The Syria Analysis Thread

Longface Wednesday 4 Sep 2013

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/cL2OingvDco

Niccolo and Donkey Thursday 5 Sep 2013

Stubby mlad Longface Angocachi SweetLeftFoot SteamshipTime

Fighting in Christian village

Residents of Maaloula said the militants entered the village late Wednesday. Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights, said the fighters included members of the of al-Qaida affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra group.

Despite heavy army presence in the village, Abdul-Rahman said the rebels patrolled its streets on foot and in vehicles, briefly surrounding a church and a mosque before leaving early Thursday.

The rebels launched the assault on the ancient Christian village of Maaloula which is on a UNESCO list of tentative world heritage sites on Wednesday after an al-Nusra fighter blew himself up at a regime checkpoint at the entrance to the mountain village.

Heavy clashes between President Bashar Assad's troops and Nusra Front fighters persisted in surrounding mountains Thursday, according to the Observatory, which collects information from a network of anti-regime activists.

Speaking by phone from a convent in the village, a nun told The Associated Press that the rebels left a mountaintop hotel Thursday after capturing it a day earlier. The nun said the frightened residents expect the Islamic militants to return to the Safir hotel and resume shelling of the community below.

"It's their home now," the nun said. She said some 100 people from the village took refuge in the convent. The 27 orphans who live there had been taken to nearby caves overnight "so they were not scared."

A bit on Maaloula:

With two other nearby towns Bakh'a ( Arabic : بخعة‎ ) and Jubba'din ( Arabic : جبّعدين‎ ), it is the only place where a dialect of the Western branch of the Aramaic language is still spoken. Scholars have determined that the Aramaic of Jesus belonged to this particular branch as well. Ma'loula represents, therefore, an important source for anthropological linguistic studies regarding first century Aramaic, hence, Jesus' own Aramaic dialect. However, despite frequent mis-statements in the media, [4] it isn't the exact dialect Jesus of Nazareth spoke early in the first century. [5] The distance from other major cities and its isolating geological features fostered the longevity of this linguistic oasis for over one and a half thousand years. However, modern roads and transportation, as well as accessibility to Arabic-language television and print media - and for some time until recently, also state policy - have eroded that linguistic heritage.
Monasteries

There are two important monasteries in Ma'loula: Greek Catholic Mar Sarkis and Greek Orthodox Mar Thecla .

St. Thecla

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Statue of St. Thecla

[IMG]

Rebels in Maaloula

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/G3mJMdBPMHA

Niccolo and Donkey Thursday 5 Sep 2013

This New York Times article is getting lots of play...............

Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West

Across much of Syria, where rebels with Western support live and fight, areas outside of government influence have evolved into a complex guerrilla and criminal landscape.
That has raised the prospect that American military action could inadvertently strengthen Islamic extremists and criminals.

Abdul Samad Issa, 37, the rebel commander leading his fighters through the executions of the captured soldiers, illustrates that very risk.

Known in northern Syria as “the Uncle” because two of his deputies are his nephews, Mr. Issa leads a relatively unknown group of fewer than 300 fighters, one of his former aides said. The former aide, who smuggled the video out of Syria, is not being identified for security reasons.

A trader and livestock herder before the war, Mr. Issa formed a fighting group early in the uprising by using his own money to buy weapons and underwrite the fighters’ expenses.

His motivation, his former aide said, was just as the poem he recited said: revenge.

In Washington on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue of radicalized rebels in an exchange with Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican. Mr. Kerry insisted, “There is a real moderate opposition that exists.”

Mr. Kerry said that there were 70,000 to 100,000 “oppositionists.” Of these, he said, some 15 percent to 20 percent were “bad guys” or extremists.

Mr. McCaul responded by saying he had been told in briefings that half of the opposition fighters were extremists.

Much of the concern among American officials has focused on two groups that acknowledge ties to Al Qaeda. These groups — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — have attracted foreign jihadis, used terrorist tactics and vowed to create a society in Syria ruled by their severe interpretation of Islamic law.

