We celebrate the Liberation of Syria on this day last year, both for itself and what it signifies as a harbinger of the fall of the Putin regime in Russia and his mad quest for imperial conquest and dominion in Ukraine and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, possibly even the fall of his puppet tyrant Trump in the captured state of Vichy America, and in the Iranian Dominion and its Axis against democracy. An improbable series of events to unfold, but not an impossible one; not since the Liberation of Syria.
In liberating Syria from the Assad regime we not only freed a nation from a tyranny whose crimes against humanity reflected those of the Nazis on whom the regime was modeled and constructed across decades and whose agenda it perpetuated, but also took one of Putin’s key allies and fortress states away from him, dealt an enormous and possibly in the near future decisive blow to the Iranian Dominion’s Axis against democracy, avenged the 2017 betrayal by Trump of our Special Operations soldiers and Intelligence agents in Syria to Russian aerial bombardment which resulted in the deaths of American servicemen and loyal heroes of liberty, indirectly aided Ukraine and crippled Russian power projection and plans for imperial world conquest and dominion at least in the short term and may in future play a role in the fall of the Putin regime, and reshaped the future of the Middle East and its political alignments.
In Syria democracy has triumphed over tyranny, and a diverse and inclusive secular society over Islamization and sectarian conflict. And thus far it appears to be stable and viable, despite Israeli destabilization operations leveraging ethnic divisions between the Druze minority and their neighbors in preparation for an invasion which failed.
The meaning of the Liberation of Syria as a test case of Resistance to tyranny, of vital relevance to America and to all democracies under threat of similar capture and subversion, is that solidarity and a united humankind may be won through co-optation of local factional authorities, even in operational environments of extreme sectarian and ethnic divisions and authorized national identities. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, alternate realities and the schizophrenia of subjects who believe themselves to be citizens and do not question the man behind the curtain; but we can escape through disbelief and disobedience. An authority in whom no one believes has no legitimacy, and the power to compel dissolves when met with disobedience. Thus do we seize our power.
Where was I in all of this? In Damascus, ensuring that the Hayat Tahrir al Sham Army of Liberation would be greeted as saviors from tyranny and state terror and not fought to the last man by Assad’s fanatics. This was easier than it might sound, as Assad hadn’t paid his army in over three years, and countless of his citizens had lost family members to the torture chambers of his regime.
I’ve been asked why I didn’t post my theme song for Last Stands, David Bowie’s Putting Out The Fire With Gasoline from the film Inglorious Basterds, as I do in farewell to signal that I am choosing to do something from which there is no foreseeable return, when embarking for Damascus; this is because it was not a Last Stand. The Syrian Endgame for myself was merely joining a mission in progress for over a year, with vast resources at hand and established networks of alliance locally, and coordinated with Advance Echelons mainly of American Special Operations soldiers active along the HTS line of advance and falling back to Damascus just ahead of it to prepare the path of victory. The only remotely dangerous parts were when I was in Russian uniform posing as an advisor to liaise with infiltration agents and assets in Assad’s military and security services to open the way.
I never planned or intended to storm the gates of Hell and pursue Assad’s torturers and their fanatic guards into the endless warrens of their underground bastion, nor did I suspect the existence of the bioweapons program and its laboratories and factories begun by Alois Brunner, once assistant to Adolf Eichmann, on whose hideous and bizarre technologies designed to create supermen who would replace humankind the institutions of the Assad dynastic regime’s tyranny and terror were constructed. Not until after the liberation of Damascus and the freeing of Assad’s political prisoners did this become known, and an airstrike was out of the question as the whole city was undermined by hundreds of miles of tunnels like a second, secret city.
And no one knew what kind of plagues were ready to be unleashed or how, or if the weapon was something entirely different; we had to go in after it to be sure, and against an enemy with nothing left to lose and a suspected plan to unleash general annihilation there was no time to wait for a CBN threat containment force. Of the three threat response steps, containment and identification were not possible until we knew more and at best had captured a sample, leaving only warning which was sent immediately. Within thirty minutes we had assembled a team and were entering the underworld maze of a secret world created and ruled by Nazis and their successor monsters for five decades into which one hundred thousand prisoners had vanished, racing against time to prevent an unknown doom from engulfing humankind.
I’d have absolutely posted my song for Last Stands for that, if I’d had the luxury of time for such theatrical gestures. But if I had time for someone else to investigate the threat I’d have run as far and as fast as I could and holed up somewhere impregnable; I might be there still. And then I’d be short of a story, so it worked out for the best anyway as I can say I’ve followed Dante through the door marked “Abandon Hope, all you who enter here”, and returned in triumph. And if I can do this, so can you.
Further general principles of action may be drawn from this incident, the first being Solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s humanity. Our duty of care requires it, but it is also in our own best interest regardless of the personal costs. When as so often in life we are confronted with overwhelming and unstoppable force and terror designed to subjugate us through despair, abjection, and learned helplessness, we must stand together as a united front to overcome common threats. Who refuses to submit cannot be conquered, and this is a power and victory which cannot be taken from us. As the Oath of the Resistance goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was composed by Jean Genet in Paris 1940 and given by him to me in Beirut 1982, paraphrased from his oath as a Legionnaire; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
A second principle, Embrace Your Fear, concerns how we process, regard, and instrumentalize fear, especially when weaponized by authority in service to power. Let us cherish our fear and hold it close, claim it as ours and avoid being claimed by it most importantly as othering, division, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in identity politics. Life is full of unknown horrors, but we can seize their power over us by questioning and exposure, just as movie monsters are only truly scary when they remain in the shadows. Once revealed, they become threats to be assessed, strategized about, and rendered harmless; so we must explore the shapes of our fears. This is why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen include Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, that last through Disbelief and Disobedience. As my father said to me as I began my study of martial arts when I was nine, having poisoned my classmates because someone put a wad of bubble gum on my chair and I felt disrespected, and only by lucky chance didn’t bring real harm to anyone; “You have discovered politics; politics is the Art of Fear. Fear is the basis of human exchange, balanced with belonging. Those who use fear to rule others are ruled by it themselves, and if you do not fear them they will fear you; this determines dominance. Fear precedes power; so, whose instrument will it be?”
