FLASHBACK: Jordanian 4/1 UFO panic. Jordanian paper's April Fool's UFOs spark panic by barracuda » 08 Apr 2010 04:51
While April Fools' Day jokes appearing in the press may be a great British tradition, this is not the case in Jordan, says the BBC's Dale Gavlak in the capital, Amman.
Syria 'rebel chemicals' story gets weirder AP reporter Gavlak now says she edited the dubious article
The story behind the story about Saudi Arabia supposedly providing Syrian rebels with chemical weapons gets weirder and weirder, though perhaps also a little clearer.
For readers who haven't been following the tale, I'll start with a quick catch-up. Last month an American website, Mint Press News, reported claims from anonymous sources in Syria suggesting that Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia had provided rebel fighters with chemical weapons which the rebels then handled "improperly", causing mass deaths on August 21.
The story was widely circulated on the internet and has since been cited by Russia and others in order to cast doubt on the findings of the UN weapons inspectors.
Mint Press named the journalists who wrote the story as Dale Gavlak (an established freelance based in Jordan who has worked regularly for the Associated Press) and Yahya Ababneh (a young Jordanian who claims to have carried out journalistic assignments "in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Libya for clients such as al-Jazeera, al-Quds al-Arabi, Amman Net, and other publications").
The story got more attention than it might otherwise have deserved because Gavlak's relationship with the Associated Press gave it an air of credibility. Ababneh, on the other hand, is virtually unknown and Google searches for examples of his previous journalistic work drew a blank.
Yesterday, however, Gavlak issued a statement denying that she was an "author" or "reporter" for the article. "Yahya Ababneh is the sole reporter and author," she said. It was a carefully-worded statement which did not specifically exclude the possibility that Gavlak had been involved in some other capacity in helping to produce the story.
Today, Gavlak's actual role has become clearer. In an email to the Brown Moses blog she stated that although she did no reporting in Syria and could not corroborate Ababneh's account she had edited his article because he normally writes in Arabic, and submitted it to Mint Press on his behalf.
Gavlak also says she asked Mint Press to publish the article under Ababneh's name only, because "I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this".
Mint Press apparently ignored this and published the article under both names and, according to Gavlak, has since refused to remove her name from it.
It seems that Mint Press wanted Gavlak's name to appear on the article for reasons of credibility but that Gavlak did not want to be publicly associated with it even though she had helped Ababneh to get it into shape and, judging by her email, may even have pitched it to Mint Press in the first place.
It's easy to see why Gavlak, as a correspondent for a major international news agency, might not want to be associated with it. The central part of the story was basically an account of some rumours circulating in Syria with no real supporting evidence.
If these had been reported simply as interesting rumours there might not have been a problem but they were presented in a way that promoted them as an alternative explanation for the hundreds of sarin deaths in Syria on August 21. Since Gavlak was editing/supervising Ababneh's work she clearly bears some responsibility for that.
Gavlak also states that she provided Mint Press with biographical information about Ababneh to accompany the article and had unspecified "further communications" with Mint Press about his background. In other words, she appears to have vouched for him as a reporter.
Given that nobody else has succeeded in discovering much about Ababneh or his work, let us hope that Gavlak's next statement or email will cast some light on that.
Official Statement On Dale Gavlak’s Involvement In Syria Exclusive By Mint Press News Desk | September 21, 2013
By Mnar Muhawesh, executive director and editor at large for MintPress News
Statement:
Thank you for reaching out to me in regards to statements made by Dale Gavlak alleging MintPress for incorrectly attributing our exclusive report titled: “Syrians in Goutha claim Saudi-supplied rebels behind chemical attacks.”Gavlak pitched this story to MintPress on August 28th and informed her editors and myself that her colleague Yahya Ababneh was on the ground in Syria. She said Ababneh conducted interviews with rebels, their family members, Ghouta residents and doctors that informed him through various interviews that the Saudis had supplied the rebels with chemical weapons and that rebel fighters handled the weapons improperly setting off the explosions.
When Yahya had returned and shared the information with her, she stated that she confirmed with several colleagues and Jordanian government officials that the Saudis have been supplying rebels with chemical weapons, but as her email states, she says they refused to go on the record.
Gavlak wrote the article in it’s entirety as well as conducted the research. She filed her article on August 29th and was published on the same day.
Dale is under mounting pressure for writing this article by third parties. She notified MintPress editors and myself on August 30th and 31st via email and phone call, that third parties were placing immense amounts of pressure on her over the article and were threatening to end her career over it. She went on to tell us that she believes this third party was under pressure from the head of the Saudi Intelligence Prince Bandar himself, who is alleged in the article of supplying the rebels with chemical weapons.
On August 30th, Dale asked MintPress to remove her name completely from the byline because she stated that her career and reputation was at risk. She continued to say that these third parties were demanding her to disassociate herself from the article or these parties would end her career.
On August 31st, I notified Dale through email that I would add a clarification that she was the writer and researcher for the article and that Yahya was the reporter on the ground, but did let Gavlak know that we would not remove her name as this would violate the ethics of journalism.
We are aware of the tremendous pressure that Dale and some of our other journalists are facing as a result of this story, and we are under the same pressure as a result to discredit the story. We are unwilling to succumb to those pressures for MintPress holds itself to the highest journalistic ethics and reporting standards.
Yahya has recently notified me that the Saudi embassy contacted him and threatened to end his career if he did a follow up story on who carried out the most recent chemical weapons attack and demanded that he stop doing media interviews in regards to the subject.
We hold Dale Gavlak in the highest esteem and sympathize with her for the pressure she is receiving, but removing her name from the story would not be honest journalism and therefore, as stated before, we are not willing to remove her name from the article.
We are prepared and may release all emails and communications made between MintPress and Dale Gavlak, and even Yahya to provide further evidence of what was provided to you in this statement.
Putin continues to deny the Syrian regime's responsibility for the chemical weapons attack, stating that 'the attack used an old Soviet shell of a kind no longer used by the Syrian army'Russian President Vladimir
Putin has asked the big question that has been the elephant in the corner as the debate continues about Syria's possession and use of chemical weapons: What about Israel's nuclear weapons?
Putin was speaking in defence of Moscow's position on the Syrian crisis, in particular the chemical weapons issue. Observers were surprised by the reference to Israel's nuclear arsenal, which is normally off-limits in such international forums, and Putin's attempt to link the caches of weapons of mass destruction in both countries. The Russian president pointed out that Syria's chemical weapons have served as a counter to the threat posed by Israel's nuclear weapons; he called for the Middle East to be a nuclear-free zone.
Continuing to deny the Syrian regime's responsibility for the chemical weapons attack last month, Putin presented "technical" evidence collected by his advisers. "The attack used an old Soviet shell of a kind no longer used by the Syrian army," he claimed.
As the war of words between Russia and the US continued on this issue, Secretary of State John Kerry tried unsuccessfully to persuade his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to back a "binding" UN Security Council resolution to remove the Syrian chemical. Nevertheless, Kerry praised China's support for a political solution, "the only available and possible solution". The Secretary of State also urged the UN Security Council to vote as soon as possible on the text of a possible resolution that would oblige Syria to respect a plan to dispose of its chemical weapons.
President Bashar Al–Assad has vowed to hand over his regime's chemical weapons but warned that this could take many months and millions of dollars before the process is complete. In an interview with Fox News, Assad stressed that the ideology of the rebels in his country should be a cause for serious concern not only in Syria but also in neighbouring countries and even the United States. It is not a civil war, he insisted, but "an attack by Al-Qaeda". Up to 15,000 Syrian soldiers have been killed so far, claimed Assad, but he expressed his government's willingness to offer an amnesty, "even for those whose hands are stained by Syrian blood", as an act of national reconciliation. Commentators have pointed out the significance of Assad's offer, coming as it has after a spokesman for his government said that the conflict is at an "impasse".
In an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Qadri Jamil, said that the Syrian authorities will ask for a ceasefire in the event that the "Geneva 2 Conference" goes ahead. He added that neither side in the conflict is able to win but insisted that there would have to be international monitors for any ceasefire.
The easing of the threat of military action against the Syrian regime has had a positive effect on Lebanon already, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister has claimed. Heading back to Moscow after talks in Damascus, Sergei Ryabkov noted that the flow of refugees across the border into Lebanon appears to have slowed. "If there is a war, however, it will have a negative effect not only on Syria but Lebanon and other neighbours," he said. :
Source: The Independent Sunday, September 22, 2013
While the Assad regime in Damascus has denied responsibility for the sarin gas missiles that killed around 1,400 Syrians in the suburb of Ghouta on 21 August, information is now circulating in the city that Russia's new "evidence" about the attack includes the dates of export of the specific rockets used and – more importantly – the countries to which they were originally sold. They were apparently manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1967 and sold by Moscow to three Arab countries, Yemen, Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. These details cannot be verified in documents, and Vladimir Putin has not revealed the reasons why he told Barack Obama that he knows Assad's army did not fire the sarin missiles; but if the information is correct – and it is believed to have come from Moscow – Russia did not sell this particular batch of chemical munitions to Syria.
Since Gaddafi's fall in 2011, vast quantities of his abandoned Soviet-made arms have fallen into the hands of rebel groups and al-Qa'ida-affiliated insurgents. Many were later found in Mali, some in Algeria and a vast amount in Sinai. The Syrians have long claimed that a substantial amount of Soviet-made weaponry has made its way from Libya into the hands of rebels in the country's civil war with the help of Qatar – which supported the Libyan rebels against Gaddafi and now pays for arms shipments to Syrian insurgents.
There is no doubt that Syria has a substantial chemical weapons armoury. Nor that Syrian stockpiles contain large amounts of sarin gas 122mm missiles. But if the Russians have indeed been able to identify the specific missile markings on fragments found in Ghouta – and if these are from munitions never exported to Syria – the Assad regime will boast its innocence has been proven.
In a country – indeed a world – where propaganda is more influential than truth, discovering the origin of the chemicals that suffocated so many Syrians a month ago is an investigation fraught with journalistic perils. Reporters sending dispatches from rebel-held parts of Syria are accused by the Assad regime of consorting with terrorists. Journalists reporting from the government side of Syria's front lines are regularly accused of mouthing the regime's propaganda. And even if the Assad regime was not responsible for the 21 August attacks, its forces have committed war crimes aplenty over the past two years. Torture, massacre, the bombardment of civilian targets have long been proved.
