A Military Chicken Base for Hezbollah

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

News reports quoted Zionists as saying that the targets Israel bombed near Damascus at dawn on Sunday, 5 May 2013, belonged to Hezbollah — and in this there is the height of contempt for people’s intelligence, Arab intelligence especially.

It is clear from what we saw on our screens that the sites that were bombed contained no strategic weapons, but were ordinary military positions concerned with supply, provisioning, and ammunition; among what we saw was a chicken farm, along with mortar shells and mortar rounds, and so on. There may have been some conventional rockets, but we did not see heavy rockets carrying a large explosive payload. The tubes we saw on screen do not match the kind of rockets that Israel takes seriously on a strategic scale.

There are many questions about this matter: why would Hezbollah set up a chicken farm near Damascus? Is there no suitable location in Lebanon itself, above ground or below it, to set up a poultry farm to supply Hezbollah’s fighters in wartime? And why would Hezbollah send a number of its members to tend a chicken farm near Damascus, when it could establish the farm near Baalbek or Hermel and save the costs of travel and lodging that come with the chickens being displaced so far from home? And what sort of military intelligence is this, which assumes chickens raised near Damascus are safe while chickens raised near Tyre are not? Can Israel not simply bomb the chicken cages during wartime while they sit in trucks on their way to the battlefront? And more to the point, do Hezbollah’s fighters have enough time to cook and fry the chicken in the middle of a war?

And what need does Hezbollah have for mortar shells and mortar rounds? Would a war, if one broke out, really be that primitive? Perhaps Hezbollah is compelled to store some combat equipment temporarily in Syria, but the sites that were bombed have belonged to the Syrian army for a long time, and are not temporary depots. Hezbollah is extremely careful when it comes to transporting and storing weapons, and it does not carry out its military and security activities openly, before onlookers. The party possesses everything it needs for war, and if it wanted to smuggle chemical weapons, it would not hesitate and would not lack the ability to do so.

…and there were Syrians who expressed their happiness at the event on Israeli television screens.

What does Israel not want, and what does it want?

Israel does not want the current Syrian political regime to survive, because it provides support to the resistance, and has not responded well to the course of Arab negotiations with it.

Nor does it want the Muslim Brotherhood, because it does not trust them, believing they may show a soft face while concealing ill intent toward it.

Nor does it want the Nusra Front, because these people know nothing but killing and destruction, and would pose a great problem for Israel and for Western policy in the region if they were to win.

But it does want two things:

The destruction of Syria — and toward that end it is prepared to intervene militarily and through security channels to keep the fighting raging, and it does not care who is doing the shooting, so long as both killer and killed are Syrian.

And if the war calms down, it wants a political system formed by Western-style liberals (those beholden to the West) who are prepared to reconcile with it at the expense of Arab rights.

We observe that those Israel — and of course America — do not want are fighting each other, while both the wanted and the unwanted are partners in the destruction of Syria.

We all remember how the Iraqi Ba’athist regime stood against the Syrian Ba’athist regime, and how their split led to what things have come to now; and we remember how the war between Iraq and Iran dragged on for years, with direct or indirect support from the West and Israel. It seems our intelligence does not rise to the level of distinguishing between being killed and being merely distracted, and that our internal conflicts outweigh the conspiracies from outside.

The solution

The Syrian National Coordination Committee is the body qualified to lead the opposition, and it is unwise for the Islamists to remain part of a coalition supported by outside powers that do harm to Islam and Muslims. And if the Nusra Front comes to realize it cannot achieve victory, it would then be possible to halt the fighting and resort to dialogue. A list of Arab thinkers has already been proposed to oversee such a dialogue, funded by the Syrian government.

Continuing to look toward Ankara, Moscow, Washington, and Tehran only complicates matters, because of the intricate calculations of each state. Some Arab intellectuals and thinkers could volunteer toward the goal of stopping the Syrian bloodletting and overcoming the various obstacles without outside interference, and the names involved could be agreed upon by the various parties.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “قاعدة دجاج عسكرية لحزب الله” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.