{"id":1589,"date":"2015-12-18T13:41:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T13:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/?p=1589"},"modified":"2015-12-18T13:41:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T13:41:00","slug":"another-activist-murdered-least-owe-raqqa-slaughtered-silently-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/?p=1589","title":{"rendered":"As another activist is murdered, the least we owe Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently is our attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyle Orton –\u00a0 independent.co.uk<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

From the outset of the Syrian uprising, the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Isis\u00a0have been united on their strategic goal: eliminate the moderate opposition and make Syria a binary choice between themselves. This is why on the battlefield Assad and Isis\u00a0largely leave one-another alone<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and the Assad regime’s propaganda\u2014that the whole rebellion is composed of Islamist terrorists\u2014reinforces Isis’s propaganda claim that it is the only effective protection for Sunnis against the regime. Both IS and the Assad regime are led by military and intelligence officers trained in the KGB and both rely on propaganda as a means of internal control, not only of controlling their international image, which is why both so virulently repress independent media that contradicts their officially sanctioned version. Last night, IS again struck down a member of an activist group that has tried to bring the truth about life under its rule to the outside world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Syrian war has suffered debilitating inequality of coverage. The Assad regime effectively banned journalists in the first year of the uprising and after the regime murdered\u00a0<\/span>The Sunday Times<\/em>‘s Marie Colvin and French photo-journalist Remi Ochlik in February 2012, the ban proved very effective. Meanwhile, as the regime retreated from areas of the north, Isis’s agents\u2014some of them released by the regime in the early weeks of the uprising in an attempt to radicalize the insurgency\u2014began a spree of kidnapping that further ensured independent coverage of Syria diminished. With the rebellion the focus of Assad’s and increasingly Isis’s wrath, it was unable to counter the Assad-Isis\u00a0media coverage that all-but wrote the moderate opposition out of the Syrian war altogether.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Isis\u00a0consolidated its caliphate\u2014aided by the lack of attention from the regime’s fighter jets\u2014it cast a narrative wherein it\u00a0was constructing utopia. The directors of this state-building project were former members of the Saddam regime, a military-intelligence apparatus trained by the KGB\u2014and it shows. Whether or not these leaders believe it\u2014and the evidence is they do\u2014the apocalyptic pitch “always works,” as one Isis\u00a0member put it, drawing in international volunteers who, unencumbered with local social ties, are some of Isis’s most ruthless enforcers. Noticeably on the Soviet model is the use by Isis\u00a0of propaganda as a form of social control\u2014though appropriately updated for the 21st century. Among other things, large screens broadcast Isis’s message and Isis\u00a0camera crews are so pervasive it distorts the events they purport to document. Reality TV-style dictatorship might be new for Syrians, but respecting the public limits of behaviour imposed by propaganda certainly is not.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Isis\u00a0banned the internet in private homes in Raqqa, forcing people into cafes where they can be monitored. Why Isis\u00a0waited this long is unclear, but the extreme penalties and the high price of internet means Isis’s policy is more or less respected. The news about this was brought to the outside world by an activist group, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), which in April 2014 starting disseminating information and media from inside the caliphate, giving a glimpse at the cold reality Isis\u00a0has taken so much trouble to obscure. Where Isis\u00a0presented a functioning, just government, RBSS showed the scarcity and brutality. Not a few foreign fighters, especially from Europe, have gone to wage “five-star jihad” in Syria only to be disillusioned\u2014so much so that Isis\u00a0is reportedly having to kill them to stop them leaving. RBSS’s work, therefore, offers the chance of preventing people inclined toward Isis’s ideology actually going to Syria.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Isis\u00a0has reacted ferociously to RBSS. Yesterday an RBSS journalist, Ahmad Mohamed al-Mousa, was murdered by gunmen in Idlib. Suspicion will rightly fall on Isis. On July 5, Isis put out a video showing the grisly murders of Bashir Abduladhim as-Salem and Faisal Hussain al-Habib, 20 and 21, two RBSS journalists who had worked to document IS’s crimes inside Syria. Six weeks later another video showed the murder of the father of an RBSS activist. Isis\u00a0showed the long arm of the caliphate when it murdered RBSS reporters Fares Hammadi and Ibrahim Abd al-Qader in southern Turkey on October 30, beheading them in their hotel room and disseminating photographs online.<\/strong><\/p>\n

RBSS’s extraordinary bravery in continuing, even after such a terrible price has been paid in the lives of its members, to expose Isis\u00a0was recognized with an International Press Freedom Award recently, and this is the least RBSS deserves. The risks run to bring the truth about Isis\u00a0to the outside world can help to keep away foreign fighters, who have proven some of the caliphate’s most merciless enforcers. RBSS’s bravery might also help mobilize a Western World that, even after Paris and San Bernardino, still in many ways considers Isis\u00a0an “over there” problem, to provide the necessary force to end Syria’s war and bring the caliphate down\u2014goals that can only be achieved once the Assad regime is gone. <\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyle Orton –  independent.co.uk From the outset of the Syrian uprising, the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Isis have been united on their strategic goal: eliminate the moderate opposition and<\/p>\n

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