[url]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exposed[/url]
Very long read.
[QUOTE]In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s [Centre for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)] headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison.
...
Counting Syria’s dead has become nearly impossible—the U.N. stopped trying more than two years ago—but groups monitoring the conflict have estimated the number to be almost half a million, with the pace of killing accelerating each year. The war has emptied out the country, with some five million Syrians escaping to neighboring countries and to Europe, straining the capacities of even those countries which are willing to provide asylum and humanitarian aid. The chaos has also played a fundamental role in the rise of ISIS, the bloodiest of the jihadi groups that have used Syria as a staging ground to expand the reach of terrorism.
Last fall, Wiley invited me to examine the commission’s case at its headquarters, on the condition that I not reveal the office’s location, the governments assisting with document extraction, or, with few exceptions, the names of his staff.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B][U]The Insurrection[/U][/B]
...Two days later, protests across the country grew larger. Assad had already formed a secret security committee, called the Central Crisis Management Cell, to coördinate a crackdown. Its chairman was Mohammad Said Bekheitan, the highest-ranking official in the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the other members—who were all Assad-dynasty confidants—were routinely shuffled among the top positions in the military, the ministries, and the security-intelligence apparatus.
Every night, the Crisis Cell met in a drab office on the first floor of the Baath Party Regional Command, in central Damascus, and discussed strategies for crushing dissent. This required detailed information about each protest, so the cell requested reports from security committees and intelligence agents in the most rebellious provinces. The group decided to hire someone to process all the paperwork.
...
Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends were involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest, he had joined one of Syria’s first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in the regime’s haste to make the Crisis Cell more efficient, it was employing a member of the opposition to process confidential security memos from all over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages arrived at Barakat’s desk, cataloguing the minutiae of perceived threats to Assad’s rule—graffiti, Facebook posts, protests—and, eventually, actual threats, like the existence of armed groups. Barakat read everything and drafted summaries, which Naimi delivered to the members of the Crisis Cell to guide each meeting.
Barakat was never allowed into the meeting room, but he saw the members walk in, and Naimi kept detailed minutes on Baath Party letterhead. Occasional guests of the group included high-ranking Baathist officials, Syria’s Vice-President, and Assad’s younger brother, Maher, a short-tempered military commander, whom the European Union identified in a sanctions list as the “principal overseer of violence against demonstrators.”
At the end of each meeting, the Crisis Cell agreed on a plan for every security issue. Then Bekheitan, the chairman, signed the minutes, and a courier delivered them to Assad at the Presidential palace. Barakat learned that Assad reviewed the proposals, signed them, and returned them to the Crisis Cell for implementation. Sometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new ones. He also issued decrees without consulting the Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made without Assad’s approval.
Shortly after Barakat began working for the Crisis Cell, he started leaking documents. Though the regime publicly claimed that it was allowing peaceful demonstrations, security memos showed that intelligence agents were targeting protesters and media activists, and shooting at them indiscriminately. Barakat photographed the memos in the bathroom, and sent the pictures to contacts in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded them to Arabic news organizations. His plan was to steal as much information as possible and then leave the country. But each leak heightened suspicion within the office, increasing the chances that, sooner or later, the regime would discover that he was the mole.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B][U]Capturing the Documents[/U][/B]
The war was going poorly for Assad. In 2012, the number of high-level defections from the military and from civilian ministries rose dramatically. The defectors joined the Free Syrian Army, a loose organization of rebel groups. They hoped to transform Syria into a democracy, but jihadis started appearing on the battlefields, too. Generally, they proved to be more capable in combat than the Free Syrian Army. Various insurgents captured key crossing points into Turkey, and pushed government troops out of much of northern Syria, including parts of Idlib and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
By that February, the head of the Central Crisis Management Cell had questioned Barakat about the leaks. Another employee of the Crisis Cell told Barakat that his secretary was spying on him. Barakat decided to escape the country, but not before securing the minutes of the meetings, which were stored in the members’ offices. He also planned to steal correspondence between the Crisis Cell and the Presidential office, the Prime Minister, and the minister of the interior. On a day off, Barakat ransacked the offices, taking as many documents as he could, before driving some two hundred and fifty miles north from Damascus, to the Turkish border.
