Gen. Idriss: The post-Qusayr state of play in Syria

Hezbollah's black flag of "Ya Hussein" on a minaret in al-Qusayr

Aljazeera Mubasher aired the following interview with Gen. Salim Idriss, chief of staff of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, today. The translation is my own:

Gen. Idriss being interviewed

Q. General, brief us if you may about Qusayr and the overall military situation

The battle for Qusayr drew a lot of media attention. It was certainly a major and key battle. Fact is that huge numbers of Hezbollah fighters – we’re talking of more than 7,000 fighters – crossed the Lebanese borders into the town’s outlying areas. It is an open secret that these were elite and well-equipped Hezbollah forces.

They crossed the Lebanese-Syrian border under the nose of the Lebanese army. We have information the Lebanese army watched nonchalantly as they crossed the border. The army did absolutely nothing to stop them. In truth, and to put it diplomatically, this is utter complicity.

The fighters went in and were able, after some fierce fighting, to take control of a number of villages in close proximity to the border.

Throughout the fighting, these (Hezbollah) forces were receiving unprecedented air cover from the criminal regime’s warplanes, which dropped all kinds of bombs and medium-range missiles -- including thermobaric bombs and long-range shells -- against our men and villages.

Mechanized regime forces and Hezbollah fighters then used what is called scorched tactics to pulverize Qusayr, one neighborhood after the other, in order to be able to control it.

The number of injured in Qusayr is very high and humanitarian conditions are tough because the criminal regime’s forces and Hezbollah fighters had been blockading Qusayr town for weeks.

With their light weapons, FSA forces were left with two options: hold out and be wiped out altogether, or retreat along with the wounded, who were many.

We, as FSA, acknowledge that we cannot face up to the regime’s regular army when it is in full-strength. Between brackets, the regime has no army left to fight us with. Its army was over and done with a long time ago.

The best way for us to fight this regime is by guerilla warfare or hit and run tactics without holding on to territory. But in Qusayr, we were forced to defend our people’s security.

Displays and manifestations of sectarianism, confessional hatred and fanaticism started as soon as regime forces and Hezbollah fighters went into Qusayr.

First thing they did was to raise a black flag with the (Shiite) cry “Ya (Oh) Hussein” inscribed on it and chant that they are “the sons of Ali.”

This liar, Hassan Nasrallah, used to claim he is a resistance (movement against Israel), which he considered to be Islamic.

These (Hezbollah) people are unrelated to Islam or to Hussein or to Ali or to Zeinab. After all, Hussein is ours and so is Zeinab.

These people are simply carrying out a dirty Iranian scheme.

God willing, the end of the Hezbollah movement will come here on Syrian land.

Syria has an area of 185,000 square kilometers. Her people, her heroes, her freedom fighters have gulped down the criminal regime’s army and are able to gulp down Hassan Nasrallah’s fighters.

Q. Did you set a new strategy for the coming battles, especially after reports that Hezbollah fighters are now massing in Aleppo, Homs and Rif Dimashq?

Certainly, but this not something we would share with the media.

But the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran know – and so does the criminal Bashar – the high figure of casualties they sustained to enter a small town. Can they keep up the momentum and bear such a high casualty toll?

We are 23 million people spread over an area of 185,000 kilometers. We will all be fighting Hezbollah and the other Iraqi Shiite bigots and Iranian fighters who support the regime. We will fight them to the finish.

We assure them, we are aware this is going to be a tough and long-drawn-out war that could last for years. The Lebanese war lasted 17 years.

The fact Hassan Nasrallah acted on Iran’s orders and joined criminal Bashar in this war opened the door to all probabilities. We are prepared for this confrontation. We are ready for this war.

Through your channel, I appeal to my brothers the combatants, fighters and insurgents to raise their alertness condition to “Maximum Readiness” level in order to confront the ongoing sectarian invasion.

After Bashar pioneered sectarianism, which was unbeknown to us, Hassan Nasrallah comes in to hoist black flags on top of our minarets

This is something we will not forget. We believe in tit for tat. We shall fight them, even if the war were to last a thousand years.

Q. How is the situation now in Qusayr? Are there still civilians there?

I can’t discuss the fate of the civilians and wounded, if only because regime warplanes are still chasing the wounded.

Whenever they are moved from Qusayr to medical facilities inside or outwith Lebanese territory, regime warplanes and Hezbollah fighters track them.

So I apologize for not being able to share with you any information on the state of the civilians, the wounded, the state of Qusayr or the villages near it.

