Revolution, civil war, proxy war --- they are all terms that
denote transformation, heaven knows we needed it. The challenge ahead of us now
is to remain vigilant and to keep learning, not just fighting. For whatever the
immediate outcome of all these goings-on might be, it will not mark the end of
the road, but a solitary milestone telling us what we still need to do to get
where we want.
Thursday January
3, 2013
Today’s
Death Toll: 170, including
14 children and 10 women:, 74 martyrs were reported in Damascus and its Suburbs
(20 of them in Douma), 26 martyrs in Idlib (7 of them in Qmeinas), 21 martyrs
in Aleppo, 16 martyrs in Daraa, 12 martyrs in Homs, 10 martyrs in Deir Ezzor, 7
martyrs in Hama and 6 martyrs in Raqqa.
Points
of Random Shelling: 303: 21 points were shelled by warplane, 5 points by barrel bombs, 3
points by Thermobaric bombs and 2 points by Cluster bombs. The mortar shelling
was reported in 115 points, the artillery shelling in 126 points and the
missile shelling in 30 points (LCCs).
Clashes: FSA rebels clashed with the
regime forces in 143 locations and downed 4 warplanes today: 2 fighter
jets in Aleppo Suburbs, 1 MiG in Deir Ezzor and 1 Helicopter in Taftanaz. The
FSA gained control of 70% of Taftanaz Military Airport and killed the leader of
the airport and the leader of communications. In Jabal Al-Zawiya, FSA rebels liberated
Baidar checkpoint in the town of Rami and captured all the vehicles and
ammunitions, they also gained control of Madjana Haboush checkpoint. In Zakiya
in Damascus Suburbs, the FSA forced the Air Defense Battalion belonging to the
regime forces to retreat from Abassiya area completely, and blocked at attempt
by the regime forces to storm Dariya from the southern side. In Raqqa the FSA
was able to control the Safeeh Oil Field arresting 15 soldiers and 2 officers
in the process. FSA rebels also tried but failed to down a warplane that was
shelling the area (LCCs).
News
Special
Reports
Where are the demonstrations? The
shocking disclosure that Syria’s civil war has claimed at least 60,000 lives
has brought precious little reaction. To place this in context, President
Bashar al-Assad’s murderous struggle to keep his stranglehold on power has now
killed more people than any of the Arab-Israeli wars. Not one of those
conflicts, going back to and including 1948, was remotely as bloody as the
conflagration in Syria. The nearest comparison is the Six Day War of 1967,
which killed 23,500 Arabs and 1,000 Israelis – barely a third of the death toll
in today’s Syria.
Those grim assessments by U.N.
officials are clearly intended to spur international stakeholders to act more
urgently to end the conflict.
Rami Jarrah, a Syrian anti-regime
activist now living in Cairo, is launching Syria's first non-state-run news
outlet to provide something he sees as sorely missing: objective reporting.
The Benetech report is only a
reflection of available data -- not a projection, estimate or demographic
study. But there is information in the actual dataset itself that points
towards a higher -- and maybe even much higher -- number of dead.
Though the
humanitarian stakes are high, the European Union (France at the forefront) and
the U.S. have chosen their allies and continue to defend geostrategic and
economic interests by pushing for the fall of the Syrian regime. To pursue this
objective, the political discourse is idealistic and focuses on the massacres
and humanitarian issues while national interests are real, but not mentioned.
However, from a
realistic point of view, the conflict can be viewed as a broader struggle
between mainly Russia and Western countries which attempt to advance their
national interests. For the West these interests are isolating Iran and
bolstering the strategic and economic alliance with Arab allies like Qatar,
which invests in Europe and offers an alternative to Russian gas.
This is an excellent analysis of why the conflict in Syria metastasized
into a proxy war pitting Russia and Iran on one side, and U.S. and Europe on the
other. By now, the reality of this development and the factors contributing to
it are simply hard to deny.
Some would even like to argue that the entire conflict in Syria, not to
mention the entire Arab Spring phenomenon, were indeed instigated as a
reflection of an ongoing geopolitical alignment seeking to isolate Iran, support
Gulf allies, and secure future natural gas pipelines. The problem with such analysis
is that it simply ignores the genuine democratic aspirations involved on part
of revolutionaries and the objective factors that paved the way to the
revolutions: authoritarianism, corruption, the youth bulge, and the breakdown
of the middle class as a result of introduction of neoliberal economic policies
coupled with lack social safety nets and lack of economic opportunity. The Arab
Spring and the Syrian Revolution are genuine indigenous phenomena which are now
being coopted by a combination of external and domestic players with their own particular
agendas. In Syria, the situation has indeed (d)evolved into a proxy war pitting
Russia and Iran against the United States and Europe, involving the issues highlighted
earlier.
Another thing we should bear in mind while reading this article is that
the author, Milad Jokar, had previously made a similar
argument and reached a conclusion that was a bit too facile in my view.
Earlier this
summer, Vali Nasr, former special adviser to the White House and now Dean of
the SAIS of Johns Hopkins University explained on Australia Network News that
"the rebels are not democrats, they are too fractured. This is an uprising
that is becoming increasingly bloody. It is now essentially a sectarian war
between a minority Alawite regime and its Christian and Kurdish allies, and the
majority Sunnis".
