'Assad's days are numbered'
Diane Rehm interviewed Martin Indyk, Aram Nerguizian and Karim Sadjadpour on an episode of her National Public Radio show discussing recent events in Syria. (Audio). She asks an intriguing question regarding the recent assassinations. It wasn't the question itself that surprised me, it was that she asked it.Rehm: Martin Indyk, we continue to hear those within Damascus throughout Syria saying, where is the United States? What is the United States doing? What more can it do?
Indyk: Well, I think that those who are calling for U.S. military intervention are likely to continue to be disappointed. The heart of the matter is that the president wants to run on a campaign platform of ending wars in the Middle East, not starting new ones, and that is broadly popular in the United States..... Simply put, the American people are war-weary after 10 years of war in the greater Middle East.
Rehm: Mm hmm.
Indyk: And so that kind of military intervention is unlikely. So the focus is much more on helping to support the opposition, perhaps now training them, supporting Saudi Arabia and Qataris....., .........
Rehm: Of course, the question becomes, how were those assassinations carried out? Was it the Israelis? Was it the Americans? How was it done?
Sadjadpour: Perhaps Aram knows more than I do. What I've read about the assassinations are is it's conflicting because the Syrian regime claims that there were suicide bombings conducted by terrorists. But journalists who went to the scene (and Sadjapour the 'expert' is talking about a most important HQ in Damascus, after this decapitation attempt) didn't see any signs of major explosions.....
Rehm: Aram.
Nerguizian: Well, I don't argue with Karim. You don't have a reliable set of narratives..... it's still an ongoing story. I don't think we have a clear picture. There's talk of involvement of Jordanian intelligence, potentially Turkish intelligence, but it's all heresy at this point.
Rehm: Martin Indyk.
Indyk: I think that if we look at the longer term trends in this battle, we can draw some more interesting conclusions which is that, first of all, ... we are witnessing is the last months -- I'm not sure about last days -- of this regime."
2 comments:
Syrian govenment security officials and the official Syrian news agency SANA have never claimed that the bombing that killed the top brass at Syria's department of defence was a SUICIDE bombing. There still hasn't been an official account of how the bombing was achieved. But the official reports that have thus far come out about the incident have never used the word SUICIDE.
The account that is probably true, and is widely accepted by well-informed pro-government Syrians, is that a briefcase bag full of explosives was left on the table or under the table at the meeting, put there by a certain employee who worked daily in the building (working as a secretary), and it was detonated by remote control. It is common and usual in office buildings for the meeting rooms to be located in the interior of the building, i.e. in a room with no windows. The Interior Minister Mohammed Al-Shaar was the meeting and he survived the explosion that killed the four others (though he was hospitalized). This indicates that the amount of explosives was not very big. Hence one shouldn't expect to see explosion damage on the exterior of the building.
With 'experts' like Sadjadpour and Nerguizian, no wonder the West is at loss about what is going on!
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