Category: Syria

Saudis Shock U.N., Quit Security Council Over Syria

Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary step Friday of refusing to take its seat on the U.N. Security Council — despite pursuing the position for years. It’s an unprecedented protest over the council’s failure to take firmer action in Syria and Palestine. And it comes at a time of growing Saudi frustration with American-led policies across the Middle East.

The decision, which came in an announcement from the Saudi Foreign Ministry, came one day after Saudi Arabia was elected for the first time in its history to the United Nations’ most powerful body. And it reflected deep resentment over China and Russia’s blockage of steps by the Security Council to restrain President Bashar al-Assad’s military and to force him from power. The announcement left many regional specialists shaking their heads, saying the move may run counter to Saudi interests and would deny the Saudis an opportunity to use the high-profile position on the council to promote a tougher line on Syria and other issues.

Read more at Foreign Policy

New Islamist Bloc Declares Opposition to National Coalition and US Strategy

By Aron Lund for Syria Comment
Sept. 24, 2013

Abdelaziz Salame, the highest political leader of the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo, has issued a statement online where he claims to speak for 13 different rebel factions. You can see the video or read it in Arabic here. The statement is titled “communiqué number one” – making it slightly ominous right off the bat – and what it purports to do is to gut Western strategy on Syria and put an end to the exiled opposition.

The statements has four points, some of them a little rambling. My summary:

– All military and civilian forces should unify their ranks in an “Islamic framwork” which is based on “the rule of sharia and making it the sole source of legislation”.

– The undersigned feel that they can only be represented by those who lived and sacrificed for the revolution.

– Therefore, they say, they are not represented by the exile groups. They go on to specify that this applies to the National Coalition and the planned exile government of Ahmed Touma, stressing that these groups “do not represent them” and they “do not recognize them”.

– In closing, the undersigned call on everyone to unite and avoid conflict, and so on, and so on.

The following groups are listed as signatories to the statement.

1. Jabhat al-Nosra
2. Islamic Ahrar al-Sham Movement
3. Tawhid Brigade
4. Islam BrigadeIslamic Dawn Movement
5. Suqour al-Sham Brigades
6. Islamic Dawn Movement
7. Islamic Light Movement
8. Noureddin al-Zengi Battalions
9. Haqq Brigade – Homs
10. Furqan Brigade – Quneitra
11. Fa-staqim Kama Ummirat Gathering – Aleppo
12. 19th Division
13. Ansar Brigade

Who are these people?

The alleged signatories make up a major part of the northern rebel force, plus big chunks also of the Homs and Damascus rebel scene, as well as a bit of it elsewhere. Some of them are among the biggest armed groups in the country, and I’m thinking now mostly of numbers one through five. All together, they control at least a few tens of thousand fighters, and if you trust their own estimates (don’t) it must be way above 50,000 fighters.

Most of the major insurgent alliances are included. Liwa al-Tawhid, Liwa al-Islam and Suqour al-Sham are in both the Western- and Gulf-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC a.k.a. FSA) and the SILF, sort-of-moderate Islamists. Ahrar al-Sham and Haqq are in the SIF, very hardline Islamists. Jabhat al-Nosra, of course, is an al-Qaida faction. Noureddin al-Zengi are in the Asala wa-Tanmiya alliance (which is led by quietist salafis, more or less) as well as in the SMC. And so on. More groups may join, but already at this stage, it looks – on paper, at least – like the most powerful insurgent alliance in Syria.

Read more at Syria Comment

Under siege: the uncertain fate of Arab Christians – Al Arabiya

Hisham Melhem

Rarely do I write about my personal feelings and passions. The situation is different this time. I write with pain, nay, I write with anger. While watching with horror the savage assaults against the Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean, one of the first and oldest Christian communities in the world, I am shocked. From the beginning of the season of Arab uprisings I kept reminding myself, and others, that when we analyze and assess the rapidly unfolding events we should not lose sight of the fundamentals: the civil and human rights of all the peoples living in theses societies regardless of their ethnic and religious backgrounds or their gender. By that I meant that we should denounce and resist repression and injustice inherent in transitional times when the old entrenched powers, along with absolutist radical groups, continue to undermine peaceful inclusive change. Both state and “revolutionary” repression and intimidation should be confronted, although state repression is more dangerous because it is systemic and institutional.

