Reports in the Turkish media cite sources within their security system as saying the Free Syrian Army’s Islamist-leaning faction, the al-Qaeda-allied Syria Revolutionaries Front (SRF), has abandoned the northern city of Aleppo in the face of a Syrian military offensive, and that the faction’s leader Jamaal Marouf, has fled to Turkey to be protected by the Erdogan government.
The report claims some 14,000 SRF fighters were in Aleppo, which would be virtually the entire group. They had previously operated out of northern Homs and southern Idlib, where they helped al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front seize territory from the military.
The group’s nominal association with the Free Syrian Army was used as a major source of claims that early Russian airstrikes against Nusra-affiliated targets were actually targeting the FSA in general, which is overwhelmingly secular.
The group had interests in Aleppo, but it is unclear how, after being routed from Homs, they managed to relocate their entire operation into the contested city. The significant number of fighters apparently did not make a big difference, either in the multi-year stalemate in Aleppo when they arrived or in slowing he ongoing Syrian offensive aimed at recovering the city.
It’s not possible to win a guerrilla war.
All Russia/Syria/America is doing is destroying entire cities making them uninhabitable, along with causing mass civilian casualties and creating refugees. Turkish officials have warned that they couldn’t take in any more refugees.
Let the Islamic State collapse by itself. The Islamic State is not like Nazi Germany. Many of the allegations of genocide against Christians, Shiites and Yazidis are untrue or exaggerated. There is no clear evidence that there was a “Sinjar massacre” by the Islamic State.
The Iraqi government is corrupt and brutal. ISIS is a resistance group against the Iraqi government and Iran-backed Shiite militias. The Iraqi government shoots peaceful protesters, shells and bombs residential areas. The Iraqi government detains Sunni Arabs. Its prisons have 30,000 to 50,000 detainees and 20% of those are killed by torture. The Iraqi government has lost its legitimacy to hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs; hundreds of thousands protest against the Iraqi government each week.
A lot of Sunni Arabs tolerate the Islamic State more than the Iraqi
government in Baghdad. They are willing to passively accept the Islamic State and even ally with them to fight the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government is so brutal that the secular former Ba’ath party members and Sunni Arab tribesman would ally with the Islamic State rather than the Iraqi government.
The solution is to stop funding the official Iraqi government. In this way it could compromise and grant more rights to Sunni Arabs. Sunni Arabs in Iraq have already stated that there will inevitably be resistance groups (like ISIS) unless the official Iraqi government is fixed.
Turkey meanwhile, continues to effectively use the refugees it so altruistically lets in — all nations, after all, have national interests except noble Turkey — so as to leverage that pressure on EU, thus leaving us with Merkel who is now pushing for a no-fly zone in N. Syria.
This is not to say that the Iraqi government, including KRG, isn’t a paradigm of corruption and cronyism. The Shi’ite militias, just like Maliki, have done wonders for Daesh — in that I fully agree.
Furthermore, Putin is effectively pursuing a copy-cat version of the cynical strategy he employed in Grozny: push civilians out of cities so as to better bomb the opposition into silence. Only in this case, his moves in Syria have the added bonus of sowing disagreement among the US and its (nominal) allies through increased refugee pressure.
3 D–If America hadn’t forced Assad/Saddam/Kaduffy to dispose/destroy their ChemStocks, they could have been used against the vermin in the major cities and saved the structures.
If you have a heavy infestation of rats in your home ?–you wouldn’t set fire to it.
Now you know why America did what they did.
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The “vermin” include Assad’s forces as well.
The Assad government detains allegedly those who oppose the regime or people are insufficiently loyal to it and some of them are tortured, raped and killed. Relatives of the dead detainees have identified them as everything from civilian activists, to those who is caught recording Assad’s forces, to teenagers whose crime was listening to anti-Assad music. There are 50,000 detainees at any one time and thousands have been killed. The Assad army executed captured soldiers and civilians and even beheaded people in the Bayda and Baniyas massacres. The Assad government had executed prisoners in response to defeat by the Islamic State.
https://www.hrw.org/node/284486
http://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/out-sight-out-mind-deaths-detention-syrian-arab-republic-enar
https://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayda_and_Baniyas_massacres
I’m not suggesting that the U.S. should attack Assad. I’m suggesting that Putin should not defend Assad. The U.S. should also stop funding and arming the Iraqi government as it is brutal as well.
The speed with which they can move around might be explained by phantom soldier syndrome, where each real fighter claims the identity and pay off 10 more fighters who never existed.
Did you notice that your source is from November 2014? This happened two years ago.
Apart from that I would rather prefer righteous islamists than massmurder secularist that kills his own people. aj