Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo
Published on
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
by
Consortium News
Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo
As the U.S.-backed offensive in Mosul, Iraq, begins, the mainstream U.S.
media readies the American people to blame the terrorists for civilian
casualties but the opposite rules apply to Syria's Aleppo
by
Robert Parry
Iraqi forces advance towards Mosul in an attempt to retake it from Isis.
(Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
Note how differently The New York Times prepares the American public for
civilian casualties from the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government assault on the
city of Mosul to free it from the Islamic State, compared to the unrelenting
condemnation of the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on
neighborhoods of east Aleppo held by Al Qaeda.
In the case of Mosul, the million-plus residents are not portrayed as likely
victims of American airstrikes and Iraqi government ground assaults, though
surely many will die during the offensive. Instead, the civilians are said
to be eagerly awaiting liberation from the Islamic State terrorists and
their head-chopping brutality.
"Mosul's residents are hoarding food and furtively scrawling resistance
slogans on walls," writes Times' veteran war correspondent Rod Nordland
about this week's launch of the U.S.-backed government offensive. "Those
forces will fight to enter a city where for weeks the harsh authoritarian
rule of the Islamic State . has sought to crack down on a population eager
to either escape or rebel, according to interviews with roughly three dozen
people from Mosul. .
"Just getting out of Mosul had become difficult and dangerous: Those who
were caught faced million-dinar fines, unless they were former members of
the Iraqi Army or police, in which case the punishment was beheading. .
Graffiti and other displays of dissidence against the Islamic State were
more common in recent weeks, as were executions when the vandals were
caught."
The Times article continues: "Mosul residents chafed under social codes
banning smoking and calling for splashing acid on body tattoos, summary
executions of perceived opponents, whippings of those who missed prayers or
trimmed their beards, and destroying 'un-Islamic' historical monuments."
So, the message is clear: if the inevitable happens and the U.S.-backed
offensive kills a number of Mosul's civilians, including children, The New
York Times' readers have been hardened to accept this "collateral damage" as
necessary to free the city from blood-thirsty extremists. The fight to crush
these crazies is worth it, even if there are significant numbers of
civilians killed in the "cross-fire."
And we've seen similar mainstream media treatment of other U.S.-organized
assaults on urban areas, such as the devastation of the Iraqi city,
Fallujah, in 2004 when U.S. Marines routed Iraqi insurgents from the city
while leveling or severely damaging most of the city's buildings and killing
hundreds of civilians. But those victims were portrayed in the Western press
as "human shields," shifting the blame for their deaths onto the Iraqi
insurgents.
Despite the fact that U.S. forces invaded Iraq in defiance of international
law - and thus all the thousands of civilian deaths across Iraq from the
"shock and awe" U.S. firepower should be considered war crimes - there was
virtually no such analysis allowed into the pages of The New York Times or
the other mainstream U.S. media. Such talk was forced to the political
fringes, as it continues to be today. War-crimes tribunals are only for the
other guys.
Lust to Kill Children
By contrast, the Times routinely portrays the battle for east Aleppo as
simply a case of barbaric Russian and Syrian leaders bombing innocent
neighborhoods with no regard for the human cost, operating out of an
apparent lust to kill children.
Rather than focusing on Al Qaeda's harsh rule of east Aleppo, the Times told
its readers in late September how to perceive the Russian-Syrian offensive
to drive out Al Qaeda and its allies. A Sept. 25 article by Anne Barnard and
Somini Sengupta, entitled "Syria and Russia Appear Ready to Scorch Aleppo,"
began:
"Make life intolerable and death likely. Open an escape route, or offer a
deal to those who leave or surrender. Let people trickle out. Kill whoever
stays. Repeat until a deserted cityscape is yours. It is a strategy that
both the Syrian government and its Russian allies have long embraced to
subdue Syrian rebels, largely by crushing the civilian populations that
support them.
