A shaved version of this review appeared in the Guardian.

In the 1980s an artist friend of mine made a poster for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, a militia later allied with the Taliban. The poster depicted a fully-bearded Afghan mujahid clutching Quran and Kalashnikov and standing atop a slaughtered Russian bear. It was sent as a postcard to British journalists and politicians, without controversy.

In the same period I remember reading stories in the mainstream press about the Mujahideen’s poetic love of flowers and song. After the Russian rout, these Mujahideen committed excesses so extreme that it took Taliban puritanism to re-establish order. Then the Taliban committed their own excesses, of a different sort, and after 9/11 the West waged war on them for metonymic reasons. Nobody now celebrates the gentle, flowery qualities of these men who have burnt schools and lynched television sets.

“Poetry of the Taliban”, therefore, is a brave and very useful project. It offers the reader a perspective on the conflict through the Other’s eyes. It offers the human element, and as such is worth more than a library-full of cold analysis.

There are poems of love, battle, transience, grief, enthusiasm, material deprivation and mystical astonishment. The voices are diverse and often surprising. Faisal Devji’s preface points out that the poetry displayed here is not the official product of the Cultural Committee of the Islamic Emirate, not centrally-organised propaganda, but the efforts of men (and a woman) who fight for a variety of reasons, tribal, ethnic or nationalist, and particularly out of gut resistance to foreign occupiers, wherever they come from.

At its simplest or crudest the poetry describes a pastoral idyll and an innocent people spoiled by the dread hand of foreign-brought war and Western technology (the mobile phone, for instance, suffers harsh criticism). Some of it is propagandistic, most isn’t – in truth it’s hard to draw a line, as poetry inevitably reflects its authors’ perceptions. The emotions are true in the poets’ hearts, and in those of their original audiences, even if they appear strange to Western minds.

But a great deal of this Taliban poetry will be comprehensible to Western readers who are unable to understand Taliban ideology. The major themes are recognisable, even universal, and the dominant form is the ghazal, or love lyric, which links the Pushto language to the classical civilisations of Persia and India and to the mystical tradition of ambiguous imagery in which wine and the face of a beautiful woman may or may not symbolise divine ecstasy and God.

The poems describe a land of mountains and pines, each stone a ruby, each bush a medicine, and of laughing blossoms, dancing tomorrows, of twilight arriving with its lap full of red flowers (the poem called “Sunset” reads more like a product of a Zen monastery than of a Deobandi madrasa).

What is so interesting is that the Taliban’s official face and past practice has been so fiercely anti-Sufi, anti-historical, and seemingly anti-culture. This book provides an entirely different outlook. Indeed, in their rich memory of 19^th Century British invasions, of Afghan folklore and Islamic heroism, the Taliban poets seem more awake to history than we are.

As well as raillery and satire against the foreign enemy and its local servants, there is self-criticism aplenty. “Humanity has been forgotten by us,” writes one poet, “And I don’t know when it will come back.”

The book’s complex interplay of modernity and tradition, puritanism and sensuality, parochialism and globalism, is fascinating; and many of the poems are fascinating in their own right, as works of art.

A mangled version of this review appeared in the Independent.

What is happening in the Middle East? Tariq Ramadan, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals, calls the contemporary events ‘uprisings’, more concrete and permanent in their effect than ‘revolts’ but still short of thoroughgoing ‘revolutions’. So far, Tunisia is the only clear democratising success, and even there it remains unclear if the new dispensation will be fundamentally more just economically than the last.

Half of this slim volume is spent examining whether the uprisings were staged or spontaneous. Ramadan counsels against both the naive view that outside powers are passive observers of events, and the contrary belief that Arab revolutionaries have been mere pawns or useful idiots in the hands of cunning foreign players.

Certainly the US and its allies helped to guide events by collaborating with the military hierarchies which removed presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, and by full-scale intervention in Libya – this for a variety of obvious reasons. An agreement signed by Libya’s NTC in March last year, for instance, guaranteed France 35% of future oil exports.

