The First Casualty Of War

Rabid Dogs On All Sides
(PLUCK series)

'Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.' 

~Samuel Johnson, 'The Idler' 1758

It is the common narrative of those who side with the rebels, often blindly, in Syria that these gun toting militants are somehow valiant characters in the overall plot. They have been cast as the defenders of the downtrodden and oppressed Syrian civilians. They have been painted as noble warriors who arose to take a stand against the savage tyrant in command of Syria. Yet the war which they wage has been brutal in it's depiction of reality. With every massacre there comes the picture of rabid dogs surrounding the citizenry of Syria on all sides. Assad's barbarians remain frothing at the mouth as they clamor for new atrocities. And, contrary to their online propagandists, the rebels are equally savage in their attempts to assert authority in reclaimed areas.

It is the common narrative of the blind support that what you are reading here is wrong. By looking beyond the partisanship of either side we are somehow committing an offense. By sifting through the lies, often pitting them against one another, we are somehow wrong for seeking the hard facts behind the fog of war. If you believe that, if you are so vehemently biased, then this is your chance to leave and go back to the media that feeds your glutinous appetite for lies.

We don't claim to know everything. This isn't a blog to tell you what to think, we didn't start this to make you believe. This is a blog that simply exists so as to make you ask questions. Our only goal here is to make you question everything you have been told. Our mission is to create screamers by unbinding the blindfolds that have covered peoples' eyes for far too long. We don't always have the answers, but we'll be damned if we would ever cease in trying to find them.

Devoured 

Syria's crisis began when Assad violently attempted to crush the spirit which we seek for all mankind. It was in Syria's underclass that the masses began to question the legitimacy of Assad's rule. From the ground up the threat was rising to a tyrant who had held power for generations. Syria's crisis began because the leader of Syria felt his dogs were turning in upon him. 

A system in which the majority of the citizenry do not belong to the same class or religion of the ruling party, is a system that becomes to top heavy to survive. When the masses began to realize that Syria's fighter jets, it's tanks, it's helicopters, and it's savage army were no longer meant to protect them but rather to dominate them... it was already too late.

Guerrilla warfare became the only method by which the underclass could rise up to challenge the bigger dog in this fight. Through ambushing, hit and run, and by utilizing rolling battles to engage the regime; the rebels were seen as fighting for their homes and their people. In the beginning this was symbolic in the fact that it made outsiders believe that Syria's masses were in open rebellion. And yet the people of Syria were not yet ready to sacrifice everything for the whims of this ragtag band of rebels. 

Assad, in all his barbaric glory, launched all out war upon his own nation. Cluster bombs, incendiaries, mortars, heavy artillery, tanks, helicopters, and jets were all thrown into the fight to stop the rebellion his own savagery had inspired. Entire villages were laid to waste as Assad sought to bring Syria back under his control. Nothing was sacred to the now rabid leader as he challenged all conventions of warfare by openly targeting civilians. 

This is how the war began. And in it's own right, this is how Syria was devoured from within. Blood spilled on one side was immediately rectified, if ever it could be, by more blood spilled on the opposing side. And eye for an eye rapidly made all of Syria blind. 

Yet it was the bitterness of war that devoured Syria completely. Rebels who had boasted about their restraint in battle quickly gave into the temptations of war. Retaliatory attacks on citizens who remained loyal to Assad began to mount the death toll on the other side. Men that online supporters claimed were somehow noble turned out to be no less barbaric than the savage they claimed to fight. Leaving many to wonder how the rebels could be praised for fighting Assad when they have mirrored their enemies own sins.

Genocide Produces Yet More Genocides

(A History) 

Namibia, the land of the 20th century's first genocide. It is a country in which the German Second Reich began it's experiments with lebensraum and eugenic philosophies. This is the place where a modern nation imposed race laws, built concentration camps, used chemicals to kill their victims, used slave labor to cause death, and committed outright mass executions of the Herero and Namaqua peoples. All of which occurred a decade prior to the Armenian Genocide. 

