Crisis in Syri� #19

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An Egyptian Nasserist Party (ENP) delegation has stirred controversy by visiting Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

“Our visit to Syria in support of Bashar Al-Assad came out of our genuine intention to back the resistance against American and Zionist plans in the region,” Farouq El-Eshri, co-founder of the ENP told Al-Ahram Arabic website.

The delegation had no intention of meeting with the Syrian opposition at the moment, he added.

Around 60,000 people have been killed during an ongoing two-year uprising against the Al-Assad government.

The meeting with Al-Assad on Tuesday did not find any solutions to the Syrian crisis, El-Eshri added, because no one can end it now.

“If Bashar falls, we are left with three scenarios: 1. the fall of ‘Arab Nationalist’ Syria, 2. Syria will fall under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, 3. It will be a civil war.”

Syria is the last defence line for Pan-Arabism, El-Eshri added.

Bashar Al-Assad is also the leader of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Syria.

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Syria's ex-spokesperson breaks silence

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Jihad Makdissi, the former Syrian foreign ministry spokesman, has said he has a neutral stance on the 23-month conflict, as he broke his silence for the first time since leaving the country in December.

"I left Syria because the polarisation in the country has reached a deadly and destructive stage... I left a battlefield, not a normal country, and I apologise to those who trusted my credibility and for leaving without prior notice," he said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

Makdissi, once one of the most recognisable faces of President Bashar al-Assad's embattled regime who disappeared from public view in December, said he was now neither with the government in Damascus nor the opposition, which has been fighting to overthrow the Assad regime for nearly two years.

"I joined no one; I am independent," Makdissi said, adding that he did not possess any state secrets and was not part of the decision-making process in the regime.

"The goals of the popular movement are frankly legitimate - in principle and in essence - and have won the battle for the hearts, because all parts of society always stand with the weak and with the legitimate demands of the people.

"But they have not won the battle for the minds, for many reasons that are common knowledge."

Makdissi criticised his pro-regime critics who "found the time to insult me and immediately accuse me of treason, without respect for the lives of the more than 65,000 Syrian martyrs".

"I wish I could have stayed on Syrian land, but there is no longer room for moderation in this chaos," Makdissi said of the war that began as a popular uprising and steadily militarised under brutal state repression.

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Op woensdag 13 februari 2013 23:07 schreef sonnyspek het volgende:
http://m.youtube.com/#/wa(...)%3DA5G_tA7BkZI&gl=GB
Jongens, horen jullie ook op 2:11 'is ie dood?' en op 2:19 'wat zeg je?'?
Dit kan wek het bewijs zijn dat er daar ook Nederlanders rondlopen.

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Op donderdag 14 februari 2013 18:11 schreef Djibril het volgende:

Bab al-Hawa, Idlib

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Elite Iranian general assassinated near Syria-Lebanon border

Syrian rebels claim responsibility for killing of General Hassan Shateri, a senior figure in the Revolutionary Guards

A senior commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards has been killed while travelling from Syria to Lebanon, according to Iranian authorities.

A man identified as General Hassan Shateri was reportedly assassinated by what Iranian officials described as "the agents and supporters of the Zionist regime" while travelling from Damascus to Beirut.

It was not immediately clear in which of the two countries Shateri was killed but a Syrian rebel commander said an Iranian official was killed in an attack carried out by Syrian rebels in Zabadani in southwestern Syria, close to the Lebanese border.

"General Hassan Shateri was martyred by the agents and supporters of the Zionist regime on his way to Beirut from Damascus," the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted the Revolutionary Guards' spokesman, Ramezan Sharif, as saying on Thursday.

Iran's state English-language television, Press TV, reported that Shateri was killed on Tuesday and described him as the man who "led the Iranian-financed reconstruction projects in the south of Lebanon". By pointing the finger at "Israeli agents", Sharif was probably referring to Syrian rebels whom Iranian officials portray as terrorist armed groups backed by Tel Aviv.

Iran is a staunch supporter of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, providing both with military and financial support. Syria gives Iran physical access to Lebanon and Hezbollah, which is strategically important for Tehran's leaders because of the group's geographical position in respect to Israel. Iran does not recognise Israel as a country and usually refers to it as "the Zionist regime".

After the 2006 war between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, Iran's elite forces bolstered their presence in southern Lebanon, saying they were willing to revamp the region's war-stricken infrastructure. This became a contentious issue for Tel Aviv but boosted the popularity of Iran among Hezbollah supporters.

Mehr said Shateri was a veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war who in recent years "had devoted his time to the reconstruction of damaged areas after the 33-day Israeli war on Lebanon".

Iran's embassy in Lebanon, meanwhile, identified the dead man as Hessam Khoshnevis, leading to confusion that there might be a second death. But the circumstances given about Khoshnevis's death and his job title were similar to those of Shateri.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP that Shateri was killed when a rebel group ambushed his vehicle while he was returning to Lebanon from Syria.

