Tag: Syria

by Brendan James

More images and testimonials of this week’s purported chemical attack flood in, with Human Rights Watch currently placing the death toll at several hundred. Jay Newton-Small sums up the administration’s tepid response, despite previous red-line rhetoric:

[T]he White House isn’t exactly springing into action. “We are calling for this U.N. investigation to be conducted,” said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest on Wednesday. “This is a situation that is ongoing, and our efforts to work with the international community and to work with the Syrian opposition to remove [President Bashar] Assad from power are ongoing.” Earnest upgraded his rhetoric slightly Thursday morning, telling reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Buffalo where the President was scheduled to give a speech about making college more affordable, that the images out of Syria “are nothing short of horrifying.”

Still, the translation amounts to: Don’t hold your breath waiting for air strikes.

Jon Western wonders if this latest attack will serve as “Syria’s Srebrenica”:

If you recall, Srebrenica did not fundamentally change the traditional, realist strategic logic on the ground during the Bosnian conflict — yet all of the internal notes on White House deliberations (as reported in Ivo Daalder’s Getting to Dayton or Derek Chollet’s history of Dayton) reveal how conceptions of interests and ideals became intertwined with the scale of the atrocity.   Domestically, there was some Congressional pressure to do more in Bosnia, but very little pressure from public opinion. Srebrenica was a game changer.

I think this is what we are likely to see happen now in Syria — and I think it changes the equation regardless of whether or not there is definitive proof as to who perpetrated the attack.  The mere fact of such a large scale loss of life in a chemical attack — along with changing dynamics throughout the region — will produce significant pressure on, and within, the administration to commit resources — airstrikes on key Syrian military installations and probably no-fly, no missile zone over Syria — something, anything, to move the conflict to some kind of end-game.

Still, Max Fisher lists off the reasons not to expect a new agenda from the White House:

Any White House cares first and foremost about domestic politics, and this administration was punished severely for its leadership on Libya; many of the same political voices that demanded the intervention spent months hammering the White House when, in the foreseeably dangerous post-conflict disorder of Benghazi, a militant group succeeded in attacking the local U.S. diplomatic outpost and killing the ambassador. You might think that Libya would have been considered a political success for the Obama administration, but it became a major political liability.

The White House’s efforts to reach out to Islamist groups in Egypt and Tunisia, meanwhile, received condemnation and criticism at home. Pragmatic, long-view Middle East watchers turn out to represent a fairly narrow slice of the American electorate. And political figures who ask the White House to take big foreign policy risks appear quite willing to punish the administration if anything goes wrong.

by Chas Danner

https://twitter.com/lizobagy/status/370209257569804288

Syrian rebel groups claim that hundreds have been killed in what may have been a chemical weapon attack by Assad on the suburbs east of Damascus. The attack may be the beginning of a larger offensive by regime forces. David Kenner gives his summary:

The information coming out of the Ghouta region, where the rebels enjoy significant support, is still unconfirmed by independent observers. But videos allegedly taken Wednesday in the area showed Syrians lying on the floor gasping for breath, medics struggling to save infants, and rows of bodies of those who had reportedly died in the attack (warning: the footage above is graphic). Syrian state media denied that chemical weapons had been used, attributing such stories to media channels that “are involved in the shedding of the Syrians’ blood and supporting terrorism.”

The opposition Local Coordination Committee, however, reported that at least 755 people had been killed in the attack. If that figure is true, what is happening on the outskirts of Damascus today is the worst chemical weapons attack since then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 people.

One report even says the death total could be over 1,300. Chemical weapon expert Ralph Trapp compares this attack to previous ones:

It is possible a gas was involved, but the images I’ve seen were not clear enough to see other symptoms beyond difficulty in breathing and suffocation. It certainly looks like some sort of poisoning. … [But] this is one of the first videos I’ve seen from Syria where the numbers start to make sense. If you have a gas attack you would expect large numbers of people, children and adults, to be affected, particularly if it’s in a built up area.

Jean Pascal Zanders’ analysis:

I am not sure whether the claims of nerve agent use accompanying the footage and images are correct. The people are not convulsing (except for one man shaking his legs while shouting out, but the remainder of his body does not suffer from involuntary contractions) and I have not seen anybody applying nerve agent antidotes. Nor do medical staff and other people appear to suffer from secondary exposure while carrying or treating victims.

It is clear that something terrible has happened. The scenes could not have been stage managed.

Jeffrey Goldberg weighs in:

Two questions are raised by reports of this attack. The first, of course, is whether or not it happened the way Syrian rebels said it happened. That is why immediately dispatching the UN team, already in-country, to the affected areas is so vital. If this process worked the way it should, they would be there already. If the Syrian regime denies the UN inspectors permission to visit these areas, well, that is kind of an answer in itself.

