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Insight: Aleppo misery eats at Syrian rebel support
ALEPPO, Syria (Reuters) Jan. 8, 2013 – At a crowded market stall in Syria, a middle-aged couple, well dressed, shuffle over to press a folded note, furtively, into the hand of a foreign reporter.
It is the kind of silent cry for help against a reign of fear that has been familiar to journalists visiting Syria over the past two years. Only this is not the Damascus of President Bashar al-Assad but rebel-held Aleppo; the note laments misrule under the revolution and hopes Assad can defeat its “terrorism”.
“We used to live in peace and security until this malicious revolution reached us and the Free Syrian Army started taking bread by force,” the unidentified couple wrote. “We ask God to help the regime fight the Free Syrian Army and terrorism – we are with the sovereignty of President Bashar al-Assad forever.”
“PARASITES”
Rebel commanders interviewed in and around Aleppo in the past two weeks acknowledged problems within the FSA – an army in name only, made up of brigades competing for recognition and resources. But they laid much of the blame on “bad apples” and opportunists and said steps are being taken to put things right.
“There has been a lot of corruption in the Free Syrian Army’s battalions – stealing, oppressing the people – because there are parasites that have entered the Free Syrian Army,” said Abu Ahmed, an engineer who heads a 35-man unit of the Tawheed Brigade, reckoned to be the largest in Aleppo province [8,000 fighters].
Abu Ahmed, who comes from a small town on the Turkish border and like many in Syria would be identified only by the familiar form of his name, estimated that most people in Aleppo, a city of over two million, were lukewarm at best to a 21-month-old uprising that is dominated by the Sunni Muslim rural poor.
“They don’t have a revolutionary mindset,” he said, putting support for Assad at 70 percent among an urban population that includes many ethnic Kurds, Christians and members of Assad’s Alawite minority. But he also acknowledged that looting and other abuses had cost the incoming rebels much initial goodwill.
“The Free Syrian Army has lost its popular support,” said Abu Ahmed, who said the Tawheed Brigade was now diversifying from fighting to talking on civic roles, including efforts to restore electricity supplies and deal with bread shortages. His own wife was setting up a school after months without classes.
Hunger and insecurity are key themes wherever Aleppines gather this winter. Outside a busy bakery in one rebel-held neighborhood men complained of having to stand in line for hours in the hope of bread, and of feeling the need to arm themselves for their own protection on the streets of the city.
Schools are being stripped of desks and chairs for firewood.
LOOTING
Lieutenant Mohammed Tlas, like many FSA officers, defected from Assad’s army. He now commands the 500 men of the Suqoor al-Shahbaa Brigade and put civilian complaints down to “bad seeds” who can label themselves as FSA fighters without any vetting.
“There are some brigades that loot from the people, and they are fundamentally bad seeds,” he said, chain-smoking in a green army sweater as he sat at his desk in a spartan office. “Anyone can carry a rifle and do whatever he wants.”
ALEPPO (Le Monde Diplomatique) Ja. 4, 2013 – The power struggle within the opposition — a struggle for the movement’s identity — has pitted liberal elements against more overtly Islamic factions. The new unified command of rebel forces, formed in Antalya (Turkey) earlier this month and dominated by Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, indicates which side came out on top: Brigadier Mustafa al-Sheikh, a senior officer known for his opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, was excluded from the meeting, as were others. How this dynamic will develop in the event Assad falls is unclear.
“We now say `when Assad goes, then the real war will begin’,” says Abu Saleh while sitting in an ice-cold, darkened Aleppo house. “It will start with a war between the FSA and the Islamists.” Abu Hassan, a fighter from the FSA, agrees, arguing that Islamist factions are hijacking the uprising, turning a nationalist movement into a religious one. “We used to say we are all Syrians. Now we think `is that person Sunni, or Alawite or Salafi’?”
It seems likely that there will some form of ethnic cleansing of the country’s Alawites, a Shia off-shoot to which the president’s family belong, if Bashar al-Assad does indeed fall: his forces and loyalist militia have committed numerous atrocities, and before the uprising began, attacks on Shia pilgrims in the country occurred with a degree of regularity. The fear is that once the revenge killings begin in earnest, Syria’s combustible ethnic and sectarian makeup may trigger a far broader Middle Eastern conflict.
Islamic Revival in Al-Sham (Syria)
On Thursday 27 December 2012, the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir invited media representatives to attend a press conference, convened by Hisham Al-Baba, the director of the Hizb ut Tahrir Media Office Wilayah of Syria. The following is a summary of the main ideas presented during that conference:
The latest plots against the Syrian Revolution were hatched when America, realizing the inevitability of the fall of its agent Bashar and the failure of its previous plots, sent its envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on one last mission to promote a political solution (as they claim) to retain Al-Assad with the formation of a transitional government that would enable America to take control in shaping the post-Assad regime, thereby aborting the revolution of Al-Sham and preventing the establishment of the Khilafah state. This malignant American plan exposes how obstinately America holds on to the old regime and its hostility towards the revolution of Al-Sham and the Muslim Ummah, and thereby, this plan gave a final green light for the continuing death and destruction, and added to that the criminal regime’s survival with Bashar the murderer at its head, without any legal accountability or legitimacy and completely free to continue the killing, torture and destruction.
America is behind the survival of the murderous Bashar in power, and behind his crimes against our people, and behind Russia and Iran in providing the Syrian regime with offensive weapons of death and destruction, and behind the Arab League and the envoys and agents that were sent by it, and behind the complacency of the OIC that slumbers while the issues of the Muslims are in the balance, and behind the United Nations Organization and its “In-Security Council” … and indeed were it not for America, Bashar would not survive as the protector of Israel – safe in the world, despite his utter rejection by the people of Syria; a rejection with no parallel in history.