Nevertheless, it also has to be said that grave doubts are being expressed by the UN and other international organisations in Damascus that the sarin gas missiles were fired by Assad's army. While these international employees cannot be identified, some of them were in Damascus on 21 August and asked a series of questions to which no one has yet supplied an answer. Why, for example, would Syria wait until the UN inspectors were ensconced in Damascus on 18 August before using sarin gas little more than two days later – and only four miles from the hotel in which the UN had just checked in? Having thus presented the UN with evidence of the use of sarin – which the inspectors quickly acquired at the scene – the Assad regime, if guilty, would surely have realised that a military attack would be staged by Western nations.
As it is, Syria is now due to lose its entire strategic long-term chemical defences against a nuclear-armed Israel – because, if Western leaders are to be believed, it wanted to fire just seven missiles almost a half century old at a rebel suburb in which only 300 of the 1,400 victims (if the rebels themselves are to be believed) were fighters. As one Western NGO put it yesterday: "if Assad really wanted to use sarin gas, why for God's sake, did he wait for two years and then when the UN was actually on the ground to investigate?"
The Russians, of course, have made similar denials of Assad's responsibility for sarin attacks before. When at least 26 Syrians died of sarin poisoning in Khan al-Assal on 19 March – one of the reasons why the UN inspectors were dispatched to Syria last month – Moscow again accused the rebels of responsibility. The Russians later presented the UN with a 100-page report containing its "evidence". Like Putin's evidence about the 21 August attacks, however, it has not been revealed.
A witness who was with Syrian troops of the army's 4th Division on 21 August – a former Special Forces officer considered a reliable source – said he saw no evidence of gas shells being fired, even though he was in one of the suburbs, Moadamiya, which was a target for sarin. He does recall the soldiers expressing concern when they saw the first YouTube images of suffocating civilians – not out of sympathy, but because they feared they would have to fight amid clouds of poison.
"It would perhaps be going beyond conspiracy theories to say the government was not involved," one Syrian journalist said last week, "but we are sure the rebels have got sarin. They would need foreigners to teach them how to fire it. Or is there a 'third force' which we don't know about? If the West needed an excuse to attack Syria, they got it right on time, in the right place, and in front of the UN inspectors."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Time for Proof on Syrian CW Attack October 1, 2013 World attention has moved to the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, but the evidence on the Aug. 21 attack near Damascus remains hidden and in dispute, causing a group of former U.S. intelligence professionals to ask Moscow and Washington to present what they have.
Memorandum to: Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
We applaud your moves toward a peaceful resolution of the Syria crisis that will lead to the destruction of all chemical stockpiles possessed by the Syrian Government.
At the same time, we strongly believe the world has the right to know the truth about the chemical attack near Damascus. We note that both sides continue to claim possession of compelling evidence regarding the true perpetrators of this crime.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. We therefore call upon Russia and the United States to release all the intelligence and corroborative information related to the 21 August chemical attack so that the international community can make a judgment regarding what is actually known and not known.
We the undersigned — former intelligence, military and federal law enforcement officers who have collectively dedicated, cumulatively, hundreds of years to making the American people more secure — hereby register our dismay at the continued withholding of this vital evidence.
The issue is one of great importance, as the United States has within recent memory gone to war based on allegations of a threat that proved to be groundless. The indictment of Syria on possibly unsubstantiated claims of war crimes could easily lead to another unnecessary armed conflict that would produce disastrous results for the entire region, and indeed the entire world.
We recognize that when it comes to intelligence, there are many gray areas, as well as evidence that can be subject to interpretation. We further believe, based on our own experience and knowledge of how intelligence collection and analysis actually works, that if there is a clear case to be made – either way – to identify the perpetrators of the attack it has not yet been publicly revealed.
If there is not a credible case, neither the United States nor Russia should be claiming that they know who carried out the attack. We note, for example, the specific claim made by you, Secretary Kerry, that 1,429 civilians had died in the chemical attack. Yet the politically impartial non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontieres, which was on the ground in Syria, provided a much smaller figure.
Foreign Minister Lavrov, you have questioned the sources of the chemicals and possible delivery systems, describing the alleged Sarin agent as “homemade.” You have suggested that the chemicals used in the attack were likely in the hands of the insurgents but have cited little hard evidence, and an intelligence assessment you provided to Secretary Kerry has not been made public.
We recognize that protection of intelligence sources and methods requires that some information will be off limits or must be sanitized, but if there is a genuine case to be made, we believe you owe it to the world to make that case now.
If Washington actually has evidence to demonstrate indisputably that August 21st was carried out by the government in Damascus, let us see it. If Moscow can demonstrate otherwise, let us see it.
Respectfully submitted for the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
W. Patrick Lang, Senior Executive and Defense Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy NIO for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Todd Pierce, US Army Judge Advocate General (ret.)
Coleen Rowley, former Chief Division Counsel & FBI Special Agent (ret.)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
By Greg Miller, Published: October 2 The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, U.S.-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war, U.S. officials said.
But the CIA program is so minuscule that it is expected to produce only a few hundred trained fighters each month even after it is enlarged, a level that officials said will do little to bolster rebel forces that are being eclipsed by radical Islamists in the fight against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The CIA’s mission, officials said, has been defined by the White House’s desire to seek a political settlement, a scenario that relies on an eventual stalemate among the warring factions rather than a clear victor. As a result, officials said, limits on the agency’s authorities enable it to provide enough support to help ensure that politically moderate, U.S.-supported militias don’t lose but not enough for them to win.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the agency has sent additional paramilitary teams to secret bases in Jordan in recent weeks in a push to double the number of rebel fighters getting CIA instruction and weapons before being sent back to Syria.
The agency has trained fewer than 1,000 rebel fighters this year, current and former U.S. officials said. By contrast, U.S. intelligence analysts estimate that more than 20,000 have been trained to fight for government-backed militias by Assad’s ally Iran and the Hezbollah militant network it sponsors.
The CIA effort was described as an urgent bid to bolster moderate Syrian militias, which have been unable to mount a serious challenge to Assad or match the growing strength of rival rebel factions that have hard-line Islamist agendas and, in some cases, ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The CIA is “ramping up and expanding its effort,” said a U.S. official familiar with operations in Syria, because “it was clear that the opposition was losing, and not only losing tactically but on a more strategic level.”
The CIA declined to comment.
The latest setback came last month, when 11 of the largest armed factions in Syria, including some backed by the United States, announced the formation of an alliance with a goal of creating an Islamic state. The alliance is led by Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that has sworn allegiance to the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.
Operating under constraints
The descriptions of the CIA training program provide the most detailed account to date of the limited dimensions and daunting objectives of a CIA operation that President Obama secretly authorized in a covert action finding he signed this year.
U.S. officials said the classified program has been constrained by limits on CIA resources, the reluctance of rebel fighters to leave Syria for U.S. instruction and Jordan’s restrictions on the CIA’s paramilitary presence there.
But the limited scope also reflects a deeper tension in the Obama administration’s strategy on Syria, one that has sought to advance U.S. interests but avoid being drawn more deeply into a conflict that the United Nations estimates has killed more than 100,000 people since it began in 2011.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
The flames of war in Homs 4:10pm ED[youtube][/youtube]
By Mariam Karouny BEIRUT | Sun Oct 6, 2013 6:17pm EDT (Reuters) - International experts began overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal on Sunday, said an official from the mission that has averted a U.S. strike but could rob President Bashar al-Assad of his most feared weapon.
The process is being conducted amid a civil war in which 120,000 people have been killed, fragmenting Syria along sectarian and ethnic lines and drawing in Iran and Hezbollah on the side of Assad and his Alawite minority and Arab Sunni powers on the side of the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels.
The official, a member of a joint team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and the United Nations, said Syrian forces used cutting torches and angle grinders to begin "destroying munitions such as missile warheads and aerial bombs and disabling mobile and static mixing and filling units".
"Let it be clear that it is the Syrians who do the actual destroying while we monitor, observe, verify and report," he said.
Witnesses said the experts, who arrived on Tuesday, left their Damascus hotel in the early hours of Sunday to begin their work in an undisclosed location.
The mission, which the United States hammered out with Russia after an August 21 chemical weapons attack in Damascus prompted U.S. threats of air strikes against Assad's forces, is expected to continue until at least mid-2014.
Even without his chemical weapons arsenal, Assad's air power and better-equipped ground forces would still hold a significant advantage over the rebels, who remain divided, with large numbers joining hardline Islamist brigades.
On the ground, the war has largely settled into a stalemate, with Assad seeking to tighten his grip on the centre of the country, the coast, areas along the country's main north-south highway, routes to Lebanon and Iraq, and Damascus, scene of the August 21 sarin gas attack.
Assad's government and the rebels blame each other for the attack in Sunni Muslim suburbs of the capital that killed hundreds of people.
The United States and other Western countries say a report by U.N. investigators indirectly implicates government-allied forces for the attack.
The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution last week that demands the eradication of Syria's chemical weapons and endorses a plan for a political transition in Syria.
The West is pushing, along with Russia, for the convening of a conference to nudge Assad and his foes towards a settlement to the conflict, the bloodiest of the "Arab Spring" revolts against entrenched autocrats.
But Assad told a German magazine he would not negotiate with rebels until they laid down their arms, and said his most powerful ally Russia supported his government more than ever.
He said he did not believe it was possible to solve the conflict through negotiations with the rebels.
"In my view, a political opposition does not carry weapons. If someone drops his weapons and wants to return to daily life, then we can discuss it," he was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel.
The opposition insists on a peace conference producing a transitional government with full powers that excludes Assad and his lieutenants, and the U.N.'s Syria peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said on Sunday it was not certain that peace talks would take place in mid-November in Geneva as planned.
Heavy fighting between rebels and loyalist forces was reported in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, once the country's industrial and commercial hub.
In the coastal province of Tartous, loyalist Alawite and Christian militia surrounded al-Mitras, a rebellious Sunni village inhabited by members of Syria's small Turkmen community, which has been generally supportive of the revolt against four decades of Assad family rule.