Syrian troops controlled the crossing point. But, with more than a thousand pages taped to his body, Barakat managed to slip through and check into a hotel under a false name before anyone in Damascus realized that he was gone. The next month, once his mother had safely left Syria, Barakat went public. He told Al Jazeera that he wanted the documents to go to the International Criminal Court.
Shortly after Barakat fled, the Crisis Cell moved its meetings from the Baath Party Regional Command to the heavily guarded premises of the National Security Bureau. In July, amid rumors of an impending coup, a blast inside the meeting room killed the chairman of the Crisis Cell; the head of the National Security Bureau; the minister of defense; and Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, who had recently taken over as the deputy minister of defense. (At least two rebel factions claimed credit for the attack, but they offered wildly inconsistent accounts of the logistics behind it.) [B]The next day, a headline in the Times read, “WASHINGTON BEGINS TO PLAN FOR COLLAPSE OF SYRIAN GOVERNMENT.” Then Assad’s Prime Minister defected to the opposition. So did the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. Even the top general responsible for preventing defections accused the military of “carrying out massacres against our innocent civilian population,” and announced, “I am joining the people’s revolution.”[/B][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B][U]Detention[/U][/B]
Mazen al-Hamada’s name soon appeared on an arrest list in Deir Ezzor. Two of his brothers were also wanted, as was one of his brothers-in-law. One day in March, 2012, a doctor asked Hamada if he would smuggle baby formula to a woman in Darayya, a rebellious suburb of Damascus. He and his nephews gathered fifty-five packages of formula, hid them under their clothes, and travelled to meet her at a café. As soon as Hamada handed over the bags, security agents handcuffed him and his nephews, pulled their shirts over their heads, and shoved them into an S.U.V. “I had no idea where we were going,” Hamada said. “The whole way, they were telling us, ‘We’re going to execute you.’ ”
After they were stripped to their underwear, beaten, and thrown in a holding cell, about twelve feet square, with some forty other detainees, they learned that they were in the Air Force-intelligence branch at al-Mezzeh Military Airport, one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country.
Two weeks later, the prisoners were put in a small hangar, a little more than forty feet long and twenty feet wide. A hundred and seventy people were packed inside, their arms wrapped around their legs, chins on their knees. “You’re rotting,” Hamada told me. “There’s no air, there’s no sunlight. Your nails are really long, because you can’t cut them. So when you scratch yourself you tear your skin off.” The prisoners weren’t able to wash themselves or to change their underwear. The sores of scabies and other skin ailments covered their bodies. Throughout the country, detainees routinely drank water out of toilets and died from starvation, suffocation, and disease. “People went crazy,” Hamada said. “People would lose their memories, people would lose their minds.” Eventually, he was transferred to a solitary-confinement cell, which he shared with ten people.
One day, Hamada was blindfolded and dragged to another room for questioning. The lead interrogator, whom Hamada knew as Suhail, began by establishing Hamada’s identity. (Some people were detained and tortured by accident; their names were similar to those on wanted lists.) When Suhail asked for information about other opposition activists he had met in Damascus, Hamada hesitated. The torture began. “At the beginning, they were using cigarettes,” he said. “They would stub them out on my legs.” He rolled up his jeans to the knee and showed me four round scars on his left leg, five on his right. There were burns on his thighs, too. They also poured water on him, and shocked him with wires and prods. To end the abuse, Hamada gave up the names of friends who had already been killed in Deir Ezzor.
The names were only the beginning. “How many people from the Syrian Arab Army did you murder?” Suhail asked. Hamada had already confessed to organizing protests, uploading videos, and speaking to the foreign press. “The challenge here is: how do you make up a story that you killed these people?” he said. His hands were cuffed to a pipe near the ceiling. “My feet were sixteen inches above the ground, so all of the weight was on my wrists,” he said. “I felt like the handcuffs were sawing my hands off. I stayed for more than half an hour, and then started screaming. Because I kept screaming, they shoved a military boot in my mouth and said, ‘Bite on this so you don’t scream.’ ” This method of torture was used in most Syrian security-intelligence detention facilities, with creative variations. Many detainees had their wrists bound behind their backs before being strung up by them; some were left hanging for days, others until they stopped breathing.
