Exploring Freedom - The Political Side

After one week staying in Antakya a reliable estimation of the situation inside Syria is still as foggy as the week, the month, the year before. Only fact given is the dramatical situation of the refugees staying here in this tiny Southern Turkish province.

Haven‘t counted all those tipping points felt and red lines crossed. But they are indeed enough to devalue completely any form of prognosis close to that what we call reality on the ground. All we see are daily counted more than hundred victims under the civilians, sometimes the bodycount is triple as high if another mass killing is committed. Some say i‘s a question in between few weeks that the regime is finished, others guess it‘ll take some months, maybe more, depending on the next steps the global powerful decide.

Exactly the same global powerful fueling the conflict with their hesitating and calculating stance preferring an as-long-as-possible draw between both sides, the regimers and the revolutionaries.

The question why the play such a dirty game at the cost of tens of thousands lives might lead to different, nevertheless shocking possible answers:

One is that most of all Syria‘s neighbors, Israel and Iran, profit from an unstable battleground. Israel, to shift the perception away from it‘s own questionable policy especially in Palestine and Gaza and to renew automatically the necessarity to protect its‘ population and its‘ borders with more arms facing the threat of chaos in Syria as well as the threat of getting invaded by militarized Muslims. Iran, to keep up the own oppressive system which in the case of a successful revolution in Syria might get endangered by an encouraged Iranian population trying to get rid of the authoritarian hydra the third time in more than three decades.

Regarding the global players and bigger blocks the answer might get more bitter. Immediate help for one of both sides, be it Russia in the case of Assad or the United States in the case of some revolutionaries‘ factions, might lead to an early success of one side wasting the historical chance of studying and analyzing the uprising in all its‘ ugly consequences if pushed into the right direction, the stalemate. Studying to learn about the mechanisms and the nature of revolutions, analyzing to understand how to avoid a similar situation in their own countries if the people start an uprising. This kind of field test crowns the top of the divide-et-impera pyramid. The wanted war. Probably best sold to the public as a serious situation too complicated to intervene in a hurry.

Poor Syrians. Being both forgotten and abused by all those asked to help and support them against their ruthless ruling elites. The more their unbroken will to finish this uprising by overcoming the regime has to be honored.

Exploring Freedom - The Personal Side

Syria: The War Next To Your Door

Writing these lines while I'm located at Hatay province in Southern Turkey. Of Antakya is spreading on the surface that kind of busy normality you expect in an average city. But a closer look and also listening carefully on the streets uncovers the tensions between Sunnis and Alawis.

This afternoon I sat on a bank at the Orontes reflecting that the river runs on its' way down here through Hama's waterwheels when I realized a group of young Alawi Syrians playing with their smartphones. Classical adolescent behavior I thought in that moment. When they jumped up to cross the street direction old city two Sunni women at the sidewalk turned their look off them until they vanished in the traffic. The women's facial expression was speaking a clear language.

It's not open hostility you find here, more a consensus of live-and-let-live. But those small signs you can register tells you a lot about the poisoned atmosphere the regime and his ruthless policy is completely responsible for. Even natives confirmed in talks I had that those tensions are no longer hidden since a few months.

That was exactly one of my crucial questions I had to answer myself by investigating on close location as possible. How real are the chances that after the downfall of the Assad tyranny a together between both Muslim groups will become true? I guess that's also one of the questions the think tanks and officials of the global community are trying to figure out.

Without coloring the future outlook too dark we have to face the fact that those tensions are having to take serious, particularly the longer the regime is playing its' barbaric role. Each new massacre creates new incomprehension, new feelings of rage, in the worst case the poison of hate. Even the desire for revenge is understandable when you try to imagine the feelings of people who've lost their children, their beloved ones, their whole families. Speaking about those feelings is the first necessary step to overcome the risk of realizing them sometimes later. Making the experience of sharing those emotions with other people able to have a certain understanding for that makes it definitely easier to avoid common cruelties and to crackdown the vicious circle of violence.

The world's powerful have failed to prevent the Syrian people from the regime atrocities until now. As disillusioning this is, it's never to late to change a dead end path. In this case by building up trust and faith in a slowly but constantly together growing Syria after Assad. The least the world could do now.

Just Think About

Coming home after a long day at work.

Stuck in the traffic.

Angry about one of the colleagues' comments.

