VIJAY PRASHAD looks at the web of militias and drug-trafficking gangs that emerged in the Sweida region through the Syrian civil war, and how they relate to recent clashes and Israel’s intervention

JUST over 10 years ago, on June 29 2009, masked soldiers kidnapped Honduras’s democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, in pyjamas, flew him to Costa Rica and unceremoniously dropped him off in the tarmac of the capital city’s airport.
The Guardian (June 29 2009) reported that Zelaya had been “ousted after clashing with the judiciary, congress and the army” over his proposed constitutional change and that the “country’s leading court said it had authorised the toppling of the president.”
The Economist (July 2 2009) wrote: “Mr Zelaya, a businessman, alienated his own party and his country’s political establishment by his decision last year to forge an alliance with Mr Chavez, joining the Venezuelan’s anti-American bloc.”



