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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| Assad Orders Mountain Stronghold Built To Protect Him And His Core Supporters | |
| 2012-01-03 | |
| Debka sez: League monitors fail in their mission to curb brutal regime violence in Syria and the ten-month popular defiance continues to rage, President Bashar Assad is digging in for a full-scale civil war. A fortress is under construction for the Syrian ruler, family, his loyal generals and ruling elite in the northwestern Alawite (Al-Ansariyyah) Mountains -- should Damascus become too hot for them.
These mountains have the only dense forests in the vicinity of Syria's Mediterranean coast. The Al-Ansariyyah range averages 32 kilometers (20 miles) in breadth and a peak elevation of just over 1,200 meters. The tallest mountain, Nabi Yunis east of Latakia, is 1,562 meters (5,125 feet) high. The range slopes down from its northern tip to an average altitude of 900 meters (3,000 feet) and 600 meters in the south. Military and intelligence sources report Syrian engineering corps crews working at speed to build a fortified encampment, partly inside caves and tunnels, on the wooded slopes. Its perimeter is enclosed with anti-tank defenses armed with anti-air batteries. When finished, the camp will be one of the most heavily fortified strongholds in the Middle East. In support of the Syrian dictator, large groups of Alawite families began moving in the last week of November from the mixed towns of Latakia, Hama and Homs to new homes in the encampment - apparently on a signal from Assad's intelligence and security services. Fortified facilities stocked with supplies are being provided for Alawite families unable to leave their towns and villages. This mass relocation encompasses around a million Alawites, or a third of the 3.5 million members of this deviant offspring of this ruling Shiite Muslim faith, which numbers just over one-tenth of Syria's total population. By reestablishing his headquarters in a mountain fortress, Bashar Assad hopes to achieve two goals: To keep his Alawite following out of harm's way in a full-scale civil war. They face bitter Sunni revenge for the brutal persecution its adherents have suffered from Assad father and son for 37 years. Clustering Alawite families in protected cantons will guarantee their loyalty to Bashar Assad and his clan. Middle East sources report that not all Alawite clan leaders are willing to following the ruler into his mountain bastion. Some communities have gone over to the other side, for the first time in the ten-month popular uprising against his regime. In the flashpoint Homs and Hama regions, a dozen Alawite village chiefs have struck deals with local rebel militia chiefs including the Free Syrian Army for guaranteed immunity from attack provided their sons refuse to join Assad's state-backed private paramilitary Shabiha. The inability of Assad and his henchmen to prevent these desertions from his own clan betokens the president's declining authority beneath the bloody surface of the contest in the strife-torn country. | |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #13 WHERE NOT-AN-EAGLE ALAWITES DARE .... versus CHINESE MILITARY FORUM > THE SUPREME LEADER NEEDS HUMAN BOMBS | NORTH KOREAN LEADERS CALL FORCES "HUMAN BOMBS" FOR SOCIALISM. HMMMMM, HMMMMMM, is this Artic trying to say that Big Daddy Hafez, Sr. never built such a bunker already??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2012-01-03 21:25 |
| #12 |
| Posted by: Mizzou Mafia 2012-01-03 18:04 |
| #11 That would make him colder than the olympic loonie at center ice. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2012-01-03 15:43 |
| #10 a Coors Light? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2012-01-03 14:08 |
| #9 This is reminiscent of Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Americas, built by Haitian leader Henri Cristophe. The official purpose of the Citadelle was to protect his kingdom of North Haiti from French invasion, but for practical purposes it was against an invasion from South Haiti and to protect Cristophe from revolution in the North. Oddly enough, North Haiti was fairly prosperous under Cristophe, because he kept many of the tyrannical French policies that had existed before, requiring hard labor from his subjects to support agriculture and business, as well as building and improving infrastructure. He even codified the law into 'Code Henry'. But because South Haiti was more liberal, its people did not work and it was generally falling apart, and quite resentful of the prosperity of the North. The North finally collapsed because Christophe had a stroke, which crippled him enough so that his people, sensing weakness, revolted. He then shot himself in the head with a silver bullet. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2012-01-03 10:05 |
| #8 re: the Odessa Network and the MidEast esp. Egypt and Syria |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2012-01-03 06:57 |
