Stunning documentary on the 1984 UK Miners Strike where international capital used Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government to mount a vicious campaign of violence and hatred on the British working class. The film features the miners and their families experiences told through songs, poems and other art.
Thank you Pulse
Nir Rosen reports from Syria
Syria’s Alawite heartland is defined by its funerals. In Qirdaha in the mountainous Latakia province, hometown of the Assad dynasty, I watched as two police motorcycles drove up the hill, pictures of Bashar mounted on their windshields. An ambulance followed, carrying the body of a dead lieutenant colonel from state security. As the convoy passed, the men around me let off bursts of automatic fire. My local guides were embarrassed that I had seen this display, and claimed it was the first time it had happened. ‘He is a martyr, so it is considered a wedding.’ Schoolchildren and teachers lining the route threw rice and flower petals. ‘There is no god but God and the martyr is the beloved of God!’ they chanted. Hundreds of mourners in black walked up through the village streets to the local shrine. ‘Welcome, oh martyr,’ they shouted. ‘We want no one but Assad!’
It was April, my sixth month travelling through Syria. After I left I heard of another funeral not far away, in the village of Ras al-Ayn, near the coast. A village of seven thousand people now had seven martyrs from the security forces, six missing or captured and many wounded. ‘Every day we have martyrs,’ an officer said. ‘It’s all a sacrifice for the nation.’ Another talked about ‘their’ crimes, and said ‘they’ had killed the soldier because he was an Alawite. One of my guides berated him for speaking of the conflict in sectarian terms in front of me. ‘The opposition have left us no choice,’ another soldier said. ‘They accept nothing but killing.’
Alawites – the heterodox Shia sect to which the Assads belong and which remains most loyal to the president and his government – make up about 10 per cent of the population. Most Syrians – about 65 per cent – are Sunni Arabs. The Alawites are one of several minorities, along with Sunni Kurds and Christians, the Druze, non-Alawite Shi’ites and Ismailis. But they have always been seen as a special case. Few Alawites are familiar with the tenets of Alawite faith: they are known by initiates only. But belief in the transmigration of the soul, reincarnation and the divinity of the Prophet’s cousin Ali – in a trinity comprising Ali, Muhammad and one of his companions, Salman al Farisi – puts Alawites at a remove from mainstream Islam. For most Alawites, religion is less a rigorous faith than an expression of their culture.
Alawite identity turns on a minority complex and fear of Sunni domination. Alawites like to rehearse the story of their oppression. ‘The lot of the Alawis was never enviable,’ the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu wrote. ‘Under the Ottomans they were abused, reviled and ground down by exactions and, on occasion, their women and children led into captivity and disposed of by sale.’ They were practically serfs to the Sunni feudal lords put in place by the Ottomans. It was only when the French mandate began in 1920 that the traditional Sunni elite was eroded and minorities, Alawites among them, began to enjoy a measure of social mobility. The Alawites pleaded in vain with the French to grant them a separate state that would protect them from a Sunni ascendancy.
To Alawites, the pan-Arab doctrine of the Ba’ath Party, which took power in a coup in 1963, was a way to transcend sectarian identity. The army and the civil service gave them a way out of their impoverished villages. Soon all kinds of people with rural backgrounds, but Alawites especially, began to dominate the non-commissioned officer corps and the military academies. In 1971 Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite and a former commander of the air force, now the minister of defence, led a coup against a Ba’athist rival. When Hafez died in 2000, after thirty years in power, his son Bashar took over. In that time Alawites had gone from marginalised minority to protégés of the state, and the state in turn became the bulwark of Alawite identity. ‘Working for cohesion at the present juncture is the strong fear among Alawis of every rank that dire consequences for all Alawis could ensue from an overthrow or collapse of the existing regime,’ Batatu wrote in 1981.
