حزب الإصلاح السوري

Washington DC, November 8, 2004 /The Australian/ - A Syrian government newspaper today denounced the US-led attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah as "a terrible humanitarian massacre".

Tishrin newspaper, in an editorial, said the attack on Fallujah would increase violence in Iraq and further complicate the security situation ahead of an international conference on reconstruction later this month at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik.

"The brutal bombardment and inhuman crimes in Iraq, especially in Fallujah, will increase violence and destroy all chances to make the Sharm el-Sheik conference a success," the editorial said.

On Monday, about 10,000 US Marines, Army soldiers and Iraqi forces, backed by air and artillery power, began their long-awaited assault on Fallujah, the stronghold of militants blamed for bombings, beheadings and kidnappings targeting foreigners in Iraq.

At least 71 militants and 10 US soldiers have been killed.

Tishrin said the United States is trying to delude the world that its military campaign on Fallujah "is no more than another step to achieve democracy in Iraq by quelling all kinds of resistance, even if it is forced to destroy all Iraqi cities".

It said insecurity in Iraq was in "no one's interest, especially neighboring countries which hope for a united and secure Iraq and for democracy that is not based on the killing of innocent people by US missiles and jets".

Syria strongly opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Syria Plays with Fire

Government wants to use the Islamists as a Card they can play against the US

Washington DC, November 10, 2004/RPS Opinion/ -- In an editorial today in Tishrin, a Ba'ath controlled newspaper, the Syrian government strongly denounced the US-led attack against Fallujah.

The Ba'ath Party and the Assad secular family have been steadfast in their own attacks on Islamists in the eighties and nineties. The Hama massacre, which killed about 30,000 innocent Syrians the majority Islamists, is a strong case in point. This apparent defending of Fallujah by a Ba'athist newspaper, a stronghold of extremists as well as foreign fighters including Syrians, is a strange and dangerous development. What is Syria up to here?

The government of Syria is taking advantage of the rise of Islamism in the Arab world to try and mend its past. In the last few months, we have seen the Syrian government get closer to the Syrian branch of the Islamic Brotherhood by opening negotiations with them and in the early days of Ramadan, we have seen the Syrian Ambassador in Egypt having Iftar dinner with the Islamists in Egypt, some of them are know for calling for Jihad against the western powers.

The Assad regime has all the intentions of using this cozy new relationship to offset the cards it lost in the past year because of mounting pressure from the US and Europe on a host of issues. The regime feels that its negotiating power has diminished considerably ever since the US freed Iraq from Saddam Hussein and it is trying to add more arrows to its quiver; one of those arrows is good relations with the Islamists that they feel they can use, if push come to shove, against the US in the future.

This is a very dangerous policy that may prompt more sanctions and possibly a military option against Syria. This US administration, under the leadership of Bush, has no intention to see the people of the Middle East suffer from Ba'athists maneuvers to stay in power. And certainly, the world has no more patience to see extreme Islamists, using the Koran and rights no one gave them, to bolster their networks of terror the world over as we have seen lately in Amsterdam. Many in this administration understand that extreme Islamism exists today because of dictatorships like the one found in Syria and the Syrian Ba'athists support for the terrorists who are beheading people on TV smacks of just a reason enough for the White House to develop a new Syrian policy that would see us threat the Ba'athists interests directly.

If we do not, the Ba'athists in Damascus, while we are asleep at the helm the way we were when extreme Islamists slowly built their base, will build either more colonies of terrorism and will condition us for a series of failures in and around the Levant region that will threaten the interests of all the countries in that region, including Jordan.

Reform Party of Syria