Syria regime lashes out at Saudi, Qatar, Turkey

Share:

The Syrian regime accused regional powerhouses Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey of trying to destroy the country and vowed Sunday that it would defeat rebels who have captured large swathes of the commercial hub Aleppo.

Military forces in Aleppo fired tank and artillery shells at neighborhoods as rebels tried to repel the government air and ground assault. According to activists, rebels who launched an operation to take over Syria’s largest city a week ago are estimated to control between a third and a half of Aleppo’s neighborhoods.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, on a visit to Iran, leveled some rare public criticism of Sunni powers in the Middle East, saying Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are supporting a plot hatched by Israel to destroy Syria. The three countries have all been backing rebels trying to overthrow authoritarian President Bashar Assad.

“Israel is the mastermind of all in this crisis,” Moallem told a joint news conference in Tehran with his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi . “They (Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) are fighting in the same front.”

The battle for Aleppo, once a bastion of support for Assad’s regime, is critical for both the regime and the opposition. Its fall would be a major blow to Assad, giving the opposition a major strategic victory with a new stronghold in the north.

“They mobilized all their armed terrorists and tried to capture Damascus in less than a week,” Moallem said. “They were defeated. Today, they’ve gone to Aleppo and definitely they will be defeated in Aleppo,” he added. The rebels mounted a challenge to the regime in Damascus before the assault on Aleppo, but after a week of intense clashes, they were defeated.

Iran, Syria’s only remaining ally in the Middle East, has provided Assad’s government with military and political backing for years, and has kept up its strong support for the regime since the uprising began in March 2011.

Sunday’s bombardment was part of a government counter-offensive to retake control of districts that had fallen into rebel hands last week at the beginning of their bid to capture Aleppo.

Activists said the shelling was most intense in the southwestern neighborhoods of Salaheddine, Bustan al-Qasr and parts of Saif al-Dawla, some of the first areas seized by the rebels when they started the push last week after being routed in a similar attack against the capital Damascus.

“Life in Aleppo has become unbearable. I’m in my car and I’m leaving right now,” said a Syrian opposition writer who was fleeing the city Sunday. “There’s shelling night and day, every day,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The writer and other activists from Aleppo said economic conditions had become dire in the city.

“Bread, gasoline and gas are being sold on the black market at very high prices,” he said. “Many things are in shortage.”

State-run news agency SANA said security agents were hunting down armed groups in several areas of Aleppo including Salaheddine, inflicting heavy losses upon the “terrorists” – the term authorities use to describe the rebels.

SANA quoted an Aleppo official as saying troops would continue until the city is “purged” of armed groups and peace and tranquility is restored.

Syrian Interior Minister Mohammad al-Shaar vowed late Saturday that the Syrian army would root out terrorism and restore order to Syria. Al-Shaar was making his first televised appearance since he was wounded in the July 18 bomb attack in Damascus that killed four other top security leaders in Assad’s inner circle.

Al-Shaar’s arm was bandaged, but he said he was back at his job with “greater determination.”

Mohammad Saeed, an Aleppo-based activist, said Sunday’s shelling was some of the heaviest seen yet.

“But the rebels are still holding up well,” he said. “No ground troops have been able to enter. They are shelling from outside.” He said rebels were fighting back against the attackers.

He said around 200 fighters entered the city Sunday to join about 1,000 fighters who had poured into the city in the past few days to take on the Syrian army, which had been massing forces around the city ahead of the bombardment.

He also said rebels have received “a new batch of weapons and ammunition,” but declined to say from where.

An amateur video posted online by activists showed flames and black smoke billowing from a building in the Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo.

Another video showed rebels celebrating the seizure of a tank in the town of al-Bab in Aleppo countryside. Dozens of rebels, some waving Kalashnikov rifles, sat atop the tank as it drove through al-Bab, while residents shouted “Allahu Akbar” and motorists honked their horns in celebration.

The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported heavy fighting and explosions in Aleppo. It reported intense clashes in the Bab al-Hadeed, al-Zahraa and al-Arqoub neighborhoods.

The international community has raised an outcry about a possible massacre in this city of 3 million but acknowledged there was little they could do to stop the bloodshed. The foreign minister of Russia, a powerful ally of Syria, said over the weekend it was “simply unrealistic” for Damascus to cede control of Aleppo.

Since the rebel assault on Aleppo began a week ago, about 162 people have been killed, mostly civilians, according to the Observatory. Some 19,000 people have been killed since the uprising began, the group says.

The violence has sent refugees flooding into neighboring countries including Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon.

Jordan said it had opened its first tent camp for Syrians, saying a surge of refugees forced it to do so.