Historically, Alawites stood so far at the margins of Islam that Assad the elder had to ‘Islamise’ them in order to be accepted as the ruler of Syria by its Sunni majority. Alawites regard themselves as more ‘liberal’ and secular than mainstream Muslims. They point to their use of alcohol, the Western dress codes of Alawite women and their freer interaction with men. Sometimes they disparage the more conservative Sunnis. They remember the Muslim Brotherhood uprising of the 1980s as a time of sectarian violence in which the regime crushed terrorists; Sunnis think of it as a time of regime brutality during which they were collectively targeted. These days it’s hard to find a Sunni member of the opposition who didn’t lose an uncle or have a father or grandfather imprisoned in the crackdown that followed. The opposition has said nothing about what would or should be done with the hundreds of thousands of men in the security forces if the present regime falls. Alawites believe they have reason to be afraid.
In the coastal province of Tartus and other parts of the Alawite heartland, countless new loyalist checkpoints have been set up, manned by the Syrian Army or by paramilitary members of popular committees in a mix of civilian clothes and military gear. The countryside has armed itself. In May I visited the mountain town of Sheikh Badr in Tartus province. Forty-three townsmen in the security forces had been killed; seven others had been captured or were missing. While I was in the mayor’s office he received news that a wounded soldier had just been brought in. Sheikh Badr’s first martyr was killed in Daraa in April 2011, one month into the uprising. Its most recent, a colonel killed in Damascus, was buried two days before I visited.
The town is known for its shrine to Sheikh Saleh al-Ali, an anti-colonial figure who fought the French. ‘In a famous speech he rejected the idea of an independent Alawite state because he loved the country,’ the mayor said, reciting part of the speech to me from memory while Abu Haidar, a local security man, listened on. ‘We don’t believe in Hafez al-Assad because he was Alawite but because he was great patriot,’ the security man said. ‘Can any regime rule for forty years without the consent of its people?’ The mayor struggled when I asked him how he would respond to a new president ruling Syria. Like most Alawites I met he couldn’t imagine a government without an Assad. One of the men with him wondered why – in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – the West was supporting Islamists rather than ‘the more secular and advanced movements’. The mayor, like many regime supporters, believed there was an Islamist conspiracy in the region. To him, the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were not a spontaneous eruption of popular protest but an organised conspiracy connecting the US, the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab Gulf countries. ‘This is not a popular movement, this is a Salafi movement,’ one of the men said. ‘What did the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt achieve?’ Abu Haidar asked. The rise to power of Islamists in those three countries made government supporters even more uncomfortable at the prospect of regime change.
I asked the security men why Bashar had only started his (timid) reforms after the protests in Syria began in March 2011. Abu Haidar answered as regime supporters always do that events in 2003 (the invasion of Iraq), 2005 (the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon), 2006 (Israel’s war on Lebanon), 2008 (internal fighting in Lebanon) ‘prevented us from having the freedom to reform’. I asked them if security forces had shot at unarmed demonstrators. They all said no and insisted that the regime had prohibited the use of weapons against protesters. I knew this to be false. In six months in Syria I had been at more than a hundred opposition demonstrations. I had been shot at in many of them. Once a young man standing beside me who had thrown a rock was shot in the abdomen and killed.
To travel safely through Alawite areas I hired an off-duty state security sergeant called Abu Laith. He was from Rabia, a town in the Hama countryside. In the year I had known him he seemed never to eat but smoked nargileh pipes every chance he had; he was constantly on the phone arranging deals for his second job as a cigarette smuggler. His salary was 17,000 liras a month, about £160. ‘We don’t have connections in the state,’ he told me, and therefore can’t get civil service jobs: ‘we cannot find employment except in the army or security.’ By selling smuggled cigarette cartons he could make an extra 1000 to 1500 liras a day. Several of his brothers were in the army or police. As we drove through areas he didn’t know he would ask people how to avoid Sunni towns. In some areas locals had plotted circuitous routes through Alawite and Christian towns, with arrows spraypainted on walls in one village pointing to the next so that bus drivers and others could avoid opposition strongholds. When we came close to Sunni areas Abu Laith loaded his Makarov pistol. ‘So I won’t go cheaply,’ he explained. ‘The most important thing is you don’t go cheaply.’ He told me that about a hundred men from his regional security force had been killed and two hundred injured. Five of his cousins had been killed.
