The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[Elvis]

Exclusive: Assad is confronted with photos of his torture victims

Anyone watch the interview with Assad at the link? He makes excellent points about the provenance of the photos. i.e. that no one has established the their locations. Time and time again, the West has relied on bogus evidence to fuel public favor for war and U.S. hegemony. So far, there is no reason to believe these photos are being used any differently.

Since there can be no conversation or discussion with AD about it, anyone else watch the interview and have meaningful comment to share?

[Elvis]

the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Council

In February 2009, James L. Jones, then-chairman of the Atlantic Council, stepped down in order to serve as President Obama's new National Security Advisor and was succeeded by Senator Chuck Hagel. [3] In addition, other Council members also left to serve the administration: Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke as the Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Eric K. Shinseki as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Anne-Marie Slaughter as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Four years later, Hagel stepped down to serve as US Secretary of Defense. Gen. Brent Scowcroft served as interim chairman of the organization's Board of Directors until January 2014, when former ambassador to China and governor of Utah Jon Huntsman, Jr. [4] was appointed.
...

In March 2016, the organization met to discuss strategies for dealing with the populist movement in Europe, which they believe is threatening the globalist agenda on the continent [koff koff].
...

In September 2014, the New York Times reported that since 2008, the organization has received donations from more than twenty-five governments outside of the United States, including $5 million from Norway.[33] Concerned that scholars from the organization could be covertly trying to push the agendas of foreign governments [koff koff], legislation was proposed in response to the Times report requiring full disclosure of witnesses testifying before Congress.[34] Other contributors to the organization include the Ukrainian World Congress [koff koff].

[8bitagent]

Conventional ground forces may be sent to fight ISIS in Syria in the coming months

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/15/politics/ ... index.html

The Defense Department might propose that the US send conventional ground combat forces into northern Syria for the first time to speed up the fight against ISIS, CNN has learned.
"It's possible that you may see conventional forces hit the ground in Syria for some period of time," one defense official told CNN.
But the official emphasized that any decision is ultimately up to President Donald Trump, who has ordered his defense secretary to come up with a proposal to combat ISIS before the end of the month.

The move would significantly alter US military operations in Syria if approved and could put troops on the ground within weeks.
Until now, only small teams made up largely of Special Operations forces have operated in Syria, providing training and assistance to anti-ISIS opposition groups on the ground.
Conventional units operate in larger numbers and would require a more significant footprint of security protection both on the ground and in the air.
US officials are characterizing the concept of deploying ground troops as a point of discussion, stopping short of saying it's a formal proposal.

[Elvis]

Funded by the NED?! Say no more....

[American Dream]

Again and Again and Again

The same racist rhetoric used against Syrians was also used to shut the door to Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust.


Complaining of an invasion and an “army of people who speak foreign languages,” she sketched out an apocalyptic vision of America should the 20,000 Jewish children be allowed in, which included the refugees leading a revolt against the US government, depriving Americans of their basic freedoms, and turning native-born Americans into slaves. She called the bill’s proponents communists and went on to accuse the committee chairman of being part of the Third International.

Such attitudes were not limited to “the masses.” Laura Delano Houghteling, Roosevelt’s cousin who was married to the US commissioner of immigration, similarly stated that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

One can’t help but hear the echoes of this rhetoric in today’s anti-refugee arguments. Right wing websites abound with stories (including totally false ones) painting Muslim Syrian refugees — or “rapeugees” in the words of one right-wing personality — as uniquely inclined toward sexual assault and other crimes.

The dehumanizing language reserved for Jewish and other European immigrants in the 1930s is repeated today, as we hear about “floods,” a “swarm of people,” and — lifted straight from the testimony of Agnes Waters — an “invasion” of refugees. And much as the Wagner-Rogers Bill’s opponents feared that allowing in Jewish children would open the door to anti-American forces determined to bring down the US government and society, so Republicans today warn that Syrian refugees could be a “Trojan horse” for anti-American “bad guys” and terrorists.



Young Jewish refugees arriving in London in 1938.

More at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/refu ... enophobia/

[Searcher08]

What a poor premise.