Turkish leaders would look back upon their German ally's success in Namibia and learn from the Second Reich what it meant to exterminate an entire ethnicity of man. In Ottoman eyes the colonization of Namibia by Germany was seen as a success because the German people never once said a word against it. Instead the German populace was seen as supportive and as willing participants in their government's atrocities. Thus, without little questioning by Turkish citizens, the Ottomans began their genocides in an attempt to maintain their crumbling empire. 

The Assyrians, the Pontic Greeks, and the Armenians would all suffer the wrath of a failing empire. 1.5 million Armenians would perish as Turkey fought to enforce "Turkification" across their territories. There was no limit to the barbarism that the Ottomans would utilize in their attempts to either deport or kill their victims. 

“Who today still talks about the annihilation of the Armenians?”

~ Adolf Hitler, August 22, 1939

Deir-es-Zor, the Turkish death camp to which Armenians were sent, is to the Armenian people today what Auschwitz is to the Jews. The extermination of the Armenian people was so vast and rapidly committed that Hitler himself referenced it while preparing the Holocaust. It was only 24 years after the Armenian Genocide that the next dictator was preparing to unleash the hell of genocide upon Europe once again. And just as with the Turks, the Nazis were simply expanding upon what their predecessors had done before them. 

Six million Jews would pay with their lives for what Hitler had unleashed upon Europe. My ancestors were taken into the mountains and shot by Hitler's dogs in Croatia. Like the Armenians who were marched away from their homes to die, my ancestors looked back upon their village and knew that they would never return home again. From their blood, from those who clung to life in our darkest hour, I'm here today. 

The suffering of my people was the playbook from which dictators like Idi Amin and Pol Pot took their instructions. Acting in the same savage spirit that had inspired hellish acts like that of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, these modern heathens unleashed genocides across the world. In Cambodia about a quarter of the population would perish as Pol Pot recreated the crimes committed by the Germans in Namibia. Idi Amin, who admitted to adoring Hitler, attempted to recreate the Holocaust as he plunged Uganda into a hell from which it has yet to recover from. 

Genocide has been looked upon by governments as the perfect crime because it is supposed to destroy the "problem" at it's root. Yet there are always those who survive. There are always those who watch the crimes and record them in their hearts and souls. These survivors and onlookers are the ones who refuse to let the sins of the past die in the killing fields. And thus, genocide for all it's absolutes, is never a crime that is easily forgotten. 

It is a crime that breeds more of it's own horrific acts in every generation to follow. In cases like that of Rwanda there is the immediate threat of the victimized community retaliating, and thus perpetrating genocide, once the killing stops. The bitterness that remains once the killings end is the seed that genocide sows wherever and whenever genocide occurs. If it does not obtain fruition in one culture it will seek out another in which to grow. It knows and respects no borders society has attempted to create. Every society is vulnerable to it's lures. 

And this is where we are today in Syria.

The brink of allowing one genocide to breed another. 

A War With No Victors

Assad watched other dictators across the Middle East get away with the very sins he has committed. It was only in recent history that Assad has seen tyrants fall to the hangman's knot. And therefore it may be this reality of repercussions for his actions that keeps the dictator clinging to power. He has nowhere left to run. His followers have nowhere left to cast their support. The battle lines are so deeply drawn that there is no crossing over. There will be no forgiveness, there will be no repentance, this is a fight to the death.

It is in the rigidness of Syria's war that the end has already been made clear. An end that will find both sides defeated in their own ways. Syria has no prize for the conquerors. It has nothing left to offer the side that claims victory. For this is a war that will have no victor. 

Far too much blood has been spilled by the true owners of Syria, it's citizenry. Too many young lives have been altered so drastically that there is no walking their hearts and minds back to civility. Young Syrians will now watch as others return home to families that they no longer have themselves. They will be left with the bitterness that comes with seeing a world move on as they remain in hell. Far too much has been taken from the true owners of Syria's hope... it's youth has been bled out. 