The second question is, why would the Assad regime launch its biggest chemical attack on rebels and civilians precisely at the moment when a UN inspection team was parked in Damascus? The answer to that question is easy: Because Assad believes that no one – not the UN, not President Obama, not other Western powers, not the Arab League – will do a damn thing to stop him.

There is a good chance he is correct.

Guardian live-blog here. A Reddit page is collecting information and videos here.

Sebastian Rotella takes note of the unprecedented wave of radicalization driving Muslims in Europe to join jihadists in Syria:

“Imagine this: Between 2001 and 2010, we identified 50 jihadists who went from France to Afghanistan,” said a senior French counterterror official who also requested anonymity. “Surely there were more, but we identified 50. With Syria, in one year, we have already identified 135. It has been very fast and strong.”

The statistics are even stronger in adjoining Belgium, one-sixth the size of France. Between 100 and 300 jihadis have journeyed from Belgium’s extremist enclaves to Syria, according to a veteran Belgian counterterror official. Other significant fighting contingents represent Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, Central Asia, Libya, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. The senior French official estimated the total number of Europeans to be at least 400. Others say it could be double that, but counterterror officials warn that precise numbers are difficult to establish.

Update from a reader:

While there can be no doubt that the conflict in Syria has stirred the passions of radical elements within Islamic culture, I think it’s worth casting a suspicious eye on Rotella’s statistics on the “jihadists” who have fled France and Belgium for the war in Syria, and the comparison he makes to the Afghan war. Syria was, after all, a French colony for years, and French is a commonly spoken language there.

That there are a substantially higher proportion of immigrants of Syrian descent living in both France and Belgium than those of Afghan descent. France doesn’t even make the top-10 list of countries playing host to Afghan refugees.

Rotella’s use of the indifferentiate term “jihadists,” imagining a unified front of de-nationalized, radical Muslims bent on the destruction of the West, hides the most logical cause of these departures for the battlefields of Syria: a lot of these young men are culturally connected to Syria. Do you honestly think the European police forces distinguish between “jihadists” of the Al-Qaeda sort, and other politically motivated Arabs…say those whose families were harmed by the current Baathist regime in Syria? Nuance has never been the strong suit of those characterizing the motivations for action among Arabic speaking Muslims.

Again, I don’t question that a portion of those who have joined the fight in Syria see this as step-one in a battle against the Great Satan. But to characterize this as an “unprecedented wave of radicalization” rather than a not-unsurprising response to cultural connections in that same, mundane way that the Irish Catholics of Boston were more interested in the goings-on of the IRA than the German Catholics of Missouri, is rhetorically inflammatory and sheds more heat than light.

Over the weekend, al Qaeda-linked insurgents staged well coordinated attacks on Taji and Abu Ghraib prisons, freeing at many as 500 inmates, including senior al Qaeda members:

Suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives to the gates of the [Abu Ghraib] prison on the outskirts of Baghdad on Sunday night and blasted their way into the compound, while gunmen attacked guards with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Other militants took up positions near the main road, fighting off security reinforcements sent from Baghdad as several militants wearing suicide vests entered the prison on foot to help free the inmates.

Hayes Brown thinks the consequences go beyond Iraq’s borders:

The sudden influx of a large number of trained fighters and convicted terrorists into Iraq would be a problem even if there wasn’t a civil war next door. Given the ongoing conflict in Syria, however, this could mark a radical shift in how the war proceeds.

While talks of a merger between the two have gone back and forth, AQI and Syrian rebel group Jahbat al-Nusra have been cooperating for months, to the point that the State Department has listed Nusra as a subsidiary of the terrorist group. Aaron Zelin, Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, told ThinkProgress that it will be interesting to see if those who escaped do go to Syria, whether they will bring with them some of their more radical tactics. At present, according to Zelin, there are jihadi groups who provide social services to civilians and perform other acts that could see themselves undermined by an influx of “hardened fighters” captured during the U.S. “surge” in Iraq.

Michael Crowley worries that Iraq is “living on borrowed time”:

“[Al Qaeda’s fighters have] got the wind at their backs from the Syrian rebellion,” where Sunni rebels are fighting an Alawite Shi‘ite regime, says Kenneth Katzman, a Congressional Research Service analyst who recently completed a detailed report on Iraq. “Their goal is to destabilize and bring down the Maliki government, and they think igniting sectarian conflict might accomplish that.”

Sectarian violence in the country has killed at least 2500 people since April. More evidence that nothing – not even the surge – produced anything of any long-term benefit to the US, Iraq or the Middle East. Just carnage and chaos.