generalspeaking

Hell On Earth

The situation in Syria becomes more convoluted by the day. What began as a simple enough reaction by a majority population to their disempowered status and oppression by a minority-representative government has steadily transited into a hate-and-atrocity-fuelled war of attrition. When the conflict in Syria is finally concluded, it is simply not possible to think of that country housing two distinct populations and a third with any degree of forgiving cooperation.

Syrian Kurds suffered the implausible indignity of no legitimacy within the country where they were born and lived for as long as they could remember, denied full citizenship. And Syrian Christians who have lived in the country since well before Islam ever came into being, have seen their uneasy relationship with their Muslim neighbours collapse as they are threatened by growing Islamism and its contempt for Christianity.

And the majority Sunnis, who declared robustly after their pleas for equality had been shunned by the minority Shia regime, and a violent crackdown ensued to put them securely back in their second-class place, armed themselves, forming a rebellious insurrection. Within the larger Middle East, Sunni Muslims dominate, so within the larger Middle East sympathy was with the Syrian Sunnis. And it wasn't long before the dynamism of tribal and secular hatreds was truly lit.

Iran, Lebanon's Hezbollah which is actually Iran's non-state militia, Iraq and Syria have formed one indissoluble block, and all the rest, irrespective of the fact that there are Shia minorities living within Sunni majority-ruling countries who are likewise oppressed, form the opposite block of opposing Islamic values - values that have been contorted and subsumed by vitriolic, demented hatred for one another despite a shared theocratic and historical crucible.

The entire region teeters on the edge of a conflagration that could consume the last remain vestiges of accommodation between countries vying for preeminence within their geography as the true and legitimate representatives of Islamic heritage, eager to take on the mantle of the caliphate in firm and gloriously victorious control of the second largest religion now dispersed over all the world's continents.

And to get a picture of how discordant and dysfunctional, menacing and sinister the situation is between the obedient worshippers of Islam who envision themselves as living the existence that a kind and peaceful God exhorts them to, in contrast to the tyranny of no other way of life permitted in the view of fanatical Islamists, one has only to peer through the murk of the conflict in Syria.

The ordinary Syrian citizens have seen their country, their way of life, their security, their belongings, their lives entirely uprooted. Millions have become refugees in their own land, and beyond. Tens of thousands have been killed, far greater numbers have suffered crippling physical and psychological blows they will never recover from completely - including vast numbers of children.

Then there is the regime which has ordered its military to use all the modern, highly technical arms at its disposal, in concert with Russian, Iranian Republican Guard and Hezbollah assistance to still a conflict by any means inclusive of mass slaughter, coming up against a disorganized rebel army consisting of various units incapable of effectively planning strategy, and using outmoded and inadequate arms.

Those rebels are now fighting on two fronts. They battle the regime which is determined to kill them all, and they battle the Islamists who represent the Sunni contingent of terror groups that have flooded into Syria from all points of the Muslim compass, better seasoned mujahadine than they are, and far better armed than they are, who are themselves brutishly determined to claim their own rule over Syria as a Sharia-bound, pitiless tyranny.

And all three, the Alawite-Shia regime, the Sunni-Syrian rebels and the Islamist, al-Qaeda-sponsored Sunni terrorists inflict horror on one another, and just incidentally, on the millions of Syrian civilians for whom life has become a living hell on Earth.

Labels: Conflict, Hezbollah, Iran, Islamism, Revolution, Russia, Syria, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 13, 2013