*Crisis Continues as Refugees Reach 1.5 Million* The number of refugees <http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php> from the conflict in Syria has reached over 1.5 million according to data collected by the UN Refugee Agency.
The rate of people<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/16/syria-crisis-refugees-million-un> fleeing the country has increased rapidly in recent weeks, which is dramatically illustrated by the fact that only 10 weeks ago the number of Syrian refugees totalled 1 million. Some estimates suggest that if this rate is maintained then by the end of the year 3.5 million Syrians – 15% of the country’s total population – could be refugees. Gerry Simpson, acting refugee programme director at Human Rights Watch, said that Turkey and Jordan were "shouldering a huge burden" of the problem: Turkey has accepted 347,157 refugees; Jordan, 473,587; meanwhile Lebanon has taken 470,457, Iraq 147,464 and Egypt 66,922. Simpson criticised Jordan for "its border push-back policy” and Turkey’s “continued partial border closure” for exacerbating the problems facing Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, pointed out that about 10% of Jordan's population were Syrian refugees adding that "I think it is unconscionable that we leave it to neighbouring states who have taken on so much. The EU has to open its doors." *Other Headlines:* *Russian Foreign Minister, UN Secretary-General Support Peace Conference** * *3 UN Peacekeepers Abducted** * *Obama and Erdogan Meet in Washington, Denounce Assad (Obama constantly reviewing and thinking about thinking)* *CIA Chief in Israel.* ** *According to a report in the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, the visit stemmed from "the American fear of escalation in the region against the backdrop of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah's threats to act against Israel in the Golan Heights and the American sense that Israel is disappointed by the ineffectuality of the Obama administration with regard to the ongoing deterioration in Syria.* *"It is assessed that Brennan was sent to Israel to co-ordinate a joint policy between the two countries and prevent Israel from taking action on its own in Syria."* *For More go to url* * http://www.enduringamerica.com/home/2013/5/17/syria-today-obama-erdogan-call-for-assad-to-go-but-will-they.html * *---------------------* *Israel, Assad, and the world <http://en.daam.org.il/?p=425>* *Posted on 14/05/2013 <http://en.daam.org.il/?p=425> by Yacov Ben Efrat<http://en.daam.org.il/?author=2> * *At the outbreak of the revolution in Syria two years ago, the Israeli government announced that events there were none of its business and it would not interfere. Forty years of quiet on the Golan Heights had led Israel to prefer Assad over any conceivable replacement. Now, however, when the rebels rule wide areas, when the Syrian army is falling apart, and when the regime’s survival is in the balance, Israeli policy appears to have shifted from passivity to active intervention.* *Continue reading → <http://en.daam.org.il/?p=425#more-425>* *http://en.daam.org.il/?p=425 * *-------------------------------------------------* http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11764/syrias-inglorious-basterd Syria's Inglorious Bastard<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11764/syrias-inglorious-basterd> May 17 2013by Audrey Ann Lavallée-Bélanger<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/100716> [image: Listen to this page using ReadSpeaker]<http://app.readspeaker.com/cgi-bin/rsent?customerid=5919&lang=en_us&readid=rscontent&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jadaliyya.com%2Fpages%2Findex%2F11764%2Fsyrias-inglorious-basterd> [image: [Khaled al-Hamad, left, in a photo from Omar Al-Farouk Brigade Facebook page]][Khaled al-Hamad, left, in a photo from Omar Al-Farouk Brigade Facebook page] On 13 May 2013, Human Rights Watch released a statement<http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/13/syria-brigade-fighting-homs-implicated-atrocities> attesting to the authenticity of a disturbing video that circulated first on Syrian pro-regime websites and then on social media. In it, a Syrian man cuts open a dead government soldier’s chest, pulls his heart and lung out, threatens “Alawite dogs” that they will all face a similar fate, and takes a bite of the viscera while addressing the videocamera. This latest sectarian evocation by a member of the armed opposition, Khalid al Hamad (“Abu Sakkar”), was simplistically depicted by many American and Gulf media outlets as an isolated abomination perpetrated by a savage man. However, the incident tells a more complex story about the evolution of sectarianism in Syria, the relationship between war and social media, and the Western media narrative on Syria more broadly. *“Most Disgusting Atrocity”* The editors of *Foreign Policy* opted for a sensationalist title for a piece by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch "Is This the Most Disgusting Atrocity Filmed in the Syria Civil War?