Markus Forhnmaier (l), a member of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Kevork Almassian (r), an important source in Max Blumenthal’s “Management of Savagery” supposedly attesting to the jihadist character of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad

A couple of days ago, I spotted an article on the Asylum – Misinformation website about a Syrian living in Germany named Kevork Almassian, who was supposedly being deported to Syria in violation of his right to asylum. As the name of the website would indicate, this was not true. When you hear the term “right to asylum”, the first thing you think of is that this poor refugee opposed to the dictatorship might get sent back to Syria where he would be tortured or killed.

As it happens, Almassian was a fierce Assad loyalist who must have told some bullshit story about being the target of jihadis, thus forcing him to seek refuge in Germany. Who knows what kind of subterfuge he used to win asylum in Germany but it has become clear that he had connections with the country’s burgeoning fascist movement. After gaining asylum, it didn’t take long for him to get jobs working for the neo-Nazis, his latest for Björn Höcke, the AfD chairman in the state of Thuringia, where the party is widely viewed as a Nazi threat.

Clearly, there is an affinity between Almassian and AfD over their Islamophobia, a key ingredient of all fascist movements in Europe today. In the article about Almassian, we learn that he used his asylum status to help send the true political refugees back to Syria where they would be tortured or killed. In concert with AfD, Almassian has mounted a propaganda campaign to “expose” Syrian refugees as coming from Afghanistan and other countries. The scare quotes in this Tweet should give you an idea of what he was up to:

In 2015, he came to Switzerland for a conference, after which he traveled to Germany where he hoped to convert a business visa into a residence permit. When that failed, he applied for asylum. I strongly suspect that he used his fascist ties to help influence their cronies in the immigration bureau. Within days of his arrival he was pictured drinking beer with Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD activist who he would serve as social media director before long—his first job with the fascists. (See photo above)

Apparently, his ties to the German fascists predates 2015. Articles referencing Almassian appeared in a right-wing military magazine run by Manuel Ochsenreiter, a far-right journalist who was implicated in planning a firebomb attack on a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine meant to compromise Ukrainian nationalists. He also visited Almassian in Syria in 2014.

You might even conclude that Almassian’s operation in Germany was the fruit of an alliance between high levels of Assad’s government and the AfD. There is ample evidence that the European fascist movements all shared a fondness for Bashar al-Assad, from Golden Dawn to the National Front in France.

When the war turned decisively in Assad’s favor, the AfD sought the deportation of Syrian refugees and to re-establish Syria as a safe country of origin. To help make their case, Almassian was critical. Not only did Almassian and the German fascists concur on booting Syrian refugees out of the country, they were part of the broad network of propagandists absolving Assad of using chemical weapons. After the sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun, one of their MPs issued a statement of solidarity with the “legitimate Syrian president”.

In an interview in 2016 with the radical right-wing newspaper Sezession, Almassian made talking points consistent with what you might read in “anti-imperialist” publications like Consortium News, 21^st Century Wire or Grayzone. He claimed that Aleppo had to be besieged in order “to spare human lives”. He also claimed that there was never a democratic revolution, but that it was dominated from the start by religious radical forces.

Most principled people trying to write an account of the Syrian disaster would probably not want to use Almassian as a source. His Islamophobic YouTube videos are the sort of thing that might be referenced in a book by someone like disgraced ex-academic Tim Anderson’s “The Dirty War on Syria”.

Would you ever expect a footnote crediting Almassian in a Verso book? When I began reading the Asylum – Misinformation article, the name Almassian rang a bell. After a few minutes, I realized that Max Blumenthal had cited him in “Management of Savagery” in order to smear the Syrian revolution as a plot designed to topple Assad and replace it with one friendly to Western imperialism.

In preparing a review of Blumenthal’s book, I learned that Verso does not have fact-checkers. That in itself might not be a problem as long as the author has some credibility, like David Harvey or Mike Davis. But by 2017, Blumenthal had the well-earned reputation of being a cynical, crude, conspiracy-mongering has-been who took a turn toward Russia and Syria for cold cash. I personally didn’t think that was the explanation. Instead, I wrote this off as his inability to see politics in class terms.

In chapter six of “Management of Savagery” titled “The Next Dirty War”, Blumenthal does not even give lip-service to the idea that the revolution was hijacked by Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia. Instead, it sprang from the womb with nefarious intentions.

On the very first page, he makes the case that the protests in Baniyas were typical. Since a Sunni cleric named Anas al-Ayrout made a speech demanding the banning of mixed gender schools, this proved that the protests were intended to turn Syria into Saudi Arabia. To back this up, Blumenthal refers to an Almassian YouTube video in his endnotes with this bland assurance:

Almasian, a Syrian-Armenian refugee in Germany, has produced a series of English-language videos  that provide a corrective to Western media characterizations of the Syrian conflict. While he makes  no secret of his support for the Syrian government,  he has relied on primary sources like video of Ayrout’s sermons in Baniyas, which were faithfully translated.

For a more balanced treatment of Baniyas, I recommend “Cities in Revolution: Baniyas”, a 34-page report that presents an entirely different portrait of al-Ayrout. Despite the fact that he held conservative religious views, he was not a sectarian. In one of the first protests in Baniyas, this was his role:

The demonstration was unorganized at first, and within a few moments, Maher al Masri, climbed on the shoulders of his freedom and began chanting as well, with people falling in behind him. The protesters moved unbothered until they reached the bus depot of the city. At that point, a number of protesters attacked an Alawite bus worker and damaged his truck. Ayrout, however, intervened immediately and ensured reparations were paid to the bus owner. Ayrout then emerged chanting, “Sunni, Alawi, we all want freedom” and the protesters repeated after him until they reached the intelligence security headquarters in the city.

This, of course, went against the grain of the kind of supposed Sunni sectarianism that Blumenthal hoped to expose. On the same page, he refers to another Almassian YouTube video that supposedly represents activists in Homs chanting “We are all jihadists! We will exterminate Alawites!” Perhaps trying to fend off critics who might find Almassian problematic, to say the least, Blumenthal’s endnote adds that the chant was also referenced in a white paper at the Open Source Center, which he describes as a “CIA intelligence center”. How telling that the anti-imperialist relies on the word of the primary imperialist institution in the world with a long and undistinguished history of using the Big Lie. By June 2012, the white paper’s publication date, it was clear that the USA had little interest in throwing its weight behind poor farmers and their young urban cohorts seeking to create a democracy in the Middle East. Assad was always the lesser evil as the Rand Corporation pointed out in a workshop they convened in 2014:

Key Findings

Workshop participants felt that prolonged conflict was the best descriptor for the situation in Syria as of December 2013, but momentum seemed to be leaning toward regime victory.

Negotiated settlement was deemed the least likely of the possible scenarios.

Regime collapse, while not considered a likely outcome, was perceived to be the worst possible outcome for U.S. strategic interests [emphasis added].

 

Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal

As a rule of thumb, the Syrian dictatorship’s chemical attacks only become a cause célèbre when there is a significant loss of life. For the better part of 8 years, Assad has dropped barrel bombs on hospitals, fired missiles into working-class tenements, starved rebel supporters into submission and generally pursued what are commonly understood as war crimes. It is only when chemical weapons are used, and, more importantly, result in a significant loss of life that American presidents get on their high horse.

The first incident occurred on August 21, 2013 in Eastern Ghouta when up to 1,729 poor people opposed to the dictatorship died from a sarin gas attack. This incident set the pattern for Assad’s apologists that continues to this day. People such as Seymour Hersh, Theodore Postol, David Bromwich, Robert Parry, Patrick L. Smith and Tariq Ali all came to Assad’s rescue, arguing that he had no motive to use sarin gas. There was a cruder battalion following these distinguished gentlemen who emphasized the “false flag” narrative, which made the case that the rebels gassed their own supporters in order to give Obama an excuse to implement “regime change”. Names like Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, and David Icke come to mind. Despite Obama bending over backwards to allow the “normal” war crimes to continue, this crowd was always on the lookout for the next incident that would allow them to posture as peace activists over the dead bodies of Syrian civilians.

