Crisis in Syrië #29: From counting victims to counting massacres

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'Syrische oppositie krijgt wapens'

Syrische oppositiegroepen krijgen ''spoedig alle benodigde materieel en uitrustingen'' van de Vrienden van het Syrische Volk.

De hulp wordt geboden aan de rebelse opperste militaire raad, een overkoepelende organisatie van opstandelingen in Syrië die vechten tegen het leger van president Bashar al-Assad

Dat hebben de Vrienden van Syrië zaterdag besloten tijdens een vergadering in het Qatarese Doha. De organisatie veroordeelde inmenging van Hezbollah, Iran en Irak in de Syrische burgeroorlog.

Tot de Vrienden van het Syrische Volk behoren de VS, Frankrijk, Turkije, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Duitsland, Italië, Egypte, Saudi-Arabië, Jordanië, Qatar en de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten.

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Thousands of Shi'ites ready to fight in Syria - Iraqi
Fri, Jun 21 2013

By Samia Nakhoul and Suadad al-Salhy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Thousands of Shi'ite Muslims from Iraq and beyond will take up arms against Sunni al Qaeda "savages" in Syria if fellow Shi'ites or their shrines come under attack again, a powerful minister in Iraq's Shi'ite-led government said.

It would be impossible to "sit idle while the Shi'ites are being attacked", while the United States and Western allies arm and finance the mainly Sunni rebels fighting against Syria's government, Hadi al-Amiri told Reuters in an interview.

Amiri, Iraq's transport minister, is head of the Badr Organisation, a political movement which arose from a heavily-armed Iran-trained militia and many of whose members are now part of Iraq's security forces.

After two years of fighting that has left 93,000 dead, the Syrian civil war is increasingly being fought along sectarian lines, with mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite sect derives from Shi'ite Islam.

The conflict is splintering the Middle East along a divide between the two main denominations of Islam, becoming a battlefield in a proxy war between Assad's main regional ally, Shi'ite Iran, and his Sunni enemies in Turkey and the Gulf Arab states.

With Russia and Iran arming Assad's forces, and Lebanon's Hezbollah Shi'ite militia joining the war on Assad's behalf, Western powers have agreed in the last week to increase aid to the mainly Sunni rebels.

Amiri said Shi'ites had been galvanised by the killing of around 60 members of their sect at the hands of Sunni insurgents in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zor earlier this month.

"If another attack against Shi'ites takes place similar to Deir al-Zor, or against the shrine of Sayyeda Zeinab, not only a handful of men, but thousands of Shi'ite men will go to fight alongside the regime and against al Qaeda and whoever backs al Qaeda," Amiri said.

"After Deir al-Zor, thousands of Shi'ite youths from Iraq and all over the world will head to fight in Syria. If 300 Lebanese Hezbollah fighters changed the equation in Syria, Iraqi young men will go to Syria to change it a hundred times over," Amiri said, referring to Hezbollah forces whose intervention enabled Assad loyalists retake the town of Qusair this month.

Traditional Shi'ites revere the Prophet Mohammad's son-in-law Ali and 11 of his descendants as imams, maintaining shrines to them across the Middle East. The Sayyeda Zeinab shrine south of Damascus, devoted to Ali's daughter, now has hundreds of foreign Shi'ite volunteers guarding it from rebel attacks.

The bombing of a Shi'ite shrine housing the tombs of two imams in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 2006 was the trigger for the worst sectarian carnage between Sunnis and Shi'ites that engulfed Iraq in the middle of the past decade.

Shi'ite leaders such as Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon have issued warnings against any repeat of that attack against shrines in Syria.

Shi'ites are a minority in most of the Middle East but form the majority in both Iran and Iraq.

Amiri's Badr Brigades militiamen fought on Iran's side in the 1980-88 war against Iraq Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein's government. The militia came to dominate much of southern Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam, and during the sectarian fighting that followed.

After the last general elections in 2010, Amiri shifted his loyalties to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, leader of the rival Shi'ite Daawa Party.

While it is unclear to what extent he is reflecting the views of the Maliki government, Amiri pulls no punches on Syria.

"Do you want us to sit idle while the Shi'ites are being attacked, while the Americans and the rest are helping them with weapons and money? What do you expect?"

He said young Iraqi volunteers are going to Syria via Beirut or flying from Baghdad to Damascus.

Asked whether the Iraqi government sponsors Shi'ite fighters across the border, Amiri compared the flow of Shi'ite fighters from Iraq to the influx of Sunni militants from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and other Arab countries.

