Terry Blue
Reese Elrich often traveled to the Middle east as a foreign correspondent with a special interest in the Muslim world. Reese is obsessed with Syria and written much on this topic through various outlets on the web and in print and has written several books on this topic. Reese risked his limbs and traveled into Syria in the height of the civil war interviewing both rebels and supporters of the regime of Bashir Al-Assad and Reese often is proud of is ability to fade into society without people realizing he is an American.
This is a bad ass reporter willing to get on the ground and inform on the brutality and volatile nature of this region and why this civil war has such strong future implications in the region. He gives a recap of the history of the country form the last century and events leading up to both the current uprising and the one in the early eighties by religious extremists against the rule of his father. Reese was disgusted by some of the taxi cabs he entered in his ventures trying to get information and why this uprising took place at the time it did. Reese mentions in all of his books about the fact that Syrians look at him with puzzle faces when he puts on a seat belt and then realizes how dirty and nasty the belts are going uncleansed for years imprinting his shirts with filth and grim. Reese recalls some interesting facts of his trip into a war zone and how Bashir Assad freaked out when Reese brought out his peacock feathers microphone and equipment that looked like it could be a shotgun concoction and the paranoid leadership of a Bashir Assad and refusal to step down in the face of so much opposition is one of the reasons tis brutal war has continued as long as it has and he is able to oscillate between the different fighting groups. In his excellent book called "Inside Syria" Reese gives chapters about the Kurdish question and why Iran had been the biggest supporter of the current regime in Syria though the years in this continual proxy battle between the superpowers in this resource-rich area where the industrial world needs to keep stable and energy flowing to all parts of the world. The propensity of the international arms dealers in prolonging this war and having an outlet for major sales all these years is explained through outside intervention of Russia and America long intrigued in this battleground region and key strategic importance to the global traders. Elrich also points out how some interventionists want basically to recolonize both Iraq and Syria to meet the ISIS threat in the region and are under the assumption Arabs can't control their own affairs without much turmoil. Of course, Elrich ignores the fact that basically this war has ripped apart relations between Alewites, Druzes, Christians and both Muslim groups forever and a reboot and new borders will eventually be the direct result of these conflicts. The borders drawn previously by European coloniziers are antiquated and the cause of much of the problem today in both Iraq and Syria. This is perhaps the best book on the market explaining the current situation in Syria and why this country is ground zero in the battle between state governments and Islamic theocrats who want to the establishment of a Sharia religious fanatical order as a result of this conflict and the family plutocratic rule that for a long period brought stability and peace to the various diverse population of this country before the coming of oil money and power of the Sunni supremacist Islamicists in the gulf region who hate Shiite Iran with such fanatical passion and are more powerful and the modern Ku Klux Klan.
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