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Patrick Cockburn in The Independent: "The Syrian army has a tight grip on most of Damascus and the roads leading north to Homs and west to Tartous on the coast. There are checkpoints every few miles on the main roads which minutely examine documents. Many of the rebel-held areas such as villages between Homs and Hama are largely empty because they have been heavily bombarded by artillery and from the air. The same is true in many of rebel-held districts in Damascus which have been sealed off, are short of food and have many buildings in ruins. Similarly places like Baba Amr and Qusayr, once rebel strongholds, are now ghost towns while Sunni villages at Houla are cut off. "What stops the Syrian army capturing many rebel areas is not armed opposition but shortage of troops, unwillingness to suffer casualties among trained soldiers and an inability to hold captured areas in the long term. If Syrian generals did use chemical weapons last Wednesday this lack of manpower might explain why they did so." On Aug 27, 2013, at 8:18 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > > Bennis, you write in the Nation Magazine: > > "Despite remaining under pressure from sanctions and facing increasing > international isolation, Damascus has been seeing some success on the > battlefield." > > I know that you are a two-bit hack but this really is a bit much. Except for > Qusayr, which relied heavily on Hizbollah support, the Syrian army is on the > defensive particularly in the Damascus neighborhoods that were the target of > the attack. > > Do you read the NYT? You really would find the newspaper most edifying, > particularly an article in today's edition that contained the following: > > > The deadliest of the attacks struck at the heart of a region known as Eastern > Ghouta, an area northeast of Damascus whose towns have swelled into cities in > recent decades with an influx of mostly poor Sunni Muslims from the > countryside, the key constituency of the anti-Assad uprising. > > Towns in the area have been held for more than a year by various factions of > the rebellion. Unlike in northern and eastern Syria, extremist groups like > the Nusra Front are not dominant. The area’s economic isolation made it > fertile ground for the rebellion, and it has proved to be a perpetual threat > to Mr. Assad’s control over the capital region. > > full: > http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/world/middleeast/blasts-in-the-night-a-smell-and-a-flood-of-syrian-victims.html > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
