FOREIGN FIGHTERS JOIN SYRIAN REBELS
JIHADISTS DECLARE HOLY WAR AGAINST ASSAD REGIME
And yet, the US, GB, France, Israel and the rest of the ‘anti-Islamic extremism’ coalition are FUNDING AND TRAINING JIHADISTS???????Does not seem to make sense, until you come to realize that Israel and the rest of her loyal, dutiful whores NEED Islamic ‘terrorism’ in order to see their agenda (war, war, and more war) realized.))
Abu Rami hails
from Lebanon, but his heart is in Syria these days. The 40-year-old is one of
hundreds of Arabs who are fighting against the Assad regime at the side of
Syrian insurgents. Many of these volunteer fighters are veterans of the Iraq
war, who have now brought their holy war to Syria.
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Abu Rami’s last
foray into war wasn’t much of a success. Just after his unit had crossed over
the border, one of his men lost his wits. The young man cowered in the
undergrowth, trembled and didn’t budge. Out of necessity, the whole unit had to
come to a stop: Ten Lebanese, armed with 10 Kalashnikovs loaded with 65
magazines of ammunition, had come to a standstill inside the Syrian border,
without any backup.
It
was pure luck that the group wasn’t spotted by a Syrian border patrol and that
they didn’t come under fire. “We sent the man with the weak nerves back to
Lebanon. The rest of us made it as far as Homs,” a 40-year-old man who goes by
the nom de guerre Abu Rami said, two days after his return from Syria.
The protest
stronghold of Homs is located around 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) from the
border.
The Lebanese
volunteers wanted to fight alongside Syrian rebels in the city’s Khaldiyeh
district.
They did just
that, and retreated only after they ran out of ammunition. Abu Rami says his
unit is now waiting in the safety of Lebanon for its next deployment.
Abu Rami is a
commander in the growing band of volunteer Lebanese fighters who are getting
involved in the conflict in neighboring Syria. Most come from Tripoli, the
northern Lebanese city that is largely home to a Sunni Muslim population. Their
hatred of the Assad regime is rooted in the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which
only ended in 2005.
Despite the
withdrawal of its troops, Syria still exercises considerable influence over
Beirut. The Shiites are also in power in the Lebanese capital, further
fomenting the hatred of Lebanese Sunnis against Assad and his Lebanese allies,
which including the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
‘WE
LEBANESE ARE PART OF THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION’
Radicals among
Lebanon’s Sunnis view the insurgency in their neighboring country as a welcome
opportunity to put an end to Damascus’ influence.
“The struggle for
freedom in Syria is our own struggle for freedom,” says Sheik Masen
al-Mohammed, one of the most important Sunni religious leaders in Tripoli. “We
Lebanese are part of the Syrian revolution, part of the rebellion. If Syria
gains its freedom, then we will also win in Lebanon.”
In addition to
the political reasons, the sheik also has a key reason for encouraging Lebanese
to fight in Syria.
“Assad is an
infidel,” the sheik says, noting that the Syrian dictator is part of the Alawite
sect, which splintered from Shiite Islam hundreds of years ago. Sheik Masen
views Assad as an enemy rather than a true Muslim.
In mid-February,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as the head of the al-Qaida
terrorist network, called on pious Muslims to support the insurgency against
the Syrian regime. In an eight-minute video message posted on an Islamist Internet
page, Zawahiri claimed that:
It is the religious duty of every Muslim to aid in the uprising against the “anti-Islamic regime … with everything that he has ~ his life, money, views and information.”
He called Bashar
Assad’s government a “pernicious, cancerous regime.”
Zawahiri targeted
his message to take up arms directly at Sunni Muslims living in Lebanon,
Turkey, Jordan and Iraq. He urged them to rush to the aid of the oppressed
people in their neighboring country.