[tapitsbo]

Speaking of Jacobin, how do you guys like the latest reveals/meltdowns from people like Sam Kriss?

[Elvis]

Speaking of Jacobin, how do you guys like the latest reveals/meltdowns from people like Sam Kriss?

Can you post an example? I'm not hip to Sam Kriss.

[tapitsbo]

He has been providing Jacobin-left style comment on the Syrian conflict for years without disclosing that his dad is a PR officer in Israel...

interesting development since the sorts of articles we've seen pasted here year in and year out seem to come from a small array of tightly coordinated groups.

[American Dream]

Salvage Perspectives #4: Order Prevails in Washington


Solidarity, Graffiti and Rubble
It is shamefully the case that some on the Left have participated in the bellicose counter-jihadist strains of Islamophobia as an outgrowth of their support for President Assad of Syria. The crushing of the Arab uprisings triggered in 2011 – a brutal nadir of which has been reached with the fall of Aleppo, after barrel-bombing, chlorine poisoning, the destruction of all hospitals and civilian infrastructure, with Putin’s bombers doing much of the work – is a tragedy for the international Left.

The ‘goodbye’ videos posted by activists and citizens are not merely a testament to that tragedy: they are a lesson. Their spirit is echoed in the graffiti of another besieged and defeated Syrian city, Homs: ‘Remember, when we were still human? Do you remember, Homs?’ These are people who threw off, however temporarily and imperfectly, the rule of a neoliberal tyranny by their own collective agency, and preserved the memory of that uprising in the rubble of their homes. Who imagines that any future revolutionaries will find more favourable conditions or less savage counter-revolution? A Left that slanders and ignores such people, simply because the regime against which they revolted was not a pro-American one, is refusing to learn the lessons of this epoch, the epoch of collapse, rather than that of circa-2003 ‘regime change’.

It is common, on the anti-anti-Assad Left, to hold Turkey and other outside powers responsible for the destruction wreaked on Syria. Salvage holds no brief for the authoritarian thug Erdoğan. Yet the road to the destruction of Aleppo has been paved by a change in Turkish policy, not by support for the Free Syrian Army or any other rebel group. Content from the autumn of 2016 on to pursue its war against the Kurdish PYD, Turkey turned its attention away from the rebels in Aleppo, allowing the Russian-Iranian-regime advance while, as the Financial Times put it, ‘Russia gave Turkey a free hand against Syrian Kurdish forces to whom it had offered temporary and opportunistic support’.

One can easily imagine the fate of the PYD cantons once all hands, including Assad’s, are freed. The mainstream Syrian opposition meanwhile has, according to the Washington Post, offered to ‘work with Trump and Russia’. As if there would be anything with which to work. This follows from a long, and failed, opposition strategy of seeking alliances with states such as Turkey only to learn that these have no permanent allies, only interests. A hard lesson is being taught here, one that will no doubt soon be visited on the PYD: solidarity against rulers, not with them, is the surest strategy.

In the midst of the assault on Aleppo, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm – one of the towering Syrian Marxist intellectuals of whom Western Leftists work hard to be ignorant – died in Berlin. Al-Azm said in an interview two years into the uprising, ‘in its revolution today, Syria spills this much blood in order to atone for all its past sins and erase its shame, and for this reason, I am with it’. How much greater the tally will be now, and how much worse the reckoning.

Yet there are Assad supporters who cheer on the bloodletting in Aleppo on the basis of a crude, barbarised anti-empire sentiment: witness George Galloway’s valediction ‘long live the Syrian Arab Republic’. If antisemitism was last century’s socialism of fools, Islamophobia is this century’s anti-imperialism of fools.

Indeed, as the rise of the alt-right illustrates, the dominance of Islamophobia is hardly any guarantee against the revival of antisemitism. As Enzo Traverso has argued, the segue of one into the other is not accidental. Their raciological metaphors are incredibly similar: ‘The beards, tefellin and kaftans of the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe [of the early twentieth century] correspond to the beards and veils of the Muslims today … Judaism and Islam both function as negative metaphors of alterity; a century ago, the Jew as painted by popular iconography inevitably had a hooked nose and sticking-out ears, just as Islam today is identified by the burqa’. While much of the neo- and post-fascist Right has made a conscious effort to shed pre-war variants of biological antisemitism, the cultural tropes of Jew-baiting were visible in the Trump campaign and are all over the pro-Trump far-right media, most notoriously Breitbart.

