Paul Raymond

What’s remarkable about the battle for Ariha is that few outside Syria were aware of it. Neither the U.N. nor most international nongovernmental organizations nor even the most widely quoted Syrian monitoring group reported on the battle. Ariha is a case study in Syria’s hidden war, in which government forces besiege towns and villages sympathetic to the rebels, fire on them with their heaviest weapons, then send in ground troops for a brutal “cleansing.”