The next incident occurred on April 4, 2017 in the town of Khan Shaykhun, this time when Donald Trump was in the White House. Once again it was a sarin gas attack that left 89 dead and more than 541 injured. Once again, the false flag brigades went to work, acting as if Trump’s retaliatory strike on a Syria airbase were the opening round of WWIII. In reality, the dictatorship only got a slap on the wrist. The missiles that Donald Trump fired on Shayrat air force base 3 days later had little impact. To start with, the runway was not damaged—something that was never even part of the plans—and jets and helicopters took off a few hours afterward. According to Wikipedia, even the Russian defense ministry said that the “combat effectiveness” of the attack was “extremely low” and that only 23 missiles out of 59 fired hit the base, destroying six aircraft. It did not know where the other 36 landed. Russian television news, citing a Syrian source at the airfield, said that nine planes were destroyed by the strike but that they were inoperative at the time.

Probably the most widely covered attack took place in Douma on April 7, 2018. This time it was chlorine gas that cost the lives of 40-50 people huddled in the lower floors of a tenement. Since chlorine is heavier than air, it descends downward with devastating effects. This was not the first chlorine gas attack in Douma. There were three earlier attacks that made lots of people sick but without any deaths. Indeed, there have been hundreds of chlorine gas attacks in Syria that might have killed a few people but nothing that would prompt the White House to act. In my view, Trump had to retaliate once again in Syria to “save face”. After he bombed a couple of buildings, people like Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal made it sound like Trump was LBJ escalating the war in Vietnam. Somehow, Trump’s decision to cut off all support for the rebels that year must have escaped them.

On April 8 this year, the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) released a report that concluded that the dictatorship had used both sarin and chlorine gas in Ltamenah on three different occasions in 2017, just around the time that Khan Shaykhun was attacked. Frankly, I don’t remember having much of a reaction at the time since this was one of those “low-keyed” affairs that only left 60 people hospitalized. Sure, a doctor did die from a chlorine bomb that fell through the roof of his hospital but that’s hardly something to write home about.

Leave it to Grayzone to push the “false flag” conspiracy bullshit once again, this time relying on an OPCW whistleblower who, despite his CV, seems to be an even bigger idiot than Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, who prefaced his attack on the findings.

Like all these people from Tariq Ali to Vanessa Beeley, the whistleblower cast doubt on the dictatorship’s culpability since it was winning the war:

They didn’t use sarin during the desperate times when they had their backs to the wall and were close to being overrun by opposition groups; but for some reason chose a time when they were back in control.

Somehow the whistleblower must have forgotten that Assad used sarin gas in Eastern Ghouta in 2013, when he was on the ropes. And, then again, this asshole probably is sure that the jihadi were ready to kill 1,729 of their supporters on the gamble that Obama would intervene. I remember during the Vietnam War when the NLF was accused of using its soldiers as cannon-fodder because “Oriental” people did not put the same value in human life as us civilized Westerners. Some things don’t change when it comes to what Edward Said called “Orientalism”.

Next, he questions the efficacy of the attack since Assad “did this by supposedly dropping a couple of sarin bombs on fields; agricultural lands in the middle of nowhere.” Is this guy for real? In the middle of nowhere? WTF?

The OPCW puts the attack into context. Contrary to the whistleblower, this was a hotly contested area:

The Idlib Governorate (together with parts of Hama Governorate, north of Hama city) was effectively under the control of a number of rival factions, rather than a single group, since it fell to armed groups in 2015 and throughout 2017. The area was regarded as the front line between the territories controlled by the authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic to the south and the land to the north, and known generally as the “Greater Idlib Region”. The strategically vital M5 highway goes from Aleppo in the north, southwards through Saraqib just outside of Idlib, Khan Shaykhun to Hama city, then onto Homs city, the capital Damascus, and all the way to the border with Jordan.

Specialists in military operations consulted by the IIT concur that controlling the M5 highway is an important objective for military operations in the area as it connects major cities including Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. When the Syrian Government recaptured eastern Aleppo city in late 2016, the highway’s strategic value further increased. Since at least 2012, there have been reports that villages and cities along the M5 highway were constant targets for conventional air strikes, as well as (more sporadically) chemical weapon attacks.

For Christ’s sake, even the Russian media understood the importance of the M5 highway in 2017. This is from the Interfax News Agency in Moscow, dated September 13, 2017:

The national reconciliation committee in the Syrian province of Rif Dimashq met with the opposition to discuss the unblocking of the M5 highway linking the country’s northern and southern regions, the Russian center for reconciliation of opposing sides in Syria told Interfax.

“In the Rif Dimashq province, the national reconciliation committee held a meeting attended by representatives from the armed opposition group Jaysh al-Islam to discuss how to open the section of the M5 road [between] Harasta al-Basal [and] Muhayam al-Vafedin,” the center said.

Like the other whistleblowers, but even more explicitly, he describes the chemical attacks, at least the two days in which sarin was used, as a “false flag”:

This, if intended to support the assertion that Syrian sarin was implicated, or that staging by the use of “spiking” chemicals was unlikely, is bordering on ludicrous. What possible reason could there be for the staging organizers, supporters (or advisors) to provide anything other than chemical samples carefully prepared by using the same precursors and sarin synthesis pathway as the well-known Syrian method? That chemistry has for many years been no secret; it is universally known and (apart from the use of hexamine as the acid scavenger) one of the “standard” ways of making sarin. That immediately defeats the “chemical marker” argument presented by the IIT. It is quite staggering that this argument has been taken seriously by any qualified or competent scientists.

Reading this malarkey, I wonder if maybe Blumenthal and Maté wrote it themselves since it is so detached from the chemical realities of sarin gas. If anything, it is the same crapola Seymour Hersh came up with to absolve Assad in 2013. He told CNN on December 9, 2013, “It’s not hard to make sarin. You could mix it in the backyard. Two chemicals melded together.” This, of course, begs the question—if it is so easy to make, why haven’t the rebels used it except to kill their own supporters? Are they pacifists when it comes to Assad’s military? I don’t think so, especially al-Nusra.

There’s some devastating gaps in the logic of this chemistry not being a secret. You can say the same thing about the atom bomb. It is not that there’s a “secret” to it. Rather, it is a function of being able to create the infrastructure in which the bomb and the explosives can be assembled.

While sarin gas is easier to put together than an atom bomb, this picture of the laboratory used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult for their terrorist attack on Tokyo subway passengers might give you some idea of how ludicrous the whistleblower sounds:

Overhead view of the Satyan-7 chemical weapon facility. (Wikipedia)

Finally, in addition to the OPCW report, I urge you to read Eliot Higgins on the Ltamenah attacks just below. Unlike me, he did not let the relative absence of a significant death count lull him. On April 21, he offered a summary of the OPCW report with a recap of his findings in 2017. This will give you an idea of how Eliot Higgins gets taken seriously while people like Blumenthal and Maté are viewed as dumb and dumber.

Thanks, Russia

November 2017 led to a number of significant developments in the investigation into the nature of Syria’s Sarin bombs, ironically due to the Russian Federation’s attempts to defend its Syrian allies against allegations of Sarin use.

In early November 2017, the OPCW FFM had released a report on their investigation into a number of chemical attacks, including the March 30, 2017 attack in Al-Lataminah. This report included photographs of debris recovered from the site of the Al-Lataminah attack, including measurements of various debris. One of the pieces of debris measured and photographed included not one, but two filling caps recovered from the site of the March 30 attack:

This proved significant, as the filling cap recovered from Khan Sheikhoun had also been measured:

It was also possible to see that both sides of the caps were identical in design, and with the measurements, exactly the same dimensions:

It was now possible for us to state categorically that the design and dimensions of the filling caps recovered from the March 30 attack in Al-Lataminah matched perfectly with the filling cap documented at the Khan Sheikhoun impact site, which the OPCW-UN JIM report had described as “uniquely consistent with a Syrian chemical aerial bomb.”

