The Islamic Ahrar al-Sham Movement, which is the leading faction of the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF) and probably the biggest salafi group in Syria, has issued a statement about Jabhat al-Nosra’s recent declaration of allegiance to al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Ahrar al-Sham statement is available in Arabic on Aaron Zelin’s Jihadology, always the go-to place for source material on jihadi groups. It has been translated into English by Misr Panorama, here (added May 6).
The background is as follows. In early April, Zawahiri issued a statement in support of the revolution in Syria and called for an Islamic state there. This was followed by a message from the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI, i.e. al-Qaida in Iraq), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who finally acknowledged the long-known fact that Jabhat al-Nosra was an ISI offshoot and that they would henceforth work under a common name and flag as “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. The day after, Jabhat al-Nosra’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Joulani issued a surprisingly sharp rejoinder. He admitted that Jabhat al-Nosra had indeed been supported by the ISI from the very beginning, and was thankful for it, but he also said he hadn’t been consulted on Abu Bakr’s announcement and denied that the groups would merge. On the other hand, Abu Mohammed took the occasion to formally “renew” his pledge of allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top emir of al-Qaida.
This procedure, “al-bayaa” in Arabic, is not mere rhetoric; rather it is loaded with religious and political significance for hardcore Islamists like these. It essentially means that Abu Mohammed, and by extention Jabhat al-Nosra, promises to follow every order from Zawahiri as long as this does not contravene sharia law. It is a step in the same process that al-Qaida in Iraq went through, when Abu Moussaab al-Zarqawi first declared his allegiance to Osama bin Laden. His group, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, was then renamed al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, after Bin Laden responded by formally blessing their union, to signify that it was now a bona fide al-Qaida wing (it then folded into the ISI in 2006, but that’s another matter). Later, the GSPC of Algeria and Shabab al-Mujahedin of Somalia went through the same steps to become formal al-Qaida branches, and now Jabhat al-Nosra is doing it.
The new Ahrar al-Sham statement, signed May 4, 2013, criticizes both Abu Mohammed el-Joulani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. According to Ahrar al-Sham, their statements were divisive, lacking in realism and “put the interest of the group before the interest of the Umma”, i.e. the Islamic nation as a whole.
Ahrar al-Sham warns that Jabhat al-Nosra’s open affiliation to al-Qaida will help the regime and that it will “regionalize” the crisis by bringing other parties into the conflict, presumably in reference to US and European hostility to al-Qaida.
While frank and critical, the Ahrar al-Sham statement is not really hostile to Jabhat al-Nosra or al-Qaida. Rather it is written in the tone of honest advise for an ally who has committed a damaging mistake. In fact, the statement expresses disappointment in Jabhat al-Nosra, since Ahrar al-Sham says it had previously only seen good deeds from the group and had expected better. Ahrar al-Sham also takes care to point out that they agree in principle with the al-Qaida goal of establishing an transnational Islamic state, but asks for a bit of realism and patience given the current situation. They also say that none of today’s Islamist factions is strong enough to assume religious leadership over the Muslim community, thereby obliquely criticizing al-Qaida, ISI and Jabhat al-Nosra while also denying that they have rival leadership ambitions.
Previously, the Jabhat al-Nosra and ISI declarations had been criticized in similarly nuanced statements by the FSA-aligned SILF Islamist alliance and several other opposition factions, including the mainstream pro-Western and pro-GCC leaderships.
But it took Ahrar al-Sham almost a month to respond. The group has recently grown a lot, incorporating smaller SIF factions, so they probably had to go through some internal consultations before producing a statement on a sensitive matter like this. The SIF as an alliance has still not taken a public position on the Jabhat al-Nosra/al-Qaida affair, but I expect it will follow. And Ahrar al-Sham is by now so dominant within the SIF that their word could almost be taken to represent the SIF.
This dispute illustrates the subtle but real distinction between al-Qaida’s radically internationalist salafi-jihadism and the more locally rooted, Syria-focused and somewhat pragmatic salafi program of Ahrar al-Sham and the SIF. For more on that, see my recent report on the SIF and its member factions.
The Haqq Battalions Gathering, a militant group in the Hama province, announced in mid-April 2013 that they are joining the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF). This is the first time since the SIF’s creation in December 2012 that an independent outside organization of any consequence decides to join the front. Previously, some small local factions had been coopted into SIF member factions, but the Haqq Battalions are joining as full members.
The Syrian Islamic Front
The SIF is one of Syria’s largest and most powerful Islamist militant alliances. It’s smaller but seems more cohesive than the large Syrian Islamic Liberation Front network (SILF), which comprises major Islamist factions like the Farouq Battalions of Homs and northern Syria, Suqour al-Sham of Idleb, the Islam Brigade of Damascus, and the Tawhid Brigade of Aleppo. The SIF is also almost certainly larger in numbers than Jabhat al-Nosra, although the latter group steals most of the limelight. Ideologically and politically, it sets itself apart from both sides.
Unlike the SILF, the more hardline SIF has no relation to the Western- and Gulf backed ”official” opposition frameworks, like the National Coalition of George Sabra (after the resignation of Ahmed Moadh al-Khatib) or Ghassan Hitto’s exile government, or Salim Idriss’s General Staff, which is the latest incarnation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Some individual SIF member factions do collaborate with these groups, such as the Haqq Brigade of Homs, which holds a position on the FSA leadership. But the central SIF leadership does not. It tends to describe the FSA leaders as inconsequential on the ground at best, and tools of the West at worst. While the SIF has promised to cooperate with any and all in the struggle against Bashar al-Assad, it will therefore not become part of the Western-backed alliances. It also makes no bones about its salafi ideology, and does not try to court international support by promising moderate Islam and democracy, like most of the SILF members.
On the other hand, the SIF has also cautiously distanced itself from Jabhat al-Nosra and its Islamic State of Iraq/al-Qaida mother group. It seems to want to portray itself as the responsible adult among Syria’s salafi factions, which will deal with Syria’s problems in a serious manner, and can be counted on to stay clear of militant entanglements outside Syria’s borders. But the SIF leadership also seeks retain good ties to all sides, including the transnational jihadi underground. While it is clearly not an al-Qaida faction, there are personal and ideological connections to radical jihadism, and the SIF leadership publicly lauds Jabhat al-Nosra as good solid Mujahedin.
The recent formalization of Jabhat al-Nosra’s relationship to al-Qaida – which the SIF, unlike the SILF, did not publicly criticize – represents both a risk and an opportunity for the SIF. On the one hand, it does not want to be lumped in with al-Qaida and sanctioned by the international community. On the other hand, it does not want and cannot afford to enter into a conflict with Jabhat al-Nosra. In fact, Jabhat al-Nosra’s pledge of allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri may help the SIF to delineate itself from the most radical wing of the insurgency, and make it come off as more moderate. Despite being very close to Jabhat al-Nosra in purely ideological terms, the SIF leaders will now be able to point out that they’re the non-Qaida wing of Syria’s salafi movement.
SIF mergers and acquisitions
The SIF was originally formed by eleven different groups, in December 2012:
– Ahrar al-Sham Battalions (present across most of Syria)
– Haqq Brigade of Homs
– Ansar al-Sham Battalions of northern Latakia
– Tawhid Army of Deir al-Zor
– Islamic Vanguard Group of Binnish, Idleb
– Islamic Dawn Movement of Aleppo
– Fighting Faith Battalions of Damascus
– Moussaab bin Omeir Battalion of Maskana, Aleppo
– Hamza bin Abdelmuttaleb Battalion of Zabadani, Damascus region
– Suqour al-Islam Battalions of the Damascus region
– Special Assignments Companies of the Damascus region
Since then, several of these groups have merged around the core Ahrar al-Sham faction, solidifying the alliance step by step. A first set of mergers were announced in January 2013, and followed by a second wave in March-April.
The resulting Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement is by far the largest and most influential member group of the SIF, and one of the largest rebel factions in Syria. Its forerunner, the Ahrar al-Sham Battalions, was the driving force behind the SIF’s creation. Most of the SIF leadership is drawn from this original Ahrar al-Sham group, including the SIF’s spokesperson Abu Abderrahman al-Souri and its chairman, Abu Abdullah al-Hamawi.
Of the SIF’s eleven original founding organizations, the following seven have by now folded into the expanded Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement:
– Ahrar al-Sham Battalions
– Islamic Vanguard Group
– Islamic Dawn Movement
– Fighting Faith Battalions
– Moussaab bin Omeir Battalion
– Hamza bin Abdelmuttaleb Battalion
– Suqour al-Islam Battalions
– Special Assignments Companies
By early May 2013, the SIF’s updated member roster therefore looks as follows:
– Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement (national)
– Haqq Brigade (Homs)
– Ansar al-Sham Battalions (Latakia)
– Tawhid Army (Deir al-Zor)
– Haqq Battalions (Hama) – the new addition
Clearly, the internal consolidation of the SIF is proceding at an impressive speed, but external growth had been nonexistent – until a couple of weeks ago.
The Haqq Battalions Gathering
In April, the Haqq Battalions Gathering (Tajammou Kataeb al-Haqq) joined the SIF as its first new member since December 2012. The Haqq Battalions Gathering is an Islamist group centered on Tayybet al-Imam, a town north of Hama City which straddles the Damascus-Aleppo highway.
The group was apparently founded by one Nabhan Ahmed al-Mustafa (later killed in the summer of 2012). It has been working with Ahrar al-Sham and other groups in the region. While it is clearly an Islamist group, it formerly acted under the FSA name (as did several other SIF factions). Rival groups in Hama have accused the Haqq Battalions of being supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, but I have no idea whether that’s true. They claim to have executed at least one suicide bombing, which is interesting. Despite their religious radicalism, suicide bombings are almost unheard of among the SIF factions, although Ahrar al-Sham possibly pulled one or two off earlier in the uprising. Instead, virtually all suicide bombings in Syria have so far been performed by Jahbat al-Nosra and its salafi-jihadi allies.
Like several other SIF factions, the Haqq Battalions have at one point hosted the eccentric London-based salafi-jihadi figure, Sheikh Abu Basir al-Tartousi. This salafi-jihadi ideologue spent much of 2012 traveling in rebel-held Syria, while publicly feudingwith other jihadis who were upset about his criticism of Jabhat al-Nosra and other al-Qaida factions (interestingly, he’s also notable for his opposition to suicide bombings). Both the SIF and Abu Basir himself deny that there is any form of organized relationship between them, but they clearly benefit from each other, and it’s interesting that everything that Abu Basir touches seems to turn into an SIF faction.
The significance of the SIF’s expansion
The recent addition of the Haqq Battalions must be a welcome event for the SIF’s leaders. Not so much because the Haqq Battalions are a major force on the ground – they’re not – but because it shows that the SIF can attract and does accept new members.
Resistance factions have been consolidating into larger blocs since many months, driven both by political and financial factors. The creation of the Salim Idriss version of the FSA, the stepped-up GCC and US support for this group, and the Jabhat al-Nosra/al-Qaida announcement, have all raised the stakes and are forcing other factions to take a stand. In this game of musical chairs, the SIF’s own cohesion will be threatened, but there’s no telling which way things will break.
If the SIF can stick together for the long term, or even manages draw fighters out of the SILF/FSA, it will be too big and radical a chunk to swallow for the FSA, and yet also too big to safely ignore, isolate, or attack. This bears watching.
In my recent discussion with Murhaf Jouejati on PBS Newshour, I argued that the reason the US should avoid taking the lead in Syria is that the conflict is sectarian and resembles that of Iraq, where the US had little success.
Murhaf took issue with my analysis arguing that Syria is not like Iraq. He said that Iraq was invaded and Syria was not. He also argued that violence in Syria stems from a popular uprising not civil war.
I disagree. Syria is like Iraq. It presents a potential quagmire for the US should Washington intervene under the assumption that the killing will stop once the Assad regime is destroyed. A humanitarian intervention will become a nation-building project, as was the case in Iraq.
Syria is much like Iraq in that minorities (20%) have for 40 years held their foot on the neck of the majority, which is now fighting a war to take control of the country. In both countries, the political struggle falls largely along religious and ethnic lines, although, both class and regional differences are also important.
Syria’s revolt started as a peaceful struggle, but took on a sectarian character as the government used violence. Sectarianism has long been a seminal part of politics in Syria. The regime has protected itself by using sectarian strategies and has mobilized and exploited historic Alawite fear of Sunni discrimination and mistreatment.
Like its neighbors, Syria suffers from sectarian divisions. The most recent PEW poll demonstrates that 91% of Lebanese Shia have a favorable view of Assad while 92% of Lebanese Sunnis have an unfavorable view of him. These Lebanese percentages probably reflect the Syrian sectarian divide as well.
In Iraq, the Sunni minority of 20% dominated the Shiite majority of 60% through the Baath Party. In Syria, the Shiite minority, supported by other religious minorities, making up 20% of the population have dominated the Sunni Arab majority of 70% through the Baath Party. In both countries the security state was controlled by the religious minority. Both countries also share a significant Kurdish minority which wants its national rights recognized and resents historic domination and discrimination by Arabs.
Of course there are differences between Syria and Iraq, but the fact remains that both have descended into sectarian and ethnic violence. Syria’s violence will not end when the state or brutal regime is destroyed. In Iraq, sectarian and ethnic violence exploded, as did general chaos and criminality, following the destruction of Saddam’s brutal state. In Syria, something similar has already begun to happen. The liberated regions are beset by chaos and criminality. Warlordism is taking root. Foreign intervention cannot solve this problem. The Syrian opposition has had over two years to unify, but has not. Fragmentation is rife, and militias abound.
Syria has not developed a national identity that can bind its people together around a common idea or ideology. This is why the US cannot nation-build. To the extent that the opposition militias have found an ideology to mobilize the Sunni Arab population, it is political Islam, not secular nationalism. If the US takes the lead in Syria, it will insist on promoting secularism and going to war against many of the Salafist groups which inspire great devotion from their followers and supply the revolution with its best fighting forces. Syrian moderates should not want the US pushing them into war against fundamentalist Sunnis. Syrians need to find a solution to their own ideological struggles, which is not violent or driven by foreign interests. The US does not understand Muslim or Syrian sensibilities. The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups will play a big role in Syria’s future. Having the US try to push them aside in favor of the small group of secular “moderates” is bad politics that will prolong instability in Syria, not shorten it.
Considering that the US engagement in Iraq cost well over 1 trillion dollars and political violence remains high, the US intervention was not a success. Washington solved little. 400 Iraqis were killed in bombings and attacks this April alone. The US did not bring power-sharing, justice, or an end to political killing in Iraq, thus failing in its mission. Iraqi Arabs do not like us today. Both on a humanitarian level and in terms of national interest, the intervention failed. The Iraqi government is working against US interests on almost every front. How will the US be more successful in Syria, where the problems are so similar?
The US should not lead the way in Syria. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have a much greater stake in Syria and should lead the way. Their interest will be sustained. They have the money, advanced weapons, and strong religious motivation to help the rebels and defeat Iranian and Shiite influence in Syria. The US should not be taking sides in the larger regional contest pitting Shiites against Sunnis.
I am sure the US can help, but to take the lead as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan would be the height of folly. The US should definitely spend much more money to aid Syrians, but others should take the lead in using military force and in helping Syria build a new state and common sense of national identity.
After President Obama’s remarks about chemical weapons use in Syria, many newspaper articles appeared suggesting that he was rethinking his opposition to US involvement there. They were wrong, and weren’t listening. Obama said we don’t know who used the chemical weapons or to what extent. That isn’t building a case for intervention, it is knocking it down.
Olivier Knox gets this story right, in part because he asked experienced Washington, D.C. insiders.
Obama learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that US military intervention in the Middle East doesn’t actually work very well. Iraq is still a security basket case, with over 400 dead in bombings and attacks in April (nowhere near the high of 3000 a month in 2006 when the US was in charge of security, or even as much as contemporary Mexico, where over 1,000 a month have been dying in the drug war — but still no paradise). It has been 11 years and we are still stuck in Afghanistan, nor have we “stood up” a credible Afghan government.
Why people think a US intervention in Syria would go better, I don’t know. They always forget that generals are about winning quickly, even at the cost of civilian lives, and that a lot of carpetbaggers always show up in any war to find ways of profiting from it. Billions were looted from Iraq by American bureaucrat-criminals.
Sen. John McCain argues for an aerial intervention, which more or less worked in Libya. But Syria is not like Libya in any way.
Syria’s weapons depots, tanks and artillery are not out in some desert where they can be bombed with few casualties. They are in the cities. Bombing them would kill a lot of innocent civilians. Even just trying to take out the large number of anti-aircraft batteries (the essential first step of any aerial intervention) would be very costly in lives.
Everyone always forgets that if foreigners bomb a hated regime’s installations and accidentally thereby kill large numbers of innocent civilians, the dead civilians show up on the front page and everyone turns against the foreign air force. NATO only avoided this outcome in Libya by staying mostly away from the cities (it did not actually intervene in the Misrata siege). The few bombing raids on Gaddafi’s HQ, the Bab al-Aziziyah, did give the regime some propaganda points, since you can’t bomb downtown Tripoli without casualties.
So an air intervention is impractical in Syria, because its geography and the distribution of weapons are just different from those in Libya. And, any air intervention could well become unpopular both in Syria and the world, really, really fast.
A limited and very careful air intervention could possibly do some good, but in my experience military enterprises cannot be conducted in a ‘limited’ or ‘careful’ way.
If the concern is chemical weapons, those cannot be dealt with (must not be dealt with) by bombing them. That step would just release them into the air and kill people. Since McCain and other interventionists are not proposing US troops on the ground, it is unclear how he thinks the chemical weapons can be secured.
Moreover, the simple fact is that the US does not have good intel on where the chemical weapons are stockpiled. In the absence of really good such information, aerial bombardment of military bases risks accidentally hitting the canisters and releasing clouds of toxic gases onto civilian populations.
If an aerial intervention is not practicable, what about arming the rebels? The latter are already armed, so what this proposal really entails is giving them medium and heavy weaponry. But there is no way to keep such weapons out of the hands of radicals within the rebel camp. Moreover, having a lot of medium to heavy weaponry flood into a country can destabilize it for decades. If the Syrian rebels got shoulder-held heat-seeking missiles, would the Israeli civilian airlines, El Al, ever be safe again, in the aftermath?
I was in Pakistan in the early 1980s when security was relatively good. Then the CIA flooded in weapons to help the Mujahidin fight the Soviet-backed leftist government in Afghanistan. These weapons got sold on a Pakistani black market and started showing up in the bazaar. I had been in Lebanon’s civil war before going to Pakistan, and knew what it means when civilians can buy automatic guns at will. Pakistan’s security has spiraled down ever since and it is unclear when the world’s sixth-largest country will recover from the plague of weapons that has afflicted it.
So sending a lot of weapons into Syria might end the war sooner (or might not; the regime has heavier weapons); but it could also prolong the violence and insecurity in the aftermath.
People talk about arming groups loyal to the West, but that was how al-Qaeda got started in the first place. They don’t necessarily maintain an alliance of convenience with the foreigners.
All this is not to reckon with Russian and Chinese opposition to NATO intervention, and the consequent lack of a security council resolution. For the US to act in the teeth of international law would just be one more nail in its coffin. Sometimes if you aren’t careful, you undermine the very framework you are trying to uphold.
Finding ways to help the refugees and displaced, and to get food to half-starving neighborhoods in places like Homs, are about the best the US could do. I think we’re on the verge of having a plausible humanitarian corridor in the north, and Jordan is considering a buffer zone in the south.
It is not as if the world is stepping up on humanitarian aid in the first place; why would anybody think they will risk even more with a military role? Lets see billions in humanitarian aid flow to the Syrian people– that might sustain them for their fight against tyranny. But even that is not being done.
It is a horrible situation. It breaks our hearts every day. But here as in medicine, the first rule has to be to do no harm, to avoid making things worse. It would be very, very easy to make things worse.
Obama is a smart man who knows all the above. That is why he is reluctant to get involved in that civil war, unless it spills over onto a US ally in the region in a highly destabilizing way.
Daniel C. Kurtzer, in NYTimes – a former United States ambassador to Egypt and to Israel
Constructing an international coalition of willing states — especially Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — is the only strategically wise option for the United States. Without such a coalition, intervention won’t work. And without such a coalition, America must reject unilateral military intervention in Syria.
Town of Masreb
In the previous post – Oil Wars, – We posted video and explained how Jabhat al Nusra took revenge regime-style on the town of Masreb near Deir ez-Zor after the men of the town commandeered an oil truck that Jabhat al-Nusra claimed was theirs. Many leaders of the town were executed and some 14 houses were blown up. New video shows the return of the men to Masreb.This video shows the town with the buildings destroyed. (Thanks to A.N.)
When the Syrian uprising was in its early stages in 2011, one businessman decided to do what he could to help. Banding together with other wealthy individuals from his town, some of them based overseas, he helped a group of local fighters buy light weapons “to continue the revolution”.
After burning through tens of thousands of dollars of his own money, he was eventually forced to give up sponsoring the group towards the end of last year. His own finances were being exhausted, while the needs of his recipients had grown. “When we began there were 50-60 people, now there are 5,000 fighters,” he says. “What can we do?”
Financing from networks of well-off individuals like him, once the lifeblood of the Syrian rebellion, is starting to dry up as the conflict escalates, increasing its dependency on state-sponsored support networks. Driven into an increasingly frantic search for support, some smaller groups have formed alliances and affiliations – often short lived – with those with more secure funding.
When the revolt against Bashar al-Assad took on an armed dimension in the second half of 2011, it was a highly localised affair involving small units defending their communities with light weapons. The fact that each aspiring commander could turn to networks of expatriate businessmen for funding helped create a rebellion fractured in to little fiefdoms.
“The way the rebellion started contained the ingredients for fragmentation, and financing was a key factor,” says Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank.
Syria uprising
The brutal response by the regime of Bashar al-Assad to the popular revolt is exposing failures in international policy
But by late last year the rebels’ needs had changed. They had progressed from smaller operations that required light weapons and instead were launching offensive assaults on helicopter bases. Qatar and Saudi Arabia had meanwhile started to supply weapons. Supporting the Syrian rebellion became a big players’ game.
“It’s very expensive,” explains another individual donor, who says he too has had to cut off support for the rebels, even though he believes it is a “duty”.
Chuck Hagel, US defence secretary, said on Thursday that the US was considering providing weapons to rebel groups fighting the regime. However, he said that President Barack Obama had not yet made a decision.
Financial exhaustion is not the only reason support from individual donors has fallen. A fighter from the northern province of Idlib dates the decline in his group’s support from individual sponsors in the Gulf and elsewhere to the US’s designation in December of the extremist rebel group Jabhat al Nusra as a terrorist organisation. The idea of even accidentally helping fighters affiliated with the group was too risky for some businessmen.
Smaller groups feel the reduced contributions from individual businessmen most. The mounting pressure on them can be seen in the funding and logistics hubs of southern Turkey, where the word da’ameen – support – peppers every conversation. “They’re always telling us to wait,” grumbles one middle-aged fighter after getting off the phone from a potential supporter.
In theory, this should result in greater consolidation of rebel groups as smaller units cluster around those who have access to resources, either from captured booty, still active fundraising networks, or through the Saudi and Qatari-backed supreme military council.
The trend since the second half of last year has been towards the formation of larger alliances, said Aron Lund, a Swedish researcher.
“Right now they are with one brigade, next another. They are following the money”
But alliances and affiliations are often tenuous. Support to the rebellion is still given on a less than systematic basis. For smaller groups, the possibility of a new source of sponsorship is always just around the corner, mitigating against cohesion.
“A few battalions have several names – they have promised this or that funder they’ll be loyal to him, and then get money from somewhere else,” says Emile Hokayem.
The supreme military council itself does not seem to be getting enough support to bind people to it. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, the body’s leader, General Selim Idriss, estimated that he was receiving just one-tenth of the rebellion’s needs, citing lack of ammunition as the reason for recent defeat in the siege of the Wadi Deif military base in Idlib.
“We are with them, but not with them,” says one fighter from a small unit in Latakia describing his group’s relationship with the supreme military council. “We take from here and there.”
The businessman certainly doesn’t see any evidence of commitment among his former beneficiaries. “Right now they are with one brigade, next another,” he says. “They are following the money.”
“The Free Syrian Army has fallen prey to gangsters & fanatic thugs!” – Spectator
“… On my last trip into Syria, I met Ayat, a female activist who had worked in a Damascus bank before she turned to running guns for the revolution. In tight black jeans and sneakers, she still looked like the girl-about-town she had once been. She refused to cover up in a hijab and would not leave the room when the men arrived, however much the fighters hissed at her and told her (literally) to get back to the kitchen. Ayat was in despair about the FSA’s inability to take the capital. ‘Each group is just sitting on its weapons trying to grab what they can for themselves,’ she said. Things are getting so bad, there are even reports of rebel fighters defecting back to the government side, disgusted with the way the armed uprising has betrayed its ideals…”
Forces loyal to Syria’s leader have stormed a village in a “massacre” that has left at least 50 people dead, reports say. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said President Bashar al Assad’s troops and militias raided the coastal village of al-Baida, Syrian opposition activists say…
President Obama is preparing to send lethal weaponry to the Syrian opposition and has taken steps to assert more aggressive U.S. leadership among allies and partners seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, according to senior administration officials.
The officials said they are moving toward the shipment of arms but emphasized that they are still pursuing political negotiation. To that end, the administration has launched an effort to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin that the probable use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government — and the more direct outside intervention that could provoke — should lead him to reconsider his support of Assad….
Darrell Issa (Credit: Bloomberg)
A Republican congressman said last week that any potential U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war would be justified, in part, to protect Syria’s Christian population and preserve the region’s Christian roots.
According to Defense News, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told reporters after a classified briefing on Syria that he favors military intervention in Syria “to preserve the region that was home to Christianity’s genesis”: “
“There’s a huge US interest in the region. Our commitment to the Levante is long-standing, partially because of our relationship with Israel and with Lebanon,” Issa told a handful of reporters after leaving a classified briefing on the Syria intel assessment and possible US options.
“Partially, if you will, because of this being an area of the Holy Land,” Issa added. “The oldest churches. So much of Christianity is there.”
Economy
Syrian Pound has fallen to 150 to the dollar from its starting point of 47 in 2011.
Syrian investor Khaleel Tohmeh is on a buying spree in the Damascus stock market, pinning his hopes on a long-term recovery of a bourse that has seen about two-thirds of its capitalisation wiped out by the two-year-old civil war.
“I am finding shares very attractive at these levels and cannot find another place to put my money, even if it will be two years before I can benefit,” said Tohmeh, speaking by telephone from his Damascus office. “Whatever the timing, the market will rise much faster than it fell.”
For the last few weeks, the stock market, with a capitalisation of about $1 billion at the Syrian pound’s beaten-down exchange rate, has boomed.
Mohamed Said Idris, a former parliamentarian and an expert on Iranian affairs, said that it is clear that Egypt is moving to adopt a different position from those of Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia on how to resolve the Syrian crisis. He added, “Egypt’s vision is based on the rejection of any foreign military action to oust the regime in Damascus.”..
It should be noted that Salafists held a demonstration and surrounded the headquarters of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Cairo to reject the arrival of Iranian tourists under the pretext of preventing the “spread of Shiism” in Egypt. According to the Egyptian Tourism Ministry, the demonstration caused the “temporary” suspension of flights between the two countries.
Nafi’a said, “Egypt should prepare itself to stand up to the US, Israel and the GCC as it re-establishes its relations with Iran. … This requires a wide-ranging vision for Egypt’s regional role and its relations around the world. But that vision, unfortunately, does not exist.”
A number of diplomats are worried about Egypt’s relations with the Gulf states. Egyptian diplomatic sources said, “We have millions of Egyptians working in the Gulf countries. They represent a fourth of our budget revenues. Will Iran compensate us, at least partially, if that revenue is lost?”….
Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. (@shadihamid)
How do the risks and interests of the United States intervening in the Syrian conflict balance with the risk of doing nothing? For two perspectives, Judy Woodruff talks with Murhaf Jouejati and Joshua Landis
Responses from Listeners
Positive
________________________________________
From: Brent Bruser
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 7:09 AM
To: Landis, Joshua M.
