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blaise_glowiak

Al-Qaeda in Syria: Our Focus Is Assad, Not West - NBC News.com - 0 views

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    The leader of al-Nusra Front - the al Qaeda-affiliate group in Syria - insisted on Wednesday that he is under orders from the organization's central leadership not to attack Western interests in Syria, but rather focus on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Golani said "all options are open," for an attack on the West if his group felt compelled to act in self-defense, but he insisted that Nusra is focused on battling the Assad regime inside Syria. Golani also issued a threat to the Shia Alawite community of Syria, saying, "if the Alawites disowned Bashar al Assad, stopped supporting his regime, and if they stopped practicing their erroneous doctrine, we would forgive them." Assad himself is Alawite.
Maria Delzi

Once-wealthy Syrian doctor works in exile to treat refugees, dreams of healing his coun... - 0 views

  • REYHANLI, Turkey — When the wounded arrived at the Red Crescent hospital in Idlib at the start of the Syrian uprising — opponents of President Bashar al-Assad who had been shot or beaten by government troops — military police ordered the doctors to just let them die.
  • Ammar Martini and his colleagues refused.
  • “This I could not do,” said Martini, a successful surgeon from an affluent family. “I treat all people, of any origin. They are human, and I am a doctor.”
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  • “They beat me. They did terrifying things,” he said quietly in a recent interview. “I don’t want to remember that day.”
  • Martini is, in some ways, typical: mostly apolitical but firmly opposed to Assad’s regime and to the Islamist groups that are vying with other armed opposition groups for control of rebel-held areas.
  • Now, he lives alone in makeshift quarters in the offices of the aid organization he helped found in this Turkish border town. He heads the group’s relief operations in northern Syria and the Turkish border regions, overseeing the delivery of medical care to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.
  • Martini is deeply skeptical of peace talks scheduled for this month in Geneva, which are supposed to facilitate negotiations between Assad’s government and rebel groups.
  • “We must keep working. Whether the time is long or short, this regime will fall,” Martini said. “Then we must rebuild our country.”
  • . Then he crossed the border into Jordan, which aid agencies say shelters more than 563,000 refugees.
  • When he left Syria, Martini said, he lost everything. The government seized all nine of his houses, along with his bank accounts, a clinical laboratory and 2,000 olive trees. The loss of the olive grove seems to have stung particularly; Idlib is known for its production of the bitter fruit.
  • In Jordan, the doctor briefly treated patients in the Zaatari refugee camp. Then he fled the difficult conditions to join his wife and youngest child in the United Arab Emirates. His older children escaped Syria, too, and are studying medicine in the United States.
  • At first, the effort paid for treatment for Syrians in Turkish hospitals. Operations were soon expanded to include the building of a 144-bed medical unit in the city of Antakya, near the Syrian border. Then hostility from Antakya’s Alawites — many of whom support Assad, who is also Alawite — prompted Orient to move the facility to Reyhanli. Alawites are members of a Shiite-affiliated sect.
  • Orient’s medical ventures expanded into rebel-held areas of Syria, where it now runs 12 hospitals and several rehabilitation centers and employs more than 400 doctors. Facilities in Turkey include a day clinic, a school for displaced Syrians and a sewing workshop that trains and provides work for many Syrian women.
  • It is an unusual arrangement for an organization of Orient Humanitarian Relief’s size — staff members said Orient programs and facilities helped nearly 400,000 people last year. But the setup offers a strategic advantage. A member of an aid organization working with Orient said it is able to move faster than any of its peers, making quick decisions unhampered by complicated bureaucracies and approval processes.
  • The many doctors and surgeons in the Martini clan are scattered across Europe and the United States. One uncle founded Martini Hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where fighting between rebels and government forces has been sustained and brutal. Ammar Martini worked at that hospital, now heavily damaged, for 10 years.
  • When his father died recently in Syria, Martini was not able to return home to attend the funeral.
Javier E