The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a monitoring group based in the UK and headed by opposition activist Rami Abdulrahman, said eight people were killed defending al-Mitras and warned of a massacre if the village were overrun.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
An analysis of the defense industry ties of experts and think tanks who commented on military intervention
October 11, 2013
During the public debate around the question of whether to attack Syria, Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to George W. Bush, made a series of high-profile media appearances. Hadley argued strenuously for military intervention in appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV, and authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined “To stop Iran, Obama must enforce red lines with Assad.”
In each case, Hadley’s audience was not informed that he serves as a director of Raytheon, the weapons manufacturer that makes the Tomahawk cruise missiles that were widely cited as a weapon of choice in a potential strike against Syria. Hadley earns $128,500 in annual cash compensation from the company and chairs its public affairs committee. He also owns 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate ($77.65 on August 23, making Hadley’s share’s worth $891,189). Despite this financial stake, Hadley was presented to his audience as an experienced, independent national security expert.
Though Hadley’s undisclosed conflict is particularly egregious, it is not unique. The following report documents the industry ties of Hadley, 21 other media commentators, and seven think tanks that participated in the media debate around Syria. Like Hadley, these individuals and organizations have strong ties to defense contractors and other defense- and foreign policy-focused firms with a vested interest in the Syria debate, but they were presented to their audiences with a veneer of expertise and independence, as former military officials, retired diplomats, and independent think tanks.
The report offers a new look at an issue raised by David Barstow’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series on the role military analysts played in promoting the Bush Administration’s narrative on Iraq. In addition to exposing coordination with the Pentagon, Barstow found that many cable news analysts had industry ties that were not disclosed on air.
If the recent debate around Syria is any guide, media outlets have done very little to address the gaps in disclosure and abuses of the public trust that Barstow exposed. Some analysts have stayed the same, others are new, and the issues and range of opinion are different. But the media continues to present former military and government officials as venerated experts without informing the public of their industry ties – the personal financial interests that may be shaping their opinions of what is in the national interest.
This report details these ties, in addition to documenting the industry backing of think tanks that played a prominent role in the Syria debate. It reveals the extent to which the public discourse around Syria was corrupted by the pervasive influence of the defense industry, to the point where many of the so-called experts appearing on American television screens were actually representatives of companies that profit from heightened US military activity abroad. The threat of war with Syria may or may not have passed, but the threat that these conflicts of interest pose to our public discourse – and our democracy – is still very real.
I stopped to buy walnuts in Sidon last week from a sunburned man sitting on the pavement of the old souk. Like the walnuts – soft, almost creamy inside their iron-hard husks – he came from the Syrian town of Bloudan.
In years gone by, I would take the steam train from the old Haj station in Damascus up to Bloudan and Zabadani, the loco so slow that passengers could sometimes jump out of the carriages to pick fruit and then clamber back aboard. Bloudan was a kind of forested spa, all soft-flowing streams and water melons and crude cement houses and big posters of Hafez al-Assad, the dictator father of Bashar. There were Palestinian training camps in these hills and a regional headquarters for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – Lebanon was only eight miles away – and the smugglers’ trails ran from Bloudan and Zabadani across the Anti-Lebanon range into the Bekaa Valley.
Bloudan is a Christian town – Zabadani is largely Sunni – and they have been on the front lines of Syria’s war; those old smuggling trails now help to bring the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into Lebanon, swelling now to 1.3 million, of whom at least 780,000 have been registered by the UN. This means that one in four of the people of Lebanon are now Syrians. It feels like it, too. The poor beg in the streets of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre, the rich cut in front of me in their smart cars with registration plates showing they come from as far away as Raqqa and Deir ex-Zour and Deraa. A few of the vehicles boast bullet holes – as so many Lebanese cars did during the 1975-90 civil war – and almost half the people I meet in an average day in Beirut are Syrians.
They work on the building sites in the side street outside my home.
Two years ago they all supported Bashar. Then the poorer labourers proclaimed the Free Syrian Army as their heroes and the supervisors turned out to be pro-regime “mukhabarat” intelligence agents.
Now the rebel faction on the building sites is silent – no Islamists they – while the pseudo-cops keep their mouths shut. The wealthy Syrians have moved into swish apartments downtown. I sometimes find that when I travel from Beirut to Damascus at the weekend, half the Syrians I want to see are not in Damascus at all. They are spending the same weekend in Beirut.
There is cause for much shame in this massive influx of refugees. When the Lebanese fled to Syria during their civil war, they were treated with great care by the regime. Now the Lebanese resent the huddled masses from the east. They are beaten in the immigration queues, cheated with exorbitant rents and, in some towns (Christian, I am sorry to say), told to stay off the streets after 8pm.
Christian Palestinians from Damascus are living in penury in one-room shacks in the only Christian Palestinian refugee camp in Dbayeh. The Sunni Palestinians from Syria have fetched up in the hovels of Sabra and Chatila to exchange their stories of horror with the tales of massacre and savagery visited upon their Palestinian brothers and sisters of this forsaken Lebanese camp at the hands of Israel’s cruel allies 31 years ago.
And it’s not hard to see why Najib Mikati, the outgoing “ghost” Prime Minister in the equally ghostly Lebanese government, is now talking of “investigating” each Syrian arrival to discover if they meet “the legal conditions of a refugee” – whatever that is – and the implications are obvious: those who have arrived in Lebanon to gather support for the Damascus regime or for the Syrian resistance will be chucked out.
Easier said than done. Lebanese ex-general Michel Aoun’s crackpot and largely Christian “Free Patriotic Movement” wants the border closed; and since Mr Aoun supports Bashar al-Assad – and since most refugees in Lebanon are anti-Assad Sunni Muslims – you can see why Mr Aoun wants the frontier blocked.
But there are deeper concerns, which afflict both the Lebanese army and the Internal Security Force, the only two viable institutions in Lebanon: that the great refugee camps spreading down the Bekaa valley might turn into miniature Ein el-Helwehs.
Ein el-Helweh is the vast Palestinian camp in Sidon whose 100,000 (or more) refugees are crammed into slums controlled by armed Palestinian militias which operate outside the law of Lebanon. Subjected to the country’s oppressive work restrictions, the Palestinian factions include Hamas and the PLO – but also Islamists, a faction of al-Qa’ida and members of Muslim groups wanted for their part in a Salafist insurrection in northern Lebanon six years ago.
A cancer in the body politic, as far as Lebanon is concerned; a pit of hopelessness for the 100,000 whose lands in Palestine were seized by the new Israeli state in 1948.
But the Lebanese army now fears that the blossoming Syrian camps in the Bekaa will yield the same, bitter fruit: armed groups supporting both the impoverished Free Syrian Army and the ever-more-powerful Sunni Muslim al-Nusra front and al-Qa’ida affiliates who are fighting to “liberate” Syria from Assad’s government.
The Lebanese cannot afford to let the cities of Syrian refugee tents turn into armed camps outside the sovereignty of Lebanon, run by Syrians carrying their own weapons outside the law.
But can the Lebanese prevent this infection when Syrian suffering is on such a scale? On Saturday night I found three Syrians – two of them only 14 years old – selling white roses on the Beirut Corniche near my home.
Amir came from the Damascus suburb of Douma a year ago. His right leg had been torn off by a shell. Hadi and Hani were brothers from Hama. Hadi’s hand had been amputated by a shell fragment eight months ago. Only Hani was untouched. I bought a white rose. Three Syrians, only one complete.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
An extremist group is ruffling feathers, including those of its Islamist peers.
THE civil war in Syria, a nightmare for most Syrians, is a dream come true for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the latter name being variously translated as "Greater Syria" or "the Levant". The extremist group, formed in Iraq in 2006 as a broad jihadist front that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, has had its best year to date for expansion. In Syria it runs a clutch of towns, taking it a step closer to its goal of creating a limitless Islamic caliphate. In Iraq its campaign of bombing against Shia Muslims, whom it considers heretics, and of assassinations of its opponents, has reached a new pitch of fury.
Syria's power vacuum has given it an ideal base. Since expanding into the country in April, ISIS has spread across the northern and eastern provinces abutting Iraq and Turkey to include thousands of fighters on both sides of the border. Its foreign leadership is experienced, its footmen, foreign and Syrian, well-trained and disciplined. Its control of Syria's oilfields has added wealth to the funds it gets from donors in the Gulf. It has sought to increase its popularity by providing services, such as supplying bread, and activities including Koranic classes for children.
But the group has ruffled feathers by becoming increasingly aggressive. It is fighting to control the border between Syria and Turkey. Last month it kicked out Northern Storm, a local rebel force, from Azaz, a staging post north of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Another border town under its control has been renamed the "emirate of Jarablus", complete with a religious school and posters extolling the virtue of the full veil for women.
Other rebels have always been wary of ISIS, but are awestruck by its fighting prowess. Some Islamist groups have joined forces with it to fight against Kurdish militias who have taken over Syria's north-east. Yet ISIS's strength and ideology have led to clashes with a range of rebels, not just Kurds, from Azaz to the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor. Some smaller rebel bands, nervous of being clobbered by ISIS, have merged with it. In Raqqa, the only provincial capital in rebel hands, all groups have now signed up to it or to Jabhat al-Nusra, the other al-Qaeda-linked outfit that is nearest to it in clout.
ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi, have grand ambitions, as heralded by the use of "state" in the group's name. ISIS's foray into Syria has led it openly to defy al-Qaeda's overall leadership, to which it supposedly defers. After creating Jabhat al-Nusra in 2012, Mr Baghdadi claimed this year to have merged it with ISIS. But Muhammad al-Golani, Jabhat al-Nusra's leader, disagreed--and was backed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's overall chief. ISIS and Mr Baghdadi rejected his ruling.
Al-Qaeda's central leadership has long found the brutality of ISIS counter-productive, in Iraq as in Syria. Its bombs in Iraq often cause mass casualties among civilians, including Sunnis. While Jabhat al-Nusra is treading more carefully with Syrians, ISIS bans smoking, harasses unveiled women and metes out the harshest of punishments, including beheadings, in the areas it controls. In May it summarily executed three members of the Alawite sect, a Shia offshoot to which the Assad family belongs, in Deir ez-Zor. It has even opened fire on Syrian civilians protesting against its behaviour.
