Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Mr. Dada and Free Syrian Army

From Yazan:
"I wanted to email you about this post you had yesterday regard FSA bragging about its chemical weapons. We've been checking the story out in order to confirm if its true and there are certain issues that came up.

The original story by Anatolian Agency in Arabic can be seen here in this link (if that doesn't work, here is a cache version here).

They quote Bassam al-Dada. Al-Dada is typically dubbed as a (incompetent) political adviser for the (incompetent) FSA whenever he is mentioned or quoted. He was (and still is) notorious in making unsavory, vulgar, sectarian statements such as when he threatened Hezbollah on New TV in early December.

He also made those threats against civilian airports in September. Akram, you're correspondent in Damascus (who I do hope is well) mentioned al-Dada, and the threats to the airport, in this post of your blog in early September (). Akram noted that the deputy commander of the FSA Kurdi renounced al-Dada's statements and explained that al-Dada was "relieved of his post a month ago [meaning he must have been 'relieved' in August]."

So I'm a bit confused here.
If al-Dada was relieved of his post in August, what's he doing still speaking to the press (and if you do a quick google search, he's quoted a lot) all these months since as a political adviser for the FSA? (kinda reminds me of Sa'ab Erekat, when he supposedly resigned and yet is still around...)".