The rebels may be the lesser of two evils in this fight. But they are not the heroes. That is a title that they will never be able to claim. For there have been far too many innocent lives lost as their militants pulled triggers and planted bombs that should have never been. Their excesses have stripped them of any praise that civilized man could have ever offered. It is in their sins that they have been found unworthy of any support.

This brings us to the final point of this long winded method of asking...

If the rebels in Syria do manage to win their war and commit even more retaliatory reprisals against the Alawite minority, will their supporters call these acts genocide?

Just as not all Sunni Muslims have offered their support to the rebels (thus marking themselves for reprisals too), not all Alawites have offered their support to Assad's regime. Yet the genocide that has seen Assad targeting Sunni civilians has bred deep animosity against the Alawites as a whole. And it has already been made clear that the rebels exercise little restraint when claiming Alawite areas. They have often been recorded as targeting Alawite civilians trapped by the sudden shift in power. 

In areas where the population is considered traditionally loyal to Assad, the rebels have done little to stop elements of their forces from savagely attacking the unarmed populace. This occurs in all wars as attacking soldiers take casualties and find themselves unable to directly attack the enemy soldiers. It has always been the civilians who suffer the hatred that feeds the will to fight on both sides. Yet when it comes to the rebels these crimes are rarely admitted by their fiercely loyal followers and supporters online. 

Thus we ask once again... If the rebels do win, and they begin targeting supposed supporters of the old regime, will there be the same "humanitarian" outcry by supporters? 

The ground has already been prepared for the next genocide in Syria. Rebels, engulfed by bitterness and hatred, stand ready to commit massacres of their own in the absence of an enemy regime. Civilians who have been told that their neighbors supported the man who killed their families stand prepared to accept that these traitors deserve to die. All the elements are there. The ground has been salted in such a way that nothing but more genocidal acts can grow here. 

So when the rebels, who many of you reading this have so adamantly supported, do openly commit crimes against humanity... will you scream?

“…the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it… the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense…”

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1918 

In 1918 Theodore Roosevelt pointed out to the world what they all seemed to be missing as the fog of war began to clear. For all the deaths that had occurred there were still those that the world was ignoring. For all the governments that the world was punishing after the war, there was still one that remained free of society's outrage for it's crimes against humanity. 

In Syria there are still deaths that remain unanswered for. There are still factions within this war that remain free from the outrage of civilized society for their crimes against all of humanity. This is not a war where there is anyone left untainted by the blood that has been spilled. Each and every war criminal deserves to be dragged out and punished upon the world stage. And the fact that anyone who claims to be a "humanitarian" would turn a blind eye to one side while being so partisan as to attack the other... that is why genocide and crimes against humanity go unpunished today. The apathy of good men.

A Line In The Sand

United States Shows Yellow Streak Over Red Line Comment
(The Darkness Visible series)

In August of 2012 President Obama said before the world in no uncertain words that the United States would not tolerate Assad's regime crossing the "red line" by using chemical weapons. In the strongest words the President could afford, Obama told Assad's regime that the use of Syria's chemical weapon stockpiles would have "serious consequences". The audience was supposed to recall Gaddafi and the US military's actions in Libya. This was Obama's moment to sound like a war hawk while seeking to be a dove.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.”

~ President Barack Obama, 20th August 2012

Well today we know that Assad crossed that "red line" after dancing upon it and the bones of the dead beneath it. This was Assad's way of telling the West that he doesn't fear them. This was Assad's way of telling Obama that unlike Gaddafi, Assad will not be removed from power by any UN or NATO action. Assad showed his teeth when Obama attempted to back him into a corner.

With the use of sarin gas Assad showed the world that his military is only getting started in a long fight to maintain power over the people of Syria. While the world watches and cheers on the rebel forces, Assad still has plenty of resources to draw upon to win this fight. He has shown with the use of chemical weapons that he will utilize whatever weapons he needs to to win this war. And once the fight has ended, Assad's al-anfal campaign will begin.