[B]Suhail’s assistants told Hamada that if he admitted to carrying weapons he would be released. He didn’t confess, so they cracked four of his ribs. At that point, he agreed that he had been armed with a hunting rifle, and they let him down. But, to better suit terrorism charges, Suhail wanted the confession to include a Kalashnikov. Hamada refused, so, he said, “they stripped me out of my underwear and brought a plumbing clamp,” of the kind typically used to moderate pressure in hoses. “They put it on my penis, and started tightening it.” Hamada recalled Suhail asking, “Are you going to admit it, or shall I cut it off?”[/B] Hamada agreed that he had carried a Kalashnikov, so Suhail released the clamp and asked how many clips of ammunition Hamada had carried. “How many clips do you want me to have?” Hamada asked. Suhail reminded him that he had to confess on his own, so Hamada said, “I had five bullets.” That wasn’t good enough, Suhail told him: “I need two magazines.” The torture escalated until Hamada confessed to everything they asked.
[B]In hundreds of witness interviews, the CIJA found consistent patterns in interrogation practices across all branches of the security agencies.[/B] People were detained following the Crisis Cell’s policy. Besides identifying “new targets,” the results of these interrogations were shared among the agencies. Detainees were routinely kept in inhumane conditions for months or years without entering the judicial system.
...
[B]Several months after first being tortured, Hamada stood in line with his nephew Fahad to ink their fingerprints onto their reports. Hamada assumed that his included his confession; he didn’t know, because reading the report was not an option. A seventeen-year-old boy stood in line behind Hamada and Fahad. When the guards learned that he was from Darayya, the suburb of Damascus, they knocked him to the ground. One fetched a welding torch and burned the boy “from here to here,” Hamada said, tracing a finger along his jawline. “And then he turned him around and he burned his neck and his entire back. . . . His face—I mean, it was fire. It was melting.”
[/B][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B][U]Hospital 601[/U][/B]
In early 2013, after nearly a year of detention, Hamada lay on the floor of the hangar. He had been interrogated and tortured seven or eight times. An infection in his eye was dripping pus. The skin on his legs was gangrenous. Prisoners were supposed to stand when a guard entered the cell, but on this day Hamada didn’t. “I’m urinating blood,” he said. The next day, the head of interrogation came to the cell and informed Hamada that he was being sent to Hospital 601, a military hospital that sits at the base of Mt. Mezzeh; the Presidential palace is perched at the top. The head of interrogation also told Hamada to forget his own name: “Your name is 1858.”
...
[B]In the hospital corridor, male and female nurses started hitting Hamada with their shoes and calling him a terrorist. When he got to the ward, he was tied to a bed with two other prisoners. A nurse asked him about his symptoms, then beat him with a stick. A U.N. report from later that year notes, “Some medical professionals have been co-opted into the maltreatment” of detainees at Hospital 601. Hamada was in disbelief as much as he was in pain.
That night, Hamada woke up needing to use the bathroom. A guard hit him all the way to the toilets, but he went in alone. When he opened the first stall, he saw a pile of corpses, battered and blue. He found two more in the second stall, emaciated and missing their eyes. There was another body by the sink. Hamada came out in panic, but the guard sent him back in and told him, “Pee on top of the bodies.” He couldn’t. He started to feel that he was losing his grip on reality. According to the U.N. inquiry, dead detainees were “kept in the toilets” at multiple security branches in Damascus.
Later that night, two drunk soldiers walked into the ward. One of them bellowed, “Who wants medicine?” Several detainees lifted their hands. The doctors hadn’t given Hamada any drugs—only a mostly empty bag of intravenous fluid—but one of his bedmates, who had been in the ward for several days, warned him not to volunteer. The soldier selected an eager prisoner. With the inmate kneeling at his feet, head facing the floor, the soldier grabbed a sharp weapon and started hacking at the base of his skull, severing the spinal cord from the head. Then he ordered another patient to drag the body to the bathroom. The U.N. report says of Hospital 601, “Many patients have been tortured to death in this facility.” The soldier called himself Azrael, after the archangel of death; other survivors recall him murdering patients in similarly horrifying ways.
[/B]
“When I saw this, I swear—that’s when I thought this was my fate,” Hamada told me. “I would die here.” On the second day, he begged a doctor to send him back to the Air Force-intelligence branch. The doctor noted that Hamada was still sick. “No, no, no, I am totally cured,” he said. On the fifth day, he was escorted out of Hospital 601 by the same guards who had deposited him there. “You animal, you son of a bitch,” they said. “You still didn’t die.” They hit him all the way back to the branch, then strung him up by his wrists for four hours.