There’s been Gulf and Western hypocrisy over Bahrain, home to Formula One and the US Fifth Fleet, and al-Jazeera’s coverage has been tailored to reflect its Qatari host’s strategic concerns.

Then, less convincingly, the social media conspiracy: trainees from 37 countries learned non-violent cyberactivism in Serbia. Google, Twitter and Yahoo offered training in the US. Google provided satellite access codes to Egyptian activists so they could evade censorship, but not to their Syrian counterparts.

Ramadan also remarks on Syria’s abandonment by the ‘international community’. “It  would have been possible to isolate the country in an effective way with a military option,” he writes in one of the more breathless journalistic pieces which make up the last third of the book. His belief that there could be such a thing as disinterested intervention is characteristically idealistic.

Ramadan pays too much attention to the foreign conspiracy red herring, in part because the “conspiratorial paranoia of those who have lost their faith in the ability of human beings to assert themselves as the subjects of their own history” necessitates it, but also because, like the media he criticises, he focuses too much on cyberactivists and not at all on organised labour, whose strike actions in Tunisia and Egypt were finally more effective than mass demonstrations, or on the rights advocates in Syria and Yemen who kept anti-regime struggles alive.

Ramadan comes into his own not as a political writer but as a historian and provoker of ideas. He notes how, in their Western representation, Muslim Arabs have shifted during the uprisings from the benighted, terrorist ‘other’ to the “alterego of the Western Universal.” He is worried by the Arab internalisation of this false universalism, and of the fruitless, inaccurate and Orientalist binary opposition of Islamism and secularism.

Both schools of thought are in crisis. Secularists lack mass support; indeed ‘secularism’, associated with colonialism and post-colonial oppression, has become a dirty word in Arabic. Islamism has support but no coherent programme. Its proponents are divided by contentious issues from the rights of women and minorities to attitudes to sharia and statehood. The Iranian theocratic model, once an inspiration, is now tarnished. In opposition the Islamist current concentrated on the symbols of an Islamic society – hijabs and the like. Political Islam may be as diverse as political Judaism or Christianity, but is unified by its failure to even claim to offer answers to pressing economic, social and environmental crises.

In recognition of their weaknesses, both parties to the argument now prefer the term ‘civil state’ over ‘Islamic’ or ‘secular’ state labels.

Ramadan blames the ideological void on “the deadening weight of dictatorship” which impoverished “the life of ideas in society.” Specifically, “critical, creative economic thinking appears to have deserted the Arab political debate”. Rejecting the superficiality of ‘Islamic finance’, he calls for a fuller critique of capitalism’s unethical and undemocratic content.

More than that: He wants the Arab Muslims to “draw upon their collective cultural and symbolic capital to produce something new, something original, something distinct.” He calls for social justice based on the Quranic verse “We have conferred dignity on human beings,” and for an all-encompassing spiritual, cultural and “intellectual jihad.”

He calls for revolution, in other words.

picture by Paul Klee

I haven’t been writing about Syria at my previous pace. The time is not right.

This is a time for Syrian internet activists, those still surviving, to send us their videos. It’s a time for gathering evidence – although no more evidence is needed.

It’s a time for reporters to write, for committed foreign journalists to smuggle themselves inside and tell the tale. (You could call the murdered journalists martyrs, because they chose to go to a place where they knew they might die, and they did so for the sake of the truth.)

People who have specific human stories to tell should tell them. I hear the occasional story, and I might relay some of them; but I am not there. I am observing from Scotland.

This time is the beginning of a long process of creative mulling for those who will eventually produce novels and films concerned with the tragedy.

Most of all it’s a time in which people scream and suffer and die, a time to wait for the next explosion, or the next kick at the door, or for the return of the rapists, or for the next shriek of pain and humiliation from the neighbouring cell. It’s a time for burying children at night, hastily, in silence. And the suffering continues with glacial inevitability. Fate doesn’t seem to plan an end to it, not yet.

