Paris and Raqqa

BY ED FELIEN
Or, should we say San Bernardino, Paris and Raqqa and Beirut?  A day before the Paris attacks, two ISIS suicide bombers killed 43 people and injured 239 in Lebanon.
Or, should we say San Bernardino, Paris and Raqqa and Beirut and Russia?  A Russian tourist flight from Egypt with 224 passengers was blown up by ISIS sympathizers on Oct. 31.
In San Bernardino two ISIS sympathizers left 14 dead at a holiday party.
In Paris the attacks by ISIS left at least 129 people dead and more than 350 injured.
In Raqqa, for the past year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, “Hundreds of airstrikes carried out by the Russian Air Force left 403 civilians dead, including 97 children and 69 women.”
The French reaction to the attacks on Paris on Nov. 13 was swift and deadly: “Almost 100 people are now believed to have died in a series of government air strikes on the Islamic State-held city of Raqqa on Tuesday,” activists say.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 52 civilians were killed.
“One activist from Raqqa told the BBC the only hospital still functioning in the city was finding it difficult to cope with the dozens of wounded.
“Activists said that in Tuesday’s air raids, government warplanes targeted at least nine sites, including a popular market near Raqqa’s museum.
“Most of the casualties were caused by two strikes in quick succession on the industrial area near the train station.” The Syrian Observatory said people who rushed to help those wounded by the first were caught up in the second.
“The UK-based group said the air strikes had killed at least 95 people, among them three women and four children. It could not confirm whether the 43 dead not listed as civilians were IS militants, but said some of the strikes took place near the jihadist group’s positions.
“The U.N. says 7.6 million people have been displaced inside Syria and 3.2 million have fled abroad since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011.”
Public Radio International reports that “after some 8,000 air strikes dropping nearly 30,000 bombs and missiles, the U.S. Central Command has acknowledged just two civilian deaths from Coalition strikes in Syria and four civilian deaths in Iraq.”
“ ‘Our own estimates are, unfortunately, far, far higher,’ says Chris Woods, editor of Airwars.org. The UK-based investigative website uses on-the-ground reports, social media and press accounts to stitch together a picture of the battles in Iraq and Syria.
“ ‘We have identified more than 260 alleged events in which the Coalition has killed civilians,’ says Woods. ‘We think around 110 of those are fairly reported, with a combined civilian death toll of somewhere upwards of 680 civilians killed.’
“ ‘Our researchers have simply been overwhelmed by the volume of reports. There have been more than 110 claimed events alleging civilian fatalities from Russian air strikes just to October 30th,’ he says, ‘and the fatality range from those Russian strikes … could run as high as 780.’
“Woods estimates 250-375 civilians were killed by Russian air strikes in just one month. ‘That is a very worrying toll.’ ”
In reaction to the attacks on Paris, Obama said, “Those that think they can terrorize the people of France and the values they stand for are wrong.”
He probably meant to add, “But those that think we can terrorize the people of Raqqa and the values they stand for are right.”
He might have quoted the War Prayer of Mark Twain:
“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —
“For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
“We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.  Amen.”
Didn’t Martin Luther King say you don’t fight fire with fire.  You fight fire with water.
The New Yorker reported, “And another survivor remembered one of the attackers saying, ‘You have killed our brothers in Syria, now it’s your turn,’ while they fired at the crowd.”
And wasn’t it Ghandi who said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Why are we attacking ISIS?
Is it because they’re right-wing Islamic fundamentalists who treat women as second class citizens and behead people who disagree with them?  If that’s our criteria for peace and war, then why aren’t we attacking Saudi Arabia?  The Saudis are horribly repressive to women.  They have committed criminal acts of war against civilian populations in Bahrain and Yemen, and they behead political dissidents.
Are we attacking them because ISIS is trying to secede from Iraq and Syria and form a Sunni Caliphate?  Then, why didn’t we bomb Scotland and Barcelona when they tried to secede?
Why is ISIS trying to secede?  The Sunni Arabs in eastern Syria and western Iraq feel persecuted and abused by the governments of Syria and Iraq.
