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Aleppo 1924, Armenian exiles from Gaziantep across the Turkish border. Via Houshamadyan.

Excerpt at The Arabist from an interview with Yassin Al-Haq Saleh, a prominent Syrian dissident who fled the country after participating in the uprising and living in hiding for several years. 

I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate....

In the last two months the Americans have openly appended our cause to their war-on-terrorism agenda. Their war on ISIS is saying that the regime that killed or caused the killing of more than 200 thousand people is only a detail; the thuggish entity of ISIS is the real danger. And of course American military training will follow the American political priorities, using Syrians as tools in their (the Americans’) war, not for concluding our struggle for change in Syria. 

In short, I think that the outcome of the American program of training Syrians will be to completely destroy the weakened FSA, converting it into cheap local mercenaries without a cause, confronting the fascists of ISIS for years for the Americans’ sake, and giving their backs to the fascists of Assad.

In sum, I am among those who adamantly oppose the American military training of Syrians.... 

I do not have any essentialist grudge towards the United States, but the superpower was extremely inhumane towards my country, and its present war is extremely selfish. It is quite feasible in my opinion to conclude from American policy in Syria that Washington is radically antagonistic to democracy and the rights of the underprivileged. I suppose this means that its war in Syria is reactionary, and that it will make everything worse for the majority in the country and the region. 

I left the following comment:

It's hard to know who even constitutes the "leftists of the West" on the subject of Syria, between those who reflexively denounce the Obama administration without any curiosity as to what its aims are and those who don't want to think about it at all, both sides being I think pretty equally uninformed, but there's an argument that there are at least elements in the administration, starting with Obama himself, who have a much stronger understanding of the situation that they cannot make quite clear in the context of stupid American journalists and politicians who lack the background to comprehend it.

The emphasis on ISIS isn't necessarily from a judgment that it's the only important thing in Syria and Iraq but that it's the only area in which US military power can make any positive difference, because they are concentrated in areas where it is easier to avoid killing civilians and because everybody hates them. I think that they have always understood that US military power against Assad can only do harm, giving minimal support to FSA as a political rather than a military gesture, and to avoid turning them into "cheap local mercenaries".

The other thing is that it is not the administration's aim to "make everything worse for the majority" but to work for the protection of the minority groups, including Shi'ites and other groups in Syria that cling to Assad in terror, in spite of his crimes, and Sunnis in Iraq who have been so badly mistreated by the Bush-installed Baghdad government. The Sunnis of Syria and Shi'ites of Iraq need to take care of themselves and not be puppets of the US (or in the latter case of Iran).

It is horrible to watch all this killing and be powerless to end it, but that's equally true in Central Africa and all sorts of places. It's good in the long run if the US finally begins to recognize the limits of its ability to take care of it all, that's something the left has been calling for, rightly, forever.