Emancipation US-style:

This is a scene of oil fields on fire in Qayyara, a town with a population of about 15,000 people that is 60 km (35 miles) south of Mosul, Iraq, where the US-led coalition of 60 countries is conducting a siege against an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 ISIS fighters in a metropolitan area with an estimated civilian population between 750,000 & 1.5 million people. The number of Iraqi & US coalition troops appears to be a closely guarded military secret because media disagree on the numbers. Secrecy, sub rosa operations is the new way the US conducts war to undercut antiwar opposition.

Media reported that Qayyarah was fully captured by Iraqi forces in August 2016. After Iraqi forces (armed, trained & controlled by the US Pentagon) recaptured a nearby airbase in July, the US Pentagon announced the deployment of 560 more troops to develop the airbase for use in the siege on Mosul.

There have been many photos like this one from Qayyara since the US coalition captured it which all claim ISIS set the oil fields on fire as they retreated. This one is from November 2016; there are also more recent ones. We know from the Iraq War that oil fires burn up to five years so it’s possible they were set by ISIS. It’s also possible they were set off by US bombing of Qayyara during the siege to retake it.

Last week, the US Department of Defense issued a special report on US bombing operations in Iraq & Syria. Since Assad supporters oppose US intervention in Syria as a regime-change operation, we would expect them to report frequently about US bombing operations, at least in Syria. Instead they harp only on US-backed “head-chopping militias” as if that were the only military method employed by the US.

That’s because if Assad supporters investigate US bombing, it contradicts, or at least weakens their claim of a regime-change scenario. There are no reports from the Pentagon nor the Syrian & Russian governments that US bombers are targeting anything other than ISIS strongholds in Syria. The US is letting Russian bombers do the dirty work of destroying popular opposition to Assad & hides its overall strategy in Iraq & Syria behind rhetoric about the fight against ISIS.

There is considerable confusion about US strategy in Syria. Intentionally so, because so much of it is secret & renders support to the Assad regime. It derives immense political advantage from such secrecy & obfuscation as we see from the capitulation of antiwar & progressive forces to Assadist propaganda.

So these are the Pentagon figures of US coalition bombing missions in Iraq & Syria:

–Between August 8, 2014 & November 28, 2016, the US & its coalition partners flew an estimated 127,764 bombing sorties in Iraq & Syria.

–In 2016, the US coalition flew a total of 16,806 air strikes in Iraq & Syria (10,678 Iraq / 6,128 Syria);

–Of the total air strikes conducted in 2016, 13,058 were by US bombers (7,248 Iraq / 5,810 Syria);

–Other countries in the coalition conducted 3,748 air strikes in 2016 (3,430 Iraq / 318 Syria).

The countries that participate in the bombing strikes include:

–In Iraq: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, The Netherlands, & UK;

–In Syria: Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, & UK.

The only principled antiwar demands are the immediate cessation of bombing in Iraq & Syria; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces in Iraq & Syria.

No to war.

(Photo by Goran TomasevicReuters)

So interesting that UNITAR published this satellite imagery of Aleppo acquired from November 2010 through September 2016 & just published on December 20th. It identifies 33,521 residential buildings damaged by bombing but excludes the industrial areas.

The UN probably knows then which military forces have been bombing Aleppo to smithereens for over five years. Have they not shared that with media or the US who still claim uncertainty about whether it’s Syrian or Russian bombers?

Then again, didn’t UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein just claim UNHCR can’t make definitive condemnations of genocide against Rohingya Muslims by the military because investigators are not allowed to enter Arakan state & have no first hand knowledge?

Has the UNHCR checked out the catalogs of high-tech military monitoring & surveillance systems? Surveillance technology employed by the US Pentagon claims surgical precision when it targets someone for assassination. But the UN can’t see what thousands of Burmese troops are doing in Arakan state? That must be where former UN chief Kofi Annan learned his “see no evil, hear no evil, report what the junta says” approach to genocide in Myanmar.