Most of Rabia’s men serve in the army or security forces elsewhere in the country. Many live in military housing complexes or have settled in the working-class Alawite neighbourhoods of greater Damascus. Qudsaya, a Sunni suburb of Damascus, has two Alawite areas, one called Wurud and the other named after the Republican Guard, whose soldiers were given housing there. Both areas border working-class Sunni neighbourhoods, and since the uprising began there have been clashes between communities. Many of the buildings in Wurud were hastily and illegally constructed on state land. The authorities turn a blind eye to these informal settlements because the residents are pillars of the security forces. Here, as in the villages most of them came from, few roads are paved and services are poor. But despite the neglect they remain stalwart regime supporters, its praetorian guard on the streets. The security men who showed me round stressed the poverty of the area to prove that Alawites don’t benefit from the regime. ‘We never asked for anything, we don’t want anything, we just want security.’
When Abu Laith took me to Rabia itself, news of our arrival spread quickly. Thousands of residents staged a seemingly spontaneous but clearly sincere demonstration in support of the regime in the centre of town, next to a statue of Hafez al-Assad holding an olive branch and a sword. The statue, paid for by locals, was erected after the uprising started. Behind it was a massive poster with a picture of Hafez and Bashar. On it was written ‘Rabia is the lion’s den,’ a play on the word assad, which means ‘lion’. I was dragged from house to house so people could speak of their dead and wounded relatives, and of Rabia’s 42 martyrs. I told one group of local men that when I visited opposition strongholds like Baba Amr in Homs I always heard similar stories about fathers or sons being martyred. ‘Our sons were just going to work,’ an army colonel whose nephew was killed in Idlib said in reply. ‘There is a difference between killing a man going to work for the state and killing an armed man taking up weapons against the state. Is it peaceful demonstrators who kill five officers at a checkpoint?’
For the past year Rabia’s Alawites have clashed with neighbouring Sunni villages. Last summer the town’s students couldn’t travel into the city of Hama to take their exams because the opposition had blocked the road. Around thirty Alawite families from one nearby majority Sunni village have settled in Rabia, feeling it was no longer safe to stay where they were. The displaced families were disappointed with the government’s response. ‘We didn’t have any weapons or we would have fought back,’ one man told me. ‘They should have sent in tanks but the opposition blocked the roads. We want the state to solve our problems and the army to return us to our land. The army has to enter the villages, but the army is busy in Hama. Why is the state taking its time?’ Abu Laith’s father, a retired soldier, agreed. ‘Only the army can solve this,’ he said. ‘If we respond ourselves it will be seen as sectarian violence and other villages will join them against us. They will outnumber us.’
From Rabia I headed north-west towards Aziziya, a remote Alawite village which has clashed with the neighbouring Sunni village of Tamana. As in most Alawite villages, the majority of its men work in security or the army. Its Sunni neighbours all support the opposition, and opposition militias have been operating in the area since last spring. Salhab, the nearest town of any size, contains hundreds of displaced Alawite mothers and children who have fled the village. The fight between Aziziya and Tamana showed no sign of abating and in the town I found several families in a near hysterical state. A woman who’d recently reached Salhab shouted at me: ‘We left under fire! Our dignity is precious! Our leader is honourable! They are traitors! Everything for Bashar!’
‘We asked the state for reinforcements,’ another complained, ‘and they didn’t send them.’ All agreed that relations with their Sunni neighbours had been close until the uprising. ‘We were neighbours,’ one mother told me, ‘eating together, going to each other’s houses. Then there was sectarian incitement. They would come out and demonstrate and curse.’ Despite their frustration with the regime’s inability to protect them – you hear this in many Alawite communities – they wanted me to know how devoted they were to Bashar. ‘They can kill us all,’ one woman said, ‘but if there is one left he will still support the president.’ It’s an intriguing contradiction. Alawites regard themselves as the country’s poorest citizens, with their origins in lowly villages, thoroughly neglected by Damascus, and yet they’re willing to die in droves for the very state they argue has failed to protect them.
