Syrian Arab News Agency S A N A
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London, SANA- Fighters from overseas are increasingly dominant – and sometimes resented – force in the fight in Syria, The Guardian reported.
Muhammad no longer recognises his country. The former teacher from Idlib province says Syria has been so overrun by foreign fighters that they are the ones calling the shots.
“There are so many foreigners now – I have met guys from Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Libya. It makes me feel like it is not my country any more.
Once, I was walking around my hometown when a man drove up to ask me for my papers. He was Tunisian. What’s his business ordering me around in my own country, in my town?” Mohammad the 35-year-old teacher told the Guardian.
Muhammad’s resentment is shared by many Syrians who have been forced out of their country while foreigners flood in to wage jihad, the British daily said.
Faisal, 27, also from Idlib, has been working in a Syrian restaurant in Reyhanli, southern Turkey, for more than two years, while watching foreign jihadis travel unhindered through the border town into Syria. “There were so many of them here, all going to my country. These people have ruined us, they have destroyed Syria.”
He accuses foreign powers of supporting without question anyone fighting against the Syrian government. “So many foreign players have their hands in Syria; they are responsible for this. I pray every day that there will be a time when the same troubles will befall them.”
A UN Security Council report obtained by the Guardian says at least 15,000 people from more than 80 countries have travelled to Iraq and Syria in recent years to become jihadi fighters.
The foreigners fighting in Syria had little trouble entering the country through the 550-mile border with Turkey via what Turkish pundits called the “jihadi highway”. Working not unlike regular tour operators, traffickers ran routine – and lucrative – transfers from Turkish airports close to the Syrian border while the authorities and border guards turned a blind eye.
“For the first two years of the conflict in Syria there was virtually no border,” says Ahmet, a smuggler and lifelong resident of a border village in Hatay province. “We pretty much came and went as we pleased. The Turkish government didn’t seem to mind.”
This year, the UN Security Council passed a number of resolutions urging member states to step up screening measures and border patrols aimed at stemming the flow of foreign fighters to Iraqi and Syrian battlefields.
Muhammad, the teacher from Idlib, scoffs at such international efforts. “Without foreign support, these groups would never have grown this powerful in Syria,” he says. He now lives in Reyhanli with his wife and two children while regularly returning to Syria to visit his parents who refuse to leave home. He says he often comes across foreigners, some of whom are unable to communicate in Arabic.
R. al-Jazaeri/ Barry