Satellite map of residential destruction in Aleppo in greater detail:

http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/UNOSAT_A3_Aleppo_DamagePercentage_20160918opt.pdf

There are still protests all over the world to stand with Aleppo. The forces of social transformation have not been fooled by journalists, propagandists, & erstwhile antiwar activists shilling for Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians.

This is an photo from Cape Town, South Africa, which also rallied in the tens of thousands for Gaza in 2014.

(Thanks to Shaheed Mahomed for sharing this.)

Some practical jokester is adding me to pro-Assad groups without my knowledge. I’m not known for political ecumenism when it comes to bombing people or operating gulags. Don’t make me hunt you down & dump you.

Vanessa Beeley, Assad’s own Leni Riefenstahl, might be tanking her career by making up all that fake news about the White Helmet rescue workers. She is so busted.

So many fact-finding missions to Syria, so many interviews, articles, videos detailing their stealing, massacring, head-chopping, lurid associations with terrorist groups, & exorbitant funding by USAID & other European governments.

Now to find out from Fares Shehabi, the Assad official in Aleppo, Eva Bartlett, & Beeley herself reporting from east Aleppo that they never existed in the first place. Accompanied by her Syrian army security, she asked terrified civilians in east Aleppo if they knew about them & she only got quizzical looks in return. Such credulity shouldn’t be let loose in a war zone.

Max Blumenthal has his own explaining to do. But then again he’s probably not getting the big bucks from Assad & won’t have hell to pay for his phony investigative reports & condemnations of the White Helmets. Mostly he plagiarized from Beeley anyway.

PS: We hope the White Helmets are safe, wherever they are. Unlike Beeley, we presume they had the good sense to remove their helmets before the Syrian army arrived.

This is a presentation by Robin Yassin-Kassab, co-author with Leila Al-Shami of “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War.” His presentation is a marvelous, succinct elaboration of the Syrian popular movement against Assad.

Unlike Assad propagandists or reluctant Assadists, Yassin-Kassab actually knows something about what is going on; his analysis is not driven by confusions, Muslim or Arab-hating, war propaganda, or rationalizations for dictatorship.

https://youtu.be/zGDwBK0OrRU

Noticing many Assad supporters flatter & ingratiate themselves with me before launching into their “head-chopping” stuff: they admire me; consider me a “dear friend”; only take exception to my confusions about Syria.

Coming from people who pillory small children & hero-worship Assad & Putin, every one of those paltry flatteries feels like a punch in the face.

Ather Zia’s #poem about the #Muslim registry

i hear
we will be in the Muslim registry
our faces will be pixelized
irises digitized,
each finger, and
the opposable thumb
that all homo-sapiens
possibly evolved together,
will be memorized

i hear,
my young cello playing son
parents,
who finally remember directions to Safeway,
daughter whose singing never stops
dead friend’s soft-spoken wife, a master at making apple pies,
husband who loves funny shows
(i still wonder why he always wants something to make him laugh)
sick aunt who waits to be buried in a quiet spot
in Southern California, where she was born –
will all be exhibits
and held as a proof
for the way we pray

i hear
my faith, does not measure up,
but will be accounted for –
and here i was,
for years and years thinking I had none
little did I know,
it only needs one, against many,
to register my faith as evidence
of an uncommitted crime
(From Ather Zia’s blog: http://raiot.in/being-of-faith/)

Nothing is more wrenching than to see antiwar activists going back to Vietnam who now say they won’t protest Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians because their only duty is to protest the involvement of their own governments.

That is a profound betrayal of antiwar traditions with analogs going back to WWI when international antiwar forces first decisively ruptured over supporting their own governments in a war fought over the colonial division of the world among European powers & the US.

The anti-Vietnam War movement involved millions around the world in protest actions coordinated for the same day. Activists outside the US never considered it of no concern to them because their own countries weren’t bombing Vietnam. The same was true of Iraq & several other wars.