Tellingly, some of the loudest advocates for this refulgent Streicherism are staunch apologists for Israel. The Zionist Organisation of America’s dinner date with Steve Bannon, and Alan Dershowitz’s defence of Bannon against well-founded charges of promoting antisemitism, shocked liberal Jewish opinion, but it was just the loudest of a chorus of hard-right Zionist defences of the alt-right. This is cause for disgust but not amazement: Israel and its hasbara merchants, as a logical corollary of the colonial struggle against Palestine and the identification of Israel’s survival with US global power, have been among the most vitriolic traducers of Islam as, per Efraim Karsh’s claim, an ‘imperialist’ creed.

[American Dream]

Salvage Perspectives #4: Order Prevails in Washington


Solidarity, Graffiti and Rubble
It is shamefully the case that some on the Left have participated in the bellicose counter-jihadist strains of Islamophobia as an outgrowth of their support for President Assad of Syria. The crushing of the Arab uprisings triggered in 2011 – a brutal nadir of which has been reached with the fall of Aleppo, after barrel-bombing, chlorine poisoning, the destruction of all hospitals and civilian infrastructure, with Putin’s bombers doing much of the work – is a tragedy for the international Left.

The ‘goodbye’ videos posted by activists and citizens are not merely a testament to that tragedy: they are a lesson. Their spirit is echoed in the graffiti of another besieged and defeated Syrian city, Homs: ‘Remember, when we were still human? Do you remember, Homs?’ These are people who threw off, however temporarily and imperfectly, the rule of a neoliberal tyranny by their own collective agency, and preserved the memory of that uprising in the rubble of their homes. Who imagines that any future revolutionaries will find more favourable conditions or less savage counter-revolution? A Left that slanders and ignores such people, simply because the regime against which they revolted was not a pro-American one, is refusing to learn the lessons of this epoch, the epoch of collapse, rather than that of circa-2003 ‘regime change’.

It is common, on the anti-anti-Assad Left, to hold Turkey and other outside powers responsible for the destruction wreaked on Syria. Salvage holds no brief for the authoritarian thug Erdoğan. Yet the road to the destruction of Aleppo has been paved by a change in Turkish policy, not by support for the Free Syrian Army or any other rebel group. Content from the autumn of 2016 on to pursue its war against the Kurdish PYD, Turkey turned its attention away from the rebels in Aleppo, allowing the Russian-Iranian-regime advance while, as the Financial Times put it, ‘Russia gave Turkey a free hand against Syrian Kurdish forces to whom it had offered temporary and opportunistic support’.

One can easily imagine the fate of the PYD cantons once all hands, including Assad’s, are freed. The mainstream Syrian opposition meanwhile has, according to the Washington Post, offered to ‘work with Trump and Russia’. As if there would be anything with which to work. This follows from a long, and failed, opposition strategy of seeking alliances with states such as Turkey only to learn that these have no permanent allies, only interests. A hard lesson is being taught here, one that will no doubt soon be visited on the PYD: solidarity against rulers, not with them, is the surest strategy.

In the midst of the assault on Aleppo, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm – one of the towering Syrian Marxist intellectuals of whom Western Leftists work hard to be ignorant – died in Berlin. Al-Azm said in an interview two years into the uprising, ‘in its revolution today, Syria spills this much blood in order to atone for all its past sins and erase its shame, and for this reason, I am with it’. How much greater the tally will be now, and how much worse the reckoning.

Yet there are Assad supporters who cheer on the bloodletting in Aleppo on the basis of a crude, barbarised anti-empire sentiment: witness George Galloway’s valediction ‘long live the Syrian Arab Republic’. If antisemitism was last century’s socialism of fools, Islamophobia is this century’s anti-imperialism of fools.

