On this May 12, rebels have agreed to free 1,500 families whom they had kidnapped and held hostages in Adra, a suburb of the capital Damascus, for the release of rebels jailed by the government. Two weeks ago they freed some one hundred infants, children and elderly men and women in exchange for evacuating the Old City of Homs unharmed.
On May 4, they cut off water supply to some three million civilians in Syria's second largest city of Aleppo, a collective punishment reminiscent of a similar horrible practice by Israel in Beirut in 1982. Last month the rebels cut off the electricity supply. For less than two years now they have been bombarding the western side of the city, which is under government control, with mortar shells and turning the civilian life there into a nightmare of suicide and tunnel bombings from the eastern side, which they control.
Rule, Not Exception
These inhuman tactics are not the exception, but the norm and rule. Since the very beginning of their rebellion in March 2011, rebels stormed into Syrian city centers, where there was no official military presence, and used the civilian population as human shields against any retaliation by the government forces, thus unleashing what the United Nations described as the world's largest refugee problem.
Civilians have paid the higher price. Syrians now hold the rebels responsible for their plight. Their sectarian public incubator has already turned against them in favour of restoring the missing safety, security and order by the government.
All factions of the rebels claim they are the representatives of the Muslim Sunni majority, but the overwhelming majority of some six million Syrians who are displaced internally are Sunnis, now hosted by non-Sunni compatriots in safe havens under government protection, let alone more than three million refugees who are also overwhelmingly Sunni Syrians and fled to neighbouring countries from the areas held by the rebels.
It's a well-known fact now that creating a humanitarian crisis in Syria, whether real or fabricated, and holding the Syrian government responsible for it as a casus belli for foreign military intervention under the UN 2005 so-called "responsibility to protect" initiative was from the very beginning of the Syrian conflict the goal of the U.S.-led so-called "Friends of Syria' coalition.
A second fact was the rush to militarize the Syrian civilian peaceful protests. When President al-Assad issued in 2011 the first of his six general amnesties, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went on record with a public appeal to armed rebels not to lay down their arms in response.
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