On Thursday Iran held a funeral ceremony for Shateri in Tehran that was attended by the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, and the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari. Ghasem Suleimani, the man who heads the external arm of the Revolutionary Guards, known as the Quds force, members of which usually shun public ceremonies, also attended the funeral.

In May 2012, a senior Quds force commander conceded for the first time that Iranian forces were operating in Syria in support of the Assad regime.

"If the Islamic republic was not present in Syria, the massacre of people would have happened on a much larger scale," Ismail Gha'ani, the deputy head of the Quds force, said at the time.

In February 2012, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, went public to say that the Icountry has provided assistance to Hezbollah and Palestinian group Hamas.

"We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, and in the 22-day war [in Gaza Strip]" he said at the time.

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Op donderdag 14 februari 2013 19:57 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op donderdag 14 februari 2013 18:28 schreef UpsideDown het volgende:

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Klinkt als Vlamingen. Maar het is bekend dat jihadi's uit alle windstreken daar heen gaan om te vechten. Hopelijk blijven ze daar ook

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Op donderdag 14 februari 2013 20:22 schreef Slayage het volgende:


ik hoop dat turken hun hoofd koel houden en iig fysiek afzijdig blijven in het conflict itt de iraniers

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How to Start a Battalion (in Five Easy Lessons)
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from Syria

In the cramped living room of a run-down flat near the Aleppo frontline, two Syrian rebels sat opposite each other. The one on the left was stout, broad-shouldered, with a neat beard that looked as though it had been outlined in sharp pencil around his throat and cheeks. His shirt and trousers were immaculately pressed and he wore brand-new military webbing – the expensive Turkish kind, not the Syrian knock-off. The rebel sitting opposite him was younger, gaunt and tired-looking. His hands were filthy and his trousers caked in mud and diesel.

The flat had once belonged to an old lady. Traces of a domestic life that had long ceased to exist were scattered around the room and mingled with the possessions of the new occupiers. A mother of pearl ashtray sat next to a pile of walkie-talkies. Small china figurines stood on top of the TV next to a box of cartridges. Guns and ammunition lay on the rickety wooden chairs and a calendar showing faded landscapes hung on the wall. In the bedroom next door clothes were piled on the bed next to crates of ammunition. The stout rebel was shifty, on edge and keen to finish what he came to say and leave quickly. The other looked like a man waiting for a disaster to unfold.

But like a couple trying to conduct the business of their divorce with civility they spent a long time on pleasantries: each asked the other about his village and praised the courage and strength of his people. Outside a machine gun fired relentlessly down the street, interrupted only by the occasional thud of a mortar shell.

‘I am taking my cousins away from the front,’ the stout man finally said.

‘Why?’ the young rebel whined, as if one of the mortar shells had smacked him in the head. ‘Did we do anything wrong? Didn’t we feed them properly? Didn’t they get their daily rations? Whatever ammunition we get we divide equally: tell me what we did wrong.’

‘No, no, nothing wrong – but you seem not to have any work here.’

‘But this is an important defensive position,’ the young rebel pleaded. ‘All of Aleppo depends on this hill. If you go, two frontline posts will be left empty. They’ll be able to skirt around us.’

‘I’m sure you’ll take care of it. Allah bless your men, they’re very good.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘A very good man, a seeker of good deeds – he is from our town but he lives in the Gulf – told me he would fund my new battalion. He says he will pay for our ammunition and we get to keep all the spoils of the fighting. We just have to supply him with videos.’

‘But why would he do that? What’s he getting in return?’

‘He wants to appease God, and he wants us to give him videos of all our operations. That’s all – just YouTube videos.’

‘So he can get more money.’

‘Well, that’s up to him.’

They spent some more time on pleasantries but the divorce was done. The stout man walked out. Waiting for him in the cold were half a dozen men, young, earnest, country boys with four guns between them. Their cigarettes glowed in the dark as they walked behind their cousin, their new commander, in his pressed trousers and shirt, who promised them better food, plentiful ammunition and victory. So a new battalion is formed, one more among the many hundreds of other battalions fighting a war of insurgency and revolution against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

*

We in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism. Some attribute it to individualism, others blame the nature of our political development or our tribalism. Some even blame the weather. We call it tasharthum and we loathe it: we hold it as the main reason for all our losses and defeats, from al-Andalus to Palestine. Yet we love it and bask in it and excel at it, and if there is one thing we appreciate it is a faction that splinters into smaller factions. Yet even by the measure of previous civil wars in the Middle East, the Syrians seem to have reached new heights. After all, the Palestinians in their heyday had only a dozen or so factions, and the Lebanese, God bless them, pretending it was ideology that divided them, never exceeded thirty different factions.

In Istanbul I asked a Syrian journalist and activist why there were so many battalions. He laughed and said, ‘Because we are Syrians,’ and went on to tell me a story I have heard many times before. ‘When the Syrian president, head of the military junta at the time, signed the unification agreement with Nasser, basically handing the country to the Egyptians and stripping himself of his presidential title, he passed the document to Nasser and said I give up my role as president but I hand you a country of four million presidents.’