By such provincial logic as these veterans now so pitifully express, all solidarity with Palestine, Kashmir, the Rohingya, Bhopal, the Guarani & other indigenous peoples, Standing Rock Sioux, Roma, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Dalits & other oppressed castes is now politically none of our business. They’re of no concern to us if they live somewhere else. The oppressed are on their own. If they’re being deported, shot at, occupied, bombed, disappeared, jailed, murdered, ethnically cleansed, what’s it to us if our government is not involved? They’re probably all “jihadists” anyway & we have bigger fish to fry. With that kind of thinking the war-makers have us just where they want us: with our heads stuck up their ass.

The oldest traditions of human civilization are based on social solidarity, on honoring the humanity of others. It’s expressed in religion, music, art, progressive political traditions. But now when they want to support Assad’s dictatorship & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians, veteran antiwar activists are turning their backs on all that & talking provincial drivel.

Solidarity as the iron law of social transformation has not changed; the activists have gone sour or been confused by propagandists. They have time to come to their senses before they edge seamlessly into political affinity with the Kremlin & then eventually with the US Pentagon. There’s a long tradition to political degeneration too.

Yesterday, I posted about Assadist propaganda vilifying & mocking the suffering of children in Syria–children who have lived through five years of daily bombing, sustained injuries, permanent disability, psychological trauma, lost parents & beloved, witnessed others buried alive in rubble or blown apart by bombs.

In the post, I said that in 50 years of antiwar activism I had never before seen children exploited with such malice, that it seemed the unthinkable & a violation of the sacred. I was speaking of its use only by those who organized against wars & should have made the distinction that targeting children for violence is a mainstay of racism & war-mongering.

These are among the most prominent uses of children in propaganda which expose the ideological current Assadism belongs with:

1) Prior to the US civil rights movement in the 1960s, “pickaninny art” was an ubiquitous form of anti-Black propaganda; it appeared on postcards, calendars, books, cartoons, magazines, newspapers. The most common theme was a Black infant holding on to a twig suspended over an alligator pit. This genre of hate literature inculcated racism in white people at the same time as it expressed fear of Black youth rebellion against oppression.

2) Human rights groups have condemned Israel for targeting children in their massive bombing campaigns over Gaza, including bombing schools, refugee centers, hospital, residences, public parks & beaches. During the 2014 bombing that lasted seven weeks, the despicable Elie Wiesel put out a full-page ad in international media claiming Palestinians used their children as human shields. Israel has long claimed that to explain away the high fatality & injury rates of Palestinian children by the Israeli military.

The portrayal of Palestinian youth as terrorists, the rubbish a year ago about a “knifing Intifada” are part of vilifying Palestinian youth & are used to justify indefinite detention of Palestinian youth without charge in the military gulag which involves torture.

3) Kashmiri activists have written cogently over the course of the occupation & particularly during the current military rampage of how Indian occupying forces target youth in arrests, torture, detention, disappearance. In the current siege since July 8th, the number of small children down to the age of four & youth who have been injured, disfigured, permanently disabled by pellet munitions is in the several hundreds. Some are blinded in both eyes, some only partially blinded; most will suffer lifelong health problems from lead pellets that cannot be extracted from internal organs.

The photo is 14-year-old Insha Malik, blinded in both eyes by pellets in July, just after the current military siege began in Kashmir. She was hit by nearly 100 pellets while inside her family home.

The targeting of children is systematic because the oppressors are terrified of every new generation whose spirit of defiance must be broken, who must by violently inculcated with self-hatred & fear of oppressive authority. Against rebel youth, they set armies to disable or kill the spirit that stands fearless & steadfast against oppression. Assadist propagandists draw from this same cesspool of racism to generate their attacks on Syrian children as budding “jihadists.”

To stand with the children of Syria, Palestine, Kashmir, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, & the Rohingya we must demand no to war, no to occupation, no to genocide, no to colonialism.

(Photo from AFP)