The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[American Dream]

I love that false dichotomies are mostly perpetuated by folks who claim to be "beyond" Right or Left here...

[Rory]

I love that false dichotomies are mostly perpetuated by folks who claim to be "beyond" Right or Left here...

You're the only one that proclaims to be upon the highest horse of neither left or right. So..

[Iamwhomiam]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/middleeast/aleppo-destruction-drone-video.html?_r=1

[Nordic]

[American Dream]

What is Aleppo?

Francesca Borri’s Syrian Dust



IT was the faux pas heard around the world. When US libertarian presidential hopeful Gary Johnson was asked what he would do about one of the most dire humanitarian crises of the 21st Century, even the hosts were stunned. “What is Aleppo?” How could a person run for the highest office in the land and not know about this place that had over the last 6 years come to represent every limit, failure and shortcoming of contemporary conflict management and international politics?


And yet, Johnson was far from the only person in the USA with this particular ignorance. In an article intended to chastise Johnson for his ignorance, the New York Times was forced to correct itself, not once, but twice which only made the newspaper seem ill-informed as well.

“‘What Is Aleppo?’ Gary Johnson Asks, in an Interview Stumble”



What is Aleppo? is one question, to which we might add, why is this even a question?

In her newly translated book, Syrian Dust, Francesca Borri has answers.

For a start, Aleppo is ugly, bloody evidence of our collective failure to give the idea of “humanity” any meaning beyond the barest rhetorical flourish. With sometimes painful clarity, Borri shows that Aleppo is every broken promise, bundled lie, and double standard implicit in the mantra “never again.” Aleppo is our collective failure to know, care, or understand. Aleppo is everything that’s wrong with what “humanity “is today.

It’s no surprise that those who don’t care don’t know. Who is shocked that the libertarian candidate is fuzzy on foreign policy? Such disregard is almost woven into the libertarian’s political isolationism; a week later, Gary Johnson struggled to name a single foreign leader he admires, and joked that he was having an “Aleppo moment.” This city, synonymous with collective failure to empathize, has become a rhetorical dismissive shrug. But Johnson isn’t the only one having “Aleppo moments.” What do we make of the fact that those who presumably do care—who believe themselves knowledgeable and authoritative, like the “paper of record”—seem to imagine that they know so much more about Aleppo than they actually do?

Borri has answers here too. For her, Aleppo is not a moment, but the culmination of many choices: a refusal to understand the Middle East beyond tropes; an unwillingness to effectively reform the international humanitarian system; and a lazy, un-creative journalism all conspire to create the “Aleppo Moment” we’re living in. Not an unwillingness to remember but an inability to engage, leaving thousands to suffer unnecessarily. It is a reckoning with everything the humanitarian system developed in the post-war environment promised but failed to become.

BEFORE 2011, Aleppo was Syria’s largest city and one of the largest in the region with a population of 2.13 million people. It was one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world and listed as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. For as many regime changes and conquests as there have been in the region, over the last four millennia, there has always been a settlement in the town currently known as Aleppo. Layers of Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Sumerian and other historical civilisations are knotted together in the city’s architecture, food, music and character. Aleppo is the story of the evolution of the modern city.

Estimates of the city’s remaining population are difficult to come by, but perhaps 60 percent of the city’s population remains, divided between the rebel-held east and the regime-held West, with pockets of intervention by Al Qaeda and its affiliates. After four years of war, the city’s remaining residents—especially the estimated 300,000 in the rebel-held east—aren’t so much living as existing. Every day, they are dodging mortar showers, evading ghoulish militants of all stripes, scavenging for rats and addled by preventable diseases; those who remain in Aleppo hold on to their survival by their fingernails. There is only one functional hospital left in Syria’s largest city, and it is in the West, where civilians have to brave snipers, airstrikes, and mortars if they try to leave.

Everything about Aleppo screams urgency, but our ability to listen or look depends on a series of gatekeepers, a network of interests and the ways in which we are conditioned to digest and process news from faraway places. You can’t know Syria if the people you look to for information about Syria are themselves biased or beholden to interests that do not want you to know. You can’t think independently if you’ve never been pushed to digest information independently, and you probably haven’t. But even if you had, what could you then do with all that information besides worry yourself into an early death?

Borri gives us the story of an unravelling country as witnessed by those left behind. By shifting the central narrative object of her analysis away from power – looking away from governments and politics to the individuals who suffer the consequences of choices made at that abstract level – she allows us to see how the concessions we make to power have produced an inherently unstable and dangerous international system. For example, bookshelves around the world are filled with misguided accounts of ancient rivalries and religious animosities in Syria, but such stories (as Borri demonstrates) have more to do with the analyst’s biases than any reality on the ground; what analysts itch to present as “ancient rivalries” are simply modern negotiations between various groups in the name of exigency or military advantage. Some rebel leaders in Raqqa are Christian and some are Alawite, Assad’s own community; in Daesh-held Raqqa, “rebels control the areas with the wells, the regime controls the areas with the pipelines…And so, for once, the regime and the rebels reached an immediate accord. Sunnis and Shiites.”

