"Rebel control over large sections of the region of Aleppo provides it with a strategic rear and interior lines of communication from southern Turkey. The disruption of rebel held areas of the northern Aleppo governorate, particularly its logistics route north-to-south from the Turkish border through the contested areas around Nubul and al-Zahraa’ to the front-lines of Aleppo, would be a significant blow to the armed opposition." Terrorism Monitor
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This is rather elementary military "strategery." Actually, it is more like grand tactics. If you succeed in cutting your opponents' supplyroute deep in his rear area, this ordinarily forces him to turn and fight you on ground of your choice. This is called a "turning maneuver." In contrast. a tight envelopment on one or both flanks results in a kessel battle.
The Assad government should have managed this on their own without Hizbullah assistance, but I suppose the presence of the authentic Shia in Hizbullah makes the acquisition of village support easier. Hey! that would work for me if I were running this. Contrary to the crap in the MSM the Alawis are not Shia. IMO, they are not even Muslims. Muslims do not worship a tri-partite god. pl
Colonel,
For my own education:
“IMO, they are not even Muslims. Muslims do not worship a tri-partite god”
Are they like the Kurdish sect : Yezidis ?
Beaver
They are equally heterodox. The Yazidis worship a strange angelic divinity even while claiming to somehow be Muslims. The Druze are yet another sect that once were related to Ismaili shiism but have strayed far the “path.” They, too, believe in a trinitarian arrangement but a different one. pl
LA Times reports that American SFf have been training Syrian rebels since 2012. Why am I not surprised?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-syria-20130622,0,4448399.story
Much less celebrate Christmas and Easter and drink wine.
walrus
This makes the question of whether or not CIA was exporting weapons from eastern Libya more interesting. pl
The trinity arrangement in Alawi faith, is that a Christian influence?
The Yezidis worship a being known as the ‘Peacock Angel’ who was once the Devil, but redeemed himself after regretting the evil he did and crying for 13 days and cooling the Earth with his tears.
I remember them from Iraq for two reasons. One, the Muslim interpreters referred to them as ‘devil worshippers’, much like Lovecraft did in “The Horror of Red Hook” because of the Malik Taus/Peacock Angel connection.
The second was that the women were absolutely gorgeous.
Col Lang,
The word is ( Shabbiha) and not (Shabiha) and it does not mean (ghosts) as the author of this article claims..it originally referred to a torturer who stretched a man between 2 pieces of wood in preparation for flogging, it is now used in dialect to refer to hired executioners.
Regardless of the military outcome, it is a bad move on the part of the Syrian government to have foreign fighters so visible in the area, unless, as many are saying, the whole situation in Syria is run now openly from Iran whose central bank just extended a billion dollars credit line to support the depreciating syrian pound.
In the interest of full disclosure at this point, I am a physician who is collaborating at the moment with a couple of non-profit US- based medical relief organization that have been extending help to Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan and to innerly displaced refugees inside Syria. What we are seeing in addition to the influx of war-related injuries is that the few clinics set up by medical relief organizations have become the de-facto healthcare providers in large areas where the health-infrastructure has collapsed, my own focus at the moment is the impact of war on the civilian population.
Maryam
Yusuf is a university educated native speaker of Arabic. I believe he attended university in the Arab World. I would be surprised of he does not know the difference etween the fist and second “measures” of sh-ba-ha. pl
tyler
There are a number of “pockets” of beautiful women around the world. Parsi women are equally beautiful. pl
kxd
We await your return. An RAF acquaintance once rebuked me for America’s tendency and desire to “steal” the best people from overseas. I asked him when we should expect his arrival. He said that he appreciated the sentiment. pl
Eliot
I think that is true but such things are lost in time. The Muslim use of masabih (rosaries) is probably another accretion from Christianity. The symbols of the “Hand of Fatima” and the blue “evil eye” used as charms are probably older than any of the three “heavenly religions.” pl
Thank you Col, I appreciate the sentiment as well.
religion smidgin
CP
“Religion smidgin” Means what? pl
Col Lang,
Anyone can make a mistake, Yusuf is mistaken.
