the extent that there are still staunch backers of Assad, they will point fingers in all manner of directions - blaming the crippling sanctions and the loss of Syria’s east for the economic strangulation of the regime, crying about treachery among the army’s officer corps for failing to fight, bemoaning the failure of Iran and the “axis of resistance” to come to Assad’s aid. The reality is that the Syrian regime had clearly reached the point of exhaustion: unable to adequately pay its soldiers, uproot corruption in the army, or motivate men to fight for it. This was a checkmated regime with a fictional army, and it is not surprising that Iran and Russia decided to wash their hands of it before it became an unbearable geostrategic albatross around their necks.

Syria: Shattered and Battered
It is very popular these days to accuse one’s adversaries of being a “fake”, or “illegitimate” country. One hears this very commonly in reference to Israel - the idea being that Israel is not really a country, but an illegitimate occupation of Palestinian land. Many Russian patriots similarly argue that Ukraine is a “fake” country, and an artifact of internal Soviet politics and Galician revanchism. China decries the illegitimacy of Taiwan and affirms the unity of the Chinese state as they see it.

I confess that I find this line of argumentation rather odd, largely because I have always seen states as constructs that have an objective reality based on their ability to mobilize resources for the purpose of exercising political power - that is, maintaining a political monopoly in their territory (against external and internal rivals), and projecting commensurate power outwards. Israel is very obviously a real state. It dispenses of a discrete territory, it checks rivals within that territory, and it projects force and influence outward. One does not have to like it, but it’s obviously real.

Complaining that a state is illegitimate or fake is a bit like arguing that an animal is not real, when in fact the life of an animal is an objective property derived from its ability to continuously mobilize calories from its environment and defend itself against predation. States and animals can die - they can waste away through the failure of mobilization (starved of revenue or calories as the case may be), they can be devastated by the internal parasitism of rebellion and disease, or they can be eaten up by larger, more potent predatory forms. Parasitism, mobilization of resources, predation, and death - all unceasing pressures for both the animal and the political organism. States don’t possess an abstract quality of legitimacy, but rather live or die on their own terms.

Syria is not quite a “fake” country, but it is certainly a diseased one. In particular, the question now arises of the relationship between the state and the discrete territory formerly known as the Syrian Arab Republic. The Assad regime is gone, but the immense pressures that distort and pull across the breadth of its former territories remain, and the basic question becomes whether any stable political arrangement can prevail on the territory of Syria.

We need to remember that Syria, as such, is an unwieldy union of discrete geo-economic regions - the coastal range, the corridor of ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus), and the Euphrates basin. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, a brief boom of oil exports, combined with expansive irrigation works along the Euphrates, allowed a Syrian population explosion, with the total population growing nearly threefold from some 7 million in the early 1970’s to more than 22 million by 2010. After a brief decline in the early years of the civil war, the population began to recover and once again crested 22 million by 2022.

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Overpopulation and Irrigation Failure - the heart of Syrian collapse

It is not a coincidence, then, that a collapse in the Euphrates irrigation system brought on by drought in 2011 (drought conditions that still persist) was a major harbinger of civil war, nor is it a wonder that this became the key fiscal-economic problem that the Assad regime could not solve. It is not simply that Assad lacked a solution - it is doubtful whether a solution exists.

The crux of the problem is simple (and I apologize for taking so long to get to the point): Syria cannot exist as a stable entity without the unification of virtually all of the territory of the old Syrian Arab Republic, but maintaining control over that territory requires welding together an explosive amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian blocs.

The vast and bloated population of the oasis city corridor cannot survive without access to both the more productive agricultural lands in the east (and even then, remediation of the irrigation system and more favorable rainfall will be essential) and the ability to export Syria’s gas and oil resources. If the interior urban corridor remains cut off from the economic resources of Syria’s east, it will be doomed to remain an overpopulated and impoverished breeding ground for dissent and violence. It likewise requires access to the coastal range to facilitate economic access to the Mediterranean. Syria’s astonishing population increase in the latter half of the 20th Century was only possible because the Syrian Arab Republic linked the corridor of oasis cities with the the coastal range and the Euphrates basin in the east. In other words, for the population of Syria to have any viable economic future, the country must have essentially the same discrete territory that it had prewar - and even then, the deteriorating irrigation system in the east makes a stable recovery doubtful.

Yet, knitting this territory back together requires mediating a host of sectarian, ethnic, and geostrategic impasses. Some of the more pie in the sky proposals for Syria involve a partitioning of the country, with an Alawite state in the coastal range, one or several Sunni states in the interior, and an independent Kurdistan in the east - these proposals perhaps make sense on ethnic and sectarian grounds, but they would ensure the economic unviability of the entire project, and would have the effect of creating overpopulated and landlocked Sunni states, cut off from both sea access and natural resources, and doomed to impoverishment. This is not a recipe for any sort of lasting peace.

This is to say nothing, of course, of the interests of outside powers. The Russians seem to have largely washed their hands of Syria and are aiming mainly to reach an arrangement with whatever powers prevail to keep their basing rights on the Mediterranean Coast - this is probably another case of Moscow being too trusting of the latest “deal” to come down the line, but so it goes. Iran’s position in Syria is essentially shattered (more on that in a moment), and regional initiative has firmly passed to Turkey and Israel. However, Iran on the backfoot still has the potential to resort geopolitical arson.

In short, it is difficult to be optimistic about Syria’s future. The structural reality of the country is the same: an overpopulated and impoverished Sunni interior that requires connectivity to the coastal range and the straining Euphrates in order to feed itself and economically recover. The shattering of Syria’s economic coherence is precisely what bankrupted and hollowed out the Assad regime to the point where it could not pay its soldiers, feed its people, or defend itself from a final sharp blow. It was the impoverishment of the bloated Syrian population, and the failure of irrigation in the east, which set off the civil war and the heaving flows of refugees to Turkey and Europe. None of this has gone away, and knitting a coherent economic unit back together in the face of Syria’s stark sectarian and ethnic divisions will require a political touch that is either unimaginably deft or violent and forceful.

Syria may or may not be a “fake country”, in the sense that its economic coherence runs contrary to the patterns of its peopling. It is, however, a country that has steadily disintegrated - subject to both internal parasitism and external predation - and the Assad regime clearly lacked the powers of mobilization to hold the thing together, cut off as they were from the Euphrates. The new Sunni rulers of Damascus may fare better, in the sense that they (unlike Assad) are astride a demographic majority and enjoy the backing of a powerful and ascendant Turkey, but there is little doubt that more violence lies ahead before a coherent state is once again hammered out of these disparate and impoverished components.

Winners and Losers
With the chapter now closed on the Assad regime, we can consider Syria as a plaything of external powers. Syria has been a place of intense interest for at least four powerful outside states, which I am assigning winner and loser status as follows:

Big Winner: Israel

Small Winner: Turkey

Small Loser: Russia

Big Loser: Iran

We’ll consider these in order, beginning with Israel and Iran - as their situations are nearly perfect inverses.

It is difficult to over-emphasize just how completely Iran’s geopolitical position has collapsed in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean. Iran invested significant resources in propping up the Assad regime, contributing military aid and logistical support on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Most significantly, however, Iran was central to providing manpower to prop up the flagging Syrian Arab Army over the years, with the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training militias to support Assad’s army and leading the mobilization and coordination of foreign fighters, including from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

For Iran, Syria and Lebanon formed a nexus of power projection that were mutually reinforcing. Syria provided a crucial land corridor that allowed Iran to funnel personnel and supplies to Lebanon, creating an essential link in the geographic connectivity of Iran’s force projection. Hezbollah served a valuable role in Iran’s coordination of militias in Syria, and Syria secured ground link between Iran and Hezbollah. For Iran, then, 2024 has been a disaster, with Hezbollah severely battered by the IDF and Syria now in a state of collapse.

Israel has, in effect, created a kinetic feedback loop which is eating away at Iran’s position in the region. Hezbollah is weakened by the 14 month war with the IDF, and its leadership and infrastructure are in disarray after a series of devastating Israeli strikes, including both the infamous exploding pager operation and an airstrike which killed Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah’s weakened state left them utterly unable to intervene to prevent the collapse of Assad’s regime, and now that same collapse means that Iran must contrive a way to rebuild Hezbollah’s operational capabilities without the vital ground-logistical link that it has long utilized.

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IDF Troops near Mount Hermon

For Israel, then, 2024 brought at least a temporary neutralization of much of Hezbollah’s command apparatus, the rupture of Iran’s ground link to Lebanon, and an enlarged IDF-controlled security zone around the Golan Heights. There is a growing sense that Israel can act with near-impunity, after conducting an impressive shooting spree against high value enemy personnel, fighting a grueling and devastating ground campaign in Gaza, and exchanging air strikes against Iran itself.

The suggestion that Israel has come off very well from all this tends to incense people and solicit the usual accusations of Zionism, but the reality is fairly straight forward. Israel has killed large numbers of high ranking enemy personnel, including the highest leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah. The IDF maintained a ground presence in the Gaza Strip for months and reduced much of its urban buildup to rubble. Israel killed the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau in Tehran itself. It has seized an expanded buffer zone in the Golan, and it has seen Iran’s ground link to Lebanon collapse. These are objective manifestations of kinetic force - exploding pagers, IDF tanks, and air strikes simply are. Any suggestion that Israel is not on a heater would be an act of willful ignorance and pointless cognitive intransigence.

Iran, of course, does have some strategic depth and options to rebuild its position. It still maintains militias in Iraq, it has the option of engaging with the SDF (the Kurdish led militias in eastern Syria), it maintains productive proxies in Yemen, and it demonstrated strike capabilities against Israel. However, it is clearly very much on the back foot and facing the prospect of painstakingly rebuilding a position in Lebanon and Syria after investing heavily in the region over the decades.

Meanwhile, Turkey has clearly supplanted Iran and Russia as the dominant external powers in Syria. A host of Turkish interests are at play in Syria, including the refoulment of Syrian refugees (nearly four million of whom are currently in Turkey and whose presence remains unwelcome to many), the rollback of Kurdish (SDF) control in eastern Syria, and the expansion of Turkish influence into the South-Caucasus, where Turkey and its Azerbaijani ally continue their press.

The unsettling ease with which Turkey managed to roll over the Assad government, as Tahrir al-Sham’s foremost foreign backer, has put Ankara in a dominant position in which it will play a central role in shaping Syria’s political future. The problem for Turkey, however, is that its interests run against the current here. Ankara would like to see a return of Syrian refugees, a stabilization of Turkey’s southern border, enduring Turkish influence in Syrian politics - and above all they want to prevent the emergence of a stable and enduring Kurdish polity in Syria’s east. All of Turkey’s interests, in other words, imply the return of Syria’s old territorial integrity under Sunni leadership.

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Turkey has supplanted Russia as the most powerful external actor in Syria

In short, Turkey won this phase of the war, but it now must “win the peace”, as the expression goes. If Syria relapses into another phase of bloody civil war, Turkey will go back to square one on its strategic goals. Ankara is much like Sisyphus with his bloody rock - he’s rolled it nearly to the top of the hill, and now he has to try to keep it there.

For Russia, the main issues at play are naval basing rights on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and the loss of leverage over Ankara that was formerly derived from the Assad regime. We can consider these in turn.

Russia maintains bases in Syria’s coastal range, including airbases and naval bases near Tartus and Latakia. These bases are a valuable link in Russian power projection into the Mediterranean, and for the time being it seems clear that Moscow has decided to wash its hands of Assad and try to salvage the bases through agreements with whatever government emerges in Syria.

The bigger issue for Moscow is a loss of leverage vis a vis Turkey. While the Assad regime remained in power, Russia was functionally the arbiter of relations between Turkey and Damascus. Syria was a pressure point for Turkey that Moscow was able to utilize to influence Ankara’s decisions on other issues like Ukraine and the Black Sea. With the fall of Assad, however, the relationship is now reversed. It is now Turkish proxy that controls Damascus, rather than a Russian one, and Moscow will need to succor Ankara if it wants to keep its bases on the coast.

Summary: Syria at a Crossroads and in the Crosshairs
Ultimately, the fall of the Assad regime is owed to inherent instabilities in Syria’s construction, particularly in the absence of consolidated control over the entire former territory of the state. Without oil exports and the growing regions around the Euphrates, Syria cannot sustain itself, and the belt of oasis cities becomes doomed to an impoverished half-life. Assad’s biggest problem is also Turkey’s problem: the millions of refugees languishing in Turkey are closely connected with Assad’s underpaid and unmotivated soldiers, in that both are a manifestation of a starving and exhausted country.

The Problem of Syria, as such, is that the fiscal-economic viability of the state is tenuous at best and relies on consolidated control of the state’s former territory, but this in turn requires welding together an amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian groups, combustible in the best circumstances, at the same time that foreign powers are trying to set them alight. The ethnic logic and the economic logic of Syria border on total incompatibility, and have historically been held together by repression and violence.

Furthermore, Syria lies almost literally at a geostrategic crossroads, as an estuary of greater outside powers. In particular, Syria forms a collision zone of Iranian and Turkish power. Whichever of these powers finds itself on the back foot in the region has recourse to strategic arson - the intentional inflammation of a trashcanistan to create a noxious hazard to the rival. While the Assad Regime held power, thanks to the generous support of Moscow and Tehran, it was Ankara who provided powerful - and eventually successful backing. For Turkey to consolidate its victory, it must successfully establish stable governance in Syria, mitigate Kurdish autonomy, and reverse the flow of refugees. But with Iran now in retreat, turnabout is fair play, and Syria - with its wobbly economic basis and host of sectarian divisions - is a land full of kindling for a geostrategic arsonist.

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-big-happening

I think Serge gives a little too 'credit' to Western spooks who funneled agitators and arms to the protestors who were legitimately protesting the governments failure to deal with the drought situation. Saying, as I have heard, the the 'civil war' was the result of climate change disregards the skullduggery.

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Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison

The Cradle uncovers a deeper struggle for power and legitimacy in post-Assad Syria, exposing questionable claims, harsh realities, and the far-reaching implications of the country’s decade-long war

A Cradle Correspondent

DEC 24, 2024

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Photo Credit: The Cradle

When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad's government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya.

A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.

But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani's rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?

Vast underground prison complex?

On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian's William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya.

Christou claimed that a day after Julani's forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”

He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.”

As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.

In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.

“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison.

She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya.

However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.

During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.

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A photo of Syrians looking at a list of prisoners' names in Sednaya to see if their missing family members are there.

Human slaughterhouse?

In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.

The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.

However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.

Further, Amnesty's report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.

The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS, and that many prisoners would be actual criminals.

According to an official document obtained by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), 4,300 prisoners were held at Sednaya as of November 28, 2024. This included:

Military field court: 1231 prisoners, one of whom was referred to the hospital.

Terrorism court: 252 prisoners.

Judicial court (misdemeanors and criminal charges involving a military party): 2817 prisoners, three of whom were referred to the hospital.

But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”

When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison was home to many high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.

This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.

Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. ISIS famously attacked the notorious prison in 2013 to help thousands of its members escape. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.


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A photo of the entrance of Sednaya prison.

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A photo of a cell in Sednaya prison.

Syria’s missing

Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed.

While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths.

One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life.

One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse.

Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.

Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.

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A photo of a cell in Sednaya prison.

The “Repentance” prison

But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.

When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.

“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn't bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren't paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”

While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.

The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.

Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”

The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.”

The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.

Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.

Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.

“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”

“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”

Julani’s prisons

Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.

While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air.

When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.

An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.

For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”

In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”

Conclusion

No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and Israel to topple Assad.

However, the propaganda coming out of western and Gulf media now seeks to paint Assad's government as having carried out Nazi-like crimes, while painting Julani and the Al-Qaeda dominated opposition as angelic freedom fighters.

Crucially, all the Syrians The Cradle has spoken to about their missing relatives and friends say the vast majority of the disappearances and detentions took place after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf. Many Syrians also say that despite the corruption and abuses of Assad's mukhabarat, life in Syria was “like heaven” before 2011 compared to now.

One can only wonder what Syria would be like, and how many would still be alive, had America and Israel's war to topple Assad and fragment the country into sectarian pieces had never been launched.

https://thecradle.co/articles/sednaya-i ... ous-prison
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 26, 2024 2:53 pm

Kit Klarenberg: Exposing CIA/MI6 ‘Justice’ Operations in Syria
December 24, 2024
By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 12/12/24

All my investigations are free to access, thanks to the generosity of my readers. Independent journalism nonetheless requires investment, so if you took value from this article or any others, please consider sharing, or even becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is always gratefully received, and will never be forgotten. To buy me a coffee or two, please click this link.

In the immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future. While longtime leader Bashar Assad has sought refuge in Moscow, most of his government and its military, security, and intelligence apparatus remains in Damascus. Calls for reconciliation between officials and the predominantly foreign “opposition” abound, but the prospect of show trials for state apparatchiks is high. After all, elements of Anglo-American intelligence have been planning for such an eventuality since before the Syrian civil war even started.

In May 2011, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) was birthed by shadowy NATO state contractors, ARK and Tsamota. Its first act was to train handpicked Syrian “investigators, lawyers, and activists in basic international criminal and humanitarian law…enabling [them] to link state and non-state actors to underlying criminal acts.” Dedicated “teams of investigators according to their regions” – including Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Idlib – were created, “and equipped with field investigative kits.”

Their objective was to gather evidence of war crimes committed by Syrian government forces, in support of a “domestic justice process in a future transitional Syria.” We must ask ourselves how such a project came to be before the Syrian army was formally deployed by Damascus, in response to the foreign-fomented crisis that commenced in mid-March that year. Particularly given bringing officials to trial in a “future transitional Syria” was wholly contingent on all-out regime change.

The timing of CIJA’s launch is a palpable indication foreign actors were laying foundations for that eventuality from the very first days of Syria’s “peaceful revolution”, before full-blown civil war had erupted. Given the affiliations of ARK and Tsamota, the pair were well-placed to know in advance of plans by Western governments to topple the Assad government via brute force. Now that has come to pass, it may be time for their long-standing plan to at last be put into action.

‘Regime Change’

Founded by MI6 journeyman Alistair Harris, ARK was one of a constellation of contractors, staffed by military and intelligence veterans, employed by British intelligence at a cost of many millions to conduct covert psychological warfare campaigns in Syria, from the initial days of the crisis. The aim was to destabilise Assad’s government, convince the domestic population, international bodies and Western citizens that genocidal CIA and MI6-backed militant groups pillaging the country were a “moderate” alternative, and deluge media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.

Under this operation’s auspices, ARK founded and ran numerous ostensibly independent opposition media outlets targeting Syrians of all ages, while tutoring and equipping countless local “citizen journalists”, teaching them “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story…video and sound editing…voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design.” The firm’s students were also instructed in practical propaganda theory, such as “target audience identification, media narrative analysis and monitoring, behavioral identification/understanding, campaign planning, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it.”

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Such was ARK’s intimate proximity with anti-Assad elements, it boasted in leaked submissions to the Foreign Office of being entrusted by Western governments to develop a dedicated Office for Syrian Opposition Support. This entity identified the most promising groups for the proxy war’s sponsors to finance, in turn “[helping] present them to international donors, and provide access to networks that could deliver assistance.” These efforts intensified “as the conflict deepened and it became apparent that regime change would not occur in the short term.”

Tsamota’s primitive official website describes the company as “a security and justice sector consultancy which provides rule of law, forensics and natural resources advisory services,” working in “in politically, legally, socially and logistically challenging environments” for Western governments. The firm is not a compelling candidate for holding government officials anywhere accountable for war crimes. Tsamota has since inception offered guidance to major corporations on how to maximise profits in the Global South, while limiting their local and international legal liabilities.

In 2013, Tsamota director William Wiley gave a scandalous presentation to Canadian consortium MineAfrica Inc. In it, he set out a series of hypothetical scenarios in which mining companies operating in countries such as the Congo and Mali employed private security firms to crack down on striking workers, or deal with “local militias” interfering with their operations. Wiley outlined a number of means by which companies could be insulated from repercussions of heavy-handed responses to such incidents, up to and including murder.

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That presentation described Tsamota as composed of “experts” drawn from “national police, military and intelligence forces.” Wiley is no exception, having served in the Canadian military for almost two decades. Subsequently, he turned to international law, among other things overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein October 2005 – December 2006, for crimes against humanity. Mainstream accounts acknowledge Wiley was imposed on the former Iraqi leader’s defence team without consent – a major breach of basic legal norms – by the US embassy in Baghdad’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office.

After capture, Hussein was initially interrogated by the CIA. Contemporary media reports note there was significant concern within the Agency that “their questioning could become public during his eventual trial,” raising issues around “how to conduct the questioning and record the conversations.” The reasons why were unstated, although a likely explanation was Washington wished to avoid awkward disclosures in court about Hussein’s long-running relationship with the CIA, and active US complicity in many of the most heinous crimes of which he was accused.

To say the least, this was a sensitive role indeed. Even prominent Iraqi supporters of US invasion and occupation charged Baghdad’s “interim” puppet government was seeking “show trials followed by speedy executions” of Hussein et al to boost its credibility. That Wiley was entrusted with this mission speaks volumes about his reliability from the US government’s perspective. It also raises obvious questions about the nature of his relationship with the CIA, and whether that bond influenced CIJA’s creation half a decade later.

‘Moving Documents’

A series of leaked ARK files on CIJA’s activities authored in the years immediately following its creation make grand claims about its achievements. One declares the Commission “innovated in the field of transitional justice…aiding the collection of evidence to document war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of International Humanitarian Law” in Syria. Another states its work represented “a landmark development in international justice: the contemporaneous gathering of evidence of violations of international humanitarian law conducted by regime forces”:

“[CIJA], through expert training, effective equipment provision and a commitment to the truth were able to ensure that when the conflict ends, the raw material of a post-conflict war crimes process is ready for trial, in turn providing a key contribution to truth telling, reconciliation and the future of Syria.”