The next major clue in our investigation was provided by the Russian Federation. In a November 2, 2017 press conference responding to the OPCW-UN JIM report on Khan Sheikhoun, the Russian Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defence, and the Ministry for Industry and Trade presented various information that they used to claim the Khan Sheikhoun attack was not the responsibility of the Syrian Arab Republic. During that presentation, they displayed a slide with a diagram of two Syrian chemical bombs, the M4000 and MYM6000:

Remarkably, the Russian Federation had just provided the first public details on the nature of these two types of bombs, including details of the internal mechanisms of the bombs, and measures of the width and length of the bombs that would prove to be crucial in identifying the type of bomb used in Syria’s 2017 Sarin attacks. The top two images of the diagram showed an MYM6000 chemical bomb before and after the filling process was completed. The filling process was described in a June 2017 Mediapart article by a former member of the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC):

“It also meant that engineers from the SSRC also had to design bombs that were specific for sarin, and which were quite different to ordinary munitions. “On the outside, they resemble conventional bombs of 250 and 500 kilos of TNT,” explained one of them. “But inside they were totally different, divided into two compartments. The first, at the front, carried the DF. The second, at the rear, [contained] the isopropyl and hexamine. This mixture is stirred together by a stirring rod that can be activated by sort of crank at the rear of the bomb. When the two compartments are filled up, a technician winds the crank which advances the stirring rod to the point it breaks the wall of mica. The sarin synthesis reaction is set off inside the bomb, placed under a cold shower and maintained within a very precise temperature range which is controlled by a laser thermometer,” continued the former SSRC source. “After which, all that’s left is to introduce, in the allocated hold at the point of the bomb, the explosive charge and detonator – altimetric, chronometric or other – and to place the bomb under the wing of the plane. The load must be very precisely measured. If it is too big, the heat given off can cause the decomposition of the product, or the formation of a cloud of gas too far from the ground, which would render it ineffective. In principle, a 250-kilo bomb contains 133 litres of sarin, a few kilos of TNT and a ballast to preserve the aerodynamic characteristics of the weapon. A 500-kilo bomb contains 266 litres of sarin. The ideal altitude for the explosion of the bomb is about 60 metres.”

(In chapter 12 of Sam Dagher’s “Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria”, there’s a telling discussion of how both the USA and France were anxious to keep Assad in power. This was before the killing machine became too obvious to prettify. Part of the PR campaign for the dictator included a puff piece in Vogue magazine. In addition to that, there’s the eye-opening mention of how Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister, former head of Doctors without Borders, and a symbol of imperialist regime change, was on board with keeping ties to the dictatorship. If you read the bullshit from Max Blumenthal, Seymour Hersh, Tariq Ali, Julian Assange, et al, you’d get the impression that there were plans to topple Assad militarily and that the burgeoning protests were a cat’s paw to accomplish that end. Dagher is a brilliant reporter and I once again urge getting his book for the all-round best chronicle of the disaster in Syria.)

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By then, Asma’s [Mrs. Bashar al-Assad] touch was everywhere, both at home and in shaping Syria’s image abroad. She completely remodeled the Assad family residence in Malki where Bashar and his siblings grew up, did the same for an old presidential mansion, and fixed up the Assads’ summer home in Latakia with the help of a famous British landscape architect.? She spent a few million US dollars on abstract sculptures. In March 2011, as protests were kicking off and turning violent, Vogue magazine had a whole spread on her titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.” The main photo was of her wrapped in a red-wine-colored pashmina and standing on top of Mount Qasioun at twilight, with Damascus visible below. Joan Juliet Buck, the writer who flew in for the piece right after Asma’s return from Paris, spent time with her and Bashar and the children at home playing and eating fondue and later singing carols at the annual Christmas concert of the children’s choir they supported.

Photo from Vogue Magazine article on Mrs. Assad that can be read here

“This is how you fight extremism—through art,” Bashar told Buck during the concert. “This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East.”

The article depicted them as the modern and tolerant Middle East power couple who nurtured and protected minorities like Christians. Bashar also made sure that he repeated to Buck what he often told foreigners: he had studied eye surgery because “it’s very precise… and there is very little blood.”

The article was the idea of one of Asma’s aides at the Trust, a friend from her London days. He approached the New York public relations firm Brown Lloyd James, which already represented several high-profile clients in the Middle East. The firm’s principal, Peter Brown, was friends with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Two months after the article came out and as the regime’s crackdown became bloodier, Brown’s firm sent another Asma aide a memorandum with advice on “crisis communications.”

The firm claimed that the US government “wants the leadership in Syria to survive,” despite the strongly worded condemnation of the violence by President Obama in April and the executive order he signed at the end of that month imposing sanctions on Bashar’s brother, Maher, his cousin Atef Najib, and mukhabarat chief Ali Mamlouk. It said that these were warning shots to prod Bashar to stop killing protesters and implement credible reforms. But the firm said the window was closing fast, as US media coverage was intensifying and officials like Senator John Kerry were beginning to reassess their positions.

Brown Lloyd James recommended drastic changes in the way the regime was articulating its reform agenda. The reform program needed “a face or brand,” Bashar must communicate more often with more “finely tuned messaging,” Asma must “get in the game” and do “listening tours,” and a reform “echo chamber” must be developed, especially in foreign media, focusing on Bashar’s desire to conduct reform in “a non-chaotic and rational way.”

Refocusing the perception of outsiders and Syrians on reform will provide political cover to the generally sympathetic US government, and will delegitimize critics at home and abroad,” concluded the firm.

The PR firm was very close to the mark in its portrayal of the prevailing thinking and mood among officials in Western capitals, at least in the first few weeks of protests in Syria.

France’s ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was one of these officials. Syria was Chevallier’s first posting, in 2009; he was a medical doctor by training and had until then worked mostly in international humanitarian assistance with the French government, as well as various NGOs and UN agencies. He accepted the Syria mission at the urging of his longtime mentor and current boss, foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, also a physician turned politician. The forty-nine-year-old Chevallier combined French charm and boyish good looks with a businesslike, practical approach to diplomacy.

To veteran French diplomats with long experience in the Middle East, Chevallier was the new kid on the block. From their perspective, he was impressionable and too eager to cozy up to Bashar and members of his inner circle, including the Tlasses.

Chevallier was interviewed for Vogue’s March 2011 piece on Asma. “I hope they’ll make the right choices for the country and the region,” he told the writer about Bashar and Asma in December 2010.

While Chevallier appeared to his detractors like an enthusiastic promoter of the Assad couple, he believed he was simply advancing his country’s policies in Syria. France was among the first in the West to bet on rehabilitating the Syrian regime and Bashar, with strong encouragement from Qatar’s superrich ruling family. The Americans, the British, and others started to reengage with Bashar after France had already made overtures, sending Sarkozy to visit Damascus in 2008 and frequently hosting Bashar and Asma in Paris. Some thought that the French had moved too fast, but France believed it had a national-interest stake in trying to steer Bashar in the right direction.

“There were two ways for them to lead the country: stick to his father’s regional alliances and family policies, or try to move forward toward a more open society, stable foreign policy, and being part of the solution in the region instead of being the problem,” argued Chevallier.16 The day after the fall of French ally Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Chevallier sent a cable to Paris from Damascus.

“Could we have a rose revolution in Damascus?” he wrote in the subject line, alluding to the damask rose. Chevallier reported that many Syrians were transfixed by what was happening in Tunisia, but it was too early to predict whether the country was going down a similar path

(The events described below are found in chapter 9 of Sam Dagher’s “Assad or We Burn the Country”. Like the NY Times’s Anthony Shadid, Dagher was one of the few seasoned, Arab-speaking, professional journalists on the ground in Syria. Unlike Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk, he was not interested in triangulating between the dictatorship and the masses. It has now been just over 9 years since the events he describes below took place. Although I have been following events in Syria very closely over the past 9 year, I wasn’t prepared for the level of detail and the deep insights Dagher provides. In March 2011, the people one activist in Daraa described as “high school dropouts, laborers, farmers” decided to challenge the mafia state that Dagher analyzes in the chapters preceding this one. I use the term mafia advisedly. Syria was run by a family of gangsters who used their power to get rich. For those of you who only know Syria as a desolate piece of real estate fought over by Turkey, Russia, et al, this reporting is essential since it will give you an idea of the pent-up revolutionary anger that will explode again sooner or later.)

Notwithstanding these resentments, over the years the regime built a sizable class of loyalists and cronies in Daraa who held senior posts in the Baath Party and government in Damascus and were granted concessions and privileges locally. These people were generally older tribal leaders and businessmen. The regime never imagined a rebellion could start in Daraa, or the “Baath’s southern citadel and bastion,” as it was called in propaganda. Hardly any attention, though, was paid to the youth, the impoverished, and those who were enraged about the wide gap between rich and poor and the practices of the police state and mukhabarat.

When protests erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, Aswad and other regime opponents in Daraa started meeting clandestinely. They were joined a few times by the Damascus-based Mazen Darwish and some of his colleagues.

