Raqqa's dirty secret

[fridi]

The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of IS fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city. A convoy included some of IS’s most notorious members and – despite reassurances – dozens of foreign fighters. Some of those have spread out across Syria, even making it as far as Turkey.

Sooo, what happened to Mattis' promise that this was a war for the complete annihilation of Daesh?

Turns out, preserving the Corporate Army for General Energy was far more important than the peace and security of the region, including Europe. Because I'm sure these folks will now be heading that way, to the EU. The land of milk and honey, and no doubt assisted by the human rights brigade. Probably already arranged housing and benefits and any other freebees going. Frau Angela must be awaiting them with open arms and teddy bears already. Soon they'll be operating a car wash / doner kebab locale near you.

It was all about removing Putin's pawn, Assad from the game. Right?

And who'll be paying the bill? I know who won't be.

Comments

[halialkers]

Remind me how much people complained about Comrade Putin blowing up hospitals again?

Spare me the pretense that the USA's the only great power involved here.

Hell, I'm pretty sure those French bombs and planes killed people, too. When are people going to haul French generals to the Hague?

[fridi]

Why, let them come to the Hague.

[johnny9fingers]

Yeah, because the Human Rights Brigade shouldn't be interested in Human Rights? Right?

I guess these folk just aren't human. Amazing taxonomical misidentification.

Rights appertain to those who observe them, true, and these folk tend not to; but as a society, if we're claiming to better than the folk we're fighting against, in order to justify our part in the conflict, we have to be better than that even if only for propaganda purposes.

The "Human Rights Brigade" reads like it comes from Julius Streicher's copybook for insulting organisations set up to defend human rights against oppression. What would you put in their place, a free market in oppression and exploitation devoid of oversight.

Have you been reading too much Paul Dacre?

[fridi]

Nope, I've just been working on the ground with migrants on a weekly basis. Have you?

Human Rights Brigade: those who invariably take the side of migrants, including ones who have been proven to have been associated with radical groups. I could go on for hours with examples if you insist.

[johnny9fingers]

Depends what you mean by on the ground, but no, and I salute you for it. It is a noble thing to do. But the casual dismissal of Himan Rights is part of a significant and deliberate cultural program to throw the idea of human rights in general in a bad light. Beware of it.

[abomvubuso]

Doing things only for propaganda purposes doesn't sound like the right reason for doing things very much, does it.

[kiaa]

What about my right as a woman to not be gang-raped in some back alley?

[asthfghl]

Criminals (war criminals, Jihadists, rapists, perpetrators of crimes against humanity, etc), should be prosecuted, period. Insisting that they should be treated with more lenience because they're poor oppressed refugees fleeing war-torn regions even if THEY are the ones who tore those regions in the first place, is insanely stupid, self-destructive, disingenuous and outright idiotic. It's incomprehensible to me. It should itself be reason for prosecution. That's how I'm reading the "human rights brigade" epithet, which to me is something completely different from genuine human rights advocacy.

[mahnmut]

So Erdogan appears to be right on this one, even if for the wrong reasons. He insists that the West is helping ISIS and that ISIS should be uprooted - he does want to intervene because he wants to stop the Kurds from taking control of North Syria and North Iraq, sure.

[mikeyxw]

Well, reading the article, I can't say I'm surprised by the Kurds. They have been pretty effective in fighting IS, more so than pretty much any other force. That said, I sympathize with their approach of letting the foreign fighters leave. They are tribal leaders and are responsible for their local area, if the world sends them a bunch of assholes to deal with, returning said assholes to the places they came from to let those locals deal with them doesn't seem entirely unjust. Inconvenient for those of us who don't live near Raqqa, but I can certainly see where they were coming from any why they chose the "show them to the exits" strategy over "fight them to the death."

I'd also expect the coalition didn't miss the opportunity to kill a large number of those fighters once they were away from witnesses.

[johnny9fingers]

It might have been difficult to have US/UK forces order the Kurds to kill every last man of them if capture was impossible. Who wants to be part of that chain of command?

It may be there was no order we could have given that might not have constituted if not a war-crime, at least something to give folk a damn good dose of post-traumatic stress of a severe kind.

BTW, it was suggested over here by a junior government minister. Essentially, kill all the returnees before they get here. It took a day for most sensible people to process, probably due to incredulity. Serious retractions later we are all aware of just what a minefield this is.

[johnny9fingers]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/british-isis-fighters-syria-must-be-killed-rory-stewart-a8014431.html

[johnny9fingers]

So should we have killed them before they get close? There are realpolitik aspects to this. And this is essentially the debate in which this piece is a late addition. A large proportion of returnees will be coming back here. And the Human Rights aspect is actually quite important as well.

