Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 165

On November 24 2013 06:12 Derez wrote:

I don't follow your argument. Libya would have been a disaster either way, intervention or no intervention. I prefer this outcome to Gadaffi murdering his way through everyone he thinks opposed him, further expanding his torture/repression state. There are still a ton of problems in Libya, but they went to the polls for a relatively free election for the first time in 40+ years. It'll take another few decades, or however long, before you have a functioning, peaceful democracy, but at least like this they have a shot at actually developing one.

Yes, the situation in Mali was related to the militias leaving Libya (next to other structural problems in mali itself and the region) but that's just a fact of life of living in a world with transnational non-state actors. If islamists are forced to leave a certain region and relocate to another that's not an inherently bad thing, that's just reality. Mali hasn't gotten any worse in recent months either: they signed a long overdue deal with the tuaregs (who have legitimate claims), rolled back islamist gains, have elected a new president after the coup and are electing a new parliament tomorrow.

You can cry over each death and condemn everything standing on the sidelines or you can recognize that progress doesn't come automatically and usually requires violence in authoritarian nations.

Response to edit: Obama's/Bush's/Tony's legitimacy as leaders of a nation was never in question and is derived from the electoral system, where they (and their parties) can be punished for choices made. The fact that at certain points during their tenure the majority of the public didn't like them doesn't affect their legitimacy. I'm also not advocating neo-imperialism, I'm advocating self-determinism (which a relatively well-funded state military can very effectively suppress). What the middle east needs is less rage against 'the west' and more rage against their own shit leaders. The sooner they're overthrown the better. We could have made a difference in Syria, one or two years ago, but now all the options are terrible.

(Reuters) - Islamist rebels led by al Qaeda-linked fighters seized Syria's largest oilfield on Saturday, cutting off President Bashar al-Assad's access to almost all local crude reserves, activists said.

There was no immediate comment from the government and it was not possible to verify the reports of the capture independently.

But the loss of the al-Omar oil field in the eastern Deir al-Zor province, if confirmed, could leave Assad's forces almost completely reliant on imported oil in their highly mechanized military campaign to put down a 2-1/2-year uprising.

"Now, nearly all of Syria's usable oil reserves are in the hands of the Nusra Front and other Islamist units ... The regime's neck is now in Nusra's hands," said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Assad's forces have gained momentum against the rebels in recent months, partially due to support from the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim milita Hezbollah and its regional ally Iran.

In the northern province of Aleppo on Saturday, army air strikes killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens, most of them civilians, the Observatory said.

But opposition fighters, particularly powerful Islamist factions, still hold large swathes of territory in northern and eastern Syria.

Claims are emerging from rebel sources that they have managed to break a small path of the government encirclement of E. Ghouta (the site of the chemical weapons attack) which has been in place for almost a year. These claims have yet to be substantiated. What is clear is that there is very heavy fighting occurring and it's worth a look.

The United Nations said Monday that Syria's government and opposition will hold their first peace talks, in Geneva on Jan. 22, an attempt to halt the nearly three-year-old civil war that has killed over 100,000 people, including 11,000 children. However, many questions still remain about who will attend the conference, being called Geneva 2, and what it may ultimately be able to accomplish.

Previous tries to bring the two sides together failed mainly because of disputes over who should represent the Syrian opposition and government and whether Iran, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers should be at the table. Speaking at a news conference Monday morning, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the conference a "mission of hope."

"The Geneva conference is vehicle for a peaceful transition that fulfills the legitimate aspirations of all the Syrian people," he said.

Ban stressed that those aspirations must include guaranteed "safety and protection to all communities in Syria." He said that "at long last," the Syrian government and the opposition would "meet at the negotiating table instead of the battlefield."

The goal of the conference is to implement the Geneva Communique of June 30, 2012, which provides for the establishment of a transitional governing body with full executive powers, including over military and security entities, based on mutual consent. But there has been no agreement on how to implement that roadmap. One of the biggest sticking points has been the future role of Assad.

BEIRUT -- Rebels on the outskirts of the Syrian capital launched an offensive over the weekend that apparently succeeded in breaking the government siege of several contested villages in a long battle that apparently involved the Lebanese Muslim Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

Three rebel commanders confirmed to McClatchy on Monday that the offensive was ongoing, but each refused to provide details, saying that the newly dominant faction that controls rebel forces around Damascus had put a news blackout in place.

