“I might get hit by a mortar and be killed, and you might live longer than me, but remember my words. They [the West] will use you, and they will unite you with Bashar’s army, and with an interim government, and they will promise you seats in parliament, and such things — the same as they did with the Sunnis in Iraq. The West will sell you cheap. They sold your grandfathers and our grandfathers. And for hundreds of years the West has been controlling us, and they keep these tyrants over our heads. As if it were us who committed the al-Houla massacre, or did the chemical weapons attack, or raped the women in Bashar’s prisons. You forgot about Bashar, and now you came to fight us in earnest, and in the end, you and the [Alawites] will hug each other. You serve this project without knowing. Your army and Bashar’s army will unify to ‘counter terrorism’ — which is us. You will kill us and we will kill you. We have no other options — either you cleanse us or we cleanse you, because the decision is not yours.” (From a phone call between al-Iraqi and his enemy, a Syrian rebel commander) Mike Giglio, “A Late-Night Phone Call Between One of Syria’s Top Extremists And His Sworn Enemy,” BuzzFeed News, April 3, 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/a-late-night-phone-call-between-one-of-syrias-top-extremists#.wgA5eEyo8d.