Events in Syria

I was shocked by, and denounced, the destruction of the great Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, a jewel of a structure with its elegant 11th century minaret. This was a beastly act perpetrated by a cruel regime and primitive gangs of fanatic Islamists. Also shocking was the shelling and looting of the historic Jobar synagogue in Damascus, one of the oldest Jewish houses of worship in the world. Now, I am seized with deep anger because the terror of both the Syrian government forces and elements of the radical Islamists Jabhat al-Nusra or Nusra Front have visited the iconic town of Maaloula, a truly unique and special Christian sanctuary nestled in the rugged mountains not far from Damascus where many inhabitants still speak Aramaic, the language of Christ . Maaloula’s Christian inhabitants, with their family tree going back to the first Christian communities in ancient Syria, fled the town when it was taken and retaken by the marauding gangs of Assad and al-Nusra.

I was born, and grew up, in Beirut in a decidedly conservative Christian (Maronite/Catholic) environment. I still remember the pride we felt as youngsters when we used to pray and chant Syriac/Aramaic hymns written in Arabic script. In my teens I read Nahj al-Balaghah by Imam ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (usually translated in English as “Peak of eloquence”) the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad, who is considered by his Shiite followers as the most important figure in Islam after the Prophet. The book is truly a magnificent collection of speeches, invocations and aphorisms written by a man of wisdom, courage and compassion. This was the beginning of my love affair with the Arabic language. Another great Muslim Caliph I admired was Omar Ibn Al Khattab, the second of the four wise Caliphs that succeeded Prophet Muhammad. Omar, one of the most powerful and consequential figures in the history of Islam, was known for his strong sense of social justice. I named my son after him.

Even when I parted ways with religion and became a secularist, I remained attached to the rituals and aestheticism of Christianity and Islam and their civilizational legacies. When I find myself in a European capital I do my own version of (Gothic) church hopping. On my first visit to Cairo and Istanbul I was intoxicated with their charming mosques and ancient churches. All this is to say that what I am writing here is not emanating from my religious background but from my moral and political convictions.

Read more at Al Arabiya

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Group are not in Line with the Syrian Revolution


Syrian Coalition
Istanbul, Turkey
September 20, 2013

The Syrian Coalition condemns the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) for its aggression towards Syrian revolutionary forces and its indifference to the lives of the Syrian people. The Syrian Coalition stresses that the following ISIS practices constitute a stark contradiction to the principles of the Syrian revolution:

1. ISIS’s link with a foreign agenda and its repeated calls to establish a new state inside Syria violating national sovereignty.

2. ISIS’s repeated repressive practices with respect to the freedoms of citizens, doctors, journalists, and political activists.

3. ISIS’s use of force in dealing with civilians, as well as its fight against the Free Syrian Army (FSA), in particular the recent incident in the town of Azaz, Rural Aleppo, where ISIS tried to control the Bab al-Salamah border crossing with Turkey on September 18, 2013.

4. ISIS no longer fights the Assad regime. Rather, it is strengthening its positions in liberated areas, at the expense of the safety of civilians. ISIS is inflicting on the people the same suppression of the Baath party and the Assad regime.

The Syrian Coalition reiterates that the Syrian people are moderate, and respect religious diversity and political differences. They reject extremist (takfiri) ideology and exclusionary behavior, including any and all criminal acts against all citizens.

The Syrian Coalition emphasizes that the principles and values of the Syrian revolution are universal human values, and calls on all revolutionary forces to continue the struggle towards a state where freedom, justice, rule of law, democracy, and equality can thrive.

We ask for Mercy for our martyrs, health for our wounded, and freedom for our detainees.

Long live Syria and its people, free and with honor.

via Syrian National Coalition

‘We Just Wish for the Hit to Put an End to the Massacres’

For Syrian refugees in Jordan’s Zaatari camp, arguments about international law ring hollow.