Q. Did fighting flare up in Rif Dimashq because Hezbollah fighters joined the fray en masse?

Hezbollah fighters are now spread across Syria. They have a presence in Eastern Ghouta alongside Iraqi Shiite extremists belonging to the Mahdi Brigade and ‘Asa’eb al-Haq, Iranian combatants and Shiite volunteers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Hezbollah fighters also have a presence in Rif Dimashq’s western and northern sectors. They have a tightly packed presence in Aleppo, Idlib and east Syria. We know their numbers, where they are positioned and where their sleeping quarters are.

For example, we know that some 4,000 Hezbollah fighters are accommodated in the Military Academy west of Aleppo. They are bracing for battle on the Khan Al Asal front.

Q. Can you promise the poorly armed FSA members qualitative weapons anytime soon?

Victory comes from God, faith and the cause we are upholding – namely, to uproot this tyrant who destroyed the country, its people and social fabric.

Weapons are vital and much needed. But the determining factor is faith and the fighter’s belief in the justice of his cause.

They’ve been saying they stifled the revolution for two years and they stifled nothing. They now brought in Hezbollah, their last card – unless of course they call on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to intervene directly.

Q. Will the FSA be intervening in Lebanon to fight Hezbollah there?

Frankly, we did not and will not ask our fighters to go into Lebanon.

We don’t want to fight on Lebanese territory.

Lebanon is a country we respect. We know Lebanese authorities can’t lift a finger against Hezbollah. Hezbollah wreaked havoc in Lebanon and destroyed its social fabric. It totally disregards state authority.

We repeatedly urged the Lebanese president to condemn (Hezbollah’s invasion). But we excuse him because he cannot do that. They (Hezbollah) would create all sorts of problems for him.

The (Lebanese) president is an honorable man and we respect him highly.

The (caretaker) Prime Minister (Najib Mikati) however is an accomplice of Hezbollah -- and so is the Lebanese army, whether willingly or unwillingly.

But we will not fight inside Lebanese territory.

Q. Are you coordinating positions with the Syrian National Coalition in respect of the proposed Geneva-2 conference?

Geneva-2 is the brainchild of the Russians and Americans.

The Russians want to exploit it to tell the world the Syrian opposition is divided.

They are hedging their bets on seeing the opposition represented at the conference by four caucuses: (1) The FSA and other fighters (2) The National Coalition (3) Haytham Manna’ and his loyalists (4) The so-called State-Building Bloc created by Assad…

The Russians want them all to meet with Walid al-Muallem so they can later say the opposition is disjointed and there is no solution other than keeping Assad to restore security and stability in Syria and protect its minorities.

The long and short of our position on Geneva-2 is this:

1. One delegation – with one head – goes to the conference to represent the opposition.
2. The delegation would forthwith table its conditions to negotiate a peaceful solution.
3. The conditions are (a) the criminal Bashar al-Assad resigns instantly and leaves the country he destroyed (b) criminal heads of the security services and commanders of the quisling army are referred to trial (c) a transitional government is formed -- one in which the opposition holds sway.
4. From thereon, we will submit to whatever decisions are taken by the Syrian people.

I want to assure the Syrian people the political and armed wings of the opposition are one in wanting the new Syria to be free and democratic, respectful of all religions, free of any sort of discrimination or acts of revenge, where citizens have equal rights and obligations…

 Q. What’s your reading of the days ahead?

The situation is grave, very grave. We forewarn everyone in the world that massacres and many tragedies are in store for Syria.

To date, 60 to 70 percent of Syria is in ruin.

The country might yet be thoroughly destroyed, which is sad but likely.

Others might not be spared. Bashar, Iran and Hezbollah have no qualms about destroying the whole region.

The greatest danger facing the world today is Iran and its quest to revive Khosru’s Sassanid Empire.

Q. And what about the clashes on the Golan front?

All Syrians are familiar with Bashar’s heroics on the Golan front. As Don Quixote incarnated, he never fought or would fight Israel.

He says he will choose the time end place to fight Israel. The time and place will never come.

Bashar and Israel have an undeclared alliance. He is the best neighbor Israel could have. That’s why Israel does not want to see him fall.

Q. Any message you would like to convey to the Syrians?

To all men on all fronts, I would say: Make sure to raise your alertness condition to “Maximum Readiness” level.

To all other Syrians in every city, town, village or rural area, I would say: Take up arms to defend your homeland against a foreign invasion. I ask everyone short of a rifle to sell his clothes and buy one.

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.”