Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Friday, 4 December 2015
Thursday, 26 November 2015
Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Monday, 9 June 2014
Friday, 6 June 2014
Monday, 2 June 2014
Thursday, 22 May 2014
Jihadists seek Islamic state on Syria-Iraq border
by Staff WritersBeirut (AFP) May 21, 2014
 Syria capacity to produce sarin destroyed: watchdogDamascus (AFP) May 21, 2014 - Syria's stocks of a key chemical used to produce the deadly nerve agent sarin have been destroyed, the mission overseeing the destruction of its chemical arsenal said.The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-UN "joint mission confirms the destruction of the entire declared Syrian stockpile of isopropanol", a statement said late on Tuesday. "Now 7.2 percent of Syria's chemical weapons material remains in country and awaits swift removal for onward destruction. The joint mission urges the Syrian authorities to undertake this task as soon as possible," the statement added. Under a US-Russian deal negotiated last year, Syria signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention and agreed to hand over its entire chemical weapons arsenal by June 30 of this year. The deal came after a sarin attack in August killed some 1,400 people in an opposition-held area near Damascus. While the opposition and its Western backers blamed forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, his government and its Russian ally blamed the rebels. The agreement headed off a US threat of military action. Assad's regime now faces new Western allegations that it unleashed the industrial chemical chlorine on a rebel-held village in central Hama province last month. Syria was not required to declare its stockpile of chlorine -- a toxic but weak agent -- as it is widely used for commercial and domestic purposes. But its use for military purposes would be a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the OPCW announced a fact-finding mission last month. |
Jihadists have launched a fresh bid to take over the Syria-Iraq border area and set up a so-called Islamic state they can control, rebels, activists and a monitoring group say.
"Their name is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Their goal is to link together the two areas (Syria, Iraq) to set up their state and then to continue spreading," said activist and citizen journalist Abdel Salam Hussein.
Speaking from Albu Kamal on the Iraq border, Hussein said ISIL seeks to crush Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate, and control the eastern, energy-rich province of Deir Ezzor bordering Iraq.
"ISIL are trying to end Al-Nusra Front's power in the area, and if they do they will take over" the whole province, he said.
ISIL's long-time ambition of creating an area under its control stretching across Syria and Iraq was undermined by a massive January offensive against it by rival Islamist rebels.
The campaign cornered ISIL fighters in Raqa province, its bastion in northern Syria.
Once welcomed into the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, ISIL's aim to dominate and its horrific abuses of civilians and rival fighters sparked the wrath of much of Syria's opposition, including former ally Al-Nusra.
Rooted in Al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIL split from the network after overall Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri ordered it to stop fighting Al-Nusra.
In February, ISIL withdrew from most of Deir Ezzor after pitched battles with Al-Nusra and other Islamist groups, said rebel spokesman Omar Abu Layla.
But ISIL has since deployed "3,000 fighters from Raqa to Deir Ezzor", Abu Layla told AFP.
"Most of them are foreigners, including Europeans, Tunisians and Saudis," he said.
"ISIL have orders from their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to focus on Deir Ezzor, to take it over. It's their main gateway to Iraq."
- 'Oil, money, weapons' -
Activists and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group said violence is escalating in Deir Ezzor, with daily battles pitting ISIL rebels against Al-Nusra fighters, and a spike in car bombings.
One such attack by ISIL on Friday killed 12 people, including three children, the Observatory said.
The watchdog's director, Rami Abdel Rahman, confirmed ISIL was expanding.
"They are pressing their bid by pushing tribes to swear oaths of loyalty to them, and by fighting rival factions in an attempt to ensure they emerge the strongest," he said.
"ISIL have oil, money and weapons," he added.
Over the past year ISIL fighters have seized regime weapons depots even after they were captured in joint battles with other groups, said Abdel Rahman.
Both the Observatory and activist Hussein say ISIL now holds sway in much of the area east of the Euphrates river in Deir Ezzor province.
Hussein said the tribal nature of the area means the war there is more over oil and loyalty than ideology.
He also said some rebel commanders in Albu Kamal, a key crossing point between Iraq and Syria still beyond ISIL control, "have sworn oaths of loyalty to ISIL".
Hussein added that anti-ISIL rebels and jihadists are fighting back, but that they have suffered heavy losses.
"And with all the oil money coming in to Deir Ezzor, ISIL is able to keep its ammunition supplies well stocked," he added.
The group has distributed food to families in flashpoint areas to try to gain popular support in an area impoverished by decades of marginalisation and three years of conflict and displacement.
