Read this.
At least Putin has his head screwed on properly and has picked the phone up to TRY and do something more than a soundbite & a drone strike.
There is only one solution. Obliterate ISIS, Allow Bashar to TRANSITION Syria (under strict supervision) before going all “he’s a very very bad boy” at him
I think it’s about time a call to arms like this is issued, (although surprising that the Indy would print an Evening Standard opinion piece…).
We have to collaborate, and eradicate, and it has to be now.
Originally posted by @Chertsey-Saint
I’m interested in the way these people think and act, their interaction with others and whether these people are ‘evil’ in the way they would live there life if this opportunity wasn’t there for them.
Try Jon Ronson’s “Them: adventures with extremists”. It’s a very entertaining read, covering Jihadists, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. So a kind of survival guide for posting on Saints-related threads as well.
Some of you may remember that our Dubai Massive ctually has a Damascus Saint (DS). A friend of many years standing. He still has family in Damascus. I need to have a late night and a lot of beer one evening and post a lengthy ramble about pre-revolution Syria and Bashar. (It is never going to be a defence of him, but in all of the articles we read, DS made an incredibly valid point down the pub last night - Why has nobody ever asked WHY Bashar ruled the way he did?)
So I have a bit more insight but it needs to be a ramble. Suffice to say, life in Damascus is pretty much “normal” DS is heading there next week for a few days with his family. The bar with the Topless Russian Dancers is still open and if anything, the price of a bottle of Johnny Walker has come down since the troubles began…
Which begs the very big question that again has not been asked. 80% of the refugees are from Alleppo Palmyra Homs Hamas and the countryside. What is their background and what are their beliefs.? It won’t cheer anyone up that is for sure.
So will chunder the stories out over the weekend.
On the subject of that piece in the Independent. There won’t be any Arab Troops joining the anti-ISIS coalition (yet). In reality we will be at all out war in Yemen within days as they advance on Sa’naa. They don’t have enough troops to fight on 2 fronts and their Air assets are already stretched very thin supporting the Jordanian airstrikes in Syria & Iraq. (Pakistan already turned down requests for help in Yemen)
Originally posted by @Dubai_Phil
Which begs the very big question that again has not been asked. 80% of the refugees are from Alleppo Palmyra Homs Hamas and the countryside. What is their background and what are their beliefs.? It won’t cheer anyone up that is for sure.
I’ve been to all of those places except, regrettably, Palmyra, and I’m puzzled by your comment. Why is there anything in any of them that “won’t cheer anyone up.”
Hama is the only city among those you list with anything resembling an Islamist past. It was the location in 1982 of a brutal massacre, when Assad senior ordered the murder of pretty much anything that moved in the city. The famous Hama water wheels were churning up human remains for weeks afterwards.
At least 20,000 died. And after they died, Assad decided to humilate their families further by dumping most of the bodies into a single mass grave and building a luxury hotel, the Sham Palace, on top of them. (I know this because I stayed there and had to ask the locals why it was so deserted.)
The idea that Aleppo was some sort of hotbed of fanatics simply isn’t true.
On the question of why, Assad junior, like a lot of dictators, is to some extent a prisoner of the apparatus he inherited from his father. The brutalism of the Assads has always been made effective by devolving violence - allowing henchmen at various levels of command, and regionally, to torture and kill at will, so long as it’s in Assad’s name. This is why the Syrian version of the Arab Spring happened (you need to trace events back to a bunch of schoolchildren in Dera’a to figure this out - what was done to those kids would start a revolution anywhere).
There is no negotiating to be done with Assad. He is ISIS only without the videos (he has the videos - I’ve seen some - but they don’t get the YouTube singing and dancing that ISIS seem to revel in). He is in any case more likely to be deposed from within, and those are the people with whom negotiations should happen to dismantle the Assad state apparatus.
The Syrian Commando blog is well worth a look. He’s no fan of Assad himself, but thinks the forces arrayed his country are even more sinister. Updated until 2013, he’s still got a Twitter account that was active until March this year.
Actually he is a fan of Assad, despite his protestations. And Putin - and against the worldwide “zionist media” attack on Syria.
Great points, very well aritculated [sic].
Just a quick point furball.
The reunification of Syria needs Bashar to work with whoever is unifying the nation. He still controls major armed forces.
This “Cannot be part of the negotiation” is why there won’t be a Western led solution. The negotiation has to be HIS LIFE and retirement plan. We don’t need to accomodate him, but at this point in time he has ONLY one way out - keep fighting and try to retake control himself.
With Bashar the armed forces in Syria can come under coalition control, it will buy time to allow Ministries to change ownership and a Police force to be “re-educated”.
Take him out then the armed forces simply fracture into even more complex “tribal” or geographic/religious factions.
In Iraq & Libya bombing the leadership & institutions to submission simply hasn’t worked, even Egypt nearly sleep walked into an extremist disaster.
Bashar currently has the choice of only fighting - he needs an exit. “Morally” nobody likes that because he is a “Bad Person”
(Didn’t say Alleppo was a hotbed of extremism by the way)
I’m not saying don’t talk to him, Phil. And I’d certainly support his being present at any international conference to bring this all to an end. But ultimately Assad is a pariah. There’s a small chance Russia will offer him sanctuary. But there will be colossal international pressure to get this guy to the International Criminal Court.
My point really was that before any such conference happened, it’s far more likely that Assad will be forced out by factions within the regime. The Syrian military is in retreat on all fronts. It doesn’t even control the borders of its own capital. There have been rumblings in the recent past of interventions from within, and with the options for clinging on reducing to, basically, one, something is going to give. That one option is that with Assad gone, those controlling what remains have a chance of a negotiated settlement in which they remain in some form. (We’ve seen in Iraq what happens when the military is simply disbanded, and we’ve seen in Egypt what happens when it’s left completely intact, so the international community needs to find a workable middle way.)
I think the idea that with Assad gone the military would dissolve into faction fighting is mistaken; Assad has never had the kind of control you think he has over that apparatus. That is, it’s not “total”, but mediated by all kinds of criss-crossing alliances.
The stumbling block in all this is, as it always has been, that the secular Syrian opposition has no coherent political leadership. The Islamists have leaders, but not the sort you’d want anywhere near the negotiating table. So the answer has to be a negotiation between ethnic and national blocs: the Kurds, Alawites, secularised Sunnis (of which there are many in Syria, although bombed to hell by both Assad and ISIS), and so on.
But if Assad is at that conference, it should conclude with his being led to the cells. He’s much more likely in my view, though, to suffer the fate of Mussolini long before that could happen.