"But in the past few days, as hopes for a revived cease-fire have
disintegrated at the United Nations, the Syrians and Russians seem to be
mobilizing to apply this kill-all-who-resist strategy to the most ambitious
target yet: the rebel-held sections of the divided metropolis of Aleppo."
Again, note how the "rebels" are portrayed as local heroes, rather than a
collection of jihadists from both inside and outside Syria fighting under
the operational command of Al Qaeda's Nusra Front, which recently underwent
a name change to the Syria Conquest Front. But the name change and the
pretense about "moderate" rebels are just more deceptions.
As journalist/historian Gareth Porter has written: "Information from a wide
range of sources, including some of those the United States has been
explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad
organization unit in those provinces [of Idlib and Aleppo] is engaged in a
military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups
fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities
with it. .
"At least since 2014 the Obama administration has armed a number of Syrian
rebel groups even though it knew the groups were coordinating closely with
the Nusra Front, which was simultaneously getting arms from Turkey and
Qatar. The strategy called for supplying TOW anti-tank missiles to the
'Syrian Revolutionaries Front' (SRF) as the core of a client Syrian army
that would be independent of the Nusra Front.
"However, when a combined force of Nusra and non-jihadist brigades including
the SRF captured the Syrian army base at Wadi al-Deif in December 2014, the
truth began to emerge. The SRF and other groups to which the United States
had supplied TOW missiles had fought under Nusra's command to capture the
base."
Arming Al Qaeda
This reality - the fact that the U.S. government is indirectly supplying
sophisticated weaponry to Al Qaeda - is rarely mentioned in the mainstream
U.S. news media, though one might think it would make for a newsworthy
story. But it would undercut the desired propaganda narrative of "good guy"
rebels fighting "bad guy" government backed by "ultra-bad guy" Russians.
What if Americans understood that their tax money and U.S. weaponry were
going to aid the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks? What if
they understood the larger historical context that Washington helped midwife
the modern jihadist movement - and Al Qaeda - through the U.S./Saudi support
for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s?
And what if Americans understood that Washington's supposed regional
"allies," including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, have sided with
Al Qaeda in Syria because of their intense hatred of Shiite-ruled Iran, an
ally of Syria's secular government?
These Al Qaeda sympathies have been known for several years but never get
reported in the mainstream U.S. press. In September 2013, Israel's
Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that
Israel favored Syria's Sunni extremists over President Bashar al-Assad.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from
Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone
in that arc," Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. "We always
wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't
backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran." He said this was
the case even if the "bad guys" were affiliated with Al Qaeda.
And, in June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute
conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a
victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranian-backed
Assad in Syria. "From Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil
that's got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail," Oren said.
But such cynical - and dangerous - realpolitik is kept from the American
people. Instead, the Syrian conflict is presented as all about the children.
There is also little said about how Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and its allied
jihadists keep the civilian population in east Aleppo essentially as "human
shields." When "humanitarian corridors" have been opened to allow civilians
to escape, they had been fired on by the jihadists determined to keep as
many people under their control as possible.
Propaganda Fodder
By forcing the civilians to stay, Al Qaeda and its allies can exploit the
injuries and deaths of civilians, especially the children, for propaganda
advantages.
Going along with Al Qaeda's propaganda strategy, the Times and other
mainstream U.S. news outlets have kept the focus on the children. A Times
dispatch on Sept. 27 begins: "They cannot play, sleep or attend school.
Increasingly, they cannot eat. Injury or illness could be fatal. Many just
huddle with their parents in windowless underground shelters - which offer
no protection from the powerful bombs that have turned east Aleppo into a
kill zone.
"Among the roughly 250,000 people trapped in the insurgent redoubt of the
divided northern Syrian city are 100,000 children, the most vulnerable
victims of intensified bombings by Syrian forces and their Russian allies.
