Wednesday, December 04, 2013
Insurgency Responsible for Civilian Plight of Syrians
By Nicola Nasser*
Creating a humanitarian crisis in Syria
Foreign military intervention is now ruled out as
impossible, but what the Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin described on last
November 29 as “the biggest humanitarian crisis in a decade” was created and this crisis “is worsening and no end is in sight”
according to the International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) on November 11.
Objective and non-objective as well as official and
non-official reports about the responsibility of the Syrian government are
abundant, but that of the insurgents has been for too long covered up and only of
late come under the scrutiny of human rights organizations and media spotlight.
The early militarization of civilian protests in Syria aborted all prospects for a long overdue
peaceful change in Syria
Militarization opened the Syrian doors wide for foreign
military, intelligence and political intervention to turn a national conflict
between the haves and have-nots into a regional and international one.
More importantly, unguardedly and grudgingly but knowingly
the so-called “Friends of Syria” also opened the Syrian doors to al-Qaeda
linked offshoots as an additional weight to enforce a “regime change;” in no
time they hijacked the armed leadership of the marginal local armed insurgency
and became the dominant military power out of the control of the intervening
regional and international powers who financed, armed and logistically
facilitated their infiltration into Syria.
The responsibility of the “Friends of Syria,” both Arab
and non-Arab, for the militarization and the ensuing humanitarian crisis was
highlighted by the US former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton’s call on Syrian rebels not to disarm as much by the Turkish, Saudi
and Qatari opposition to a political solution through the upcoming
Geneva – 2 conference next January 22.
When the United States
last December added al-Nusra Front to its list of terrorist organizations,
topped by al-Qaeda, supposedly to tip the balance in favor of what is called, in
US
The US measure was only a green light for the beginning of
another war inside the Syrian war, this time launched by The Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (Da'āsh) against all others in the
insurgency, including al-Nusra Front.
The end result was further exacerbation of the Syrian
humanitarian crisis, for which the United States
The responsibility of the insurgency, which is politically
sponsored, financed, armed and logistically facilitated by them, is now
unfolding to uncover the fact that the militarization of the early legitimate
peaceful protests has created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world
today by the military tactics the insurgents used.
These tactics include mortar shelling of civilian densely
populated areas under government control, targeting public services
infrastructure of power, oil and gas, hospitals and health clinics, schools and
universities, stealing public warehouses of strategic basic food reserves,
dismantling and stealing public and private factories, flour mills and
bakeries, interrupting or cutting transportation and traffic on highways, assassinations,
extrajudicial killings and public beheadings, suicide bombings in city centers,
targeting and besieging minorities, destroying and desecrating all religious
and historic relics, flooding Syria with tens of thousands of foreign mercenary
fighters obsessed by the al-Qaeda-like bizarre interpretations of Islam who violently
compete among themselves for local leadership and war exploits because they are
controlled by competing foreign intelligence agencies, and subjecting the
population who come under their control to their brand of Islamic law courts,
fatwas and orders, which dumped women out of society altogether to be reserved
only for their sexual needs, etc.
However, exploiting the fact that the regular army was
deployed along some seventy miles of the ceasefire line for a confrontation
with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on the Syrian Golan Heights and
trained for a regular warfare, their strategic military tactic was from the
start to entrench themselves among the civilian population, using them as human
shields, in countryside towns and villages where the army has no presence and
where even the police and security agencies maintain minimal presence or none at
all.
The early successes of the insurgents were military
exploits against peaceful civilians; they were not achieved in military vs.
military battles. It was enough for a few rebels to hold any such peaceful town
or village hostage, but it needs an army operation to kick them out.
Except for the northern city of ar-Raqqah, which Da'āsh turned into what the Lebanese daily
Al-Akhbar on last November 8 defined as “Syria’s answer to (Afghanistan’s) Kandahar – the birthplace
of the Taliban” since the rebels stormed the city
early last March, the Syrian state maintains control and presence in all the
major cities.
But the official Arab Syrian Army had been on the
defensive for some two years since the eruption of the insurgency in 2011. It
needed this time to adapt, train and allocate counter insurgency units to fight
in irregular city wars.
Since its strategic victory in al-Qaseer early last June
it has gone on the offensive and is rapidly gaining more ground and achieving
successive successes ever since.
However, the insurgency bears the main responsibility,
mainly during the “defensive” interval, for the civilian plight; waves of
refugees and displaced people came out from the areas under their control to
find refuge either in government held cities or across the nearest borders with
neighboring states. The latest largest wave of refugees of the Syrian Kurds
into northern Iraq
The fact that the Syrian state and government were
reacting rather than acting against the insurgency is now coming to light. This
fact is explained better by the UK-based opposition Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights, which reported on this December 3 that it had documented the
death of (50,927) government soldiers versus (36228) insurgents including (6261)
non-Syrian fighters.
Rebel infiltration into countryside towns and villages was
the main reason for more than two million internally displaced civilians who
left their homes as soon as they could out of fear either of the rebels
themselves and their practices or the inevitable government retaliation. They
were taken care of by the government in government shelters.
In addition to Christians and other minorities targeted by
the rebels who posture as the defenders of Sunni Islam, most of the refugees
and those displaced are Sunni Muslim Syrians and more than one million of them are
hosted by their compatriot Alawites in the west of the country, a fact that
refutes the narrative of the US government and media about a “civil” and
“sectarian” war in the country.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
