Nidal

Article du 25 juillet 2012 : Christians Flee from Radical Rebels in Syria
►http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/christians-flee-from-radical-rebels-in-syria-a-846180.html

“There were always Christians in Qusayr — there were around 10,000 before the war,” says Leila, the matriarch of the Khouri clan. Currently, 11 members of the clan are sharing two rooms. They include the grandmother, grandfather, three daughters, one husband and five children. “Despite the fact that many of our husbands had jobs in the civil service, we still got along well with the rebels during the first months of the insurgency.” The rebels left the Christians alone. The Christians, meanwhile, were keen to preserve their neutrality in the escalating power struggle. But the situation began deteriorating last summer, Leila says, murmuring a bit more before going silent.

“We’re too frightened to talk,” her daughter Rim explained, before mustering the courage to continue. “Last summer Salafists came to Qusayr, foreigners. They stirred the local rebels against us,” she says. Soon, an outright campaign against the Christians in Qusayr took shape. “They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away,” she says. “We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed.”

Grandmother Leila made the sign of the cross. “Anyone who believes in this cross suffers,” she says.

It is not possible to independently corroborate the Khouri’s version of events, but the basic information seems consistent with what is already known. On April 20, Abdel Ghani Jawhar involuntarily provided proof that foreign jihadists are engaged in combat in Qusayr. Jawhar, a Lebanese national and commander with the terrorist group Fatah al Islam, died that day in the Syrian city. An explosives expert, Jawhar had been in Qusayr to teach rebels how to build bombs and accidentally blew himself up while trying to assemble one. Until his death, Jawhar had been the most wanted man in Lebanon, where he is implicated in the deaths of 200 people. Lebanese authorities confirmed his death in Syria. The fact that the rebels had worked together with a man like Jawhar fomented fears after his death that the ranks of insurgents are increasingly becoming infiltrated by international terrorists.

Archive : août 2010. Après avoir été le principal vecteur des rumeurs du 14 Mars soutenant que c’était le régime syrien qui avait organisé le Fatah al-Islam à Nahr el Bared (suggérant même que Seymour Hersh avait été précédemment manipulé par Michel Samaha pour évoquer le Fatah al-Islam avant que les services syriens ne déclenchent les événements dramatiques contre l’armée libanaise), Now est forcé d’admettre le contraire en 2010. What’s next for Fatah al-Islam ?
▻https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/reportsfeatures/whats_next_for_fatah_al-islam

The report was denied in Beirut, where March 14 politicians countered that Saudi wasn’t funding Fatah al-Islam, but rather that the Syrians specifically let Absi out of jail to come wreak havoc in Lebanon as a pretext to re-occupy the country their troops had left less than two years prior following a nearly 30-year presence.

Haddad wrote in his paper that there is no evidence to prove the Syrian puppet theory, and told NOW Lebanon, when asked about the Saudi money theory – which was not addressed in the paper – that authorities curiously did not ask arrested militants how they were funded.