#75226 Re: Sirija vol. 2
Posted: 25/05/2017 14:43
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/maga ... .html?_r=0
Vrlo interesantan osvrt i prilicno neutralan za NYT, obicni ljudi gledaju da prezive, preporucujem navijacima obe strane da procitaju.
In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol of Syria’s future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding militias — some of them radical Islamists — who hoarded food and weapons while the people starved.
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What destroyed Aleppo? It was not the sectarianism that is often held up as a key to the Syrian war. It was not just “terrorism,” the word used by regime apologists to fend off any share of blame. Those things played a role, but the core of the conflict in Aleppo, as in much of Syria, was a divide between urban wealth and rural poverty. It is not new. Travelers in the Ottoman era used to describe the shocking gulf between Aleppo’s opulence and the countryside surrounding it, where peasants lived in almost Stone Age conditions. Later, this divide mapped onto the city itself, as eastern Aleppo spread and filled with poor migrants. Deeply religious and mostly illiterate, smoldering with class resentment, they became the foot soldiers of a violent insurgency led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s.
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“I was very scared of both sides,” Yasser told me later. “If I went to one side, the other would kill me.” He lay there, his limbs going numb, too frightened to move or speak for more than four hours.
________________________________
There was a prison too, and I later met a woman who seems to have been kept there. She had been captured in a rural village, and the rebels killed her husband and then moved her from place to place, intending to trade her for their own prisoners. There were female jailers who beat and cursed her and called her an infidel. She told me she was given a bottle of water to wash herself with once every 10 to 15 days. During the final battle for Aleppo, she often heard the sounds of bombs and mortars exploding nearby, and her jailers would taunt her, saying Assad’s bombs will kill you.
______________________________
Nista cudno sto svako ko moze bezi glavom bez obzira.
Vrlo interesantan osvrt i prilicno neutralan za NYT, obicni ljudi gledaju da prezive, preporucujem navijacima obe strane da procitaju.
In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol of Syria’s future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding militias — some of them radical Islamists — who hoarded food and weapons while the people starved.
_________________________________
What destroyed Aleppo? It was not the sectarianism that is often held up as a key to the Syrian war. It was not just “terrorism,” the word used by regime apologists to fend off any share of blame. Those things played a role, but the core of the conflict in Aleppo, as in much of Syria, was a divide between urban wealth and rural poverty. It is not new. Travelers in the Ottoman era used to describe the shocking gulf between Aleppo’s opulence and the countryside surrounding it, where peasants lived in almost Stone Age conditions. Later, this divide mapped onto the city itself, as eastern Aleppo spread and filled with poor migrants. Deeply religious and mostly illiterate, smoldering with class resentment, they became the foot soldiers of a violent insurgency led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s.
________________________________
“I was very scared of both sides,” Yasser told me later. “If I went to one side, the other would kill me.” He lay there, his limbs going numb, too frightened to move or speak for more than four hours.
________________________________
There was a prison too, and I later met a woman who seems to have been kept there. She had been captured in a rural village, and the rebels killed her husband and then moved her from place to place, intending to trade her for their own prisoners. There were female jailers who beat and cursed her and called her an infidel. She told me she was given a bottle of water to wash herself with once every 10 to 15 days. During the final battle for Aleppo, she often heard the sounds of bombs and mortars exploding nearby, and her jailers would taunt her, saying Assad’s bombs will kill you.
______________________________
Nista cudno sto svako ko moze bezi glavom bez obzira.