Elsewhere, ARK boasted how CIJA had seized thousands of kilograms of “contemporaneous documentation”, hundreds of thousands of pages of “evidential material” and thousands of videos from Syria, “all of which had to be hand carried” out of the country. Cut to February 2021, and Commission chair Stephen Rapp, a US diplomatic warhorse, bragged to CBS about the sheer volume of evidence CIJA collected. He claimed the papertrail exposed a systematic strategy of Assad government-directed executions of opposition activists, along with ensuing coverups:

“Now we have 800,000 pages of original documents, signed and sealed with original signatures going all the way up to Assad that document this whole strategy…We see reports back about ‘well, we’ve got a real problem here, there are too many corpses stacking up, somebody’s gonna have to help us with that’…Everything is handled in this sort of totalitarian system where they frankly think they can get away with things…they were almost stupid…they created evidence.”

If such damning, incontrovertible proof was bagged at any stage by CIJA, it has never emerged publicly. Still, throughout the Syrian dirty war, the Commission enjoyed glowing profiles in Western media, while providing journalists and rights groups with multiple scoops supposedly exposing Syrian government atrocities. At no point did any mainstream reporter or NGO question, let alone raise concerns about, the manner in which the Commission garnered the material upon which its cases against government officials in Damascus was “hand carried” out of the country.

CIJA chief Wiley acknowledged in 2014 that his organisation smuggled evidence from Syria by working with every opposition group “up to but excluding Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.” However, a 2019 investigation by The Grayzone amply indicates that CIJA was frequently in extremely close quarters with both groups. Moreover, they were paid handsomely for their assistance in securing documentation. This included material seized in Raqqa after its January 2014 capture by ISIS, right when the ultra-extremist group was massacring Alawites and Christians.

In a 2016 New Yorker profile of CIJA, Wiley detailed the practical hassles and financial drain inherent in “moving documents [over] international borders” and opposition-controlled “checkpoints”, while relying on “rebel groups and couriers for logistical support.” He described how bundles of government files “typically” arrived at the Commission’s offices “in a dizzying array of crappy suitcases.” Wiley lamented, “we burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff.”

Accordingly, CIJA received tens of millions of dollars for its efforts from a variety of Western governments, including those at the forefront of the Syrian dirty war. Despite the vast windfall, the Commission’s work produced zero prosecutions for many years. This changed in late 2019, when Anwar Raslan and Eyad Gharib, two former members of Damascus’ General Intelligence Directorate, were indicted in Germany for crimes against humanity.

‘Many Contradictions’

Raslan headed the Directorate’s domestic security unit, while Gharib was one of his departmental subordinates. The pair defected to the opposition in December 2012. Raslan and his family fled to Jordan, where he played “an active and visible role in the Syrian opposition.” He was part of the anti-Assad delegation at the Geneva II conference on Syria in January 2014, and in July that year, was granted asylum in Germany.

After his escape from Syria, Raslan told numerous lurid tales of abuse and atrocities perpetrated by his unit, and the Assad government more widely, during his 20 years of state service. He claimed his defection was spurred after learning an apparent opposition attack in Damascus that he was charged with investigating was, in fact, staged by security forces. Significant doubts about his accounts, and whether his defection was principled or just cynical opportunism, have been raised in many quarters.

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Artist’s rendition of Raslan’s trial

In a perverse irony, Raslan’s loudmouth propensity was his undoing. His assorted claims post-defection provided grounds for arrest by German authorities, and were used against him and Gharib in their prosecutions. These legal actions heavily relied on documents seized by CIJA, including Central Crisis Management Cell records. This unit was created in March 2011 by Damascus, to manage responses to mass rioting that erupted this month. These documents have been widely described as the “linchpin” of the Commission’s case against “the Syrian regime.”

Yet, as this journalist has previously exposed, the Central Crisis Management Cell files in fact show the Assad government explicitly and repeatedly instructed security forces to protect protesters, prevent violence, and keep the situation under control. The documents also detail how from inception, many “peaceful” demonstrators were extremely violent, while opposition fighters systematically murdered security service operatives, pro-government figures, and demonstrators to foment catastrophe, in a manner eerily similar to many CIA/MI6 regime change operations old and new.

In February 2021, Gharib was found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He received four-and-a-half years in prison. A year later, Raslan was given life for crimes including mass torture, rape, and murder. The pair were not convicted for personally perpetrating these horrors, but serving in the General Intelligence Directorate at the time they were allegedly committed. “Expert” witness evidence provided at their trials left much to be desired.

For example, judges and prosecutors alike expressed disquiet at “many contradictions” in the testimony of “P3”, a Syrian government operative who purportedly worked in a security service “mail department”, and was central to Gharib’s conviction. P3 professed to seeing sensitive documents “related to the transfer of corpses” of opposition activists “to burial sites.” They “provided contradictory information” in statements to German police and the court, and were “visibly nervous” while testifying. Throughout, their seemingly aghast attorney sat nearby “putting his hands behind his head.”

Meanwhile, during Raslan’s prosecution, “P4” – a nameless individual who claimed to have been detained in a Syrian prison, and bribed his way out – testified he saw 500,000 corpses buried via a “bulldozer and a truck” next to his house, in an area which was previously “a desert”. Reports of the trial indicate there “was a feeling” among those present in court, including “the public”, that these numbers were greatly “exaggerated.”

The sense that Gharib and Raslan were prosecuted because they were within easy reach, and CIJA needed something to show for all its well-remunerated efforts, is ineluctable. The Commission had strong grounds to be anxious about failing to fulfill its founding objective. In March 2020, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) formally accused the organization of “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering” relating to an EU “Rule of Law” project it ran in Syria.

Fast forward to today, and The Guardian reports that “the abrupt implosion of the infrastructure of state terror” in Syria “has made available a huge volume of evidence.” The outlet quoted CIJA chief William Wiley at some length. He compared Assad’s fall to “a situation much like Germany in 1945 or Iraq in 2003,” with “a sudden availability of all state records” making prosecution of state officials a fait accompli:

“It’s a very unusual situation, and its suddenness creates challenges and opportunities in simply dealing with the material…If there’s any security intelligence guy that rocks up in Europe, there’s typically going to be enough material already to hand.”

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/12/kit ... -in-syria/

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On the Syrian military's attack on HTS militants
December 26, 15:07

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In Tartus, they chopped up ( https://t.me/Oleg_Blokhin/62485) a pack of HTS militants.
HTS militants claim that former soldiers of Assad's army attacked.
It seems that more militants were killed in this skirmish than during the defense of Damascus and Homs.

There is no faith at all in a long-term pro-Assad underground. There will certainly be some attacks, but it is unlikely to last much longer than the resistance in the Panjshir Gorge in Afghanistan after the fall of the Ashraf Ghani regime. Or the resistance of troops loyal to Gaddafi after the assassination of Gaddafi himself. But in the long term, after the bloody mess awaiting Syria, those of Assad's military who survive until then will be able to return to the "new Syria" in a new role. As happened with the Gaddafi supporters in Libya.

Syria itself, as expected, continues to bubble with internal contradictions, which the Turks are trying to keep under control through the hands of the HTS and the SNA.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9574274.html

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 28, 2024 1:03 pm

ISIS Seizes Massive Amount of Weapons in Syria
December 27, 11:33

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The Iraqi Interior Minister reported that ISIS militants have seized a huge amount of weapons left over from the Syrian army and now expects a sharp increase in the activity of the group in Syria and Iraq. ISIS is already sharply increasing its activity in Syria.
I saw one story in 2014 that began exactly the same way.

A wave of various atrocities and reprisals against former Assad officials, Alawites, Christians and simply those who were not liked is rolling across the rest of Syria.
The SNA and HTS continue their sluggish battles against pro-American Kurds, and Israel is expanding the occupation zone near the Golan Heights.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9575505.html

Google Translator

********

Medley Report: Bilderberg News, Turkey Sets Court in Syria, Ukraine Grid Strikes

Simplicius
Dec 26, 2024

<snip>

Syria-Turkey-Israel
As the reformation of Syria takes shape, opinions continue running the full gamut as relates to who exactly benefits most, and who is in the driver’s seat. Russia’s Lavrov himself recently remarked that Israel stands to be main beneficiary, with many in agreement with that angle.

But I continue to contend that this is merely a short-lived phenomenon. The ultimate winner is the burgeoning Ottoman Empire revival.

Jolani has been getting chummier and chummier with top Turkish officials—last time it was head of Erdogan’s MIT—the main Turkish intelligence agency. This time Jolani hosted Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who was also previously a director of the MIT. Jolani likewise drove Fidan around Damascus, and they took in the sights, sipping coffee together from the top of Mount Qasioun overlooking the capital city: (Video at link.)

Now a Turkish national has been appointed as the first female senior official in Jolani’s new government:

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And this comes amid reports that Turkey will be establishing its presence in the military academies of Aleppo and Damascus:

Turkey will send military advisers to train the new Syrian army at academies in Aleppo and Damascus, the Turkish resource ClashReport writes, citing its sources.

There is also mention of the possible deployment of a Turkish army unit in Homs to train air defense operators for the new Syrian authorities.


If that wasn’t enough, Erdogan’s son Bilal was seen in a video calling for a large pro-Palestine gathering on the Galata bridge in Istanbul for January 1st, just as they did last New Years, from which the video footage is pulled. But the big shift lies in their gathering under the banner of an interesting new slogan:

“Yesterday Hagia Sophia, today the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus), tomorrow Al-Aqsa (Jerusalem).”

(Video at link.)

This appears to be the official poster for the event, with the slogan even printed on top:

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As can be seen, a nationalist fervor is slowly building up for the recapture of Jerusalem. Israel now has its hands full with a seriously armed, notoriously tenacious NATO member with its sights set on a modern reconquista of its former dominions. The way things are going, Turkey may soon control virtually everything that happens within Syria by proxy, and Israel will face its greatest ever challenge directly on its doorstep.

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With the US backing Israel, I could foresee Turkey being forced to forge closer ties with Russia and perhaps Iran as backstops, in order to surround Israel and keep it under pressure. Russia is already slated to sign the big comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran on January 17th, just as it did with North Korea recently:

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https://tass.com/world/1894081

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Russia and Iran may sign a new strategic partnership agreement ahead of Trump's inauguration, - Newsweek

According to the publication, the new agreement between Tehran and Moscow indicates an attempt by the two countries to "join forces" amid "isolation on the world stage."

Newsweek notes that the agreement with Iran has been in the works for many years. In late October, Russian Foreign Minister S. Lavrov said that the agreement would be ready for signing in the near future and "formalizes the parties' commitment to close defense cooperation, interaction in the interests of regional and global peace and security."

The new bilateral agreement should replace the 20-year strategic agreement that was signed between the countries in 2001 and extended in 2020. It will contain promises of cooperation in the fields of energy, manufacturing, transport and agriculture. - RVvoenkor


President Pezeshkian will travel to Moscow to personally sign it on that date.

Israel now scrambles to weaken Iran as much as possible, brutally striking Yemen for the past few days while praying Trump gives his blessing to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities upon his arrival. But I believe Israel is focused on the wrong opponent and has in fact traded one enemy for a far more powerful one.

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(Much more at link.)

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/med ... ews-turkey

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Manufacturing Rebels: How the UK and US Empowered HTS
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 26, 2024
Kit Klarenberg

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A deep dive into the covert support the UK and US provided to HTS exposes the calculated, secretive western strategies to support the Al-Qaeda-linked, UN-designated terror group that runs Syria today.

On 18 December, The Telegraph published an extraordinary investigation into how the UK and US trained and “prepared” fighters in the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA), a “rebel” force that collaborated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the mass offensive toppling of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad weeks earlier.

In an unprecedented disclosure, the outlet revealed that Washington not only “knew about the offensive” well in advance, but also had “precise intelligence about its scale.” Washington’s now-confirmed “effective alliance” with HTS was described as “one of many ironies” emerging from the decade-and-a-half-long proxy war.

The Telegraph suggested this collaboration was inadvertent – simply a symptom of how Syria’s grinding, protracted civil war gave birth to “a bewildering array of militias and alliances, most of them backed by foreign powers.”

US support of HTS: A ‘necessary’ alliance

Alliances were fluid, with groups often splintering, merging, and shifting allegiances. Fighters frequently found themselves switching sides, blurring lines between factions. Yet, ample evidence indicates the UK and the US maintained deliberate, long-standing ties with the dominant rebels of HTS.

For instance, in March 2021, President-elect Donald Trump’s former lead Syria envoy, James Jeffrey, gave a revealing interview to PBS, during which he disclosed that Washington secured a specific “waiver” from then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo to assist HTS.

While this did not permit direct funding or arming of the UN/US-designated terrorist organization, the waiver ensured that if US-supplied resources “somehow” ended up with HTS, western actors “[could not] be blamed.”

The fungibility of weapons on the Syrian battlefield was something Washington counted on heavily. In a 2015 interview, CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines was quizzed about why Pentagon-vetted fighters’ weapons were showing up in the hands of the Nusra Front (precursor to HTS). Raines responded: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces – we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”

This legal loophole enabled Washington to “indirectly” support HTS, ensuring the group did not collapse while maintaining its designation as a terrorist organization – a status complete with a now-rescinded $10 million bounty on leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa.

Jeffrey rationalized this strategy, calling HTS “the least bad option” for preserving “a US-managed security system in the region,” and thus worth “[leaving] alone.” HTS’s dominance, in turn, gave Turkiye a platform to operate in Idlib. Meanwhile, HTS sent unmistakable messages to their US patrons, pleading:

“We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”

‘Safe haven’

Since Assad’s fall, officials in London have markedly taken the lead in legitimizing the HTS-led interim administration as Syria’s new government. The group was added to the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations in 2017, its entry stating HTS should be considered among “alternative names” for the long-banned Al-Qaeda.

While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared it “too early” to rescind the group’s designation, British officials met HTS representatives on 16 December – despite the illegality of such meetings.

This likely signals an impending, highly politicized western rehabilitation of HTS. Throughout Syria’s dirty war, UK intelligence waged extensive psychological operations to promote “moderate rebels,” crafting atrocity propaganda and human-interest stories.

These efforts were ostensibly aimed at undermining groups like HTS, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. Yet leaked documents from UK intelligence reveal how HTS remained intertwined with Al-Qaeda post-2016, directly contradicting media narratives.

In other words, throughout the decade-and-a-half-long crisis, HTS was officially considered on par with the most fundamentalist, genocidal elements in the country.

British documents also make a total mockery of the common refrain that HTS severed all ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016. A 2020 file described how Al-Qaeda “co-exists” with HTS in occupied Syrian territory, using it as a launchpad for transnational attacks.

The document warned that HTS’s domination created a “safe haven” for Al-Qaeda to train and expand, fueled by instability. British psyops against HTS spanned years but ultimately failed. Instead, leaked files lament HTS’s growing influence, territorial gains, and rebranding as an alternative government.

“[Al-Qaeda] remains an explicitly Salafi-Jihadist transnational group with objectives and targets which extend outside Syria’s borders. [Al-Qaeda’s] priority is to maintain an instability fuelled safe haven in Syria, from which they are able to train and prepare for future expansion. HTS domination of north west Syria provides space for [Al-Qaeda] aligned groups and individuals to exist.”

British-backed propaganda benefiting HTS

British intelligence psyops attempting to hinder HTS were in operation from the group’s founding until recently. Yet, they appear to have achieved nothing. Numerous leaked files reviewed by The Cradle bemoan how HTS’s “influence and territorial control” had “dramatically grown” over the years.

Its successes allowed the extremist group “to consolidate its position, neutralize opponents, and position itself as a key actor in northern Syria.” But HTS’s “domination” was secured in part by the group rebranding itself as an alternative government.

HTS-occupied territory was home to a variety of parallel service providers and institutions, including hospitals, law enforcement, schools, and courts. The group’s domestic and international propaganda specifically promoted these resources as a demonstration of an “alternative” Syria awaiting rollout across the entire country.

Ironically, many of these structures and organizations – such as the infamous White Helmets, who also operated in ISIS-run territories – were direct products of British intelligence, created for regime change propaganda purposes. Moreover, they were aggressively promoted by London at enormous expense.

Repeated references are made in leaked UK intelligence documents to the importance of “[raising] awareness of moderate opposition service provision,” and providing domestic and international audiences with “compelling narratives and demonstrations of a credible alternative to the [Assad] regime.” There is no consideration evident in the files that these efforts might be assisting HTS greatly in its own efforts to present itself as a “credible alternative” to Assad.

Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that Syrians in occupied territory would accommodate HTS “particularly if [they are] receiving services from it.” Even more eerily, the documents note, “HTS and other extremist armed groups are significantly less likely to attack opposition entities that are receiving support” from the UK government’s Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund (CSSF).

This was the mechanism through which Britain’s Syrian propaganda war and organizations like the White Helmets and extremist-linked Free Syrian Police were financed.

These UK-run governance structures and opposition elements, which were allegedly intended to “undermine” HTS, operated in areas controlled by the group safe from violent reprisals for their foreign-funded work, as they “demonstrably provide key services” to residents of occupied territory.

There is also the darker prospect that HTS was well aware these “opposition entities” were bankrolled by British intelligence, and they were unmolested on that very basis.

Coordinated offensive

As The Telegraph‘s report explains, “the first indication that Washington had prior knowledge” of HTS’s offensive was when its RCA proxies were given a rousing pep talk by their US handlers three weeks prior.

At a secret meeting at the US-controlled Al-Tanf air base close to the borders of Jordan and Iraq, the militants were told to scale up their forces and “be ready” for an attack that “could lead to the end” of Assad. A quoted RCA captain told the outlet:

“They did not tell us how it would happen. We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”

This followed US officers at the base, swelling the RCA’s ranks by unifying the group with other UK/US-trained, funded, and directed Sunni desert units and rebel units operating out of Al-Tanf under joint command.

According to The Telegraph, “RCA and the fighters of HTS … were cooperating, and communication between the two forces was being coordinated by the Americans.” This collaboration proved to be of devastating effect in the “lightning offensive,” with RCA rapidly seizing key territory across the country upon explicit US orders.

RCA even joined forces with another rebel faction in the southern city of Deraa, which reached Damascus before HTS. RCA now occupies roughly one-fifth of the country, pockets of territory in Damascus, and the ancient city of Palmyra.

Hitherto “heavily defended” by Russia and Hezbollah, Moscow’s local base has now been taken over by RCA. “All members of the force continued to be armed by the US,” receiving salaries of $400 monthly, nearly 12 times what Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers were paid.

It is uncertain whether this direct financing of the RCA and other extremist militias that toppled the Assad government continues today. What is clear, though, is that the UK and US supported HTS from the group’s inception, even if “indirectly.” In turn, this covert backing played a pivotal role in positioning HTS financially, geopolitically, materially, and militarily for its “lightning” swoop on Damascus and assumption of government today.

Reinforcing the interpretation that this was the objective of London and Washington all along, following Assad’s ouster, Starmer promptly declared that the UK would “play a more present and consistent role” in West Asia as a result.

While western and certain regional capitals may celebrate the apparent success of their lavishly funded, blood-soaked campaign to dismantle decades of Baathism, British intelligence had long cautioned that the outcome would grant Al-Qaeda an even larger “instability-fueled safe haven” for “future expansion.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... wered-hts/

Is Syria on the Brink of Civil War?
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 26, 2024



Syriana Analysis

Since the regime change in Syria, militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have been involved in escalating sectarian actions, raising concerns that these tensions could drive the country toward a full-scale civil war.

🇸🇾🚨🏴 WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN SYRIA?!

Constant attacks, summary executions, and religious sites razed to the ground. Humiliation at every turn. And let’s not forget the constant drumbeat of hate: media outlets and social media are flooded with calls for extermination and… pic.twitter.com/4kTfkcQmgX

— Kevork Almassian🇸🇾🇦🇲 (@KevorkAlmassian) December 26, 2024


[youtube]http://youtu.be/clSJur-iH4Q[/youube]

This live stream exposes Israel’s support for the ‘Syrian rebels’

Syria stood as one of the safest countries in the world. In 2010, the number of foreign visitors reached its peak with 8.5 million with GDP reached its highest value in the observed period: $60.04 billion.

Today, it has descended into chaos—a lawless jungle. In the intervening… pic.twitter.com/IpwXKkBoXZ

— Kevork Almassian🇸🇾🇦🇲 (@KevorkAlmassian) December 27, 2024


https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... civil-war/

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HTS names UN-designated 'terrorist' as Syria's new intelligence chief

Former Al-Qaeda commanders make up the bulk of new authorities named by Syria's western-backed 'transitional government'

News Desk

DEC 26, 2024

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(Photo Credit: SANA)

On 26 December, Syria's de facto authorities appointed former Al-Qaeda commander and Nusra Front co-founder Anas Hassan Khattab as the head of the country's general intelligence agency.


Meet the new Head of Intelligence in Syria - probably Al Qaeda's greatest success since 9/11...

"Abu Ahmed Hudood (Anas Hassan Khattab) was appointed as head of the General Intelligence Service in Syria. He was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (2004-2011), one of the founders of… https://t.co/3Mq1DQCF3C

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) December 26, 2024
Khattab, also known as Abu Ahmed Hudood, was blacklisted as a “terrorist” by the UN Security Council in September 2014 for his close association with Al-Qaeda.

According to the listing, for several years, he was involved “in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of” and “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” the Nusra Front. This Al-Qaeda offshoot was rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.