Subject: News Hour of 4/29/13Dr Landis
I wish to thank you and applaud your brilliant, logical engagement in last night’s discussion concerning the USA’s role in Syria. It is hard for me to understand and accept the rising rhetoric for escalating our involvement. Your observations were right on and should give all Americans pause. Our President needs support to show restraint. I do not understand the media’s role in the conversation and their apparent willingness to help march us into another terrible, terrible situation, even war.
Thank you!!!!!!!!
From: G.B. Smith To:[email protected] Sent: Mon, April 29, 2013 6:22:47 PM Subject: Comments on PBS 4/29/13
Thank you very much for your progressive, correct and bold comments on the Syrian civil war made on PBS Monday evening. Your insight is more than anything I would have expected from a fellow Oklahoman; a breath of fresh air seldom felt in our reddest of red states. Keep the faith and the rightness of your thinking.
Don Speicher, Pawnee, Oklahoma
From:[email protected] Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 9:40 PM To: Landis, Joshua M. Subject: NewsHour
Another great job on the NewsHour. Thank God somebody is standing up to these Charge Card Imperialists like McCain and Graham who are insisting in getting us bogged down in another hopeless and stunningly expensive civil war in the Middle East. I thought it was apropros that after your segment, the lead story on the NewHours News Summary was the 5 car bombs in Iraq that left dozens dead. Probably 2 Trillion in real dollars pissed away on that insane war and what did we get – 5,000 dead Americans, tens of thousands terribly wounded, 100,000+ dead Iraqis, 2 million displaced Iraqis, the Muslim world infuriated at us, our allies alienated and Iran sitting in the catbird seat. Totally predictable and totally self destructive. MJS
From: Christopher Brauchli [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:45 AM To: Landis, Joshua M. Subject: Thanks
Hi Joshua: As someone who grew up in Oklahoma City but left in 1952 after high school it’s refreshing to occasionally hear a voice of reason from that state. …Your comments on the News Hour were refreshing. Some day perhaps we’ll quit thinking we can control what goes on all over the world. Chris Brauchli
From: Barry Gardner Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 7:40 AM To: Landis, Joshua M. Subject: Nice job on the NewsHour
Thanks for your comments on the PBS NewsHour. You made so much sense. ….
From: Molly O’Neal [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 7:53 AM To: Landis, Joshua M. Subject: Good and timely points
Dear Prof Landis,
In the midst of a fever rising here to choose military means to fix another middle eastern crisis, I was so happy to hear you on PBS last night explain why this is a bad idea.
Also I was happy to hear you explain that the war is not between the syrian people and the regime but rather among two large camps of syrian people, one of which loyal to the regime and the other in revolt.
Also your point that with lots of men, money and effort, we have not fixed either Iraq or Afghanistan is a telling one…
From: James Becraft Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 9:15 PM To: Landis, Joshua M. Subject: News Hour Tonight
Josh,
Absolutely right you are. Hold the line. I like the vigor of your response.
US entering this would be a great big mistake.
I’m not sure what to do, but the complexities Syro-Lebanon are far too great to really win. Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the ineptitude of the US.
Durry wrote: “While Joshua Landis was bringing Iraq and Afghanistan example repeatedly to remind the viewers of the high cost of the US involvement, I wish Murhaf Jouejati mentioned Libya’s example, that is the most likely scenario to what will happen in Syria. My dear freind Josh, your family affiliation has really clouded your objectivity in this conflict, I still respect you a lot, but I think you may need to leave the in-laws influence at home instead of bringing it on national TV.”
Bassel H. Atasi Your point of view is, sadly, very wrong, as professor Juijati said. That is a shame. You don’t have a good grasp on the reality of the situation in Syria, or Syrian history and culture. Syria and Afghanistan are 2 very different countries with different cultures and history.
You don’t have to look far to realize why @joshua_landis is a sectarian bigot.
Americans are exhibiting an isolationist streak, with majorities across party lines decidedly opposed to American intervention in North Korea or Syria right now as economic concerns continue to dwarf all other issues, according to the latest New York …
WaSHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama cautioned against a rush to judgment on whether Syria used chemical weapons against its own people on Tuesday in a sign he is going to take a deliberate approach to a problem that could lead to U.S.
WASHINGTON—Lawmakers pressed the Obama administration to intervene in Syria’s civil war, citing the regime’s alleged chemical-weapons use, as the White House weighed its response against a sobering fact: Damascus has developed a world class air-defense system.
That system, built, installed and maintained—largely in secret—by Russia’s military complex, presents a formidable deterrent as the White House draws up options for responding to a U.S. intelligence report released last week concluding that Damascus likely used chemical weapons on the battlefield.
Leading Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Sunday said they didn’t believe the U.S. should send American troops into Syria. They and the Obama administration are wary about U.S. involvement in another Middle East conflict after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some called for a no-fly zone and more humanitarian aid.
Previously undisclosed details about Syria’s antiaircraft systems outline the evolution of one of the most advanced and concentrated barriers on the planet, developed to ward off U.S. and Israeli warplanes, say U.S. intelligence and defense officials. The Obama administration only sporadically intervened to try to stop its construction, the officials say.
In White House meetings about military options for Syria, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, frequently singles out Mr. Assad’s air-defense prowess as the single biggest obstacle to U.S. intervention, according to current and former officials who participated in the briefings.
Advocates of military action believe the threat posed by Syria’s defenses is overstated by the Obama administration, in part to justify not taking action. Some have cited Israel’s successful bombing in January that targeted a suspected SA-17 antiaircraft missile shipment.
However, as Pentagon officials later learned, the Israeli planes never entered Syrian airspace.
Instead, the Israeli warplanes were flying over Lebanon when they executed what is called a “lofting” maneuver—using a sudden burst of speed and altitude to catapult a bomb across the border to the target about 10 miles inside Syria, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. account of the Israeli operation
.Israeli officials said the decision was made to bomb from nd tracked many of the upgraded systems during a period of rapid modernization after a 2007 Israeli airstrike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site. But the Americans rarely interfered, viewing Iran as the region’s larger threat and, under the Obama administration, initially pursuing improved ties with both Russia and Syria.
Obama administration officials say they raised their concerns with Moscow in their meetings even if they knew Russia was unlikely to respond.
Now, with evidence mounting that the Syrian regime has used at least small amounts of chemical weapons against opponents of President Bashar al-Assad, the consequences of policy choices from a prior decade may limit the ability of the U.S. and its allies to respond today.
President Barack Obama has sethe relative safety of Lebanese airspace for diplomatic as well as security reasons. The Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
Gen. Dempsey has told the White House that stealth aircraft and ship-based, precision-guided missiles could destroy many Syrian air-defense sites relatively quickly. But he has warned policy makers that mobile launchers would be harder to find and destroy and that their location among population centers likely would mean civilian casualties.
Officials believe any operation would also be costly and dangerous to U.S. personnel.
On Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), a sharp critic of Mr. Obama’s Syria policy, didn’t discuss those risks in arguing that the U.S. should support a no-fly zone with unmanned aircraft to protect civilians and rebels. Other lawmakers called for more humanitarian aid. “We can get in and out. That’s not the issue,” said a senior U.S. official. “The issue is can you take out the entire air defense system and keep it down. That’s just completely a different kettle of fish.”
U.S. officials were aware of Russia’s involvement a
t the use of chemical weapons as a “red line” that could trigger U.S. military involvement. Reluctant to intervene, however, the White House has called for a deeper international investigation into evidence pointing to the likelihood that Syrian forces have gassed their opponents.
“We knew the Syrians were bolstering their air defense systems. We saw this as a Syrian effort to deter Israeli incursions,” said one of the senior U.S. officials who helped oversee those efforts during Mr. Obama’s first term. “But we [the U.S.] would pay attention to it sporadically. We had to pick and choose. The main focus was Iran.”
U.S. officials believe Russia’s goal in helping Mr. Assad was to deter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from intervening in Syria as the alliance did in Libya in 2011 and in Serbia in 1998, operations Moscow opposed.
U.S. officials believe Russian technicians are on hand with many of the Syrian air-defense units, providing technical assistance. The Russians, many employees of Russian defense contractors, repair broken equipment with components imported from Russia, the officials said.
Officials at the Russian embassy in Washington said they don’t discuss military and technical cooperation with other countries. But Moscow has denied any special relationship with Mr. Assad, arguing that Russia is supporting the principle of nonintervention.
The first air-defense deals between Russia and Syria date back decades. But Russia in recent years has stepped up shipments to modernize Syria’s targeting systems and make the air defenses mobile, and therefore much more difficult for Israel—and the U.S.—to overcome.
The U.S. detected Mr. Assad was seeking major air defense expansions after a series of foreign incursions, including the 2007 Israeli bombing of a suspected nuclear site at al Kibar; the February 2008 assassination in Damascus of Imad Mugniyah, a high-ranking Hezbollah military commander; and a September 2008 car bombing that U.S. officials say targeted a Syrian military intelligence facility.
Embarrassed by Israel’s ease of access to his country, Mr. Assad plunged into an effort to procure batteries of Russian interceptors and early warning systems. He arrayed them in overlapping concentric circles in and around population centers.
According to an internal U.S. intelligence assessment, in August 2008, Russia began shipping SA-22 Pantsir-S1 units to Syria. The system, a combination surface-to-air missile and 30 mm antiaircraft gun, has a digital targeting system and is mounted on a combat vehicle, making it easy to move. Today, Syria has 36 of the vehicles, according to the U.S. assessment.
In 2009, the Russians started upgrading Syria’s outdated analog SA-3 surface-to-air missile systems, turning them into the SA-26 Pechora-2M system, which is mobile and digital, equipped with missiles with an operational range of 17 miles.
The U.S. is particularly worried about another modernized system provided by Moscow—the SA-5. With an operational range of 175 miles, SA-5 missiles could take out U.S. planes flying from Cyprus, a key NATO base that was used during Libya operations and would likely be vital in any Syrian operation.
Since March 2011, when the rebellion against Mr. Assad started, Russia has continued to support the air-defense system, providing key components and replacement parts, and sending technicians to test it, U.S. officials say.
Officials suspect one of the Pechoras shot down a Turkish reconnaissance plane last June, an incident closely studied by the U.S. and cited as evidence the system hasn’t been degraded by the conflict.
Last November, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that a flight from Russia to Syria was carrying components for the SA-17 Grizzly antiaircraft system, according to U.S. officials, who say resupply flights continue.
The Pentagon decided it could do little to stop the shipments, reflecting Washington’s shifting views of Damascus and a lack of U.S. influence with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“A major focus has been on offensive weapons, not defensive,” a senior Obama administration said of the U.S.’s approach under Mr. Obama toward arms transfers to Syria.
Defense officials worried that raising U.S.-Russian tensions over Syria could prompt Moscow to retaliate by making it harder for the U.S. to use needed air and ground routes though Russian territory to withdraw military supplies from Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials concluded it wasn’t realistic to try to block all sales of air-defense systems. Instead, they decided to target what officials called “game changers”—the systems that most threaten Israel and the U.S.
Intelligence agencies are confident the poison gas was released but are less sure about whether Bashar Assad’s regime is responsible or even whether it was deliberate.
After weeks of skepticism about reports that chemical weapons had been used, the Obama administration announced Thursday that the agencies making up the intelligence community had concluded “with varying degrees of confidence” that the Syrian regime had used sarin on a “small scale.”
Before deciding on a response, the administration said, it wants definitive proof that the regime used the poison gas. It said it would work with the United Nations and allies such as France and Britain to find the answer.
(Reuters) – Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge that Syria’s use of chemical weapons is a “game changer” for the United States, he is unlikely to turn to military options quickly and would want allies joining him in any intervention.
Possible military choices range from limited one-off missile strikes from ships – one of the less complicated scenarios – to bolder operations like carving out no-fly safe zones.
One of the most politically unpalatable possibilities envisions sending tens of thousands of U.S. forces to help secure Syrian chemical weapons…
“There’s a lot of analysis to be done before reaching any major decisions that would push U.S. policy more in the direction of military options,” a senior U.S. official told Reuters.
That caution is understandable, given the experience of Iraq ….
STRIKES, NO-FLY ZONE
One form of military intervention that could to some extent limit U.S. and allied involvement in Syria’s war would be one-off strikes on pro-Assad forces or infrastructure tied to chemical weapons use. Given Syria’s air defenses, planners may choose to fire missiles from ships at sea.
“The most proportional response (to limited chemical weapons use) would be a strike on the units responsible, whether artillery or airfields,” said Jeffrey White,…
Another option that the Pentagon has examined involves the creation, ostensibly in support of Turkey and Jordan, of humanitarian safe areas that would also be no-fly zones off limits to the Syrian air force – an option favored by lawmakers including Senator John McCain of Arizona.
This would involve taking down Syrian air defenses and destroying Syrian artillery from a certain distance beyond those zones, to protect them from incoming fire.
Advocates, including in Congress, say a safe zone inside Syria along the Turkish border, for example, would give needed space for rebels and allow the West to increase support for those anti-Assad forces it can vet.
Still, as officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have warned, once established, a safe zone would tie the United States more closely to Syria’s messy conflict. Assad would almost certainly react.
“Once you set up a military no-fly zone or safe zone, you’re on a slippery slope, mission creep and before you know it, you have boots on the ground,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.
“Or you end up like Libya where you don’t really have a control mechanism for the end-game, should you end up with chaos.”
…. leaving weapons sites vulnerable to pillaging. The U.S. fears anti-Assad Islamist rebels affiliated to al Qaeda could grab the chemical weapons but a U.S. intervention into Syria to get the arms would require tens of thousands of American troops.
Asked if he was confident the U.S. military could secure Syria’s chemical weapons stock, Dempsey told Congress: “Not as I sit here today simply because they have been moving it and the number of sites is quite numerous.”…
Without foreign military intervention or a substantial boost in military support for the rebels, the civil war in Syria will probably destroy its state and economy. This has spurred much discussion in policy circles about Syria’s postwar reconstruction and economic recovery, which could cost an estimated $80 billion. Much of it has rightly focused on reestablishing and strengthening trade, investment, and monetary stability. But focusing solely on key sectors and best practices of development neglects the role of wartime elites in postwar economies. Postwar reconstruction efforts that do not account for the economic logic of civil war and the interest groups it creates may well fail, and even lead to a resumption of fighting. Policymakers involved in building a new Syrian economy will therefore face fiendishly difficult choices.
Civil wars present unique challenges to rebuilding efforts, due to the destruction they inflict on state institutions and a country’s social fabric. Syria has already seen two years of fighting, and there is no indication of an end to the war. The collapse of government authority and services in much of the country has led to a proliferation of militias and the emergence of a war economy led by new elites. In addition to the current problems of inflation, soaring unemployment, a shortage of basic goods, and a weakening currency and financial system, economic reconstruction efforts will have to contend with troubling new realities: a vast informal economy and black market; the rise of militia leaders as business actors, rent-seekers and patronage distributors; unemployed fighters who will need to demobilize and rejoin civilian life; and rising sectarianism coloring many aspects of economic, political, and social life.
Lebanon faced many of the same challenges following the end of its own civil war (1975-1990). Fifteen years of fighting had essentially destroyed the state by the time a peace accord was signed, leading to near-total economic collapse. Significantly, the war began as a conflict between two broad political factions but, as in Syria, within a few years the number of factions and front lines multiplied exponentially. Rival militias carved out their geographic and economic spheres of influence, and many of their leaders grew exceedingly wealthy. Civil war took on an economic logic of its own.
Lebanon’s war was not fought over economic issues, but the deepening parochialism of the conflict and focus on war as a money-making enterprise certainly complicated peace efforts and postwar development. Something similar appears to be happening within the Syrian rebellion, with reports of looting by fighters. Some rebels treat private property in captured territory as spoils of war, and a mentality of plunder is taking root among militias (jihadist groups are reportedly more disciplined, but constitute a fraction of total fighters and, in any case, are not likely to play a significant role in post conflict development). Lebanon witnessed the same wartime phenomenon, and was only able to end its civil war and begin to recover economically by granting rival militia leaders a major stake in the postwar economy. This was seen as the only way to commit the civil war elites to peace and demobilization, and led to the emergence of postwar business elites closely connected to and sometimes overlapping with the political elite.
Syria’s dominance of postwar Lebanon allowed it to act as an arbiter and distributor of economic largesse to rival factions. Thus far, no one foreign actor appears ready to assume responsibility for postwar Syria. On the contrary, local militant groups fighting the same enemy (the regime) are backed by rival foreign powers, and increasingly fear and distrust one another. The absence of an overlord of sorts may complicate efforts to enforce a division of public services, jobs, and resources among militia members and supporters, and hinder economic recovery in general.
In addition to the rise of new elites from the ranks of militias, there is likely to be some continuity between pre and postwar power groups in Syria. This applies to the Sunni business class, which has been slow to turn against a regime that historically protected its commercial interests. Less obviously, it also applies to the Alawite elite: some analysts predict that a rebel victory would trigger an Alawite migration to a sectarian enclave in the northwest, leaving the cities and their lucrative economies to the Sunnis. This is one possibility of course, but not a very likely one. Elites, including or perhaps especially minority elites, seldom cede hard-won power and economic privileges easily. The Alawites share a vivid collective memory of their misery and crushing poverty in pre-Assad Syria. They will probably use any means to ensure they retain a stake in the postwar economy, in which they will almost certainly play some role. Whether this is a spoiler role—perhaps in the form of an insurgency—or a helpful one will depend on the postwar order’s ability to extend state patronage to Alawite groups….
…The only independent variable you need to understand the resilience of the Syrian regime is the kin-based and sectarian (Alawite) nature of its military. All other purported factors are in fact dependent variables. ….
Sectarianism is a powerful instrument to make sure that you can use the army’s full military might against the population. No military that is reasonably representative of the population could do what the Syrian army did over the last two years, i.e. destroying most of the country’s major cities, including large parts of the capital. You need a sectarian or ethnic divide that separates the core of the military from the target population. Algeria went through a nasty civil war in the 1990s, and Algerian generals are ruthless people, but I do not think that the Algerian military ever used heavy artillery against one of the country’s large cities. The fact that the best units in the Syrian military are largely manned with Alawite soldiers (in addition to members of some loyal Bedouin clans) has been key to explaining the level of violence we have seen over the last two years. Of course, the majority of Syrian soldiers are Sunnis, but it is striking that Asad did only use a minority of the army’s available units: according to some observers, only one third of the army was entrusted with combat missions since the start uprising. Seen from that angle, the purported “cohesion” of the Syrian army becomes much less puzzling: the risk of defections significantly decreases when two-third of the soldiers are in fact locked up in their barracks, or at least kept away from the battlefield.
A wide range of Syrian religious leaders convened in Istanbul to advance multi-religious cooperation for peace in Syria during a meeting, Syria for all Syrians. They committed themselves to the establishment of a Syrian Religions for Peace Council (RfP—Syria).
irst: Principles and Visions
A. That all religions renounce violence, corruption and the destruction of humanity and the environment. All religions advocate peace and love. All Syrians deserve to live a free, dignified and virtuous life.
B. Preserving the unity of Syria, land and people, is a national duty.
C. Syria is for all Syrians regardless of their affiliations. Syrians are united in citizenship regardless of their religion, creed, ethnicity, gender and regionalism.
D. Our commitment to moderation compels us to reject all kinds of violations, particularly those instigated by fanaticism and hatred.
E. Syria is a country of diversity. Cultural and civilizational diversity is the source of wealth for all.
F. Emphasize and nurture all commonalities in our religions that call for and nurture peaceful coexistence.
G. Valuating the role of Syrian women and actively calling to cease all forms of aggression and violence against them.
H. We condemn the crimes against the Syrian people, support the UN resolutions condemning this violence and reject all efforts to provoke sectarian violence.
SAS news: As the National Coalition prepares to establish a representative presence in Syrian territories controlled by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), opposition and independent voices alike are expressing doubts about the interim government’s ability to manage the tumultuous security situation, and in particular, guard against the regime’s aerial attacks….
Concerns about the FSA’s ability to protect the interim government were raised over the weekend as regime forces killed hundreds of people in Jdeidat al-Fadl and Artouz in Outer Damascus province. Some activists are beginning to question not only the interim government’s appraisal of the security situation in Syria, but also the strategic competence of the FSA.
“The FSA was very wrong to enter the city of Jdeidat al-Fadl,” says Ayham al-Dimasqhi, a computer engineer who is currently living in Damascus. He believes that the FSA’s apparent presence in these towns provoked the regime to attack and massacre residents, who were defenseless because FSA soldiers had actually retreated prior to the attack. “The FSA cannot protect itself,” al-Dimashqi argues, adding that this does not bode well for its ability to protect an interim government.
Echoing al-Homsi and Farzat, al-Dimashqi cites the regime’s air raids, which he believes to be a consequence of the international community’s indifference toward Syrians, as the FSA’s primary weakness against the Syrian army.
“The reason behind their failure is the air attacks,” al-Dimashqi said…..
SAS news: Syria’s Local Coordination Councils issued an impassioned statement calling on the FSA to protect civilians Monday after a government assault over the weekend in Jdeidat al-Fadl and Artouz which left up to 566 dead in the southern approaches to the capital.
GHASSAN HITTO: We are certain that this regime has used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. GHASSAN HITTO: What we need from the US is surgical strikes of all the launching pads of Scud missiles. These locations are known to the intelligence community. That’s one. We need the establishment of a no-fly zone. We need safe passages to be established so we can deliver aid to the Syrian people more effectively and more regularly. Holly Williams
Removing Assad from power, he added, will be highly beneficial for Israel from a strategic point of view, weakening Hezbollah and Iran in the process. Dagan said that Israel should not be too concerned about the potential animosity a new regime in Damascus, saying that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries will do their utmost to ensure that the successor regime is moderate.
Former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told the conference that Israel can attack Iran – and will also be able to withstand the consequences of such an attack. “We cannot allow this regime to have the bomb,” Ashkenazi said.
Obama’s Syria Dilemma
Damned if he does; damned if he doesn’t.
BY AARON DAVID MILLER | APRIL 26, 2013 – FP
….. a red line has indeed been crossed — not only in terms of Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but also in the slippery slide toward American military involvement. What Obama needs to decide is whether such military action is designed to deter the use of chemical weapons or topple the Assad regime by giving the rebels the advantages they’ve longsought — weapons, a no-fly zone, or direct U.S. military strikes against regime targets.
There’s a lot that’s murky about Syria right now, but one thing is clear. For America, a messy situation is about to get a whole lot messier.
Interview with Dr. Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm: The Syrian Revolution and the Role of the Intellectual
Translated by Nader Atassi and Ziad Dallal
January 10th 2013
Doctor Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (born in 1934 in Damascus) is one of the most important Syrian intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries…..
The revolution is a Syrian settling of old accounts and an overdue payment of bills that were the result of Syrian silence and cowardice.
The popular Intifada in Syria seeks restoration of the republic through the toppling of the old hereditary regime that is worn-out in all its institutions, and to establish an alternative system of governance
Yes, I fear political Islam, before and after the fall of the regime.
In our culture and society there exists ample elements of authoritarianism, criminality, paternalism and vendetta, that make the reformulation of a despotic regime, in one form or another, a likely and formidable possibility, which calls for extreme caution and utter vigilance.
Syria’s “Wretched of the Earth” are participating in a revolution against a government, a party, and an authoritarian financial-military junta, and against a “nationalist” leadership of divine eternality.
If the revolution brings us somehow to the ballot boxes, then I will be a satisfied citizen.
Among the characteristics of secularism and democracy is that they provide a neutral ground for the meeting of the various religious doctrines and beliefs that are exclusionary by nature, allowing them to interact in the public space, the national arena, and the political landscape.
Syrian media-activists and comedians joined to produce a full length cinema film in English language – to be screened on Torronto Wold Film Festival September 2013 – a black comedy:
Posted by Matthew Barber on Saturday, April 27th, 2013
By Matthew Barber and the Syria Video team
This long post contains the following sections:
The Defectors Defect
Will EU Oil Purchases Finance al-Qaida?
Al-Musareb: Al-Nusra Punishes a Village Regime-Style
Syrian Taliban
The Opposition’s Ambivalent Response to al-Nusra’s Affiliation with al-Qaida (and the Plan to Introduce an Alternative Islamic Law in Syria)
Jabhat al-Nusra is Now an Iraq-to-Lebanon Phenomenon
Conclusion: Outsiders Reevaluate Their Positions as it Becomes Easier for the Regime to Sell Itself
The Defectors Defect
A Lebanese acquaintance of Dr. Landis wrote in an email about the recent experience of his Syrian natoor (a worker at an apartment building functioning like a cross between a guard, concierge, and janitor):
I’m now in Beirut at my mother’s. The natoor of our building, Riyadh, is from Hassaka. He’s been our natoor for 6 years.
He just got back yesterday from Haasaka after visiting his folks.
On my last trip here in December, he was 100% anti-regime and his two brothers were fighters with FSA. He told me at the time that Assad must go, he is not good for Syria and his cousin Rami ripped off the country. He came to Lebanon after his military service because Assad and his family destroyed Syria.
That was December 2012. He is now 100% pro regime. His two brothers surrendered to the Syrian army and gave up their $500 a month [FSA] salary (he makes here $250/month).
He said the FSA and Nusra are thieves and robbers – much worse than the regime. They quit after seeing how the FSA (their direct commander was an Afghani) was ripping off and selling everything to Turkey. They sold 4 years worth of huntaa [wheat] for 600 SYP a shewal (no idea what a shewal is, but ya3ni) whereas it’s worth 6,000 SYP. They dismantled whole bakeries, small factories, cables, he swore even faucets were ripped out and shipped to Turkey.
His trip from Beirut to Tadmor was relatively safe, he said. But from Tadmor to Hassaka, there is a Nusra roadblock every few kilometers. At each roadblock, heavily armed men, faces completely covered, get up to the bus and shout “Allahu Akbar.” They wait for the passengers to shout back the same while these men lock their eyes trying to figure out if someone is saying Allahu Akbar back according to their standards. He said I know “Ibn baladi” [locals of the area]. None of these thugs are Ibn baladi.
Women, if any, must be completely covered for the roadblock – head to toe like a trash bag. The driver usually tells all women that they must have black burqas with them before they get on the bus.
Anyway, he said “yashodu allah ya ustaz that Bashar is now in our hearts and minds”:
He said, we let Bashar down (???? ??????? ? ?????? ). And in doing so we let Syria down.
Riyadh is here now to pack his things and go back to Syria to fight with the Syrian army (????). I said how many people are feeling like you in Hasakaa, he said many – all his ??? [a term for family commonly used by Bedouins and Arabs of tribal affiliation]. He is 36 years old. Went to hajj twice. He’s Muslim Sunni.
I asked him what about the Christians in Hasakaa, he said they all left. Only the very weak and poor are left behind, but they are ok.
The FSA ripped off the power plant, dismantled all equipments, generators, transformers, even under ground cables were ripped out and were sold to a turkey.
He said this is not a fight for Assad, this is a fight for Syria.
Such an account looks almost engineered to tickle the ears of regime supporters, but it is real. It obviously, however, cannot reflect the experience of someone whose community has undergone direct bombardment from the regime. Those who have contributed to this long fight or have lived through the airstrikes and massacres of so many towns and villages would not suddenly make a political turnabout and say “we let Bashar down.” Such a statement will appear as the height of absurdity to a great number of Syrians, and even we find it almost bewildering. But it does reflect the feelings of some communities that have become disillusioned with rebel control, or have felt that “you rebels brought the fight to our neighborhood,” a sentiment we’ve seen crop up often.
It reflects the dilemma expressed by the writer of the email: “Syrians today have clarity in the choices being offered: the regime, version 2.0; or a Salafi Islamic Banana Republic. My relatives, friends, and many Syrians I know who were staunch anti-regime revolutionaries early on are privately rethinking their position. It’s almost impossible for Syrians to admit defeat or mistakes (it’s related to some strange DNA mutation I will tell you about later!), but it’s not hard to see where a Sufi Syria would end up given these two distinct choices. The revolution is now proving to be incompatible with the hearts and minds of the Syrian masses.”