Though the world is jolted periodically by the suffering of children in the
Syria conflict - the photographs of Alan Kurdi's drowned body and Omran
Daqneesh's bloodied face are prime examples - dead and traumatized children
are increasingly common."
This propagandistic narrative has bled into the U.S. presidential campaign
with Martha Raddatz, a moderator of the second presidential debate,
incorporating much of the evil-Russians theme into a question that went so
far as to liken the human suffering in Aleppo to the Holocaust, the Nazi
extermination campaign against Jews and other minorities.
That prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to repeat her call
for an expanded U.S. military intervention in Syria, including a "no-fly
zone," which U.S. military commanders say would require a massive operation
that would kill many Syrians, both soldiers and civilians, to eliminate
Syria's sophisticated air-defense systems and its air force.
Based on the recent Wikileaks publication of Clinton's speeches to
investment bankers and other special interests, we also know that she
recognizes the high human cost from this strategy. In one June 2013 speech,
she said, "To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air
defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even
if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our pilots at risk -
you're going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention
that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement
where you take a lot of civilians."
Yet, during the campaign, Clinton has spoken glibly about her own proposal
to impose a "no-fly zone" over Syria, which has become even more dangerous
since 2015 when the Russians agreed to directly assist the Syrian government
in fighting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Also, left unsaid about such a U.S. intervention is that it could open the
way for Al Qaeda and/or its spinoff Islamic State to defeat the Syrian army
and gain control of Damascus, creating the potential for even a worse
bloodbath against Christians, Shiites, Alawites, secular Sunnis and other
"heretics." Not to mention the fact that a U.S.-imposed "no-fly zone" would
be a clear violation of international law.
Over the next few weeks, we are sure hear much about the Islamic State using
the people of Mosul as "human shields" and thus excusing U.S. bombs when
they strike civilians targets and kill children. It will all be the
terrorists' fault, except that an opposite set of "journalistic" rules will
apply to Aleppo.
C 2016 Consortium News
Robert Parry
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Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo
Published on
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
by
Consortium News
Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo
As the U.S.-backed offensive in Mosul, Iraq, begins, the mainstream U.S.
media readies the American people to blame the terrorists for civilian
casualties but the opposite rules apply to Syria's Aleppo
by
Robert Parry
. 13 Comments
.
. Iraqi forces advance towards Mosul in an attempt to retake it from
Isis. (Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
. Note how differently The New York Times prepares the American public
for civilian casualties from the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government assault on
the city of Mosul to free it from the Islamic State, compared to the
unrelenting condemnation of the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on
neighborhoods of east Aleppo held by Al Qaeda.
. In the case of Mosul, the million-plus residents are not portrayed
as likely victims of American airstrikes and Iraqi government ground
assaults, though surely many will die during the offensive. Instead, the
civilians are said to be eagerly awaiting liberation from the Islamic State
terrorists and their head-chopping brutality.
. "Mosul's residents are hoarding food and furtively scrawling
resistance slogans on walls," writes Times' veteran war correspondent Rod
Nordland about this week's launch of the U.S.-backed government offensive.
"Those forces will fight to enter a city where for weeks the harsh
authoritarian rule of the Islamic State . has sought to crack down on a
population eager to either escape or rebel, according to interviews with
roughly three dozen people from Mosul. .
. "Just getting out of Mosul had become difficult and dangerous: Those
who were caught faced million-dinar fines, unless they were former members
of the Iraqi Army or police, in which case the punishment was beheading. .
Graffiti and other displays of dissidence against the Islamic State were
more common in recent weeks, as were executions when the vandals were
caught."
The Times article continues: "Mosul residents chafed under social codes
banning smoking and calling for splashing acid on body tattoos, summary
executions of perceived opponents, whippings of those who missed prayers or
trimmed their beards, and destroying 'un-Islamic' historical monuments."