Indeed, as the rise of the alt-right illustrates, the dominance of Islamophobia is hardly any guarantee against the revival of antisemitism. As Enzo Traverso has argued, the segue of one into the other is not accidental. Their raciological metaphors are incredibly similar: ‘The beards, tefellin and kaftans of the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe [of the early twentieth century] correspond to the beards and veils of the Muslims today … Judaism and Islam both function as negative metaphors of alterity; a century ago, the Jew as painted by popular iconography inevitably had a hooked nose and sticking-out ears, just as Islam today is identified by the burqa’. While much of the neo- and post-fascist Right has made a conscious effort to shed pre-war variants of biological antisemitism, the cultural tropes of Jew-baiting were visible in the Trump campaign and are all over the pro-Trump far-right media, most notoriously Breitbart.

Tellingly, some of the loudest advocates for this refulgent Streicherism are staunch apologists for Israel. The Zionist Organisation of America’s dinner date with Steve Bannon, and Alan Dershowitz’s defence of Bannon against well-founded charges of promoting antisemitism, shocked liberal Jewish opinion, but it was just the loudest of a chorus of hard-right Zionist defences of the alt-right. This is cause for disgust but not amazement: Israel and its hasbara merchants, as a logical corollary of the colonial struggle against Palestine and the identification of Israel’s survival with US global power, have been among the most vitriolic traducers of Islam as, per Efraim Karsh’s claim, an ‘imperialist’ creed.

[conniption]

MoA
(embedded links)

February 23, 2017

Syria - A Confused Trump Strategy Lets Erdogan U-Turn Again

There are two new developments on the Syrian front. The Islamic State suddenly changed its tactic and the Turkish President Erdogan again changed his policy course.

In the last 24 hours news announcements about victories against the Islamic state (ISIS) rapidly followed each other:

>> The Kurdish U.S. proxy forces in east Syria (SDF) announced that it had reached the northern bank of the Euphrates between Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. This cuts the ISIS communication line between the two cities.

>> Turkish forces and their "Syrian rebel" mercenaries have been attacking Al-Bab east of Aleppo for nearly four month. They made little progress and incurred huge losses. Late yesterday they suddenly broke into the city and today took control of it. Various sources claim that a deal was made between the Turkish forces and ISIS for the later to evacuate Al-Bab unharmed and with its personal weapons. It is not yet known what price Turkey paid in that deal.

>> South of Al-Bab the Syrian Army is moving further east towards the Euphrates and took several villages from ISIS. The Syrian move is largely designed to cut the roads between the Turkish forces around Al-Bab and the Islamic State forces in Raqqa. (This now might become a race.)

>> Further south another Syrian Army group is moving east towards Palmyra.

>> In the eastern city of Deir Ezzor the Syrian army garrison is under siege by Islamic State forces. A few weeks ago the situation there looked very dire. But with reinforcements coming in by helicopter and massive Russian air force interdiction the position held out quite well. In recent days the defenders took several hills from a retreating ISIS.

>> In Iraq the army, police and the various government militia are pushing towards south Mosul. Today the airport south of the city fell into their hands with little fighting. Like everywhere else ISIS had stopped its resistance and pulled back. Only a few rearguards offered tepid resistance.

While ISIS was under pressure everywhere the sudden retreat on all fronts during the last 24 hours is astonishing and suggest some synchronicity. A central order must have been given to pull back to the buildup areas of Raqqa in Syria and south Mosul in Iraq.

But ISIS has nowhere to go from those areas. Mosul is completely surrounded and Raqqa is mostly cut off. After the massacres they committed everywhere ISIS fighters can not expect any mercy. They have made enemies everywhere and aside from a few (Saudi) radical clerics no friends are left to help them. The recent retreats are thereby likely not signs of surrender. ISIS will continue to fight until it is completely destroyed. But for now the ISIS leaders decided to preserve their forces. One wonders what they plan to stage as their last glorious show. A mass atrocity against the civilians in the cities it occupies?

When in late 2016 the defeat of the "Syrian rebels" proxy forces in east-Aleppo city was foreseeable the Turkish President Erdogan switched from supporting the radicals in north-west Syria to a more lenient stand towards Syria and its allies Russia and Iran. The move followed month of on and off prodding from Russia and after several attempts by Erdogan to get more U.S. support had failed. In late December peace talks started between Syria, Russia, Turkey and Iran with the U.S. and the EU excluded.

