10-05-2017, 10:21 PM
*** 6-Oct-17 World View -- Syria's war resumes in full, as 'de-escalation' agreements unravel
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
****
**** International Red Cross: Fighting in Syria worst since Aleppo
****
![[Image: g160818c.jpg]](http://Media.GenerationalDynamics.com/ww2010/g160818c.jpg)
From August 2016: Five year old boy, Omran Daqneesh, sitting confused in an ambulance in Aleppo after being pulled from the rubble of one of Bashar al-Assad's airstrikes. To al-Assad, this boy and others like him are just cockroaches to be exterminated.
Syria's president Bashar al-Assad promised last year that when his air
force was finished killing as many people as possible in the battle of
Aleppo, then the Syrian war would be end, because his opponents would
have nothing left to fight for.
A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
indicates not only that the war has not ended, but that in fact the
level of fighting across much of Syria has reached the levels of the
battle of Aleppo.
Much of the fighting is around the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, which
is one of the last strongholds in Syria for the so-called Islamic
State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh). There are many groups fighting
ISIS in Deir al-Zour: The Syrian army backed by the Russian military,
Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias, and mostly Kurdish Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF), which have been supplied weapons by the US
military.
However, there is also fierce fighting in three "de-escalation zones"
-- Idlib, rural Hama and eastern Ghouta -- that were set up in a
series of "peace talks" held in Astana, Kazakhstan. The participants
in the meetings were Russia, Iran and Turkey, but most noticeably did
not include the Syrian regime, or any of the opposition groups to
Bashar al-Assad. The result is that it appears that the de-escalation
zones are unraveling, to no one's real surprise.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 3,000 people,
including 955 civilians, were killed during September, making it the
deadliest month of the conflict so far this year. More than 70% of the
civilians were killed in air strikes. Furthermore, as many as 10
hospitals have been damaged during the last 10 days, cutting hundreds
of thousands of people off from access to basic healthcare.
In a separate development, al-Assad's air force is once again using
Sarin nerve gas civilians, based on laboratory analyses of samples
taken from the north Syrian town of Ltamenah which was bombed by
Syria's air force. The Syrian air force bombing injured around 50
people, although nobody was believed to have been killed. The finding
was announced on Thursday by the by the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
According to Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations:
"For years the Assad regime has used chemical weapons to murder and
terrorise innocent Syrian civilians. Unfortunately, it’s clear that
the Syrian regime not only lied about the extent of their chemical
weapons programmed, but that they will continue to refuse to cooperate
with watchdog organizations like the OPCW."
As I've written many times in the past, Bashar al-Assad is the worst
genocidal monster so far this century. The Syrian war began in 2011
when al-Assad ordered his army and air force to attack peacefully
protesting civilians, including women and children. Things really
turned around in August 2011, when al-Assad launched a massive
military assault on a large, peaceful Palestinian refugee camp in
Latakia, filled with tens of thousands of women and children
Palestinians. He dropped barrel bombs laden with metal, chlorine,
ammonia, phosphorous and chemical weapons onto innocent Sunni women
and children, he's targeted bombs on schools and hospitals, and he's
used Sarin gas to kill large groups of people. He considers all Sunni
Muslims to be cockroaches to be exterminated.
After the attack on the Palestinian refugee camp, thousands of young
Sunni jihadists from 86 countries around the world traveled to Syria
to fight al-Assad, and they formed ISIS. Thanks to al-Assad, millions
of Syrians have fled to neighboring countries to escape the violence,
and over a million have fled to Europe. The amount of global
destruction that al-Assad has brought about is truly breathtaking.
As I've written many times, al-Assad is a delusional psychopath, and
from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, his delusions are
based on the experiences of his father, Hafez al-Assad.
Syria's last generational crisis war was a religious/ethnic civil war
between the Shia Alawites versus the Sunnis. That war climaxed in
February 1982 with the destruction of the town of Hama. There had
been a massive uprising of the 400,000 mostly Sunni citizens of Hama
against Syria's Shia/Alawite president Hafez al-Assad, the current
president's father. He turned the town to rubble and killed or
displaced hundreds of thousands. Hama stands as a defining moment in
the Middle East. It was so shocking that it largely ended the war.
