An autobiography of Syria's revolution

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 17/8/2016]

Can it really be three years this month since the enormous sarin attack on Damascus’ East Ghouta? Events move at such dizzying pace in Syria that a massacre in the morning is already forgotten by nightfall, while last week’s atrocity is ossified history. The British novelist Martin Amis says we each become different people with every decade that passes. If so, we’re only 50% at most of who we were when demonstrations broke out across Syria in March 2011, and for many of us our perceptions of what happened have since undergone equally pronounced transformations.

It’s bad enough that we forget details; worse is the way facts registered at the time get clumsily fused with information (and misinformation) acquired later on. We now know, to take an example at random, that Al-Qaeda was actively involved – albeit on a microscopic scale – in the armed insurrection from as early in the day as August 2011. Even those who are still perfectly certain Assad is a heinous war criminal can now increasingly be heard contemplating the state of the rebel movement today and asking: was there ever really a ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army? And, while we’re at it, just how democratic was the initial civilian uprising, anyway?

If you’ve ever caught yourself even momentarily entertaining such revisionism, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War will make for deeply embarrassing reading. One opens its pages and steps into the spring of 2011 and suddenly it’s all there once again, just as it was: the “crowds of hundreds of thousands – men and women, adults and children,” dancing the dabke to the beat of the dirbakkeh; Christians in Homs’ Hamidiyeh throwing rice affectionately onto mostly-Muslim demonstrators in the streets below their balconies, chanting “Muslims and Christians, we all want freedom” (it rhymes in Arabic) and “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.”

In fact, the authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami recreate the scene in much higher-definition than one watched it at the time. Among many things that make this the Syria book we’ve all been waiting for is the incredibly extensive and eclectic dramatis personae interviewed and quoted in its pages. Here we meet Sunni Marxist rappers organizing demonstrations with Alawite anarchists in Tartous; atheist supporters of the Free Syrian Army; and Christian women protesting in Damascus’ “conservative Muslim neighborhood” of Maydan wearing “skimpy top[s];” inter alia. Many interviews have in fact been conducted inside Syria, where the Syrian-British authors have traveled repeatedly since 2011. The result is the most vivid ground-level account of the revolution through the eyes and mouths of its own protagonists yet compiled in English.

Not, however, that this is remotely a sentimental stroll down memory lane or nostalgic lament for the golden days. Committed revolutionaries that they are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami are also analysts of the first rank, and they set about diagnosing where it all went wrong with a remarkably Orwellian power of facing unpleasant facts. Where the opposition has erred, the authors are unsparing. Ahrar al-Sham, the “largest” rebel brigade and also the “most extreme” save for ISIS and the group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, is rebuked for its slaughter of Alawite civilians, and described as “undoubtedly led by jihadist extremists who oppose the revolution’s original democratic aims.” Jaysh al-Islam, kingpin of the rebel-held Damascus suburbs, is taken to task for its Islamist authoritarianism, best exemplified by its “likely abduction and perhaps murder” of the human rights lawyer and activist Razan Zaitouneh (along with her husband and two colleagues), a figure of peerless importance in the secular, democratic, grassroots opposition, and the dedicatee of the book. The political opposition in exile is pasted for its failure to sufficiently reach out to Alawites, Kurds, and other minorities in the crucial early days when it might have made the difference.

Some perspective, however, is called for here. Bashar al-Assad’s regime remains primarily, overwhelmingly, incomparably at fault for the disaster Syria has become. In his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence, the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya wrote that as much as he willed every moment of every day for the fall of the Saddam regime, he feared the profound damage done to Iraqi society by decades of Baathist totalitarianism would all but guarantee a nightmare of sectarian bloodletting in its wake. He could just as easily have been writing about Assad’s Syria. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami demonstrate ably how a great portion of the opposition’s faults bear the genetic imprint of regime parentage.

Take religious sectarianism. While today often unthinkingly seen (by Arabs no less than Westerners) as a permanent, ineradicable feature of Middle Eastern society since time immemorial, the authors argue persuasively it is chiefly the bastard child of the region’s utterly unscrupulous contemporary regimes. Syria, they write, was “set on a secular trajectory similar to Europe’s” in the 1960s, when left-of-center politics dominated and the hijab (for example) was worn by fewer women than ever.

That all met a swift death with the advent of the Assads père et fils, whose approach to governance combined colonial divide-and-rule strategy with the mobster’s tactics of blackmail and extortion. It wasn’t just that Alawites were showered with socioeconomic patronage and other inducements to purchase their sympathies. Sunnis, while forbidden on pain of death from joining the Muslim Brotherhood, were permitted and even encouraged to become Salafists, the better to convince both Alawites and Western governments that the Assads – ever the arsonists and firemen at one and the same time – were all that stood between them and baying masses of fanatic lynch mobs.

At its most flagrant, this took the form of grooming fighters to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, facilitating their training and transport to the border. The regime’s direct collaboration with the group that would go on to spawn both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra continued until at least 2009, according to a Guardian investigative report. Famously, Assad also released a legion of violent Islamist prisoners from their cells in 2011 (at the very moment he was arresting, torturing and murdering non-violent secularists), including Ahrar al-Sham’s Hassan Abboud, Jaysh al-Islam’s Zahran Alloush, “as well as founding members of Jabhat al-Nusra [and] important figures in ISIS,” write the authors.

More generally, the complete lack of free speech, civil society, independent media, apolitical education, and cultural space stretching back four decades drained the air of the oxygen necessary for healthy communal coexistence. “What Syria needed was a national conversation about historical fears and resentments aiming towards greater mutual understanding,” write the authors of the pre-2011 state often dubbed the ‘Kingdom of Silence.’ “Instead people discussed the other sect in bitter secret whispers, and only among their own.” Baathist monopolization of politics had a further ruinous effect – in one of their most original insights, the authors note, “The elimination or co-optation of the left removed one of religion’s natural competitors.” (To this day, the godless whisky-guzzlers of the Lebanese Communist Party stand as the last remaining obstacle in certain Shiite towns and villages to Hezbollah’s Islamization.)

The wonder, given all this, is that the revolution was ever as democratic and pluralist as it was, and that so many Syrians were so readily able to break, spontaneously and entirely of their own accord, with a lifetime’s worth of conditioning. That their experiment – carried out in unfathomably dangerous conditions – was too often met not with encouragement and support from the democratic world but with ambivalence and even hostility is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century. In the final chapter, the authors write with cold contempt of all the segments of the so-called international community that failed Syria, from the UN to Western politicians to establishment pundits to dishonorable journalists to far-right nationalists to fatuous hard-left pseudo-anti-imperialists.

The lessons, as world leaders inch closer by the day to a long-term (re-)accommodation with Assad, should need no spelling out. It’s not just that he’s incapable of unifying the country, in the preposterous euphemism of diplomats, or that the ‘stability’ he would supposedly usher in would come at a rather unsavory humanitarian price. He isn’t merely not the solution; he is the walking, breathing personification of the problem; the radix malorum of the entire catastrophe. He’s the ‘devil we know,’ all right, and he’s an agent not of stability but of cataclysmic instability. ‘We’ may have already forgotten what the revolution was about – or that a revolution happened at all – but the millions of Syrians who continue to live day and night at the capricious pleasure of Assad’s homicide machine certainly haven’t, and won’t. By reminding us of this, and how we got to where we are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami plainly illuminate for us the necessary path ahead.

Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami was published by Pluto Press in January 2016.

Stop the outrageous Saddam nostalgia

[Originally posted at NOW]

The man was responsible for more deaths than the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars put together.

It’s a curious fact that criticism of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein quite often gets coupled with the claim that his reign in Iraq was not as unpleasant as has generally been made out. This has been true more or less since day one of the intervention; no one yet has topped the breathtaking shamelessness and crudity of Michael Moore’s 2004 depiction in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Saddam’s Iraq as literally a garden of children and kites.