"The other day they were giving out fruit to families. It's a tactic to win support," Hussein said.
But rebel spokesman Abu Layla, who opposes both ISIL and the Assad regime, said he believes ISIL has no future in Deir Ezzor.
"They want to use force to set up a brutal, extremist state that has nothing to do with Islam, and people reject that," he said.
"Every day we are fighting ISIL and the regime, without a single bullet or dollar of support from the outside world," Abu Leyla said.
"They can never claim real, grassroots support. Nobody in Syria wants ISIL."
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Hizbullah Fighters Say a 'Duty' to Help Assad
As he pushes a cart full of tomatoes and cucumbers in the market at Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon, nothing marks out Mahmoud as an experienced Hizbullah fighter.
The stocky vegetable vendor in his fifties, who sports a red beard, fought Israel in 2006, but that battle is now old news.
He has just come back from another front: in Syria, where he fought for 25 days against the rebels who have sought to overthrow President Bashar Assad for the past three years.
Since the Shiite movement's chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave the order more than a year ago, thousands of Hizbullah fighters have fought in Syria, playing a decisive role in key victories for the regime.
Street vendors, farmers, restaurant owners, medical professionals and students have all joined what they call an "existential battle" against "takfiris" -- Sunni extremists.
"When the party called on me to go, I responded. I left my job and I went to stop the takfiris from entering Lebanon," says Mahmoud.
"I fought in several regions and took fighters from the region and elsewhere prisoner," he adds.
"Our cause is just. They are mercenaries from Chechnya, Yemen and Libya who want to overthrow Bashar Assad, who supported us enormously during the 2006 war against Israel," Mahmoud insists.
"It's our duty to help him."
Hizbullah presents its role as protecting Syria from Sunni-dominated rebels who they say want to overthrow the regime because they hate Alawites, including Assad, whose faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
In another southern Lebanese village, Fatima has not let the death of her husband in the June 2013 battle for Syria's Qusayr stop her from encouraging her son to join the fight.
"I've send Khodr, with dozens of other young men, to do one month of training in Lebanon," she says.
"He must learn to handle weapons so that he can become a fighter like his father."
Next to her, Khodr sorts tobacco seedlings for planting. His beard is just coming in and his eyes are sad.
He wears a picture of his father around his neck and has a pin on his T-shirt bearing Nasrallah's picture and his phrase "Victory awaits us".
His older brother Wissam, 25, came back from Syria a week earlier.
"We obey Sayyed Hassan (Nasrallah) when he invites us to fight. My father died a martyr and we must follow his path," he says.
There are no official figures on how many Hizbullah fighters have been killed in Syria, but some put the toll at around 300.
"Should we let them come and kill us like sheep, like they have done to the Shiites in Iraq and Syria? No, we will defeat them as we defeated Israel," Wissam adds.
When they first began fighting in Syria, Hizbullah members refused to discuss their involvement, but now they talk about it with pride, while declining to offer details of their numbers or operations.
At a school in southern Lebanon, Hizbullah posters advertise scouting sessions, but the accompanying photos of young men in military uniforms suggest the training is more combat-based.
In some places, there are voices of dissent against the group's involvement in the conflict next door.
"They sent my son to his death without my approval. Who told them that I wanted my son to die in Syria?" one man asks, declining to be named for fear of incurring Hizbullah's wrath.
But that sentiment is rare among the party's constituents, who also know Hizbullah will support them if their loved ones are killed.
"My family's future is safe if I die. They'll take care of the schooling for my nine-year-old son and look after his health," says Osama, a 38-year-old party member in the city of Tyre.
In Baalbek, a Hizbullah stronghold in eastern Lebanon, 22-year-old Hussein is heading to Iran to undergo a commander training course.
The psychology student's parents are both party members and he has already fought in Syria's northern province of Aleppo.
"I'm very excited about going to Iran to become a battalion chief. It's a promotion," he says, under his mother's watchful eye.
Saturday, 12 April 2014
The Ukraine Conflict and Syria
With Russia moving forces onto the Crimean Peninsula in southern Ukraine, Europe can yet avoid a new Crimean war—but some argue that it is already caught up in a renewed Cold War. The Ukraine conflict is reshaping Russia’s relations with the United States and the European Union, and the repercussions will be widely felt—including in the Middle East.
For one thing, events in Ukraine are sure to intensify the long-running struggle over natural gas supplies to the EU, given that Ukraine is the main transit route forRussia’s own exports. Attempts to secure gas for the EU from other sources—including via pipelines over Turkish territory—must now seem all the more urgent to European governments. The long-term effects will be felt as far away as in Qatar and Iran, two major gas producers. And of course, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran are all intimately involved with the Syrian war.
