Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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I have not looked at his previous writings.


He might have been good 20 years ago.



From: Louis Proyect 
Sent: Tuesday, 6 June 2017 11:13 AM
To: Chris Slee; Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200,000 Syrians From Their Homes

On 6/5/17 8:33 PM, Chris Slee wrote:
> Thus, Gutman was embedded with the Turkish army and its allied militias.  He 
> seems to be Turkey's equivalent of Vanessa Beeley.

No, he is just being Roy Gutman. When he was writing articles denouncing
Milosevic as a genocidal monster, he never got on your shit list, did he?
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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As for the difficulties alleged by Gutman in reporting on those affected by
the fighting on the approach to Raqqa, Times journalist Anthony Lloyd
reports no such difficulties and paints a rather different pictures of the
response of Arab villagers to the SDF:

Few of the women waste any time hurling away their dark clothes as soon
they reach the first positions of the SDF, the American-backed units now
approaching Raqqa from three sides.

“The niqab came to symbolise the suffocating feeling we had of life under
the Daesh,” Um Lamis, 33, a mother from Raqqa, said as she sat in the shade
of a tree discussing her flight across the lines two days earlier.

“The veil removed me from my sense of engagement with the outside world. It
is something Raqqa women grew to hate more than anything else. So I ripped
it off as soon as I reached the SDF frontline.” She ululated with delight.
“It was like breathing again!”

The accounts of the Raqqa women escaping one of the most stifling
environments on Earth ­illuminate a system whereby ­Islamic State not only
repressed women but delighted in the ­cruelty of its repression.

“I was forced to watch more ­beheadings than I care to remember,” Um Lamis
said, cradling her three-year-old daughter. “You don’t ever expect — not as
a man nor woman — to see anything like that. Yet we were repeatedly forced
to watch it.”

She described seeing one man, accused of collaboration with the coalition,
crucified.

“I was ordered out of the back of my husband’s car to watch the man tied to
a cross. He was begging for forgiveness but an emir stabbed a knife into
his chest and then shot him in the head. He was left on the cross for three
days as an example. The image was burned into my brain. I thought I would
never sleep again.”

Um Ali, 60, who had fled across the frontline a week before, was forced to
watch her son beat her daughter in a village south of Raqqa. The incident
began when a patrol of Islamic State religious police, Hisbah, noticed the
daughter had taken off her niqab. They rounded up the family, ensured the
daughter was wearing the niqab and marched them to their headquarters in
the village.

“First they beat my 20-year-old son with 70 lashes across his back with a
cane as punishment for ­allowing his sister to sin,” said Um Ali. “Then
they sat my daughter in a chair, a guard either side, and ­ordered my son
to beat her outstretched hands with the same cane used to beat him.”

At first, she said, her son, his own back thick with weals, tried to avoid
hurting his sister. “So the Hisbah told him, ‘Beat her strongly or we will
punish you again.’ He gave her 50 strikes. My daughter flinched with every
blow. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not as the niqab covered her
face.”

The codes Raqqa women had to abide by under Islamic State rule were similar
to those of the Afghan Taliban. No woman could go out unaccompanied. The
chaperone had to be a direct male family member — father, brother, son.

Even sunlight was restricted, as windows were ordered shrouded so that
passers-by could not see women inside their houses. Clothing transgressions
were punished with 15-day re-education courses or beatings, depending on
the scale of the offence and whim of the Hisbah, the local government.

The women regarded the ­female branch of Hisbah, the al-Khansaa brigade,
with particular fear. Their numbers included wives of foreign fighters,
radicalised local women, and impoverished recruits who joined because they
had little choice. “They were cruel, and stole from our homes during
searches,” Um Lamis said. “And they seemed to enjoy issuing beatings.”

Yet there was a realistic acceptance of Islamic State widows who had
escaped among them. Um Lamis said many had no choice in their husband’s
decisions, or that their dead husbands joined ISIS as an alternative to
poverty.

Compounding the shock of their flight from Raqqa and sudden freedom, many
women said the first fighters they had seen across no man’s land had been
Kurdish women from the YPJ, the all-female units fighting as part of the
SDF.

“One minute I lived in Raqqa, a city ruled by men,” said Um Lamis, “where
women had not even the power to show our faces. The next I am greeted by
armed Kurdish women, faces bare and their hair uncovered, guns in hands,
fighting the Daesh.

“They welcomed me as a sister! I bow to their courage!”

Contact with the YPJ cadres, each versed in the rights of women as a
central part of their own ideology, has left an indelible ­impression on
many Raqqa women.

