Syria Disintegrating: Part 2

[CountDeMoney]

Moshe Dayan's lost left eye begs to disagree with you.

Mose Dayan's Left Eye.  What a great name for a band,

[Ed Anger]

Moshe Dayan presents Shitgoat

[CountDeMoney]

Listen as Moshe sing his greatest hits, such as " Your Love is Like the Egyptians in My Tank Tracks", and "Since You've Been Gone, I Can't See How Far Away You Are Now?"  Order now!

[Ed Anger]

From K-Tel!

[Savonarola]

Now here's a little something about a Jihadist like Deso
Never should have been let out of Guantanamo...

Rapping for al Qaeda in Syria

(CNN) -- In August, al Qaeda's propaganda arm released a video starring the German rapper Deso Dogg.

Wearing combat fatigues and standing next to a waterfall in Syria, Deso Dogg raps in German calling on others to join the jihad and "to make an effort for Paradise."

Deso Dogg, whose real name is Denis Cuspert, is one of several dozen German citizens who have fought in Syria.

Their move to Syria marks an important shift in the focus of global jihadists. Videos by German militants training with groups associated with al Qaeda during 2009 and 2010 were invariably taped in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

That region now is largely shunned by foreign militants partly because of effective CIA drones strikes and partly because Syria is now the destination choice for jihadists from around the world.

Deso Dogg is one of the many thousands of foreign fighters who have been drawn to the jihad in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad over the past three years.

This group includes an estimated 800 to 900 from Europe, mostly from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. A handful of Americans have also fought in Syria.

The concern, of course, is that these militants will swap business cards and will acquire arms training and bomb-making skills and will return to Western countries and carry out acts of terrorism.

This is what happened after the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Arab veterans of those wars formed the heart of al Qaeda and affiliated groups. Osama bin Laden fought in the Afghan War against the Soviets and then founded al Qaeda, which subsequently, of course, launched the 9/11 attacks. The failure to pay adequate attention to the so-called "Afghan Arabs" such as bin Laden proved an expensive one for the United Sates and her allies.

Could Syria be a new Afghanistan? Maybe.

Last month, for instance, British authorities arrested militants who were allegedly planning a terrorist attack. Two British officials who work on counterterrorism issues told us that that the militants had traveled to Syria.

The 37-year-old Deso Dogg was born in Berlin. His mother is German and his father from the West African nation of Ghana. As a teenager, he became politicized during the first Gulf War, joining anti-American demonstrations in Berlin. "We marched, shouted and burned the American flag," Cuspert recalled.

Cuspert joined Berlin street gangs and became a popular artist in the German gangsta-rap scene, known by his nom de rap "Deso Dogg" and touring with other rappers such as DMX.

After surviving a car accident, he started questioning his lifestyle and turned to Islam for answers. In 2010, he ended his career as a rapper. Deso Dogg changed his name again to "Abu Talha al-Almani" and his rap songs became nasheeds, Islamic devotional songs.

Cuspert's nasheeds were posted on jihadist websites and became popular among al Qaeda supporters.

The ex-rapper went on to become one of the key figures in the militant Millatu-Ibrahim group in Germany.

The group was banned by the German government last year and several of its members, including Cuspert, moved to Egypt to avoid possible arrest by German authorities.

Cuspert's whereabouts remained unclear for many months until the video was released in August showing him to be in Syria and rapping about the duty to "go into battle."

Some 6,000 to 10,000 foreign fighters from more than 80 countries are believed to have traveled to Syria since the beginning of the conflict to join the rebels who aim to topple al-Assad's regime.
Close to 800 of those foreigners are from Saudi Arabia. Tunisia and Libya are the next highest contributors, according to residents and analysts, but Chechnya, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have also seen citizens join the rebel forces in Syria.

Not all of these fighters have joined al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria, but it is likely that many of them have done so because they are generally Sunni militants who are drawn to the conflict for religious reasons.

Canadian news reports estimate the number of Canadian citizens fighting in Syria range from a few dozen to as many as 100. An American filmmaker, Bilal Abdul Kareen, who lived with an Islamist group in Syria for a year said he met with 20 to 30 Canadians.

Experts say the number of Americans fighting in Syria is likely less than 10. Eric Harroun, a former U.S. solider, was charged this year with conspiring to use a rocket-propelled grenade in Syria, and he admitted to fighting with the al Qaeda affiliate group, al-Nusra.