In his great opera cycle Wagner teaches us that the Ring of fear, power, and force which births states as embodied violence may be broken only by love, and love in its form as solidarity, our duty of care of each other, mercy, compassion, and empathy grants us the power to reclaim our humanity and become Unconquered, Living Autonomous Zones bearing the power to set each other free.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote on this day one year ago; We celebrate Liberation of Syria Day as the tyrant Assad flees to Russia; the living dead emerge from the underworld labyrinth of prisons and torture laboratories to which they were condemned, the monuments and propaganda of the regime are given to the flames, and the diverse peoples and communities of Syria begin to reclaim the nation that was always theirs from those who would dehumanize and enslave us, and with their independence won awaken to a world of limitless possibilities of becoming human, with no one other than ourselves the arbiter of our identity and future.
There are many blueprints and historical legacies for how such a becoming may be achieved, but no imposed orders of human being, meaning, or value, nor any better or worse ways of being human together beyond what best preserves our freedoms and universal human rights, that we each of us may discover or create our own best selves without infringing on those of others.
This is the true meaning of democracy; a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Syria is now free to struggle toward such a humankind; many forces and influences with different visions of an ideal society and future will be negotiating the boundaries of their otherness, and not always amicably, but without tyranny and the imperial dominion of foreign powers as imposed conditions of struggle that journey has now become far more hopeful.
With the Liberation of Syria, keystone of Iran’s Axis versus democracy and of the Russian Empire, we have shattered the spell of invincibility, terror, despair, and learned helplessness by which the nation, the region, and much of the world has been ensorcelled and held spellbound by Russia’s Third World War on its many fronts, and this has civilizational and world-historical consequences which will unfold across time in ways which cannot be predicted, and this is their great power as a Rashomon Gate Event of reimagination and transformation. The enemies of democracy, of our liberty and humanity, can be defeated.
We have brought the Chaos, and with luck a tidal change; in the words of the magnificent commander of Hayat Tahrir al Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, in his victory speech; “The future is ours”.
I wonder if he was quoting me; when I said it in Damascus as we welcomed him into the city I was quoting Jerzy Kosinski in his brilliant study of Soviet society The Future is Ours, Comrade; he was quoting Lenin, who was paraphrasing Shakespeare in The Tempest, Act 2 Scene 1; “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come, in yours and my discharge.” That this is a line of the treacherous murderer Antonio seems to have been forgotten or lost in translation by all and sundry, except of course for Lenin who knew exactly what he had unleashed, and Kosinski who suffered for it.
I say again, among the ruins of the first Russian fortress state to fall, the future is ours. Today we rejoice in Damascus; one day we may do the same in Moscow.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As to the history of the 2024 Liberation of Syria, here follow my journals beginning with two days before I opened the gates of Damascus.
December 6 2024 Onward to Damascus: Syria’s Assad Regime Nears Collapse; With Iran and her Hezbollah forces diverted or engaged by Israel as she makes a fiction of Biden’s Pax Americana with over one hundred violations of the peace in its first days, Syrian Democratic Forces mainly of Kurdish fighters mixed with American Special Operations Forces and some Turkish Communists, anarchists from Rojava in Syria itself, and other volunteers, on the northeast and former al Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham on the northwest are coordinating actions to make a wishbone of Syria and overthrow the loathsome Assad regime.
While the SDF and America liberate Kurdistan and her oilfields, HTS has seized Aleppo and Hama City in a blitzkrieg campaign which may well capture Damascus.
This was triggered by the performative Israeli-Hezbollah peace agreement, but also designed to buy time for Ukraine after a disastrous month and facing a second invasion force from North Korea, and very much a hail mary play by an America whose government will soon be captive of a Trump regime which will commit us not to the liberation of democracies such as Ukraine or a possible free Syria, but fully to the imperial conquest and dominion of Russia and Trump’s puppetmaster and agent handler Putin, beginning with Syria and Ukraine and ending with Russian and Iranian control of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean.
Russia currently plans to invade Poland and the Danube through the Romanian port of Constantia on the Black Sea this spring, and capture or destroy NATO bases and ability to resist conquest through the Northern Route of invasion, the Baltic and Arctic, and Britain, Canada, and others are now bolstering paper thin defenses in the region because they know what is coming. All of this is made possible because Putin’s star agent Traitor Trump will hold that door open for him. Motivation for solidarity is high, especially among the nations of a resurgent NATO under threat by Russia and a America captive to Trump and the Fourth Reich acting together, and can be leveraged to the benefit of liberty in all of the theatres of World War Three ongoing now; Ukraine and Syria obviously, but also long smouldering conflicts throughout Africa, Palestine and Lebanon, Yemen, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Libya and the contest with Turkey and France for the Mediterranean, within Russia herself, and most crucially in America where propaganda warfare and long term infiltration and subversion programmes have resulted in the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024.
We have only a few points at which the dawn of a new Russian Empire allied with the Iranian Dominion can be placed in check, and Syria is one of them. This does not mean regime change in Syria is a foregone conclusion, nor that the confused and ambiguous nature of political loyalties which is normal here will change.
Everyone fights Islamists which includes HTS and their constituent elements al Qaeda and IS both of whom HTS has long fought as well, though not as ferociously as al Qaeda and IS fight each other. Except when we are all fighting Russian and Iranian forces as we are now in Syria; this is especially curious when Saudi Arabian and Gulf states forces who are experienced in fighting Russia’s Africa Corps at the same time as they fight African IS affiliates now fight side by side with IS, al Qaeda, and Taliban fighters in the same units both in the HTS and SDF, Sunni warriors united only by a shared fury at Iranian Shia proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Elsewhere and at the same time in both the Middle East and Africa where the UAE’s ally the RSF puts Sudan to the torch in horrific ethnic cleansing, Saudi and Emirates forces fight each other for supremacy with a savagery equal to that of their sectarian conflicts with Iranian Shia forces.
Turkey backs the HTS because HTS represents something new, built by integrating its opponents and local ethnic communities which have historically proven resistant to playing well with others, and has fought both IS and al Qaeda as well as Assad’s forces though many of its fighters are former and possibly concurrent members of both. But although Turkey historically fights against and not for the mainly Kurdish SDF which otherwise is an independence movement from both Turkey and Syria, at this moment Turkey is allied with and aiding SDF, again something new and very strange.