So, the message is clear: if the inevitable happens and the U.S.-backed
offensive kills a number of Mosul's civilians, including children, The New
York Times' readers have been hardened to accept this "collateral damage" as
necessary to free the city from blood-thirsty extremists. The fight to crush
these crazies is worth it, even if there are significant numbers of
civilians killed in the "cross-fire."
And we've seen similar mainstream media treatment of other U.S.-organized
assaults on urban areas, such as the devastation of the Iraqi city,
Fallujah, in 2004 when U.S. Marines routed Iraqi insurgents from the city
while leveling or severely damaging most of the city's buildings and killing
hundreds of civilians. But those victims were portrayed in the Western press
as "human shields," shifting the blame for their deaths onto the Iraqi
insurgents.
Despite the fact that U.S. forces invaded Iraq in defiance of international
law - and thus all the thousands of civilian deaths across Iraq from the
"shock and awe" U.S. firepower should be considered war crimes - there was
virtually no such analysis allowed into the pages of The New York Times or
the other mainstream U.S. media. Such talk was forced to the political
fringes, as it continues to be today. War-crimes tribunals are only for the
other guys.
Lust to Kill Children
By contrast, the Times routinely portrays the battle for east Aleppo as
simply a case of barbaric Russian and Syrian leaders bombing innocent
neighborhoods with no regard for the human cost, operating out of an
apparent lust to kill children.
Rather than focusing on Al Qaeda's harsh rule of east Aleppo, the Times told
its readers in late September how to perceive the Russian-Syrian offensive
to drive out Al Qaeda and its allies. A Sept. 25 article by Anne Barnard and
Somini Sengupta, entitled "Syria and Russia Appear Ready to Scorch Aleppo,"
began:
"Make life intolerable and death likely. Open an escape route, or offer a
deal to those who leave or surrender. Let people trickle out. Kill whoever
stays. Repeat until a deserted cityscape is yours. It is a strategy that
both the Syrian government and its Russian allies have long embraced to
subdue Syrian rebels, largely by crushing the civilian populations that
support them.
"But in the past few days, as hopes for a revived cease-fire have
disintegrated at the United Nations, the Syrians and Russians seem to be
mobilizing to apply this kill-all-who-resist strategy to the most ambitious
target yet: the rebel-held sections of the divided metropolis of Aleppo."
Again, note how the "rebels" are portrayed as local heroes, rather than a
collection of jihadists from both inside and outside Syria fighting under
the operational command of Al Qaeda's Nusra Front, which recently underwent
a name change to the Syria Conquest Front. But the name change and the
pretense about "moderate" rebels are just more deceptions.
As journalist/historian Gareth Porter has written: "Information from a wide
range of sources, including some of those the United States has been
explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad
organization unit in those provinces [of Idlib and Aleppo] is engaged in a
military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups
fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities
with it. .
"At least since 2014 the Obama administration has armed a number of Syrian
rebel groups even though it knew the groups were coordinating closely with
the Nusra Front, which was simultaneously getting arms from Turkey and
Qatar. The strategy called for supplying TOW anti-tank missiles to the
'Syrian Revolutionaries Front' (SRF) as the core of a client Syrian army
that would be independent of the Nusra Front.
"However, when a combined force of Nusra and non-jihadist brigades including
the SRF captured the Syrian army base at Wadi al-Deif in December 2014, the
truth began to emerge. The SRF and other groups to which the United States
had supplied TOW missiles had fought under Nusra's command to capture the
base."
Arming Al Qaeda
This reality - the fact that the U.S. government is indirectly supplying
sophisticated weaponry to Al Qaeda - is rarely mentioned in the mainstream
U.S. news media, though one might think it would make for a newsworthy
story. But it would undercut the desired propaganda narrative of "good guy"
rebels fighting "bad guy" government backed by "ultra-bad guy" Russians.
What if Americans understood that their tax money and U.S. weaponry were
going to aid the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks? What if
they understood the larger historical context that Washington helped midwife
the modern jihadist movement - and Al Qaeda - through the U.S./Saudi support
for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s?
