The CPD should ask itself, if the relatively more mechanised government army holds the military advantage against irregular guerrilla forces, why according to the SOHR have more soldiers on the government’s side (SAA & NDF) been killed than opposition fighters? There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, as the footage taken in the aftermath of the Hatlah massacre (7) indicates, there’s a tendency for rebel fighters to refer to the civilians they’ve massacred as “shabiha” (a pejorative term widely used by rebels to refer to pro-government militias), as such it’s quite possible that rebel fighters would report to the SOHR that the civilians they’ve massacred were “pro-government militia”. Secondly, as journalist Nir Rosen points out, when rebel fighters are killed they’re often listed as civilians: “Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many of those reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden and they are described in reports as innocent civilians killed by security forces, as if they were all merely protesting or sitting in their homes.” (3) This ‘accounting trick’ has also been noted by Musa al-Gharbi: “For instance, when it is stated that the majority of the victims of the conflict have been civilians, this number is achievedby conflating the dead non-military rebel fighters with non-combatants. While militiamen technically are civilians (simply by virtue of being non-military), the connotation of civilian is “non-combatant;” i.e., a victim of the conflict who was not actively taking part in it. In fact, this connotation is cynically exploited in delivering the statistic to people in order to make the regime seem as though they are “indiscriminately slaughtering their own people.” (4) As a heuristic device for analysing counter-insurgencies, i.e. wars fought between regular armies and guerrillas, one can rationally expect the deaths of two rebels for every government soldier killed (4). This would imply, based on the figures provided by the SOHR, that at least 51% of total casualties have been rebel fighters. That would take casualties of armed combatants to 77% of total casualties, which doesn’t include the deaths of pro-government militia, the figure for which, as we’ve established earlier, is potentially unreliable owing to the SOHR’s dubious accounting methods. Furthermore, the sectarian hatred and violence directed at Alawis by rebel forces, as seen in dozens of online videos, helps explain why, according to these rebel accountants themselves, 42% of total casualties are listed as Alawis (2) making them overrepresented as casualties by a factor of four. - See more at: globalresearch.ca/americas-imperial-left-and-the-proxy-war-against-syria/5343850#sthash.juARBwUG.dpuf
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 14:31:10 +0000