If the conflict in Ukraine develops into a lasting standoff between the U.S.-EU camp and Russia, it may shift the dynamics in Syria in more direct ways as well. Both the rebel movement and the government in Damascus are by now fully dependent on foreign support, with the United States and Russia as two key actors. A crisis in Ukraine will not in itself alter the political interests of these states in Syria, but it will greatly affect the relations between them.
THE NONINTERVENTION ARGUMENT
“The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not,” Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote in a New York Times op-ed in September 2013, arguing against a U.S. military strike on President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. “Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the [UN] Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.”
Of course, Putin’s word did not carry any great moral weight in international affairs even then. (Neither did Washington’s after the United States illegally invaded Iraqin 2003, cavalierly breaking all those principles that it now accuses Russia of violating.) But the past few days must still have been instructive to those who had sought to convince themselves of Russia’s charitable motives for propping up Assad.
By exposing the hollowness of Putin’s public argument on Syria, events in Ukraine could for good or bad reopen the way to unilateral action by his rivals—or even help provoke it, if Russia manages to antagonize the United States and the European states so thoroughly that they decide to strike back where they still can.
CHEMICAL WEAPONS DISARMAMENT
More immediately, the chemical weapons deal concluded between Russia and the United States in September 2013 might now be in danger. The deal laid out a plan for the dismantlement of Assad’s chemical weapons program, but the implementation of this plan has faltered of late. The Syrian government is reporting perfectly legitimate security concerns as a reason for not being able to fulfill its commitments on time, but it may also be dragging its feet and trying to extract concessions over the time and scope of the disarmament process.
So far, the operation has been financed almost entirely by the United States and the EU, with minor contributions from Russia and China (and none whatsoever from Iran or the Arab League states). But regardless of who has been stuck with the bill, the United States and Russia are in fact both heavily invested in the September agreement. Neither government has any real reason to abandon it, since it serves as a linchpin of their current policy in Syria.
Even so, it is of course possible that relations could fray over Ukraine to a point where Washington and Moscow cease to work effectively together in Syria, thereby ending pressure on Assad to complete the deal. If that is allowed to happen, it is again worth recalling that the United States never took the threat of air strikes against Assad’s government off the table. U.S. President Barack Obama simply decided to hold off on unilateral action for as long as Syrian authorities demonstrated full cooperation. And making that happen was Putin’s job.
THE GENEVA II PEACE PROCESS
Of course, the U.S. president does not really seem to want intervention in Syria. Rather, Obama has wagered much of his prestige on collaboration with Russia to achieve a negotiated containment and scaling down of the Syrian conflict through the United Nations–backed peace process known as Geneva II.
The first two rounds of the Geneva II peace conference, held on January 22–31 and February 10–15, achieved almost nothing. The United States and its allies were clearly frustrated, and many now seem to have lost faith in Russia’s assurances thatit could deliver concessions from Assad once negotiations began.
With no date set for a third round, both sides have already been ratcheting up their rhetoric and increasing arms deliveries to the conflict. Add the Ukraine crisis to that mess, and any useful progress on Geneva II becomes unlikely indeed.
RESHAPING RELATIONS BETWEEN THE EU AND RUSSIA
In the larger scheme of things, what Ukraine means for Syria is a remodeling of Russia’s relations with the United States and the EU. By virtue of U.S. global power, Obama will be expected by many European nations to take the lead on Ukraine, just like they expected him to do in Syria. But in Ukraine, the stakes are far higher for European nations than for the United States itself. They are highest of all for Russia, which views events in Ukraine as intrinsically linked to its own national security. And Russia has now made its move, opting for massive escalation.
Many members of the EU, particularly among Moscow’s former subjects in the Eastern bloc, are understandably terrified by Putin’s saber rattling. They will argue for a punishing response to what they view as the last and worst in a long line of provocations. At the same time, others may feel that the United States and the EU cannot hope to roll back Russian advances and should at least avoid a more fundamental breakdown in Russian-EU relations. But whatever path is chosen, European states that have remained hands-off on a distant conflict like that in Syria—think, for example, of Germany—will now be fully involved in facing Russia on the Ukraine front.
