U.S. to Give Some Syria Rebels Ability to Call Airstrikes
Source: WSJ
WASHINGTON—The U.S. has decided to provide pickup trucks equipped with mounted machine guns and radios for calling in U.S. airstrikes to some moderate Syrian rebels, seeking to replicate the success Kurdish forces, aided by American B-1B bombers, had over Islamic State last month.
The plan comes as the U.S. prepares to start training moderate rebels, who are waging a two-front fight against the extremists and Syrian regime forces. Defense officials said American trainers will be in place March 1 in Jordan, with a second site due to open soon after in Turkey.
The Obama administration has been facing growing pressure to step up support for the moderate Syrian rebels from Republican hawks in Congress and from some allies.
The first training sessions are to last between six and eight weeks. The training will focus on helping the rebel forces hold territory and counter Islamic State fighters—not to take on the Syrian army.
Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-give-some-syria-rebels-ability-to-call-airstrikes-1424208053
The full article can be read by typing the headline into a search engine like google and then by clicking on the resulting link
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No chance at all of us getting dragged into a shooting war either, the moderates would never think of getting us to attack Assad directly.
Assad keeps the detention, torture, and "disappearances" to himself. Journalists have been killed by IS and in Syrian prisons.
The mass killings of civilian populations in cities are probably the worst of the Assad violations.
Assad airstrike in Aleppo
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Since a lot of the fighting of Syria’s conflict takes place in heavily populated towns and urban areas, sniper kill zones often dissect neighborhoods and fighters dig in and embed among the civilian population. Effectively, this makes human shields of their inhabitants, and inevitably ensures they suffer disproportionately when those entrenched combatants start to fight and shell each other’s positions. This is made worse by the very nature of this type of urban warfare, which usually produces deadly stalemates, or only excruciatingly slow advances at terribly high cost. This callousness and indifference to the suffering of Syrians by those fighting in their name the Syrian regime and the rebel and jihadist groups opposing it has been a central and dominant theme throughout this messy and brutal war.
Another disturbing aspect in which civilians are caught up in the war is through the heavy indiscriminate bombing of their neighborhoods by the infamous “barrel bombs” dropped by regime helicopters from high altitude on rebel-held areas, the main purpose being to clear out the residents and make the areas easier to capture. Needless to say, the results of such bombing campaigns are catastrophic. This sometimes goes in tandem with crippling sieges that can last for months or even years, causing untold misery and suffering for the people trapped inside, who have to not only contend with a possible quick death from above but also a slow agonizing death from starvation and poverty.
Being in an area that one of the warring camps controls does not necessarily delineate support for that camp, although it is matter-of-factly portrayed as such by the propaganda machine of the other side, seeking to justify its excessive brutality. This divisive “us against them” is a rather peculiar aspect of this conflict, even if not surprising. A terrified populace can easily be polarized against their former friends and neighbors, especially when told that they are now the enemy, with corroboration of that coming in the form of deadly shells and bombs fired from their areas. We have experienced this first hand in Aleppo city, for instance, where rebels shell neighborhoods in the west (the regime-controlled part) on a daily basis, killing and wounding many people, with the justification being that anyone still living there must be “shabiha,” a derogatory term for a regime loyalist.
Thus, the warring camps in Syria seek to consolidate support among “our civilians” while demonizing “their civilians,” which makes mass slaughter of people more palatable and acceptable. In fact, in the tit-for-tat shelling of Damascus city and eastern Ghouta earlier this month, there were calls to wipe Douma out, and everyone in it, by people in Damascus, while those in Ghouta cheered with glee every time rockets were fired into the capital. Of course these sentiments are not universally shared or accepted, but illustrate how quickly desensitized and dehumanized people living through the horrors of war can become. The end result, though, was equally as grotesque as those attitudes, with many deaths and injuries in Damascus, and a disproportionate number of people killed in Ghouta, too, with the unsettling prospect of this mutual slaughter now becoming the new norm as both sides continue to threaten and escalate their rhetoric.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/syria-war-civilian-casualties-regime-opposition-jihadists.html#ixzz3S3hNhBUh
We are to the point now where 90%-plus of the "news" is some PR bullshit.