...
In the early hours of August 21st, the Syrian government launched rockets carrying sarin gas into densely populated neighborhoods in Damascus, killing more than fourteen hundred people. In response, President Obama, who had earlier committed to a “red line” should Assad use chemical weapons, announced, “I have decided the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.” He said he would wait for congressional approval, but, he continued, “what message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death, in plain sight, and pay no price?”
Shortly after the chemical attack, Hamada and many other prisoners were transported to al-Mezzeh, without explanation. Agents moved the detainees to a large, empty hangar on the base. At least one of the sarin-gas rockets is believed to have been launched from the base at al-Mezzeh—it was a logical target for an American strike. Inside the hangar, guards jeered at the detainees. They said that when the Americans bombed Syria all of them would be killed.
...
[B]Hamada’s account of atrocities at Hospital 601 was later corroborated by approximately fifty-five thousand photographs, smuggled out of Syria by a military-police officer known by the name Caesar, an alias. Before the war, Caesar and his colleagues had documented crime scenes and traffic accidents involving military personnel in Damascus. He uploaded pictures to government computers, then printed them and stapled them to official death reports. Beginning in 2011, however, the bodies were those of detainees, collected each day from security branches and delivered to military hospitals.
[/B]
At Hospital 601, Caesar’s team photographed bodies in the morgue and in a garage bay. Each corpse that was photographed had a unique number, usually four digits—like Hamada’s 1858—scrawled on paper, tape, the chest, or the forehead with a thick marker. Another number signified the intelligence branch in which the patient had been killed. There were about eleven thousand bodies. Caesar’s team sometimes catalogued more than fifty corpses a day—emaciated, mutilated, cut, burned, shot, beaten, strangled, broken, melted.
According to a U.N. report, after Caesar’s team had finished their documentation a doctor at the hospital usually wrote “heart attack” on the death certificate. Then the bodies were loaded onto trucks and hauled away. In rare cases, family members have been able to retrieve a body, but the report noted that in each known instance it “bore marks of extensive torture.” The report continued, “Some bodies were returned from hospital morgues to their family only after the family agreed to sign a statement confirming that the deceased had been killed by ‘terrorists.’ ”
Caesar fled Syria in August, 2013, with flash drives hidden in his socks. The photographs remained a secret until after he had spoken to a team of international prosecutors and forensic experts, the following January. Without a key connecting detainee names to the corpse numbers, identifying the dead is difficult. Many of the faces were thoroughly destroyed, or the eyes were gouged out. Syrian activists close to Caesar published several thousand pictures online, allowing family members to search for missing loved ones. The photographs also circulated in refugee camps. Some families discovered that they had been paying bribes to insure decent treatment for relatives who had been killed long before. So far, about seven hundred and thirty victims have been identified. Hamada recognized several of his cellmates in the files.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B][U]End Game[/U][/B]
...Last year, when Assad was asked about the Caesar photographs during an interview with Foreign Affairs, he said, “Who said this is done by the government, not by the rebels? Who said this is a Syrian victim, not someone else?” [B]In 2011, the U.N. commission of inquiry alleged that a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been tortured to death in detention. In response, a Syrian investigation concluded that, shortly after the boy died, a “forensic photographer” took “six colored photos” of the corpse. “We attributed the number twenty-three to it.” The Syrians determined that the pictures showed “no beating marks, no traces of torture,” and that the boy had been killed by gunfire, “most probably by his fellow-terrorists.” The investigation also found that a doctor who had reported that the boy’s penis had been cut off “had misjudged the situation in an earlier examination.” Caesar’s collection contains six images of Hamza al-Khateeb’s body. His eyes are swollen shut, and his head is a deep purple, from being beaten. His penis is missing. In every picture, there is a bloodstained note card bearing the number twenty-three.[/B]
In a formal response to a U.N. inquiry, Syria’s permanent mission to the U.N. wrote a letter citing Syria’s constitution and domestic laws as evidence that allegations of arbitrary detention and torture are “no longer plausible.” The letter continued, “We have no detainees unlawfully arrested with regards to peaceful demonstrations. If your question concerns individuals who have used weapons or terrorist acts against the state, it is an entirely different matter.” A few months later, Assad told Barbara Walters that Syria’s participation in the United Nations was “a game we play. It doesn’t mean you believe in it.”