Regardless of the degree to which that last statement can be said to be true for various segments of the Syrian population, disillusionment has prompted even some who have been engaged at the forefront of the struggle against the regime to abandon the revolution. The situation alluded to above (the selling off of Syrian assets to Turkey) is a real problem that ultimately drove the head of the Farouq Brigades in Deir Ezzor, Yussef ‘Alke, to resign as leader, leave the Brigades, and declare the revolution a corrupt sham. In a recent statement he laid out 5 reasons for his departure:
That the trajectory of the revolution in Deir Ezzor has deviated from the right path and transformed [into a campaign of] acquiring wealth
That some leaders of the Farouq Brigade, in partnership with other brigades undertook the sale of the tools and equipment from the warehouses of sugar mills without our knowledge or agreement
The failure of the Revolutionary or Military Council or any subsidiary of the join leadership to support us, even with a single bullet, knowing that the everything that comes in the way of support from these groups goes to particular persons with a blind allegiance to the leaders of these councils
The new emergence of the old phenomenon of bloc formation, partisanship, and allegiances to foreign parties which people are forced to follow or face elimination, as has recently become clear
The lack of seriousness on the part of any party responsible for the Free Syrian Army or its supporters in the fight against the regime in Deir Ezzor—instead the main concern was, and still is, making financial deals with the regime
‘Alke gave just one example of destructive economic opportunism to occur in his local area (that of the sugar mill). A commodity that has been intensely fought over recently in several areas is wheat. A feud erupted in Tal Hamis (Hasakeh) over the right to distribute wheat between the FSA 313th Division and Ahrar al-Sham who attacked the FSA positions and took over the grain silos. Another scandal took place in al-Shadadi where the elected head of the Local Council was accused of appropriating wheat to sell it for his own profit. But the hottest affair of all is oil.
By Opening Oil Exports, Will the EU be Financing al-Qaida?
Where Syrian oil went before the sanctions – source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
Though the war seems far from over, the fight over oil has begun.
The European Union on Monday lifted its oil embargo on Syria to provide more economic support to the forces fighting to oust President Bashar Assad’s regime.
The decision will allow for crude exports from rebel-held territory, the import of oil and gas production technology, and investments in the Syrian oil industry, the EU said in a statement.
… Being able to take advantage of the country’s oil resources will help the Syrian uprising ‘‘big time,’’ said Osama Kadi, a senior member of the Syrian opposition. While the security situation remains a challenge, getting the oil flowing will be a top priority for the Syrian interim government expected to be formed by the end of the month, added Kadi, who is an economic adviser to the opposition Syrian National Coalition.
‘‘We are really hoping that Turkish companies will help in terms of importing and exporting the oil, because we need some refineries to get our diesel to run all our generators, to run our hospitals, and we need diesel in large amounts,’’ he said in Istanbul.
Opening up oil to help the rebels seems a little strange, since much of the territory that produces the oil is under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra. These areas are already experiencing conflict as various parties vie for control over oil.
Columns of black smoke rise from several points along the road in part of northern Syria. Here the smoke is not a sign of airstrikes but of crude oil being processed in makeshift refineries.
“People started doing it about one year ago but at that time we didn’t know how to,” says Ahmad, a 35-year-old farmer-turned-refiner. “We got the knowledge from someone from around here who had learned in Saudi Arabia,” he says, standing next to a big metal tank containing crude oil.
… Their tank has a capacity of 1,000 liters, though they only make it two-thirds full at a time because the refining process requires air, they say. A fire is lit underneath to heat the tank, eventually boiling the crude, and producing thick black smoke. As the crude boils, various products run off through two tubes which are cooled as they pass underwater through three ponds and then into a container that collects the resulting products. What comes out first, the brothers term “cooking gas,” which they simply allow to escape. Next comes petrol, then kerosene used in stoves, then diesel fuel. The pair call the final product “fat” and either add it back into the fire under the tank, or occasionally mix it with the diesel for use in some “heavy vehicles.” This process is a crude form of the fractional distillation process used at oil refineries around the world, and has proved profitable for the brothers.
Boiling and refining a tank takes them about four hours, and they estimate they make a 50-60 percent profit on each barrel, selling the products to locals. “Business is good,” Ahmad says smiling, his face and hands blackened by the smoke.
The brothers are unlikely to win any health and safety awards. Neither wears gloves nor protective gear, and Abdullah smokes a cigarette on the job. “It’s OK as long as you are not right next to the benzene [petrol],” he says matter-of-factly. “We haven’t had any [health] problem, nothing will happen to us,” he adds with a grin.
The brothers get their raw material from the Deir al-Zor countryside, driving two and a half hours in their truck to purchase oil barrels from middlemen or those in control of the oil fields: local tribes and the jihadist Nusra Front.
Nusra got involved in the oil business about six months ago, they say. “Nusra are operating in both lines, business and fighting,” Ahmad says.
… Ahmad says he’s not a fan of the Nusra Front, buying from them only out of necessity. Rebel brigades “Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, they are very good guys, but we don’t like Nusra,” he says.
The brothers buy crude about three times a week, picking up nine barrels a time. “Each well has a different price, depending on the quality of its oil,” Ahmad says. One 2,200-liter barrel runs from 500 to 10,000 Syrian pounds, approximately $5-$1000, but the cheapest barrels only yield about 50 liters of refined products, they say.
Local tribes first began controlling oil fields in the Deir al-Zor countryside about a year ago. … “When these tribes discovered the oil wells, the revolution in Deir al-Zor was over, they used to be poor and it went from revolution to oil industry.”
Deir al-Zor contains the largest energy reserves in Syria, which produced some 420,000 barrels of oil a day before the United States and the European Union banned the import of Syrian petroleum in 2011.
Oil and Gas Fields and Pipelines in Syria – Source: Tri-Ocean Energy
The current enterprise of oil in Syria is a dangerous business. It takes different forms in various regions, but it can involve the puncturing of pipelines to steal oil, smuggling, tremendous pollution, significant health hazards and physical danger, and the risk of armed disputes and localized political conflict over the product.
Here are several videos dealing with the process. This one features commentary lamenting the state of the oil business in the area: a bus (possibly a school bus) is used to transport oil, the roads and ground are covered in oil to the extent that people can no longer drive quickly on the road surface, even for urgent matters; this one shows oil shooting out of the ground with truck lined up to collect.
The following video from Deir Ezzor presents the enormous pollution problem. Men can be seen taking oil from pits filled with oil by breaking a pipeline. One such pit is shown burning; apparently when disputes arise as to who has claim to oil, it is sometimes set on fire so that no one has benefit from it. The gist of the commentator’s observation is: “As if the chemical attacks of the regime weren’t enough, now we have face the health threat of fumes arising from the illegal extraction of crude oil which is later refined in the north and then sold, by thieves who consider themselves part of the revolution, creating a lot of health and environmental hazards, including cancer.”
After being collected, refining the oil is another endeavor proving that necessity is the mother of invention. The following interesting videos show the refining process outdoors in: al-Safira (SE of Aleppo), Daret ‘Izza, again al-Safirah; and indoor refining in Ras al-Ain, Hasakeh.
Refining the oil is hazardous; in the above video, children can be seen working with the oil, and there have been reports of children being burnt to death while working to process oil. This video shows the aftermath of an explosion claiming the lives of those harvesting the oil. The commentary in the video says to the effect of: this is a message to opportunistic people, those who run after money, death is the end of all who covet. The bodies on the ground have been completely burnt, leaving skeletons. The tajwid playing in the background is of a sura that talks about visiting graveyards and seeing hellfire. The message seems to be that they were in the wrong for taking oil that wasn’t theirs, but who exactly does the oil belong to?
General Idriss (who has remained on the sidelines through the conflict) has placed a new request for a force of 30,000 troops, not to fight the regime but to control Syria’s oil fields. Syrian rebels seek control over oilfields – FT
… According to activists, however, many of those oilfields are now under the control of Jabhat al-Nusrah, the al-Qaeda-linked rebel group. General Selim Idriss, the western-backed head of the Supreme Military Council, told the Financial Times he wanted to assemble a 30,000-strong force of military defectors to secure oilfields, grain silos and cotton stocks, as well as crossing points on the Turkish and Iraqi borders.
Now that oil is on the table, it’s no wonder there’s a bigger push to get an interim government functioning. AP:
The Syrian opposition will not be able to sell its crude oil for at least another month due to a lack of real executive power, even though the EU has eased an embargo to help them, a prominent member of the Syrian National Council said on Monday.
… However, the opposition still does not have a provisional government to oversee possible sales as the coalition must still receive and then approve a proposal for a potential new leadership. “Without an interim government, nothing can be done now,” Osama Al-Qadi, general director of the Syrian economic task force under the umbrella of the opposition’s coalition told Reuters.
“By the end of the month, an interim government proposal will be submitted to the coalition for approval.” The Syrian National Council is a large Muslim Brotherhood-influenced bloc within the opposition group called the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces. Once an interim government is appointed, he expected governmental agreements to be pursued. “Then we will sign some agreements with neighboring countries to buy our crude, like Turkey,” he said. Meanwhile, the coalition has no control over crude oil that is already leaving the country by truck from the north east. “We consider this smuggling…”
Turkish Opposition Burn NATO Flag – AP
Oil and other goods (much of it looted) are already being sold off in Turkey, as mentioned by this article and in anecdotal accounts like that of the Natoor at the beginning of the post. The selling of Syria to Turkey is a serious problem, and a lot of inquiry could be pursued as to who is profiting in southern Turkey. The tragic consequences of these new economic opportunities emerging in lawless, rebel-held areas are examined in the next section.
Al-Musareb: Al-Nusra Punishes a Village Regime-Style
The results of the new game for oil have played out tragically in the village of al-Musareb, a village near Deir Ezzor, which experienced terror and destruction in an attack from Jabhat al-Nusra following a dispute over rights to oil that turned violent. The incident seems to be part of a larger conflict for power in the area between al-Nusra and local tribes. Information is scant on this situation; a Saudi source reported on it as well as a Reuters Arabic article based on a report from SOHR. In addition to these, we piece the story together based on video clips originating from pro-Nusra sources and articles on facebook pages (1, 2) belonging to a fighter group called Fawj Seif al-Rasul (“the Sword of the Prophet Regiment,” apparently made up of men from the village of al-Musareb) that was in conflict with al-Nusra. There are certainly more sides to this story yet to be told.
The story begins with this video in which men are fighting over a large truck full of oil. The truck is being fought over by men from the al-Saf tribe, and men from Jabhat al-Nusra. Supposedly, the truck was first stolen by thieves who later sold it to a man from the village of al-Musareb (who may or may not have known that it was stolen). Apparently, when the original owner learned that truck had wound up in the possession of an individual from al-Musareb, he appealed to al-Nusra to come to his aid. When the Nusra fighters arrived, however, they found themselves to be outnumbered by armed tribesmen.
The man with the brown hat in that video was the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra in this area, a Saudi named Qasura al-Jazrawi. There are two versions of the story at this point: al-Nusra claims that al-Jazrawi and his forces had to retreat because the tribesmen were more powerful, a few days after which the tribe invited Jabhat al-Nusra to lunch (presumably for negotiations), which turned out to be a bitter meal for al-Jazrawi, who ended up getting killed. The Seif al-Rasul rebels maintain that when al-Jazrawi and his men from al-Nusra came to deal with the problem of the oil truck, they did so aggressively with intimidation, threatening men with their guns. Because the confrontation was hostile, the tribesmen took the al-Nusra men prisoner, after which one of them tried to detonate explosives, at which point he was killed by the men of al-Musareb. This either led to the killing of al-Jazrawi directly, now viewed as a source of threat to the village, or to his killing after he tried to escape. In either case, young men are seen kicking al-Jazrawi’s body around (we see a lot of videos from Syria of people kicking dead bodies…) in the video of the aftermath.
After this, the “Hay al-Shari’a for the Deir Ezzor Countryside” issued a statement warning people of the area against “tying their fate to that of the killers whose hands have been tainted by the shedding of the blood of martyrs.” The speaker tells them that it is urgent that they leave the village (al-Musareb) that very night, claiming that other tribes and fighting groups are declaring war on the al-Saf tribe. He also claims that the village was being supported by the regime. He warns the men, women, children, and elderly who had no part in the killing to leave that village immediately because the mujahideen are coming.
Next, the elders of the al-Saf tribe and Saif al-Rasul issued a statement condemning the “criminal act” but saying that it is against their tradition to hand members of their tribe over to those outside the village for trial. They say that they will hand over vehicles and weapons, but urge them not to harm the innocent.
Following this, Jabhat al-Nusra plays detective, concluding that those in the video issuing the statement are the guilty party, based on the hand-jewelry worn by one of the men which appears to be the same as one in the video of the desecration of al-Jazrawi’s body.
The elders issue a second statement, the gist of which is: We condemn those people who killed the man, and their blood is “majdour” [according to Islam they become a legal target for killing to exact revenge], but only outside the village. We don’t agree that you enter the village. He quotes an ayah from the Qur’an and tells them that “we are on the same side.” (It is interesting how such exchanges are being conducted via uploaded video.)
The next footage we have is of al-Nusra’s attack on the village. They actually film their convoy setting out on the offensive, camera positioned at a series of road curves, apparently to accentuate the vehicles’ performance and evoke a sense of the heroic, set to one of the stirring jihadi anthems typical for such videos. After this sequence, we see the fighters holding blind-folded prisoners inside the village. But Nusra’s revenge is exacted on more than individuals: at just before 3:00 into the video we see the beginning of their demolition campaign, in which explosives are used to destroy homes. We see a total of 12 houses blown up in the remainder of the video, followed by footage of the aftermath, eerily resembling similar scenes in villages bombed by the regime. Narration informs us that one of the houses had belonged to the son of the mukhtar (mayor).
One claim was the al-Musareb was a center for thieves after the breakdown of security. The fighters of al-Nusra obtained a fatwa from the Hay al-Sharia that they could break into the homes of those suspected of stealing or killing, and if they are not present they can destroy the home. More aftermath videos show fire (either set inside homes or the result of explosives). One video claims that al-Nusra fighters stole from the home before destroying it. Narration in another aftermath video shows the destruction of a house claimed to have been owned by the mukhtar himself.
[Thanks to Heather Jenkins for pointing out that the photo we initially inserted here was misattributed to the al-Musareb case by the source we took it from, and was actually from a separate incident.]
Another video shows the fighters herding the prisoners which the video description refers to as the “killers of Qasura.” As the Nusra fighter is marching the prisoners along he introduces those conducting the operation as “the champions of al-Nusra and the Syrian Taliban movement.” This reference to the “Syrian Taliban” generated confused responses on the part of those commenting on YouTube, upon which the uploader posted a comment in reply saying that the fighter was merely “speaking spontaneously.” We do not see the final fate of the prisoners.
Jabhat al-Nusra’s attack led to the displacement of the people of the village, as well as the refugee population that had already fled other areas and taken refuge in al-Musareb. One report said that 14 houses were destroyed, another put the number as high as 30. The death toll was placed at near 50; a number of the Nusra fighters killed were Saudi and Tunisian, according to SOHR. One video showed a man claiming he’d been shot by a Nusra sniper.
The order of events is not clear, but it may be that at some point (after al-Jazrawi was killed?) tribesmen from the area gathered together and attacked the salt mine which had been al-Nusra’s headquarters, to try and eliminate their presence once and for all. Seif al-Rasul claims that the regime bombed the mine, leading to al-Nusra’s accusations that al-Musareb was working with the regime. We hear numerous statements in the videos from al-Nusra fighters referring to the men of al-Musareb as “shabiha.” Another aftermath video narrated by a Nusra fighter states that the village was “liberated from shabiha and the opportunists of the revolution.” It seems clear that the entire episode was the culmination of a long period of tension between al-Nusra and the locals, who had resisted al-Nusra’s ambition to gain control over the greater area of the countryside. The tribe had not welcomed Nusra’s interference in their lives nor allowed them to speak during the Friday prayers.
Though al-Nusra accused the people of the village of working with the regime, the locals expressed a different sentiment. The fighter group Seif al-Rasul posted videos from their village showing the effects of attacks from both the regime and al-Nusra. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Despite the accusations of being “shabiha,” the Seif al-Rasul fighters pointed out that they had participated in the Raqqa offensive that took the city from regime control. This group also posted videos purporting to show them in the siege of Raqqa, taking over checkpoints and helping people defect.
Introducing the Syrian Taliban
Though the above al-Nusra source attempts to downplay the mentioning of a group calling themselves the “Taliban,” it is now clear that there is a group operating within Syria, claiming to be the Taliban. We have found three videos in each of which the use of this name by the rebel group is self-declared. It is also clear that this group participated with Jabhat al-Nusra in the campaign on al-Musareb.
The following video shows the Taliban and al-Nusra roughly questioning a terrified prisoner in al-Musareb, who they accuse of having weapons of the regime. (Don’t rebels regularly use weapons taken from regime ammunition depots and overrun bases?) One appears to be carrying a stun baton. One tells him “I’m going to slaughter you, you animal.” Another tells him, “say the shahada,” (something Muslims believe will bring favor from God if said just prior to dying) “and may God have mercy on you.” It looks like we’re seeing the last moments of the young man’s life, but the video doesn’t include the execution; the last we see of the prisoner, he is blindfolded and placed in a vehicle.
In all three videos, members of the group refer to it as the “Islamic Taliban Movement.”
The following video contains the group’s statement of purpose:
The Opposition’s Ambivalent Response to al-Nusra’s Affiliation with al-Qaida, and the Plan to Introduce an Alternative Islamic Law
The proliferation of such groups has been a growing problem in Syria for some time, climaxing with the recent declaration of an Islamic state on the part of Jabhat al-Nusra, putting the opposition in an uncomfortable position. The revelation of sibling-hood between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida in Iraq was condemned in statements issued by some rebel groups (including Islamist ones). For example, Abu Basir al-Tartusi, a Syrian Salafist ideologue for Islamism in the revolution (mentioned in Aron Lund’s reports), took issue with the decision in a statement containing the following 7 points:
Jabhat al- Nusra didn’t consult with other sheikhs and scholars in the Levant (conflicting with Qur’anic sura “al-Shura” 38) before making the announcement
Assad will be the primary beneficiary of this development
The rebels will be spread thin by making new enemies to fight
Because of the announcement, the Syrian revolution will now be associated with all of the previous and future mistakes of al-Qaida in Iraq
This announcement will hurt the project of the Muslim Syrian People, which is the creation of a free and just Islamic Syrian state that has institutions, because it will give the US, China, India, and Russia more reasons to interfere in internal Syrian matters
The announcement will result in a lack of assistance for refugees and people in need of humanitarian aid; plus, aid to rebels will stop
“I hope that this announcement is not the beginning of the shedding of haram blood, on the basis of whoever opposes this announcement being killed” [he doesn’t want to see people who disagree with the announcement getting killed for their position. He also mentions “sahawaat” ??????? (referring to the tribes that the US empowered in Iraq to beat al-Qaida), i.e. he doesn’t want al-Nusra to start treating groups not aligned with them like ISI treated the sahawaat] “to repeat the failed case of Iraq”
Al-Tartusi’s reasons for disapproving of the statement seem to have little to do with any moral objection to the ideology and tactics of al-Qaida, but are rather based on utilitarian considerations. Nevertheless, it is a great irony that Islamists such as al-Tartusi can be more outspoken with their criticism of Jabhat al-Nusra than can Syria’s official opposition. The National Coalition issued its own statement following the Nusra/ISI announcements, denouncing (with very unspecific language) “all positions that stand in the way of Syrian freedom and that do not align with the will of the people.” It went on: “The Syrian Coalition is deeply concerned about recent statements regarding the affiliations and ideologies of particular factions of the rebel forces. We find it imperative to respond to these statements. The Syrian Coalition urges Jabhat al Nusra to stay within the ranks of nationalistic Syrians, to continue its efforts in fighting the Assad regime, and in supporting and protecting the freedom of all Syrian sects.”
Rather than express discomfort regarding the fact that al-Nusra’s leadership openly revealed that it was birthed by al-Qaida in Iraq (that was responsible for a high level of deliberately-sectarian violence and violence against minorities), the statement then maintains its opposition to the designation of al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, serving more as a defense of the front than a condemnation of its ideology. That the recent announcements of al-Qaida affiliation were accompanied by statements to the effect that “after so much struggle and sacrifice, we shouldn’t settle for the second-rate option of a democracy,” it is highly ironic that the National Coalition could urge Nusra to remain “within the ranks of nationalistic Syrians.”
They never were within those ranks.
The ambivalence in the opposition’s relationship with Nusra—a group they both need but whose positions they cannot accept—is illustrated in a statement issued by the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union saying “We are proud of our jabhat al nusra mujaheeden brothers, and we protect their back as well as the backs of all the fighters on the fronts of struggle and jihad against the the dictator bashar al assad, but we refuse the pledge of allegiance that the jabhat made to skeikh alzawahiri.” It seems that Jabhat al-Nusra made this pledge, and its refusal on the part of others will not mean much.
Photo: Cihan, Ali Ünal
Following the announcement of al-Nusra’s affiliation with al-Qaida, Mu’az al-Khatib attempted to rationalize al-Nusra’s role in the revolution by claiming that al-Qaida in Iraq is more than one organization, apparently suggesting that Nusra is associated with the “real mujahids” who basically don’t exist anymore: Khatib says Syrians reject ideas of al-Qaeda, stresses moderate Islam – Today’s Zaman
Noting that al-Qaeda in Iraq can be divided into three groups, Khatib said: “The first group is composed of real mujahids [fighters] and most of those are liquidated. And the two other groups are affiliated with Syrian and Iranian intelligence. I ask my brothers [in the Nusra front] to change their name and speak about the love of God through good words.”
Also coming after al-Nusra’s declaration of an Islamic state, al-Khatib unveiled a project to introduce “a moderate form of Islamic law in all rebel-held areas of the country.” This clearly appears to be a reactionary attempt to maintain some say over the process of forming a legal system in a context where something called “Islamic law” is increasingly proving to be the most popular (or at least most successful) form of governance in areas under rebel control. Since al-Nusra and other extreme groups are the ones currently defining Islamic law for these areas, the political opposition probably feels forced into acting now to start promoting an “alternative shari’a” that will be less extreme, but still sell-able to the Islamists operating in Syria.
The main opposition to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad will begin establishing what it calls a moderate form of Islamic law in all rebel-held areas of the country, as part of an effort to prevent chaos and stop hardline interpretations of Islam from becoming entrenched.
The legal code was drawn up by Muslim scholars, judges and top anti-Assad politicians in advance of meetings this week in Istanbul convened by the Syrian National Council (SNC), where transitional justice arrangements are being discussed.The opposition hopes that an interim government, as yet unformed, will apply a version of the new legal system nationwide, after it goes into effect in areas currently controlled by the insurgents.
Different systems of Sharia now govern pockets of Syrian territory controlled by the rebels. Some are enforced by Jabhat Al Nusra, a militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda, prompting fears that its interpretation of Islamic law is filling the legal vacuum.
Despite it’s apparent necessity vis-a-vis the current activities of hardliners on the ground, the project nonetheless seems to place the opposition in the camp of those advocating an “Islamic state,” and not everyone is happy about this:
… the proposed rebel Sharia system seems likely to upset some in religious minority groups and secular Syrians, both pro and anti-regime. “We’ve not gone through all the trouble of a revolution to have an Islamic state,” said a secular activist familiar with the plans. However he stressed there are different forms of Sharia, and that if moderate it would be widely accepted. “As long as they’re not talking about turning Syria into Afghanistan under the Taliban it will be probably be okay,” he said…. Exactly what type of Sharia will be chosen by the rebel government remains to be seen. Respected moderate clerics, including Osama and Saria Rifai, popular Damascus imams who spoke publicly against Mr Al Assad, have been involved in drafting early proposals. So too has the Association of Syrian Scholars, which encompasses clerics close to the Muslim Brotherhood.George Sabra, vice president of the SNC and a Christian, has backed the new legal code, saying it will ensure equal rights. Haitham Al Maleh, a former judge, has also been involved in the drafting process.
… According to the documents, people accused of crimes will not be afforded a lawyer. Instead, their case will be heard by a trained judge – the ranks of rebels include many magistrates who have defected from the regime. These judges will determine guilt or innocence and then, in conjunction with an Islamic legal expert, they will hand down a punishment.Major decisions, especially cases involving the death penalty, will be reviewed by a higher committee of Islamic judges.The judicial system is to be based on the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, a widely followed Islamic legal framework, but experts in the three principle other schools – Shafi’i, Hanbali and Maliki – also will be attached to the courts, with Muslim defendants allowed to choose judgment according to their own beliefs.
The move will likely be welcomed by the Muslim Brotherhood-oriented SNC who would be advocating such an Islamic legal framework. The Muslim Brotherhood is now making their grand return after decades of exile: Exiled Muslim Brotherhood plans return to Syria – FT
The Muslim Brotherhood is set to open offices inside Syria for the first time since the organisation was crushed there decades ago, in an apparent effort to capitalise on the increasingly Islamised rebellion.
Riad al-Shaqfa, the movement’s exiled leader, said in an interview with the Financial Times that a decision was recently taken to revive organisational structures inside Syria and followers have been asked to start opening party offices in rebel-held areas.
In a war-battered suburb of Damascus, a commander for one of the smaller nationalist brigades fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad grumbles about the lack of ammunition for his men. He blames Qatar, saying the state directs its backing to rebels with a more Islamist ideology.
Qatar has emerged as one of the strongest international backers of the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar Assad… But its role has also caused tensions within the ranks of the highly fragmented rebellion and political opposition. Some rebel brigades complain they are left out in the cold from the flow of money and weapons, sparking rivalries between secular and Islamist groups. Fighters and opposition activists worry that Qatar is buying outsized influence in post-Assad Syria and giving a boost to Islamist-minded groups if the regime falls.
“Qatar is working to establish an Islamic state in Syria,” Abu Ziad, the commander of a brigade in the Damascus suburb, said sullenly…
A 13-year-old boy from Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria was shot dead in his father’s car after a hit-and-run road accident in March. The incident would have led to a series of revenge killings between two major tribes in the region, except that this was forestalled by a newly-formed Sharia court there. As that case demonstrates, the absence of functioning state institutions means that Sharia courts are increasingly necessary as a tool to solve disputes in rebel-held areas of Syria.
That is why this week’s announcement by the Syrian opposition, that it will establish a moderate form of Sharia, is extremely important and timely. The increased incidence of rigid rulings in rebel-held areas is largely a result of the lack of such a model. Many moderate voices have been waiting for the conflict to end, leaving the more enthusiastic hard-line fighters to establish their own vision of Sharia.
… At the Istanbul meeting Moaz Al Khatib, the head of the opposition’s National Coalition, told of a Sharia court that had executed a woman after finding her guilty of adultery. Mr Al Khatib’s point was that the ruling had violated true Islamic law since hudud, the Islamic penal code, cannot be applied during wars or in the absence of a state or ruler.
Whether or not this will come to fruition is unknown, now that Khatib has resigned (for the second time) from the National Coalition. (Syria opposition names George Sabra interim chief) It may be pursued by other members of the Coalition.
Jabhat al-Nusra is Now an Iraq-to-Lebanon Phenomenon
On the same day that American attention was focused on the bombing at the Boston Marathon, Iraq experienced its deadliest day in a month. A significant number of people were killed by bombs around the country by what’s being called “a resurgent al-Qaida in Iraq” empowered by al-Nusra: Iraq attacks kill 55 less than a week before vote
Insurgents in Iraq deployed a series of car bombs as part of highly coordinated attacks that cut across a wide swath of the country Monday, killing at least 55 on the deadliest day in nearly a month. The assault bore the hallmarks of a resurgent al-Qaida in Iraq and appeared aimed at sowing fear days before the first elections since U.S. troops withdrew. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but coordinated attacks are a favorite tactic of al-Qaida’s Iraq branch.
Iraqi officials believe the insurgent group is growing stronger and increasingly coordinating with allies fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad across the border. They say rising lawlessness on the Syria-Iraq frontier and cross-border cooperation with a Syrian group, the Nusra Front, has improved the militants’ supply of weapons and foreign fighters.