Abu Yaser, a spokesman for Jaysh al Islam, a coalition of Islamist rebel groups, said details of the fight would be made public when the operation was completed.

Photos posted on Facebook and Twitter showed rebels celebrating what appeared to be a series of bloody victories over Hezbollah fighters who’d been supporting the Syrian army in the area. Rebels appeared to be holding prisoners, and some of the photos depicted apparent executions.

Word of the fighting came the same day that the United Nations announced that the United States and Russia had agreed to Jan. 22 as the date for the so-called Geneva 2 peace talks, intended to find a political solution to the civil war.

Since 2011, large numbers of European Muslims have gone to Syria to fight with the rebels. But exactly how many are they, and which countries are providing most of the fighters? The question matters because some of these foreign fighters may return to perpetrate attacks in the West, and Western governments are now grappling with the question of how to design and calibrate countermeasures.

Assessing the terrorist threat to Europe from the foreign fighters in Syria is tricky. On the one hand, as I showed in an earlier study summarized here on the Monkey Cage, foreign fighters are much more likely to engage in international terrorism than the general Muslim population, and they produce more lethal attacks than do plotters without foreign fighting experience. On the other hand, only a small proportion of Western foreign fighters tend to come home to attack. Moreover, the return rate varies considerably between destinations; for example, Western foreign fighters in Pakistan have tended to return for plots more frequently than their counterparts in Somalia.

However, a prerequisite for any threat assessment is a decent estimate of the gross number of departing fighters. Knowing the return rate doesn’t help if we don’t know how many people left in the first place. One estimation strategy consists of collecting all conceivable types of open-source reports of foreign fighter flows, from individual martyrdom notices to aggregate estimates from the United Nations. Aaron Zelin and I have been doing this for the past 15 months, and this work-in-progress has yielded a collection of over 800 data points. This approach has many advantages – which we will highlight in future publications – but it is not ideal for producing comparable country-level estimates, because it includes observations of very different types.

BERLIN – A leading European expert on security and counterterrorism published an analysis on a range of countries that have sent radical Islamic fighters to overthrow the Syrian Regime, on Wednesday.

Thomas Hegghammer, a political scientist with the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, wrote in The Washington Post that “the number of European fighters in Syria may exceed the total number of Muslim foreign fighters from all Western countries to all conflicts between 1990 and 2010 (that the above-mentioned study estimated to just under a thousand). And we are only 2.5 years into the Syrian war.”

Hegghammer uncovered new data about the level of fighters from overlooked European countries such as Austria, Denmark, Belgium and Norway.

“These countries have produced a high number of foreign fighters,” Shiraz Maher, the senior research fellow and head of the outreach at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR) at Kings College London, told The Jerusalem Post in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Maher said the numbers from the smaller European countries were dramatic. He attributed the spike in numbers to the rise of Salafists movements in those countries.

Syria attracts fighters from North Africa who speak the language and know the culture.

Denmark and Belgium, for example, have a high proportion of citizens from North Africa.

He said that many of the British Muslims fighting in Syria are from southeast Asia and do not speak Arabic.

According to Hegghammer’s analysis, between 200 and 400 French Muslims left for Syria.

Tunisia – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has proclaimed that Saudi and other countries’ support for terrorist groups will delay any solution to the crisis. He also said that the Syrian government was advancing on more than one front against terror and the war against Syria, stressing that the government would not go to Geneva if it is expected to hand over power.
Assad’s remarks on the situation in Syria came during a meeting on the sidelines of the Arab Parties Conference held in Syria 10 days ago. Al-Akhbar interviewed a party leader from the Maghreb who took part in the meeting.

In response to a question on what is happening in Syria, Assad said, “We have been subjected to a major war. In the first phase, we had to focus on standing our ground, which is what we did in the first year. Then we moved into the stage of triumphing over the enemies. There are experiences in recent history, including what happened with the Resistance in Lebanon, which stood its ground for many long years, and then achieved major victories in 2000 and 2006. We have known from the outset that the battle targeted our independent decision, but this independent decision was a major factor in our steadfastness and our victory, although we appreciate the support Syria has received from its allies, and some allies have had a pivotal role, such as Russia, which stands on our side because its interests, too, are threatened. I heard directly from the Russian leadership that they stand alongside Syria to defend Moscow and not just Damascus.”

