Syria’s “Liberated” Future:
Ethnic-Religious Cleansing and Genocide
Shamus Cooke, Workers’ Compass, Aug 5 2012

A fascinating shift has happened in the US mainstream media: After a year of anti-Syria war propaganda and lies, glimmers of truth are making their way into the public’s view. This may be too little too late: the country is being torn at the seams into the nightmare of ethnic-religious cleansing and massacres. After non-stop war mongering, the NYT took a second to wipe the blood off its hands to report the true state of things in Syria. Apparently, the previous, ongoing reports about the Syrian army indiscriminately massacring citizens in the city of Homs was simply a lie, repeated over and over. It now turns out that the exact opposite was true. In actuality, many of the refugees fleeing Homs were persecuted Christians, attacked by members of the Free Syrian Army, who have been killing religious minorities in an attempt to recruit hard-line Sunnis in Syria as they wage a religious war against the Syrian secular state. (See NYT op-ed below – RB)

Because the Free Syrian Army did not emerge from a popular revolution, but instead the pocketbooks and arsenal f Saudi Arabia, the war to destroy the Syrian government had to be waged as an ethnic-religious war. Saudi Arabia has a long history of exporting Wahhabism as a political tool to help overthrow unfriendly governments. The US has a long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia in this effort, a dynamic that, over the years, has given birth to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The US refuses to stop using this strategy because it’s incredibly effective at overthrowing “unfriendly” governments, while keeping large sections of the Middle East stalled in the formative years of Islam, which keeps a good check on any political activity from working people, since in Saudi Arabia protests, labor unions, and civil rights are illegal. The persecuted religious minorities in Homs view the Syrian government as their ally against the US media-darling “liberators” of the Free Syrian Army, puppets of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy. The opinion pages of the NYT laid out the facts better than any previous reporting:

As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who’ve been ‘cleansed’ from their homes. in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home. The rebels’ conduct has prompted at least some Sunnis who had supported the rebels and once-wavering Syrians to pledge renewed loyalty to Assad. Many who once regarded the regime as a kleptocracy now view it as the best guarantor of Syria’s endangered pluralism.

This sudden somersault of facts has been long known to both the US government and the media. The NYT continues:

Washington is aware of the scale of the problem. As early as Jun 2011, US ambassador Robert Ford briefed his counterparts in Damascus about al-Qaeda’s penetration of the opposition forces. By still ploughing ahead with its support for Saudi Arabia’s effort to destabilize Syria, Washington, far from assisting Israel or weakening Iran, is helping to fuel a humanitarian crisis that will come back to haunt the US.

To summarize: US politicians from both parties have lied to the public about the true nature of the conflict in Syria, because it benefited them politically to see a non-US ally destroyed by ethnic-religious barbarism. Finally from the NYT:

The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria’s religious minorities, and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad, is breeding a bitter anti-USAianism among many secular Syrians who see the US aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world’s most resolutely secular state.

There you have it. It took over a year but suddenly the Syrian war isn’t so black and white, good guys versus bad guy. The utter devastation that has been brought to Syria was done so on a false premise, by foreign backers, Saudi Arabia and the US, who wanted nothing except to see the country annihilated so that Iran would be isolated and easier to topple. To sell this bloodbath as an advance of democracy, as US politicians and media have done, is beyond hypocritical; it falls under the category reserved for those who are labeled war criminals.

Syria’s Crumbling Pluralism
Kapil Komireddi, NYT/IHT, Aug 3 2012

Here in Damascus, the day begins with the call to prayer and ends with the roar of gunfire. Syria’s pluralistic society, which once rose above sectarian identity in a region often characterized by a homicidal assertion of religious belief, is now faced with civil disintegration and ethnic cleansing. In Bab Touma, the Christian quarter of the old city, the magnificently restored Ottoman mansions housing many of the hotels that only two years ago overflowed with Western tourists have become temporary sanctuaries for Syrian minorities fleeing their homes and cities. A Christian doctor of Palestinian origin huddling with his family of four in a small room in one of the hotels was looking for a way out of the country. He told me:

My father came to Syria as a refugee. I made it my home. Now I am having to uproot my two young sons.

His home, in Midan in southern Damascus, came under attack during an intense battle last week between the opposition Free Syrian Army and government forces. Midan is now officially a safe area, but hardly anyone believes that peace will endure. Syria’s 2.3 million Christians, constituting about 10% of the country’s population, have generally known a more privileged existence under the Assad dynasty than even the Shi’ites. Yet their allegiance to Assad was never absolute. Some Christians openly clamored for political change in the early months of the anti-government uprising. But as the rebellion became suffused with Sunni militants sympathetic to or affiliated with Al Qaeda, Christians recoiled. A churchgoing Syrian told me that he used to see himself primarily as “Syrian” and that religious identity, in political terms, was an idea that never occurred to him, until an opposition gang attacked his family earlier this year in Homs. He said:

It’s a label they pinned on us. If their revolution is for everyone, as they keep insisting it is, why are Christians being targeted? It is because what they are waging is not a struggle for freedom, and it’s certainly not for everyone.

As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who’ve been “cleansed” from their homes in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home. The rebels’ conduct has prompted at least some Sunnis who had supported the rebels and once-wavering Syrians to pledge renewed loyalty to Assad. Many who once regarded the regime as a kleptocracy now view it as the best guarantor of Syria’s endangered pluralism. A Sunni shopkeeper in the impoverished suburb of Set Zaynab, which was partly destroyed in the clashes last week, no longer supports the rebellion. He said:

I wanted Assad to go because he is corrupt. But what happened here, what they did, it scared me. It made me angry. I cannot support the murder of my neighbors in the name of change. You cannot bring democracy by killing innocent people or by burning the shrines of Shi’ites. Syrians don’t do that. This is the work of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.

Repeated attempts by Free Syrian Army fighters to destroy a shrine to Sayyida Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet, have not yet caused the area’s Sunni minority to flee. Many Shiites here have refused to blame their Sunni neighbors for the rebels’ crimes. Over the past week, more than a dozen Syrians, chiefly Alawi and Christian, but also a handful of Sunnis, affirmed to me their determination to pick up arms to defend Assad. The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria’s religious minorities, and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad, is breeding a bitter anti-USAianism among many secular Syrians who see the US aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world’s most resolutely secular state. Fresh from abetting the suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Syria is part of its effort to attenuate Iran’s influence and cripple what it fears is a growing Shi’ite corridor of power in the Middle East.

Most Syrians, regardless of their faith, want the power to change their government. But the armed groups that have seized control of the rebellion, now contaminated with Al Qaeda fighters and corrupted by Saudi money, have repelled many people. A year and a half after the insurrection began, there is no sign of a simultaneous mass uprising in any of the major cities. Instead, rebel fighters on Saudi payroll launch coordinated attacks on high-value targets, the Syrian Army retaliates, and videos of the ensuing devastation are posted on the Internet. Proponents of a peaceful political solution, like the signatories to the so-called Sant’Egidio appeal last week in Italy, have been eclipsed by sectarian leaders of the Syrian National Council urging the international community to give them anti-aircraft weapons. Washington is aware of the scale of the problem. As early as Jun 2011, US ambassador Robert Ford briefed his counterparts in Damascus about Al Qaeda’s penetration of the opposition forces. By still ploughing ahead with its support for Saudi Arabia’s effort to destabilize Syria, Washington, far from assisting Israel or weakening Iran, is helping to fuel a humanitarian crisis that will come back to haunt the US.