That worked because at that time, Syria was in a generational crisis
era, and the destruction of Hama was the climax of the war. The
reason for Bashar al-Assad's delusions is that he thought that the
destruction of Aleppo last year would end the war in the same way that
his father's destruction of Hama ended the war. But this is a
generational Awakening era, and that kind of outcome doesn't work.
The reason that it doesn't work is that there are many survivors who
were shocked by the destruction of Hama in 1982, but are no longer
shocked by similar actions since they've seen it all before. So the
destruction of Aleppo did not end the war, as Bashar al-Assad
delusionally hoped, and now the war is back in full force. BBC and
International Committee of the Red Cross and Reuters and The National (UAE)
Related Articles
****
**** Analyst gives a chilling analysis of where the Syrian war is going
****
As I've written many times, the war in Syria will never end as long as
Bashar al-Assad is in power. Syria is in a generational Awakening
era, with little desire for war, as the survivors of the 1982 are
still war-weary from what happened at that time. This war would have
ended long ago, except that Bashar al-Assad, along with Russia, Iran
and Hezbollah, have forced it to continue. Bashar al-Assad is a
delusional psychopath who will never allow the war to end, and
apparently Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are willing to shed blood and
treasure to support him.
Last year, al-Assad claimed that the battle of Aleppo was "history in
the making":
<QUOTE>"[The liberation of Aleppo was] history in the making
and worthy of more than the word congratulations.
History is being written in these moments. Every Syrian citizen is
taking part in the writing. It started not today, but years ago
when the crisis and the war on Syria began.
I think that after the liberation of Aleppo we’ll talk about the
situation as ... before the liberation of Aleppo and after the
liberation of Aleppo."<END QUOTE>
Well, that didn't happen.
Joshua Landis, from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at
University of Oklahoma, is an expert on Syria. He was interviewed on
the BBC on Thursday, where he gave a chilling analysis of what's to
come. Landis was asked why there's been a spike in violence in Syria
(my transcription):
<QUOTE>"In the south of Syria, near the Jordanian border, it
has largely been controlled. But in the north of Syria, there is
intense fighting around Deir az-Zour, major provincial capital,
held by ISIS, both pro-US Kurdish forces and the Syrian army are
trying to take that city, and trying to take the Euphrates, all
the way down to the Iraqi border. And there's a scramble to
destroy ISIS as quickly as they can, and to grab as much
territory. This territory has lots of oil wells in it. It's very
important for the future of both the Kurds and Syria. So this is
causing a spike in the amount of deaths , because they're trying
to go as quickly as they can, they're not being very
discriminatory.
Then in the west of Syria, the northwest, near the Turkish border,
there's been a lot of fighting and a lot of bombing, by the Syrian
air force and the Russian air force, of rebels, largely extremist
Muslim rebels. and so this doesn't entirely put paid to the
de-escalation zones, but on the other hand it shows how delicate
they are, and that the war is far from over."<END QUOTE>
Landis said that the agreements that created the de-escalation zones
are unraveling, and that Syria wants to destroy the hospitals that the
Syrian air force has been attacking:
<QUOTE>"This has unraveled. And there's a lot of fingers
pointing to whose fault it is. There was an attack from Idlib
province towards Hama, that gave the Russians and Syrians an
excuse to go after these militias in the Idlib province, but now
they've gone on for weeks, and they've bombed many hospitals in
the region, and they've escalated far beyond a tit for tat basis.
Well, a lot of those hospitals are being maintained by western
NGO's, by Syrian charitable organizations and so forth, and I
think the Syrian govt wants to destroy them in the northwest of
Syria. Idlib province, a rebel-held province, has become a
dumping ground for all kinds of rebel groups, and Syria, as well
as the Russians, I think hope that they drive a lot of those
rebels out into Turkey.
It wants to make the region uninhabitable, and inhospitable, to
all groups, so that they flee, making it easier for the Syrian
army to push back into the region."<END QUOTE>
If Landis is correct, this is really a dramatic development. It took
months for al-Assad to make Aleppo "uninhabitable and inhospitable,"
and Landis says that al-Assad wants to do the same for all of Idlib
province. Based on the Aleppo experience, this would involve months
of extremely bloody fighting
Landis was asked: If ISIS is defeated in the east and in the north,
can we expect the Syrian government and its allies to shift their
focus to some of the opposition-held regions that are relatively
peaceful right now?
