The Middle East is falling apart at the seams

Painting by Syrian artist Wissam Al Jazairy

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of al-Hayat newspaper, penned this think piece in Arabic for today’s edition

Times are hard for the Middle East. It has to find a recipe for coexistence, drawing in the Muslims, Jews and Christians, which is not easy.

It has to search for a coexistence formula binding the Turks, Persians, Kurds, Arabs and others and a coexistence blueprint joining ethnicities, nationalities, religions and sects. This is not simple either.

Long lulls are deceptive. They feign that old conflicts have been assigned to the history books. This is not true -- any sudden twist is liable to rekindle old feuds streaming with blood.

Nation-states that were configured in the aftermath of World War One either curbed these conflicts or gave them other names. Once these nation-states’ repressive machines crack, the old demons resurface.

We’re clearly on the way to a ghastly, rather than a new, Middle East – one where the coexistence chapter drawing together its various components ends, heralding the reconfiguration of nation-states and maps.

We are unmistakably facing something more cataclysmic than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of Yugoslavia.

We are facing a Nakba worse than the 1948 Nakba of the Palestinian people, one marking the demise of coexistence.

We are into violent cross-border designs and aspirations tackling maps like an inmate treats his prison walls.

Don’t accuse me of being a prophet of doom. The pointers are everywhere in the print and audiovisual media, supported by rivers of corpses and declarations promising endless wars.

A suicide attacked a Husseiniya (Shiite house of worship) in Kirkuk, and the response was a spectacular offensive against Sunni mosques in or near Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed remnants of the “Baath” and “sectarian hatred.” His adversaries accused him of being a “sectarian bigot.”

Protesters in al-Anbar province treat the Iraqi army as a “Shiite militia” or the cover for one.

The Sunnite Iraqi says he won’t accept to be a second-class citizen, which is what the Shiite Iraqi was saying in decades past.

We’ve moved from the Arab-Kurd crisis to a Sunni-Shiite-Arab-Kurd predicament. It’s as if the whole Middle East has turned into the knotty problem of the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Both sides in the Syria war are keen to deny its sectarian character. One side paints it as a war on inflowing terrorists and the opposite side depicts it as a revolt against a dictatorship.

So how do we explain the presence of Chechen fighters in Idlib, the arrival of Libyans to support their Sunni brethren or a funeral for a young Iraqi in Basra killed defending the Shiite shrine of Sayyeda Zeinab in Damascus?

Also, how do we explain the funeral for a young Sunni in the North Lebanese port city of Tripoli killed trying to infiltrate into Syria and the funeral for a Hezbollah member felled while on “jihadist duties” there?

Why does the Sunni Lebanese support the Syrian revolution and the Shiite Lebanese hinder it?

Why didn’t Alawites flee before rebels entered their villages or Sunnis take to their heels before government and allied forces stormed their townships?

Do the slogans of “objection” and “resistance” justify the military involvement of Iran and its allies in the Syria war? The counter-meddlers could be asked the same question.

What you hear in Lebanon, which used to be a model of and a proving ground for coexistence, is worrisome and unnerving.

Yesterday, I heard a prominent member of Gen. Michel Aoun’s “Free Patriotic Movement” accuse other Christians of treason. His charge sheet says the other Christians agreed to an electoral law allowing Muslims to have a weighty say in the election of 10 Christian legislators out of the 64 allotted to Christians in parliament.

A retreat to self-made islands won’t solve either Lebanon’s problems or the problem of its minorities. The biggest danger for Lebanon now is the growing number of risk-takers walking on thin ice.

Clearly, we are toughing out the eclipse of coexistence.

Our nation-states, our societies and our armies are breaking up.

The inviolability of international borders has evaporated. We’re in the midst of a regional civil war caused by a stream of cross-border projects. I am afraid we’re on the way to a period awash with statelets, militias, cemeteries and “cleansed regions.”

Assad cedes provincial capital, is ambushed in Iraq

The ambush was near Akashat (center), inside Iraq, not far from the Syrian border (Map from Euronews)

The Damascus and Baghdad governments were dealt a spectacular body blow each yesterday.