For decades, the dictatorship in Syria worked to stamp the people into submission: every pulpit, every media outlet, every schoolbook sent out the same message, that people should be subservient to the ruler. In Syria (as in a different way in Iraq, Egypt and the rest), those in authority – from the president to the policeman, from the top party apparatchik to the lowliest government functionary – exercised power over every aspect of people’s lives. You spent your life trying to avoid being humiliated – let alone detained and tortured or disappeared – by those in authority while somehow also sucking up to them, bribing them, begging them to give you what you needed: a telephone line, a passport, a university place for your son. So when these systems of control collapsed, something exploded inside people, a sense of individualism long suppressed. Why would I succumb to your authority as a commander when I can be my own commander and fight my own insurgency? Many of the battalions dotted across the Syrian countryside consist only of a man with a connection to a financier, along with a few of his cousins and clansmen. They become itinerant fighting groups, moving from one battle to another, desperate for more funds and a fight and all the spoils that follow.

Officially – or at least this is what many would like to believe – all the battalions are part of the Free Syrian Army. But from the start of the uprising in March 2011, the FSA has never managed to become an organisation with the kind of centralised command structure that would allow it to co-ordinate attacks and move units on the ground. Until recently, Colonel Riad al-Asad, the nominal head of the FSA, and his fellow defectors from the Syrian army were interned in the Officers’ Camp, a special refugee camp in southern Turkey – for their protection, the Turks say. All meetings and interviews with the defecting colonel had to go through Turkish intelligence. Towards the end of last year the FSA announced that it had moved its headquarters to the Syrian side of the border, in an attempt to prove its relevance. But battalions are still formed by commanders working and fighting on their own initiative across Syria, arming themselves via many different channels and facing challenges unique to their towns and villages. For these people the colonel was just a talking head and a stooge of the Turks, and the FSA not much more than a label. Another problem emerged when higher-ranking officers started defecting from the army. Who leads the FSA? The officers who defected first? Or the men who outrank them? Parallel organisations of defecting officers started to pop up, but few had any real influence where it mattered.

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So how do you form a battalion in Syria? First, you need men, most likely young men from the countryside, where the surplus of the underemployed over the centuries has provided for any number of different armies and insurgencies. Weapons will come from smugglers, preferably via Iraq or Turkey. You will also need someone who knows how to operate a laptop and/or a camcorder and can post videos on the internet – essential in applying for funds from the diaspora or Gulf financiers. A little bit of ideology won’t hurt, probably with a hint of Islamism of some variety. You’ll also need money, but three or four thousand dollars should be enough to start you off.

Long before the uprising, Abu Abdullah and his brothers made a fortune running an import/export and cross-border transport business. Their trucks crossed the frontiers of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, all the way to Saudi Arabia, ferrying Turkish vegetables to Iraq and bringing back fuel, taking Syrian fruit across Jordan to the Saudi border. Not all the products they traded in were perishables nor were all legal; subsidised Syrian petrol was smuggled to Lebanon and Turkey.

The brothers, like many other members of the rich business elite, were conservative Muslims, though not radical or Salafist. Thanks to their wealth and religion, they had connections across the mercantile Middle East, the illicit smuggling networks of the region and, more important, links to powerful preachers and religious families in the Gulf. When, very early on, their native town of Homs erupted in an uprising that soon became an armed insurrection it was wealthy – and, usually, religious – Syrians like Abu Abdullah who sent money, ran services, provided food and fuel. They are still central to humanitarian provision in Syria.

Abu Abdullah also used his extensive cross-border network to bring in weapons and ammunition. ‘I had five pick-up trucks filled with weapons and ammunition crossing from Lebanon and ten crossing from Iraq every week. We started with hunting rifles and now we bring anti-aircraft guns. We were the ones who powered the revolution.’

He is tall, well-built and has the confidence of a wealthy man surrounded by poor peasants. He conducts the business of funding and arming the uprising from a small concrete room perched deep inside a pine and olive grove that cascades down the slopes of a mountain in Idlib province. Delegates from across the country would come to sit on the floor beside him. Some asked for weapons, others brought money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through the room. At night he lay on a thin mat on the bare concrete floor. Switching from vegetables to armaments turned out to be very easy, he said. But as the fighting spread and intensified more money and more organisation was needed to push the battle towards a tipping point. A master plan was devised to co-ordinate the flow of weapons.

‘We reached a point in the fighting, in spring 2012, when we needed proper support. We needed heavy machine guns, real weapons. Money was never an issue: how much do you want? Fifty million dollars, a hundred million dollars – not a problem. But heavy weapons were becoming hard to find: the Turks – and without them this revolution wouldn’t have started – wanted the Americans to give them the green light before they would allow us to ship the weapons. We had to persuade Saad al-Hariri, Rafic Hariri’s son and a former prime minister, to go to put pressure on the Saudis, to tell them: “You abandoned the Sunnis of Iraq and you lost a country to Iran. If you do the same thing again you won’t only lose Syria, but Lebanon with it.”’ The idea was that the Saudis in turn would pressure the Americans to give the Turks the green light to allow proper weapons into the country.

