Syria war update 17 Jan 2016

Decisive Days of Battle for Latakia

In the past few days the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) achieved significant territorial gains in the former insurgent heartland, located in the “Mountain of the Kurds” (Jabal al-Akrād) region near the Turkish border in Latakia Governorate. For the past three years, the Syrian insurgency greatly benefited from supply routes running from the Turkish border and also from the hilly and wooded terrain. This region has a vital importance for the both war parties because of its proximity to the city of Latakia and other urban centres near the Mediterranean coast. The Syrian-Turkish border area was an area denial zone for the Syrian Government forces for a long time. This has been changed.

As expected, the fall of the most important insurgent stronghold of Salma had a severe negative impact on the insurgency’s defense capabilities. On January 20, the SAA liberated the village of Ateera and the surrounding areas, which insurgents attempted to recapture a day before, without success. The government forces pushed insurgents from the al-Kabeir village and moved the pressure away from the loyalist forces deployed at the village of Bayt Ablaq. The most important advance took place in the southern operational area near the strategic M4 highway, which leads to the cities of Jisr al Shughour and Idlib.

Keep an eye on the following twitter account for updates : PetoLucem

a reply to: Azureblue

I read on another site that a civil war is planned for Turkey which will result in several new micro states in the area where Turkey, Syria and Iraq (I think it is) meet.

The Kurds. I think Turkey may be building to a new Genocide, like the Armenians, but this time the Kurds. They been deploying tanks and armored vehicles, shooting at civilians protesting, carrying white flags…

Turkey is backed by the US and NATO who will look the other way as this happens, just like they did when Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurds with Nerve gas that the US sold them.

This just happened, these people were carrying a white flag during a funeral procession, a tank can clearly be seen up the street before the shooting started.

Warning, murderdeathkill…

a reply to: Xcathdra

i dont know why i bother with you. russia killed citizens in the ukraine now? wowee. youll make up any old lie if it suits you huh?

also i dont see how bringing up the chaos america has caused is off topic on a post about atrocities happening in syria. they sit in the middle of this thing.

a reply to: AVoiceOfReason

Start here if you will.

A double story began on the Syrian conflict, at the outset of the armed violence in 2011, in the southern border town of Daraa. The first story comes from independent witnesses in Syria, such as the late Father Frans Van der Lugt in Homs. They say that armed men infiltrated the early political reform demonstrations to shoot at both police and civilians. This violence came from sectarian Islamists. The second comes from the Islamist groups (‘rebels’) and their western backers. They claim there was ‘indiscriminate’ violence from Syrian security forces to repress political rallies and that the ‘rebels’ grew out of a secular political reform movement. This happened in Kiev as well

Careful study of the independent evidence, however, shows that the Washington-backed ‘rebel’ story, while widespread, was part of a strategy to delegitimise the Syrian Government, with the aim of fomenting ‘regime change’. To understand this it is necessary to observe that, prior to the armed insurrection of March 2011 there were shipments of arms from Saudi Arabia to Islamists at the al Omari mosque. It is also useful to review the earlier Muslim Brotherhood insurrection at Hama in 1982, because of the parallel myths that have grown up around both insurrections.

US intelligence (DIA 1982) and the late British author Patrick Seale (1988) give independent accounts of what happened at Hama. After years of violent, sectarian attacks by Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, by mid-1980 President Hafez al Assad had ‘broken the back’ of their sectarian rebellion, which aimed to impose a Salafi-Islamic state. One final coup plot was exposed and the Brotherhood ‘felt pressured into initiating’ an uprising in their stronghold of Hama. Seale describes the start of that violence in this way:

At 2am on the night of 2-3 February 1982 an army unit combing the old city fell into an ambush. Roof top snipers killed perhaps a score of soldiers … [Brotherhood leader] Abu Bakr [Umar Jawwad] gave the order for a general uprising … hundreds of Islamist fighters rose … by the morning some seventy leading Ba’athists had been slaughtered and the triumphant guerrillas declared the city ‘liberated’ (Seale 1988: 332).