But similar, if occasionally better-dressed variants of the theme have long been making their way into respectable publications, and increasingly so as prospects of Western intervention in the region have revived since Bashar al-Assad’s crossing last summer of Obama’s red-line-that-wasn’t. In June, the Independent disgraced itself with a piece saying “life wasn’t so bad at all” for Iraqis in the 1980s. Later the same month, Anne-Marie Slaughter got away with saying in the New York Times that Saddam was “far less brutal” than Assad. And this week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the son of a Saddam-era Iraqi Air Force member fondly remembering the pre-1990 “Iraq I loved and was proud of,” which was a “modern, Westernized and secular” marvel that only turned sour after the Americans prevented the natural progression of Baathist enlightenment into Kuwait.

What were some of the highlights of this golden age? A book written in 1993 called Cruelty and Silence by the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya recalls a few. Here are excerpts from a conversation Makiya had with a Kurdish Iraqi boy, describing one memorable encounter with Saddam’s Westernized modernity in 1988:

Makiya: When they opened the door of the lorry, what was the first thing you saw?

Taimour Abdallah: The first thing I saw was the pits, dug and ready.

[…]

M: They pushed you directly off the truck into the pit?

A: Yes.

[…]

M: How many people were put inside?

A: One pit to every truck.

M: And how many people were in a truck?

A: About one hundred people.

[…]

M: Soldiers were surrounding the whole grave?

A: Yes. […] There were two soldiers […] We sat in the pit and they fired bullets at us.

[…]

M: The soldier who pushed you back into the hole, was he the one who shot you the second time?

A: Yes. This soldier shot me again after he received the order from the officer who was standing beside the pit.

[…]

M: What about the rest of the people, were they all dead?

A: They didn’t make noises.

Abdallah is the only known survivor of Saddam’s systematic extermination of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s – a campaign officially described in government documents as “the heroic operations of the Anfal,” a Quranic term for war booty (Saddam’s “secularism” often took such strange forms, like when he introduced amputation and branding with hot irons as punishments for theft, citing the Islamic shari`a as justification). Along with every member not just of his family but of his entire village, Abdallah had been rounded up by the army and transported to the desert near the Saudi border, where firing squads and mass graves awaited. By extraordinary chance, the two bullets he received failed to kill him, and he managed to flee under the cover of dark to a nearby Bedouin camp, where he was sheltered and eventually reunited with Kurdish relatives. He was 12 years old.

What happened to Abdallah’s village happened to over 1,200 villages in Iraqi Kurdistan throughout 1988. We’ll never know the total number of Kurds thus extirpated with certainty, but the regime’s own “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majeed (whose nickname came from his enthusiastic use of the weapons of mass destruction Iraq is supposed never to have had) himself admitted to a figure of 100,000. The more likely number of 180,000, based on Kurdish sources, is now generally accepted (Patrick Cockburn, for example, whose decades of reporting from Iraq have been consistently critical of Western policy, considers it reliable). As a rule of thumb, when it comes to Saddam, the facts are usually far worse than initially believed.

Of course, 1988 was only one of 24 years of Saddam’s rule, which also featured the killing of some 150,000 Shiites in 1991, and well over 100,000 Iranians from 1980-88, and over 1,000 Kuwaitis in 1990, and untold thousands of Iraqis of every sect and ethnicity for any number of reasons at one point or another. How bad was Saddam? Add the death toll of the current Syrian war to that of the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, and throw in Hafez al-Assad’s massacre at Hama in 1982, and you’re still nowhere close to how many he killed.

Not that statistics can begin to do justice to the complete, unique gruesomeness of this regime: the state-employed rapists (“violation of women’s honor” was the exact job description used in the government paperwork, according to documents seen by Makiya), who would often carry out their work in the presence of their victims’ relatives, sometimes in designated ‘rape rooms’ of prisons; the burning alive of children in front of parents as interrogation technique; the imprisonment and torture of total innocents as deliberate policy; the ‘Victory Arch’ Saddam had built in Baghdad using fifty-foot replicas of his own forearms, carrying 24-ton stainless steel swords above 5,000 genuine bullet-ridden and blood-stained Iranian helmets. Quite a legacy to “love” and be “proud of,” and quite a state of affairs to be remembered with nostalgia in the finest newspapers of the ‘free world’.

Blame Assad first for ISIS' rise

[Originally posted at NOW]

The regime has abetted Sunni extremists to influence Western public opinion.

In the week since Al-Qaeda spinoff the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) brought Iraq back into international headlines by seizing around a third of the country in a matter of hours, there has understandably been a great deal of soul-searching and hair-pulling as to how a group that was supposed to have been “decimated,” in a country that was supposed to be last decade’s headache, has once again managed with just a few hundred men to humiliate an army many times its size and generally outfox the entire world.

Fingers have been hastily pointed in every direction, with culprits found ranging from the timeless “conspiracy” (in the Iraqi prime minister’s words) to Tony Blair (who took to his website Saturday to cantankerously declare his complete innocence of all charges). An increasingly widespread claim – appealing perhaps because of its ring of an ironic morality tale about imperial folly – has it that ISIS’ growth is in fact the doing of the West’s closest but most duplicitous Arab allies, the oleaginous Gulf dictatorships, who have done to us once again what they’ve been doing since they backed the Afghan Mujahideen that nurtured Bin Laden in the 1980s. Will we ever learn?

Lost in this din, driven more by the grinding of old axes than dispassionate consideration of the evidence, is the obvious fact that one man has contributed vastly more than anyone else to getting ISIS where it is today: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

First, though, it’s worth exploring the Gulf hypothesis, because like any popular misconception, it does contain elements of truth. It’s unquestionably the case, as Josh Rogin argued in The Daily Beast on Saturday, that the Gulf monarchs make little if any real effort to prevent their more pious subjects from sending considerable sums of money to extremist outfits, including ISIS. That a Kuwaiti man named Ghanim al-Mteiri had no objection to going on the record to the New York Times in November about his financing of Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s official Al-Qaeda franchise, says everything that needs to be said about the Al-Sabah regime’s commitment to what Rogin still calls the “war on terror.”

But this is not the same as saying – as Rogin’s title (“America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS”) does, and as others such as Simon Henderson in Foreign Policy and Robert Fisk in The Independent have – that ISIS is actively and deliberately sponsored as a matter of policy by the Saudis and other Gulf rulers and should be thought of as no more than a proxy created to advance Riyadh’s regional ambitions. Quite to the contrary: ISIS has long been at war with Saudi’s actual clients in Syria, the Islamic Front and what is loosely called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who have successfully driven it out of much of its former turf in the north. Indeed, among the many sources of hostility between ISIS and the other brigades is precisely the former’s rejection of Saudi intervention. While FSA leaders openly express gratitude for Riyadh’s help, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani mocks the Kingdom as a “state which claims to be Islamic,” and denounces as traitors all factions “supported by the Saudis, America, and the infidels of the West.”

Another cause of friction is the FSA’s frequent accusations of ISIS collaboration with the regime. Though this line of argument, too, can take irrational and conspiratorial forms, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that, taken in aggregate, suggest the “Assad-or-the-terrorists” dichotomy that so much guides (or misguides) Western policy toward Syria is not nearly as straightforward as we’re led to believe:

● For long periods of time, the regime largely spared ISIS’ bases from the kinds of aerial and other attacks it daily visits upon the rest of the country. A government adviser told the New York Times’ Anne Barnard this was indeed a deliberate policy, designed to “tar” the broader opposition and “frame [the] choice” as either Assad or the extremists. As one ISIS defector told The Daily Telegraph, “We were confident that the regime would not bomb us. We always slept soundly in our bases.” He added, in a quote that didn’t make the final text, that ISIS had even been infiltrated by regime agents. “I know men who were officers in the police and Syrian intelligence branches who are now in ISIS. They grew long beards and joined.” Another good reason for Assad not to drop barrel bombs on them.