In one blow to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, Syrian militants scored one of the biggest gains of their two-year revolt by capturing the strategic northern city of Raqqa.

Situated on the highway to the major northeastern towns of Qamishli, al-Hasakah and Deir Ezzor, Raqqa is the first Syrian provincial capital to fall into opposition hands.

In another blow to Assad and his ally, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, 48 Syrian and nine Iraqi soldiers were killed in an ambush near Akashat, inside Iraq, not far from the Syrian border.

Iraqi officials said the Syrians had sought refuge through the Rabi’a border crossing in northern Iraq during recent clashes with rebels and were being escorted back home through a different crossing farther south when the ambush occurred.

The fact the Syrian soldiers were on Iraqi soil at all raised questions about Baghdad’s perceptible willingness to help Assad’s embattled regime by stealth.

Maliki told The Associated Press last week a victory for Syrian rebels would spark sectarian wars in Iraq and Lebanon (see my Feb. 28 post, “Iran proxies growl: Hands off Assad”).

“If truth be told,” political analyst Elias Harfouche writes today for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, “what risks destabilizing Iraq is its prime minister’s prejudiced meddling in the Syria crisis,” his corruption and his blackballing of Iraq’s Sunnites and Kurds.

Noting that this month marks the 10^th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Harfouche evokes the expression “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

In the same vein, he says, you can rid a country of a tyrant, but you can’t turn it into a democracy if its regime balks at the concept.

To prove his point, Harfouche cites the case of Iraq, where he says Maliki’s “democracy” is worse than Saddam’s dictatorship. He also quotes from the first two of a six-part series on “today’s Iraq” penned by Patrick Cockburn for The Independent.

According to Cockburn:

Iraq is disintegrating as a country under the pressure of a mounting political, social and economic crisis, Iraqi leaders say.

They add that 10 years after the U.S, invasion and occupation the conflict between the three main communities – Shiite, Sunnite and Kurd – is deepening to a point just short of civil war...

The record of failure of post-Saddam governments, given the financial resources available, is astounding. One of the reasons many Iraqis welcomed the fall of Saddam in 2003, whatever their feelings about foreign occupation, was that they thought his successors would restore normal life after years of sanctions and war. To their astonishment and fury this has not happened, though Iraq now enjoys $100bn a year in oil revenues. In Baghdad there is scarcely a new civilian building to be seen and most of the new construction is heavily fortified police or military outposts. In Basra, at the heart of the oilfields, there are pools of sewage and heaps of uncollected rubbish in the streets on which herds of goats forage...

Theft of public money and incompetence on a gargantuan scale means the government fails to provide adequate electricity, clean water or sanitation. One-third of the labor force is unemployed and, when you include those under-employed, the figure is over half. Even those who do have a job have often obtained it by bribery...

The rule of Nouri al-Maliki, Prime Minister since 2006, has become a near dictatorship with highly developed means of repression, such as secret prisons, and pervasive use of torture. He has sought to monopolize control over the army, intelligence service, government apparatus and budget, making sure that his supporters get the lion’s share of jobs and contracts...

As the pre-eminent leader of the Shiites, three-fifths of the population, he alarms them by suggesting that their political dominance is under threat from the Sunni, a fifth of Iraqis, once in charge under Saddam but now marginalized. Last year, Maliki sought to unite Sunnite and Shiite Arabs against the Kurds, another fifth of the population, by massing troops and threatening to invade Kurdish-controlled but disputed areas.

The Sunni had suffered shattering defeats with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the formation of a Shiite-Kurdish government and loss of the sectarian civil war. But the conflict in Syria marked a change for the better in Sunni fortunes. They have been emboldened by the bid for power of Syria’s Sunni majority just across the border from their own heartlands in Anbar and Nineveh provinces...

Maliki may employ a million men in different branches of the Iraqi security forces. In most countries this would guarantee government control, but in practice Maliki only has full authority in about half the national territory. He has no power in the northern third of the country held by the Kurds and increasingly limited influence in Sunni areas...

A few months before the invasion, an Iraqi civil servant secretly interviewed in Baghdad made a gloomy forecast. “The exiled Iraqis are the exact replica of those who currently govern us… with the sole difference that the latter are already satiated since they have been robbing us for the past 30 years,” he said. “Those who accompany the U.S. troops will be ravenous.”

