Goodbye to the Last of Syria’s Good Guys
Let’s dispense with wishful illusions. The idealists who started the Syrian revolution have been killed, quieted or forced out of the country.
In November of 2012, Iyas Kadouni, an activist from the town of Saraqeb in northwestern Syria, grew disenchanted with the abuses of some rebel brigades in the area. A few days earlier, a YouTube video had been posted online showing rebels beating and executing captive government soldiers, and Kadouni took to Facebook to condemn it. “We don’t want those who are liberating us from killers to resemble them and take on their values,” he wrote. Soon, he told reporters at the time, he started being bombarded with angry messages from supporters of the rebels, warning him that he was “playing with fire.”
For the next several months, Kadouni stuck it out in Syria, campaigning for the revolution, sharing news with journalists covering it from abroad, and speaking his mind about the course of the conflict. But a rift had formed between him and the leading factions of the rebellion, and by early last summer, Kadouni felt it was time to leave. Some activists he knew had begun to turn the cause into a business enterprise, violating what he considered to be the basic precepts of the revolution and putting people who disapproved in danger. Worse, a sinister new militant organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, had moved into Saraqeb, displacing the less battle-hardened brigades that Kadouni knew well. “I found myself in a very dangerous situation,” Kadouni told me recently by phone from Brussels, where he now lives.
Over the weekend, President Barack Obama said that he and the intelligence community had “underestimated” the threat posed by ISIS, a group he once dismissed as a “JV team.” The White House has also embarked on a campaign of airstrikes against the group, while pledging to send money and weapons to “moderate” elements of the Free Syrian Army who can help retake ground from ISIS. It’s not yet clear if such moderate factions truly exist; some of the most effective rebel battalions are those with hardline Islamist views, and the preferred FSA units remain undertrained and unreliable. But in the search for the true moderates of the Syrian uprising—the activists and humanitarians who, like Kadouni, eschewed violence and resisted the growing extremism and religiosity of the various rebel brigades—the prognosis is much more clear: The revolution has not had space for them for more than year.
“If you wanted to work for Syria—just for Syria, for the Syrian people—you could not be safe at any time,” Kadouni said of his experience last year. “You would sleep in your house waiting for someone to come kill you.”
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/02/the-idealists-who-started-syria-s-revolution-have-all-been-killed-jailed-or-exiled.html
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