<QUOTE>"Absolutely. And this is a problem with these
de-escalation zones. The United States I think has sold them as
something that could be permanent, but Bashar al-Assad has said in
no uncertain terms that he plans to take back all of Syria. And
the Russians have said that they do not intend to partition Syria.
So for both of them, deescalation zones are a temporary fix. It
allows them to fight ISIS now, in the northeast of Syria, but as
soon as that fight is finished, they're gonna swing back, and
they're gonna begin to mop up rebel-held territory in other parts
of Syria. So those truces are temporary, and some of them are
breaking down, as you say today."<END QUOTE>
This is astonishing. According to Landis, al-Assad is going to "swing
back and mop up" other parts of Syria, so that he can have control
once again of all of Syria. I personally don't believe that this is
even possible and that it's all part of al-Assad's delusion, but if it
did happen, it would take years of bloody war, with continuing support
from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, pretty much the only
way that a war can end is with an explosive climax at the end of a
crisis war during a generational Crisis era. Examples are the 1982
destruction of Hama, or the 1945 nuking of Japan. Awakening era wars
can only end with an armistice or peace agreement which is typically
violated a few months later. With the delusional Bashar al-Assad in
power in Syria, there is no chance at all that the Syria war will end
any time soon. Al Jazeera
Related Articles
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Syria, Aleppo, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad,
Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh
Deir Ezzor, Deir al-Zour, Deir ez-Zor, Deir Azzour, Ltamenah,
International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC,
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Nikki Haley,
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW,
Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF, Idlib, Hama, Ghouta,
Russia, Iran, Turkey, Astana, Kazakhstan,
Hafez al-Assad, Joshua Landis
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- International Red Cross: Fighting in Syria worst since Aleppo
- Analyst gives a chilling analysis of where the Syrian war is going
****
**** International Red Cross: Fighting in Syria worst since Aleppo
****
From August 2016: Five year old boy, Omran Daqneesh, sitting confused in an ambulance in Aleppo after being pulled from the rubble of one of Bashar al-Assad's airstrikes. To al-Assad, this boy and others like him are just cockroaches to be exterminated.
Syria's president Bashar al-Assad promised last year that when his air
force was finished killing as many people as possible in the battle of
Aleppo, then the Syrian war would be end, because his opponents would
have nothing left to fight for.
A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
indicates not only that the war has not ended, but that in fact the
level of fighting across much of Syria has reached the levels of the
battle of Aleppo.
Much of the fighting is around the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, which
is one of the last strongholds in Syria for the so-called Islamic
State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh). There are many groups fighting
ISIS in Deir al-Zour: The Syrian army backed by the Russian military,
Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias, and mostly Kurdish Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF), which have been supplied weapons by the US
military.
However, there is also fierce fighting in three "de-escalation zones"
-- Idlib, rural Hama and eastern Ghouta -- that were set up in a
series of "peace talks" held in Astana, Kazakhstan. The participants
in the meetings were Russia, Iran and Turkey, but most noticeably did
not include the Syrian regime, or any of the opposition groups to
Bashar al-Assad. The result is that it appears that the de-escalation
zones are unraveling, to no one's real surprise.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 3,000 people,
including 955 civilians, were killed during September, making it the
deadliest month of the conflict so far this year. More than 70% of the
civilians were killed in air strikes. Furthermore, as many as 10
hospitals have been damaged during the last 10 days, cutting hundreds
of thousands of people off from access to basic healthcare.
In a separate development, al-Assad's air force is once again using
Sarin nerve gas civilians, based on laboratory analyses of samples
taken from the north Syrian town of Ltamenah which was bombed by
Syria's air force. The Syrian air force bombing injured around 50
people, although nobody was believed to have been killed. The finding
was announced on Thursday by the by the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
According to Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations:
"For years the Assad regime has used chemical weapons to murder and
terrorise innocent Syrian civilians. Unfortunately, it’s clear that
the Syrian regime not only lied about the extent of their chemical
weapons programmed, but that they will continue to refuse to cooperate
with watchdog organizations like the OPCW."
