Syrian Rebels' Lament

" Delay, delay, delay. This is what has caused the catastrophe for Syria, for Syrians, and now for the whole region and the world. For three years, we were shouting, day and night."
"If you leave Assad to destroy the country, not just every day but every hour, this is what will happen."
"Syrians have ended with the idea that we are victims of the whole world, that the whole world is against us."
"Assad has friends in Tehran, a little bit in China, and in Moscow. The Syrian people have no friends."
"But what does this friendship [2012 when 100 UN member states pledged recognition of the Syrian Opposition Coalition as legitimate representative of the Syrian people] mean if you recognize my right to defend myself but you don't provide something to let me do it? How can I protect myself? These people who go to fight for the Islamic Front and Ahrar ash-Sham and Daash (Islamic State), they see there are no bullets in our guns, no money in our pockets, no food, no hope for the future, and we have nothing, just promises."
"So, in front of our eyes, they left our positions, and they joined Daash and Nusra. This was a disaster for us."
George Sabra president, Syrian National Council

The captors threaten to continue beheading the prisoners should Obama's (right) assistance continue

Just think, it all began in 2011 when Sunni Syrians decided to mount a protest against the unfair treatment they received under the Alawite Baathist government of President Bashar al-Assad which favoured the Alawite Shiites in Syria, leaving the Sunnis to look to their own affairs, disentitled and ignored. The protest could be overlooked, as Syria's president laughingly informed President Obama on a Washington visit; that the protesters were merely disaffected, but all of Syria loved their president.

And then, Syrian Sunni schoolchildren wrote insulting, anti-regime messages on the wall of a school in Daraa. One Syrian boy was abducted, tortured, killed; due punishment for daring to protest in his small way. And he never would again. And thus began a campaign of the regime against its people, to teach it the cardinal rules of surviving a totalitarian government; never complain, never, ever provoke the government, for the end result would not please those who protest. And it didn't.

But they continued their protest, peacefully at first, then developing militias to fight back against the predations of the military, and a full-scale civil revolt was born, that has never stopped. Terrorists all, the international community looking in was informed. And it was the government's responsibility to clear out all those terrorists to protect the civilian population of Syria -- as long as they were Shiite, and not Sunnis since those were of course, the terrorists.

Who eventually welcomed the appearance of battle-hardened Sunni Islamists who began to congregate, sniffing out a good fight against the heretic Shiites that no good jihadist would ever want to miss, enabling them the opportunity to practise all those very effective manoeuvres they had developed in other battlefields in Libya, and Mali and Somalia, enticing the entrance of Egyptian and Saudi jihadis and finally a Sunni militia from Iraq. And modern history was reborn.

It wasn't as though this wasn't predictable. In the U.S. those warnings went unheeded though they came from high-placed authorities and intelligence groups; even U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. No one was listening; 'no-one' referring specifically to the White House's primary resident. Now he's listening. When the al-Qaeda mutation of the Islamic State, now an international consortium of fanatics drawing on their Sunni jihadist heritage to drive fear deep in the hearts of minority ethnic and religious groups is on a rampage.

President Assad, with the support of Moscow and Tehran and its proxy in Lebanon has been enabled thanks to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah, to concentrate on defeating the Sunni Syrians using all means at their disposal; nothing quite dreadful enough to beat them down and out, from chemical weapons to artillery and helicopter gunship strikes to barrel bombs whose shrapnel tears human flesh to bloody shreds. Creating in the process millions of external and internal refugees; people without homes, without hope.

Which is conceivably worse for Syrians, the predations of their own government or the threat of ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State? Is it worse to offer fealty to the Islamic State or to the regime, both pitiless and grovelling with pleasure in committing people to slaughter. "...terrorism is terrorism. We have to fight terrorism, whether it is Sunni, Shia, or even Christian terrorism. Politically, organizationally, and militarily. There is no other way", said George Sabra.