This website has some exceptional information about Syria.

From Prayers for Syria.com,  September 30, 2014

The following article is written by my friend, Declan Hayes – a passionate Irishman. I was with Declan in Damascus in April of this year. He has been back to Syria twice since then and spent the bulk of his time meeting with ordinary individuals and families on the front line, and doing his best to contribute to the rebuilding of the country.

Declan is an academic by trade – a lecturer in finance at the University of Southampton – and hence not the most obvious character to be playing a key role in the rebuilding of Syria, and yet it tends to be the Good Lord’s pattern to choose the most unlikely characters to spearhead His work.

Declan introduces his article as follows:

“The comments that follow are based on my experiences and observations from the last month which I spent in government-controlled Syria, in particular, from my time in Damascus, Ma’lulah, Saydnaya, Latakia and Kasab where I saw at first-hand the results of the terrorist war of attrition the Syrian rebels, Turkey and their Western allies are waging against the Syrian people.”

Declan’s article is long and it is a hard read as it will likely bring a tear to your eye. But I would encourage you to read it through to the end. Our Western governments need to know what they are involved in in Syria and if no one speaks out then the killing will continue unabated.

Father Dave

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By Dr Declan Hayes

Syria is like a hunted animal, being slowly killed one American arrow at a time. In Syria’s north east, the Islamic State forces, obviously trained, supported and supplied by their regional allies, Turkey in particular, inflict heavy losses on the outgunned Syrian Arab Army forces. In the north, roving bands of Western armed and funded “moderate” gangs, aided and assisted by Turkey, plunder isolated Christian communities at will, slaughtering the inhabitants and, crucially, ripping the heart out of these communities.

Across the border, in Turkey, Western aid, most of it channeled through the terrorist Syrian Muslim Brotherhood organization, is given to the Islamic bands who control the refugee camps; some of the aid is given to the families of the fighters, more is given to opportunistic entrepreneurs and the rest is sent to the “moderate” Islamic fighters across the border in Syria to help them rid areas contiguous to Turkey of all non-Sunni minorities. All of this is designed to dismember Syria and to divide it, like ancient Gaul and modern Iraq, into three dysfunctional but malleable pieces, all the better to control and exploit it.

Aleppo, the industrial heartland of Syria, has been stripped of its factories, which have been sold as war booty in Turkey. Scores of civilians remain missing, sold, no doubt in Raqaa to Turks or Saudis who are not too particular how they acquire their non-Sunni sex slaves whom they regard as sub-humans.

Across the border, Lebanese soldiers are kidnaped by American-trained rebels and are beheaded so that Lebanon, which stands at the edge of the Syrian abyss, might also be devoured by the sectarian fires all of Syria’s armed rebels, along with their foreign mercenaries and the foreign powers, which fund them, stoke.

In the north, the mothers of Tartous and Latakia continue to bury their sons, who die in the uniforms of the Syria Arab Army, defending their families from the unspeakable fate Obama’s moderate rebels have decreed for them and which was visited in person to the mothers of Latakia in August 2013 by suspected war criminal and White House darling General Sam Idriss, when his moderate rebels kidnapped hundreds of women and children and slaughtered entire villages for no other crime than being moderate in their beliefs.  Syria’s Christians, meanwhile, their churches ransacked, scour the world, looking for a refuge, any refuge, from the fate that the West has decreed for them and for Lebanon’s Christians by the hands of the moderate Syrian rebels, who delight only in death and destruction, pillage and rape.

To the south, Israeli artillery units give covering fire to moderate rebels as they over-run Druze villages and behead their elders. In the outskirts of Damascus, the story is not much different. The moderate rebels shell residential communities on a daily basis and, when the Syrian Army counter-attacks, the West condemns them for defending their homeland against foreign rebels and mercenaries who brook no resistance, who countenance no contrary opinion and who execute all who are not fully subservient to them and their sectarian, slaughter campaign.

Syria’s true opposition, meanwhile, are numbed into inertia by all of this. This group, which includes opposition MPs, doctors working in Syria’s hospitals, as well as voluntary and church workers, cannot understand why Syria’s most sectarian forces, the extremist and ultra-sectarian Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in particular, are the darlings of the West. Though they can point to countless atrocities committed by these embittered thugs, they cannot understand why the John Kerry continues not only to wine and dine them but also allows them to continue their criminal enterprises.

This is not to say that they do not comprehend what the Pentagon has in store for Syria and her people; with Iraq just over the border, no one could fail to understand that the entire region is being fashioned to the design of the obnoxious regime of Saudi Arabia, which beheads far more people than do their Islamic State proxies and which suppresses freedom of expression in Bahrain with the same gusto than do the moderate rebels in Syria.

They know that the rebels could not function without the help of Saudi Arabia and Turkey and that their help is, in turn, conditional on the United States and the human rights groups she controls turning a blind eye to their crimes. They know all that but they cannot understand why the West wants to sacrifice them on the altar of Saudi Arabia’s ugly obscurantism. They cannot understand why Turkey is allowed to collude in blatant war crimes against the civilians of Kasab, Idlib and Aleppo and why the West also colludes in the final solution of extermination that is their lot.

The West’s leaders could be a part of the solution and not the problem if they wished. First off, they could immediately criminalize the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and prosecute those involved in its charity racketeering. Next off, they could investigate the role of Turkey’s leaders in the vast number of atrocities that have their paw prints indelibly embedded in them and take appropriate action against them and the Turkish state. Next, it could send fact-finding delegations to Damascus to get a feel for life under perpetual mortar fire, fortified by the West’s sanctions.

They could do all that and more but they do not want to because they want Syria destroyed and her people pauperized and impoverished. The moderate rebels have driven Syria’s farmers off their lands, they have stripped bare the factories of Aleppo, America’s green light has allowed them to hire armies of rapacious Chechen mercenaries and pay them three times as much in a day than Syrian soldiers can hope to earn in a month. That is the White House way.

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