Once upon a time, early in the previous century, a line in the sand was drawn, from Acre to Kirkuk. Two colonial powers - Britain and France -- nonchalantly divided the Middle East between themselves; everything north of the line in the sand was France's; south, it was Britain's.
Blow by blow
No matter what militarized Western corporate media spins, there's no endgame in Syria -- yet. On the contrary; the sectarian game is just beginning.
It's 1980's Afghanistan all over again. The over 100 heavily armed gangs engaged in civil war in Syria are overflowing with Gulf Cooperation Council funds financing their Russian RPGs bought on the black market. Salafi-jihadis cross into Syria in droves -- not only from Iraq but also Kuwait, Algeria, Tunisia and Pakistan, following enraged calls by their imams. Kidnapping, raping and slaughtering pro-Assad regime civilians is becoming the law of the land.
They go after Christians with a vengeance.[1] They force Iraqi exiles in Damascus to leave, especially those settled in Sayyida Zainab, the predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood named after Prophet Muhammad's grand-daughter, buried in the beautiful local mosque. The BBC, to its credit, at least followed the story.[2]
They perform summary executions; Iraq's deputy interior minister Adnan al-Assadi told AFP how Iraqi border guards saw the Free Syrian Army (FSA) take control of a border outpost and then they "executed 22 Syrian soldiers in front of the eyes of Iraqi soldiers."
The Bab al-Hawa crossing between Syria and Turkey was over-run by no less than 150 multi-national self-described mujahideen[3] -- coming from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Chechnya and even France, many proclaiming their allegiance to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
They burned a lot of Turkish trucks. They shot their own promo video. They paraded their al-Qaeda flag. And they declared the whole border area an Islamic state.
Hand over your terrorist ID
There's no way to understand the Syrian dynamics without learning that most FSA commanders are not Syrians, but Iraqi Sunnis. The FSA could only capture the Abu Kamal border crossing between Syria and Iraq because the whole area is controlled by Sunni tribes viscerally antagonistic towards the al-Maliki government in Baghdad. The free flow of mujahideen, hardcore jihadis and weapons between Iraq and Syria is now more than established.
The idea of the Arab League -- behaving as NATO-GCC's fully robed spokesman -- offering exile to Bashar al-Assad may be as ridiculous as the notion of the CIA supervising which mujahideen and jihadi outfits may have access to the weapons financed by Qatar and the Saudis.
At first, it might have been just a bad joke. After all, the exile offer came from those exact same paragons of democracy, the House of Saud and Qatar, who control the Arab League and are financing the mujahideen and the anti-Syria jihad.
Baghdad, though, publicly condemned the exile offer. And the aftermath -- in fact on the same day -- was worthy of The Joker (yes, Batman's foe); a wave of anti-Shiite bombings in Iraq, with over 100 people dead, duly claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq, al-Qaeda's local franchise. Spokesman Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi energetically urged the Sunni tribes in Anbar and Nineveh to join the jihad and topple the "infidel" government in Baghdad.
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