How that will affect their behavior in Syria remains to be seen. By energizing the European opposition to Putin, the Ukraine affair could sway the EU as a whole toward greater active involvement in Syria. But for all of these states, the future of Ukraine is of course vastly more important than Syria itself will ever be. Leaders in Moscow, Brussels, Berlin, and Washington may well end up using their political leverage in Syria as a bargaining chip to gain concessions where they think it reallymatters—that is, in Ukraine.
Islam in Syrian Textbooks: Monolithic and Nonpluralic
The school system is a crucial incubator of social and cultural understanding in any country. In Syria, however, the education system has failed at this task—notably when it comes to Islamic education. The effects of this failure are keenly felt today as Syria suffers sectarian conflict and a surge of religious intolerance.
NO ROOM FOR NON-SUNNI ISLAM
The overwhelming majority of the Syrian population is Sunni Muslim, but around one-quarter of the population is made up of a combination of Christian minorities and Shia-affiliated sects, including Alawites, Druze, Ismailis, and Twelver Shia Muslims. While Christian children are allowed their own religious education, all Muslim children in public school study a particular strand of Sunni Islam from grade one through grade twelve for two to three hours a week, regardless of which interpretation of Islam their own family follows.
After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assumed the presidency in 2000, the school curricula and textbooks were revised. However, the new editions of the Islamic religious education texts continued to present Islam as a monolithic religion, disregarding the different Sunni schools of thought as well as the beliefs and rituals of other Muslim sects—particularly the Alawites and the Shia. Muslim schoolchildren were not taught to accept diversity among Islamic sects since the texts presented only one “true” strand: mainstream Sunni Islam.
The textbooks, for example, glorified the lives and achievements of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, such as Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab. But these companions are highly controversial within the Shia community, which accuses them of robbing the Prophet’s cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib, of his “legitimate” right to succeed the Prophet in political leadership (khilafa).
The Prophet’s wife Aisha, daughter of Abu Bakr, is another contested figure. She is described in the ninth-grade textbook as the Mother of Believers (Umm al-Mumineen) and as a role model for Muslims, particularly women. According to the textbook, Aisha was very knowledgeable, pious, generous, and a leader in defending women’s rights. Shia Muslims mostly deny her these attributes and accuse her of fomenting sedition among Muslims by leading armed men in the Battle of the Camel against Ali ibn Abi Talib, an event that is not mentioned in the Syrian textbooks.
Such texts obviously do not help minority students develop a profound understanding of their own faith. And by erasing non-Sunni versions of Islam, the school system has failed to foster acceptance and mutual understanding between Syria’s religious faiths.
INSTEAD OF SECULARISM, A SUNNI-INFUSED ARABISM
The “secular” regimes of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and his successor and son Bashar have not promoted secular values in the true sense of the word. Rather, they have fostered the Baath Party’s unrealistic conception of Syrian society, which is based on a close link between the ideals of Arabism and Sunni Islam.
It might seem puzzling that an avowedly secular government would not promote secularism through school textbooks and even more curious that an Alawite president would force all Muslim students to study only orthodox Sunni Islam. But the Syrian regime, which is run by Alawite Baathists, aims first and foremost at suppressing doctrinal divisions among the different Muslim groups in favor of integrating them under an Arab nationalist political banner. The fact that this Arabist tradition remains culturally linked to Sunni Islam matters little to them, and the ruling group sees no benefit in challenging the country’s conservative Sunni Islamic civil society leaders over an issue like primary education. Thus the officially secular government does not object to the Islamic education textbook for grade twelve, which promotes the “Islamic approach as the closest to the civilization of tomorrow.”
This policy worked well while the regime was strong. However, as the regime has started to weaken over the past two years, many Muslim youths, deprived of a pluralistic Islamic education, began expressing intolerant beliefs in words and actions.
LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE
There is certainly no inherent contradiction between Islam and a religious education program that would foster understanding and respect among different faiths. A valuable example is the declaration on “fundamental freedoms” made on January 2012 by the Egyptian Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyib of al-Azhar, which is historically one of the world’s most influential centers for the understanding and teaching of Sunni Islam.
According to that declaration, freedom of belief is a right for all citizens and is based on explicitly stated verses in the Quran. More importantly, the declaration prohibits any attempt to exclude others or label them as infidels, rejecting orientations that “denounce the beliefs of others.” It incriminates any manifestation of “compulsion in religion, persecution, or religious discrimination” and strongly endorses plurality, diversity, and the equality of citizens, including nonbelievers.
Surely, a religious education curriculum based on such tolerant and open-minded Islamic values would have served Syria better than the exclusionary teachings that have for decades been promoted under the guise of secularism.
Muhammad Faour is a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon.
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