The war in Syria is the product, simply, of a global political system that privileges profits, that sells obscene quantities of arms to bloodthirsty tyrants and an international system that too beholden to the powerful nations that profit from this trade ever to challenge this system. Consider Borri’s account of the evolution of the Arab spring, where she observes:

“the main supporter of the rebels in Syria – the main supporter of democracy – is Saudi Arabia. Which doesn’t even have a real parliament, and which I’ll never be able to write about because to go there I need a male guardian. So either find me a husband who will take me there on a leash, or I will never be able to tell you about this country, champion of freedom in Syria.”

It’s not that other journalists have not made connections between the revolution in Syria and international geopolitics. It’s that few point out how absurd these connections are. But Borri spares no sentiments; she’s not interested in making conciliatory noises at Russia or the US or Iran or Saudi Arabia. She is interested in painful realities like “the sole area of Aleppo that has never been bombed is Al Qaeda’s headquarters.”

Continues at: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/what-is-aleppo/

[American Dream]

Assad losing control of his foreign militia fighters?

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Tue, 10/18/2016 - 22:03

An analysis on Middle East Eye suggests that even if Bashar Assad's loyalist forces succeed in taking Aleppo, the dictator could have a hard time actuall reconsolidating his rule there—as he is overwhelmingly relying on foreign Shi'ite militias that he only has tenuous control over. As of 2013, Syria’s army had lost half of its forces, shrinking from 220,000 before the war to approximately 110,000, according to International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates. Even in areas under regime control, growing numbers of youth are evading conscription. "The regime's growing dependency on local and foreign militias is slowly building the potential for a complete breakdown of order, with militias having either competing backers or different localised agendas."

Still betting on Assad for "stability"?

http://countervortex.org/node/15098#comment-453737

[American Dream]

Gilbert Achcar: What are the prospects for peace in Syria?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt6F8e1t4eQ

[American Dream]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2016/10/b ... syria.html

Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Bassam Haddad on Syria
This is a new article on Syria by Bassam Haddad. I don't agree with it in full, but he raises interesting points. I wish he treated both sides (which he deals with) with equal derision.
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil

[American Dream]

https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2 ... -invasion/

Comrade Seumas Milniski on Protests at Russian Embassy over Czechoslovakia ‘Invasion’.


Diversionists Protesting at Russian Embassy: 1968.


From Sputnik 1968.

“…the focus on the comradely Warsaw Pact intervention to restore stability on Czechoslovakia was diverting attention from US-led coalition atrocities elsewhere.”

“.. unshakable fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism demand an implacable struggle against bourgeois ideology and all antisocialist forces. ” “The petty-bourgeois forces outside the London, so-called International Socialists’ are wrecking elements foreign to the working class, must be condemned.”

Seumas Milniski.

Speaking on the Schwarze Kanal George Gallowski said,

“Already tourists are massing on the Czechoslovakian borders to take advantage of the good butter and beer that have come with this new era of normalisation.”

Lindsey Germain’s comments remain unknown but it believed that she considers that nature of the Czechoslovakian government is an issue for the people of the country alone to decide.

[American Dream]

What’s behind Stop the War’s aversion to Syria voices?


Above: a Stop The War Coalition protest outside Downing Street, 12 Dec 2015

Comment: The problem with the Stop the War coalition, is that it is fundamentally not anti-war, but simply anti-western intervention, writes Joey Ayoub

StW has prevented Syrian activists from speaking at their rallies or from taking part in any “anti-war” campaign, while giving a platform to pro-Assad apologists and inviting Assad’s own allies like the Ghouta massacre-denier Fadia Laham, also known as “Mother Agnes”, for years.

This exposes two fundamental aspects of StW today: A de facto tolerance and acceptance of Assad’s tyranny translated as the problem of people “over there” which “we” must not get involved in, regardless of the repercussions, and a hatred for subaltern voices, in this case Syrians, who do not fit the accepted narrative.

This, in turn, works hand in hand with an outdated cold war-era framework, still plaguing much of the western and Arab Left, which romanticises (read: whitewashes) the Kremlin’s politics.

More at: https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2 ... ia-voices/

[coffin_dodger]

^ It's the relentlessness of it that amazes me. It's like a itch has taken hold and must be scratched until that's all you end up doing - scratching.