But after the Trump administration took over the Turkish position changed again. Erdogan is now back to betting on a stronger U.S. intervention in Syria that would favor his original plans of installing in Syria an Islamic government under Turkish control:

Ankara understands today that Trump is aggressive toward Iran and gave his blessing to Saudi Arabia. Therefore Erdogan is taking a new position: hiding behind Saudi Arabia, mimicking the US hostility towards Iran and, in consequences, declaring himself once more against the Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The new Turkish position was confirmed by Senator John McCain's visit to the Kurdish YPG and U.S. Special Forces in Kobani. McCain came via Turkey. An earlier visits to the YPK by U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk had been condemned by Ankara. Outside of a wider agreement such McCain's antics would not be allowed.

The U.S. is allied with the Kurdish YPK in Syria who are blood-brothers of the Kurdish PKK group in Turkey which the Turkish government has been fighting for decades. The YPG fighters are good and reliable light infantry fighters. They work together with U.S. special forces and are well regarded.

Turkey offers to send its own ground troops together with Saudi forces to liberate Raqqa from ISIS. <snark>The expertise the Saudi military shows in Yemen combined with the Turkish military prowess in its "Euphrates Shield" operation in Syria will surely will be welcome by the U.S. military. </snark>

But there are bigger strategic issues at stake and some agreement between the U.S., Turkey and the Saudis has been found (adopted machine translation):

[T]he sudden transformation of the Turkish position occurred after a lengthy conversation conducted with the US president, Donald Trump, and the visit by the head of the U.S. intelligence agency (CIA). A re-shuffling of the cards took place which induced another turn in Ankara on the Syrian file.
...
The new U.S.-Turkish understandings that fixed the bridge between President Erdogan and the old U.S. ally is based on the escalation of hostility to Iran and the (re-)establishment of a "Sunni axis" led by the Turkish president. It includes the establishment of a buffer zone in Syria as a prelude to a partitioning [of Syria] scenario.

This is essentially a fall back to the positions taken by the Obama administration in 2011/12. The lessons learned since will have to be relearned. The signals from the U.S. military now suggest the introduction of additional regular ground troops in support of a U.S. proxy force and an eventual U.S. protected enclave in east-Syria. The YPK is the only reliable proxy force available to the U.S. and it needs heavier weapon support to take on Raqqa. But U.S. boots on ground in the Middle East have never been a solution. They are a guarantee of extended fighting and eventual failure.

The strategic view is contradictory. The U.S. wants to fight the Sunni radical forces that Saudi Arabia grows and pampers. Even while ISIS gets diminished new such forces are already growing in Iraq. Any anti-radical strategy that builds on cooperation with the Saudis will fail.

It is impossible to get Turkey and the YPK/PKK to fight on one side - McCain visit or not. The U.S. would loose its only reliable proxy force in Syria should it make common cause with Erdogan in the fight about Raqqa. Any anti-Kurdish Turkish-U.S. controlled "safe zone" in north Syria will come under fire from all other sides on the ground. Any U.S. base in Syria will be the target of various regular and irregular forces. In the long term the new plans are doomed and Erdogan's latest u-turn is unlikely to be rewarded.

But until then we can expect more bloodshed and more fighting in Syria. As Eljah Magnier comments:

The US policy in Syria seems frantic and far-fetched without efficient powerful allies on the ground, and is unable to retake cities from ISIS with its Kurdish proxies alone. And the “honeymoon” between Washington and Riyadh will certainly have a substantial negative effect on the war in Syria. This will increase the closeness between Russia and Iran, but the tension between US and Russia is also expected to increase: one side (the US) wants partition and the other (Russia) wants a unified Syria without al-Qaida and ISIS, and without Turkey occupying the north of Syria and a Saudi Arabia return to the Bilad al-Sham. At this stage, it is difficult to speculate on what this clash of incompatible objectives will produce on the ground in Syria.

Posted by b on February 23, 2017

[American Dream]

Standing with Syrians: An Open Letter to an Anti-Imperialist

Eva is a real person who I have known since 2007, as described in this article. But in this text Eva also stands for many other people, whether outspoken or silent supporters of the Syrian regime and its allies. I will not re-post her photo here. In a world flooded with images, it is important to maintain our ability to imagine a moment.