Yusuf is welcome to consult the Lane English-Arabic dictionary of the trilateral root for SH-B-H to see the difference.
Thank you Colonel and Tyler for the clarification.
Tyler: IIRC I once saw a documentary either from BBC or French TV (go both when I was growing up in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa) that Druze also used to pray to “Lucifer”,that name stuck to my childhood brain since then. May be I got the sect wrong and it was the Yazidis
As: Martin Bashir, Piers Morgan, Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson.
Some of us were very sorry when Anatol Lieven left. However, he was pushed out of the Carnegie Endowment, on the grounds that he was anti-Semitic. So now he is home again.
David Habakkuk
I don’t understand the connection to Lieven. pl
You wrote:
“…the whole situation in Syria is run now openly from Iran…”
Am I am so blessed to see the return of the days of the Great King?
Please tell me, when will the Persians be back in Athens after 2300 years?
That is what I always said: instead of complaining about brain-drain, put your money where your mouth is and make them (the brains) an offer they cannot refuse.
It was the Yazidis.
One of my teachers in high-school explained the origin of tasbih/roasaries in this manner:
The Prophet, when delivering his sermons, noticed that Arabs sitting on the floor were playing with their testicles (absence of under-garments ?).
Considering that to be an activity not befitting the Believers, rather than admonishing them directly, a few days late he showed up with a few clay beads strung together; passing one bead saying “Sobhan-o Allah”, passing another bead saying “Al Hamd al Allah” etc.
Arabs emulated the Prophet, him being the Messenger of Allah and all that, and so started the usage of rosaries in Islam.
I do not know the veracity of this story: Allaho A’alam!
I noticed that the Christian Greeks rosary is actually the same as what Muslims use and is not at all like the one used by Catholic Christians.
Babak
I like the thing about the testicles. I would observe that the Muslims first encountered the Byzantine Greeks and indeed lived with them as overlords as in the Case of St. John of Damascus. pl
This was good for a chuckle. I suspect you could be there Monday morning if you bailed out the current Greek government.
A question for the colonel and others knowledgeable about the Levant: how “foreign” do Syrians and Lebanese consider each other today, provided that they belong to the same sects? I’ve met people from the region–I think they were mostly Lebanese–who seemed to consider those who were not of their own religious community as outsiders, regardless of their legal nationality, but considered their coreligionists, even when they were of different nationality, as “one of them.” I always wondered how common this view is nowadays.
My personal view is that Arabs do not consider one another foreign – they would treat an Arab Jews a hundred times better than they would an Iranian, for example.
Isn’t that the truth. Women are rather amazing creatures, aren’t they?
I should have been more explicit. Anatol, like his elder brother Dominick, really are the ‘best’ we have to offer in the field of foreign affairs. So Niall Ferguson is a nostalgic imperialist Scot,who — as such types frequently did — naturally gravitates to the current seat of imperial power.
The Lievens have a complex ancestry — Baltic German servants of the Tsars on their father’s side, Catholic Irish servants of the British Raj on the other. Both their wide range of reference, and the ability to identify both with the administrators of empires and their victims, which comes out of this background, makes listening to them well worth while.
Whether Anatol would have stayed, and become an American, had he not been hounded out of the Carnegie Endowment on totally spurious charges of anti-semitism, I cannot say. My suspicion is not — that, like myself, without wanting to make any kind of claims about the peculiar virtues of the British, he would see London as his home.
As a Shakespeare character is often supposed to have said, although he actually said something slightly different ‘a poor thing, but mine own.’
David Habakkuk
I thought it was Samuel Pepys. pl
What did he do, call a neo-con an ideological imbecile? In 2005 that would get one a professinal purity purge.
David,
I agree, Lieven is superb. His latest book on Pakistan is compulsory reading.