Khattab served as the administrative emir of the Nusra Front as of early 2014 and was part of its shura council by mid-2013. He was also tasked with selecting personal bodyguards for HTS leader and Syria's de facto ruler Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who dropped his nom de guerre earlier this month and now goes by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa.

In recent years, Khattab oversaw general security operations in Idlib. His involvement in intelligence gathering dates back to the period when HTS consolidated control over northern Syria with Turkish support; during this time, he managed surveillance of covert networks along the borders of HTS-controlled areas.

Syria's new intel chief was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2012 for his ties to Al-Qaeda.

Khattab is the latest HTS authority to be granted a top post in the so-called “transitional government” following the success of the Turkish and US-backed coup against the government of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Last week, the General Command of the Armed Opposition Factions appointed Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, a founding member of Al-Qaeda in Syria, as the new caretaker foreign minister. This was followed by the appointment of Murhaf Abu Qasra, a top HTS leader known by his assumed name Abu Hassan 600, as defense minister.

As HTS continues to consolidate power with the full support of western nations, clashes have broken out in western Syria between the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and HTS-led extremists.

https://thecradle.co/articles/hts-names ... ence-chief

(The tie is a nice touch. They must have 'reformed'...)

Turkiye boosts efforts to provide power to Syria, 'rapidly revive' battered energy sector

The Turkish foreign minister said Ankara is working with Syria’s new authorities to provide power to areas without electricity

News Desk

DEC 27, 2024

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(Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Turkiye has an interest in providing electricity to Syria and strengthening the country’s energy infrastructure, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar was quoted as saying on 27 December.

The energy minister explained to Turkish reporters that Ankara may also cooperate with new Syrian authorities, led by former Al-Qaeda group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to strengthen oil and natural gas projects in Syria.

“We must very rapidly provide electricity to parts of Syria that do not have electricity, with imports in the initial phase. In the medium-term, we also plan to increase the set electricity power, the production capacity there,” Bayraktar said, according to Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

“There is a need for everything in Syria. We will work on the infrastructure master plan with the leaders there.” He also said Ankara could potentially send electricity to Lebanon via Syria. Prior to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government, US sanctions stalled a gas deal to provide Lebanon with energy via Syria.

The deal was initially brought forth by Washington to prevent Hezbollah from continuing efforts to bring in Iranian gas to Lebanon. The US-sponsored agreement never materialized.

“There is a need for everything in Syria. We will work on the infrastructure master plan with the leaders there,” the Turkish energy minister went on to say. “There are many topics that need to mature, from forming an oil pipeline from Syria to Turkey, merging this with our Iraq–Turkey pipeline.”

Regarding the pipeline, the minister said “there are ongoing discussions about transporting Qatari gas through Syria to Turkiye and Europe,” and that “these plans are still in the early stages and require further technical and financial evaluation.”

He added that the pipeline project could help create a significant energy corridor in Syria.

“We plan to share our potential contributions with our counterparts. Projects such as integrating a Syrian oil pipeline with the Iraq–Turkiye pipeline and transporting Qatari gas through Syria to Turkiye and Europe are still in early stages. Similar to how we transport Gabar oil to Idil via a 38-kilometer pipeline, a similar model could be applied here,” Bayraktar said.

The Turkiye–Qatar natural gas pipeline project was proposed in the early 2000s and was aimed at transporting Qatari gas towards Turkiye and into Europe via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. The Qatari proposal was rejected by the former government in Syria.

The revival of these energy projects comes as Ankara has signaled that it will have a hand in drafting Syria’s new constitution.

Turkish military forces have been occupying Syria since 2016 and supporting a coalition of armed extremist factions called the Syrian National Army (SNA), which helps Turkiye combat Kurdish militants in the country. Ankara has also provided support to HTS over the years, particularly back when it was known as Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

Fierce clashes have been raging between the SNA and the US-backed Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has close ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its Syrian branch.

The SDF has for years helped US occupation forces in Syria oversee control over the country’s oilfields and energy-rich regions.

Syria’s energy sector has incurred billions in losses over the years due to sanctions, US occupation, and Washington’s looting of Syrian oil.

https://thecradle.co/articles/turkiye-b ... rgy-sector
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 29, 2024 6:43 pm

The Syrian Nation is Occupied
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 28, 2024
Tim Anderson

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Just as the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance are battered but resilient, the occupied Syrian Nation is down but not out.

Syria is not dead, it is occupied. The two biggest NATO militaries, the Israelis and their Al-Qaeda styled terrorist proxies occupied one third of the country before 8 December 2024, now they occupy 100%. The “transitional” government led by UNSC listed terrorists, has a way to go before it receives either local or international approval; and armed and civil resistance have already emerged.

The HTS (Jabhat al Nusra, Al-Qaeda) regime has no revolutionary or democratic mandate and its sponsors are scrambling to rebrand it (HTS is still listed by the UNSC as a banned terrorist organisation) as democratic and inclusive. No doubt they will find some token collaborators. Many Syrians are reinventing themselves to survive and, in some cases, find a role in the new regime. Yet according to the UNHCR, after the HTS offensive, another million people have been “newly displaced” while few of those who fled the dirty war are returning.

Yet in face of the tragedy of the Al-Qaeda takeover, there is a revival of Syrian values, a phenomenon neither reported by the Anglo-American media nor its media allies in Turkiye and Qatar. As with the Israeli crimes in Gaza, we have to turn to social media to find detail of (1) the crimes of the al-Qaeda regime (2) more fake and exaggerated propaganda against the fallen Assad regime, used to justify the foreign occupation, and (3) the emerging civil and military resistance to the occupation. It is precisely this resistance which tells us that the Syrian nation is still alive.

Assad is gone and it is inconceivable that he will return. Many who were close to him remain bitter about the manner of his rapid exit. He surrendered – under what circumstances we still do not know – leaving a vacuum into which the foreign occupation moved rapidly.

It is clear that there was a failure in the Syrian Army command, including its commander in chief, though not necessarily in the will of Syrian Army soldiers. Some groups of Syrian soldiers have already resorted to guerilla style attacks on the sectarian terrorists. It is sheer ignorance to label these brave soldiers simply regime or Assad “loyalists”. They are defending an independent and inclusive Syria and its constitution, which is now under serious threat.

There has been much speculation about the role of Russia and Iran in the collapse of the Assad government. Some otherwise quite sober analysts refer to Putin “backstabbing” Assad. I cannot see evidence of any such betrayal, except to the extent that Russia’s support for the Syrian Army’s fight against proxy armies always had the limits of not directly confronting “Israel” or Turkiye. Iranian explanations for the collapse of the Assad government run along these lines: Iran warned Damascus about the threat since September and offered direct help, but Assad declined such help, wanting to distance himself from Iran and gain some sort of economic breakthrough with the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

He may have been misled by false promises but, in any case, he did not call for Iranian help. In those circumstances, uninvited, Iran could not fight in place of the Syrian Army. Sources close to the Syrian Army told me that Assad made some inexplicable changes in senior commanders, sidelining some of the more capable generals. Certainly, Syria had been under tremendous economic pressure, and that must have weakened its capacity to resist. Yet in the end, there was a failure of the Syrian command leading to Assad’s surrender. By the same reasoning, as regards Russia, I tend to agree with Helena Cobban’s first proposed explanation: that “Putin decided he could not save the Assad government if it could not save itself.”

While Syrians now adapt to survive under HTS rule, many hoping that their lives will be “free” or go on as normal, there can be no doubt that a great tragedy has fallen on them. Never mind the sustained propaganda war against Assad, an al-Qaeda led regime propped up by predatory foreign powers is the worst of all outcomes for the Syrian people. The Israelis, battered in Gaza and Lebanon, have had a “free kick” in Syria, racing in to occupy large parts of the south and bombing all the major defence infrastructure of the country. The fall of the Assad government was thus also a major setback for the Axis of Resistance, the only real ally of the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance.

In the first few days, while the Western media reported that sectarian violence was “less intense than feared”, there were dozens of sectarian murders across Syria. The crimes of the HTS regime began in a sporadic rather than a systematic way, as Jolani and his henchmen tried to brush up their image, for their sponsors. But the sectarian character of HTS had not changed. While in early 2011 sectarian terrorists chanted “Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave”, in December 2024 the pro-Jolani crowd chanted, “Homs is for Sunnis, Alawites must get out”

Western think tanks like the Washington based CSIS prepared the ground for the rebranding back in 2023, saying that “HTS’s status as a terrorist group … grows increasingly complex”. After the fall of Damascus, France 24 observed that the “West” was looking at “normalisation” with the UNSC listed terrorist group, as it was regarded as having become more “moderate”. Certainly, in helping topple the independent Assad regime, the group was serving the interests of the US, Turkiye and the Israelis.

Syrians looked for some hope in the new rhetoric which claimed that, despite its bloody history, the HTS regime pledged “tolerance” for minorities and women. Many Syrians waved the new flag, as a form of protection, while former Syrian soldiers rushed to seek an amnesty from the new regime, fearing reprisals. Many were arrested and jailed.

Yet HTS crimes were filmed and published, like the sectarian murder of two soldiers who were called “Nusayri [Alawi] pigs”. There are now social media accounts documenting the crimes of the HTS regime and others documenting acts of resistance.

Nevertheless, the Syrian nation remains because there is resistance, civil and armed. Armed guerilla style attacks on the HTS forces took place on the coast between Jableh and Latakia (14 December), at Talfita in rural Damascus (20 December), and through another ambush by former soldiers in Tartus (25 December) which killed 14 and injured 10 HTS fighters, as people in Daraa stoned the invading Israelis and brave crowds mounted demonstrations in Ummayad Square, Damascus, demanding elections, women’s rights and an end to sectarian attacks. In an attempt to normalise this violence Reuters reported that Syrian “police” had imposed a curfew “after unrest”.

There were similar demonstrations in Homs, in Aleppo, by Christians in Christian areas of Damascus and in Tartus, against sectarian policy and practice. In Tartus, the old slogan which pledged loyalty to Assad (“with our souls with our blood”) became a pledge of loyalty to Syria from people of all religious sects.


After the Christmas attacks in Tartus, huge HTS reinforcements were seen moving to the coastal cities, amid reports of Sunnis joining Shia, Alawite, and Christian protesters in demanding that foreign fighters be expelled from the country. Jolani has suggested that these foreign fighters might be given Syrian citizenship. Yet there are thousands of foreign extremists in Syria (Chechens, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Afghans, Albanians, Europeans) in the ranks of the NATO-backed HTS coalition.

In efforts to cover the history and crimes of the HTS gangs – and to divert from the Israeli crimes against Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria – Western media went into overdrive to rehash the supposed crimes of the Assad regime. I addressed many of these claims in my 2016 book The Dirty War on Syria.

In brief, ‘false flag’ massacres were used to impose an economic blockade on Syria in 2012; the various chemical weapons claims (2013-2018) were also all false flags: attacks carried out by US backed armed groups, then falsely blamed on the Syrian Arab Army. Most of the accusations of abuse had to do with captured or wounded terrorist fighters, which the Western media called “political opposition”. In the case of “mass graves”, unlike those created for the civilians and doctors killed by the Israelis in Gaza, in Syria the mass graves were for terrorists killed in large scale operations.

The notorious case of “Caesar”, a worker from the Damascus morgue who defected to Qatar in 2014 with photos of dead bodies, involved a claim that all dead bodies in this wartime morgue were “opposition” prisoners who had been tortured to death. Yet even the US-based Human Rights Watch, which ran constant false propaganda against Syria during the dirty war, was forced to admit that more than half of the photos were those of “government soldiers, other armed fighters, or civilians killed in attacks, explosions, or assassination attempts”.

In short, exaggerated claims against the Syrian army were run to cover the far worse and better documented sectarian atrocities of the ISIS and HTS gangs, crimes which led to Jabhat al Nusra, HTS and ISIS being listed as terrorist groups by the United Nations Security Council. What this means for recognition of an HTS led Syria is interesting. Of course, Washington wants to legitimise its triumphant proxy in Syria but to do so would undermine its already fragile claim to be “fighting terrorism” in multiple countries; so it may prefer the creation of a weak coalition of HTS and HTS collaborators, individuals chosen from minorities and the former government. At the UNSC level, a unanimous decision of the council is needed to lift the ban on HTS, otherwise an asset freeze, travel bans, and an arms embargo is expected of every country.

Overall, what Washington wants in Syria is mainly the destruction of the independent will which allowed it to ally with Iran and support the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance. That mission has been achieved, for now. What comes next is less important for the US and its forward base “Israel”, but could mean (a) long term sectarian fighting as in Libya, after Gaddafi was deposed, or (b) an Iraqi style dismantling of the state into a weak, sectarian federal system. In each case, the aim is to prevent the restoration of a state with independent political will.

There were earlier plans for the partition of Syria, both from the French colonial regime and various options floated in relation to the US ‘New Middle East’ project. These plans typically involved an Alawi statelet on the coast, some sort of Druze protectorate in the south, perhaps a Kurdish region in the north east and a “Sunni” heartland ruled by Salafist extremists. However any such partition is now subject to several constraints: first is the extent to which a post-Assad unified Syrian resistance is able to undermine rule by the fractious coalition of HTS and foreign extremists; second is the claims by Erdoğan over parts of the north and his demand to eliminate Kurdish separatists who would use any Kurdish enclave in Syria as a springboard for separatists within Türkiye; third is the extent to which the Israelis will try to annex parts of the south and the mountains between Syria and Lebanon. There is no indication that the HTS regime would oppose the ambitions of the Israelis or of Erdogan’s forces, all of whom provided substantial support to Nusra/ISIS/HTS.

A fourth constraint is the UNSC resolution 2254 of 2015, which Washington and its minions used against Assad but may now become an obstacle for the HTS regime: the resolution demands maintenance of the territorial integrity of Syria, “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance”, a new constitution followed by “free and fair elections”. Regional Arab countries are more or less on board with UNSC 2254, as are Russia and China. While UN officials are notoriously compliant to the demands of the big powers, calling the HTS regime a “flame of hope”, UNSC resolutions will certainly influence international legitimacy.

For now, the HTS regime has neither revolutionary nor democratic mandate, so it is liable to overthrow by the same methods which brought it to power, until there is a real democratic mandate. That places a heavy burden on the Syrian Nation: can it resist by civil and guerilla warfare methods a sectarian occupation regime supported by NATO’s two largest armies plus the Israelis, who have already wiped out most of the country’s defence infrastructure? Nevertheless, as we have seen in many other countries, and even against great odds, while there is resistance the nation survives.

Iran believes the Axis of Resistance, the key support for Palestine and Lebanon, will maintain its strategic and moral high ground against the Israelis and will adapt to the challenges of the fall of Damascus. Former Iranian IRGC chief commander Major General Mohsen Rezaei adds that, in his view, the Syrian resistance will rise rapidly. “In less than a year, Syrians will revive the resistance in their country in a different way and neutralize the evil and deceitful plan of the US, the Zionist regime” and their collaborators.

While we can understand that many Syrians will test all possible options to survive under the current regime, those outsiders who celebrated the fall of Assad and naively shared the slogans of a “Free Syria” should appreciate that they are applauding a great victory for the Israelis and for the US strategy of smashing the main supply line to the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance. Iran will ensure that that supply line will be rebuilt. Just as the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance are battered but resilient, the occupied Syrian Nation is down but not out.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... -occupied/

US, UK Preparing ‘ISIS Attacks’ on Russian Military Bases in Syria
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 28, 2024
The Cradle

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Washington has supported ISIS in the past and still uses the group’s existence as a pretext to occupy northeast Syria.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS) warned on 28 December that the US and UK are planning to use ISIS to attack Russian military bases in Syria to further destabilize the country after the fall of the Syrian government.

Russian intelligence confirmed that ISIS field commanders had obtained attack drones to carry out these attacks.

The FIS stressed that President Joe Biden’s outgoing government aims to sew chaos in West Asia “to ensure their long-term dominance in the region.”

But this is “impeded by the Russian military presence on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, which remains an important factor in regional stability, which necessitated assigning ISIS to carry out the mission,” the FIS said.

Russia maintains an air base near the coastal city of Latakia and a naval base near the coastal city of Tartus. The presence of Russian forces in Syria is now in question after the fall of the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally, on 8 December.

Damascus is now ruled by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former Al-Qaeda commander and current leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is a long-time asset of the US, Israel, and Turkiye.

Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent in Russia stated that Washington and London want to expel Russian forces from Syria while continuing to occupy the oil-rich areas in the northeast of the country. Since 2016, US forces have occupied Syrian territory east of the Euphrates River in partnership with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Washington maintains its occupation of Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS, despite previously supporting the terror group in its conquest of large swathes of eastern Syria and Western Iraq in 2014, including the city of Mosul.

Washington later partnered with the SDF to occupy the territory previously controlled by ISIS in Syria to prevent its return to Syrian government sovereignty.

The US-backed SDF holds large numbers of ISIS militants in its prisons in the city of Hasakah in northeast Syria.

The SDF released thousands of ISIS members this summer as part of an amnesty, raising fears that the US may again use the group to achieve its foreign policy goals in the region.

The SDF is currently fighting the pro-Turkish Syrian National Army (SNA) near the city of Manbij and the Tishreen Dam in northern Syria. The SDF leadership has warned that ISIS members may break out of their prisons if the SDF comes under sustained attack by the SNA and Turkish military.

“With the increasing threats that faced the city of Manbij, we relocated ISIS detainees from the prisons there to other, more secure detention facilities,” SDF leader General Mazloum Abdi told CNN on Wednesday.

“As Turkey-backed factions advanced toward the city center, cells launched attacks on detention centers holding both civilians and terrorists,” he added. “Currently, detention centers in both Raqqa and Hasakah are facing similar threats, necessitating enhanced cooperation and additional security measures to protect these sites.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... -in-syria/

******

Syria, a fallen civilization that will rise again

Despite the shock reverberating around the region there are the first signs that Syria will not die as an ancient, pluralist civilization

vanessa beeley
Dec 29

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The destruction of Syrian Christian churches in Deir Ezzor 2019 - photo: Vanessa Beeley

Mouin Rabbani on X. A thread covering the chequered history of Syria:

I started writing a thread about recent developments in Syria, and ended up delving into the country’s very long history. This first instalment attempts to summarise aspects of Syria’s history until the First World War. For those interested, I’ve here and there included references to a number of accessible texts for further reading. These are included in brackets at the end of the relevant paragraphs.

[My note - I have also added links and videos]

With the unanticipated, rapid collapse of the Syrian government between 27 November and 8 December 2024, sixty-one years of uninterrupted Ba’thist rule over the country has come to a sudden end. The repercussions are expected to be seismic, first and foremost for Syria, but also for the wider region, with potentially geopolitical ramifications. How did we get here?

Roughly the size of New England in the United States or China’s Hubei province, Syria is the product of some of the world’s oldest civilisations. Its capital, Damascus, sitting astride the Barada river, is a leading candidate for the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. Syria’s second city but at various points its most prominent urban center, Aleppo, situated along the Quwayq river, is among the few competitors for this title, and is believed to be permanently settled since the sixth millennium BCE.

Reputedly even older is Idlib, which was first settled during the ninth millennium BCE (some ten thousand years ago). Periodically abandoned and resettled, it once again re-emerged during the previous millennium as an important center of cotton, olive oil, and soap production in Ottoman Syria. Homs and Hama, sustained by the Orontes (‘Asi) river, were permanently settled during the third millennium BCE.

The ancient trading entrepôt of Palmyra (Tadmur), situated in the Syrian desert and nurtured by an oasis, is also several thousand years old. It made its enduring mark on history during the third century CE when its Queen Zenubiya, believed to be of mixed Aramean-Arab descent, rebelled against the Roman Empire then dominant throughout the Mediterranean basin. Proclaiming herself Empress, Zenubiya controlled a realm stretching from central Anatolia to Upper Egypt before being captured by a Roman expeditionary force while on her way to add Sassanid Persia to her possessions.

Over the millennia the Syrian lands spawned or nurtured a breathtaking number of civilizations, cultures, religions, sects, and cults, as well as innovations in material culture, economic relations, statecraft, sciences, and the arts. Most of these have left a mark of some sort on contemporary Syria.

[Trevor Bryce, Ancient Syria: A Three-Thousand Year History (2014) provides a good introduction to ancient Syria.

[For histories of specific cities see, for example, Colin Thubron, Mirror to Damascus (1967) and Philip Mansel, Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Great Merchant City (2016).]

To this day Syria remains among the most heterogenous of Middle Eastern states. With its population primarily Arab in composition, there are also substantial Kurdish, Turkmen, Circassian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Yezidi communities. In terms of religion its primarily Muslim population is largely but not overwhelmingly Sunni, and also contains Alawite, Ismaili, and Shia populations. In addition to a substantial number of Druze, Syria boasts a large and diverse Christian population. About half of these are Greek Orthodox, half the remainder Syriac Orthodox, slightly less than half of this remainder Armenian Orthodox, with the rest adhering to a bewildering number of denominations.

[William Dalrymple’s “From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East” (1999) provides a fascinating account of this extraordinarily rich diversity.]

The villages of Ma’lula and Jub’adin in Syria’s Qalamun mountains are the only places on earth where Aramaic, among the oldest languages that have been in continuous use, remains the native spoken language. Syria’s once-thriving Jewish population began, like other Syrians, emigrating westwards during the nineteenth century (Egypt and the Americas were primary destinations), before ultimately falling victim to nationalist and sectarian forces unleashed by Zionism and Israel. By the early 1990s the community had dwindled to approximately 4,000, most of whom left in 1992. Approximately forty per cent of Syrian Jews emigrated to Israel, with most others to the United States and Argentina.