Train missed, an hour waiting in the cold.

Favorite bread sold out.

The list is pretty much longer and can be easily continued searching for explanations of the own bad mood, the crabiness.

Instead of take a closer look to the five mentioned luxury problems.

The day at work might have been a long one. At least you have work, probably not your dream job, but just think about how many of us in the meantime don't even have one. Even in the richer states and welfare nations the numbers of jobless and low-income earners are increasing. How many aren't even allowed to work, forced to do nothing, prevented from building an own existence.

So you're stuck in the traffic? With a company car or your own one? Even if you're on your way to work and back home with the public transport system, busses, trolley lines, it means you can travel safe from a to b. Before continuing to complain just think about those not having the possibility to travel safe and free, in between their countries of from one to another. For refugees fleeing from violence traffic can become in the worst case a lethal threat. More like for you in that situation.

Some work colleagues tend to scratch on your sovereignity, and a handful of them might get named sociopaths analyzing their intentions and their behavior. But is it really your reaction like that worth? Inhale, take a deep breath and just think about workers and employees in totalitarian systems. Not only that they might lose their job as a result of directed denunciation, they might also get tracked by the authorities, imprisoned, isolated from their loved ones. You definitely won't be in their situation, believe me.

You're luckily living in a country where trains arrive more or less hourly to manage the distance between your origin and your destination. That's not a reason to moan over the injustice of life dragging yourself down. Just think about all those not able to pay for a ticket. All those not living in the near of a railway station. All those forced to walk dozens of miles, daily, because they can't afford buying a car, even a bicycle.

To have a preferred fresh bread sort is conceded to everyone. Insisting upon an alltime disposability only if you are the bakery's owner. As a regular customer you have good chances that your baker shop reserves the object of your desire for you. Just think about those people standing for hours in front of nearly empty bakeries for some bread when suddenly a grenade caused by an air raid shells into the crowd.

You see, all of these complaints are for sure luxury problems when you live in those parts of our world where your existence is directly not endangered, not threatened.

Just think about.

Merry pre-Christmas time everyone.

The Ghost Of Chemical Warfare

It appears that the Syrian regime has unleashed its' last shabeeh. His soul consists of lethal chemical substances like Sarin and other ugly stuff, able to end the lives of tens of thousands in only a few seconds.

Since a long time that threat is known to the global representatives. So it wonders a bit that the raised forefinger telling 'hands off chemical WMD's' is put exactly now direction Damascus. Because instead of intimidating the regime it looks in the meantime as a gesture of desperation, of helplessness. Despite interpretating one or the other statement of U.S. spokesmen as a possible mobilization of ground troops to prevent the Assad faction of using those weapons.

Fact is that the regimers will not hesitate to start a chemical warfare against so-called terrorists if they see a way in it to regain lost ground in a battle they are inevitably loosing.

The world's powerful watched tea-zipping the increasing brutality of the regime's crackdown measures. They noticed gruesome massacres committed on civilians, women, children, ordering their PR officers to restate earlier given expressions of indignation, repacked until they degenerated to abstract empty phrases.

Acting in an adequate time was never a fortitude of the political class but in the case of Syria the slow motion management became in the meantime a disgusting taste of bitterness. Time to prepare really effectful measures was a lot. At the latest with the start of the Ramadan massacres in summer 2011 the global community should had engage itself into constructive politics being aware of the regime's tightening screws of mass murder and blind rage slaughter.

So it might not surprise when we'll have to witness similar images in the nearer future reminding us on the horrible footages of Sadam Hussein's chemical warfare against the population in Northern Iraq. Men, women and children, mouth and eyes teared wide open in their moment of death, covered in white dust ..

Alive Or Not? Guesswork And A Strange Feeling ..

The night of Dec 2, 2012.

Recapturing the puzzling news of the recent day. After such a long time struggling against the tyranny in Syria we all are cautious due to rumors.

It was never easy to confirm some tweets and posts filed under 'BREAKING' or stuff like that.

But this night is somehow exceptional.

All I'm writing now down expresses my own subjective views about the ongoings I've witnessed online the last three days. Therefore the drawn conclusions represent exclusively my personal point of view.

First of all there was the mysterious internet shutdown in whole Syria. Attempts of analysis tracked the regime as responsibles for that. Comprehensible, because the revolutionaries would have no interest in putting the whole country offline, especially when it comes to the meanwhile legendary Fridays when they upload evidence footages of protests taking place all over.