"As long as those governments say they are not aware (of fighters going to Syria) we also in the Iraqi government are unaware," he said, adding the official line that Iraqi fighters are not state-sponsored and they go to "protect their Shi'ite shrines".

Streams of Sunni Islamist fighters have already converged to wage holy war in Syria, where the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front is sidelining more moderate groups that do not share its goal of establishing a Sunni Islamic Caliphate in the country.

Nusra has announced a merger with Iraq's branch of al Qaeda, which spent the last decade fighting U.S. troops and the Shi'ite-led Iraqi authorities, and which Baghdad blames for bomb attacks that still kill civilians and police.

Last month 1,000 people were killed in bomb attacks in Iraq, the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07.

Amiri ridiculed the idea that Western powers could ensure weapons only reached the hands of moderate rebel groups, describing al Qaeda and its affiliates as "savages".

"The powerful ones in the Syrian arena are the Nusra Front and they would take the arms from the moderates by force," he said. "We believe that any arms that reach the Nusra Front will be directed against the Iraqis."

Amiri, like other leaders in Baghdad and Tehran, fears Assad's demise would make way for a hostile Sunni Islamist government in Syria that would weaken Shi'ite influence in the Middle East and eventually turn its sights on Iraq and Iran.

Re-invigorated by the Syrian conflict, al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate is gaining strength and recruits from Sunnis who resent Shi'ite domination since the fall of Saddam.

"I fought and carried arms against Saddam for over 20 years… I swear by God that if I had to choose between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda I would fight alongside Saddam and against al Qaeda. There is no one worse than al Qaeda," Amiri said.

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New wave of foreigners in Syrian fight
By Griff Witte, Published: June 21

CAIRO — He was young and bright, with an education from Egypt’s premier school of Islamic studies and lucrative job offers in the Gulf.

But Bilal Farag chose a different path, friends say, one that led him to die on a distant Syrian battlefield while fighting Shiite Muslims he regarded as infidels.

“Everybody has their own goal in life,” said a close friend, Hosam Ali. “Bilal’s was to be a martyr.”

Waves of Egyptians are now preparing to follow, fired by the virulently sectarian rhetoric of Sunni preachers and encouraged by the newly permissive policies of Egypt’s Islamist government. In recent days, this city’s ancient mosques have crackled with calls for jihad, as hard-line Sunni Muslim leaders command the faithful to respond to recent escalations in Syria by the Shiite forces of Iran and Hezbollah.

The Sunni backlash has echoed far beyond Egypt, penetrating every corner of the region, where divisions between the rival Muslim sects are hardening fast. At the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, the top cleric broke down in tears on pan-Arab television last week as he pleaded with his fellow Muslims to help the Syrian rebels “by all means.”

Foreign militants have long played a critical role in the Syrian uprising, but the prospect of a fresh flow of radicalized fighters bent on waging sectarian war threatens to complicate the Obama administration’s recently announced strategy to arm the rebellion’s moderate factions.

Although the United States and the Sunni jihadists share a common enemy — the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite sect represents an off-shoot of Shiite Islam — they have starkly different motivations. The United States is hoping to strengthen the rebels’ hand in advance of possible peace talks and to marginalize radical groups. Many foreign fighters, meanwhile, are seeking to defeat what they consider a deviant strain of Islam that they believe has declared war on the religion’s true adherents.

“This war is not only against Syrians. It is against the Sunni people all around the world,” said Adel Shokry, a 32-year-old lawyer who is contemplating joining the rebels after hearing a stinging denunciation of Assad and his allies at a Cairo mosque.

The vast majority of Egyptian Muslims are Sunni, but until recently, Egypt had sought to stay on the sidelines of the Syrian war. It was part of the shrinking middle ground in an increasingly polarized region. The nation’s Muslim Brotherhood-aligned president, Mohamed Morsi, had avoided sectarian rhetoric and had even carved out a possible mediating role by cultivating closer relations with Iran.

That changed Saturday night. Morsi, who has been under pressure from hard-line Islamists at home, used a stadium speech before thousands of supporters to rip into Assad, Hezbollah and Iran. As the crowd chanted, “Sunni blood isn’t cheap,” the president announced that he was cutting all ties with Assad’s government and that Egypt would provide support for the rebels.

Well of would-be fighters

Short on cash and facing growing internal discord, Egypt’s government is in no position to provide meaningful assistance. But as the Arab world’s most populous nation, one with an especially high proportion of unemployed youth, Egypt has a deep well of would-be fighters.