● According to the same Daily Telegraph report, both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have raised millions of dollars through sales of crude oil from fields under their control to the regime, a unique case of overt partnership between ISIS and a state actor.

● Although ISIS only officially formed in April 2013, its roots lie in Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the same group Assad paid and equipped in the mid-2000s to fight the Americans in precisely the region of Iraq now occupied by ISIS. In 2003, on the regime’s orders, Syria’s ordinarily mild-mannered Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro issued a gladiatorial fatwa calling for attacks, including suicide bombings, against the Americans in Iraq. Those who came back alive after making the trip over the border – following training and funding from the regime – were promptly thrown into Damascus’ notorious Sednaya prison upon their return. Years later, on May 31, 2011, Assad suddenly pardoned and released dozens of Sednaya’s most dangerous inmates, who predictably went on to become leaders in Islamist rebel brigades, including extremist ones. This was at the same time the regime was imprisoning, torturing, and indeed murdering the secular and nonviolent democracy activists out in the streets. What was going on? As Aron Lund, editor of the Carnegie Endowment’s "Syria in Crisis" page, put it, “There are no random acts of kindness from this regime.”

● Nawaf al-Fares, the defected former Syrian ambassador to Iraq, has claimed the regime ordered a series of suicide bombings in Syria in 2012, carried out by the very jihadists he himself had sent to Iraq years previously. Again, the idea was to discredit the opposition, thereby duping the world into preferring Assad. “The Syrian government would like to use Al-Qaeda as a bargaining chip with the West,” he said, “to say: ‘it is either them or us.’” Another defector, former intelligence officer Afaq Ahmad, similarly recalls how “the jihadist groups and brigades” were “very useful for the regime,” which infiltrated them and even brokered non-aggression pacts with some of them.

To be clear, nobody is suggesting ISIS fighters are pure agents provocateurs, or that the regime doesn’t also kill them as and when expedient. Indeed, presumably realizing (or being told by “brotherly” Iran) after the fall of Iraq’s Mosul last week that ISIS had been allowed to grow stronger than intended, on Sunday Assad’s air force began bombing the group’s strongholds across northeastern Syria.

But that, if anything, only underlines the point that the regime knew the locations of those strongholds all this time. There simply is no other actor, not even the roundly assailed Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, who has done so much for so long to directly facilitate ISIS’ rise. So far from facing a choice between “Assad and the terrorists,” in other words, Syrians – and now Iraqis too – suffer the latter precisely because they have for so long been plagued with the former.

Arsal on a knife-edge

[Originally posted at NOW]

As Syrians flee new regime airstrikes, Arsal residents fear they may be next.

A girl from Qalamoun who arrived in Wadi Hmayed within the last week (NOW/Alex Rowell)

WADI HMAYED, Lebanon – High up in the rocky, khaki moonscape of the Anti-Lebanon mountains, to the east of the border town of Arsal, stands an army checkpoint that marks the de facto limit of the Lebanese state’s sovereignty. Beyond it lie a series of barren valleys that form a kind of lawless no-man’s-land, technically Lebanese soil but effectively annexed to the Syrian war zone, where regime air strikes, rebel rocket launches, and mutual ambushes and kidnappings happen on a regular basis. Because the Lebanese army itself has no presence in Wadi Hmayed, as the area is known, access is forbidden without special permission, and most international organizations, including the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), do not operate here.

And yet it is here that the bulk of the more than 10,000 new refugee arrivals from the adjacent Qalamoun region of Syria have settled in the past week, fleeing the intense bombardment of the nearby city of Yabrud to a few collections of tents erected by independent NGOs. They’re among the most vulnerable refugees in the country – none has registered with UNHCR so far, and many say they don’t want to – but, having made it out of Qalamoun, most said they were just grateful to be alive when NOW visited one of the camp sites Friday afternoon.

“Praise be to God,” said a remarkably cheerful old man, squatting on the gravel outside his tent, his six children and grandchildren sitting on slender mattresses inside. “We have everything we need here.”

“I haven’t showered since I arrived four days ago, and I have nothing but the clothes on my back, but praise be to God, we’re all happy here,” said a grinning adolescent at a second tent.

Asked what compelled them to leave Yabrud in the last week, they described scenes of immense and indiscriminate bombardment by the Syrian air force.

“The airplanes were bombing our houses, what else could we do?” said one young man, as a crowd gathered outside his tent. “We have kids they killed there. I saw a tank run over a six-year-old boy. And all the time they were dropping barrel bombs. There are still many people buried under the rubble.”

“Initially the regime said they were targeting ‘terrorists’,” said another young man. “But they killed more civilians than fighters.”

Although from Wadi Hmayed they are still close enough to Qalamoun to see the fighter jets on occasion, the refugees said they had no plans to move further inside Lebanon. Some, indeed, were not aware it was even an option – the old man, for instance, was surprised when NOW suggested he could relocate to the Beqaa Valley. As for registering with UNHCR, they were generally divided between those who didn’t know how to and those who didn’t want to.

“Where’s Zahle?” asked a young man unsarcastically, when NOW inquired whether he would be traveling to the UNHCR registration center there (the nearest one to Arsal). The ones who did know where Zahle was were often unwilling, however, to make the trip, fearing harassment or worse at the numerous army and Hezbollah checkpoints on the road from Arsal (NOW was stopped and searched on the return journey by the army, the army intelligence unit, and Hezbollah gunmen). Unless and until they register, they will have to make do with the basic aid UNHCR is able to provide them via its independent NGO partners, as well as what those NGOs themselves can offer. UNHCR spokesperson Joelle Eid told NOW this pre-registration aid includes hygiene and baby kits, stoves, blankets, fuel vouchers, food supplies, and medical assistance where needed.

Arsal in the crosshairs?

Back on the other side of the army checkpoint, in Arsal itself the tension sparked by recent events is palpable. It is this town, after all, that Hezbollah accuses of being the gateway through which car bombs, allegedly rigged in Syria, make their way inside Lebanon, where seven have exploded since the start of 2014 alone. Indeed, just 10 days ago, the army intercepted an explosives-laden car on its way out of Arsal.

For residents here, such accusations are part of a longstanding campaign to target the town for supporting the Syrian opposition. Last month, a rocket attack on the town center killed eight people, including six children, and though a claim of responsibility by the Syrian jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham group surfaced online, Arsal residents issued a statement pointing the finger at Hezbollah.

“We are being punished, because from day one we were the first to support the Syrian revolution, and to treat the Syrian wounded, and receive refugees,” the town’s Deputy Mayor Ahmad Fleeti tells NOW in his office, looking drained as he drags on a cigarette.

Asked about reports that Arsal’s outskirts, including Wadi Hmayed, could be the Syrian regime’s next target should it succeed in Yabrud, Fleeti shifts nervously in his seat.

“If there’s anything we fear, it’s regime airstrikes. We’re not afraid of Hezbollah, because we think they’re smarter than to invade Arsal. If Hezbollah invades Arsal, it will be a civil war for sure, so it’s more convenient for them to let Syria do the work. Yes, who knows, maybe the regime will do in Arsal what it’s doing in Syria.”

One of Arsal’s biggest problems, Fleeti argues, is its negative media image as a hostile “terrorist” hub, which has increasingly turned public opinion against it since the recent wave of car bombings began.

“We’re not takfiris here, we’re Lebanese, and we want to be under the state’s authority,” he tells NOW. “Arsal’s residents are paying with their own blood for all these explosions. Look at Abdallah Izz al-Din, who was an innocent victim killed in the most recent Bir Hassan bombs, and at first they suspected he was the suicide bomber because it can’t be that someone from Arsal is a victim.”

