Konflikten i Syrien

Don't fall for the Aleppo propaganda

What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.
Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.
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The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.

The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.
So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.

In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.
He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…
‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’

If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?

Moscow Counting on Partners to Get Militants to Leave Aleppo

“"Russia now largely expects efforts from its partners on the Syrian reconciliation so that they pick up the baton, contribute to this humanitarian operation, contribute to criminals leaving Aleppo, especially its eastern part, and so that the actual process of separation of the so-called moderate opposition and terrorist groups were to begin," Peskov told reporters.”

Army Command warns terrorists attempting to flee Mosul into Syria would be dealt with

Damascus, SANA – The General Command of the Army and the Armed Forces said the supporters of international terrorism are trying to secure safe routes and corridors for the ISIS terrorists who are fleeing Iraq’s Mosul to cross into Syria.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Command said a “malicious scheme” by the backers of international terrorism, mainly the US and Saudi Arabia, is unfolding and becoming clear after military operations were launched by the brotherly Iraqi army and its supporting forces to liberate Mosul city from the gangs of ISIS terrorist organization.

The scheme, the statement explained, is to provide safe routes for the groupings of ISIS terrorists who are reeling under the Iraqi army’s strikes in Mosul-Iraq’s second largest city-to cross the border into the Syrian territory.

The aim of providing such corridors, it added, is to provide protection to the terrorists on the one hand and boost the terrorist presence inside the Syrian territory on the other hand in a bid to impose a new military reality in the eastern region in the direction of Deir Ezzor, Raqqa and Palmyra.
The General Command of the Army stressed in its statement that the battle of liberating Mosul and the whole territory of Iraq from terrorism is its own battle.

The Command warned that it would consider any attempt at crossing into its border as “an attack on the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic,” and that those who attempt to do that would be regarded as terrorists and would be dealt with with all the forces and means at its disposal.