generalspeaking

Giving Credit Where It's Due

"We should not be giving credit to a regime just for providing food for a few days to people who are starving, given that's the right moral thing to do. This is something they should have been doing all along."
U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki

Stating the obvious, and emanating from an authority whose national administration has, through inaction, indifference and ultra-caution, allowed the situation in Syria to deteriorate to the point where large swaths of the population have been victimized by their government. A regime that sees its majority Sunni civilian population as intrinsically guilty by association with their sectarian counterparts who have taken up arms against a Shia-minority government that never hesitates to brutalize its people.

Rebels in Aleppo have been attempting to take control of the city's central prison along with the Kweiras military airbase to the east for quite some time. It was at first assumed that a Chechen suicide bomber associated with the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra front had attacked the prison gates. That personal sacrifice to the greater glory of Allah, transforming the bomber into fleshly smithereens, but also into a blessed martyr whose down payment guarantees him access to Paradise, gave the opportunity to the rebel fighters to gain control of much of the compound.
Violent clashes between the rebels and the military raged on, yesterday. Interestingly, the supposed Chechen fighter appears to have been instead, a man of Pakistani origin with British citizenship. His pseudonym, Abu Suleiman al-Britani, marks the man as the eighth Briton taking part in the 3-year-old civil war, happy to make the supreme sacrifice, which it was his glorious privilege to make. A senior professor at Kings College London, Shiraz Maher posted a photo of the suicide truck driven by 'Mr. Britani', the black Jabhat al-Nusr flag draped over it.


 In the melee that followed, several hundred prisoners were freed. Another method of conscription to rejoin the battle. And while that scene was unfolding the regime has deployed its forces to continue dropping those deadly, crude "barrel bombs" in airstrikes meant to cripple the rebel forces, to enable the government to retake those areas in the Aleppo suburbs long in the hands of the opposition fighters.

Those containers packed with explosives, fuel and scrap metal have taken the lives of an additional 250 people in Aleppo, in the past six days alone. Among them, 73 children. Videos taken by activists show the grisly aftermath of the bombs, complete with weeping men, collapsed buildings turned to smoking rubble, and bodies covered with blankets, littering the pavement. The videos have been verified by their consistency with reporting by the Associated Press.

But all is well in Syria. State-operated Syrian television confidently asserted that the Syrian army had turned back an attempt by "terrorist groups" to attack the prison. Of the four thousand inmates said to populate the prison, thus far a mere two hundred are estimated to have made good their escape. In their efforts to besiege the prison, rebels have rammed suicide car bombs twice before into the front gates. They have lobbed shells into the compound and engaged frequently with the hundreds of guards and troops stationed within the area.


The European Union's Domestic Affairs Chief, Cecilia Malmstrom stated last month that over twelve hundred citizens from the EU are believed to be fighting with the opposition in Syria. The prospect of those surviving the battles returning to Europe to inflict on societies there what they have learned to wage in loving obedience to Islamist dictates, appears to be a concern.

One that might conceivably be tackled head on by increased vigilance and less acceptance of viral Islamist activities within Europe wedded to immigration and the accommodating self-defeating fiction of pluralistic multiculturalism.

Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, European Union, Immigration, Syria

posted by Pieface @ Friday, February 07, 2014