While Syria’s various communities tend, as in Lebanon, to be concentrated in particular geographic regions, they have never lived in isolation from each other. Virtually all are to be found in the country’s major cities, and regularly in smaller population centers as well.

Boasting one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated urban cultures, Syria is also home to several thousand villages, where about half its population lives. Its Bedouin tribes are today largely settled within or on the peripheries of Syria's rural areas, and are often part of larger confederations that extend into Iraq, Jordan, and/or the Arabian Peninsula.

Although the term “Syria” is generally believed to be derived from Assyria (‘Ashur), and its territory was under Assyrian rule or domination for extended periods, the latter was in fact centred in Mesopotamia. Whether “Syria” was initially employed to distinguish the lands west of the Euphrates from Assyria in Mesopotamia, or for some other reason remains unclear.

Over time Syria or the Syrian lands, what is often called Greater Syria, came to denote the area encompassing modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, parts of Turkey, and in some cases Cyprus as well. In Arabic, Bilad al-Sham refers to Greater Syria, while Al-Sham can refer to either Syria or, colloquially, Damascus (formally known as Dimashq).

Situated in the Fertile Crescent, Syria is among the regions where animal domestication, agriculture, and settled life made their first appearance. Its first civilizations spoke a variety of Indo-European and Semitic languages. Among the latter, Amorite-speaking tribes, city-states, and kingdoms established themselves in much of Syria during the third millenium BCE, to be followed by Aramaic-speaking successors who dominated much of central Syria, including Damascus.

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[My article about the theft of Syrian Arabian horses during the first proxy terrorist invasion of Syria can be read here ]

[The following video is a history of the Syrian Arabian horse by breeder and historian Basil Jadaan] (Video at link)

With its lands extensively cultivated, and situated along vital maritime and overland trade routes including the Silk Road, Syria was a source of great wealth for its various rulers. Predictably, all or parts of it was during ancient times repeatedly conquered by regional powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Alexander the Great, and others. They sometimes replaced local rulers with their own, and occasionally went so far as to deport existing elites, but more often retained existing leaders as vassals in exchange for tribute, soldiers, and a variety of goods and services.

During the final three centuries BCE Syria was part of the Hellenistic Seleucid empire, which established its capital in Antioch. During this period the Greek language and culture, augmented by Greek immigrants, spread throughout its territory and particularly among its elites. This influence would remain for centuries after the Seleucids’ demise, continue during the similarly Hellenistic Byzantine era, and persist long after Syria came under Muslim rule during the seventh century.

In 83 BCE the Seleucids were supplanted by Tigran the Great of Armenia, who two decades later lost Syria to Rome. The latter annexed it in 64 BCE in an effort to put an end to persistent civil conflict among various claimants to Syria’s wealth and power, establish its own pre-eminence, and keep the Parthians, whose empire was expanding westward from Persia, at bay.

Syria was among the Roman Empire’s most productive provinces, which helps explain why a number of its nobles achieved senior positions in Rome including, on several occasions, the supreme office of Emperor. Julia Domna, matriarch of the Severan imperial dynasty which ruled Rome during the late first and early decades of the second centuries CE, hailed from a wealthy Syrian Arab priestly family in Emesa (Homs) devoted to the Arab-Roman sun god Elagabal.

In addition to herself achieving the position of Empress and wielding considerable influence, two of her sons, and several other relatives, became emperors themselves. Emperor Philip I (Marcus Julius Philippus), also known as Philip the Arab, and who ruled during the mid-second century, hailed from what is today Shahba in the Suwayda region abutting the Jordanian border. Philip’s tolerance of Christianity would later produce disputed accounts that it was he rather than Constantine in the following century who was the first Roman emperor to embrace the new religion.

During the Byzantine era that commenced during the fourth century, the wealth of its Syrian province was rivalled only by that of Egypt. According to some historians, during this period “Syrian” came to specifically denote its Aramaic-speaking Christians, as distinct from their Hellenistic, primarily urban neighbours. Like Greek, Aramaic remained in widespread use, particularly in rural areas, until well into the Islamic era, during which both were gradually supplanted by Arabic. With few exceptions, Aramaic became a liturgical rather than spoken language.

[The following is a post from Telegram Channel Enemy Watch. Aramaic is still taught in the Syrian Christian town of Maaloula. Now under attack, again, by the HTS-affiliated sectarian forces.]

> Syrian Christian Abu George has passed away due to heart attack:
>
> He was the one whose videos we shared. He was very poor, and his farm was looted by terrorists while his grandson was beaten in front of him by Israeli-Turkish terrorists (aligned with Julani’s group).
>
> Abu George, a native of Maaloula, was reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Western Neo-Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ (A), when the attack occurred.
>
> This is what Israeli jihadists did to him and his family just two days ago.

(Video at link)
>
Just as Roman control of Syria had been challenged by its Persian Parthian rival, so it was between their Byzantine and Sassanian successors. Constantinople’s emperors appointed the Ghassanids, an Arab Christian tribe that had migrated north from Yemen after the Ma’rib dam burst during the second century, as rulers of over much of Greater Syria and defenders of its eastern frontiers and associated trade routes.

The Ghassanid Kingdom, which emerged during the early third century and made its capital initially in Jabiya in the Golan Heights but later moved it to Bosra southeast of Der’a in the Hawran, would last for more than three centuries until the Muslim conquest of Syria. Many of its battles would be fought not against the Sassanians but rather the latter’s Lakhmid clients.

The Lakhmids had established an Arab Christian kingdom encompassing southern Iraq and the eastern Arabian peninsula. Unlike the Hellenized Ghassanids, who shared the faith and theological doctrines of Constantinople, the Lakhmids belonged to the rival Church of the East and were aligned with the Zoroastrian Sassanids, who supported the Church.

The numerous, mutually debilitating wars fought between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and by the Ghassanids and Lakhmids on their behalf, form the crucial background to the rapid expansion of the religion and polity that emerged in the Hijaz during the seventh century. From this springboard, the Islamic Caliphate would expand its dominions from southern France to the Indian subcontinent and eastern fringes of Central Asia in little over 100 years.

[Juan Cole in his landmark Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (2020), explores how this imperial conflict, as well as Muhammad’s journeys to Damascus as a merchant on behalf of his future first wife, the businesswoman Khadija, and his interaction with Christians and Jews in Syria, helped inform his religious development.]

As noted above, Arabs and Arabic-speakers were already part of Syria’s demographic mosaic long before it came under Arab-Muslim rule during the 630s, and were already well-established in the areas of Palmyra, Homs, and the Hawran. Indeed, in the campaign led by the Muslim military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid to conquer Syria, whether in the decisive 636 Battle of Yarmuk or others, its main defenders were the Arab Ghassanids, who had already been there for centuries, and had been preceded by others.

[For an early account of the Muslim conquest of Greater Syria, see Hamada Hassanein and Jens Scheiner, The Early Muslim Conquest of Syria: An English Translation of Al-Azdi’s Futh al-Sham (2021).]

Such realities present somewhat of a challenge to those who recently discovered “Arab colonialism” in Syria and other Arab states in order to deflect from Israel’s indisputable (and formerly self-proclaimed) colonial practices in Arab – including Syrian – territory. If Arabs were indeed colonial usurpers in Syria, how do Israel flunkies explain that it was also Arabs – in the form of the Ghassanids – who led what they would describe as the “anti-colonial resistance” against them?

The silly polemics deployed to exonerate Israel’s contemporary practices additionally fail to account for the reality that after the Muslim conquest Syria’s existing population was, in contrast to the Palestinians or Syrians of the Golan Heights under Israeli rule, neither expelled nor exterminated. Evidence that Arab immigrants to Syria ever outnumbered the local population is also non-existent. Rather, and over the course of several centuries, the region’s Aramaic and Greek-speaking majority came to adopt Arabic as their lingua franca and eventually as their native tongue.

During the same period most of its overwhelmingly Christian inhabitants and many of its Jews eventually, and for a range of reasons, adopted the religion of Islam as their own. Rather than being excluded by the new rulers Syria’s existing elites were, whether or not they converted to Islam, often incorporated into the new polity and would eventually come to dominate the new elite. Contrary to caricature, the forced conversions employed to Christianize Europe were rare in Muslim Syria.

(Parenthetically, Israel flunkies habitually claim that the term “Palestine” disappeared with the Romans and didn’t re-appear until the British “invented” it during the 1920s. In fact, and among many other examples, one of the Caliphate’s military districts was named “Filastin”. Rather, it was “Judea” that fell into permanent disuse, even as Jewish communities remained in these territories).

The second Islamic Caliphate, that of the Umayyads (661-750) established its capital in Damascus. Drawing heavily on Byzantine traditions on matters ranging from administration to architecture, as well as influences from further afield, and fusing these with their own, the Umayyads developed institutions, patterns of rule, and new approaches in fields such as commerce and science that would in many respects serve as a template for those who succeeded them.

[For a standard introduction to the Umayyad Caliphate see G.R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate 661-750 (1986).]

After the Umayyads were deposed by the Abbasids, the center of gravity of the Islamic empire moved either eastwards to Baghdad or westwards to Cairo, which unlike Damascus were new cities. Syria would once again rise to prominence during the twelfth century when the Muslim military commander and first Sultan of the Ayyubid dynasty, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), united Egypt and Syria under his rule.

Of Kurdish origin, Saladin hailed not from Syria where Kurds already had a longstanding presence, but rather from Iraq. Saladin would launch his final campaign to defeat the Crusaders from Syria, and in 1187 liberated the Holy City from their control. His name synonymous with chivalry on account of real as well as mythical conduct attributed to him, Saladin lies buried in Damascus’ imposing Umayyad Mosque complex, where according to Christian and Muslim tradition the head of John the Baptist also lies buried.

[Amin Maalouf, best known for historical novels such as Samarkand and Leo Africanus, has also produced a fascinating work of history about this period, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1989), drawn primarily from contemporaneous accounts.]

During the thirteenth century Syria was once again dominated by rulers based in Egypt, in this case the Mamluks, a caste of slave-soldiers. In a number of battles in Ain Jalut in Palestine, Homs in Syria, and in the Orontes (‘Asi) river valley over the course of half a century, the Mamluks successfully kept the Mongols, who had in 1258 sacked Baghdad, at bay.

In 1516, after a decisive battle at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo, the nascent Ottoman Empire dealt a death blow to the Mamluk Sultanate and added most of the Arab world, from Basra to Algiers, to its Anatolian and Balkan dominions (Morocco, Sudan, Oman, and the interior of the Arabian Peninsula were the main regions that did not come under Ottoman rule). While Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz along with Jerusalem held the greatest significance on account of their religious status, Damascus and Aleppo together with Cairo would form the most important cities in the new Ottoman domains.

The initial Ottoman province of Syria, corresponding to its Mamluk predecessor, comprised much of Greater Syria, and was governed from Damascus. That said, Aleppo was for much of the Ottoman period the more prominent and wealthy urban center. Improvements in security and administration along with widespread public works and expanding trade networks produced substantial economic growth and increases in agricultural output throughout Ottoman Syria. Persistent conflict between rival empires based in Anatolia and Persia continued, this time between the Ottomans and Safavid Iran, but to Syria’s good fortune their wars were primarily fought in Iraq.

[The distinguished Syrian historian Abdel-Karim Rafeq, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 93, published one of the seminal studies of Ottoman Syria, The Province of Damascus, 1723-1783 (1966). Jane Hathaway, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800 (2020), extensively discusses Syria/Greater Syria.]

Prior to the nineteenth century Ottoman rule in its Arab provinces was fairly decentralised. Governors and other senior officials were directly appointed by Istanbul, while revenue was primarily generated by tax farming, in which the right to collect taxes from particular lands, goods, or trades was auctioned by the state in exchange for fixed payments to the treasury.

The Ottomans, who until the nineteenth century related to those under their rule as subjects rather than citizens, also organized society according to religious affiliation. Muslims held a legally privileged position. With respect to religious minorities, the Sultan would appoint/confirm a religious leader from each of the various communities. These leaders were responsible for organising the affairs of their community in accordance with its own laws, traditions, and courts, and for ensuring the community’s loyalty to Sultan and state.

While hardly a recipe for equality, which arrived only during the second half of the nineteenth century, it allowed for considerable autonomy which served the interests both of these communities and of the state. On the whole, Syrian religious minorities and Jews in particular fared much better during this period than their European counterparts.

The nineteenth century was a period of profound change and disruption in the Middle East. An Egyptian rebellion against Ottoman suzerainty led by Muhammad Ali Pasha, its Albanian-born governor who is often considered the founder of modern Egypt, saw Greater Syria fall under Egyptian rule from 1831-1840. The effectiveness of the Egyptian administration led by Muhammad Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, and particularly its tax and conscription regimes led to widespread opposition.

This culminated in a peasant rebellion that erupted in Palestine in 1834, and quickly spread to other sectors of society and as far as the province of Aleppo. The Egyptian interlude ultimately strengthened the population’s Ottoman loyalties as well as local identities.

[Incidentally, Israeli scholars Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, in their Palestinians: The Making of a People (1998) trace the formation of a distinct Palestinian national identity to this rebellion, which long preceded both the Zionist movement and the British Mandate]

A combination of growing European influence in Ottoman affairs coupled with inter-European rivalries, together with a series of administrative and constitutional reforms emanating from Istanbul designed to consolidate central rule and modernize the Empire, during this period helped transform largely inconsequential sectarian distinctions into tensions and ultimately violent conflict.

In 1840, during the waning days of Egyptian rule, in what is known as the Damascus Affair, the city’s Jews were subject to a blood libel after an Italian monk and his Muslim assistant disappeared. Incited by the French consul, the city’s Egyptian governor Sharif Pasha imprisoned and tortured to death a number of prominent Jews before extracting the required confessions, which in turn led to a rampage through the Jewish quarter by a Christian-Muslim mob.

When Ottoman rule was restored later that year the authorities publicly denounced the blood libel as a fabricated slander against the Jews, released the surviving prisoners, and executed Sharif Pasha.

Two decades later the city’s Christians would meet a more calamitous fate. Amidst Franco-British rivalry that saw London and Paris not only sponsor different communities but also seek to define and promote their interests, a peasant uprising in Mount Lebanon in 1859, initially by Maronite Christian peasants against their Maronite landlords, descended into sectarian warfare that primarily pitted the British-sponsored Druze against French-sponsored Maronites.

The unprecedented sectarian slaughter, fomented by a combination of local and foreign agitation, spread to Damascus, where in July 1860 some 5,000 of its Christians were massacred over the course of eight days in an orgy of violence that also left many of their properties and institutions in ruins.

In sharp contrast to the Ottoman authorities’ conduct during the subsequent Armenian genocide, the Sublime Porte on this occasion intervened decisively, imposed accountability and reparations, and restored the co-existence that had for so long dominated relations between the region’s various communities. [Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (1995) and particularly Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2024) provide excellent accounts of this traumatic episode.

[Indispensable for a broader discussion of these themes is Ussami Makdisi’s Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019).]

During the latter half of the nineteenth century intensified European political and economic encroachment in the Middle East; the accelerating centralization of Ottoman governance; the growing dominance of Turks in administering the Empire‘s Arab provinces – perceived as transforming the multinational empire into a Turkish state; the dissemination of European concepts of nation and nationalism; Ottoman territorial losses in the Balkans, Caucasus, and North Africa; and a revival of interest in the Arabic language and culture known as the Nahda, or Arab Awakening, laid the basis for the emergence of Arab nationalism.

Although the Arab nationalist movement had prominent Christian leaders from the outset, the caricature of an ideology imported into the region by Western missionaries and pioneered by Arab Christians in order to replace Islam as the region’s unifying bond with an Arabism that would provide them with full equality does not hold up well against reality.

As C. Ernest Dawn has demonstrated, for example, Christians were in fact underrepresented among the first generation of Syrian Arab nationalists relative to their proportion of the general population, and most of this generation were graduates of Ottoman state schools rather than missionary institutions. Additionally, Islamic modernists also significantly contributed to its development. Not all forms of Arab nationalism were secular, and those that were often acknowledged Islam’s prominence in the region’s culture.

[For a study of the development of Arab nationalism in Syria during this period see Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860-1920 (1984).]

Some Arab nationalists took their inspiration from German romantic nationalism. Sati’ al-Husri, for example, who was born into a Syrian Muslim family, promoted the view that the Arabs had been a people united by bonds of blood, soil, and language long before the advent of Islam, and saw little room for any Muslim dimension in Arab national identity. Shakib Arslan, who was born into a Druze family (and is the grandfather of Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt), by contrast viewed Islam as the central component of Arabism and the basis for nationalism.

In other words, like its counterparts elsewhere nationalism in the Arab world came in multiple forms, some of them contradictory or even incompatible.

[William L. Cleveland has written detailed biographies of both individuals mentioned: The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (1972), and Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (1985).]

Syria and particularly Damascus emerged as important centers in the development of Arab nationalism, complemented by Syrian émigrés based in Egypt. The activities of these advocates, who tended to focus their aspirations on Greater Syria and Iraq (and at times Egypt and the Hijaz), and tended to exclude North Africa from their calculations (Arslan was an exception in this regard), took more organised forms in secret societies such as al-Fatat and, for military officers, al-‘Ahd. But until the First World War their ideas gained only limited traction, with most politically-engaged Syrians either remaining loyal to the empire to which they had belonged for four centuries, or advocating greater regional autonomy and political freedoms within it.

The Great War changed everything. Most importantly, the Ottoman Empire was defeated, lost all its Arab provinces by 1918, and in 1922 ceased to exist.

https://substack.com/redirect/1da9c7f7- ... 679Y4OEysA

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Syria's de facto ruler says it will take four years to hold elections

Ahmad al-Sharaa said it will take three years to write a new constitution

News Desk

DEC 29, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: Wassim Nasr, France 24)

Syria’s de facto ruler, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), stated on 29 December that organizing elections and writing a constitution for the country may take years.

Following the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December, Sharaa announced the establishment of a caretaker government that would last for three months.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya on Sunday, Sharaa stated, “The process of writing the constitution may take about three years, and we look forward to a constitution that lasts for the longest possible period, and this is a difficult and lengthy task.”

“Organizing elections may take four years; any valid elections will require a comprehensive population census,” Sharaa told the Saudi news channel.

Sharaa has appointed several fellow HTS members as ministers in the caretaker government, including ministers of defense, justice, and intelligence.

Many held posts in the Salvation Government, which Sharaa established to rule Idlib after HTS conquered the governorate in northwest Syria with CIA assistance in 2015.

Sharaa stated that the appointment of the new ministers and other state officials was part of a necessary stage that is “preparatory to a longer interim government.”


Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani) said in an interview with Al-Arabiya that writing a new Syrian constitution could take up to 3 years, while organizing elections could take up to 4 years.

He claimed that "liberating Syria guarantees the security of the region and the… pic.twitter.com/Fowqbb6wGp

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) December 29, 2024


A delay in holding elections may allow Sharaa to consolidate control of Syria and assist him and his supporters in remaining in power for a long time.

Idlib is conservative religiously and a center of Salafist ideology in Syria, resembling the sectarian Wahhabi religious doctrine of Saudi Arabia.

Sharaa added that, “The Idlib experience is not suitable for all of Syria, but it is a nucleus.”

He said that it would take roughly one year before Syrians feel radical changes in government services.

Sharaa also announced that HTS, the former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, would be dissolved at the upcoming National Dialogue Conference.

The HTS leader stated that neighboring Saudi Arabia will play a large role in Syria’s future.

“I am proud of everything Saudi Arabia has done for Syria, and Saudi Arabia has major investment opportunities in Syria,” Sharaa said.

“Liberating Syria guarantees the security of the region and the Gulf for the next 50 years," he added.

Sheraa also explained that his government is in talks with the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to resolve the crisis in northeastern Syria and to include them in the government's armed forces.

The SDF is currently battling a Turkish-backed faction, the Syrian National Army (SNA), in areas of northern Syria, including Manbij and the Tishreen Dam. Alongside occupying US forces, the SDF controls Syria's major oil fields.

Sharaa stressed that the Kurds are an integral part of Syrian society, emphasizing that there will be no division of the country.

He also expressed his hope that incoming US President Donald Trump would lift the US sanctions, which have crushed Syria's economy and impoverished millions of Syrians in the past decade.

https://thecradle.co/articles/syrias-de ... -elections

Syrian minorities under threat as security forces carry out raids against 'remnants of Assad militias'

Reports of sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing of Alawites and Christians continue to emerge as Ahmad al-Sharaa's new government seeks to exert control over the country

News Desk

DEC 29, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: The New Arab)
The new Syrian government led by former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani is carrying out raids and arrests against members of Bashar al-Assad’s fallen government amid reports of sectarian killings of minorities by forces associated with the new government.

The state-run Syrian news agency SANA reported on Saturday that “a number of remnants of the Assad militias” had been arrested and their weapons and ammunition confiscated in Syria’s coastal Latakia region.

Security forces have also been pursuing members of the former government in the regions of Tartous, Homs, and Hama in recent days.

The media office of Syria’s interim interior ministry said the campaign was only launched after members of the former government had failed “to hand over their weapons and settle their affairs” within a specific time frame.

Videos and reports circulating on social media indicate that former soldiers and civilians are also being expelled from their homes or abducted and executed by HTS militants for simply being Alawite.

The HTS-led Military Operations Command in Syria has set up "reconciliation centers" for ex-Assad government personnel to surrender weapons and receive temporary IDs, but reports indicate that numerous individuals have been abducted and found dead, even after having given up their weapons.


Rami Abdulrahman, director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), said he received reports that government security forces were carrying out random arrests of supporters of the former Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad.