For three decades under President Hosni Mubarak, the government cracked down hard on militants seeking to leave Egypt to fight in foreign wars, such as Afghanistan or Iraq.

But that has changed under the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, which came to power in last year’s elections, after the 2011 revolution that deposed Mubarak.

“Before, we would have to sneak fighters out of the country,” said Mohammed Hassan Hamed, a spokesman for Gamaa Islamiya, a radical Islamist group that waged an insurgency against the Egyptian government before officially renouncing violence in 2003. “But now it’s more comfortable for fighters to go to Syria. If they live through the war and come back, they know they are not going to be prosecuted.”

That, Hassan hastened to add, “is not a reason for Americans to be afraid.” Unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, the United States and the jihadi fighters are on the same side in this war.

But to many secular Egyptians, it is terrifying. “They’re going to get weapons and training, and one day they could come back to fight us,” said Khaled Salah, editor in chief of the secular-minded Youm7 newspaper.

Tellingly, Egyptian moderates such as Salah have been the loudest critics of Morsi’s decision to back the rebels. Liberal Egyptians who overthrew their own autocratic leader had been sympathetic with the uprising against Assad early on. But now many now say they don’t know which side to support and think that Egypt should stay out of what they see as a sectarian conflict.

“The Middle East is shifting from a region that was dreaming of democracy to a battlefield between Shiite and Sunni,” Salah said. “It’s very dangerous.”

Syria, where the United Nations says more than 93,000 people have died since the conflict began two years ago, is not the only sectarian battlefield in the region. Iraq has seen an escalation of tit-for-tat killings in recent weeks, and an upsurge in violence in Lebanon has sparked fears that the war in Syria is spilling past its western border.

But Syria is undoubtedly the central fight in a dispute that dates to the 7th century, when followers of the prophet Muhammad fought over the line of succession after his death.

The region’s turn to sectarianism intensified late last month, when Hasan Nasrullah, leader of the Shiite Lebanese political party and militia Hezbollah, announced that the group was going all-in to support Assad and belittled Syria’s predominantly Sunni rebels as agents of Israel and the United States. About the same time, Iran acknowledged that its Revolutionary Guard forces were operating inside Syria in support of the government. Iraqi Shiites, too, have joined the fight.

Both Iran and Hezbollah have been instrumental in recent battles that have turned momentum toward Assad. Far from conceding defeat, Sunni clerics across the region have rallied to the rebel cause. Yousuf al-Qaradawi, a charismatic Egyptian preacher who is influential within the Muslim Brotherhood, condemned Hezbollah as “the party of Satan” and sought to goad his fellow Sunnis into action.

“How could 100 million Shiites defeat 1.7 billion [Sunnis]?” he asked, referring to a global population balance that strongly favors Sunnis. "Only because [Sunni] Muslims are weak.”

‘Stunningly rapid’

While Assad has cast his opponents as foreign terrorists, no more than 10 percent of the rebel force is foreign, according to a study released this month by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Flashpoint Global Partners.

Still, that’s enough to make Syria the third-largest mobilization of Sunni Islamic fighters to a foreign cause in recent decades, “falling short only of Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iraq during the last decade,” the study’s authors write. “The difference this time is that the mobilization has been stunningly rapid — what took six years to build in Iraq at the height of the U.S. occupation may have accumulated inside Syria in less than half that time.”

And unlike in Iraq, where the vast majority of the foreign fighters were from Syria or Saudi Arabia, this time the three North African nations that experienced Arab Spring revolutions — Libya, Tunisia and Egypt — have all been amply represented.

Hesham el-Ashary, a jovial former tailor who speaks English with a Brooklyn accent after spending 15 years in the United States, said he has been helping Egyptians travel to Syria for the past year. Most, he said, are members of the middle class or above who can afford a plane ticket and a gun — the two main requirements for any would-be fighter. He instructs them to fly to one of Syria’s neighbors and facilitates introductions with rebel groups who take the recruits from there.

“More will be going to Syria, because there’s no way for Bashar to win,” said Ashary, a community leader among hard-line Islamists known as Salafists. “And Syria will be established as a strong Sunni Muslim country.”

Word of an imminent influx of foreigners has reached the many refugee camps ringing Syria. There, young Syrian men say they’re headed back into the fight, now that they know reinforcements are on the way.