“We used to say to each other, ‘Let’s go eat mlaihi,” said Mazen, referring to a traditional Daraa dish of lamb and warm yoghurt on a bed of bulgur. “As we ate we discussed how we could take advantage of what was happening around us. We wanted to have a civil and peaceful revolution against the regime. You want to call that a conspiracy? Sure.”

Nobody spoke about Bashar’s departure. The discussion was centered around the same issues that Mazen and his friends were talking about in Damascus: ending the state of emergency, releasing political prisoners, and freeing political life and media, among other things.

Aswad and some twenty other veteran opponents in Daraa, many of them elderly and previously imprisoned by the regime, tried to air these demands on March 15 in front of the city’s main courthouse, but they backed off when they saw the number of heavily armed security force personnel swarming the area.

That same day, some 200 people, mostly young men and women, marched through the alleyways and souks of Damascus’s old quarter chanting for freedom and dignity in response to a call to protest on Facebook. The whole thing barely lasted thirty minutes before security forces and pro-regime thugs dispersed the crowd and arrested protesters. The following day, March 16, saw the demonstration for the release of political prisoners organized by Mazen and his colleagues outside the Ministry of the Interior in Damascus. A few activists came up from Daraa to take part and added their demand for the release of the boys who had sprayed the graffiti. Protesters were viciously attacked by pro-regime thugs and many were arrested.

On March 18, activists and regime opponents in Daraa were hesitating until the last minute about whether to protest or not after Friday prayers, given the heavy security presence in the city and the way Mazen and others had been violently dealt with in Damascus.

Aswad, who was not a particularly religious man and rarely prayed or went to a mosque, was home with some of his like-minded friends when his phone rang. It was a relative.

“Things have kicked off in Al-Balad!” said the excited relative and hung up.

Aswad understood that a protest had started in the city’s old district, called Al-Balad. He and the others got into their cars and drove toward the protest.

In other parts of the city, men were returning home from Friday prayers at their neighborhood mosques. (Women usually prayed at home and prepared lunch.)

Word of the protest was spreading, but it had not yet reached the home of eighteen-year-old Sally Masalmeh, who was among those eager for what many in the Arab world were calling thawra, or revolution, to come to Syria, too. Not far from Sally’s home lived Malek al-Jawabra, a young man she did not know at the time but would meet a few years later in circumstances that neither of them could have ever imagined.

Malek, a twenty-one-year-old law student, was getting off his motorbike as his cousin Ahmad rushed toward him.

“Do not you know what happened?” said an excited and breathless Ahmad.

“No,” said Malek, alarmed.

“A protest left the Hamza and Abbas mosque and it has reached the Omani mosque,” said Ahmad.

“Okay, let’s go!” said Malek.

Malek restarted his motorbike and Ahmad hopped on behind him.

By the time they arrived, several hundred people were on the street outside the Omani mosque, a city landmark that was more than a thousand years old. It was built with the area’s distinctive dark volcanic rocks and had a clock-tower-like minaret. More people kept arriving. There were a lot of teenagers and young men. They were the most fired up. There were also many fathers with their sons and a few elderly people in tribal dress, but not a lot. There were no women, but things would soon change.

It was more of an impromptu gathering than an organized protest, and even had a carnival-like air. People whistled, cheered, sang, and clapped. “Hurriyeh, hurriyeh!” (“Freedom, freedom!”) they shouted. Malek and his cousin joined in.13 There were no real political slogans or even articulate demands. Many people were there because they hoped this could pressure the mukhabarat to release the boys who had sprayed the graffiti.

There was one thing, though, that almost everyone present that day had in common: a sense of collective exhilaration and liberation. A people unshackled.

They were finally speaking out after being told all their lives to keep their mouths shut and mind their own business—otherwise they and their families could get into real trouble.

“Ba’ad el your-n ma fi khoul” (“No more fear after today!”) they shouted that day in Daraa. Nobody covered their faces. People held up their cell phones and took photographs and videos. It felt like emancipation after decades of servility.

“Young men, calm down, just write down your demands and we will read them,” said a voice over a loudspeaker coming from inside the Omani.

One hour earlier, Bashar’s cousin and mukhabarat chief, Atef Najib, had summoned the mosque’s influential imam, Ahmad al-Sayasneh. He wanted the respected and well-liked cleric to pressure the crowds to go home. “Sheik Ahmad, all your demands will be met in a week, God willing, but we want you to calm people down,” Najib told Sayasneh, adopting a conciliatory tone in total contrast to his earlier belligerence .

“I have nothing to do with what’s going on,” said the blind, sixty-five-year-old cleric, who wore a white embroidered skullcap.

“No, they will listen to you,” insisted Najib.

Sayasneh came back to the mosque and told protesters massed outside to hand him their demands so he could pass them on to local officials.

“Liars, liars, liars!” was the crowds’ answer to the call for calm. “Thieves, thieves, thieves!”

As the pleas for them to disperse persisted, the chants became more animated and bold.

“Down with Atef Najib! The people want to topple the governor! The people want to tear down corruption!”

The crowd kept swelling. By afternoon, there were several thousand people clogging the street in front of the Omani. They moved toward the provincial government headquarters on the north side of the city, a section called Al-Mahata. They hoped more people would join the protest as it made its way down the hill from the mosque toward Al-Mahata. The more-organized and politically minded in the crowd even thought they could present the governor with a set of written demands.

The crowd passed a metal archway with a portrait of Bashar in the middle.

Some looked up and began chanting: “The people want to bring down the regime!”

“No, no, no! The people want to reform the regime,” shouted others in the crowd, hoping to drown them out. There was a large contingent who advocated for more-measured change focused on ending corruption and releasing prisoners.

The chant grew louder and louder: “The people want to reform the regime!”

In the meantime, Najib called Damascus and the regional mukhabarat headquarters in Suwayda to send him reinforcements to deal with the protest. He had already mobilized all the forces at his disposal in Daraa, including regular police, military police, and civil defense. The uniformed forces were divided into packs, each commanded by one of Najib’s mukhabarat henchmen, all in plainclothes. Many wore tracksuits and sneakers and carried pistols.

As protesters came down the hill and reached an area called Al-Karak, they were met with a hail of tear gas cannisters fired by these forces. People responded by throwing rocks and stones at them. A couple of vehicles belonging to the security forces were quickly surrounded, and after their occupants had fled, the cars were smashed by angry protesters determined to press ahead.

A cat-and-mouse game ensued, with protesters trying to go down the hill and security forces pushing them back up again. Some protesters were caught by security forces. These unlucky ones were beaten, trampled on, kicked, dragged on the pavement, and then bundled into mukhabarat vehicles parked at the bottom of the slope. This only made protesters angrier and more defiant. Fire trucks tried to repulse the crowd by hosing people down, but that did not work either. By late afternoon the reinforcements that Najib had asked for reached Daraa, streaming in by helicopter and bus.

“That’s the big boss,” said some Daraa residents as they spotted a swarm of helicopters touching down briefly inside the city’s soccer stadium and then taking off again.22 They thought that perhaps it was Bashar himself coming to Daraa to calm things down.

Shortly thereafter, masked gunmen in black began arriving at the scene of the standoff with protesters. They were members of an elite security force never previously seen in Daraa.

Some protesters started shouting “Allahu akbar!” (“God is greatest!”) to try to give people courage and make them hold their ground. Others honked the horns of their motorbikes. People burned tires and threw large rocks at the security forces to try to thwart them.

Malek and his friends and relatives watched from the side. The black-clad forces started shooting in the air. The barrage of gunfire lasted a few minutes. Many protesters scurried back up the hill. Others were determined to stand firm and even charged forward.

Sharpshooters among the black uniformed forces were now perched on a hilltop overlooking the scene. There was more gunfire, this time more intense and sustained. Most of it was still into the air, but some of it was now being aimed directly at the crowd. Malek could see people being hit in their legs and arms. Then he saw his relative Mahmoud al-Jawabra collapse to the ground. Another man standing nearby also fell. Mahmoud was hit in the neck. His T-shirt was soaked in blood. He was dead.

“One guy has DIED!” people began shouting as they frantically rushed up the hill toward the Omari mosque.

A couple of people carried the bodies of Mahmoud and the other man, who was killed with a shot in the head. They bundled them into cars and sped away. Malek fled on his motorbike with his cousin.

