Syria: Why Some Revolutionaries Are Picking Assad Over Islamist Rebels – With their revolution hijacked by Islamists, many Syrian rebels are rethinking their stance against the man they’ve been trying to overthrow
▻http://world.time.com/2013/12/09/some-syrian-revolutionaries-choose-assad-over-islamist-rebels
“A lot of former activists are now saying to me, ‘When the choice is between Daish and Assad, I am going for Assad,’” says Randa Slim, a Syria expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, using the Syrian Arabic word for ISIS. To be sure, not all the rebel groups share the same ideology, but the most effective fighting groups, with their ranks filled by foreign jihadists, funded by private donors in the Gulf and backed by al-Qaeda, are gaining ground. As they grow, they are squeezing out the activists who dreamed of a Syria founded on democratic representation, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
In March 2011, Nawfal joined the Syrian revolutionaries protesting the repressive regime of President Assad. When Raqqa fell to the rebels in April 2013, she was one of the first to cheer. But then she got a closer look at the rebels. Raqqa had been taken over by al-Qaeda sympathizers who immediately started implementing their harsh interpretation of Islamic law. Music, photography and cigarettes were forbidden. Women were instructed to cover their heads and dress “modestly” — even though Nawfal wears the tightly wrapped headscarf of a conservative Muslim, the rebels objected to her wearing trousers. Anyone who objected to their ideology was tried, and punished, as an apostate. Dissidents disappeared. Nawfal started wondering what, exactly, she had been liberated from. So she started protesting and made a series of anti-ISIS videos.
[…]
Her gender may have won her some time; scores of male antiregime activists who tried to take on ISIS have been thrown in prison, kidnapped, tortured or disappeared. Frustration with the rebels has driven many activists to exile while others have simply given up on the revolution. Some are even rethinking the revolution entirely.
À noter, cet article du Time arrive quelques jours après une longue dépêche de Reuters au thème identique:
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/205217