Nicole Mansfield of Flint, Michigan, was killed in May by Syrian government forces who claimed she was fighting with an al Qaeda linked insurgent group.

How to prevent the foreign fighters in Syria fomenting acts of terrorism around the world?
The United States and its allies should make a careful effort to find out the identities of the foreign fighters who have joined the jihadist groups fighting in Syria. And the U.S. should make clear to countries such as Saudi Arabia, which is supplying hundreds of Saudi fighters in Syria, that encouraging this kind of militancy could create a "blowback" problem in the Middle East in the form of terrorism directed at Arab regimes.

As for the former Deso Dogg, in September a jihadi forum released a statement saying that the German ex-rapper had been wounded by an air strike in Syria.

And it's rat-a-tat-tat-tat like that
You know I never hesitate to put a Hebrew on his back

[CountDeMoney]

And it's rat-a-tat-tat-tat like that
You know I never hesitate to put a Hebrew on his back

[Queequeg]

don a keffiyah and ride on Damascus

NO PRISONERS!

[jimmy olsen]

Stunning news from the UN!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25189834

UN implicates Bashar al-Assad in Syria war crimes

The UN's human rights chief has said an inquiry has produced evidence that war crimes were authorised in Syria at the "highest level", including by President Bashar al-Assad.

It is the first time the UN's human rights office has so directly implicated Mr Assad.

Commissioner Navi Pillay said her office held a list of others implicated by the inquiry.

The UN estimates more than 100,000 people have died in the conflict.

The UN's commission of inquiry into Syria has produced "massive evidence... [of] very serious crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity," Ms Pillay said.

"The scale of viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by elements on both sides almost defies belief," she said.

The evidence indicated responsibility "at the highest level of government, including the head of state", she added.

The inquiry has also previously reported it has evidence that rebel forces in Syria have been guilty of human rights abuses.

However, the investigators have always said the Syrian government appears to be responsible for the majority, and that the systematic nature of the abuse points to government policy.

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was dismissive of Ms Pillay's remarks.

"She has been talking nonsense for a long time and we don't listen to her," he told AP.

Mr Mekdad was in The Hague at a meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to discuss the effort to destroy Syria's chemical weapons.

He told the BBC that Syria needed more money and equipment from the international community.

He said Syria needed lorries and armoured vehicles to transport chemicals to prevent "terrorists" attacking the vehicles on their way to the port of Latakia, where they will be loaded onto a US naval vessel for destruction.

An OPCW spokesman at the conference told the BBC that any donations of dual-use equipment would be carefully monitored and there would have to be strict guidelines imposed to make sure the machinery could only be used for the purpose of removing the weapons.

Death toll 'over 125,000'

Ms Pillay said the UN commission of inquiry had compiled a list of those believed to be directly responsible for serious human rights violations.

It is assumed that senior figures in the Syrian military and government are on that list, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva.

However, the names and specific evidence relating to them remain confidential pending a possible prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

She has previously called on the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the ICC.

Syria is not a state party to the ICC and therefore any investigation into the conflict would need to be mandated by the Security Council.

However, Russia and China have a veto on the council and would be highly unlikely to let such a move pass.

Human rights groups say that the regime's use of air power often amounts to war crimes

Ms Pillay's statement is a reminder of the severity of the situation in Syria as preparations are made for the Geneva II peace conference next month, our correspondent says.

Both the government and the opposition National Coalition have said they will attend the conference, but the head of the Western-backed rebel Free Syrian Army has said it will continue fighting during the talks.

The National Coalition says it categorically rejects any role for President Assad in any transitional government, while the regime has said it is not going to negotiate a "handover of power".

Also on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based activist group which monitors deaths in the conflict, said its estimate of the number of dead had now reached 125,835, more than a third of them civilians.

Almost 28,000 rebel fighters had died, and more than 50,000 on the side of the government, including both regular soldiers and pro-regime militias. The latter figure also includes almost 500 dead from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and other foreign Shia militias.

However, it said it believed these figures were an underestimate as both sides were reticent about reporting deaths in their ranks.

The SOHR also reported on Monday that Islamist rebels had seized control of the town of Maaloula, which houses a historic Christian community.

Earlier the state-run Sana news agency had claimed that fighters from Islamist brigades had stormed Maaloula's St Tekla monastery and had detained some of the nuns that live there.

However, information is difficulty to verify as access for foreign journalists is restricted.

After fighting in the town in September, a nun at the monastery told the BBC she did not think the towns Christians had been deliberately targeted by rebels.