Eva,

For the past couple of years I have meant to write you, but I simply could not find the words. Then, on December 13 an old post of yours came up on my Facebook feed with a photo of you next to a smiling Syrian military officer in Aleppo.

I remember when years ago you risked your life for the people of Gaza, when you risked your life for others, joining ambulance drivers to the most dangerous areas in the hope that the Israeli military machine might spare the lives of civilians because a white Canadian activist accompanied them. You stood on the side of the oppressed. I never lived through the brutal Israeli military assaults on Gaza that started shortly after I lived there. I don’t think I would have had the courage to do what you did; for this I respect you deeply. During those weeks you certainly saved countless innocent lives when the far more powerful Israeli military relentlessly ravaged the Palestinian population, at times snuffing out the souls of entire families hiding in their homes because they had nowhere else to flee, or gassing the internally displaced in UN shelters. Later you wrote the stories of the people you met, as so often is said about the privileged like you and me, “to give a voice the voiceless.”

I am a film-maker, I work with images. The way I read it, the photo you posted from Aleppo was intended to display the kindness of the Syrian army and more importantly to prove that you, as in Gaza, were there in Aleppo as a witness to what was happening--as noted in the caption, on November 5, “prior to full liberation.” More on this image later.

After you left the Gaza Strip, you made your way to Syria. There your thinking took a drastic turn, you chose the side of the victor. You ignored the most vital factor of the reality in Syria: large sections of the Syrian population had chosen to rise up, as in Egypt, Tunis, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region, for freedom and dignity, much as Palestinians have since the colonization of their land against their occupier. Yet, unlike the Palestinians who face a US-backed Zionist occupation of their land, Syrians were facing a Russian-Iranian backed dictator. The danger of a black-and-white way of thinking has made you fall into a trap of letting ideology alone determine your political stance. Shaped by cold war politics, of First-World guilt, due to US imperial domination, you bought into a narrative, like a large section of the left in the West and East, that the US is always the greatest criminal and therefore one must defend the other side.

By no means do I support the US in their role in the bloodshed and turmoil of the past years in Syria. But that certainly does not lead me to support Russia and its ally Bashar Al-Assad. The greater power’s position on a conflict alone cannot determine whose cause is just. We must listen to the people. We need to address this paradigm of the “people”, who are “Syrians”? For it is precisely here that you have allowed ideology to take priority over your sense of justice, and this is what surprises me most about you, Eva. But for a moment, let us take a step back, I will speak about the Egyptian revolution, which I lived through and participated in, not to make a one-to-one comparison but to put this conversation into a much-needed context.

In Egypt, in all stages prior to, during, and after the revolutionary period of 2011-2013, a majority of people backed the status quo. They would say, “Mubarak wasn’t a good president but at least he brought stability,” “Better Mubarak than whom we don’t know.” Many Egyptians did not believe reports of torture at the hands of the police and military, they claimed images of military violence against the revolution’s protests were photoshopped, they too claimed we were traitors, funded by the West, merely because we opposed “our glorious military.” In various phases of the revolution, our biggest threats were not the secret police’s wide net of informants and agents but “honorable citizens” who believed they were serving their fatherland by handing us over to the police, neighbors reporting on neighbors, family members on family members. Patriotism, after all, sinks deep into the psyche. Many Egyptians are still in prisons today or have faced death due to these “honorable citizens.” I am certain that some of our accusers didn’t truly believe what they were saying but held such opinions because they so desperately wanted to be able to believe in a government that would respect and protect them, a government that would do what was best for the nation. We know from experience while protesting, imprisoned in police stations, in custody of the state security, or before the courts of justice that in Egypt, sadly, today as before the revolution, the “elected” leaders’ care only for the longevity of their power, not the population they “represent.”

