Patrick Cockburn writes:
It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two
men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a
machete at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been forced to lie in the
street with his head on a concrete block. At the end of the film, a soldier,
apparently from the Free Syrian Army, holds up the severed heads by their
hair in triumph.
The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing their
fears that Syria is imitating Iraq's descent into murderous warfare in the
years after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria's
non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government as
soldiers or civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in Syria
if the rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are
circulating, the men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging to
the 2.5 million-strong Alawite community. This is the Shia sect to which
President Bashar al-Assad and core members of his regime belong. The
beheadings, so proudly filmed by the perpetrators, may well convince them that
they have no alternative but to fight to the end.
The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US and
its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National
Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate
representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has
denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the rebels,
as being terrorists and an al-Qa'ida affiliate.
Paradoxically, the US makes
almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as does the
Syrian government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states now recognise the
National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, it is
unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry crowds in rebel-held areas of
northern Syria on Friday chanted "we are all al-Nusra" as they
demonstrated against the US decision.
Videos posted on YouTube play such a central role in the propaganda war in
Syria that questions always have to be asked about their authenticity and
origin. In the case of the beheading video, the details look all too
convincing. Nadim Houry, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the
Middle East and North Africa, has watched the video many times to identify the
circumstances, perpetrators and location where the killings took place. He has
no doubts about its overall authenticity, but says that mention of one district
suggests it might be in Deir el-Zhor (in eastern Syria). But people in the area
immediately north of Homs are adamant the beheadings took place there. The
victims have not been identified. The first time a version of the film was
shown was on pro-government Sama TV on 26 November, but it has been widely
viewed on YouTube in Syria only over the past week.
The film begins by showing two middle-aged men handcuffed together sitting
on a settee in a house, surrounded by their captors who sometimes slap and
beat them. They are taken outside into the street. A man in a black shirt is
manhandled and kicked into lying down with his head on a concrete block. A boy,
who looks to be about 11 or 12 years old, cuts at his neck with a machete, but
does not quite sever it. Later a man finishes the job and cuts the head
off. The second man in a blue shirt is also forced to lie with his head on a
block and is beheaded. The heads are brandished in front of the camera and
later laid on top of the bodies. The boy smiles as he poses with a rifle beside
a headless corpse.
The execution video is very similar to those once made by al-Qa'ida in Iraq
to demonstrate their mercilessness towards their enemies. This is scarcely
surprising since many of the most experienced al-Nusra fighters boast that
they have until recently been fighting the predominantly Shia government of
Iraq as part of the local franchise of al-Qa'ida franchise. Their agenda is
wholly sectarian, and they have shown greater enthusiasm for slaughtering
Shias, often with bombs detonated in the middle of crowds in markets or outside
mosques, than for fighting Americans.
The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so
bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of the 23
million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were peaceful and
the central demands of the protesters were for democratic rule and human rights
as opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic government. There are Syrians
who claim that the people against the regime remains to this day the central
feature of the uprising, but there is compelling evidence that the movement has
slid towards sectarian Islamic fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.
The execution video is the most graphic illustration of deepening religious
bigotry on the part of the rebels, but it is not the only one. Another recent
video shows Free Syrian Army fighters burning and desecrating a Shia
husseiniyah (a religious meeting house similar to a mosque) in Idlib in
northern Syria. They chant prayers of victory as they set fire to the building,
set fire to flags used in Shia religious processions and stamp on religious
pictures. If the FSA were to repeat this assault on a revered Shia shrine such
as the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in Damascus, to which Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims
have flooded in the past and which is now almost encircled by rebels, then
there could be an explosion of religious hatred and strife between Sunni and
Shia across the Middle East. Iraqi observers warn that it was the destruction
of the Shia shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, by an al-Qa'ida bomb in 2006
that detonated a sectarian war in which tens of thousands died.
The analogy with Iraq is troubling for the US and British governments. They
and their allies are eager for Syria to avoid repeating the disastrous mistakes
they made during the Iraqi occupation. Ideally, they would like to remove the
regime, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and the present leadership, but not
dissolving the government machinery or introducing revolutionary change as they
did in Baghdad by transferring power from the Sunnis to the Shia and the Kurds.
This provoked a furious counter-reaction from Baathists and Sunnis who found
themselves marginalised and economically impoverished.
Washington wants Assad out, but is having difficulty riding the Sunni
revolutionary tiger. The Western powers have long hoped for a split in the
Syrian elite, but so far there is little sign of this happening. "If you
take defections as a measure of political cohesion, then there haven't been any
serious ones," said a diplomat in Damascus.
Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing respect. I
have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am struck by the fact
that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from
the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign
media. The last time I felt like this was in Baghdad in late 2003, when every
Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was proving a disaster just as George W Bush,
Tony Blair and much of the foreign media were painting a picture of progress
towards stability and democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its
carefully chosen Iraqi acolytes.
The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels closing in
on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or, at most, a few
months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said last week
that the regime is "approaching collapse". The foreign media consensus
is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on all fronts and the end may be
nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is to discover that the best informed
Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on the contrary, that the most recent rebel
attacks in the capital had been thrown back by a government counteroffensive.
They say that the rebel territorial advances, which fuelled speculation abroad
that the Syrian government might implode, are partly explained by a new Syrian
army strategy to pull back from indefensible outposts and bases
and concentrate troops in cities and towns.
At times, Damascus resounds with the boom of artillery fire and the
occasional car bomb, but it is not besieged. I drove 160 kilometres north to
Homs, Syria's third largest city with a population of 2.3 million,
without difficulty. Homs, once the heart of the uprising, is in the hands of
the government, aside from the Old City, which is held by the FSA. Strongholds
of the FSA in Damascus have been battered by shellfire and most of their
inhabitants have fled to other parts of the capital. The director of the
1,000-bed Tishreen military hospital covering much of southern Syria told me
that he received 15 to 20 soldiers wounded every day, of whom about 20 per cent
died. This casualty rate indicates sniping, assassinations and small-scale
ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.
This does not mean that the government is in a happy position. It has been
unable to recapture southern Aleppo or the Old City in Homs. It does not have
the troops to garrison permanently parts of Damascus it has retaken. Its
overall diplomatic and military position is slowly eroding and the odds against
it are lengthening, but it is a long way from total defeat, unless there is
direct military intervention by foreign powers, as in Libya or Iraq, and this
does not seem likely.
This misperception of the reality on the ground in Syria is fuelled in part
by propaganda, but more especially by inaccurate and misleading reporting by
the media where bias towards the rebels and against the government is
unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War. Exaggerated notions are given of
rebel strength and popularity. The Syrian government is partially responsible
for this. By excluding all but a few foreign journalists, the regime has
created a vacuum of information that is naturally filled by its enemies.
In the event, a basically false and propagandistic account of events in Syria
has been created by a foreign media credulous in using pro-opposition sources
as if they were objective reporting.
The execution video is a case in point. I have not met a Syrian in Damascus
who has not seen it. It is having great influence on how Syrians judge their
future, but the mainstream media outside Syria has scarcely mentioned it. Some
may be repulsed by its casual savagery, but more probably it is not shown
because it contradicts so much of what foreign leaders and reporters claim is
happening here.
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