Syrien

[Shahab3]

Syria’s war in miniature: meeting the Christians driven out of Qusayr
Events in one Syrian town cast light on the nation’s strife
Paul Wood 10 August 2013
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It started happening after foreign jihadis arrived, said Ilyas. ‘Syrian Muslims are not extremists. It’s outsiders who made this conflict sectarian.’ Ilyas was told to demonstrate his loyalty by carrying a weapon to fight the regime. Still clinging to the idea of a peaceful revolution, he refused, and was threatened by the foreign fighters. His friends in the rebel army couldn’t help him. ‘The FSA couldn’t mount any military operation without the extremists: they had the training, the weapons, the money.’

As the town’s native Sunnis suffered more losses, so their attitude towards the Christians started to harden. One local man formed an Islamist brigade (its ranks filled with foreign fighters) and last summer, he commandeered the mosque’s loudspeaker to announce that all Christians should leave. He was one of those who finally forced Ilyas from his home, last December. ‘I had known him ten years,’ Ilyas said sadly. ‘We used to walk arm-in-arm at the protests.’
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At first, she said, their Sunni neighbours tried to protect them. ‘But after a while, the Christians were left with a choice: fight alongside the rebels, or leave Qusayr. Masked gunmen came to our house and shouted for our men to come out. We could see our relatives, already captured, sitting in cars.’

The head of the FSA’s military council in Qusayr, Abu Arab, was incoherent with rage when I asked why he had failed to protect the Christians. It wasn’t his fault, he said. The West had stood by while the jihadis got arms and funding and corrupted the revolution. ‘The revolution was abandoned by its friends in the West,’ he said. ‘We were left to descend into chaos.’
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The lesson of Qusayr is that conflicts evolve, and as they do so, they change the people involved in them. Friends mutate into mortal enemies. No wonder western governments struggle to keep up. British military planners were in neighbouring countries to see how and where arms would be sent to the rebels, one official told me. Now they have been returned home, the official said. ‘We may all have to eat humble pie and learn to live with Assad.’ Western governments signed up to help a popular uprising, not to get involved in a sectarian civil war. Syria is not that quite yet. But Qusayr is a warning. It could become the kind of war the West does not want to fight.

Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent covering Syria

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Free Syrian Army commander celebrates victory with al Qaeda affiliate
By Bill RoggioAugust 10, 2013 10:38 AM

In this New York Times article on the influx of foreign fighters into Syria (more than 6,000 foreign fighters are now estimated to be fighting with jihadist groups) is a report of a Free Syrian Army commander celebrating the capture of the Minnigh airport in Aleppo with a leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al Qaeda affiliate. The ISIL is known to have led the charge to take control of the airport after FSA units failed to capture it during an eight-month siege. The video of the celebration is reproduced above
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Read more: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2013/08/free_syrian_army_commander_cel.php#ixzz2bbpoQNQ3">http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-ma ... z2bbpoQNQ3</a><!-- m -->