People scattered as the black-uniformed forces chased them. There were more forces waiting for protesters on the hilltop next to the mosque. They were surrounded from all directions. The cars with the two dead men were stopped. Security personnel snatched the bodies and arrested everyone.

Malek and his cousin escaped, but two other relatives were arrested. Everyone found on the streets that day was swept up by security forces.

“They just killed people like that—impossible!” said Sally when the news reached her home.

Her family, like many Daraa residents, did not know whether a protest was going to come out for sure that day. Yes, the situation was tense after the arrest of the boys, and yes, everybody was wondering when protests would start in Syria, like in other countries, but nobody thought people in Daraa could overcome their fears and take to the streets, just like that. And for people to be killed on the first day was also hard to fathom for Sally and others who were not yet born when Hafez crushed the rebellion against his regime.

Sally had a connection to the two slain young men. Mahmoud al-Jawabra’s mother was related to Sally’s mother. Sally casually met Mahmoud at a few family gatherings. His father had died when he and his siblings were very young. He was the eldest. He dropped out of school to support his family and later opened a small grocery store. He was a well-liked young man; many in Daraa knew him because he played for the local soccer team. The other man, Husam al-Ayash, was the brother of one of Sally’s friends. He also came from a poor family. Like many in Daraa, he had gone recently to the Gulf to work and had come back to Daraa to get married before leaving again.

“God help us all,” said Sally’s mother as the family gathered in the living room. “We are not going to get off easy—it’s going to be just like Hama,” she added, referring to Hafez’s siege and destruction of the rebellious city in central Syria in 1982. The older generation had never forgotten Hama.

The next day, elders from the tribes to which the Ayash and Jawabra families belonged went to meet with Bashar’s cousin Najib. He was ready to hand over the bodies of the two dead men on this condition: They should be buried quickly and quietly without any elaborate funeral processions or protests.

Some of the elders were loyal to the regime and were eager for damage control. They did not want to drag the names of their tribe and family further into the camp of those seen as agitating against the regime. They assured Najib that they would carry out his orders.

In the meantime, hundreds of people flocked to the homes of the two dead men. Elders arrived with the bodies and informed the grieving families of their deal with Najib. Heated exchanges broke out at both homes. How could they make such an agreement with Najib? Younger members of both families saw the fallen men as martyrs. They were determined to hold a fitting funeral. At the Jawabra home the arguments turned into scuffles, with some young men destroying a traditional funeral tent set up outside the house, where condolences were to be received during the mourning period. They said that no condolences would be accepted before a proper funeral procession and burial.

Eventually the youth in both families prevailed over the tribal elders. From the first moment, the struggle against the regime was a standoff between the younger generation that wanted to challenge and break free from fear and tyranny, and the older generation that still remembered Hafez and the heavy price he made Syrians pay for defiance.

The Ayash and Jawabra families agreed that the funeral processions bearing the coffins of the two young men would meet outside the Omani mosque, there they would merge and head toward the cemetery. The bodies were wrapped in blankets and placed in open coffins carried by relatives. Women ululated and threw rice grains and splashed rose water at the large procession as it passed by, rituals reserved for special occasions.

Sally stood on the balcony of her home facing the Omani. Many other women did the same. Some were on the street in front of their homes. Custom prevented them from going to the cemetery with the men, but they were eager to participate in their own way, too. Thousands of men joined the combined procession, and as their numbers swelled a massive anti-regime protest emerged.

“We sacrifice our soul and blood for you, martyr,” people chanted as they clapped and pumped their fists in the air.

“He who kills his own people is a traitor!”

Sally was determined to catch up with the procession as it headed toward the cemetery. She did not want to miss a thing. She told her mother that she was going to her aunt’s house, which was near the cemetery, and ran out the door before her mother could stop her.

From the rooftop of her aunt’s house Sally saw a sea of young men, children, and some elders moving toward the cemetery. They must have been in the tens of thousands.

“Revolution, revolution against tyranny and aggression!” they chanted in one voice.

That day—March 19, 2011—Republican Guard general Manaf Tlass was at his base in the mountains around Damascus. He had barely slept the night before as he and his aides tried to gather information about events in Daraa and decide what precautionary measures they needed to take in Damascus, which was a mere sixty miles away from the southern city.

What Manaf pieced together was that, on March 18, Atef Najib had called his cousin Hafez Makhlouf, who headed one of the mukhabarat branches in Damascus to let him know that he needed help to break the protest.32 Hafez agreed with other mukhabarat chiefs, including Jamil Hassan, who commanded the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, to immediately assemble a strike force and fly it down to Daraa to deal with the protest. Manaf concluded that those who had opened fire on protesters must have belonged to this force.

The shoot-to-kill orders given were in keeping with Hafez Makhlouf’s bloody tendencies and disdain for average Syrians. Hafez, who turned forty at the start of the uprising, was the second of the Makhlouf sons after the eldest, Rami. Unlike his business-mogul brother Rami, Hafez rarely appeared in public and most Syrians did not know what he looked like. He had miraculously survived the 1994 car accident that killed Bashar’s older brother, Bassel. Hafez’s slight-build, clean-cut appearance, and calm persona belied a murderous megalomaniac, according to those who interacted with him.

Following the death of the two protesters, Bashar and his brother, Maher, and their cousin Hafez decided on March 19 to dispatch more forces to Daraa, as well as two senior mukhabarat officers, Hisham Ekhtiyar and Rustum Ghazaleh, to establish a crisis cell there to deal with the situation. Ekhtiyar and Ghazaleh, a Daraa native, were given firm instructions to do whatever it took to restore order in Daraa and prevent the situation from escalating any further. Bashar also sent civilians, including his deputy foreign minister and Daraa native Faisal al-Mekdad and another Baath Party apparatchik who was from Hama, to speak in a more conciliatory tone.

“His excellency [Bashar] considers Daraa to be in the forefront in its loyalty to the regime… He was shocked and so were we about what happened,” Ghazaleh told the Daraa elders and officials he had summoned to the local Baath Party headquarters.

The next day, March 20, Bashar called Manaf at the base. It was their first contact since the deaths in Daraa. Bashar decided to follow the advice of hard-liners like his brother, Maher, and cousin Hafez on how he should deal with Daraa, but he still wanted to sound out other people close to him. Maybe there were other ways to bring the situation under control. Maybe he was missing something or was not being given the full picture by the hard-liners. He also wanted to see where everyone stood on what just happened in Daraa —who was in favor of a tough response and who was not.

“What’s your decision?” Bashar asked Manaf.

“My decision is that you throw Atef Najib in jail and sack the governor. Go down to Daraa tomorrow and make peace with the people,” said Manaf. He told Bashar that families of the dead should be generously compensated and all those detained in Daraa, including the boys who had sprayed the graffiti, should be released immediately.

“What do you know about the dead?” asked Bashar.

“They were killed during the protests. They’re not from powerful families, but still you should go down and be conciliatory,” said Manaf. Manaf explained that this would quickly bring the situation under control—the idea being that Bashar’s gesture would mean a lot to Daraa’s people, who were seen within the regime as simple and emotional tribal folk.

“These are generous and good-hearted people,” said Manaf.

“Okay,” said Bashar before ending the call.

Back in Daraa, events were moving fast. After the burial of the two young men killed on the first day of protests, angry youth were determined to stay on the streets to defy regime forces. They decided to head to Sahet al-Saraya, or Serail Square, in the northern section of the city, Al-Mahata. They wanted to organize a sit-in there in front of the provincial government palace, Baath Party headquarters, and other symbols of authority located around the square.

“To the Mahata, to the Mahata!” they shouted after the funeral. They were immediately confronted by security forces. More people were shot dead and many more were wounded or arrested.

Sheik Sayasneh, the Omani mosque’s blind cleric, pleaded with protesters not to go to the government square and to stay in the city’s old section, Al-Balad, so they wouldn’t provoke further violence by regime forces. He told them they could have their sit-in at the mosque and make their demands from there. Surely there was enough respect for the mosque’s sanctity that security forces would not breach its threshold so easily. It would offer protesters some measure of protection from the deadly force being deployed on the streets.

Many accepted Sayasneh’s offer and moved to the mosque. But there was a limit to his ability to control people, given that this was still a spontaneous outpouring of popular anger and frustration led by the youth, with no clear leader and objective.