“We need transitional justice, not revenge justice,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “The new Syria should be a state of justice, democracy, equality, and law.”

SOHR has also documented at least 85 murder crimes across Syria that have led to 144 fatalities.


At the same time, Christian sources report that large numbers of Christians are fleeing the ancient Christian town of Maaloula, where Aramaic, the ancient language of Jesus, is still spoken.

The World Council of Arameans (WCA) reports that Maaloula’s Christian population has dwindled from 1,000 to fewer than 200 since the new government took power and now “faces an alarming escalation of threats, gunfire attacks, and expulsion.”

WCA reported that militants from the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), led by Abu Amsha, are “raiding homes, intimidating families, and issuing orders for Christians to leave Maaloula, applying relentless pressure to force the last Arameans to abandon their homeland.”


The WCA added that extremist militants attacked a Christian man’s farm near Maaloula. After the man returned fire in self-defense and killed one attacker, extremists are now demanding his surrender and openly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Maaloula’s remaining Aramean Christian population.


On 18 December, the Washington Post reported that some HTS members were carrying out sectarian revenge attacks.

“Over the past week, Washington Post reporters saw evidence of extrajudicial killings in Damascus and Hama province, and verified two videos showing fighters executing alleged members of Syria’s state security forces,” the paper wrote.

In one video verified by the Post, a “militant kicks the bloodied face of an apparently lifeless man on the floor. Another man with his hands and feet bound is kicked in the face behind him.”

Another video verified by The Post “shows a fighter in military garb conducting a roadside execution of two men.

“These are pigs; officers from Assad forces were trying to escape,” the fighter says to the camera.

https://thecradle.co/articles/syrian-mi ... d-militias
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 31, 2024 12:43 pm

AS’AD AbuKHALIL: Six Scenarios for Syria
December 29, 2024

The situation of Syria is like the chaos of Libya but there are many more actors (local and external) operating, making it difficult to foresee what will happen.

Image
The Umayyad Mosque. Damascus, Syria. (Vyacheslav Argenberg/Wikimedia Commons)

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

It is naive to assume that the current regime in Syria will remain in place — as it is — going forward.

Syria is now in a state of uneasy transition and the political-military situation will remain in flux as long as the conflicts between the various armed and civic groups are not resolved.

We have seen during the age of the Arab uprisings that the collapse of a regime does not necessarily produce a stable or a democratic government. In Tunisia, the democratic transition was concluded when the current president decided to exclude the Islamists from power and to rule as a despot.

In Egypt, the UAE and Saudi regimes helped install a military government headed by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to end the elected rule of the Muslim brotherhood. The conflicts in these countries are not purely the outcome of internal developments, but often reflect regional conflicts, conspiracies and competition.

Turkey and Qatar support the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, while Saudi Arabia and UAE support their ouster and exclusion from government. This will be central in understanding what comes next in Syria.

Israel and the U.S. are close to the Saudi-UAE camps but are also close to Qatar; and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to work well with the U.S. and even avoid pushing a radical line against Israel.

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June 16, 2012: Street in Cairo during second round of presidential elections, which Muslim Brother’s candidate Mohamed Morsi won. (Jonathan Rashad, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt did not attempt to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel and even allowed the continuation of the military-intelligence coordination with Israel.

Furthermore, after a meeting at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in Washington, Rashid Ghanoushi, head of the Islamists of Tunisia, complied with U.S. wishes and froze a push in the Tunisian parliament to criminalize normalization with Israel.

Syria is a more complex political and military situation for several reasons.

The U.S. maintains an occupation of sizable territory in Syria. Whenever the U.S. keeps troops in a country that operates outside the control of the local government, that the country (or a chunk of it at least) is under U.S. occupation.

In Iraq, the U.S. maintains a few thousand troops, but it continues to wield tremendous influence over the government and rejects parliamentary calls for the withdrawal of those troops.

We learned in recent weeks that the size of the U.S. military force in Syria is double what the public has been told, and the presence even of a small military contingent requires a sizable military suppor force in the region.

The U.S. is not only fighting ISIS (while the U.S. does not give a timetable or a roadmap for its unending fight against ISIS) but it also provides support for militias that are under its control in Syria.

The U.S. preaches state monopoly of the use of force in the Middle East except where U.S. surrogate militias operate in a country.

Turkish & Israeli Roles

Turkey has a strong military presence in Syria and — like the U.S. — can easily influence developments on the ground, making things easier or more difficult for whatever government that may arise in Syria. Turkey’s military and intelligence intervention was key to the ouster of Bashar Al-Assad.

Israel has expanded its occupation of Syrian territory and has been conducting hundreds of bombing raids inside the country after the collapse of the regime. Like the other actors, Israel wants to shape the orientation and policy of the future government and seeks to prevent a radical or democratic regime from emerging.

The regional conflict has not been decisively resolved yet.

So far, the Turkish-Qatari-Israeli-U.S. axis has scored major successes in Syria (thanks to their support or indulgence of the former Al-Qa`idah militia which now runs the country) but Russia and Iran may still try to either take revenge or enhance their regional power status.

Russia lost a major strategic military presence inside the country, while Iran lost the direct link to Hizbullah, which passed through Syria.

More than in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, there are many militias operating in Syria, and they all have external sponsors. Outside powers will be involved in the formation of the new government in Syria.

The situation of Syria is like the chaos of Libya but there are many more actors (local and external) operating there.

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Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan in September 2023. (Sergey Guneev, RIA Novosti, President of Russia)

The Six Scenarios

While it is not clear how the local and regional conflicts will affect the emergence of a new and potentially stable government in Syria, it is possible to consider these scenarios.

1. Libyan Model

Syria may very well follow the example of Libya. Like Libya, the regional conflicts between those who support the Islamists and those who abhor them may play out for many years to come.

The Obama administration promised with great excitement a new democracy in Libya and an end to tyrannical rule after the NATO assault in 2011.

In Syria, the various Islamist militias have a history of bloodshed that may not end just because Hay’at Tahrir Sham (HTS) has taken control of the central government — at least formally.

The size of the new government’s militia is not large and it may face military challenges from various fronts. If Syria were to follow the scenario of Libya, it would mean that Russia, Turkey, Qatar, UAE and the U.S. will all be involved. It would also bring in Israel, which harbors keen interest in establishing a client regime in Damascus.

The massive Israeli bombing of Syria since Assad’s fall was intended to demolish Syria’s military infrastructure and intimidate the new government. HTS quickly signaled it has no agenda against Israel, and does not concern itself—not even verbally—with the aim of liberating Syrian territory from Israeli occupation.

The potential for disintegration and fragmentation is particularly high because Syria is far less homogeneous (ethnically and religiously) than Libya. The crackdown by the new government against Alawites has triggered outrage and calls for self-defense in the Alawite region.

2. Military Coup

The UAE and Saudi Arabia may very well arrange for a military coup to install a client military despot, like Sisi in Egypt.

The UAE was instrumental in the Egyptian coup of 2013 and its media have been alone in expressing alarm regarding the new regime in Damascus. After all, the UAE’s ruler was in close contact with Assad to the very end and was steering him away from Iran and the “axis of resistance.”

In fact, since Assad’s rapprochement with the UAE began he had been restricting the movement and activities of Iranian and Hizbullah military officers. This coup scenario would work to establish a regional alliance of republican despotic regimes tied to the Saudis and the Emiratis.

Of the two, the UAE has thus far been more successful in imposing its political and military will in Somalia, Yemen (south), Libya, Sudan (with the RSF) and Egypt.

An installed military regime could easily be integrated into the Abraham accords once the Saudis reach agreement with Israel on a peace treaty. The problem with this scenario is that the UAE is the chief opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region that wields influence in Syria.

That would mean imposing brute force against them just like in Egypt, which had been the Brotherhood’s base before and after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

3. Democracy

Image
Voting in the 2021 Syrian presidential election. (Habib Kamran/Wikimedia Commons)

The new government would heed the call of many Syrians and begin a transitional period in which free elections are held and a new constitution is drafted. That would lead to the formation of a democratic government, something that Syria has not experienced since the 1950s when the democratic order was very flawed and subject to outside intervention and manipulation.

This democratic scenario would alarm both Israel and the U.S. who are keenly aware that people— left to their own devices – -would not necessarily serve Western and Israeli interests. Despotic rule is always preferable to the West and Israel. The U.S. hasn’t yet lifted its cruel sanctions against the Syrian people (though it did lift the $10 million bounty on the HTS leader’s head) because Washington can use it to blackmail any future Syrian government.

4. HTS Dictatorial Rule

The HTS would monopolize political power and rule alone disregarding demands for wider representation. Such a scenario would alarm religious minorities and women given the ideological origins of the new rulers. The U.S. and Israel may favor this scenario if the alternative is an uncontrollable democracy near Palestine.

5. Syria Breaks Up

Syria could lose its territorial integrity and become a patch of semi-independent, sectarian enclaves where the Druze would govern their own province, and the Alawites and Kurds would do the same ad so on. This scenario would be too alarming for Turkey, which is willing to use military force to crush an independent Kurdish statelet inside Syria.

The West and Israel would favor such an outcome; after all, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken advocated dividing Iraq into three enclaves after the American invasion of 2003. If this scenario arises, Northern Lebanon (Tripoli and Akkar) may ask to join the Sunni enclave.

6. Restoration

The least likely scenario entails the restoration of the old regime with the assistance of Iran and Hizbullah. Members of the “axis of resistance” are furious at Assad for abandoning power so quickly; they are also outraged over revelations of his close coordination with the UAE to distance Syria from Iran.

Iran and Hizbullah have been weakened and won’t risk their forces to defend the ousted regime if Assad indicated he wanted to return. Their intervention in Syria on his behalf would trigger Israel targeting them.

It is most difficult to predict the political future of Syria. It has never been an easy country to govern and the nightmarish experience of living under the Assad regime for decades embittered many Syrians.

But the ideology the new rulers of Syria brings is too alien to a society that is diverse and has a history of secularist tendencies. There are many claimants to power inside the country, and a multiplicity of outside powers who want a piece of Syria (figuratively or literally).

Whatever happens, the next phase will not be peaceful.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/29/s ... for-syria/

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The scramble for Syria: Regional powers jostle for influence

Assad’s fall has left regional powers – Turkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – racing to redefine their roles in Syria, competing to win favor with the interim government, reviving old rivalries, and reckoning with the unintended consequences of their own past interventions that led to Syria’s destruction.


Mawadda Iskandar

DEC 30, 2024

Image
Photo Credit: The Cradle

The Syrian situation remains shrouded in ambiguity. Despite efforts by the rebel-led interim leaders to seek a fresh start focused on ‘zeroing problems,’ embracing inclusivity, and delaying decisions on critical issues, the arrangement of Syria’s future that is shaped by Turkish–Qatari sponsors and US allies faces daunting challenges.

The stakes are high, as this pivotal phase will determine the country’s future governance and alliances. Against this backdrop, how do key regional players interpret these transformations, and what positions are they likely to adopt?

The rapid fall of Syrian governorates to armed factions led by Ahmad al-Sharaa (commonly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani), who has rebranded himself from a terrorist figure to a modernist leader, caught the region by surprise. The de facto leader's recent declaration that “Organizing elections may take four years; any valid elections will require a comprehensive population census” adds to the uncertainty surrounding the political system set to replace decades of authoritarian rule.

States emerging from a 13-year estrangement with former president Bashar al-Assad had not anticipated his abrupt departure. Initially, their instinctive response was to support Syria's unity under its existing leadership. However, the shock of 8 December reverberated beyond Syria's borders, compelling regional powers to reassess their positions.

Rethinking GCC and Arab reconciliation

The sudden overthrow of the Syrian government raised critical questions: Had the Persian Gulf and Arab states rushed their reconciliation with Assad? The ‘opposition’s’ capture of Damascus and Assad’s subsequent flight to Moscow exposed the fragility of their strategy.

Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, quickly pivoted to engage with the new leadership. Hours after the government’s fall, Saudi Arabia issued a statement that it was “monitoring the rapid developments in the brotherly country of Syria and expressing its satisfaction with the positive steps taken to ensure the safety of the Syrian people, prevent bloodshed, and preserve Syria’s state institutions and resources.”

Just days before the rebel takeover, the UAE’s President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan said in a phone conversation with his then-Syrian counterpart that his country “stands with the Syrian state and supports it in combating terrorism, extending its sovereignty, unifying its territories, and achieving stability.”

The day after the fall of Damascus, Abu Dhabi reiterated its support for Syria’s unity and integrity but also “called on all Syrian parties to prioritize wisdom during this critical juncture in Syria's history, in a manner that fulfills the aspirations and ambitions of all segments of the Syrian population.”

Egypt, undoubtedly experiencing a ripple effect with great intensity, stressed the importance of unity, prioritizing a comprehensive political process to achieve stability and consensus.

Coinciding with their geopolitical realignment, the media in the regional countries underwent a notable shift in its narrative of events. Initially, it echoed the Syrian government's perspective, adopting its terminology by referring to the armed groups as ‘terrorists.’ Over time, however, this language evolved; the media began describing these groups as the ‘armed opposition.’ Eventually, the fall of the Syrian government was framed as the ‘long-awaited fall of the government.’

Regional concerns for Syria’s future

The unfolding events have spurred critical concerns: What form of government will emerge in Syria? What will happen to factions with a history of extremism? How will minorities and former government loyalists manage?

For Riyadh, Damascus’s collapse was a blow to its geopolitical calculus, leaving the kingdom scrambling to redefine its approach – yet it also presents an irresistible opportunity to undermine further the Axis of Resistance led by rivaling Iran. It swiftly dispatched a delegation to meet with the new leadership under Sharaa, signaling a pragmatic shift.

The UAE, cautious of the opposition's Islamist inclinations, also approached the emerging administration to explore potential cooperation, while safeguarding against the strengthening of Turkish and Qatari influence.

Egypt, grappling with internal political fragility, avoided direct engagement, limiting its involvement to diplomatic overtures. Jordan, equally apprehensive about regional instability, convened an emergency meeting of the Arab Ministerial Contact Committee on Syria on 14 December.

Participants, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt, agreed on “Supporting the role of the UN envoy to Syria and requesting the UN Secretary-General to provide all necessary resources to begin working on establishing a UN mission to assist Syria in supporting and overseeing the transitional process, and to aid the Syrian people in achieving a political process led by Syrians in accordance with Resolution 2254.”

Competing agendas

Hadi Qubaisi, director of the Union Center for Research and Development, highlights divergent regional priorities, telling The Cradle:

“Saudi Arabia is trying to have a role in Syria because it had a role in the Syrian war and has Wahhabi influence, the influence of sheikhs, extremist forces, and some military forces. Therefore it seeks to obtain a share of the Turkish success, so that Turkiye does not monopolize the entire Syrian opportunity. It also wants to be a partner in arranging the Syrian situation on the economic and political level, so that this achievement and this Syrian environment do not become a platform for raising problems that affect Saudi Arabia, especially in Jordan.”

As for the UAE, Qubaisi believes that it “views what happened as a Turkish and Qatari achievement, and considers that this achievement should not continue and tends to weaken and sabotage it. And because it has influence in the Kurdish regions and did not have influence among the opposition during the previous war, it will try to make the construction of this new structure more difficult and complicated.”

The researcher and political writer adds that Egypt “sees this climate, which wears an Islamic garb to a large extent formally, as an influential factor on the Brotherhood, especially since it is going through a state of great weakness on the economic and internal political levels, and fears the spread of a behavioral infection from Syria to Egypt.”

Stability and self-interest

Who will ultimately shape Syria's future? While the internal dynamics of a fragmented social fabric and conflicting political allegiances will play a central role, external interventions remain a significant factor. Supportive states like Turkiye and Qatar will use their influence carefully, while others, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan, will weigh their involvement to protect their strategic interests.

However, Qubaisi argues that Sharaa's leadership, thus far marked by pragmatism, aims to neutralize potential conflicts with foreign powers by fostering balanced relationships. The clashing agendas of northern (Turkiye and Qatar) and southern (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan) coalitions may lead to intensified competition on Syrian soil, potentially entangling Kurdish factions in broader geopolitical rivalries.

Several key factors will determine Syria’s future direction and the stability of West Asia. First, the satisfaction of regional powers with their respective positions, influence, and gains in the new political system will play a critical role. Each state will assess whether its strategic interests are being adequately addressed and if it can maintain its foothold in the evolving order.

Second, the level of confidence that these states have in Syria’s long-term stability will heavily influence their engagement. Any signs of prolonged unrest or governance failure could prompt external actors to reconsider their involvement or escalate their interventions.

Finally, the degree to which cooperation among key regional players – Turkiye, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – aligns with their shared interest in maintaining regional security will be decisive. If these Sunni-majority countries can find common ground and view Syria’s stability as mutually beneficial, the chances of a peaceful transition and rebuilding process will significantly improve.

While Ankara and Doha celebrate the demise of the Syrian Arab Republic as a political triumph, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt remain wary of the potential resurgence of Islamist movements within their own borders.

Islamist movements – many of which these same countries previously armed or supported, either directly or indirectly, as part of their geopolitical strategies during the Syrian conflict – may now represent a case of chickens coming home to roost or the unintended consequences of blowback.

HTS appoints foreign extremists to top positions in new Syrian army

More than 40,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries traveled to Syria during the war to fight for UN-designated terror groups, including the Nusra Front and ISIS

News Desk

DEC 30, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: Stringer/Reuters)
The interim Syrian government has promoted seven foreign fighters from extremist groups formerly linked to Al-Qaeda to the ranks of lieutenant and colonel as part of a series of promotions announced on 30 December.

The Syrian Defense Ministry announced the promotions in a letter signed by Ahmad al-Sharaa (previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani), who became Syria’s new de facto leader and commander-in-chief of the Syrian armed forces after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government earlier this month.

Sharaa formerly led the Al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front, which he founded in Syria under the direction of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2011. The Nusra Front later changed its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

According to the US State Department, more than 40,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries traveled to Syria to fight for UN-designated terror groups, including the Nusra Front and ISIS.

Now, many are receiving high positions in the new Syrian army.

According to the letter, Jordanian citizen Abd al-Rahman Hussein Khatib has been promoted to lieutenant in the new Syrian army.

Khatib, also known as Abu Hussein Jordani, is of Palestinian origin and has close relations with HTS leader Sharaa. He graduated from a medical college at the University of Jordan and came to fight in Syria in 2013. Khatib is responsible for monitoring conflicts between armed groups and currently serves on HTS’s military council.

Abd al-Aziz Daud Khudaberdi, also known as Abu Mohammed Turkistani, is a native of Turkistan and has been promoted to lieutenant.

Omar Mohammed Ciftci, also known as Mukhtar Turki, is a Turkish national who has become a lieutenant.

Abdel Samriz Bishari, an Albanian, has been promoted to colonel.

Maulana Tirson Abdul Samad, a native of Tajikistan, became a colonel.

Ala Mohamed Abdul Baqi, an Egyptian, was promoted to colonel.

Ibn Ahmad Hariri, a Jordanian, became a colonel.

The decree was issued within the framework of the “process of development and renewal of the Syrian army and armed forces.”

The promotions are “to continue the spirit of commitment and dedication to the service of religion and the country,” the decree said.

Syrian nationals who fought with Sharaa and HTS have also received promotions.

Murhaf Abu Qasra, who has been promoted to lieutenant, is currently serving as defense minister in the Syrian interim government until March.

Abu Qasra previously served as commander-in-chief of the HTS military wing.

He was also one of the most prominent leaders of the Military Operations Directorate, which led the lightning assault to topple the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad earlier this month.

He holds a bachelor's degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Damascus.

Israeli army advances in south Syria, expels employees from government buildings

The Israeli military is carrying out ‘inspections’ in the city of Quneitra under the pretext of searching for weapons

News Desk

DEC 30, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: X)

Israeli troops surrounded Syrian government buildings in the southern city of Quneitra on 30 December as Israel’s military continues to expand its occupation in Syria’s south.


The Israeli army demanded the evacuation of employees from official buildings in Quneitra.

“The Israeli occupation army entered the town of Baath [in Quneitra], expelling employees from government offices under the pretext of conducting inspections [for weapons],” Syrian television reported. Earlier this month, Israeli forces surrounded Baath and demanded the surrender of all weapons within hours.

Videos and photos on social media showed Israeli army troops and vehicles deep in the city of Quneitra.


“The occupation forces advance with tanks and armored vehicles towards the former city of Al-Baath in Quneitra (Golan Heights) to reach the Directorates of Supply and Electricity, the Real Estate Bank, and the automated bakery under the pretext of inspection, and expel employees from government buildings,” Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported.

The advancements came a day after over a dozen people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Adra Industrial City in the Damascus countryside. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement’s Quds Brigades said three of its fighters were killed in Syria.

Israel has continued to reinforce and expand its wide-scale occupation of southern Syria, which began from Mount Hermon after the toppling of Bashar al-Assad's government and has extended to as deep as Damascus's outskirts and countryside.

Israel's recent expansion has seen invading troops seize precious water sources such as the Al-Wahda Dam in the Yarmouk River Basin. It has also set up seven permanent outposts along the UN-monitored buffer zone, which Israeli forces expanded immediately in the aftermath of the fall of Damascus when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the end of the 1974 Israeli–Syrian border agreement.

Two of these outposts in Mount Hermon overlook Damascus and all its western suburbs.

Israeli strikes also continue to target what remains of Syria’s military infrastructure, the majority of which was destroyed in massive bombardments following the collapse of Damascus.

