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On 8/10/18 5:57 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:
In June 2015, Jabhat al-Nusra carried out a massacre of 20 Druze in a village in Idlib. This was condemned by other rebel groups.
The first part of [Andrew] Cockburn’s article rehashes the support that the Reagan White House gave to the Islamists fighting against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, an affair about which there should be no controversy. What is controversial is Cockburn’s claim that Obama is reprising Reagan’s mission but in Syria rather than Afghanistan.
He singles out al-Nusra, the group that holds the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria, as carrying on in the bloodthirsty vein of Afghan rebels under Osama bin Laden’s command. As a sign of how bestial they are, Cockburn points to their killing members of the Druze faith in Idlib province last spring. What he fails to point out, however, is that Sunnis were killed as well. According to Scott Lucas the killings had more to do with al-Nusra’s determination to seize some abandoned houses that they planned to use as frontline defense against both Assad’s army and ISIS. When a Druze family claimed ownership of the properties, a heated argument led to a confrontation that finally ended in a machine gun attack on nearby houses that resulted in the death of 23 innocent people. The Tunisian commander who led the al-Nusra unit was relieved of his duties while the group publicly repudiated and denounced what most commentators describe as an isolated incident.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2015/12/29/andrew-cockburn-joins-the-baathist-amen-corner/
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