HELL ON EARTH: THE
FALL OF SYRIA AND THE RISE OF ISIS B
USA (99 mi) 2017
d: Sebastian Junger and Nick
Quested
One of the problems of
letting civil war go on for so long is that more and more people get
involved. It’s like a bar fight, where
all a sudden everyone’s jumped in and is throwing chairs at each other. Syria became a civil war in response the
violence of the government, but eventually Iran got involved through Hezbollah
to support the Assad regime; the Kurds, Turkey, the Arab Gulf states got
involved. … Eventually all the world powers and all the regional powers had
some investments in Syria. Once you get
a proxy fight, with so many powers, so huge interests in the outcome, it’s
almost impossible to stop.
—Director Sebastian Junger on Syria’s civil war
One of a flurry of recently released Syrian documentaries, though
it’s more of a history lesson, providing plenty of background information while
getting at the root of what started it all, namely a spreading optimism in 2010
arising out of the Arab Spring democracy movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and
Libya, where young people in particular envisioned a better future for
themselves, often expressed by massive street demonstrations captured on social
media that challenged the government’s hand, toppling dictatorial regimes that
had previously appeared invincible. Even
in Syria, following the death of Soviet-style Syrian strongman President Hafez
al-Assad in 2000, a country governed by the authoritarian rule of the Ba’ath
Party since 1963, living under a declared state of emergency since then, where
the head of state since 1970 was a member of the Assad family, including his
son, Bashir al-Assad, who was installed as president, yet it appeared there was
some loosening of the grip, as some opposition parties were allowed, the press
got a little bit freer, and hundreds of political prisoners were released
during a period described as Damascus
Spring. But within a few months,
opposition leaders were arrested and the government clamped down on any voices
of resistance, calling them enemies of the state, reinstating the repressive
measures of his father. When a 14-year
old kid is seen writing anti-government graffiti on school walls protesting the
rule of Assad, he is immediately arrested and tortured, where we see
photographs of his battered body being returned to his family. Looking around at what happened in other Arab
countries, with the toppling of authoritarian regimes, Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad decided that was not going to happen in his country, so he actively
retaliated, using maximum military force against peaceful street demonstrators,
attacking them with machine guns, crushing the spirit of any budding revolution
before it had time to spread, where his calling card was leaving dead bodies on
the streets. The funerals of dead
protesters turned into bigger protests, with many calling for Assad’s removal
from power, but this was only met with more torture and arrests, literally
filling the prisons, where one man described the condition of prisons at the
time, which were so overcrowded there was literally no room to breathe or
sleep, with precious little oxygen, where prisoners viciously fought each other
for what little food was provided, causing massive deaths simply from
neglect. An estimated 13,000 prisoners
have been executed in government prisons.
Seeing the abuses, many soldiers started defecting from the ranks of
Assad, forming local militia groups to defend the protesters called the Free
Syrian Army. While they were initially
successful, stopping a succession of government army tanks entering the
neighborhood, seen expressing what can only be described as open jubilation,
but they had no answer once Assad starting dropping barrel bombs on his own
citizens (List of Syrian Civil War
barrel bomb attacks).
Narrated and co-directed by American photojournalist,
Sebastian Junger, who previously shared directing duties in Afghanistan with Restrepo
(2010), this is a film about the eye of a camera, where the viewer sees what
the camera sees, compiling footage from as many as a dozen different countries,
collected by Middle East news outlets, but also activists, journalists, and
witnesses, providing a you-are-there style of cinéma verité, bringing the war
into the living rooms of people around the world, premiering at film festivals,
but then broadcast in 171 countries and in 45 languages on the National Geographic Channel that
normally screens gorgeously filmed animals-in-the-wild television shows. In an unusual twist, the filmmakers gave
cameras to two brothers, Radwan and Marwan Mohammed, who film the reactions of
their families as they are being bombarded in Aleppo, at the time the country’s
largest city, where they continually smile and put on brave faces in order to
minimize the fear of their children who are cowering under the covers,
eventually following their dangerous quest to smuggle themselves into Turkey,
though repeated attempts to make it to Greece fail. It was only after the FSA rebels took a
military base in Aleppo and freed most of the city from Assad’s army that the
aerial bombardments began, barrel bombs day and night, nonstop, on civilians
and militia alike. While the film
doesn’t get into it, barrel bombs have a history in the Middle East, as they were
used by the Israeli Air Force during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, bombing the
Arab village of Saffuriya, causing widespread destruction and panic in the
population, where other than a few elderly, the entire town fled and relocated
elsewhere. Nothing of the former village
remains, so in 1992 the area occupied by the former village was turned into a
national park. In Syria (Assad
'dropped 13,000 barrel bombs on Syria in 2016', watchdog ...), barrel bombs
are dropped out of helicopters, wherever the Syrian president saw pockets of
resistance, and could easily be attributed to no one else but Assad, as none of
the rebel groups have helicopters. But
in 2013 Assad went further, using sarin gas in rockets targeted against the
people of East Ghouta, a Damascus suburb of working poor, killing an estimated
1400 people, largely children, with 3600 more victims displaying neurotoxic
symptoms in hospitals. American
President Obama met with Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along
with various allied countries and initiated military plans for a counter
attack, including the British and the Saudis who were willing to join an
alliance against Assad, claiming Assad had crossed that “red line” warning
Obama issued a year earlier. But at the
last moment, Obama had a change of heart, cancelling all military plans, as
there was skepticism among international intelligence communities, as well as
several member of Congress, with some suggesting rebel groups were capable of
processing sarin, implying they could not definitively prove the chemical
poisoning came from Assad. This is one
of the major American blunders, according to the film, as that left these
communities completely defenseless from unrelenting aerial attacks that
continually escalated, feeling betrayed by the West, who would not even provide
surface-to-air weapons to shoot helicopters out of the sky, where the number of
dead would only rise exponentially, a decision that is at the root of the
European refugee crisis, as since the outbreak of civil war in March of 2011, an
estimated 11 million Syrians have exited the country in droves to escape the
bombings.
