Obama, Cameron, Hollande, and others want to supply even more arms to these
West-hating, Christian-killing terrorists.
BTW, this is the prize we were awarded in Iraq when we 'won' the Iraqi
war.
It is reassuring that, throughout the West, the political class, along
with the chattering class ('journalists'--with the exception of those who have
been to the ME), is now practically isolated and unable to drum up popular
support for another ill-starred military adventure.
Don Hank
Face to face with the new enemy in Syria
The Times, Anthony Lloyd
Last
updated at 12:03AM, September 19 2013
A
teenage foreign fighter stepped out into the dusty road before us. Turbanned and
wild-eyed, he stared into our car with a gun in one hand, jabbing a finger in
repeated accusation with the other.
Catalysed
with anger, long hair falling over his shoulders, he spoke with a voice that was
a tumble of loathing.
“ISIS,”
murmured our interpreter, alias “Hamza”, confirming that we had just driven into
a checkpoint controlled by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. The very word seemed
to suck the oxygen out of the vehicle.
Infamous
for abduction and torture of their enemies, hatred of Westerners and a radical
interpretation of Sharia, they hold the fate of two dozen forlorn foreign
hostages inside Syria.
It
was a few minutes before Hamza turned and spoke to us again, by which time more
ISIS fighters had appeared beside the car, every bit as hostile as the first,
their mood caught between anger and delight at finding two British journalists
in their hands.
Hamza
spoke again. “Iraqis. They want to take us to their Islamic court for
investigation,” he said quietly, pale and grim-faced. “One of them wants to
shoot us as spies.”
The
autumn sun suddenly seemed unbearably hot, and I felt the first drip of sweat
break from my hairline and run down my face.
My
nightmare was on the edge of becoming reality. We looked at a field to our
right, murmuring between us that a headlong rush over it could be our best
chance of escape for the next year or two.
In
the front seat, unseen by the fighters around us, our young Syrian driver eased
his leg off a concealed sub-machine pistol. There was so much that could go
wrong. Fear of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known inside Syria simply
as ISIS, is not just the preserve of foreign journalists unlucky enough to run
into their checkpoints.
Grabbing
at the ideological wheel of Syria’s careering and chaotic revolution, ISIS’s
growing strength and numbers are beginning to shape the direction of the war. It
is squeezing out less extreme rebel groups in the start of a grab for doctrinal
and territorial dominance.
There
are now thousands of its fighters spread across Iraq and northern Syria to
within striking distance of the Mediterranean coast. Espousing the most radical
takfiri brand of Islamic ideology, ISIS wants to create a caliphate under
Sharia, uniting Sunni territories in Iraq and Syria. Westerners are its natural
enemy, but so too any Syrian who opposes it.
I
had only to look at the marble expression on the face of Hamza, a tough and
resolute Syrian activist who had seen war at its worst and spent months in jail
for his opposition to the regime, to see how bleak was our situation.
“Once
we welcomed them as a necessity in the fight against Assad when no one else came
to help,” he had told me. “Now, many people are more frightened of them than the
regime.”
ISIS
in Syria is the direct descendant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, responsible for the
deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians during the peak of the war there as well
as the failed bomb attacks in London and Glasgow in 2007. They are commanded by
the Iraqi Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, himself sworn by “bayat”, loyalty to the command
of the al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al Zawahiri.
The
group conducts war in both countries, so that the suicide bombers killing Shia
civilians in Baghdad belong to the same command structure as those attacking
Alawites in Syria, now regarded by al-Qaeda as the most important global arena
for jihadists.
Exploiting
the Syrian’s sense of abandonment, ISIS has spread westwards from the Iraqi
border, seizing oilfields around Raqqah this year, before moving across northern
Syria to the Mediterranean coastal province of Latakia, where in July they killed Kamal Hamami, a leading commander in the Free
Syrian Army, Syria’s home-grown anti-Assad rebels.
That
was just one killing in what analysts have noted as a summer “surge” in ISIS
attacks on FSA units considered as a threat to their power and ideology.
Last
week jihadist online forums announced the start of ISIS’s Cleansing Evil
operation, aimed at destroying the FSA’s Farouk and Nasr battalions, which ISIS
denounced as traitors and apostates.
The
FSA and ISIS also clashed in the town of Boukamal, in eastern Syria, after local
mullahs called for the group to leave the area. Two days earlier ISIS killed
three Syrians protesting against their presence in Al Bab, northwest of Aleppo.