SDF is an American ally and the de facto national army of Kurdistan; also not Islamist but pro western democracy ideologically, and easy to tell from HTS because its full of foreign fighters from everywhere, plus female Kurdish warriors famous as snipers and recce horse cavalry. SDF has units which may be official forces from France and Israel as well as America and Turkey, with the usual mercenaries, professional adventurers, and madmen like myself.
Its all very nostalgic as we find ourselves returned to the start of this conflict in 2012 with the Syrian Civil War, with clear goals of regime change and the liberation of Syria from Russian and Iranian dominion. We are also close to the conditions of Friday January 20 2017, when Trump abandoned America’s forces in Syria and sabotaged the democracy movement, with Russian bombs raining death on our soldiers while he took the Oath of Office to protect and defend our nation from all enemies foreign and domestic. This I shall avenge.
With our window of opportunity for the Liberation of Syria closing on Inauguration Day January 20 2025, and the chance that Traitor Trump may once again betray our armed forces and the cause of liberty in handing Syria to Russia, we must be swift, but also tricky. I hope to offer our enemies surprises and forms of mischief they cannot imagine or predict.
Confusion to the enemy.
Onward to Damascus!
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Syrian militants HTS seize Aleppo – and how did they do it so quickly?; “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist militant group that has surged to global attention by launching a surprise and successful offensive in Syria over the past week, has long been the country’s most powerful rebel faction. Now its tens of thousands of fighters have seized a major city, cut a strategic highway and forced the military of Bashar al-Assad into a hasty retreat across a swath of the country, opening a new phase in a 13-year civil war that many presumed was over.
What is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?
This sudden turn of events is shocking but not entirely surprising, veteran observers say.
“Everyone watching Syria knows it has been a tinderbox under very great pressure both domestically and from regional powers for years. The war has been continuing in the background … The scale of the gains made by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is surprising but not the offensive if you look at what the group has been saying and signalling,” said Charlie Winter, a Syria expert and director of ExTrac, a UK-based risk intelligence platform.
For about five years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which means Movement for the Liberation of Greater Syria, has controlled the north-western Syrian province of Idlib, where it has set up what it calls the Syrian Salvation government to run schools, clinics and courts for an estimated 4 million people. Idlib thus provides a secure territorial base but also a steady stream of funding from taxes among other resources.
The group’s forces are reportedly well-trained but lightly equipped, though heavier weapons have been seized from Syrian government troops during the advances of recent days. HTS leads a rough coalition of ideologically aligned smaller factions, including groups made up of Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen militants who have been based in Syria for many years. There may be a “smattering” of veteran western European Islamists among them, analysts said.
Where did HTS come from and who is its leader?
Formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS was originally founded by al-Qaida to exploit opportunities offered by the collapse of Syria into civil war. It was swiftly successful, building a fearsome reputation for insurgent attacks and suicide bombings against regime forces and other enemies. Though broadly committed to the same project of establishing a new Islamic caliphate based in Syria and Iraq, the group became a bitter enemy of the Islamic State, and eventually split from al-Qaida too.
The leader throughout its 13-year existence has been Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, better known as Abu Muhammed al-Jawlani, who is 42 and is thought to have been born in Syria from a family that had fled the Golan Heights after the 1967 war during which Israel occupied the mountainous area.
Little is known about Jawlani’s early years but he has described fighting with insurgents against US-led coalition forces after the invasion in 2003 before being detained with thousands of other militants in 2006. He was then imprisoned for five years in a series of US-run and Iraqi prisons before being released in 2011 and returning to Syria with six others to lead al-Qaida’s push there.
Experts say Jawlani not only distanced itself from al-Qaida but, having been targeted by Islamic State from early in the civil war, fought hard against its brutal rivals. Over the following years, Jawlani’s fighters sought, with limited success, to win the acquiescence of local communities by providing basic administration and security, rather than simply through fear. In 2021, Jawlani’s efforts to rebrand HTS culminated in an interview with US public broadcasters – though the $10m (£7.9m) reward for information leading to his arrest by US authorities remains.
This strategy led to a fierce debate among analysts. Though the US and Russia, Turkey and other states designate HTS as a terrorist group, some analysts have considered it as breaking with the extreme violence and fanaticism of many previous groups.
They point out that its aims are explicitly local, stripped of any broader vision of a much wider war against the west or Middle Eastern rulers that characterised Islamic State, and that the group has enforced Islamic codes of behaviour less strictly than many expected, recently withdrawing “morality police” from the streets after public protests.
Other experts are convinced that the group’s core thinking remains faithful to the main principles of extremist Islamist ideologies, even if its day-to-day behaviour and tactics are different. They point to thousands of arbitrary detentions in areas under its control and say any idea that HTS is a new and pragmatic form of Islamic militancy is entirely misguided.
Why launch an offensive now?
It is unclear why the HTS chose this moment to launch an offensive and recapture Aleppo, once a bastion of resistance to the Assad regime. One factor may be the military weakness of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militia that provided crucial support for Damascus but has been hard hit in its war with Israel. Another may be the distraction of Iran and Russia, both key supporters of Assad. HTS claims the “aggression” of the regime against the people of Idlib had become unbearable.
Whatever the truth, the offensive has already had a huge strategic impact. “It took 100 days for Aleppo to fall in 2016, and only 48 hours for it to be recaptured,” said Winter. “This takes us back to the middle of the last decade in terms of how the war could end.”
As I wrote in my post of February 9 2023, Lines of Fracture: Earthquake Exposes Systemic Flaws in Syria; Disaster seizes a region already destabilized and made precarious by multiple lines of fracture, wishbone of Russia and Turkey in World War Three’s catastrophic contest for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Beneath the hammer of fate and an earthquake which is among the most terrible disasters within living memory, the systemic flaws of our civilization are exposed as historical political decisions about how to be human together circle round in recursive process to seize and shake us all, like an ouroboros swallowing its tail.
One can learn much in the study of systems under stress, but what is most important here are the lives of the people caught in the gears of the great machine we serve, like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory, and the opportunity for change such destabilization offers us.
Chaos opens a gate for the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, of our possibilities for becoming human, and of new dreams of human being, meaning, and value.
In Syria and throughout the world, let us act in solidarity to establish beyond question the principle of universal human rights and the institutions of democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and forever abandon as a species all inequalities of power, divisions of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the tyranny and terror of carceral states of force and control.
