Central Damascus Resident Phone Conversation [video]
108morris108
August 30, 2012
Muslim Brotherhood cannot rule the people. This 2005 Brzezinski plan will backfire on the United States. And the plan is for all the Middle East not just Syria.
Backing Fundamentalists and Extremists will not work.
Eye Witness Accounts: FSA Delivered the Bloody Massacre in Daraya
Friends of Syria
August 29, 2012
Exclusive: The first Western journalist to enter the town that felt Assad’s fury hears witness accounts of Syria’s bloodiest episode
by Robert Fisk
The massacre town of Daraya is a place of ghosts and questions. It echoed with the roar of mortar explosions and the crackle of gunfire yesterday, its few returning citizens talking of death, assault, foreign “terrorists”, and its cemetery of slaughter haunted by snipers.
The men and women to whom we could talk, two of whom had lost loved ones on Daraya’s day of infamy four days ago, told a story different from the version that has been repeated around the world: theirs was a tale of hostage-taking by the Free Syria Army and desperate prisoner-exchange negotiations between the armed opponents of the regime and the Syrian army, before President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces stormed into the town to seize it back from rebel control.
Officially, no word of such talks between the enemies has been mentioned. But senior Syrian officers told The Independent how they had “exhausted all possibilities of reconciliation” with those holding the town, while residents of Daraya said there had been an attempt by both sides to arrange a swap of civilians and off-duty soldiers – apparently kidnapped by rebels because of their family ties to the government army – with prisoners in the army’s custody. When these talks broke down, the army advanced into Daraya, six miles from the centre of Damascus.
Being the first Western eyewitness into the town yesterday was as frustrating as it was dangerous. The bodies of men, women and children had been moved from the cemetery where many of them were found; and when we arrived in the company of Syrian troops at the Sunni Muslim graveyard – divided by the main road through Daraya – snipers opened fire at the soldiers, hitting the back of the ancient armoured vehicle in which we made our escape. Yet we could talk to civilians out of earshot of Syrian officials – in two cases in the security of their own homes – and their narrative of last Saturday’s mass killing of at least 245 men, women and children suggested that the atrocities were far more widespread than supposed.
One woman, who gave her name as Leena, said she was travelling through the town in a car and saw at least 10 male bodies lying on the road near her home. “We carried on driving past, we did not dare to stop, we just saw these bodies in the street,” she said, adding that Syrian troops had not yet entered Daraya.
Another man said that, although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard, he believed that most were related to the government army and included several off-duty conscripts. “One of the dead was a postman – they included him because he was a government worker,” the man said. If these stories are true, then the armed men – wearing hoods, according to another woman who described how they broke into her home and how she kissed them in a fearful attempt to prevent them shooting her own family – were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops.
The home of Amer Sheikh Rajab, a forklift truck driver, had been taken over, he said, by gunmen as a base for “Free Army” forces, the phrase the civilians used for the rebels. They had smashed the family crockery and burned carpets and beds – the family showed this destruction to us – but had also torn out the internal computer chip parts of laptops and television sets in the house. To use as working parts for bombs, perhaps?
On a road on the edge of Daraya, Khaled Yahya Zukari, a lorry driver, had been leaving the town on Saturday in a mini-bus with his 34-year-old wife Musreen and their seven-month-old daughter.
“We were on our way to [the neighbouring suburb of] Senaya when suddenly there was a lot of shooting at us,” he said. “I told my wife to lie on the floor but a bullet came into the bus and passed right through our baby and hit my wife. It was the same bullet. They were both dead. The shooting came from trees, from a green area. Maybe it was the militants hiding behind the soil and trees who thought we were a military bus bringing soldiers.”
Any widespread investigation of a tragedy on this scale and in these circumstances was virtually impossible yesterday. At times, in the company of armed Syrian forces, we had to run along empty streets with anti-government snipers at the intersections; many families had barricaded themselves in their homes.
Even before we set out for Daraya from the large military airbase in Damascus – which contains both Russian-made Hind attack-helicopters and T-72 tanks – a mortar round, possibly fired from Daraya itself, smashed into the runway scarcely 300 metres from us, sending a column of black smoke towering into the sky. Although Syrian troops nonchalantly continued to take their open-air showers, I began to feel some sympathy for the UN ceasefire monitors who departed Syria last week.
Perhaps the saddest account of all yesterday came from 27-year-old Hamdi Khreitem, who sat in his family home with his brother and sister, and told us of how his parents, Selim and Aisha, had set out to buy bread on Saturday. “We had already seen the pictures on the television of the massacre – the Western channels said it was the Syrian army, the state television said it was the “Free Army” – but we were short of food and Mum and Dad drove into the town. Then we got a call from their mobile and it was my Mum who just said: ‘We are dead.’ She was not.
“She was wounded in the chest and arm. My Dad was dead but I don’t know where he was hit or who killed him. We took him from the hospital, covered up and we buried him yesterday.”
Prominent Syrian National Council member quits
Al Arabiya
August 28, 2012
by REUTERS
BEIRUT
A prominent figure in the Syrian National Council (SNC), resigned on Tuesday, the latest of several senior members to leave the leading Syrian opposition group this year.
