Assad hints at chemical weapons’ hazard against Israel
Il Giornale, December 17th, 2012
Like in a spiral of atrocities, now also Palestinian refugee camps come into play: it’s an air raid carried out by Assad’s fighter jets which struck 25 rebels inside a mosque in the Yarmouk refugee camp, near Damascus. They had taken shelter there after attempting to advance toward the capital. They all were killed. Previously due to the heavy fighting within the camp, the famous commander of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Jibril, a tough guy, now an old man, had been forced to flight. He stayed loyal to Assad, whereas Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal had gone looking for sponsors elsewhere.
The mosque massacre by the fighter jet attack is the last piece that urges the world to get ready and expel the tyrant from Damascus, although the future does look gloomy considered that rebels are tainted by cruel episodes, and considered that Assad is still backed up by Russia and Iran. Iran threatened to even wage a “third world war because of the patriots that NATO deployed along the border of Turkey and Syria”. Syria is nowadays a constant outrage with 43 thousand dead, and unremitting report of atrocities. European leaders, who met last Friday, reiterated their intention to “back up and support the opposition and enable enhanced support for the civilian protection”. The 27 Ministers of Foreign Affairs Council will decide how to proceed: they might loosen the weapon ban on the rebels or even directly supply them. Angela Merkel maintains a weapon supply be out of question, UK Prime Minister David Cameron however says that “inaction is not an option”; Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, says that “the EU has the obligation to intervene because innocent lives are at stake”. The climate looks like the one preceding the Iraq intervention. A possible “smoking gun” has been identified by Obama in Assad’s chemical weapons that he would be transferring, arranging, even using in small amounts (it is as per now an unconfirmed revelation, appeared on the site Zaman-alwsl by a defecting Major regarding the Baba Amr battle).
The “red line” however is beyond the atrocities we saw these months, like the Alawites’ massacre carried out in Akrab by Assad’s army, Alawite himselves; or rumors of children forced to massacre their loved ones … horrible indeed, but the “red line”, the rebels say, enables Assad to kill also with Scud missiles as in these very days, as long as he does not breach the codified pact. After all France apparently is already at least providing funds for the purchase of weapons; the rebels front has been officially recognized as representative of the Syrian people by the US and Europe; Russians are experiencing manifest internal disputes on continuing to support the rais; Patriots have already been deployed on the Turkish border. There is smell of war. But the general idea, i.e. Obama’s and Europe’s, is to support rebels and not to enter the game as long as possible. Unless the famous gun is already smoking. Americans are seeking precautions against the jihadists by banning “Al Nusra”, whose leader Mustafa Abdelatif Saleh, brother-in-law of Abu Mussa al Zarkawi’s, Bin Laden’s Deputy, was killed in Iraq in 2006.