Why is Ghouta so Important to the West?

The Western press has achieved Goebbelsesque levels of distortion in its presentation of  the jihadists' loss of their mortar launch pad of eastern Ghouta. I can think of no better example of this than "‘We Were Dying in There’: Thousands of Syrians Flee Rebel Enclave," by Nada Homsi and Nick Cumming-Bruce. (Cumming-Bruce is The New York Times chief propagandist in Geneva. His job is to filter information that comes out of the United Nations offices there, amplifying the humanitarian crimes of official enemies while air-brushing away any U.S. misdeeds.)

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce ostensibly write about the Syrian government evacuation of civilians  held hostage by the Salafi jihadists in eastern Ghouta. But since this is an unalloyed tale of victory for Syria and its Russian ally, Homsi and Cumming-Bruce execute a switch-up and instead discuss the systematic use of rape by the Syrian Arab Army and its militias. There is no hyperlink to the UN Commission of Inquiry report within the NYT story, but here it is.

Homsi and Cumming-Bruce skew the summary of the report in favor of the Salafi jihadists, making it seem as if they were less criminal than their enemies. Judge for yourself:

United Nations investigators said Thursday that Syrian government troops and affiliated militias had raped and sexually assaulted women and men in a systematic campaign to terrorize, humiliate and punish civilians seen as linked to the opposition — actions that amounted to crimes against humanity.

Opposition armed groups had also committed rapes and sexual violence. Although such acts by rebels were “considerably less common,” the investigators said, extremists had carried out executions and harsh punishments to enforce their rigid social order.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring Syria’s conflict said it had documented the rape of women and girls in 20 government detention facilities and military intelligence branches between 2011 and 2016, and the same violence against men and boys in 15 branches.

Such attacks were “not isolated incidents but rather part of a pattern observed countrywide,” the investigators said in a 29-page report, which the panel’s chairman, Paolo Pinheiro, said was “based on 454 powerful, devastating interviews” with victims and witnesses.

The panel’s hope, he added, was that the report would serve as “an equally powerful trigger for accountability,” he told a meeting at the United Nations in Geneva. It was “particularly repulsive” that such violence continued to go unpunished, he said.

During house raids searching for opposition supporters in the early years of the conflict, troops and militias raped women and forced family members to watch the assault, the panel said.

In detention centers, guards subjected women to humiliating invasive searches, gang rapes and torture to force confessions and extract information. Low-ranking officers were often the perpetrators, the panel found, but “numerous cases of rapes by high-level officers have also been documented.”

Male detainees, some as young as 11, also suffered a wide range of sexual abuse, including rape, torture and genital mutilation. Investigators said they had documented such abuse in the political security and military intelligence branches in Aleppo, Hama, Idlib, Tartus and Damascus, including the infamous Sednaya Prison, sometimes “seemingly for amusement.”

Rape and sexual violence by armed opposition groups was not systematic, the panel said, but throughout the conflict it had received regular reports of extremist groups attacking people suspected of being gay, including throwing them off rooftops.

Militant groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State had sentenced women accused of adultery to death by stoning, and subjected women who violated their dress codes to lashings. In areas controlled by Islamic State, women and girls as young as 14 were forced to marry fighters.

When I read this over the weekend two things raked up a stench right away. New York Times readers know that to ISIS "marriage" is a euphemism for rape. If  Homsi and Cumming-Bruce would have scrolled to page 19 of the report they would find: "Many women were passed between multiple ISIL fighters, some as many as six or seven times within two years." Rukmini Callimachi has written about "marriages" that last for 45 minutes.

Then, also on page 19, a direct refutation of the "not systematic" claim:

Until mid-2016, ISIL did not allow their members who “owned” Yazidis to sell the Yazidi children separately. This rule was changed in mid-2016 and resulted in the separation of children from their mothers and subsequent sale of young boys as house servants, and girls as young as nine years as sexual slaves. Such children are often then given Muslim names. Identifying their ancestry remains problematic.

Once again, readers of the "newspaper of record" know that ISIS strictly codified a system of sexual slavery. So why is it undercutting all that reporting now with disingenuous stories out of Geneva, stories that make the jihadists sound better than the Syrian government?

Keeping a foothold in eastern Ghouta must really be important to the United States Government. Elijah Magnier explains why in "Will Syria be the Battleground for All-Out War Between Russia and America?":

The US’s anger at the Syrian-Russian attack on al-Ghouta needs to be made clearer here: the US occupation of al-Tanf Syrian-Iraqi borders aimed to create a launching platform for its military operations towards Deir al-Zour in the north and al-Ghouta in the east. The US plan was to occupy the city of Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim north-east and the capital Damascus. But Iran went around the area where the US forces were positioned, isolating these in the al-Tanf pocket, and made a qualitative leap to liberate Deir al-Zour and al-Qaim by defeating ISIS forces, who withdrew towards the US area of influence east of the Euphrates.

Moreover, Al-Ghouta is a clear demonstration of the US’s failed plan to attack Damascus. The strategic military planning and link between al-Tanf and al-Ghouta was possible had the Syrian Army and Russia not intervened on time to surround it and attack jihadists to force these to surrenderer and pull out to Idlib. The US thought to create a real menace against Damascus and at least prevent the parliamentary and presidential elections due next year. By controlling Ghouta, jihadists were supposed to keep up the pace of bombing to render the Syrian capital “unsafe”.

The US and the International community tried to stop the battles of al-Ghouta to no avail. This prompted Washington to exercise its favourite hobby of imposing sanctions on Russia, without succeeding in stopping the Syrian army (fighting without its allies – except Russia) from recovering its control over Ghouta. The answer came immediately from Moscow by bombing Daraa and hitting al-Qaeda’s area of influence in an indication as to where the future theatre of military operations is expected to be.

Again, events are moving very fast: the US response came quickly through its UK ally when Britain took advantage of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in London to accuse Moscow of being behind his assassination. The message here is clear: all means are legitimate for the control of the Middle East, specifically Syria.

Israel followed by demanding the return of the UNDOF troops, withdrawn in August 2014 following the abduction of 47 UN peacekeepers by al-Qaeda (the ransom for their liberation was paid by Qatar). The Israeli demand coincided – I have learned from well informed sources – with the gathering of forces of Syria’s allies, including Hezbollah, in Daraa, in preparation for future wide scale military operations. The US considers that the battle of Daraa is directly against itself and its Israeli ally, especially as it is party, along with Russia and Jordan, to the agreement to reduce the escalation there, to serve Israel and secure its security in southern Syria.

In this tense political climate it requires no imagination to link the issue of the Russian former spy to the aggressive statement of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials who threatened to use military force against the US and any other country in Syria if necessary.

The Syrian war is far from being a normal one. It is THE war between two superpowers and their allies, where US and Russian soldiers are directly involved on the ground in a war of domination and power. The lack of victory in the US eyes is worse than losing a battle. Even more, the victory of Russia and its allies on Syrian soil in any battle is therefore a direct blow to the heart of Washington and its allies.

Russia understood the US, UK and NATO’s message, including that of the mainstream media, and had no other choice but to escalate the pace of war in Syria as harshly as possible.

The superpowers are on the verge of the abyss, so the danger of falling into a war of cosmic proposition is no longer confined to the imagination or merely a sensational part of unrealistic calculations.

Will Damascus be the door of a major war that destroys everything? Asking the question is very important : but it is a very difficult question to answer.