“This was a people’s revolution, not a revolution of the educated and the elite,” said Sally Masalmeh. “There were all sorts of people among us: high school dropouts, laborers, farmers, and so on. The youth were the hardest to control.”

Arguments broke out between sons and fathers, who wanted to hold back their children from risking their lives on the streets.

“Why should we listen to you? You were the ones who brought us to this miserable state,” sons told their fathers.

“Why did you not rise against Hafez? Why did you just watch him hand power to Bashar?”

Very quickly the Omani mosque and its courtyard turned into a base for protesters. They decided to set up a field hospital there to treat those wounded in ongoing confrontations with security forces. The city’s hospital was far away, and the nearby small clinics were reluctant to take in the wounded, fearing it could expose them to punishment by the regime. The only option was to set up the makeshift hospital at the mosque. Pharmacists and Daraa residents donated surgical packs, portable oxygen machines, stretchers, medicine, and other supplies.

This was an opportunity for some women who wanted to take a more active role in the uprising. Those with medical training and experience headed to the mosque courtyard to help. Sally had completed first aid and CPR training the previous summer, so she went, too, despite attempts by her parents to stop her.

“You could count the girls on one hand,” said Sally. “We wanted to help in any way we could. All the taboos were starting to crumble.”

There were still limits, though. All the women left at sundown, and only men spent the night at the mosque to keep the sit-in going. Foam mattresses and blankets were brought to the prayer hall. People took turns sleeping. They were starting to get more organized. They formed a media committee. They wrote their demands on cutouts of white bedsheets and hung them on the mosque’s outer wal1.

These demands included the following:

“End the state of emergency” which had been in place since 1963.

“Release prisoners of conscience.”

“Freedom of expression, freedom to protest.”

“Fight corruption and provide jobs to recent graduates.”

“Raise the minimum wage and salaries, and reduce taxes and improve living standards.”

The revolution that Sally and other young Syrians were watching unfold across the region had finally come to Syria, at least to Daraa.

While a revolutionary spirit gripped the city’s south side around the Omani mosque, there was a different mood on the opposite side of the city, where the regime was in control. At the Baath Party’s local headquarters off Serail Square, the mukhabarat commanders dispatched by Bashar huddled with Daraa officials and tribal notables loyal to the regime. The mukhabarat chiefs made it clear that the mosque sit-in could no longer be tolerated. It was March 22, now three days since the protesters they called “terrorists” had taken over the mosque. The children who were detained for spraying the graffiti had been released the day before, after many had endured horrific torture.

The president, Bashar, agreed to sack Daraa’s governor and review the protesters’ other demands, and as such those inside the mosque should leave at once, demanded the mukhabarat chiefs through mediators. Protesters scoffed at what the regime cast as major concessions. They knew that the governor had no real power and was conveniently being made the scapegoat. What about the one with the real power, the security chief and Bashar’s cousin, Atef Najib? What about all the people who had been killed and detained since March 18? They did not trust the regime.

One of the main mediators between the regime and protesters in the mosque was Muwafaq al-Qaddah, a Daraa native and rich businessman based in the United Arab Emirates. He was a self-made man who had built his fortune starting as a traveling salesman. Qaddah was among those courted by Bashar and encouraged to invest in Syria when Bashar launched his economic liberalization. Like most other businessmen, Qaddah partnered on several projects with Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf. Despite his regime links, Qaddah was generally well respected and liked in Daraa. He was a local farmer’s son who had gone to the Gulf and done well.

Qaddah could not say no when Bashar asked for help in ending the standoff in his hometown Daraa. He immediately flew to Damascus and headed down to Daraa. There he was told to coordinate with the office of Bashar’s brother, Maher, who was overseeing the crisis cell in Daraa and was monitoring the situation hour by hour. One of Maher’s crony businessmen, Mohammad Hamsho, was friends with Qaddah. The two would keep in touch throughout the emergency.”

On the evening of March 22, Qaddah met for hours with protesters at the Omani mosque. Past midnight he thought there was a breakthrough. The protesters agreed to leave the mosque on condition that all those arrested since March 18 would be immediately released. The fate of those missing—dead, alive, or held by the regime—would also be ascertained. All other demands were subject to future discussions.

It was very late already. So Qaddah and his entourage got into their cars to head back to the crisis cell on the other side of the city to inform its leaders about the deal that they had just struck with the protesters.

As the peace delegation left the Omani mosque, the entire city was plunged into darkness. Streetlights were extinguished and power went off in all homes. Cellular phone service was also cut.

Sally was asleep. She was in bed next to her mother. Her father was still up in the living room.

Suddenly the crackle of heavy gunfire pierced the silence and darkness.

“Oh my God! Could they be storming the Omani?” said Sally as she jumped out of bed.

She ran into the living room. Her two younger brothers were already there with her father. Her mother came out from the bedroom.41

The mosque was a few hundred meters from their home. They could hear everything. The gunfire grew louder and more intense and sustained. It sounded like machine guns. The booms of explosions rang through the air.

Sally and her siblings started to cry. Her brothers wanted to run back to the mosque and be with their friends who were there. Her tearful mother barricaded their way and locked the front door. They would die if they stepped outside.

“Allahu akbar, people of Daraa! Help us, we are being slaughtered!” cried a man over the mosque’s loudspeaker. “Persevere, my brothers—stay in your place, we will be victorious. We do not have weapons, we are peaceful.”

And then, addressing the security forces: “You killers, you mercenaries.”

Indeed, all the shooting was done by regime forces: not a single bullet was fired from inside the mosque. There were only cries for help and shouts of defiance.

As regime forces closed in on the mosque, they started chanting: “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O Bashar!”

A doctor and a medic who rushed over to the mosque in an ambulance were both shot dead by regime sharpshooters hunkered down on adjacent roofs. At least six people inside the mosque were also murdered, and many others were wounded.

Bashar’s cousin Atef Najib entered the mosque after it was taken over. He wore military fatigues and carried an assault rifle. He stood in the courtyard and began shooting in the air.

“You sons of bitches!” he shouted as he emptied one magazine after another.

He was surrounded by dozens of armed men, mostly in plainclothes. They were laughing, smoking cigarettes, and back-slapping one another .They looked like gangsters. Many spoke with the distinctive accent of Bashar’s Alawite sect.

“We killed them,” one of them announced before joining the others in a trancelike chant: “God, Syria, and Bashar!”

When the news reached Qaddah, he was stunned. He felt betrayed. He had been used as bait by regime forces. They were preparing the assault even as he was inside the mosque assuring protesters that a deal could be worked out and that their demands regarding detainees could be fulfilled. Qaddah called Maher al-Assad’s associate Hamsho from the crisis cell command center to express his anger.

Shortly after, Maher himself called back and asked to speak to Qaddah. He was on speakerphone. All the mukhabarat commanders who had overseen the storming of the mosque were sitting around and could hear Maher, too.

“So, Muwafaq, I heard you shit in your pants—ha ha ha!” said Maher as he laughed uncontrollably.

The next day Bashar and Manaf spoke again by telephone.

“How can this carnage happen?” demanded Manaf. “This is unreal. I thought Muwafaq Qaddah was your emissary and was negotiating on your behalf.”

Bashar said Qaddah was being played by the protesters who, he claimed, were armed and dangerous and part of a foreign conspiracy. He said he had spoken to his brother, Maher, and cousin Hafez Makhlouf before the order was given to storm the mosque.

“We had no choice but to nip this whole thing in the bud,” Bashar said.

After the call this thought occurred to Manaf: “They have wasted no time in taking the Hama manual out of the drawer.”

 

(A guest post by Omar Sabbour that appeared originally on Facebook. Omar is an independent Egyptian writer and activist.)

So let’s assess what Turkey’s almost unchallenged destruction of the regime today (exposing how much of a paper tiger it really is when it can’t rely on Russian warplanes to bomb civilians out of an area before they take it) means:

it means that Russia has been bluffing for a long time, as many of us long suspected, and the fears of a ‘war with Russia’ (yet alone a war between US and Russia) were based on a fundamental overestimation of Russian military capabilities. It is the US which has created the image of a behemoth out of Russia in Syria by coordinating airstrikes with it for years while blocking anti aircraft weaponry from regional allies to the rebels on the ground.