<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/13/most_disgusting_atrocity_syrian_civil_war_rebel_eat_heart>" Two weeks after another massacre in al Baida village and Baniyas, where parents discovered their children’s bodies cut into pieces, stabbed, and burned by government soldiers, it has become redundant to note that a voyeuristic title suggesting a hierarchy of atrocity is an insult to the suffering that is hardly shared by an increasingly apathetic audience. Abu Sakkar’s action in the video is undoubtedly and unquestionably horrific. However, unfortunately, it is reminiscent of other cases in Syria and beyond, on either side of the battleground, where violence in all its forms is used as a weapon of war to intimidate the adversary and empower the perpetrator (not unlike the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/>). Singling out an act of atrocity alone is an obfuscation of the pervasiveness, proliferation, entrenchment, and intransigence of Syria's gruesome and grueling sectarian problem. The latest “cannibalistic” spectacle follows many equally damaging, albeit less graphic, incidents in Syria over the past two years that were not pornographic enough to make the headlines. In July 2011, exiled Sheikh Adnan Kaour said that Alawites deserved to be put into meat grinders<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwz8i3osHww>. In December 2012, members of the Free Syrian Army burned down a Shi’a mosque in Jisr al-Shoughour, perhaps in retaliation for the government attack on the city in June of that year, which sent thousands of refugees to Turkish refugee camps. In February 2013, some children in Binnish<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v> disturbingly sing of cutting throats of Alawites, under the guidance of fighters harboring the al-Qaeda scarf. Those few examples, for which there is no shortage of equivalents on the other side, show the steady progression of a harmful mediated sectarian rhetoric threatening to leave an irreparable scar on Syria. Abu Sakkar's video, like any other, is dangerous especially as it is magnified, instrumentalized, and internalized. *The Good Guys* When the news depict Abu Sakkar as being somewhat of a free agent having created his own brigade, they insinuate that he is an exception to the rule. Many a media outlets was quick to point that the event was an isolated case, with TIME <http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/>advancing that the Supreme Military Council, overseeing 90 percent of the fighting groups, had joined forces to catch Abu Sakkar, “dead or alive.” However, this reassuring statistic, for anyone familiar with the diverse armed opposition spectrum<http://www.feps-europe.eu/uploads/documents/20120510-syrian-opposition-aron-lund.pdf> in Syria, is mere wishful thinking. Indeed, there were various instances where commanders adopted a nonsectarian<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Polzea5v9zQ> discourse and seemed to be advocating for the ideals of the Syrian revolution. This was the case of Abu Furat<http://darthnader.net/2012/12/15/remembering-abu-furat/>, an FSA commander who was killed in combat last December. However, in a context of protracted asymmetric war, where factions have different objectives and are mostly chasing funds, drawing the lines between the “good guys,” the “bad guys,” the “secular,” the “religious,” and the “moderate,” is both loaded and irrelevant. Earlier this year, Ghaith Abdul Ahad was reporting on how many "secular-minded" rebels were trying to impress Gulf <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/ghaith-abdul-ahad/how-to-start-a-battalion-in-five-easy-lessons>funders through videos to receive more resources for battle. Thus, though the latest incident is certainly condemned by many, this should neither cast a fog on the major public relations campaigns played by rebels, nor overshadow the now widespread use of sectarian rhetoric in their ranks. In the case of Abu Sakkar's video, he certainly had a predetermined audience in mind--both of the radical sectarian comrades and enemies in the Syrian army--considering the heavy symbolism of eating hearts and livers. Before biting into the viscera of his victim, Abu Sakkar looked to the camera and said: "I swear to God, you soldiers of Bashar, you dogs, we will eat from your hearts and livers! O heroes of Bab Amr, you slaughter the Alawites and take out their hearts to eat them!" It should come as no suprise that the surfacing of such a video and its exponential proliferation serves as fodder for Islamophobia on the Syrian war and beyond. For instance, Theodore Shoabat, a prolific anti-Muslim writer, wastes no time to raise Abu Sakkar's video in the context of a critique of Islam<http://shoebat.com/2013/05/13/islamic-ritualistic-cannibalism-caught-on-film/>. He notes the television appearance of an Egyptian scholar who revealed that some Al-Azhar-sanctioned high school books condoned cannibalism<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNz>. While the gorging and biting of an enemy's viscera was considered, historically, an act of bitter humiliation in combat, it did however contradict Islamic tradition. For instance, at the Battle of Uhud in 625, Hind bint Utbah allegedly bit the heart of Prophet Mohammad’s uncle, Hazrat Hamza, in a battle opposing Muslims and Meccans, an act considered a complete abomination. It is interesting to note that while most outlets failed to pick up on that particular instance of religious and historical symbolism, they were nevertheless quick to draw broad generalizations about a timeless Sunni/Shia animosity dating