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→Iran in Syria
The Arabic website "Al-Rai Al-Arabi" has reported that some 600 Libyan "volunteers", who want to participate in the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, came to Syria through [[Turkey]]. This is not too surprising; the current Transitional National Council (TNC) was the first to recognize the Syrian National Council as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people. The "Islamic State of the Levant" ([[ISIS]]) in part of a group affiliated with the Libyan rebel movement, which have been linked in the past to Islamic extremist's organizations and al-Qaida of the Islamic Mahgred (AQIM). Their agenda simply put is to establish an Islamic caliphate in Syria, much as they did in [[Iraq]], with the help of [[Saudi Arabia]].
The Arabic website "Al-Rai Al-Arabi" has reported that some 600 Libyan "volunteers", who want to participate in the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, came to Syria through [[Turkey]]. This is not too surprising; the current Transitional National Council (TNC) was the first to recognize the Syrian National Council as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people. The "Islamic State of the Levant" ([[ISIS]]) in part of a group affiliated with the Libyan rebel movement, which have been linked in the past to Islamic extremist's organizations and al-Qaida of the Islamic Mahgred (AQIM). Their agenda simply put is to establish an Islamic caliphate in Syria, much as they did in [[Iraq]], with the help of [[Saudi Arabia]].
==pro-Nazism under the Assads==
==Nazism==
A Syrian born explains in 'Swastikas in Damascus':<ref>A. Khattab, [https://newlinesmag.com/essays/swastikas-in-damascus/ Swastikas in Damascus], New Lines, March 17, 2021.</ref>
<blockquote>Syria under the Assads has long harbored a soft spot for Nazism. The revolution is changing that...
Those around me who sported some vague admiration for Hitler almost always supported the Assads, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Some of them sought to join the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), established by Antoun Saadeh, a 20th century politician who spoke of the superiority of Middle Eastern Arabs over Africans and Syrians over neighboring peoples. Unlike the Assads’ Arab Socialist Baath Party and the many other political and social movements that called for a unity of Arab nations, the SSNP believed in the Syrian nation, a Greater Syria that would include modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan. Saadeh himself was Lebanese.
The anthem of the SSNP, its flag, and its own version of Führerkult around Saadeh seem to some as the closest one could get to a Nazi ideology that is alive and well in the region, though today’s SSNP tries to distance itself from some of Saadeh’s right-wing racial theories.
I’ve tried understanding where some of this right-wing sentiment, of a seemingly Nazi-esque flavor, may have originated. In 1939, Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbles, launched the Radio Berlin Arabic-language program. The program broadcast across the Middle East and North Africa and told Arab listeners that everything they had heard about Hitler hating Arabs and assigning them a low “racial status” was wrong. It even broadcast Quran recitations, in what seemed to have been an attempt to steal listeners from the BBC’s Arabic-language radio service.
The Nazis also developed relations with Muslim public figures, most notably Hajj Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time. Husseini knew Hitler personally. And, despite what Radio Berlin used to say, Arabs suffered because of Nazism too. Hundreds of Arab nationals, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike, were led to concentration camps under Hitler...
We were never taught this. And yet at some point, I began hearing a startling number of Syrians quoting Hitler and discussing his views and political career. Some would mutter the common, and not altogether accurate, claims that Germany “rose from the ashes” of World War I and from the confines of the Treaty of Versailles and that the lives of German citizens greatly improved under Hitler before World War II began in September 1939.
Those were mostly teenagers who had seen a clip of the dictator delivering a tirade and went about glorifying him without any real knowledge of who he was. Some might have heard a quote out of context and went about repeating it. Others, perhaps, were filtering their world through a warped understanding of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, cornerstones of the ruling Baath Party, whose ideologies we learned at school.
“I could have killed all Jews, but I left some of them alive in order to show you why I was killing them.” Hitler never once said these words, but I remember the made-up quote circulating on Facebook since the site gained popularity among Syrians around 2009. It was usually paired with a black background and a photo of Hitler himself.
</blockquote>
==Iran in Syria==
==Iran in Syria==
[[Iran]] has for years sought to entrench itself militarily in Syria. It has active military bases in Syria and tenths of thousands of fighters.
[[Iran]] has for years sought to entrench itself militarily in Syria. It has active military bases in Syria and tenths of thousands of fighters.