Syria, Obama and Putin - The New York Times - 0 views

  • today’s reigning cliché is that the wily fox, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has once again outmaneuvered the flat-footed Americans, by deploying some troops, planes and tanks to Syria to buttress the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and to fight the Islamic State forces threatening him. If only we had a president who was so daring, so tough, so smart.
  • The Sunni Muslims are the vast majority in Syria. They are the dominant sect in the Arab world. Putin and Russia would be seen as going all-in to protect Assad, a pro-Iranian, Alawite/Shiite genocidal war criminal. Putin would alienate the entire Sunni Muslim world, including Russian Muslims.
  • The only way Putin can get down from that tree is with our help in forging a political solution in Syria. And that only happens if the Russians and the Iranians force Assad — after a transition — to step down and leave the country, in return for the opposition agreeing to protect the basic safety and interests of Assad’s Alawite community, and both sides welcoming an international force on the ground to guarantee the deal.
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  • let’s say by some miracle the Russians defeat ISIS. The only way to keep them defeated is by replacing them with moderate Sunnis. Which moderate Sunnis are going to align with Russia
  • But to get there we need to size our rhetoric with our interests in Syria as well. Our interests right now are to eliminate or contain the two biggest metastasizing threats: ISIS — whose growth can threaten the islands of decency in the region like Lebanon, the Kurds and Jordan — and the tragedy of Syrian refugees
  • If we want something better — multisectarian democracy in Syria soon — we would have to go in and build it ourselves. The notion that it would only take arming more Syrian moderates is insane.
  • Why do we have to search for moderates like a man with a dowsing rod looking for water, and then train them, while no one has to train the jihadists, who flock there? It’s because the jihadists are in the grip of ideals, albeit warped ones. There is no critical mass of Syrian moderates in the grip of ideals; they will fight for their own homes and families, but not for an abstract ideal like democracy. We try to make up for that with military “training,” but it never works.
  • Everyone wants an immaculate intervention in Syria, one where you look like you’re doing something, but without the political cost of putting troops on the ground or having to make unpleasant compromises with unsavory people. There is no such option.
Ellie McGinnis

Same War, Different Country - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Libya — the last country we bombed because its leader crossed a red line or was about to
  • worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Qaddafi
  • example of a successful foreign military intervention, which should be repeated in Syria
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  • Iraq was the bad war and Libya was the good war and Afghanistan was the necessary war and Bosnia was the moral war and Syria is now another necessary war.
  • They are all the same war.
  • multisectarian societies, most of them Muslim or Arab, are held together for decades by dictators ruling vertically, from the top down
  • how the people in these countries respond to the fact that with the dictator gone they can only be governed horizontally
  • own social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens
  • without falling into Hobbes or Khomeini.
  • Saddam to Jefferson
  • “the army of the center.”
  • Iraq, we toppled the dictator and then, after making every mistake in the book, we got the parties to write a new social contract
  • “army of the center.”
  • Ditto Afghanistan.
  • Libya: No boots on the ground. So we decapitated that dictator from the air.
  • both will be uphill fights.
  • For any chance of a multisectarian democratic outcome in Syria, you need to win two wars on the ground: one against the ruling Assad-Alawite-Iranian-Hezbollah-Shiite alliance; and, once that one is over, you’d have to defeat the Sunni Islamists and pro-Al Qaeda jihadists.
  • Hobbes took hold before Jefferson.
  • The center exists
  • weak and unorganized
  • pluralistic societies
  • lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism
  • tolerance, cooperation and compromise
  • pluralistic society but lack pluralism
  • not without an army of the center to protect everyone from everyone.
  • not just poison gas, but poisoned hearts
  • self-governing, largely homogeneous, ethnic and religious units, like Kurdistan
  • modus vivendi, as happened in Lebanon after 14 years of civil war
  • smaller units will voluntarily come together into larger, more functional states.
  • “arm and shame,”
  • spare me the lecture that America’s credibility is at stake here. Really?
  • Their civilization has missed every big modern global trend
  • learning to tolerate “the other.” That struggle has to happen in the Arab/Muslim world
  • quality of local leadership and the degree of tolerance
julia rhodes

Beyond Camps, Aiding Syrians Is Even Harder - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The family did not consider staying in Zaatari, which, as the refugees agency itself has acknowledged, is lawless in many ways, with criminal and rebel groups operating beyond the control of agency officials.
  • As the United Nations and regional governments work on the assumption that Syria’s civil war will last years and are ready to open new camps or expand existing ones, many worry that the worst camps are becoming incubators of despair and Islamic extremism. “If I were in Zaatari, I’d become a jihadist,” said Hassan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian expert on Salafist jihadism.
  • Tightly controlled by the Turkish government, which backs the rebel movement against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, they effectively serve as rear bases for Syrian rebels and have few, if any, Alawites, members of the Shiite offshoot who tend to support Mr. Assad.
Alex Trudel