Nevertheless, the more than two years of brutal warfare in Syria have undoubtedly drawn a minority of Arsal’s more than 80,000 residents (some 60% of whom are now Syrians) in the direction of militant fundamentalist ideology. Black-and-white banners bearing Islamist calligraphy decorate the back windows of several cars cruising through the cramped streets. A number of men, especially the youth, groom their facial hair in the Salafist style. And in the tents in Wadi Hmayed, one refugee scarcely out of his teens gave an ominous reply when asked what would happen if the regime succeeded in its Yabrud offensive.

“If the regime wins, all of us young men will go and join the jihad.”

Some names have been withheld at the interviewees’ requests.

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

Assir's media return buoys supporters, frightens others

[Originally posted at NOW]

ABRA, Lebanon – A first-time visitor to the Bilal bin Rabah mosque complex today in Abra, east of Sidon, might never guess there were several days of intense rocket and machine gun clashes here just over seven months ago, killing 18 Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) soldiers and around 40 gunmen loyal to the mosque’s imam, Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir.

The once-devastated apartment block housing the mosque, which had entire wall panels blown out when NOW saw it after the June 2013 fighting, has now been immaculately repaired and restored, a “For Rent” banner hanging from one balcony indicating that it is inhabitable once again. Long gone, of course, are the young men standing guard outside with AK-47s hanging by their sides. (Those who weren’t killed or arrested have, like Assir himself, gone into hiding.) Gone too are the heavy-duty barriers installed by the sheikh on the side-streets leading up to the mosque complex, as well as a protective metal roof constructed above the mosque’s entrance. Some new shops have opened up in the adjacent small square; others have closed down. The whole block has the eerie air of the scene of an historic and infamous crime, mopped up and painted over but still evidently raw in the memories of those who witnessed it.

Thus when NOW asked local residents Friday about their thoughts on Assir’s recent reappearance in the media, many who still supported him would only say so in lowered voices. “Inshallah (God willing) he’ll return,” murmured one adolescent worker in a bakery before returning to the oven. Others would reveal their sympathies only in roundabout or implicit ways. A few, however, remained as outspoken as ever – seeing perhaps that NOW were journalists, the driver of one passing car raised his fist out the window and shouted, “Sheikh al-Assir, God protect you!”

For such people, the reemergence of the sheikh on social media networks has evidently been a great boon. Having not used his Twitter account since August 2013, Assir surprised followers with a new message on 14 January, and has since posted over 25 times. The messages generally address current events in Lebanon and Syria, peppered with Qur’anic citations and the derogatory references to “Safavids” (Shiites and/or Persians) and “Hizb al-Lat” (a pun on “Hezbollah” implying idolatry) that are the hallmark of hardline Sunni Islamism. On Syria, he sarcastically says the siege of the Yarmouk camp is the “true picture of the support of Iran and [Hezbollah] and Assad for the Palestinians and their cause,” and laments that “the world” cares more about “the mujahideen” in Syria than the regime’s “planes dropping barrel bombs, and chemical weapons, and slaughter with knives.” He also calls for the release of kidnapped Christian priests and nuns, “[even though] many Christian clergymen and politicians stood with Assad and justified his criminality against our people.” On Lebanon, he says the “main reason” for the recent wave of explosions is “[Hezbollah’s] criminality in Syria,” defending March 14, the Future Movement, and President Michel Suleiman from accusations of responsibility. At the same time, he accuses Future leader MP Saad Hariri of providing “cover” for the continuing presence of the army (labeled a “tool” of Hezbollah) in Abra, and mocks March 14’s recently-launched “civil resistance” campaign, the “first result” of which was “the approval of a unity cabinet with [Hezbollah] covering their criminality in Lebanon and Syria.”

As before, it is this posture as an uncompromising defender of “the Sunni people” (Ahl al-Sunna) that appeals to Assir’s supporters. “[Some] still say they don’t feel secure anymore [after his disappearance],” a butcher near the mosque told NOW. “They say he used to protect this area.”

Yet the violent legacy of his movement has also left many in the neighborhood fearful of his reemergence, particularly in the wake of rumors tying him to extremist groups. A Twitter account said to belong to one of his wives wrote on 16 January that efforts were underway to make Assir the head of the Lebanese branch of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda offshoot that has claimed two deadly suicide bombings in Lebanon* since the announcement of its formation in December 2013 and is believed to have around 170 fighters based in Sidon’s Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Also in December, one LAF soldier was killed and three wounded in dual attacks on army checkpoints in Sidon, including one close to Assir’s mosque. And on Friday, concerns of possible further attacks in Sidon, including car bombings, prompted authorities to implement new security measures in the city.

“He could be affiliated with any extremist group, in my opinion, because the people who don’t know God tend to bond together. […] May God take his soul,” said a baker near the mosque (at which point his younger apprentice indignantly retorted, “May God protect him!”).

“Most of us were relieved when Assir left, as though a rock were lifted off our chests,” said the manager of a nearby money transfer outlet. “I can’t tell what his possible affiliations are, but I fear he’s affiliated to a group that is worse than Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, like Al-Qaeda itself.”

“His return to the media spotlight definitely caused tension, because we here still have a feeling that things aren’t okay and something is being prepared,” the manager told NOW. “His supporters still show up at the mosque, which is why I have a feeling something might happen, especially after his latest statements.”

All interviewees requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

* Since the time of publication, Jabhat al-Nusra has claimed a third suicide bombing, killing 4 in Hermel.

Galloway's attack on Nawaz plumbs new depths of hypocrisy

[Originally posted at NOW]

I have twice had the honor and pleasure of interacting with Maajid Nawaz; first when he was kind enough to sign my copy of his remarkable memoir, Radical, at the 2012 Edinburgh Book Festival; and second when I interviewed him by phone shortly afterward in NOW’s own pages. On both occasions the winsome charisma and quick intelligence for which he’s renowned were in full evidence.

We didn’t agree on everything – he is a believing Muslim who opposed any kind of intervention in Syria – but these facts, if anything, only make it more outrageous that he should have become the target this week of a takfir campaign launched by Islamist fascists after his tweeting of a cartoon along with the words: “This [...] is not offensive & I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it الله أكبر منه.” The former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned counter-Islamist democracy activist, who recently succeeded in convincing the head of the anti-Muslim ‘English Defence League’ skinhead mob to step down, has now received “credible” death threats, and has felt compelled to issue a statement of “regret.”

Loathsome as this assault is, it’s perhaps only to be expected from the Islamists, who are at least open about their utter rejection of “godless” liberalism and “man-made” democracy. In a sense, their behavior here is fitting, even reassuring (to discover anew that one has made an enemy of the theocratic far-right is, or ought to be, a source of satisfaction). Much less stomachable, however, was the solidarity offered to the scrofulous thugs by MP George Galloway, who took it upon himself to tweet:

“No Muslim will ever vote for the Liberal Democrats anywhere ever unless they ditch the provocateur Majid [sic] Nawaz, cuckold of the EDL.”

It’s just astounding what the man gets away with. Bad enough that Galloway – who is actually a sectarian Roman Catholic, who argues against Scottish independence because the resulting peninsula would contain too many Protestants – supposes himself eligible to speak on behalf of “Muslims.” Far worse that, in so doing, he equates all “Muslims” with the crackpot fringe minority represented by Nawaz’ would-be-murderers (precisely the sort of vile smear that was, incidentally, the stock-in-trade of the EDL).

Yet it’s his rancid hypocrisy that most churns the gut. Galloway has spent the best part of the last three years defending Bashar al-Assad, whose merciless regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslim civilians, as an enlightened and secularist bastion against the “takfiri fanatics” and “beasts” of the Syrian opposition. America, he now tells us, is “in bed with al-Qaeda.” But whenever Galloway is back home, it’s precisely the brethren of those very same takfiris and fanatics who are his dearest comrades. Indeed, he’s even dabbled in the takfir business himself, slandering his Muslim rival in a recent by-election as a hopeless alcoholic, and thundering thuggishly that “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not […] I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.”