Early in the uprising I had got to know Dr Yahya al-Ahmad, an influential figure in one of the middle-class Alawite parts of Homs. Then, his main concern had been to work alongside Sunni friends to reduce sectarian tensions. I was sitting on the roof of his building during one of his meetings when snipers suddenly opened fire on us. Nobody was hurt; the doctor and his colleagues suspected that the snipers weren’t members of the opposition but extreme regime loyalists. When we met again earlier this year things had deteriorated – the building had been mortared twice by the opposition – and he spent most of his time in a nearby town. Nearly all the local shops were shut. He told me that Alawites had been kidnapped, and that other Alawite men had retaliated with force. I asked how many Alawites had been killed. ‘The dead, the numbers?’ he replied. ‘The clock stopped ticking. The numbers stopped mattering.’ My friends in the opposition said much the same of their own dead.
‘Armed men control things,’ Yahya went on. ‘I am armed. It’s a response, if the state fails to provide security then it’s down to me. You cannot, as an Alawite, put all your trust in the state. What if the security man at the checkpoint is asleep?’ Yahya’s position had changed. ‘A year ago if you’d asked me who could replace Bashar al-Assad I’d have said: this guy or that guy. Ask me today and I’ll tell you I don’t accept anyone but Bashar al-Assad.’ But there was the same ambivalence one finds in many Alawites. ‘Bashar weakened the role of security in daily life, which is one of the reasons for this situation.’ I wanted him to acknowledge the enormous civilian death toll that has resulted from the government’s crackdown. ‘Innocent people are always killed,’ he said. ‘You can’t distinguish whether a target is innocent or not. Do you think there is any authority in the world that wouldn’t defend itself?’
A senior security figure, responsible for Homs among other places, told me that eighty officers and NCOs were in detention for ‘mistakes’ – abuse, atrocities, torture – and at least ten could expect fifteen-year sentences. The assertion seemed meaningless in the face of the regime’s violence against civilians. (If the security services have made any attempt to discipline their personnel, they haven’t publicised it.) Alawites aren’t wrong to feel that for all the fury of its repression, the state is at a loss to know how to protect them. It is this feeling, above all, that has led to the growth of the increasingly powerful independent loyalist militias who act with impunity and often embarrass the regime. The militias have been responsible for several massacres in Homs and Hama, but Bashar is in no position to bear down on his most diehard supporters. An engineer in Homs, an Alawite who had joined the opposition, told me that the first time he saw loyalist gangs in action was in March 2011. ‘It was random and nobody organised them,’ he said. ‘They only had clubs. But by July they were organised. Now they work on their own account … The most dangerous thing in a civil war is the people who live off it and depend on it financially. I saw this in Lebanon. In Homs it’s open civil war.’
In the days of Hafez al-Assad the term shabiha, which means ‘ghosts’, referred only to organised criminals and smugglers who co-operated with the security forces. Some were part of the Assad clan – Bashar’s brother famously crushed and jailed elements of the Assad shabiha who got out of control – but by no means all were Alawites. When the uprising started, however, the word shabiha quickly came to refer to the loyalist militias, and in due course to any government loyalists. Soon many loyalists could be heard at pro-regime rallies directing chants at the opposition: ‘We are the shabiha! Screw your freedom! Shabiha for ever!’ There are thousands of shabiha, or popular committee members, in the Alawite neighbourhoods of Homs, a security officer told me. They are not paid for their militia activities, he said, but they continue to draw their government salaries even though they no longer go to work. They answer to local mayors. ‘They can arrest somebody from Khaldiyeh or Bayada,’ he said, naming two Sunni neighbourhoods, ‘and hand him over to security forces. They co-ordinate with security.’
