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How to Start a Battalion in Syria (in Five Easy Lessons)

(London Review of Books) Ghaith Abdul-Ahad - For decades, the dictatorship in Syria worked to stamp the people into submission, to be subservient to the ruler. In Syria, you spent your life trying to avoid being humiliated - let alone detained and tortured or disappeared - by those in authority while somehow also sucking up to them, bribing them, begging them to give you what you needed: a telephone line, a passport, a university place for your son. So when these systems of control collapsed, something exploded inside people, a sense of individualism long suppressed. Why would I succumb to your authority as a commander when I can be my own commander and fight my own insurgency? Many of the battalions dotted across the Syrian countryside consist only of a man with a connection to a financier, along with a few of his cousins and clansmen.
2013-02-22 00:00:00
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