No, I didn’t forget to take my daily Fluoxetine pill (Prozac, Sarafem, Fontex), I never depended on this or other medical drugs.
But sympathy and sorry feelings for Hugo Chávez, who’s cancer has returned, darkens my mood. Sympathy and sorry feelings for the 23 million Syrians who face an uncertain future darkens my mood even more.
I apologize for the gloomy and discouraging title, but during last week a string of bad news about Syria came in. I don’t mean the mass media propaganda lies about chemical weapons stockpiles or scud missiles, I refer to the disheartening messages written between the lines of alternative news sources.
The kidnappers of Russian/Ukrainian journalist Anhar Kochneva (more about this case in Get the word out, if you can) have threatened to execute her if their demand of a 50 million US$ ransom payment is not met. This demand was never meant seriously because Kochneva’s mother is of course not able to pay this sum and no government will pay such a high ransom to terrorists.
The execution was set for yesterday, until now nobody knows, if the savages are serious. The kidnappers are part of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and they also threatened to target the Russian, Ukrainian, and Iranian embassies in Syria and in general all Russians, Ukrainians, and Iranians on Syrian soil.
There are reports about a statement by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, that Moscow will evacuate the Russians in Syria -- this is not yet confirmed though.
The journalists of Kreml.TV and Vesti.ru have already gone back to Russia, Marat Musin and his cameraman Dmitry Yershovt from ANNA-News are the only Russian journalists left to report from the Syrian front lines.
There are of course quite a few FSA embedded Western journalists who gladly fill the void to tell the story from the terrorists point of view.
Will Russia jump ship?
"We have never changed our position (on Syria) and we never will," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said, after Deputy Foreign Minister Bogdanov earlier this week remarked that the Syrian regime "is losing more and more control" and that it could be imaginable that President Bashar al-Assad loses the war with the rebels.
It is not clear if Bogdanov -- who is also the Kremlin's special envoy for the Middle East -- was aware that his remarks were on the record and would be reported by Russia's news agencies.
Vladimir Putin once boasted that he is ready to defend Syria "on the very streets of Moscow.” But his visit to Turkey at the start of December and the signing of 11 bilateral cooperation agreements made clear that Russia is not willing to jeopardize the 40 billion US$ trade with Turkey despite Ankara’s military support for the FSA, which amounts to an open undeclared war in bridge of international law.
Putin doesn’t have to defend Syria on the very streets of Moscow, but he should defend it on the streets of Aleppo, Homs, and Idlib. If the Russians indeed forsake Syria they will pay dearly for their cowardice and timidity and Putin one day will have to defend Russia itself on the very streets of Moscow.
If Syria falls, Iran is next, together with the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Islamists and their CIA handlers will lose no time to destabilizing Russia’s southern neighbors Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and its southern republics Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria.
But who knows, maybe this backtracking is only a clever trick, a duplicity to fool the Western strategists. Maybe columns after columns of Russian armored vehicles are already on the way to reach Syria soon via Iran and Iraq.
One shouldn’t hold one’s breath though.
US-NATO Sponsored Humanitarian Disaster
When Prof. Michel Chossudovsky writes about a “US-NATO Sponsored Humanitarian Disaster”, he means the possible use of chemical weapons by the FSA terrorists. This is for sure a possibility, but the humanitarian disaster is happening right now, because the FSA systematically destroys important infrastructure installations and food stockpiles.
It seems that there is indeed an inexhaustible supply of young radicalized Arab men and more Islamic fighters are flooding in from all over the Middle East. They are trained by US military contractors in Turkey, Jordan, the UAE, Kuwait, Kosovo, and probably several other places that are not known yet. Since the start of December about 10,000 new jihadis have crossed from Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon into Syria.
These fighters are now everywhere and though many of them don’t survive their first few encounters with the Syrian army the FSA can easily replenish the losses with the steady stream of new canon fodder.