We started out thinking about rehabilitation. Then Rory advocated Murder. (It's a view.) Then the Daily Heil and Getsworse went bonkers because the ISIS folk were getting closer, then the Beeb picked it up. But the bones of this are still being chewed over in the SCR's, the diplomatic chaps, the security folk, the government etc.

The general opinion is it's not quite the done thing to off the blighters (though it would be a relief) but we don't know if we can get enough evidence together to convict in all cases, which puts us in a bit of a quandary.

I'm opting for suspending habeas corpus, in a limited number of named cases, subject to the Home Secretary's authority, via a parliamentary bill granting that authority.

[johnny9fingers]

Also I'd probably add another crime to the charge sheet.

Admittedly an ideal law not yet on the statute books: "Forcing parliament to infringe upon the natural rights of an English or Welsh person by passing an act to curtail freedom." and give them another twenty years. Maybe too arbitrary and draconian.

[mahnmut]

"I'm opting for suspending habeas corpus"
...

There goes the whole "but, but, human rights!?" schtick.

[fridi]

Suspending habeas corpus. I see.

So you first insinuated that I wanted them killed - and then you went on to indicate that you wanted them tortured instead?

And YOU presume to be lecturing me on human rights!?

[airiefairie]

There is nothing "limited" or "partial" about human rights. They either mean nothing to you and you suspend them, or they do, and you don't do it at all.

[mikeyxw]

I thought that just by going to Syria and fighting with anyone other than the British military, a Brit is committing a crime which they could be arrested for. This seems like a pretty low bar, if her majesty's folks can't prove someone went to Syria, any arrest seems a bit arbitrary after all.

Y'all could also ask the Kurds to off any Brits they happen across. They could probably tell by where they were caught and who they were caught with if they've joined IS or not. They'll even give them something that looks like a trial, so you can sleep well at night.

[halialkers]

It should have been but the moral wisdom of the American Left was that genocide was entirely fine as long as Russia's pet dictator was doing it, just like how Putin's genocidal massacres in Syria weren't a bad sign of where his regime could go? I mean to be fair it's also clear that the war only mattered in Europe when people shot up a French soccer game, as opposed to when NATO members were already being attacked and it became brutally clear that NATO stops on the Elbe in the eyes of a lot of Europe.

And as far as that goes, I'm sure if it had been pursued as a true Vernichtungskrieg there would have been posts of bathos bemoaning the USA's cruelty to innocent people who burned people alive in cages and the USA bombing those people to smithereens would be the real problem, based on say, North Korea continually firing missiles over Japan and threatening to attack the USA and the belief that this time the country being threatened is the bigger problem to the one doing the threatening.

You wouldn't have written those but I'm pretty sure someone who hasn't been here in a while and who I hope is OK probably would have. He's an actual Marxist after all, I'm pretty sure all Assad had to do to earn his support was get Putin's endorsement.

[halialkers]

I mean let's be real here. It's a war. The alternatives to taking them alive would be taking them someplace like Guantanamo for more bitching about what the USA does with the willingness to do something about it vastly disproportionate to the bitching and kvetching or simply adopting 'kill them all for God will know his own.'

If the USA did take them prisoner and to Guantanamo, would that get praise here or condemnation? I have my suspicions that it wouldn't be the word starting with p.

Moral considerations broke down in Syria years ago, there's picking at the carcass of a country whose cities are rubble and ashes, the population is halved, and where the outside intervention has been of the kind to make the dying worse, not better.

[johnny9fingers]

To be fair I'm neither American nor left wing, unless a desire for justice and reasonable fair play make me left wing; and I was rather more pro Assad than most on here, because as with Aung San Suu Kyi, I was under the not unnatural assumption that something of non-political British values informed some part of her actions, and also Assad's. Some British folk were aghast when British teenagers went to fight for ISIS. It ran counter to our experience of folk in Britain. We have a culture of fitting in or being eccentric, or sometimes both at the same time. But once a Brit... Look at poor old Tom Stearns E, by the time of his death you wouldn't have known he hadn't been born in Hampstead and gone to Winchester and the House rather than Harvard. My Indian and Pakistani chums tend to sound like me. If they go abroad they cause heads to turn because Public-School (i.e. very expensive private school) RP isn't what you expect from Apu. The other classes fit in, live side by side, and miscegenate at will regularly, like good English folk, for we are a bastard mongrel people. But unlike the Hindus and Sikhs, the Muslims haven't integrated as easily. And this has given friction to this debate: should we treat one version of a religion, in this case a version of an extreme militant jihadist Islam, as being antithetical to our nation-state, and therefore outside of the pale? We can certainly regard some political parties as such. We have banned a few far-right parties, inasmuch as that means anything in an age of distributed computing networks. So we can do it in certain circumstances. But is it right to do so? Morally or politically?