[jimmy olsen]

Is it still too late to bomb Assad into pulp?


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/12/iraq-battle-dead-valley-peace-syria

Controlled by Iran, the deadly militia recruiting Iraq's men to die in Syria
The Middle East's most potent new political force, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, is stepping up its support for the Bashar al-Assad regime


    Martin Chulov in Najaf
    theguardian.com, Wednesday 12 March 2014 13.15 GMT   

Each day for the past nine months, the bodies have been coming. Some are carried in simple wooden coffins strapped to car roofs. Others arrive with more ceremony, escorted by black-clad mourners or men in military fatigues to a hypnotic soundtrack of Islamic hymns.

The convoys turn into the cavernous lanes of the Valley of Peace cemetery, squeezing past tombstones weathered by millennia and stopping next to freshly dug holes in the desert soil.

The newest inhabitants of the world's biggest cemetery were killed not here in Iraq but in Syria, where they fought under the green flag of the Middle East's most potent new Shia Islamic political force, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous).

The militia has been busy readying for the afterlife, buying up more than 2,500 square metres of burial plots and erecting shrines for its fallen. And in Baghdad, nearly 100 miles north, the group has been more occupied with the here and now, imposing its influence on Iraq's fractured political scene and steadily asserting its will throughout the city's Shia heartland suburbs.

Since the American military left Iraq in December 2011, and within two months of the first national election since then, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq has quietly emerged as one of the most powerful players in the country's political and public life. Through a mix of strategic diplomacy, aggressive military operations and intimidation – signature methods of its main patron, the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani – the group is now increasingly calling the shots in two countries.

Its rise to prominence has disturbed many Iraqi political leaders. "Little more than seven years ago, they were just another Iranian proxy used to attack the Americans," said one minister. "Now they have political legitimacy and their tentacles in all the security apparatus. Some of us didn't notice until it was too late."

Until early 2007, few outsiders had heard of Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, which had emerged over several years from a split within the Mahdi Army, the then-dominant arm of the Shia insurgency in Iraq. Its earliest incarnation – stealth tactics and the denial of responsibilty for attacks – was straight from the playbook of Suleimani, an elusive Iranian general whose influence over Iran's strategic interests has grown sharply in the past 10 years.

The group has a close connection to Lebanon's Hezbollah and ideological links to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Its debut as a strike weapon of Suleimani, who reports directly to Khamenei and commands the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, came with an attack in January 2007 on a US military outpost in Karbala, another Shia shrine city, south of Najaf, that killed five US soldiers.

Several months later, the group's leader, Qais al-Khazali, his brother Laith al-Khazali and a senior Hezbollah member, Ali Moussa al-Daqduq, were captured by the SAS near Basra. Then came a series of events that gave rise to the group's claim to legitimacy.

In May 2007, a British IT consultant, Peter Moore, and four of his bodyguards were seized by Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq and Iraqi security force members from a government building in east Baghdad. Moore was released in late 2009 after the Khazali brothers were freed from US prisons in Iraq.

However, the Briton's guards were all killed, their bodies returned one by one as part of a choreographed exchange with Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq prisoners who were released from US and Iraqi prisons. Daqduq, one of the last to be freed, was returned to Lebanon in 2012.

Now, as Iraq approaches parliamentary elections on 30 April, the group is stepping up both its political activism in Baghdad and its support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. In speeches and interviews over the past two years, Qais al-Khazali has claimed a role for the group based on its military "defeat" of the US.

His message has galvanised thousands of Iraqi Shias who have volunteered to fight for the Assad regime in Syria. And it has worried many communities across the Shia heartland, who see their countrymen's involvement in Syria's battles as a costly investment in a sectarian conflict that increasingly respects no border.

In the Najaf cemetery, gravediggers say they can barely distinguish between the end of one war and the beginning of the next. "No sooner had the Americans gone than Syria exploded," said one worker, standing against a newly built shrine.

"There have been more of their bodies coming back from Syria than ever before," he said. "There are easily around 500 of them buried here. We have been getting around three each day for the past month alone. They get driven to us from across the border in Iran. When they are killed in Syria, they are flown there."

The regular rhythms of life and death keep business ticking over in this graveyard of more than 5 million souls. But even by Najaf's standards, business has been brisk lately.

A warm wind swirls soil from open graves nearby, and a newly etched tombstone spells out the short life of the Shia jihadist killed somewhere in Syria last November. His grave, and the 30-odd alongside it, all say the occupant died "defending the Holy Shrine Sayyidah Zaynab".