Still, ISIS is now the most feted group on jihadist online forums, where prominent scholars have called on people to pledge the baya, or oath of allegiance, to Mr Baghdadi. But ISIS comes up against big obstacles in Syria, as it has done in Iraq. It faces growing criticism from locals who say they do not wish to fight against one regime, only to be oppressed and humiliated by another bunch of criminals. In Iraq, when al-Qaeda-linked groups overreached themselves, they provoked a successful sahwa, or uprising, by Sunni tribes backed by foreign money and arms. The same could happen to ISIS in Syria.
I'm not sure if this analogy is quite equivalent, but it seems to me that what the Khmer Rouge was to Mao, so is ISIS to al-Qaeda.
Some may look at this and call it blowback. I call it an insurance policy for further justification of The War That Will Not End in Our Lifetime.
And seriously, ISIS?! Getting mythological on us, those religious fundamentalists.
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick On How Obama Should Handle the Crisis In Syriaby Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick Oct 15, 2013 5:45 AM EDT Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick on how President Obama should handle the crisis in Syria. Kudos to Vladimir Putin for proposing a formula to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. Any action that reduces stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons anywhere should be applauded. Each day’s news testifies to the fact that the world is awash in weapons, both “conventional” and unconventional. That the United States accounted for 78 percent of world arms sales in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, is not something to be proud of.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Elena Scotti
But as loudly as we applaud Putin’s initiative, we just as strongly take issue with his timing. When he announced his proposal, the U.S. peace movement was within days of achieving its greatest victory in decades, as both houses of Congress were on the verge of repudiating U.S. bombing of Syria in response to a groundswell of antiwar sentiment. The American people, and a growing number of their representatives, had finally come to understand that threatening, bombing, and invading other countries was not the way to solve problems. Punishing the vile Assad regime by blowing up Syrian government assets would benefit neither the Syrians nor the Americans. Sixty-three years of American military involvements, from Korea through Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, had proven that U.S. bombing of other countries had achieved little more than obscenely fattening the coffers of America’s arms producers and sellers—modern day merchants of death. The purpose of publicly rejecting military action would not be to embarrass Obama, who had long resisted pressure to attack Syria and may have welcomed this face-saving way out. It would be to announce forthrightly that the American people are as sick and tired as is the rest of the world of having the U.S. serve unilaterally, or as the backbone of coalitions of the “willing,” to police the planet often in defiance of both the U.S. Constitution and international law.
The opposition to attacking Syria came from a remarkable coalition. Knee-jerk Obama haters who would oppose anything he supported, neo-isolationists of the Ron Paul variety, and antiwar progressives formed an interesting new coalition. Among the recent converts was one who really didn’t fit into any of these categories—Robert Gates. Gates, the former CIA director and Secretary of Defense, warned that recent presidents “have become too quick to reach for a gun to solve an international problem.” Gates wondered, “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action once it’s launched?” He had already been having second thoughts when, in February 2011, he told West Point cadets, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Gates had parted ways with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who had also supported authorizing Bush’s Iraq invasion, Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan, and the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya. But, unlike them, he saw the folly of launching missile strikes on Syria, which, he argued, would not only “be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East,” but would, in many people’s eyes, make the U.S. “the villain instead of Assad.”
Obama, too, apparently realized how disastrously recent military interventions and attempts at regime change had worked out and resisted deep involvement in Syria. That such statements were coming from Gates, who for decades had been a leading architect of the American empire and a staunch defender of the military interventions that propped it up, reflected the abject failure of the neocon campaign to turn the 21st century into the “new American century.”
One shouldn’t forget that the neocon interest in toppling Assad had long predated legitimate concerns over the Syrian bloodbath. In fact, Syria has figured prominently in neocon fantasies for years. It was high on the list of prized targets during the Bush administration’s post 9/11 euphoria. After the anticipated cakewalk in Iraq, Syria’s turn would come. The leading neocons competed with each other to come up with the most grandiose vision of Middle East and planetary restructuring. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, though not usually known for his restraint, envisioned Syria and North Korea as the next two in line for regime change. Leading neocon strategist Norman Podhoretz thought much more expansively. “The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil,” he wrote in his journal Commentary. “At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends’ of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.” When retired general Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer told him “of a five year campaign plan … beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.” Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman dismissed such thinking as the rantings of people who “know nothing about the Middle East.” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that such thinking “crosses the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy.” Obama, too, apparently realized how disastrously recent military interventions and attempts at regime change had worked out and resisted deep involvement in Syria despite sustained pressure from neocons, militarists, and his own liberal interventionists like Susan Rice and Samantha Power. He was finally boxed in by his own ill-conceived red line until Putin offered him a way out.
Not only had the Iraq invasion created chaos, death, destruction, and near civil war in Iraq, it helped unleash the sectarian passions that now roil Syria and much of the rest of the region. Conditions in Syria were ripe for an explosion. By 2009, poverty stood at 44 percent and unemployment at 20 percent. Both have risen sharply since. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that Syria was in the midst of a six-year drought that began in 2006. The consequences were devastating. Sixty percent of Syrian land became parched. Seventy-five percent of farmers lost their crops. In some areas, 85 percent of livestock died. At least 160 villages were abandoned. One and a half million people were internally displaced. The cities swarmed with desperate refugees. Among the areas hardest hit was the city of Dara’a, where the uprising began in February 2011. Syrian government mismanagement exacerbated the problem, but the source of the drought, according to a 2011 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was man-made climate change, which the U.S., most pointedly and most shamefully, still refuses to take seriously as the Koch brothers and other energy industry-linked falsifiers continue to weave their dangerous web of lies and deceit.
None of this should be allowed to diminish the seriousness of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Syria. The interventionists are right that something needs to be done. That something, however, is not a military strike or arming an opposition increasingly dominated by Islamic extremists. A solution will not come from solely within Syria—at least not in the near future. Too much blood has been shed and the lines have hardened. A solution will have to be imposed from without. Unified U.N. Security Council action has been stymied by a number of factors including the opposition of veto-wielding Russia and China. Since Obama took office, U.S. relations with both countries have gone from bad to worse. The Obama administration needs to reverse course in its dealings with these two nations both to get cooperation on Syria and to defuse growing tensions.
Under Obama, the United States has embarked on a foolhardy Asia “pivot,” announced most forcefully by the ever-hawkish Hillary Clinton in her November 2011 Foreign Policy magazine article titled “America’s Pacific Century.” Since that point the U.S. has striven aggressively to isolate and “contain” China, much as it had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It has strengthened military ties with and increased arms sales to other Asian nations, revamped its military policy, positioned more troops, announced plans to rebalance its fleet, and generally militarized the conflict. In response, the People’s Daily, the official Chinese newspaper, informed the United States that it could forget about Chinese cooperation on other global issues: “American politicians are totally mistaken if they believe they can, on the one hand, demand that China behave as a responsible great power and cooperate with the United States on this and that issue, while on the other hand irresponsibly and wantonly harm China’s core interests.” It is clear that the United States needs to abandon this foolhardy approach if it hopes to get China’s help with Syria or other vital issues.
Relations with Russia have also soured as the Russians deplored U.N. overreach in Libya and gave temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who bravely revealed the astounding reach of U.S. government surveillance. Putin recently mocked Obama’s trite declarations of American exceptionalism, which Mikhail Gorbachev had earlier declared dangerous and delusionary. Three American policies particularly irk the Russians—NATO expansion, weaponization of space, and missile defense. While it is too late to prevent George W. Bush from abrogating his father’s pledge to limit NATO expansion, it is possible to give assurances that NATO would expand no closer toward Russia’s border. Stopping the headlong American drive to weaponize space, which almost the entire civilized world opposes, would send a positive signal to China as well as Russia. But nothing would be more welcome in Russia than concrete steps to halt construction of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe.
Soviet mistrust of American intentions regarding missile defense skyrocketed following publication of a 2006 Foreign Affairs article by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press contending that U.S. nuclear capabilities so outpaced those of Russia and China that neither country could effectively retaliate against a U.S. nuclear attack. The U.S. had achieved the first-strike capability it had long been seeking.
That the article was published by the Council of Foreign Relation lent added credibility. The Kremlin was in shock. The article “sent heads spinning” in Russia “with visions of Dr. Strangelove,” reported the Washington Post. Soviet strategists knew that U.S. missile defense would be worthless in protecting against a large-scale Russian first strike. However, if the United States struck first, missile defense might prove capable of striking down the handful of retaliatory Chinese or Russian weapons that might survive such an onslaught. As with China, the United States has room to maneuver if it wants to win Russian trust and cooperation, including on Syria.
The third country that can help negotiate a Syrian settlement is Iran. Though a charter member of Bush’s “axis of evil,” Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has been conducting his own peace offensive in hopes of easing sanctions, normalizing relations, and sidestepping the threat of war. Americans must remember that the U.S.-Iranian narrative begins not with the revolution of 1979 and the associated taking of American hostages but with the CIA overthrow of the popular, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, following his nationalizing British oil holdings. In his place, the U.S. installed the hated and repressive shah, who was finally ousted by Iranian nationalists two and a half decades later.
The Iranian initiative is not entirely unprecedented. Following the 9/11 attacks, Iran, like Russia, had come to the aid of the U.S. in its fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Then, in May 2003, after a series of meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials, Iranian leaders offered the U.S. a grand bargain that would settle outstanding issues and mend relations. The terms were extraordinarily favorable to the U.S. Iran sought enhanced security, mutual respect, and access to peaceful nuclear technology. In return, it offered to recognize Israel as part of a two-state solution, assist in stabilizing Iraq, halt material support for Hamas and other Palestinian opposition groups and pressure them to “stop violent action against” Israeli citizens, attempt to transform Hezbollah into a “mere political organization within Lebanon,” and make its nuclear program fully transparent. But Bush administration neocons, salivating over regime change in Iran, spurned this extraordinary deal. As we say in our Untold History of the United States, “it was a blunder of epic proportions.” We may finally have another opportunity to restore friendly relations and win Iranian support for a negotiated settlement in Syria.
