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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Syrian Army Turns to Women on Damascus Front Lines |
| 2015-03-28 |
| [AnNahar] Perched on a makeshift bench taking turns with a sniper rifle, the Syrian army's top markswomen await their "prey" on the front line in east Damascus. Sergeant Rim, 20, and Chief Sergeant Samar, 21, belong to the First Women's Commando Brigade of the Republican Guard, an elite unit stationed on some of the most dangerous battlegrounds on the outskirts of the Syrian capital. There are roughly 800 soldiers in these all-female commando brigades, who face determined and entrenched rebels to the east and southeast of Damascus. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #3 Assuming these are all Alawites, that's a pretty high death toll. I assume that anyone not in the various Free Syria factions, Al Nusra, ISIS or Syrian Kurdistan has hooked up with Assad if they possibly can, and some of them are getting actual paychecks for being soldiers. I suspect it's not an insignificant death toll, nonetheless. Everybody fights dirty over there. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2015-03-28 19:55 |
| #2 More than 46,000 soldiers have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Assuming these are all Alawites, that's a pretty high death toll. The US lost 400K dead during WWII. That was 0.3% of the population. Alawites are estimated at 3.3m people in total. 46K out of 3.3m is 1.4%, or about 5x the US casualties per capita during WWII. They had will need to be drafting all able-bodied Alawites over 12 soon. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2015-03-28 12:20 |
| #1 I guess hiding behind them didn't work any more. |
| Posted by: Black Bart McGurque3985 2015-03-28 10:51 |