21 May 2011

Tel Kalikh: The Evolving Lie

Tel Kalikh: The Evolving Lie


As everyone knows, the town of Tel Kalikh has, in the past few days, been the scene of some of the most brutal repression in the country. Tanks and large numbers of troops entered the town and shelled significant parts of it. And the regime has told numerous versions of what its doing.

The town is hard on the Lebanese border; if you’ve ever taken the highway to Tartous, you might recall long lines at gas stations right near the turn off for Krak des Chevaliers … that’s it. (Those long fuel lines? Lebanese coming to buy cheap Syrian petroleum). Not a place that really sticks in one’s mind for it’s own sake and a ‘mixed’ town. In that area, that means a town that’s majority Alawi – around 2/3rds – with the rest mainly Sunni and a few Christians. Hardly the sort of place one would expect to be a major site of anti-Baath protests; rather, it’s the sort of place where mukhabarat guys come from.

So, what happened?

Well, if we believe the first government story, bands of Hariri supporters snuck in from Lebanon with lots of arms and, after spray painting crazy things that no real Syrian would believe, began randomly killing innocent Syrians, in hopes of stirring up sectarian war …

Then, scratch that! The story changed. Now, the bands of Islamic radicals had come in with the express sole desire of raping underage Alawi girls and eating the hearts of Alawi men …

Whoops, that wasn’t it; by now, the party gangs and mukhabarat had tanks and were shelling whole (sunni) neighborhoods … The next version – boradcast widely by al Manar – was that Syrian radical Islamists, inspired by al Qaeda, and following a wahhabi, Salafi doctrine, had seized control of the town and proclaimed an Islamic Emirate. Wahhabi interpretations of Sharia had been put in place; Alawis and Shia were being persecuted by the new rulers …

Ahem, no that’s not it; now, there were large numbers of refugees going in to Lebanon, some being shot as they fled (including elderly women and other obvious militant wahhabis). So that version was forgotten. Now, the problem was easily explained: Tel Kalikh was a center of smuggling operations and cross-border illegal trade and the smugglers had taken advantage of the foreign conspiracy to be more bold in their operations. Noble hearted but out gunned police tried to interdict them; the smugglers started shooting and killing people. So, the government had to send in back up. Naturally, the drugged up members of the foreign conspiracy mistook a simple police action in order to malign the state.

Of course, none of these explanations makes sense: really, the Syrian state decided now to crack down on people buying cheap fuel to sell in Lebanon? Uh huh … really, a Wahhabi emirate in an Alawi majority town?

All of them, of course, are lies but the fact that they keep changing the story shows they know it too.

3 comments:

Dave said...

The lies of this regime are stupendously retarded.

It's frightening that for so many years, the same regime has indoctrinated it's citizens with lies. We can only hope once you'll attain freedom the citizens will find new information sources, which won't be pure propaganda.

Anonymous said...

Hello! I am an italian journalist....How I can contact you, Amina? E mail or stuff like that...

Elizabeth said...

The real smugglers (of weapons, not cheap gasoline) is the Syrian regime. How dare they even speak about smuggling?

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