The intensifying violence, some of it related to the provincial elections scheduled for Saturday, is worrying for Iraqi officials and Baghdad-based diplomats alike. At least 14 candidates have been killed in recent weeks, including one slain in an apparent ambush Sunday. … Monday’s attacks — most of them car bombings — were unusually broad in scope…
An Iraqi army military vehicle burns near a demonstration site in Ramadi, Iraq – AP Photo
Iraqi Sunnis have been protesting against the government for four months now, in what many have compared to “Arab Spring” protests. The mobilization of Sunnis around the country (including the use of arms) and the Iraqi crackdown on the protests are starting to resemble a “Syria-style uprising.”
Gun battles erupted in cities with Sunni majorities across Iraq on Tuesday after security forces from the Shiite-led government stormed a Sunni protest encampment in a village near the northern city of Kirkuk. The clashes left dozens dead and wounded, and raised fears that the sectarian civil war that is roiling Syria might spill into Iraq.
… you will have been monitoring the situation in Iraq today, after a raid by government troops on a protest camp in Hawjiah resulted in about 30 killed and dozens more wounded. The protesters were Sunnis who had been camped out for demonstrations against the Maliki government for some weeks. The incident sparked an angry reaction in Anbar, Samarra, Mosul, and some other Sunni cities. 13 armed men were killed when they launched revenge attacks against ISF checkpoints. A crowd attacked an ISF convoy in Anbar and burned several vehicles (no casualties). Three Sunni mosques were attacked in Baghdad, with dozens killed and wounded. Current death toll stands at 56 according to the AP.
Political response has been fairly vehement. Two Sunni ministers resigned their posts, one of them from Saleh Mutlaq’s party and the other from Osama Nujaifi’s party. When asked what his community’s response would be, Ahmed Abu Risha (the Awakening leader from Ramadi) said that ultimately Maliki would be tried and hanged for ordering today’s massacre just as Saddam had been hanged for ordering the 1982 massacre in Dujail. … Two [other Sunni leaders] have called on Sunnis to defend themselves using force if necessary. PM Maliki has announced the opening of an investigation to find out who is to blame for the violence. The Ministry of Defense claims many of the killed and wounded protesters were Al Qaeda members, to which Abu Risha replied by asking, “Since when did Al Qaeda engage in demonstrations?” Meanwhile, Iraqiyah sources tell me they believe the raid was ordered by PM Maliki and carried out by General Ali Ghaidan, the Iraqi Ground Forces Commander (I’ve no other corroboration for this), and they also believe PM Maliki targeted the relatively small Hawijah protest camp in order to send a message to other larger protest groups. The timing of the raid, just three days after elections, would seem to lend itself to that interpretation, but on the other hand there have been many instances of Iraqi troops getting into sticky situations and winding up in big gun battles that they did not intend to be in (e.g., Basra 2008), so there is always room for miscalculation as an explanation.
The 25th:
The body of a gunman killed during clashes with Iraqi security forces lies on the ground in Hawija – AP Photo
… in the 4+ years since 2008, I have not seen the situation in Iraq closer to a return to civil war than it is right now. Those of you who have been in northern Iraq and remember the violent fault lines there will recognize the seriousness of a report that tells us that 40 people were killed in Mosul in fighting between gunmen and Iraqi troops. I have not seen that kind of thing happen in Ninewa since 2007. Equally disturbing are the reports telling us that in a carryover from the violence in Hawijah earlier this week, gunmen have taken over Suleiman Beg near Tuz Khormato, the Jebel Hamrin area between Kirkuk and Diyala–another flashpoint that for years was an insurgent safe haven. The situation is close to spinning out of control. AQI and the Naqshbandis are certainly playing a role in this, but the most dangerous aspect is that it is not merely the Sunni extremists who are moving toward revolt: it is the Sunni center as well. It seems as though the long-running political dispute, coupled with the government’s recent heavy handedness, together with the fallout of the Syrian conflict, have finally led the Awakening movement and the northern tribes back into armed resistance. That’s the way it looks from my desk, anyway.
Many factors are responsible for what’s happening in Iraq, but a number of articles have discussed al-Nusra’s role in reinvigorating Sunni Islamist activities there. Moving to Lebanon, the recent period has shown a tremendous upsurge in Sunni Islamist and Salafi activity, aggravated by the Syrian situation and the sectarian context of areas along the Lebanese-Syrian border. This has culminated in the last few days with fatwas calling for jihad on the part of Lebanese Sunni clerics (in northern Tripoli, and in southern Saida) in support of Syrian Sunnis currently embattled in al-Qusayr, a Syrian city just east of the border of northern Lebanon. There is growing evidence of Hezbollah involvement in supporting the side of regime loyalists in Qusayr (though SOHR has suggested that those who have joined the fight are not necessarily crossing borders but are merely Shiites from the local area; however, a number of funerals for fallen Hezbollah fighters have recently taken place inside Lebanon, after bodies have been sent back from Syria). Hezbollah has said they have a “moral duty to defend Lebanese residents from Syrian rebels following the Beirut government’s failure to protect border villages…” (some villages have experienced shelling from the Syrian side). In response to this, the Sunni Lebanese clerics have attacked Hezbollah and called for a jihad in Qusayr, encouraging Sunnis to go fight in Qusayr on the side of the Sunnis/Syrian opposition (and claiming that they have already sent Sunni fighters who are currently fighting there). This means that Sunni and Shi’i Lebanese are currently fighting each other, inside Syria. Fighting in al-Qusayr is ongoing as the regime and the opposition vie for control.
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Update: we removed a video that was misattributed to Tripoli by the uploader, who seems to have mistaken “Jarablos” for “Tarablos.” Thanks to @Syrian_Scenes for alerting us.
Reports on Jabhat al-Nusra in Lebanon have begun appearing recently. This new article (in Arabic) from a Lebanese newspaper discusses a government security report detailing the foothold that al-Nusra has developed within the country so far. It discusses their structure and way of operating in Lebanon, listing among their bases: ‘Arsal (200 members), Tripoli (600 members), Akkar (300 members), Saida (250 members). The article says they are particularly thriving in poor, volatile neighborhoods and camps, and that they are targeting young people for membership. The Tripoli base is being led by Hossam al-Sabagh who the article links to bin Laden. An article in the Daily Star says more about Nusra’s development in Lebanon:
The latest statement released by Jabhat al-Nusra threatening to launch harsh strikes against Hezbollah, in Beirut in the city’s southern suburb and across Lebanon, is being taken seriously at the national security level and by Hezbollah. It can no longer be denied that Jabhat al-Nusra has found fertile ground in the Palestinian refugee camps in the country, among the nearly one million Syrian refugees there, as well as in Lebanese Sunni areas, especially in ??northern Lebanon near the Syrian border.
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As sectarian tensions erupt in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, we are seeing a high level of Sunni jihadist mobilization against governmental and Shi’i targets. Of course, this Sunni mobilization is about a number of factors and Jabhat al-Nusra is just one piece of a greater whole (though an important piece), but what is clear is that the Syrian conflict has helped ignite a broader trend of jihadism and Salafi activism, and the accompanying destabilization has given Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida, and other groups a new level of space within which to operate and grow.
For more on what’s happening in al-Anbar and the al-Nusra connection, see this helpful report from Linda Lavender; see another report from her on the situation in the Bekka Valley.
Conclusion: Outsiders Reevaluate Their Positions as it Becomes Easier for the Regime to Sell Itself
The beginning of this post dealt with the phenomenon—perhaps widespread, probably not—of Syrians abandoning the revolution. Although the return to Assad’s ranks may be rare, disillusionment with the opposition is not. Fragmentation, factionalism, and chaos are now the law of the land, as ordinary Syrians now face a moral universe that offers up only shades of gray. The problem of the ascendance of extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra is chiefly responsible for the soul-searching being done by those now wondering which will be the lesser of two evil futures.
The reality of growing disillusionment with the revolution and the rebels is a very uncomfortable station on this journey, for many both inside and outside Syria. How can it be possible to suddenly decide the regime is an ally? A corrupt, selfish, and brutal regime was largely responsible for this descent into chaos in the first place. This regime has no moral capital; its massacres continue. And yet, as many of its doomsday predictions come true, the troubling question is: how many of its battles are being fought against extremist movements that would be opposed by the government of any nation?
This post explored several topics involving the role of Jabhat al-Nusra, which now enables al-Qaida-aligned jihadi groups to operate from Iraq to Lebanon. Anxious lest the US become a tacit ally of al-Qaida, the administration proscribed Jabhat al-Nusra. At the time, many policy makers thought this was premature and unwise, and the charge was leveled that Obama lacked leadership. But in retrospect, the prescience of this decision is becoming clear, and it continues to raise the question of what positive role the United States can play in this conflict.
Radicalization is not the result of Washington’s refusal to intervene or Obama’s “lack of leadership.” Rather, it is the result of Syria’s national breakdown. The U.S. could not have prevented Syria’s civil war or its profound identity crisis. In Iraq, the U.S. took out Saddam’s regime in 3 short weeks, dissolving both the army and the Ba’ath party. But despite a swiftly-implemented intervention, the U.S. was not able to prevent Iraq’s descent into sectarian civil war and radicalization. These were the result of a contest over the state’s basic identity, a question that has never had a cohesive answer since the alien framework of the nation state was imposed on the region.
Washington analysts who have been forecasting the demise of al-Qaida following the death of Bin Laden must reconsider. Al-Qaida is not dead; the one we knew in Afghanistan may be significantly degraded, but a potent new al-Qaida incarnation is emerging, one that is much closer to establishing its conception of Islamist rule in the heart of the Middle East.
This phenomenon is one aspect of the Syrian regime’s battle. They wanted the battle to be about this, rather than a crackdown on a peaceful protest movement, in order to legitimize their claim to continued power. The rise of Nusra helps to frame the regime in the light of an indispensable defense against extremism, and it is quick to point this out to anyone listening.
Because of the regime’s many crimes and atrocities throughout this conflict (not to mention its previous decades of oppression), it has been easy to ignore its one-sided narrative since the beginning of the uprising. Nevertheless, many of its predictions have come to fruition. We are so used to outrageous propaganda in this conflict that when two archbishops were kidnapped in Aleppo, the announcement from regime sources that Chechens were involved prompted me to laugh out loud, as I assumed it was a ploy to exploit the sympathies of those currently focused on the Boston bombing. But it turned out that they were telling the truth.
The regime’s primary message to the international community from the beginning was: if you oppose us and weaken our stabilizing control here, extreme Salfisim will wash across the region. That their predictions are coming truer every day spells their own demise while simultaneously vindicating (or at least demonstrating the soundness of) their original position. Claims that al-Nusra and similar groups were engineered by the regime in order to improve its position as indispensable guardian of stability seem farfetched, but still, the more the uprising becomes characterized by extremism, the sounder the credibility of the regime appears.
The Syrian regime is now working hard to convince the international community see things its way. The new maneuvering space enjoyed by al-Qaida and Salafi militias is prompting some reporters and not a few policy analysts to begin reevaluating support for the revolution, or at least to begin considering the perspective of Damascus a little more, as the following articles demonstrate.
The dilemma is summarized thus: Our sympathies lie with the aspirations of those freedom-seeking Syrians who oppose their corrupt, cruel, and despotic regime, and simultaneously the West and that regime are fighting on the same side in the war on terror.
The international community’s relationship with the conflict becomes complicated as outsiders begin to see two enemies inside Syria: the Assad regime and al-Qaida:
Senior Obama administration officials have caught some lawmakers and allies by surprise in recent weeks with an amended approach to Syria: They don’t want an outright rebel military victory right now because they believe, in the words of one senior official, that the “good guys” may not come out on top.
Administration officials fear that with Islamists tied to al Qaeda increasingly dominating the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad , too swift a rebel victory would undercut hopes for finding a diplomatic solution, according to current and former officials. It would also shatter national institutions along with what remains of civil order, these people say, increasing the danger that Syrian chemical weapons will be used or transferred to terrorists.
This assessment complicates the White House’s long-standing push to see President Assad step from power. It also puts a spotlight on the U.S.’s cautious approach to helping the opposition, much to the frustration of U.S. allies including France and the U.K., which want to arm Syria’s moderate rebels.
… “We all want Assad to fall tomorrow, but a wholesale institutional turnover overnight doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” a senior U.S. official said. “The end game requires a very careful calibration that doesn’t tip the meter in an unintended way toward groups that could produce the kind of post-Assad Syria that we aren’t looking for.”
… The U.S. administration considers Syria’s conflict a war of attrition, however, and believes that the rebels are gradually gaining the upper hand, an assessment the administration doesn’t believe Mr. Assad accepts. Officials say it will require delicate maneuvering to restrain the influence of radicals while buying time to strengthen moderate rebels who Western governments hope will assume national leadership if Mr. Assad can be persuaded to leave.
… The U.S. also wants to keep technocratic elements of the state in place, seeking to avoid a repeat of what happened in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Then, civil authority evaporated after the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi military.
The U.S. fears that the abrupt collapse of the Assad regime will lead to Syria’s Balkanization, threatening North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Turkey, key partner Jordan as well as neighboring Iraq, whose government looks increasingly fragile, according to a senior defense official. …
… But several current and former officials briefed on these calibrated efforts to bolster moderate rebels without strengthening the Islamists said the U.S. doesn’t have the influence to precisely control the flow of aid.
“This is like Goldilocks, but I don’t think we live in a world in which we have porridge that’s just right,” said a U.S. official familiar with the new approach.
Just how complicated is the Syrian conflict, Goldilocks? Chew on this porridge:
Syria Is Complicated — Simultaneous Conflicts Always Are – The war in Syria is so enduring and vexing precisely because it is such a multi-layered conflict, comprising at least six separate battles taking place at the same time, arguesRami G. Khouri
The easiest way to describe the events in that region has been to speak of Sunni-Shiite fighting, or antagonisms between pro- and anti-Syrian government elements. The involvement of Hizbullah adds a significant new element to the mix, and also helps to clarify what the fighting in and near Syria is all about. It is much more than merely “spillover” of the Syrian war into Lebanon. I have previously described the war in Syria as the greatest proxy battle of our age, and I believe that is now clearer than ever as we see how Syria comprises a rich and expansive web of other conflicts that play themselves out on a local, regional and global scale.
The war in Syria is so enduring and vexing precisely because it is such a multi-layered conflict, comprising at least six separate battles taking place at the same time:
1. The domestic citizen revolt against the Assad family regime that has ruled Syria for 43 years is the first layer of the Syrian conflict, which reflects a widespread spirit of citizen activism for freedom, rights and dignity that continues to define much of the Arab World today. After the non-violent demonstrations that erupted across the country in spring 2011 elicited a violent military response from the regime, this political conflict quickly became a militarized war.
2. This armed battle for control of Syria reignited the second layer of conflict that has defined the region since the 1950s — the Arab cold war between assorted regional forces that keep shifting over time, but can most easily be described as conservative vs. radical, or capitalist vs. socialist, or royalist vs. republican, or Islamo-monarchist vs. Arab nationalist, or pro-Western vs. anti-Western, though none of these simplistic black-and-white dichotomies is fully accurate. At its simplest, this Arab cold war for decades has been led on one side by Saudi Arabia and its conservative allies, and on the other by governments such as those in Syria, Egypt or Iraq at various moments.
3. The third layer of conflict in Syria is the old Iranian-Arab rivalry, recently also often defined as Shiite-Sunni rivalry. This is symbolized by the Iranian government’s alliance with Syria since 1979, and recently including the close structural ties between Iran and Hizbullah (or, more accurately, the ties between Hizbullah and the institution of the Wilayet el-Faqih, or the Supreme Leader, in Iran). Iran’s strategic links with both Syria and Hizbullah have been among the few foreign policy achievements of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, so the Iranian, Syrian and Hizbullah leaderships will battle hard to maintain those mutual benefits that all of them derive from their relationships.
4. The fourth battle taking place in Syria is the renewed but more limited version of the Cold War between the United States and Russia (with other players like China and assorted European states hanging around to pick up energy contracts and other gains). At its simplest, this renewed Son of Cold War sees Russia taking a determined stand in Syria to prevent the United States from unilaterally deciding which Arab leaders go and which ones stay, while also burnishing its renewed credentials as a global power. Almost a quarter century after the end of the original Cold War, Russia is trying to recalibrate global power relations, formally closing the “post-Cold War” era in which the USA was the world’s sole superpower in a uni-polar world.
5. The fifth conflict in Syria — like the domestic citizen revolt against autocracy that reflects a regional trend — is the century-long tension between the power of the centralized modern Arab developmental and security state and the forces of disintegration and fragmentation along ethnic, religious, sectarian, national and tribal lines. These sub-national, ancient and primordial identities defined our societies long before the imposition of the modern Arab state, and are always there to reaffirm themselves when that state fails to function efficiently and meet citizen needs.
6. The sixth and most recent strain of conflict in Syria is between the forces of Al-Qaeda-inspired Salafist fanatic militants, like Jabhat el-Nusra, and mainstream opposition groups fighting to overthrow the Assad family regime, like the Muslim Brotherhood or broader, more secular groups, like the Syrian National Opposition Coalition or Council. Hysteria has typically gripped some analysts in the region and in the West today as they fret over the prospect of Nusra and others like them taking control of all or parts of post-Assad Syria — an impossible prospect, in my view.
So what we witness in and around Syria is a lot more complicated than spillover into neighboring countries or Sunni-Shiite rivalry.
… The Syrian war is a challenging problem for strategic foresight and warning because, besides the humanitarian disaster, the risks to regional and global peace and stability continuously increase, because the conflict is redrawing the strategic outlook of the region while participating into the global paradigm shift, and, finally, because the fog of war makes our anticipatory task more difficult and complex.
… We are facing three – related – sets of problems. First, we must deal with the war itself, where three, four or five types of Syrian actors and their “international backers” – or even more according to typologies, as we shall discuss below – and not two, fight for power. Second, we must prepare for the following peace while, third, evaluating and considering the still being redesigned strategic environment.
… We are faced with cognitive biases, or more specifically with the problem of enduring cognitive models in the face of new evidence, when the initial model was created early and with very few available evidence (Anderson, Lepper, and Ross, 1980). The tendency of our human brain to also overestimate “intentional centralized direction and planning” (Heuer, chapter 11, bias 2) is also probably at play. …
A Pan-Syrian dialogue may begin in the near future, a representative of the Popular Front for Change and Liberation in Syria, Qadri Jamil, said after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “Whereas before the idea of a dialogue was purely theoretical, now there is every chance of translating it into reality,” Jamil said…
“Now we are discussing the details of the opportunity for coming to the negotiating table – what oppositional factions will be participating, the agenda, and how quickly that may be done,” he said. Asked by Itar-Tass if there was a possibility such consultations might take place before the summer, he replied that there was no chance of setting firm dates in politics. “But we can hope this may happen in the foreseeable future,” Jamil said. “Several months and, possibly, even weeks is the likely deadline.”
When President Obama welcomes the leader of Qatar to the White House on Tuesday, he will doubtless thank the Qataris for hosting a major U.S. air base in the Persian Gulf, and for their help on a wide range of strategic issues from Libya to Afghanistan. But he is also likely to press Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to ensure that none of the weapons Qatar is sending to Syrian rebels end up with the Jabhat al-Nusra…
The last remaining Christian church in Deir Azzor was destroyed in an explosion by armed groups as they intensify their efforts to take the city and nearby airport. In recent days increasing amounts of footage have been uploaded documenting intense fighting between armed groups and the Syrian army. The Capuchin Franciscans have been present in Deir Ezzor in the northeast and Al-Suwayda in the southwest – in a place called “Mountain of the Druze (Jabal al-Druze)”. Two friars remained in Deir Ezzor up until the recent explosion at the church, with the help of the Lebanese and Syrian International Red Cross.
In a statement posted on the website of The Order of Friars Minor, a report of the explosion said:
“There was an explosion near our church in Deir Ezzor that destroyed it,” writes Br. Antoine Haddad, Viceprovincial Minister of Lebanon, in a message to us. The news was picked up by the media because the two Capuchin friars who lived there, with the help of the Lebanese and Syrian International Red Cross, and the nuncios of Lebanon and Syria, left with the Sisters of Mother Teresa and about ten seniors who lived in our place. They were the last remaining Christians in the area to leave. The church was completely destroyed, but until now it was not possible to know if the friary was hit or not, because there are no longer any Christians in Deir Ezzor, apart from one who returned because he lived in the ‘quieter’ area of the city….
Israeli buffer zone inside Syria considered by Netanyahu
Buffer Zones have become the topic de jour in Washington DC. For some time, the language used in the White House to frame the Syria problem has been that of containment. Here are some of the oft repeated phrases I have been hearing from White House insiders:
“Keep the violence inside Syria
“Cauterize”
“Prepare for Syrian failure”
“Shore up the neighbors”
“There are no good guys in Syria”
This gloomy assessment of the prospects for Syria has created a cottage industry of policy proposals from Washington think tanks that appropriate White House language and focus on containment. They present possible plans for limiting the destabilization of the region and for shoring up weaker countries, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq.
And for building “buffer zones” to ensure that the “Las Vegas rules” apply to Syria: that what takes place in Syria stays in Syria.
Here is Dennis Ross of WINEP on buffer zones: U.S. Policy Toward Syria, Dennis Ross, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 11, 2013
….[A] requirement of our policy now is to hedge against the disintegration of Syria. I often say that the Las Vegas rules don’t apply to Syria; what takes place in Syria won’t stay there. Without making the fragmentation of the country a self – fulfilling prophecy, we need a containment strategy. Much of the opposition is highly localized. We need to think about how buffers can be built up at least in southern Syria, along part of the Syrian/Iraqi border and in the north. Investing in local governance — as part of a coherent design with the British, French, Saudis, Emirates, Jordanians, Turks and others — may be a way to hedge against the unknowns of the future and build the stake of those in Syria to stay put and shape their own future. I don’t suggest that devising a containment strategy will be easy, but we have an interest in doing so and many of our allies, particularly those in the Gulf, do as well. And, the Saudis and Emiratis certainly understand this.
Ross proposes a buffer zone along the Jordanian border. He also earges the establishment of buffers along the Turkish border (already created by Patriot Missiles if they are used against Syrian aircraft) and a Kurdish buffer along the Iraq border. But the focus of his attention is the Jordan border and also presumably protecting the Occupied Golan and Israel from possible attacks by al-Qaida or militias with an anti-Israeli animus.
Ross in a recent talk expressed the hope that Saudi Arabia might be willing to fund such a militia which would serve to protect the monarchy in Jordan, a Saudi interest. The US could help train it.
David Pollock, also of WINEP, responded to Ross with Syria’s Forgotten Front in the The New York Times on April 16, 2013.
To keep yet another Syrian frontier from spiraling downward, Washington should urge Israel and the mainstream Syrian opposition to focus on keeping Hizballah and jihadist groups away from the border.
As the civil war in Syria rages on, the risk that Israel will be drawn into the fray is rising…. The risk that Israeli retaliation for cross-border fire could spiral into a major skirmish, or even a larger Israeli intervention to set up a buffer zone in Syria, is real. To prevent it, the United States should broker a tacit agreement between Israel and moderate elements of the Syrian opposition.
Israel and the Syrian opposition don’t have much in common, but they do share some important mutual enemies, namely Hezbollah and Iran, both of which are fighting furiously to save Bashar al-Assad’s government.
This convergence of interests provides an opening for America to quietly strike a deal between Israel and the leadership of the Syrian opposition: Israel should agree to refrain from arming proxies inside Syria to protect its border; and the Syrian opposition should work to keep extremist groups like Hezbollah and Jabhat al-Nusra and other affiliates of Al Qaeda far away from the Israeli frontier. This would demonstrate the Syrian opposition’s bona fides to potential Western supporters and dissuade Israel from intervening or arming allies in Syria.
He goes on to argue that if Israel built a buffer zone inside Syria with a proxy force to protect the Golan , it could backfire as “happened in Lebanon, with disastrous long-term consequences, beginning in the late 1970s when Israel invaded southern Lebanon and set up the South Lebanon Army to protect its border before staging a second, larger invasion in 1982. The result was the creation of Hezbollah, with Iranian support, to “liberate” south Lebanon — a threat that remains today.”
The problem with buffer zones is that they could lead to the dismemberment of Syria. What is more, Obama seems to have little taste for such involvement in Syrian. He seems to believe that they would lead to mission creep.
The refugee burden that Syria’s neighbors are shouldering is heavy and should not be borne alone. But keeping people fleeing for their lives in buffer zones inside Syrian borders risks trapping rather than protecting them.
Yet this is precisely what President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon proposed on April 4, joining others such as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, who made a similar call in November 2011, and Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour of Jordan, who spoke in January of securing “safe havens” inside Syrian territory, saying of potential new refugee flows, “We will stop them and keep them in their country.”
It appears that steps are being taken to create such border zones. The United States is working with Jordanian authorities to train Syrian opposition forces in what may be an attempt to set up a buffer zone on the southern border of Syria for defectors from the army and displaced civilians….
It seems quite clear that all of Syria’s neighbors have an interest in creating buffer zones in Syria, particularly if someone else will pay for them and if the US will help manage them. This is not a solution that will be attractive to either the US or Syria.
In responding to the growing security crisis emanating from Syria, Jordan finds itself caught between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council, with the U.S. insisting on restraint in Syria and the GCC pushing hard to tip the military balance against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Jordan’s King Abdullah must negotiate these competing forces to manage what he sees as an imminent threat in Syria.
BEIRUT (AP) — After watching much of Syria’s territory slip into rebel hands, President Bashar Assad’s regime is focusing on the basics: shoring up its hold on Damascus and the strip of land connecting the capital with the Mediterranean coast.
In the past week, government troops have overrun villages near the Lebanese border and suburbs of Damascus, including two districts west of the capital where activists say regime forces killed more than 100 people. The advances have improved the regime’s footing in strategic areas that are seen as crucial to its survival.
In many ways, Assad’s government has little choice at this point in the civil war, analysts say. Rebels have captured much of northern and eastern Syria, seizing control of military bases, hydroelectric dams, border crossings and even a provincial capital. Those areas are home to most of the country’s oil fields, and the losses have deprived the regime of badly needed cash and fuel for its war machine.
But those provinces — Raqqa, Hassakeh and Deir el-Zoura — are located hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the capital. Rebel advances there pose no direct threat to the regime’s hold on Damascus — the ultimate prize in the civil war — and any effort to claw back the lost territory would demand manpower and military hardware, neither of which the regime is inclined to invest at the moment.
Instead, it has used its remaining airbases and military outposts in those areas to shell and bomb the territory it has lost in an attempt to forestall the opposition from establishing an interim administration in the rebel-held regions.
“What’s important for the regime is not to leave any buffer zone, or any security zone for the rebels,” said Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese army general who heads the Middle East Center for Studies and Political Research in Beirut.
While keeping the rebels off-balance in the lands it has lost, the regime at the same time has dedicated its resources to Damascus and securing what it widely believed to be Assad’s Plan B — a retreat to the Mediterranean coastal region that is the heartland of his Alawite minority, which views its own survival as being tightly intertwined with that of the regime.
Key to that strategy is control of the corridor running from Damascus to the city of Homs and from there to the coast.
ISTANBUL // The main opposition to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad will begin establishing what it calls a moderate form of Islamic law in all rebel-held areas of the country, as part of an effort to prevent chaos and stop hardline interpretations of Islam from becoming entrenched.
The legal code was drawn up by Muslim scholars, judges and top anti-Assad politicians in advance of meetings this week in Istanbul convened by the Syrian National Council (SNC), where transitional justice arrangements are being discussed.
The opposition hopes that an interim government, as yet unformed, will apply a version of the new legal system nationwide, after it goes into effect in areas currently controlled by the insurgents.
Different systems of Sharia now govern pockets of Syrian territory controlled by the rebels. Some are enforced by Jabhat Al Nusra, a militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda, prompting fears that its interpretation of Islamic law is filling the legal vacuum.
Launching the initiative on Monday, Moaz Al Khatib, president of the SNC and himself a widely respected Islamic cleric, appealed for a moderate, fair legal system, which would meet demands for justice and head off the growing influence of extremists.
“I want to talk frankly. When there is injustice, there is a revolution against that injustice. In the same way there should be a revolution in religious thought,” he said.