“It is the duty of every Muslim, every Arab to fight the infidels,” Sheik Masen also stated.“There is a holy war in Syria and the young men there are conducting jihad. For blood, for honor, for freedom, for dignity,” he said, speaking in a warehouse filled with spare parts. In his normal life, Sheik Masen operates an auto repair shop.
But these days he
has little time for selling fan belts. Every minute, new applicants arrive in
his oil-covered garage. The majority are Syrian refugees hoping to find
lodging, a job and help.
“We are sister
peoples, and the enemy of the Syrian people is also the enemy of the Lebanese,”
the sheik says, providing a rationale for the efforts of the fighters on behalf
of Syrians who have been driven from their homeland.
Abu Rami claims
that between 100 and 150 Lebanese have traveled to Syria in recent months to
fight alongside the rebels. Between two deployments, he visits the wounded at
the hospital and he discusses strategy with those fit for combat. Abu Rami was
trained to become a television technician, but he quit his job in order to
devote himself to the battle in Syria.
REBELS
NEED WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION, NOT REINFORCEMENTS
Abu Rami first
took up contact with the rebels in Syria last summer. He soon began crossing
the border regularly for combat missions. In recent months, he was captured
once for a short time and also wounded on another occasion. During what has now
become one year of fighting, he has risen to become a leading figure in the
network of Lebanese volunteer brigades that are in combat in Syria.
Sheik Masen
claims that the Syrian conflict is becoming increasingly international.
“We know of Palestinian, Libyan and Yemen fighters who are active there,” he said. Iraqis are also fighting in Syria.
The situation
hasn’t become as explosive the period in the Iraq war when thousands of
volunteer fighters flooded into the country in 2006 to wage war against the
American occupiers, Sheik Masen says. It’s not fighters the Syrian rebellion is
lacking ~ it simply doesn’t have enough ammunition or weapons, he says. “We
currently have 20 men willing to fight for each weapon in our possession. They
need weapons and ammunition ~ not reinforcements.”
The Lebanese say
they try to help the rebels in whatever ways they can. “We send as many
supplies as we can,” Masen says. But he adds that, after one year of fighting
against Assad, the black market for weapons in the Middle East has dried up.
“It is high time that major Arab powers like Saudi Arabia intervene and start officially delivering weapons. That is their duty as Muslims,” he says.
ED:
Who pays this Sheik Masen to betray his people and his nation so? He certainly
walks the perfect NATO party line.
FIRST
EUROPEAN JOINS FIGHT AGAINST REGIME
Sheik Masen
expresses hope that the situation in Syria will soon be like Iraq was and that
Arabs from all nations will join forces to battle the regime. “If we get to
that point, then we will be able to mobilize tens of thousands of Lebanese,” he
says.
“I have a long
list of telephone numbers of men who want to go to war in Syria,” Abu Rami
says, adding that most are experienced fighters. “Of the Lebanese who are
deployed now, around 60 percent already fought in Iraq,” he says. Men who once
did battle against American soldiers, and were branded as al-Qaida terrorists,
are now fighting on the side of Syrian insurgents, whose victory over Assad
would be entirely welcomed by the West.
Still, the
involvement of foreign jihadist fighters makes it more difficult to
differentiate between good and evil in the Syrian conflict.
Last week, the
first European fighter voluntarily crossed the border and entered into Syria to
fight alongside the Free Syrian Army against the Assad regime. He was “a
Frenchman who had just turned 24 and comes from a wealthy family,” reports Abu
Rami.
“He just turned
up here with his credit card in hand.”
Abu Rami says he
tried in vain to talk the man, whose parents are Algerian, out of it.
ED: He should have choked on that one! Unbelievable.
“He
bought a gun, we gave him a short bit of training and then he went in with one
of our units,” he says.
Still, Abu Rami
doesn’t believe the regime will fall anytime soon. “You will first get married
when the problem in Syria has been taken care of,” he says jokingly to one of
his subordinates. “In other words, in 50 years.”