Global warming has made a desert out of what was once barely subsistence farmland in eastern Syria.  The peaceful protests that began the civil war in Syria were meant to call attention to the fact that there was no government support for farmers who had lost their land to the desert and were forced to live in the cities.  Bashar al-Assad violently crushed these protests and, in doing so, created a violent opposition and a civil war.
The Sunnis felt they were being persecuted by the Shi’a majority government in Iraq.  To support the Sunnis, Bush, Petraeus and the CIA supported the creation of “Sunni Awakening” paramilitary units that led directly to the creation of ISIS.
From the Sunni perspective, it’s Sunni Arabs against the whole world.  And that seems like a fair description of the forces aligned against them in Raqqa.  They’re being attacked by Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Russians and Americans.
What claim does ISIS have to the city of Raqqa?
Raqqa is a Sunni city in the center of the broad Sunni area that is quickly becoming a desert, but it was once the center of an Arab caliphate that stretched from Damascus in the west to China in the east and as far south as northern Africa.  It was the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur who moved the capital of the caliphate from Damascus to Raqqa.  He was asked by the Tang dynasty emperor of China to help put down a rebellion in western China.  He sent in 4,000 Arab mercenaries.  They put down the rebellion, and they stayed and extended the caliphate, and the Muslim Uighurs have been a headache for China ever since.  In an interesting parallel, the Tang Chinese called the Abbasid Arabs “Black Flags,” which echo the black flags ISIS waves today.  For 13 years, at the end of the eighth century, Raqqa was the center of the Islamic empire.  These are some of the reasons Raqqa has cultural and religious significance to Sunni Arabs.  The city has no such historic significance to Syria, Iraq, the U.S., Russia or the Kurds.
It will be years before we find out the hidden role the CIA played in the protests against Assad.  We know that its clumsy efforts to arm an opposition ended up delivering arms to ISIS.  We know that many of the troops they trained went over to ISIS.  Were these the unintended consequences of the haze of battle, or were these the deliberate objectives of CIA policy?
The governments of Russia and Syria consider U.S. intervention in Syria a continuation of the Cold War doctrine of anti-communism.  The governing party in Syria is the Baath Socialist Party.  It’s an oversimplification to say that France and Britain drew up the borders for countries in the Middle East after World War I, and the U.S. and Russia divided up those countries after World War II, but there is some validity in that characterization.  Russia got Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. got Iran.  After crudely overthrowing the democratically elected socialist government of Mosaddegh in 1953, the CIA installed the Shah on a Peacock Throne and collaborated in a period of brutal repression of the Iranian people.  Afghanistan was part of the Soviet orbit until Jimmy Carter and the CIA gave a billion dollars to the Pakistani military to create a religious resistance that morphed into the Taliban.  Iraq was nominally pro-Soviet until the CIA convinced Saddam Hussein to overthrow the Iraqi government in 1979.  Syria is Russia’s last good friend in the Middle East.  They’re neighbors, so it’s reasonable Russia would take an interest in developments there.
What would be the smart thing for the U.S. to do with regard to Syria and ISIS?
The smart thing would be for the U.S. to do nothing—to withdraw all military support for rebels against the Syrian government and to stop all military action against ISIS.
What is the military and political objective in the battle for Raqqa?  Does anyone seriously believe that a military occupation of a Sunni Arab city (that was at one time the capitol of the Sunni Arab Caliphate) should be done by either the Alawite Shiite government of Syria or the Shiite government of Iraq?  Does anyone seriously believe that Russia or the U.S. or the Kurds have any sympathy for the indigenous Sunni Arab population?  If ISIS surrendered tomorrow and was occupied by Syrian, Iraqi, Russian, U.S. and Kurdish troops, wouldn’t we eventually want to turn the city over to the people who live there?  And wouldn’t that mean they would probably set up a government sympathetic to Sunni Arab cultural traditions?
Why don’t we leave them alone.  Let them work it out.  We have problems enough with poverty and violence here at home.  Let’s deal with that before we go out and try to remake the world in our own image.