The opposition engineer in Homs was more blunt: ‘A shabih is somebody who loves Bashar more than Bashar. A shabih is a culture not a person. He feels he is above the law, he is the law … For now the state can control them but I don’t know if they can control them in the future. The state is using them now. The state did it.’ Alawites who join the opposition, he added, are regarded as traitors against the sect. Some Alawites who were active in the opposition in Homs, as he is, had died at the hands of loyalist militias: in April 2011 in one of Homs’s main squares, an opposition sit-in which even included some Alawites ended in a massacre by security forces and popular committee men.
What becomes of the Alawites if the regime falls, and what becomes of Bashar’s support base as a whole, are not the same question. Bashar’s following includes other minorities besides the Alawites, not to mention Sunnis. From the outset the government has described the opposition as motivated by sectarianism – an accusation that encourages the very tendency it claims to deplore – but it has carefully refrained from any show of sectarianism itself, even if its Alawite supporters are less fastidious. Loyalists say that they are diverse while the opposition is almost entirely Sunni. Yet Sunni officers and soldiers belong to some of the most elite army units such as the 4th Division and the Republican Guard, and many opposition intellectuals have admitted that if the government’s base was confined to Alawites, it would have fallen long ago. Were this struggle to be reduced to a bald conflict between Sunnis and Alawites the government would lose its Sunni support and be left with only 10 per cent of the population behind it, plus a few stragglers from the other minorities.
When I asked Abu Rateb, leader of the Homs military council, what would happen to the security forces and shabiha, the hundreds of thousands of armed Alawites, if the government fell, he told me I was exaggerating the numbers. He foresaw what he described as ‘slaughter’ but felt that an alternative to Bashar would emerge from within the regime and preside over a settlement. ‘Bashar is the central figure for them. They will be broken by the fall of Bashar and lose motivation.’ After a difficult transition a new Syria would be born, ‘a free Syria, just and democratic’. A leading insurgent in Duma, the largest suburb of Damascus, told me he worried about fighting between Sunni and Alawite villages like Aziziya and Tamana. ‘We can’t say that we have the right to live here and they do not,’ he said, but ‘after the revolution Alawites will return to their natural place. They won’t have the authority.’
It is not clear what that ‘natural place’ would be. Are they meant to leave the cities and resume their traditional links with the rural areas? A new generation of Syria pundits in the West is already discussing the possibility of a separate Alawite state, but one hears of no such thing from the Alawites themselves. Syria has long been their central project, and their mode of involvement has been to leave their villages and move towards a version of modernity. It is conceivable that they will end up in some form of autonomous enclave as a result of a civil war in which the opposition gains the upper hand, but it is not their wish. They believe they are fighting for the old Ba’athist ideals of Syrian and Arab nationalism. An Alawite state would not be viable in any case: the old Alawite heartlands have never had much in the way of utilities or employment opportunities and the community would be dependent on outside backers such as Russia or Iran. A Lebanese solution for Syria, in which different areas have different outside backers, may be the end result, but it is nobody’s goal.
AFP – Firas, a youth who helped topple Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi last year, says Syrians aided in that struggle and he has now come to Syria to return the favour.
“In the Libyan revolution, many Syrians fought on our side, so it is now time to return the favour,” explained Firas, who left his studies in Britain to join the uprising to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Firas said he had been watching the events in Syria unfold on television and knew he had to do something.
“I am tired of peace conferences, of useless sanctions imposed on the Assad government; I am fed up as people look the other way while Russia and China supply weapons to the regime.
“While the world sits down to talk, women and children here in Syria die under the regime’s artillery fire and nobody does anything about it.”
Firas sees a big difference in the two conflicts.
“In Libya, we had a no-fly zone to which civilians could flee without fear of being systematically bombed, but here the cities have become death traps in which the Assad government punishes the people without a thought,” he said.
Abu Omar, another Libyan fighter, also feels it was his duty to fight in Syria.
“I had to do something for them. At the moment it is important to be here with my brothers,” he said.