Then again, there’s a warped sort of consistency here (and not just because, before Galloway started disliking al-Qaeda, he was lauding them as a “resistance” force in Iraq). Much like America’s televangelist millionaires, one never quite knows whether ‘Gorgeous George’ sincerely believes the things he says, or if he’s just doing too well for himself to stop now. There’s reason to think it’s the latter; in other words that he’s found a highly lucrative niche as the go-to propagandist for whichever mass-murderer is the international community’s bogeyman-of-the-day.

For example, a 2007 British parliamentary inquiry found “strong circumstantial evidence” that Galloway received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Saddam Hussein regime; money siphoned out of the UN Oil-for-Food Programme that was, incidentally, supposed to buy relief for Iraqi civilians rendered destitute by years of international sanctions.

And since becoming an MP again in 2012, Galloway has been forced to disclose some other fascinating sources of income, including at least $119,000 a year for his twice-monthly show on the staunchly pro-Assad al-Mayadeen TV station here in Beirut, as well as “several £20,000 ($33,000) payments for presenting programmes on Press TV,” the Iranian state channel, from which platform he memorably declared last year’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus to have been the work of al-Qaeda in cahoots with Israel (and then lied about it in parliament). No doubt impressed with what they saw, and realizing the potential value of his services, the Putin regime has since given him a weekly slot on their RT channel, in return for as-yet-untold sums.

But at the same time, there’s also reason to believe that what he says comes largely from genuine conviction. He certainly goes above and beyond the call of duty of a mere mercenary. His record on LGBT rights, for instance, is notoriously shady – he both denies that Iran executes gays and says the ones it does execute are either rapists or pedophiles. Rape itself, as it happens, is something he’s willing to pardon as long as the right people are doing it – commenting on the Julian Assange allegations, Galloway shrugged that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.” And his support for censorship has been expressed repeatedly and unambiguously: “Of course in this country there’s freedom of speech, but it cannot be an unlimited freedom of speech and other freedoms must trump it, including the freedom not to be terrorized in your own home, not to have your prophet insulted, your religion insulted.”

Perhaps these too are purely cynical statements, calibrated solely to win votes and fatten pockets. But I’m tempted to think Galloway is also one of those authoritarians still lurking on the ostensible left for whom the very idea of liberal democracy is a bourgeois abomination. There’s far more “revolutionary” excitement, after all, in the Castros and Chavezes and Saddams of the world, whose despotism, no matter how bloody, can always be excused for the good of the cause (even when “the cause” is nothing more than petty dynastic perpetuation). Ultimately, for Galloway no less than the Islamists, Nawaz’ original sin was committed the moment he put down the black-and-white flag of the caliphate, and turned his back on totalitarianism tout court. It’s incumbent on all who wish to live neither in Stalinist nor Salafist serfdom to offer their full support to Nawaz, and their full contempt to his adversaries.

Right and wrong: British conservatives, still falling for Assad

[Originally posted at NOW]

Reviled though he might officially be by David Cameron’s right-of-centre cabinet, Bashar al-Assad has never been short of friends in the fustier, more bucolic hinterlands of authentic, red-blooded British reactionism.

Everyone knows of the now-bankrupt British National Party leader MEP Nick Griffin’s “fact-finding” trip to Damascus in June, which was short on facts but long on things like warm handshakes with Assad’s prime minister and praise for the “better job” Hezbollah has done than London’s policemen in “dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.”

But while Griffin may be a crackpot – he has since washed up in Athens, where he denounced the government’s “totally illegal” crackdown on the “patriots” of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn crime gang – his way of thinking on Syria is shared by somewhat saner conservatives, like Peter Hitchens, who has insinuated the 2011 protests were a foreign conspiracy and said the region-wide refugee crisis is “largely [Cameron’s] fault.”

And it’s a sign of how much further this rot has spread that yesterday’s Telegraph brought us a column titled, “If we’re not talking to President Bashar al-Assad, we should be.” The writer, veteran foreign correspondent Con Coughlin, welcomes the news that Western governments are “finally persuaded” that the fall of Assad is not in their “countries’ long-term security interests” (“Better late than never, I say”), and are thus seeking to work with Damascus to combat the Islamists among the opposition’s ranks “who pose the greatest threat” to the West. He refers to recent claims by Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Moqdad that western intelligence services had indeed done just that; claims which are quite believable in the current zeitgeist in which Assad’s continuing rule is said out loud to be, in former US ambassador Ryan Crocker’s words, the “least worst option.”

Coughlin, at least, has the honesty to admit his is not a moral argument but one of realpolitik (or “common-sense,” as he prefers). How could it not be, when the atrocities committed by Assad – chemical weapons attacks, airstrikes, SCUD missiles, aerial barrel bombs, cluster bombs, and what Michael Weiss has called terror-famines – are so many multitudes vaster than anything seen from the rebels? What Coughlin is really saying is that Assad, while naturally far worse for mere Syrians, can at least be relied on to leave our civilians alone, which is all that counts.

This would be a repellent thing to say at any point in time, but is especially distasteful coming just a month after the cold-blooded murder of a British surgeon, Abbas Khan, by his Syrian regime jailors, who had passed the previous eight months beating, burning, and electrocuting him until his weight dropped to a childlike five stone (32kg). To this day, the regime continues to humiliate not just Dr Khan’s family but the entire British government with its ludicrous claim that he committed suicide, only days before a scheduled release that his mother spent six terrifying months in Damascus trying to secure, and to which he was known to be looking forward tremendously.

Yet the Khan murder is only the most recent example of Assad’s danger to “us” as well as “them,” which has been amply demonstrated over the course not of years but of decades. Perhaps Coughlin has forgotten the last-minute discovery of a bomb on the tarmac at Heathrow in 1986, planted there by a Syrian national on orders from the Syrian embassy in London, which later harbored the would-have-been-bomber.

And it’s certainly odd, given Coughlin’s aversion to “Islamist fanatics,” that he would overlook Assad’s frantic funneling of al-Qaeda fighters into Iraq after 2003, where they helped kill nearly 200 British troops. His glossing over Assad’s history of incubating jihadist cells in Lebanon, for use whenever expedient against whoever is convenient, including the Lebanese army of whom Britain is supposed to be an ally, is similarly curious.

But perhaps strangest is Coughlin’s apparent insouciance at Assad’s watertight alliance with Hezbollah, the formidable jihadist militia whose kidnapping of British and other civilians in the 1980s supplied the material for one of Coughlin’s own books. All behind us now, perhaps. What, then, about Hezbollah’s refusal to hand over its members indicted by UN prosecutors for the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister; its continuing violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701; or its intimidation of UN peacekeeping units in south Lebanon? None of Britain’s business, evidently. Not that that stops Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, from making Britain his business. In a rousing war speech on Jerusalem Day last year, the Sayyid made special mention of Coughlin’s compatriots, promoting them to the uniquely villainous status of being worse than both the Greater and the Lesser Satans:

“Today, we want to say to all of them: to America, Israel, and the English… [pauses for emphasis, smiles] they’re the most cunning at [manipulation] [applause erupts]”

Nasrallah may have his hierarchy of enemies, but for Western policymakers, picking favorites between Sunni and Shiite jihadists doesn’t suggest itself as the most thoughtful approach. Coughlin is undoubtedly right to raise concerns about what passes for “moderation” among Syria’s rebels nowadays. But it’s a complete non sequitur – not to mention a moral outrage – to jump into bed with Assad, Hezbollah and Iran in response. If Britain doesn’t want to help Syria’s rebels, the least it can do is not bolster their enemy; an enemy which, in Syria more than anywhere, is certainly not its friend.

[Correction: An earlier version of this text mistakenly ended with "the enemy of which, in Syria more than anywhere, is certainly not its friend". This has been amended as above]

Air strikes kill 76: Just another Sunday in Aleppo

[Originally posted at NOW]

For those joining the likes of onetime US ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker and former Israeli army chief Dan Halutz in seeing Bashar al-Assad not so much as the conscious and principal architect of Syria’s relentless agony as its earnest and wrongfully neglected ameliorant, it’s perhaps futile to expect actual facts on the ground to be persuasive. (What is there left to say to someone who, fourteen chemical weapons attacks later, can still bring himself to start sentences with “But as bad as Assad is […]”?)