In such a context, I wonder what the use of words is. It’s not a cerebral questioning – I know words have as much or as little use today as yesterday or tomorrow; an unquantifiable amount – but a physical doubt. Words appear as pretty imposters. Today guns speak. Mortars, rockets, Scud missiles, helicopter gunships, tanks, the foul mouths of the torturers, the opened mouths in their victims’ chests – all these speak. To be specific about it, they don’t speak, they act. Trucks and cars. Sticks and whips. The wires which deliver electric shocks. And the men of the armed resistance also act. While the world outside watches and sometimes speaks froth.

The words used by the demonstrators are not drowned out. This is because their words have become deeds. Each sound they make is a defiance – defying not only the regime but the rules of reality as previously established. Each sound they make is amplified a thousand times by their astounding, ridiculous courage. To dare to chant while the killers surround you is to have made a spiritual commitment, or perhaps it is to have gone mad. (Bertolt Brecht says: “He who fights can lose, but he who does not fight has already lost.”)

But the written word, and in English – what use is it? To point out that the regime is barbaric, criminal and stupid? Anybody who doesn’t know this by now, after over a year of slaughter, will never know it. To change the minds of faux-leftists whose compassion ends at the borders of occupied Palestine? Such minds will not be changed. To predict the future? I see no future for Syria. I don’t mean the future is doomed, I mean my predictive powers have frozen entirely, except for the obvious, that there will be blood and chaos so long as this criminal gang remains at large. To discuss whether or not things which have happened inevitably, like the emergence of the Free Syrian Army, are good or bad things? Such a discussion would be an exercise in abstract idealism, and this is not the time for that. People are being murdered, right now, again and again and again.

the Syrian dictator accompanied by the Sunni mufti

This was published in the excellent Ceasefire magazine.

Ba‘athism began as a conscious attempt to supercede the sectarian and regional divisions which plague the Arab world. That’s why many of its early ideologues were Christians or members of other minority groups. The Ba‘athist slogan umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida – One Arab Nation Bearing an Eternal Message – employing the word for ‘nation’ which previously designated the international Muslim community, and the word for ‘message’ previously associated with the Prophet Muhammad’s divine message – suggests that this variety of Arabism actually intended to supercede religion itself, or to become a new religion.

In Iraq it all went wrong very quickly. Saddamist Ba‘athism in effect designated ethnic Arabs of the Sunni sect as true Arabs, the Shia majority as quasi-Persian infiltrators, and the Kurds as an enemy nation. Saddam even wrote a characteristic pamphlet called ‘Three Things God Should Not Have Invented – Persians, Jews and Flies’, and so demonstrated the slip from nationalism to fascism.

Syria was somewhat different, somewhat more sophisticated. Despite the fact that the president and his top spies and generals were Alawis from the Lattakkia region, only Sunni Islam and Christianity were taught in the education system (to the chagrin of traditional Alawi shaikhs). When the president prayed in public he prayed in the manner of the majority, Sunni-style. In the last couple of decades the regime sought to broaden its base by coopting Sunni businessmen as well as soldiers from the minority groups. And the majority’s rituals and religious festivals were never banned as they were in Iraq.

Public discussion of sect and sectarianism was taboo. To an extent this was a good thing. When I lived in Damascus I heard about a Christian (the friend of a friend) who had a fist fight with a Jew. The fight was over the affections of a woman, and had nothing to do with religion or sect, but the Christian was nevertheless swooped upon by plain-clothes mukhabarat on suspicion of provoking sectarian dissension. This was unfair, but also somehow impressive. (Of course, if you were minster of defense – and your name was Mustafa Tlass – you could write volumes of ridiculous text on Jewish ‘blood sacrifice’ and no mukhabarat would swoop down on you).

