Adib shishakly houston

He is now working to form an alliance with a similar Salafist group known as Ahrar al-Sham. To gather funds, Abu Issa was said to have visited the Turkish border city of Antakya last week to meet with Saudi businessmen who might contribute to his group. Another jihadist group bidding for power is known as the Majlis al-Shura, or Shura Council.

Its former leader, Mohammed al-Absi, is said to have been killed recently after he raised the black flag of al-Qaeda at the Syrian border crossing at Bab al-Hawa. When supporters of the Free Syrian Army protested to Absi's group about the banner, decorated with words from the Koran, the extremists answered, "What's wrong with the name of God? Finally there is Jabhat al-Nusra, which openly boasts of its links with al-Qaeda. Yakzan Shishakly says he tried to warn a U. If you don't help now, there will be more and more.

David Ignatius Author Archive. His father, Ihsan Shishakly, also is a military-political notable and a former high-ranking official in Syria. Suppression by Hafez al-Assad's government, including killing and imprisoning family members, obliged Adib Shishakly to leave to the United States during his early life, dreaming of returning to "a free Syria" one day.

An active lobbyist and advocate for the Syrian opposition's cause, Shishakly has met leaders and policy makers in more than thirty countries, organizing humanitarian support for refugees [4] and internally displaced Syrians. He was once described as a Gandhian philosophy adopter when the uprising bloomed in Syria. This article "Adib Shishakly activist " is from Wikipedia. Follow us on Twitter! Create account Log in.

Recent changes. Articles by topic. View source. When he saw an agency operating in a dishonest way, he would delay or even block their shipments, sometimes forcing NGOs to stop working at the camp altogether. The move worked a little too well. Faced with a loss of control over their imports, businessmen and middlemen fought back. He told everybody that we were trying to stop their food from being prepared. At another point, Shishakly said he noticed that an agency from the Gulf had suddenly appeared at the camp, working with yet another local businessman from Atmeh to construct a bakery.

So he blocked a shipment. In response, the agency, like the breakfast cook, shuttered the bakery, infuriating the residents of the camp, who took their frustration out on Shishakly. He showed up at the camp the next day to find residents chanting angrily outside the Maram office. As he walked up, the mob noticed him and turned.

How could you! Shishakly was taken aback. But as the year wore on, it became clear that complaints like these were reverberating through the camp. Abu Gharbeh recalled a time in the spring when donated food ended up stuck in a warehouse in Reyhanli for so long that it spoiled.

They felt the reason for the delays was because of Yakzan. Fifty years ago, journalist Patrick Seale published The Struggle for Syria , a gripping account of the chaotic decade after the end of French occupation.

By the summer of , the year Shishakly took control, there had already been two coups. In the early hours of December 19, Shishakly sent tanks into Damascus, making his the third coup in a year. Hinnawi, unlike his predecessors, was not sentenced to die; instead, he was sent into exile in Beirut, where he was assassinated less than a year later by the cousin of al-Barazi, the executed former prime minister.

Shishakly ruled as a populist, promising to uplift peasants to a position of greater prominence in Syria. In Hama province, for instance, just three families—the Barazis, the Azms, and the Kaylanis—owned a preponderance of land across the northern countryside, including ninety-one of villages.

It was very feudal. Faced with threats to his rule and discontent over his strong-armed economic policies, he began to make more decisions unilaterally. He extended state authority into the far reaches of daily life, urging the government takeover of public schools, abolishing political parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and embarking on a brutal military conquest of the minority Druze sect.

In a presidential election two years later, Shishakly won with a distinctly Assad-like The Shishakly era came to a close in , when he, like his predecessors, was ousted through a military mutiny—a tenure animated by lofty aims and expansive vision ending in betrayal and disappointment.

He eventually retired in Brazil, where, a decade later, he was assassinated by a disaffected member of the Druze community. The brothers both strongly contest the notion that their grandfather was a dictator, even one with an egalitarian vision.

This ambiguous legacy has stuck with many of the people who accompanied the brothers in the contemporary effort against Bashar Assad. Syrians either love the elder Adib or they hate him.

In fact, just the opposite: They often cite his insistent optimism and his stubborn determination to singlehandedly improve the lot of those in Atmeh as the characteristics that most impeded him at the camp. Of course, the problems at Atmeh were much larger than any one man, just like the problems in the uprising were larger than just Atmeh.

Of the many Syrian expatriates with whom Shishakly regularly came in contact were several descendants of people his grandfather had tangled with sixty years ago. For the Syrian opposition, these sorts of historical tensions have only compounded the troubles of an already delicate alliance, which has struggled from the start of the uprising to cohere into something more than just a shared antipathy toward Assad.

Activists and politicians bickered with one another in conference rooms in Doha and on the planning committees in Gaziantep. In late , the opposition coalition, viewed as too divided and out of touch, was completely dismantled and replaced with another one, this one supposedly less closely affiliated with supporters of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

More recently, Atassi, who held posts in both the humanitarian affairs bureau and the political opposition, was forced to resign from the latter after she was accused of mismanaging funds and bringing politics into relief operations. She has denied the claims. Meanwhile, in places like Atmeh, the return of well-heeled expatriates with last names like Shishakly poses a different kind of challenge: They may not be wholly embraced by an opposition looking to move the country forward.

There is an urban-rural divide and there has always been and in some ways the Shishaklys and Hinnawis, they were an expression of the revolt of the middle class against the urban notables. No one wants them back. Early in the summer of , Shishakly was still making expansive plans for Atmeh. It included games and art classes but also therapy and dental clinics—and he hoped to make it a full-time affair. But on the ground, the obstacles facing Shishakly were only mounting.

That summer marked a second year of merciless heat, with attendant disease and unrest. He had few friends he could count on when refugees criticized his work, or when his missteps were inflated through rumors of malfeasance.

At some point that summer, Shishakly recalled, a television network did a report on the camp that contained a litany of complaints about Shishakly and the rest of the management. He was dismayed. I had to control myself. The kidnapping, as it turned out, was just one manifestation of this danger. Through the summer, Shishakly says, he was continuously reminded that he risked his life with each visit to Atmeh. You have to pay salaries, you have to build infrastructure.

And we never had that. He was thrilled, and, once again, intensely busy. We can finally control how we raise these children—we can do it in a Syrian way. I consider it like my home. An entire generation of young activists had invested themselves in a similar dream, embracing the promise of a Middle Eastern awakening, imagining they could help their country obtain noble things—freedom, community, integrity.

And they let themselves believe that their good intentions were all it took. The fall has been as disappointing as the rise was hopeful. The arc of events that happened to Syria, Atmeh was a microcosm of that. The closest I ever got to Atmeh came in the fall of At the time, ISIS, which already controlled large parcels of northeastern Syria, had recently begun to advance on the western Turkish front, and the area was under grave threat.

There were reports that inside the camp itself, Islamic militias had made themselves a dominant presence: Women had to wear head coverings, and visits from the outside had all but ceased. He has been interviewed and quoted by mainstream international and pan Arab media. Adib Shishakly Adib Shishakly, Aug Retrieved 4 February The season has turned".

The Hindu. Chennai, India.