And what if Americans understood that Washington's supposed regional
"allies," including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, have sided with
Al Qaeda in Syria because of their intense hatred of Shiite-ruled Iran, an
ally of Syria's secular government?
These Al Qaeda sympathies have been known for several years but never get
reported in the mainstream U.S. press. In September 2013, Israel's
Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that
Israel favored Syria's Sunni extremists over President Bashar al-Assad.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from
Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone
in that arc," Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. "We always
wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't
backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran." He said this was
the case even if the "bad guys" were affiliated with Al Qaeda.
And, in June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute
conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a
victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranian-backed
Assad in Syria. "From Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil
that's got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail," Oren said.
But such cynical - and dangerous - realpolitik is kept from the American
people. Instead, the Syrian conflict is presented as all about the children.
There is also little said about how Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and its allied
jihadists keep the civilian population in east Aleppo essentially as "human
shields." When "humanitarian corridors" have been opened to allow civilians
to escape, they had been fired on by the jihadists determined to keep as
many people under their control as possible.
Propaganda Fodder
By forcing the civilians to stay, Al Qaeda and its allies can exploit the
injuries and deaths of civilians, especially the children, for propaganda
advantages.
Going along with Al Qaeda's propaganda strategy, the Times and other
mainstream U.S. news outlets have kept the focus on the children. A Times
dispatch on Sept. 27 begins: "They cannot play, sleep or attend school.
Increasingly, they cannot eat. Injury or illness could be fatal. Many just
huddle with their parents in windowless underground shelters - which offer
no protection from the powerful bombs that have turned east Aleppo into a
kill zone.
"Among the roughly 250,000 people trapped in the insurgent redoubt of the
divided northern Syrian city are 100,000 children, the most vulnerable
victims of intensified bombings by Syrian forces and their Russian allies.
Though the world is jolted periodically by the suffering of children in the
Syria conflict - the photographs of Alan Kurdi's drowned body and Omran
Daqneesh's bloodied face are prime examples - dead and traumatized children
are increasingly common."
This propagandistic narrative has bled into the U.S. presidential campaign
with Martha Raddatz, a moderator of the second presidential debate,
incorporating much of the evil-Russians theme into a question that went so
far as to liken the human suffering in Aleppo to the Holocaust, the Nazi
extermination campaign against Jews and other minorities.
That prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to repeat her call
for an expanded U.S. military intervention in Syria, including a "no-fly
zone," which U.S. military commanders say would require a massive operation
that would kill many Syrians, both soldiers and civilians, to eliminate
Syria's sophisticated air-defense systems and its air force.
Based on the recent Wikileaks publication of Clinton's speeches to
investment bankers and other special interests, we also know that she
recognizes the high human cost from this strategy. In one June 2013 speech,
she said, "To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air
defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even
if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our pilots at risk -
you're going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention
that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement
where you take a lot of civilians."
Yet, during the campaign, Clinton has spoken glibly about her own proposal
to impose a "no-fly zone" over Syria, which has become even more dangerous
since 2015 when the Russians agreed to directly assist the Syrian government
in fighting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Also, left unsaid about such a U.S. intervention is that it could open the
way for Al Qaeda and/or its spinoff Islamic State to defeat the Syrian army
and gain control of Damascus, creating the potential for even a worse
bloodbath against Christians, Shiites, Alawites, secular Sunnis and other
"heretics." Not to mention the fact that a U.S.-imposed "no-fly zone" would
be a clear violation of international law.
Over the next few weeks, we are sure hear much about the Islamic State using
the people of Mosul as "human shields" and thus excusing U.S. bombs when
they strike civilians targets and kill children. It will all be the
terrorists' fault, except that an opposite set of "journalistic" rules will
apply to Aleppo.
C 2016 Consortium News
/author/robert-parry
http://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-parry