So, it could be said that Turkey couldn’t do the sort of thing it seemingly has done with incredible ease today years ago because of simultaneous US and Russian opposition (both of which still exist – there is little doubt in my mind that US today is also unhappy with Turkey’s actions; the US has since 2017 sent signals that ‘al-Qaeda held’ Idlib should collapse). Now it is argued that Turkey could step in because of the vaccum left by the partial US withdrawal from the arena, in a way that it couldn’t before when both US and Russia were active. In other words, ironically it was the US presence, not the Russian one, that was the main factor that stopped Turkey doing this kind of thing before.

But what would have been the cost to Turkey if it went ahead anyway years ago to do the sort of thing it did today – both US and Russia be damned? Would the US have shot down Turkish warplanes? Doubt it. International isolation, even though Turkey would’ve simply been carrying out the theoretical anti-Assad position of the US (even if this was of course opposite to the actual US policy of opposing taking out the regime militarily)? What would have happened? US would go to support YPG? Happened anyway. Turkey isolated/disliked in Western capitals? Happened anyway.

Would the adopted Turkish trajectory, basically allying with Russia and making quid pro quo exchanges of rebel territories for Kurdish ones have been necessary if it acted early on against regime, calling US bluff, and insisted on forcing itself into the fight against ISIS, ensuring US/YPG didn’t get all the spoils?

There’s no question that there were the sort of things that were considered by Turkish policymakers. There were a variety of options available to them: from ignoring US objections and providing MANPADs to FSA before Russia’s intervention, to the more direct option of intervening itself, as took place today.

Instead, Turkey took the most cautious and conservative approach – underplaying its cards vis a vis Russia and wasting massive leverage, especially when opposition was spread across the country. And for what? What gains did it achieve by this policy?

I wrote a (unpublished) piece a few months ago saying that Turkey had to go it alone against *both* US and Russian objections in Syria. Some might have thought this was too far-fetched but today perhaps shows that it wasn’t.

Main mistakes:

– Abiding by US diktat on giving anti-aircraft defences to rebels since 2012 onwards (abandoned *eight* years later)

– Refusing to seriously support FSA against ISIS in 2013/14

– Leaving fight against ISIS mainly to US/YPG afterwards

– Underplaying leverage (post-2016) and making uneven deals with Russia of surrendering rebel territories to regime in exchange for being able to act against YPG. With today’s events, it’s questionable even if it was necessary for Turkey to clear Euphrates Shield (i.e. Aleppo for Al-Bab) and Olive Branch (East Idlib for Afrin) with Russia beforehand.

– In any case, exchanges were not even (though of course Turkey cared about Kurds first and foremost) and furthermore, Turkey continued to pacify northern rebel front outside of the framework of these exchanges, as part of ‘deescalation agreements’ which would be completely ignored by Russia. As well as the direct surrender of places like Aleppo and East Idlib, this meant the indirect aiding of fall of places like Eastern Ghouta, Dara’a, Homs countryside by freezing northern rebel front and allowing regime to focus fully on each area one at a time.

– Finally, taking waaaaay too long and allowing regime to completely trample on Sochi agreement on Idlib (ever since regime capture of Khan Sheikhun quite a long time ago) even though Turkey had by now run out of ‘exchanges’ to make with Russia. In short, Turkey kept sending Russia signals that it will acquiesce to regime to take more territories, even though this violated Sochi, but the regime/Russia just wouldn’t stop.

The recent events will be portrayed as Turkey being aggressive/expansionist in Syria vis a vis regime. In reality, Turkey has actually bent over backwards to please Russia, ignoring its violations of the agreed de-escalation zones in 2017, then its violation of Sochi specifically since 2018, even though the anti-Kurdish bargains to be made with Russia had been completed and Turkey was not gaining anything in return for letting Russia/regime violate their agreements and seize territory.

Even today, Turkey has avoided saying that it was Russia who bombed it (even though it almost certainly was and it isn’t the first time) and has even let Russian warships through the Bosporus. I also have doubts that the current level of Turkish escalation against regime will be a protracted thing, I think it’s meant to send a strong message to Russia (better late than never) with the aim of reaching a new/old political accommodation in Idlib, though I certainly hope I’m wrong. Some of the more excited folks are saying that Turkey can even escalate to take out the regime in Damascus. I doubt that though as there are simply no rebel forces on the ground who can advance in south Syria to take advantage. In other words, two years too late.

The more realistic question is which scenario Turkey will take:

1. Declared scenario: Turkey will back serious FSA offensive that pushes back regime to Sochi lines and reverse all recent gains (still a serious endeavour). Of course, Russia unlikely to sit by idly and will try and destroy everything that rebels try to take, so there’s that consideration (unless Turkey intervenes with its own airforce, for example with NATO defensive cover)
2. Pragmatic scenario: Turkey will back more limited offensive that takes back some territories but leaves regime with gains
3. Maximalist/’punishment’ scenario: Turkey will push a very strong offensive that pushes back regime to beyond Sochi lines, probably encompassing parts of Greater Idlib (east of M5) and Northern Hama exchanged with Russia as part of Afrin offensive. Such an offensive (this could have different details, at its fullest extent it could encompass assaults on imagine if it took the cities of Hama and Aleppo) would probably cause a massive fear of regime collapse and may bring Russia to compromise on Assad. This I think is the only scenario which actually has a chance of resurrecting “political solution” but on record Turkey is not ambitious enough to attempt it. Of course however, Russian airforce may go even crazier than it already has if Turkey attempted this, again, absent Turkish airforce/NATO deterrence.
4. Pessimistic scenario: Turkey deescalates after sending message and regime actually continues to take more territory (which it actually is currently doing in South Idlib)

In conclusion, Turkey alone, through acting unilaterally, can bring a change in equilibrium which can end the Syrian war. At most optimistic, an expanded (“punishment”) campaign for Eastern Idlib, Northern Hama (maybe even Hama city) and Aleppo would result in a regime panic and perhaps a transition. Hypothetically, a surprise offensive on something like Aleppo for instance, if successful, would be such a shock that it would probably force a Russian agreed transition. Realistically though, a reversal of recent gains back to Sochi lines would still be a very significant achievement; it would likely result in a freezing of the war – at least on the part of Assad/Russia until they hope that Erdogan loses power in Turkey, leaving them to try again, Which is why, naturally, a full out offensive to beyond Sochi lines would be the most efficient way of bringing war to close – question is if Turkey has a) the ability (can it deter Russian airforce, or if not, can its own military capacities nonetheless enable rebels to advance?) and b) the willingness to do it.

Medal of Freedom awardee and Syria false flagger speaks out

Almost a year ago, a group of pro-Assad academics in England organized as the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media and led by the odious Tim Hayward posted a report on their website written by former OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) employee Ian Henderson. It was a highly technical rebuttal to the official report, which concluded that dozens of Syrians living in Douma were killed by gas released from a weaponized chlorine tank dropped by a regime helicopter.

Delivered as a series of bullet points, Henderson’s report concluded:

33. In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.

“Manually placed” could have only meant one thing. Even though Henderson stopped short of stating it, the pro-Assad academics said it for him. This was a “false flag” intended to provoke American intervention. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, they concluded that jihadis planted the chlorine tanks. Part of the conspiracy also involved killing dozens of Douma residents beforehand just to lend an air of realism to the staged event, like in a Hollywood film: “As we have previously noted, if the Douma attack was staged the only plausible explanation for the deaths of the victims is that they were murdered as captives by the opposition group in control of Douma at the time.” Most recently, one of Hayward’s henchmen went so far as to claim that they used a “gas chamber”. 

Eventually, another “whistleblower” turned up, an ex-OPCW employee first identified as “Alex”. He eventually turned out to be one Brendan Whelan. Like Henderson, Whelan stuck to the technical details that he presented to a conference organized by Wikileaks in October 2019. Wikileaks has also been posting leaked OPCW documents intended to absolve Assad of the Douma chemical attack. As part of the propaganda offensive by Wikileaks, an open letter was signed by former OPCW director José Bustani, Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk. They hoped that  their good names would help draw attention to “alternative hypotheses on how the alleged chlorine munitions came to be found in the two apartment buildings.” It is sad that these model citizens’ reputations will be stained forever by serving such filthy ends.