“The West has left us to be massacred by Iranians, Hezbollah and Iraqis,” said Mohammed Al Rifai, 22, as he waited in a Jordanian camp to board a bus destined for the Syrian border. “But now we are relying on our Muslim and Arab brothers coming from Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and elsewhere. They will be the ones who will save us.”

Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo and William Booth and Taylor Luck in the Zaatari refugee camp outside Mafraq, Jordan, contributed to this report.

© The Washington Post Company

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US troop buildup in Jordan after Turkey shuts US-NATO arms corridor to Syrian rebels DEBKAfile Special Report June 22, 2013, 5:44 AM (IDT) Tags: Barack Obama, US military buildup, Jordan, Syrian war, Turkey, Syrian rebels,

Tayyip Erdogan's U-turn on Syria


The US decision to upgrade Syrian rebel weaponry has run into a major setback: DEBKAfile reveals that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan phoned President Barack Obama in Berlin Wednesday, June 19, to report his sudden decision to shut down the Turkish corridor for the transfer of US and NATO arms to the Syrian rebels.
Against this background, the US President informed Congress Friday, June 22, that 700 combat-equipped American military personnel would remain in Jordan at the end of a joint US-Jordanian training exercise. They would include crews of two Patriot anti-aircraft missile batteries and the logistics, command and communications personnel needed to support those units. The United States is also leaving behind from the war maneuver a squadron of 12 to 24 F-16 fighter jets at Jordan’s request. Some 300 US troops have been in Jordan since last year.
Erdogan’s decision will leave the Syrian rebels fighting in Aleppo virtually high and dry. The fall of Qusayr cut off their supplies of arms from Lebanon. Deliveries through Jordan reach only as far as southern Syria and are almost impossible to move to the north where the rebels and the Hizballah-backed Syrian army are locked in a decisive battle for Aleppo.
The Turkish prime minister told Obama he is afraid of Russian retribution if he continues to let US and NATO weapons through to the Syrian rebels.
Since the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland last week, Moscow has issued almost daily condemnations of the West for arming “terrorists.”
Rebel spokesmen in Aleppo claimed Friday that they now had weapons which they believe “will change the course of the battle on the ground.”
DEBKAfile’s military sources are strongly skeptical of their ability - even after the new deliveries - to stand up to the onslaught on their positions in the embattled town by the combined strength of the Syrian army, Hizballah troops and armed Iraqi Shiites. The prevailing intelligence assessment is that they will be crushed in Aleppo as they were in Al Qusayr.
That battle was lost after 16 days of ferocious combat; Aleppo is expected to fall after 40-60 days of great bloodshed.
The arms the rebels received from US, NATO and European sources were purchased on international markets – not only because they were relatively cheap but because they were mostly of Russian manufacture. The rebels are thus equipped with Russian weapons for fighting the Russian arms used by the Syria army. This made Moscow angrier than ever.
Until now, the Erdogan government was fully supportive of the Syrian opposition, permitting them to establish vital command centers and rear bases on Turkish soil and send supplies across the border to fighting units. He has now pulled the rug out from under their cause and given Assad a major leg-up
This about-turn is a strategic earthquake – not just in terms of the Syrian war but also for the United States and, as time goes by, for Israel too.
Ten years ago, Erdogan pulled the same maneuver when he denied US troops passage through Turkey to Iraq for opening a second front against Saddam Hussein.
President Obama reacted by topping up the US deployment in Jordan by 700 combat-equipped troops to 1,000. Patriot missile interceptors and F-16 fighter jets are left behind from their joint war game for as long as the security situation requires. DEBKAfile: The joint US-Jordanian maneuver was in fact abruptly curtailed after two weeks although it was planned to continue for two months until the end of August.
The widening disruptions of the surging Syrian war are on the point of tipping over into Jordan and coming closer than ever to Israel.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 17:52 schreef Terminator2000bc het volgende:
En China die blijft maar lachen in z'n vuistje. Twee potentiële kandidaten voor wereldleiderschap, het Midden-Oosten en de westerse wereld die zich op elkaar blijven kapotbeuken onder leiding van radicale moslimpsychopaten enerzijds en neo-con kleptocraten anderzijds.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 18:02 schreef Slayage het volgende:

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waarmee zou het midden oosten de wereld willen leiden? met olie en gas?

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 17:15 schreef UpsideDown het volgende:

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NU.nl

Hahaha wtf? Dit wordt een regelrechte massaslachting.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 18:15 schreef Hierro het volgende:

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Die worden al gepleegd hoor, o.a. door Assad.

