From the very start of the popular uprising in Syria, Assad and his regime described the unarmed protesters as “terrorists.” In order to ensure that reality fell in line with its propaganda, the regime began arresting tens of thousands of activists calling for democracy and who resisted sectarianism. At the same time, it released from prison Jihadists, who in turn began establishing armed groups that adhered to Salafi and Jihadist ideologies, which eventually became IS.The rise of radical groups in Syria benefited the regime not only by making its propaganda a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also by increasing support for it among religious minorities, the bourgeois and liberals. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Assad regime consistently refrained from directly fighting IS. The jihadist organization, for its part, preferred to focus on the establishment of an Islamic state and fighting against more moderate rebels and enforcing Sharia on the population under its rule.“From the time when IS took full control over Raqqa in March [2014], there was only one aerial bombing – 40 days after they arrived,” Akram recalls. “Then there was complete calm.”In June 2014, with the help of local Sunni tribes and organizations related to the Iraqi Ba’ath party, IS forces took control of large parts of Iraq, including the Sunni cities of Mosul and Tikrit. The IS advance has since been halted as a result of a counter attacks by Shi’ite militias, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iraqi Army and the American Air Force.“Everything changed dramatically [in Raqqa] after IS’s huge advances in Iraq and its capture of Mosul,” Akram explains. “Since then we have witnessed at least 10 air raids a week.”
via
Trapped between Assad and ‘IS’: Inside the capital of the ‘Islamic State’
+972 Magazine.
As some guy stated out there commenting this link on Facebook:
“Over the past few decades, Saudi Arabia has founded and funded Wahhabi mosques in many cities in many, if not most, countries. Those Wahhabi mosques preach division and discord between Muslims, and condemn all other interpretations and traditions of Islam as heretical, often even calling for non-Wahhabi Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, to be killed.
Those Wahhabi mosques and preachers are the sources of many, if not most, of the foreign fighters who’ve joined ISIS, and their same sources of funding are behind ISIS, itself.
Authentic Islamic sources and teachings make it clear that Wahhabi/takfiri/khawarij doctrine is not only un-Islamic, but anti-Islam.
The only reason it has been able to flourish is because the British helped the Wahhabi-backed Al-Saud family seize Arabia after WW1, as a way of controlling the oil that was found there, and the Americans compounded that error in the post-WW2 era, in the name of “stability”.
As well as acting against ISIS, the Saudis’ global network of Wahhabi mosques and preachers should be either dismantled, or subjected to rigorous scrutiny and controls, to end their incitement against both non-Wahhabi Muslims and non-Muslims”
And I agree… if we want to stop Muslim extremism (and not only IS, but all kinds) we have to stop those who teach it and recover the memory of people like Ibn Rushd, Rumi, Ibn Arabi and other wise men from the Sufi tradition that represented the splendor of Islam, and erase the heritage of Ibn Wahab, who represents its shameful moral decline.
Al-Must'arib (the vocational Mossarab) 