Grayzone has joined the British academic Assadists and Wikileaks in a tripartite propaganda campaign, posting and commenting on leaked material. As you probably know, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton were well-known opponents of Assad but had a change of heart after Blumenthal had an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow for the purpose of celebrating RT’s anniversary. Once he returned, he started writing articles of the kind that he formerly denounced. Some people believe that he is getting paid by Russia to write propaganda. I have no proof one way or another.

Adding to these fairly high-profile outlets, there are other defenders of Assad who rally around the OPCW leaks. They include individuals like Jonathan Cook and Robert Fisk, as well as websites such as Mint Press, Off-Guardian, Consortium News and Moon of Alabama.

For the most part, the debate around Douma has been focused on technical issues such as whether there was forensic evidence of chlorine gas poisoning or whether the placement of the weaponized chlorine tanks was consistent with a helicopter attack or not. Much of it has been probably far too arcane for the average leftist to absorb. The best of it has originated from Eliot Higgins’s BellingCat or from Brian Whittaker’s articles on https://al-bab.com/. I have written a number of articles myself that are focused on the objective factors that make a false flag unlikely, such as the difficulty of securing weaponized chlorine tanks, but will take a look at Douma from a different angle today.

I want to show how the entire notion of a “false flag” runs counter to the agenda of the Trump administration that could care less about Syrians being gassed. In fact, Douma had been subject to three chlorine gas attacks in 2018 prior to the one that left over 40 people dead. Not a peep was heard from the White House before then. All told, there have been 336 chlorine gas attacks in Syria and 98 percent of them have been linked to the dictatorship.

Only once has the USA retaliated and that was after the attack on Douma in 2018, when Trump authorized a missile attack on buildings in Damascus that were supposedly part of its chemical weapons development program, as well as some air bases. Since chlorine can be purchased by practically anybody involved with sterilizing swimming pools and the like, the missile attack was mostly for show. The Economist reported that the USA contacted Russia in advance just to make sure that it didn’t become collateral damage. NBC News described it as an “empty gesture”, especially since the advance warning allowed the dictatorship to evacuate its war planes and helicopters to safety.

The propaganda offensive around Douma is based on the notion that Donald Trump is bent on “regime change”, whereas in fact he had zero interest in such a project. The only reason he retaliated after the Douma gas attack was to show that the USA was still capable of unleashing a well-orchestrated military offensive even if it was pulling its punches. The false-flaggers fail to acknowledge that Trump never had a problem with Baathist rule in Syria. Unlike George W. Bush, who was determined to topple it in Iraq, Trump never saw Syria as a threat to American interests except perhaps for Iran’s presence.

Keep in mind that Trump marched to the tune of a different drummer. Instead of listening to Max Boot or William Kristol, he was attuned to the commentary on Fox News that is for the most part on the same wave-length as Grayzone, et al. This should be obvious from the red-carpet treatment afforded Max Blumenthal during his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show. But you might be surprised by how extensive sympathy for Assad was not only on Fox News but other rightwing media voices that Trump took to heart.

Just the other day, Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom. I bet you didn’t know that Rush was a false-flagger in good standing. Here he is in 2013 (as shown in the YouTube clip above) blaming the rebels for using sarin gas on their own supporters in East Ghouta:

And then late last night, early this morning, I run across this piece by Yossef Bodansky. And I look him up, find out who he is, just shared his resume with you, and his story, his article here is that there is evidence, mounting evidence that the rebels in Syria did indeed frame Assad for the chemical attack. But not only that, that Obama, the regime, may have been complicit in it. Mounting evidence that the White House knew and possibly helped plan this Syrian chemical weapon attack by the opposition.

Just four days after the April 7, 2018 Douma attack, Ann Coulter called the experts who blamed Assad a bunch of liars.

Steve Doocy: shares the concerns of Grayzone, et al

Although the name Steve Doocy might not ring a bell, he is one of the hosts of Fox and Friends, the morning talk show that Trump starts his day with. Just a few days after the Douma chlorine attack, Doocy said, “I was reading this morning in Newsweek … that apparently this group called the White Helmets, … there are stories that they staged bodies to make it look like there was a gas attack.”

Glenn Beck, a former Fox TV star who went on to form his own media company called TheBlaze TV, was also caught in the act of  false-flagging. On April 17, 2018 his website posted an article titled “The war machine springs to life over Syria,” a title that sounds like it might have appeared on Grayzone. It stated:

Are these so-called “moderate rebels” morally capable of using poison gas on civilians, children especially? You bet they are. These are proven head-choppers, supported by the US, who have publicly posted numerous videos of themselves beheading children. Morals are not part of their framework or this war.

Plus, the gas war crime certainly serves their interest more than it does Assad’s at this time.

Between the two suspects, it’s far more likely that the increasingly desperate jihadists, who are clearly losing the fight at this point, would use any and every method at their employ to their advantage.

Finally, you have Michael Savage who is probably the most ardent supporter of Donald Trump on talk radio. He, like the others, drew the line on bombing Syria. Here he is in a scathing attack on what he called a “Potemkin raid”:

It was not just the Fox News talking heads that rejoiced in Trump’s repudiation of neoconservative-type warmongering. There were probably hundreds of articles from the left that saw him as a welcome departure from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama interventionism.

Gareth Porter, a perennial false-flagger, wrote an article for Middle East Eye titled “US intervention in Syria? Not under Trump” that was subtitled: “The Trump administration may recognise that the Syrian army is the only institution committed to resisting terrorism in its country.” Specifically:

The US military leadership was never on board with the policy of relying on those armed groups to advance US interests in Syria in the first place.

It recognised that, despite the serious faults of the Assad regime, the Syrian army was the only Syrian institution committed to resisting both al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

It seems likely that the Trump administration will now return to that point as it tries to rebuild a policy from the ashes of the failed policy of the Obama administration.

Dave Lindorff, a long-time contributor to CounterPunch with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials, chimed in as well with an article titled “Trump does something right for once”. It celebrated his announced withdrawal of 3,000 troops from Syria—a bit prematurely. But it did give him credit for at least making such an announcement that included this provocative encomium: “Hell, I’ll be the first to endorse him for a Nobel Peace Prize!”

Although American policy in Syria is still filled with contradictions, there is little doubt that Trump has given Putin carte blanche to have his way. Idlib is being bombed to oblivion, while the Max Blumenthal’s of the world are warning about American intervention being prepped by another false flag.

In yesterday’s Grayzone, there’s an article by the halfwit Aaron Maté that recapitulates all of the false flag themes that have been oozing out of the pores of the pro-Assad “left” for the past two years. One thing in particular caught my eye. He wrote:

Alex revealed that a delegation of three US officials visited the OPCW at The Hague on July 5th, 2018. They implored the dissenting inspectors to accept the view that the Syrian government carried out a gas attack in Douma and chided them for failing to reach that conclusion. According to Steele, Alex and the other inspectors saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure.” In his statement to the UN Security Council, Henderson confirmed that he attended the meeting.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, they implored? Who authorized them to do so when clearly the Trump administration was well on its way to washing its hands of the entire resistance to Assad. A year before that delegation showed up at OPCW headquarters, Trump had cut off all funding to the rebels as the July 19, 2017 NY Times reported:

President Trump has ended the clandestine American program to provide arms and supplies to Syrian rebel groups, American officials said, a recognition that the effort was failing and that the administration has given up hope of helping to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The decision came more than a month ago, the officials said, by which time the effort to deliver the arms had slowed to a trickle.

It was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of the program four years ago were officially a secret, authorized by President Barack Obama through a “finding” that permitted the C.I.A. to conduct a deniable program. News of the troublesome program soon leaked out.

In light of all the evidence that Trump has zero interest in a military intervention in Syria of the kind that Obama mounted in Libya, why do Wikileaks, Tim Hayward’s gang and Grayzone continue to act as if it is 2002 and Colin Powell is making speeches about WMD’s in Iraq? After 9 years of asymmetrical warfare in Syria that has included the bombing of hospitals, chemical attacks, the torture and murder of captive rebels by the thousands in Syrian prisons, the starvation siege of places like Aleppo and East Ghouta, these contemptuous apologists for mass murder like Max Blumenthal, Tim Hayward, and Julian Assange flunkies continue to act as if they are heroic antiwar activists and investigative journalists. In fact, they are swimming with the tide. The reality is that they are likely acting on the basest of motives that might include payoffs from the Kremlin and an intoxication with strongmen like Assad and Putin that only a psychiatrist could explain.