IDF: Arab-Israeli paraglides to Syria from Golan - CNN.com - 0 views

  • "Yesterday, an Israeli citizen crossed our borders in order to join enemy groups in Syria. We will work to revoke his citizenship. Whoever joins enemy groups in order to fight against us will not be an Israeli citizen
  • The Golan Heights is regarded internationally as occupied territory despite Israeli annexation. It is home to 41,000 residents, including Jews, Druze and Alawites.
  • Israel captured the territory from Syria during the 1967 Israel-Arab war, and it was eventually annexed.
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  • An Arab-Israeli man was spotted paragliding across the Golan Heights border into Syria by an Israeli Defense Force watchtower Saturday afternoon, according to a statement posted on an official IDF Twitter account.
  • "We believe he planned this move to the other side, and joined a group there," Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz told reporters during a conference call, the Post reported.
sarahbalick

Syria conflict: Iran to attend talks in Vienna - BBC News - 0 views

  • Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will attend multilateral talks on finding a political solution to the conflict in Syria in Vienna this week, a government spokeswoman has said.
  • Meanwhile, Russia said its aircraft had struck 118 "terrorist" targets in Syria over a 24-hour period - a new record - as a result of what its defence ministry said was new intelligence.
  • For some time, Iran has been pushing a four-point plan for Syria that calls for a ceasefire, followed by the formation of a national unity government, constitutional reforms and, finally, free elections. The plan could now, conceivably, be used as a basis for further discussions.
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  • Many in the region see the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia as being at the heart of the deepening conflicts in the Middle East.
  • owever, Syria's political opposition has warned that Iran's involvement will only complicate the meeting in Vienna.Both Iran and Russia - another ally of President Assad - have recently stepped up their military role in the Syrian conflict.
  • More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed and a million injured. Some 11 million others have been forced from their homes, of whom four million have fled abroad - including growing numbers who are making the dangerous journey to Europe.
  • The US has indicated it could only tolerate President Assad during a short transition period, after which he should step down.
  • Government forces concentrated in Damascus and the centre and west of Syria are fighting the jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, as well as less numerous so-called "moderate" rebel groups, who are strongest in the north and east. These groups are also battling each other
  • Despite that, unconfirmed reports earlier this month said that hundreds of Iranian troops had arrived in Syria.
  • Iran, Russia and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement are propping up the Alawite-led Assad government, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar back the more moderate Sunni-dominated opposition, along with the US, UK and France. Hezbollah and Iran are believed to have troops and officers on the ground, while a Western-led coalition and Russia are carrying out air strikes.
alexdeltufo

Syria will join peace talks, but wants to know what 'terrorists' will be there - LA Times - 0 views

  • he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month
  • “terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.
  • The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The
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  • credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance,” constitutional reform and U.N.-supervised elections within 18 months
  • parties will participate in the conference, while excluding those deemed as terrorist organizations 
  • “terrorists” and “mercenaries,” as well as the sectarian nature of many rebel factions on the ground.
  • use of shelling and aerial bombardment against civilians, safe and voluntary refugee transfer, and unfettered access for humanitarian agencies to besieged areas of Syria.
  • “useful” and that he is “looking forward to the active participation of relevant parties in the Geneva talks.”
  • “From the government’s point of view, they’re not keen on negotiations anyway,” Rabbani said.
  • The talks face another stumbling block in soaring tensions between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia,
  • Previous attempts at jump-starting peace talks have failed because of what was viewed as the government's intransigence regarding rebel participation.
  • Last week, Saudi Arabia executed an influential Shiite cleric, enraging Iran and leading to a cutoff of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
  • an has similarly called for calm, while diplomatic efforts from Iraq and Oman continue to encourage a reconciliation between the two countries
  • Iran’s Shiite leadership has backed Assad, a member of the Alawite sect that is related to Shia Islam.
  • don’t at all see that the proposed date is a realistic one, especially since on the ground there were no confidence-building measures,”
  • He cited the situation in Madaya, a town with an estimated population of 40,000 located 25 miles northwest of Damascus that has been besieged by pro-government forces since July.
  • “The issue of Madaya has become a key point. The Syrian cannot go to negotiations while Syrians are dying of hunger and cold,”
  • the Syrian government said it would allow aid to enter Madaya in the coming week.
  • In recent days, Madaya has become a media battleground for the warring parties in Syria.
  • he furor also has affected the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, an ally of the Assad government, which is accused of perpetrating what Madaya residents have described as a nightmare
  • Hateet also accused rebel fighters bunkered inside Madaya of holding civilians hostage, barring their exit from the town.
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