Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Hizbullah, the national guard for South Lebanon, announced Saturday that it supports the agreement on a truce in Syria, where its fighters have been battling on behalf of the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Its statement said that “the field commander for operations in Syria has affirmed that allies of Syria are abiding in a complete and exact fashion with what has been decided by the Syrian leadership and the government and the security and political leadership with regard to the truce and to respecting their decisions and implementing them in the desired manner.”
Damascus itself signed off on the truce agreement worked out between the United States and the Russian Federation, which aims at an immediate tamping down of violence and and kickstarting negotiations toward achieving a political transition.
It is estimated that that 5,000 to 8,000 Hizbullah militiamen are fighting at various fronts in Syria.
Hizbullah receives military and financial support from Iran, which also welcomed the truce on Sunday.
The truce is supposed to come into effect Monday evening, in conjunction with the Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holy day.
Hizbullah said that it would continue its open war against terrorist excommunicators, i.e. groups that try to throw other Muslims out of Islam and target them for violence. (The Salafi vigilantes in Syria consider Shiites to be heretics deserving of death.)
For its part, Iran said that the agreement, which it welcomed, needed a “monitoring instrument” so that what it called ‘terrorist groups’ did not exploit the truce.
The office of Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif welcomed the Russo-American understanding. Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said that Iran looked forward to the implementation of any truce in Syria. He said its success would depend on the establishment of means to monitor the border so as to stop the flow of terrorist volunteers and weapons and finances.
It should be noted that the regime’s Syrian Arab Army and its Shiite militia allies, including Hizbullah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Iraqi Movement of the Noble (Harakat al-Nujaba’) at the moment have East Aleppo surrounded and besieged, and that the truce requires allowing civilian aid to reach it. Will they give up their current advantage and allow these supplies in?
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Related video:
Press TV: “Iran welcomes Russia-US ceasefire deal for Syria”
Is there something fallen off the end of the last paragraph?
The article appears to stop mid-sentence. Also, Facebook prohibits me from posting it on my facebook page through the facebook icon above at this page. They say their security prohibits it.
After 9/11 everybody is a “terrorist”. Noam Chomsky’s words a few days after 9/11/01 ring more true everyday. To paraphrase, he said that governments such as Russia, Indonesia and so on will use the term “terrorist” to justify any military action. The above quotes from Hizbullah and Iran above, along with quotes from other countries around the globe, prove Noam’s words true over and over again.
Such a sad state of affairs….
The whole world must welcome it. The situation is deplorable. While everyone concentrates of Aleppo there are other areas where besieged Syrians are dying. To make the ousting of Assad a priority above saving their lives is simply unconscionable. If there really are ‘armed moderates’ then as human beings and Syrians they might consider joining the Syrian forces and cooperating to get rid Daesh etc. together. Successful cooperation between opponents in a higher cause where their interests unite often serves to take heat out of subsequent dealings.
Strange how Russian and US interests, or rather those of Putin and Obama, seem to have converged for the time being like leafs on a stream. Obama would presumably like to achieve something not only for his legacy but to avoid his successor having to deal with ‘the mess Obama left behind’, while Putin, apart from serious local reasons, must be concerned to contemplate what might happen to the world if Clinton should reach the Oval Office and there be no resolution in sight. Meanwhile, momentarily at any rate, Assad’s position appears to be getting a degree safer. The whole thing has a curiously Ukrainian feel to it; I am reminded that Roland Dumas, the former French Foreign Minister, a man with a Trump like tendency to make utterances better unuttered, recounted how Syrian regime change was being hatched back in 2009. NSNBC quoted him:
link to nsnbc.me
Blair, of course, was UK PM at that time
I’m not sure how this will work when some of the strongest rebels are excluded. I mean the groups allied with Al Nusra. There are dozens of groups. It sounds like a good idea to end the carnage, but Assad will stay in power; the Russians got their objective and the Americans can save face (sort of). And they might even be ‘allies’. Now that’s really scary!