As I've written many times in the past, Bashar al-Assad is the worst
genocidal monster so far this century. The Syrian war began in 2011
when al-Assad ordered his army and air force to attack peacefully
protesting civilians, including women and children. Things really
turned around in August 2011, when al-Assad launched a massive
military assault on a large, peaceful Palestinian refugee camp in
Latakia, filled with tens of thousands of women and children
Palestinians. He dropped barrel bombs laden with metal, chlorine,
ammonia, phosphorous and chemical weapons onto innocent Sunni women
and children, he's targeted bombs on schools and hospitals, and he's
used Sarin gas to kill large groups of people. He considers all Sunni
Muslims to be cockroaches to be exterminated.
After the attack on the Palestinian refugee camp, thousands of young
Sunni jihadists from 86 countries around the world traveled to Syria
to fight al-Assad, and they formed ISIS. Thanks to al-Assad, millions
of Syrians have fled to neighboring countries to escape the violence,
and over a million have fled to Europe. The amount of global
destruction that al-Assad has brought about is truly breathtaking.
As I've written many times, al-Assad is a delusional psychopath, and
from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, his delusions are
based on the experiences of his father, Hafez al-Assad.
Syria's last generational crisis war was a religious/ethnic civil war
between the Shia Alawites versus the Sunnis. That war climaxed in
February 1982 with the destruction of the town of Hama. There had
been a massive uprising of the 400,000 mostly Sunni citizens of Hama
against Syria's Shia/Alawite president Hafez al-Assad, the current
president's father. He turned the town to rubble and killed or
displaced hundreds of thousands. Hama stands as a defining moment in
the Middle East. It was so shocking that it largely ended the war.
That worked because at that time, Syria was in a generational crisis
era, and the destruction of Hama was the climax of the war. The
reason for Bashar al-Assad's delusions is that he thought that the
destruction of Aleppo last year would end the war in the same way that
his father's destruction of Hama ended the war. But this is a
generational Awakening era, and that kind of outcome doesn't work.
The reason that it doesn't work is that there are many survivors who
were shocked by the destruction of Hama in 1982, but are no longer
shocked by similar actions since they've seen it all before. So the
destruction of Aleppo did not end the war, as Bashar al-Assad
delusionally hoped, and now the war is back in full force. BBC and
International Committee of the Red Cross and Reuters and The National (UAE)
Related Articles
- US increasingly expresses total disgust with Syria regime for Bashar al-Assad's atrocities (21-Sep-2016)
- Western leaders sickened by Assad's 'industrial strength' torture in Syria (22-Jan-2014)
- Syria's air force deliberately targets hospital in Aleppo, killing dozens (29-Apr-2016)
- From 2013: The history of how Syria's Bashar al-Assad created ISIS (07-Sep-2016)
****
**** Analyst gives a chilling analysis of where the Syrian war is going
****
As I've written many times, the war in Syria will never end as long as
Bashar al-Assad is in power. Syria is in a generational Awakening
era, with little desire for war, as the survivors of the 1982 are
still war-weary from what happened at that time. This war would have
ended long ago, except that Bashar al-Assad, along with Russia, Iran
and Hezbollah, have forced it to continue. Bashar al-Assad is a
delusional psychopath who will never allow the war to end, and
apparently Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are willing to shed blood and
treasure to support him.
Last year, al-Assad claimed that the battle of Aleppo was "history in
the making":
<QUOTE>"[The liberation of Aleppo was] history in the making
and worthy of more than the word congratulations.
History is being written in these moments. Every Syrian citizen is
taking part in the writing. It started not today, but years ago
when the crisis and the war on Syria began.
I think that after the liberation of Aleppo we’ll talk about the
situation as ... before the liberation of Aleppo and after the
liberation of Aleppo."<END QUOTE>
Well, that didn't happen.