Obama is thus in a position to ease tensions with three of our primary adversaries and draw them into the Syria peace process. But he will have to show the kind of integrity, courage, and leadership that Gorbachev has urged on him and that he has thus far proven woefully unable to exercise. Unlike in 2008, progressives now have no illusions. But Obama has proven himself to be a pragmatic politician, who bends to pressure as he did in abandoning plans to bomb Syria. Once again the nation’s antiwar forces must mobilize on a massive scale to compel him to do the right thing. Doing so may not only save the lives of countless thousands of Syrians; it would put the world back on a path toward peace. And it might restore a bit of the luster to a Nobel peace prize that went to someone who has thus far proven himself to be anything but a man of peace.
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Wed Oct 16, 2013 12:42 am, edited 2 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick On How Obama Should Handle the Crisis In Syriaby Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick Oct 15, 2013 5:45 AM EDT Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick on how President Obama should handle the crisis in Syria. Kudos to Vladimir Putin for proposing a formula to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. Any action that reduces stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons anywhere should be applauded. Each day’s news testifies to the fact that the world is awash in weapons, both “conventional” and unconventional. That the United States accounted for 78 percent of world arms sales in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, is not something to be proud of.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Elena Scotti
But as loudly as we applaud Putin’s initiative, we just as strongly take issue with his timing. When he announced his proposal, the U.S. peace movement was within days of achieving its greatest victory in decades, as both houses of Congress were on the verge of repudiating U.S. bombing of Syria in response to a groundswell of antiwar sentiment. The American people, and a growing number of their representatives, had finally come to understand that threatening, bombing, and invading other countries was not the way to solve problems. Punishing the vile Assad regime by blowing up Syrian government assets would benefit neither the Syrians nor the Americans. Sixty-three years of American military involvements, from Korea through Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, had proven that U.S. bombing of other countries had achieved little more than obscenely fattening the coffers of America’s arms producers and sellers—modern day merchants of death. The purpose of publicly rejecting military action would not be to embarrass Obama, who had long resisted pressure to attack Syria and may have welcomed this face-saving way out. It would be to announce forthrightly that the American people are as sick and tired as is the rest of the world of having the U.S. serve unilaterally, or as the backbone of coalitions of the “willing,” to police the planet often in defiance of both the U.S. Constitution and international law.
The opposition to attacking Syria came from a remarkable coalition. Knee-jerk Obama haters who would oppose anything he supported, neo-isolationists of the Ron Paul variety, and antiwar progressives formed an interesting new coalition. Among the recent converts was one who really didn’t fit into any of these categories—Robert Gates. Gates, the former CIA director and Secretary of Defense, warned that recent presidents “have become too quick to reach for a gun to solve an international problem.” Gates wondered, “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action once it’s launched?” He had already been having second thoughts when, in February 2011, he told West Point cadets, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Gates had parted ways with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who had also supported authorizing Bush’s Iraq invasion, Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan, and the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya. But, unlike them, he saw the folly of launching missile strikes on Syria, which, he argued, would not only “be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East,” but would, in many people’s eyes, make the U.S. “the villain instead of Assad.”
Obama, too, apparently realized how disastrously recent military interventions and attempts at regime change had worked out and resisted deep involvement in Syria. That such statements were coming from Gates, who for decades had been a leading architect of the American empire and a staunch defender of the military interventions that propped it up, reflected the abject failure of the neocon campaign to turn the 21st century into the “new American century.”
One shouldn’t forget that the neocon interest in toppling Assad had long predated legitimate concerns over the Syrian bloodbath. In fact, Syria has figured prominently in neocon fantasies for years. It was high on the list of prized targets during the Bush administration’s post 9/11 euphoria. After the anticipated cakewalk in Iraq, Syria’s turn would come. The leading neocons competed with each other to come up with the most grandiose vision of Middle East and planetary restructuring. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, though not usually known for his restraint, envisioned Syria and North Korea as the next two in line for regime change. Leading neocon strategist Norman Podhoretz thought much more expansively. “The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil,” he wrote in his journal Commentary. “At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends’ of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.” When retired general Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer told him “of a five year campaign plan … beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.” Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman dismissed such thinking as the rantings of people who “know nothing about the Middle East.” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that such thinking “crosses the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy.” Obama, too, apparently realized how disastrously recent military interventions and attempts at regime change had worked out and resisted deep involvement in Syria despite sustained pressure from neocons, militarists, and his own liberal interventionists like Susan Rice and Samantha Power. He was finally boxed in by his own ill-conceived red line until Putin offered him a way out.
Not only had the Iraq invasion created chaos, death, destruction, and near civil war in Iraq, it helped unleash the sectarian passions that now roil Syria and much of the rest of the region. Conditions in Syria were ripe for an explosion. By 2009, poverty stood at 44 percent and unemployment at 20 percent. Both have risen sharply since. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that Syria was in the midst of a six-year drought that began in 2006. The consequences were devastating. Sixty percent of Syrian land became parched. Seventy-five percent of farmers lost their crops. In some areas, 85 percent of livestock died. At least 160 villages were abandoned. One and a half million people were internally displaced. The cities swarmed with desperate refugees. Among the areas hardest hit was the city of Dara’a, where the uprising began in February 2011. Syrian government mismanagement exacerbated the problem, but the source of the drought, according to a 2011 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was man-made climate change, which the U.S., most pointedly and most shamefully, still refuses to take seriously as the Koch brothers and other energy industry-linked falsifiers continue to weave their dangerous web of lies and deceit.
None of this should be allowed to diminish the seriousness of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Syria. The interventionists are right that something needs to be done. That something, however, is not a military strike or arming an opposition increasingly dominated by Islamic extremists. A solution will not come from solely within Syria—at least not in the near future. Too much blood has been shed and the lines have hardened. A solution will have to be imposed from without. Unified U.N. Security Council action has been stymied by a number of factors including the opposition of veto-wielding Russia and China. Since Obama took office, U.S. relations with both countries have gone from bad to worse. The Obama administration needs to reverse course in its dealings with these two nations both to get cooperation on Syria and to defuse growing tensions.
Under Obama, the United States has embarked on a foolhardy Asia “pivot,” announced most forcefully by the ever-hawkish Hillary Clinton in her November 2011 Foreign Policy magazine article titled “America’s Pacific Century.” Since that point the U.S. has striven aggressively to isolate and “contain” China, much as it had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It has strengthened military ties with and increased arms sales to other Asian nations, revamped its military policy, positioned more troops, announced plans to rebalance its fleet, and generally militarized the conflict. In response, the People’s Daily, the official Chinese newspaper, informed the United States that it could forget about Chinese cooperation on other global issues: “American politicians are totally mistaken if they believe they can, on the one hand, demand that China behave as a responsible great power and cooperate with the United States on this and that issue, while on the other hand irresponsibly and wantonly harm China’s core interests.” It is clear that the United States needs to abandon this foolhardy approach if it hopes to get China’s help with Syria or other vital issues.
Relations with Russia have also soured as the Russians deplored U.N. overreach in Libya and gave temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who bravely revealed the astounding reach of U.S. government surveillance. Putin recently mocked Obama’s trite declarations of American exceptionalism, which Mikhail Gorbachev had earlier declared dangerous and delusionary. Three American policies particularly irk the Russians—NATO expansion, weaponization of space, and missile defense. While it is too late to prevent George W. Bush from abrogating his father’s pledge to limit NATO expansion, it is possible to give assurances that NATO would expand no closer toward Russia’s border. Stopping the headlong American drive to weaponize space, which almost the entire civilized world opposes, would send a positive signal to China as well as Russia. But nothing would be more welcome in Russia than concrete steps to halt construction of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe.
Soviet mistrust of American intentions regarding missile defense skyrocketed following publication of a 2006 Foreign Affairs article by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press contending that U.S. nuclear capabilities so outpaced those of Russia and China that neither country could effectively retaliate against a U.S. nuclear attack. The U.S. had achieved the first-strike capability it had long been seeking.
That the article was published by the Council of Foreign Relation lent added credibility. The Kremlin was in shock. The article “sent heads spinning” in Russia “with visions of Dr. Strangelove,” reported the Washington Post. Soviet strategists knew that U.S. missile defense would be worthless in protecting against a large-scale Russian first strike. However, if the United States struck first, missile defense might prove capable of striking down the handful of retaliatory Chinese or Russian weapons that might survive such an onslaught. As with China, the United States has room to maneuver if it wants to win Russian trust and cooperation, including on Syria.
The third country that can help negotiate a Syrian settlement is Iran. Though a charter member of Bush’s “axis of evil,” Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has been conducting his own peace offensive in hopes of easing sanctions, normalizing relations, and sidestepping the threat of war. Americans must remember that the U.S.-Iranian narrative begins not with the revolution of 1979 and the associated taking of American hostages but with the CIA overthrow of the popular, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, following his nationalizing British oil holdings. In his place, the U.S. installed the hated and repressive shah, who was finally ousted by Iranian nationalists two and a half decades later.
The Iranian initiative is not entirely unprecedented. Following the 9/11 attacks, Iran, like Russia, had come to the aid of the U.S. in its fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Then, in May 2003, after a series of meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials, Iranian leaders offered the U.S. a grand bargain that would settle outstanding issues and mend relations. The terms were extraordinarily favorable to the U.S. Iran sought enhanced security, mutual respect, and access to peaceful nuclear technology. In return, it offered to recognize Israel as part of a two-state solution, assist in stabilizing Iraq, halt material support for Hamas and other Palestinian opposition groups and pressure them to “stop violent action against” Israeli citizens, attempt to transform Hezbollah into a “mere political organization within Lebanon,” and make its nuclear program fully transparent. But Bush administration neocons, salivating over regime change in Iran, spurned this extraordinary deal. As we say in our Untold History of the United States, “it was a blunder of epic proportions.” We may finally have another opportunity to restore friendly relations and win Iranian support for a negotiated settlement in Syria.