“The goal of religion is to liberate human beings, all of the prophets came to liberate the people.”
Extremists, including groups such as Al Nusra, one of the most powerful rebel factions, should not be allowed to spread their ideas, Mr Al Khatib said.
“We do not need ignorant people coming to Syria and teaching us the meaning of religion,” he said, chiding members of Al Nusra for trying to enforce an uncompromising version of Islam on a country with traditions of greater religious tolerance.
“Some in Al Nusra have told women they must wear hijab and that is not right, if you want to preach, do it well, you can talk, you cannot command, there is no compulsion in Islam,” he said.
Al-Hayyat In this article the author argues that the “Sunni majority” is a made up Baathi concept. Sunnis do not form a solid block united by similar views. He does a good job in listing the different groups within that “majority”. The whole point of the article is to suggest that offering guarantees to the minorities in Syria is not the Sunnis job because the Sunni community itself is a group of minorities with conflicting views. [Tuesday, April 16, 2013]
Israel has a rare chance to build a U.S.-coordinated alliance with the pragmatic Sunni Muslim states that have emerged from the Arab Spring – but the new coalition’s lack of political will is likely to block this happening.
… Egypt and other new Islamic regimes in the Arab world have continued to support the Saudi/Arab peace initiative, while the Palestinian issue has gained great interest and solidarity among the Muslim masses, notably amongst militant groups. Simultaneously hatred for Israel and for Jews continues to increase among many Arabs and Muslims, because of the continued occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, especially of East Jerusalem with its Muslim holy shrines.
Consequently it is in Israel’s vital interest to neutralize or decrease this negative sentiment while improving its image and position among moderate/pragmatic Muslim groups and governments. These goals can be achieved by accepting the Arab peace initiative and renewing the peace process with the Palestinians. Such crucial steps are likely to facilitate Israel’s potential alliance with Sunni Muslim states, notably Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf Emirates, vis-à-vis the common hazard emanating from Iran and its allies – Lebanese Hezbollah and the Alawi government in Syria.
Such an alliance must be coordinated by the U.S. with the tacit, gradual participation of Israel – provided Israel makes substantial progress in the peace negotiations with the Palestinians and simultaneously accepts the Arab Peace initiative. Alas, as during his previous government, the Netanyahu’s current cabinet is unlikely to assume such a pragmatic policy.
A significant change may occur only under U.S. pressure and with a reshuffle of the Israeli government, namely replacing Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party with the Labor party (and perhaps also Shas). The chances for this happening are slim; it is far more likely that Israel will continue to aggravate and intensify its regional and international isolation.
Mr Netanyahu, in an exclusive interview with the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, said Israel’s concern was “which rebels and which weapons?”
“The main arms of concern to us are the arms that are already in Syria – these are anti-aircraft weapons, these are chemical weapons and other very, very dangerous weapons that could be game changers,” he said.
“They will change the conditions, the balance of power in the Middle East. They could present a terrorist threat on a worldwide scale. It is definitely our interest to defend ourselves, but we also think it is in the interest of other countries.”
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retains only a “tenuous hold” on power after two years of armed strife as opposition forces have grown more effective, according to the Pentagon’s top military intelligence official.
Assad’s government “maintains the military advantage — particularly in firepower and air superiority,” and his inner circle “appears to be largely cohesive,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn said in testimony prepared for delivery later today to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Still, the government “continues to struggle with defections, morale problems and an overall inability to decisively defeat the opposition,” Flynn said in the remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. He also said the Syrian military “is likely stretched thin by constant operations.”…
Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who testified with him, if Obama had asked the Pentagon to recommend how to apply “any additional military pressure” on the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.
“We’ve had national security staff meetings at which we’ve been asked to brief the options, but we haven’t been asked for a recommendation,” Dempsey said.
“We’ve not been asked,” Hagel said. “As I said, I’ve not been asked by the president.”
DEMPSEY: Well, at the time the … we felt like we had a clear enough understanding of the moderate opposition. And we felt as though it was in the long-term interest of Syria as a nation-state that the institutions wouldn’t fail and that the time was proper at that moment to intervene that way. … My military judgment is that now that we have seen the emergence of Al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham notably, and now that we have seen photographs of some of the weapons that is have been flowing into Syria in the hands of those groups, now I am more concerned than I was before.
On April 14, 2013, regime forces broke the 6-month siege of the Wadi al-Deif and Hamidiya military compounds outside of Maarat al-Numan, putting the rebel opposition in the area on the defensive and reestablishing overland supply lines to the bases. [i] The regime is now able to redistribute its military forces in the north, particularly its airpower which was tied up running dangerous supply drops to the troops besieged in the two bases, and engage the opposition for control of the Aleppo-Damascus highway. Although this new development will impact military operations in the northern provinces for both sides, it also highlights the military deficiencies that exist among the opposition groups and the continued capabilities of the regime. Although the regime has given up territory to the opposition, it has largely done so by choice to consolidate forces in more strategic locations, and it retains the ability to seize the strategic advantage when the opportunity presents itself……
President Bashar Al Assad warned on Wednesday the West that it will pay a heavy price for its alleged support of Al Qaeda in Syria and said his regime’s defeat is not an option….
Maamoun Abdul-Karim, director general of antiquities and museums uncovered a dangerous crime against Syria and its history. The systematic looting of Syrian antiquities by Turkish, Lebanese and Iraqi artifacts merchants with the help of FSA groups.
Recently 300 unauthorized digging operations (holes) were discovered in Dura-Europos.
Maamoun Abdul-Karim pointed out that this illegal digging to steal antiquities have also compromised the underground structure of the whole site. 50 similar holes were found in Mari. This is endangering the whole Syrian historical heritage, a heritage that belongs to the whole world not only Syria.
Both sites are being systematically looted and vandalized by the FSA, professional thieves & criminals, and foreign artifacts merchants. FSA threatened the locals with death if they dared interfere.
The Syrian military, whether it admits it or not – and I’m not happy with the replies I got from Syrian officers on the subject last week – work with the shabiha (or “village defenders” as one soldier called them), who are a murderous, largely Alawite rabble who have slaughtered hundreds of Sunni civilians. Maybe the International Court in the Hague will one day name Syrian soldiers responsible for such crimes – be sure they won’t touch the West’s warriors – but it will be impossible for the Syrian army to write the shabiha out of the history of their war against the “terrorists”, “armed groups”, Free Syria Army and al-Qa’ida.
The attempted disconnect has already begun. Syrian troops are fighting at the request of their people to defend their country. The shabiha have nothing to do with them. And I have to say – and no, yet again, I am not comparing Bashar with Hitler or the Syrian conflict with the Second World War – that the German Wehrmacht tried to play the same narrative game in 1944 and 1945 and, then, in a much bigger way, in post-war Europe. The disciplined lads of the Wehrmacht never indulged in war crimes or genocide against the Jews in Russia, Ukraine or the Baltic states or Poland or Yugoslavia. No, it was those damned SS criminals or the Einsatzgruppen or the Ukrainian militia or the Lithuanian paramilitary police or the proto-Nazi Ustashe who besmirched the good name of Germany. Bulls***, of course, though German historians who set out to prove the criminality of the Wehrmacht still face abuse.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his growing fears of weapons falling into the wrong hands in Syria, and stressed “we are prepared to defend ourselves if the need arises.”
REUTERS/Benoit Tessier Western nations have “hard evidence” that chemical weapons have been used at least once by the Syrian army, diplomats told Agence France-Presse. “In one case we have hard evidence,” a western diplomat said. “There are several …
BEIRUT (AP) — President Bashar Assad has exploited his greatest advantage in the Syrian civil war — his air power — to push back rebel advances and prevent the opposition from setting up a rival government in its northern stronghold…..
While the air force is an important tool in Assad’s battle for survival, it’s not his last one, said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.
“It’s the 3 million Alawites who believe that they will be ethnically cleansed by the opposition if the rebels overthrow Assad,” Landis said. “It’s because of the fear of those who could come after him that has spread around Syrian minority communities in the past year of the revolution, that many — including Sunnis — continue fighting on the regime’s side.”
In their campaign against the opposition, the Syrians have been using helicopters, MiG jets and trainer aircraft to hit targets daily in the north, the east, the south and in rebel strongholds on the edges of the capital of Damascus.
“The aim of the airstrikes appears to be to terrorize civilians from the air, particularly in the opposition-controlled areas where they would otherwise be fairly safe from any effects of fighting,” Ole Solvang of Human Rights Watch told The Associated Press….
……Joshua Landis, who directs the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, sees Syria turning into an arena for a ‘Sunni-Shiite showdown,’ of potentially ‘apocalyptic’ proportions.
“Syria means a lot to Islamists [salafists],” Landis said. “Iraq for them has not been successful. The U.S. is still hunting and killing militants in Afghanistan and Yemen, but Syria presents a completely different possibility where the potential gains for them are real.”
Proxy wars
They have their sights set on removing Syria from Iran’s orb of Shiite influence and reasserting Sunni Muslim control over the country.
Moreover, the salafists and the West are seeking the same initial objective in Syria: the fall of the Assad regime. But what is hoped for afterward is radically different. Some believe the West and secular rebels want to see democracy flourish after decades of dictatorial rule, while militants say they will fight for the establishment of an Islamic state governed by ‘sharia’ or Islamic law.
“The fall of Assad would be a tremendous blow to Hezbollah, Iraq and Iran. The stakes are high even for the Sunni Muslims and jihadists,” Landis said.
He said jihadists from Sunni areas of Iraq and as far afield as Chechnya are flocking to Syria to fight. The same can be said for Shiites. Landis points to the upsurge in funerals of Hezbollah, Iraqi and Iranian fighters as one indication of the numbers of foreign Shiite fighters involved in the conflict. “It’s gaining pace,” he said.
A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army rebels, Loay al-Mikdad, claims that Hezbollah has expanded its operations over the past two months, mostly in central Homs province near the Lebanese border, and in Damascus, where Assad’s grip on the capital is weakening and more military defections are feared.
Hezbollah’s role in Syria is crucial, said Torbjorn Soltvedt, at the British risk analysis firm, Maplecroft, because it is more adept at fighting an irregular conflict than the Syrian regime troops trained for conventional warfare.
Shiite awakening
….Landis said the apex of Shiite power in the region was the Israel-Hezbollah war in July 2006 in which the Lebanese Shiite militant group claimed victory. Then, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was lauded even in Sunni Muslim capitals at the time. Shiites had also consolidated their political hold over Iraq, while Iran faced off with its Gulf Arab neighbors. A “Shiite awakening” was breaking out.
Shiites believed they lived under the heel of Sunni Muslims for far too long — the past 1,400 years — and were marginalized during the Ottoman Empire. But then the 1979 Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran, witnessing Shiite ascent to power.
“They don’t want to go back to the dark corner of the political halls of power, Landis said.
“But now, Sunni Muslims are on the march. They see the potential to compensate for Iraq in a big way,” he said of the Syrian conflict.
Landis also said that Syria’s Alawites and Shiites fear ethnic cleansing, seeing Iraqi Christians and minorities in Eastern Europe suffer that fate. “It’s a battle for survival,” he said.
He believes that we are witnessing a “big sorting out along ethnic and religious lines” in Syria, which could be part of the “painful process of nation-building.”
One feature sets the Syrian city of Raqqa apart from other towns captured by Syria’s rebels: The Syrian rebellion’s traditional flag — green, white and black with three red stars, representing the moderate views of the original rebel movement — is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a black flag bearing a verse from the Quran flies over Raqqa’s main square — a flag often associated with Sunni Islamist extremists.
CORKER WARNS OF LACK OF CLARITY IN US SYRIA STRATEGY, CALLS FOR POST-ASSAD PLAN AND CONGRESSIONAL CONSULTATION PRIOR TO SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN US INVOLVEMENT, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) News Release
Economic liberalization without political reform to spread that wealth triggered the civil war, writes Majid Rafizadeh.
The media have paid a considerable amount of attention to political analyses that focus on the authoritarian, totalitarian, and corruptible character of Bashar al-Assad’s government. However, scarce attention has been given to one of the crucial factors that have contributed to the ongoing revolt against the police-state of Syria and other Arab states. Assad’s neoliberal policies and economic liberalization—without the political reforms to redistribute the wealth—severely exacerbated the inequality between the poor and the rich. In middle-class areas and cities, the separation was especially felt. While a small portion of the crony capitalists, business class, and loyalists to Assad were able to benefit from these policies, the vast majority of the population was disenfranchised. The regime attacked the worker and peasant unions in the country, viewing them as obstacles to the neoliberal policies, by not providing them with funds that they needed to continue to function…..
These policies of Bashar al-Assad were directly intended to transfer the “public asset” into the hands of crony capitalists, privileged networks, and corporations in order to increase the wealth of his inner circle. Unlike his father, Hafez, Bashar also sought to decrease the reliance of the Syrian regime on Russia and Iran by expanding the scope of the sweetening deals that the regime would receive from foreign and other Arab corporations. At this time, the regime’s policies and politico-economic and sociopolitical agenda departed heavily from the original Baath Party’s slogans voicing socialist and Arab nationalistic sentiments and aspirations. These sweeping changes left the Syrian people in a dire state of need and neglect…..
Although Bashar al-Assad appeared to be successful, in that moment, with his method of gradual liberalization, authoritarian upgrading, and readjustment of the economy to the advantage of the few privileged, the neoliberal change failed to correspond and did not go hand in hand with redistribution and political liberalization.
The war of attrition in Syria ground on this week, with all sides locked in a death-grip. In A-Raqqa, our reporter finds the rebels continuing their assault on Division 17, the largest military presence left to the regime in the northeastern part of the country. The Syrian Air Force retaliated by using mortar shells inside nearby A-Raqqa city, hitting civilian residences and the Cultural Center for five days in a row. Meanwhile, the FSA and its allies continued to engage regime forces at the Tabaqah Air Force Base, with no end in sight.
Regime forces are hammering the key Eastern Ghouta town of Outaibah. If they capture it, it would mean a victory that would block the rebels’ supply route to eastern Damascus. Our coverage has strengthened with a new partnership with the Shahed Network, a network of citizen journalists based in and around Damascus. The network provides independent and credible reporting from inside the capital and its suburbs that we translate into English. Arabic speakers can follow their news on the ???? ?? ??? ????? Facebook page.
Also this week, a tape surfaced claiming a merger has taken place between Iraq’s Islamic State of Iraq and Jabhat a-Nusra in Syria. In our conversations with opposition figures inside Syria, we learned that they are privately concerned with the implications and impact for their cause abroad and their future at home. The regime claimed the merger as proof that the opposition is led by terrorists, while a number of dissidents cast doubt on the veracity of the claim, questioning why the head of Jabhat a-Nusra did not show his face in the video, as other jihadist leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abul Musab al-Zarqawi have done in the past.
The exiled leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood denied Monday widespread accusations by other pro-rebel political factions that the group is seeking to impose its will on other members of the opposition. The rare news conference by Mohamamad …
A Third of Syria’s Housing Damaged or Destroyed by Conflict – A third of Syria’s housing units has been destroyed or damaged by the conflict, according to the United Nations. (Syria Report)
Government to Relocate Plants in “Safe Areas” – Syria report – The Syrian government is planning to relocate state factories to “safe areas” in the country, according to the Minister of Industry.
The mid-day news update is provided by Shahed News, a network of vetted Syrian citizen journalists providing independent, accurate and reliable… Read more
Testimony by Elizabeth Jones, Acting Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Robert S. Ford, Ambassador to Syria Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC, April 11, 2013
When The Monitor first met Syrian rebel fighter Abu Omar last July, he was buoyant and determined to bring down the Assad regime. Now his outlook is a bit more grim.
Syrian president lashes out at Jordan
2013-04-17 15:06:56.507 GMT
Cairo (DPA) — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad lashed out at Jordan: “We cannot believe that thousands of insurgents are entering Syria with their weapons, at a time when Jordan was capable of stopping and arresting one person carrying a simple weapon for the Palestinian resistance,”
There was a distinctive sense of national pride in Syria. It flowed from the confidence of a civilization dating back to the times of the earliest alphabets and visible in the country’s wealth of archaeological sites, including some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It came from the depth of local culture. It stemmed from the music of Syrian Arabic, the elegance of Syrian manners, the finesse of Syrian cuisine and the sincerity of Syrian hospitality. It proceeded from modern geopolitics, too, as Damascus carved out for itself a role bigger and bolder than its scarce resources should have allowed. In particular, and despite tremendous pressure, Damascus stood firm on the Palestinian cause, which Syrians feel more strongly about than anyone, perhaps, except the Palestinians. The regime may have been a conveniently quiescent foe for Israel, but Syria was, on the map of the Arab world, the only state still “resisting.”
Battle for Damascus: Regime Fights on Four Fronts
A young Syrian boy holds a bag as he collects plastic and metal items in a garbage dump in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on 17 April 2013. (Photo: AFP -Dimitar Dolkoff)
At the Istanbul meeting Moaz Al Khatib, the head of the opposition’s National Coalition, told of a Sharia court that had executed a woman after finding her guilty of adultery. Mr Al Khatib’s point was that the ruling had violated true Islamic law since hudud, the Islamic penal code, cannot be applied during wars or in the absence of a state or ruler.
2013-04-18. The situation in Syria is the gravest it has been since peaceful protests began in March 2011. Civil resistance has been reduced to relief operations and humanitarian assistance, and the efforts of Syria’s democratic forces are now scattered and …Syria’s
Those still left in the city feel defenseless among the current vacuum of authority. Despite a truce currently in place, the constant presence of heavily armed rebel soldiers from different warring factions does little to assuage their fears. “There are so many battles in this city, I don’t feel safe. There is no one in charge, no government,” Abdulahad says. “I am afraid of anyone with a gun.”Starting in November, roughly four months of fighting devastated the city. The Free Syrian Army, along with Islamist groups like Jabhat Al-Nusra, attacked Assad regime soldiers. After regime soldiers were forced out, the rebel coalition then battled the Kurdish militia known as the Popular Defense Forces (YPG), They fought pitched battles throughout the city streets as the Assad regime continued to send aircrafts on bombing runs.During the last phase of the fighting, in which the FSA fought the YPG, Abdulahad lay trapped in his apartment for 17 days, subsisting on very little water and stale bread. Many residents fled the city, with some activists speculating that 65 percent of the total population had left. In February, Syrian Christian dissident Michel Kilo brokered peace between the factions. Some residents have returned, despite power cuts, water shortages, and the constant presence of various armed fighters…..
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom released its first ever report on Syria. USCIRF is concerned by the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict and how it threatens Syria’s religious diversity and the religious freedoms of religious minorities, including Christians and Alawites. In response, the report provides a range of recommendations for U.S. government activity. For instance, the report recommends the U.S. government make clear to opposition forces and outside powers of the need to protect religious diversity and religious freedoms in a post-Assad Syria.
Syria’s top rebel commander is seeking to create a new military unit to assert authority over oilfields controlled by extremists and other rebels, as lucrative natural resources captured from the regime stoke tension between rival factions.
European Union foreign ministers on Monday lifted an oil embargo against Syria to allow rebels to sell crude to fund their operations. But the move comes amid growing signs of tensions within the rebel camp over control of captured oilfields and other strategic assets.
At the end of 2012, rebels seized oilfields in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor and earlier this year they advanced into resource-rich Hasaka and Raqqa, putting opponents of Syrian president Bashar al Assad in control of much of the country’s oil and a substantial portion of its agriculture. According to activists, however, many of those oilfields are now under the control of Jabhat al-Nusrah, the al-Qaeda-linked rebel group.
If you haven’t yet watched it, allow me to strongly encourage you to view the Frontline documentary Syria Behind the Lines. Superior even to this documentary, however, is a segment of extra footage from the journalist who filmed the documentary (Olly Lambert). A single, unbroken walk-through of just one day in just one village in the Syria conflict, narrated by Lambert himself, the work is simultaneously enlightening as to the journalist’s own experience and to that of the people in the community featured, beyond what the primary documentary (or most documentaries for that matter) can offer. A masterful piece of footage and commentary, please view (full screen recommended): The Bombing of al-Bara. Witnessing a single afternoon in al-Bara is a sobering experience when considering that it is just one example of a reality being experienced in countless locations in Syria every day.
Attack on Ghabagheb
Destruction in Ghabagheb
One such recent location was the locale of Ghabagheb and nearby al-Sanamayn, attacked on the 10th of April. The day of the attack, a friend from Ghabagheb wrote saying: “The regime attacked my town today, they used tanks, cannons, missiles, nine people were killed one of them is a friend of mine (Ebraheem Alhorany) I have never seen him without a smile on his face… a house about 150m from ours was completely destroyed.” In his conversation with me, he said that the regime attacked the town “for no reason.” I’m certain it felt that way for everyone in the town, but emerging reports claimed that the army’s motivation was to go after defectors who had taken refuge in the area. Of course, the communities were collectively punished with the usual brutality leaving women and children dead, houses destroyed, and numbers of men rounded up and executed. Ghabagheb and al-Sanamayn are located in the Dera’a muhafiza on the main highway, but are so far north within it that they are actually closer to Damascus than to the city of Dera’a. Areas within the muhafiza that previously avoided direct conflict (including parts of the north) are seeing intensified action after earlier rebel gains in the southern part of the muhafiza.
Destruction in Ghabagheb
Al-Sanamayn (C on the map) suffered even more than Ghabagheb (D on the map). On April 10, videos emerged indicating that a massacre occurred there. Syria Video contains examples showing mass graves, large numbers of bodies, and the bodies of women and children. This Sham News Network report documents the names of 49 deceased victims. This all4Syria report explains that the attack happened after a meeting between the village elders of Sanamayn and the commanders of the 9th Division, in which the commander threatened the elders, saying that he would “burn the village” if they would not hand over soldiers who had defected and were hiding in the village.
Many other towns have been attacked by the regime in the period since these events, but we mention these incidents to highlight the situation facing the Dera’a muhafiza, contributing to the mounting problem of refugees fleeing southern Syria for Jordan. Fighting is continuing in locations around the Dera’a muhafiza, with daily skirmishes in Kherbet Ghazalah, a strategically-important site that the army wants to win back from the rebels. Videos emerging from the village (B on the map) indicate an ongoing battle for the control of the Damascus-Dera’a City highway passing near the town. Commentators in videos recorded and uploaded daily keep count of the number of days they’ve been successful in repelling government attempts to secure the highway and keep ammunition flowing to the governorate capital, Dera’a city. They named the confrontations The Horan Bridge Battle (????? ??? ?????) ,and yesterday was the 44th day. Another video shows a checkpoint near the village, heavy explosions and gunfire in the background.
The conflict in Dera’a has also seen the recent destruction of the historical Omari Mosque in the city of Dera’a, an icon of the beginning of the uprising. (Several previous reports of the mosque’s destruction during the development of the conflict had turned out to be fabricated, but it seems that now it is finally the case.) The mosque had been a field hospital in the early days of the uprising. Newer videos show the aftermath of the recent destruction.
The past week has produced a number of stories of regime successes in Idlib and other provinces, but there have also been sporadic reports of successful rebel counter-offensives retaking important sites. In Dera’a it’s difficult to say which way the pendulum is swinging, but amidst growing talk of an overall “stalemate,” it’s clear that it is not a static stand-off; both sides are exhibiting a tough determination responsible for the back-and-forth pattern of gains and losses.
As the conflict lengthens, the number of villages that have evaded direct military assault grows less and less as fighting constantly moves into new locations, as Ghabagheb has experienced. A recent video revealed that a military base in Busr al-Harir (eastern Dera’a, right on the Sweida border), responsible for transportation and ammunition, was surrounded by rebels. The regime campaign to regain control in Dera’a is directly influencing growing levels of refugees entering Jordan (a 331% increase within just four months), something that is stretching the Jordanian state’s coping capacity to the maximum.
The Exodus
The violence of these ongoing contests has made life impossible in many towns, fueling more surges of refugees from Dera’a into Jordan. Refugees are exiting Syria through every border, but Jordan has seen the highest influx of people on the run. We’ve created the following graphs based on the most recent UN data. Lebanon was previous host to the largest number of refugees until Jordan moved into first place. The first two charts are derived from the UN count of “total persons of concern” which include both those already registered and those awaiting registration.
The governments of the states hosting the refugees offer their own estimates with numbers exceeding those accounted for by the UN so far:
UN numbers place Jordan in the lead as host, but as governments report, Lebanon is hosting the highest number of refugees.It is possible that Lebanon maintains a high estimate because it wants to include a large number of Syrians who already had extended family systems or secondary housing in Lebanon and who have now relocated there permanently but who do not refer to themselves as refugees. Many Syrians already have long-term connections to Lebanon. (Other reasons could be responsible as well.)
The following two charts show change in the number of refugees over the last 4 months and are based only on registered persons (they do not include those waiting to be registered).
Actual numbers of UN registered refugees between December 24 and April 17:
Based on these changes, the percentage of increase for each country over the last four months is as follows:
Of the bordering countries, Iraq has received the least number of refugees. The biggest percentage of recent increase has occurred in Egypt, but the number of refugees it has received is far less than that of any of the bordering countries. Based on these percentages, the average of increase for bordering countries for the last four months would be 237.75, and Jordan is 1.58 standard deviations above average, which suggests an abnormal level of increase. Though all countries have witnessed significant increases, the likelihood is very strong that something is different about Jordan. The heightened war activity occurring in Dera’a is certainly part of it, but refugees also come to Jordan from other parts of Syria.
The UN’s current total of Syrian refugees (total persons of concern) for today, April 21, is 1,369,206. Government estimates put the number at 1,970,000, which do not include Iraq; adding Iraq’s UN count (133,840) breaks 2 million (bringing the total to 2,103,840). Other reports put 4 million more Syrians displaced inside Syria. This means that close to 1/4 of the Syrian population (or even more) are currently displaced.
The particularly severe burden that this is placing on these states has prompted tension and outbursts recently in the Jordanian parliament. In a recent chaotic session, a shouting match ensues following MP Mohammed al-Dawayima’s demand that those with Palestinian documents and children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanian men be given the same rights as Syrian refugees:
In the same session, MP Maysar al-Sardia delivered some alarming statements. She asked the Jordanian government to begin searching for an alternative homeland for the Jordanian people, who she said have been taking in refugees from 1948 to the present, stating that they can’t cope with it any longer. She questioned why Syrians from northern and western Syria flee to Jordan instead of to Turkey and Lebanon, and suggested that the Jordanian government discuss this with those countries, also asserting that though Obama gives aid to the Syrian refugees, Americans will make back all of those donations through reconstruction projects that they’ll have when the war is finished. She deplored the phenomenon of Gulf Arab males visiting the refugee camps to exploit the vulnerable through “pleasure marriages.” (The temporary “mut’a marriage” is a Shi’i institution, but a Sunni practice called “misyar” can fulfill the same function.) In her attack on this trend, she referred to Arab Countries (her comments seem directed primarily at Saudi Arabia and Qatar) as “the Jews of Khaybar” (a reference to a community of Arabian Jews near Medina who underwent a war with the Prophet Mohammed; in other words, she is calling those she castigates enemies of Islam). These and similar statements have led to Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh apologizing to the Qatari and Saudi ambassadors.
Jordan has allowed 3,900 Syrian refugees to return to their home country over the last three years following protests against the poor living conditions in the Zaatari refugee camp. A total of 32,409 Syrian refugees have returned from Jordan since the outbreak of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.
The refugees requested to return to Syria and received the approval of the Jordanian authorities after a series of protests at the Zaatari refugee camp, located 58 km northeast of Amman, during which dozens of people were arrested and interrogated, according to the camp’s head.
The return of refugees to Syria is miniscule in contrast with the flow of people in the opposite direction. Approximately 2,000 Syrians cross the border into Jordan every day to escape the violence, according to UN figures.
It has been reported that some Syrians are taking advantage of their refugee status to gather supplies Jordan, which they then bring back to Syria before returning to Jordan with other groups of refugees.
… The constant flow of Syrian refugees has aggravated the economic crisis in Jordan, contributing to a split in the country’s political class between those who are for or against the regime in Damascus.