As I wrote in my post of March 14 2022, Russia’s Wars of Imperial Conquest and Dominion Since 2020: the Case of Syria in the Russian-Turkish Conflict for Dominion of the Middle East; Future scholars of the genesis and development of the Third World War which has now begun may trace its faultlines in two parallel and interdependent conflicts being waged beyond the borders of Ukraine, where we are witness to the unfolding of secondary and tertiary consequences which have engulfed Ukraine like the expanding ripples in a pool into which a stone has been cast.
These conflicts are first the reconquest of former Soviet client states as a new Russian Empire, and second the imperial conflict between Russia and Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Multiple theatres of war are ongoing in both conflicts; Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the democracy movement in Russia itself are in the first category, while Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh are examples of the second.
This is the first in a series of essays in which I will address each of these theatres of war, and as the Stalingrad-like devastation of Ukraine is being compared with that of Syria and Russia’s lawless brutality and cruelty in its policies and strategies of waging war in support of Assad’s monstrous regime, I thought I’d begin with Syria.
As I wrote in my post of March 26 2021, A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party: Syria; Syria is a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of multisided issues and shifting alliances, and like Afghanistan a place where empires go to die. One is confronted here with a Great Game in which two Great Powers Conflicts are in play, one of Turkey versus Russia, and another of the Arab-American Alliance most especially including Israel versus Iran, but also one in which everyone fights Isis and Trump infamously assassinated America’s two greatest allies in that cause, Iran’s Qassem Suleimani and Iraq’s Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the national heroes of their nations.
It is also a game of conflicting and ambiguous loyalties, interests, and goals which tend to neutralize and cancel each other out; Turkey, our principal ally versus Assad and Russia, also fights two other allies versus Isis, the Kurds and Turkey’s Communists, and her use of Syrian refugees as provocations to win concessions from the European Union are among the causes of Nazi revivalism in Europe. Here also chaos reigns, and the whole region is destabilized and filled with warlords, mercenaries, tribal vendettas, oligarchic and sectarian divisions.
Chaos is a measure of the adaptive potential of a system, and where many see only its negative aspects I see also its possibilities for growth and transformation.
As I wrote in my post of January 4 2020, Cry Havoc: Consequences of the American Assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite Military Leaders; As the consequences of this event ripple outward through the medium of time, multiplying possibilities. alternate futures, transforms of ourselves and our shapings of one another, the true magnitude of the American assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite military leaders will unfold.
It is a seed of destruction, but of who?
An age of Chaos dawns, and we are abandoned to its whims and to its wantonness as it seizes and swallows the mighty, disrupts and changes power relations and structures of social form, bringer of death as an aspect of Time but also of transformation and rebirth.
Chaos which I celebrate as a principle, but which must be wielded as a dangerous and multidimensional force with great forethought and caution as we play the Great and Secret Game, for action and reaction always strike in both directions.
The magnificent Guillermo del Toro, in his gorgeous work Carnival Row which explores themes of racism and inequality among war refugees in the nation which failed to defend them from their conquerors and in harboring them finds itself confronted with an alien people as neighbors amid squalor, poverty, and social destabilization, much like many nations in our world today, depicts the formation of an alliance between two leaders of rival factions:
“Who is chaos good for?”
“Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of those in the shadows.”
To summarize the war in Syria during the past year, I recount here my posts, beginning with that of February 7 2020, Syrian Peace Accord Collapses as Turkey Invades, Turkey has invaded Syria today with an enormous column of over 400 vehicles, to control a highway in support of their allied rebel forces in Idlib which have been under sustained attack by Syrian and Russian forces since December, displacing 600,000 new refugees in a war which has driven 12 million from their homes.
This is the third time Turkey has invaded Syria during this war; the previous two were directed against the Islamic State which still controls Idlib, and the second against US allied Kurdish forces who fought the IS but also want an independent state, anathema to Turkey.
Just to confuse things further, the IS and their rivals al Qaeda had been nearly destroyed by the US before Trump ordered the abandonment of our allies as a favor to Putin, besides noninterference in the Russian conquest of Ukraine supremacy in the Middle East being the reason Russia interfered with our elections in the first place. The CIA’s Tenth Division was abandoned in place under Russian aerial bombardment when Trump was delivering his Oath of Office speech, as loyal American servicemen died. Yes, they understand that they are deniable forces and are trained to exfiltrate on their own; I mention this because this was the moment I realized Trump was a traitor and a foreign agent. With the bombs raining death on our soldiers.
February 27 2020, Syria: Victory for the Rebellion Against Assad and Russia; Syrian rebel forces backed by Turkey seize Saraqeb in a victory which isolates Assad and his Russian allies, cutting the road between Damascus and Aleppo and the main highway which acts as a supplies lifeline to the sea.
If neither side can claim victory and a new peace cannot be negotiated, Russia, Iran, and Turkey will continue to fight for dominion of the Middle East in a destructive forever war until the world abandons fossil fuels and oil becomes worthless.
If Assad’s regime of terror is utterly destroyed, which requires the decisive defeat of Russia, unlikely without American intervention, the endgame of this horrific war will devolve into myriads of sectarian and oligarchic conflicts, resulting not in liberation and a secular democracy but in fragmentation and thereafter the probable emergence of an Iranian Shia proxy state uneasily neighboring a rival Sunni fundamentalist state itself divided into al Qaeda and IS factions, splitting Syria along sectarian allegiances in a parallel of Yemen. Until the next round of proxy wars and great powers imperialism begins again.
Poor Syria seems doomed to calamity in this simplistic formulation of an intensely complex set of issues, but there are multiple paths to countless outcomes which are possible here; consider if the people of Syria destroyed the oilfields. What then would imperial powers fight to gain?
March 5 2020, Pawns in a Turkish Great Game: the Syrian Refugee Crisis; Erdoğan is driving a million refugees from his invasion of Syria into Europe in order to win concessions from the EU, using some of the world’s most vulnerable people in a game of brinksmanship where the price of its failure may be a Third World War.
Turkey challenges Russia in both Syria and Libya, engulfing both the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the threat of war; today saw Greek and Turkish special forces deployed against each other along the border, and reports of skirmishes as thousands of refugees make suicidal runs to a Europe which offers no safety and does not want them.
