Saturday, March 31, 2012

Outgunned Syria Terrorists Turn To Empire's Ordnance

Outgunned Syria rebels turn to homemade bombs

"IDLIB, Syria — Scattered around the house that Abu Nadim once shared with his wife and five children are hints of its former existence: a SpongeBob SquarePants pillow, a baby's crib, a woman's purse.

Now the four-room home is a bomb-making workshop.

Bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, containers of peroxide and acetone and powdered aluminum cover the floor, along with boxes of wires, PVC pipes, computer parts and cigarette ash, as if someone had wandered through without thought for an ashtray.

Abu Nadim, 42, has a teddy-bear face and a left hand that's wrapped in blue fabric and missing three fingers, casualties of a grenade experiment that went awry. He holds his cigarette between thumb and stub.

Once it became clear that the lightly armed rebels who are fighting to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad were no match for tanks, the taxi driver, like others, turned to bomb-making videos made by Palestinians, Lebanese and Afghans.

He sent his family to live with his brother-in-law and started making bombs.

When the armed resistance began, the rebels envisioned their revolution as an iteration of the Libyan model: a steady, if slow, battle to the capital backed by foreign military support. But in the absence of weapons, foreign aid and an organized defense, more and more it appears to be following a different model of insurgency, predicated on bombings and kidnappings.

"We used to see people in other countries put on suicide vests and blow themselves up; now we understand it comes as a result of oppression and torture and killing," said Abu Nadim, whose home is in the village of Bennish. "If the situation continues like this and no one helps us, then it is possible that the young men will turn to suicide bombings."

Sweet Jeebus, it's all made up.

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