Tel Aviv has vowed to maintain its expanded occupation of Syria for the foreseeable future.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-a ... -buildings
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 01, 2025 12:20 pm

First Communiqué from the Syrian Resistance
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 30, 2024

Image

After nearly three weeks of armed gangs taking power in Syria with the approval and blessing of America, the Zionist occupation state, and NATO.

We have seen since the first day the malicious acts they committed, including thefts, violations, riots, corruption, chaos, sabotage and destruction of Syrian public property.

We have also seen the Hollywood films they made in the Saydnaya prison to gain public opinion and support, mocking the minds of the who believed in naivety and shared the lies. They were helped in this by media hype from Zionist channels, especially those of the Gulf, forgetting the prisons of the Zionist occupation and the war of extermination on Gaza.

We expected from day one that the future of Syria after 12/8 would be dark for its people, and we said that the “Wahhabi law of swords on necks” had come.

Some believed us at the time, while others continued to dance in delight at the imaginary “freedom” to the tunes of the Israeli bombing that did not stop for several nights, coinciding with an Israeli incursion and violation of the land and sovereignty of the state.

This was complete disregarded by the administration that took over the reins of power, until the so-called “Maher Marwan” made statements a day ago justifying the reasons for the Israeli bombing of the capabilities of the Syrian people and tickling the feelings of the enemy that the new administration does not have any problems with him and that it is prostrate and open to peace, and that Netanyahu’s problem was only with Iran and Hezbollah in Syria and that they got rid of these problems and now the so-called “Sharia” is fully prepared to implement and receive orders from Tel Aviv.

Indeed, the Zionist “Wahhabi” project began killing the sons of the Syrian people in the streets, homes and farms with the bullets of the new administration, the government of terrorist gangs, unjustly and aggressively, without any legitimate religious or legal justifications.

The decision to shed human blood is made by asking a question or by looking at an identity, and starving and besieging residential areas and bombing them with the children, women inside under the pretext of pursuing the “remnants of the regime.” What kind of remnants are these and what false pretexts makes you bomb homes over the heads of their inhabitants?

But there is nothing strange about these actions, because whoever was taught by the Jewish ISIS will do what the Israeli army does in Palestine, where it bombs a building crowded with civilians and kills hundreds of martyrs under the pretext of pursuing the resistance.

Following the above, we, as a group from Damascus, the coast, and other cities, confirm the following:

The continuation of the armed gangs affiliated with the new administration in committing massacres against our people will be met with targeting your terrorist elements and leaders.

Our Syrian popular resistance has many surprises in store, and our youth are capable of reaching you in the middle of Damascus. We call on all concerned parties inside and outside Syria to force the terrorist administration represented by Ahmed al-Sharaa to stop its criminal operations against the Syrian people, so that a bloodbath does not occur, which is now just around the corner with the escalation of their terrorism and criminality.

We are still waiting for the blood shed to stop so that it is not said that we are instigators of sedition. We only want Syria to be Arab and independent, as it was for all components of our people.

First statement by the #Syrian resistance. Via @Partisangirl
“After nearly three weeks of armed gangs taking power in Syria with the approval and blessing of America, the Zionist occupation state, and NATO.

We have seen since the first day the malicious acts they committed,… pic.twitter.com/D91mXUYxzG

— tim anderson (@timand2037) December 30, 2024


https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/12/ ... esistance/

******

Fierce clashes rage in north Syria as Pentagon claims SDF-Turkiye ceasefire 'holding'

Extremist factions allied with Syria's de-facto new rulers are conducting an offensive against Kurdish-controlled regions with the support of the Turkish army

News Desk

DEC 31, 2024

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(Photo Credit: BAKR ALKASEM/AFP)

Violent clashes continued to rage between the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Turkish-backed factions from the Syrian National Army (SNA) in the east of Aleppo on 31 December.

According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), forces from the US-backed SDF took control of Shash al-Bobanna village southeast of Aleppo. At the same time, the Turkish army launched heavy artillery attacks near the Qarquzaq bridge east of the besieged city of Manbij.

Intense airstrikes by Turkish drones supporting the SNA advance have also been reported on different areas in the countryside of Aleppo and Raqqa, “targeting military posts and civil targets, including vital institutions and service centers,” according to SOHR.

At least 179 people, including 25 civilians, have been killed since the clashes started on 8 December.

The SNA is a Turkish proxy militia comprised of former fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Ankara has used the SNA for years as a tool to prevent the US-backed SDF from establishing a contiguous Kurdish autonomous zone from Afrin in Syria’s northwest to Hasakah in the northeast.

Tuesday's clashes came less than one day after Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters that a US-brokered “ceasefire” was “holding” in northern Syria.

“The ceasefire is holding in that northern part of Syria,” Singh said during a press briefing on Monday.

On 19 December, a Turkish defense ministry official said there was “no talk” of a ceasefire between Ankara and the SDF. "As Turkiye, it is out of the question for us to have talks with any terrorist organization. The (US) statement must be a slip of the tongue," the unnamed official said in response to Washington's repeated claims of brokering a truce.

The SDF was formed in 2015 with US assistance in a race to occupy Syria's energy-rich regions after Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia helped the Syrian army defeat ISIS. The SDF has close ties with the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkiye, the US, and the EU.

https://thecradle.co/articles/fierce-cl ... re-holding

Abductions, extra-judicial killings mount in Syria under HTS rule
Some 400 kidnappings and killings have been reported since the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled in early December

News Desk

DEC 31, 2024

Image
(Photo credit: Reuters)

Nine civilians were kidnapped and executed by unknown gunmen in the Syrian cities of Homs and Jableh, as revenge killings continue in the wake of President Bashar al-Assad's ousting earlier this month, Sputnik News reported on 31 December.

Local sources speaking with Sputnik stated that "six civilians were kidnapped in the Abbasiya neighborhood in the city of Homs on 29 December by unknown gunmen. Their bodies were found after they were executed by firing squad on the outskirts of the city of Homs. Five of them were from the same family."

The sources reported further that the bodies of three people who were executed by firing squad were found in the coastal city of Jableh. The victims included a man in his seventies and his son in his thirties. An armed group abducted them and took them to an unknown location two weeks ago.

The sources added that four young men in the city of Homs were kidnapped by masked gunmen riding two four-wheel drive vehicles on Monday. Their fate is unknown.

In the countryside of Latakia, the western countryside of Hama, and Aleppo, a further 15 people have been kidnapped in the past 48 hours, Sputnik added.


Violence has also been reported in the Damascus countryside.

Security forces of the new Syrian government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) carried out a raid in a town in the Damascus countryside, killed its mayor, and arrested 30 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on Tuesday.

"Yesterday, the town of Ras al-Ma'arra in the western Qalamoun region in the Damascus countryside witnessed a raid carried out by armed groups affiliated with the General Security in the Military Operations Department amid heavy gunfire," SOHR stated.

Medical sources speaking with Sputnik say that some 400 kidnappings and killings have been reported across Syria since militants from HTS toppled the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad on 8 December.

Many victims are members of Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect.

The HTS leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, became Syria's de facto leader and has formed a caretaker government. Sharaa was formerly a deputy of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq. He traveled to Syria in 2011 on Baghdadi's orders to found the Nusra Front, which later became HTS.

The HTS-led Syrian government has required all members of the previous government's army and security forces to turn in their weapons and undergo a reconciliation process to ensure they have not committed any acts HTS considers as crimes.

https://exchange.charter-business.net/o ... /&reason=0

'Revived' ISIS killed over 750 people in nearly 500 attacks in Syria throughout 2024: Report

The past 12 months witnessed a marked spike in ISIS operations, with many being launched from US-occupied regions of Syria

News Desk

DEC 31, 2024

Image
(Photo Credit: Reuters)

Since the start of the year, ISIS fighters have killed around 753 people during 491 recorded operations in Syria, according to a report published by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on 29 December.

“ISIS continues executing almost-daily military operations and counter-attacks in areas controlled by Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian desert, while ISIS cells are still able to exploit opportunities to create a security vacuum and carry out assassinations, which clearly indicates that the ‘Islamic State’ is still alive and kicking,” the SOHR report states.

These operations included ambushes, armed attacks, and bombings. They were concentrated in the Aleppo-Hama-Raqqa triangle, the eastern desert of Homs, and the deserts of Deir Ezzor and Raqqah governorates, where a total of 646 people were killed.

The report highlights that at least 78 of those were civilians – including women and children – while 568 were members of the disbanded Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

Furthermore, another 107 people were killed in areas controlled by the US-backed SDF in Deir Ezzor, Hasakah, Aleppo, and Raqqah. The figure is divided between 30 civilians and 77 members of the SDF, the Internal Security Forces (Asayish), and other groups in the US-controlled regions.

The Syrian desert region is geographically linked to what is referred to as the '55-kilometer-zone’ surrounding the massive Al-Tanf US occupation base in eastern Syria. According to numerous reports in recent years, ISIS and other extremist groups have received training at the Al-Tanf base and were given logistical support to carry out hit-and-run attacks against Syrian military forces in the desert region.

Although the bulk of those killed by ISIS this year were SAA members, the extremist armed group often targets truffle hunters in the Syrian desert, killing hundreds over the past several years.

In contrast, since the start of the year, ISIS has lost about 117 fighters and commanders in security operations by the different actors present in Syria. At least 58 of those were killed by Russian airstrikes and SAA operations, while 42 were killed by the SDF and the US-led “International Coalition.”

As ISIS continues to revitalize its forces, concerns are increasing about the fate of 10,000 ISIS fighters imprisoned by the SDF in northeast Syria. Kurdish officials stated earlier this month that an ongoing offensive by former ISIS and Al-Qaeda factions – supported by Turkiye and allied with the “transitional government” in Damascus – poses a direct “threat” to the security of these prisons.

"This is the closest thing we have to a ticking time bomb. If [Turkiye] doesn’t get these attacks on the SDF halted, we could have a massive jailbreak on our hands,” an unnamed US official told POLITICO on 18 December.

In response to the growing threat, Iraq has significantly boosted security in its northwestern region, deploying hundreds of anti-terror troops and building trenches along the Syrian border. Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria's de-facto new ruler and protegé of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has not commented on the crisis since seizing power and receiving the support of western and Gulf nations earlier this month.

https://thecradle.co/articles/revived-i ... 024-report
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:39 pm

Syrian authorities continue campaign against ex-government ‘war criminals’ in Homs

Fierce clashes have been raging between security forces of the new Syrian government and former elements of the Syrian Arab Army

News Desk

JAN 2, 2025

Image
(Photo credit: AA)

Security forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched search operations throughout Syria’s central governorate of Homs on 2 January, targeting “war criminals” affiliated with the former government’s armed forces, Syrian state media reported.

“The Ministry of Interior, in cooperation with the Military Operations Department, begins a wide-scale combing operation in the neighborhoods of Homs city,” state media outlet SANA reported, citing a security official.

The official added that the security forces are targeting “war criminals and those involved in crimes who refused to hand over their weapons and go to the settlement centers,” as well as “fugitives from justice, in addition to hidden ammunition and weapons.”

“We ask our civilian people to cooperate with our forces to find these criminals who keep weapons and ammunition among you, and refuse to settle and hand over these weapons,” the security official went on to say.

A curfew has been imposed on several neighborhoods in Homs city. As security forces entered and searched homes in Homs, residents told Sputnik that “fear and panic” have overtaken the streets and that “heavy gunfire” is being heard.

The search operations coincide with fierce clashes between Syria’s new authorities and remnants of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

Ambushes and attacks have recently targeted HTS patrols and positions in the western Latakia and Tartous governorates and other areas across the country. SANA reported over the weekend that former members of the SAA were refusing to hand over their weapons, and that this was the reason operations were continuing.

The HTS-led Military Operations Command in Syria has set up “reconciliation centers” for former government personnel to surrender weapons and receive temporary IDs, but reports indicate that numerous individuals have been abducted and found dead, even after having given up their weapons.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has documented at least 85 murder crimes across Syria that have led to 144 fatalities in recent weeks.

While the new government has vowed to protect minorities, there have been numerous instances of attacks on Christian and Alawite holy sites and symbols. Executions of Alawite civilians and former government soldiers have been widely reported.

A large number of Christians are fleeing the ancient Christian town of Maaloula in southwestern Syria, where Aramaic, the ancient language of Jesus, is still spoken.

A new group called the Syrian Resistance in Al-Sahel announced late last month that massacres committed by the HTS-led “terrorist administration” will be met with attacks on “elements and leaders” of the new government.

“We are still waiting for the bloodshed to stop so that it is not said that we are the instigators of sedition. We only want Syria to be Arab and independent, as it was for all components of our people,” the group added.

https://thecradle.co/articles/syrian-au ... ls-in-homs

Israeli army bombs Damascus outskirts, seizes control of Syrian water sources

Tel Aviv now controls the six most important water sources in southern Syria and continues to expand its occupation in the country

News Desk

JAN 2, 2025

Image
(Photo credit: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images)

The Israeli air force launched a violent attack near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 2 January, coming as Israel’s military continues to expand its occupation in the country, reaching a key dam in the southern Quneitra area.

Syrian media outlets reported that powerful explosions rocked the capital’s western countryside and that the target was the Tal al-Shahem military site overlooking Quneitra, Damascus, and its countryside.

“This site is considered one of the most important military centers of the Syrian army in the southern Damascus countryside. It contains military communications centers and radars, in addition to being an important site for missiles and anti-tank weapons,” Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in Syria said.

The Israeli army stated on Thursday that elite troops recently raided and destroyed an underground Iranian missile facility west of Hama.

Israel has launched hundreds of heavy airstrikes targeting the majority of the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) military infrastructure across Syria since former president Bashar al-Assad’s government fell to extremist groups on 8 December.

Billions of dollars worth of weapons and ammunition have reportedly been taken out in the ongoing campaign.

The Israeli army also continues to expand its occupation across southern Syria.

Al Mayadeen reported on 2 January that Israeli troops have now reached the Al-Mantara Dam in the Quneitra countryside, the largest dam in southern Syria, adding that Israel has seized control of the six most strategic bodies of water in the south.

Israel's recent expansion in Syria, which began immediately after the fall of the Assad government, has seen invading troops seize precious water sources such as the Al-Wahda Dam on the Yarmouk River Basin and others. Syrian and Israeli sources, as well as Carmel News citing an Iranian source, reported last month that Israel now controls 30 percent of Syria's water supply and 40 percent of Jordan's.

“The occupation's control over the Al-Wahda Dam, which is located on the Jordanian border, is a threat to Jordan, because it was the biggest beneficiary of this dam,” Al Mayadeen’s correspondent said on Thursday.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-a ... er-sources

'From nationalist to Islamist': Syria's de facto rulers order sweeping reforms to school curriculum

Entire segments of Syrian history, including atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire, will be deleted from school programs

News Desk

JAN 2, 2025

Image
(Photo credit: Reuters)

The Ministry of Education in Syria announced on 1 January a series of new reforms to the country’s previously secular nationwide curriculum, which has sparked controversy and outrage.

Syria's famous secular school curriculum is being butchered by the alQaeda regime in Damascus. Look at these amendments.
**Changes to the Curriculum**
- The removal of the mention of the "Martyrs of May 6th."
- The removal of Zenobia and Syrian queens.
- The removal of the… pic.twitter.com/KjvmWGZerT

— tim anderson (@timand2037) January 1, 2025


The changes will affect all levels of education and include significant amendments to religious and historical studies – namely, the removal of important events in Syrian history and the erasure of content about Syria’s historical connection to polytheistic civilizations and empires.

The ministry confirmed textbooks will undergo large-scale editing to delete and rephrase passages, alter and delete images, and eliminate any material linked to the former government of Bashar al-Assad and his predecessor, Hafez al-Assad.

Some examples of the changes to be made include the removal of the terms “Ottoman injustice,” “brutal Ottoman rule,” and any reference to Ottoman “occupation” in Syria, as well as the deletion of important historical events that took place during the Ottoman Empire’s reign in the country.

References to the “Martyrs of May 6” – which relate to the Muslim-Christian Arab nationalists who were executed by Ottoman ruler Jamal Pasha in 1916 in Beirut and Damascus – will be removed.

Entire segments of Syrian history will also be scratched – including the period between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the election of Shukri Quwaitli as president in 1943. The term “1973 Liberation War,” referring to the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, was replaced with just “1973 war.”

The new curriculum will also exclude all references to pagan gods and goddesses in ancient Syrian civilizations, including Canaanite entities and deities of other empires and civilizations.

Studies on Chinese philosophical thought are also excluded, as well as scientific studies relating to the theory of evolution and brain development.

References to female monarchs, such as Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, have been erased. Khawla bint al-Azwar, a Muslim warrior described as one of the greatest female soldiers in history, was labeled as a fictional character.

The meaning of the word “martyr” will be altered from someone who is killed “in defense of the homeland” to someone who is killed “to uphold the word of God.”

The term “those who have incurred wrath” will be changed to “those who have gone astray from the path of goodness,” specifying Christians and Jews.

Entire segments of the curriculum that were unspecified by the ministry will also be taken out.

“The curricula in all Syrian schools are still in place until specialized committees are formed to review and audit the curricula,” newly appointed Syrian Minister of Education Nazir al-Qadri said on Thursday.

“We adopted images of the Syrian Revolution flag in all school books, and we corrected some incorrect information in the Islamic Education curriculum, such as explaining some Quranic verses in an incorrect way, and we adopted their correct explanation as stated in the interpretation books for all educational levels,” he added, seemingly downplaying the alterations which are set to be made.

Syrians have reportedly called for nationwide protests and the dismissal of the education minister.

“After reviewing the amendments, it’s clear that, aside from removing signs of the criminal Assad regime, the rest changes have a distinct religious tone,” said journalist Hussam Hammoud.

🚨#Syria
Syrian calls for protests against the curriculum changes by the new Minister of Education, demanding his dismissal.
After reviewing the amendments, it’s clear that, aside from removing signs of the criminal #Assad regime, the rest changes have a distinct religious tone. pic.twitter.com/LuKo15bcDV

— Hussam Hammoud | حسام (@HussamHamoud) January 1, 2025


Academic and Syria commentator Joshua Landis said Syrian textbooks “are moving from a nationalist to Islamist interpretation” of history.

The new #Syria school textbooks are moving from a nationlist to Islamist interpretation of Syrian history.

A "martyr" is no long someone who dies defending the "homeland" but someone who dies for "God." https://t.co/Ztc2HC7wT3

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) January 1, 2025


https://thecradle.co/articles/from-nati ... curriculum

(I would suggest that the removal of Ottoman atrocities has more to do with 'Friend Erdogan' than Islam.)

******

The sad downfall of the Syrian government

This is indeed a devastating setback for the long-suffering peoples of Syria and the wider region, but it is by no means the end of their liberation struggle.
Harpal Brar

Wednesday 1 January 2025

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Despite having been essentially defeated some years ago, jihadi mercenaries backed by the USA and Turkey were left to regroup and rearm in the northwestern province of Idlib. This failure to complete their ejection from Syrian soil has had devastating consequences for the Syrian people, who have already endured so much since the onset of the west’s regime-change war in 2011.

At long last, US imperialism and its surrogate in the middle east, Israel, have, at least temporarily, achieved their long-held dream of overthrowing the Syrian government headed by Bashar al-Assad. In the latest instalment of the conflict between Syria and the US-Israel combine, events unfolded in a way, and with a speed, no-one had expected.

The jihadi head-chopping, throat-slitting, heart-eating serial rapists and torturers broke out of their haven in the province of Idlib and launched their assault on 27 November, capturing within a week Aleppo (the second-largest city in Syria), Hama (the third-largest), followed by Homs and the capital Damascus on 8 December.

The fall of Damascus within 12 days, and the flight of President Assad to Moscow, where he and his family have been granted asylum, was greeted by imperialist and zionist leaders and media with delirious joy, accompanied, on the one hand, by demonisation of Assad as a ‘brutal dictator’, ‘serial killer’ and ‘criminal boss’, and on the other hand by the rebranding of the jihadis, hitherto characterised as terrorists, as ‘liberation fighters’.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is the biggest and dominant outfit among those who have managed to overthrow the Syrian government. Headed by the so-called Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the jihadis were able to capture Damascus and force the country’s president to flee to Moscow to secure sanctuary.

Accompanying the jihadi forces were the White Helmets, a British intelligence creation, working in close cooperation with the terrorists while pretending to be a ‘humanitarian’ organisation, albeit one funded by imperialism to the tune of millions of dollars.

HTS has been designated by the United Nations, the USA and many other countries as a terrorist organisation, but is now in the process of having the terrorist label removed by imperialism and being rebranded as a ‘liberation’ force. The USA, doubtless to be followed by many other imperialist countries, is considering removing the crippling economic sanctions which contributed to the fall of the Syrian government.

The official story is that HTS’s leader, Julani, was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Saudi Arabia to Syrian exiles, and that his family moved back to Syria in the 1980s. In 2003, he travelled to Iraq to join al-Qaeda to join the fight against the US occupation and spent several years in an American prison in Iraq. At the beginning of the Syrian conflict he returned to Syria, founded Jabhat al-Nusra and took the nom-de-guerre of Julani. HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – Organ for Liberation of the Levant) is an offshoot of Jabhat al-Nusra – a salafist jihadist group spawned by al-Qaeda.

He fought with Isis, was its deputy head, and had a $10m US bounty placed on his head. Yet the USA is now greeting with open arms the very same jihadis whom it claims were behind the 9/11 attack in which close to 3,000 Americans died. While claiming to be fighting terrorism, the USA has long been in bed with terrorists as a means of maintaining its hegemony.

Julani is now presented as an “urbane pragmatist” after he was interviewed by CNN, appearing with a trimmed beard and in western dress. Speaking softly, he pledged not to harm minority communities. All this was for public relations to convey the impression that he and his HTS cut-throats had undergone a drastic reform for the better.

