A growing number of Syrians in the embattled city of Aleppo harbor bitter resentment towards the violence brought by the Free Syrian Army, prompting many in the opposition to suspect they miscalculated in their campaign to win hearts and minds.
Until recently, most neighborhoods in Aleppo had been relatively insulated from the conflict. But disparate militias of rebel fighters have flooded to the city in a supposed last stand with the regime. The violence this has brought is causing much of civilian life to screech to a halt.
Reporting from Aleppo, the Los Angeles Times interviewed a father of seven in Aleppo who “is solidly opposed to Assad, but he fears the prospect of rebels who have filtered in from the suburbs seizing his neighborhood.”
“What [the rebels] did was wrong, coming in and forcing all these civilians to flee and live in schools,” he told the Times. “You came to protect civilians, but now you’re hurting them? It’s wrong what they did.”
Not only has the rebel offensive in Aleppo caused a new refugee and humanitarian crisis, but the rebels now face a growing list of accusations of grave human rights violations. Now many in the opposition fear this has hurt their chances to gain new adherents.
Meanwhile, the US and its allies have been pressed to find ways to frame their support for the rebel militias trying to overthrow the Assad regime. The opposition still represents a minority of Syria’s 20 million people, so building a narrative of aiding freedom fighters battling for a supportive population has been difficult.
And now the rebels’ ushering in of new violence and humanitarian crisis in Aleppo may have turned the population even more solidly against them.
I find it hard to believe that any significant portion of the population was ever "for" the rebels. Now that they've clearly ushered in a new area of misery and death to an otherwise peaceful city and having been forced from Damascus, the rebels could very well find themselves left out in the cold – especially if their western/Saudi backers begin to balk. Turkey is also slowly discovering that allowing the rebels to stage attacks from Turkey is not worth unsettling their Alawite population, not to mention the enormous increase in attacks from Kurdish rebels.
The west has seriously miscalculated with Syria. This exercise in "regime change" may turn into an exercise in humility for the west and its gulf despots.
I really hope you're right, especially for the thousands of innocents -women, children, the elderly- who are the most vulnerable. They are the ones that suffer the most in these circumstances, but the powerful of the world don't give a damn because for them these people's lives are worth less that those of their pets.
"This exercise in "regime change" may turn into an exercise in humility for the west and its gulf despots."
It may very well be that all the propaganda about how Assad is most certainly and positively on his way out, played up by the Western media, will fade and fail to produce the Western public support for a more robust intervention.
But power-mongers, of the sort that are behind this nasty business, are stubborn, short on humility, devoid of humanity, and don't give up — not easily — when faced with resistance — even substantial resistance — to their wishes. They just go for more bullets, bombs, bribes, and bluster. No, this is going to get worse — maybe even blow up into a major regional war — before it gets better.
Arrogance never admits to limits.
Look: The saudis and UAE been paying these people, they are on their payroll, this is not today news, the Saudis, UAE as well as Turkish government and Jordanian are all in this for the sake of US, Israel England, they are not there to free the country, even if that was the case from what is it that they wanting to free Syrian people…? We said that from day one, these terrorists and street intellectuals have no backing of the Syrian people, people in Aleppo and els where in Syria are scared of these barbarians because they are barbarians, they act as barbarians because they are the modernized version of barbarians paid and organized by the west and their allies of barbarians. If you think for a moment that Saudis kingdom don’t know about this then ask the Wahhabis and their murderous sects as Al Qaeda or those who just arrived from Libya that were and are feed by the French and English, if you think that these governments don’t knows about these barbarians and how they operate, is like and if asked about backwater.., Hillary Clinton would say that she don’t know anyone by the name of Adolph Prince, the one who started the Blackwater, the famous american mercenaries operating around the world getting paid by US State department. As US army is doing its way to scare people by killing innocent people, so are these barbarians savages, as Blackwater killed innocent people in Iraq, so is these barbarians tactics when they throw a postal worker from a building even when they have killed him, this is barbarism, as they cut a man head and his legs and his arms, thats savagery. The irony here is that US and EU think that these people will bring “democracy” and that these people are working for democratization of Syria or Libya for that matter. Look, Saudi Arabia wants to be the middle east emperor by being able to dominate the southern part of Iran, the entire Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, if they could Pakistan and Afghanistan would be part of that idea. Here the irony is that Paul Wolfowitz the father of all zionism in US have the same idea given it to Bill Clinton in writing for US to do the dirty job, so is the idea by Madeline Albright when she started using sunny muslims for dividing Yugoslavia, so is Israel which always at war with everyone in this world scaring people keeping that idea a life. Wake up America, your democracy is proven to be a false idea falsified by the day and by “democrats" at the top.
Bush and his gangs of neo fascist would kill you once, the democrats will kill you many times before they kill you for real.
So the US-supported rebels are worse than Assad? That won't make the MSM.
Nope. The American MSM is just now starting to "admit" that there are Al-Qaeda among the rebels! Really? We over here at antiwar.com have known this for over a year! If you notice whenever they "admit" it, it's always accompanied by the usual spin that these jihadist only make up a small fraction of the fighters – This too will prove to be nonsense. We've now got Youtube videos from Aleppo of them literally terroizing the population but none of these videos are given any play in the MSM…..They just ignore it.
Incredible.
america did the same in Iraq destroyed the country utterly this will not happen there are many players in this deadly game that is consuming Syria.
hearts & minds ain't working. What else we got, any ideas, duh
The article is so polite. The poor guy they interviewed made sure that he uses OBLIGATORY phrase "he is not for Assad", as this is a condition sine qua non for being interviewed by western media. Again, as in all other places these monsters took control, targets are teachers, small business owners if they do not pay ransom, postmen, government workers, social workers, street cleaning crews, road repair workers, hospital workers — etc. etc. etc.
The bottom line is, why support thugs? Why not admitt that supporting them was a mistake, and go home. This would be the only honorable thing to do. As it turned out, the armed rebellion has no support from population — never did. It has been supported by the most represive regimes in the world. It is distrubing the entire region, making it more dangerous to US long term objectives. Cui bono?
It is time to pick up the marbles and go home. But given the sensibilities of our chief diplomat, I do not think it will happen. She will want to beat heads against the wall, in hope the wall gives. Unless cooler heads preavail.
The Empire NEVER admits its wrong. Might makes right.