generalspeaking

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Insidiously Viral

"ISIL no longer fights the Assad regime. Rather, it is strengthening its positions in liberated areas at the expense of the safety of civilians. ISIL is inflicting on the people the same suppression of the Baath party and the Assad regime."
Free Syrian Army warning

Syrian rebels take up positions during clashes with forces loyal to President Assad near Aleppo. Photo: Abdalghne Karoof/Reuters

ISIL, which is to say the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, has slithered its jihadists across the border into Syria from Iraq. Obviously not content with the mass murder and mayhem it is inflicting within Iraq, its ambitions to spread its insidious hatred elsewhere is completely irresistible to its lethal leadership.

Not all that long ago, the traffic went the other way. When, during the presence of mostly American and British troops in Iraq bringing the downfall of the Sunni Baath regime of Saddam Hussein, Syria was being criticized for heedlessly leaving its long border with Iraq as open as a welcoming sieve.
Now the Shia Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad observing the traffic streaming in the opposite direction.

And this being so, the situation presents itself to the Western community of onlookers struggling with the imperative to "do something" to help protect Syria's civilians against the violent backlash of its own government against the predominately Sunni population. Torn with indecision over whether to supply the poorly armed rebels with more useful weapons to match their skills against those of the Syrian military.

Supply the rebels with weapons and as in past such similar situations, there are never any guarantees that those advanced weapons will not be seized by the Islamist jihadis who have inflicted themselves upon Syria. Their rising predations against the population no less atrocious than that of the regime's, thereby leading to the charge by the Free Syrian Army.

Itself facing what it has long feared would occur. Their battle with the regime to alter the political and social face of their country to transform it into a a more just and balanced social community doesn't match with the ideological transfixion of the Islamists.

Fighting within Syria between the rebels and the regime has been greatly enhanced on the rebel side with the introduction-without-invitation of the foreign invading terrorist groups. The fiercer, more battle-hardened and better-equipped Islamists have been most effective in the conflict against government forces.

And therein lies the dilemma for the rebels. Knowing that the Islamists care nothing about Syria, other than that it presents as ripe ground for a transformation to a Sharia state reflecting their Islamist ideals. The rebel leaders have long since acknowledged there would come a time when they would have to fend off the foreign invaders who entered Syria to "help them" in their conflict with the regime.

Their idea of help unfortunately, was to help themselves to the shattered remnants of Syria in an epic battle to transform the entire Middle East and North Africa into a closed, totalitarian theocracy, broodingly inward-looking and rejecting all contact with Western ideals, ideas and social culture that would contaminate fundamentalist Islam.

The rebels' dream of a free Syria is swiftly evaporating. And now the two regime-battling factions, the Syrian rebels and the foreign Islamists, have turned their guns on one another. Turf wars and retaliatory assassinations have bred the kind of battles that reflect a war of ideologies even while another, larger war is raging beyond, that both are involved in.

While the rebels and the Islamists focus on killing one another with hundreds left dead on both sides the regime can view the results with huge satisfaction.

And for the West?

The colossal concern remains; of two cruel evils which is the least destructive? Leaving a citizen-slaughtering government in place and swallowing the well-experienced past in the Middle East that ruthless killers make good tyrants who can manage to keep their own citizens from butchering one another in endless rounds of tribal and sectarian violence, or help to sweep that tyrant from the scene, and allow an even more odious stream of psychopathic jihadists who kill without provocation to bring about their ideal dystopia of human dysfunction to prevail?