Judging from the statements that have been made so far by
both contenders to the presidential title in the U.S., and the statements that
were just made by their running mates during the vice-presidential debate, it
seems clear that Syria is not a priority for any of them, a fact that is
unlikely to change in the future irrespective of the elections’ outcome. Though
Syrians will have to bear the brunt of it all, there will be enough fallouts to
spread the pain around.
Thursday October
11, 2012
Today’s
Death toll: 210. The Breakdown: toll includes 10 children and 6
women. 47 in Idlib, 44 in Damascus and Suburbs (among them 3 field-executed in
Tadamon), 37 in Deir Ezzor (including 21 field-executed), 24 in Daraa, 20 in
Homs, 20 in Aleppo, 8 in Tartus, 7 in Hama, 2 in Raqqah, and 1 in Hassakah (LCC).
News
Special
Reports
In the midst of Syria’s civil war,
more is being lost than lives. Aleppo may be the world’s oldest continuously
occupied city, dating to the era of the pyramids, and at the height of the
Ottoman Empire, it was the world’s largest metropolis after Istanbul and Cairo.
The cost of intervention in Syria may
be high now, but the price will only increase for all nations if civilian
massacres continue unabated.
Alawites and Alevis alike represent
non-Orthodox Islam, and the two groups have similar-sounding names because of
their shared reverence for Ali, son-in-law of Mohamed. Nevertheless, Alawites
and Alevis are in fact different groups ethnically and theologically, and
confusing the two would be akin to saying that all Protestants are protestors.
The BBC's Ian Pannell visits a
hospital in Aleppo overwhelmed with trauma victims of Syria's civil war, where
doctors work under fire to keep people alive.
Turkey's forced landing of a Syrian
passenger jet from Moscow suspected of carrying military cargo is the latest
example of regional spillover from the Syria crisis. The risks of these
cascading spillovers may ultimately emerge as the leading rationale for
international intervention.
The Syrian Army's pounding of the
territory between Homs and the Lebanese border has sent hundreds of Syrian
fighters and civilians fleeing to the Lebanese town of Masharih al-Qaa.
In a society where the transition from
warzone to civilization takes a matter of days, the rapid change tends to leave
a rift between two selves. One self is who you were during the war, while the
other is who you were before it. Readjusting to the world after deployment is
the reunification of these two selves. After merging them together, you are
left with the person you have become after experiencing the realties of
conflict.
He may no longer control huge swathes
of Syrian territory, but his forces appear nowhere near collapse. Over the past
18 months, at least, the dictator has beaten the odds
The Assad regime dealt with
ethno-sectarian wounds through a combination of policies
that—unsurprisingly—elevated its own minority community and filled the broader
sectarian milieu with paranoia and distrust. One can understand the
ruthlessness of the shabeeha militias only in the light of Alawi historical
memory: of poverty, underdevelopment, labor migration—its dependence on
colonial and military institutions for social integration and its experiences
of second-class citizenship. These memories (and fear of an unknown future)
have helped lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians during the
current conflict, in which an important segment of Syria’s Alawi community has
been instilled with fear of annihilation.
With the forcing down of the airliner,
Ankara is clearly increasing the already increased pressure it started putting
on the Assad regime after last week's Syrian shelling of a Turkish border town,
which resulted in the death of five locals and was followed by several days of
back-and-forth artillery exchanges between Turkish and Syrian forces.
Arabic
Press (Prepared by Steven Miller, FDD Research Associate)
According to the Syrian paper
al-Watan, Homs could be announced a "secure province" in the coming
hours or days, after marked progress by the regime in the city and its
surroundings. Activists on the ground denied those reports, saying that the
Syrian military has not made any progress in the city in the last few days,
despite heavy shelling and its attempt to penetrate the city through the
al-Khalidiya and Bab Houd neighborhoods. The London-based Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights pointed out that there was "heavy shelling on the
neighborhoods that the opposition controls in Homs, which has been besieged for
months by regime forces," and that the regime specifically targeted
al-Khalidiya, Jouret al-Shiyah, and areas of Homs' old city.
Ammar Abdulhamid & Khawla
Yusuf: The
Shredded Tapestry: The State of Syria Today
The Alawite Front
More clashes were reported in the town of Qardaha in Latakia Province today,
pitting pro- and anti-Assad Alawite clans. Today’s clashes, we are told, came
as a reaction to finding the bodies of 2 of the three girls from the anti-Assad
Al-Khayyir clan who went missing last week. The clashes took part at the town’s
periphery and in nearby villages due to the presence of loyalist troops from
the 4th Armored Division in the town’s center. Inter-Alawite clashes
have also taken place beyond the borders of Latakia province and in reached
Alawite-majority suburbs and neighborhoods in Damascus City, especially Ish
Al-Warwar which seems to have to a larger concentration of anti-Assad Alawite
clans.
So far this is indeed the extant of U.S. involvement in the Syrian
Crisis. As I have argued in Shredded
Tapestry, the Office of Syrian Opposition Support (OSOS) represents the
maximum that the Obama Administration seems willing to do at this stage. Indeed,
"we
are not talking about major expenditures here," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a
prominent Syrian activist and fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies in Washington, cautioning that OSOS was too new to assess its
effectiveness.
Still, if OSOS is not meant as a first step in a plan that will involve
military assistance soon, then it’s a meaningless and unnecessary expenditure
and a waste both from an American tax-payer perspective and a Syrian activist
perspective. OSOS will prove useless and ineffective if it’s not part of a
larger more focused plan, and no Syrian activist will take it seriously if it
does not aim at providing enough support to the rebels to determine the outcome
of the transition taking place.
We do not need America’s leaders to spend any amount of funds to assuage
a guilty conscience and to pretend to give a damn when they actually don’t. We
will not be fooled, and the American tax-payer, though sympathetic, is already uninterested,
so, it is not really necessary to try to fool him/her.
Video Highlights
A child killed by the shelling in Aleppo City http://youtu.be/R88W7_kYWJ4
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