Yet, despite long ago realizing that help isn’t coming, and victory isn’t within reach, Syria’s media activists and citizen journalists continue to document the daily murder of their fellow men, women and children in videos that, if they aren’t put to their rightful use in evidence at The Hague, will at least be a source of much stimulation for future history students.

Today’s example is this clip from Aleppo, showing the aftermath of the regime’s aerial dynamite-barrelling of a residential neighborhood. The scene is typical, if such a word can be used for something so grotesquely abnormal: charred lumps of gore in the shape of children littering the ground; lifeless bodies being dragged from the rubble; dazed survivors choking on the dust generated by the sheer obliteration of entire buildings; and the endless, piercing screams of grief. All in all, AFP reported “at least 76 people, including 28 children” were killed in the series of attacks.

These are the forgotten horrors in the media’s exciting, daring new story, in which we’ve had Syria back-to-front all this time; conned by a duplicitous opposition into a false impression of Assad as (in Seymour Hersh’s smirking phrase) “a ruthless murderer.” Watching Sunday’s carnage, I remembered the Syrian journalist Mohammed Aly Sergie’s unforgettably dark comment on another recent regime atrocity, the butchery of infants with knives in the Qalamoun city of Nabk: “[The victims] seem to be Sunnis killed by conventional weapons, so nothing to worry about.”

New rebel merger off to modest start

[Originally posted at NOW]

The merger of seven major factions has yet to make much impact on the battlefield.

When seven major Syrian rebel brigades announced their merger last week into a unified Jabhat al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Front”), independent of both the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadi factions and the US-backed Supreme Military Council, a number of analysts speculated the move would translate into significant military gains for the opposition on the ground.

So far, however, while rebel factions have made a number of advances on forces allied to President Bashar al-Assad in recent days, analysts told NOW Jabhat al-Islamiyya’s contribution to these efforts appears to have been relatively modest.

The new super-brigade brings together an estimated 45,000 fighters from some of the most powerful Islamist forces in the country, comprising what were hitherto known as Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, Suqur al-Sham, Liwa al-Haq, Ansar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, and the Kurdish Islamic Front. Over and above the military alliance, Jabhat al-Islamiyya has also explicitly declared a political program. In a marked departure from the more secular rhetoric of the Western-supported Syrian National Coalition opposition body, Jabhat al-Islamiyya calls for replacing the Assad regime with an “Islamic state where the sovereignty of God almighty alone will be our reference and ruler.”

Coinciding with the Front’s formation were several substantive territorial gains for rebel forces, though the overall war continues to stand at a general stalemate. On Saturday, in Deir Ezzor province, rebels captured the largest oil field in the country, effectively bringing an end to the regime’s supply of the commodity. On the day the Jabhat al-Islamiyya merger was announced, rebels captured the town of Deir Attiyeh in the strategic and heavily-contested Qalamoun region along the Lebanese border, though regime forces later re-took it. And in the Damascus suburbs, an intense rebel campaign to break a year-long regime siege overran a number of neighborhoods earlier this week, and has led to a spike in casualties among pro-regime militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah has already announced around 30 dead for November,” said Phillip Smyth, researcher at the University of Maryland and author of the Hizballah Cavalcade website that tracks the various Shiite Islamist militias active in Syria. “Casualties are [also] coming from the entire Iranian-backed front” of pro-Assad Shiite forces, including the Iraqi Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and the Badr Organization, which recently announced the death of a commander, Smyth added.

For the most part, however, these rebel advances have been made not by Jabhat al-Islamiyya fighters but rather their powerful jihadi rivals.

“The capture of Deir Attiyeh was the work of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which is currently in a joint front in Qalamoun with Jabhat al-Nusra and an independent battalion led by Saudi foreign fighters known as ‘The Green Battalion’,” said Aymenn al-Tamimi, Syria analyst and Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Similarly, “the capture of the [Deir Ezzor] oil field was led by Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Only in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta does Jabhat al-Islamiyya appear to have played a lead role in the recent fighting, where it and a local coalition have outperformed the smaller ISIS and Nusra contingents, according to Tamimi. A video uploaded Sunday showed Ghouta residents celebrating as “victorious” rebel brigades drove through the streets.

In general, though, “It’s still very early days for the Islamic Front so [there have been] no really significant military gains as of yet,” said Tamimi.

Nonetheless, several analysts with whom NOW spoke argued the Front could soon make a noticeably bigger impact on the battlefield, provided it receives sufficient logistical and financial support.

“If they can draw more financial backing and set up a better internal coordination of their forces, funding channels, and resources, I'm sure that the creation of the Islamic Front could have an impact on the military balance,” said Aron Lund, researcher and editor of the Carnegie Endowment’s Syria in Crisis website.

“This coalition is formal and set to last, unlike the Islamic Alliance that translated to no real change on the ground,” said Tamimi. “A change in the rebels’ fortunes might occur if this appeals to the Saudis and potential foreign backers to step up support in the belief it is the only viable rebel force.”

Absent that crucial ingredient of material foreign assistance, said Lund, the Islamic Front’s formation will be “mainly a political event, rather than a military one.”

(Don't) Stop the War: Agnes meets the pseudo-pacifists

[Originally posted at NOW. Since the time of publication, Mother Agnes' name has been dropped from the conference speakers list]

Later this month, Bashar al-Assad’s favorite nun, Mother Agnes-Mariam, is set to receive perhaps the most significant legitimization of her career, when she will speak in Britain alongside the former chairman of the Labour Party, Tony Benn, current Labour MPs Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, and more than half a dozen writers, including Guardian columnists Jonathan Steele, Seumas Milne, Tariq Ali, and Rachel Shabi, at an event sponsored by the Stop the War coalition.

Indeed, to judge from the event’s write-up on the STW website, Syria will take center-stage at the ‘International Anti-War Conference’, making Agnes something of a guest-of-honor: the description begins by cheering the “historic setback for the organizers of the War on Terror” engineered by Russia in September. Though the conference will also include such sessions as “Imperialism, war and resistance” and “The new scramble for Africa,” the main event will surely be “The Syrian war in context.”

Below, NOW imagines how that panel might kick off:

Jonathan Steele: Many thanks to all of you for coming to what I hope will be our most enlightening panel, on what is perhaps the most important and dangerous conflict facing the world today. Of course, we all know the mainstream media has been totally one-sided on the so-called Syrian “uprising,” and what’s needed more than ever is to put this war in its proper context, free from nefarious state-sponsored propaganda.

Mother Agnes-Mariam: You have to understand, all Free Syrian Army fighters are terrorists.

Steele: That’s a great place to start, thank you Mother Agnes. It’s a great irony that, while one of the most perfidious lies of the War on Terror propagated by Orientalist imperialism is that all Muslims carrying guns are “terrorists,” this has in fact turned out to be entirely accurate in Syria.

Tariq Ali: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Steele: Indeed.

Seumas Milne: If I could just jump in here, on that point, what’s been especially depressing for me to watch is the decline of al-Qaeda in Iraq from a resistance force, as I described them in 2011, to a reactionary, counter-revolutionary one in Syria.

Ali: Hamas, too. Don’t forget they’ve become terrorists now as well.

Milne: Right, yes. The very Palestinian cause itself is threatened as never before by imperialism.

Steele: Is anti-Zionism the new Zionism?

Milne: We should have called one of our sessions that. Next year.

Steele: We could invite Galloway.

Milne: Definitely. But back to the point, obviously propaganda-wise what we’ve seen in Syria fits a familiar pattern. Just as the number of Stalin’s victims has long been inflated by capitalist agitprop, so the alleged crimes of President Assad have been hugely exaggerated, if not outright fabricated. And this is something I know Mother Agnes has often spoken very courageously about.