| #7 At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi war criminals found refuge in South America and in Arab countries, including Syria. Damascus welcomed Nazis partly out of ideological sympathy for the Hitler regime, and partly because the German fugitives were useful allies in Syria's war to prevent the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Israeli military intelligence reports during that first Arab-Israeli war were filled with references to the presence of Nazis, especially as commanding officers, among the Syrian forces attacking northern Israel. Indeed, there were so many Germans in the Syrian ranks that when the Haganah (the Labor Zionist militia that became the Israeli Army) defeated the Arab forces in Haifa in April 1948, its official terms for a truce included a provision that "European Nazis will be delivered to [the British] Military [authorities]." During the 1950s and 1960s, the names of prominent Nazis living in Syria began to surface. One was SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, who had helped Adolf Eichmann implement Hitler's genocide policy in France, Bulgaria, and Hungary. When the legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen took up residence in Damascus in 1962, his Syrian acquaintances introduced him to Karl Rademacher, a senior Eichmann aide who had been involved in the mass murder of Jews from Belgium, Holland, Croatia, and elsewhere. After the war, Radmacher had fled to Syria and became an official in the Syrian Secret Service. The most notorious of the Nazis granted asylum in Syria was another top Eichmann aide, SS Lieutenant Alois Brunner. After being convicted in France in 1954 of responsibility for the murders of more than 100,000 Jews, Brunner disappeared. Two decades later, the famed French Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld tracked down Brunner in Damascus, where he was making a comfortable living as an adviser to the Syrian intelligence services. LINK |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2012-01-03 06:47 |
| #6 Oh Oh... the US subsumed Gen Gehlen's eastern europe and Russia spy org so this doesn't look good. It has been alleged that Brunner found a working relationship after WWII with the Organisation Gehlen. He then fled Germany only in 1954, on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then Egypt where he worked as a weapons dealer, and then to Syria, where he took the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer. In Syria, he was allegedly hired as a "government advisor" — with some suggesting he was advising the Syrian dictatorship on torture and repression techniques, some dating from his time as an SS torturer. He also allegedly trained Kurdish rebels to operate against Turkey, and shipped arms to Algerian rebels during their war of independence with France. Syria has constantly refused entry to French investigators as well as to Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld who spent nearly 15 years bringing the case to court in France. Simon Wiesenthal tried unsuccessfully to trace Brunner's whereabouts.[citation needed] In his 1980s interview by the German magazine Bunte, Brunner declared that his sole regret was not having murdered more Jews. In a 1987 telephone interview to the Chicago Sun Times, he stated: "The Jews deserved to die. They were garbage, I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again..."[13] He was reported to be living in Damascus under the alias of Dr. Georg Fischer.[1] Although there were unconfirmed reports that Brunner may have died in 1996, he was reportedly sighted in 2001.[citation needed] In 2011, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service BND had destroyed its file on Brunner in the 1990s, and that remarks in remaining files contain conflicting statements as to whether Brunner had worked for the BND at some point.[14] |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2012-01-03 06:38 |
| #5 Here was one Alois Brunner Alois Brunner (born 8 April 1912) is an Austrian Nazi war criminal. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's assistant, and Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man."[1] As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the Drancy camp. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost an eye and the fingers of his left hand, respectively, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by Mossad. |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2012-01-03 06:34 |
| #4 Hey, his father's top strategist used to work for der Fuhrer. Same tactics... |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2012-01-03 06:27 |
| #3 Fuhrerbunker is so 20th century |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2012-01-03 03:06 |
| #2 Preparing to retreat to the Alpenfestung is not the move of a man who is winning. |
| Posted by: gromky 2012-01-03 02:41 |
| #1 Alawite Syria is not a very pleasant neighboor. But, I believe, it beats Ikhwan Syria. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2012-01-03 01:24 |