Assad continued, “The time required to end the crisis in Syria depends to a large extent on the ongoing support and funding to armed groups provided by the actors in the region.”

He added, “Saudi Arabia and other countries are strong backers of terrorism. They have dispatched tens of thousands of takfiris to the country, and Saudi Arabia is paying up to $2,000 as a monthly salary to all those who take up arms on their side.”

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s state news agency says clashes between supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad and opponents killed eight people in the northern city of Tripoli over the weekend.

The NNA said Sunday that 60 people were wounded.


Sectarian clashes linked to the war in neighboring Syria often flare between two impoverished rival neighborhoods in the rundown coastal city. The Bab Tabbaneh district is largely Sunni Muslim, as are most of the Syrian rebels fighting Assad’s rule. Residents of Jabal Mohsen are mostly of Assad’s Alawite sect.

Tripoli is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim but the fighting rarely spreads beyond the two neighborhoods.

A Petroleum Ministry official has admitted that attacks on natural gas facilities have caused a substantial loss in daily energy supplies.

The official said insurgents had cut off supply from a natural gas pipeline linking Homs in western Syria to Deir Ez Zor Province in the east.

State news agency SANA said the attack disrupted 194 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Another attack on a natural gas field in Palmyra in central Syria led to the loss of 70 million cubic feet per day.

The Ministry official said the Government had restricted the use of electricity to cope with the ensuing gas shortage.

Last week, insurgents damaged the oil refinery in Homs.

The UN's human rights chief has said an inquiry has produced evidence that war crimes were authorised in Syria at the "highest level", including by President Bashar al-Assad.

It is the first time the UN's human rights office has so directly implicated Mr Assad.

Commissioner Navi Pillay said her office held a list of others implicated by the inquiry.

The UN estimates more than 100,000 people have died in the conflict.

The UN's commission of inquiry into Syria has produced "massive evidence... [of] very serious crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity," Ms Pillay said.

"The scale of viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by elements on both sides almost defies belief," she said.

BEIRUT - A group calling itself "The Free Sunnis of Baalbek Battalion” claimed Wednesday on Twitter responsibility of the assassination of Hezbollah leading member Hajj Hassan Houlo al-Laqis in Beirut’s Hadath.

“The Free Sunnis of Baalbek Battalion officially claims the heroic jihadist operation of assassinating the leading member in the party of the devil [Hezbollah] Hassan Houlo al-Laqis in [Hezbollah’s] home ground,” the group wrote on the social networking site.

“The jihadist operation was implemented by free Sunni lions from Lebanon,” another tweet said.

A leading Hezbollah member was assassinated on Tuesday evening near his house in the Saint Therese area in Hadath, a statement issued by Hezbollah’s press office said.

A security source told NOW that the Hajj Hassan Houlo al-Laqis was killed when unknown gunmen opened fire on him when he was inside his car – a green Jeep Cherokee - in the parking lot near his house.

He added that Laqis was gravely wounded in the attack and was admitted to Al-Rassoul al-Aazam Hospital where he passed away.

Hezbollah’s statement accused Israel of being the main suspect.

On December 05 2013 19:45 zeo wrote:
When I look at all the Syrian refugees coming into Serbia now, most of them fled their country because of the rebels. Its sad when you hear them talk about how they don't want to be moved to refugee centers in cities where there is a muslim majority because they are afraid of muslim extremists. Muslims terrified of muslims...
All you can do is pray Syria doesn't turn itno the hell hole Libya has become.

(Reuters) - A unit of the Russian security forces is training to counter Islamist militants amid fears fighters in Syria will return to join insurgents in the North Caucasus, Chechnya's Kremlin-backed leader said.

The Kremlin fears Russian-born militants will return from Syria to join those who want to carve out an Islamic state in Chechnya and other mostly Muslim provinces in the mountains on Russia's southern fringe.

Officials have said 400 Russians are fighting with al Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria. Experts estimate the numbers are much higher. Some Chechens, veterans of two post-Soviet wars against Russian rule, have emerged as Syrian rebel leaders.

"These bandits post videos daily claiming that after Syria they will migrate to the North Caucasus and engage in terrorist and subversive activities," Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov said in a statement posted on the regional government's website late on Wednesday.