Logistics are not so much a problem because the fighters operate in small groups and rob what they need from warehouses, repositories, and ordinary citizens.
Diesel, cooking gas, and petroleum have disappeared. If fuel can be found, its price has reached insane levels on the black market
Hundreds of flour containers were stolen during clashes in the countrysides of Aleppo and Idlib in the last months. In al-Bab the FSA stole large quantities of wheat from the city’s silos and sold it to Turkey. As a consequence hundreds line up now outside bakeries from the early morning hours on to get their daily bread.
The situation in Aleppo becomes increasingly unbearable for most residents. There is a huge shortage of essential goods and even bread is often outsold and no more available. The FSA steals, robs, or destroys any accessible inventories of heating oil, bread, and other essential goods.
Many factories have been ransacked and burned down, or the workers are too terrified to go there.
This week Aleppo spent two nights without electricity because the FSA bombed the main power line from the al-Safira energy plant (Syria’s biggest power plant) to the city. Before that the terrorists had already destroyed a natural gas pipeline to the plant. The utility company reported that until now 17 workers and engineers from the company have been killed by the FSA during maintenance and repair operations on the power grid and on transfer stations.
Already in September FSA fighters destroyed a major water pipeline, leaving hundred thousands of Aleppo’s inhabitants for days without drinking water.
There have been reports about the emergence of plague in parts of Homs.
Can Syria be saved?
I’m in no position to give anybody any advice but here a few ideas:
There is undoubtedly corruption and cronyism in Syria. Even alternative and unbiased sources acknowledge that. The corruption may be not as bad as in the USA (where it is called “lobbying”), but it should be stopped. When you face the devil, you need to have a pure heart!
President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t seem to be corrupt, he actually appears to be a decent guy (though I never would claim that I’m sure about this characterization because I don’t know him personally). Bashar al-Assad may be okay but some of his family members are said to be corrupt and there could be legitimate grievances against the Assad clan.
What if President Assad calls the bluff of the anti-Syria coalition and steps down?
What if he transfers power to a military council like it was done in Egypt when Mubarak stepped down? The Syrian army is probably still the most stable and respected institution in Syria.
What if he invites the US appointed Syrian National Coalition to join a new body which includes all involved parties to prepare new UN supervised general elections and constitutional referendums.
What if Russia and China in a concerted diplomatic effort push for the deployment of a massive UN peacekeeping force to Syria?
All this will not come to pass because the FSA terrorists never will accept a democratic solution, they despise even the Syrian National Coalition.
The FSA will create their caliphate in one part of Syria, The sane people will gather in another part. There will be massive sectarian and ethnic cleansing, unimaginable hardship, there will be massacres, even genocide. If the sane Syrians hold on to their part of the country, they will be one day again live in a united Syria because the caliphate of the religious psychopaths will crumble, implode, go up in flames sooner or later.
Following are excerpts from an article by Finian Cunningham for Press TV
The chemical weapons trick seems to have fizzled like a damp squib. So, now it’s time for another illusion – the “worthy Syrian opposition”.
This motley crew of treasonous exiles -- who mysteriously some how have bags of money to trot all over the globe from Doha to Cairo, Tokyo to Marrakech -- are all of sudden anointed by the American President as the next government of Syria.
The latest Obama stunt follows the dress rehearsals in previous weeks by Britain, France, Turkey and the Persian Gulf Arab dictators who had already appointed the SNC as the de facto government-in-waiting on behalf of the 23 million Syrians.
Anyone who has read the Doha Protocol that the SNC willingly signed up to while seduced in a luxury hotel last month by their Qatari sponsors should be under no misapprehension. This group of self-serving opportunists has been cobbled together with the sole purpose of selling Syria’s sovereignty to the highest, or even lowest, bidder. The people of Syria have been spared no treachery low enough in the imperialists’ manifesto of regime change, including surrender of wealth, natural resources and all of Syria’s independent foreign policy principles.
