Mixed Martial Arts

"Just as the Citizen Lab was preparing its Blue Coat report, we stumbled upon a number of Syrian government websites that were hosted on Canadian servers, including the state-backed television station, Addounia TV that had been placed on an official sanctions list by Canada and the EU for incitement of violence. The content being streamed online by Addounia TV claimed that the atrocities shown on a film by Syrian protesters were fabrications, and it encouraged Syrians who supported Assad to take to the streets and fight back.
"We also found that the website of Al-Manar, the media wing of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, was hosted on the same Montreal-based servers, again in violation of Canadian sanctions. Reflecting on the role media have played in inciting genocide in places like Rawanda, we decided to publish our findings immediately. Called The Canadian Connection: An Investigation of Syrian Government and Hezbollah Web Hosting in Canada, our report no doubt caused a few red faces in Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, but it also underscored the complexity and difficulty of imposing effective international sanctions over cyberspace activities."
Ronald Deibert: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace

Wouldn't it figure that the weak link would be Montreal. Infiltration into Canada appears to have been easy enough for Hezbollah; their presence in the province is well enough known. And in all likelihood they are present in other areas of Canada as well. Espionage, recruitment, incitement, all part of their jihadic Islamist culture and inheritance. This is a terrorist group spawned from among factions of Civil War Lebanon, championing Palestinian refugees within Lebanon.

Israel entered Lebanon to halt Yasser Arafat's attacks across the border into Israel, and in its place arose Hezbollah.

Although Hezbollah is listed on the official terror list of Canada and the United States, the European Union hesitates to rule that it be listed, and has come out in favour of listing the "military" wing, as opposed to the "political" wing. That same "political wing" that has dominated Lebanese politics and presents as the most powerful military in the country, ensuring that sectarian tensions and tensions among the Christians and the Druze and Muslims remain fraught.

European countries, knowing how compromised they are by the presence of Hezbollah members among their immigrant Arab populations have no wish to rile the leadership and those of its members in Europe who have the potential of launching terrorist attacks in Europe, although they have refrained up to now from anything other than using Europe as a launching pad for discrete attacks mostly against Israeli and American targets, in service to Iran.

Cyber-security expert Ronald Deibert has written extensively of a little-acknowledged part of the ongoing civil war in Syria; the cyber-war component. Young Syrian IT hot-shots have burnished their credentials in Internet ease and disruptions to websites and systems by highjacking usernames, email credentials and passwords of Al Jazeera journalists to avenge their purported bias in Assad regime coverage during its prolonged civil war.

The Syrian Electronic Army post their victories on their Arabic Facebook pages of which there are hundreds. Facebook administrators delete these pages for their incitement to violence or the illegal use of Facebook for the dissemination of links to malicious software -- and the SEA simply uses the expedient of creating new pages, with new domain names. Their Twitter account posting in Arabic taunts adversaries, and boasts of exploits, an unstoppable invasion, irritation and challenge to those whom they target.

The Toronto-based Citizen Lab monitors the use of cyberspace for political purposes,and turned its attention to the activities of the SEA when Damascus first experienced its gentle-at-first Arab Spring protests in 2011 which turned into a ferocious opposition to the Shia-Baath Alawites. While the United Nations monitors took to reporting that "crimes against humanity" were taking place courtesy of the Syrian regime, the talented young Syrian hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army responded on social media.

Which piqued the interest and activities of Hacktivist groups like Anonymous, responding by breaking into Syrian government computers, and which then began most helpfully distributing secure tools for Syrians' use to enable them to circumvent government Internet censorship. Telecomix and Anonymous, the scourges of corporations and governments alike, also exposed companies providing services to the Assad regime.

While all this was occurring, American and British authorities began to provide tools and training for the armed opposition in the Free Syrian Army. The Canadian government used diplomatic headquarters in Ankara, to channel information to those Syrians involved in battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Levelling the playing field to the extent that those opposed to Assad are equally endowed with the ability to conduct their version of cyber-war activities. Syrian government Internet restraints have been lifted, resulting in a cyber-war free-for-all.

With aid from Citizen Lab, videos produced by the Syrian opposition saw larger exposure when videos were translated and aired that presented the reality that presented itself within the country at war with itself. "...protesters were being buried alive at gunpoint, forced to swear allegiance to Assad while they drew their last breath; that tidy lines of corpses covered in blood-stained white sheets, some clearly children, were the victims of deliberate Syrian military attacks on the country's own people in its own cities."

War, even a conventional war with matched militaries facing off against one another, has changed immeasurably from what was traditionally plotted out as potentially successful military manoeuvres during conflicts. Now added elements like use of the Internet to spread news has transformed the sharing of information, knowledge and invitations to respond.

The uneven match of a well-armed military with the latest technological munitions, bringing in an equally well-endowed terrorist group, responding to an uncoordinated mass of separate militias, poorly organized, trained and armed, but taking advantage of the freely offered experience and arms of opposite-sected jihadists has produced a conflict that seems prepared to stagger back and forth in wins and losses and the taking of tens of thousands of lives of non-combatants.

It is a war that is one of conquest and attrition, slowly destroying the country's infrastructure. A war that will eventually resolve itself with the country dividing itself geographically in reflection of its various human components; majority Sunni, minority Shia, and Kurds.