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Rebel control of Yarmouk 'real gain for opposition'
[JPost] The capture by Syrian rebel forces of a Paleostinian refugee camp in southern Damascus
...Home to a staggering array of terrorist organizations...
is another significant gain for the opposition in the capital, Israeli experts said on Tuesday.

"It is another tactical development that, taken together with other developments, makes for a dramatic change [for the rebels] because it is another neighborhood in Damascus," Prof. Eyal Zisser, who heads the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, told The Jerusalem Post.

According to Zisser, the rebel gains inside the capital are a sign that this is the beginning of the end for Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
. However,
corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds...
it is unlikely that his regime will collapse quickly.

"That end can take a long time to come," Zisser added.

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Shlomo Brom, an expert on Syria and the Paleostinians at Tel Aviv's Institute for National Security Studies, said that Paleostinian support for Assad had waned well before the latest violence in Yarmouk.

"The Paleostinians are Sunnis and have been sympathetic to the opposition," Brom said.

The Syrian conflict has split Sunni loyalties, with Hezbollah following its patron Iran in backing Assad. In July, pan-Arabic newspaper Asharq Alawsat reported that the leadership of the Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Mohammedan Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the liquidation of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
had left Syria for Iran but still remained on good terms with the Assad regime.

However,
we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by...
Paleostinian Sunni terror group Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, closed its offices in Damascus earlier this year, announcing in February that they were turning against the Alawite Assad and instead supporting the Sunni rebels.

In October, Syrian rebels announced they had begun arming sympathetic Paleostinians, who would form a group called the Liwa al-Asifa (Storm Brigade) to fight against the PFLP-GC and take its Yarmouk stronghold.

The PFLP-GC have accused the Liwa al-Asifa of trying to stir up trouble within the Paleostinian refugee community in Yarmouk, while Syrian rebels have accused the PFLP-GC of stifling Paleostinian dissent against Assad.

Last month, PFLP-GC sources said that Liwa al-Asifa fighters had critically injured a senior PFLP-GC leader and killed four others in an boom-mobileing attack in Yarmouk.

Now, with Yarmouk fallen to the rebels, PFLP-GC fighters are also starting to defect and join the opposition forces, Rooters reported on Monday, citing Paleostinian sources.

Many of the defections came on Saturday, the same day that PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril fled the Yarmouk camp with his son, the sources said.

Like Zisser, Brom believes that if the Syrian rebels' claim of taking the Yarmouk camp is true, it is significant only in that it is another gain for the opposition within Damascus, and not because it is a Paleostinian area.
Posted by: Fred 2012-12-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=358298