In the beginning of the internet shutdown we feared a regime strategy using chemical weapons against the Free Syrian Army and other freedom fighter groups in liberated areas as a last attempt to crackdown the revolution and to regain ground in an almost lost battle. Fortunately that didn't happen up to now, several usage of white phosphorus ammunition was reported but a major attack with lethal chemicals wasn't reported yet. Maybe the regimers realized that such an attack could also hit their own people; by examining the map the liberated areas are closely mixing up with regime held areas, especially in Damascus.

We can only speculate about what really happened in those more or less 60 hours of virtual darkness. But another event of this Saturday tracked our interest more than usual: despite heavy clashes between the Free Syrian Army and regime forces around the Damascus International Airport flights were cancelled. It seemed that from that moment on no one was able to leave the capital with the help of an airplane. Then an A320 from the Syrian Airlines, flight SYR441, was reported to start direction Moscow, destination Vnukovo, the smaller airport of the Russian capital.

Some unusual details about that flight drew our attention: the machine flew above average speed, a sign that only a few passengers or/and little cargo was on board. If it had been a Russian airplane it wouldn't had wonder me at all, years ago I flew with the Aeroflot from Germany to St Peterburg arriving approximately 20 minutes before the scheduled time. That had to do with the circumstance that the captain of the Tupolew switched on the auto pilot after reaching the ordered flight height heading straight towards the destination .. and .. that we were only six passengers on board.

Another interesting detail was the announcement that the closure of the Damascus International Airport will be compensated by opening the military airport of Tartous for civil airlines' arrivals and departures. Not that they tried to assure the public to do everything to renormalize the situation at the capital's airport. True or not, that message should prepare the public for a longer closure due to the ongoing clashes. Regarding that, flight SYR441 appears retrospectively even more suspicious.

Examining the route of the plane raised another question. Instead of flying via Eastern Turkey and the Black Sea across the Ukraine to Russia flight SYR441 took a route around Turkey over the Mediterranean, crossed Greece and Bulgaria before heading direction Moscow. Well, maybe they were instructed to follow that route by the international air space control agency. Maybe.

Then one of the Brotherhood party members announced during a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo that 'Bashar al-Assad is probably dead or has left Syria'. My first thoughts were like: c'mon, you don't need to use such kind of rumors to heaten up the protesting masses (it worked well what the footage on Al Jazeera proved). In the moment I wanted to reject that occurance I remembered Lakhdar Brahimi's last comments and estimations about Assad's actual situation and possible future. His undertone changed slightly but perceptable from trying to defend Bashar's status as representant of (at least a handful of) the Syrian people to a much more clearer rejection. Not that I'm fully trusting in politicians like him but something says me that this could have been a signal to a certain group of the regime's circle to drop down, to get rid of Assad.

In the language of the Chess game said: in a situation like the regime's top one the king had switched the position with the checkers to get sacrificed. We can only suggest who might become the replaced king in that game, probably it will take another time before he will be presented. But Bashar al-Assad is according to that theory off the board.

And to all appearances on board of that ominous flight SYR441. The last remaining question is now: in what condition he might have been on board? Speculation 1 - alive after being urged (I don't suppose convinced, mainly after his last public announcement some weeks ago) to leave Syria. Speculation 2 - in a wooden case. Maybe it came to a violent dispute after the lobby of those trying to save their own asses as far as possible with the hardliners' circle around Bashar. That would explain a possible successful coup d'etat during the well-planned internet shutdown. Certain things can only become realized when the lights are out.

Alive or not - the powerful friends of the Syrian regime will try to prevent all kind of exposed clearness around these possible ongoings if my assumptions become proven true. The reason for that is a) keeping the Syrians as long as possible in the dark to construct a new follow-up able to act for their interests and b) to avoid a sudden push for the revolution movement when the end of the Assad era becomes - from the regime's allies point of view - too early confirmed.

As previously mentioned, this summary bases upon combining observations of unconfirmed occurances (the only facts are the two and a half days' internet shutdown and the Syrian Airlines flight SYR441 from Damascus to Moscow) and personal estimations after monitoring twenty months the people's revolution in Assad's Syria, a jungle of rumors, myths and speculations.