The taboo extended so far that the word ‘church’ in an English-language film would be translated on state TV as ‘place of worship’. The regime apparently assumed that the best way to deal with the social cleavage was to ignore it, and to infantalise the people so that they would be forced to ignore it too. But ignoring an illness is never a good idea, and the regime’s policy – if it really was intended to overcome sectarianism – failed miserably. An honest public discussion would have necessarily aired a variety of perspectives, and would have allowed more Sunnis to understand why Alawis and Christians sometimes feel ill at ease with their neighbours. Post-war Germany underwent an honest examination of its anti-Semitism, and is a much better place for it (the examination was sometimes derailed by Zionism, as Gunter Grass notes, but that’s another story). Post-apartheid South Africa avoided collapsing into chaos by its truth and reconciliation process, which not only allowed blacks to express their injuries, resentments and fears, but also whites. The absence of public discussion in Syria, on the other hand, increased the sectarian vitriol of private discussions. Evil grows best in the dark.

Symptoms of this stultifying taboo afflict several pro-revolution Syrians today. At a recent event in London I heard Ali Ferzat describe Syria as a beautiful and unified mosaic of peoples. He stated very firmly that Syrians had never in their history suffered from sectarian hatred or violence.

(Ali Ferzat doesn’t claim to be a political analyst, so I don’t hold his romanticism against him. He claims to be a cartoonist, and indeed he’s perhaps the best, or most important, cartoonist in the world, one who tackles universal as well as local themes. He’s also a man whose hands were broken by the regime.)

There is certainly some truth to the mosaic idea. A variety of ethnicities and religions have coexisted in Greater Syria for thousands of years, and peaceful interaction has been the rule. Yet there have been bloody exceptions. As Ottomanism degenerated and European powers moved in to sponsor favoured communities in the 19^th Century, relations often broke down. Druze and Christians fought each other. In 1860 the Christian quarter of Damascus was destroyed by fire. And then there’s the case of the Alawis. Except in Antakya, now part of Turkey, Alawis didn’t share Syrian cities with Sunnis until the French arrived in the 1920s. Since Ibn Taymiyya, under Mamluks and Ottomans, Alawis were deprived of all legal and civil rights as soon as they set foot outside their own villages. Most young Alawis have no theological gripe with Sunnism, but they’ve heard stories of insult and humiliation from their grandfathers.

All this has to be recognised and understood in order to understand the divide-and-rule strategy of British and French imperialism in the north eastern Arab world. After Sykes-Picot drew the artificial borders, minority groups were propelled to power in each new country. In Iraq Sunni Arabs inherited. In Jordan the Meccan Hashemite family ruled over local Beduin (and later Palestinian refugees). Palestine was controlled by Zionist Jews, an immigrant minority which (briefly) became a majority when most of the natives were driven out. In Lebanon Maronite Christians held prime position over the panoply of sects.

In Syria, the French first tried to further split the country according to region and sect. This plan failed (to the credit of the Syrian people), but the French were successful in building an army of minorities. The troupes speciales were recruited disproportionately from hitherto oppressed rural minority groups. This was the basis of the national army which first took over the country (with CIA help) in 1946, and which has ruled for most of the time since.

The ugly history has to be understood now most urgently because the regime has instrumentalised sect so savagely since the uprising began. It has done so through its propaganda and, more dangerously, by arming Alawi thugs and sending them to kill and rape in Sunni neighbourhoods. The ruling gang’s objective is to encourage Sunni hatred of Alawis so as to scare Alawis into loyalty to their ‘Alawi’ president. It doesn’t need to be said that the Alawi community as a whole is, or will be, the prime victim of this policy.

Rather than eternally agitating for a Western military intervention that will probably never come, the Syrian National Council would do better to address Alawis and Christians specifically and repeatedly, to name the crimes committed against them in the past, and to welcome the migration of Alawis and others to the urban centres in the Ba‘athist years as a redress of historical wrongs. And anti-Sunni prejudice should also be addressed. Those Syrians who believe that a chant of ‘Allahu akbar’ is inevitably a call for Sunni supremacy, for instance, should be encouraged to confront their assumptions.