The others have cited personal rivalries within the leadership and have suggested that the SNC is not doing enough to back the increasingly militarized 17-month revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Ry and Pepe Escobar talk Syria [audio]
Rys2sense
August 29, 2012
boy I cut the beginning when we were really shooting the shite but the whole thing in one part will be up on Vimeo RyLiberty same as my twitter RyLiberty
From the Houla Hoax to Chemical Weapons – Deceptions in Syria [video]
Global Research TV
August 29, 2012
Over the course of the Syrian crisis, a number of events have been used to portray Assad as a genocidal madman and military intervention as a necessary step. As things come to a head in the terrorist-torn nation, the lies, half-truths and exaggerations behind this “red line” thesis are gradually being exposed. Find out more in this week’s GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=5508
Western Commando’s Tasked to Disable Syria’s Anti Aircraft Missiles – Ziad Fadel [video]
108morris108
August 29, 2012
Ziad Fadel, a Lawyer and Political Commentator suggests it is time to ask for Russian Troops as a counter measure to NATO’s forces.
NATO Terrorists Target Syria & Algeria
NATO’s Pan-Arab Terrorist Blitzkrieg.
by Tony Cartalucci
August 29, 2012 – Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region.
Image: NATO’s intervention in Libya has resurrected listed-terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate, LIFG. It had previously fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now has fighters, cash and weapons, all courtesy of NATO, spreading as far west as Mali, and as far east as Syria. The feared “global Caliphate” Neo-Cons have been scaring Western children with for a decade is now taking shape via US-Saudi, Israeli, and Qatari machinations, not “Islam.” In fact, real Muslims have paid the highest price in fighting this real “war against Western-funded terrorism.”
AQIM, like their Libyan counterparts, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) are both listed by the US State Department as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” Likewise, both the UK Home Office (.pdf, listed as GSPC) and the UN recognize both organizations as terrorists.
Despite this, military intervention in Libya was pursued by the West and condoned by the UN with full knowledge that the militants leading so-called “pro-democracy uprisings” were in fact merely the continuation of decades of violent terrorism carried out by Al Qaeda affiliates. The West had full knowledge of this, primarily because it was Western intelligence agencies arming and supporting these militants for the last 30 years, in Libya’s case, while coddling their leaders in Washington and London.
Additionally, the US Army itself meticulously documented foreign terrorists fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that the highest percentage per capita emanated from Libya’s cities of Benghazi and Darnah, the so-called “cradle” of 2011’s “pro-democracy uprisings” in Libya.
What unfolded was a premeditated lie – where placard waving “activists” overnight turned into battle-hardened heavily armed, tank driving, jet flying militants waging a nationwide battle against Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. In reality, it was the fruition of 30 years of covert support the West has poured into militant groups across the region – support that would not end with the fall of Qaddafi.
LIFG terrorists promptly turned both east to Syria and west to Mali beyond their borders – a logistical matter they had perfected during their operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. LIFG commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj, as early as November 2011, arrived on the Turkish-Syrian border to provide cash, weapons, and LIFG terrorist fighters, overseen by Western intelligence along with US funding and arms laundered through Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) members such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Since then Libyan militants have been confirmed to be leading entire brigades of foreign fighters inside Syria.
And as Bruce Riedel of Brookings concedes, these weapons went west to Mali as well. Algeria had feared just such a scenario unfolding with NATO’s intervention in Libya – a fear now fully realized. Ironically, Riedel, in August 2011, had tried to make a case for Algeria being “next to fall” in an article titled literally, “Algeria Will Be Next to Fall.”
A year ago, Riedel attempted to argue that it would be the so-called “Arab Spring” that would spread into Algeria after having taken root in neighboring Libya. He had eluded to, and it has now become abundantly clear, that by “Arab Spring,” Riedel meant, US-backed subversion, and more specifically NATO-armed Al Qaeda-brand militancy and terrorism.
With the US now openly arming, supporting, and literally “cheering” Al Qaeda in Syria, it is clear that the “War on Terror” is an unprecedented geopolitical fraud perpetuated at the cost of millions of lives destroyed and an incalculable social and economic toll. NATO, with full knowledge of the consequences is literally carving out of North Africa and the Middle East, the so-called “Caliphate” Western leaders had held over their impressionable people’s heads as the impetus to perpetually wage global war. Torn from the pages of Orwell’s 1984, an artificial war has been created to carry forward corporate-financier machinations both abroad and domestically. The so-called threat to Western civilization is in fact a foreign legion of Western corporate-financier interests, executing Wall Street and London’s foreign policy on a global scale where and in a manner traditional Western forces cannot.
NATO’s terrorist blitzkrieg across the Arab World will not end in Syria. It will continue, if allowed, into Iran, through the Caucasus Mountains and into Russia, across China’s western borders, and even across Southeast Asia. The price for ignorance, apathy, and complicity in supporting the West’s so-called “War on Terror” will ironically reap all the horrors and then some in reality, that were promised to us if we didn’t fight this “Long War.”
Our support of both the political gambits of our politicians, as well as our daily patronage of the corporate-financier interests driving this agenda have already reaped an unprecedented and still growing regional safe haven for terrorists – and as moderate secular governments continue to be undermined and toppled, we can only imagine the blowback, retaliation, and other consequences as this destructive foreign policy unfolds. To imagine that such meddling will not end up being visited back upon us, even if in the form of a false flag attack dwarfing 9/11, would be folly.
Already, we are suffering economic devastation and an increasingly stifling security apparatus at home, and as long as we capitulate to this current agenda instead of asserting a more rational one of our own, it will only get worse.
PN 