back to the time of Karbala. Two days ago, Richard Spencer published an article<http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/richardspencer/100217033/cannibalism-in-syria-why-is-this-a-bigger-story-than-the-routine-slaughter-of-children/> that attempted to historicize cannibalism in the context of Chinese and early Greek history, an aspect overlooked as the prevailing journalistic narratives stressed the exceptional nature of the video, and pointed out the "tension sometimes between journalist and moral narratives." Beyond this journalistic urge, however, lie more structural problems. At the outset, the narrative is reinforced by the difficulty of reporting accurately from within Syria and the choice between being followed by rebels or regime soldiers in an increasingly dichotomized polarized environment. In such an journalistic climate and given the levels of logistical chaos, there is more room for homogeneous, replicable, and lowest common denominator reporting. The denominator in this case is both "evil" and "random." More abstractly, the depiction of an act as seemingly random, sporadic, and ahistoric prioritizes sensationalistic savagery over more genuine attempts at providing context. This lack of editorial perspicacity ultimately legitimizes a language of international relations serving some interests and ideologies at the expense of critical journalism. Indeed, it is this same international language that legitimizes apologetic statements, lowers the moral expectations and obligations for the rebels, and allows a Human Rights Watch employee to write the following words about the incident<http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/13/syria-brigade-fighting-homs-implicated-atrocities>: “these atrocities are shocking but so is the obstruction of some Security Council members that still do not support an ICC referral for all sides.” It is this very language that enables journalists to, concurringly, slip in empty statements about how the events might, finally bring Russia<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/05/14/syrian-rebel-leader-abu-sakkar-cutting-eating-soldiers-heart-video_n_3271067.html?utm_hp_ref=uk> to get on the Western bandwagon of moral high ground. *A Performance* Though sadistic displays were always weapons of war, there is something to be said about memorializing this moment on camera. It captures the sense of impunity felt by the perpetrator, the endorsement of the act by his cheering friends, and its sick audience of 900,000+ viewers in pursuit of the latest adrenaline rush. Pro-regime pages used the incident as a warning about the fate of the Alawites if the Assad government were to fall. Many viewed and shared the video as an insight into the latest sneak peek into the “unfortunate” and “incomprehensible” chaos unfolding in Syria. While many have emphasized the craziness of the individual, no one has questioned the guilty pleasure and fetishistic excitement felt by viewers. Relatedly, few have so far raised the question of individual and collective trauma and mental illness that will arise from the conflict. Peter Bouckaert encapsulates that exhibitionist/voyeuristic instance when he describes what seems to be a performance by Abu Sakkar: “The cameraman jokes with the commander, telling him, "God Bless you Abu Sakkar, it looks like you are drawing a love heart [on his chest]!" The commander, the man called Abu Sakkar, then picks up the bloody liver and heart and speaks directly into the camera, delivering a chilling threat [...] As men in the background shout *Allahu Akbar!* (God is Great!), Abu Sakkar ends the video by putting the dead man's heart in his mouth and ripping off a chunk of the bleeding organ.” The irony is that the very tools that enable human rights violations to be documented, archived, and perhaps prosecuted on, the social media have opened another front where a battle of words and acts is being shepherded. Indeed, Al Jazeera English was quick to offer a platform for the latest Syrian National Council PR stunt, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DAaUWj1IYM> in which spokesperson Khaled Saleh reassures his audience with a “we’re not them” discourse, claiming that the SNC has initiated a new media campaign<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owhH_z8lPQw> to “educate” rebels about the Geneva Conventions. In his paternalistic words: “some of [the fighters] do not understand international human rights law, and we felt that there is a need to provide education to help them understand the need to help them understand what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.” *Read*: We would like to reassure the West that we are doing everything in our power to keep these uncivilized farmers under control, so long as you keep supporting us, the good guys in a post-Assad period. Indeed, considering that the funding of rebels comes from Gulf funders looking for videos of the rebels’ bravado, those media campaigns are nothing but self-serving and giving more weight to elitist politics. And while the Free Syrian Army's spokespersons the Syrian opposition distance themselves from Abu Sakkar and rendering him a pariah before the international media, the insatiable interest in the mind behind the video continues unabated. Media coverage attempts to weave a psychoanalytic profile of single man