Authorities had been reluctant to set up the camps, possibly to avoid angering Assad’s regime by concentrating images of civilians fleeing his military onslaught.

But with 142,000 Syrians refugees and their numbers growing daily by up to 2,000, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said Sunday that Jordan had no other choice. He spoke at the camp’s opening ceremony in the hamlet of Zataari, about 11 kilometers (7 miles) from the northern border with Syria.

Associated Press

photo: Syrian rebel fighters hold up tail fins of regime-fired 120mm mortar shells as in Aleppo. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty

Share:

Comments

9 responses to “Syria regime lashes out at Saudi, Qatar, Turkey”

  1. rossoferrari Avatar
    rossoferrari

    Israel is the mastermind of all in this crisis,” Moallem told a joint
    news conference in Tehran with his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi .
    “They (Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) are fighting in the same front.”
    Given that information, wouldn’t you think that this is a “fait accompli” !! why fight the citizens and not broker a peace deal so he and his clan would survive. I smell a rat in him, he is positioning and soon will defect.  As a foreign minister, he can only dialogue with iran, russia and china and cannot be at odd with the other 193 countries. If he was smart: my guess he is not, he will do the right thing and defect, otherwise his fate is going to be “unfortunately” similar to the other 4 top aides of ass assad.

  2. rossoferrari Avatar
    rossoferrari

    Israel is the mastermind of all in this crisis,” Moallem told a joint
    news conference in Tehran with his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi .
    “They (Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) are fighting in the same front.”
    Given that information, wouldn’t you think that this is a “fait accompli” !! why fight the citizens and not broker a peace deal so he and his clan would survive. I smell a rat in him, he is positioning and soon will defect.  As a foreign minister, he can only dialogue with iran, russia and china and cannot be at odd with the other 193 countries. If he was smart: my guess he is not, he will do the right thing and defect, otherwise his fate is going to be “unfortunately” similar to the other 4 top aides of ass assad.

  3. Moe2000 Avatar

    It is extremely embarrassing, in an era of information revolution, for Journalists to continue and fail to get the Real Story behind the most obvious Journalism is not about body count, nor explosion metrics. Its about getting to the heart of the matter. It is very well known that Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been feeding and funding, arming a movement that would NOT be there without there effort – for a coup – masked – opportunistically –
    as an Arab Spring. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have funded a failed Bay of Pigs – which is quite Haram. This – the scent of innocent flesh – is not hallal. What has been done here, covertly is an abomination. What journalists have failed to repeatedly grasp – is tragic. Once upon a time people failed to understand a Coup because there was no information. There is PLENTY of information and OVERT statements by Saudi Arabia and Qatar about their funding of this BLOOD BATH – that would not be there in their absence. Credit goes to Saudi
    Arabia and Qatar for funding a blood bath. Yeah. Assad is going to come back – like General Sherman. BUT the seed source for this blood bath is Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The News agency’s need to do a better job of
    journalism than this pathetic reporting, bullet building down, body count. You boys aren’t really arming for Pulitzer are you? ( The Blood Bath in Syria is an orchestrated Coup by Qatar and Saudi Arabia – by their own increasingly emboldened positions of admissions – you would have to be really dumb or really
    corrupt not to state the obvious ). This is no Arab Spring. Its a Failed Coup. Agent Provocateur fall out.

    1. 5thDrawer Avatar
      5thDrawer

      All of which was predicted a year and a half ago when peaceful protesters simply asking for a change in how they were represented and treated by their theoretical government began to be – no matter what age or gender –  arrested, mutilated, killed in prisons and hospitals, shot at by snipers, fired upon from gun-boats, and otherwise generally ignored by Assad’s system except to be herded into stadiums like the sheep they have always been.
      Assad and his minions opened the way to all this, by closing a way forward for the people. The blame, as my Armenian friend always said, begins at the top. (The fish stinks from the head.) It was bound to happen, as we ‘debated’ in here at that time, after witnessing the senseless inhumanities visited on all citizens by army and shabiha and gleeful torturers in the prisons. As in the time of the French Revolution, something had to snap … and it did long before Assma’s shopping trips made her appear like Marie Antoinette and the infamous line ‘Let them eat cake.’ given when told the peasants couldn’t afford the bread. (While similarly disconnected from ‘the people’, not a fair treatment for either of them in male-dominated societies.)
      Who indeed was your ‘Agent Provocateur’ … other than Assad.
      People – even those used to being stomped on – got really mad when children were used for target practice by their own army, and the generally acknowledged ‘race of thugs’ called shabiha. Everything flows from that.
      There was even a time when the FSA said they would hold off on shooting if some forward-looking talks were to take place and the tanks pulled back from blasting women and kids in their homes. But Assad only wanted the war, and the accompanying ‘sectarian’ violence. And he’s got it.
      The people did not want war. They wanted change.
      And although there may be other political reasons for ‘certain others’ now entering the fray, besides the images documented and seen by the world, only Assad is responsible for that too. If the human abominations  had stopped, ‘the others’ would not have had the excuses to help the FSA – which has at least the courage of their convictions, that children should not be targets, to back them up.
      And of course, the theoretical lines in journalism continue. They are always with us, as some try to second-guess in the chess games people play. Assad banned journalists of the world in an attempt to hide what he does. But Syrians are voting with their feet now, where they were not allowed to before. The 150,000 will grow even as they are fired upon for leaving, and journalists will see that too. (Now reportedly 200,000 more leaving … at least.)
      The bread is no longer available, and children need to eat. The farmers felt it first with dried fields due to water being denied, but the city-folk experience it now too. Assad caused it all by simply ignoring a wind of change in human desire.
      Do not blame ‘others’ for any of it. What they do is as a result, not a beginning, of the mind-set of Assad.