Many of the Iraqis who came back to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion were people of high principle who had sacrificed much as opponents of Saddam Hussein. But fast-forward 10 years and the prediction of the unnamed civil servant about the rapacity of Iraq’s new governors turns out to have been all too true. As one former minister puts it, “the Iraqi government is an institutionalized kleptocracy”…

Last week, Harfouche recalls, Maliki warned that a victory for the opposition in Syria would lead to “a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian conflict in Iraq.” His warning echoed Assad’s earlier threat – namely, that sparks from his regime’s fall would ignite the entire region.

Harfouche says the alarming trade-off being proposed is this: we [Assad and Maliki] shall keep the peace in Syria, Iraq and the entire region if you let us keep our sectarian hold on power in Damascus and Baghdad.

“If truth be told,” Harfouche writes, “what risks destabilizing Iraq is its prime minister’s prejudiced meddling in the Syria crisis and his piloting the de-structuring of Iraq through corruption and the exclusion of large numbers of Iraqi Sunnites and Kurds from public office and the decision-making process.

“The Americans can’t be blamed for backing Nouri al-Maliki’s rise to power. Nor are they supposed to crave for Iraq’s destiny more than Iraq’s prime minister.”

Out of sight, Iraq breaks up in three

By eKurd.net

Iraq has long been a religious, ethnic and ideological mosaic difficult to rule as a united entity, and Saddam Hussein's removal did little to change that.

In 1919, there were no Iraqi people. History, religion and geography pulled the people apart, not together.

Basra looked south, towards India and the Gulf, Baghdad had strong links with Persia [Iran], and Mosul had closer ties with Syria.

And the current war in Syria, Iraq’s next-door neighbor, has helped reignite the Sunnite-led insurgency in northern and western Iraq, especially in Mosul and the Anbar Province.

Gunmen yesterday killed two soldiers, injured another and kidnapped three more in Anbar after seven protesters were shot dead and 60 others injured by army gunfire in Fallujah.

The attacks on soldiers came as mourners buried the Sunnite protesters felled a day earlier.

The army said the protesters were trying to cut off an international highway linking Iraq with neighboring Jordan and Syria.

The tit for tat killings in Anbar Province, which makes up roughly one-third of Iraq's territory, are the first since mass protests against the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki began five weeks ago in Baghdad and western Iraq.

A demonstration followed the burials during which protesters shouted: “Listen Maliki, we are free people” and “Take your lesson from Bashar,” a reference to Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

The protesters accuse Maliki of being “Iran’s man in Iraq” and his government of discriminating against Sunnite Arabs, saying they are treated as second-class citizens.

Their leaders’ demands range from Maliki's removal to the release of hundreds of women detainees and the suspension of an anti-terrorism law that Sunnites believe has been abused by authorities to target their sect unfairly.

The Sunnite protests broke out in December after Finance Minister Rafei el-Essawi's bodyguards and staff were detained on terrorism charges. Sunni leaders saw the arrests as part of a sustained crackdown on their sect by Iraq's Shiite leadership.

In December 2011, another crisis erupted after Maliki sought the arrest of Sunnite Vice-President Tariq el-Hashemi, accused by the prime minister of running death squads. He fled the country and was later sentenced to death in absentia.

Complicating the attempts to ease Sunnite protests, the government -- made up of Shiite, Sunnite and Kurdish blocs -- is also caught in a standoff over oil with autonomous Kurdistan in the north.

Abdelghani Ali Yehya

Abdelghani Ali Yehya, a Kurdish political analyst and prominent writer who heads the Journalists Union of Kurdistan, says today’s Iraq has already “splintered in three, but out of sight.”

In his think piece for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, he begins by quoting from a memo written by Iraq’s King Faisal, the first (1921- 1933) monarch in the country’s modern era.

The 1925 memo was addressed to a commission mandated by the League of Nations to look into a dispute over the Mosul region between Turkey and the British protectorate of Iraq.