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Kerry voert druk op Rusland op

_{Toegevoegd: zaterdag 22 jun 2013, 15:49
Update: zaterdag 22 jun 2013, 16:29}

De Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken John Kerry voert de druk op Rusland verder op, om deel te nemen aan een internationale conferentie over Syrië. Daar zouden afspraken moeten worden gemaakt over de vorming van een overgangsregering. Rusland is de belangrijkste bondgenoot van het regime van de Syrische president Assad.

Kerry deed dat in Doha, de hoofdstad van Qatar, waar de Syrië-contactgroep bijeen is. Het is een verzameling van Westerse en Arabische landen die tegen het regime van Assad zijn. Zij willen de steun aan de opstandelingen in Syrië coördineren om zo het regime van Assad omver te werpen.

De Amerikaanse minister zei dat er diplomaten klaar staan om naar Genève te vliegen om daar het gesprek aan te gaan met de Russische minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Lavrov.

Wapens
Eerder liet Obama al weten dat zijn land wapens gaat leveren aan de rebellen in Syrië. Persbureau Reuters meldt op basis van twee anonieme bronnen dat Saudi-Arabië meer geavanceerde wapens aan opstandelingen in Syrië levert.

Aan de bijeenkomst van de Syrië-contactgroep doen behalve de VS ook Frankrijk, Turkije, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Duitsland, Italië, Egypte, Saudi-Arabië, Jordanië, Qatar en de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten mee.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 18:08 schreef IPA35 het volgende:

[Mooie vrouwen

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 17:39 schreef De_Guidance het volgende:
Debka komt weer met een vreemd bericht. Turkije zou de wapenlevenratiewegen naar de rebellen hebben geblokkeerd. Lijkt mij sterk.

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http://www.debka.com/arti(...)or-to-Syrian-rebels-

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 18:35 schreef Aloulou het volgende:

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Hoewel er genoeg mooie dames rondlopen zeg ik: Brazil en Oekranie > M-O. Maar smaken verschillen gelukkig.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 19:16 schreef Djibril het volgende:
Aloulou je hebt altijd goed bijgedragen aan dit topic, maar kom op vriend Libanese, Israëlische, Koerdische, Syrische dames zorgen gewoon ervoor dat MO Oekraïne en Brazilië(deze zijn natuurlijk ook niet verkeerd) verslaat.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 20:13 schreef Aloulou het volgende:

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Djibril habibi dit zijn serieuze zaken die onder het genot van een lekkere muntthee en shisha besproken moeten worden, ik neem aan dat je dat snapt. Maar goed, ik ben het met je eens dat in het M-O hele leuke dames rondlopen en ook temperamentvol enzo Maar ik ga je keertje meenemen naar Kiev, komt goed habibi ... killers
Jeremaine Lens weet wat ik bedoel trouwens

SPOILER

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 22:55 schreef Djibril het volgende:

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Beter houden we met dit topic een Syrie-meeting in Syrie. Aleppo lijkt me wel een leuke stad om te meeten jongens. Hebben we dit keer geen BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN of zo niet nodig voor onze discussies en kan alle bias eruit
Vaste mensen hier Peunage, IPA, Papierversnipperaar, Frikandelbroodje, Waht en UpsideDown komen jullie ook?

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Misschien zien we AbuHamza wel daar, die heeft namelijk al lang niks meer gepost hier

SPOILER

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 20:13 schreef Aloulou het volgende:

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Djibril habibi dit zijn serieuze zaken die onder het genot van een lekkere muntthee en shisha besproken moeten worden, ik neem aan dat je dat snapt. Maar goed, ik ben het met je eens dat in het M-O hele leuke dames rondlopen en ook temperamentvol enzo Maar ik ga je keertje meenemen naar Kiev, komt goed habibi ... killers
Jeremaine Lens weet wat ik bedoel trouwens

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 23:44 schreef De_Ilias het volgende:
Hopelijk zal jubhat anosra snel gehakt maken van die Sjieietische milities die naar niks te zoeken hebben, bashar het duurt niet lang meer, Amerika staat aan onze kant en de nieuwe anti tanks staan gereed om dat speelgoed van jou voorgoed te slopen.

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Op zaterdag 22 juni 2013 23:44 schreef De_Ilias het volgende:
Hopelijk zal jubhat anosra snel gehakt maken van die Sjieietische milities die naar niks te zoeken hebben, bashar het duurt niet lang meer, Amerika staat aan onze kant en de nieuwe anti tanks staan gereed om dat speelgoed van jou voorgoed te slopen.