Originally Posted by
Humbert
^^Code brown alert again. Christ it's getting thick in here with all the worship for Putin and Assad.
I spent quite a lot of my life in Syria. I know Aleppo very well. I always travelled to Syria by bus and train, crossing the border outside Antakya - in Turkey. Antakya is also known as Antioch, you might want to look upthe significance of that name in Western culture (although these days it's nothing special). I have many, many friends in Aleppo. maybe I should say I HAD many, many friends there. I spoke to some of the survivors today. Friends I haven't spoken to for a long long time but who are now able to communicate over the internet because Bashar's army escorted them out to safety.
Every single one of my Christian friends is dead, you do know Aleppo had a large Christian community, don't you. Every single one of them, entire families from grandparents to toddlers. Mostly crucified or decapitated. The women raped first of course, even those in their 80s. Waste not, want not, eh? It wasn't the Syrian Army or the Russians who did that.
They were all killed by the rebels, most of them were killed quite slowly. The area of the city they live in has gone, blown up. Not blown up by barrel bombs, blown up by IS and Al-Qaeda. It was a lovely area, little winding alleyways with bars and restaurants hidden behind tiny little doors. They weren't illegal but they always reminded me of speakeasys, open the tiny door and you were in a huge room, two stories high, hundreds of people talking and laughing, a piano player in the centre. I always ordered the local speciality, a kind of kibbeh kebab with a black cherry sauce. All gone now, an entire culture wiped out by an evil death cult.
I always stayed at the Baron Hotel. It was owned by an Armenian, Mr Masmoulian, I think. I never knew him. I knew Mr Walid though, the Major-Domo. I used to hire his 1950's Buick, Aziza, for trips around Aleppo and visits to the Dead Cities. I would carry messages for him to his enormous family all around Syria, Hama, Homs, Tadmor, Damascus. They're all gone now too.
I drank in the bar of the Baron, the barman was a Palestinian. It was a tiny bar, T.E Lawrence and Agatha Christie drank there a long time ago, when we got nostalgic the barman would take the old guestbooks out of the safe so we could see their signatures. When I was a regular most of the customers were Alawite Mukhabarat, we used to get very drunk on raki and sing scurrilous songs about Bashar and his semi-deified brother Basil.
I had many Muslims friends too, we used to walk to the souk together and I'd visit their houses and eat halva, lots and lots of halva. I hate halva. They'd visit me and we'd drink raki. Aleppo is one of the oldest cities on earth, maybe even the oldest. We'd talk about that and wonder if that was the reason Christians, Jews, and various different types of Muslim lived together peacefully. Most of them had absolutely no time for fundamentalists and worried about those who supported Al-Ikhwan al-muslimeen, most of them supported what Hafas and Riaat did in Hama, always called "the incident" in Syria, and only wishing that they'd finished the job.
Did you know Syria was the only country where people still spoke on a daily basis the language Jesus spoke?
Most of those muslim friends are dead too. Killed because they weren't Muslim enough, or because they had attractive wives or children. Or because they liked to drink raki with foreigners.
Anyway, out of my many hundreds of friends and acquaintances in Aleppo I've been able to get in touch with in the last couple of days. Two doctors and a teacher, I knew them and their families well. These days, of course, they're just refugees and victims, the object of Teakdoor contempt and vilification, and their families are much, much smaller.
They told me that a couple of days ago they had to hide because the heroic rebels you seem to love so much were moving through the streets killing everyone they saw. They were finally rescued by the Syrian Army and taken to a Refugee centre.
The Syrian Army, once they'd taken an area, moved through the streets rounding people up and taking them to refugee centres just outside the city. My friends that they are with thousands of people and under the protection of the army and they have not heard a single instance of these alleged Syrian Army death squads reported in the Western media.In fact they'd never even heard those stories until I mentioned them.
They are pathetically grateful to Putin. They looked to the West for help and we pissed on them. Putin came and rescued them and they don't care about his ultimate aims. They just care that they're finally free of the nightmare creatures that have destroyed everything they held dear.
Don't give me this shit about Putin or Assad. Nothing either of them has ever done compares remotely to the atrocities inflicted on the Syrian people by the so-called rebels our governments and our media have supported. The aims of Putin are entirely suspect but the fact is that his military have rescued tens of thousands of people from fates we can barely imagine. The few remaining of the many Syrians I once knew are only grateful that somebody, finally, came to their aid and are very clear that no matter how bad Bashar or Putin might have been they are nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the IS and al-Quaeda filth the Western media have been lauding as rebel heroes.