      1. dateam Avatar

        I agree with what your saying to a point….I also agree with some of moes points…..the sad part is there are people that have come into this that have other intentions who are being funded openly by saudia Arabia and Qatar….their being payed to go in and kill Shia,all awaited,Christians and Druze….there are Indonesians,Pakistanis,libyans,egyptians Africans you name it….as long as the money flows they will keep coming…again we go back to the thinking of bcc keep them poor so when you need them you can buy them…..your right everyone saw this coming….but I don’t think anyone thought to this extent….the Saudis are funding democracy? Women can’t drive? The qataris? He came into power via a coup against his own father and they have no system of government there at all it all run by monarchy?? Who in their right mind would listen to them other than the people they fund? You have a situation where the west namely USA and Israel don’t care because it has weakened Syria externally and you have the Saudis who are looking for a Sunni empire since they lost Iraq and Egypt……unfortunately brother the people never matter

    2. 5thDrawer Avatar
      5thDrawer

      All of which was predicted a year and a half ago when peaceful protesters simply asking for a change in how they were represented and treated by their theoretical government began to be – no matter what age or gender –  arrested, mutilated, killed in prisons and hospitals, shot at by snipers, fired upon from gun-boats, and otherwise generally ignored by Assad’s system except to be herded into stadiums like the sheep they have always been.
      Assad and his minions opened the way to all this, by closing a way forward for the people. The blame, as my Armenian friend always said, begins at the top. (The fish stinks from the head.) It was bound to happen, as we ‘debated’ in here at that time, after witnessing the senseless inhumanities visited on all citizens by army and shabiha and gleeful torturers in the prisons. As in the time of the French Revolution, something had to snap … and it did long before Assma’s shopping trips made her appear like Marie Antoinette and the infamous line ‘Let them eat cake.’ given when told the peasants couldn’t afford the bread. (While similarly disconnected from ‘the people’, not a fair treatment for either of them in male-dominated societies.)
      Who indeed was your ‘Agent Provocateur’ … other than Assad.
      People – even those used to being stomped on – got really mad when children were used for target practice by their own army, and the generally acknowledged ‘race of thugs’ called shabiha. Everything flows from that.
      There was even a time when the FSA said they would hold off on shooting if some forward-looking talks were to take place and the tanks pulled back from blasting women and kids in their homes. But Assad only wanted the war, and the accompanying ‘sectarian’ violence. And he’s got it.
      The people did not want war. They wanted change.
      And although there may be other political reasons for ‘certain others’ now entering the fray, besides the images documented and seen by the world, only Assad is responsible for that too. If the human abominations  had stopped, ‘the others’ would not have had the excuses to help the FSA – which has at least the courage of their convictions, that children should not be targets, to back them up.
      And of course, the theoretical lines in journalism continue. They are always with us, as some try to second-guess in the chess games people play. Assad banned journalists of the world in an attempt to hide what he does. But Syrians are voting with their feet now, where they were not allowed to before. The 150,000 will grow even as they are fired upon for leaving, and journalists will see that too. (Now reportedly 200,000 more leaving … at least.)
      The bread is no longer available, and children need to eat. The farmers felt it first with dried fields due to water being denied, but the city-folk experience it now too. Assad caused it all by simply ignoring a wind of change in human desire.
      Do not blame ‘others’ for any of it. What they do is as a result, not a beginning, of the mind-set of Assad.