This week, a new round of negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition is set to begin in Geneva, where U.N. officials will shuttle between delegations that still refuse to meet in person. In advance of the negotiations, Barakat, the former mole in Damascus, told me that the opposition delegation asked him for copies of the documents he stole from Assad’s government; the delegation failed, however, to arrange a pickup.
In the past few months, as the Syrian Army has regained territory it had lost to rebel forces, it has come to seem increasingly unlikely that Assad will step down. His foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, recently announced, “We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the Presidency.” Wiley and the CIJA staff avoid comment on regime change. He told me, “We don’t get too caught up in the policy agony” of the efforts to end the Syrian war. “We’re simply confident—and I don’t think it’s hubris—that our work will see the light of day, in court, in relatively short order.”[/QUOTE]
I've read about Military Hospital 601 before. This whole situation is horrifying.
[quote]2011, the U.N. commission of inquiry alleged that a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been tortured to death in detention. In response, a Syrian investigation concluded that, shortly after the boy died, a “forensic photographer” took “six colored photos” of the corpse. “We attributed the number twenty-three to it.” The Syrians determined that the pictures showed “no beating marks, no traces of torture,” and that the boy had been killed by gunfire, “most probably by his fellow-terrorists.” The investigation also found that a doctor who had reported that the boy’s penis had been cut off “had misjudged the situation in an earlier examination.” Caesar’s collection contains six images of Hamza al-Khateeb’s body. His eyes are swollen shut, and his head is a deep purple, from being beaten. His penis is missing. In every picture, there is a bloodstained note card bearing the number twenty-three.[/quote]
well you have it here folks, it was the terrorists that shot him, not the bludgeoning and other stuff
[QUOTE=Govna;50112826]I've read about Military Hospital 601 before. This whole situation is horrifying.[/QUOTE]
I had not, and at this point wish I hadn't.
I would recommend this to people who:
a) Support the continuation of Assad's regime
b) Support Putin, who has allowed Assad to win this conflict
c) Oppose Western miltiary intervention
Assad was likely on the brink of defeat, as shown by the defections. Any kind of US action would have toppled him. Although Libya is in a bad situation, Syria is a bloodbath that Libya can not hope to match - and Libya would have been the same if we did nothing. The West, and America in particular, has been badly damaged by failing to enforce its 'red line' on chemical weapons use and allow this monster to stay in power. Now we are powerless: Assad, Russia and Iran have won from our decision to kick the can down the road.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50112935]
Assad was likely on the brink of defeat, as shown by the defections. Any kind of US action would have toppled him. [/QUOTE]
I know it has already been said like thousands of times, but then what? I mean, i'm not going to justify Assad by any means nor am i going to support our millitary's actions there, as it's obvoius that their goal was to just beef up Russia's sphere of influence in that region, but it's naive to think that other local leaders there are any better than Assad himself.
What really creeps me out with shit like this is how well documented the perpetrators keep it. They clearly have institutionalized this sort of treatment, torture and murder. They've got procedures and protocols for it. It's not just soldiers acting on their own out of vengeance in probably the most bitter civil war in history; it's organized, from-the-top ordered procedures.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50112935]
Assad was likely on the brink of defeat.[/QUOTE]
Not entirely. I will say that the intervention by the Russians enabled some pretty damn significant moves such as the North Aleppo offensive,Palmyra, Daara,Latakia, they still have some significant indirect help via the US airstrikes on ISIS.
[QUOTE=antianan;50113010]I know it has already been said like thousands of times, but then what? I mean, i'm not going to justify Assad by any means nor am i going to support our millitary's actions there, as it's obvoius that their goal was to just beef up Russia's sphere of influence in that region, but it's naive to think that other local leaders there are any better than Assad himself.[/QUOTE]
What could be [I]worse[/I] than this? Sure, no one is qualified to take over and make it good, but this stuff is very rapidly approaching first place in the contest for historically absolutely worst.
I find it extremely disheartening that there are so many within the US government willing to turn tail and allow this tyrant to return to power because we were too afraid to step in before it was too late.
[QUOTE=Riller;50113062]What could be [I]worse[/I] than this? Sure, no one is qualified to take over and make it good, but this stuff is very rapidly approaching first place in the contest for historically absolutely worst.[/QUOTE]
This is why i think the best thing we could have done is to just stay away from that civil war at all, and by "us" i mean both Russia and the US-led coalition, because as for now it's almost like that tagline of some shitty alien movie: "Whoever wins syrian people lose".
[QUOTE=antianan;50113109]This is why i think the best thing we could have done is to just stay away from that civil war at all, and by "us" i mean both Russia and the US-led coalition, because as for now it's almost like that tagline of some shitty alien movie: "Whoever wins syrian people lose".[/QUOTE]
That was theoretically possible until ISIS became a major player and started seriously spilling the conflict across borders and into the entire region. ISIS had to be halted so the U.S. supplied everyone but ISIS and Assad with guns and air support. This made Russia mad because "MUH SPHERE OF INFLUENCE!" and they decided to escalate the conflict to absolute bullshit by counteracting every single thing that was bringing the war to a sort-of maybe end.
[QUOTE=Riller;50113134] U.S. supplied everyone but ISIS[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't be so sure about that bit.
[QUOTE=DoktorAkcel;50113191]I wouldn't be so sure about that bit.[/QUOTE]
Fine. "U.S. supplied Iraqi militias, Kurdish forces, the wide umbrella of militias that is the Free Syrian Army and its' friends, and the Iraqi military". You get what the point is.
All those headers sound like MGS chapters
[QUOTE=Riller;50113051]What really creeps me out with shit like this is how well documented the perpetrators keep it. They clearly have institutionalized this sort of treatment, torture and murder. They've got procedures and protocols for it. It's not just soldiers acting on their own out of vengeance in probably the most bitter civil war in history; it's organized, from-the-top ordered procedures.[/QUOTE]
It's exactly what the Nazis did with their extermination of "undesirables" during the Holocaust. There are many instances of camps being liberated with huge piles of documents being burned as the Nazis attempted to cover up their deeds
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50113232]It's exactly what the Nazis did with their extermination of "undesirables" during the Holocaust. There are many instances of camps being liberated with huge piles of documents being burned as the Nazis attempted to cover up their deeds[/QUOTE]
More or less what I was getting at in all but mention, because the direct mention gets the Assad-apologists crying Godwin's law.
Thats so absolutely overwhelming and horrific. What can possibly become of syria
Assad is terrible
moderate opposition aren't unified or power
"moderate" opposition are as bad as isis
ISIS is isis
hezbolla and iran hate israel and saudi
Alawaite's are too deep in with assad to be viable
Turkey and Saudi are assholes
Kurds will cause shit with turkey
Could balkanisation be the answer?
[QUOTE=Riller;50113280]More or less what I was getting at in all but mention, because the direct mention gets the Assad-apologists crying Godwin's law.[/QUOTE]
Oh, okay
At first I was like "yeah dude that's basically shot-for-shot what the Nazis did". It's just the fact that Assad is indiscriminate, rather than having the bizarre national focus on the elimination of a certain race/group of people.
[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;50112935]c) Oppose Western miltiary intervention[/QUOTE]
Because it's turned out all sunshine and rainbows every other time we've done it. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are the envy of the Middle-East.
[QUOTE=mdeceiver79;50113305]Thats so absolutely overwhelming and horrific. What can possibly become of syria
Assad is terrible
moderate opposition aren't unified or power
"moderate" opposition are as bad as isis
ISIS is isis
hezbolla and iran hate israel and saudi
Alawaite's are too deep in with assad to be viable
Turkey and Saudi are assholes
Kurds will cause shit with turkey
Could balkanisation be the answer?[/QUOTE]
I don't know what could fix this short of dismantling the entire region and redrawing national lines along ethnic and religious borders. But that's totally unfeasable and who's to say these newfound nations won't just use their newfound patriotism to fuel conventional wars with each other like 1948 Israel x10.
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50113426]Oh, okay
At first I was like "yeah dude that's basically shot-for-shot what the Nazis did". It's just the fact that Assad is indiscriminate, rather than having the bizarre national focus on the elimination of a certain race/group of people.[/QUOTE]
It just generally weirds me out that you would want to document and save shit like that so well. What happened to 'plausible deniability'?
[QUOTE=Riller;50113438]It just generally weirds me out that you would want to document and save shit like that so well. What happened to 'plausible deniability'?[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/20/khmer-rouge-s-bloodiest-murderers-on-trial.html[/url]
Strangely not that uncommon.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;50113433]
I don't know what could fix this short of dismantling the entire region and redrawing national lines along ethnic and religious borders. But that's totally unfeasable and who's to say these newfound nations won't just use their newfound patriotism to fuel conventional wars with each other like 1948 Israel x10.[/QUOTE]
Thats sorta what i meany by balkanisation. I agree though, as we saw there there'll be... tension... for decades to come. Maybe if there could be a common enemy, a dangerous concept but it tends to bring people together.
[QUOTE=Riller;50113438]It just generally weirds me out that you would want to document and save shit like that so well. What happened to 'plausible deniability'?[/QUOTE]
I believe it has something to do with the idea of "we can use this again in the case of insurrection". It's very strange, it's been seen throughout history time and time again. Even Roman victory columns are basically "Yeah here's when we massacred huge portions of a population" to an extent
Terrible. Still believe that getting rid of all these dictators was the worst thing to do as it seems like you need one nutjob to control all the nutters that live in those countries.
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50113483]Even Roman victory columns are basically "Yeah here's when we massacred huge portions of a population" to an extent[/QUOTE]
That was a different time, where such a thing was actually seen as a positive thing to do. In our current world I see absolutely no reason to keep organized evidence of horrible crimes like these around after you commit them.
[QUOTE=Complifusedv2;50113550]Terrible. Still believe that getting rid of all these dictators was the worst thing to do as it seems like you need one nutjob to control all the nutters that live in those countries.[/QUOTE]
Except we didn't really get rid of any of them, and they started losing control all over the place because they couldn't keep those "nutters" living in fear any more.
[QUOTE=mdeceiver79;50113305]Thats so absolutely overwhelming and horrific. What can possibly become of syria
Assad is terrible
moderate opposition aren't unified or power
"moderate" opposition are as bad as isis
ISIS is isis
hezbolla and iran hate israel and saudi
Alawaite's are too deep in with assad to be viable
Turkey and Saudi are assholes
Kurds will cause shit with turkey
Could balkanisation be the answer?[/QUOTE]
probably not because assad hasn't even been willing to even listen to the idea that some other government could exist in parts of syria
unless russia stomps down hard on assad, and the new states rapidly bulk up on military power, assad would just launch an attack on these new states to take them out immediately
then in the long run they would then have to develope independant economies and rebuild out of the rubble, and make no mistake, much of their infastructure is rubble by now, its almost worth just picking everybody up thats left and dumping them off in nevada or something, the place will never be rebuilt
[QUOTE=mdeceiver79;50113305]Thats so absolutely overwhelming and horrific. What can possibly become of syria
Assad is terrible
moderate opposition aren't unified or power
"moderate" opposition are as bad as isis
ISIS is isis
hezbolla and iran hate israel and saudi
Alawaite's are too deep in with assad to be viable
Turkey and Saudi are assholes
Kurds will cause shit with turkey
Could balkanisation be the answer?[/QUOTE]
Balkanization arguably wouldn't cause Syria to cease existing as Syria has a stronger national identity than Iraq. And regardless of whose leading it, mini-Syria probably wouldn't be too happy about losing a ton of land unless its their idea.
[QUOTE=Aredbomb;50113625]Balkanization arguably wouldn't cause Syria to cease existing as Syria has a stronger national identity than Iraq. And regardless of whose leading it, mini-Syria probably wouldn't be too happy about losing a ton of land unless its their idea.[/QUOTE]
Yeah and looking into it dividing ethnically is not realistic
[t]http://cdn1.theodysseyonline.com/files/2015/09/21/635783974648825367-23612126_nina.png[/t]
Alawites and kurds (baathists woulda been feasible if it didnt always end up with people dying) seem to be the most realistic option for a secular state going forward. But then you risk alienating all the other groups and theres lots of support for fundimentalist islamic state groups (coming from turkey and saudi)
Glad to hear he is working hard to keep Syria stable, good work Assad!
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