generalspeaking

Balancing The Ledger

"The martyr leader Abdul-Qadir Saleh was one of the bravest men of the Syrian revolution. He had an excellent reputation and he was well-mannered. It is a loss to us because we lost a gentleman and an honest fighter, someone from whom we never heard any lies or betrayal."
Salar al Kurdi, rebel activist from Idlib

"It's a real blow that probably puts an end to the question of whether there are moderate rebel factions effective enough to do buiness with. He was backed by Qatar, at least until recently, and knew how to make Western figures comfortable with his goals for Syria, while at the same time commanding the same sort of battlefield respect from (ordinary) Syrians usually reverved for the more radical factions. The rebels and the West just lost the one commander who might be willing to talk to the regime about a sort of peace and actually be able to deliver some sense of it."
(anonymous) Western military attache

The now-dead commander, Abdulkader al-Saleh, 33 was an effective leader of the moderate Syrian rebels; his death now considered a setback for the future of those very same factions. The Syrian rebels have reeled under attacks both by the regime's military and at the hands of the al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups. His reputation for battlefield success and his ability to work with a large range of anti-Assad groups made him a valuable asset to the rebel side.rom Western donors to al Qaida-inspired militants.

His rebel militias under a Tawhid umbrella were suffering a decline in influence, edged out by the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The ISIS extremists distinguished themselves by public executions, by kidnappings, by attacks on Tawhid and other of its rebel allies. Mr. Saleh kept his counsel about the atrocities, while attempting to mediate disputes and infighting that have succeeded in gutting the revolt.

"The Islamic resistance in Hezbollah proudly weds a new Knight ... Ali Shabeebe (Abu Trab al-Rweis) who died as he was performing his sacred religious duty."
pro-Hezbollah website

Here is factional Islam with the sects at war with one another. They are, just incidentally, at war with a brutal tyrant whom many in the West may consider to be a 'moderate' Islamist, though he maintains close company with a powerful theocratic tyranny exulting in death and violence, one which thirty years earlier inspired a death cult of blessed martyrs upon whom it calls upon to do its duty from time to time. This is one of those times. Iran has crooked its finger and Hezbollah has responded.

These are, then, death-inspired Shi'ite warriors for Islam, revelling in their jihadist duty as martyrs, engaged in a fight to the death to combat the Sunnis whose own extremism and vicious reactions in their battle-hardened prowess is to foster an aura of dread, the kind of terror that occasionally slips into the world of the West, horrifying the tender sensibilities of people who have over the centuries removed themselves from the psychopathic world of death and terror.

"We have said on several occasions that the presence of our soldiers on Syrian soil is to defend ... Syria, which supports the resistance" [against Israel. "So long as that reason exists, our presence there is justified. Those who speak of our withdrawal from Syria as a condition to form a government in Lebanon know that it is an impossible condition."
Hezbollah Chief Hassan Nasrallah

Israel? What has the State of Israel to do with the Baathist Alawite regime of President Bashar al Assad? Much less the Syrian Sunni majority that have resolved they will no longer suffer the contempt and oppression far too long perpetrated upon them by the minority Shia leadership. It is the surrounding Sunni-majority Arab countries that give moral authority and support to the Free Syrian Army and who loosen their purse-strings to afford them weapons.

But these are the devilish details that erupt in the climate of the Middle East that confound onlookers attempting to make sense out of the ongoing and everpresent occasions of struggle and conflict, tribal and sectarian hatreds and campaigns of covert jockeying for power resulting in quite overt mass bloodshed without which the Middle East would quite simply not be itself. All of it fired by mistrust, blame, hatred and deadly violence and enabled by oil wealth.

Virulent hatred and vicious conflict attract the attention and commitment of others within the Islamic world committed to jihad. Which, with the no-holds-barred actions of the Syrian regime bombing and strafing innocent Syrian civilians -- creating the havoc and despair of millions of homeless hoping to avert the death that has already claimed a substantial number of Syrians -- has brought forward to join the fray not only Hezbollah but militias from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. Their distinction is pride in beheading their enemies.

And in Aleppo, which the Syrian regime would dearly love to recapture along with suburbs of its capital Damascus, those ISIS militants were proud to publicly display their dedication to bestiality; the decapitated head of what they boasted was an Iraqi Shiite pro-regime militiaman. A YouTube video illustrates their pride in parading the head before a crowd in the city. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights rained cruelly on their parade, pointing out that in their zeal to prove their Islamist chops the ISIS beheaded an Islamist anti-regime rebel.

An ISIS Islamists holds aloft the severed head of a militant -- LeJournal

Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, Islamism, Syria

posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 18, 2013