Syrian Defector: More Guns, Less Gandhi

[tabatha]

By: Dan Bilefsky

With his slight figure and pensive disposition, Ammar Cheikh Omar seems more like a contemplative German philosophy student than a would-be Syrian Rambo. But the 29-year-old defector from the Syrian Army insists it is time for the Syrian opposition to shed its passive philosophizing. It is time, he says, to take up arms.

Only months ago he used to dread it when he was a member of the army and armed agents of President Bashar al-Assad’s fearsome security apparatus would menacingly prod new recruits like him to shoot at unarmed protesters.

But now that he has defected and joined the rebel army fighting Assad, his erstwhile gun-shyness has transformed into a new resolve to fight.

Like many members of the rebel Free Syrian Army whom I met in the dusty Turkish border town of Hatay, Mr. Omar was fed up with the passive resistance espoused by the Syrian opposition. Gandhi’s ideology, he said ruefully, is no match for a loaded AK-47. Guns must be met with guns, he insisted on a recent day. He and his comrades bemoaned the chronic passivity of the Syrian National Council, the political wing of the Syrian opposition, in the face of a cruel dictator using violence against his own people.

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/syrian-defector-more-guns-less-gandhi/

So much for the "terrorists".

[ellisonz]

1. "Freedom Fighters"

[leveymg]

2. There goes the rationale for UN "humanitarian intervention."

You can't have your AK-47s, and claim to be a peaceful, persecuted opposition group. Otherwise, the UN (had it been around) would have to intervene on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War once significant casualties occurred.