Now suddenly, while on the ground the revolution was still in the hands of small bands of rebels and activists, a set of outside interests started conspiring to direct events in ways amenable to them. There were the Saudis, who never liked Bashar but were wary of more chaos in the Middle East. The Qataris, who were positioning themselves at the forefront of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, using their formidable TV networks to mobilise support and their vast wealth to fund illicit weapons shipments to the Libyans. And of course there were the French and the Americans.

‘The Americans gave their blessing,’ Abu Abdullah said, ‘and all the players converged and formed an operations room. It had the Qataris, the Saudis, the Turks and Hariri.’ In their infinite wisdom the players decided to entrust the running of the room – known as the Armament Room or the Istanbul Room after the city where it was based – to a Lebanese politician called Okab Sakr, a member of Hariri’s party who was widely seen as divisive and autocratic. The plan was to form military councils to be led and dominated by defectors from the Syrian army – this in order to appease the Americans, who were getting worried about the rising influence of the Islamists. All the fighting groups, it was assumed, would eventually agree to answer to the military councils because they were the main source of weapons.

At first, the plan seemed to be working. As summer approached military councils sprang up in Aleppo, Homs, Idlib and Deir al-Zour and some major battalions and factions did join in. Better weapons – though not the sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft equipment the rebels wanted – started entering Syria from Turkey. Until this point, most of the weapons smuggled from Turkey had come in small shipments on horseback or carried on foot by intermediaries and the fighters themselves, but these new shipments were massive, sent by truck. Iraq remained the largest single supplier, a legacy of three decades of war, but a lot of the Iraqi ammunition was of bad quality, having been buried in the sand for years. So the new supplies were eagerly received.

In the city of Deir al-Zour, in the early summer I sat with the chief armaments officer of the military council, who had converted his bedroom into an arsenal. I watched as he unzipped travel bags and distributed RPGs to his fighters, the rockets brand-new in their plastic wrapping, along with Austrian rifles (surplus or refurbished), Swiss hand grenades, Australian sniper rifles – the list went on.

A few weeks later, though, the plan started to collapse. In Deir al-Zour, an army defector accused the military council of being dominated by a single tribe and village. He set up a rival council. In Idlib and Homs the council was seen as too weak as rival battalions grew in influence. The Istanbul Room was accused of favouritism. By mid-July it was only in Aleppo that the council seemed to be working and the rebels pushed towards the city.

*

After two weeks of fighting the rebels were in control of large parts of Aleppo, but they soon suffered a serious setback in the Salah al-Din district. The weapons shipments stopped getting through in September. When I went there skirmishes were still taking place on dozens of frontlines criss-crossing the city and shelling and air strikes pounded the concrete residential blocks mercilessly. The air was sultry and oppressive, with an occasional breeze carrying the smell of death and festering garbage and rustling the curtains in broken windows.

Just before dusk a plane that had been circling overhead for hours, driven away only briefly after rebels wasted precious ammunition on it, returned with new determination. With each circle the rebels ran for delusional cover: a bush, a tree, a house – nothing that would stop a bomb, but at least it gave a feeling of protection. The plane circled, swooped down, released a black object and rose up again in a graceful curve like a dancer. The object, a bomb, disappeared behind a building. First there was a cloud – brown, black and grey – and then a thunderous explosion. The plane passed overhead and banked away.

Two officers, members of the Aleppo military council, were policing the frontlines. Captain Hussam – codename Abu Muhammad – was round and tall and always laughing. He drove an old car loaded with ammunition, co-ordinating attacks and supplying the fighters along a stretch of the boulevard. His friend Musbah, or Abu Hussein, was short and agitated. He would rush from one skirmish to another, leading the men through tunnels under apartment blocks, moving through bedrooms and kitchens, picking positions behind lace curtains to snipe at government soldiers.

‘Before we entered Aleppo we were promised ammunition,’ Hussam said. ‘They told us to start the fight here and that they would get us support. Well, we got some.’ Like a provincial pharmacist dispensing his precious tablets individually wrapped, the captain carried out his daunting job frugally and with minute attention. His reserve cache of ammunition, which was to service the whole frontline, had dwindled to one thousand Kalashnikov bullets and six RPG rockets. The fighters harangued him: they needed ammunition but he had none to give.

He had recently been in a meeting with other Aleppo commanders. The cracks between the military councils and the battalions starting to grow. ‘The Islamists at the meeting attacked the councils,’ he said. ‘They’re furious that the officers control the new ammunition. They think we want to bring in military rule, and they consider us infidels because we once supported the regime.’

‘This is a secular nation,’ his friend Musbah said. ‘They want to bring back the days of the caliphate.’

