Syria surpasses Game of Thrones - Hufvudstadsbladet

Almost 4 million Syrians have been displaced. LEHTIKUVA / AFP / Mamoud ZAAYAT

recently stopped reporting from Syria, the world’s interests have moved elsewhere.

I recently heard a photographer colleague say that there is no “action” longer then the conflict has increasingly taken the form of a trench war.

Personally, I think the civil war is beginning to resemble the TV series Game of Thrones. I say it without minimizing all the terror and death that the Syrian people are exposed to daily. But just like in the popular fantasy series intrigues many in the Syrian story. The people cheering you on can suddenly betray a moral and villains may prove to have good sides. New people meddling in and others fall away.

This weekend it was reported that the old castle Krak des Chevaliers outside Homs were wounded by mortar fire. What was the military truth korsfararriddarna in the Middle Ages are still valid today. Dominating this highland area around Homs have full control over the way down to the sea and the border with Lebanon, and can cut off supply lines between Damascus and Aleppo.

who has visited the World Heritage site of Krak des Chevaliers know that Game of Thrones can roll over – this is one of history’s most beautiful military complex.

My comparison may seem far-fetched but follow the war through the unconfirmed clips on Youtube reality exceeds fiction several times over. Here are children who executes prisoners of war with the sword, Christian priests who are beheaded by al-Qaeda groups, one can follow the sniper DEVICES victims through the scope. There is even the FSA soldiers tormenting a whimpering puppy. In the most widespread clip seen a rebel cut out and eat a government soldier’s heart. No PR agency in the world can smooth over the devastating publicity for the FSA and the Syrian government in exile. Which American or European population to send weapons and anti-aircraft missiles to the barbarians who eat their enemies’ hearts?

Here lies the Syrian conflict dilemma – who to the outside world while supporting the rebel movement now seems to crack up into factions divided by ethnicity, religion and extremism? At the micro level out war between different neighborhoods in the cities and on the macro level between Sunni and Shia. Should we cheer the dwarf Tyrion Lannister or she is blonde with dragons? It has become as surreal as the Syrian situation, with nearly 100 000 deaths and 2.5 million people threatened by starvation.

Most recently the Taliban have thrown themselves into the war on the Islamists’ side. War enters another opaqueness phase. The Taliban say they want to repay the service that their “Arab brothers” for more than three decades made them in Afghanistan. But most Syrians realize that it is a disservice and the larger association that Free Syrian Army (FSA) has with al-Qaeda-linked groups, the farther away from a real American support.

time of advent is hardly a coincidence. Recently executed an officer of the FSA by al-Qaeda groups in a vägpostering and on Saturday ended the FSA and the militia “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” in regular battles on a picket outside Aleppo. A deep crack in the resistance movement is about to be formed, and in the worst possible moment during the war. Last month, the regime with the help of Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah launched a massive offensive to regain lost control.

Bashar al-Assad on his “iron throne” in Damascus understand this, or at least his Russian and Iranian military advisors, surely they have all already seen the third season of Game of Thrones. It is the time now that the rebels seem most preoccupied with killing each other.