It's what I love about the Internet. And RI, as a forum, in particular. The medium of the Internet is absolutely unique in human history. It is the first form of communication known to Homo sapiens that can lay the mind of a participant absolutely bare for all to see, without any other external input feeding info through your senses. Never mind that you have not seen, met, studied the body language of, detected the nuances in their speech, seen laughter or tears from or even heard the voice of the other person - you can know them quite intimately through their purest expression - that of mind, to keyboard, to screen.

The fascist/anti-fascist thing is an itch. Don't let it consume you.

[MacCruiskeen]

What’s behind Stop the War’s aversion to Syria voices?


Above: a Stop The War Coalition protest outside Downing Street, 12 Dec 2015

Comment: The problem with the Stop the War coalition, is that it is fundamentally not anti-war, but simply anti-western intervention, writes Joey Ayoub[/b]

StW has prevented Syrian activists from speaking at their rallies or from taking part in any “anti-war” campaign, while giving a platform to pro-Assad apologists and inviting Assad’s own allies like the Ghouta massacre-denier Fadia Laham, also known as “Mother Agnes”, for years.

This exposes two fundamental aspects of StW today: A de facto tolerance and acceptance of Assad’s tyranny translated as the problem of people “over there” which “we” must not get involved in, regardless of the repercussions, and a hatred for subaltern voices, in this case Syrians, who do not fit the accepted narrative.

This, in turn, works hand in hand with an outdated cold war-era framework, still plaguing much of the western and Arab Left, which romanticises (read: whitewashes) the Kremlin’s politics.

More at: https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2 ... ia-voices/

^^What. A. Load. Of. Crap. (And from Shiraz Socialist... )

You are no leftist, AD, and certainly no anti-imperialist. You are a warmonger, a scaremonger, a sower of confusion, a shameless waster of everyone's time and patience, and a persistent sly apologist for every "Western" aggression until it actually gets going. Upon which, you go silent about it, because: job done. Then you carry on filling up one of your many other Personal Data Dumps on this "Discussion Board" with some dire warning from Penny Proyect or the Daily Beast or the Center for International Anarchism (CIA) about the deeply worrying threat posed to The West™ by TERF Maternity Wards or Racialist Hapkido or the Stop The War Coalition.

Whenever you're challenged, however politely, you respond with evasive and patronising (and strikingly wooden) one-liners, or else you announce de haut en bas that you are putting the challenger "on ignore" because you don't like their tone. (So don't dare accuse me of refusing to engage.) You are the one who never engages in discussion, who never makes the slightest attempt to address anyone honestly in argument. This is not the behaviour of someone who is seriously interested in persuading anyone of anything. What could explain it? It looks very like the behaviour of someone who is paid by the line to disrupt -- and, if possible, destroy -- an online forum. Why else would you bother?

I don't really care, though, whether you are in fact a half-demented amateur, like Hugh Manatee Wins of fond memory, an honest Man On A Mission*. Your agenda is now blatantly obvious, and it particularly needs opposing at a time like the present. (Halloween, which now lasts a full fortnight. I saw four spooks on the street this evening, all of them adults. They were laughing. It was kinda scary. Then I realised they were marketing something. What a relief.)

Meanwhile, Syria is following Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as the next item on the neo-cons' well-publicised shopping list (with only Russia between them and it). while Yemen too is in agony, thanks to a murderous and underpublicised US proxy-war conducted by Saudi Arabia. A New American Century of carnage and destruction, precisely as promised - and war between the USA and Russia is, therefore, now a very distinct possibility. Your response? To copy-and-paste a torrent of pro-war propaganda under a laughably flimsy "anarchist" veil.

Last not least, and regardless of the content you're peddling: You have been blatantly abusing and misusing the RI General Discussion Board as your own personal Data Dump Collection of Data Dumps for years now, with complete impunity. It's been pointed out a million times, and god knows not only by me. Nearly everyone here is utterly sick of it, but you just carry on regardless, plodding away, dropping your factory-built loads everywhere, emitting the occasional mechanical droning noise, like an ancient and battered but still-lethal B-52. Why? Because you can. Why can you? Because you may. (Why may you? It's not for me to say.)

I know your little game, matey.

*To bore the board to death.

[American Dream]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2016/10/s ... ganda.html

Thursday, October 20, 2016
Syrian rebels propaganda



Rebels of Ahrar Ash-Sham and Nusrah Front and Jaysh Al-Fath have been posting those signs in Idlib and elsewhere. The sign reads: "Beware of Secularists". Who remembers when Western journalists were writing that Syrian rebels are exclusively secularists and feminists and hippies and democrats? I do.
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil

[DrEvil]

Well, this is new. I agree with Mac!

[American Dream]

I find it deliciously ironic how much rhetoric is deployed here against binary logics and yet how much reliance there is upon them.