Saudi-backed Salafists are already talking about sect. Important sections of Sunni society in Lebanon and Iraq understand the Syrian tragedy in sectarian terms. Western journalists very often overemphasise the salience of sect. Why then do pro-revolution leftists, liberals and secularists tend to ignore the issue, and to leave the field to more retrograde voices? People are being killed. There isn’t any more time to waste on taboos.

I’m very proud of the arts section. The first issues include a story by the accomplished British-Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein, poetry and prose from upcoming Iraqi writers (one of whom is the very highly-rated Hassan Blasim), a selection of the Arabic poetry (Qabbani and others) which accompanied the Arab uprisings, essays on the Palestine Literature Festival and the Erbil Literature Festival (in Iraqi Kurdistan), a great story of cross-cultural love (and disappointment) by young British writer Suhel Ahmed, poetry from the great Mimi Khalvati, an essay on Muslim jazz, and much more.

Each issue is themed. The first, for instance, focuses on the contemporary Arab uprisings. My contribution is an essay which came out of a trip to Egypt last spring, and conversations with Muslim Brothers, Tahrir Square revolutionaries, journalists and shop keepers. Prominent Arabic journalist and author of the noted “Who needs an Islamic State?” Abdelwahhab El-Affendi writes on Islamism. Novelists Jamal Mahjoub and Fadia Faqir write respectively about Sudan and women. Pulse’s Muhammad Idrees Ahmad and Jasmin Ramsey write about Wikileaks and the Green Movement in Iran.

Issue Two is called The idea of Islam, and includes something controversial by Michael Muhammad Knight, author of “The Taqwacores”, a brilliant essay by Soha Al-Jurf on her unorthodox blend of Islam and Buddhism, commentary on misogyny by journalist Samia Rahman, and a study by Carool Kersten of ‘heresy’ in Muslim history. Issue Three is called Fear and Loathing. Issue Four will be a Pakistan special, and should be particularly rich.

Please subscribe. And please encourage your local library, college, even mosque or church, to subscribe. Details on the website. There’s so much rubbish out there written on Islam and the Muslim world, by unreflective Islamists and Islamophobes alike. Why not support a more sophisticated voice?

I mention novelist Manhal al-Sarraj’s immediate response to the repression in Syria, ‘Syrian Scenarios’, which can be read here.

Here’s me doing a creative writing class at the festival. Part one. And part two. It’s probably very boring to watch on video except perhaps for the less formal question and answer at the end.

This review appeared in the Guardian.

The Mujaheds, if somewhat more privileged than their neighbours, are a typically itinerant Palestinian family who have learnt to attach sentimental value “only to the small things, the ones that could be thrown into suitcases and scurried away with.” Originally from Jaffa, now returned from Tunis, Beirut and Scandinavia, the novel’s opening finds them living in Gaza in the early years of the second intifada.

One of the many strengths of Selma Dabbagh’s writing is its unerringly precise sense of place. Gaza, imagined from inside with the mental aid of satellite images, is “like dried-out coral, ridged, chambered and sandy.” It contrasts with Israel, “the other side, that side, the place they came from, that had been theirs,” which, studded by solar panels, swimming pools and irrigated fields, looks from above like “an elaborate blanket of modernist design.”

Life in the Mujahed apartment, between the noise of nearby families and the louder noise of warplanes and helicopters, may be like “camping under a flyover”, but it’s better than living in tents as the neighbours – refugees from house demolitions – are forced to do.

The details of dispossession and siege are relentlessly accumulated: the rotting flowers and fruit blocked off from the market by the ‘closure’, the targetted killings, incursions and arbitrary arrests, as well as the increasingly violent internal competition between the religious parties and the corrupt Palestinian Authority whose luminaries are “yearning for cheap suits and desks with name plaques.”

