'Rebels' in Syria doing jihadist things
- Thread starter seminole97
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"Hama lies more than a third of the way from Aleppo to Damascus and its capture will hinder any quick attempt by Assad and his allies to launch a counteroffensive against rebel gains of the past week.
A rebel advance on Homs, 40 km (24 miles) south of Hama, could meanwhile cut Damascus off from the coastal region, a stronghold of Assad's Alawite sect and where his Russian allies have a naval base and airbase.
"Assad now cannot afford to lose anything else. The big battle is the one coming against Homs. If Homs falls, we are talking of a potential change of regime," said Jihad Yazigi, editor of the Syria Report newsletter."
https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...ave-begun-enter-crucial-city-hama-2024-12-05/
I recognize there are hundreds of layers as to why the Middle East is in a constant state of turmoil but let’s just be honest: the Middle East is backwards and ****ing sucks
This puts us potentially in a tough situation as fighting ISIS likely means supporting a dictator.
Pretty difficult “lesser of two evils”.
Since ISIS is the absolute worst gotta go with the dictator
This is just an awful situation. Assad is an absolute butcher and a proxy of Iran, and Iran taking L after L is without a doubt great for the middle east.
However, there are obviously elements of the rebel forces that are ISIS and jihadists.
I lean toward rooting for the rebels, even though they are horrible people, on the assumption that they will not be able to wield the same level of power as Assad does with the backing of Iran and Russia. I don't know how the worst elements of that get cleaned up, but I'm going to hope that this is legit:
www.france24.com
It might be bullshit and they might be awful too, but we KNOW Assad/Iran/Russia is evil and destabilizing. I'm kind of like F them, and we'll deal with what comes after next.
But hell...I could feel differently.
However, there are obviously elements of the rebel forces that are ISIS and jihadists.
I lean toward rooting for the rebels, even though they are horrible people, on the assumption that they will not be able to wield the same level of power as Assad does with the backing of Iran and Russia. I don't know how the worst elements of that get cleaned up, but I'm going to hope that this is legit:
HTS rebel group sweeping Syria tries to shed its jihadist image
Unexpected alliances, seeing strength in "diversity" – Syria's Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former branch of al Qaeda, is trying to soften its public image in a bid to become…
www.france24.com
It might be bullshit and they might be awful too, but we KNOW Assad/Iran/Russia is evil and destabilizing. I'm kind of like F them, and we'll deal with what comes after next.
But hell...I could feel differently.
When the two choices are this bad….yikes.
Honestly, least bad option is probably to stay the heck out of the conflict unless it spreads. Otherwise provide as much humanitarian aid as possible.
Hopefully the rebels ultimately win and the saner factions are able to reign in these ISIS- adjacent nuts.
hawkeyetraveler
HB Heisman
It’s a real devil’s bargain of a mess. It is basically impossible to pick a side…I guess I hope they burn each other to the ground, but of course the innocents will be the ones caught in the crossfire. It sucks all around.This is just an awful situation. Assad is an absolute butcher and a proxy of Iran, and Iran taking L after L is without a doubt great for the middle east.
However, there are obviously elements of the rebel forces that are ISIS and jihadists.
I lean toward rooting for the rebels, even though they are horrible people, on the assumption that they will not be able to wield the same level of power as Assad does with the backing of Iran and Russia. I don't know how the worst elements of that get cleaned up, but I'm going to hope that this is legit:
HTS rebel group sweeping Syria tries to shed its jihadist image
Unexpected alliances, seeing strength in "diversity" – Syria's Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former branch of al Qaeda, is trying to soften its public image in a bid to become…
It might be bullshit and they might be awful too, but we KNOW Assad/Iran/Russia is evil and destabilizing. I'm kind of like F them, and we'll deal with what comes after next.
But hell...I could feel differently.
We created the situation.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that the US will not "cry" over the pressure the Syrian government and its allies are facing from an offensive on Aleppo led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda.
Sullivan acknowledged that HTS was "a terrorist organization designated by the United States" and said the US has "real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization."
It's an undisputed fact the neocons will side with ****ing Al-Qaeda in their forever wars:
Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups always made up a significant portion of the opposition to Assad after the war broke out in 2011. In 2012, Jake Sullivan, who worked as an aide to then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at the time, told his boss in an email released by WikiLeaks that "AQ (al-Qaeda) is on our side in Syria."
Well, GWOT is ongoing. I've been told on here that it's not cool to target monsters being harbored in other countries. All sorts of "invasion" worries. I don't see it that way. When weeds rise up, they need to get picked. And if a country full of "weeds" won't clean up their own mess, we'll do it for you. Free of charge. The cartels in Mexico are a great example. And it's one thing I agree with Trump on completely. They need to be crushed. Mexico isn't going to do it so we'll do it for them.
Our CIA gave the "weeds" weapons.
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/JEMEAA/Journals/Volume-02_Issue-1/Sorenson interview.pdf
While some subgroups had no particular ideology, others had Sunni Salafist leanings; thus, the Obama administration was reluctant to support them. Yet the CIA began to support certain opposition groups in early 2013, though it is not clear how carefully the agency vetted each group. The supplies included small arms, training, and money paid to commanders. By 2015, aid to anti-Assad forces became the most expensive US covert action program in history, topping 1 billion USD. However, some of the funds and arms wound up in the hands of violent extremists, while some of the troops with the units funded by the United States defected to other groups, taking their arms with them. After the rise of ISIS in June 2014, more US aid went to groups professing to be anti-ISIS, but some of these groups had violent jihadi orientations. It was also the case that the anti-Assad groups were disorganized, had no unified strategy, and sometimes wound up fighting each other. Finally, in June 2017, Pres. [Donald] Trump cut off aid to anti-Assad groups
It's not new for the United States to support a group against an enemy only to have the support group also become the enemy. There's no political "win" to be had in the topic. The world is a complex place.
