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Home > Ignored By Western Media, Syrians Describe the Nightmare the Armed
Opposition Brought Them
Ignored By Western Media, Syrians Describe the Nightmare the Armed
Opposition Brought Them
By Rania Khalek [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 15, 2017
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Supporters of the Syrian opposition have relentlessly demanded that Western
observers listen to "Syrian voices." The idea is that by absorbing the
testimonies of Syrians who have experienced the violence of the conflict
first hand, Westerners will know how to best help them. Yet Western media
consumers have scarcely heard from ordinary people who reside within the
areas controlled by the government -- the areas where the vast majority of
Syrians live. Indeed, the voices of Syrians like Areej, one of many people I
spoke to inside Syria's government-held areas for this report, present a
testimony that is simply too inconvenient for Western media to consider.
Areej was a university student in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2012 when the
American-backed Free Syrian Army captured the eastern half of the city. She
had participated in student protests against the Assad regime and was
initially sympathetic to the armed insurgents. Nowadays, however, she
regrets protesting at all and even blames herself for her country's descent
into war.
"I was with the demonstrations," Areej told me when we met in Damascus. "At
the beginning of the war it was for freedom. But if I could go back to four
years ago, I would not have gone out to the demonstrations because I didn't
want the situation to become like this. We regret it."
Once the armed opposition besieged [3] the government side of Aleppo in 2013
where Areej and the vast majority of the city's 1.4 million residents lived
at the time, they cut off the electricity and the water supply. Life became
intolerable. Disillusionment with the uprising turned into resentment and
before long, Areej fled to Damascus.
She became even further disturbed by the rebellion after her family's
village Jisr al-Shugour, located in Idlib Governorate, was seized [4] by
insurgents in 2015.
When Areej visited her family the following year, she was shocked at what
she discovered. Suddenly trapped under Taliban-style rule, Areej was forced
to cover from head-to-toe. "I stayed one year and a half without seeing my
family. I hugged my father in the street and asked, am I going to get you in
trouble for hugging you in public since I am a woman?" she recalled.
The insurgents renamed the center of the town "Slaughter Square," publicly
punishing people there for moral code violations like smoking and adultery.
Areej complained, "The style of the armed groups is disgusting. Their beards
are like 5 meters long. They think they are living like in Mohammed's time.
They are wrong. And anyway, we are in 2017. They think they are in 1014
Islamic State."
Many of the armed groups Areej came across were made up of non-Syrian Salafi
Jihadists who could not speak the local dialect. In many cases they couldn't
speak any Arabic at all. "There was a group from China, Kazakhstan, another
from Pakistan, another with fighters from France," she said, rolling her
eyes. Indeed, there are thousands of Chinese foreign fighters who joined the
jihad in Syria. Calling themselves the Turkistan Islamic Party, they helped
spearhead the seizure [5] of Areej's village. But they weren't alone.
Each street corner seemed to be controlled by a different faction. Every
faction spray painted their name on the walls to demonstrate their claim
over a street. She remembers on one wall where a rebel group inscribed the
popular slogan, "Democracy is the religion of blasphemy."
Areej noticed that much of the graffiti was scrawled by foreigners. "The
groups that are governing the area my family is from wrote their names on
the walls in bad Arabic," Areej recalled, shaking her head in disdain. Her
hometown was suddenly teeming with Frenchmen. "Syrian people are dying to
reach France while people from France come here to kill Syrians," she
complained.
She eventually helped her family escape Jisr al-Shogour. They joined her in
Damascus where they are internally displaced refugees dependent on UN aid.
"There are no winners," said Areej. "All of the countries-Russia, Iran,
America, Saudi Arabia-they are playing with us. We are like toys." Yet she
still wants the government to vanquish the insurgents because the
alternative they present to Assad is so terrifying.
Worst media coverage in modern history
The voices of Syrians like Areej simply do not fit within the accepted
narrative that justifies the West's geopolitical aims. And it is wholly out
of line with the content that dominates the Qatari state outlet Al Jazeera,
which has functioned as a 24/7 vehicle for the Syrian armed opposition. And
so she and others like her have been ignored.
Like 18 million Syrians, Areej lives under the control of the Syrian
government. Seven million of them are internally displaced refugees who have
fled from the areas conquered by the insurgents and ISIS. Only about 2.5
million people live under the opposition's control, while some 1.8 million
live in areas dominated by ISIS.
The coverage of Syria by Western media contains little resemblance at all to
the lived experiences described to me by the people I met when I visited the
areas where most Syrians live in 2016.
Having watched for years as Syrian expatriates promoting regime change from
abroad occupy the limelight, Syrians inside the country have developed a
strong sense of resentment.
