Syria Disintegrating: Part 2

[Sheilbh]

I meant more that it's an old symbol based on Mohammed's flag, so I think it's only recently been identified solely with al-Qaeda.

[CountDeMoney]

I meant more that it's an old symbol based on Mohammed's flag, so I think it's only recently been identified solely with al-Qaeda.

Yeah, it's a play on Mohammed's jihad battle flag, and various Al Qaeda franchises have pretty much been using it since we started sucking the air out of the lungs and igniting it with daisycutters.

[derspiess]

I meant more that it's an old symbol based on Mohammed's flag, so I think it's only recently been identified solely with al-Qaeda.

Yeah, it's a play on Mohammed's jihad battle flag, and various Al Qaeda franchises have pretty much been using it since we started sucking the air out of the lungs and igniting it with daisycutters.

When we were at the Air Force Museum a couple weeks ago, I was standing there in awe of a daisycutter they had on display.  Tommy asked me what it was & I simply told him it was one of the coolest things ever made.

[CountDeMoney]

Tommy asked me what it was & I simply told him it was one of the coolest things ever made.

"Son, when you've got to push something out of the back of an airplane on a palette with a parachute, you know there's a world of hurt on the way."

[Syt]

Just noticed this:



Looks very much like an Austrian Steyr AUG rifle. In the region it's used by Oman and Suadi-Arabia. Also, there's Austrian observers on the Golan Heights.

[Syt]

Also, this guy is awesome:

[Viking]

Just noticed this:



Looks very much like an Austrian Steyr AUG rifle. In the region it's used by Oman and Suadi-Arabia. Also, there's Austrian observers on the Golan Heights.

He probably got it the same place Hizbullah got it's night vision gear, combat armor and assault weapons... US gun shows.

[Syt]

Looks like the old A1, btw. I like the look of the A3 better - with the right modules added it looks like a prop from Aliens.

[Ed Anger]

They are all shopping at Red Jacket.

GAMECHANGER.

At least they are being hideously overcharged.

[CountDeMoney]

Also, this guy is awesome:

He ain't hitting shit, but at least he looks beefy doing it.

[Razgovory]

Also, this guy is awesome:

He ain't hitting shit, but at least he looks beefy doing it.

Just mugging for the camera.  Though I doubt he'd hit much even if was actually trying.

[KRonn]

He probably got it the same place Hizbullah got it's night vision gear, combat armor and assault weapons... US gun shows.

Or more likely, the botched US law enforcement programs that gave hundreds or thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels, and they in turn sold those guns off for profits.        

[mongers]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/opinion/syrias-crumbling-pluralism.html?_r=2

Syria's Crumbling Pluralism

DAMASCUS — The day begins here with the call to prayer and ends with the roar of gunfire. Syria's pluralistic society, which once rose above sectarian identity in a region often characterized by a homicidal assertion of religious belief, is now faced with civil disintegration and ethnic cleansing.
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In Bab Touma, the Christian quarter of the old city, the magnificently restored Ottoman mansions housing many of the hotels that only two years ago overflowed with Western tourists have become temporary sanctuaries for Syrian minorities fleeing their homes and cities.

A Christian doctor of Palestinian origin huddling with his family of four in a small room in one of the hotels was looking for a way out of the country: "My father came to Syria as a refugee," he told me. "I made it my home. Now I am having to uproot my two young sons."

His home, in Midan in southern Damascus, came under attack during an intense battle last week between the opposition Free Syrian Army and government forces. Midan is now officially a safe area, but hardly anyone believes that peace will endure.

Syria's 2.3 million Christians, constituting about 10 percent of the country's population, have generally known a more privileged existence under the Assad dynasty than even the Shiite Alawi sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs. Yet their allegiance to Assad was never absolute. Some Christians openly clamored for political change in the early months of the anti-government uprising. But as the rebellion became suffused with Sunni militants sympathetic to or affiliated with Al Qaeda, Christians recoiled.

A churchgoing Syrian told me that he used to see himself primarily as "Syrian" and that religious identity, in political terms, was an idea that never occurred to him — until an opposition gang attacked his family earlier this year in Homs. "It's a label they pinned on us," he said. "If their revolution is for everyone, as they keep insisting it is, why are Christians being targeted? It is because what they are waging is not a struggle for freedom, and it's certainly not for everyone."

As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who've been "cleansed" from their homes in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home.

The rebels' conduct has prompted at least some Sunnis who had supported the rebels and once-wavering Syrians to pledge renewed loyalty to Assad. Many who once regarded the regime as a kleptocracy now view it as the best guarantor of Syria's endangered pluralism.

A Sunni shopkeeper in the impoverished suburb of Set Zaynab, which was partly destroyed in the clashes last week, no longer supports the rebellion. "I wanted Assad to go because he is corrupt," he said. "But what happened here, what they did, it scared me. It made me angry. I cannot support the murder of my neighbors in the name of change. You cannot bring democracy by killing innocent people or by burning the shrines of Shiites. Syrians don't do that. This is the work of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia," he added, referring to the ultra conservative Sunni sect.

Repeated attempts by Free Syrian Army fighters to destroy a shrine to Sayyida Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiites, have not yet caused the area's Sunni minority to flee — many Shiites here have refused to blame their Sunni neighbors for the rebels' crimes.

Over the past week, more than a dozen Syrians — chiefly Alawi and Christian, but also a handful of Sunnis — affirmed to me their determination to pick up arms to defend Assad.

The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria's religious minorities — and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad — is breeding a bitter anti-Americanism among many secular Syrians who see the United States aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world's most resolutely secular state.

Fresh from abetting the suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia's intervention in Syria is part of its effort to attenuate Iran's influence and cripple what it fears is a growing Shiite corridor of power in the Middle East.

Most Syrians, regardless of their faith, want the power to change their government. But the armed groups that have seized control of the rebellion, now contaminated with Al Qaeda fighters and corrupted by Saudi money, have repelled many people.

A year and a half after the insurrection began, Assad's forces are exhausted and dispirited — but there is no sign yet of a simultaneous mass uprising in any of the major cities. Instead, rebel fighters on Saudi payroll launch coordinated attacks on high-value targets, the Syrian Army retaliates with disproportionate force, and videos of the ensuing devastation are posted on the Internet.

Proponents of a peaceful political solution, like the signatories to the so-called Sant'Egidio appeal last week in Italy, have been eclipsed by sectarian leaders of the Syrian National Council urging the international community to give them anti-aircraft weapons.

Washington is aware of the scale of the problem. As early as June 2011, Robert Stephen Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, briefed his counterparts in Damascus about Al Qaeda's penetration of the opposition forces. By still ploughing ahead with its support for Saudi Arabia's effort to destabilize Syria, Washington, far from assisting Israel or weakening Iran, is helping to fuel a humanitarian crisis that will come back to haunt the United States.

Kapil Komireddi, an Indian journalist, has written from South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

[Ed Anger]

I got a major murder boner with the footage of Frogfoots in action over Aleppo.

[CountDeMoney]

By still ploughing ahead with its support for Saudi Arabia's effort to destabilize Syria, Washington, far from assisting Israel or weakening Iran, is helping to fuel a humanitarian crisis that will come back to haunt the United States.

Yeah, we never learn when it comes to those people.  Once the government falls, it's gonna Iraqi Tribalism In A Vacuum Part Deux.