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I have vented my opinion on the ill founded logic to overthrow the Assad regime by military force. I do blame the Obama administration and especially the State Department for a dumbfounded policy.
Tonight I listened to a dissident voice of a Syrian woman in The Netherlands who fled her country under the elder Assad ruler as a teenager. Her parents had warned her of the dark side of the conflict to come over more than a year ago. Today she realizes that what will replace Assad will be much worse.
Recent developments
The so-called uprising has been taken over by foreign fighters, jihadists who come from Libya, Algeria, Chechnya, Yemen and Arabs who fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jihadist have taken over a large part of Aleppo, established an Islamic state and vowed not to abide by the newly formed Syrian Opposition Alliance. Women have been forbidden to drive cars in their territory.
The new leader of the opposition was elected by 41 elder men with no votes from women. This Syrian woman who was hopeful for a democratic Syria, realizes her dream is a fata morgana. That Syria will not come to be after Assad is overthrown. The new regime will be led by the Muslim Brotherhood and a striong element of extreme Salafists where the rights of women will be limited by Sharia rule. There will be no place for Christians, they will flee Syria.
The foreign fighters are funded and armed by the Gulf States Qatar, Oman, UAE and Saudi Arabia.
BREAKING NEWS: In recent days I have noticed the MSM started to report about Saddam’s chemical warfare and the attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja. Today, President Obama gave a second stern warning for Assad not to use chemical wardare on its own people. Will Obama play the WMD card in Syria?
Holy Warriors – A field guide to Syria’s jihadi groups
(FP) – Eighteen months into the Syrian uprising, the country’s Sunni Arab insurgency is now fighting a largely sectarian war against a regime dominated by religious minorities, most notably the Alawite sect to which the Assad family belongs. While the exiled opposition movement in Turkey and elsewhere remains reasonably pluralistic, the armed insurgency that took off in mid-to-late 2011 has always been a Sunni Muslim Arab affair.
This climate of sectarian polarization has triggered a slow but certain “Islamization” of the armed movement. Ultraconservative Salafi-jihadis, in particular, have made rapid inroads among the rebels. They tend to organize in small, close-knit groups, but their ideological impact is visible across the rebel movement, with other factions increasingly adopting their religious discourse.
Report Syrian Jihadism [pdf]
Jordan has recently thwarted an attack on their territory by jihadists coming from Syria
(JPost) – A Jordanian Salafist-jihadist cleric with ties to al-Qaida said on Saturday that jihadists from his country had planned to carry out a suicide attack in Israel. Abu Muhammad al-Tahawi said that Jordanian Salafist-jihadists had wanted to carry out an attack but the plan had failed.
However, Tahawi said that Jordanian Salafists were “getting closer to Palestine via Jordan, Syria and Lebanon,” according to a report on Jordan’s Albawaba news website on Sunday.
“Our Palestinian brothers who are now in Aleppo [Syria] will then go to Israel to fight there,” he said, speaking at a funeral ceremony for a Salafist killed fighting against President Bashar Assad’s forces in Deraa, Syria. “Jihad requires patience.”
Underreported impacts of the Arab Spring on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Clinton Helps Shape New Syrian Gov in Exile
(Syria Comment) – The United States is withdrawing support for the Syrian National Council (SNC) and helping form a more representative opposition group. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “There has to be representation of those who are on the front lines, fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom.” The SNC is largely comprised of exiles. The Obama administration has been working behind the scenes for several months in negotiations to build a new Syrian opposition leadership. Clinton said she has been heavily involved in planning an Arab League supported meeting for next week in Doha, Qatar, where opposition figures will work to form a new opposition body.
Syria opposition’s new ‘progressive’ Islamist leader aims to gain international recognition
DOHA/CAIRO — Syria’s newly named opposition leader, a soft-spoken cleric backed by Washington and the Gulf Arab states, launched his quest on Monday for international recognition of a government-in-waiting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Mouaz Alkhatib, a former imam of a Damascus mosque, flew to Cairo to seek the Arab League’s blessing for a new assembly, the day after he was unanimously elected to lead it. He made a concerted effort to address the sectarian and ethnic acrimony underlying 20 months of civil war that has killed 38,000 people.
His new Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces received the endorsement of the six Sunni Muslim-ruled kingdoms of the Gulf Cooperation Council as the “legitimate representative of the Syrian people”.
Washington also promised to back the new body “as it charts a course toward the end of Assad’s bloody rule and the start of the peaceful, just, democratic future”.