In the United States, two of the Syrians most prominently featured by
mainstream media are Lina Sergie Attar, CEO and co-founder of the Karam
Foundation, and Zaher Sahloul, the former head of the Syrian American
Medical Society (SAMS). Both have been pushing for years for the US to bomb
Syria, and have set up advocacy arms to promote their aims.
Writing under the pen name Amal Hanano for Al Jazeera in 2013, Attar
agitated [6] for the US to go to war against the Syrian government. She
claimed to be speaking on behalf of Syrians but she hasn't been to the
country since 2008.
Despite providing medical services in areas controlled by Al Qaeda's local
affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Sahloul's SAMS has received millions in
support from the US Agency for International Aid and Development. Both his
organization and Karam have collaborated [7] on Syria with the Zionist and
Islamophobic Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago. They have therefore
been branded with the Western media's stamp of approval.
Attar was a guest on Democracy Now the day after President Donald Trump
bombed Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack that the US blamed on
the Syrian government. "I am very happy [8] that there is one less airfield
for Bashar al-Assad to use to kill his own people," Attar told Amy Goodman.
However, residents near the targeted al-Shayrat airbase told [9] the LA
Times that the base was instrumental in protecting them from ISIS.
Zaher Sahloul, another vocal advocate for US military intervention who has
also appeared on Democracy Now, claims that SAMS provides medical care in
opposition areas, but never specifies that these areas -- like eastern
Aleppo before the government recaptured it or Idlib today -- are under the
control of Salafi Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda. In Idlib, the
Al-Qaeda-controlled area where SAMS supports the rebel-run administration,
"schools have been segregated, women forced to wear veils, and posters of
Osama bin Laden hung on the walls," according to Joshua Landis [10], the
director of the University of Oklahoma's Middle East Studies Center.
During my trip to Aleppo, the center of the Western media's attention and
one of the most misunderstood places on Earth, I met Sameer, a 28-year-old
Aleppo native and Aleppo University graduate. (Sameer asked me to change his
name to protect him from retaliation by extended family members who have
joined rebel groups). He complained to me that pro-interventionist Western
Arabs who dominate the narrative come from one of two camps.
"Most Syrians in the West who are today's pro-opposition activists are
descendants of Syrian and Egyptian-expelled Muslim Brotherhood families or
they are ex-aristocrats who lost their lands due to socialist policies in
the 1950s and 60s," he told me. "Now they speak out against the government
from the safety of America."
His description reminded me of right-wing Cubans who formed a vast apparatus
in Miami to lobby for overthrowing Cuba's communist government or shady
influencers like Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who convinced Washington
power brokers that he would usher in a democratic, Israel-friendly
government if it agreed to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Before the war, Sameer was just out of college and earning $350 monthly as a
sales manager. Today, because of inflation [11] due in large part to
draconian [12] US and EU sanctions pushed [12] by Western opposition
activists, he works twelve hours a day, six days a week and makes about $47
a month.
One reason rebel groups still have fighters is because they pay salaries to
average Syrians, especially in areas where the state has been expelled,
where residents are most desperate to feed their families. With the Syrian
economy teetering on the edge of collapse, the sanctions provide the armed
groups with an endless stream of economically desperate recruits. In other
words, Western sanctions are fueling the war.
Sameer is among the 18 million Syrians -- over75 percent [13] of the
country's population -- that live in government-controlled areas. Like
Areej, he supports Syria's government out of strong opposition to the
religious fundamentalism and brutality of the armed groups, which they
perceive as a foreign invasion force that will eradicate their families if
they win.
The US media tends to avoid any factual analysis of the rebels, their goals
or their extremist ideology. In doing so, they avoid some of the most
crucial questions of the conflict: Who will succeed Assad if his government
collapses? And what will happen to the two million Christians, the Shia
minorities, and the masses of secular Syrians who have no place under the
religiously exclusivist rule the Salafist insurgents have imposed on areas
they control?
A recently published report [14] by the London-based IHS Jane Terrorism and
Insurgency Centre hinted at the answer. The report found what has always
been obvious to Syrians living in government controlled areas: the Islamic
State, or ISIS, is the Syrian government's chief opponent and would be the
primary beneficiary of regime change. "Any further reduction in the
capability of Syria's already overstretched forces would reduce their
ability to prevent the Islamic State from pushing out of the desert into the
more heavily populated western Syria, threatening cities like Homs and
Damascus," the report concluded.
To avoid acknowledging inconvenient truths, American media tends to shift
all the blame for the conflict onto the Syrian government, spinning out a
convenient narrative of a one-sided war pitting a cartoonishly evil regime
that enjoys killing children against a ragtag team of freedom fighters who
were forced to take up arms to protect Syria's civilian population. Assad is
invariably portrayed as a uniquely evil figure with no rational capacity --
an "animal," as Donald Trump called him -- while the atrocities committed by
his Western-backed adversaries, most recently in Rashidin, where over 80
Shia evacuees, mostly women and small children, were slaughtered by a
suicide bomber, are ignored or whitewashed.