I am certain that there are countless Syrians in a similar predicament - especially in regime-held areas - who are afraid to say what they truly believe because they do not have the luxury of that choice. Some believe the regime because their experience of the past years is so much worse than what they lived before it; others, out of fear of the unknown, prefer the evil of the Assad regime to evils they don’t know. Yet, most importantly, there are millions who oppose this regime, and they have risked their lives for the sake of a better future for generations to come. But to them you do not listen, because--as you explained to me in one of our last exchange of messages in the summer of 2014--“The ones who stayed in Syria are largely those who don't support this ‘revolution’ and the ones who left, vice versa.” When I replied to your claims by talking about the Syrians I know who had come to visit Cairo from Syria in 2011, all of whom went back, you ended that exchange abruptly, saying, “I am not going to waste a whole lot of time. However, if you were to go to Syria and talk with average Syrians, you'd find a different picture.” That is the last time I had a political exchange with you, because you made clear to me that you did not even consider my opinions because I had to speak to Syrians “in Syria” to have a valid opinion. In line with such an argument, you wrote off everyone who had left Syria as a lying idealist. You dismissed the opinion of a majority of the five million political refugees, Eva, on the basis of your “on the ground reporting” in the bosom of the offices of a murderous government officials. While ushered through the corridors of the Syrian regime, you wrote off the views and opinions of Syrians threatened with arrest, torture, or death for living in the areas the regime had withdrawn from and was bombing.

I wonder what would have happened if the Egyptian revolution had turned violent to the extent Syria has, if the Egyptian military junta had not sacrificed Mubarak for the sake of the longevity of the regime itself, and if Russia had come to the aid of the Egyptian regime, while the US opposed it. Would you have been “reporting” on the Egyptian revolution, would you have turned me and Egypt’s revolutionaries into US-backed, jihadist-loving, Gulf funded terrorists? The only journalists who did that in Egypt were part of the Egyptian propaganda establishment. The question is valid because Bashar al-Assad whom you claim to be a “legitimately elected president” holds a very similar track record to Mubarak and Sisi. Egypt and Syria’s military regimes were founded in similar times in the 1950s and 60s, were both backed by the USSR, which helped each establish an effective police state with competing reputations for the torture apparatuses that they run. The comparison between Syria and Egypt is valid because, had the Egyptian revolution gone the way of Syria’s, Egypt’s revolutionaries would also have found themselves fighting on the same side as many Islamists.

Despite your years among those opposing oppression in this region, you have not learned realpolitik--that you cannot always choose those you fight alongside. Despite the Qatar-funded, Islamist agenda of Hamas, you defended them when they opposed the Western-armed and backed Israeli occupation and murder of Palestinians. I remember how adamant the Syrian activists visiting Cairo from Syria in 2011 were to clarify that their struggle was non-violent. This was a distinction we never made in Egypt and in retrospect I can see why they did that as at that point: the Syrian and Egyptian scenarios differed vastly. The Syrian uprising quickly became militarized, a playing field for global interests, US and Russian but also Iranian and Turkish, Saudi, and Gulfi. Like in Egypt, we know that soon after the uprising began the Assad regime released fundamentalists from prisons en masse - thus supporting the growth of Islamist forces in an attempt to undermine the civilian-run revolution. Despite this clear risk of militarization, Syrian activists rose up against a military regime that, much like in Egypt, has robbed the nation, exploited the poor on behalf of its inner circle, and for years locked up and tortured its opposition - including Palestinians in Tel al-Zaatar in ’76 and in Yarmouk camp today. Once people have risked everything for revolution there is no turning back, even if you find yourself battling side by side with militias you do not identify with, you do not support, trust, or even want to exist. In a situation of war you do no have the privilege of choosing those who fight your enemy. You didn’t always in Gaza in 2009 and Syrians didn’t in 2012 as the foreign-backed militias gained strength and began to attack and weaken their powerful initiatives of self-organization in areas Assad had withdrawn from all over the country. You are right in claiming that these so-called “moderate,” often US-funded, often al-Qaida-affiliated Islamists are not to be cheered; they have pillaged, they have stockpiled food while civilians go hungry, they have threatened, arrested, and killed their critics. But you do not note that the Syrian regime and its allies strategically prioritize targeting less-Islamist dominated territories (like Eastern Aleppo) before Raqqa. For the counter-revolution the civilian revolution poses the bigger threat and must be wiped out first.