A week later, Musbah was killed, and whatever ammunition he was able to get was gone. The men were complaining more than ever, so Hussam decided to go north to find the leaders of the Aleppo military council to ask about his promised ammunition. He drove for several hours through hayfields and villages, heading close to the Turkish border. He arrived at a luxurious villa with whitewashed walls and a large swimming pool and was led inside. The marble floors were cold and clean. The fridge was stuffed with meat, fruit and even an ice cream cake. A few journalists, French and Arab, lounged around in the marble hallway using the wifi. Maybe it was the heat, the death, the weeks of fighting at the front or maybe the sugar rush from the ice cream cake, but Hussam’s nerves snapped and he started shouting.

‘You guys should really come down and see what’s going on. We’re dying down there.’

The head of the council, a former colonel in combat fatigues with a Vietnam-era flack jacket, arrived along with his assistant and bookkeeper, a former teacher called Ali Dibo, now treasurer of the arsenal. Hussam was taken aside, promised his ammunition again and sent back to Aleppo.

Ali Dibo drove me in his fancy car to another large villa in a nearby village. An old Mercedes truck was parked outside, covered in a tarpaulin. Fighters stood around under the orange trees. Two commanders were waiting to see Ali, now no longer the meek subordinate he’d been in the presence of the head of the military council but sporting the air of supreme commander of the faithful. He interrogated one of the men: ‘Why do you need so much ammunition?’ But he signed the necessary papers and the men under the orange trees started unloading crates of ammunition from the truck into a waiting pickup. The big truck was the council’s mobile armoury, containing 450,000 rounds of bullets and hundreds of RPGs.

Ali Dibo turned to another supplicant. ‘All I want from you is a short video that you can put on YouTube, stating your name and your unit and that you are part of the Aleppo military council. Then you can go do whatever you want. I just need to show the Americans that units are joining the council. I met two Americans yesterday, and they told me we won’t get any advanced weapons until we show we’re united under the leadership of the officers in the military councils. Just shoot the video and let me handle the rest.’

Months later I visited Hussam. He had discovered that the ex-teacher had been running his own show, siphoning off weapons intended for frontline troops and using them to build his own power base. Hussam sank into a sofa in the small apartment where he lives with his wife. Metal spikes stuck out of his leg: not long after he was sent back to Aleppo his car flipped over as he tried to flee an aerial bombardment. One of his close friends was killed – in fact most of his friends were by now either dead or seriously injured. ‘Ali Dibo was building his own personal fiefdom. He was using the ammunition destined for Aleppo to curry favour with other commanders.’ The military council, he said, was now just one more militia among the feuding battalions. ‘The problem is that every time they set up a council to oversee the war effort it turns into a militia. They can’t differentiate between their own personal interests and those of the nation.’

*

Last November, under pressure from the Americans, and with promises of better funding and more weapons from the Gulf nations, all the opposition factions met in Doha. A new council was created, called the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. Under its aegis a new military command structure was supposed to include all fighting groups, commanders inside and outside the country. But the promised flow of weapons never materialised: there were small amounts of ammunition, but no major shipments. Only weapons bought from Iraqi and sometimes Turkish smugglers were still getting through.

I stood with Abu Abdullah on a muddy hill not far from the Turkish border. Nearby was a makeshift refugee camp, with sewage water trickling between the tents and children shivering in front of a water truck, where they were playing with the shiny pots distributed by a relief agency. Some put them on their heads like helmets, others sat on them. The fence separating us from Turkey had collapsed; two Turkish army jeeps rumbled up and down the road.

Abu Abdullah pointed at a Turkish military outpost further down the hill. ‘This is where we did the handovers of shipments: they drove them to the post and we took over from there, but now we’re only getting ten to fifteen thousand rounds a week. It’s nothing. Iraq has been the main provider, but we can’t get anything interesting from there either. I sent people looking for weeks and we only found one anti-aircraft gun.’

After giving up on the Turks and their Armament Room, Abu Abdullah and his friends turned to the Libyans. Libya is both a fervent revolutionary power and a huge weapons market. ‘In Iraq we buy a certain number of bullets but in Libya they sell them by the weight, by the ton, and it’s dirt cheap. But we can’t ship them by sea. Thirteen countries control the waters in the Mediterranean and we need permission from all of them or from the Americans. So the Qataris fly the weapons to Doha and then they ship them down from Turkey.’

We drove along the border looking for a place to cross, but stopped by mistake in front of the wrong gate. A bearded man in a military jacket appeared carrying a Kalashnikov. He waved us in with his flashlight, but then an older man came over and ordered us to halt.

‘We want to cross into Turkey,’ Abu Abdullah said.

‘You can’t, this is private property,’ the old man said in heavily accented Arabic. There were three tents behind him and material for more. ‘You have to leave immediately,’ he said, politely but firmly. This camp, right on the Turkish border, was for foreign jihadis – the only people, as Abu Abdullah complained, who were getting money and equipment these days. Hakim al-Mutairi, a Kuwaiti Salafi preacher, was sending them millions of dollars. ‘I confronted him at a meeting a few weeks ago,’ Abu Abdullah said. ‘I told him you are hijacking our revolution. The jihadis are buying weapons and ammunition from the other units. They have no problem with money.’