Refugee crises, inclusive of the one on America’s border with Mexico as well as those of Venezuela and Syria, are failures of human values as well as policy; manmade crises which reveal the depth of a government’s commitment to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Born of complex and intractable situations, refugee crises may seem like Gordian Knots of multilayered and interdependent issues, but the last decision, the one that actually sacrifices a people, is often a political choice made for a limited gain.
Our world is filled with such conundrums, in which we are offered choices between conflicting and unclear goals and values; how do we choose our side? I have been asked this literally, at times by people who are armed and with flames and gunfire in the background; whose side are you on?
To this I could answer that I am on the side of freedom versus authority, of democracy and of equality, truth, and justice. It’s the version which explains why I have chosen one thing and not another without going into easily misunderstood complexities; for example in Syria I am on the side of Turkey and America against Russia because of the brutality of Assad’s tyranny and its many abuses of our universal human rights, and I think we should take the fight to liberate Syria to the streets of Moscow. Equally do I oppose Erdogan’s tyranny in Turkey, and his policies against our allies the Kurds.
There is but one principle higher than that of Liberty, and that is the Rights of Man which derive from our condition and not our government, being universal to humankind and superseding the laws of any nation.
I have but one answer to any question of loyalty or allegiance; I am on the side of the dispossessed, the powerless, and the vulnerable.
The BBC has a great explanatory article on the history of the Syrian War; “It is now more than a battle between those who are for or against Mr Assad.
Many groups and countries – each with their own agendas – are involved, making the situation far more complex and prolonging the fighting.
They have been accused of fostering hatred between Syria’s religious groups, pitching the Sunni Muslim majority against the president’s Shia Alawite sect.
Such divisions have led both sides to commit atrocities, torn communities apart and dimmed hopes of peace.
They have also allowed the jihadist groups Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda to flourish.
Syria’s Kurds, who want the right of self-government but have not fought Mr Assad’s forces, have added another dimension to the conflict.
Who’s involved?
The government’s key supporters have been Russia and Iran, while Turkey, Western powers and several Gulf Arab states have backed the opposition.
Russia – which already had military bases in Syria – launched an air campaign in support of Mr Assad in 2015 that has been crucial in turning the tide of the war in the government’s favour.
The Russian military says its strikes only target “terrorists” but activists say they regularly kill mainstream rebels and civilians.
Iran is believed to have deployed hundreds of troops and spent billions of dollars to help Mr Assad.
Thousands of Shia Muslim militiamen armed, trained and financed by Iran – mostly from Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, but also Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen – have also fought alongside the Syrian army.
The US, UK and France initially provided support for what they considered “moderate” rebel groups. But they have prioritised non-lethal assistance since jihadists became the dominant force in the armed opposition.
A US-led global coalition has also carried out air strikes on IS militants in Syria since 2014 and helped an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) capture territory once held by the jihadists in the east.
Turkey has long supported the rebels, but it has focused on using them to contain the Kurdish militia that dominates the SDF, accusing it of being an extension of a banned Kurdish rebel group in Turkey. Turkish-backed rebels have controlled territory along the border in north-western Syria since 2016.
Saudi Arabia, which is keen to counter Iranian influence, has armed and financed the rebels, as has the kingdom’s Gulf rival, Qatar.
Israel, meanwhile, has been so concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria and shipments of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah that it has conducted hundreds of air strikes in an attempt to thwart them.
How has the country been affected?
As well as causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, the war has left 1.5 million people with permanent disabilities, including 86,000 who have lost limbs.
At least 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced, while another 5.7 million have fled abroad.
Neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which are hosting 93% of them, have struggled to cope with one of the largest refugee exoduses in recent history.
How is the country divided?
The government has regained control of Syria’s biggest cities. but large parts of the country are still held by opposition armed groups and the Kurdish-led SDF.
The last remaining opposition stronghold is in the north-western province of Idlib and adjoining parts of northern Hama and western Aleppo provinces. It is home to an estimated 2.9 million people, including a million children, many of them displaced and living in dire conditions in camps.
In September 2018, Russia and Turkey brokered a truce to avert an offensive by pro-government forces that the UN had warned would cause a “bloodbath”.
Rebels were required to pull their heavy weapons out of a demilitarised zone running along the frontline, and jihadists were told to withdraw from it altogether.
In January 2019, the truce deal was put in jeopardy when a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, expelled some rebel factions from Idlib and forced others to surrender and recognise a “civil administration” it backed.
The SDF currently controls almost all territory east of the River Euphrates.
The alliance had appeared to be in a strong position until December 2018, when President Donald Trump unexpectedly ordered US troops to start withdrawing from Syria with the territorial defeat of IS imminent.
The decision suddenly left the SDF exposed to the threat of an assault by Turkey, which has said it wants to create a “security zone” on the Syrian side of the border to prevent attacks by Kurdish fighters.
Kurdish leaders have urged the Syrian government and Russia to send forces to shield the border and begun talks about the future of their autonomous region.”
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Can Syrian rebels maintain momentum and take Damascus?; “So far the rebel advance in Syria appears unstoppable. On Friday, the columns of pickup trucks and motorbikes of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies were reported to have reached the outskirts of the city of Homs, only 100 miles (160km) from Damascus, the capital.
The extraordinarily rapid advance made by the coalition of rebel groups has stunned not only observers and regional powers but also, it appears, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. HTS swept first from its north-western stronghold into Aleppo, the country’s second biggest city, and then Hama, another major city 80 miles further south down the strategic M5 highway.
Assad’s military forces have offered negligible resistance. Poorly trained police officers have been pressed into service, with predictable results. Shortly before the rebels arrived outside Hama, Syria’s defence ministry called its defensive lines “impregnable”. The Syrian army then said it had withdrawn “to preserve the lives of civilians”.
Few are fooled by such claims, particularly from a regime responsible for such vast numbers of civilian casualties over 13 years of civil conflict. Analysts describe Assad’s military as “hollowed out” by poor morale, defections and corruption. Its retreat has left rows of armoured personnel carriers, tanks, even sophisticated Russian-supplied missile launchers and warplanes in rebel hands.
“The question is whether they can continue the momentum and go to Damascus. It looks like a huge groundswell of support for what’s happening and that reveals the brittle nature of the regime,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at London’s Chatham House.