Leaving aside imperialism’s earlier attempts to overthrow the Syrian government, the present war began in 2011 when, taking advantage of what has come to be called the Arab Spring, the USA decided to try for regime change in Syria.

In February 2012, Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who back then was working for Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama’s notoriously bloodthirsty secretary of state, told her in an email: “Al-Qaeda is on our side.” The USA picked up a lot of weapons in Libya and sent them to Turkey, which in turn handed them over to the jihadis in Syria (see Wikileaks).

In 2013, President Obama, the darling of the liberal ‘left’, declared: “Assad must go,” while hypocritically professing support for democracy, human rights and the rule of law! Thereafter, Saudi money and arms from imperialist quarters flowed in vast quantities to support a jihadi cut-throat mercenary army that was sent as imperialism’s invasion force. These mercenaries, while including some home-bred Syrian fundamentalists, hailed from dozens of foreign countries. At the same time, intensified imperialist propaganda demonised the Syrian government while portraying the jihadi bandits and thugs as the ‘moderate’ opposition.

The jihadis managed to gain control of large parts of Syrian territory, capturing half (the eastern part) of Aleppo. Facing a dire situation, the Syrian government requested Russian help and, in response to this plea, Russia intervened in 2015, as did the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.

The combined forces of the Syrian army, Hezbollah fighters and the Russian air force delivered devastating blows to the jihadi puppets of imperialism, freed most of Syria’s territory and liberated Aleppo in 2016, pushing the jihadis into Idlib in the north-west of the country. In March 2020, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in Moscow to broker the Idlib ceasefire.

Freed, temporarily it transpired, from the imperialist-backed jihadi menace, the Syrian people began to enjoy the return of peace. It is, however, now clear that the jihadis in Idlib, with the support of Turkey, used this period to re-equip themselves and prepare for a new offensive.

They developed a sizeable armaments manufacturing industry, churning out mortar shells, drones and guided missiles on an industrial scale, with the aim of launching a new offensive. This latest offensive began on 27 November 2024, and a mere 12 days later the jihadis took Syria’s capital, Damascus. It is not as though they fought their way into Damascus; they simply walked in as the Syrian Arab Army melted away without putting up any resistance.

The jihadis now occupying Damascus may feel that they are victorious, but the real victory belongs to US imperialism and its surrogates – the zionist regime in Israel, and the Turkish regime. The jihadi success was coordinated by US imperialism.

Reasons for the downfall of the Syrian government
The most important factor in the defeat of the Syrian government has been the decades of draconian sanctions applied against Syria by US imperialism and its junior imperialist partners and their flunkeys in the middle east, as a result of which Syria was cut off from the international system of trading facilities – all aimed at hurting the Syrian masses so as to soften up their resistance and make them blame their government for their privations and the non-availability of essential items for their everyday existence.

Combined with these inhumane sanctions was the occupation by 2,000 US troops under the pretext of fighting against Isis but actually to steal Syrian oil and illegally send it to Israel and elsewhere. The area of Syria which is the repository of Syrian oil is also home to rich wheat-producing soil, so Syria was not only deprived of its energy but also of a vital food source. Shameless and thoroughly immoral, bourgeois political and journalistic spokespersons, who blame the consequences of the scarcity thus produced on mismanagement by the Syrian government, deliberately ‘forget’ about these facts.

Previously, oil accounted for a quarter of Syria’s GDP, which enabled its government to pay its employees and armed forces, and to fund its education and health facilities and other social services. Denied access to this economically vital material as a result of the US occupation, the country was brought to its knees. The Syrian government was bereft of the resources it needed to make the life of the population bearable, or even to pay its soldiers a living wage, with the average monthly wage being $7-15 per soldier and the generals getting no more than $40 a month.

This extreme scarcity makes it only too easy to breed corruption, particularly when seen in the light of jihadi mercenaries receiving between $400-$2,000 a month thanks to the largesse of US imperialism and Turkey. Though at the moment there is no evidence that the Syrian command was bribed, it would come as no surprise if that were indeed the case and that Syrian soldiers were instructed by their officers not to resist.

Also, it transpires that President Assad had replaced some generals by men he perceived to be more loyal, which may have led to some resentment.

Secondly, Syria has for years been the target of US and Israeli bombing, especially by the latter, which has weakened its defences and destroyed much of its infrastructure.

Third, over the recent period Assad had been distancing himself from Iran and coming closer to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the hope of getting some economic assistance and mending relations with the west. He had been invited to attend the recently-held Brics summit in Kazan but did not turn up, the reason for which could be that he did not want to meet with President Erdogan.

Erdogan had been trying to meet with Assad for quite some time, but Assad had refused such a meeting, which did not exactly help him to mend fences with Erdogan, a vain and arrogant person, and treacherous into the bargain. Double-crossing and hypocrisy are second nature to him.

He has been making harsh statements criticising Israel for the genocide it is committing in Gaza, but at the same time facilitating that genocide by allowing the flow of oil from Azerbaijan through Turkey to Israel. He had also declared that if Israel went into Lebanon, the Turkish army would march there to confront the IDF. Well, Israeli forces did march into Lebanon, but Erdogan did nothing while Lebanon was being flattened by the Israeli air force. While pretending to be a friend of the Palestinian struggle, he was getting the jihadis ready to launch a new offensive against the Syrian government, giving financial and material support and weapons to the HTS and other terrorists in Idlib.

Lastly, the timing was perfect, and the coordination between US imperialism, the Israeli zionists and Turkey was meticulous. The zionists had just concluded a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah. Apparently the Iranians had offered to send forces to Syria shortly before the terrorist offensive began, but Assad declined their offer. Both Russia and Iran claim to have suggested that the Syrian army be modernised and reorganised to become more fit to fight against its enemies. Again, no positive response from Syria. As a result, Syria has paid a very heavy price.

US imperialism has been trying for a regime change in Syria for more than half a century, as have been their fundamentalist proxies. In 1982, with the tacit support of the USA, fundamentalists rose in rebellion in the city of Hama, but were crushed by the Syrian armed forces and taught a lesson.

This time, however, for the reasons mentioned above, Syria’s position had weakened while that of the jihadis had strengthened. In the circumstances, Turkey gave the green light to the jihadis to start the offensive, while the zionists bombed the crossings between Iraq and Syria. The jihadi forces in question were no longer a ragtag of guerrillas but a modern army with tanks and sophisticated weaponry. As it turned out, they did not have to use these, since the Syrian army did not resist to block their advance.

Thus came to an end the six-decade long Ba’athist regime – the last five decades having been under the Assad family: Hafez al-Assad from 1963-2000 and following him under his son Bashar. On entering Damascus, the HTS head-choppers have been busy smashing statues of Hafez al-Assad, who was the creator of the modern Syrian state in which people of various religious denominations – muslims (of many sects), christians and jews – lived harmoniously side by side with one another. Syria was a secular state and a place where women were accorded rights and liberties which are entirely absent in the Gulf autocracies that are the darlings of imperialism.

Since the demise of Bashar al-Assad’s government, the Israelis have launched a ferocious assault on Syria, with the Israeli air force conducting at least 1,000 sorties, destroying what is left of Syria’s defence capability – all of its air, naval and land-based defence infrastructure. They have occupied Syrian portions of the ‘buffer zone’ in the Golan Heights that was established in 1974 and taken control of the strategically positioned Mount Hermon.

The USA, too, has launched close to 100 missile attacks on Syria. These Israeli and US strikes are aimed at depriving any government in the near future of the ability to resist Israeli aggression and to render the country defenceless. They clearly do not trust either the new incumbents or the new Sultan of Syria – Erdogan.

The jihadi authorities have not uttered a murmur against, let alone put up any resistance to the latest zionist aggression. They are busy conducting public executions and terrorising minority communities – be they christians or shia muslims – in complete violation of their hypocritical promises of treating Syria’s minorities with respect and not engaging in acts of vengeance against their opponents. Imperialist media and politicians alike have maintained a deafening silence in the face of these horrific outrages.

Who gains?
The gainers from the overthrow of the Syrian government are, of course, imperialism, zionism and Turkey. All of them, not surprisingly, have cheered the outcome. The US president, the brain-dead Genocide Joe Biden, has hailed the HTS victory as the inaugural action of a “free Syria”!

So has British prime minister Keir Starmer, alongside the leaders of all the other imperialist countries. So much, then, for their much-touted ‘fight against terrorism’. While the British police have been detaining, and in some cases prosecuting, pro-Palestinian demonstrators under terrorism laws, our politicians shamelessly endorse with zeal the terrorists of the HTS and other such outfits who have now become the new government of Syria.

The imperialist media have, with almost complete unanimity, joined in the celebrations marking the overthrow of the secular anti-imperialist Syrian government and its replacement by the crazed enemies of humanity. Every bourgeois media outlet – from the newspapers to television – forgetting their past fulminations against the jihadis are now singing their praises, while demonising the erstwhile Syrian government.

The following few lines from a nauseating article written by despicable lickspittle Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times are typical of the stance and standards of bourgeois journalism: “It was perhaps the most brutal government in a region full of ghastly regimes.”

Is that so, Mr Rachman? Not your beloved Israel whose zionist, racist, antisemitic and reactionary government is busy perpetrating a genocide on the Palestinian people? Which, combined with racist superiority is, right under the eyes of the people of the world, involved in ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the Palestinian people so that those who have stolen Palestinian land and property may enjoy the fruits of their theft? That in the process of so doing, have already murdered 200,000 Palestinian men women and children, in a fashion that even Hitlerites might have baulked at?

We shall not mention the holocausts committed by your paymasters – Anglo-American imperialism – all over the world.

While Mr Rachman writes with feigned outrage of the “murder and torture” that he alleges characterised Syrian prisons, it does not occur to him ever to mention the well-documented murder and torture of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli dungeons, where murder, torture, humiliation, rape and denial of food are everyday occurrences.

Instead of blaming US imperialism for the deaths of half a million Syrians through the war it has been waging against Syria since at least 2011, he blames its victim – the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. He blames the Assad government instead of pointing the finger at US imperialism, which recruited thousands of head-chopping and paid-for jihadis, not only from Syria but also from other countries, to practise their favourite art, and supplied them with weaponry – all in their endeavour to destroy the Syrian government because it has, over a very long period, supported the Palestinian people in their just struggle for national liberation and freedom from occupation.

US imperialism has been acting in this way in order to strengthen the zionist state of Israel. Israel is its chief attack dog in the middle east for maintaining imperialist hegemony over the region, which furnishes it with fabulous riches through the looting of oil (the staple diet of imperialist industry and war machinery), and is a market and an avenue of investment. No wonder Genocide Joe is famous for saying that “Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

Using Israel as its tool is the cheapest option for US imperialism. Imagine the cost of keeping a million-strong – at least – army stationed in the middle east – if Israel were not there to help the US maintain its hegemony over the region!

Imperialism does not do this for the love of jews; it could not give a damn for the jews, for if it did have any regard for the lives of jews, it would not be supporting the continued existence of Israel – a colonial project that is destined to meet the same fate as all other colonial projects.

Nor is it doing so because of the zionist lobby in the US, which allegedly – even according to some very intelligent and erudite commentators on social media – controls the US government. Far from it. Despite appearances, it is US imperialism that controls the zionist lobby, which is no less its proxy in the USA than is the zionist Israeli state in the middle east.

That is why the USA funds Israel and its war machine to the tune of billions of dollars a year, and especially the wars which that surrogate wages against the Palestinians and other Arab countries. Israel could not survive more than a few months without US military, financial and diplomatic support; it could not wage a single war successfully without such support.

Having characterised the erstwhile Syrian government as “perhaps the most brutal”, Mr Rachman went on to greet the arrival of the government led by the HTS cut-throats thus:

“The fall of the brutal regime that is aligned to other brutal regimes is a good thing.”

Obviously Mr Rachman’s idea of a brutal regime is any government that opposes the truly brutal, not imaginary, successive US imperialist governments and their junior partners from Canada and Britain, France and Germany. (The west should not succumb to cynical regret ever Syria, 10 December 2024)

You need not worry on that score, Mr Rachman. Your imperialist patrons are no less possessed of lack of decency, hypocrisy, lack of humanity and disregard for human life than you are. Hypocrisy is the defining characteristic of all dying systems; it is the homage, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, that vice pays to virtue.

Losers
Who, then, are the losers, for the moment, of the demise of the Syrian government? They are, first, the Syrian people, who will soon discover the joy of living under a truly brutal jihadi government which, on top of the economic misery that it will heap on the Syrian masses, will undoubtedly subject them to the daily infamies of living according to medieval social norms.

Second are the resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine – for they lost a very good friend, which not only supported them but furnished a conduit for material support from Iran on its way to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the resistance in Palestine. In view of this, it is nothing short of an act of foolishness for Hamas to join the crowd greeting the fall of Bashar al-Assad with entirely misplaced enthusiasm.

Third is the regional Axis of Resistance, in which Syria played a very important role.

Time will tell how things turn out. Iran and Hezbollah are better placed to recover from this undoubtedly severe setback. The question being asked is: why did Iran and Russia not come to the support of the Assad government during the last days of its existence?

In view of the collapse of the Syrian army, they must have concluded that there was nothing they could support. If the Syrian army were unwilling or unable to fight for Syrian sovereignty, territorial integrity and honour, Russia and Iran could not do much. In addition, they are fighting their own wars – Russia against Nato’s proxy war using Ukrainian lives as cannon fodder, and Iran under constant threat of US imperialism’s proxy war using zionist forces and jewish lives.

The future
Even before 9 December, Syria had been partly partitioned, with US imperialism occupying that part of Syria that is rich in oil and wheat, Turkey occupying Idlib through its jihadi surrogates, and the Kurdish ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’, in close alliance with US imperialism, occupying the north east. At the same time as the HTS were advancing from Idlib in the north to towns in the south, Kurdish forces seized the city of Deir al-Zov. They may live to regret their anti-Assad US imperialist-aligned stance.

Turkey has designs on swathes of Syrian territory and its major preoccupation is to crush the Kurdish movement for an independent state. This will confront the USA with the dilemma of either trying to prevent the Turks from crushing the USA’s Kurdish surrogates, whom Turkey considers to be an extremist arm of the PKK; or letting Turkey have a free hand in crushing the Kurds who will soon have to face the consequences of having contributed to the fall of the Assad government.

Then, within the jihadi camp that has captured Damascus, although HTS is the dominant group there are over a dozen other lunatic outfits. Although they were united in bringing down the Assad government, they are by no means united on how Syria should be governed. The likelihood of clashes among them is great.

On top of all this comes the question of their relations with the zionist state of Israel, which is busy taking over chunks of Syrian territory. If the jihadis resist, they will be confronted with the zionists backed by US imperialism; and if they don’t, they will correctly be perceived by the Syrian people as the traitors they are and be faced with the opposition of the Syrian masses.

The Kurdish SDF has thousands of jihadis in its prisons, including British jihadis who travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis from 2013 onwards. The SDF could free them and they could form the nucleus of a new Islamic state – unless, of course, they decided to join HTS. One way or another, the chances of an internecine fight among the jihadis is high.

Finally, there is the Russian naval base at Tartus and its air base in Khmeimim (Latakia), which serve as staging points for the Mediterranean. At the time of writing, the Russians are negotiating with the new ‘government’. If no agreement can be reached, Russia may have to look elsewhere, possibly to Iran or Algeria.

In view of the turmoil created by imperialism, the jubilation among its proxies and surrogates is only too likely to be a short-lived affair. In the end, the people of Syria, Palestine and the wider middle east will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. They will not put up with the subjection imperialism has imposed on them. The laws of history are bound to prove stronger than the laws of artillery.

The ‘left’
Before concluding this article, we must include a few words about the imperialist ‘left’ in Britain – from the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites to the revisionist renegades and left social democrats. They have either, without the least sense of decency or shame, joined the jubilation in the imperialist camp, or some fainthearts have simply raised the white flag, regarding the Arabs as a “lost cause”.

For our part, we shall never desert the forces of resistance against imperialism in spite of the temporary reverses, however severe. Our slogans remain: Victory to the resistance; Death to imperialism; Death to zionism! Our job remains that of mobilising the British working class to refuse to cooperate with the imperialist war machine.

In the context of the present difficult and dark hours that have descended on the middle east, these slogans may sound empty and be mocked by the Trotskyites, revisionists, ‘left’ social democrats and faint-hearted deserters, but developments along the line will prove their correctness of our stance.

Long live the resistance of the Syrian and middle-eastern peoples!
Death to imperialism and its zionist proxy!
No cooperation with imperialist war!


https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/01/ne ... -al-assad/

******

Is Syria a failed state or will the Syrian civilisation reject the Zionist CIA MI6-imposed dark age?

My latest conversation with the panel of guests on Quantum Nurse Grace Asagra

(Video at link)

Vanessa Beeley
Jan 3

https://beeley.substack.com/p/is-syria- ... dium=email
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2025 12:22 pm

Israeli Airstrikes Target Syrian Defense Facilities Amid Escalating Tensions

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Explosion made by the israeli attacks in Aleppo, Photo:@TimesofIsrael

January 3, 2025 Hour: 2:43 pm

In a significant escalation of military aggression, Israeli warplanes launched attacks on various installations in Syria late Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday.

Among the targeted sites were defense industry factories located in the rural areas south of Aleppo, part of a broader strategy to weaken Syria militarily and assert control over occupied territories.

Reports indicate that loud explosions were heard throughout Aleppo and its suburbs, particularly in Al-Safira, situated 25 kilometers southeast of the city. This area also saw strikes on scientific research facilities, resulting in large fires and substantial damage. As of now, there have been no confirmed reports of casualties.

Simultaneously, Israeli forces bombarded areas near Quneitra in southern Syria, where they had previously invaded extensive regions. According to Syrian state television, the target was the Tal al-Shahm military site, one of the most critical centers for the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), which houses communication systems, radar installations, and missile storage facilities.


In recent hours, Israeli occupation forces have encroached upon the outskirts of Mantara Dam, the largest water reservoir in southern Syria. This move grants them control over six vital water facilities in the region while also providing access to Damascus.

The sequence of Israeli attacks on SAA military installations—including weapon depots and strategic missile sites—began in mid-December following the takeover of Damascus by armed terrorist coalition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied radical groups that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Reports suggest that Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes against Syrian defense capabilities, with estimates indicating that approximately 70 percent of Syria’s military capacity has been destroyed.

Media outlets and experts warn that these bombings are not merely aimed at preventing weapons from falling into terrorist hands—as claimed by Israeli officials and pro-Zionist media—but rather serve to systematically weaken Syria militarily. This strategy appears designed to prolong Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, a territory recognized internationally as Syrian land.

As tensions continue to rise in the region, it is crucial for global observers to recognize the implications of these actions on regional stability and sovereignty. The ongoing conflict underscores a pressing need for diplomatic efforts aimed at restoring peace and addressing the humanitarian crises exacerbated by such military interventions.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/israeli- ... -tensions/

*****

Maaloula Under Seige
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 2, 2025
Vanessa Beeley

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Easter 2018 in Maaloula. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

Maaloula is synonymous with martyrdom and miracles. Scaling the cliffs that tightly contain it, Maaloula’s sacred and secular architectural wonders rise several stories, usually wearing a wash of blue distemper. Were it not for the vineyards and olive and apricot orchards that carpet the surrounding valley, a casual visitor might ponder how the townspeople have survived the mountains’ sun-dried, barren landscape for millennia.

Mitchell Prothero 2008


Since the Turkish-Takfiri coup in Syria backed by the US, Israel, Qatar and the West, Christians are, again, under threat.

Maaloula is a Christian town some 50km from Damascus in the north-eastern Damascus countryside, overshadowed by the Qalamoun mountains.

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Residents of Maaloula still teach and speak the same dialect spoken by Jesus of Nazareth – the ancient language of Aramaic originated more than 900 years before Christ and was widely used throughout the Middle East from B.C. 1200 to A.D. 700.

The Syrian government under President Assad established a new Aramaic Language Institute in Maaloula to preserve the Aramaic language that was gradually dying out in the region. This is from a Guardian article in 2009:

In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians, so it’s a big decision to allow the teaching of other languages in government schools – But the government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because it goes back so deep into Syria’s history.

Maaloula sits at the head of a fertile valley. Farming is the main local industry, and the village is known for the quality of its produce. It is also known globally for the unique celebration of the Feast of the Holy Cross that has been celebrated here for centuries. The feast commemorates the finding of the ‘true Cross’ in Jerusalem in the fourth century, by Empress Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. Tradition states that she ordered fires to be lit on high mountains across the region, to announce the discovery. The night before the celebration on 14 September, bonfires are lit on the summit of both mountains north and south of the town to mark the start of the feast.

Maaloula is home to several of Christianity’s oldest holy sites, including the Melkite Greek Catholic Monastery of St. Sergius and the Antiochene Orthodox Convent of St. Thecla.

Built in the early fourth century on the remains of a pagan temple, St. Sergius looms over the town from a high hilltop. Staffed by the Basilian Salvatorian Fathers, the monastery commemorates two Roman soldiers, Sergius and Bacchus, whom the Roman Emperor Maximian exiled to Syria for their Christian beliefs. Resolute in their faith, they were executed (around 303) and buried in Syria. Devotion to Sergius and Bacchus, particularly among officers and soldiers, spread rapidly throughout the empire after Constantine the Great’s edict of religious toleration in 313.

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Prothero wrote:

Near a gap in the mountain, at the bottom of the ridge, stands a 10th-century convent containing a shrine built around a cave honoring Christianity’s first female martyr — St. Thecla, a disciple of the Apostle Paul and considered by the Christian East as “equal to the apostles and protomartyr.”