For the Western mainstream media, the very existence of Syrians like Sameer
-- ordinary people who have been forced into a corner and who now view the
government in Damascus as the only thing standing between themselves and
life (or death) under Salafi-Jihadist warlords -- is perhaps the most
uncomfortable reality of the conflict.
Even the progressive American left, which has traditionally been skeptical
of pro-war propaganda, has bought into the mainstream version of the Syrian
conflict. Across the political spectrum, from the New York Times to
Democracy Now - the supposed bastion of alternative media - we hear
strikingly similar talking points supporting intervention. The impact of
such coverage on the antiwar movement cannot be overstated. In private,
leftists of all stripes tell me that they are afraid to speak out against
the destruction of another state under the guise of humanitarian
intervention for fear of being mocked as "anti-imperialists" or accused of
Islamophobia and "Assadism."
American media outlets from right to left seem to imagine that there is a
democratic mass movement living in Al Qaeda's Idlib [10]. Or they insist
that the uprising was always moderate and democratic until Assad's bombs
transformed protesters into armed and radical insurgents, a common talking
point that permeates any discussion of Syria. According to Syrian protesters
I spoke to, both of these claims are at best simplifications, and at worst,
complete myths.
Two revolutions
From the perspective of the Syrians I met who witnessed the protests of
2011, there was never one single unified democratic uprising. Some protests
were led by idealistic young people who wanted basic democratic reforms.
Others were religiously conservative and devoted to Islamist oriented
demands.
"There were always 2 parallel streams in the Syrian uprising at the
beginning. The civil activists who wanted democratic reform and change in
the form of a secular state, and the conservative stream, which was markedly
more Islamist and sectarian in its tone and demands," Edward Dark, an
activist from Aleppo who participated in the city's pro-democracy protests,
told me.
"The former was mostly urban, the latter rural," he explained. "As the
uprising went on and the violence intensified, the civil movement became
increasingly silenced and weak, while the Islamist movement became quickly
more militant and radicalized."
Video footage of an anti-regime protest in the Syrian city of Baniyas [15]
on March 18, 2011, for example, shows an imam listing protester demands,
including a call for gender segregated schools and for women teachers to
wear the niqab, both practices banned by the regime. His demands were met
with raucous cheers, applause and religious chants from a large, all-male
crowd of demonstrators. These videos were often promoted by US media as
proof of Syria's democratic uprising at the time. But few observers bothered
to listen to what the protesters were actually saying.
Opposition activists in the Syrian village of Hula echoed these same
right-wing demands to journalist Nir Rosen in 2011. "They were upset about
the ban of the niqab, or full veil, on women in public schools - while the
medical student complained that the books of the medieval Islamic scholar
and Salafi source, Ibn Taimiya, were banned," Rosen reported [16] at the
time.
Of course, there were pro-democracy protests, but the uprising failed to
spread along any unified political lines. The revolt presented a mix of
religious conservatives and democratic-minded reformers. Depicting these
disparate groups as one in the same would be the equivalent of conflating
left-wing American protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives
Matter with the right-wing Tea Party protests or Trump rallies.
According to Dark, "most civil activists refused to support an armed
uprising, and either went into exile and remained silent, or became active
on a solitary basis. Those who switched to the armed camp did so mostly out
of sectarian, or personal reasons (revenge over a death for example). The
rest who remained either turned their back on the armed uprising, or
actually turned against it as they saw it was now being used a vessel to
destroy the country and no longer championed any ideals of freedom and
democracy and instead encompassed a violent Islamic extremism that was
contrary to what they were struggling for."
"The wake-up call for me was when rebel groups from the neighboring towns
stormed Aleppo in spring 2012, bringing with them a wave of violence,
looting and destruction the likes of which Aleppo hadn't seen in centuries.
A particular incident I can clearly remember was seeing black Qaeda flags at
a checkpoint in my city, and having a foreign fighter ask Syrian people for
their IDs. That's when I knew everything had gone horribly wrong, and it was
all over for our side of the 'revolution'," he said.
Dark was heavily attacked for refusing to support the armed insurrection.
"Those outside Syria called me a traitor for turning my back on what they
still saw as a 'Syrian revolution' as was to be expected from people who
never lived and saw what we did and only got their news from social media or
global news networks," he said.
"Most Syrians also seem to think the Syrian regime is infinitely more
preferable to the anarchy of a failed state ruled by extremist Islamists. I
would invite anyone who thinks the opposite to come to Syria and try living
in rebel vs regime controlled areas, or to imagine that some of those rebels
he supports came over to his city and took over power there," he added.