The mosque, on the south-west outskirts of Damascus, is said to be the resting place of the daughter of the Imam Ali, the prophet Muhammad's cousin, and is revered by the Shia faithful. Its defence has served as a clarion call for Shia fighters from around the Middle East who believe it to be under attack from Sunni extremists.

Hezbollah also claims its widespread intervention in Syria on the side of Assad is in defence of the shrine. So too does Kata'ib Hezbollah, another Iranian-backed Iraqi proxy, whose members are often buried alongside Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq fighters. Both Iraqi groups fight across Syria under the banner of Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas, which has been at the vanguard of attacks against the almost exclusively Sunni opposition across Syria.

They, along with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, are helping turn the tide in favour of the Assad regime, which in late 2012 was losing control of Damascus to rebel groups who were finding serious cracks in the regime's inner cordon. "Then came a strategic decision by all the Shia groups to defend Assad whatever the cost," said a regional ambassador who at the time was based in the Syrian capital. "You could see the turnaround in Assad almost immediately. Even in his speeches, it was like 'we can do this.'"

Estimates of the numbers of Shia fighters in Syria range between 8,000 and 15,000. Whatever the true figure, the involvement of large numbers of Iraqis is not the secret it was in the early months of Syria's civil war, which is now being fought along a sectarian faultline.

Outside Baghdad University, a large poster of Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq's dead, superimposed on a photo of the Sayyidah Zaynab shrine, greets students. Similar posters stand outside other universities, and on prominent public squares. Security forces pay them no heed.

"The government has given them cover for their political and security life," said a senior Iraqi official with links to the intelligence community. [The Iraqi prime minister Nouri] al-Maliki is wary of them, but what can he do? His nature is that if he cannot deal with the issue he will turn his head away. He tried to set up a cell to monitor them in late 2010, but they found out and he was embarrassed. He paid them money and said sorry. They don't respect him now."

Iraqi intelligence officials believe Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq is receiving $1.5m-$2m a month from Iran. "They see themselves as the 'Soldiers of the Marjaeen' [the ultimate Shia religious authority]," the official said. "Their power is unchecked."

The gravediggers who sit in concrete huts, waiting for business, along the main road through the cemetery, fear nothing in death, but admit to being scared of the threat posed by anyone who earns the ire of Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq.

"They are everywhere," said one. They're in the [official records] building. Don't go asking questions there. You will be arrested."

In Baghdad, homes and offices have been bought or, in some cases, commandeered by officials from the party who use them as recruiting centres for anyone looking to fight in Syria. Most locals seem to give them a wide berth.

"You need to be young and you need to have two written references," said a local man who had sat in on an interview between a would-be volunteer and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq officials. "Those guarantees are important. It is also better if you don't have children, or a wife.

"If you are accepted, you will be taken to Iran for around two weeks for training and then you will be sent to Syria. It's the same way home if you die there.

"And if someone dies, they will be looked after by Iran. The families of martyrs are paid up to $5,000 each. And if they are too poor to pay for the burial, that will be taken care of too."

The Najaf gravediggers have learned to stay ahead of the market, digging holes in advance for the bodies that will soon follow. Tombstones lie piled nearby for up to 30 Keta'ib Hezbollah graves waiting for engravers.

On a corner nearby, a woman in a burqa was cleaning dust from large plastic bottles of pink rosewater that family members use to wipe tombs, new and old. A faint floral smell wafts on a dusk wind past the new arrivals. "We'll be back here tomorrow," said the gravedigger. "We will bury whatever they send us."

[derspiess]

Assad is a reformer

[Queequeg]

Huh. Never thought of it before but if all the worst radicals are fighting and killing eachother there then they won't be doing it in Tikrit and Kerbala. Always thought of it as a spreading infection rather than just a killing ground for the Middle East's worst.

[jimmy olsen]

Huh. Never thought of it before but if all the worst radicals are fighting and killing eachother there then they won't be doing it in Tikrit and Kerbala. Always thought of it as a spreading infection rather than just a killing ground for the Middle East's worst.

Violence has been escalating in Iraq as of late. Just because a lot of islamists are going to fight in Syria, doesn't mean that nothing is going down in Iraq.

[CountDeMoney]

Obama lost Syria.     Just like he lost Crimea.   

[citizen k]

Obama lost Syria.     Just like he lost Crimea.   

And now he's lost East Harlem.

[Ed Anger]

THANKS OBAMA