Refugees don’t take kindly to Jordanian authorities telling them when they can or can not leave. As the above article mentioned, some come to the Jordan camps just to collect goods to take back into Syria. Safety is also a concern motivating the authorities restrictions: A riot broke out among Syrian refugees after Jordanian authorities prevented Syria-bound buses from transporting them back to their country, due to the increased level of warfare in Dera’a. Riots in the camps are not isolated events, but continue:
A Jordanian official says 10 Jordanian policemen have been injured in a riot that erupted at a Syrian refugee camp near the Jordan-Syria border. Anmar Hmoud says the Friday afternoon riot in Zaatari camp occurred after handful of refugees tried to sneak out of the camp.
Hmoud, a government spokesman for the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, says that when police stopped them, 100 other refugees turned up, showering the policemen with stones. Police say tear gas was used to disperse the crowd.
Videos of the riots and Jordanian riot police can be seen on Syria Video here, here and here. According to video information, the incident started after a family tried to leave to the camp but was pushed back by the police.
Jordan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, subject to an ongoing drought that has devastated agricultural prospects in the country’s northern areas for nearly a decade. The large and rapid influx of Syrian refugees into the border cities of Ramtha and Mafraq, home to the Za’atari refugee camp, has strained water supplies to the breaking point — for two weeks in February, parts of Mafraq town had no water whatsoever. Summer’s soaring temperatures will put additional demands on a poor region that can hardly support its own population, let alone the surge of new refugees that are expected as the war in Syria grinds on. When the peaceful Syrian uprising evolved into a bloody conflict nearly two years ago, residents of Mafraq welcomed refugees fleeing the violence. That hospitality is starting to wane. Competition between Syrian refugees and local residents over limited resources, from water to electricity, food, schooling, housing and health care could boil over, potentially causing unrest in one of the few stable countries left in the Middle East. “As temperatures rise, so too will tensions,” says Nigel Pont, Middle East Regional Director for Mercy Corps, an international development agency actively involved with the Syrian crisis. Resentment among the Jordanians is palpable, he adds, and could easily escalate into violence if the underlying issues are not addressed.
Aid is not enough for the 2,000 to 3,000 (the latter figure from the Time article above) entering Jordan every day: Jordan Needs Support
“Jordan urgently needs the support of the international community in order to cope with the immense necessities of the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees whom it harbours on its territory. Merely fulfilling the basic needs of the 140,000 Syrian refugees placed in the Za’atri camp, which our delegation visited, costs a million dollars a day. And over 2 000 new refugees are arriving at Za’atri every day,” Josette Durrieu (France, SOC), Chair of the Assembly Sub-Committee on the Middle East, declared today after their visit to Jordan on 6 and 7 April.
In the heart of rebel-held territory in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, a small group of intrepid Westerners is undertaking a mission of great stealth. Living anonymously in a small rural community, they travel daily in unmarked cars, braving airstrikes, shelling and the threat of kidnapping to deliver food and other aid to needy Syrians — all of it paid for by the U.S. government.
So secretive is the operation, however, that almost none of the Syrians who receive the help are aware of its American origins. Out of concern for the safety of the recipients and the delivery staff, who could be targeted by the government if their affiliation to the United States were known, the Obama administration and the aid workers have chosen not to advertise the assistance.
… “America has done nothing for us. Nothing at all,” said Mohammed Fouad Waisi, 50, spitting out the words for emphasis in his small Aleppo grocery store, which adjoins a bakery where he buys bread every day. The bakery is fully supplied with flour paid for by the United States. But Waisi credited Jabhat al-Nusra — a rebel group the United States has designated a terrorist organization because of its ties to al-Qaeda — with providing flour to the region. “If America considers itself a friend of Syria, it should start to do something,” he said.
Source: U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Washington Post.
The UN has announced it will have to cancel food aid to 400,000 refugees in Lebanon if it doesn’t receive more funding (Reuters):
The cash shortage is part of a wider financial shortfall that the organization says is threatening its efforts to help nearly 1.3 million Syrian refugees and almost 4 million more people displaced inside Syria by the two-year conflict. “The speed with which the crisis is deteriorating is much faster than the ability of the
international community to finance the Syrian humanitarian needs,” Panos Moumtzis, the U.N. refugee agency’s regional coordinator for Syrian refugees said.
…All refugees currently receive food when they register and then get monthly food coupons worth $27 a month, Labande said…
The United Nations says that so far only $400 million out of more than $1.5 billion pledged by international donors in late January to cover Syrian refugee needs for the first six months of this year has actually been committed.
New camp opened, Jordanians frustrated – France Press
Jordan, already straining from hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, is increasingly feeling the heat from its own citizens who are fed up with the growing influx.
Jordan says it is hosting more than 500,000 Syrian refugees and the authorities last week opened a new refugee camp in the Mrigeb al-Fuhud area east of the capital Amman as thousands continue to flee the war across the border. The 13,000-acre (5,200-hectare) camp, built and run by the United Arab Emirates northeast of Amman, has 750 caravans, a hospital and a school and can accommodate 5,500 people. The seven-million-dinar ($9.8-million, 7.5-million euro) facility was opened nine months after Jordan set up the sprawling Zaatari camp that houses 150,000 Syrian refugees outside the northeastern city of Mafraq.
Now Jordanians, who are already suffering from high unemployment, prices and inflation as well as poverty, accuse the refugees of taking their jobs and prompting greedy landlords to raise rents. “More than 160,000 Syrians hold various jobs in Jordan, though most do not have work permits,” Hamda Abu Nejmeh, secretary general at the labour ministry, told AFP. “It is a huge number that has a very negative impact.” He said Syrians “are depriving Jordanians from having jobs. If this continues, unemployment will rise and our plans to help citizens work will be affected negatively.”
Abu Nejmeh said Syrians accept less than the monthly minimum wage of 190 dinars ($268, 203 euros) and work longer hours. Unemployment is officially around 14 percent in the country of 6.8 million people, 70 percent of them under 30, but other estimates put the figure at 30 percent.
“Rents have doubled in the (northern) cities of Ramtha and Irbid. An apartment that is usually rented for 125 dinars a month now costs 250 dinars,” said Fathi Bashabsheh, who owns a housing complex in Ramtha where 35 Syrian families live.
“Around 130,000 people live in Ramtha now, including 40,000 Syrians. This is a problem for Ramtha residents who face many problems in finding jobs and renting houses and shops.” …
“We cannot keep paying for refugees while the international community is showing little support. We need more help or pressure will mount to close the borders,” a senior Jordanian government official told The Media Line.
… “I do not advise any refugees to return to Syria, they will face certain death. People in Dael are waiting for the bombing to stop and then plan to leave for Jordan,” he added. The rebels say they are powerless to stop people from returning, which is a personal choice, but had issued warnings about doing so which were not always heeded.
… Abu Hamza, leader of the rebels’ Houran Brigades, meanwhile said the rebels would not wait for an international resolution to establish a no-fly zone in Syria. “We have enough anti-aircraft missiles to create a no-fly zone,” he told The Media Line, adding, “We only need to advance near the border and push government forces out.”
Photograph: IBL / Rex Features
Buffer Zones
The discussion of buffer zones grew as the reality of Syrian territory controlled by hardline Islamists became clearer. First there was the plan to bolster the nationalist opposition:
Jordan to spearhead Saudi Arabian arms drive – Guardian – Fears over rising power of al-Qaida-linked groups drives move to channel weapons to moderate rebel fighters through Jordan
Jordan has agreed to spearhead a Saudi-led push to arm rebel groups through its borders into southern Syria, in a move that coincides with the transfer from Riyadh to Amman of more than $1bn (£650m).
It marks a significant change for Jordan, from a policy of trying to contain the spillover threat posed by the civil war across its border to one of actively aiming to end it before it engulfs the cash-strapped kingdom.
Jordan’s role as a conduit for arms has emerged in the past two months as Saudi Arabia, some Gulf states, Britain and the US have sharply increased their backing of some rebels to try to stop the advances of al-Qaida-linked groups among them.
A push to defeat al-Qaida, rather than an outright bid to oust Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, is Jordan’s driving force. Officials in Amman concede it heightens a risk of retaliation from its increasingly cornered neighbour.
But beyond the problem of al-Qaida’s influence on the ground, the destabilization of Dera’a through the intensified battle between the regime and the rebels is pointing toward a destabilization of the border. This weekend alone, almost 8,000 new refugees have entered Jordan. The possibility of creating a buffer zone is gaining currency in Jordan, who on Thursday revealed that they would be hosting US troops. Al-Monitor:
Jordan acknowledged for the first time yesterday [April 18] that it would be hosting American troops. At the same time, it emphasized its rejection of any military intervention in Syria, and called for a comprehensive political solution that halts the cycle of violence there. This comes amid reports that Amman is considering the creation of a buffer zone in Daraa, Syria, to stop the flow of Syrian refugees into its territory.
Government spokesman Mohammed Mumuni said, “The US Department of Defense suggested deploying 200 troops on our territory, in light of the security repercussions that may result from the Syrian crisis.”
He added: “The kingdom’s position regarding what is going on in Syria has not changed. Jordan is against any military intervention, and calls for a comprehensive political solution that halts the cycle of violence and bloodshed there.” He stressed that “sending members from the US army to Jordan is part of the standard joint cooperation between the Jordanian armed forces and the US Army.”
A Jordanian army official, however, said: “Sending 200 US troops has nothing to do with the situation in Syria.” Speaking to the official Jordanian news agency [Petra], he said, “These soldiers represent the first unit among others that will take part in the Eager Lion exercise, which is held annually in Jordan.”
… The Jordanian government is considering using the city of Daraa, which is the largest in southern Syria, to test the possibility of creating a buffer zone there and its ability to contain the conflict and its repercussions.
Posted by Matthew Barber on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
From al-Akhbar article, below: A young Syrian boy holds a bag as he collects plastic and metal items in a garbage dump in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on 17 April 2013. (Photo: AFP -Dimitar Dolkoff)
The State of the Regime
Some believe that the clearer identification of Jabhat al-Nusra as al-Qaida will benefit the Syrian regime by drawing sentiment away from the rebels. Others, however, see the possible stepping-up of an effort to back nationalist rebels who offer an alternative to Islamists as a death knell for the regime, as it would be opposed by both battle-hardened mujahideen and Western-trained forces. Regardless of the ultimate outcome, observers believe the regime has had a good week:
Syrian government troops have broken through a six-month rebel blockade in northern Syria and are now fighting to recapture a vital highway, opposition and state media said on Monday. Rebels had kept the army bottled up in the Wadi al-Deif and Hamidiya military bases in Idlib province. But on Sunday, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces outflanked the rebels and broke through, the pro-government al-Baath newspaper said. The insurgents counter-attacked on Monday but their front has been weakened in recent weeks due to infighting and the deployment of forces to other battles, activists said. The break-out from the bases, located outside Maarat al-Nuaman town, may enable the army to recapture the main route into Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and bolster their fragile supply lines in the heart of the rebel-held north.
… Activists in Maarat al-Nuaman, which has faced daily air strikes due to the blockade, accused rebels of causing their own defeat by depleting their forces in the area. Islamist units that moved in over the weekend accused forces on the ground, lead by the Martyrs of Syria brigade, of failing to secure the base and sending away too many fighters. The Martyrs of Syria brigade said they were pushing their campaign and the Islamist groups had hurt their blockade by interfering.
According to Abdelrahamn, many of the main fighting units previously based in the area had moved to Raqqa, Ras al-Ain, and Hassakah, towns in the northeast which rebels recently seized.
Talks of tipping points, battles for Damascus and a regime on its last legs have all proved to be false dawns over the past number of months. So just how badly off is President Bashar al-Assad’s government?
On the battlefield, the regime has proved stubbornly resistant. In the north, government forces on Sunday broke out of their Wadi al-Deif and Hamidiya military bases and outflanked rebels that had been besieging them for months, according to both activists and pro-government media. Districts of central Homs have been retaken by the government in recent weeks and rebels have been successfully fought off in Quneitra, along the Syrian-Israeli demilitarized zone.
Aleppo International Airport, a strategic asset for the regime in the north, was thought to have been close to falling into rebel hands in February. It hasn’t happened. Baba Amr, a symbol of resistance in Homs, was retaken by government forces last month.
… Furthermore, Syria’s Western-backed political opposition has clearly been caught out in its own backing of Jabhat al-Nusra – an Islamist fighting force now openly aligned with Al-Qaeda.
To state the obvious, Western capitals cannot support elements of the Syrian opposition that may have Al-Qaeda ties. France, Britain and others pushing for the arming of rebels certainly won’t be able to sell this to their respective populations with al-Qaeda in the mix. The ties between Syria’s opposition and its international sponsors may well be torn over the status of Jabhat al-Nusra, today the most successful fighting force taking on Mr. Assad.
Mr. Assad has mostly delivered on the promises and threats he has made over the duration of the uprising. Early on he spoke of “ten Afghanistans” in Syria should outside forces intervene, or fundamentalist takfiris and Islamic extremists dominating the opposition. Though clearly propaganda at the time, today it is difficult to dismiss his argument, a perspective that resonates with the millions of Syrians exhausted by two years of conflict and instability.
… The declaration of an al-Qaeda presence in Syria in the form of Nusra complicates the conflict even further: the Assad regime will say it has been proven right, as will Russia, China and Hezbollah. For Western observers, the presence of such a foe means that no one can entertain the notion of giving weapons to forces that may sympathize with an al-Qaeda ideology.
In addition, it divides Syria’s political opposition even more. And al-Qaeda on the battlefield creates a quandary for other rebel groups: Do they bed down with these well-organized crazies or continue the lonely fight?
Amidst the discussion of military advances for the regime, Robert Fisk discusses another important development also related to the military, namely that the former power of mukhabaraat entities is being replaced by the more visible power of the military. Previously I discussed how “the Ba’athist cult of unreality” prevents an open discussion (even of something as important as territorial losses in the conflict) from taking place in the Syrian parliament. Fisk’s article, “President Assad’s army is starting to call the shots in Syria,” underscores this ever-paradoxical dilemma before discussing the changing power dynamics he observes:
Old Mohamed Said al-Sauda from Deraa, in his tawny gown and kuffiah headscarf, sat at the end of a conclave of tribal elders, all newly arrived in Damascus for an audience with no less than the President himself. They sat – only one woman in a blue dress among them – round a long table in the Damas Rose Hotel drinking water and coffee, rehearsing their anxieties. How should they talk to the young armed men who came into their villages? How should they persuade the rebels not to damage their land and take over their villages? “We try to talk to the saboteurs and to get them to go back to rebuilding the country,” al-Sauda told me. “We try to persuade them to put aside their arms, to stop the violence. We used to have such a safe country to live in.”
These men, middle-aged for the most part with tough, lined, dark faces, are the first line of defence of the Assad regime, the landowners and propertied classes of the peasants who benefited most from the original Baathist revolution and whose prosperity has been threatened by the mass uprising against the regime. They come from Tartus, Deraa, the Damascus countryside, from Hama and Latakia, and they speak the language of the Assad government – up to a point. “Syria is a mosaic unlike any other in the world,” says Salman Hamdan. “The sectarian divide does not exist in our country. Muslims, Christians, they are the same…”
But the woman in blue hands me a printed sheet of paper with a list of demands. “We come from all walks of political life,” it begins. “We reject violence and we reject repression, sectarian massacres and the destruction of the cultural heritage of Syria.” And there it was. That word. Repression. For these men and this lonely woman know what helped to set fire to Syria. “Every government makes mistakes,” one of the men says – but we know what he means. He is talking about the mukhabarat intelligence service which lit the fire two years ago by its brutality towards the children of Deraa. The system of torture and fear that the secret police services of the regime imposed for decades upon Syria – the “repression” mentioned so obliquely in the lady’s demands – still lies like a blanket over those areas of the country that the government still controls.
How does a Syrian loyal to the regime tell its leader that his own security agencies helped to bring down this catastrophe upon their country? For these agencies have contaminated not just the Baath and the President but even the government army – the Syrian Arab Army – which is now trying to shrug off the awful carapace of legimitised violence that the plain-clothes men, in their tens of thousands, have used as a tool for more than 30 years. Even in the cities that the government still controls they have still not learned their lesson.
The country’s brutal secret services are no longer the power they once were. Other forces are at work
… There are also some intriguing signs that the government army, so keen to appear as the foundation stone of the state – which it is – without the dark stain of fear left by the mukhabarat, is taking its own steps to push back the “terror” men. The military security forces, now that they have – for the first time – to deal directly with their own civilians, are giving orders over the heads of the intelligence agencies. In 2010, Assad himself took a decision to ban security agents from carrying weapons covertly – a highly contentious rule for the secret police – and the army has now followed on from this.
The army, for example, is today in command of security in battle. In the past, military intelligence men would give instructions to the army. But the Syrian army is now in charge. Field commanders – not cops – make decisions. There have been many cases, according to those involved with the military, where plain-clothes security agents witnessed brutalising civilians have been arrested and – incredibly – put before military courts. The generals and the colonels, in other words, are no longer prepared to play patsy to the regime’s thugs.
But romantics beware. The army is a ruthless machine and its commander-in-chief remains Bashar al-Assad. Its loyalty is still without question. The UN maintains voluminous files of war crimes that they say were committed by regular soldiers in the Syrian army. And the idea that the presidency itself may abandon its own security agents is a myth. A militarised state will always need a bodyguard of secret policemen. Nor will Assad’s enemies ever accept an army takeover – with or without an Assad leadership – as a compromise for a truce. For them – correctly – the army remains more dangerous than Assad himself. The mukhabarat may come and go, but the army remains.
… It is an irony of Syrian history that hitherto most threats to the regime have come from within the cities. The Muslim Brotherhood, still officially illegal in Syria, was an urban institution and it was the Brotherhood that threatened Damascus and the central cities of Homs and Hama in the 1980s. The great uprising of 1982 emanated from the centre of Hama, from the city’s mosques and underground tunnels; and thus the cruellest of the nation’s security forces, the Special Forces of Rifaat al-Assad – led by the president’s now-disgraced uncle – was sent in to liquidate the Brotherhood and up to 20,000 of Hama’s residents. But now the uprising comes from the countryside
That a regime originally founded on peasant reform should discover that its enemies now live among that same peasantry is a terrible stroke of history for Baathism. That a nation with a non-sectarian constitution – needless to say, we all know what is wrong with it – should find itself consumed by the very sectarian conflict that it was designed to prevent is a tragedy. No wonder the new 60-man special units of the government army being trained for operations across Syria are a careful mixture of all sects – Sunnis, Christians, Alawis, Druze and others – and are openly referred to as the most “colourful” of all military battalions. …
For the message – if there is one in the coming weeks and months – is that the most important institution to watch in Syria is not the regime. Nor is it Bashar al-Assad. Nor is it the secret police. Nor is it the Free Syrian Army, nor al-Nusrah. Nor the platitudes of the White House or Downing Street. It is the government Syrian Arab Army. Watch, as they say, this space.
Raqqa
Interesting article by Martin Kramer about Iranian influence and symbolism in Raqqa: The Shiite Crescent Eclipsed
… The upper inscription identifies this site as the shrine of two figures from seventh-century Islamic history, Ammar ibn Yasir and Uways al-Qarani. The façade is striking, but just what is the connection of this shrine in Raqqa to Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khameneh’i, and why is their portrait being defaced at its entrance?
As we shall see, the answer to that question establishes the short video clip as one of the most significant images to emerge from Syria’s civil war. It proclaims that the so-called “Shiite crescent” is now eclipsed.
… Raqqa is surrounded by semi-settled tribes, some branches of which believe they are descended from Husayn, the son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who is the central figure of Shiite martyrology. They sometimes belong to Sufi orders that venerate Ali and Husayn. Unlike the city dwellers, who regarded the shrine project with surly resentment, they welcomed it as a kind of beautification project. They are Sunnis, not Shiites, but they seemed like promising targets for Iranian proselytization. Visiting Iraqi or Iranian preachers would bring them together at the shrine for sessions commemorating their supposed forebears (majalis husayniyya).
… After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iranian planners conceived an ambitious plan for a kind of pilgrimage trail, consisting of a chain of shrines from Karbala to Damascus. Following the battle of Karbala in 687, the Umayyad caliph Yazid ordered that the head of the defeated Husayn be brought to him in Damascus. The idea was to create a route of pilgrimage following the stations of the head’s journey, anchored at the midway point by the already existing shrine to Husayn in Aleppo. To this end, Iran began to invest in the renovation and expansion of other sites in Syria.
Still, a scholar who has studied the entire range of Iranian shrine projects in Syria has written that, more than any other such effort, the Raqqa shrine “best represents the extent of Shiite triumphalism and state support in Syria.”
What will become of the shrine itself is uncertain. A false Iranian report claimed it had been destroyed by Sunni extremists, but that didn’t happen and it is unlikely to happen, since veneration of the tombs was a local tradition even before the Iranians arrived. The site is likely to be purged of its explicitly Iranian and Shiite references, but it is impossible to know which symbols will replace them.
It could be any one of the flags now sold in Raqqa, as shown in this photo. From right to left are the flags of the Free Syrian Army (minimally present in Raqqa), Ahrar al-Sham (dominant), and the black-and-white variations of the jihadist flag flown by Jabhat al-Nusra (also a major force). The struggle that will elevate one of these symbols over the others has only just begun.
Belgium has asked Turkey to help in its efforts to prevent Belgian nationals from illegally crossing into Syria to fight alongside opposition forces trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Belgian police raided four dozen homes on Tuesday looking for potential extremists who lure youngsters into traveling to Syria to join rebels trying to overthrow the government there.
Officials say dozens of Belgian teenagers already have left for the Syrian front, willing to fight but ill-prepared to survive the Arab country’s brutal civil war. Belgian leaders worry that the young fighters could return from Syria radicalized and willing to stage terrorist attacks at home.
… The mayor of Mechelen, whose city saw some homes raided, said the police action was linked to the disbanded Islamic group Sharia4Belgium.
Authorities are trying to determine if the group is a terrorist outfit, and prosecutors allege that Sharia4Belgium members who had traveled to Syria linked up with “al-Qaida-inspired combatants.” Videos showed its former leader Fouad Belkacem being taken from his home in the pre-dawn sweep.
The UN is amassing war crimes indictments against all kinds of armed groups in Syria – the government army very much among them – but the fact remains that this conversation would have been impossible – unthinkable – before the uprising. The war has given a freedom of speech even to soldiers to debate among themselves, as they do, about the war.
World-renowned Turkish pianist Faz?l Say was handed a suspended 10-month prison sentence today for “insulting religious beliefs held by a section of the society,” bringing to a close a controversial case while sparking fiery reaction in Turkey and abroad.
Egypt Update
After last week’s sectarian problems in Egypt, Islamopedia provides a number of useful stories:
The Coptic Orthodox Church has identified five demands for President Mohamed Morsy to resolve the sectarian crises that have erupted in various parts of the country.
“We demand the president to apply the law to everyone, ensure safety and security in the entire country, activate fully the principle of citizenship, amend religious discourse, and teach Coptic history in schools,” Father Makary Habib, the personal secretary to Pope Tawadros II, told the Turkish Anadolu News on Wednesday.
A senior Coptic bishop has praised Muslims in Al-Khosous who attempted to protect Christians during a recent bout of sectarian violence that left five people dead.
“The loving Muslims who protected Christians and the church during the deadly clashes in Al-Khosous highlighted the mistakes of the fanatics and showed the true meaning of religion and love,” Bishop Moussa, who is in charge of youth affairs at the Coptic Orthodox Church, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Because of my position against ‘Brotherhoodizing’ Al-Azhar and the state, and my defense of Al-Azhar and its [grand] sheikh, the minister of endowments issued a decision to suspend me before any interrogations were carried out. He assigned in my place one of the pro-Muslim Brotherhood group imams, without prior warning or interrogation, in violation of the law,” Shaheen said.
Posted by Matthew Barber on Sunday, April 14th, 2013
by Matthew Barber
Al-Qaida and Jabhat al-Nusra have each declared an Islamic State in Syria, in their own way.
And by the way, Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaida. The head of al-Nusra, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, finally confirmed the obvious through an official declaration of allegiance.
An Islamic State in Syria? For Real?
Al-Qaida in Iraq already styles itself as the “Islamic State in Iraq” (ISI). The difference between it and Jabhat al-Nusra is that the latter actually controls territory, making the declaration of a state cause for a moment of disconcerted reflection: If Jabhabt al-Nusra currently administers various villages and cities (such as Raqqa) through a manifestation of Islamist governance embodied in shari’a councils, and if Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaida, then it’s not absurd to say that something resembling a rough patchwork of quasi city-states has been established by al-Qaida in Syria. This is a strange station that no one expected to arrive at when the Syrian uprising began.
Whether or not al-Nusra is developing the various ministries and institutions typically associated with statehood, they are expanding their scope of shari’a governance, and as al-Julani stated in his announcement, they receive some kind of budget from al-Qaida in Iraq.
The lately growing anticipation of total failure of statehood in Syria—code for the emergence of an al-Qaida-branded Islamist patchwork state—is behind the U.S. reaction to train nationalist rebels (of course not “secular rebels”—a strange term frequently appearing now), as well as an alleged change in Saudi policy (more below). Should an al-Qaida state grow into even more of a reality, Israeli and Jordanian border integrity are the primary concerns motivating the counter effort, which would likely develop into buffer zones.
He Said—I Say
It all started with a speech from Ayman al-Zawahiri who apparently decided to rip the lid off the affiliation between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida. This seemed to prompt the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to quickly go public in announcing that together with Jabhat al-Nusra, they were forming an entity called “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”
… Al-Baghdadi then says that ISI [al-Qaida in Iraq], following the same path set by its predecessors regarding the group’s adherence to a doctrine that does not abide to geographical border or ethnic affiliation, has in fact had training and support cells operating in Syria; however, these cells have been “awaiting the chance” to expand their operations. Such a chance came after the bloodshed ensued in Syria, and after the Syrians’ call for help was answered. Therefore, Al-Baghdadi says, ISI decided to answer the call by assigning the “Julani” – a reference to Abu Muhammad Al-Julani, the leader of [Jabhat al-Nusra] – to lead the group there. Al-Baghdadi confirms that Al-Julani was in fact dispatched from Iraq along with a group of men to Syria in order to meet the aforementioned cells there. Furthermore, Al-Baghdadi says that ISI provided JN with the plans and work strategy needed in Syria. He also says that ISI has been in fact splitting its funds evenly with JN, which received those funds on a monthly basis.
Addressing Syrians, Al-Baghdadi says that the announcement about JN being part of ISI was not released earlier for security reasons, and also in order to provide the Syrian people the opportunity to see and judge JN on their own, as a separate entity that is not part of Al-Qaeda, rather than perceive the group through the eyes of the biased media.
Al-Baghdadi then declares the nullification of both the names of ISI and JN, while announcing the two will be joined under the name “Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.”
Al-Baghdadi then urges Islamic scholars to join the mujahideen in Syria, while inviting the various opposition groups and tribes to work on raising the banner of tawhid in Syria, and to work on instating the shari’a.
Al-Baghdadi warns Syrians not to fall victims of democracy, while adding that democracy should not be the outcome for the endless suffering and death they have faced thus far.
After this announcement from al-Baghdadi, al-Nusra leader al-Julani countered some of al-Baghdadi’s assertions through a statement of his own, revealing that al-Nusra had not been involved in planning for the announcement and generally expressing a greater degree of separateness from al-Qaida in Iraq than that conveyed by al-Baghdadi. However, he did not renounce the declaration of establishing this “state” (though he framed it differently), and he affirmed al-Nusra’s allegience to Ayman al-Zawahiri. We are providing a rough translation of al-Julani’s statement, with some considerations following:
Muslims everywhere, leaders of the jihadist movements, leaders of the armed factions, people of the Levant, children of Jabhat Al-Nusra, as-salam wa’leikum.
Al-Haq [one of the names of Allah], praise his highness, said: [Surah Al-Ankaboot 1-3]
“Alif, Laam, Meem
Do the people think that they will be left to say, “We believe” and that they will not be tried? But We have certainly tried those before them, and Allah will surely make evident those who are truthful, and He will surely make evident the liars.”