As another Syrian told me, "We are trapped between a police state and al
Qaeda. Of course I choose the police state." For many Syrians they prefer a
state to no state at all.
Getting sectarianism wrong
Anas Joudeh, an attorney and political activist in Damascus, says he and his
colleagues, not the armed groups, represent the real opposition in Syria.
Joudeh heads the Nation Building Movement, a civil society opposition group
that works to build domestic and organic nonviolent opposition from within
the country.
"I will not accept anybody from Ahrar al Sham or Jaish al Islam or
Mujahideen or whatever guy in those ranks to be at the table of the
political discussion. If we do that, what next? Should we appoint Ahrar al
Sham as Defense Minister of Syria? They will kill me. I'm not talking about
minorities. I, who was born to a Sunni Muslim family from Damascus, will not
accept this. They will attack me first," he told me when we met in Damascus
late last year.
Joudeh was ecstatic at the eruption of protests in 2011 but quickly became
disenchanted with the sectarian flavor of the insurgency. After some of the
opposition took up arms and began to organize into Islamist factions, Joudeh
stepped in to help mediate between the government and the armed groups and
was close to reaching a negotiated ceasefire. But the emergence of ISIS
changed everything.
"Everything collapsed when ISIS took Mosul," Joudeh told me. "The armed
groups in Aleppo and in Idlib said we can't have any kind of negotiation
with the regime now because our guys will go to ISIS and we will lose
everything. We have to keep some kind of balance with ISIS. So they said we
will not attack ISIS because we are brothers with the same ideology. They
are Muslims like us. The whole scene changed. You have to look now for the
civilians under their control, but [the armed groups] are out of the
equation," recalled Joudeh.
Joudeh strongly disagrees with the notion, common in US media and among
opposition advocacy groups operating in the West, that the Syrian government
is committing genocide against the country's Sunni population.
"It's always easy to have a simple view of what's happening. That's the
problem with the Americans," he commented. "They think it's all sectarian.
But until now we didn't have this religious war in Syria. If you go to
Tartous and Latakia you have almost one million refugees from Idlib. The
regime is not an Alawite regime. It's an oligarchy. It's about
self-interests."
Joudeh pointed to Aleppo as an example: "The western side of Aleppo [that
was] controlled by the regime is mainly Sunni. And they are totally
pro-regime. The roots of the crisis are mainly social not religious."
The stakes
The armed insurgency seeking to topple the government, on the other hand, is
exclusively Sunni and has openly expressed genocidal ambitions that Western
media tends to downplay, if not ignore altogether.
The insurgency;s sectarianism is even more dominant today given that the
vast majority of the rebellion has merged with Al Qaeda [17], whose leader,
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, called [18] on the group's Syria affiliate to "prepare
yourselves for a long battle with the Crusaders and their allies, the
Shiites and Alawites."
Syria may be a dictatorship but it is also a religiously pluralistic and
culturally rich society that would be shattered by a Salafi-jihadist
takeover.
Mahmoud Abdel Latif al Jamil Ahmed was an Imam in East Aleppo in 2012 when
it was captured by rebels. He worked at the endowment ministry of liaisons
affairs. He told me he was arrested by the insurgents and charged with the
following crimes: Writing in a newspaper they did not like, naming his son
Hassan Nasrallah (after the leader of Hezbollah) and failing to instruct his
congregants to protest the Assad regime after Friday prayers.
On June 27, 2012, he says he was almost assassinated "because I did not
agree with their [the rebels] ideas. They tried to shoot me. They killed 11
sheikhs, four of whom were working with the endowment ministry."
Another Imam who asked to go by Dr. Rami, added, "They are the enemy of
humanity. The mosaic we are living with in Syria is incompatible with them.
Those killing Sunnis are the same as those claiming they are defending
Sunnis."
He blamed the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia for inciting fanaticism
that is antithetical to Islam. "Our religion calls for tolerance and free
speech," Rami insisted. "How far are the terrorists from these concepts?" He
referenced the role of Saudi-born clerics like Abdullah al-Muhaysini, whom
he called "Al Qaeda's "rock star Sheikh," in inspiring rebel atrocities.
In Aleppo, I also met the city's Bishop Youssef Tobji, a leader of the
city's threatened Christian Maronite community. "If you respect us, please
don't say 'rebel' in front of us," Tobji demanded. "They killed our
children, our history. They are terrorists."
The bishop then turned to me and asked how America, the target of the 9/11
attacks, could arm groups associated with Al Qaeda and then have the
audacity to glorify such people as rebels. I struggled to offer him an
answer.
Rania Khalek is an independent journalist living in the Washington D.C.
area.
