"And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness, the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief. "

Khalil Gibran (How I Became a Madman)

Lübnan Marunîleri / Yasin Atlıoğlu

NEWS AND ARTICLES / HABERLER VE MAKALELER

Monday, March 02, 2015

Who Are the Pro-Assad Militias? (Aron Lund- Carnegie Endowment)

In a recent report for Open Democracy, Dutch journalists Robert Dulmers and Teun Voeten tell of a recent trip through the parts of Syria still held by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Embedded with the Syrian military, they traveled by car from the capital Damascus via the reconquered city of Homs to Aleppo in the north, and back.
These cities, the country’s three largest, are at the core of Syria in every way: politically, culturally, economically, and, of course, demographically. Assad’s dominance over the Damascus-Homs-Aleppo axis, in addition to the coastal areas, Hama City, large parts of the south, and even a few small pockets in the northeast (Qamishli, Hasakah, and Deir ez-Zor), underscores that he remains the central actor of this war. He is the ruler of not exactly Syria, but of “useful Syria,” a potentially economically viable region encompassing at least two-thirds of the country’s population.
But what about the state of the regime itself? The most interesting part of Dulmers and Voeten’s account is their brief insider view of the pro-Assad forces. “In 12 days travelling some 1,200 km, except for special forces in Aleppo we hardly saw anything of the regular army,” they write, noting that most of the many checkpoints and bases along the road were manned by locally recruited militias.