If Alawites are turning against Assad then his fate is sealed

2012-09-03 · first published in ESSF · 100 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to europe-solidaire.org”

Only a fragment of this survives. It may have been a short link-and-comment post, which marxsite ran many of, or the opening of a longer piece cut off by the capture — from what remains there is no way to tell which. The original is still readable at ESSF: read it in full.

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ROBERT FISK 3/09/2012 The Independent via ESSF The Long View: There seems to be a Baathist pattern of destroying Sunni villages on the edge of the Alawite heartland. ’Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger," Macbeth’s First Witch announces, but Shakespeare got his geography a bit wrong. Aleppo is 70 miles from the Mediterranean. It’s certainly ancient; Aleppo was mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Ebla in the third millennium BC and belonged to the Hittites and the Emperor Justinian, its 14th-century citadel walls still lowering today over the revolutionary capital of northern Syria. And that’s the point.

The capture this was recovered from