Meet a Moderate Syrian Insurgent
SYRIA IN CONTEXT, 22 Jul 2013
Hi, my name is Mostafa and I’ll be your moderate insurgent today. I’m addressing you all because we badly need your help. We could have started a Facebook page, like We Need Your Weapons or something, or ask the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights to make a YouTube video, but I prefer to speak straight to your heart.
Our Supreme Commander, the blessed General Salim Idriss, has acknowledged we are now receiving many new weapons from many friendly Arab countries, which helped us “destroy more than 90 armored vehicles” of the Syrian regime. And Amrika helped us to get the guns, of course. But we need more.
Your President Mr Obama told the Blessed King of Saudi Arabia last Friday that he is committed to providing more support for us. Your Secretary of State Mr Kerry said on Saturday there must be more support for us “in order to have an impact on the ground”. Your CIA said they will make sure only moderate insurgents get the weapons, and not the bad guys.
But your Congress is blocking our weapons. Oh people from Congress!
Don’t be such a spoiler! We have such a brotherhood of nations here. People from 29 different countries! OK, there are a lot of Salafis, a bit hot headed. But for us they are all brothers. In fact most of us are moderate insurgents.
Don’t you like moderates? Remember when you wanted to talk to the moderate Taliban? Now you’re talking to the moderate Taliban! And the Pakistani Taliban, they are now even sending their people here to help us! The other day they raised a big, white Taliban flag somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border. That was a blessed moment.
Our Taliban brothers are coming here via Saudi Arabia. Why don’t you do like Saudi? They never let us down; they always fight those apostates Iranians and Shi’ites. The Taliban too, they know how to fight apostates and Shi’ites. So we will learn a lot from them.
You see how hard is the life of a moderate rebel? Not only we have to fight the despicable dictator in Damascus – we fight Shi’ite apostates and we even fight terrorists! Oh, Amrika! The terrorists are among us as well, just as they are among you.
I’m talking about those terrorists of the Nusra gang. They are no good; not “clean cut”, as you say in Amrika. They killed our beloved brother Kamam Hamami in Latakia! They beheaded two of our valued brothers and left their heads by a garbage can in a square in Dana, in Idlib province, near the Turkish border. They raped a local boy. They are no good.
Remember that guy who ate the lung – or was it a kidney? – of a dead Syrian soldier? He was all over on YouTube? Well, people say he was one of us, and not a jihadi. He was a “moderate”. OK, I admit, he may have gone over the top, but who doesn’t? People, there’s a war going on here!
Please believe us: we’re not al-Qaeda; we’re the good guys. Those al-Qaeda, they cannot control even who’s a jihadi in Iraq and who’s a jihadi in Syria; they think it’s two separate things. Here in Syria there are so many jihadis from so many different places, we don’t even know who they are working for anymore, it’s a mess! But this has nothing to do with us. We’re the good guys.
Well, OK – it’s true that on the battleground, we have to talk to the not so moderates, and we even organize operations together. After all they are better fighters than we are. Some even fought against you, Amrika, in Anbar province in Iraq! And now they are your friends! But anyway, if only we would have more weapons … We would dump them right away! Make them go back to the back of beyond where they came from.
We promise you; we will do whatever you ask from us. We promise that every battle will be documented for your specialists – photos, YouTube, everything, we will send a full package to that operations room in Jordan. So you will see that we are really, really moderates. You can even get your NSA to spy on us to make sure we are really “clean cut”.
OK, all our glorious battalions celebrate fierce, historic Sunni Arab warriors. But after all they are our heroes. Don’t you celebrate your battle heroes in Amrika – like your president Eisenhower? So, yes, we are moderate, like your Eisenhower. We just want to win. Who does not want to win? Don’t you like guns? Don’t you all have guns at home? We also need guns – to defend ourselves. So please donate, generously. We promise we will never use these guns against you.
Thank you for your attention. I remain your humble servant, Mostafa.
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Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
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