According to the apocryphal “Acts of Paul and Thecla,” a second-century text of Coptic origin, the young virgin of noble lineage found the cave as she fled soldiers intent on executing her after denying the advances of a nobleman from nearby Pisidian Antioch. Reaching the side of the mountain, Thecla implored the Lord to save her and the ridge opened, revealing her cavernous refuge. From this story originates the town’s name. In Aramaic, Maaloula means “gate” or “entrance.”


Watch Journeyman Pictures – The Village in Syria where they speak Jesus’ tongue:



The first Al Qaeda invasion of Maaloula 2013

What follows is a report from BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, full of the usual inserts of misleading narratives – “rebels” “Iran and Russia arming the Syrian Arab Army” while he witnesses the Al Qaeda invasion of Maaloula and does not report on the atrocities committed during their reign of terror.

Myself and independent journalist Eva Bartlett would later report on the crimes committed by the so called “rebels” against unarmed Christian civilians. In 2016 Bartlett wrote:

On September 4, 2013, a Jordanian suicide-bomber exploded his truck at the Syrian army checkpoint at the arched gate outside the village. This was immediately followed by attacks on Syrian soldiers nearby, mainly by al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) terrorists—including Chechens, Uighurs, Turkestanis, Libyans, and Saudis, as well as locals.

Locals believe that Muslim families and neighbours of the Christian residents had given drugged food to the Syrian Arab Army soldiers at the checkpoint so they were impervious to the warnings and alarms given by the residents when they saw the terrorist truck-bomb driving towards the entrance gate.

According to locals – the fighters included people from the Free Syrian Army, the Al Farouq Brigades, Ahfad al Rasul, Jabhat al Nusra, Jaish al Islam, Ahrar al Sham, Jabhat Islammiya, Palestinian Hamas fighters (Jabhat Tahreer al-Qalamoun), and Jabhat al Ruhr Qalomoun. Amongst them were fighters from Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Uyghur Turkic Chinese as well as Syrians.

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Safir Hotel – Photo: Vanessa Beeley

The militants first occupied the northern lands of Maaloula (near Qalamoun) in December 2012. On 8 February 2013, they occupied the popular and spectacularly located Safir Hotel overlooking the town, making it their headquarters.

On September 7, 2013, terrorists point-blank assassinated three unarmed Maaloula men after they refused to convert to Islam, critically injuring one of the men’s sisters. I was later told that the men were executed one by one, forced to watch as their friends were killed in front of them for refusing to convert to Islam.

Bartlett writes:

Antoinette recounted how lying bleeding inside the house, she heard her brother, brother-in-law, and nephew being murdered.

“The terrorists told Anton to say the Shahada. Anton told them ‘I was born Christian and I will die Christian.’,” Antoinette recalled. Mikhael and Sarkis were likewise ordered to convert to Islam, and likewise refusing, were assassinated.


A few days later, on 7th of September, six young men were kidnapped. What is particularly difficult for the Christian community in Maaloula to forgive is the fact that, “four of the six young men were kidnapped by their Sunni neighbours who were working with the terrorists and then they were executed by the Maaloula Muslim Leader Emad Diab and his local gang.” Their bodies were finally discovered in 2016. I attended their funeral in Damascus:

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(Other images at link.)

On 2 December 2013, Jabhat-al-Nusra kidnapped 13 Greek Orthodox Nuns from the Convent of St. Thecla. They were held for three months in various locations, finally ending up in Yabroud, before negotiations involving the Qatari, Lebanese and Syrian governments resulted in their release on 9 March 2014, in exchange for 150 women detained in prisons in Syria. (Hart UK)

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View from the mountain of Maaloula. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

The terrorists proceeded to take up positions in the hotel and mountainous ridges that overshadowed Maaloula and they were able to snipe residents as they came into the open to collect water or food. Icons were burned and destroyed, including the statue of the Virgin Mary that had always overlooked the town. The terrorist factions would fill tyres with flammable material and roll them down onto the rooves of civilian homes below them.

AP Report from 2016 – Inside Maaloula, ravaged by “militants”

Liberation finally came on April 14th 2014. A year later, a new statue of the Virgin Mary was placed on one of the rocky pinnacles overlooking the town to replace the one that had been destroyed by the Islamist fighters. In Maaloula the scars remain, a testament to the ravages of Western and Zionist-backed sectarian insurgents that again, threaten the town today after the 2024 terrorist coup that finally plunged Syria into the darkest age it has yet faced.

Maaloula 2024 – under attack again by Takfiri elements

On New Year’s Eve 2024 reports were circulating on social media that internet services have been cut to Maaloula and no communications were being received from the remaining residents of Maaloula. Members of the Christian community are known to have fled to Damascus just as they were forced to do in 2013. Terrorist factions mocked them as they fled.

The Syrian Arab Army has been replaced by HTS-affiliated factions led by members of the Diab family who were banished from Maaloula in 2014 (by President Assad). The terror of 2013/14 is returning to Maaloula bereft of any legitimate military protection and facing revenge-fueled gangs intent on finishing what they failed to do in 2013 – ethnically cleansing Maaloula of its Christian inhabitants. These factions entered Maaloula chanting:

We will make you taste what we have tasted for 14 years.

The Catholic news agency ACI MENA confirmed the following:

Mass displacement of Christians from Maaloula under threat of death if they remain
Seizure of businesses and property
Return of exiled militants and accomplices involved in the murder and kidnappings of Christians in 2013/14
Turkish Takfiri gang is in charge of Maaloula “Sultan Suleyman Shah Brigade”
Attempted break-in and burglary by armed militia at the farm of a father and son. One of the armed men died during clashes. The Christian farmer handed himself over to the local priest who transferred him to the HTS authorities in Damascus.
The death of an armed insurgent led to the humiliation of Maaloula’s Christians, forced to the funeral of the dead militant killed in self-defense by a peaceful Christian farmer whose family and relatives were forcibly expelled from their homes by the armed thugs.

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Since the initial post-coup invasion of Maaloula by the Turkish and Diab-led factions, HTS has allegedly deployed their “General Security” forces to the town but only after the flight of multiple families under threat of revenge executions and kidnappings.

While HTS led by Al Qaeda/ISIS-origin Jolani have publicly endorsed Christmas celebrations and decorations, the tree in Maaloula remains undecorated and bare. The tree in the Christian own of Al Sqeilbiyyeh, northern Hama, was set ablaze by the occupation armed gangs.

🇸🇾 Christians Under Siege in Maaloula

Reports indicate that half of the Christian population in the historic city of Maaloula has fled due to threats by Muslim families. These families, once barred by Bashar al-Assad’s administration from entering the city, are now pressuring… pic.twitter.com/5ohVPmhymU

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) December 28, 2024


The US went public with a muted condemnation of revenge attacks on “regime remnants” – a blanket term to justify the extra-judicial execution or abduction of more than 400 individuals since the Turkey-Israel-US-Qatar-backed coup in Syria. It is suspected that many more have disappeared and will have been liquidated.

Jolani, clearly being managed by MI6 rebrand agents, called a meeting with Christian faith leaders providing an antidotal photo op for his western media henchmen.

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Almost simultaneously the Orthodox Times issued a report – Christian leaders in Syria issue a joint statement of hope and reconciliation amid transition.

At this historic moment, as Syria is undergoing a new transition, we, the heads of the Christian Churches in Syria, address the public with a message of love and hope.

The leaders refer to the new constitution – Jolani has indicated that constitutional reform will take three years and no elections will be held for four years – contrary to the concept of the HTS regime being transitional while Jolani appoints foreign mercenaries to military command positions and “redeemed” terrorists to regime power slots.

The necessity for the constitution-drafting process to be inclusive and comprehensive, involving all components of Syrian society, including various ethnicities, denominations, men and women, young and old, to ensure the constitution represents the will of the people in all its diversity.

The full statement can be read here (and below):

At this historic moment, as Syria is undergoing a new transition, we, the heads of the Christian Churches in Syria, address the public with a message of love and hope.

This message springs from our sense of responsibility and our deep faith in the mission of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who blessed the peacemakers and called them children of God (Matthew 5:9).

During this Holy Nativity season, Christ calls us to be messengers of peace on earth.
Today, we stand on the threshold of a new era that requires all of us to have humility, courage, and determination to build the Syria of the future.

This new phase calls for a commitment to a culture of dialogue and openness to others. It demands wisdom, deliberation, and foresight as well as the ability to avoid getting caught up in pointless disputes, populism, or isolation.

As Christians, we have a vital and pivotal role to play in this phase by cooperating with everyone to advance and rebuild this homeland.

We recognize that our spiritual, moral, and national responsibility compels us to always raise the voice of truth, defend human dignity under all circumstances, and strongly strive to support the path of democracy, freedom, independence, and peace, which ensures the rights and dignity of all Syrians.

Our message today is based on four key axes:

Reconciliation,

Appeal to the World to Lift External Economic Sanctions,

Partnership,

Hope.

National Reconciliation and Dialogue as a Path to Unity

Syria is a nation with a human and civilizational identity, built upon a history and geography that have evolved over the ages. However, it has remained steadfast in its will for coexistence to ensure common interests.

The ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity that has characterized Syria’s local communities is a source of its wealth and strength. Today, Syria is called to reclaim its role as an active member of the international community and to strengthen its belonging to its broader geographical and Arab surroundings.

To achieve this, we call for:

• Launching a comprehensive national dialogue that brings together all spectrums and components of society, fosters trust and social cohesion, addresses the roots of conflict, and redefines Syria’s national identity based on common values: citizenship, dignity, freedom, and coexistence.

• Initiating dialogue workshops at the local level across all provinces, cities, and villages to address challenges affecting social cohesion and coexistence, achieve genuine reconciliation in areas where reconciliation and transparency are needed, and enable communities themselves to work toward shared recovery throughout Syria.

• Building trust among all Syrians through developmental community projects that contribute to rebuilding the social fabric and enhancing a shared sense of belonging to one united state.

• Reviving the spirit of coexistence, which has always been part of our Syrian heritage. This includes working to eliminate prejudices and countering exclusionary rhetoric, hate speech, and discrimination, as vengeance and resentment do not build a nation.

• Collaborating to enhance security and safety to ensure the well-being of all citizens and to solidify civil peace.
Second: An Appeal to the World to Lift External Economic Sanctions

Syria has recently endured economic sanctions, as well as an economic blockade. This has affected Syrian citizens from all spectrums. These sanctions have negatively impacted the local community in Syria and neighboring communities, which were also affected by migration.

Their repercussions have extended to countries receiving Syrians, whether through legal or illegal migration. Hence, we call upon the international community to act swiftly to lift these unjust sanctions, support the path of reconstruction and economic recovery, and create job opportunities.

Participation in Drafting a New Constitution for the Country

We believe that drafting a new constitution that reflects the aspirations of Syrians is key to building a modern and democratic state. Therefore, we emphasize:

• The necessity for the constitution-drafting process to be inclusive and comprehensive, involving all components of Syrian society, including various ethnicities, denominations, men and women, young and old, to ensure the constitution represents the will of the people in all its diversity.

• Adherence of the constitution to the principles of citizenship, guaranteeing human rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, while respecting public and individual freedoms, including freedom of opinion and belief, as well as the inclusion of women.

• Adoption of values of justice and equality in the constitution, as the foundation for building a state that offers equal opportunities to all its citizens, without any discrimination, in political, social, and economic life.

Hope for a Bright Future

We believe that a new Syria should remain united and serve as a model of a modern state founded on the principles of citizenship, democracy, and human rights. Hence, we affirm our vision for the Syria of tomorrow:
• A united, sovereign, and independent Syria that preserves the dignity of every citizen, regardless of religion, denomination, ethnicity, or political affiliation.

• A Syria governed by a constitution that ensures the rule of law, equality before the law, separation of powers, and respect for diversity and freedoms.

• A Syria where everyone, particularly women and youth, actively participates in building the future.

• A Syria where the state maintains an equal distance from all religions and denominations, with a constitution guaranteeing the state’s neutrality towards religion and religious institutions. This ensures the separation of state institutions from religious institutions and prevents the misuse of authority for religious purposes or the exploitation of religion for political gain.

A Call to Commitment and Action

We, the heads of Christian Churches present in Syria for nearly two millennia, call upon all Syrians, at home and abroad, to work hand in hand to realize this vision and bring it to life. We also urge our Christian faithful not to retreat into isolation or fear but to engage actively in the public sphere, moved by the spirit of the Gospel, so they may be partners in building a new Syria.

We also appeal to the international community to stand with the Syrians in rebuilding their homeland within its internationally recognized borders, to prevent any external violations on national sovereignty, and to lift the sanctions imposed on them so that they may freely and independently rebuild their country and its people.

We believe that God, Who brought us together in this land, from which civilizations and faith-based messages originated, will bless our efforts and guide us on the path to peace. Let us lift up our hearts and hands to Him, reconcile with one another, and seek from Him strength and wisdom to move forward. Let us be peacemakers, carrying the hope of Christ and remaining faithful to His message of reconciliation, fraternal love, and peace on earth.

JOHN X

Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East MO

IGNATIUS APHREM II

Syriac Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, and Supreme Head of the Universal Syriac Orthodox Church

YOUSSEF I ABSI

Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and All the East


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A united, sovereign, and independent Syria that preserves the dignity of every citizen, regardless of religion, denomination, ethnicity, or political affiliation.

I asked former Ambassador to Syria (2003 – 2006) Peter Ford and Arab Lebanese journalist Myriam Charbaty to comment on the statement in the light of the recent threats to Maaloula by the Turkish armed factions. You can listen to my previous conversation with Charbaty here.

Peter Ford:

The statement by the Patriarchs arouses deep suspicion. Is it really authentic? I have no doubt the Patriarchs gave their possibly coerced approval, but did they really author a statement in perfect English which reads more like it was drafted in Langley, Virginia than Damascus. Syria? No woke button is left untouched, even “hate speech” is referenced!.

The other tell-tale sign of the statement having been drafted by other hands is the prominence given to the call for lifting of sanctions. Would Christian leaders solicitous for their flock really call for the immediate surrender of the main lever Western powers have to ensure good behaviour towards Christians and others by the new jihadi regime?

Why would the US want to engineer this statement, which can only help to launder the terrorists’ image and make them internationally respectable? Because the US Deep State has every interest in grooming iits protege Jolani into becoming a domestically and internationally accepted US client and asset rezpectablewith complete comnand over that rump part of Syria the US/Israeli masters choose to allocate him from the carcass of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The statement reads especially oddly at a moment when the Christians’ oppressors are particularly active in the Christian stronghold of Maaloula.No word about this? Not even an oblique reference to this and other tribulations being suffered by the Christians of Syria? Only “reconciliation” with the oppressors?

Another curious omission is the signature of any dignitary representing Syria’s large Maronite community. Might this be because the Maronite head resides in Lebanon, making it more difficult to pressure him?

In my analysis the Patriarch’s text is a hostage statement which it would be a charity towards its signatories to discount. Alternatively it is a sad case of Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnappees come to embrace the cause of their kidnappers.


Myriam Charbaty:

With all due respect, the statement issued by the patriarchs in Syria falls significantly short of addressing the grave challenges faced by the Christian community and the Syrian people as a whole, particularly amidst the rise of Takfiri ideology in its various forms.

While the statement may have been made in good faith, it reflects a limited understanding of the broader regional dynamics. The West continues to tighten its grip on the region, further fragmenting the already divided Sykes-Picot entities—entities that, if united, could form a strong and liberation-capable Arab world.

Amid persistent Western efforts to destabilize the Axis of Resistance and dismantle Arab identity, the patriarchs’ statement fails to confront the existential threats posed to the Syrian people. Takfiris are waging a brutal campaign of beheadings, torture, and killings, targeting anyone who defends Syria’s historic position as a pro-Resistance, anti-Israel, independent Arab state that embraces all sects and ethnic groups under a unified and collective Arab identity.

As places like Maaloula, Wadi al-Nasara, and Souqailabiyeh face open threats and attacks, Christians and other Syrians have repeatedly called on their Christian leadership to empower them to defend their presence and existence. They have asked to be armed against forces like Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and his Takfiri militia, made up of mercenaries from across the globe.

Instead, under the biblical slogan, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9), the church leadership appears to advocate pacifism in the face of imminent violence and atrocities. However, the Bible—and Jesus Christ himself—does not call for passivity in the face of injustice. Rather, it calls on us to stand for justice, even at great cost, for only through justice can true peace be achieved. Peace cannot coexist with oppression or subjugation; it must be rooted in liberation.

As Father Gustavo Gutiérrez once wrote, “The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.” This sentiment is one we must urgently echo today.

While the patriarchs’ diplomatic tone may aim to preserve lives, the reality is that the threats we face are existential. What is required now is not mere rhetoric but a firm and active stance of Resistance.

We are confronted with the expansionist ambitions of the Israeli enemy, orchestrated and backed by the United States.

Our people are being killed and displaced, and Syria’s rich history—our shared Arab identity and social fabric—is being systematically erased, both from museums and from collective memory.

Regrettably, the only viable path left is one of Popular Armed Resistance. Freedom will not be granted; it must be seized through strength and resolve. Maaloula, Wadi al-Nasara, and Souqailabiyeh have learned that well the first time around and this time it must not be any different. Our existence on this land requires sacrifice and that, by Christ’s commandment, is the greatest form of love.

Let it be clear: the conflict in Syria is not a civil war. It is a battle against foreign mercenaries and internal collaborators advancing Western, U.S.-led agendas designed to fragment and dominate our region.


As Myriam later explained to me – Christians are no threat to Takfiris, not like the Alawite, Shia and Sunni communities that oppose foreign-backed Takfirism. The forced exodus of Christians from the region are part of the demographic rearrangement of the Middle East. The removal of Christians leaves the field open to the orchestrated Muslim-centric sectarian wars that serve the Zionist and Western agendas.

While Christians are being “quietly” persecuted, the West can continue a policy of cosmetic defence of the Christians in the region. The drive to conceal the dark agenda and to present life as “normal” in the multi-denominational Christian towns in Syria is designed to prevent any localised resistance until the time that everyone will be displaced or massacred. As Charbaty said:

HTS does not have the numbers to consolidate power in full confrontation with all sects in Syria. It needs to divide and conquer.

Charbaty also added:

These institutions lack the courage to defend our existence. In their desire for a quiet life, they have abandoned righteousness, truth, and solidarity with their brothers in the coastal regions of Syria and beyond. Seeking only to preserve their human form of existence, they have turned away from justice and the noble sacrifices required to uphold it.

They have lowered their heads so that they do not get mistaken for a threat. A move which, in time will prove, was a cheap surrender under the veil of self-preservation.


As Syria begins 2025 in darkness and bloodshed the glimmers of a Resistance against these agendas is beginning to emerge from the initial turmoil, confusion and fear, grounded in love for community, faith and justice. The new Crusader paradigm will not conquer such resistance.

As Malcolm X said:

When the people who are in power want to [..] create an image, to justify something that’s bad, they use the press. And they’ll use the press to create a humanitarian image, for a devil, or a devil image for a humanitarian. They’ll take a person who’s a victim of the crime, and make it appear he’s the criminal, and they’ll take the criminal and make it appear that he’s the victim of the crime.

Stay vigilant and don’t abandon Syria.

Some of the photos I took of Maaloula on one of my many visits:

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https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... der-seige/

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US lays groundwork for new military base in northern Syria: Report

As clashes continue to rage between Washington and Ankara's proxies in north Syria, the US is heavily reinforcing its presence near the Turkish border

News Desk

JAN 2, 2025

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(Photo Credit: X)

The US army mobilized at least 50 trucks transporting concrete fortifications to the town of Kobani (Ain al-Arab) in the eastern countryside of Aleppo on 2 January in preparation for building a new military base, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

The convoy was spotted traveling along the Hasakah–Raqqah highway en route to the Kurdish-majority city near the Turkish border. It was accompanied by a military vehicle from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Washington's proxy militia in northeast Syria.


On Wednesday, local sources reported that another large US convoy delivered logistic reinforcements to Kobani, including premade chambers, surveillance cameras, cement blocks, fuel tanks, and digging equipment.

Construction on Washington's new military base will reportedly begin on Friday. “More military reinforcements such as soldiers, weapons, armored vehicles, radars, and anti-aircraft weapons will be brought [later on],” the SOHR report states.

The US illegally deployed troops in Syria in November 2015 to allegedly “prevent the return of ISIS.” This came just two months after Russia accepted the request of Damascus to provide air support to the Syrian army, Iranian special forces, and Hezbollah in their fight against ISIS forces who threatened to overrun the Syrian capital.

Since then, Washington has retained a stranglehold on Syria's largest oil and wheat fields in the northeast with the help of the SDF. The US also controls a massive 55-kilometer zone near the tri-border area with Iraq and Jordan.

Last month, the Pentagon confirmed that it has about 2,000 troops deployed inside Syria.

Washington's increased military presence in Syria's Kurdish-controlled north comes as SDF troops confront an intense offensive from the Syrian National Army (SNA) with air and artillery support from Turkiye.

On Thursday morning, the Turkish army and the SNA hit SDF positions in the eastern countryside of Ain Issa in Raqqah with heavy shelling and mortar fire. Close to 200 people have been killed since violent clashes broke out on 8 December between Washington and Ankara's proxies.

The SNA is comprised of former fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Ankara has used the group for years as a tool to prevent the SDF from establishing a contiguous Kurdish autonomous zone from Afrin in Syria’s northwest to Hasakah in the northeast.

The armed group is also closely allied to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The former Al-Qaeda affiliate took control of Syria early in December after leading a successful armed coup against former president Bashar al-Assad.

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-lays-g ... ria-report
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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