The Libyans are fighting Syrian government forces in Aleppo’s Saif al-Dawla district, which has witnessed fierce clashes between the rebels and regime troops for several days now.
“After 30,000 dead you think the Syrians expect Westerners to come and help? Nobody will do anything for them because the life of a Syrian child is not worth that of a Western child,” said Abu Abdo, another Libyan.
“How many more children must die for the West to act,” he asked, adding that he is “fighting against a tyrant who uses weapons bought from the West to massacre his own people.”
He said the Libyans are not fighting a holy war.
“It is not jihad, it is a revolution,” Abu Abdo insisted, adding that “in Syria there are many foreign fighters as we no longer believe in promises coming from the West.”
Firas has his own explanation for why the West is not interfering in the Syrian conflict as it did in Libya.
“In Libya there is oil and gas and the West is still looking for wars from which it can derive economic benefits even if it is at the cost of thousands of lives, as was the case in Iraq,” he said.
“The second reason is that Libya is far from Israel, a war out there does not affect Israel as here a large-scale conflict would be devastating.”
He also pointed to talk about the presence of radical Islamists among the rebels as a concern in the West.
“Does our wearing a beard or praying to a god different than yours make us terrorists or members of Al-Qaeda?” he asked angrily. “If that’s the case, then we are all Al-Qaeda,” he added sarcastically.
“Kadhafi used the same technique. He said we were backed by Al-Qaeda so that Europe would not intervene and he could annihilate us. Here too you are fighting against a dictator who is violating human rights every day and killing his own people.”
Firas warned that the West’s passive approach towards the Syrian conflict is contributing to the rise of pro-Qaeda sentiment among the people and rebels.
“It is undeniable that in Syria, as elsewhere, there are people who support Al-Qaeda,” Firas says.
“I have met a number of fighters from a small group very close (to Al-Qaeda) and it would definitely scare you to talk to them. They are very radical and they hate everything that comes from the West.”
Abu Omar echoes similar fears.
“These people are beginning to smear the Syrian revolution,” he laments.
“But what we must understand is that this is not a religious war; this is a war for a people’s freedom. We have not come from Libya to fight against Shiites or Alawites, but the troops who support the regime, regardless of their faith.”
September 18, 2012
The battle in Syria is being fought by rebel fighters who lack many of the basics typically associated with warfare: helmets, a large supply of ammo, and military planning.
“I was with one fighter who had 11 bullets, and he was, like, roaming as a freelance fighter along the front line trying to pick up a fight somewhere,” journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad tells Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies.
Abdul-Ahad describes the situation in Syria as fluid and complicated. A correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian, Abdul-Ahad reported for the PBS Frontline documentary The Battle for Syria, which airs Tuesday.
“There is chaos, there is no military planning, there is no organization,” he says. “Most of the skirmishes happen like a game of cat and mouse: The tank is the cat. When the tank moves down street, the rebels disperse, run away, try to ambush the tank, they go from a corner to a corner. Meantime, there is shelling [and] mortars raining on them.”
Abdul-Ahad has covered conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq for the past nine years — and he says he hasn’t seen such disorder and violence since reporting on Fallujah during the Iraq War in 2004.
“In other conflicts, you meet people and then you hear they died after a few weeks, months, years,” he says. “In Syria, you meet someone in the morning and they die at the end of the day. As one of the officers was saying: ‘The only thing we have plenty of to spend is men.’ ”
The Battle for Syria is an up-close look at insurgents fighting government forces in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city.
Abdul-Ahad says most of the fighters he has met — some of whom are jihadis, secularists or Salafists — are “just driven by the spirit of the Arab Spring, the spirit of the revolution … fighting to topple [Bashar] Assad because they wanted a form of dignity. They were tired of being ruled like sheep, enslaved by one family, one ruling party.”
Ghaith says he sees the recent protests and violence in Egypt and Libya as manufactured events by Salafists [ultra-conservative Muslims] looking to drive religion into daily political life.
