An add-on, if you don’t mind - because I’ve received a number of related questions during the day, and I would like to help people avoid situations like when journos from the Austrian and German TV-stations are fabricating rubbish news at rates the Assadist regime used to manufacture Captagon…
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Yes, there is a growing number of reports about revenge attacks on Assadists appearing from multiple places in Syria. The following is no justification: just an explanation.
- All the known attacks (as of present time) were launched at key Assadist figures, top henchmen, or their supporters - many responsible for deaths of thousands of Syrians (example: Jalal al-Daqqaq was publicly executed in Hama; that thug used to feed oppositionals to his lions)
- Not one such attack can be brought in connection with the 'HTS';
- On the contrary: 'HTS' (actually: it's CMO-troops, controlled by the SSG) are pursuing and arresting all such characters and didn't execute anybody. For example: they’ve caught General Sohail 'Botox' Hassan, alive, and took him away for further prosecution.
- Actually, it is different 'locals' that took affairs into their own hands (especially so along the coast, where the regime mass-murdered dozens of thousands of Sunni Arabs, but also multiple Alawi clans, back in summer 2012);
- Representatives of multiple Alawi, Ismaili, and Druze communities have already stressed that not one of such attacks was an act of inter-ethnic violence;
- Indeed, the 'HTS' (again: CMO-troops, controlled by the SSG, but also the growing number of SSG's police officers) are trying to catch such thugs, because they want to bring them to justice in form of an official prosecution, in order to expose Assad's machinery of mass-murder; they're just far too few and far from being present everywhere;
- Moreover, during a meeting with its ex-Assad counterpararts today, the SSG has stressed the requirement for a rapid development of a legal system and police, so they can prevent further acts of vengeance. Just... sigh... establishing judicial and executive authorities that everybody in Syria trusts... that's simply going to take 'months' (at least).
…and, despite Israeli air strikes on (hkhm… sorry, that’s from smoking only 12 cigarettes today), ‘strategic targets’ in Syria of the last four days: the country is bristling with all sorts of firearms.
Bottom line: attacks of this kind are tragic and it is troubling this is happening. Indeed, in one attack by unknown persons, somebody shot one of White Helmets, earlier today…
Sadly, amid the prevailing chaos, they are unsurprising (actually, I’m surprised not many more are taking place).
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Cannot but describe it as ridiculous that multiple German TV-news channels have sent their journos to Damascus, but these are then ‘reporting’ news based on what they find in Telegram and other social media, and comment it without having a trace of clue about Syria (it’s telling the very same ‘journalists’ had no clue about what’s going on in Ukraine, either, regardless how much time they’ve spent there, the last three years). What a surprise then, for them ‘it’s all the HTS’.
So, also when it was combatants of the Türkye-supported SNA that have entered a hospital in Manbij and summarily executed a number of wounded combatants of the PKK/PYD/YPG/SDF… Gauging by some of your questions: it seems that the reporting in the English-language TV-news is of similar quality like in (Austria and) Germany.
One is left to wonder why are the journos in question sent to Syria at all: reporting rubbish on basis of the social media can be done from the safety of an office in Berlin as well…
Why the journalists are sent to Damascus? Their lies are more believable from there, the background pictures cooler, the self importance and self image way better… I can probably give ten more reasons. Nothing to do with quality of work of course, or truth or anything like that. But reasons? No problem.
It is right to hold a new government to humanitarian standards and expect them to resist the temptation to bloody revenge. It's not reasonable to hold ordinary people to this standard. They are not sophisticated lawyers, they are simple people who have endured intolerable suffering for decades while their family members were tortured and murdered. There comes a point when all bets are off. The standards we live by have long ago disappeared from their lives.