HTS, a former branch of al-Qaida, has made efforts to soften its sectarian image and, possibly, ideology. H A Hellyer, a senior associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, said careful management of relations with diverse communities was one reason for the successes of the last week, pointing to the negotiated entry of the rebels into Ismaili Shia villages as an example. “If they could pull off that kind of approach with Alawite communities then it is all over,” Hellyer said, referring to the heterodox Shia minority of which Assad is a member and from which he draws much of his most loyal support.
There is evidence too of close coordination between rebel forces – the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army sent a convoy to support HTS when it needed reinforcements – which may allay concerns about the unity of the rebels.
This weekend may see the most significant gains yet. Homs province is Syria’s largest in size and borders Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. Homs city, parts of which were controlled by insurgents until a bloody siege in 2014, is a gateway to Damascus, as well as Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, both bastions of regime loyalists.
But anyone hoping for a decisive outcome in the coming days or even weeks may be disappointed. The rebels may not even have thought they could seize Aleppo so swiftly when they launched their offensive last week, and have come a long way very quickly. It is not clear that they will be able to use the heavy weapons or other equipment they have seized, and success could expose the deep divisions between their various factions.
At the same time, the regime’s forces may rally as the initial shock subsides. Assad is already withdrawing forces from Syria’s east to reinforce those around Damascus, ceding key cities such as Deir ez-Zor to Kurdish opposition factions.
“There is a clear level of desperation and they are concentrating defence around strongholds. The big question now is what Iran and Russia do,” said Broderick McDonald, an associate fellow at King’s College London.
Moscow, a key backer that provided much of the firepower that turned the tide of the civil war in Assad’s favour, is distracted by Ukraine but is unlikely to abandon its investment in Syria outright. Tehran too, though weakened by the conflict with Israel, will do what it can after decades of support for the Assad family. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, fought for the regime in the civil war, and may still be able to offer some assistance despite recent losses in its war with Israel. Hundreds of fighters from Iran-backed militia in Iraq are poised to cross into Syria to fight the rebels.
Then there are Gulf powers who are more likely to back the devil they know than the one they do not, particularly when the main contender is a proscribed jihadi extremist.
This weekend two annual conferences in Bahrain and Qatar will bring together many of the foreign ministers of the region, allowing unofficial discussions and possibly the formulation of a plan to roll back the rebel advance.
“This brings the whole Syrian uprising full circle,” Vakil said. “Assad survived through external support, but this is giving people another shot at the Arab spring … We are in the fog of it but for ordinary civilians this is a real moment, dangerous and uncertain but an opportunity, definitely.”
Two days after this we liberated Syria and won a victory against the Russian Empire which may have turned the fate of the Third World War in our favor; immediately following this we began the hunt for Assad’s torturers to bring a Reckoning for their decades of crimes against humanity and to avenge their countless victims, and to stop them from loosing the doom of man upon us all. Like Mariupol, Palestine, and Afghanistan, some of this unfolded for me as tunnel warfare, often a special horror.
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2024, An Underworld Journey in Damascus, Hunting Monsters; In the Red Fort, where humans once became things at the hands of the tyrant Assad’s torturers and enforcers, there is a hidden door, one among many throughout Damascus, to a vast underworld of prisons, dungeons, catacombs, armories and fortresses of last resort where once masters and slaves, the regime and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege with their enforcers and secret police and the imprisoned masses of silenced and erased others on whose exclusion on sectarian and ethnic lines the power and authority of the regime was based, lived in strange and twisted interdependence.
While others are liberating the prisoners, I am searching for the guards and torturers hiding among them.
One hundred thousand political and religious dissidents or those so judged by the regime disappeared into this underworld during the five decades of the Assad dynastic regime, with half a million killed in the thirteen year civil war.
Here the limits of the human are defined. There are doors which, once opened, cannot be closed again.
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
The idea of Monstrosity is central to my interrogation of the origins of evil in the recursive Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a system of oppression and dehumanization.
The use of social force in service to power and the illusions of security and authority obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always creates its own Resistance. Both carceral police states of force and control, surveillance, propaganda, and repression of dissent, and the liberation movements which arise as their counterforce in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, are about seizures of power and the social use of force. But there is no moral equivalence, as the imposed conditions of struggle are determined by who holds power, and responsibility for its consequences belongs to tyrants and those who would enslave us. All Resistance is War to the Knife.
Where the state as embodied violence seeks to impose law and order through centralization of power to authority and to enforce virtue as security, we revolutionaries seek to delegitimize authority, through the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and through Defining Acts of Becoming Human; Transgression of the Forbidden, Violations of Normality, Performances of Unauthorized Identities, and Subversions of Other People’s Ideas of Virtue.
The great secret of power is that alone it is hollow and brittle, and crumbles to nothingness when confronted with disbelief and disobedience. And these are powers which cannot be taken from us, to disbelieve and disobey, inherent and defining qualities of our humanity, which once seized as the power over ourselves to choose, discover, and create our identity and destiny, confer autonomy and freedom as we become Unconquered and Living Autonomous Zones.
This is what I learned about Becoming Human as an art of revolution in Beirut 1982 when Jean Genet and I defied the Israeli siege in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and a Last Stand beyond hope of victory of survival in which we expected to be burned alive, and am now illuminated by again here is Damascus 2024, beyond our maps of becoming human and the topologies of civilization, in the empty places of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons.
Be not afraid of unknowns, for they hold both beauty and horror, and are spaces of free creative play wherein we may reimagine and transform ourselves and our ideas of human being, meaning, and value. Always go through the Forbidden Door, as have I in the forty two years I have lived among the Dragons of the Unknown, and do so now in the hells below Damascus.
Here I search for the perpetrators of crimes which have no names, and for the bioweapons network of laboratories, torture chambers, and factories designed originally by Nazis seeking to transform some of us into a posthuman species of elite supermen while annihilating the rest of us, a programme of human extinction moderated only by the need for slaves and a parallel scientific organization devoted to thought control technology. The infamous Alois Brunner was not alone in creating the state of Syria under the Assad regime as an instrument of the Nazi vision of a master race, nor is Syria alone in this role as host and profiteer of Nazi terror among nations.