However the Army responded with a huge force of about 12,000 and the battle raged for three weeks. It was a foreign-backed civil war, with some defections from the army. Seale continues:

As the tide turned slowly in the government’s favour, the guerrillas fell back into the old quarters … after heavy shelling, commandos and party irregulars supported by tanks moved in … many civilians were slaughtered in the prolonged mopping up, whole districts razed (Seale 1988: 333).

Two months later a US intelligence report said: ‘The total casualties for the Hama incident probably number about 2,000. This includes an estimated 300 to 400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elite ‘Secret Apparatus’ (DIA 1982: 7).

Seale recognises that the Army also suffered heavy losses. At the same time, ‘large numbers died in the hunt for the gunmen … government sympathizers estimating a mere 3,000 and critics as many as 20,000 … a figure of 5,000 to 10,000 could be close to the truth’ He adds:

‘The guerrillas were formidable opponents. They had a fortune in foreign money … [and] no fewer than 15,000 machine guns’ (Seale 1988: 335). Subsequent Muslim Brotherhood accounts have inflated the casualties, reaching up to ‘40,000 civilians’, thus attempting to hide their insurrection and sectarian massacres by claiming that Hafez al Assad had carried out a ‘civilian massacre’ (e.g. Nassar 2014). The then Syrian President blamed a large scale foreign conspiracy for the Hama insurrection. Seale observes that Hafez was ‘not paranoical’, as many US weapons were captured and foreign backing had come from several US collaborators: King Hussayn of Jordan, Lebanese Christian militias (the Israeli-aligned ‘Guardians of the Cedar’) and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Seale 1988: 336-337).

The Hama insurrection helps us understand the Daraa violence because, once again in 2011, we saw armed Islamists using rooftop sniping against police and government officials, drawing in the armed forces, only to cry ‘civilian massacre’ when they and their collaborators came under attack from the Army. Although the US, through its allies, played an important part in the Hama insurrection, when it was all over US intelligence dryly observed that: ‘the Syrians are pragmatists who do not want a Muslim Brotherhood government’ (DIA 1982: vii).

There is plenty of reading there for anyone who dares to "rock their already accepted CNN/ABC/FOX white house" narratives provided almost exclusively by the kind and generous cannibal slave traders (peaceful protesters?)

References you say? Oh wait, they have a few dozen of those as well.

References:

Abouzeid, Rania (2011) ‘Syria’s Revolt, how graffiti stirred an uprising’, Time, 22 March

Al Akhras, Samer (2011) ‘Syrian Citizen’, Facebook, 25 June, online: www.facebook.com...

Al Jazeera (2011a) ‘Nine killed at Syria funeral processions’, 23 April, online: www.aljazeera.com...

Al Jazeera (2011b) ‘Deraa: A city under a dark siege’, 28 April, online: www.aljazeera.com...

Al-Shaqfa, Muhammad Riyad (2011) ‘Muslim Brotherhood Statement about the so-called ‘Syrian Revolution’’, General supervisor for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, statement of 28 March, online at: truthsyria.wordpress.com...

Allaf, Rime (2012) ‘This Time, Assad Has Overreached’, NYT, 5 Dec, online: www.nytimes.com...

Blanford, Nicholas (2011) ‘Assad regime may be gaining upper hand in Syria’, Christian Science Monitor, 13 may, online: www.csmonitor.com...

Chossudovsky, Michel (2011) ‘Syria: who is behind the protest movement? Fabricating a pretext for US-NATO ‘Humanitarian Intervention’’, Global Research, 3 May, online: www.globalresearch.ca...

Clinton, Hilary (2011) ‘There is No Going Back in Syria’, US Department of State, 17 June, online: www.state.gov...

Maktabi, Rima (2011) ‘Reports of funeral, police shootings raise tensions in Syria’, CNN, 5 April, online: edition.cnn.com...

Crimi, Frank (2012) ‘Ethnic Cleansing of Syrian Christians’, Frontpagemag, 29 March, online: www.frontpagemag.com...

Daily Mail (2011) ‘Nine protesters killed after security forces open fire by Syrian mosque’, 24 March

DIA (1982) ‘Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies’, Defence Intelligence Agency (USA), May, online: syria360.files.wordpress.com...
... more in linked article

a reply to: AmericanRealist