Syria

[mids2019]

Has Syria been forgotten and who is to blame for civilian deaths in this region. It is Assad or rebel groups?

(Its a conflict in the middle East with huge civilian casualties but doesn't involve Israel so I guess this thread will for a death)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war#:~:text=The%20Syrian%20civil%20war%20(Arabic,sponsored%20and%20non%2Dstate%20actors.

The issue is we won't have streams of people in London demanding Putin exile Assad to face justice.

The level of killing by Assad's regime is coming to surface and horror stories are going to leak. There are multiple geopolitical problems and bloody conflict across the middle East and it looks like even the Guardian has changed it's Gaza war tab to the Middle East to reflect this.

I think across the world there can be brief celebration of the downfall of a brutal dictator. It is an irony that the decimation of Hezbollah indirectly led to the fall of Assad which is now being widely celebrated across Syria and possibly in other regions

How noble of the Israeli government!

Israel is involved in Syria, therefore it is legitimate to mention what the Israeli government is doing on three fronts ( land grabbing, obviously). Facts.

I cannot believe this isn't getting more traction on MN!

Absolutely horrific details in the press

We literally had someone say that Assad would not measure up to Netayahu's crimes
One poster.....not a theme

And we endlessly have people exveptionalising the gaza conflict in a whole variety of ways.
They are discussing an active conflict/ potential genocide and highlighting the atrocities that have taken place. Maybe it would suit you better if people stopped doing that and turned away.

@Auvergne63 why the sarcasm? I wasn’t suggesting it was “noble” in any way. I was suggesting Israel’s aims were defensive and purely military. Clearly Israels’s main purpose is to avoid the possibility of these weapons being used against Israel. The reports coming out today by the BBC and others support this.

@Auvergne63 also rather odd to focus on Israel’s “ land grabbing” and state it as a “fact”.

There is a very interesting map of Syria published by the BBC today and attached, which shows who controls what. Can you see any land “grabbed” by Israel? No? That’s because there hasn’t been - it is not remotely a “fact”. There is a tiny sliver of land 400km2 which borders the Golan Heights that the Israeli military are occupying temporarily until a better solution that protects Israel’s border can be found.

The fact that a Muslim Arab leader tortured and killed tens of thousands seems to have curiously bypassed the attentions of those who only want to portray Netanyahu as the bad guy of the middle East
Perhaps we need a league table?

A 'tiny slither of land' that measures more than Gaza does in size. Will it be 'temporarily occupied' like Golan Heights? Why don't Israel ever use a 'tiny slither' of their own land to protect their borders instead of occupying everywhere else and then acting surprised when people in those countries get pissed off at them?

I'm just going to take a tiny slither of your garden. You won't even notice. Stop making a fuss,

What I stated was a fact was that Israel was involved in Syria. You read it differently, despite me putting "the land grabbing" in parenthesis.
Maybe looking up the use of parenthesis would be helpful for you.

As a newcomer to this thread, I think it’s a shame it is drifting into a pro vs anti Israel match, when it should be about Syria. I was looking for informed comment on the potential, if any, of HTS to set Syria on track for some kind of peaceful transition out of brutal dictatorship. I’m sure there’s people out there with good insights into the region, let’s not make it all about Israel again.

Maybe people should realise there is time and place. The whole "conflict in middle east" topic is really just about Gaza conflict.
It really does grate when everything is turned to Gaza and it devalues others suffering in different conflicts tbh.

Imagine a country taking a tiny slither of Israel...

It's been the way of these threads for some time now, some cannot tolerate talking about other conflicts, other situations in the middle east and bring in bad Israel and talk about Gaza as if Gaza is the only place in the middle east where people are suffering. Sadly, there are many people in the middle east suffering.... Syria, Yeman, etc Lebanon, Iran, they don't matter to some.

Scroll back to see where the deflection started. Posters were commenting on Syria until one post brought Netanyahu into it. It's unfortunate that it keeps happening

Why can’t there be one thread that isn’t turned into an ‘Israel is evil’ thread? Israel is currently making very sensible decisions to protect its borders and its population because no one else will. And making sure chemical weapons don’t fall into the hands of unpredictable rebel groups seems in the best interests of all minorities. Minority groups - Christians, Druze, Yazidis, Kurds - are at very real risk from the rebels.

Well scroll back then because it was not done by someone talking about bad Israel. I find it is often the pro Israelis that are responsible for the deflections.

The thread was discussing Syria until mids2019 · Today 17:22, post which caused a deflection. Which I agree is very frustrating

Did you not get it?? We ( the west ) have supplied the weapons to the Isis jihadist fighters to get rid of the Assad regime.
The new regime is an extreme version compared to what they had before.

I'm not sure what you mean. Turkey and Arab countries have been supplying various groups in Syria with arms for years. HTS manufactures some of their own weapons and they've captured weapons, including Russian & Iranian weapons, as they've progressed across Syria.

That completely ignores the fact that the Assad regime had been supported by Russia and Iran. Russia’s weaker due to the war in Ukraine. Iran had been supplying weapons plus sending Hezbollah fighters but has been massively weakened by Israel who took out all of the Hezbollah leadership and totally degraded their ability to fight. Even the rebels have acknowledged that.

it’s an incredibly complex situation and trying to see it thru a simplistic lens of ‘the evil west destabilising the ME’ isn’t helpful.

@nomoretoriesforme endlessly blaming the West/ Israel for the Arab world’s woes rather disregards their own agency and the fact that they have been independent and autonomous, in syria’s case since 1946. ISIS created ISIS, it wasn’t the west’s plan to unleash a murderous “ caliphate” upon the Syrian people. Notwithstanding some catastrophic mistakes, such as the invasion of Iraq, The whole “ the west has created a monster” narrative is running out of steam as far as I’m concerned.

I agree the narrative is pushed on here but rarely do people look at those with agency

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