Freedom From Oppression

"Whatever the resolution they make will be useless.  They don't have the power to enforce it.  The international community has no credibility - political, humanitarian or military.  The Syrian people have lost all faith."  Hafez Abdul Rahman, Syrian National Council
"Among my people there is no faith in the international community, which is allowing extremists to be more violent.  We have lost all hope for a political solution."

How perfectly counterpunctual, in the sense that these words could have come from the mouths of those whom Syrians despise, and who discovered to their great grief that there is no outside source that will save it from the savage indifference of those outside their community when it is attacked.  The sole difference here is that this is Syrians attacking Syrians.  Muslims attacking Muslims.  Their antipathy toward one another sourced through tribal and sectarian affiliation.

But, in fact, there are those who make an attempt to give assistance to the disorganized but resolute opponents of the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  Both from within the Arab and Muslim world and without. Which is, in a sense, far more than can be said for European Jews when the game at hand was assembling, isolating, slandering, ghettoizing, and slaughtering a people.  In his wildest dreams al-Assad could not accomplish anything remotely similar.

Although he has thus far accomplished what his father before him did, in slaughtering 20,000 Sunni Muslims in Homs, decades earlier.  And it was from Homs that his latest insurrection developed to eventually envelope the entire Sunni majority population of Syria.  And thus far Bashar al-Assad has succeeded in killing a like number of rebels and civilians. Rebels now in Aleppo take huge pleasure in chanting "Assad must die", as they prepare for increasingly intense fighting.

"The spiral of violence is still increasing.  We have reason to believe the main battle is about to start", stated a senior UN peacekeeper, warning the UN Security Council in New York that Aleppo is facing a military showdown that will eclipse in numbers and casualties anything so far seen.  Aleppo is a city in ruins, its people cowering in terror at what may confront them; injury or death.  Those who feared enough have fled the city.

The diplomats at the United Nations, in demanding that the Government of Syria accede to their demands, take the initial step to put an end to the violence, withdrawing heavy weapons, ordering troops back to barracks, locking down the nation's supplies of chemical and biological weapons, surely knew that President al-Assad, with the backing of Iran's ayatollahs, the Republican Guard and Hezbollah, would assent to do no such thing.

Now, fears of a spillover effect into Turkey, into Jordan, into Lebanon, are becoming more acute.  Palestinian refugees have been fleeing Syria for Jordan, their numbers swelling those being housed there, tipping the balance of being able to cope with the human tide of misery.  Turkey has initiated a military exercise, placing 25 of its tanks close to the Syrian border, and the encampments of PKK Kurdish separatists.

This is Turkey's greatest fear, that the Kurds in Syria will seize their advantage to connect with Turkish Kurds and those in Iran and create a combined violent diversion to push for their long-awaited homeland; land that neither Turkey, Syria nor Iran or Iraq truly contemplate surrendering to the Kurds.

Meanwhile, the growing presence of government military vehicles, preparing their offensive, has led the rebels to make their own preparations.  Barricading the narrow streets, planting bombs and making good use of the growing numbers of captured government heavy weapons.  They will rely on themselves to make good what they contend they are owed; freedom from oppression.

Freedom from oppression?  Who knows what their future will bring them.