at the expense of a wider frame of the conflict. Channel 4<http://www.channel4.com/news/syria-rebel-eating-heart-soldier-abu-sakkar-mani> revisited a report from February 2012 featuring Abu Sakkar himself while Kim Sengupta<http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/i-met-the-followers-of-syrian-rebel-commander-abu-sakkar-who-was-filmed-cutting-out-government-soldiers-heart-and-eating-it-29270828.html> of *The Independent* wrote his reflection about the man behind the media outrage. CNN invited James Dawes, the Director of the Human Rights program at Macalester College and author of just-published book entitled Evil Men<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072657> (2013), to didactically explain how "war criminals" and "monsters" like Abu Sakkar are made <http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/opinion/dawes-syria-video/> and how to reverse their diabolical psychology. *The Fatalistic Narrative * To further entrench a fascination with the spectacle of evil and to render it functional, when TIME sought Abu Sakkar for an interview, he said in a Skype call <http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/>that “after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.” He is saying that if he cannot outgun his opponent at least he can try to scare him away with his inglorious actions. Even though the journalist is in direct contact with the Abu Sakkar, the quotes are provided with little context and Abu Sakkar’s dual PR stunt--to instill fear in the regime and embolden his sectarian-minded audience--is excised from story. More context behind this desperate calculated act could lead to a more important conversation about why and how the regime continues, apparently, to have the upper hand. Is Abu Sakkar’s depiction as the crazy Syrian sectarian cannibalist yet another attempt to display the Syrian crisis as fatalistic in the absence of a definite rebel victory? In the early months of the uprising, the revolution was represented optimistically and romantically through a simplistic binary: the Syrians were fighting for democracy against a brutal regime. Over time, there was a greater emphasis on the sectarian threat looming <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/world/middleeast/20syria.html>, initially as something the regime had manufactured<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/opinion/friedman-syria-is-iraq.html?_r=0>, then as an "a priori monster" re-emerging from past religious struggles with the arrival of foreign jihadists<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/world/middleeast/as-syria>. The evolution of a fatalistic<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/after-syrias-assad-falls-the-us-must-work-with-iran.html> discourse on Syria strangely coincides with a foreign policy increasingly suited to the status quo and adverses at the idea of having to make concessions with countries such as Iran. In that optic, it is better to maintain Abu Sakkar’s image of the lunatic Syrian sectarian cannibalist. It is surreal enough to send shivers down the spine of its viewers who will feel saddened by the events, but apprehensive and noncommittal enough compared to massacres of children such as the one in Baniyas that would revive debates about international accountability and dialogue. ------------------- http://www.marxist.com/syrian-masses-pay-the-price-for-imperialist-meddling-and-sectarian-deadlock.htm Syrian masses pay the price for imperialist meddling and sectarian deadlock<http://www.marxist.com/syrian-masses-pay-the-price-for-imperialist-meddling-and-sectarian-deadlock.htm> Written by Reza MohammadiThursday, 16 May 2013 [image: Print]<http://www.marxist.com/syrian-masses-pay-the-price-for-imperialist-meddling-and-sectarian-deadlock/print.htm>[image: E-mail]<http://www.marxist.com/component/option,com_mailto/link,6c2de490e7f70b05a1ef21e789d2bfb51b3ba081/tmpl,component/> - - - As the Syrian revolution remains locked in civil war for a third year, regional powers have begun to use the conflict as an opportunity to advance their own imperialist agendas. Syria has become a battleground for a proxy war between Iran, Israel, and the Arab states of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. [image: syria-civil-war]<http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/syria/syria-civil-war.jpg>Last week saw the renewed bombing of Syria by Israel, and on a scale not witnessed since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Unofficial Israeli sources claimed that the strikes on Damascus targeted Fateh-110 missiles sent by Iran en route to the Lebanese Shi’ite organisation, Hezbollah. But this is merely the surfacing of a long-term trend as Iran and Israel have vied for geopolitical supremacy in the region. The Iranian government has for some time sought to build up Hezbollah – for its proximity to Israel – as a deterrent to any Israeli airstrikes on Iranian soil. The Assad regime has played a critical role in this process by housing Iranian resources and weaponry ready to be sent to Lebanon. Israel, of course, has long sought to extend its borders, notably in its conflicts with Syria over the Golan Heights. But as with any proxy war, this can only mean the suffering of the people living in the battle zone, namely the Syrian people. Added to this toxic cocktail is