"Heartbrokenly,” King Faisal wrote, “I can say there is no Iraqi people yet, but only deluded human groups void of any national idea. Iraq is one of those countries lacking the fabric of social life – namely intellectual, denominational and religious unity."

Yehya says King Faisal was right. Since its inception in 1921, the Iraqi state has not ceased being challenged.

In August 1933, for example, it had to brutally repress a revolt in Dohuk Province by the Assyrian Christians of northern Iraq.

The 1935–1936 Iraqi Shiite revolts in the mid-Euphrates region against the Sunnite dominated authority of the Kingdom of Iraq followed.

Parallel revolts also broke out that year in chiefly-Kurdish northern Iraq.

In October 1935, the Iraqi government crushed yet another revolt by the Yazidi Kurds of Jabal Sinjar.

The Yazidis of Jabal Sinjar constituted the majority of Iraq’s Yazidi population -- the second largest non-Muslim minority within the kingdom, and the largest heterodox Kurdish group in the province of Mosul.

In 1939, the region of Jabal Sinjar was once again put under military control, together with the Shekhan District.

Yehya says persecution of Iraq’s minorities precipitated the schism between its Arab and ethnic Kurdish components.

It came in the wake of the Kurds’ 1991 uprisings, which culminated in the West’s establishment of no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq and the Kurds’ creation of the Kurdish Autonomous Republic in an area of Iraqi Kurdistan.

As the years passed, the Kurds could no longer remain under the authority of a central government, thus fulfilling the first two-way partition of Iraq, says Yehta.

The three-way breakup started after the 2003 fall of Saddam’s Sunnite-led Baathist regime and its replacement by a chiefly Shiite administration.

The ethnic and sectarian cleansing of Kurds, Christians, Shiites and Yazidis by extremist Sunnite factions started that same year.

Some Shiite militias in turn began cleansing Sunnites in Baghdad and the southern provinces. Thousands of Iraq’s Arab Sunnites were driven to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Kurdistan and elsewhere.

Mutual cleansing by the two sides, Yehya explains, eventually carved Iraq’s exclusively Arab Sunnite region.

The idea of dividing Iraq in three gained significant momentum over the past 10 years, specially after then Sen. Joe Biden – the incumbent U.S. vice president – embraced it in 2006.

Biden's so-called soft-partition plan -- a variation of the blueprint dividing up Bosnia in 1995 -- called for dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions, held together by a central government.

There would be a loose Kurdistan, a loose Shia-stan and a loose Sunni-stan, all under a big, if weak, Iraq umbrella.

"The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests," Biden and Leslie H. Gelb wrote in their opinion piece for The New York Times on May 1, 2006. "We could drive this in place with irresistible sweeteners for the Sunnis to join in, a plan designed by the military for withdrawing and redeploying American forces, and a regional nonaggression pact."

Yehya says much as past Iraqi governments cracked down on Kurds, Maliki has now taken the foolhardy step of closing the Jordanian-Iraqi crossing at Trebil in order to strangle Anbar economically.

Adding to the three-way partition fuel are the pro-Maliki demonstrations in the Shiite provinces.

“If Iraqi Kurdistan is semi-independent and the Sunnite Triangle is fenced in and shut out, it means the three-way breakup has become a fait accompli,” writes Yehya.

“It also means partition in the minds has translated into partition on the ground. Either an Iraqi Gorbachev comes next to institutionalize the breakup smoothly or we enter into an unpleasant cycle of creative chaos, catastrophes, killings and bloodshed.”

Iraq-Syria-Lebanon rushing to Brahimi’s “hell”

Top right: Placard raised in Anbar demands release of Sunnite women detainees

Tens of thousands of Sunnite protesters in Iraq’s west today kept the main highway to Syria and Jordan blocked for a ninth straight day.

The mass protests in Iraq’s Anbar and several other Sunni-dominated provinces accuse Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of mounting an organized campaign against their sect and of being an ally of the Syrian regime and a surrogate of Iran.

The protests erupted December 21 in Anbar province after troops loyal to Maliki detained bodyguards and aides of his finance minister, a Sunni. The move evoked attempts to arrest Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi in December 2011. Hashemi was later sentenced to death in absentia.

