Alex Crawford: Syria: Idlib Residents Prepare For Attack

[tabatha]

http://news.sky.com/home/video/world-news/video/16167476

[tabatha]

1. Shelling of Homs continues, with tanks believed to be within the city now.

Daraa: Tasil: is under vicious attack, with regime forces continuing to murder, burn and destroy in the town. Demonstrations in support of Homs, mass demos folloing funerals, and more defections are the main events in Syria today, even as communications including the uploading of videos continue obstructed. What is happening in Syria continues sickening...with Assad determined to win the title of the most relentlessly bloodthirsty murderous tyrant of all time and looking well set for it. The whole world wants to look away.... none of us can bare this... none of us can bare that this is happening anywhere in the world.... it takes apart everything we believe in, all faith in the human race....the world is shocked to its core by this horror.... and those who aren't, have lost all claim to be human.

http://www.facebook.com/ENGSPK

‎8th Day of the Bombardment of Baba Amr... where many of the homes are built from materials no stronger than breeze blocks.... and no match for the rockets and armour piercing shells the Regime army is firing on them.... as well as brutal... it is insane... the economy is already falling.... and the government is killing the people, destroying cities and creating damage they have no means of putting right...at the moment they finally stop... they have hundreds of thousands of people who need to be maintained.... barbaric and brainless insanity

http://www.facebook.com/ENGSPK

‎'Amr' from Damascus Suburbs reports the widespread communications blackout in Syria, and reports that Damascus Suburbs are very tense, with heavy security, and destruction of homes within the Suburbs. Widespread regime abductions for torture and execution continue... too many for it to be possible to keep records... and it is feared that the number of missing may never be known, and the fate of those arrested, apart from the certainty of torture and abuse, in many cases leading to death is unknown. That less family members have been returned to their families dead from torture only indicates that the Regime is now covering this up. We pray for all in Syria....

http://www.facebook.com/ENGSPK

[leveymg]

2. There are those who simply want to maximize the damage to Syria, regardless of the human costs.

The Neocons and Jihadists fed and encouraged this rebellion. They armed and funded the defectors. Now, those Syrians who were led to believe they would get outside military assistance, a la Libya, are paying a steep price. Those who set these events into motion may, if there is justice in this world, also reap the whirlwind.

[tabatha]

3. Where is your proof?

The damage is being done by Assad and Assad only.

If there were supposed "terrorist" groups in the US, would the army surround the town with tanks and bombard homes of innocent civilians?

Please!

This started out as peaceful demonstrations by Syrians who are sick of Assad and were inspired by others in the Arab world.

Russia has provided arms to Syria after the protests started.

The protesters have arms taken from the Syrian regime forces who defected - most of them are not armed.

Your charges are disgusting and demeaning to the Arab people.

[leveymg]

4. Do you deny that the Syrian opposition is funded and supported by outside powers?

As for US cities being leveled, you obviously have never heard of Atlanta or Richmond. Are you even an American, or has it never occurred to you that civil wars are like that, violent - and our own involved casualties on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in the Mideast right now. But, wait, as this escalates, you haven't even begun to see bloodshed. By the current logic put forward for military intervention in Syria, the UN would have stepped in with a "humanitarian mission" on the side of the Confederacy.

This phase of the Syrian civil war started out as the "long campaign of terror" by Salaafist Sunnis backed by KSA thirty years ago, or have you never heard of that? Fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ia did not start last March. It has been going on for centuries - during most of that period, the Shi'ia were a persecuted minority. The last phase of the conflict ended in 1982 with the death of 20,000 people in the rebel stronghold of Hama. Sectarian hatreds are now so intense that this now has the potential of becoming a full-fledged genocide, if the Ba'ath party were overthrown and the Syrian military were to come under the control of Sunni extremists. Here are some sources you might want to read on the subject:

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Terrorism in Syria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Syria Cached - Similar
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From 1976 to 1982, Sunni Islamists fought the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria in what has been called "long campaign of terror". Islamists attacked ...
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Hama massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre Cached - Similar
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From 1976 to 1982, Sunni Islamists fought the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria in what has been called "long campaign of terror". In 1979 the ...
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Islamic uprising in Syria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_uprising_in_SyriaCached
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The uprising was aimed against the authority of the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria, in what has been called "long campaign of terror". During the ...
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Syria became independent on April 17, 1946. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Syria endured a succession of military coups in 1949, the rise of the Ba'ath Party, and unification of the country with Egypt in the United Arab Republic in 1958. The UAR lasted for three years and broke apart in 1961, when a group of army officers seized power and declared Syria independent again. A further succession of coups ensued until a secretive military committee, which included a number of disgruntled Alawi officers, including Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid, helped the Ba'ath Party take power in 1963. In 1966, Alawi-oriented military officers successfully rebelled and expelled the old Ba'ath that had looked to the Christian Michel Aflaq and the Sunni Muslim Salah al-Din al-Bitar for leadership. They promoted Zaki al-Arsuzi as the "Socrates" of their reconstituted Ba'ath Party.
The Assad family

In 1970, then-Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a "Correctionist Movement" in the Ba'ath Party.[33] Robert D. Kaplan has compared his coming to power to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries."[29]

In 1971 al-Assad became president of Syria, a function that the Constitution allows only a Sunni Muslim to hold. In 1973 a new constitution was published that omitted the old requirement that the religion of the state is Islam and replaced it with the statement that the religion of the republic's president is Islam. Protests erupted when the statement was altered,[34] and to satisfy this requirement in 1974, Musa Sadr, a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement who had earlier sought to unite Lebanese Alawis and Shias under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council without success,[3] issued a fatwa stating that Alawis were a community of Twelver Shia Muslims.[35][36] Under the authoritarian but secular Assad government, religious minorities were tolerated, political dissent was not.

After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad maintained the outlines of his father's governance.[citation needed] Although the Alawis comprise the entirety of the top military and intelligence offices, government employees from lower bureaucratic ranks are largely from the majority Sunni Muslim faith, who represent about 74% of Syria's population. Today the Alawis exist as a minority, but are the most politically powerful sect in Syria and the only one with direct government control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawi

Russia has been the weapons supplier to Syria since the coup that brought the Ba'athist party (and the minority Alawite Shi'ia) to power in 1966. Nothing has changed, and the Syrian military has not used its most destructive Russian and Chinese-sourced weapons to put down the uprising. The US and other outside parties have funded the Syrian opposition for many years. As is known from Wikileaks cables: Barada TV is closely affiliated with the Movement for Justice and Development, a London-based network of Syrian exiles. Classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the State Department has funneled as much as $6 million to the group since 2006 to operate the satellite channel and finance other activities inside Syria. Or, are you unaware of that fact, too?

The units of the Syrian Army that defected obviously have their own weapons. The SLA has received tons of fresh weapons and supplies in border areas such as Jisr Al-Shugur and southern town of Daraa the Salaafists have long controlled, which is precisely why the armed uprising started there last year.

Your response is nonsensical and shows that you know nothing about the origins and history of the Syrian religious war other than the talking points the corporate media and Neocons have been feeding through you. Much of what you post is simply propaganda.

[tabatha]

5. There were actions in Libya and Egypt and South Africa long before things reached a head.

And I would hope that we have moved beyond the era of the civil war in the US.

Oh, and by the way, the articles I post are sourced from AJE blogs, twitter feeds, and mar15.info - where posts include opinion from all sides.

Your posts, on the other hand do not seem to appreciate anything other than Syrian regime propaganda.

[leveymg]

6. You're posting feeds directly from the opposition. Much of it is rumor that can't be confirmed,

even if some of details, granted, turn out to be accurate. For my own part, I try hard to source mainly confirmed and accepted mainstream sources. Besides, I tend to focus on historical facts that put current events into context. That is what almost all your sources totally lack - any balance or context that might help the reader understand why so many Syrians are killing each other.

Civil wars don't happen in a vacuum or because the local President for Life is a Bad Guy. Most of them are bad guys, by my standards, and sometimes the opposition is even worse, as is the potential for even greater loss of life. That is precisely the situation of potential genocide in Syria today - a potential for mass death that is being raised greatly by outside efforts at regime change and intervention.

[tabatha]

7. My reporting is mostly of what is happening in the ground.

Historical facts can be important - but things do change over time.

There are Alwaite on the side of the opposition, and Sunni on the side of Assad.

I think one has to observe what is going on and not to filter it through historical context because that can be a distortion.

And the slaughter by far, is by the Assad regime, and that is why my posts tend to be in support of the innocent civilians who happen to be Sunni.

There is revulsion across the spectrum, left to right, across the world to what Assad is doing. Even the Chinese internet posters do not like the Chinese veto.