The same day ISIS shot dead a leading figure in a Syrian Islamic brigade, Abu
Obeida al-Binnishi, after he intervened to protect two Malaysian Islamic relief
workers from abduction.
It
would be too easy to describe this growing division as a two-way stand-off.
Syria’s war is more complicated than that, and the lines between ideological
affiliation are blurred.
Among
the men detaining us were Syrian ISIS fighters as well as Iraqis. The younger
were almost indistinguishable, feral teenagers dressed in camouflage shalwar
kameez, some long-haired and turbanned.
The
Iraqi commander who then approached, confirmed that we were British and sent our
passports away with a fighter on a motorbike, was different: older, better
groomed, self-possessed and chillingly cold.
At
one point a gun truck halted behind us, with fighters from what looked like a
half-dozen different countries, including sub-Saharan Africans. “They come from
everywhere,” Hamza said. “Once I even met fighters from Brazil.”
Though
Iraqi al-Qaeda veterans dominate the ISIS command, and Gulf Arabs form the
majority of its rank and file, the policy of Turkey has ensured that fighters
from across the globe have had easy access to Syria’s conflict.
Estimated
to number anything between 5,000 to 8,000, they come from as far apart as the
Philippines, South America, the Caucuses, North Africa, Sudan, Pakistan and
Europe.
“I’ve
even met a blond-haired blue-eyed Australian Muslim convert among them, as well
as Belgians, French and Africans,” a Syrian community leader said. “They don’t
all get to the war via Turkey, but many do.”
Last
year Turkey relaxed its border controls with Syria, pulling its patrols back
from swaths of territory to allow the FSA better logistical access. Thousands of
jihadists took advantage.
Ankara
has denied giving official help to ease the passage of foreign fighters through
its territory to Syria, but opposition parties are convinced that the Government
aided and abetted the jihadist flow.
“This
Government is giving money, accommodation and safe passage to jihadists,” said
Servet Mullaoglu, head of the opposition CHP party in Hatay governate, southern
Turkey, a staging post for foreign fighters.
“Ninety
per cent of the jihadists are getting there through Turkey. Some are just young
men going to fight jihad, but among them too are slaughterers and terrorists
well known to international intelligence organisations.”
There
was a time I remembered in Syria when it was best to ignore foreign fighters,
certain that they in turn would ignore me. The increase in their numbers has led
to a shift in gravity. A growing trend of abduction and murder has followed in
ISIS’s wake.
There
are thought to be at least two dozen foreigners missing in Syria, mostly
journalists and aid workers. Their fate, including that of at least one Briton,
three French and three Americans, is largely unknown. Most, including the
Italian Jesuit priest Paulo Dall’Oglio, are presumed to have been abducted by
ISIS or its affiliated groups, also thought to be behind the murder last week of
a surgeon in Aleppo.
A
message posted on a jihadist forum three days ago reminded foreign fighters in
Syria that journalists, especially foreigners, were “enemies of the mujahidin”
and should be kidnapped, investigated, and punished under Sharia. In border
areas seized by ISIS, NGOs have received letters warning foreigners against
entering Syria.
So
after an hour at a roadside verge beside an ISIS base, dripping with sweat in
our airless car, I had very little faith that the negotiation conducted by local
Syrians to secure our release — a process over which I had no control — could
save us from captivity, or worse, a roadside killing.
Yet
we were released suddenly, for reasons I cannot fully explain, but which felt
little short of miraculous.
As
we left that place, scarcely daring to look over our shoulders, Hamza spoke
again. “I could never imagine when it started that our revolution could end like
this. Foreign fighters everywhere, chemical weapons, every important building
damaged or destroyed, the honest fleeing and the thieves on top. There is no
choice now but to leave, or seek respectability by becoming a radical. It’s
over.”
propaganda..
ReplyDeletethis article is full of anti jihadi propaganda. so they wild eye boy was right to not trust western journalists. but still they let you go. if they are really that evil and bloodthirsty this article would have never been written.
the writer of this article is the real killer of journalists because i could imagine that when the same guys read this article on the net. they will be certain that western journalist are there to spy or write propaganda against them. other journalist would have a hard time convicing them otherwise. all thanks to this selfish Anthony Lloyd.
Maybe you cannot recognize Muslim terrorists for what they are and that is your mistake.There is no propaganda as only the truth is made known. You are the propagandist and best wake up to reality. Pastor Lee
Delete