They fight back with homemade bombs, limited weapons and meagre medical supplies. In pockets of resistance across Syria, groups such as these carry out missions against an army equipped with tanks and helicopters. United by the government’s alleged atrocities, Fatalah said they now fight like brothers.
Others were students, farmers or taxi drivers. “ We are using very simple weapons against the highly sophisticated weapons of the regime,” said Fatalah, a former Syrian army lieutenant who defected at the beginning of the uprising.īefore the revolution many, like Fatalah, worked as police officers or soldiers for the government. The morning’s bombing was a small victory for the Sham Falcons, but its leaders were realistic. They sustained no injuries, and rebel fighter Hamza Fatalah said the ambush had killed three enemy soldiers. Mortars and gunfire from the pursuing government soldiers filled the mountains as the rebel fighters ran several kilometres to escape. The ensuing blast ripped up a massive section of road, but was detonated too soon to destroy the infantry carrier that was the target of the attack. The night before, the rebels had planted a roadside TNT explosive at a key point on the way to a government position.Īs the convoy passed below, the designated triggerman detonated the bomb with a converted garage-door opener. Dozens of government soldiers approached in a procession of pick-up trucks and an armoured infantry vehicle. Like so many Syrians, they decided to fight back.
Like other armed fighting groups, they were drawn from local towns and villages that carried fierce resistance to the Damascus government of President Bashar al-Assad and claimed to have suffered from its brutality. Like many of the hundreds of ad hoc rebel groups that have sprung up across Syria, they are loosely trained but closely knit, and armed only with Kalashnikov rifles, PKT machine guns and a few rocket-propelled grenades. The roughly 100 guerrillas were members of a larger group known as the Sham Falcons. is undoubtedly much the most important book to be written on Zimbabwe for many years and it transforms our understanding of the whole colonial experience.Idlib Province, Syria – Dawn broke over the northern mountains of Jabal al-Zawiya late last month to find a group of anti-government fighters hiding along a ridge line, waiting for their remote-controlled bomb to destroy an army convoy on the road below. Logie Barrow, Professor of History, Hamburg in" The oral-historical part of Ranger's bibliography is also a model. of experiences which, while chronologically still in limbo between (for present-day Westerner) media-drenched present and a literarily-disciplined past, lie already on the far side of an allegedly or actually profound change. But Ranger's book should be seen as a major event in contemporary oral history, i.e. They are less used to treating as already historical a voice from the 1970s. Oral historians are at home when listening to a voice directly or indirectly from the 1890s or 1940s. Ranger's present book has all the many-sidedness of a 25-year historiographical and political engagement. "Ranger continually illuminates Rhodesia's tortuous passage to majority rule by comparison with two contrasting models of decolonisation: Kenya (conservative) and Mozambique (la luta continua).
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