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Syrian Rebels Try To Get Journalists Killed
Alex Thomsen reports for the British Channel 4. He is just back from reporting in Syria for which he had an official visa. He accompanied the UN observers and was frequently also in rebel held areas. On his blog he just posted this vignette:
We decide to ask for an escort out the safe way we came in. Both sides, both checkpoints will remember our vehicle.
Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind.
We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land.
At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I’ve experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover.
Another dead-end.
There was no option but to drive back out onto the sniping ground and floor it back to the road we’d been led in on.
Predictably the black car was there which had led us to the trap. They roared off as soon as we re-appeared.
I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.
That conviction only strengthened half an hour later when our four friends in the same beaten-up black car suddenly pulled out of a side-street, blocking us from the UN vehicles ahead.
The UN duly drove back past us, witnessed us surrounded by shouting militia, and left town.
Eventually we got out too and on the right route, back to Damascus.
In a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what’s the big deal in sending a van full of journalists into the killing zone?
It was nothing personal.
Is anyone still believing that Syrian government forces are committing those massacres? Has there been any evidence yet of the one that Ban Ki Moon claimed yesterday to have happened?
The shabiha are very real in all the US MCM (Mainstream Corporate Media) and being made more “real” in almost every news report. CBS Evening News last night led with absolute statements that the shabiha are thugs employed by Assad to kill civilians and enforce through terror the “regime’s” rule, that it was they killed in Houla and Qubeir. Only at the very end of the video from Qubeir did the reporter add that while it was clear there had been killings in the village, it was impossible to assign blame or determine why it had been done. But every preceding statement had been clearly indicating that the horrors were the result of shabiha thugs working for Assad.
Last evening NPR added to The Narrative with an interview with Andrew Tabler, titled Assad’s ‘Shabiha” Terrorize Syrians After Shelling. Kinda says it all. (Audio available at the link.)
Tabler is apparently a go-to guy for interviews about Syria, and he works for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and wrote In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria. He says there are thousands of shabiha, mostly Alawites and Christians. They are called shabiha after the darkened windows of the cars, mostly Mercedes Benz, which they drive around in. They began as thieves and smugglers, but
“with the coming of the uprising last year, they morphed into groups of thugs and a sort of paramilitary organization that backs the Alawite-dominated Assad regime. … [T]he term generally now means supporters for President Assad, but the ones that we’re seeing the effects of, those are primarily Alawites and Christians who go into areas after the regime shells those areas and then kills and terrorizes the civilian population.”
So, Assad and shabiha are mentioned together throughout the interview, with emphasis on their brutality and thuggish looks:
Andrew TABLER:… I was recently in Wadi Khaled, in northern Lebanon, where you could look across the border and see the Shabiha patrolling the border alongside Syrian military forces. They had tight black shirts on, very muscular, shaved heads, camouflaged pants. They look very scary. And all of the people, the Syrian refuges in Lebanon, all they could talk about were Shabiha coming to their houses, ransacking their things and then many times killing and carting off many members of their families so they disappeared into the Syrian prison system.
SIEGEL: Big question about the Shabiha is this: The Syrian regime seems to use their role to be able to claim that the army has not committed massacres and it hasn’t committed atrocities. How close to the army, how coordinated with the army do you figure the Shabiha are?
TABLER: The Shabiha report directly to the Assad family and other prominent Alawites. We know that they’re paid sometimes hundreds of dollars a day, which is a lot of money inside of Syria, and they have been a part of the regime’s approach from the beginning. Now, they’re just playing a more prominent approach as the military and security forces can no longer deal with the situation in these areas which have fallen outside of government control.
SIEGEL: So when you hear an account in which people say first army artillery and tanks shelled our neighborhood and then the Shabiha came through, one shouldn’t read this, from what I’m hearing you saying, as first was the fighting and then came the scavengers who did something else. That’s the second wave. That’s part of the attack.
TABLER: That’s correct. It’s all part of a coordinated attack, which has been going on actually for months. Now, what we’re seeing is they’re playing an increased role. The Assad regime’s security forces and armed elite Alawite divisions try to go into areas to clear them, but they can’t hold them militarily. So now, they’re using shelling on these areas and the Shabiha activities as a way to try and maintain order or to reassert their control of those areas. The problem for them is it’s not working, and the monitors are there to see it.
SIEGEL: To maintain order or to terrorize?
TABLER: They rule through fear, and so what they’re trying to do is reassert that fear factor. They’ve been doing it for – since the beginning of the uprising, and this is the thing that we can’t understand about President Assad. Many others thought that by now he would be able to change course, but he has instead quadrupled down on what they call in Syria the security solution, and that is use of armed forces, shelling, helicopter gunships and then the use of the Shabiha. The problem that Assad has is that the Syrian opposition is not going away, both the civilian opposition as well as the armed opposition. (My emphasis)
The information being fed to the American audiences is that not only are there massacres by gangs of thugs, but these thugs are in the pay of and directed by Assad and his Alawite regime members. They are BAD, very BAD. Listeners are being led to feel disgust for the regime and thugs’ actions and frustrated anger than such EVIL is allowed to continue. They are by implication being told to tell their government to DO SOMETHING.
And any violence from “doing something,” all the future deaths and injuries, the ruined lives will be worth it because it’s for the Greater Good of Democracy and Freedom. And bringing down an Evil Dictator.
The MCM is working hand in glove with the War Party (R’s and D’s). It is the propaganda arm of the US government*, but still allowed to offer small back pages sentences or paragraphs or a few lines in the middle of long articles or short remarks which the MCMers can point to as showing they did indeed report all the known facts. If the public later feels misled, it will be told the information was there if they had only paid attention to it.
*Not sure if it’s Defense, State, WH, or all that put out The Narrative.
Posted by: jawbone | Jun 9 2012 19:52 utc | 58
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