Syria

Aftermath of the Assad regime's shelling of the city of Homs.

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff.

Click HERE for more by Tariq Ali. For more on Syria, click HERE.

By Tariq Ali

September 16, 2012 -- CounterPunch, via Green Left Weekly -- Angered by the non-stop, one-sided propaganda on CNN and BBC World, usually a prelude to NATO bombing campaigns (including the six-month onslaught on Libya, the casualties of which are still hidden from the public) or direct occupations, I was asked to explain my views on RTV [Russia Today].

I did so, denouncing the promotion of the Syrian National Council by Western media networks and pointing out that some of the armed-struggle opposition were perfectly capable of carrying out their own massacres and blaming them on the regime.

There were doubts at the time about who was responsible for the massacre in Houla in May. No longer. It’s now clear that the regime was responsible.

Prison writings: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century

[Click HERE for more analysis of the situation in

[Click HERE for more analysis of the situation in Syria.]

By Tony Iltis

August 12, 2012 -- Green Left Weekly -- The 50-year rule of the Ba’ath Party in Syria looks to be effectively over. In the past month armed clashes have spread to the Syrian capital, Damascus, and the largest city, Aleppo. Armed opposition forces have taken control of several border points. On August 6, Prime Minister Riad Hijab defected to the opposition.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad — who inherited the presidency in 2000 from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in a 1970 military coup — no longer controls the country.

However, an end to the violence, which has claimed 20,000 lives since the uprising that broke out in March last year against Assad, looks far away. So, too, does the realisation of the uprising’s original aims: democratic rights and economic justice.

The regime has indicated it will cling to whatever power it can with counter-offensives in Damascus and Aleppo. Western demands that Assad face an international war crimes trial, and the nastier fate of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who was brutally murdered after his overthrow and capture by NATO-led forces, has given Assad no incentive to compromise.

Anti-Assad protest in Syria organised by the Local Coordinating Committees.

Western military intervention will cause more death and suffering in Syria.

Hillary Clinton (centre) meets King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (right) in Riyadh to discuss Syria. Photograph: AP.

By Rupen Savoulian

May 21, 2012 -- Antipodean Athiest, submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author-- In April 2012, a number of high-level political officials attended conferences in Paris and Istanbul organised by the Friends of Syria group. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton attended these meetings, and joined the foreign ministers from the NATO powers and Arab Gulf monarchies in denouncing the killings committed by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

By Omar S. Dahi and Vijay Prashad

April 26, 2012 --Jadaliyya -- At 2 am on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, the Palestinian-Syrian intellectual and activist Salameh Kaileh was arrested from his home “without explanation”, as his lawyer Anwar Bunni of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research put it. This is not Salameh Kaileh’s first time in a Syrian prison. He was a guest of the Assad family in its several jails for eight years and 11 days in the 1990s.

By Rupen Savoulian

Members of the self-proclaimed, US-backed Syrian National Council.

By As‘ad Abukhalil