Category Archives: Syria

‘Holland House’: Dutch jihadists stay in Saudi-funded villa in Aleppo

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Photo: Giath Taha, Reuters

Photo: Giath Taha, Reuters

Dozens of Dutch jihadists are housed in a luxurious villa in one of the richest neighbourhoods of the Syrian city of Aleppo. They receive salary and training, and have to stay in service for at least one year, Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reports in its April 20 paper edition.

The newspaper spoke to several Dutch parents whose sons – and in two cases, daughters – travelled to Syria to join the over two year old rebellion against the Assad government.  Before leaving their homeland, the youngsters sent their families vague messages such as, “You won’t hear from us in a while. We are going on a training course. Don’t worry”, or cryptic notes like, “See you in paradise”.

One of the parents recently received a photo from their son showing Dutch fighters at the edge of a swimming pool of a luxurious villa “in Haleb” (Arabic for Aleppo) which, according to the fighters, has been made available by “a rich Saudi”.

They also told their parents not to worry about their livelihood: “We receive one hundred dollars a month.” For the rest, they are reluctant in giving information. The parents assume that their phone conversations are recorded.

“The villa looks like a ‘Holland House’ where dozens of Dutch live”, they say.

“Ahmad”, a Syrian activist who on condition of anonymity spoke to de Volkskrant, said he knows the villa with the Dutch men. According to him, they are part of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the rebel extremist group with close ties to Al Qaeda that has been at the helm of the fight against the Syrian government.

“They live separated from other fighters because they don’t speak Arabic”, Ahmad said. “Only during the fighting they move among the others. There are also other non-Arabic fighters in the battalions, Afghans, Chechens, Turks. They take the oath to become anti-government fighters to Mohammed al-Jolani, the emir of Al-Nusra. Their freedoms as for where and how to fight are limited. But nobody goes to war without training.”

The concerned parents state that jihadists recruiting for jihad in the Netherlands should be criminalized.

Earlier this year, the chief of Dutch intelligence agency AIVD warned that Dutch citizens who are fighting with rebels in Syria could return home battle-hardened, traumatized and even further radicalized.

“I think many of the jihad fighters who go there realize very quickly it is less romantic than they were led to believe,” he said. “But at the same time they realize there is no way back.”

Imperialism’s Devilish Dance with Time

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[Updated November 9, 2012] Imagine the following scenario: A handful foreign-sponsored rebels start to try to wreak havoc to the only true democratic system in the world. After failing to succeed in their evil plans, they start to cry for help to the most powerful military alliance in the history of time. It still takes this most powerful military alliance in the history of time more than seven months to bomb the democratic and sovereign country into submission. Subsequently, after hundreds of thousands of casualties and deaths, the country’s resources are robbed and its assets are stolen – stolen to be used in a similar war, with similar purposes, causing similar casualties and deaths.

Imagine this all would happen in a very short period of time – let’s say in one or two weeks – and humanity would be able to fully see through the veil used by the imperialist powers to hide their true intentions. Won’t we all be in constant utter shock and awe over the excessive injustice, the immense crimes and the indescribable suffering that human beings cause to their fellow human beings?

But because these criminal acts are skillfully phased and happen in stages, the conditioned human mind tends to put it into some vague perspective or even to forget.

Our perception of time has become one of the most powerful weapons of mass destruction, as it influences our perception of reality by changing a past reality in our memory to something that equals less actual with less important – no longer actual with no longer important – only to psychologically prepare us for absorbing new shocks, new crimes and new atrocities in a way that disconnects them from the importance and relevance of earlier events.

If we are able to connect the dots and to relate what happened in the past to what is happening in the present, there is no doubt we will be overwhelmed first of all by how all the pieces of the puzzle start falling into places, and subsequently about how incredibly ugly and corrupt the complete image turns out to be – and that we are part of that mess. Continue reading →

Documentary on Syrian DM’s funeral wins Dutch camera prize

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The daughter of the late Syrian Defense Minister Daoud Rajha at her father's funeral (Reuters)

The daughter of the late Syrian Defense Minister Daoud Rajha at her father’s funeral (Reuters)

October 12, 2012 – On Friday Dutch cameraman Roel Rekko was announced the winner of the Stan Storimans Prize 2012, a prize for cameramen of news programs. Rekko received the award for a documentary he made in Damascus during the funeral of Syrian Defense Minister Daoud Rajha who was killed by a terrorist suicide bomb on July 18.

Despite its length of less than two minutes, the jury considered the report to be “very layered” and therefore worth the prize named after Dutch cameraman Stan Storimans who died in an airstrike on the Georgian city of Gori during the 2008 South Ossetia War. Continue reading →

A train conversation on Syria

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October 3, 2012 – “It is all orchestrated by the U.S. and Turkey”, he says. “They are behind this chaos. World War III already started, people just don’t recognize it. It’s no longer soldiers of one country fighting soldiers of an other country you know.”