At the end of January, I met a friend of Abu Abdullah; he’d once been a wealthy man, a merchant, but he’d seen his wealth dwindle as all his businesses came to a halt. His lips were quivering with anger and he kept thumping the table with his fist.

‘Why are the Americans doing this to us? They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse? They say it’s because of the jihadis but it’s the jihadis who are gaining ground. Abu Abdullah is $400,000 in debt and no one is sending him money anymore. It’s all going to the jihadis. They have just bought a former military camp from a battalion that was fighting the government. They went to them, gave them I don’t know how many millions and bought the camp. Maybe we should all become jihadis. Maybe then we’ll get money and support.’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/(...)in-five-easy-lessons

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Op vrijdag 15 februari 2013 19:18 schreef Aloulou het volgende:

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De Turken zitten heel diep in het Syrische conflict. Afzijdig kan je het absoluut niet noemen. Ik denk dat je de Turkse steun voor de rebellen en hoe ver die gaat onderschat. Ik denk dat veel Turken (in Turkije) niet eens precies weten hoe diep hun regering bij dit conflict betrokken is.

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Op vrijdag 15 februari 2013 19:21 schreef Aloulou het volgende:
Het volgende zeer grote artikel geeft heel veel goede inzichten in hoe de situatie in Syrie nu is, welke partijen en individuen erbij betrokken zijn en hoe de wapenleveringen tot stand komen en via welke kanalen. Flink artikel maar zeker aan te raden, door de goede Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Meerdere malen langere tijd in Syrie verbleven en ook op de frontlinie.

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Syria rebels claim northern airbase takeover

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Syrian rebels have captured a military airbase in the north and geared up for a major battle against regime forces as the opposition says it refuses to accept President Bashar al-Assad in talks on the 23-month conflict.

The rebels on Friday said they overran the base in the town of Sfeira, east of Aleppo international airport, and captured a large stockpile of ammunition.

Activists reported intermittent clashes around the Aleppo airport itself as well as around Nayrab airbase and another military complex, as the two sides squared up for a major fight.

"The army shelled the area around Aleppo international airport and Nayrab air base on Friday morning, while rebels used home-made rockets to shell Nayrab," Rami Abdel Rahman, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.

The Syrian army "is preparing a large-scale operation to take back control of Base 80", he said, referring to a military complex tasked with the security of both Nayrab and Aleppo airports.

Rebels seized the base on Wednesday after a battle that left at least 150 dead from both sides, among them senior army officers, according to the Observatory.

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Syrian rebels being treated in Israeli hospital

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the treatment of seven wounded Syrians in an Israeli hospital "exceptional, isolated cases."
The men were wounded Saturday near Israel's security fence with Syria in the Golan Heights during clashes between the Syrian army and rebel forces in Syria's two-year civil war.
During the regular weekly Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said of the civil war in Syria: "Yesterday, we saw that the fighting is also approaching our border. We will continue to guard our border and prevent passage and entry to Israel, except for exceptional, isolated cases, every one will be considered on its merits."
Israel Defense Forces soldiers discovered the injured men near the security fence and brought them to Ziv Hospital in Safed, Haaretz reported. The newspaper reported that the men likely are rebels. One reportedly was severely wounded and the rest were injured from bullets and shrapnel, according to Haaretz. The men are being isolated from other patients and are expected to remain in the hospital for one week.
Druze communities on the Golan Heights reportedly have asked the army to allow the men to stay in Israel or be sent to a third country that will accept them as refugees, the Israeli daily Maariv reported.

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'Invasie Hezbollah in Syri�'

DAMASCUS - De Libanese groepering Hezbollah heeft enkele dorpen in Syri� aangevallen. Dat hebben rebellen gemeld die tegen de Syrische president Bashar al-Assad vechten.

Ze spreken van een ''invasie'' van Hezbollah-strijders in Syri�, meldt de BBC.

Zondag kwamen zeker twee strijders van Hezbollah om in Syri�, aldus de oppositie tegen Assad. De rebellen beschuldigen Hezbollah ervan zich in de strijd te mengen tussen hen en de president.

Hezbollah heeft ontkend dat het strijders naar Syri� heeft gestuurd om voor Assad te vechten. Hezbollah heeft nauwe banden met Iran en de Syrische regering.

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Op maandag 18 februari 2013 18:10 schreef Frikandelbroodje het volgende:

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Interessant. Chinese wapens had ik niet verwacht. Het blijft ook gissen naar de bron, maar misschien via Pakistan. Maar omdat de gebruikers mij geen extremisten lijken, lijkt Libi� logischer, die kunnen die wapens vast makkelijk uit Sudan halen. Goed nieuws in ieder geval, de luchmacht van Assad is al flink gedecimeerd en rebellen hebben nu ook intacte vliegtuigen in een recent veroverde luchtmachtbasis.

