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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Syrian troops storm areas near capital of Damascus
2012-01-29
it gets closer..
In dozens of tanks and armored vehicles, Syrian troops stormed rebellious areas near the capital Sunday, shelling neighborhoods that have fallen under the control of army dissidents and clashing with fighters. At least 62 people were killed in violence nationwide, activists and residents said.
what's a Sunday without indiscriminate killing in Islam?
The widescale offensive near the capital suggested the regime is worried that military defectors could close in on Damascus, which has remained relatively quiet while most other Syrian cities descended into chaos after the uprising began in March.
time for the wives and kiddies to take that "early-early-summer-vacation" in France?
The rising bloodshed added urgency to Arab and Western diplomatic efforts to end the 10-month conflict.

The violence has gradually approached the capital. In the past two weeks, army dissidents have become more visible, seizing several suburbs on the eastern edge of Damascus and setting up checkpoints where masked men wearing military attire and wielding assault rifles stop motorists and protect anti-regime protests.

Their presence so close to the capital is astonishing in tightly controlled Syria and suggests 1) the Assad regime may either be losing control or 2) setting up a trap for the fighters before going on the offensive.
betting on option #2
Residents of Damascus reported hearing clashes in the nearby suburbs, particularly at night, shattering the city's calm.
Posted by:Frank G

#3  Geez, Zhang, that's kind of harsh. It's like saying they can't help themselves or something. Like the time the Israelis left one of the zoo doors open and some Christians massacred some Muslims. The fault is with the zookeepers, right?
Posted by: Richard Aubrey   2012-01-29 22:05  

#2  what's a Sunday without indiscriminate killing in Islam?

Given that Alawites aren't actually Muslims, I think it's more a case of infidels selectively killing Muslims. From Wikipedia:

In 1970, then-Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a "Correctionist Movement" in the Ba'ath Party.[30] His coming to power has been compared to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries."[27]

In 1971 al-Assad became president of Syria, a function that the Constitution allows only a Sunni Muslim to hold. In 1973 a new constitution was published that omitted the old requirement that the religion of the state is Islam and replaced it with the statement that the religion of the republic's president is Islam. Protests erupted when the statement was altered,[31] and to satisfy this requirement in 1974, Musa Sadr, a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement who had earlier sought to unite Lebanese Alawis and Shias under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council without success,[3] issued a fatwa stating that Alawis were a community of Twelver Shia Muslims.[32][33] Under the authoritarian but secular Assad government, religious minorities were tolerated, political dissent was not.

Pan Arabism has been a fig leaf behind which the Syrian Alawite minority wielded power against the Sunni majority. The reason it did so was because the French refused to establish Latakia, homeland of the Alawites, as an independent country, despite the desperate entreaties of Hafez Assad's father. This is the real problem with the dissolution of the European empires - to make lives simpler for their foreign offices (and perhaps to avoid the expense of multiple embassies), they grouped large numbers of mutually incompatible peoples together in sprawling countries several times the size of the average EU member, paving the way for the persecution and large scale massacres of ethnic or religious minorities who were the traditional prey for their historical blood enemies. It's the equivalent of putting a rapist and his victim in the same home after his release from prison.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2012-01-29 20:23  

#1  should've had a question mark on "betting on option 2"
Posted by: Frank G   2012-01-29 18:25  

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