Agnes: Yes. Whether it’s the Houla massacre, or the chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta, there’s never been any evidence of Syrian government responsibility.

Owen Jones: I’ve said that too.

Milne: Me too.

Steele: We’ve all said that. It’s disgraceful how so-called journalists rely on YouTube videos for their reporting nowadays.

But I think more broadly the problem is a fundamental refusal to understand that Assad is not the problem in Syria. As I’ve often written, it’s the rebels themselves who are responsible for the continued violence.

Agnes: Assad is a merciful man. Let me give you a personal example. When I negotiated the handover of hungry civilians from Moadamiyah to government forces last month, not all of them were arrested.

Milne: Remarkable. Even though they were Sunnis.

Agnes: Yes.

Milne: And people have the gall to say Assad’s government is sectarian.

Steele: They use the same smear on Hezbollah, even though Sayyid Nasrallah has made it very clear that his fighters are in Syria to save Sunnis as much as Shiites.

Milne: And what do they get in return? Human hearts eaten out of corpses. I mean we’ve all seen that YouTube video.

Agnes: Can I just say, it’s so nice to be here in Britain. I deeply regret that, during his recent visit to Syria, I wasn’t able to meet with the head of your National Party, Nick Griffin.

Steele: [Coughs] Coffee break! Anyone fancy a coffee break?

What happened to Noam Chomsky on Syria?

[Originally posted at NOW]

It seems I owe Noam Chomsky a belated apology. In the days following his summer sojourn to Lebanon, I wrote a rather cross rebuke of his description of Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria as “understandable;” an adjective I thought (and still think) left slightly too much room for interpretation as an endorsement. At the time, some suggested he meant it more in the sense of ‘comprehensible,’ rather than ‘pardonable,’ to which I replied that the linguistics professor wouldn’t have been so evasive in denouncing, say, Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

I now learn, thanks to a subsequent interview dug up by Asaad AbuKhalil, that the optimists were right. Challenged by Syrian playwright Mohammed al-Attar specifically on the word “understandable,” Chomsky immediately backpedalled: “There’s a difference between understanding the reasons for intervening and excusing it. To be clear: nothing can justify Hezbollah’s involvement [in Syria].”

This is certainly strange talk from the man better known for defending Hezbollah’s right to command a private Islamist militia (a stance he iterated publicly after a friendly meeting with Nasrallah in 2006), and more generally lauding the Party of God as the darling of Lebanese secularism.

Indeed, the Attar interview reveals a transformation in Chomsky’s thinking on Syria in several respects. To see how, first rewind to March, when he was advocating straightforward anti-interventionism to The Guardian:

“I tend to think that providing arms is going to escalate the conflict. I think there has to be some kind of negotiated settlement.”

This seemingly remained his view when interviewed by The Daily Star on 14 June:

“The only slim hope that I can see is the Geneva-style negotiated solution […] Any kind of militarization is going to widen that conflict.”

And yet, only two days later, he was telling Attar that should Putin fail to undergo his long-awaited humanitarian epiphany, arming the opposition would only be the natural back-up plan:

“We all want to force Assad to the negotiating table and from there, to resign, but the question is how to achieve this? The first way to do this is to supply the opposition with arms […] The second approach is to go to Geneva with the cooperation of the major powers, including Russia, and force the regime to accept a truce […] I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option becomes more acceptable.” [Italics added.]

Also remarkably, given the vitriol routinely heaped upon the rebels by the ‘Hands Off Syria’ crowd, the Professor actually spoke quite favorably of the opposition brigades, even comparing them to the victims of Vietnam:

“I don't think the Syrians made a choice [to arm]. It happened in the wake of the Assad regime’s repressive response. Syrians could either have surrendered or taken up arms. To blame them is akin to saying that the Vietnamese made a mistake responding by force when their US-backed government started committing massacres. Sure, the Vietnamese made a choice to arm themselves, but the alternative was [to] accept still more massacres.”

(Amusingly, this comparison infuriated AbuKhalil, who wrote last week of being “quite displeased” with Chomsky’s “woefully ill-informed” analysis, quite out of step with that of “real leftists” such as himself. Like a bad drunk revealing a repressed bigotry, AbuKhalil even lapsed into outright Assadism, scolding Chomsky for omitting to mention “the role of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in forming armed militant groups […] prior to the eruption of the Syrian uprising.” It must have stung when, asked by Attar what to do with those for whom the whole rebellion is self-evidently an imperialist scam, Chomsky replied: “Just disregard them. They are insignificant.”)

To be clear, Chomsky isn’t about to start scheduling power breakfasts with John McCain. He said last week any military strike on the regime without UN authorization would constitute a “very serious war crime.” Yet it’s clear nonetheless that he’s breaking ranks with most of the pseudo-left on Syria overall, and it’s worth asking why.

One clue may lie in the otherwise-unreported meeting Chomsky had in Beirut, according to Attar, “with a group of independent Syrian media activists, aid workers and individuals active in cultural and economic spheres.” It’s fair to assume they were not discussing the glories of the October War.

Yet even before that, for more than a year there’s been a key divergence between Chomsky and most of his comrades regarding Israel’s view of Assad, and I think it’s this that’s been decisive. While the likes of Ibrahim al-Amin and George Galloway have championed Damascus as Zionism’s worst nightmare (and concurrently smeared the opposition as Likudniks with Qur’ans), Chomsky has seen through this pantomime, correctly noting that Tel Aviv was never as unhappy with Assad as all that, and certainly wouldn’t be thrilled to see what the IDF itself has called “the terrorists” running the show in his place.

Thus freed from the poisonous notion that the rights of Palestinians must be won through the enslavement of Syrians, Chomsky has had the sense to see both peoples as equal victims of oppressors who have a warmer history than either would like to admit.

Syria suspected in Tripoli bombs

[Originally posted at NOW]

Indictments of five people, including a Syrian intelligence officer, on charges of carrying out last week’s deadly mosque blasts suggest senior Syrian regime involvement, say analysts.

Investigations into last Friday’s deadly twin bomb blasts in the northern city of Tripoli appeared to make significant progress Friday, with Military Prosecutor Saqr Saqr filing charges against five men suspected of planning, preparing, and placing the car bombs outside the crowded mosques. The identities of the suspects, who include a Syrian intelligence officer, point to high-level involvement of the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to analysts NOW spoke with, although a laywer for one of the accused insists the charges are false and politically-motivated.

The two key Lebanese indictees, Sheikhs Hashem Menqara and Ahmad al-Gharib, are respectively the leader and a member of a splinter faction of the Islamic Tawheed Movement, a small Sunni Islamist movement based in Tripoli known for its links to the Syrian regime, although it was once bitterly opposed to Damascus.

Formed in the early 1980s in alliance with Iran and what would become Hezbollah, the militia in fact fought the Syrian occupying forces until the latter’s bloody crackdown in Tripoli in 1985, at which point Menqara was jailed. By the time he was released, 14 years later, Hezbollah and Syria had overcome their onetime enmity, and Menqara “came out as an ally of the Syrian regime and worked alongside them,” according to Sheikh Nabil Rahim, a Tripoli-based member of the Muslim Scholars’ Committee. According to Rahim as well as a senior Tawheed source who asked not to be named, the movement today is divided, with one faction loyal to Menqara and another to Sheikh Bilal Shaaban, son of the founder, Sheikh Saeed Shaaban. The senior Tawheed source, who belonged to the latter faction, firmly denied to NOW that his movement was responsible for Friday’s bombs.

And Menqara’s lawyer, Ibrahim Ayyoubi, also told NOW his client was not guilty. “This case is politicized […] the evidence isn’t there. The sides that are accusing him are known. It’s impossible, completely, entirely, fully, for Sheikh Hashem to do this […] He can’t, as a matter of religion, do anything involving bloodshed.”