He says if the film that insulted the Prophet Muhammad were the motivation behind the demonstrations, there would have been millions of Muslims in the streets of Cairo and Libya, not just hundreds or thousands.
“There are so many grievances against the West, but [they’re] not necessarily the reason for these demonstrations. We are not entering a new era of anti-American feelings,” he says.
Interview Highlights
On Syrian rebels posing as Salafists, followers of an ultra-conservative sect of Islam
“They are very, very restrictive in the way they interpret Islam. They have a very specific ideology … You see them as probably 30-40 percent of all the fighting that happens in Syria. …
“Why? Because most of the support is coming again from the Gulf countries, from Saudi, from Qatar, who really espouse these ideologies. And again, they [Syrian rebels] really have to take money from these countries because no one else is giving them money. I’ve met Syrian rebels who grow beards, who espouse this very conservative radical rhetoric when they speak. In reality, they drink, they take drugs, they have nothing to do with Islam, but they have to adopt this ideology to get money and support.”
On the crowds demonstrating sadness over Ambassador Stevens’ death
“[There are] far more people in Libya, in Tunis, in Cairo — especially in Libya — who support what the ambassador was doing in Libya than the people storming the embassy or killing the poor guy.
“But the reality is, those guys, these Salafists, most of these demonstrations were led by the Salafists — and the Salafists were totally outfitted by this Arab Spring. They were posing as the opposition to these oppressive regimes, they were saying for a long time — they and other Islamists — they were saying that Islam is the solution, that Islam provides the path for the revolution. And then, suddenly, you see those masses pouring into these streets calling for democracy. They didn’t call for Islam … the revolution was never about having an Islamic state.”
On the American approach to Syria
“I think [the U.S. is] taking the worst approach at the moment. They are not openly supporting the rebels, while they are, from under the table, coordinating with the rebels, letting their allies send them a trickle of weapons — the weapons are neither enough for the rebels to win nor for them to be defeated.
“So you have this prolonged conflict and mainly because of — not only the West, but the whole international community — paralysis of the Syrian situation. For months, the activists, the people were demonstrating in the streets, but no one wanted to touch the Syrian uprising because they feared it might change the balances in the Middle East. …
“So I think a big opportunity was missed when the activists were not supported, with the paralysis of the international community, allowing Russia, China and Iran to play a huge, big role in this conflict, allowing the Saudis and Qataris to sponsor militias and send weapons. So [the U.S. is] neither supporting the rebels, nor … stopping this conflict.”
Syrian Rebels Seize Control Of A Border Crossing
It’s believed to be the first time they’ve taken the border area in the northern province of Raqqa.
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS | Wed Sep 19, 2012 4:40pm EDT
(Reuters) – Iran has been using civilian aircraft to fly military personnel and large quantities of weapons across Iraqi airspace to Syria to aid President Bashar al-Assad in his attempt to crush an 18-month uprising against his government, according to a Western intelligence report seen by Reuters.
Earlier this month, U.S. officials said they were questioning Iraq about Iranian flights in Iraqi airspace suspected of ferrying arms to Assad, a staunch Iranian ally. On Wednesday, U.S. Senator John Kerry threatened to review U.S. aid to Baghdad if it does not halt such overflights.
Iraq says it does not allow the passage of any weapons through its airspace. But the intelligence report obtained by Reuters says Iranian weapons have been flowing into Syria via Iraq in large quantities. Such transfers, the report says, are organized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“This is part of a revised Iranian modus operandi that U.S. officials have only recently addressed publicly, following previous statements to the contrary,” said the report, a copy of which was provided by a U.N. diplomatic source.
“It also flies in the face of declarations by Iraqi officials,” it said. “Planes are flying from Iran to Syria via Iraq on an almost daily basis, carrying IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) personnel and tens of tons of weapons to arm the Syrian security forces and militias fighting against the rebels.”
Although the specific charges about Iraq allowing Iran to transfer arms to Damascus are not new, the intelligence report alleges that the extent of such shipments is far greater than has been publicly acknowledged, and much more systematic, thanks to an agreement between senior Iraqi and Iranian officials.
