Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label idlib

Syria

The arguments make sense, but I think it is a silly headline Syria's revenge? What is Syria since 2011, the regimes, the warring factions, the internally displaced, the millions of refugees, the a hundred thousand plus in jails ...? "   In a normal world, great powers would marshal the resources necessary to meet the challenge, leading a global effort of expertise, technology, money, and materiel to save lives everywhere, including in Syria."  When was that "normal time"? Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, Ruwanda...? It's some people, some NGOS, local organisations mobilising their resources to help and save lives. Local and global powers have been waging proxy-wars and fuelling conflicts directly and indirectly, with geopolitical calculations of who is an ally and who is not, who serves their interests and who might jeopardise them. "Syria's revenge on the world" will be a second wave of coronavirus
"Down with the regime and the opposition... Down with the Arab-Islamic nation ... down with the Security Council... Down with the world... Down with everything." (A banner held by protesters in Kafr Nabl, 14 October 2011) Life of a mother fleeing bombardment in Idlib (North Syria 2018-2019)
Syria: just another news item while I am sitting comfortably at a café in a rich city sipping coffee... The assault on Idlib and its consequences See also Inside Syria's Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent
The outcome of regional strategic calculus and "lesser evil" mentality, especially when "the lesser evil" is "secular". Sections of the left are still in denial. How chemical weapons helped bring Assad close to victory

The coming assault on Idlib

"Worst of all, there is a  growing international consensus  that the regime is the best solution for the devastation it has wrought. The international community is now shifting its focus toward reconstruction, rehabilitating the regime through rewarding those responsible for the country’s devastation, and pressuring refugees to return to a country where their safety is far from assured." Is it impossible that one day, we see that ‘secular’, unveiled wife of Al-Assad in London or Washington, preparing the ground for a full rehabilitation of the regime? The coming assault on Idlib

Resisting Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham

Syria The picture drawn in this analysis precedes a recent major development: the beginning of an assault by the Syrian regimes and the militias allied to it, with Russian aid from the sky, on Idlib province, the stronghold of the opposition. That is more likely to change the facts on the ground as the opposition begins to lose areas which has controlled for the last two years. Resisting Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham
"You can spew your visceral hatred for Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Gert Wilders or other far-right “populists” – whom I prefer to call racists –  all you want, but an abandonment of the Syrian people using the age-old adage of “it’s all America’s doing” and absolving the crimes of such people puts you in cahoots with these very same bigots." That father