Syria Besieged

The Syria-based deputy patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Bishop Luka Khoury, said Thursday that there was no danger of a partition of Syria, or threats to Syria’s Christian community, despite the ongoing unrest in the country. “There are many rumors; there is no civil war in Syria until now. No one has attacked us so far and there is no danger to Christians,” the bishop said.

Unfortunately, it is civil war and sectarian clashes in Syria and the whole region that certain politicians in the allegedly historical Christian countries, like the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America, and France, seem to be after.

More than that! According to some US and British diplomats, the most obvious scenario in Syria would be “an all-out war” and “a proxy conflict with arms flowing in from all sides.”

If you doubt that the above mentioned countries, as well as some others, are actively pushing Syria toward a localized Armageddon that would most certainly engulf the whole region in an armed conflict of epic proportions, you should look into the most recent activity by those states as well as such “friends” of Syria, albeit of varying notoriety, as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, Libya, and Russia.

All those countries are actively supplying weapons and military equipment to either the Syrian government or to the warring multinational terrorist groups there, the latter for convenience sake slyly dubbed “opposition forces” or “rebels”.  The US State Department insists that the United States is not paying for or supplying any weapons to the conflict, but admitted to The Washington Post that it is providing "non-lethal assistance" to the “opposition forces”, in the form of information sharing and coordination between the “rebels” and other nations in the region. More and better weaponry is being funneled to Syrian “rebels” by neighboring Persian Gulf states, and much of the support effort is being organized by U.S. officials.

Most recent videos out of Syria appear to show the terrorists fighters carrying and using much more sophisticated and up-to-date weapons than at the beginning of the conflict and their US–coordinated attacks on Syrian government troops are growing more aggressive and deadlier.

It is a common knowledge that Syria is one of Russia's top weapons customers. Russia has been providing Syria with modern weapon systems incessantly under various contracts, which had been concluded long time ago, fully in line with international law. Officially they do not contribute to the current armed violence in Syria. So far.

In a letter to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had seen reports of countries supplying arms to the government and “rebels”. He even urged states not to arm either side in the Syrian conflict.

The situation around Syria has turned into regional arms race frenzy on behalf of the conflicting sides, each side trying to out-supply the other in apparent preparation for a fierce and lengthy armed conflict. The amount of the most sophisticated weapons in Syria, as well as in the entire region, must be staggering. If a fully blown war starts there it will remind us of the Cold War era of similar proxy wars that had been waged intermittently across the globe but on a smaller individual scale. It has been 14 months since the conflict started in Syria and the situation has been growing decidedly worse.

Now, almost a year since the conflict entered its deadly military stage, all sides involved seem to have agreed to let all systems go. Syrian government, the only party not interested in seeing all this regional weaponry come to all-out use, has issued the results of the preliminary investigation which showed that last week several anti-government armed groups (totaling 600 – 800 armed men) carried out a coordinated attack on security posts in Houla region and a simultaneous death raid which ended with a massacre of 108 civilians, among them children, from local villages. Most of the victims died in their homes and entire families were summarily executed by gunmen at close range. According to the report, most of the victims were family members of those "who refused to oppose the government and were at odds with the armed groups". Some of the victims were relatives of a member of parliament.

We might never come to know exactly who those terrorists who had carried out such a pointedly provocative and showy act of barbarism were. The Western governments unashamedly used that deadly provocation in their interests and prematurely accused the Syrian government. The position of the accusers is clear. They are waiting for such provocations, to say the least. They never concealed their desire to get rid of the Syrian government and expressed clearly their readiness to reach their end by all means. As we all know, from their point of view, the end justifies the means.

But toppling the Syrian lawful government is not really the sole objective of this campaign. Needless to say that the ultimate aim of political economists from the West is to create certain economic conditions favorable to the leading corporate banking houses in Europe and America to do their murky businesses on new territories where bank loans would be forced on local economies so that later they could be privatized for debts. Destabilizing local political situation in one country is a precondition necessary for destabilizing the situation in the whole region. The main objective here is to render the whole Middle-Eastern region a political hell on the one side and on the other an economic heaven regarding the opportunities it presents to certain banks and corporations in terms of loans and investments into newly politically disorganized and devastated economies. Do you remember what happened to Europe after the WWI and WWII? Who benefitted the most from the chaos in the aftermath of all the revolutions and wars? What about more recent precedents? Is the turn of the Middle East to follow that kind of path, now?

Not exactly! After all, geopolitical situation in general is rather different now. There is no more Soviet Russia and no stifling global ideological, military, and economic standoff any more. It is free for all, now! And what is most exciting is that Russia, tri-color as she is, plays, or at least is learning fast to, the good old game just like everybody else! Wow!

The siege of the Syrian state is tightening, though. The US Treasury Department said Wednesday that the Syria International Islamic Bank, or SIIB, has been acting as a front for other Syrian financial institutions seeking to circumvent sanctions. The new penalties will prohibit the bank from engaging in financial transactions in the U.S. and will freeze any assets under U.S. jurisdiction.

SIIB said it would undertake all necessary measures toward the U.S. decision, saying it has no assets or accounts in the United States. It added that the bank, like other Syrian banks, halted all banking operations with the dollar since U.S. sanctions were first imposed on Syria. Well, it means that most likely the future of Syria is settled. In a negative way, though.

So, while Syria is being turned, by means of financial and economic sanctions, as well as overall military preparations, into a fortified castle besieged from all sides, the true masters of the game keep on going preparing the whole of the region for action.  There is evidence that the unrest has already spilled over several times into neighboring Lebanon. In the latest incident, gunmen kidnapped two Lebanese farmers in the country's north and took them across the border into Syria on Wednesday, a Lebanese security source said. United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has assured all parties concerned that “the violence escalates, the conflict spreads and intensifies”. “It involves countries in the region, it takes on increasingly sectarian forms, and we have a major crisis not only in Syria but in the region,” she said. So, it goes as planned, apparently.

Iran, meanwhile, has recently blamed Israel for the violence in Syria, saying Jerusalem is deliberately sabotaging the UN peace plan. Speaking at a weekly press conference, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast stated: “Any crime committed (in Syria) can be traced back to the (Israeli) regime’s hirelings”.

The U.S. and Russia, while accusing each other of pushing Syria towards a fully blown military conflict, keep arming the opposing sides in Syria. According to specialists, though, in contrast to Libya where NATO forces helped “rebels” topple Muammar Gaddafi last year, Syria's sectarian divisions, splintered opposition, stronger air defenses and armed forces all factor against armed intervention. Does it mean that the military conflict can be avoided? Probably not, unless the leaders in the United States, Great Britain, and France change their minds and learn to respect other peoples’ rights to national sovereignty and unless they stop their willful interventionist policies against other independent, albeit smaller, nations.
But the logic of the Economic Shock Doctrine dictates the opposite and the greedy immoral decadent but still powerful transnational financial-banking-oligarchic-corporate circles are not going to stop. They use every means possible to crush, to lie, to steal, and usurp… They kill people to live off their blood and suffering! The amount of weapons already amassed in the region indicates that the military conflict could be very long and devastating. Is it really to get that far worse, before it gets any better for the Middle East? Unfortunately, British and American politicians already predict terrible times of incessant “sectarian violence” for the whole of the Middle East in the near future.