A family from Dara’a, now living in a caravan in Zaatari. “Even the children have forgotten how to smile,” the woman remarked to me. (All photos: Max Blumenthal)

I sat inside a dimly lit, ramshackle trailer functioning as a general store for the residents of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, while a wiry, sad-eyed man named Adbel told me about the massacres that drove him from his hometown. Dragging deeply on a cigarette, Abdel described how army forces rained shells down on his neighborhood in Deir Ba’alba, a district in Homs, over five months ago, pounding the town over and over. Then he told me how government thugs barged into homes at 6 am, methodically slashing his neighbors to death with long knives, leaving fields irrigated with the blood of corpses, a nightmarish scene that looked much like this. Like nearly everyone I interviewed in the camp, he described his experience in clinical detail, with a flat tone and a blank expression, masking continuous trauma behind stoicism.

As Abdel mashed his cigarette into a tin ashtray and reached to light another, a woman appeared at the shop window with three young children. She said she had no money and had not been able to purchase baby formula for three days. She had trudged to hospitals across the camp seeking help and was turned away at each stop. Without hesitation, the shop owner, a burly middle-aged man also from Homs, pulled a can of formula off a shelf and handed it over to the woman. She made no promise to pay him back, and he did not ask for one. Like so many in the camp, she left Syria with nothing and now depends on the charity of others for her survival. In a human warehouse of 120,000, the fourth-largest population center in Jordan and the second-largest refugee camp in the world, where few can leave and even fewer are able to enter, the woman’s desperate existence was not an exception but the rule.

“We’re in a prison right now,” Abdel told me. “We can’t do anything. And the minute we try to have a small demonstration, even peacefully, [Jordanian soldiers] throw tear gas at us.”

“Guantánamo!” the shop owner bellows.

None of the dozens of adults I interviewed in the camp would allow me to report their full names or photograph their faces. If they return to Syria with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad still intact, they fear brutal recriminations. Many have already survived torture, escaped from prisons or defected from Assad’s army. “With all the bloodshed, the killing of people who did not even join the resistance, Bashar only wanted to teach us one lesson: That we are completely weak and he is our god,” a woman from Dara’a in her early 60s told me. “His goal is to demolish our spirit so we will never rise up again.” The woman’s sons had spent four months under sustained torture for defecting to the Free Syrian Army. She does not know where they are now, only that they are back in the field, battling Assad’s forces in a grinding stalemate that has taken somewhere around 100,000 lives.

Mansour, a 7-year-old, was held at gunpoint by regime forces when his father was arrested. They were reunited in Zaatari, where Mansour is desperate to receive a caravan for his family.

When news of the August 21 chemical attacks that left hundreds dead in the Ghouta region east of Damascus reached Zaatari, terror and dread spiked to unprecedented levels. Many residents repeated to me the rumors spreading through the camp that Bashar would douse them in sarin gas as soon as he crushed the last vestiges of internal resistance—a kind of genocidal victory celebration. When President Barack Obama announced his intention to launch punitive missile strikes on Syria, however, a momentary sense of hope began to surge through the camp. Indeed, there was not one person I spoke to in Zaatari who did not demand US military intervention at the earliest possible moment.

Read more at The Nation

What You Need to Know About the Syrian War

Syria is much like Egypt. While it is a Muslim-dominated country with a rich Islamic history, it has also had a secular, authoritarian government for decades. And like Egypt, Syria is a country of considerable ethnic and religious diversity, a country with a high literacy rate, a large educated class, and a reasonably good educational system. The point here is that there is no more popular support for the creation of an Islamic state in Syria than there is in Egypt. The Arab world is very much divided in its vision of the desired outcome of the Arab Spring.

The Syrian opposition Free Syrian Army is headed by defected leaders of Assad’s military establishment, and the majority of its fighters are defected Syrian military soldiers and citizen militia, and they number about 200,000 fighters. Of these, roughly 10,000 are Syrian Islamist fighters. There are also about 2,000 foreign jihadist fighters from around the world, who have come to Syria to fight because of their deep Islamic religious fundamentalist beliefs. These are estimates were provided by FSA Colonel Abdul Jabbar al-Oqaidi.

