XPost: soc.rights.human, alt.anarchism, alt.society.anarchy   
   XPost: alt.activism, alt.politics.socialism   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Robert Fisk: Now we see how his doctrine turns enemies into ‘allies’   
      
   Assad’s enemies, whom Blair’s bombing of Damascus would have helped, now   
   threaten Iraq   
      
   How do they get away with these lies? Now Tony Blair tells us that Western   
   â€œinactionâ€� in Syria has produced the Iraq crisis. But since bombing Syria   
   would have brought to power in Damascus the very Islamists who are now   
   threatening Baghdad, it must therefore be a mercy that Barack Obama does not   
   listen to the likes of Blair.   
      
   Having just spent several days travelling between three cities in Syria – and   
   let’s have no illusions about the brutality of the Assad regime – I find it   
   instructive to contemplate what Blair’s rebel chums in Syria are up to. Take   
   the five-mile Aleppo airport road.   
      
   It’s newly held by government troops, but the Islamists hold so much   
   territory   
   around the city that you have to first drive 16 miles in darkness to reach the   
   city along dirt tracks and overflowing lagoons of untreated sewage and beneath   
   a disused railway line where bright red tracer fire – from the men Blair   
   would   
   have us support – criss-crosses the road. Syrian troops hold checkpoints on   
   this crazy snakes-and-ladders journey. Sometimes the Islamists are only 200   
   metres away.   
      
   So a snapshot of Aleppo today – which would be Mosul if Blair’s friends had   
   won and if the West had shown “actionâ€� against the Assad regime. In the   
   streets, I find government militiamen and civilians digging 20ft-deep ditches   
   in the streets to hunt for the ubiquitous tunnels which the Nusra and Isis   
   forces now use to attack their enemies. Entire government buildings have   
   exploded in government-held Aleppo.   
      
   It’s a mirror world. While Assad’s helicopters drop barrel bombs on rebel   
   bases – and lots of civilians – in northern Aleppo, the armed opposition   
   fire   
   mortars into the Christian district of the city. We wander along the front   
   line; kids playing, an old man smoking a cigarette on a pile of rubble, the   
   crash of mortars less than a mile away. A Syrian soldier removes a concrete   
   breeze-block from an old stone wall – it is the edge of the old city – and   
   I   
   squint for a millisecond through the hole. A few feet away, behind rotting   
   sandbags and broken beams, is another hole – where the rebel sniper   
   presumably   
   watches me. Personal history moment: almost exactly 96 years ago, my dad poked   
   a camera above the 1918 front line in France and took a snapshot of rotting   
   sandbags and broken trees.   
      
   Major Somer of the Syrian army describes the tunnel labyrinth dug by the   
   opposition under the old city, and the day the minaret of the great Omayed   
   Mosque, built in the age of the Abbasids, crashed to the ground – blown up by   
   explosives in the rebels’ tunnels, he says, though the jury is still out on   
   this one.   
      
   â€œWhen it fell,â€� he says, “I felt that 1,500 years of civilisation had   
   died. I   
   was on the front line and I heard it crash – all over Aleppo, the ground   
   shook, like an earthquake. They had dug under most of old Aleppo. They wanted   
   to take revenge, to destroy our infrastructure. Why do Muslims do this?   
   Because they are not Muslims.â€�   
      
   This is bizarre, grotesque – certainly for his enemies a few metres away –   
   but   
   there is no doubting the explosions around us; 16 will die here in the next   
   few hours. One will have his head blown off that night in a restaurant half a   
   mile away from us, a witness running into a café where we’re eating a   
   late-night snack, shaking his head and smiling with relief. Plenty of food   
   since the army broke the siege of Aleppo. No water for six days since the   
   Turks sealed off the watercourse from the dam north of the border. Children   
   and old women carry plastic tubs of the stuff from government-delivered water   
   tanks.   
      
   No need to ask why the army cannot retake the old city. “Not enough   
   soldiers,â€�   
   a Syrian journalist says bluntly. “That’s why the government agreed to end   
   the   
   siege of Homs peacefully and let the rebels go free to the north – they   
   needed   
   Homs under their control so the soldiers there could reinforce the men here in   
   Aleppo.â€� I go to Homs, 200 miles away, an ocean of white ruins with miles of   
   abandoned tunnels and a few Christians who shyly take me through the wreckage   
   of churches to a small garden in which stands a pink plastic chair. “This is   
   where they executed Father Frans,â€� one says. “They made him sit in the   
   chair   
   and shot him just above the left eye.â€�   
      
   Father Frans van der Lugt was a martyr of Homs, refusing to leave his   
   Christian flock and Muslim friends throughout the years of siege, imploring   
   the world to pity the innocent and the starving until, on 7 April this year,   
   gunmen arrived in the church garden and murdered him. They came from the Nusra   
   forces – the Assad regime called them terrorists, the opposition said, of   
   course, that if Assad had not besieged Homs, the 72-year-old Catholic priest   
   would not have died. He is buried a few metres away, his grave a cheap wooden   
   cross surrounded by flowers. From a photograph, his bespectacled face stares   
   at us. The Pope later prayed for Van der Lugt’s soul.   
      
   I suppose if the West had bombed Damascus last year – as Blair bombed Baghdad   
   in 2003 – Father Francis might have lived. But then again, he might have been   
   murdered much earlier by the Islamists we would have been helping.   
      
   But there you go. Assad’s soldiers hold the line  where Iraq’s forces   
   initially disintegrated. Assad’s enemies are the same Nusra and al-Qa’ida   
   fighters whom Blair’s bombing of Damascus would have helped – and who now   
   threaten Iraq’s existence. Will the Iranians send their soldiers to defend   
   the   
   Shia of Iraq?   
      
   A good question to ponder on a military flight from Aleppo to Damascus, in an   
   iron seat on an old Antonov-26 among 60 Syrian soldiers, many of them wounded,   
   the bodies of two 25-year-old conscripts in the cargo compartment, shot by   
   snipers the previous night. A flicker of machine-gun fire comes from the   
   darkness below, and by the time we land in Damascus, five of the “Syriansâ€�   
   opposite us shout a Shia prayer – in Persian. They tell us they are Afghans,   
   Shia from the Hazara people. They are in Syrian uniform, holding rifles, an   
   Iranian beside them. They were returning to Tehran next day. So now the Afghan   
   Shia fight on Assad’s side – and Afghan Sunnis fight the rebels.   
      
   Ah Blair, thou shouldn’t be with us at this hour.   
      
   http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-how-does   
   tony-blair-get-away-with-his-lies-9538846.html   
      
      
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