  4. Moe2000 Avatar

    It is extremely embarrassing, in an era of
    information revolution, for Journalists to continue and fail to get the
    Real Story behind the most obvious Journalism is
    not about body count, nor explosion metrics. Its about getting to the
    heart of the matter. It is very well known that Qatar and Saudi Arabia
    have been feeding and funding, arming a movement that would NOT be
    there without there effort – for a coup – masked – opportunistically –
    as an Arab Spring. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have funded a failed Bay of
    Pigs – which is quite Haram. This – the scent of innocent flesh – is
    not hallal. What has been done here, covertly is an
    abomination. What journalists have failed to repeatedly grasp – is
    tragic. Once upon a time people failed to understand a Coup because
    there was no information. There is PLENTY of information and OVERT
    statements by Saudi Arabia and Qatar about their funding of this BLOOD
    BATH – that would not be there in their absence. Credit goes to Saudi
    Arabia and Qatar for funding a blood bath. Yeah. Assad is going to come
    back – like General Sherman. BUT the seed source for this blood bath
    is Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Washington Post needs to a better job of
    journalism than this pathetic reporting, bullet building down, body count. You boys aren’t really airming for Pulitzer are you? ( The Blood Bath in Syria is an orchestrated Coup
    by Qatar and Saudi Arabia – by their own increasingly emboldened
    positions of admissions – you would have to be really dumb or really
    corrupt not to state the obvious ). This is no Arab Spring. Its a
    Failed Coup. Agent Provocateur fall out.

    1. 5thDrawer Avatar
      5thDrawer

      All of which was predicted a year and a half ago when peaceful protesters simply asking for a change in how they were represented and treated by their theoretical government began to be – no matter what age or gender –  arrested, mutilated, killed in prisons and hospitals, shot at by snipers, fired upon from gun-boats, and otherwise generally ignored by Assad’s system except to be herded into stadiums like the sheep they have always been.
      Assad and his minions opened the way to all this, by closing a way forward for the people. The blame, as my Armenian friend always said, begins at the top. (The fish stinks from the head.) It was bound to happen, as we ‘debated’ in here at that time, after witnessing the senseless inhumanities visited on all citizens by army and shabiha and gleeful torturers in the prisons. As in the time of the French Revolution, something had to snap … and it did long before Assma’s shopping trips made her appear like Marie Antoinette and the infamous line ‘Let them eat cake.’ given when told the peasants couldn’t afford the bread. (While similarly disconnected from ‘the people’, not a fair treatment for either of them in male-dominated societies.)
      Who indeed was your ‘Agent Provocateur’ … other than Assad.
      People – even those used to being stomped on – got really mad when children were used for target practice by their own army, and the generally acknowledged ‘race of thugs’ called shabiha. Everything flows from that.
      There was even a time when the FSA said they would hold off on shooting if some forward-looking talks were to take place and the tanks pulled back from blasting women and kids in their homes. But Assad only wanted the war, and the accompanying ‘sectarian’ violence. And he’s got it.
      The people did not want war. They wanted change.
      And although there may be other political reasons for ‘certain others’ now entering the fray, besides the images documented and seen by the world, only Assad is responsible for that too. If the human abominations  had stopped, ‘the others’ would not have had the excuses to help the FSA – which has at least the courage of their convictions, that children should not be targets, to back them up.
      And of course, the theoretical lines in journalism continue. They are always with us, as some try to second-guess in the chess games people play. Assad banned journalists of the world in an attempt to hide what he does. But Syrians are voting with their feet now, where they were not allowed to before. The 150,000 will grow even as they are fired upon for leaving, and journalists will see that too.
      The bread is no longer available, and children need to eat. The farmers felt it first with dried fields due to water being denied, but the city-folk experience it now too. Assad caused it all by simply ignoring a wind of change in human desire.
      Do not blame ‘others’ for any of it. What they do is as a result, not a beginning, of the mind-set of Assad.

      1. dateam Avatar

        I agree with what your saying to a point….I also agree with some of moes points…..the sad part is there are people that have come into this that have other intentions who are being funded openly by saudia Arabia and Qatar….their being payed to go in and kill Shia,all awaited,Christians and Druze….there are Indonesians,Pakistanis,libyans,egyptians Africans you name it….as long as the money flows they will keep coming…again we go back to the thinking of bcc keep them poor so when you need them you can buy them…..your right everyone saw this coming….but I don’t think anyone thought to this extent….the Saudis are funding democracy? Women can’t drive? The qataris? He came into power via a coup against his own father and they have no system of government there at all it all run by monarchy?? Who in their right mind would listen to them other than the people they fund? You have a situation where the west namely USA and Israel don’t care because it has weakened Syria externally and you have the Saudis who are looking for a Sunni empire since they lost Iraq and Egypt……unfortunately brother the people never matter

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *