Syria

With such a messy situation in Syria, where do we even start?

It’s always a difficulty when you have deep complexities on the ground to start with what’s going on there, it just becomes more and more complex. So I think the best way to view it is from the top.

The attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) on Paris, and on Shia Muslim suburbs of Beirut a few days earlier, are being marked as a new chapter in the “war on terror”.

The tragedy in Syria has taken another disastrous turn with the military intervention of Russia. This is being played out in its ruined cities and the waves of desperate refugees attempting to flee their homes.

Warplanes from the US, Russia, Turkey and their various allies have crowded the skies above the country. Now Russian, Iranian, Turkish and US troops are beginning to put boots on the ground.

It has been a disastrous few months for the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria following a string of military defeats at the hands of rebels.

Assad’s forces have been driven out of the northern province of Idlib, while his troops are said to be planning to abandon the key eastern city of Deir el-Zour to the Islamic State (ISIS). His grip on Aleppo, once the economic powerhouse, is also slipping.

The Coalition campaign to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has failed to dent the Islamist movement.

Despite thousands of bombing missions by Western warplanes, the Iraqi army and its Syrian counterpart continue to retreat in the face of a few hundred determined fighters.

The Coalition and its allies promised earlier this year that they were about to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second city that fell to ISIS during its lightning offensive last summer. Instead it is the newly rearmed Iraqi army that is once again in retreat.

The US has ramped up delivery of weapons to the Iraqi forces ahead of an assault on Mosul. Some 25,000 Iraqi troops, backed by sectarian Shia militias and Kurdish Peshmerger fighters, are being prepared to lead an assault on the city in spring.

The Coalition-led bombing campaign on Iraq and Syria is being sold as a desperate intervention to push back the Islamic State (IS also known as ISIS and ISIL. In Arabic it is known by its acronym Daesh). The battle for control over the Kurdish-majority Syrian city of Kobane (Ayn al-Arab) is portrayed as a possible turning point in this war.

The new rush to war in Iraq and Syria by the West is a dangerous foray back into the quagmire created by its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

US President Barack Obama announced that he has assembled a 50-country coalition to destroy the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and in Syria — IS is also known as Isis and Isil.

This new “coalition of the willing” includes Western allies in the Arab world — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain and the UAE — as well as France, which refused to join in the 2003 invasion. Britain is also on board.

The Co-ordinating Committees (tansiqiyat) are an organisational form for directing the daily struggle of the masses. They are active across Syria, even in areas still controlled by the regime. In every neighbourhood, or every workplace, or small towns and villages, there are a network of committees. These committees work together, and when they cooperate at a neighbourhood, or village level, then they are called a Local Committee. When a number of committees work together, or form a network together, they are called Co-ordinating Committees.

Manbij is a poor and rural town of some 200,000 people in north eastern Syria. The city is half an hour's drive from the border with Turkey and the vital Tishrin Dam. It sits in the agricultural hinterland of Aleppo with one of the largest mills in the region, grinding some 500 tonnes of flour a day. Control over Manbij is a strategic prize for the Syrian revolution.