Obama is thus in a position to ease tensions with three of our primary adversaries and draw them into the Syria peace process. But he will have to show the kind of integrity, courage, and leadership that Gorbachev has urged on him and that he has thus far proven woefully unable to exercise. Unlike in 2008, progressives now have no illusions. But Obama has proven himself to be a pragmatic politician, who bends to pressure as he did in abandoning plans to bomb Syria. Once again the nation’s antiwar forces must mobilize on a massive scale to compel him to do the right thing. Doing so may not only save the lives of countless thousands of Syrians; it would put the world back on a path toward peace. And it might restore a bit of the luster to a Nobel peace prize that went to someone who has thus far proven himself to be anything but a man of peace.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD FRIDAY, 11 OCTOBER 2013 00:44
Here is my most recent column for the print version of CounterPunch, which was published last month.
***
As we all know, the use of chemical weapons is the most heinous crime that can be committed by a brutal, aggressive government: a brazen act of state terror, an offense against all humanity. Those who perpetrate such actions put themselves beyond the pale; indeed, they rank themselves with Hitler himself, as a succession of America’s highest officials has pointed out in recent weeks.
And that’s why the details of the infamous chemical attack in the Middle East resonate with stark moral horror. Especially chilling are the reports of some of the soldiers who actually took part in the chemical attacks, coming forward to offer evidence after the regime they served denied its obvious crime. As one regime soldier noted, the chemical weapon involved in the attack “burns bodies; it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone. I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Anyone within a radius of 150 meters is done for.”
A document produced by the regime’s own military said the chemical weapon “proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions and as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents … We [were] using [chemical weapons] to flush them out and high explosives to take them out.” Another soldier involved in these chemical weapons attacks said: "There is no way you can use [it] without forming a deadly chemical cloud that kills everything within a tenth of a mile in all directions from where it hits. Obviously, the effect of such deadly clouds weren't just psychological in nature."
But of course, chemical weapons were only part of this attack on the rebel position – an attack absolutely replete with war crimes violations. Before assaulting the civilian quadrants with a barrage of chemical weapons, the regime cut off the city’s water and power supplies and food deliveries. One of the first moves in the attack was the destruction of medical centers; indeed, 20 doctors were killed, along with their patients – innocent women and children – in a savage blitz before the chemical weapons were unleashed. But why would even a regime full of rogue barbarians attack a hospital? It’s simple, one of the regime’s “information warfare specialists” told the New York Times: hospitals can be used as “propaganda centers” by rebels trying to stir up sympathy for their cause.
Meanwhile, the BBC managed to penetrate the rebel-held areas and report on the results of the combined attack of chemical and conventional weapons:
“There are more and more dead bodies on the street, and the stench is unbearable … There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.”
By the end of the attack, vast areas lay in ruins. More than 36,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and religious centers. Medical workers estimated the civilian death count at between 4,000 and 6,000, which, the Guardian noted, was “a proportionally higher death rate than in Coventry and London during the Blitz.”
As both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said so eloquently, those responsible for such a crime must be punished. To look away from such an atrocity, to fail to hold those responsible to account would be, as these eminent statesmen tell us, a crime in itself, tantamount to ignoring the Holocaust or the massacres in Rwanda …
But of course the crimes enumerated above did not take place in Syria in August of 2013. They were part of America’s Guernica-like destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004: one of the most egregious – and most sustained – war crimes since the Second World War. The widespread use of chemical weapons in the decimation of Fallujah – including the flesh-eating horror of white phosphorous, the future-maiming deployment of depleted uranium and other chemicals, which have led to an epidemic of birth defects in the region – is well-documented and, after years of outright lies and evasions, now cheerfully admitted by the United States government. Using these chemical weapons – along with good old-fashioned mass-murdering conventional munitions just like mother used to make – the United States government slaughtered thousands upon thousands of innocent people in its berserker outburst against Fallujah.
It goes without saying that the “international community” did not rise up in righteous indignation at this use of chemical weapons to slaughter far more civilians than even the Obama Administration’s wild exaggerations are claiming in Syria. It goes without saying that the drone-bombing Peace Laureate and his lantern-jawed patrician at Foggy Bottom have signally failed to criticize – much less prosecute! – the perpetrators of the Fallujah war crime, or make the slightest change in the system of military aggression that produced it. Instead they have expanded and entrenched this system at every turn, extending it far beyond the wildest dreams of Bush and Cheney.
Whatever his manifest crimes (and alleged exacerbations), Bashar Assad will remain a hapless piker next to these pious virtuosos of mass-murdering violence.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Remembering Syria: Mark Gergis Of Sublime Frequencies Interviewed
A US campaign of missile attacks on Syria, which in all certainty would have killed a unforgivably large number of civilians, was averted at the eleventh hour recently. This isn't leftist hyperbole; it is a statistical certainty based on all the evidence available. But although (a no doubt relieved) President Obama has been given the space to back down in the unlikely form of Russian diplomatic intervention, this probably only amounts to breathing space for a country which is already violently disrupted by civil war. The Russian-overseen program of chemical weapon decommissioning may well be in place, but given that the country’s 1,000 tons of chemical ordnance is distributed between 50 different cities and towns and needs to be dealt with before the deadline of Summer 2014, trouble remains intransigently on the horizon.
Whatever nearly came to pass and whatever may still come to pass, there’s something that should be acknowledged, however: the vast majority of people in America, Russia, France, the UK and other Western countries politically involved in the Middle East, will generally accept the things done in their name because of misconceptions about countries such as Syria and the people who live there. The views of the majority in these countries are often moulded by the Orientalism of the news media (including some liberal/ left leaning sources of journalism). This is not even particularly surprising. Places like Syria and Iraq are not exactly common holiday destinations for those who don’t have family living there. Where else would information on these territories come from? Should we really be surprised, when the only time most people think of the inhabitants of Damascus, it will be after watching news reports discussing ethnic conflict, civil war, potential “breeding grounds” for terrorism, chemical attacks, internal repression and human rights abuses? Because in previous times of relative peace, we heard little or nothing about these countries.
For these reasons, it should be said that the compilation of field recordings, interviews, music and snippets of radio shows called I Remember Syria put together by the artist, musician and anthologist Mark Gergis is a very important social document. The tapestry of street sounds, speech and music builds up a sonic picture of a country that is all but ignored outside of (often) misleading news bulletins. While the odd snippet of dabke and Syrian folk music on the compilation are as “alien” and as “other” as any omnivorous Western music fan could wish for, everything else simply serves to do what news reports never do: to humanize and give rich character to everyday Syrian folk. As wild and weird as some of these amazing recordings are, when you are listening to children singing in the street, or the sound of construction sites, knackered car horns bibbing in traffic jams, the lascivious jokes of a gay man, the friendly political banter of a shop keeper, the slightly naff muzak from a radio advert, you know you are listening to people who are, in their essence, like you. (Not all of the lengthy double album fits neatly into these categories. The last track for example, ‘The Norias Of Hama (Blood Irrigation On The Orontes)’ is a recording of a giant, aqueduct supplying waterwheel. There is no western equivalent to this piece of six century old engineering and it sounds more like a bootleg of a SunnO))) gig than the field recording of some riverside machinery but the point stands generally.)
I should admit, at this point, I have a romantic and perhaps far-fetched belief that if people genuinely love pop music and pop culture from foreign countries then they will be much less willing to tolerate those countries being bombed in their name. (I'm sorry if anyone finds this idea to be patronising or stating the bleeding obvious but it is a belief that I hold sincerely and passionately at least.) And this comes with an extra admission: I don't think it's the job of the news media to persuade people to love Syrian pop music.
Gergis, who is part of the Sublime Frequencies team and the man responsible for introducing Omar Souleyman, the dabke singer, to the West, made the series of recordings while on two trips to Syria in 1997/8 and 2000. They were initially released on double CD a decade ago but have recently been reissued as a digital download with all profits going to Syrian humanitarian charity.
This album and a compilation (Dabke: Sounds Of The Syrian Houran, released on his own Sham Palace label) have been key records for The Quietus in 2013, so we caught up with him recently for an illuminating email conversation about music and culture in Syria, Iraq and the west.
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Normally I would take you through stages in an interview to form a rough narrative for the sake of the reader but I'm really keen that people should buy I Remember Syria and listen to it while they're reading this feature... Can you outline briefly what I Remember Syria is? (We'll come back to this in detail later.)
Mark Gergis: I Remember Syria is a full-length audio document consisting of field recordings, interviews, radio recordings and music snippets assembled from material recorded during my first two visits to Syria in 1997/98 and 2000. It was released as a double-CD on the Sublime Frequencies label in 2004, and reissued this year (2013) as a special digital issue in light of the Syrian disaster, as a charity release, with all proceeds going to Syrian charities.
Where can people get it from and where does the money go?
MG: The digital release is available through iTunes, Boomkat and other familiar dispensaries. Money has been going to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, but as the situation in Syria deteriorates and organizations there have a harder time functioning on the ground, I am continuously monitoring charities to ensure that the money gets to the best place.
Can you tell me about your background. Where were you born geographically but can you also tell me about your racial, social and cultural background as well?
MG: I was born in California, USA to an Iraqi immigrant father from Baghdad, and a Californian-American mother. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The rest of my Iraqi family ended up immigrating to Detroit, Michigan, where we’d spend time throughout my youth.
What music did you like when you were young? Were you part of a local scene or anything like that?
MG: As a kid, I was exposed to a lot of Iraqi and Arabic music at weddings and functions. 1970/80s Americana shaped the other half of my youth. As a teenager getting into subculture and post punk music in the mid-1980s, Arabic and other international music weren’t things I was interested in. I had my cultural renaissance – like any kid should – at 14 or 15, fuelled by curiosity, good music, good books, good drugs and a growing understanding and anger related to domestic and global politics (then under the Reagan/Bush regime). I started writing and making films and music at that time. The mid-late 1980s were peppered with teenage film and music follies made with local pals in the suburbs. I moved to Oakland in 1991, and soon co-founded a few music and performance groups that played and recorded a lot in the then-vibrant San Francisco/Oakland “interesting music scene”. I started my solo project – Porest in 1993, the same year my group Mono Pause (later known as Neung Phak) began. Those projects still breathe today.