An attempt by Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, one of the most senior Sunnite officials in the government, to defuse the crisis ended in chaos, with his bodyguards opening fire and wounding two demonstrators in Ramadi.

The protesters want an end to what they perceive as Maliki’s targeted marginalization of Sunnites and the release of Sunnite females rounded up after the detention of their male relatives under terrorism charges.

When women in Iraq are arrested, they routinely go through three gruesome phases, starting with humiliation, followed by torture, and often ending with rape (see report).

“Clouds of divorce” is the inspired title of a leader comment today focusing on Iraq by Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.

He recounts how he called on a senior Iraqi official for a nameless briefing on the situation in the country.

In Charbel’s words as I paraphrased from Arabic:

Since I want to talk candidly, the official said, the situation is very bad and the days ahead are far from looking rosy.

He then pulled out from his pocket a note, which he started reading.

He said the number of Sunnite staff at the Interior Ministry that was so-and-so has dropped to this much; same thing at the Defense Ministry -- the Agriculture Ministry wasn’t spared either.

The Sunnite positions in the Armed Forces are also dwindling non-stop, the official added.

“A few days ago, a senior officer was assassinated, most probably by a man in uniform,” he blurted out.

When I asked about his expectations, he said: “The Iraqi Sunnite street is at boiling point. No Iraqi Sunnite accepts being a second-class citizen. Where would the Iraqi Sunnites’ wrath lead? Beyond what you imagine! I don’t fancy that, but I am afraid that’s where we’re heading.”

After the meeting, I felt distraught. It’s unusual for a state official to talk so plainly to a journalist he was meeting for the first time.

When protests broke out in Anbar a few days back, I called another Iraqi politician, asking how serious the unrest was.

He told me in no uncertain terms: “It is more serious than many people imagine. If Maliki persists in his exclusion, marginalization and monopolization policies, I don’t rule out Iraq heading to partition.

“His (Maliki’s) policies are destroying Iraq’s political fabric. He has taken relations with the Kurds to the verge of war and reneged on his promises to them.

“He is now driving Arab Sunnites to challenge his rule in the open.

“Add to that another split among Iraqis over Iran and happenings in Syria.

“It is in your interest as a journalist to visit Iraq because it is at a critical juncture. Sadly, we can’t now hide behind our finger and cover up our divisions by blaming the (U.S.) occupation and the remnants of Saddam Hussein.”

While the clouds of divorce were gathering in the skies of Anbar, UN reports and correspondents’ dispatches spoke of the Syria conflict turning overtly sectarian. This probably explains Lakhdar Brahimi’s remark on his return from Moscow predicting “hell” and a breakdown of Syria into a “new Somalia” in the absence of a negotiated settlement.

Taken in the context of Brahimi’s earlier call for “real and deep change” in Syria, chances are that “hell” is more likely in 2013, particularly that the Syria conflict is now on the Sunnite-Shiite fault line stretching from Baghdad to Beirut, passing by Damascus.

The winds of divorce whipping Syria are lashing Lebanon as well. Sectarian affinities have brought down the sanctity of international borders and built up the appetite for risk-taking. The Lebanese are divided over the Syrian Revolution, the Syrian regime’s future and the flow of refugees fleeing the Syrian inferno.

The “hell” Brahimi talked about won’t necessarily respect international borders that are porous anyway.

Gambles taken by allies of the Syrian regime, and by some of its opponents, are also inviting strife.

Together, the clouds gathering in Iraq’s Anbar and the winds of divorce lashing Syria and Lebanon show the Iraq-Syria-Lebanon triangle gushing forth to “hell.” 

Pro-Iran Maliki and Syria war risk fracturing Iraq

Iraqi political analyst Ahmad al-Sharifi and a map showing Iraq's provinces  

Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki’s drive to sideline the country’s Arab Sunnites, his harassment of ethnic Kurds in autonomous Kurdistan, his subservience to Iran and his support of the Syrian regime risk fragmenting Iraq and embroiling Jordan.

The arrest of bodyguards assigned to Finance Minister Rafei al-Essawi, one of Iraq’s most prominent Sunnite politicians, while searching his home and offices on December 20, sparked week-long mass protests in western Iraq's Sunnite province.