There have been talks about a speech attributed to Sheikh Abi Baker al-Baghdadi, may Allah protect him. In the speech attributed to the Sheik, there was mention of Jabhat al-Nusra being an expansion of the ISI [Islamic State in Iraq] and a declaration of the nullification of both the names of ISI and Jabhat al-Nusra, to be replaced with one name: “The Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.”
Thus, we would like the people to know that the leaders of al-Nusra, its Majlis al-Shura [advisory council], and the al-‘abd al-faqir [“the poor slave of God”–a self-debasing reference to himself], the Secretary General of Jabhat al-Nusra were not informed about this declaration, except for what they heard through the media. So if this speech is true, then we weren’t consulted or briefed about it.
Now that some cards have been revealed, I can say that we were part of the the jihad in Iraq from the beginning until we came back following the start of the Syrian revolution. Despite the disconnect that we had [?], we observed those momentous events that the path of jihad in Iraq went through and took from our experience there what brought joy to the hearts of the believers in the land of Sham [the Levant], under the banner of Jabhat al-Nusra.
And Allah knows, that we haven’t seen from our brethren in Iraq anything but great generosity and hospitality. We won’t be able to pay them back for that graciousness for as long as we live. I did not wish to leave Iraq until seeing the banners of Islam flying over it, but the rapidly-developing events in the Levant came between us and our wishes.
I was honored to accompany those who we believe to be the people of righteousness in Iraq. We lost so many of them that I have to say “May God accept him [as a martyr]” for almost every name mentioned in front of me. In addition to the tens if not hundreds of muhajariin [those who emigrate for jihad] who met their destiny, from the Levant and elsewhere, for the sake of raising the word of Allah under the banner of the Iraqi Islamic state.
Then God honored me by introducing me to Sheikh al Baghdadi, who returned the favor multiplied, to the people of the Levant. And he did that by agreeing to a project that we proposed to him, to aid the oppressed in the Levant.
He then provided us with the money of the state [the “Islamic State of Iraq”], even despite the harsh times that they were passing through. And he put his complete trust in me to produce policies and plans. And he sent us a few brothers, who, even with their small numbers, Allah had blessed their gathering.
Jabhat al-Nusra started facing the difficulties, a bit at time, until Allah blessed us and our banners were raised high and waved along with the hearts of the Muslims and the oppressed. And al-Nusra became those who made the difference in the battle of the umma today. And it became the center of hope for Muslims around the world. We declared, from the start, that our aim is to bring back the power of Allah to his land, and to raise the umma to follow his judgment and his way.
And we did not want to rush the announcement, as the role of the state in applying sharia and settling disputes and bringing security to Muslims and meeting their needs is already underway in the liberated areas, even with all the shortcomings. The matter of announcing it was not of importance, as long as it was underway.
In addition, the Islamic state in the Levant is built with the help of everyone without the exclusion of any principal parties, from jihadi groups and renowned Sunni clerics to the muhajariin, who fought and performed jihad alongside us in the Levant.
In addition to the exclusion of Jabhat al-Nusra leaders and its shura. [?]
The delay in the announcement was not because of weakness in religion or fear on the part of the men of Jabhat, but it was wisdom based on principles of the sharia and a long history of effort in understanding the sharia politics applicable to the situation of the Levant and which were agreed upon by the people of wisdom and logic in the Levant, from the leaders of Jabhat and its students, and the leaders of other factions and their students and those who support and advise us from outside the country.
Thus, I won’t respond to[I comply with] the invitation of al-Baghdadi, may Allah protect him, in moving from the lower to the greater and I say: [Thanks to Cole Bunzel for identifying the correct Arabic word that we misheard when performing the translation from the audio version]
This is a pledge of allegiance that Jabhat al-Nusra and their secretary general renews for Sheikh of jihad Ayman Al Zawahiri, may Allah protect him. We pledge allegiance to him and will listen to and follow his orders […] in hijra and jihad and we won’t dispute his decisions unless we see blasphemy in them.
And the banner of the Jabhat will stay as it is, even though we are proud of the flag of the ISI and those who carried it and sacrificed their lives for it. And to the people of the Levant, rest assured that what you saw from the Jabhat in its defense of your religion, blood, and honor and its good manners with you and the fighting factions will remain the same. And this declaration of allegiance will not change any of its policies. May Allah bring us together to the path of righteousness. Amen, Amen
Thanks to Allah
The servant of Muslims
The Secretary General of Jabhat al-Nusra
Abou Mohamad Al Julani
A number of interesting observations can be made about this statement. First, it is amusing that al-Julani would begin his speech—a response to a speech by a fellow jihadi—by quoting a Qur’anic verse about liars. He clearly states that Jabhat al-Nusra had not been informed that the announcement was forthcoming. Though framed with respectful language, the entire statement represents a veiled rebuke to al-Baghdadi.
Al-Julani discloses the real picture of al-Nusra, revealing that the core of al-Nusra are Syrian jihadis who participated with al-Qaida in Iraq “from the beginning” of the Iraq war, only returning to Syria after the uprising began in order to engage in jihad against the Syrian regime by employing all the experience and tools gained through the long period of fighting in Iraq. And in addition to being the offspring of al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Julani affirms that al-Nusra has been supported by them throughout its tenure in Syria—supported both financially and with fighters. He intentionally downplays the numbers of fighters from Iraq, however; while expressing gratitude for their participation, he endeavors to place distance between the Iraqi and Syrian jihadi groups by framing the role of jihadis from al-Qaida in Iraq as minimal. Even when emphasizing a degree of autonomy from al-Qaida in Iraq, he nevertheless ends up indicating a measure of subordination by saying “he put his complete trust in me to produce policies and plans.”
So if al-Nusra was born of al-Qaida in Iraq, includes Iraqi jihadis, has continually received support from al-Qaida, and willingly affirms allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, what is the rub between al-Julani and al-Baghdadi’s statement? The point of tension seems to center around the declaration of an Islamic state. Though he never denies affiliation with al-Qaida in Iraq, or what he sees as the evolving emergence of an Islamic state in Syria, he seems to have taken offense to the timing and manner of the declaration, and rejects al-Baghdadi’s approach of a single state for Syria and Iraq under a single governing structure.Though he has no problem being under the authority of al-Qaida’s top command, he experiences possible resentment at the suggestion that al-Nusra be subordinate to al-Qaida in Iraq.
Al-Julani therefore rejects al-Baghdadi’s assertion that the two wings will abandon their separate titles and merge into a single unit. He maintains that al-Nusra will continue to use its name and flag. He confirms the declaration of an Islamic state in Syria (saying it is “built” by all parties who participated in the struggle), but he does not link it with that in Iraq: Rather than the “Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham” it is merely “The Islamic State of al-Sham.” Though acknowledging the presence of an Islamic state, he says that declaring statehood is not important, since the state has been coming into being through a process of implementing shari’a to the degree it is possible in the Syrian context. (This process is ongoing, through such projects as the effort to bring shari’a classes to the public.)
These announcements therefore do not represent a “merger of Jabhat al-Nusra with al-Qaida” but the disclosure of their equivalency. While it has long been perceived that ISI and al-Nusra were linked counterparts, this reality is now in the open. Further, both factions declare an Islamic state in Syria, through formulated differently.
On Tuesday, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq publicly unveiled its links to the jihadist group al-Nusra Front, which is fighting against the regime in Syria. In turn, the head of the al-Nusra Front has pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who as Osama Bin Laden’s successor is at the helm of the entire terrorist organisation and has recently called for an Islamic holy war in Syria. FRANCE 24 talked to a jihadist fighter who shared his analysis of al Qaeda’s strategy in the Syrian conflict.
In his latest announcement, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq – an operation al Qaeda refers to as the “Islamic State in Iraq” – confirmed what the United States had long claimed: that the al-Nusra Front had ties to his organisation. The al-Nusra Front first made its appearance in Syria in early 2012, and has since become one of the most well-organised and well-equipped groups of rebel fighters in the country. In the same statement, al-Baghdadi announced that he planned to rename his organisation the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [a historical name for Syria] in order to include the al-Nusra Front.
In an audio recording published on YouTube, Abou Muhammad al-Julani, the head of the al-Nusra Front, says he was not consulted on this decision. However, he explains that he “accepts al-Baghdadi’s call to rise toward excellence by vowing allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri.” While he did not refuse to work under the new “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”, he did say he wanted to “keep the banner of the al-Nusra Front”.
Louaï Mokdad, the spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, which has fought alongside the al-Nusra Front, says his rebel group “does not support al-Nusra’s ideology” and that their cooperation in battle was born out of necessity. However, a few weeks ago, the head of the Free Syrian Army, Riad al-Asaad, publicly expressed his support for the al-Nusra Front and criticised Washington for labelling it a terrorist organisation.
Riad al-Asaad’s recent expression of support for al-Nusra and criticism of the U.S.’s designation of it a terrorist group will now be a source of consternation for many. That al-Nusra is now more visibly subsumed under or an extension of al-Qaida will make such criticism difficult to deliver in the future.
France Press spoke to “the head of Ansar al-Sharia, a Syrian jihadist group that has close ties to the al-Nusra Front,” who sheds light on the spontaneous announcement that was delivered quickly rather than following a planning phase that would coordinate with all the various groups. He suggests that al-Qaida in Iraq was trying to beat several other groups to the punch, groups that can be viewed as competitors in the ambition to establish an Islamist state. The following are his words, reported in the FP article:
We’re all happy with al-Baghdadi’s announcement. But we also understand our chief al-Julani, who has asked that we wait for the results of a planned meeting between all the different groups fighting in Syria to work out the details of this new form of cooperation and to understand why the al-Nusra Front wasn’t consulted beforehand.
Everyone knew about the al-Nusra Front’s orientation and about its ties to the Islamic State in Iraq – that was no secret. I don’t think this has had any negative impacts on the battlefield, since, up until now, the international community hasn’t given us anything even though the Syrian regime has been murdering its people for two years now. In any case, creating an Islamic state in Syria is the logical next step for us.
On Wednesday, I took part in a meeting with different groups fighting in the region of Douma [a suburb of Damascus], including the Free Syrian Army. All those that attended were in favour of creating an Islamic state. Why would we make all these sacrifices just to see foreign states name others to rule over Syria? Or even to create a democracy? We’ve seen what’s happened in other Arab states where they tried to install democracies, and the results aren’t at all encouraging.
Many people think that al-Baghdadi’s announcement may have been a little premature, but there are two parameters to consider. First of all, recently, new groups of fighters have emerged, notably in the region of Ghouta al-Sharkiya [near Damascus] and in Deraa. These groups use Islamist names. But in fact, these fighters are controlled by the United States government, with the aim of curbing the al-Nusra Front’s influence. I believe the al Qaeda chiefs decided to make this announcement in order to regroup all the fighters who are truly jihadists under their banner.
Secondly, there’s a political side to this: we know that some jihadist groups, like the al-Furqan brigade, are backed by Qatar, and others by Saudi Arabia. We’ve heard that these groups were getting ready to announce the creation of their own Islamic state. So it seems that al-Baghdadi decided to pre-empt this by declaring the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
The rebel leader is referring to Syrian rebels being openly trained by Jordan and the U.S. as an alternative to an Islamist presence near Israel, though he adds the conspiratorial twist that their purpose is to impersonate Islamists.
Amid reports that Syria has turned the main destination of the world’s Jihadists, Damascus warned that unless those Jihadists are denied access, the crisis it has sustained for over two years will spill over across its border and set the entire region ablaze.
Syria, via its state-controlled newspaper al-Thawra, warned Jordan on Thursday against training foreign fighters on its territory and accused it of espousing the policy of a double ambiguity.
While the Syria conflict may be the biggest break al-Qaida has had in a long while, it remains to be seen how much appetite there will be for Islamist rule on the part of the Syrian people, some of whom have already shown an unwillingness to stomach it through protests against al-Nusra.
A leading coalition of Syrian Islamist insurgents broke with a more radical group on Friday, sharply criticizing its announced alliance with Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch as a moral and political mistake that would benefit only their common enemy, President Bashar al-Assad. …
“This is not the right time to declare states, or to unify a state with another state.”
Expressing “surprise and dismay” at the development, the coalition statement said, “We don’t need imported charters or a new understanding of the nation’s religion.” And in a further criticism of Nusra’s loyalty to outsiders, the statement said, “We won’t be doing our population, and our nation, any service if we pledge our allegiance to those who don’t know a thing about our reality.”
… Assad has long contended that his enemies are foreign-backed terrorists affiliated with Sunni extremist groups like Al Qaeda. The news that Al Qaeda and Nusra were joining together not only appeared to partly validate his claims but reflected the divergent paths of the insurgency against him.
… “The bottom line is that Al Qaeda ideology doesn’t suit us, and rebels in Syria have to take a clear stance about this,” Mr Al Khatib, the leader of the Syrian National Coalition, said yesterday on Facebook.
Peter Bergen andJennifer Rowlandalso have a useful article on the development, though framing this development as a “merger” is not exactly correct, as discussed above: Syria rebel group’s dangerous tie to al-Qaeda
On Tuesday, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq announced that it had merged with the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra to form the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” …
The merger was first reported by SITE, a Washington-based group that tracks jihadist material online. The authors were able to confirm the announcement by monitoring the jihadist site, Ansar al Mujahideen, which frequently posts material from al Qaeda, including Tuesday’s news of the merger of the Syrian and Iraqi wings of al Qaeda. Complicating matters, on Wednesday al Nusra claimed it wasn’t merging with al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, but instead was pledging its allegiance to al Qaeda’s overall leadership.
… The fact that al-Nusra has publicly aligned itself with central al Qaeda is worrisome. A long-term safe haven for this group in Syria could be the prelude for the formation of an organization with the wherewithal to attack the West, just as al Qaeda’s sojourn in Afghanistan when it was controlled by the Taliban prepared the group for the 9/11 attacks.
Second, al-Nusra is widely regarded as the most effective fighting force in Syria, and its thousands of fighters are the most disciplined of the forces opposing Assad.
Al-Nusra is also the first al Qaeda affiliate to take a page out of Hezbollah’s book and operate not only as an effective fighting force but also as a large-scale provider of services…
Finally, al-Nusra is the first jihadist group for many years that has chosen to merge with al Qaeda at a time when it is having significant success on the battlefield. Al Qaeda’s North African franchise, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as well as the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, both announced their affiliation with al Qaeda only when they were struggling for resources and exposure.
… Sheikh al-Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, said that he had delayed the announcement of the formal merger with al-Nusra because he wanted to allow Syrians time to get to know al-Nusra on its own terms, without the inherent negative bias that would be caused by an early announcement of its ties to al Qaeda.
… According to Leila Hilal, a Syrian-American who meets regularly with the Syrian opposition and is the head of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, the merger announcement may “confirm the suspicions of much of the Syrian public that al-Nusra is not fightingfor a free Syria, but for the establishment of an ultra-fundamentalist state.”
That might explain why the head of al-Nusra, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, claimed in an audio message released on Wednesday that he wasn’t “consulted” on the announcement of the merger of the Syrian and Iraqi wings of al Qaeda. Jawlani then stepped on his effort at damage control by announcing his pledge of allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is, of course, the overall head of al Qaeda worldwide.
Syria could become a “long-term safe haven” from which al-Qaida could attack “the West”? Ah, that’s why they’re talking about drones…
While Qatar inaugurates first Syria interim government embassy and welcomes Hitto in Doha (who “has begun talks to form an interim government of 11 ministries to administer the whole of Syria”), Saudi Arabia is allegedly beginning to second-guess its participation with Qatar and Turkey in supporting Islamist rebels:
Saudi Arabia is seeking to inherit Syria’s role in Lebanon, which began in the 1970s and lasted until Syrian troops withdrew from the country following accusations that Syria was behind Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005.
Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Lebanon has undergone many phases. During the rise of Nasserism, Riyadh espoused in Lebanon a policy of opposition to the Egyptian leader. After Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death in 1970 and the beginning of the Lebanese civil war and the growth of Syrian interference there, Riyadh vacillated between having an adversarial, peaceful or even harmonious relationship with Damascus in relation to Lebanon.
During the last 10 years, Lebanon has become akin to a mirror of the sometimes intimate, and other times strained, relationship between Riyadh on one end and the Damascus-Tehran alliance on the other. The last harmonious period Syria and Saudi Arabia had in Lebanon occurred following King Abdullah’s initiative aimed at reconciling with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the 2008 Arab Economic Summit in Kuwait. This led to the Lebanese adopting the term “seen-seen” (Arabic for S-S) to describe the Syrian-Saudi Arabian accord relating to the management of the Lebanese crisis. This accord, in turn, led to Lebanon enjoying a period of political calm and the formation of a national unity government headed by Riyadh’s most prominent ally, former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, which included members of Hezbollah and representatives of all the components of Lebanon’s incongruous political factions.
But, the S-S understanding soon collapsed, with Hezbollah turning against Hariri’s cabinet. The reason was that Damascus, under Iranian pressure, had forsaken another of its agreements, namely to work together toward guaranteeing that Ayad Allawi, and not Nouri al-Maliki, became prime minister of Iraq.
…Once the Syrian crisis erupted, Riyadh’s announced priority was to back the Syrian opposition’s efforts to change the Assad regime. Since then, Saudi Arabia’s ally in Lebanon, Saad Hariri, has remained outside the country, bound by a Saudi decision to do so and by Riyadh’s desire to make it known that it was choosing to “disengage” itself from the Lebanese scene.
…Recent weeks, however, have seen a radical change in the Saudi policy of turning its back on Lebanon, with events pointing to a Saudi Arabian decision to return in force and re-establish its influence on the country’s political scene…
What led Saudi Arabia to change its stance and re-immerse itself in Lebanon’s quicksand? Several sources point to a Saudi re-evaluation of the policy adopted toward Syria. This does not equate to a change in position regarding the necessity of toppling the Syrian regime, for that remains a constant in its Syria policy.
This re-evaluation occurred as result of Saudi Arabia espousing a different view than Qatar and Turkey concerning the political alternative that would inherit Syria’s regime, if it were to fall. While Doha and Ankara favor the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, Saudi Arabia strongly opposes that eventuality. In fact, it will expend great diplomatic effort to prevent the establishment of yet another Brotherhood regime in an Arab country.
According to experts in Saudi affairs, Riyadh is of the view that Muslim Brotherhood rule in Syria would lead to the Brotherhood eventually coming into power in Jordan, thereby threatening to turn the attention of Arab revolutions from military presidential totalitarian regimes to regimes ruled by royal families.
Riyadh is also wary that the fall of Jordan into the hands of the Brotherhood would leave Saudi Arabia half-surrounded by Brotherhood regimes, and threaten to spread Brotherhood control over Syria and some other Gulf monarchies.
According to these sources, Riyadh started a concerted move on three different axes. The first aimed to thwart a Brotherhood takeover of Syria. The second proposed an alternative to the Syrian regime composed of Salafists and some elements who defected from the Syrian army. There is some diplomatic information pointing to the fact that US Secretary of State John Kerry was informed by his Saudi interlocutors, during his visit to Riyadh, that the Brotherhood experiment, as seen in Egypt, has proved to be a failure and that Riyadh strongly objected to the establishment of Brotherhood rule in Syria.
The third axis revolves around Saudi Arabia’s return to the Lebanese scene, which emanates from a Saudi belief that it needs both a Levantine card and Syrian opposition bargaining chips to bolster its position and influence when negotiating for the establishment of an alternative to the Syrian regime. …
Part of the apparent change in Saudi policy may be what is described in this article:
Syrian rebels say they have been told access to weapons from Arabian Gulf states will be conditional on their pledging allegiance to the Free Syrian Army and its civilian overseers in the Syrian National Coalition.
The conditions are part of an effort to better organise the revolt against Bashar Al Assad and rein in Islamist militants.
The Free Syrian Army commander Gen Selim Idriss visited Gulf states last week to ask if the flow of weapons to the rebels could be increased. …
There has been no public comment on the talks from any Gulf countries. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been supplying elements of the opposition with arms for months via Turkey but not in sufficient volumes to act as an equaliser between rebels and the regime.
This is in addition to Saudi issuing explicit warnings regarding the illegality of its citizens going to fight in Syria, after confirmations of the presence of high numbers of young Saudis fighting in Syria. Considering the role that Saudi Arabia is known to play, this alleged, sudden change of policy seems puzzling. Saudi interests have long been characterized by a high degree of ambivalence.
The Syrian government is sending members of its irregular militias for guerrilla combat training at a secret base in Iran, in a move to bolster its armed forces drained by two years of fighting and defections, fighters and activists said.
… Israel’s intelligence chief and a Western diplomat have said Iran, Assad’s main backer, is helping to train at least 50,000 militiamen and aims to increase the force to 100,000 – though they did not say where the training occurred.
…if the reports by Syrian fighters are true, the move to train combatants in Iran suggests that their country’s increasingly regionalized conflict has grown well beyond – and could even outlast – a battle for power between Assad’s circle and the opposition.
… Nabeel, a muscular Christian fighter from Homs nicknamed “The Shameless One”, said Iranian trainers repeatedly lectured on looting, a crime widely committed by fighters on both sides.
“On our first day of training, the Iranian officer overseeing our course said, ‘I know exactly what is going on in Syria and want to tell you one thing: If you joined the National Defence Army for looting and not to defend your country, you will die an ugly death and go to hell’.” …
GULF SEEKS TO “BLEED” IRAN
The following paragraph of this article conveys the general sense that has been held about Saudi Arabia’s agenda in the conflict, and stands in stark contrast to the understanding laid out in the above article on Saudi influence in Lebanon, which, if to be confirmed, needs to be developed and aired further.
“If the Saudis felt that the Iranians are really moving this game up, they will be sure to check that escalation by increasing assistance to rebel fighters,” said Michael Stephens, a Doha-based analyst for the security think tank RUSI.
“Saudi Arabia is totally focused on this as a way to make the Iranians bleed … keep the Iranians bogged down in this proxy war, bleed them dry.”
That the conflict could drag on beyond the fall of the Syrian regime is echoed by MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITT:
WASHINGTON — As it cobbles together additional aid for rebel fighters there, the Obama administration believes Syria could face a protracted, bloody conflict, even if the rebels succeed in ousting President Bashar al-Assad, several officials said Thursday.
The top American intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., said that even if Mr. Assad’s government fell, sectarian fighting would most likely engulf the country for a year or more. The American ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, warned that without a negotiated political transition, supporters of the Assad government, “fearing death, would fight to the death.”
Those bleak assessments, delivered in separate hearings before the House and the Senate, underscore the grinding nature of the conflict in Syria and the administration’s pessimism that outside intervention will avert further humanitarian tragedy.
“I agree with you that the prospects in Syria are not good,” said Elizabeth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, who along with Mr. Ford faced sharp questioning from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over what the members said was an inadequate American response to the continuing bloodshed.
President Obama has signed off in principle on more aid for the military wing of the opposition, which could include battlefield gear like body armor and night-vision goggles. The United States has already pledged medicine and food, and is training rebels covertly in Jordan….
Administration officials said the rebels had made slow but steady gains against the forces of the Assad government, and now controlled significantly more territory than five months ago. But they also warned about the rising danger of extremist groups, which Mr. Ford said were being bolstered by the “pernicious” influence of Iran.
“There is a real competition under way now between extremists and moderates in Syria,” said Mr. Ford, who had just returned from London, where he met with leaders of the opposition. “We need to weigh in on behalf of those who promote freedom and tolerance.”
Mr. Ford said the United States was also urging the Syrian opposition to reach out to minority groups, including Christians and the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Mr. Assad and many of his closest advisers and loyalists belong.
“There needs to be a negotiated political settlement because if there is not a negotiated settlement, our sense is that regime supporters, fearing death, would fight to the death,” he said.
Mr. Obama discussed Syria on Thursday in a White House meeting with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who urged the president to show “stronger leadership” in dealing with conflict.
The president, acknowledging that the situation there was at a “critical juncture,” said, “It is important for us to bring about an effective political transition that would respect the rights of all Syrians.”
In the short term, Mr. Obama added, it was important “to try to eliminate some of the carnage.”
Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the most likely situation was a Syria divided along geographical and sectarian lines, with militias fighting for at least a year to 18 months after an exit by Mr. Assad.
“There are literally hundreds of these militia groups that are fighting on a local basis in the north and east of the country,” he said. “They are gaining more control of the area.”
But Mr. Clapper acknowledged that American intelligence agencies were not venturing a guess about when or how Mr. Assad might go, given continuing support from Russia and Iran, and the Syrian leader’s own belief that he can ride out the civil war.
“His own perspective is that he believes he’s got the upper hand, that he’s winning,” Mr. Clapper said. “He’s also said that he was born in Syria and he’s going to die there.”…
Another article underscoring the intractable character of the conflict: The Battle of Armageddon byMichael Weiss
The impregnable regime bases are in the Qassioum, which, in addition to being Assad’s domicile, is also the headquarters of the Republican Guard, al-Drejj (to the north of Qudssaya), Mazzeh, home a military airport and army bases belonging to the Fourth Armored Division, Qataneh, and Kiswah.
The rebels face two major obstacles in any concerted foray into central Damascus. First, there is a greater concentration of conventional regime forces here than anywhere else in Syria, including not just the bulk of the two praetorian divisions but other divisions and the now mainly Alawite-staffed Special Forces. Rebels have never encountered this quotient of Syrian regulars before because these troops constitute a loyalist hardcore, the possibility of prompting defections is much slimmer. This is to say nothing of the capital’s buildup of the Popular Committees and Jaysh al-Sha’bi militias which stand to take the place of Syrian army in a coming sectarian free-for-all. Urban combat here will be longer and bloodier than it was in Aleppo. Imagine every street another Salaheddine.
The second problem is topographical. All of the regime installations cited above are in elevated positions meaning that, as rebels advance into downtown Damascus, a steady barrage of rockets and artillery can rain down on the capital until there aren’t any buildings left standing. As grim as it may sound, this may actually constitute the rebels’ end-game in the absence of foreign intervention.
How does a guerrilla insurgency make up for its lack of firepower or an air component? By using the other side’s to do its bidding. Typically what has happened in other fought-over swaths of Syria is that the rebels have laid siege to regime installations with their own rockets and artillery for the purpose of infiltrating them and confiscating whatever materiel they can carry or drive off with. (This ranges from Kalashnikovs to surface-to-air missiles). The regime inevitably responds to the loss of its own strategic terrain, and the prospect of better-equipped enemies, by bombarding these sites and rendering them inoperable even when the rebels are flushed out.
According to analysts I’ve spoken to, there is simply no way that the rebels can penetrate the Rif Dimashq military installations given their current capability, even with Croatian rocket launchers and recoilless guns. Since they don’t have a no-fly zone or close air support, or heavier caliber weapons the West has been reluctant to supply them, they will likely resort to the kind of pinprick measures – suicide and car bombings – we’ve seen used against NATO and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rebels will thus act as both moving targets and guidance systems for the regime’s own war machine, raiding one base in the hopes that it will be cannibalistically powdered by the adjoining. Jahbat al-Nusra is well-poised to be the vanguard fighting force in Damascus since its militants have the fewest reservations about sacrificing themselves. Idriss’ Supreme Military Command, although it disclaims Nusra membership in its ranks, is not above partnering with the caliphate-minded jihadists for precisely this reason.
… But be under no illusions about how long it will take or at what price the fall of Sham will come. Since the siege of Aleppo began last summer, 10,000 have been killed in that province, a million have fled, another half million are internally displaced, and out of a total population of 2.4 million, 2.3 million are living in areas needing humanitarian aid. Not for nothing did the rebels name the battle for Damascus the ‘Battle of Armageddon.’
Back to Iran, they support the Syrian regime, do they not? But they also seem to have a relationship with al-Qaida… what exactly is their game? Strange bedfellows — Iran and al Qaeda By Peter Bergen
The appearance Friday in a lower Manhattan courtroom of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and one-time al Qaeda spokesman, to face charges of conspiracy to kill Americans underlines the perhaps surprising fact that members of bin Laden’s inner circle have been living in Iran for the past decade or so.
It was Abu Ghaith’s decision to leave the comparative safety of his longtime refuge in Iran for Turkey a few weeks ago that led to the chain of events that landed him in Manhattan for trial.
… As is well known, many of bin Laden’s family and members of his inner circle fled Afghanistan for Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban in the winter of 2001, but what is less well known is that some also fled to neighboring Iran.