How did you get into collecting international music? What were the gateway artists into this world? Where did you look for music and did you have any purpose in mind other than just enjoyment when you started collecting records?
MG: Around the early 1990s, I began to feel so bored and disappointed with the state of western music, even that which was supposed to be progressive – that I began turning to other sounds. Since I lived in California – a state with a large and diverse immigrant population, I just opened my ears up to what was going on around me. I remember a stage in the early 90s where I began listening in to Mexican AM radio, and recording it – particularly the very fast banda music. I even tried incorporating some of it into my own home-recorded music at the time – learning some of the bass lines and melodies and writing lyrics to it in English, just for fun. In that sense, the discoveries began at home.
It was the first Gulf War (the US and allied forces war against Iraq back in 1990) that really began to politicize me and force me to realize what sort of country I was living in, and also how it was to be of Iraqi or Arabic heritage in the United States - which was pretty shit in suburban America, unless you were an assimilated proto-American. I began going back to Arabic music with fresh ears. Most of my Iraqi family were living in Detroit, Michigan – and I’d often visit the many Iraqi music shops there, looking for good sounds. I took a lot of road trips across the United States in my early-twenties, and took special interest in discovering which immigrant communities had settled where, and what music they were making.
In Oakland, I started buying cassette tapes at local markets and grocery stores (Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, etc). There’s a rich South East Asian population there – and even the Asian branch of the Oakland library was a valuable resource for music at that time. Americans are generally quite insular, and often willfully ignorant about the world around them. I was probably no exception, really. At that time, I started feeling the need to get out of the armchair and begin traveling, in order to learn more about everything – including the music I was hearing, and the people that made it, and the places it came from.
You're an artist, a DJ, a film maker and work for a record label - among other things - can you tell me about the chronology of how all of these musical interests developed?
MG: Full-immersion in music came first. I spent all of my 20s listening, watching and developing music and audio experiments. Film too. It’s also when I started playing live and recording more seriously – anything from insane performance and music groups, to languid instrumental improv offshoots, or novel compositions and shows made with my brother. There were so many projects – even a fake Christian band. In the late-90s, I began to release more CDs and records with these groups. My Porest project started taking precedence as well, and I was always recording in my home studio.
It was around this time that I began traveling as well. My first trip in 1997 was 6 months long, staying for long periods of time in the Middle East and Germany. Concurrently, I was beginning to compile prototypes of what would later become Sublime Frequencies releases – mainly with the Syrian, Cambodian, Iraqi and Thai music I was collecting and researching.
Sublime Frequencies began in late 2003 (10 years ago as I write this). It all took off pretty quickly, and we were issuing quite a lot of music and traveling whenever we could – shooting film footage, researching, meeting artists and musicians, getting CDs into production, and eventually bringing acts like Omar Souleyman and Group Doueh to stages in the west. In 2011, I started my own label – Sham Palace, which I operate today alongside my work with Sublime Frequencies. DJing started after Sublime Frequencies had been going for a while. Coming from more of a musical and performance background, somehow I never take the DJ title seriously, but once I get on stage and am able to loudly enjoy a lot of this music and share it live, I can really get into it.
Can you explain for those who don't know, a little bit about Sublime Frequencies, the background of the guys who run it and how you became involved with that label?
MG: Sublime Frequencies is run by Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet. Alan Bishop and I met in 2002 after one of my music groups (Neung Phak) performed in Seattle with Alvarius B – Alan’s solo project. I had been a Sun City Girls fan for years, and it was a pleasure discussing politics and world travel together, as well as common interests in Southeast Asian and Arabic/Middle Eastern music. I had also met Hisham a few years previous through mutual friends when we both lived in the Bay Area.
I’ve been a frequent collaborator since the inception of the Sublime Frequencies label, as has Robert Millis and a few others. Before the label was created, we would get together and spend hours sharing music, film footage and ideas with each other from our respective travels. The fact that all of us were musicians meant we were naturally keeping our ears open to the sounds we encountered while traveling.
A lot of the music we collected on out trips was contemporary “hybrid folk-pop” from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Very incredible sounds! The same question kept coming up during our listening and viewing sessions – "Why hasn't this music been made available to people here before?" (Here being the music-listening western world). So one initial goal of the project was to issue music that was criminally ignored by established institutions and record labels alike at the time.
Sublime Frequencies was formed as a way to try and get this music out there and share what we were learning and hearing with a listening audience that might also be interested. You could say that the label was also a direct response to what “world music” had become – and aimed to combat the negative stigma – and ultimately terrible sounds and presentation – that so much international music had developed by the 1980s and 1990s. Even today, many presenters of international music in the West show a proclivity toward taming sounds in the studio – over-producing the music – cleaning it up – tempering and softening it for Western audiences. It is a form of aural globalization – very appropriate for an increasingly sterilized world.
How did you first come across the music of Omar Souleyman and what attracted you to it?
MG: Planning my first trip to Syria, one of the big questions was whether I’d be able to find forms of Arabic dabke and folkloric music that defied the few sterile versions available in the western world. I’d grown up hearing live ensembles at Iraqi family weddings in the US, and was disappointed that all of the recorded forms of Iraqi and Arabic contemporary music were aurally vaccinated, polished, and aesthetically unappealing to me. I was sure there had to be something more genuine out there. These were pre-YouTube days, so research meant something entirely different than it does today. On the night of my arrival in Damascus in 1997, I was already swimming in music. At that time, cassette-stalls lined the streets in every Syrian city. They’d be blaring their wares at maximum volume – competing with each other, sometimes even playing the same song as the cart next door – but louder. It was beautifully disorienting. I started spending time with these vendors and asking questions. I bought as much as I could, taking tapes back to my hotel for a listen, then going back to the vendors with more inquiries. Omar Souleyman was one of many artists I found that first week. Only a few years into his singing career at that point, he’d just had his first regional “hit” with his song 'Jani' – a Kurdish/Arabic melding of a traditional melody. The man who first put Omar in business was Zuhir Maksi, a producer and engineer in Ras Al Ain, who ran a music label featuring local singers. Zuhir had done well recording, promoting and distributing Omar throughout Syria on the dabke circuit. Many labourers in Damascus come from the Jazeera region, and they were the primary market for this sort of dabke there, where I found it.
How did you become involved in releasing his music in the West?
MG: I‘ve worked with Sublime Frequencies since its inception in 2003. In 2006, I proposed that I try locating Omar in Syria to discuss releasing a collection of music I’d compiled from his tapes. I didn’t actually meet Omar until that year – about 9 years after I began collecting his music. Over the years, it was just something I’d listen to privately. I was visiting Syria whenever possible throughout the 2000s, and dabke tapes were a good way to keep me satiated between visits. I’d crank Omar cassettes at top volume in my car while driving the roads of paranoid post 9/11 America, and as the US was beginning their campaign to destroy Iraq. When I’d play the tapes for people in the beginning, it would get mixed reactions. More astute listeners took my word for it and heard it as a lively, local variation on Arabic dabke. Other reactions varied from, “Wow - amazing alien exotic psychedelia” to “Why is this so angry?” or even, “Is this anti-semitic?” Others saw it as a cheap and novel synthetic nuisance. I was a bit concerned about how it would do, and I wanted it to do well. Just before Highway To Hassake was released, I put together a promo video on YouTube for one of my favorite tracks, ‘Leh Jani’ – comprised of footage I’d shot of Omar and his group in Syria, and edited with footage pulled from Syrian-issue VCDs. I felt that a western audience should have the context for Omar and where he’s from. In the end, the clip was instrumental in generating the first wave of initial interest. Personally, I doubt Souleyman would have had the same reception in the west, had we chosen to release his music in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Maybe the world wasn’t ready yet.
How difficult was it getting Omar over to play gigs in the West?
MG: It took some significant work getting the Omar group prepared for their first western tour in 2009. I was on the ground in Damascus helping prepare visas, etc – but in a way, that was the easy part. I based in Ras Al Ain for a while and spent a lot of time building the setlists and curating the feel of the shows with Omar, Rizan and Zuhir Maksi. They are musicians for hire in Syria, and basically play what their employers want to hear, so they asked what I wanted for their western performances. I wanted them to be themselves – with the same power that I knew from their cassette repertoire, and assured them they needn’t ham it up for the west. I was aware that their technology and musical preferences had changed considerably over the previous years, and their preconceptions about what the west wanted to hear were interesting. They had a group of confidants around them at all times – whispering in their ears, telling them (and me) what the west wants to hear; Clean music… Euro-dance techno music… Maybe some western songs… certainly not what they would normally play in Syria. Someone even suggested I get them to play music from the film, Titanic!
When we started rehearsing and building the first set list, I based it on songs I knew and loved from their recorded history. When I explained that the audience in the west were enjoying tracks like ‘Leh Jani’, ‘Jani’ and the rest, they were surprised, as they hadn’t played this material in years. In the end, an incredible set was built, featuring old and new songs. During Syrian weddings, each song is usually played for 30 minutes or more, so we timed out the material – truncating it considerably, and also sequenced the setlists carefully in order to create a dynamic flow. In Syria, the wedding party dances all night to the songs, and there is no start and stop. No one applauds – It’s just non-stop music. When Rizan asked which keyboard he should bring with him, I requested the one he’d created the earlier songs with. This was also hilarious to him, because he had graduated to newer technology. In the end, we had the original as well as his newer keyboard on stage.
It must have been interesting for you to see how Western audiences and Omar Souleyman interacted. I was at the Boston Manor/Dome gig with Group Doueh and he looked slightly stunned at all the attention in the UK but by the time he was playing Field Day he was in his element leading a Dabke rave in in a park in East London.
MG: The first responses to Omar in the west were unprecedented, and surprising for everyone involved. People were blown away. All of these first shows of 2009 were captured on video, and even in this footage, it’s evident that a phenomenon was developing almost overnight. The first show at The Dome in London had people talking for a long time – mainly about how crazy it was to see people from numerous scenes losing their shit together in one place, united by a Syrian man with an image so demonized by western media for years – khaffya, sunglasses and a jalaba.