Meanwhile, as Assad was busy encountering resistance
throughout his country, ISIS filled the void, starting out with missionary
offices throughout the country, which gathered needed intelligence information,
before utilizing quick military strikes to grab huge areas of unprotected land
in both Iraq and Syria, taking weapons and oil fields in their path, which
financed their mission, while establishing themselves as a force to reckon
with. The other colossal American
mistake was made earlier in the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, supposedly to
liberate the people from Saddam Hussein, yet among the first things they did
was disqualify anyone from Saddam’s Sunni Ba’ath Party from serving in the new
government, including the police and military, basically disempowering them,
forcing them to go underground, where they immediately became the American
opposition, with many of them eventually joining arms with ISIS, proudly
defining themselves as the saviors of Sunni Islam. One other mistake was for American soldiers
to be broadcast on television continually pointing their guns at Iraqi
citizens, yelling, screaming, and constantly threatening them, which sent a
sign they were not there on any peace mission.
Showing themselves to be expert in social media broadcasts, ISIS
immediately caught the eye of the world through sheer viciousness and
brutality, posting live beheadings on YouTube, looting ancient artifacts, while
destroying mosques or other cultural heritage sites as a sign of cultural
cleansing, burning historic papers and books, including works dating back to
5000 BC, leaving no trace of any previous culture or civilization. In this manner, they instill fear around the
rest of the world and dominate the area under their jurisdiction, while luring
others to join them. Using recruitment
videos that resemble video games, this appeals to vulnerable young men, as it displays
a perception of strength, reminiscent of similar recruitment commercials for
the Army or Marines, where young men aren’t joining out of any political or
religious affiliation, but for the visceral thrill of action, where they can be
part of a dominating force. At their
peak in 2014 ISIS governed nearly 6 million people, but an American bombing
campaign has forced them to relinquish territory, where they are on the
retreat, but continue to operate in lone wolf situations, reigning terror on a
smaller scale. One of the more shocking
moments in the film comes from footage shot by a lone French terrorist,
Mohammed Merah, a 23-year old French national of Algerian origin, who is seen
getting on his motorbike, where the camera follows his actions as he meets
another biker, an off-duty soldier, where they pull into an empty parking lot,
supposedly to shoot the breeze, but Merah pulls a gun on him, ordering him to
the ground, and when he refuses, shoots him dead on the spot, all captured on
his own first person video. Over the
course of ten days, Merah killed three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children
near his home in Toulouse before being shot in a dramatic police capture. This film makes clear that ISIS is not really
perceived as a radical Islamist organization, as they operate closer to the criminal
practices of the mafia, where all they really want is money and power,
resorting to extortion methods, taking a cut out of every profession in the
areas under their control that generate income.
In this way, they’re constantly getting a piece of the action. It’s also interesting that Assad never
attacked ISIS, but left them alone, even releasing many of the jihadist
political prisoners from his jails, causing confusion in the West, as they were
afraid weapons might end up in the wrong hands, where Assad’s plan all along
was to eliminate any opposition force, where the choice for Syrians eventually
became following Assad or ISIS. The
Russian military intervention siding with Assad only made that clearer, as their
bombing targets were almost exclusively rebel strongholds, rarely bothering
with ISIS at all, and then only to protect Assad assets, such as oil fields,
which generate an ongoing source of revenue.
If and when the bombing ends, 470,000 people have been killed so far,
and major Syrian towns have emptied after being reduced to rubble. One has to wonder, after all is said and
done, just what constitutes victory and what will history call a moral
disgrace?
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