The Independent
How did warning flares from a small town near Gothenburg find their way into the weaponry of the anti-Assad resistance?
The Oslo express is racing across the pre-dawn, frozen pine forests
of Norway, snow shawling over the corner window of carriage three,
wherein sits Detective Inspector Fisk on the last day of “Operation
Aleppo”. He is reading Rafael de Nogales’ Memoirs of a Soldier of
Fortune, a 1932 edition of the Venezuelan general’s account of
derring-do in revolutionary Latin America and service in the First World
War Ottoman army.
On page 294, he meets a doomed German soldier in the Middle East, a
“tall, handsome young officer” who has disgraced his Prussian honour by
having an affair with a girl who claimed she was 18 when in fact she was
only 16.
And oddly – for books often carry weird geographical hints about ourselves – General Nogales briefly meets this young man in the German military mess “sometime in August 1915, when I arrived at the city of Aleppo, after six months’ steady fighting against the Russians and Armenians in the Caucasus”.
Odd. For Inspector Fisk is investigating events that occurred in that same city of Aleppo more than 90 years later, when a Syrian army general on the city’s front line ordered his soldiers – just three months ago – to show me weapons recently captured from the country’s anti-Assad resistance.
And among the grenades, rifles and explosives, was a plastic packet containing three pink sticks of what looked like gelignite, on each one of which was labelled “Hammargrens, 434-24 Kungsbacka, Sweden”.
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And oddly – for books often carry weird geographical hints about ourselves – General Nogales briefly meets this young man in the German military mess “sometime in August 1915, when I arrived at the city of Aleppo, after six months’ steady fighting against the Russians and Armenians in the Caucasus”.
Odd. For Inspector Fisk is investigating events that occurred in that same city of Aleppo more than 90 years later, when a Syrian army general on the city’s front line ordered his soldiers – just three months ago – to show me weapons recently captured from the country’s anti-Assad resistance.
And among the grenades, rifles and explosives, was a plastic packet containing three pink sticks of what looked like gelignite, on each one of which was labelled “Hammargrens, 434-24 Kungsbacka, Sweden”.
Read More
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