The emerging system of local governance is remarkable for its difference,
too. Typically, the Rojava territory is governed by local 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Nick Fredman via Marxism]

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Gutman's unreliable hackery isn't just indicated by the Turkish state's
sponsorship of him, and his breezy use of the term "ethnic cleansing" and
general distortion of the recent UN report that Chris mentions. After his
Nation smear jobs earlier this year, two of his sources complained that he
distorted their views. He also ludicrously distorted the battles of Shinjar
and Kobane to paint the PKK-led current as collaborators with ISIS bent on
regional domination at the expense of the innocent defenseless parties
Turkey and the KRG. See
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-a-response-to-neocon-hit-man-roy-gutman/
(not that I agree with everything this guy says on Syria but he dies nail
Gutman's distortion) and my article
http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 at 10:35 am, Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Roy Gutman was in northern Syria as a guest of the Turkish government.
>
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 6/5/17 8:33 PM, Chris Slee wrote:

Thus, Gutman was embedded with the Turkish army and its allied militias.  He 
seems to be Turkey's equivalent of Vanessa Beeley.


No, he is just being Roy Gutman. When he was writing articles denouncing 
Milosevic as a genocidal monster, he never got on your shit list, did he?

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200, 000 Syrians From Their Homes

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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Roy Gutman was in northern Syria as a guest of the Turkish government.  He 
effectively admits this when he says:

"Reporting on the civilians displaced by the Raqqa offensive has been sparse, 
partly because of limited access.  Citing security concerns, the Turkish 
government restricts reporters' access to the territory that it controls.  The 
government permitted a Daily Beast reporter to travel here only under escort 
and provided an armored SUV and armed Syrian rebel units in two pickup trucks 
for protection".

Thus, Gutman was embedded with the Turkish army and its allied militias.  He 
seems to be Turkey's equivalent of Vanessa Beeley.

Hence it is no surprise that this article contains allegations of anti-Arab 
racism on the part of the Syrian Democratic Front.  These allegations should be 
treated with skepticism.

Gutman cites UN reports, but draws incorrect conclusions from them.  He says:  
"According to a May 28 UN report, 200,000 civilians have been made homeless 
since November - all from ISIS-controlled towns and villages surrounding 
Raqqa".  This is the result of heavy fighting in the area, but Gutman talks of 
"ethnic cleansing".

He admits that some of the displaced people have returned to their homes, but 
implies that most will not be allowed to do so.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report is critical 
of some measures taken by the SDF (e.g. "lengthy security checks", involving 
"confiscating ID cards and travel documents", and "delayed return of IDs or 
travel documentation").  But it makes no suggestion that these practices are 
ethnically motivated, or that there is an intention to permanently prevent most 
of the displaced people from returning to their homes.

Some displaced people have been unable to return home due to hazards such as 
unexploded mines.  For example, the UN report mentions that in the town of 
Tabqa, "The process of removing mines continues in the National Hospital and 
its surroundings".  

Despite this, the report says that more than 15,000 displaced people have 
returned to Tabqa, bringing its population up to 35,000, compared to 80,000 
before the fighting.  

(More recently, according to Kurdish sources, the population of Tabqa has 
reached 65,000)

The UN report gives a number of other examples of people returning home, 
including the following:

"People continue to return to their communities of origin in the villages of 
the Ar-Raqqa sub-district such as Tal Elsamen Dahham, Sukariyet Tal Elsamen, 
Thulth Khneiz, Abbara, Kalta, Hilo Abed and Rohayat...

"On 21 May SDF allowed approximately 6,000 people to return to their home town 
Hazima..."

Despite its bias, Gutman's article does make one useful point.  He points out  
that the US is not giving any aid to refugees in SDF-controlled areas.  The UN 
is only able to send a small amount of aid, due to the blockade by Turkey and 
the [Iraqi] Kurdistan Regional Government.

Chris Slee



From: Marxism  on behalf of Louis Proyect 
via Marxism 
Sent: Thursday, 1 June 2017 10:59 PM
To: Chris Slee
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: U.S. Helps Drive 200,000 Syrians From Their Homes

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After U.S. bombing ousts ISIS militants from the villages they’ve
occupied, the proxies on the ground set up by the U.S.—the Syrian
Democratic Forces—enter the villages and order the mostly Arab
population to leave at gunpoint. People say they are stripped of their
identity cards and herded like livestock to a transit camp.
The SDF, which has Arabs in its ranks but is dominated by Kurds, tells
these internally displaced persons, or IDPs, as they are called in
humanitarian jargon, that they can return to their homes if they find a
local sponsor. Otherwise, their only option is to exit the region. Many
arrive in Jarablus bearing only travel papers authorizing a one-way trip
out of the Raqqa area within 24 hours.

full:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/us-helps-drive-20-syrians-from-their-homes
[http://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1496285931/170530-Gutman-Syria-03_ucwzue.jpg]

U.S. Helps Drive 200,000 Syrians From Their 
Homes