The protests in the predominantly Sunnite provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin have blocked the country’s highway to neighboring Syria and Jordan.

Demonstrators torched pictures of Maliki and the Iranian flag and flown the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

“Why doesn't Maliki go after criminals and outlaws among the Shiites who sit in parliament and government, and are well-known for their atrocities over the years?

“The answer is clear. He wants to shut the mouths that criticize him to turn this country into a pure Shiite one affiliated to Iran,” a protester charged.

Essawi said Maliki was deliberately seeking to stoke sectarian strife between Sunnites and Shiites by targeting Sunnite national figures.

The incident was essentially a replay of a similar crackdown in December 2011 targeting Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, also a leading Sunnite politician.

Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government charged Hashemi with running death squads. He has been sentenced to death multiple times in absentia.

Iraq has an estimated population of 31 million, roughly including 15 million Shiites, nine million Sunnites and five million ethnic Kurds.

The move against Essawi also came amid growing tensions between the Maliki government and Kurdistan, which have seen Iraqi troops and the Kurdish Peshmerga militia facing off against each other in disputed territory in the autonomous Kurdistan region north of the country.

Ahmad al-Moussawi Makki reporting today for the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar under the title, “The Anbar war: Gateway to partition,” suggests the most alarming aspect of the ongoing Sunnite protests are the calls for regional autonomy in Anbar and other provinces in the northwest where the Sunnites are in majority – a status similar to that of the Kurds in autonomous Kurdistan.

Makki says some of the protesters are even clamoring for setting up the “State of Western Iraq.”

He quotes Iraq’s respected political strategy analyst Ahmad al-Sharifi as telling him: “These sit-ins and demonstrations are meant to pave the way for Iraq’s partition. It’s an objective shared by many Iraqi political leaders. You can tell by the flags raised by demonstrators – the flags of the Iraqi Free Army and the Kurdistan region. All this heralds the so-called New Middle East.”

Sharifi says Maliki’s whistle-stop visit earlier this to Amman, where he offered to prop up the cash-strapped Jordanian economy, was aimed at preempting the empowerment of Islamist forces in the Hashemite Kingdom “because the Islamists’ advent to power in Jordan would lay the cornerstone for declaring the State of Western Iraq.”

Sharifi adds, “In addition to a vast oil field discovery, an enormous field containing as much as 53 trillion cubic feet of natural gas was found in western Iraq lately.”

The finds, together with the intractable problems between Baghdad and Kurdistan, are the harbingers of Iraq’s dismemberment – “perhaps six months from now,” according to Sharifi.

Syria

Iraq’s fragile power-sharing government has been lurching from crisis to crisis. Should today's protests in Anbar provide a mass show of force, it may add to concerns that Syria’s increasingly sectarian war, where majority Sunnites are battling a quasi-Shiite ruler backed by Iran, will push Iraq back to the Sunnite-Shiite butchery of 2005-07.

When fugitive Vice President Hashemi was asked in an interview with Thursday’s pan-Arab daily al-Hayat if he had evidence Maliki supports President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, he said:

“There is conclusive evidence. Maliki acknowledged in a statement weeks ago that the Iraqi government is no longer able to inspect Iranian planes [overflying Iraq] after the pledges he made to the Arab League and the United Nations.

“Since he first made the pledge to the U.S. administration, I said this man is lying and would only inspect aircraft carrying medicine and medical equipment. This happened on two occasions. He inspected a plane coming from Iran and a second one coming from Syria, after it unloaded its full cargo of militias, explosives and other weapons. He called it a search.

“The media is focusing on aviation, but the main problem is land corridors. According to my information, there are endless means of overland transportation, from Zurbatiyah on the Iraq-Iran border to the al-Waleed port of entry [between Syria and Iraq]. There is a stream of civilian convoys with tinted windows heading from Iran towards Syria... These convoys don’t stop at checkpoints, and no one knows what they are carrying. I think this is part of the scenario to support the Syrian regime and increase the suffering of the Syrian people, regretfully.”

Hashemi added, “When the reference of the officials in Maliki’s sectarian regime is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, what do you expect…?

“I suspect the war machine killing the Syrian people is run by Iran.”