I don't argue that it's new, I argue that it's stupid.
The neocons deliberately armed jihadists. The whole thing was intended to create a justification for our intervention.
I don't argue that it's new, I argue that it's stupid.
The neocons deliberately armed jihadists. The whole thing was intended to create a justification for our intervention.
Except that we have to play. This isn't Thomas Jefferson's vision of an agrarian United States.
No we don't.
It's to absolutely no advantage to the United States to help kill half a million Syrians and create milions and millions of refugees that stream into Europe and destabilize it.
A tiny, tiny handful of people profit from these wars, but that doesn't make them worth fostering.
If we never fostered a jihadist driven civil war in Syria, what is the bad thing that happens to the US, the thing that means we 'have to play'?
Sure, can you drop your bias and examine the evidence?
January 10, 2017
Well before Russia’s military came to Bashar Assad’s aid in Syria, the Obama administration calculated that the Islamic State’s expansion in the region would force the Syrian president into negotiating with Washington, according to private comments Secretary of State John F. Kerry made last fall.
Leaked audio captures Mr. Kerry’s closed-door discussion with Syrian activists on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in late September.
Although some details of the meeting have been reported, little attention has been paid to Mr. Kerry’s discussion about a strategy to use the terrorist group’s growing presence in Syria and Iraq as leverage to pressure Mr. Assad.
Wikileaks has released a full audio of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's meeting with the Syrian Opposition members at the Dutch Mission of the United Nations on September 22, 2016, where he implied the U.S. initially thought Daesh's growth would weaken the Assad regime.
"And we know that this was growing, we were watching, we saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened," Kerry said during the meeting.
"We thought, however, we could probably imagine that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him," he said in the audio.
"The reason Russia came in is because ISIL was getting stronger. Daesh was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus at some point and that's why Russia came in. Because they didn't want a Daesh government and they supported Assad. " Kerry said.
Kerry also told Syrian members that he pushed for intervention in Syria, but eventually lost the argument as the U.S. congress voted against the military intervention.
'"I lost the argument for use of force in Syria,"
...
But a previously leaked Defense Intelligence Agency memo shows U.S. officials were monitoring the group as far back as 2012 and were even hoping at that time for such a scenario to unfold in Syria.
According to the memo, obtained and published in May by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, a DIA analyst in Baghdad wrote in August 2012 that Salafists were the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” and included the “Muslim Brotherhood and AQI” — a reference to the Islamic State’s predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq. The memo outlined how Western powers, including the U.S., were backing the forces in Syria while others, including Russia, China and Iran, were lining up in support of the Assad regime.
“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria,” the memo said. “This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
That may have been the plan, but Mr. Assad’s growing isolation did not push him to offer concessions to Washington. Instead, Russian forces deployed in force to Syria to aid Mr. Assad, Moscow’s longtime ally. The situation caused hand-wringing among administration officials.
At the time, Mr. Obama’s former top adviser on Middle East policy wrote in Politico Magazine that the administration would be wise to “revisit some fundamental questions” about its approach to Syria.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf
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The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.
The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.
That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.
Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much.
Extremist Groups Carry Out Revenge, Sectarian Killings In HTS-Controlled Syria
Via The CradleExtremist armed factions across Syria are carrying out executions of civilians and soldiers amid the chaos following the fall of deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government.
Al-Mayadeen reports on Tuesday that a video circulating on social media shows armed militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Al-Qaeda offshoot that took control of Damascus on Saturday, carrying out field executions of unarmed men in the village of al-Rabia in the countryside of Latakia.
The militants referred to the men as ‘Shabiha’, a derogatory term long used to describe pro-government Syrian soldiers and civilians.
The HTS military operations administration reported ongoing clashes in Al-Rabia, including the encirclement of a group of officers inside a fortified farm in the village, Al-Mayadeen stated.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on Tuesday that, according to its sources, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) carried out executions and assaulted properties of nearly 30,000 Kurdish families in Manbij City.
In the Nawaha and Al-Asadiya neighborhoods, SNA militants burned houses of civilians, stole their property, and executed at least three people, including a woman, SOHR added.
On Monday, ISIS militants killed 54 Syrian army soldiers who were fleeing an attack by the terror group in the central province of Homs.
ISIS militants captured “personnel fleeing military service in the desert ... during the collapse of the regime” of president Bashar al-Assad and "executed 54" of them in the Sukhna area in the Homs desert, SOHR stated.
Militants take cell phone video of alleged Syrian Army soldiers and officers before executing them in Latakia, Syria. It reportedly happened or was uploaded on December 10.
Syrian sources reported the assassination on Tuesday of Sheikh Tawfiq al-Bhouti by unknown attackers. Bhouti was the son of the world-renowned Sunni Muslim scholar Sheikh Muhammad Saeed Ramadan al-Bhouti, who was assassinated along with 40 others in a mosque in 2013 by members of the Nusra Front, now known as HTS.
The elder Bhouti was an advocate of Sufism, and an opponent of Salafi interpretations of Islam that teach hatred against non-Muslims. Bhouti was a strong supporter of Bashar al-Assad's government and spoke against the extremist armed groups attacking Syrian civilians, police, and soldiers during the war that began in 2011.