Nonetheless, if the accusations should prove true, the case would tally with a history of Syrian-ordered bombings in Lebanon already well-established, said Lebanese American University Professor Imad Salamey.

“Considering the infamous case of Samaha-Mamluk, this sounds like it fits the same pattern,” Salamey told NOW, referring to the 2012 indictment of former Lebanese minister Michel Samaha along with Syrian national security chief General Ali Mamluk on charges of planning a number of terror attacks in Lebanon, particularly in the north.

As for why Syria would order such a bloody attack, Salamey believes the rationale is bound up with the ongoing war in the country.

“The regime is trying to expand its crisis to make it region-wide, linking the fate of regional stability to its survival. This gives it negotiation leverage with the international community, both for itself and its allies in Lebanon.”

Speaking of whom, Salamey argues the attack need not have involved Hezbollah, being the kind of tactic on whose merits Damascus and Hezbollah’s patrons in Tehran would likely disagree at the present moment.

“I personally doubt that Hezbollah approved of this – not because they care much about the people who were in those mosques, but rather because it’s not in Hezbollah’s interests for the security situation in the country to get totally out of hand, and for them to be engulfed in a sectarian struggle without much purpose or benefit for them.”

“So I think there is a relative difference here between the Iranian position and that of Syria. While the Syrian regime is desperate to expand the regional instability […] for Iran, the situation in Lebanon is to its advantage. Hezbollah has the upper hand politically, militarily, and security-wise, and the outbreak of Sunni-Shiite conflict in Lebanon would undermine this,” he told NOW.

Finally, despite Friday’s indictment of another Syrian regime official on charges of plotting attacks on Lebanon, Salamey foresaw no deterioration in Lebanese-Syrian diplomatic relations.

“The foreign policy position of Lebanon is officially tied to [that of] Syria. So Lebanon officially will just turn a blind eye to the situation, as they did with the Samaha-Mamluk issue.”

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

The fall of Homs in context

[Originally posted at NOW]

Rebels had not posed a real threat to the Syrian regime in Homs since the summer of 2012.

The reclaiming by the Syrian regime and allied forces of one of the last remaining rebel-held neighborhoods in the central city of Homs on Monday marked a second territorial defeat for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in two months, coming on the heels of the fall of the nearby town of Qusayr in June.

The Khalidiyeh neighborhood, which regime forces battered for weeks with air strikes and surface-to-surface missiles in coordination with Lebanese Hezbollah units, was a key link in the rebels’ chain between the Old City and the few remaining adjacent ‘liberated’ neighborhoods of the city once known to the opposition as the “capital of revolution,” or the “citadel of the terrorists” to the regime.

Its fall prompted speculation that regime forces would soon sweep the entire city, and then turn their attention northwards to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and now the only major one in which the rebels have a sizeable and comparatively secure presence. However, as of Saturday the fighting in Homs is continuing, and according to both activists on the ground and foreign analysts NOW spoke with, the regime is unlikely to be in a position to advance on Aleppo any time soon.

“In Homs, the opposition is still holding on in Jurat al-Shiyah, al-Qusur, al-Qarabis, Bab al-Dreb, Bab Turkman, Bab Houd, and Wadi al-Sayeh,” said Muhammad Radwan Raad, a Homs-based activist. He added, however, that “it is very unlikely that they will be able to keep hold of these neighborhoods because they only have AK-47s and RPGs.” Asked to estimate the number of rebels remaining in the city, Raad said it was in the hundreds, although “it is very hard to determine [because] many [have been] killed after the battles.”

As for what would likely follow the complete fall of Homs, Raad was in agreement with analysts NOW spoke to that it is the roads and countryside between Homs and Damascus, rather than Aleppo, that will be the next targets, although preparations for an eventual showdown in Aleppo will also be made wherever possible.

“The regime recently took control of the strategic village of Abel, on the Homs-Tartous highway. Now, it is seeking to take control of another road leading to Aleppo and a third one that links Homs with Damascus. Clashes are ongoing and once the regime takes control of these roads, it will move on to Homs’ northern fringes.”

There are several reasons the regime will likely avoid a substantial Aleppo offensive in the near term, according to Elizabeth O’Bagy, senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

“The interesting demographic balance in Homs actually favored the regime because you had so many Shiite – specifically Lebanese Shiite – and Alawite villages in the surrounding countryside,” O’Bagy told NOW. “You don’t see that in and around Aleppo so I think it’ll be much more difficult for the regime to find the right areas to launch operations from. This is exactly what we saw with some of the defeats that the opposition was able to inflict on Hezbollah.”

“I think after the regime won Qusayr it made the mistake of trying to advance onto Aleppo too quickly without consolidating its gains and so the recent offensive in Homs was actually their realization that they’d overplayed their hand. I think that for some time you’ll see them continuing to consolidate in and around Homs. They’re going to have to send significant reinforcements from Homs back to Damascus because of the rebel offensive going on there right now.”

Indeed, O’Bagy argues that recent rebel accomplishments in Damascus – such as the seizure of an anti-tank and ground-to-ground missiles depot Saturday – defy an increasingly current media narrative of the regime being close to military victory over the opposition.

“Momentum is clearly in favor of the regime right now, and there has been a shift in the tide of battles because of Hezbollah’s involvement [and] assistance from Iran and Russia, but what is often ignored is the fact that when the regime makes significant gains in one area they often lose territory in others. There is a major [rebel] offensive going on in Damascus right now. The opposition is able to enter neighborhoods that it has never been able to enter before. And they’ve also had some significant victories in and around Aleppo.”

Moreover, argues O’Bagy, many observers exaggerate the tangible significance of rebel defeat in Homs.

“The opposition hasn’t really had a strong presence in Homs since the summer of 2012. It’s important psychologically because it’s seen as an essential part of the resistance front but strategically the opposition hasn’t really been able to do much from Homs and they’ve never been able to effectively combat regime forces in and around that area.”

Christine Sleiman contributed reporting.

A regime so "leftist", it hosts the most right-wing man in Britain

[Originally posted at NOW]

Within hours of the savage butchery of a British soldier by a British citizen in Woolwich, East London, three weeks ago today, a hundred or so portly football enthusiasts congregated outside a local pub, costumed in balaclavas and England flags, to bellow semi-coherently about the demerits of “the Muslim scum” as well as to attack the very police force that had apprehended and arrested the soldier’s loathsome murderers.

The leader of these fine exemplars of contemporary British culture, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is habitually denounced for his craven, limp-wristed moderation by Nicholas Griffin, the British National Party leader, Holocaust denier, and Member of the European Parliament who has been spending quality time this week in Damascus as the guest of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Granted, says Griffin, Robinson may be perfectly sound on the question of the evil (or should that be ‘The Innocence’?) of Muslims. But he hopelessly fails to grasp the utter subservience of Downing Street to the machinations of global Jewry (euphemized by Griffin in public, though not in private, as “Zionism”).

Which is by no means all the man has in common with Hezbollah. Griffin’s is the instinctive bigotry of the parochial white reactionary, whose revulsion for foreigners is proportionate to the “alienness” of their appearance. Since Lebanese Shiites have shorter beards than Syrian Sunnis (and Assad doesn’t have one at all!), he’s cast his lot with the former, whom he said via Twitter were “doing [a] better job than the [London police] dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.” That Hezbollah fighters are themselves jihadists is evidently of scant concern – like the Israeli military establishment before him, Griffin has concluded that some ‘terrorists’ are more terrorist than others.

Surprised though some may have been to see the leader of Britain’s ultra-right shaking hands with the prime minister of a regime better known for befriending George Galloway, the contradiction only exists if you imagine Assad and his gargoyles were remotely “leftist” in the first place. From the first day of the uprising, Assad’s policy has been one of maximum violence, deliberately targeting the men, women and children of the Sunni majority sect. A seasoned hatemonger and thug like Griffin ought to feel right at home.