A member of an Islamist group holds a flag during a protest against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Deir el-Zor, February 25, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Khalil Ashawi
How al-Qaeda Changed The Syrian War -- Sarah Birke, New York Review Of Books
Talk to any Syrian you meet on the Syrian-Turkish border these days, and in less than five minutes the conversation is likely to turn to Da’ash—the Arabic acronym for the rebel organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. Linked to al-Qaeda, the fearsome group has swept across northern Syria, imposing sharia law, detaining and even beheading Syrians who don’t conform to its purist vision of Islam, and waging war on rival militias. In early December, the group killed a foreign journalist, Iraqi cameraman Yasser Faisal al-Joumali, who was reporting in northern Syria. Even using the word Da’ash—seen as derogatory by the group’s members—is punishable by eighty lashes, a twenty-three-year-old wounded fighter from a rival Islamist group told me from his bed in a Syrian-run makeshift clinic in Turkey.
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My Comment: Al Qaeda's involvement in the Syrian civil war has clearly changed everything. In my now case .... if I had a choice between Al Qaeda and the Assad regime, I would prefer the Assad regime as the lesser of two evils.
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