Omar and his group (which featured the incredible Ali Shaker on electric saz, Zuhir Maksi as an MC and acting poet, and Rizan Sa’id on synths) were clearly startled by the response, but they played it off well. It was a bizarre confluence of circumstances, I think. The timing was right, and audiences were ready for the sort of power the early live Omar shows delivered. It all snowballed quite quickly. Omar unwittingly became the first-ever Syrian singer to “break” on the scale he did. And for the first time, it wasn't the result of flash producers trying to add global beats and fusion into the equation. This was the real deal from rural Hassake, Syria - and it had a power of its own that didn't need any of that.
Have you heard Wenu Wenu, his new Four Tet produced album?
MG: I have heard Omar’s new record, and it’s not so compelling to me. Though some of the performances are decent, it’s missing a lot of the urgency and edge, in my opinion. I found this to be true of many of Omar’s previous studio recordings in Syria as well. He’s made dozens of studio albums back home, and in my opinion, with a few exceptions, he is best outside of the studio. It boils down to aesthetics and the choices made by the producer or management in the end. I haven’t managed or produced Omar and his group since 2011, and I’m not a spokesperson for his new direction. I will say though, that at the end of 2010, during the same time we were producing the Bjork EP, I produced a full-length Omar Souleyman Group album – recorded at the legendary ADA studio in Istanbul with Randall Dunn. It's an exciting sounding record that everyone had a great time making, but the project was shelved for various reasons.
Can you tell me about your trips to Syria. What equipment you used to make the recordings, what your aims were, how you found people to talk to etc?
MG: I first decided to travel to Syria in 1997 – out of curiosity, and because I felt like it was the last sovereign Arab state with integrity left in the Levantine Middle East that hadn’t bowed to the US and Israel or been destroyed by those countries. I couldn’t really travel to Iraq at the time, which I wanted to do, but I felt Syria would be a similar experience and I was interested in seeing the country, meeting the people, hearing the music, and learning more about it. I brought my shortwave radio and a cassette recorder and recorded the sounds and interviews that would later become I Remember Syria. That album was actually the result of my first and second trips to Syria in ‘97/98 and 2000.
Syria has always fallen under the category of rogue/ pariah/ terrorist state, etc in the west. Upon my return to the States, I was convinced I should begin sharing the sounds of Syria in hopes of defying this reputation. While the general western public had been exposed to anti-Syrian rhetoric for decades, it seemed to know nothing of the vibrant culture or history, and nothing about its extant culture or people. When the US began ramping up its rhetoric against Iraq in 2003, I was angered, and sensed Syria might be next. This pushed me to assemble I Remember Syria with greater urgency. I like to say that it was an audio love letter to the Syria I grew to know. Being the cheap date that I am, I didn't use fancy equipment – just cassette and minidisc recorders and a variety of small microphones, including binaural mics.
More than anything else, these albums help challenge popular misconceptions of people from MENA countries don't they?
MG: That was the original aim, and we can hope so. The realist’s version may reveal some cracks in the clay, however. Once something is commodified, you see how easily manipulated and cheapened it can become. In the bigger picture, the hope is that it helps when people start appreciating something from a country like Syria. Perhaps they’d never considered the country before. For instance, maybe Omar helped put Syria on the map for some music fans, but there’s no controlling how people take away the music and how it may help challenge popular misconceptions. That’s up to the individual. The political landscape regarding MENA countries is so distorted and confounding – particularly since 2011. I’ve seen some people try and parade Omar as the voice of the “Syrian revolution”. On another hand, some people just want a party –and if there’s a token Arab mascot moving around on stage, all the better for a freaky night out. So the intent may be different than the end result, but again, it’s up to the end user how they process it. I do my job (with fingers crossed), and they do theirs.
Before I went to Egypt recently I had a few people - who would otherwise be quite intelligent - saying the craziest things to me about the stuff I would see which was so far off the mark it was unbelievable. Do you find that people's perceptions of what it's like in Syria are misguided? To what extent is the European and American press (including the mainstream liberal/left media) complicit in misleading people?
MG: Yes, I know this phenomenon too well. And coming from the US, I imagine the misconceptions and ignorance are similar, or even greater than in the UK and Europe. People at home were always telling me I was going to die if I went to Syria, how dangerous it was there, etc. These weren’t experts on Syria or the Middle East, just concerned people that unwittingly got their news and opinions from professional liars.
Growing up half-Iraqi in the US helped show me from a very young age, just how misguided people were regarding the region and its people. I would say that the ignorance actually increased after the dawn of CNN and Reagan. Almost everything people have generally thought about Syria is wrong. Syria, as I knew it up until 2010, was one of the most civilized and dignified places I’d ever been. Despite what one thought of the government, or what internal problems the country had, there was no arguing that it was a safe, functional and gentle place – and a secular country where many ethnicities and religions lived together. I often spoke to western travelers who’d made their way to Syria overland while traveling between the more common destinations of Egypt and Turkey. Most of them were stunned after experiencing Syrian culture with their own eyes, as opposed to what their governments and western media portrayed it as.
For the past two years, the focus for the west has been to finally eradicate and control the Syrian “pariah state” they’ve had their sights on for decades. From my point of view, what has occurred in Syria has basically been a grand infiltration operation – a set up – directed and financed by western countries, Israel and certain Gulf states. This plan is all about reshaping and neutralizing the Arab world to fit a globalist model that will serve those financing it – all at the expense of the Syrian people. This is how the west now performs ‘regime change’ – the act of undermining and reshaping a sovereign country from the outside. It's based on a similar model to covert operations America employed repeatedly in Southeast Asia and South America between the 1960s and 1980s. It’s difficult to watch as sovereign countries are being consumed with impunity while neo-liberals everywhere cheer it on, and praise what they believe to be a grassroots people's revolution. Many liberals and progressives have been surprisingly silenced over the past several years. Somewhere along the road, the broad concept of democracy seems to have been completely redefined and co-opted. For me, democracy itself has become a mantra worth questioning, when you see who its biggest proponents are, and what their agendas are.
What were the most surprising and moving and scary experiences you had recording the material for I Remember Syria?
MG: Actually, There weren’t many scary experiences, as Syria wasn’t really a scary place. A lot of the album captures my own real-time discoveries in the country, as I spoke with people and interviewed them. During the period the album was recorded, there wasn’t much tourism in Syria – particularly not American tourists. There was a greater level of paranoia there during the late-1990s, and understandably so, as there were serious threats and coup attempts abounding. The secret police apparatus was firmly intact, and I was approached a number of times over the years, mostly through obvious means involving friendly but persistent questioning. Obviously, I had only nice things to say, and didn’t flaunt my microphone when having talks with these folks.
Once while in the eastern city of Deir Uz Zur (very sadly, now a city lying in ruins), I had a wiring problem with my binaural mics (the type meant to look like headphones, and go in your ears). After searching town for a repair shop, I found one, run by a friendly, bearded man. I explained to him that these weren’t headphones, but actually microphones. He seemed quite surprised as he looked them over, but said he could fix them. I picked them up a few hours later, and as the man handed them to me, I saw a pistol hanging out of his belt. He saw that I saw. I asked him if he was secret police, and he affirmed with a smile. No problem. “Welcome to Syria”, he said.
The track ‘Kazib City’ is one of my favorites. It’s an edited version of an hour-long play conceived and recorded in the hotel I was staying in by a Sudanese man that worked the front desk, and some of his Syrian colleagues. It was based on conversations we’d had the night before where we’d invented a mythical city called KAZIB (meaning ‘lie’ in Arabic). We all started telling unwitting hotel patrons about this amazing city, and how they should visit if they met the requirements (which was impossible to do). The whole charade was metaphorical, and as a result, a great vehicle for open political discourse and satire, at a time where discussion of politics there was more of a muted affair.
The segments I recorded from Syrian radio were also surprising to me – and an amazing way to discover the sounds and opinions in the country at the time.
Can you tell me more about the Dabke compilation, where you sourced the material from and how it differs from what we may have heard from Omar Souleyman?
MG: In 2012, I released Dabke – Sounds of the Syrian Houran on my Sham Palace label. I’ve been an avid collector of Syrian music, amassing large amounts of cassettes and digital media over the years. Looking back from 2013, I realize now more than ever that these archives are national treasures. They already were, in the sense that in Syria, as in much of the world, an album that is three or four years old, particularly one that was a cassette-only issue, and recorded at a wedding party is seldom cherished as a keepsake. It’s an ephemeral industry, and the tapes vanish after a short period of time. There are very different ideas that are exclusive to the west regarding collecting, hoarding, archiving, documenting, etc – all of which may seem frivolous and indicative of a mental illness if described to someone elsewhere. As a result, music gets lost and forgotten. This was the case before the 2011 crisis in Syria. Post-crisis, it's hard to imagine anyone having the time or interest to do any sort of musical archaeology.
The dabke sound varies throughout the country with regional nuances – some subtle, and some more pronounced. While Omar’s sound is known for its coarse urgency and rawness, the Hourani dabke feels amped up by a few more notches. There’s a strikingly more tribal feel (and I mean tribal in the most literal sense). Even though it may use the same technology, it doesn’t contain the Kurdish or Assyrian influences that dabke made in the Jazeera region does. Instead, Hourani dabke is more rooted in Bedouin Arabic melodies and rhythms, and is very close to the kinds of dabke you can hear in Jordan and Palestine. The collection represents some of the most outstanding moments from my Hourani cassette-tape archives.
You've got a second Choubi Choubi compilation coming out in November. Can you tell me about this series of releases?
MG: Choubi Choubi volume one was released in 2005, and features Iraqi folk-pop recordings from the 1970s – 1990s. Choubi is one of the main focuses in the collection, but other Iraqi styles are featured as well. Choubi music is a style I’d always wanted to hear more of, after growing up with it at Iraqi weddings in my youth. Despite never having been to Iraq, I began to collect Iraqi music inside immigrant communities in the States, and later, during my Syrian travels, particularly in towns near the Iraqi border. It’s some of my favorite music in the world. Choubi is Iraq’s dabke music, essentially. Often, it’s a style performed in Baghdad nightclubs and at parties by Iraq’s gypsy community. Volume one was a favorite of mine on Sublime Frequencies. Of course, I never did stop collecting Iraqi music, and I knew someday I’d find a way to assemble a second edition.
and cptmarginal 