CHARLES GLASS[email]
Recently in Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s largest city, Glass is author of the book on Syria, “Tribes With Flags.” He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent and recently wrote the piece “Aleppo: How Syria Is Being Destroyed,” which states: “I wanted to visit the souks in the morning, but my friend told me that continued fighting there made it impossible. Who burned the souks a few weeks earlier? ‘That was the Free Syrian Army,’ my friend said. ‘We are caught between two bad powers. As you know, I don’t like the dictatorship. But these people are showing themselves as worse.’ …
“Aleppo is under siege. Transporting heating oil for people to survive the winter has become a dangerous task. The price of mazout, the cheap fuel that heats most Aleppo homes, is now double what it is in Damascus, when people can find it. In Aleppo’s center, where the Syrian army maintains control with fortified positions, roadblocks, and regular patrols, the only commodity that seems to arrive without hindrance is food. Plentiful produce from local farms is on display on the open sidewalks that have replaced the burned-out fruit and vegetable stalls in the old souks.
“The government’s brutal suppression of the rebels, especially the aerial bombardment of densely populated urban areas, has pushed some regime supporters into the arms of the opposition. One young woman, who told me in April that she loved Bashar al-Assad, said that she wept when she saw his air force bombing Aleppo. A physician, whose anti-regime views were familiar to me, said, ‘The majority of the Syrian people don’t want Bashar al-Assad because of what happened in the last ten years. We want change, but not like this.’ This is a topsy-turvy war in which loyalties and animosities can no longer be predicted.”
Glass recently appeared on Democracy Now! His past pieces on Syria include “Syria’s Many New Friends are a Self-Interested Bunch.”
See from FAIR: “This Time, Trust Anonymous WMD Claims — They’ve Got ‘Specific Intelligence’” about recent media and government claims about the Syrian government preparing to use chemical weapons.