I, monster and hunter of monsters, wish to inscribe upon the memory of humankind and hurl in defiance into the chasms of our darkness this one true and possibly final witness; our humanity is not an imposed condition of being nor is our biology, genetics, hormones, and the morphology of our form destiny, but processes of becoming human shaped by our prochronism or the history of our choices and adaptations across vast epochs of time as a continuum of being, not national identity, nor race, nor gender, nor class, nor of any fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, not of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness of any kind, but our embrace of love over hate, hope over fear, faith in each other as solidarity over division, and of mercy, empathy, and compassion over cruelty and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
As written by Alex MacDonald in Middle East Eye, in an article entitled Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians: While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria; “The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has emptied the country’s jails.
Many of those who have emerged after years or decades of confinement are pale and starving. Frequently they bear the marks of Assad’s torturers.
Few places are worse than the sprawling Sednaya Prison, around 30km north of Damascus, where thousands are believed to have been executed in what was known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”.
The methods employed by Bashar are a continuation of those of his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria between 1970 and 2000.
Such practices were in part learned from Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who lived in Syria for more than half his life and who served as an adviser to the state on repressing dissent and establishing a regime of torture.
Alois Brunner and the Holocaust
Brunner was born in April 1912 in Vas, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the end of the 1920s he was a member of the Nazi Party, before joining the SS in 1938 following Germany’s annexation of Austria.
He was the righthand man of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust and responsible for implementing the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe. Brunner’s postings included as commandant at the Drancy internment and transit camp in northwestern Paris; and at the Breendonk internment camp along the Antwerp-Brussels highway in Belgium.
According to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner “was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews”. These included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. “He was a fanatic antisemite, a sadist and a person who was totally dedicated to the mass murder of European Jewry.”
Several interviews published during the 1980s appeared to show Brunner unrepentant about his role during the Holocaust. “All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. “I have no regrets and would do it again.”
Earlier, in an interview with a German magazine in 1985, Brunner is reported as having said: “My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.”
Brunner arrives in the Middle East
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Brunner fled using a fake Red Cross passport, heading first to Egypt and then to Syria in 1954, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Syria at the time was fertile ground for Brunner. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Nakbah (“Catastrophe”) that saw more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and land, Jewish residents of neighbouring states faced intense scrutiny and persecution.
Syrian Jews, whose population once numbered around 25,000, faced some of the harshest treatment in the region. They were forbidden to work for the government, nationally owned enterprises, and banks. When the head of a Jewish family died his property would be forfeited to the state while members of the family could only stay by paying rent to the state. Some confiscated Jewish property was handed to Palestinian refugees.
With a few notable exceptions, Syrian Jews were not allowed to leave the country, amid fears they would bolster Israel. They were the only minority to have their religion mentioned on their passports and identification papers.
In addition, post-war Syria was a highly unstable entity that regularly underwent coups, including four violent changes of power between 1949 and 1954, the first of them orchestrated by the CIA.
Brunner initially stayed at George Haddad Street in Damascus as a sublease of Kurt Witzke, a German officer and adviser to the Syrian government. But the new arrival was later to denounce his landlord, leading to the arrest and torture of Witzke and leaving Brunner as the property’s only resident.
During the 1950s, Brunner worked with fellow Nazi fugitives in Damascus, smuggling weapons, including between the Soviet Union and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria’s fight against French colonialism.
Eventually Brunner’s work was noticed by Syrian intelligence, who arrested him for interrogation. “I was Eichmann’s assistant,” he reportedly told his interrogators, “and I’m hunted because I’m an enemy of the Jews.” He was promptly hired.
Brunner’s fortunes fluctuated during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His position was eventually secured with the rise of the Arab Ba’ath Party, which seized power in March 1963, and the subsequent Assad dynasty which would govern Syria until December 2024.
Brunner and the Assad dynasty
Brunner was reportedly “spoiled” by the Baathist leaders who carried out the coup, according to Danny Orbach, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brunner’s benefits included a generous salary, a driver and regular contact with senior regime officials.
The new leadership also included eventual defence minister Hafez al-Assad, who was introduced to Brunner by Colonel Abd al Hamid Al-Sarraj.
It was while living in Syria under the pseudonym “Dr Georg Fischer” that Brunner taught Hafez Assad “how to torture”, according to Zuroff. “He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture.”
The extent and exact details of Brunner’s status and influence on Assad remain hard to verify due to the secrecy surrounding it (new information may come to light with the overthrow of the Assad dynasty).
But one torture method attributed to Brunner is the technique known as the “German Chair”, whereby a detainee has their hands and feet tied underneath a flexible metal chair which can then be bent to apply pressure to the neck and spine, resulting in paralysis or death.
Defence lawyer Andreas Schulz outlined the method at the trial of alleged Syrian war criminals in Koblenz, Germany, in December 2021. He said that Brunner was likely to have been responsible for the technique, although the Communist government of East Germany had also had links with Syria.
In a report of proceedings by the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research (SCLSR), Schulz said that Brunner “established a suppression apparatus to ensure the future of the Baath Party and the Alawites”. He managed this, according to Schulz, through mention of his relationship with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, thereby securing the post of presidential adviser to Assad, training intelligence officials and testing torture techniques.
Brunner’s first work was at an intelligence base specialising in torture in Syria’s southwest Wadi Barada valley region, the SCLSR reported Schulz as saying. But the relationship eventually soured and he fell out with Assad.
In 2017, the French magazine Revue XXI reported three Syrian security sources as stating that Brunner “trained all the leaders” of the Assad regime at Wadi Barada.
“With the help of Alois Brunner, the new Syrian president sets up a repressive apparatus of rare efficiency,” wrote Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain. “Complex, divided into numerous branches which all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalisation, this apparatus is built on a principle: to hold the country by the use of limitless terror.”
The hunt for Brunner
But Syria was not the only Middle Eastern government with an interest in Brunner: he had also attracted attention from Israel, which in May 1960 had drugged and kidnapped his former boss Eichmann, ahead of a trial and eventual execution in Israel in June 1962.
Brunner survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria in 1961 and 1980 that reportedly cost him three fingers and an eye. During the 1985 interview, he was reported to have pulled a poison pill from his pocket, swearing that he would never allow the Israelis to take him alive like they did Eichmann.
Since the end of World War Two, Nazi war criminals had always been on the radar of those who wanted to bring them to justice: during the 1950s, Brunner himself had been found guilty in France in his absence and sentenced to death.