أول مطار في حلب يسقط بيد الثوار

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Het momentum licht nu heel duidelijk bij de rebellen.

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Op maandag 18 februari 2013 19:37 schreef Frikandelbroodje het volgende:

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Naar mijn mening niet meer. De rebellen hebben toch wat overwinningen geboekt de laatste maanden. Veel militaire en luchtmachtbasissen veroverd, grootste dam dat de elektriciteit van Aleppo regelt, terreinwinst in vrijwel elke provincie, kleine delen van Damascus bezet, zijn luchtmacht is flink uitgedund, vliegtuigen zijn veel minder actief en effectief en zijn helikopters zijn zeldzaam geworden etc etc.

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Leg eens uit.

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Syrian leaders should face justice at ICC, UN says

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Syrian leaders should be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face justice for murder and torture, UN investigators urged on Monday as the EU renewed its blanket arms embargo on both sides in Syria's bloody conflict.

Britain, however, secured the agreement of its partners to make it easier to supply "non-lethal" equipment and training to maintain security in rebel-held areas, which was not previously possible. But it had not sought agreement to send weapons, Whitehall officials insisted, rejecting claims from Brussels that it had.

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In a small corner of Syria, rebels attempt to reconcile

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Our new host is Abu Oday, the commander of the armed opposition in this town in the western corner of Syria, and what we are witnessing is one of the most extraordinary facets of the country's catastrophic civil war: the birth pangs of a truce that has restored calm to one small area after almost two years of violence.

Abu Oday carries no gun, nor do any of the dozen men who stand around us curiously as plastic chairs are drawn up. By agreement they no longer show their weapons while, for its part, the Syrian army has ended the regular hail of mortar fire that terrorised this side of Talkalakh.

The architect of the change is Sheikh Habib or, to give him his full name, Mohammed Habib Fendi. Barely mentioned in Syria's official media, he prefers to keep a low profile even though he seems a rare hero in the country's brutal conflict.

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Bloedbad Aleppo na raketaanval

Syrische opstandelingen zeggen dat een raketaanval van het leger een bloedbad heeft aangericht in Aleppo. Meldingen over het dodental vari�ren van acht tot zo'n honderd.

De raket sloeg in in Jabal Badro, een wijk die in handen is van opstandelingen. Nieuwsuur-verslaggever Jan Eikelboom is in de getroffen wijk: "De verwoeste plek is zo groot als een half voetbalveld. Tussen het puin wordt nog gezocht naar lichamen", twittert hij.

Eikelboom spreekt van afschuwelijke beelden. "Overal lijken, wat een drama filmen we hier."

Een ooggetuige zegt tegen persbureau Reuters dat door de raketinslag van gisteravond drie gebouwen zijn ingestort.

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janeikelboom twitterde op dinsdag 19-02-2013 om 13:27:40 We zijn Aleppo uit. Omdat ook de dorpen in de omgeving met scuds worden beschoten gaan we vanavond in Turkije slapen. reageer retweet

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Op dinsdag 19 februari 2013 15:08 schreef rakotto het volgende:
Presidentiele paleis in Damascus schijnt aangevallen te zijn met twee raketten volgens Aljazeera. Ik heb geen kennis over raketten/wapens, maar als ik het zo vertaal waren het: HOUN? HAWN? Raketten.

Iemand die weet wat het is of wat het kan zijn?

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Op dinsdag 19 februari 2013 15:15 schreef deleriouz het volgende:

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Volgens mij Google Translate zijn dat mortieren.

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Op dinsdag 19 februari 2013 15:08 schreef rakotto het volgende:
Presidentiele paleis in Damascus schijnt aangevallen te zijn met twee raketten volgens Aljazeera. Ik heb geen kennis over raketten/wapens, maar als ik het zo vertaal waren het: HOUN? HAWN? Raketten.

Iemand die weet wat het is of wat het kan zijn?

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Syria in ruins: civilians suffer as military stalemate drags on

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Every conversation is dominated by the rumble of bombing and the misery it causes as the regime seeks to keep control of "old Damascus", the area that lies inside the ring road and where regime supporters' homes and most government ministries are situated. Beyond it, to the east of the city, the rebels have seized a large area of farmland known as the Orchards, where settlements of low-cost housing have sprung up over recent decades. To the south the rebels occupy Deraya and are fighting in Yarmouk, a once largely Palestinian district.

"When I asked the army why they bomb, the explanation I got was that it bolsters troop morale. It also protects troops from having to go into areas on foot," said a senior government official, now retired. "When I said: 'Isn't it collective punishment of the civilian population?', they said nothing."

The punishment seems to have two variants. The lighter one was described to me by an elderly resident of Qudsaya, a district about five miles north-west of central Damascus. I visited it during an illegal protest last February when some 2,000 euphoric young people paraded through the main street, shouting: "Down with Bashar!" There was no police presence or any sign of regime reaction. Now every shop is in ruins or under slow repair as owners try to rebuild their livelihoods. The wrecks of burnt-out cars litter the street, and many houses have shell-holes in their facades.

