Posted on 09/15/2013 5:35:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Most of the proregime militias around the country are regionally based and funded by local businessmen or religious leaders eager to curry favor with the government and shore up their own protection networks... shabiha has its origins in the loose-knit smuggling and organized crime networks of Latakia province, the coastal enclave where Assad's Alawite sect dominates. These days, shabiha are just as likely to be Sunni, Kurdish or even Eastern Orthodox Christian as Alawite, says Lund. Some gangs have been organized into Popular Committees, a kind of armed neighborhood watch with independent leadership and few centralized directives other than to defend the regime in whatever way they deem necessary. In many cases this means setting up roadblocks, taking bribes, charging protection money, looting the homes and businesses of suspected rebels and otherwise raising funds to cover their costs by dint of their weapons. "When these gangs can't get financing from the government they start extorting the local communities," says Lund. That enables them to keep fighting, but it also means they are less beholden to Assad. "The government has more important things to do than put a stop to it." ...Bashar Assad's success in keeping them reined in when he inherited the presidency from his father is now being undone, says the businessman who spoke to TIME on condition of anonymity. "[Assad] is telling his friends, 'I managed to contain these groups for over 10 years. Now that they are unleashed, I can't stop them."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
....”Since none of these countries have a national identity as soon as the iron grip is loosened they go back to their tribal identities. We’re seeing this played out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya”....
True enough Pan!......they are connected thru Islam only...they see Nation ‘Borders’ as ‘obstacles’ preventing their agenda of a Caliphat and eventual World Rule. Which is why the Brotherhood is all for One World Governance....and why the Globalists keep trying to get them into governance.
...”It’s like trying to set up a single nation containing Jews and Germans after a thousand years of Holocausts”...
Excellent anology Zhang....the battle will rage on which side gets to own Islam.
I assume you mean the Dutch East Indies as the predecessor empire.
The Dutch retained control of Western New Guinea for more than 10 years after the lost the rest of their empire.
East Timor was a Portugese possession throughout the colonial period, conquered by Indonesia in 1975 and granted freedom in 1999.
No, I meant the Majapahit empire, which is why I referred to it as “Javanese”. I was emphasizing the closest thing to a native empire in what is now Indonesia before the VOC came along. The interesting thing about Indonesia’s (aka its Javanese overlords’) expansive claims is that, depending on the era, it has extended all the way to Thailand and the Philippines and has even included Oceania, in the rhetoric of various modern leaders.
Thank you. Of course that was way back in 1300/1400 or thereabouts.
Also, the area “controlled,” if that is even an appropriate term, by Majapahit is sometimes claimed to have included Timor and parts of New Guinea.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Criminals or jihadists? I’ll take criminals anytime.
As long as they’re running up a body count of Al Qaeda and Moslem Brotherhood scumbags, their supporters and their camp followers, who cares?
-—that was never a “train of thot “ -—more of a snotstream.
As Muslims go, Shiites are pretty ecumenical. Iran takes a hard line on apostasy, and missionary activity to convert Muslims to any other religion, but that's about the extent of really hard-line Shiite religious fervor. But it's not really clear that this is what the Shiite masses want. I really don't hear too much about Shiites going after other religions in either Lebanon or Iraq. Whereas the stories of Sunnis going after Shiites, and non-Muslims - on their own initiative, as well as with the tacit support of the state - are too many to count. While we should take out the Iranian nuke program, the real ticking time bomb is the seething Sunni masses.
Wonder where the world would be now if those dead english guys had divided the Ottoman Empire Kurds with Kurds, Armenian with Armenian, Aramaic with Aramaic, Shiite with Shiite, yaddah yaddah. Hhhmmmm......
Oh, they'd still be choppin' each other up but it would be across borders instead of civil wars. Now if that had happened the carpet bagging royals put in place by the English (Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan) would have probably been ethnically cleansed long ago in countries where they couldn't play one group against the other as easily as they have in their current artificial states.
Speaking of which did you ever notice the huge inferiority complex of Arab rulers? They all want to marry Western women and act like European nobles from the 19th century.
Not as easy as it sounds. Every community goes for maximalist borders. Inter-communal struggles break out as majority communities attempt to persuade minorities now felt to be fifth columnists to leave via beatings and pogroms. The British partition of its South Asian holdings into India and Pakistan resulted in 1m dead. Muslims attempted to regain the sway they had held and felt entitled to under the (Muslim) Mughal dynasty that had preceded British rule. Hindus wanted the freedoms that preceded Mughal rule. So they thrashed it out in the streets, and millions of refugees ran the gauntlet all the way to the (newly-defined) border and beyond, of lands they had never seen before.
Can the pattern of Obama administration not be seen. They’re doing the same thing here as they did in Egypt. Topple the guy there and replace them with far worse - which is the mass murdering jihadists promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood is the dearest of all groups to Obama - he’s filled his administration with Muslim Brotherhood advisors. He even put a Muslim Brotherhood operative at Hillary Clinton’s ear. Clinton and Obama follow Muslim Brotherhood version of reality. Hillary’s even put her back on her staff this week for her “transition” office. Heaven forbid Hillary transition to anything that has to do with the American people.
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