But towards the end of the 20th century, concerted international efforts were made to track down elderly Nazi war criminals before they died and escaped justice.
Brunner was one of those still on the list: at the launch of the UN Nazi War Crimes Commission in New York in November 1987, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, held up a file about Brunner’s activities.
In March 2001, a French court again found him guilty in his absence, this time for the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region.
By July 2007, Austria was prepared to pay €50,000 for information that led to his arrest and extradition. Six years later, the Annual Simon Wiesenthal Center Report on The Status of Nazi War Criminals stated that Brunner was the “most important unpunished Nazi war criminal who may still be alive” while conceding that the “chances of his being alive are relatively slim”.
But Syria had always rebuffed attempts by France and other nations to investigate Brunner or even admit he was in the country.
The mystery of Brunner’s death
By the 1990s, Brunner’s high-profile interviews had made him a liability for his hosts in Damascus.
Revue XXI magazine suggested that Brunner died in 2001 in Damascus, aged 89, living in a squalid basement under a police station where he was quietly stowed by the authorities in 1996. The report quoted one of Brunner’s guards as saying that he “suffered and cried a lot in his final years, [and] everyone heard him”.
A second guard testified that the door to his cell was closed “and never opened again”, similar to the fate dealt to numerous prisoners in Sednaya. “We are satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well,” Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld told the AFP news agency at the time. Another report by a German intelligence official suggested to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2010 that he was dead.
The opaque nature of the Syrian state, combined with the chaos of the recent civil war, means that the true extent of the influence of Brunner and other Nazi war criminals on the Assad dynasty is still unknown.
In the years following the downfall of Nazi Germany, war crimes trials followed to ensure that those responsible faced justice. In a statement on Monday, the International Federation for Human Rights called for similar accountability for the violence inflicted on the Syrian people since 2011.
“The brutal repression unleashed on the Syrian population since March 2011 has led to nearly 500,000 deaths, displaced over 6 million refugees, and caused more than 150,000 disappearances,” it said. “These atrocities cannot go unpunished, and those responsible must be held accountable.”
The case of Alois Brunner proves that the legacy of repression in Syria originated before 2011, and in many respects can be traced back to World War Two and earlier.”
As the conversation goes in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus;
“Faust: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians
While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria
A reasonable account of a fragment of the backstory on the Liberation of Syria from open sources, though I disagree with some of the author’s interpretive claims and he seems to not know that American intelligence and special operations forces had been active in Syria for a year before the blitzkrieg, setting it up:
Covert Action in Irregular Wars: Unraveling the Case of Timber Sycamore in Syria (2012-2017)
The dead, the missing and the reunited: Three tales of Syria’s tortured prisoners
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/13/middleeast/syria-tortured-prisoners-assad-r
The Rise of Tunnel Warfare as a Tactical, Operational, and Strategic Issue
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2244191#abstract
John Spencer archive on Underground Warfare
https://www.johnspenceronline.com/undergroundwarfare
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
The History of Hell, Alice K. Turner, Donadio & Olson
The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33026.The_Dream_and_the_Underworld
La Divina Commedia #1 Inferno, Dante Alighieri, Anthony Esolen (Translator)
Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Helen Luke
Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End, Ian Thompson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211943208-dante-s-divine-comedy?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_44
Syrians celebrate fall of Bashar al-Assad after five decades of dynastic rule
Tears of joy and sadness as ‘disappeared’ Syrians emerge from Assad’s prisons
‘Our father did not die for nothing’: on the ground in Damascus, disbelief turns to jubilation
Israel, US and Turkey launch strikes in Syria to protect interests
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels free prisoners of the former president, Bashar al-Assad, who has fled to Russia
Assad’s murderous regime has been toppled – but what will fill the vacuum in Syria? Simon Tisdall
Hezbollah’s war with Israel left the Assad regime fatally exposed
Who are the main actors in the fall of the regime in Syria?
Fall of Damascus sidelines Russia and brings Turkey to the fore
Patrick Wintour
References
The Future is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians, Jerzy Kosiński
Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, Vladimir Lenin
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12985.The_Tempest?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_11
Here is my Panopticon and scrying glass of our futures, regarding the collapse of revolutions into tyrannies, illuminated by The Tempest:
The Tempest by William Shakespeare | Act 2, Scene 1 walkthrough: vengeance, power, and the subversion of the Ideal Utopian commonwealth
The Tempest – Helen Mirren – Ben Whishaw – Djimon Hounsou – Julie Taymor – 2010
A Modern Perspective: The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/the-tempest-a-modern-perspective/
Liberation of Syria Campaign of 2024
Can Syrian rebels maintain momentum and take Damascus?
Who is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leader of Syrian insurgents HTS?
Syrian insurgents close in on Homs as advance towards Damascus continues
Opposition forces enter key towns north of Syria’s third largest city after taking control of Hama
Islamist rebels seize strategic city of Hama from Syrian regime forces:
Fighters led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group rout government troops after five-day battle amid sweeping offensive
Syrian insurgents advance on Hama city after capturing Aleppo
Seizure of Aleppo threatens Moscow’s foothold in Syria – and the wider region
Islamist militants take control of Aleppo – in pictures: Syrian militants led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched an offensive on 27 November, taking control of large parts of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city
Who controls what territory in Syria?
War broke out in 2011 following the government’s repression of peaceful pro-democracy protests and has spiralled into a complex conflict
Why did Syrian militants HTS seize Aleppo – and how did they do it so quickly?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/15/crime-assad-regime-aleppo-war-dead-syria-forensic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war
February 25 2024 First General History of the Third World War
Syria, a reading list
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami
The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, Samar Yazbek, Nashwa Gowanlock (Translator), Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Translator)
The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, Alia Malek
No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, Rania Abouzeid
Syria’s Secret Library: Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege,
Mike Thomson
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, Wendy Pearlman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32051585-we-crossed-a-bridge-and-it-trembled?ref=rae_7
Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, Marwan Hisham, Molly Crabapple (Illustrator)
My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution, Diana Darke
Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising, Jonathan Littell, Charlotte Mandell
(Translator)
Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect,
Reese Erlich, Noam Chomsky (Foreword)
Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years, John McHugo
The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, Charles R. Lister
Syria: Descent Into The Abyss 2011-2014, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Kim Sengupta
Torch of Liberty 