Joshua Landis, from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at
University of Oklahoma, is an expert on Syria. He was interviewed on
the BBC on Thursday, where he gave a chilling analysis of what's to
come. Landis was asked why there's been a spike in violence in Syria
(my transcription):
<QUOTE>"In the south of Syria, near the Jordanian border, it
has largely been controlled. But in the north of Syria, there is
intense fighting around Deir az-Zour, major provincial capital,
held by ISIS, both pro-US Kurdish forces and the Syrian army are
trying to take that city, and trying to take the Euphrates, all
the way down to the Iraqi border. And there's a scramble to
destroy ISIS as quickly as they can, and to grab as much
territory. This territory has lots of oil wells in it. It's very
important for the future of both the Kurds and Syria. So this is
causing a spike in the amount of deaths , because they're trying
to go as quickly as they can, they're not being very
discriminatory.
Then in the west of Syria, the northwest, near the Turkish border,
there's been a lot of fighting and a lot of bombing, by the Syrian
air force and the Russian air force, of rebels, largely extremist
Muslim rebels. and so this doesn't entirely put paid to the
de-escalation zones, but on the other hand it shows how delicate
they are, and that the war is far from over."<END QUOTE>
Landis said that the agreements that created the de-escalation zones
are unraveling, and that Syria wants to destroy the hospitals that the
Syrian air force has been attacking:
<QUOTE>"This has unraveled. And there's a lot of fingers
pointing to whose fault it is. There was an attack from Idlib
province towards Hama, that gave the Russians and Syrians an
excuse to go after these militias in the Idlib province, but now
they've gone on for weeks, and they've bombed many hospitals in
the region, and they've escalated far beyond a tit for tat basis.
Well, a lot of those hospitals are being maintained by western
NGO's, by Syrian charitable organizations and so forth, and I
think the Syrian govt wants to destroy them in the northwest of
Syria. Idlib province, a rebel-held province, has become a
dumping ground for all kinds of rebel groups, and Syria, as well
as the Russians, I think hope that they drive a lot of those
rebels out into Turkey.
It wants to make the region uninhabitable, and inhospitable, to
all groups, so that they flee, making it easier for the Syrian
army to push back into the region."<END QUOTE>
If Landis is correct, this is really a dramatic development. It took
months for al-Assad to make Aleppo "uninhabitable and inhospitable,"
and Landis says that al-Assad wants to do the same for all of Idlib
province. Based on the Aleppo experience, this would involve months
of extremely bloody fighting
Landis was asked: If ISIS is defeated in the east and in the north,
can we expect the Syrian government and its allies to shift their
focus to some of the opposition-held regions that are relatively
peaceful right now?
<QUOTE>"Absolutely. And this is a problem with these
de-escalation zones. The United States I think has sold them as
something that could be permanent, but Bashar al-Assad has said in
no uncertain terms that he plans to take back all of Syria. And
the Russians have said that they do not intend to partition Syria.
So for both of them, deescalation zones are a temporary fix. It
allows them to fight ISIS now, in the northeast of Syria, but as
soon as that fight is finished, they're gonna swing back, and
they're gonna begin to mop up rebel-held territory in other parts
of Syria. So those truces are temporary, and some of them are
breaking down, as you say today."<END QUOTE>
This is astonishing. According to Landis, al-Assad is going to "swing
back and mop up" other parts of Syria, so that he can have control
once again of all of Syria. I personally don't believe that this is
even possible and that it's all part of al-Assad's delusion, but if it
did happen, it would take years of bloody war, with continuing support
from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, pretty much the only
way that a war can end is with an explosive climax at the end of a
crisis war during a generational Crisis era. Examples are the 1982
destruction of Hama, or the 1945 nuking of Japan. Awakening era wars
can only end with an armistice or peace agreement which is typically
violated a few months later. With the delusional Bashar al-Assad in
power in Syria, there is no chance at all that the Syria war will end
any time soon. Al Jazeera
Related Articles
- Syria and Russia see 'the light at the end of the tunnel' after Aleppo victory (18-Dec-2016)
- US and Iran headed for military confrontation in Deir az-Zour in eastern Syria (09-Jun-2017)
- Russia uses the 'Grozny Model' to pursue mass slaughter in Aleppo Syria (02-Aug-2016)
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Syria, Aleppo, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad,
Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh
Deir Ezzor, Deir al-Zour, Deir ez-Zor, Deir Azzour, Ltamenah,
International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC,
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Nikki Haley,
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW,
Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF, Idlib, Hama, Ghouta,
Russia, Iran, Turkey, Astana, Kazakhstan,
Hafez al-Assad, Joshua Landis
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
