Jun 27, 2013

ALEPPO, Syria — The schism between civil activists and armed revolutionaries is at its widest since the Syrian uprising began, and it’s only getting worse. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but the most important one is expectations — what each side hoped the uprising would achieve. For the civil activists, it was the overthrow of tyranny and the establishment of a secular, civil and democratic society. For those who took up arms, it was basically a many pronged power struggle; class, sectarian or opportunistic, depending on which spectrum of the armed groups they belonged to.

The major defining characteristic of civil activists across the country was their insistence on non-sectarianism and an adherence to the higher ideals of justice and freedom. The armed groups morphed like a chameleon changing colors, at the beginning justifying taking up arms to “protect the protesters” from security forces, and later on justifying their violence as a reaction to the regime’s. Any hidden agendas some of those groups may have had initially were carefully kept secret, both from society as a whole as well as media scrutiny — of course some pan-Arab media was actively complicit in this cover up — although there were some troubling tell-tale signs. As the uprising progressed, and some of those groups were armed and trained by regional and foreign powers, they adopted other agendas — usually dictated by whoever was supplying the weapons and the paychecks. They simply no longer cared and transcended the popular uprising and protests that spawned them and gave them their legitimacy, to completely dominate the revolution, and so in essence destroyed it by morphing it into a civil war with visibly sectarian dimensions — as became evident with the deliberate targeting of Shiites and Alawis, regardless of their links to the regime.

And that’s not even mentioning the more sinister of the armed groups, the Islamists, Jihadists and al-Qaeda affiliates who wanted nothing less than to turn Syria into another Taliban-style theocracy. They already have their religious courts and councils set up, dispensing justice via “Sharia law.” The one in Aleppo, for example, is called the “Hai’aa Sharia,” which looks into anything from murder and rape to “morality” crimes such as drinking alcohol or wearing shorts. The worrying trend is that many locals see this as preferable to the rampant crime and lawlessness, and that helps these groups gain traction and support on the ground at the expense of the more moderate ones. That, plus the aid they supply to residents as well as their reputation for not looting private — public- or state-owned is fine, however — property.

In other words, the civil activists wanted to change society, while the armed groups only wanted to change the face of the tyrants ruling it. Another striking difference between the armed and civil sides was the strange way the armed groups used “the ends justify the means” motto to do basically whatever they liked, including looting people’s homes and businesses, execution without trial, kidnapping for ransom, car bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, and even — and this is perhaps what rubs salt in the wound — the torture and killing of several prominent opposition and media activists in Aleppo such as Mohammed al-Khalid and Abdullah Yassin. Both were silenced after they started openly criticizing and exposing the thefts of various rebel factions. The perpetrators of those crimes are well-known, and even now, months later still on the loose and fighting the “good fight” against the regime.

To illustrate more personally what I’m talking about, take the story of my friend, and longtime civil activist, Mustafa Karman, who was tragically killed when a protest he was at in Bustan el-Qasr in Aleppo was shelled. He was there, almost every day delivering aid, organizing a protest or working on his long-term project, a school for the displaced and poor children of the area. He died just before it opened, and it was posthumously named after him. Many don’t know this, but Mustafa was a Shiite, and he often bitterly joked that both sides were after him. One because he was an opposition activist, the other simply because of his sect. This was his dilemma, and it became so dangerous that he was planning to leave the country. Sadly, he was killed shortly before he could do so.