My informant recalled the regime's revenge. "At 5am one morning in August the government started firing shells and mortars from al-Areen, an Alawite district on the other side of the valley. About an hour later soldiers and shabiha [pro-government militias] arrived and warned everybody they had an hour to leave Qudsaya. Anyone who remained would be shot," he said.

With his wife he joined hundreds of frantic families, who fled on foot or in their cars. His 27-year-old son stayed behind with some Druze neighbours who had once worked for the defence ministry and seemed to be trusted by the soldiers. According to the son's account, over the next three days the soldiers and militias proceeded to break into houses and smash the metal shutters of shops, loot TVs and other electronic goods, and then set the buildings on fire. An unknown number of people were executed.

Most residents have now returned to Qudsaya, traumatised but apparently having "learned their lesson". The message has gone out to would-be protesters to lie low and to the armed opposition not to come into the area. The same message has been absorbed by people in the districts of Midan and Old Mezzeh, which rebels penetrated briefly last summer before being driven back by a massive army counter-attack. Residents have urged the rebels to keep out and not provoke total destruction.

In the capital's eastern districts and the Orchards area civilians had less chance. Rebels advanced and joined local people who took up guns in Qaboun, Douma, Harasta, and Jobar and the government is still responding with the rain of bombs and shells that you hear in central Damascus. As well as collective punishment it amounts to a "strategy of denial". Recognising that it cannot regain control without risking excessive numbers of soldiers' lives, the regime's fallback is to prevent civilians going home under rebel protection and have the opposition proclaim them as "liberated areas" where normal life is resuming.

The latest district to suffer from this strategy is Adra, a new zone of industrial investment about 20 miles north-east of Damascus. Half the apartment blocks are incomplete, a forest of raw concrete buildings with no doors, windows, water or electricity. This bleak wasteland now houses at least 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) who have fled from the Orchards.

A fortnight ago the war reached them again. A military airfield is located near the original village of Adra, where another 20,000 people live a few miles from the industrial zone. The rebels have started to make airfields their prime targets throughout Syria and the government feared armed groups were infiltrating Adra in preparation for an attack. It launched bombing and artillery strikes on Adra on 31 January. On 4 February, some 2,000 families set off on foot to the already overcrowded industrial zone. Volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent broke the locks of five schools and helped them to move in. According to witnesses, less than 20% of these desperate people are male. They fear the army will assume all males are rebels and arrest or kill them.

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Mortiergranaten ingeslagen bij paleis Assad in Syri�

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De aanval is een teken dat de oorlog doordringt op plekken die tot voor kort nog relatief veilig waren.

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Syrische voetballer gedood in stadion

Een Syrische voetballer is woensdag omgekomen toen twee mortiergranaten insloegen in het stadion in Damascus waar hij op dat moment met zijn team aan het trainen was.

Dat meldt de staatsomroep. Ook andere bronnen bevestigen het bericht. Een aantal andere voetballers raakte gewond.

Dinsdag ontploften twee mortiergranaten bij een paleis van president Assad. Toen was er alleen materi�le schade.

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Doden bij zware explosie in centrum Damascus
In het centrum van de Syrische hoofdstad is een zware explosie geweest vlak bij het hoofdkantoor van de regerende Baath-partij. Ook de Russische ambassade ligt in de buurt.

De Syrische staatstelevisie spreekt van een terreuraanval. Op tv-beelden zijn zeker vier lijken te zien. Ooggetuigen zeggen dat een autobom ontplofte tussen het gebouw van de Baath-partij en de Russische ambassade.

Door de explosie hangt er een dikke zwarte rookwolk boven de stad.

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A correspondent for Syrian state television said he saw seven body bags with corpses in them at the scene. He said he counted 17 burnt-out cars and another 40 that were destroyed or badly damaged by the force of the blast, which ripped a crater 1.5 metres deep into the road.

The official SANA news agency said casualties included children at a nearby school in Mazraa, which it described as a busy residential district of the capital.

Activists reported at least two further blasts in the city after the Mazraa explosion. The Observatory said two car bombs exploded outside security centres in the north-eastern district of Barzeh, but there were no details of casualties.

Syrian TV said security forces had detained a would-be suicide bomber with five bombs in his car, one of them weighing 300 kg.

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Syrian health ministry says 53 dead, 235 wounded in Damascus car bombing

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Assad duikt op in Duitse documentaire: 'Ik heb niet voor deze oorlog gekozen'

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De Syrische president Bashar al-Assad laat zich zelden interviewen. Dat was al zo voor de opstand, maar zeker nu er een burgeroorlog aan de gang is. Het is de Duitse documentairemaker Hubert Seipel wel gelukt. In 'Die Syrien-Falle, Deutschland und der Krieg gegen Assad' ontkent de president dat hij verantwoordelijk is voor het bloedige conflict.

Die Syrien Falle - Deutschland und der Krieg gegen Assad