With the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Obama declares: “We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.”
The White House tried to give this “recognition” wheeze some credibility by demarcating an illusory line between “legitimate” and “renegade” Syrian opposition, and by proscribing certain militant groups within Syria as “terrorists”. The Jabhat Al Nusra front, which is said to be linked to Al Qaeda, is henceforth ostracized, at least officially, by Washington.
Of course, Washington had to crank out some rhetorical fog to cover up the glaring contradiction between its decade-long “war on terror” mantra and the fact that Islamic extremists are central to the Western-backed campaign of subversion in Syria.
But this chicanery is fooling no-one who has been accurately following the state terrorist war of aggression in Syria over the past 22 months. No-one, that is, except those perhaps who have been brainwashed by the Western mainstream media echo chambers, which call this campaign of terror afflicting Syria a “pro-democracy uprising”.
Obama’s cynical charade of isolating extremists from supposed worthy opposition belies the fact that Syrian society is being assailed by a gargantuan criminal conspiracy authored, fomented and fueled by Western governments and their regional proxies. The so-called Syrian rebels are terrorist foot-soldiers of foreign masters.
Think about it. What group claiming to liberate Syria would murder their own compatriots -- men, women and children -- with such fiendish, unrelenting barbarity?
For Obama to try to make out that the opposition has now been cleansed from extremists - on the basis of his say-so -- is transparent nonsense.
Are we expected to believe that the litany of atrocities perpetrated against the Syrian people are all down to “rogue Jihadis”?
Let’s review just some of the low-lights of the putative Syrian liberators:
1. Massacres of whole villages. Just as Obama was sanitizing the opposition, news was coming in of yet another massacre this week in the village of Aqrab. Reports put the number of killed at over 125. Typically, the Western media lie machine was vague in ascribing blame, but past record shows that such atrocities are stock-in-trade of the anti-government foreign militants. On May 25, the village of Houla, also in Hama Province, was massacred, including 49 children. After initial media misinformation, it turned out that the mass murders were carried out by the Western and Arab-backed mercenaries.
2. No-warning car bombs across Syria in urban areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Daraa, Homs. The newly American-sanctioned Al Nusra front is said to be based in Aleppo. Are we to believe its operatives can whisk around the entire country of Syria carrying out suicide bombings? Again, as Obama was pronouncing the validity of Syrian opposition, the suburb of Jaramana outside Damascus was attacked with no-warning bombs, killing two and injuring several more. Last month, the mainly Christian and Druze community of Jaramana was targeted for the fourth time in as many months with multiple explosions that claimed over 34 lives.
3. Video evidence emerges this week showing Saudi mercenaries recruiting a child to behead what appears to be a captured Syrian soldier as he lay on the street, his neck propped on a concrete block and his hands tied behind his back.
4. Other footage shows foreign militants taking unarmed men out on to a street and executing them one-by-one. In other horrific scenes, Syrian soldiers lying on the ground are seen begging for mercy as gun-toting captors spray them with bullets.
5. Victims of cold-blooded executions are thrown off multi-story buildings onto the pavement below, their mangled corpses lined up in the gutter for gruesome public display.
6. Mosques and churches are desecrated by being turned into sniper posts of the Western-backed mercenaries, from where they shoot randomly at civilians in the streets.
7. Family members are kidnapped for ransom only to find that their loved ones have been slain in the most heinous way.
8. Mortar shells are fired deliberately at civilian apartment blocks by mercenaries who then film the aftermath fabricating that the crimes were committed by the Syrian Army, fabrications which the Western mainstream media peddle in line with their governments’ propaganda.
9. Journalists who are trying to give an accurate account of all of the above and more are targeted and assassinated, including Press TV’s Maya Naser and at least 15 other Syrian media workers.
10. In yet another crime against humanity, it is revealed this week that Saudi Arabia has forced inmates from its seething jails to go and wage “holy war” on the Syrian people.
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