"We need to expand the evidence we have, we need to make it reviewable, we need to have it corroborated," ~ Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary 4th June, 2013

While the White House drags their heels the forces of Assad's brutal regime continue to move chemical weapons about Syria in preparation for wider use. The intent to suppress unorganized units of the rebels while pinning down battle hardened opposition has proven to be useful to Assad's military. They have been able to hold their ground while the opposition has been able to only shift the line on one point just to lose another. All the while Assad has been receiving arms and goods from Iran, Russia, and China. Allowing the regime to hold out while the rebels beg for supplies from the West. 

With every passing day the civilians trapped between the trenches are sacrificed to an ever shifting line in the sand. Obama's promise of action had shifted that line in their favor last year. Now it has been dragged back over the border as the Syrian people become refugees in their own country. For the lucky ones there is still the hope to cross the only permanent lines by fleeing the country for Turkey and Lebanon. 

“These weapons are made to be used strictly and only in the event of external aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.” ~ Jihad Makdissi, Foreign Ministry Spokesman.

Then there remains the threat that Syria issued in July of 2012 when Assad was beginning to realize that UN or NATO troops might intervene. It was at that time that Assad raised the stakes by declaring that his forces would use any and all chemical weapons against foreign soldiers and/or nations who interfered. This now (that we already know Syria has used chemicals) hints that Assad has something worse than sarin gas to use on outsiders. It also leaves one to wonder just why Assad went ahead and used sarin gas in the first place. 

So we should therefore ask ourselves, us in the United States, if we want our troops exposed to a war where the other side has already used chemicals and promises to use them again. We must ask if we wish to sacrifice our blood and treasure to end the suffering of Syrian civilians trapped between two armies (or more). And just how much will we invest to end the bloodshed? Will we accept the cost of spilling blood to supposedly end the flow of innocent blood? Just how much more suffering can we stomach? 

"Russia has been a key supporter of Assad, protecting his regime from the United Nations sanctions and providing it with weapons despite the two-year civil war in which more than 70,000 people have been killed." ~ CBS News

With the cold war supposedly dead the West finds itself face to face with a man that reminds many of Stalin reincarnated. Putin's Russia has supplied Assad with weapons that the unstable regime had previously only been able to drool over. Now the crazed president uses Russian munitions upon his own citizens, killing women and children rather intentionally. All of which has brought a weakened West to an awkward feeling of déjà vu (think Vietnam, Afghanistan, or even Korea). 

If the United States is to overcome its reputation of making false promises and hollow threats it will be facing off with Russian made weapons and Soviet trained units. This would be a war where the UN and NATO forces would not necessarily be better armed than their prey. Instead Obama would be throwing American lives into the breach without knowing what the opposite side is willing to bring to the table. 

So once again, should we be ready to join the fray? 

For over two years I have listened to the loudest and most persistant voices here at home say that "it is sad what is happening to those Syrians, but... it's not our fight.". The irony to me is that most of the time these are the same people who uphold President Bush's decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. When there was the promise of gain from the sacrifice of others, these were the people who were ready to "liberate" an opponent. These were the brave warriors of "freedom". These were the ones who claimed the moral high ground while we, the underclass, sacrificed our brothers and sisters for their wars. 

Now we are faced with a war to end the slaughtering of innocent civilians by a tyrannical dictator. For the first time in a generation we are presented with a good fight. And suddenly the West backs down with their tails between their legs. Where have the war hawks gone? Where did the moral high ground disappear to? Where is Uncle Sam's conscience now that the blood of innocence is upon our President's hands? 

Promises of this magnitude can not be backed away from just because the other side has taken the opportunity to up the ante. When we tell a dictator that we will act we must do so. Any hesitation is complacency with the crimes committed by the enemy. Any motion that even hints that we are turning away from our word is a defeat before we ever begin. Barack Obama must be forced to stand up and be a man. He must be forced to uphold his promise to the people of Syria. 