Ali al-Moussawi, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s media adviser, dismissed the intelligence report.
“Iraq rejects baseless allegations that it allows Iran to use its airspace to ship arms to Syria,” he said. “The prime minister has always called for a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict and … the need for a ban on any state interfering in Syria whether by sending arms or helping others to do so.”
The issue of Iranian arms shipments to Syria came up repeatedly at a Senate hearing in Washington on Wednesday on the nomination of Robert Beecroft as the next U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. Beecroft is currently deputy chief of mission there.
John Kerry, the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Beecroft what the embassy was doing to persuade the Iraqis to prevent Iran from using their airspace for flights carrying weapons to Syria. Beecroft said that he and other U.S. officials made clear to Iraq the flights must stop.
U.S. THREAT TO REVIEW AID
Kerry said he was alarmed that U.S. efforts thus far had not persuaded Baghdad to halt the overflights, and suggested that the United States could in future make some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance it gives to Iraq contingent on their cooperation on Syria.
“Maybe we should make some of our assistance or some of our support contingent on some kind of appropriate response,” he said. “It just seems completely inappropriate that we’re trying to help build democracy, support them, put American lives on the line, money into the country, and they’re working against our interest so overtly.”
The intelligence report, which Western diplomats said was credible and consistent with their information, said Iran had cut a deal with Iraq to use its airspace.
One envoy said it was possible that Tehran and Baghdad did not in fact have any formal agreement, but only an informal understanding not to raise questions about possible arms transfers to Syria.
In comments published by Iranian media on Sunday, IRGC commander-in-chief Mohammad Ali Jafari said members of the force were providing non-military assistance in Syria and Lebanon. He added that Tehran might get involved militarily in Syria if its closest ally came under attack. A day later, however, Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied those remarks.
Two Boeing 747 aircraft specifically mentioned in the intelligence report as being involved in Syria arms transfers – an Iran Air plane with the tail number EP-ICD and Mahan Air’s EP-MNE – were among 117 aircraft hit with sanctions on Wednesday by the U.S. Treasury Department.
The Treasury Department also blacklisted aircraft operated by Iran’s Yas Air for supplying Syria with weapons. A U.N. panel of experts that monitors compliance with U.N. sanctions against Iran has repeatedly named Yas Air, along with Iran Air, as a supplier of arms to Syria.
The Treasury Department statement on the new blacklistings said the move would “make it easier for interested parties to keep track of this blocked property, and more difficult for Iran to use deceptive practices to try to evade sanctions.”
The statement did not mention Iraq.
Earlier this year, the U.N. panel of experts recommended that Yas Air be put on the U.N. blacklist for helping Iran skirt a U.N. arms embargo. So far the Security Council has not taken any action on that recommendation.
The U.N. panel’s reports have described Iranian arms shipments to Syria via Turkey, not Iraq.
The intelligence report said such transfers across Turkish airspace had ceased.
“Since Ankara adopted a firm position against Syria, and declared that it would intercept all weapons shipments sent to the Assad regime through Turkish territory or airspace, Tehran has all but completely stopped using this channel,” it said.
Tehran is forbidden from selling weapons under a U.N. arms embargo, which is part of broader sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Syria’s conflict had taken a brutal turn with other countries arming both sides, spreading misery and risking “unintended consequences as the fighting intensifies and spreads.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn, Mark Hosenball and Susan Cornwell in Washington and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; editing by David Brunnstrom and Mohammad Zargham)
Minutes after Newsweek posted a picture of its upcoming cover story about “Muslim Rage,” Muslims and others began mocking it with the hashtag #MuslimRage. Curated by Alex Fitzpatrick.Newsweek’s cover story, titled “Muslim Rage: How I Survived It, How We Can End It,” in part examines the passionate and occasionally violent protests over a controversial anti-Islam YouTube video that have been spreading throughout Muslim communities.
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