http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-they-snipe-at-us-then-run-and-hide-in-sewers-8063515.html










Mortars crashed into the middle-class streets around us and a T-72
tank baked in the heat under a road viaduct, but Bashar al-Assad's most
senior operational commander in Aleppo – a 53-year-old Major-General
with 33 years in the military and two bullet wounds from last month's
battles in Damascus – claims he can "clean" the whole province of Aleppo
from "terrorists" in 20 days. Now that is quite a boast, especially in
the Saif el-Dowla suburb of the city, where sniper fire snapped down
leafy streets. For the battle of Aleppo is far from over.


But this was a strange sensation, to sit in a private house,
commandeered by the Syrian army – 19th-century prints still on the
walls, the carpet immaculate – and talk to the Generals accused by
Western leaders of being war criminals. I was, so to speak, in "the lair
of the enemy", but the immensely tall, balding General – his officers
adding their own impressions whenever they were asked – had much to say
about the war they are fighting and the contempt with which they regard
their enemies. They were "mice", the General said – he would not give
his name. "They snipe at us and then they run and hide and in the
sewers. Foreigners, Turks, Chechens, Afghans, Libyans, Sudanese." And
Syrians, I said. "Yes, Syrians too, but smugglers and criminals," he
said.I asked about the rebels' weapons and the clutch of
conscripts staggered into the room under the weight of rockets, rifles,
ammunition and explosives. "Take this," the General said, grinning as he
handed me a two-way radio, a Hongda-made HD668 taken two days ago off a
dead Turkish fighter in Saif al-Dowla a few hundred metres from where
we were sitting. "Mohamed, do you hear me?" the radio demanded. "Abul
Hassan, did you hear?" The Syrian officers roared with laughter at the
disembodied voice of their enemy, perhaps in the same block of
buildings. We took this ID from the "terrorist", the General said.
"Citizen of the Turkish Republic" was printed on the card, above a photo
of a man with a thin moustache. Born – Bingol (Turkey) 1 July 1974.
Name: Remziye Idris Metin Ekince. Religion: Islam.So, suddenly,
we had a name for one of the mysterious "foreigners" who – at least in
popular Baathist imagination – staff the "terrorist" army the Syrian
military is fighting. And a lot of other names with far larger
significance. As I prowled around the weapons – all captured within the
past week, according to the Syrian officers – I found sticks of Swedish
explosives in plastic covers, dated February 1999 and manufactured by
Hammargrens, whose office address was printed as 434-24 Kingsbacka in
Sweden; the words "made in USA" was also marked on each stick.There
was: a Belgian rifle, an FN from the town of Herstal, manufacturer's
code 1473224; a set of hand grenades of uncertain provenance numbered HG
85, SM8-03 1; a Russian sniper scope; a 9mm Spanish-made pistol – model
28 1A – manufactured by a Star Echeverria SA Eibar Espana; an ancient
automatic rifle; a Soviet sub-machine-gun of 1948 vintage; a mass of
Russian rocket-propelled grenades and launchers; and box after box of
medical supplies."Every unit of the terrorists has a field
ambulance," an intelligence officer said. "They steal medicines from our
pharmacies but bring other packets with them." True, it seems. There
were painkillers from Lebanon, bandages from Pakistan, much of the stuff
was from Turkey. Interesting to know who the Spanish, Swedish and
Belgian manufacturers originally sold their guns and explosives to. The
haul went on and on, a newly out-of-date Visa card under the name of
Ahed Akrama, a Syrian ID card in the name of Widad Othman – "kidnapped
by the terrorists," another officer muttered – and thousands of rounds
of ammunition. The General agreed that weapons may have been taken from
dead Syrian troops or soldiers who had been captured. Army defectors
existed, he said, but they were "drop-outs, soldiers who had failed
their basic tests who were motivated only by money". This is what they
say under interrogation, he said.It wasn't difficult to work out
just how the fighting in Aleppo is developing. Walking the streets for
more than an hour with a Syrian army patrol, individual snipers would
shoot from houses and then disappear before government soldiers arrived.
The army had shot dead one man with a sniper's rifle who fired from the
minaret of the El-Houda mosque. The Salaheddine district had been
"liberated", the Syrian officer said, and the Saif el-Dowla district was
only two blocks from a similar "liberation".At least a dozen
civilians emerged from their homes, retirees in their 70s, shopkeepers
and local businessmen with their families and, unaware that a foreign
journalist was watching, put their arms round Syrian troops. One told me
he had stayed in his home as "foreign" fighters used his courtyard to
fire on government soldiers. "I speak Turkish and most were speaking
Turkish but some of the men had long beards and short trousers like the
Saudis wear, and had strange Arab accents."So many Aleppo
citizens talked to me, out of earshot of soldiers, about armed
"foreigners" in their streets along with Syrians "from the countryside"
that the presence of considerable numbers of non-Syrian gunmen appeared
to be true. While much of the city continues its life under occasional
mortar fire, tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting
between the Free Syrian Army and what the government always calls the
"Syrian Arab Army" are now housed in vacant dormitories on the Aleppo
University campus. And President Assad's enemies are never far away.Returning
to the city centre yesterday afternoon, I discovered five Syrian
soldiers – exhausted, with sharp, tense eyes – walking back to their
barracks with a civilian called Badriedin. He had alerted the soldiers
when he saw "10 terrorists" in Al-Hattaf street and the government
troops had killed several of them – their bodies taken away on motor
scooters, Badriedin said – and the rest escaped. The soldiers were high
on their story, how they had been outnumbered but fought off their
enemies. Even the operational commander of all Aleppo told me that a
major battle was beginning in an area containing a mosque and a
Christian school where his men had surrounded a large number of
"terrorists". "The Syrian army doesn't kill civilians – we came here to
protect them, at their request," he said. "We tried to get civilians out
of the area where we have to fight, with loudspeakers we give lots of
warnings."I prefer the words emblazoned on the T-shirt of young
man who said he was trying to reach his apartment in the snipers' zone
to see if it had survived. They read: "You see things and you say 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were, and I say 'Why not?' – George
Bernard Shaw." Not a bad motto for Aleppo these days.