Why have you never report about the battles of Syrian revolutionaries against the Islamist forces amongst them? One of the reasons so many of the non-militant revolutionary initiatives were short-lived is because they fought a battle on two fronts, against the regime and against militant Islamist groups. Many of those who have stopped fighting in either armed or non-armed struggle, and left Syria due to the nature of these militias, are precisely those you accuse of being Western-backed activists. And yet you ignore the fact that despite the terrible rise in power of the Islamists there are still Syrian revolutionaries who have remained, some who until recently took the risk to protest openly the presence of the Islamists in their midst. In Ma’arat Numan, in the countryside of Idlib, the biggest remaining opposition area, locals protested for 214 days straight against the presence of the Qaida-affiliated Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Nusra Front) as well as the policies of Assad December 4th was only the last time that the Assad/Russian bombs targeted their market, killing dozens. In Ma’arat Numan they protest, elsewhere civilian activists have paid with their lives for doing so.

Why have you never reported on the horrors of Assad’s torture chambers, Eva? Because a majority of Syrians anyone will meet today have themselves passed or know of someone who since the start of the revolution has passed through these torture dens. If one denies the arrest and disappearance of hundreds of thousands, and the structural torture in Assad’s prisons, then there was no reason for a revolt to begin with. You are claiming that millions of Syrians are merely imagining the risk of death for the sake of a political opinion.

Finally, how can you simply neglect to report the killing spree Assad and his allies have been on since the start of the uprising?

In response to these questions, you claim that the mainstream media are lying to us. I am no fan of commercial media outlets, but there are also plenty of non-mainstream media outlets - like the ones where you publish- and countless Syrian journalists and citizen journalists reporting “on the ground.” You are claiming that every journalist - except for a select few who propagate the Assad regime’s information - are liars. I have lived under military dictatorship in Egypt my entire life, but you are telling me to trust no one but the military dictator.

Finally, I want to return to the issue of images. In recent times we have seen more and more photoshopping of images, I am certain it happens on all sides, propaganda is nothing new. We live in an era in which our screens are infiltrated with images, we can no longer base our decisions solely on the images produced by your hated mainstream media nor by the Assad regime’s propaganda. In December at the height of the siege and bombing campaign on Eastern Aleppo we did not see so many images. I wonder, is it surprising that there are no journalists embedded with the Iranian militias? Or that there are no videographers to document retribution killings at the checkpoints? But more importantly, why must more images be produced - of blood, of human remains, of bombed homes - when the world has been silent about the atrocities in Syria all these years? Finally, why must we see images in order to believe?

In a world gone mad, literally drunk on images, we must have a radical capacity to question the images we choose to form our worldview. This radical criticism entails making decisions based on the structural logic of the forces involved. For six years the regime and its allies have been arresting, torturing, and bombing hospitals and schools and residential areas, structurally starving besieged communities as retribution against a population that stood up for itself and opposed this brutality. The Assad regime and its greater allies - Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah - and shadowy friends - China, Israel, and recently Egypt - as well as the powers with their own non-Assad-aligned interest in Syria - the USA, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Gulf states, and the UN - all stand accused in the demolition of the life of Syrians. If you turn away for a moment from the burning frontlines, you will see that each of these sees their own goldmine in Syria - regional demographics through population re-settlement, control over natural resources or trade interests or sectarian geopolitics. No longer is there only one single imperialism to oppose. We must reclaim the terminology of “anti-imperialism,” using it to assess any forces that practice a military strategy based on imperial logic. All of these powers are far from having an interest in human beings. And finally, as people who criticize and oppose the agendas of these forces, we must realize that choosing only one side to stand against makes possible a strategy of divide and conquer. You and I, Eva, once stood on the same side of the wall; today we stand opposing each other. This is one of the greatest successes of the powers involved in this game: to pit not only Syrians against Syrians, but Palestinians against Palestinians, protesters against protesters.

Today I stand with the besieged citizens of Idlib and the small but powerful spirit of the Syrian revolution still existent in corners all over Syria, not next to a smiling army officer.

[Elvis]

AD posted "tabulagaza" writing:

Finally, why must we see images evidence in order to believe?

Fixed.

[Nordic]