John Kerry, the US Secretary of State reportedly came close to revealing his true thoughts when he was accosted by two Syrian aid workers at a reception in London after the collapse of the Geneva talks last week.
The Syrians accused him of doing nothing to protect civilians from the onslaught they were facing in Aleppo. One of the aid workers, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her organization, told Middle East Eye that Kerry replied : 'Don't blame me - go and blame your opposition." The aid worker said Kerry blamed the government offensive on the opposition walking out of the talks.
Kerry got flustered in the encounter: "What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?" the aid worker said Kerry told her. Kerry then anticipated three months of bombing during which time " the opposition will be decimated."
Kerry's off-mike encounter deviated significantly from the official line. This was that Russia and Iran had offered Washington a ceasefire. Kerry's remarks differed also from the State Department's mantra that the brutality of Assad against the Syrian people had helped foster the growth of the Islamic State group. Apparently now, Syrians who resisted Assad's brutality were responsible for the barrel bombs being dropped on them.
After multiple avowals that Assad's army was on the point of collapse and after the ill-fated CIA training programmes, Syrian rebels are being sold down the river by the country that urged them to rise up five years ago.
The Deraa protests started peacefully. To that, all witnesses attest. Four factors turned those protests into an armed uprising: the brutality of the regime's response, Assad's decision to release jihadis from Sednaya Prison, an act which "islamised" the opposition, the Libyan intervention, and the intervention of foreign powers - Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The scenes today on the Turkish border are direct consequence of Obama's "intervention-lite" in Syria - a drip feed of weapons - but only 16 bullets per fighter per month. The Free Syrian Army has reportedly stopped receiving weapons for four months. Barack Obama boasted he was leading from behind in the Libyan intervention. That has changed in Syria. He is wringing his hands from behind.
There can be little doubt that Kerry's policy is twisting in the wind as a result of the Russian intervention. That much was evident from Kerry's meeting with Riyad Hijab general coordinator of the High Negotiations Committee, the body formed in Riyadh in response to American pleas for unity.
Kerry told Hijab that talks must begin before the bombardment stopped, that there was no timetable for Assad's departure; that the objective of the talks would be nothing less than a national unity government; and that the failure of the opposition going to Geneva would mean US cutting off aid to the opposition. Michael Ratney, US Special Envoy to Syria, attempted over to smooth things over by claiming there had been a misunderstanding caused by bad translation. But Hijab understood Kerry all too clearly.
Kerry's Damascene conversion took place in four stages. The first was Assad's chemical attack on opposition positions in Ghouta, in Eastern Damascus, which paved the way for Russian mediation which persuaded Assad to give up his stockpile of chemical weapons. This gave Russia a good argument to use with Kerry who refused at the time to recognise Assad's authority: If Assad was legitimate enough to negotiate with over the surrender of his chemical stockpile, he surely had to remain as head of a transitional government. Either way he had to be recognised as the de facto head of state. This is the logic Kerry has now accepted.
The second was Mosul, a city held by four divisions of the Iraqi army trained by the US to the tune of $25 billion which was captured by 350 ISIS fighters. The third was the Russian intervention on October 30 and the final nail in the coffin of Kerry's Syria policy was the attacks in Paris in November. Gradually Kerry began to see Assad as the lesser of two evils. Kerry bought into Sergei Lavrov's line that Russia had saved Damascus from falling into the hands of IS.
Kerry has come dangerously close to seeing the Syrian conflict as a binary fight between two forms of ruthless dictatorship - Assad and the Islamic State group . This is exactly how Assad himself, Russia, Iran and Arab autocracies in Egypt and the Emirates and Jordan, frame the conflict. And it is one of the main reasons why the Islamic State group is growing from strength to strength.
To see the civil war through this prism, you have to persuade yourself that the opposition to Assad consists exclusively of Salafi Jihadi extremists, supported by the Wahabi doctrines of Saudi Arabia and the imperial conceit of Erdogan's Sultanate in Turkey. You have to persuade yourself that the Syrian rebels, like IS, want to impose a brutal theocracy on a secular state.
You have,in short, to airbrush out of this landscape the faces and views of the majority Sunni population. You have to turn a deaf ear to the testimony of 4.6m refugees registered with the UNHCR. Nor are they the last. Another exodus is on its way in Aleppo. There are 150,000 civilians in rebel held eastern Aleppo and up to 250,000 others in the area. 70,000 have crossed into Turkey as a result of the Russian bombing and government advances and 31,000 are waiting at the border. The Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday that 600,000 could be heading towards Turkey.
Why do they flee? Whom are they fleeing? Are they forced out by Jihadis imposing Sharia Law ? Are fleeing the warm embrace of a liberal, secular multi-confessional republic, as Assad likes to present himself as leading? If the Syrian army is a disciplined force, as its apologists maintain, why are hundreds of thousands of civilians so terrified of being liberated by it?
I spent a week in the refugee camps on Jordan's northern border asking these questions, going from tent to tent in search of answers. The following is a representative sample of the replies I got.
Meteb was a civil servant, the head of the transportation department in Baba Amr. Homs became the epicentre of anti-government protests, after protests in Deraa had been quelled by a large scale military operation. A Free Syrian Army brigade formed by defecting Syrian Army officers ambushed government forces around Baba Amr in October 2011 and defended the neighbourhood .When an Arab peace mission failed - the Syrian army hid their tanks under fake sand dunes to conceal their presence from the monitors , witnesses claimed - the army launched an offensive in February 2012.
"For six months there were no arms whatsoever. People only started using arms when they witnessed the brutality of the regime. The police would undress the women, force them to strip and put them on the tanks for people to watch." Meteb said.
Continued....a long read......
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