In such an environment, hope is “the thing that could devastate them all.” Yet each family member aims, in some way or other, to escape their predicament, to get ‘out of it’. The mother, to save her skin, has eluded an earlier political identity (a secret which is teased out as the novel progresses). Her son Sabri escapes nostalgia for his baby son and his Christian, Jerusalemite, activist wife, and for his own legs – all destroyed by an Israeli bomb – by recording and analysing the oppression around him. He hopes (that dangerous word) that his efforts will one day sway the world towards recognition, and justice.

His younger brother Rashid’s way ‘out of it’ is via the winged leaves of a marijuana plant called Gloria, and then by travel. His visa documents for London, and reunion with his girlfriend Lisa, are “certificates of release”. London is the setting for a fine comedy of cultural difference: the home of Lisa’s parents, to whom Rashid is shown off  “like a gaudy piece of jewellery”, is a realm of small portions, meagre eye-contact and trapped air.

Rashid’s sister Iman, meanwhile, is briefly tempted by the escapist dream of dramatic, putting-an-end-to-it-all action. “We have a role for you,” a hyper-religious co-worker ominously intones. Iman is not the type to blow herself up – not until one of her students is killed by Israeli bombing: “Deaths of children changed everything. Resistance movements started with dead children.”

But the attempt to recruit her is observed by Ziyyad, an orphaned fighter and an old family friend. He arranges to have Iman safely packed off to join her father in his bolt hole in the Gulf, a consumerist nightmare of malls and maltreated migrant workers. Here attempts are made to straighten Iman’s unruly curls and to depilate her skin. Suzy, Iman’s father’s girlfriend, instructs her to ‘develop herself as a woman.’ This is precisely what Iman does when she too arrives in London, although not in the way her father would have chosen. The benign influence of Ahdaf Soueif whispers through this section.

The final drama – back in Gaza now – hinges on the mysterious (and Shakespearean) pairing of Rashid and the fighter Ziyyad, his lookalike.

This is a very successful debut novel from a British Palestinian writer who has already notched up successes with her short stories. Like a good short story, “Out Of It” manages to fit a great deal in without feeling crowded: Gaza’s collaborators, heroes and dope dealers, and London’s restaurants, bedsits, demonstrations and police cells. Dabbagh does group scenes best of all, finely observing and analysing power relationships. When, for example, the chairwoman leaves a Women’s Committee meeting which has stretched on through an entire night of bombing, “the room’s centrifugal force was released and a panic spread through the women” who ask each other for the first time where the bombs have fallen. In the same way Dabbagh masterfully evokes the complex web of family relationships, a tangle of love, jealousy, resentment, intimacy and distance.

One negative point is the overuse of Arabic phrases followed by translation. This technique may be helpful for the language student but risks alienating the general reader and exoticising material which Dabbagh has so carefully depicted from within as (horrifically) ‘ordinary.’

Otherwise, the novel is full of exact, unexpected images. A man falls asleep – “a boot nudging him into a trench backwards.” An old English house is like a cross-dresser, “sloppy thatch flopped like a lady’s hat and the climbing roses were like rouge.” The writing is both literary and accessible, fast-paced, passionate, exuberant and heart-lurching. We’ll be hearing much more from Selma Dabbagh.

It’s interesting to note that the Golan was occupied by Zionists in 1967, before most of the demonstrators were born, and illegally annexed in 1982. The very Syrian drama unfolding on these ‘Israeli’ streets proves – if proof were needed – the absurdity of Zionist hopes that Arab national identity on occupied territory will gradually evaporate.

by Ali Farzat

Many Syrians have been awaiting this moment with dread. A further step down into bloody chaos and incipient civil war, a further step into the dark. This morning two car bombs exploded at security installations in Kafar Souseh, Damascus. At least thirty people were killed and over 100 injured.