What if China and Iran back Russia and engulf the region in civil war? What if the West is being dragged into a proxy war? What if Syria is just the first domino to fall? 

There will always be reasons to stand by while innocent lives are being destroyed. We will always have fears to face when we are presented with the right thing to do. If doing what is needed was easy then France would already be mobilizing. But the reality that Syria presents to the West is that when faced with massacres and the war crimes that Assad has given us we have no other option. This is where we prove that freedom is not free. And that no matter what, we will never surrender our belief that the liberty of others is always worth the risk... the fight... the suffering... and the blood we will surely spill. 

Putin and Assad may have led us to this moment. Their desire to prove our weakness may very well be reason for the constant antagonism that Syria displays to the West. Yet in the end we have to live with the fact that a promise was made. We drew the line in the sand. And we can't let it be moved again.

Source Documents
(Note: not all sources listed)

CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57587640/france-says-sarin-gas-used-in-syria/
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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57587531/putin-russia-has-not-sent-s-300-air-defense-missiles-to-syria-yet/
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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57587007/russia-to-sell-mig-jet-fighters-to-syria-jet-maker-says/

NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/world/middleeast/obamas-vow-on-chemical-weapons-puts-him-in-tough-spot.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/obama-threatens-force-against-syria.html
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https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/world/middleeast/chemical-weapons-wont-be-used-in-rebellion-syria-says.html

Raining Fire

Cluster Bombs And Syria
(part of The Darkness Visible series)

(Cluster Bombs Don't Just Kill Militants)

Over the past six months there have been 119 locations where cluster bombs have been verified to have been used against the civilian population within Syria. 156 known cluster munitions have been verified to have struck and/or have been targeted against civilians. This means that in those 119 locations, Syria's government has used multiple cluster munitions on the same location. And with each and every attack there has been children like the one above either killed, wounded, and physically and emotionally scarred by the heartless brutality of these indiscriminate attacks. 

Human Rights watch has identified two such attacks in just the past two weeks. Between the two cluster bombs dropped there were 11 civilians killed (of which were two women and five children) and 27 others wounded. It is important to note that these were just the results of two cluster bombs. 

As of March 5th the world was given evidence of new cluster bombs entering the conflict. These Soviet made weapons were not known to have been used prior to this attack. A fact that points to the continued support of the Assad regime by the Russian government. It also points to the fact that Assad is expanding his ruthless campaign of slaughtering civilians while he pretends to be looking for a "peaceful resolution". 

(Russian Made, Assad Approved)

The ShOAB 0.5 is a weapon that is not only old but has been proven to be both deadly upon impact and a prolonged killer upon the battle field. Not only does it spread out over a large area when dropped but many of the little grenade like bombs are left unexploded. This means that they can detonate at any time and kill those trying to save wounded or clear out the initial fatalities. It also means that they pose the same risk as landmines once the battle is over or the war has ended. 

In the past Assad has used cluster bombs ahead of military or Shabiha militias to clear the way for his troops. Now Assad appears to be carpet bombing areas simply to drive the death toll upward. At times it doesn't even seem that the Syrian army needs to have any indication that rebels are in the area for them to justify the use of weapons like cluster munitions. All that is apparently needed is for the military to believe that the local citizens at one time supported the rebel cause. 

For the children of Syria this "death from above" method has left them seeking more creative ways to hide. In the past they had been able to hide in their homes from the government militias and military forces. By simply staying indoors when the shelling began or the gunfire grew louder they could at least pray for protection. Yet cluster munitions void that strategy. With cluster munitions, if the neighbor is suspected of a crime... so are you.

I have said over the past two years that I believe Assad will only get more violent as the war goes on. Cluster munitions are just one way he is proving me to be correct in my assumptions of him. If these weapons are not stopped and Assad is not given limits to his madness... what kind of new hell will he unleash next?