“Indeed”, I say, pleasantly surprised. This middle-aged Turkish man next to me on the train in a West-European country isn’t supposed to have an opinion like that. “Nowadays’ wars are fought by foreign mercenaries and supported by many youth and many ignorant that have been brought into the streets to act in fake, corporate-fascist financed ‘revolutions’. Those people have been duped into believing in the sincerity of those fake revolutions by the Zionist and imperialist powers, don’t you think so too?”

The Turkish man, I forgot his exact name but it sounded like Ishafin, nodds at me. “And now that bitch gave them another 45 million dollars!”

I giggle a bit about the word bitch, I know exactly who he means. “Hitlery, Killery“, I say conspiratorial. Continue reading →

“Hacked” Amnesty International blog condemns West arming Syrian terrorists

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amnesty international logoAugust 28, 2012 – Like Reuters a few weeks ago, Amnesty International claims to be hacked on Monday when an article with headline “Amnesty calls on UN to stop the US, Qatar and Turkey funding and arming Syria rebels” condemning the foreign-backed armed insurgents who seek to overthrow the Syrian government appeared on its blog livewire.amnesty.org.

An other article that appeared during the alleged hack contains the testimony of a Bahraini activist who states he “escaped the most oppressive regime in the world”.

The articles have been removed from the blog now, but one of them is still available at breakingnews.sy. Continue reading →

I’m Joan Juliet Buck and I got Duped

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Joan Juliet Buck

Joan Juliet Buck

August 1, 2012 – “Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, ‘the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors’. It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings.* Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe, or hiss. Syria is a dictatorship, which is the default mode throughout the region.”**

Makes sense? It does in Miss Joan Juliet Buck‘s world – and she isn’t bipolar, as far as I know. Continue reading →

Dutch photographer held hostage in Syria: jihadists, rebels, half-truths and lies

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Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans (ANP)

Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans (ANP)

July 28, 2012 – Jihadists

“They were only foreign jihadists; I don’t think there was one Syrian among them,” Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans says about the group of fighters who captured and held him and British photographer John Cantlie for a week in northern Syria. Referring to them as jihadists, he declares in an interview with journalist Bram Vermeulen in Dutch newspaper NRC: “Those guys are totally independent from the Free Syrian Army. Many of them spoke good English, with Birmingham accents. According to them, a large flow of international fighters have crossed the borders with Syria during the past few weeks.”

Oerlemans, a freelancer with the British agency Panos Pictures, and Cantlie illegally crossed the Syrian border with Turkey on July 19 through a hole in the border fence and climbed up a hill. “John [Cantlie] had entered Syria this way before”, Oerlemans tells NRC, “but where he went left before, we now went right. A Syrian smuggler sent us in that direction. He was constantly on the phone and didn’t speak English, so we couldn’t discuss anything with him. After a while we reached what I thought was a refugee camp – but we walked straight into a group of twenty bearded men who started to yell at us and showed us their Kalashnikovs. We asked them if they were shabiha, Assad forces. ‘You don’t think shabiha would speak English’, a Pakistani-looking guy said to us. There were a few Africans among the group. Many Central-Asians. Foreign jihadists.” Continue reading →

“Friends of Syria” to meet in the Netherlands to proceed with Globalist Plans

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July 20, 2012 – On a yet unknown date in September, the Netherlands will host the next and fourth meeting of the so-called “Friends of Syria” group, a coalition of Western and Arab countries which support the armed terrorists who seek to replace president Assad’s government with a puppet regime. The Dutch Foreign Ministry announced the meeting on Friday, adding its purpose will be “a further improvement of the sanctions against the Syrian regime.”

“Heavy pressure on Syria is now more necessary than ever”, declared Dutch FM Rosenthal in a statement on the Foreign Ministry’s website.

Rosenthal, who will be the president of the meeting which is hosted in his country on the request of Qatar, stated that further sanctions against Syria should be taken “to stop the violence and to initiate a political process”. Other ways to achieve this are “providing support to the [Syrian] opposition” and “providing humanitarian aid”, Rosenthal said. Continue reading →

Dutch Amnesty International launches propaganda campaign to make “Putin stop Assad”

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June 27, 2012 – In yet another politically-motivated move, the Dutch branch of Amnesty International has launched a petition campaign urging Russian president Putin to demand Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to stop what Amnesty describes as the “systematical use of horrible violence by Syrian government troops and militias in towns and villages”.

The site writes in Dutch language: People are dragged out of their houses and are summarily executed. Prisoners are tortured, sometimes to death. The Syrian army surrounds cities and incessantly bombs and shells them. There also took dozens of massacres place in which children were murdered in cold blood. This violence has to stop now!

Russia blocks the UN Security Council and thus prevents any possible solution. Russia continues to supply arms to the Syrian regime. Russia is against the departure of president Assad, against military intervention and against an arms embargo.

Ask Russian president Putin to take responsibility and to use his influence to end the violence in Syria! Continue reading →