Who’s to blame? There is no evidence of anyone’s guilt, and there won’t be any credible evidence while the criminal Asad regime remains in power and continues to lie and to block journalists’ access. This means that pro-regime people will follow the regime line and blame al-Qa’ida, and anti-regime people will blame the regime. I make no bones about it: I’m firmly in the anti-regime camp. Those who followed my writing before this year will know that I was once willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. Not any longer. This year I’ve been forced to admit that the regime is a lot less intelligent, a lot less sophisticated, than I thought. Back in February it had enough popularity to lead a genuine reform process. It’s entirely possible that Bashaar al-Asad, had he played this revolutionary year right, could have won a real election. But he didn’t play it right. From the start his regime slaughtered peaceful protestors and subjected thousands to torture, including children, even to death. Worst of all, the regime instrumentalised sectarianism in an attempt to divide and rule. After months of attacks by armed Alawi gangs on predominantly Sunni lives and property there are now instances of ‘revenge’ attacks on innocent Alawis, and tit for tat sectarian killings particularly in Homs and its surrounding countryside. All of this could have been predicted months ago. Of course, the mechanics of these killings is as obscure as that behind the bomb attacks in Damascus today. Some revolutionaries believe the regime is behind the killings of Alawis too, because it aims to spark a sectarian war which it thinks it can win. And we must not forget that sectarian war is still – to the credit of the Syrian people – not the dominant strain in the conflict. There are thousands of defected soldiers, many of whom have seen their comrades gunned down. If they had chosen to they could have attacked the minorities in a coordinated fashion. They haven’t. And the Alawi actress Fadwa Sulaiman is still leading demonstrations in the Sunni heart of Homs.

It’s debatable whether or not the regime can win a sectarian war, but it’s certain that it can’t win its struggle against the revolution for dignity. In fact the signs are piling up that the regime is losing by the day. Three days ago 60,000 revolutionaries took to the streets of Meydan in central Damascus. Thousands took to the streets of central Aleppo. It can no longer be said, therefore, that central Damascus and Aleppo are not participating in the revolution (the suburbs of these cities have been demonstrating for months). The regime’s response to the awakening of the two largest cities has been to escalate. Reports from Jabal az-Zawiyeh in Idlib province suggest that at least 250 people have been massacred there in the last three days, defectors and civilians alike. And the daily death toll of civilians across the country has risen to between 20 and 50.

Now this double bomb attack on Kafar Souseh looks very much like part of the regime’s response. It certainly plays into the regime’s hands, reinforcing the terrorism narrative on the day that the Arab League observers (very worryingly led by Muhammad ad-Dabi, who was Sudan’s intelligence chief during the massacres in Darfur) arrive in Syria. Apparently it took less than twenty minutes for the regime to ‘discover’ that al-Qa’ida, backed by the United States and Israel, was behind the bombs. The regime’s ad-Dunya TV station even informed us that the exploding cars had pictures of bin Laden on their windows. Intelligent people will have as much trouble believing this story as they have believing Butheina Shaaban’s indignant insistence that torture never happens in Syria, or the lisping idiot-in-chief’s assertion that he would leave power if the people stopped loving him.

Witnesses claim that the streets around the bomb blast were closed off by security before the explosions. The oppositionist Muhammad al-Abdullah writes on his facebook page that “Reliable sources leaked the news that the victims of the bombings in the security services building were innocent people detained during demonstrations and were transferred from prisons and detention centers to the military and security buildings to use as victims in the series of explosions planned in the coming days after signing the death protocol (the Arab League protocol) and the presence of Arab observers to let the world think that the Syrian revolution is a terrorist revolution.” The regime claims it received information from Lebanon two days ago that 200 al-Qa’ida operatives were crossing the border. Lebanon’s ex-prime minister Saad al-Hariri (admittedly an anti-Syrian politician) says “this is fabricated by the Syrian ministry and some of its tools in Lebanon.”

So choose the narrative that fits you best. This is the confusion into which the criminal and traitorous regime has led us.