Hi Lee,

hope you don’t mind if I start with two quotes this time:

Hi Lee,

hope you don’t mind if I start with two quotes this time:

> I’ll end by pointing out that the vast majority of us — myself included — have no idea what is really happening on the ground in Ghouta

This is fair, no doubt but also clearly obvious from the following statement, which is factually incorrect:

> The main group there is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS…

By far the strongest faction in the Eastern Ghouta is the Islamic Front, a Saudi-supported ‘Salafist’ coalition of about 50 different insurgent groups, united in 2013, and strongly centralized ever since. All the pro- and contra propaganda aside, for better understanding of who-is-who in Eastern Ghouta, and mutual relations between local insurgent groups, I would recommend two reads:

Into the Tunnels: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Rebel Enclave in the Eastern Ghouta

and

What western ‘experts’ get so wrong about the conflict in Syria (feel free to replace ‘Western’ with ‘Israeli and most of others, too’)

Since the publishing of the study ‘Into the Tunnels’, about a year ago, the Faylaq ar-Rahman (a group still affiliating itself with the ‘Free Syrian Army’ ideology, often intentionally mis-declared for ‘moderate Jihadists’ by all the possible online fans of Assad, IRGC and Hezbollah in particular) established itself as the second most powerful party.

Other groups present in Eastern Ghouta are the Muslim-Brotherhood-affiliated (and Turkey-supported) Faylaq ash-Sham, and few local groups with opportunistic politics and uncertain ideology.

The ex-JAN/JFS-cum-HTS in Eastern Ghouta can only be sorted within the latter category: it’s holding only a very small quarter of this area; has no direct links to the HTS in Idlib already since years; has found itself exposed to repeated attacks by multiple other factions; and has no say in the ‘big picture’.

With other words, Syrian Salafists have the say there. I stress ‘Syrian Salafists’ because these — just like Yemeni Salafists — strongly differ from most of quasi-Salafists we know in the West. Between others, they do not have the ideology of waging some sort of ‘jihad’ against the West, and the majority of them are actually combating various extremist groups with ideologies with Wahhabist backgrounds since at least the late 2013.

However, their ‘presence’ and ‘domination’, as well as that of the ‘al-Qaeda-affiliated HTS’ (again: this group in Eastern Ghouta is cut-off from the outside world since 2013, i.e. nearly five years now!) is used as justification for all the bombardment and atrocities.

Overall, there is no way to be ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ in regards of what is going on in Eastern Ghouta, because the situation there is neither ‘fair’ nor ‘balanced’: the Assad Regime — supported by the Russian Air-Space Force (at least since yesterday) and the IRGC, is maintaining a siege of this area (which includes eastern parts of Damascus) and running a campaign of intentional bombardment of everything and everybody there. ‘Intentional’, because their intention is to de-populate the area in exactly the same fashion in which they have de-populated most of southern Damascus (see Darayya) — as both ‘punishment’ for those who ‘rebelled’ against the regime, and in order to secure its own survival. The result should be clear to everybody: mass-murder and ethnic cleansing.