Nasr already argued
that the conflict "is no longer about democracy, and a liberal democracy does
not emerge in these kinds of circumstances of violence and fratricide."
He compares a
possible fall of Assad to the situation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam
Hussein in 2005 where "very quickly al Qaeda began to recruit among Iraqis
and then sent Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians to come to Iraq to serve as suicide
bombers and take over territories and confront U.S. forces and they became a
major muscle within the insurgency".
Today, we can
clearly see this picture in Syria and the current situation confirms the words
of Nasr, who warned months ago, "the more the control of the Assad regime
erodes, the more you are going to have opportunities in which varieties of
forms of illegal activities, from drug lords to criminal to mafia types and to
al Qaeda, begin to finding the ability to taking over towns, villages and
neighborhoods to operate at will because there is not going to be any police or
military to push them out."
What is happening
in Syria is no longer about a democratic movement against a dictatorship, nor
is it simply a civil war between two camps. Syria has become the theater of a
proxy war which is spilling over to its neighbors. Consequently, to focus only
on the departure of President Bashar al Assad is a strategy doomed to failure
because it will not solve the conflict. The crisis is spreading far beyond the
person of Bashar al Assad. Demanding the departure of the dictator can only be
viewed as an attempt to advance the West's geostrategic and economic interests,
namely isolating Iran, securing Western energy supply policies and competing
with Russia, and bolstering Arab Gulf allies; what it will not achieve is a
lasting ceasefire to stop the bloodshed and a transition to a brighter
political future for the Syrian people.
The last paragraph in particular is quite telling: Assad’s departure
serves the West’s interests and is not conducive to a lasting ceasefire or a
transition to democracy.
By the same logic, however, we can argue that keeping Assad serves
Russia’s interests and is equally unhelpful when it comes to achieving a
lasting ceasefire, or any ceasefire for that matter, not to mention facilitating
transition to democracy. So, the author did not follow his own logic to its own
logical conclusion and was unable to say that irrespective of Assad’s fate, no lasting
ceasefire or a transition towards democracy is likely at this stage, thanks to
this ongoing proxy war. As such, what we have to look forward to in the near
future is civil strife and state failure. Both Russia and the West might be willing
to live with this outcome for a while, albeit, Russia and Iran might be the
ones hurt by it the most. The West might end up wiggling out a victory of some
sorts in time, at which point we have to hope that the state can still be put
back together, a development that cannot logically happen with Assad and his
top aides on board. We simply cannot ignore the element of psychopathy involved
in their case. But this development cannot happen unless a highly decentralized
vision for administering the country is adopted by all parties. It’s this
decentralized vision that might give minority groups a way to decouple
themselves from Assad without fearing for their existence.
Be that as it may, the final outcome relies heavily on the nature of
unfolding developments on the ground. Surprises can still happen that could
twist things around.
Video Highlights
Many activists on the ground are still confusing incendiary cluster
bombs with white phosphorous bombs, I did for a while as well. But experts who
reviewed this video among others have confirmed that these are white incendiary
cluster bombs, treatment for wounds resulting from such bombs is quite
different from those resulting from use of white phosphorous. We have alerted
many activists to this, and we hope to mount an awareness raising campaign in
this regard as well, not that treatment is readily available. This video was
taking in Jobar, Homs City where pro-Assad militias have intensified
their attacks on restive neighborhood in order to drive out rebels and take
full control of the city http://youtu.be/rWWeO4ewnts
Nearby village of Eastern Bouaydah was also pounded with cluster bombs http://youtu.be/SqQ1bb6zFKI
A leaked video shows loyalist militias abusing the dead bodies of
rebels http://youtu.be/Qa2WuMQTp7c
This video reportage by Al-Arabiya shows how Syrian regime media
fabricate lies about the rebels. In this part of this video, we see a girl with
her face blurred claiming that she has been kidnapped and raped by rebels in
the Damascene suburb of Harasta. In the second part, we see clips
smuggled by a defector showing the same girl as she rehearsed her parts,
giggling, making mistakes and is being corrected by her handlers http://youtu.be/zlyUTBtRq_8
Scud missiles are now being used more regularly in pounding rebel
strongholds. This particular missile was fired from Al-Hisheh military
base near Tartous City, the target: the Hama countryside http://youtu.be/C69xUPCcQOg
Shelling leaves many dead in Eastern Ghouta, Damascus Suburbs,
especially in Douma http://youtu.be/VcRr-1ofV4c
, http://youtu.be/qLUmdfFfabY A
martyred child http://youtu.be/7qu2wMQIInY
Arbeen http://youtu.be/6ZDv-lAZVNE
Putting out a fire http://youtu.be/i6-k2RdoM1s
And the pounding continued: Hamouriyeh http://youtu.be/eu-Jfne3Mdk , http://youtu.be/QtxF15DSjP8 , http://youtu.be/AUGyf012otk Saqba
http://youtu.be/nwg4zlpQLVo
In Idlib, the shelling of the town of Qmeinas left many dead http://youtu.be/RBslSnKe7jY
Rebels laying siege to Manag Airport, Aleppo http://youtu.be/fuUyvqGndx0 , http://youtu.be/8zAh1uJTeIA , http://youtu.be/rWV4quacW-Y
Clashes in Aleppo City http://youtu.be/Yy9F4mmFdZc
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