The Syrian people are desperate. As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remarked recently on the television program Face the Nation, it is hard to imagine how things in Syria could become worse as a result of an American military strike. The Syrian civil war has caused the most dire humanitarian crisis on the planet. Over a 100,000 people have died, every manner of war crime has been committed by the regime against its own people, and over two million Syrians are now refugees, many being without the most basic means of survival. The likelihood that a targeted U.S. strike against military assets of the Assad regime could actually make things worse for the Syrian people is an argument that simply does not stand up to critical scrutiny. How could things be worse?

The Syrian opposition has been accepting support from any and all sources. The majority of the opposition fighters have made it quite plain that they are not particularly fond of the presence of foreign fighters in their country, but anyone who opposes Assad is a nominal ally.

I believe that it is true and fair to say, and I say this as an Obama partisan, that the Obama administration missed an opportunity to be the principal ally of the Syrian opposition, and thus deferred this role to the jihadists. On the other hand, American involvement taints the noblest of motivations in the eyes of the Arab world. It is a foreign policy no-win scenario for the Obama administration. Thank you, George Bush.

Here, from the archives, is the essence of the political philosophy of the Syrian opposition movement, as published in late February of this year by the conference of the Syrian National Coalition, in Cairo, Egypt:

The Syrian Coalition’s Closing Statements of the General Assembly — Cairo, Egypt

The Syrian Coalition’s Closing Statements of the General Assembly Meeting Outline the Framework of a Political Solution and Announce a Date for the Selection of a Prime Minister for the Interim Government

In its meeting on February 21-22, 2013, in Cairo, Egypt, The Syrian Coalition defined the framework of a political initiative that is inline with advancements on the ground, while at the same time ensures achieving the goals of the revolution, the preservation of human life, stability, infrastructure and institutions. Such a political solution must be founded within the following fundamental parameters:

1. Achieving the goals of the Syrian revolution, which include: justice, freedom, liberty, and dignity, while preserving human life, and sparing the country further destruction, devastation and dangers. Furthermore, it is important to preserve the unity and sovereignty of Syria, geographically, politically, and socially, as the ultimate goal is to achieve a civil, democratic and pluralistic Syria, where all citizens are equal regardless of gender, religion, or ethnicity.

2. The removal of Bashar Al-Assad and all of the security and military leadership responsible for the decisions that have destroyed the country and terrorized its people. These individuals do not fall within the confines of any political framework and will not be a part of this political solution. They must be held accountable for their crimes.

3. The political solution and the future of our country encompasses all Syrians, including honorable persons from within the current security forces, the Baathist regime and any other government, civil or political organization, so long as these individuals were not involved in crimes against the Syrian people.

4. All initiative must be defined by the above parameters, set within a specific time frame, and must include a clear and announced goal.

5. International guarantees from the Security Council, and especially from Russia and the United States, as well as international support and safeguards are important for the realization of any initiatives through a binding UN Security Council resolution.

6. A commitment to continue supporting the revolution on the ground to tip the scale of power in support of the revolution.

7. Obtaining the necessary support from the friends of Syria and its neighbors within the region is also vital for a successful political solution within the above parameters.

8. The General Assembly of the Coalition is the only body authorized to propose a political initiative on behalf of the Syrian Coalition.

The Syrian Coalition’s General Assembly has decided to form an interim government for Syria that will carry out its duties from within the Syrian territories. The Coalition set a date of March 2nd, 2013 to select a prime minister from amongst the candidates nominated by the General Assembly, within the agreed upon parameters and after consultation with Syrian opposition forces and the revolutionary movement.

The General Assembly of the Syrian Coalition condemns the barbaric bombing and assault, which once again targeted several civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo. These attacks were carried out using Russian made ballistic missiles and caused severe damage and loss of life.

These bombings and attacks on densely populated neighborhoods with missiles launched from a distance of over 400 km away are a crime against humanity. The head of this criminal regime, those who carry out these attacks and those who supply this regime with weapons of mass destruction bear the full moral and political responsibility of these crimes. Furthermore, those who deprive the Syrian people from a fair and equal defense by failing to provide them with the necessary weapons to do so also bear the moral and political responsibility of these vicious attacks.

via البيان الختامي لاجتماع الهيئة العامة / The Syrian Coalition’s Closing Statements.