They have established a firm presence in parts of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and in the northern provincial capital of Raqqa and in Deir al-Zour, to the east on the Iraqi border.

While the jihadis claim to be superior fighters, and have collaborated with secular Syrian rebels, some analysts and diplomats also note that they can appear less focused on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they said, they focus more on establishing a zone of influence spanning Iraq’s Anbar Province and the desert eastern areas of Syria, and eventually establishing an Islamic territory under their administration.

Other areas are under more secular control, including the suburbs of Damascus. In East Ghouta, for example, the suburbs east of the capital where the chemical attack took place, jihadis are not dominant, according to people who live and work there.

And while the United States has said it seeks policies that would strengthen secular rebels and isolate extremists, the dynamic on the ground, as seen in the execution video from Idlib and in a spate of other documented crimes, is more complicated than a contest between secular and religious groups.

Mr. Issa’s father was opposed to President Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president. He disappeared in 1982, according to Mr. Issa’s accounts.

Mr. Issa, the aide said, believes his father was killed during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood that year, known as the Hama massacre.

By the time he was a young man, Mr. Issa was vocally antigovernment and was arrested and imprisoned twice for a total of nine months, the aide said.
When the uprising against Bashar al-Assad started two and a half years ago, the family saw it as a means to try to settle old scores.

At first, people who know Mr. Issa said, he was a protester, and then he led fighters in small skirmishes. By last year he was running a training camp in the highlands near Turkey.

By this year, the aide said, he was gathering weapons from relatives and Arab businessmen he knew from his work as a trader and, at least once, from the Western-supported Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, the rebel forces.

(Two representatives of the military council declined to comment on the council’s military collaboration or logistical support for Mr. Issa’s group. Mr. Issa could not be reached for comment over two days this week.)

By the spring, his group had taken a resonant name: Jund al-Sham, which it shares with three international terrorist groups, and another group in Syria.
Its relationship — if any — with these other groups is not clear.

Mr. Issa’s former aide and two other men who have met or investigated him said he appears to assume identities of convenience.

But, they said, one of his tactics has been to promise to his fighters what he calls “the extermination” of Alawites — the minority Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and which Mr. Issa blames for Syria’s suffering.

This sentiment may have driven Mr. Issa’s decision to execute his prisoners in the video, his former aide said. The soldiers had been captured when Mr. Issa’s fighters overran a government checkpoint north of Idlib in March.

Their cellphones, the former aide said, had videos of soldiers raping Syrian civilians and looting.

Mr. Issa declared them all criminals, he said, and a revolutionary trial was held. They were found guilty.

Mr. Issa, the former aide said, then arranged for their execution to be videotaped in April so he could show his work against Mr. Assad and his military to donors, and seek more financing.
The video ends abruptly after his fighters dump the soldiers’ broken bodies into a well.

One of the participants, a young man wearing a purple fleece jacket, looks into the camera and smiles.

Bob Dylan Roof Thursday 5 Sep 2013

What will the NYT editors do when Obama effectively cedes substantial portions of the country to Islamic militants who are focused on preventing women from getting an education? Imagine that op-ed section.

President Camacho Friday 6 Sep 2013

LOLOL Kerry the "gay mortician" as Thomas described him is a certified clown! The only honorable exit for him now is to volunteer being drawn and quartered live on C-SPAN.

Longface Friday 6 Sep 2013

Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria

JERUSALEM — President Obama’s position on Syria — punish President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons without seeking to force him from power — has been called “half-pregnant” by critics at home and abroad who prefer a more decisive American intervention to end Syria’s civil war.
But Mr. Obama’s limited strike proposal has one crucial foreign ally: Israel.
Israeli officials have consistently made the case that enforcing Mr. Obama’s narrow “red line” on Syria is essential to halting the nuclear ambitions of Israel’s archenemy, Iran. More quietly, Israelis have increasingly argued that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome.
For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.
“This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”

The Syria Analysis Thread

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