the ascendancy of Islamic extremism, supported and funded by Saudi and Qatari authorities. Many jihadist organisations have gone into Syria and have made no attempt to hide their agenda of trying to divert the revolution to an Islamist cause. The most prominent of these groups is the Jabhat al-Nusra, who have links to al-Qaeda and have become entrenched within the rebel Free Syrian Army. Indeed, al-Nusra have become the leading tendency amongst the rank-and-file of the resistance movement, and one that the liberal, bourgeois leaders of the Syrian National Coalition – the supposed mandated representative body of the revolution – have tried to quash. This Islamist element has attempted to fuel the sectarian edge of the conflict in order to replace the main aim of the revolution from one of political freedom to one of Sunni ascendancy over Shi’ites. Because the Assad family are Alawite, a sect of Shi’a Islam, and have traditionally protected and favoured Syrian Alawites in a majority Sunni country, the pro-Assad and anti-Assad forces of the war have increasingly tended to align approximately with the Shi’a and Sunni sections of the population, respectively. However, these sectarian lines have been made bolder by al-Nusra’s insistence that this is a religious war against an ‘untrue’ version of Islam, which, in turn, has rallied more Shi’ites to the cause of Assad to seek protection. This sectarian divide also suits the purposes of other regional powers, especially Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Iran can use the conflict to mobilise Shi’ites across the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Lebanon, and present itself as the protector of Shi’ism in an attempt to secure geopolitical supremacy. Already we have recently seen the Shi’ite government of Iraq banning 10 news channels from the country, including Al Jazeera, for ‘sectarian bias’. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s recent announcement that his organisation was now actively involving itself in Syria in order to protect Syrian Shi’ites is an extension of this phenomenon and one that reveals the extent of Iranian interference in the Syrian conflict. In response Saudi Arabia and Qatar have continued to fund militant Sunni organisations like al-Nusra.*Therefore, what all these foreign influences have in common is that their aims are hostile to those of the Syrian revolutionaries*. But even if such groups are gaining ascendancy in Syria, it is through pragmatism rather than ideology. Of course, many Syrians are very devout and it would be foolish to deny the importance of religion in their lives. However, many Syrian rebels within the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have become aligned with al-Nusra not out of religious inclination but because the Islamist organisation – thanks to the logistic and military support of their patrons – is much better organised and possesses a greater wealth of resources with which to tackle the pro-Assad forces. The commander of a rebel brigade in Hasaka told a *New York Times* reporter that al-Nusra “are the strongest military force in the area… We can’t deny it.” But he added, “Most of the youth who joined them did so to topple the regime, not because they wanted to join Al Qaeda.” While al-Nusra continues to gain control of government oil fields, the FSA itself it losing territory, which has been blamed on a shortage of weapons and resources. For example, one FSA member who joined al-Nusra told *The Guardian*, “If you join al-Nusra, there is always a gun for you but many of the FSA brigades can't even provide bullets for their fighters." Indeed, al-Nusra is apparently wealthy enough to support rebels’ families financially during the conflict. In a situation of war, can it be so difficult to see why al-Nusra is gaining support? At the same time, who else can Syrian Shi’ites turn to other than pro-Assad forces and Hezbollah for their survival? Meanwhile, the West stands paralysed as to how to address the situation. European countries like the UK and France have promoted the liberal Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate government of Syria and have pushed for assistance to be provided to the FSA. The USA, perhaps more fearful of Islamist influence in the FSA, have been more reluctant but no less keen to control the situation, shown by its move to hold talks with Russia about what should be done concerning the conflict. What all this shows is that the Syrian National Coalition is largely influenced by Western powers, and would submit to their will and laws of capitalism should they come to power. Therefore, the situation in Syria shows a clear lack of genuine revolutionary leadership. While what seems like the most of the world attempts to use the conflict to forward their own agenda, the Syrian people are paying the price. At this current time, a Marxist leadership would provide unfettered opportunities for liberation, not tied to regional or imperialist influences. It would also be the only leadership that could cut across sectarian lines of Sunni-Shi’a in demanding the equality of all, which is perhaps the only foreseeable avenue for peace in Syria. In the absence of such leadership, we can only expect the conflict to escalate, with perhaps even more active foreign interference. 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