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Syria: Special Forces From Turkey Attack The Syrian Arab Army
Yesterday the Syrian Arab Army tried to relief the insurgent-besieged villages of Nubl and al-Zahraa and to close the corridor between the city of Aleppo and the Turkish border to the north. The troops captured three villages and nearly closed the gap in their ring around Aleppo but were pushed out again in an onslaught by hundreds of enemies coming from the direction of the Turkish border.
The map shows the areas gained and lost again by the SAA in light green. (bigger)
A bloody video from the aftermath (now deleted) showed several dozens of dead Syrian Army fighters massacred in what looked like a well executed ambush.
This was curious as the usual insurgent groups in the area are not know for good military planning:
Regime sources say that the defining characteristic of yesterday’s “ferocious” battle was Turkish support for the armed groups, as evidenced by the transfer of fighters and military supplies from inside Turkey to Aleppo’s northern countryside, including Caucasian fighters who answer directly to Turkish intelligence.
On Twitter one Ömer Khãn, who claims to be a Turkish soldier and is an avid supporter of the Syrian opposition, looks at the gruesome pictures of the dead soldiers and remarks (1, 2, 3):
Who where these SAA up against in #Mallah ? Shooting only Head is feat for a Regular Army, much less for #Rebels.
SAA skulls shattered/shot in/bet Eyes. this is only work of special units, unlikely any Rebel Org.
#Aleppo Whoever killed those SAA was no Mere Rebel, Pro-Reg cry about Turkish Intervention.
I concur. Whoever attacked those Syrian troops must have had, unlike the usual insurgents or jihadists, some extensive and professional special forces experience.
This is not the first time that Turkey actively intervenes in Syria. Recently released Turkish court documents show that Turkey, on top of logistic help, gave direct artillery fire support to the insurgents in several case.
There are new reports that the U.S. plans to give the insurgents radios and other equipment to call in air strikes especially to the Kurds. But the U.S. has already given such equipment to a few selected Kurdish fighters in Kobani for use against the Islamic State. I doubt very much that these will be given to "moderate rebels" or will be used against the Syrian army.
I also doubt that the U.S. will really train or further equip additional "moderate" anti-Syrian fighters. The biggest lobbyist for such arming was the former U.S ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. He has now changed course and admits that there are no "moderates" who could sensibly be armed:
Ford has accused the rebels of collaborating with the Nusra Front, the al Qaida affiliate in Syria that the U.S. declared a terrorist organization more than two years ago. He says opposition infighting has worsened and he laments the fact that extremist groups now rule in most territories outside the Syrian regime’s control.
Ford said part of the problem was that too many rebels – and their patrons in Turkey and Qatar – insisted that Nusra was a homegrown, anti-Assad force when in fact it was an al Qaida affiliate whose ideology was virtually indistinguishable from the Islamic State’s.
…
“It becomes impossible to field an effective opposition when no one even agrees who or what is the enemy,” he said.
Ford said the latest U.S. approach of ditching the old rebel model to build a new, handpicked paramilitary to focus on the Islamic State was doomed; Syrian rebels are more concerned with bringing down Assad than with fighting extremists for the West, and there are far too few fighters to take the project seriously.
…
Ford said the time had come for U.S. officials and their allies to have a serious talk about “boots on the ground,” though he was quick to add that the fighters didn’t need to be American. He said a professional ground force was the only way to wrest Syria from the jihadists.
With Ford's support lost the Syrian opposition lobbyists and their friends in the Obama administration will not be able to get the U.S. support they want.
Ford is right that a professional ground force is needed to "wrest Syria from the jihadists". That ground force already exists. It is the Syrian Arab Army and its allies. But when NATO member and U.S. ally Turkey sends special forces to support the jihadist in ambushing and slaughtering those forces without getting rebuffed from Washington it will take years and lots of bloody slaughters until the jihadists are finally finished.
today banner headline in NYT, NGOs at work
HD Children, Caged for Effect, to Mimic Imagery of ISIS
BY By ANNE BARNARD; Mohammad Ghannam contributed reporting.
WC 1212 words
PD 21 February 2015
SN The New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The killings have been both deliberately lurid and strangely intimate. Designed for broadcast, they have helped the Islamic State militant group build a brand of violence that shocks with its extreme brutality, yet feels as close to viewers as the family images on their smartphones.
Broadcast specifically to frighten and manipulate, the Islamic State’s flamboyant violence consumes the world’s attention while more familiar threats, like the Syrian government’s barrel bombs, kill far more but rarely provoke global outrage.
A few human rights advocates and antigovernment activists in Syria are creating shocking if nonviolent images and videos — even herding children in orange jumpsuits into a cage — to call attention to the wider scope of violence. So far, though, their voices have hardly been heard.
The Islamic State’s campaign of high-profile killings is not war at a remove, with the mechanized distance of drone strikes or carpet bombing. It is one-on-one slaughter with Hollywood production values, seeking to maximize emotional impact and propaganda value.
Cameras zoom in as captors lay hands on their captives — Western reporters, a Jordanian pilot, Egyptian Christian laborers. In the group’s latest video, black-clad men lead the Egyptians almost gently, one by one, down a sunset-tinged beach, then saw off their heads until the waves turn red.
For many in the Middle East who obsessively share the latest images, the Islamic State’s exhibitionist brutality is the apotheosis of several years of carnage gone viral. The group’s bloody imagery, flooding social media already widely used to chronicle conflict, makes violence seem ubiquitous, even mesmerizing, and spurs a sensory overload that can both provoke feelings and numb them.
”It’s like action movies,” said Ahmad, 39, an employee of the Damascus Opera House in the Syrian capital, who asked to be identified by only his first name for his safety. Islamic State violence is stylized, as if in a Quentin Tarantino film, he said, in a macabre bid ”to win the prestige of horror.”
The killings have been answered quickly with airstrikes — from the United States, Jordan and, on Monday, from Egypt, which said it struck in Libya, where the Egyptian Copts were killed.
While the Islamic State’s provocations draw pronounced reactions, however, the less-choreographed slaughter that has killed, for instance, more than 200,000 Syrians fades to the background. Those bearing the brunt of the Syrian war’s spillover across the region, and humanitarian workers trying to assist, frequently express anguish that government bombings, the displacement of more than a third of the population and the gutting of the health care system do not bring similar attention — let alone dramatic action.
Of course, that is partly a matter of realpolitik. While Western governments denounce Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for attacks on civilians, they do not view him as a threat on the order of the Islamic State, which is encouraging followers to launch attacks in the West.
And that difference in Western perception of the two threats exists partly because shock videos work. Even in Saudi Arabia, where beheadings are the state’s method of capital punishment, they are not broadcast. When images of a recent execution leaked, they created a scandal.
But the perception gap is also because the shelling of cities in Syria has become almost numbingly normal. It is as if the value of trauma and shock has undergone a hyperinflation that neuters all but the most exaggerated images of violence.
That, in turn, has pushed human rights advocates and activists to search for eye-grabbing images of their own.
Baraa Abdulrahman, an antigovernment activist in the Damascus suburb of Douma, desperate to direct the world’s attention to government airstrikes that were killing scores of people, set up a scene that echoed the Islamic State video in which the caged Jordanian pilot, in an orange jumpsuit, was burned alive.
He ordered an iron cage from a blacksmith and placed it against a backdrop of collapsed buildings, and then filled it with a gaggle of neighborhood children dressed in orange. As the camera rolled, he waved a burning torch, asking why the world responded to the killing of the pilot but not to the deaths of children in Douma. Some of the children in the cage, he admitted, were frightened and cried.
”I’m very sorry to get to this point, to use the kids,” said Mr. Abdulrahman, who uses a nom de guerre for security. ”But this is the fact. Our kids are getting killed every day, every moment, getting under the wreckage.”
Yet images of mangled children no longer get traction, he said. ”These sights, people now are used to them.”
Antigovernment activists are not alone in trying to compete with the war’s most lurid imagery. The Syrian government has made much of a video of an insurgent ripping the organs from a slain soldier and taking a bite.
Humanitarian organizations are also seeing the power of startling videos. A group training volunteer civil defense workers has circulated a video of what it calls ”the miracle baby,” an infant named Mohammad who is seen being pulled from the rubble of an airstrike. Opposition groups have passed around videos from the captured cellphones of pro-government fighters and soldiers who have apparently filmed their own cruelty, like one of a militiaman stabbing an old man in the head.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees widely circulated images of triplets born in a snowstorm in a refugee camp, only to lose their mother to complications from childbirth.
”There is personal tragedy of mammoth proportions happening every day by the thousands in individual lives that never get picked up by a media camera,” said Ninette Kelley, the director of the refugee agency in Lebanon, where more than one million Syrians have fled.
”Refugees whose lives have been irrevocably damaged, people who die from cancers that but for the crisis would have been treated in Syria, these wounds are very real but not always as visible.”
A few have even been tempted to fictionalize. Last year, for instance, a viral video of a Syrian boy saving a girl from sniper fire turned out to have been staged by a Norwegian film crew.
But while some groups want to publicize suffering in order to stop it, analysts said perpetrators like the Islamic State seek to magnify the suffering by inflicting it twice — first on the victim and then on the viewer.
”One of the things about traumatic imagery is that it can numb us and render us passive and helpless,” said Gavin Rees, the Europe director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which focuses on the issues of reporting on violence. ”That is part of the gain for those who are producing these videos: They want to inspire fear and helplessness.”
Children were herded into a cage in Douma, near Damascus, evoking an Islamic State video, to draw attention to violence in Syria. (A1); Children in a cage during a protest against forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY BASSAM KHABIEH/REUTERS) (A9)
Posted by: Cu Chulainn | Feb 21 2015 16:24 utc | 64
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