International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 55

International Journal on Criminology
in Beirut employs a suggestive reference to the “Middle Ages” to convince us that
the war of liberation led by the Syrian Army and its allies is dragging us back to
one of the darkest periods of humanity! A period of a thousand years extending
from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, the Middle Ages may have an undeserved
reputation, but a decent man with a little cultural education should know that a
number of technological and intellectual revolutions, with a pivotal role in world
history, took place during this transitional period. The medievalists Jacques Le
Goff and Johan Huizinga have written a number of definitive books on this subject
that the staff of Le Monde would do well to look up.
Finally, the most factually contestable piece of fiction: “Eastern Aleppo, the
stronghold of the insurgents ( ... ) with 250,000 inhabitants.” 4 The most serious
Western military experts estimated the number of “insurgents” in the eastern areas
of the city to be around ... 20,000. The same sources confirmed that civilians
on the ground numbered no more than 70,000 and fell into two categories: those
who had joined the jihadis and those who had been held there against their will
in order to serve as human shields for the valiant “insurgents.” When forty-nine
of them decided to escape via the humanitarian corridors opened by the Syrian
and Russian armies, they were executed in cold blood by these same “resistance
fighters.” In regard to many of these “civilians,” noted a senior officer from the
European intelligence agency, “it would be more accurate to call them hostages ...”
So why expend so much energy selling us this false “Stalingrad in reverse,”
to use the words of a French ambassador posted to the region? This latter began
to doubt—better late than never—the value of François Hollande’s foreign policy
strategy, which “no-one in the region gives a damn about,” he added skeptically.
Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault could be seen on the small screen at
the time responding to the presenters on a publicly-owned audiovisual channel:
“this killing must stop, the images shown on the television are unbearable!” Since
when does a minister of the Republic base his remarks on “images shown on the
television”?
Three key reasons may explain this panicked propaganda, which by no
means reflected the true situation on the ground. A resurrected Battle of Stalingrad,
the liberation of Aleppo—in which the Syrian Army was seeking to recapture its
own national territory—signified a double defeat for its adversaries: a defeat for
the misnamed “Arab revolutions” through which Washington hoped to bring the
Muslim Brotherhood to power in several Arab capitals; and a defeat for the NATO,
Israel and Gulf axis hoping to see events in Syria mirror those in Iraq and Libya,
including the fragmentation of nation states in the region into multiple ethnically
and religiously purified micro states. A true manifestation of the “Greater Middle
East” project led by Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s former secretary of state:
a project not renounced by the Obama administration, which then found itself
overcome by new realities on the ground.
4 Benjamin Barthe, “En Syrie, déluge de feu ...”
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