According to U.S. documents and officials, in addition to Abu Ghaith, other of bin Laden’s inner circle who ended up in Iran include the formidable military commander of al Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as Saad bin Laden, one of the al Qaeda’s leader older sons who has played some kind of leadership role in the group.
Saad bin Laden spent the first six months of 2002 living in Karachi in southern Pakistan. From there he helped one of his father’s wives, Khairiah bin Laden, and several of his father’s children to move from Pakistan to Iran.
For years these bin Laden family members all lived in the Iranian capital, Tehran, under some form of house arrest. Their conditions were not unpleasant, with time for visits to swimming pools and shopping trips.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence learned that some al Qaeda operatives were living in the northern Iranian town of Chalus, on the Caspian Sea.
… A year after that operation was called off, according to US and Saudi officials, from his Iranian refuge Saif al-Adel authorized al-Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia to launch a series of terrorist attacks in the Saudi kingdom that began in the capital Riyadh in May 2003, a campaign that killed scores of Saudis and expatriates.
On the face of it, the fact that a number of al Qaeda leaders and operatives and bin Laden family members found shelter in Iran is puzzling, as the Shia theocrats in the Iranian regime are hostile to the Sunni ultra zealots in al Qaeda, and vice versa. …
As al-Qaida’s influence in Syria becomes more visible, it also grows in Lebanon:
Waving al-Qaeda’s flag during protests and marches carried out by Salafists in Lebanon has become very common. Al-Qaeda’s flag was recently seen flying in the center of Beirut when 2,000 Salafists gathered in the capital upon the call of Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir to go to the streets. In one of Beirut’s neighborhoods [Tariq al Jadidah], which is the stronghold of the Sunni sect in the Lebanese capital, young masked men go occasionally to the streets waving al-Qaeda’s flag, as is the case in the city of Tripoli [the capital of North Lebanon], which is currently dominated by the Salafist movement.
In light of the current political situation, this phenomenon does not bode well for Lebanon. Al-Qaeda’s presence has become prominent on the Lebanese arena to the extent that it has become part of its normal political and partisan life. At the security level, it is believed that the Syrian crisis has been spilling over into some areas of Lebanon, as clashes in the Damascus countryside and Homs are reflected in some of the towns on Lebanon’s northern and eastern border.
The Lebanese security apparatus has been trying as much as possible to hide the grim reality from the public. It has been saying that al-Qaeda’s flags flying during protests do not suggest that the organization has a physical existence in Lebanon. …
Interior Minister Charbel Mansour, however, does not hesitate to appear on local television to warn that “Lebanon’s security situation is increasingly worsening and that armed groups have become more present than the state in many streets and regions.” …
First indications
According to the security information, al-Qaeda has affiliated groups in Lebanon, which have begun to grow and engage in raging confrontations in its northern cities, mainly the clashes taking place in Tripoli against Alawites. This is not to mention the confrontations waged by Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, especially in the rural areas of Damascus and Homs. Moreover, the security information shows that first indications of al-Qaeda public appearance in Lebanon go back to period before the eruption of the Syrian revolution between 2007 and 2011, with the growing semi-public appearance of the movement of Fatah al-Islam, Abdullah Azzam Brigades and the Ziad Jarrah Brigades.
Nevertheless, al-Qaeda has had an increasingly heavy presence in Lebanon with the growing rise of the jihadist Salafist movement within the Syrian uprising, which created some sort of a link between the jihadist Salafists in Homs in particular, and the nascent Salafist movement in northern Lebanon. It was not long before the extremely poor Sunni-dominated northern Lebanon turned into the backyard of the Syrian armed Salafist opposition and an extension of its ideological climate. …
Imitating Jabhat al-Nusra
According to this information, the rise of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria prompted the emulation of its jihadist model by Lebanese Salafists who are active in northern Lebanon and some Palestinian camps in the process of “supporting their brothers in Syria.” The information also indicates that “the Salafist arena of jihad” in Syria has started to produce an organic and organizational extension of it inside several Lebanese areas. It is noteworthy that al-Qaeda, which includes Jabhat al-Nusra, still classifies Lebanon as a “Nusra arena” (i.e., an arena to gather mujahedeen and prepare them for jihad in another). …
Since the mix isn’t diverse enough, let’s add Hamas. After years of support from the Assad regime, Hamas, now supported/hosted by Qatar, joins the array of Sunni Islamist groups participating in the Syrian uprising:
The military wing of Hamas has upped its support for Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad and is now providing training.
Prior, Hamas was offering only support and assistance, but had held back from tapping its military forces, Ynet reported. But Friday, various media outlets reported that Hamas had completely severed ties with Mr. Assad and had sent military experts to Damascus to train the Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian Army. The group is now friends with Qater, Ynet reported.
Egypt Update
A lot has been happening in Egypt, including sectarian attacks on churches and violent clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents. The following scratch the surface of what’s been happening.
It has come to be known as the “Battle of the Mountain”: a ferocious fight between members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents near the group’s Cairo headquarters. In a country that has already seen crisis after crisis, it could mark a dangerous turning point in the political turmoil.
The aftermath of the fighting is raising worries that the confrontation between Islamists,, who dominate power in the country, and their opponents is moving out of anyone’s control. The riot on March 22 revealed a new readiness of some in the anti-Brotherhood opposition to turn to violence, insisting they have no choice but to fight back against a group they accuse of using violence against them for months. The fight featured an unusual vengefulness. Young protesters were seen at one point pelting a Brotherhood member with firebombs and setting him aflame. Others chased anyone with a conservative Muslim beard, while Islamists set up checkpoints searching for protesters. Each side dragged opponents into mosques and beat them.
Since the fight, Islamists enraged by what they saw as aggression against their headquarters have for the past week hiked up calls for wider action against opponents — and the media in particular — accusing them of trying to overthrow Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
Those calls may explain moves by the country’s top prosecutor the past week: the questioning of a popular television comedian, Bassem Youssef, whose Jon Stewart-style satires of Morsi drive Islamists into knots of anger, the summoning of several other media personalities and the issuing of arrest warrants against five opposition activists on accusations of fomenting violence.
Opposition activists warn the moves are the opening of a campaign of intimidation to silence Morsi’s critics. The presidency says the prosecutor is just enforcing the law and that Morsi’s office has nothing to do with the moves. Morsi’s supporters say they are showing restraint against extreme provocation.
… The fury growing for months was on display in the March 22 clashes in Moqattam, a district located on a rocky plateau overlooking Cairo, where the Brotherhood’s headquarters is located. Both sides came ready for a fight. Opponents had called for a march on the Brotherhood headquarters to “restore dignity” after an incident a week earlier, when Brotherhood members beat up activists who were spray-painting graffiti outside the building, as well as journalists filming the incident, slapping one woman to the ground.
The Brotherhood brought in several thousand supporters, vowing to defend the building, referring to it as “our home.” The mayhem erupted the minute the two sides faced off, and each accuses the other of throwing the first stone. The heaviest fighting was in a square several kilometers (miles) away from the Brotherhood headquarters, which was guarded by lines of police. Rains of stones and gunshots were exchanged, while “popular committees” formed by residents to protect their neighborhood joined in, swinging poles and machetes.
All day and into the night, the two sides battered each other with everything from knives and iron bars to homemade pistols, leaving 200 injured. Bearded Brotherhood members dragged dozens of activists into the Bilal bin Ramah Mosque, where they beat them and flogged them with whips, several of those who were held told The Associated Press.
Christian activist Amir Ayad recalled how, while he was being beaten, he’d hear Brotherhood supporters coming into the mosque greeted by their comrades who told them, “Go warm up on that Christian dog inside.” Ayad — who was left with a fractured skull and broken ribs — said Brotherhood members forced him to pose for photograph, wielding a knife they pushed into his hands to use as evidence that he was thug.
Opponents, meanwhile, snatched a number of Brotherhood members and took them into the Al-Hamad Mosque. A reporter for the Brotherhood’s party newspaper, Mustafa el-Khatib, told the AP he was seized and carried by his arms and legs into the mosque and beaten.
“You sheep, we’ll show you,” his tormentors shouted, using a term many protesters use against Islamists they see as blindly following their leaders, el-Khatib told the AP. He had deep cuts in his head and bruises all over his body. …
At least one person is killed outside Cairo’s main Coptic Cathedral on Sunday night following attack by unknown assailants during funeral for victims of Saturday’s sectarian bloodletting
Unknown assailants attacked the main Coptic cathedral in Cairo’s Abbasiya district on Sunday as hundreds of mourners held a funeral for victims of Saturday’s sectarian clashes in the Qalioubiya governorate, north of Cairo. At least one was killed in the melee.
The Head of the Egyptian Ambulance Organisation, Mohamed Sultan, announced that one person had been killed after having been struck by birdshot outside Cairo’s main Coptic cathedral. The identity of the deceased is yet to be revealed.
As of 6pm, the health ministry said that the injury toll had reached 29, at least two of which were in critical condition.
… After being pelted with stones, mourners at the cathedral responded by throwing stones back. Gunshots were heard during the subsequent clashes; some eyewitnesses confirmed that assailants used firearms.
Witnesses at the scene confirmed that teargas canisters had landed inside the cathedral’s precincts. Other eyewitnesses said that unknown assailants dressed in plainclothes were hurling Molotov cocktails towards the cathedral.
… Hundreds of mourners had turned out for the funeral on Sunday for those killed in Saturday’s sectarian clashes in Qalioubiya governorate.
In the early hours of Saturday, five people were shot to death – and at least eight injured – in Qalioubiya’s Al-Khosous town. Four Christians and one Muslim were killed in the violence, Egypt’s health ministry reported.
A Coptic priest, however, told the private CBC satellite channel on Sunday that six Copts had died and many more had been injured.
Egypt’s leading Islamic authority Al-Azhar said on Thursday its clerics must be consulted on a law allowing the state to issue Islamic bonds, setting it at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood which drove the legislation through parliament last week.
It marks the first time Al-Azhar, a thousand-year-old seat of Islamic learning, has said its Senior Scholars Authority should be consulted on issues pertaining to Islamic law as set out in Egypt’s new, Islamist-tinged constitution.
Al-Azhar’s intervention could set a precedent for clerical oversight of other affairs of state. The Salafi Nour Party has said Al-Azhar must also approve an agreement Egypt is seeking with the International Monetary Fund because it includes a loan upon which Egypt will pay interest.
The Islamic bond, or sukuk law, will allow Egypt to issue debt compliant with Islamic principles, allowing the state to tap a new area of finance as President Mohamed Mursi’s administration grapples with an unaffordable budget deficit.
The popular Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef was released on bail yesterday after prosecutors questioned him on charges that he insulted Islam and the president.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit down with a member of Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s inner circle. He is Syria’s Ambassador to the UN. His name is Bashar Ja’afari and he began his career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1980. Back then, Syria was governed by Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al Assad.
Our meeting came in the wake of a General Assembly vote that approved the historic Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The ATT will attempt at regulating the $70 billion dollar arms trade by scrutinising whether sales of weapons breach international law, abet terrorism or foment genocide.
Syria, North Korea and Iran voted against the ATT. Ja’afari was quick to point towards India’s decision to abstain. India, a major importer, complained that the treaty favored exporting over importing states. …
ALIA ALLANA: At the Arab League’s most recent meeting in Doha (Qatar), Syria’s seat was given to the Opposition, Syrian National Council. How do you respond to this?
BASHAR JA’AFARI: There is no more Arab League. How can there be one without Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Iraq? These four countries are the four pillars of Arabism and they have either collapsed or face serious problems. There is a heavy weight vacuum that is being taken advantage of by Gulf States, by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
All the decisions made by the Arab League are a violation of the Charter. The league deals with states, not bodies such as the Syrian National Coalition. The Arab League has become an integral part of the problem, not the solution. The Arab League had a duty to help Syria resolve the crisis not to allow and approve terrorists to acquire more weapons. …
This week the global community saw that the Charter and by-laws of the Arab League, has not been respected with respect to the Syrian crisis from the beginning despite its mission to bring together Arabs. Rather it has been actively working to prevent coming together especially with respect to Syria.
Frankly, it never was much of a “League” of Arab states. And arguably it never really achieved a whole lot but two dozen lavish ‘summits’ offering inflated rhetoric, often calculated to assuage the Arab people about their central cause, Palestine.
… Despite years of pledges to eliminate visas requirements, along the lines of the European Ginga visa it should be noted that only one Arab country has waived visas for their Arab sisters and brothers internationally.
That would be the Syrian Arab Republic.
It is Syria, along with Palestine, out of all the 22 Arab League members, who most consistently and steadfastly have represented Arab Nationalism, Arab resistance to occupation, and the stated goals enunciated 66 years ago when the Arab League was established.
Presenter Ghida Fakhry: Joshua Landis; Yazan Abdallah, a Syrian academic and member of the Syria Dialogue – a group calling for transitional change in Syria; and Saleh Mubarak, a member of the Syrian National Council and a professor at Qatar University.
[Excellent article based on interviews with numerous Alawi inhabitants of Homs, explaining their reasons for supporting the regime and fighting in the various branches of the military and shabiha. ]
Syria’s vital oil industry is breaking down as rebels capture many of the country’s oil fields, with wells aflame and looters scooping up crude, depriving the government of much needed cash and fuel for its war machine against the uprising.
Exports have ground practically to a standstill, and the regime of President Bashar Assad has been forced to import refined fuel supplies to keep up with demand amid shortages and rising prices. In a sign of the increasing desperation, the oil minister met last week with Chinese and Russian officials to discuss exploring for gas and oil in the Mediterranean off Syria’s coast…. “Businesswise there isn’t a company that is willing to invest in Syria these days,” said Seifan, who currently lives in Iraq.
AMMAN, Jordan — The United States and Jordan have stepped up training of Syrian opposition forces that may be used to establish a buffer zone along Syria’s southern border, according to U.S. and Jordanian officials. Training begun last year has been expanded and accelerated after rebel gains in the south, including capture of a stretch of the Jordanian-Syrian border near the Golan Heights, two military outposts and the country’s main border crossing with Jordan.
Buffer zones along the Syria/Jordan border
Jordanian security officials said a previous timetable to complete training of about 3,000 Free Syrian Army officers by the end of June has been moved up to the end of this month in light of the border victories.
Creation of a buffer zone would aim to convert areas now in rebel hands into permanent havens for thousands of army defectors and displaced civilians in the area and allow easy access for humanitarian aid. More than 470,000 Syrian refugees have already crossed into Jordan — a number U.N. officials expect to pass the 1 million mark this year.
Officials from the United States and Jordan cautioned that implementation of the zones has not been set in motion and listed several stumbling blocks, including the ongoing refusal of the United States and other international backers to provide air cover to prevent Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s air force from attacking rebel outposts.
Two years after the start of the Syrian conflict, Western and Middle East governments are struggling to devise an effective strategy they can agree on, even as the war appears to be spinning beyond their ability to influence it, short of the direct intervention they have refused to contemplate.
But the officials cited growing concern that moderate rebel forces, who have fought effectively in the south and around Damascus, would be overtaken by extremist Islamic fighters who have become dominant in northern areas under rebel control.
“The last thing anyone wants to see is al-Qaeda gaining a foothold in southern Syria next to Israel. That is a doomsday scenario,” said a U.S. diplomat in Jordan who was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject….
The Obama administration and regional governments fear the fighting may soon spill over into other countries.
“Buffer zones on the Syrian side of the border is the only way to keep the conflict away from Jordan,” said Mahmoud Irdaisat, head of the Amman-based Center for Strategic Studies at the King Abdullah II Defense Studies Academy.
The Obama administration, which sent a force of about 150 U.S. military personnel to Jordan last year, has repeatedly refused to comment on reports that the force is training Syrian fighters…
Obama administration officials have expressed repeated concern that some of about 20,000 of the weapons, called MANPADS, have made their way from the arsenals of former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi to Syria.
The administration has acknowledged that Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels, and it has helped vet the recipients. But it has repeatedly expressed concern that adding surface-to-air missiles to their arsenal would risk putting the weapons in the hands of militants and pose a threat to Israel and other nearby countries…..
…But while the fall of southern Syria would facilitate the rebel push for Damascus, it might also create dangerous complications, potentially drawing Syria’s neighbors into the two-year-old civil war. Besides abutting Jordan, the region borders Syria’s side of the Golan Heights, along a sensitive frontier with Israel.
‘‘This is a very sensitive triangle we are talking about,’’ said Hisham Jaber, a retired Lebanese Army general who heads the Middle East Center for Studies and Political Research in Beirut. ‘‘The fall of Daraa, if it happens, may usher in strategic changes in the area.’’…
‘‘Damascus will be liberated from here, from Daraa, from the south,’’ declared an armed fighter,….
Opposition fighters battling Assad’s troops have been chipping away at the regime’s hold on the southern part of the country in recent weeks with the help of an influx of foreign-funded weapons.
Their aim is to secure a corridor from the Jordanian border to Damascus in preparation for an eventual assault on the capital. …
A Western diplomat who monitors Syria from his base in Jordan said the fall of Daraa appeared imminent, possibly in the next few days or weeks. His assessment was based on classified intelligence information, he said.
Daraa’s fall could unleash lawlessness on Jordan’s northern border and send jitters across the kingdom, a key US ally which fears Islamic extremist groups on its doorstep.
Also of grave concern are rebel advances in areas near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. ‘‘If Daraa falls, the rebels will come face-to-face with the Israeli army in the Golan,’’ said Hilal Khashan,
Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he believes Syria could turn into another Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia is backing a push by Syrian opposition rebels to carve out a “liberated” area in southern Syria, opening a key route of attack on Damascus…. Americans are supervising the flow of arms and the Saudis pay for them,”….Those receiving training are mainly moderate Sunni Muslim tribesmen from central and southern Syria, many of whom have served in the Syrian army….
General Salim Idriss, who heads the SMC has been touring donor countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Kingdom to rally support and map a military strategy.
Qatar has been working more closely with Turkey, who are more sympathetic to the Doha backed Muslim Brotherhood, whilst Saudi Arabia has been pushing much of its support through Jordan, analysts and diplomats have said.
Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he believes Syria could turn into another Afghanistan. Dempsey, who is on an unannounced visit to Afghanistan, also said “…
I have grave concerns that Syria could become an extended conflict” that drags on for many years. Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of Army and security personnel, have been killed in the violence…..
Syrian leader warns of domino effect and accuses Arab neighbours of sheltering rebels who seek to overthrow him…
“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control … the situation will inevitably spill over into neighbouring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he said in an interview with Turkish television.
Turmoil would spread “east, west, north and south. This will lead to a state of instability for years and maybe decades to come,” Assad said in the interview, posted by the Syrian presidency on the internet.
[Important read]…The National Coalition is not simply an SNC clone, but it has replicated the representation game that the SNC and the Friends of Syria had already played over the preceding year. A central assertion in Clinton’s critique of the SNC was that it was insufficiently representative of those opposing the Assad regime. The National Coalition claims to represent the Syrian opposition more broadly than the SNC—but that is a stretch…..
The SNC had still not set up permanent aid offices or a supply structure to deliver the most urgently needed commodities to liberated areas—such as fuel to run power generators for field hospitals, bakeries, and water pumps, and for heating. Nor had it attempted systematic surveys of needs and data collection….
The scale of the challenge, and its political complexity, were highlighted when the Syrian government authorized the United Nations World Food Program in mid-January 2013 to work with local nongovernmental organizations to distribute food aid worth $519 million. The program was already delivering aid for up to 1.5 million Syrians a month through the government-controlled Syrian Arab Red Crescent, but the new agreement allowed it to reach an additional one million Syrians in need. The National Coalition protested vociferously against giving assistance to “the regime that destroyed cities and shelled hospitals and bakeries and displaced inhabitants, to help it to fix what its own hands have perpetrated.”34 Noting that rebel areas, “in which over ten million people reside, or nearly half the Syrian population,” were receiving only 10 percent of what they needed, its Aid Coordination Unit offered itself as a more effective and equitable alternative for aid distribution.35 Syrian activists acknowledge that the Friends of Syria lack confidence in the operational capacity of the National Coalition to deliver international aid on a large scale, and resent this. Its ability to provide security is an added concern, as United Nations food and fuel convoys have come under rebel attack. In late January, National Coalition Chairman al-Khatib acknowledged that “much of the relief aid has been stolen or looted by gangs exploiting the security anarchy.”36 ….Activist writer Hajj-Saleh, who remains in hiding in Damascus, offered a bleak assessment of the local civilian structures at the start of March 2013. The grassroots movement provided a “multifaceted creativity” that the formal opposition lacked, he noted, butThis is not to say that conditions in the society of the revolution or its various local communities are promising. In reality we can speak of widespread signs of dissolution, damage to social ties even at the local level, the spread of violence and use of violence to settle diverse scores or for private profit. The forms of self-organization do not meet needs in most areas, as the elements of dissolution, fragmentation, and selfishness are more present and influential than those of healing, cooperation, and joint action.49
BEIRUT: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood may be President Bashar Assad’s best-organized political adversaries, but they are also loathed by some dissidents who accuse them of trying to dominate the opposition, backed by funds from Qatar.
In late March, some 70 dissidents sent a letter to the Arab League criticizing “the dictatorial control exercised by one of [the opposition’s] … currents over its decisions and actions, and the flagrant hegemony of diverse Arab and regional players.”…
London-based Ali al-Bayanouni, the Brotherhood’s deputy political chief, rejected the accusations.
“Our role in the coalition has been greatly exaggerated, and we are not financed by any state,” he told AFP, saying the group’s funding comes from “members and supporters, from Syria and elsewhere.”
“We represent just 10 percent of the coalition. How can they say we control everything?”….
“They believe that they are the natural leaders of Syria, they believe … their time has finally come and that they represent the nation better than anybody else,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.
“That self-assurance is resented of course by all the other groups. … The Brotherhood are the presumed winners, and that is why they are targeted.”
Analysts and dissidents admit that the Brotherhood are Syria’s best-organized opposition group. They have a hierarchy, offices, a website and even a newspaper.
“Qatar and Turkey support them because they are the only institutional party that has any chance of organizing Syria” should Assad fall, Landis told AFP…..
And the Brotherhood is confident they have real support on the ground too. “When there are democratic elections in Syria, we shall see w
ANTAKYA, TURKEY // Syrian rebel fighters have accused the Muslim Brotherhood of undermining the revolt against Bashar Al Assad and trying to dictate opposition politics.
Rebel officers said the Brotherhood was putting narrow factional politicking over the broad interests of the revolt.
“We hold you responsible for delaying victory of the revolution and the fragmentation of the opposition,” the Joint Command of the Free Syrian Army said in an open letter to the Muslim Brotherhood.
There was a “deep confrontation” within the opposition between the Muslim Brotherhood and other secular, national and military factions, the FSA said.
Anti-Brotherhood sentiments, particularly in Damascus, were running high, the FSA warned, with growing anger at efforts by the group to control military and humanitarian relief efforts administered by the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition bloc given Syria’s seat in the Arab League at a summit last week.
A significant majority of its members are directly or indirectly allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, much to the dismay of other rebel factions who say the group’s representation in the SNC political chambers vastly outweighs its street presence inside Syria.
The uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s rule entered its third year in March. The process of disaggregating the political and armed currents that are struggling against the Ba’athist regime, however, remains an exercise in futility. Despite ardent efforts by the numerous opposition factions to portray an image of ideological moderation, the preponderance of evidence indicates that radical Islamists dominate the Syrian insurgency. Jabhat al-Nusra, a radical Salafist organization that is acting as al-Qaeda’s surrogate in the conflict, has solidified itself as the most deadly insurgent faction fighting in Syria today. Yet other similarly motivated extremist formations are also making their presence felt. It is against this background that the activities of the Kata’ib Ahrar al-Sham (Free Men of Greater Syria Brigades, hereafter referred to as Ahrar al-Sham), a radical Salafist faction operating largely in northern Syria, warrant a closer look.
Ahrar al-Sham has consolidated its influence in strategically important theaters across Syria, including portions of Syria’s second city of Aleppo and its environs as well as vital supply and communication lines extending to Turkey (al-Monitor, January 13). It has also reportedly engaged Syrian security forces in some of the fiercest combat witnessed since the militarization of the uprising, including a series of fierce battles for control of a number of military air bases and civilian airports in January and February (al-Safir [Beirut], January 30; al-Jazeera [Doha], February 12). Perhaps most importantly, the instrumental role played by Ahrar al-Sham in the formation of the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF), an association of eleven like minded Salafist militant factions that came together in common cause in December 2012, is emblematic of its growing influence. [1] Ahrar al-Sham is widely reputed to maintain a dominant presence within the SIF. [2] In another sign of its expanding authority, a number of fellow Salafist insurgent groups merged under Ahrar al-Sham’s leadership structure to form the Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiya (The Islamic Movement of Ahrar al-Sham) in January 2013 (AFP, February 13).
Details surrounding the precise origins and leadership of Ahrar al-Sham remain murky. The group is believed to have organized in late 2011 and is reportedly led by Abu Abdullah al-Hamawi. While the nisbah portion of his name suggests that he hails from Hama, it has also been reported that he hails from Aleppo (al-Monitor, January 13). [3] Ahrar al-Sham’s founding members are said to be former political prisoners who were incarcerated in the infamous Sednaya Prison located just outside of Damascus until they were granted amnesty in May 2011. While it welcomes foreign-born militants into its ranks, Ahrar al-Sham boasts of its mostly Syrian-born membership (al-Monitor, January 13; AFP, February 13). Ahrar al-Sham’s influence is centered largely in Syria’s northern governorates of Idlib, Aleppo and Raqqa and, to a lesser extent, the western-central governorates of Hama and Homs. An accurate estimate of its membership is difficult to discern. An alleged member of the group asserted that Ahrar al-Sham commands between 5000 and 6000 fighters in Aleppo governorate alone, a figure that is likely to be inflated for propaganda purposes (al-Monitor, January 13). Tens of regional-based detachments likely organized around local village, town and city networks operate under its auspices.
Ahrar al-Sham’s track record to date is fraught with contradictions. From an ideological perspective, Ahrar al-Sham has declared its objective to transform Syria into its image of an Islamic state. Members of Ahrar al-Sham have stated that their conception of an Islamic state would protect religious minorities and be based on the premise that the majority of Syrians, who are Sunni Muslims, would choose to live in an Islamic society (Daily Star [Beirut], February 13; al-Akhbar [Beirut] January 5). Yet its official discourse is replete with extremist themes and
symbolism informed by its radical Salafist pedigree. Ahrar al-Sham’s frequent resort to sectarian diatribes targeting Alawites and Shiite Muslims, both of whom are viewed by hardline Salafists as h
….The majority of Kurds in Syria have been pro government through the uprising. Now the Kurdish card is being played. They will promise the Kurds their own state that runs from Iraq and through Syria. A new state will be carved. What was once the Skyes-Picot Agreement will be the Erdogan-Hamad deal….
In 10 years as Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at times reliably unscripted and unpredictable, has attracted his fair share of brickbats. But not last week when, buried in bouquets of praise, he started decisively down the road to peace with Turkey’s Kurds.
On Kurdish new year, or Newroz, Abdullah Ocalan, jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), called a truce in its 29-year war against the Turkish state, after a delicate negotiation with Mr Erdogan’s most trusted aides.
This process is a high-risk strategy to address a tangled story, with tactics that appear inconsistent and policy signals that will look contradictory. The reward for Turkey if it works is potentially enormous…
In exchange for the PKK standing down, a deal would require: reform of anti-terror laws that criminalise opinion (and jail thousands of Kurdish political activists); replacement of ethnic references in the constitution with equal citizenship; equality for the Kurdish language in education and public life; devolution of some power, probably through a broad decentralisation of Turkey; lowering of the electoral threshold to enter parliament, currently at 10 per cent, which prejudices Kurdish parties.
There will also have to be a formula to release Kurdish prisoners and exiles (including the reviled Mr Ocalan), and a reconciliation process to establish the truth about a dirty war that has cost about 40,000 lives.
All this requires not just cultural change but almost doctrinal revolution, and Mr Erdogan’s aides warn that the prime minister will continue to seem unpredictable, if only to keep at bay the wolves of Turkish nationalism.
But what seems to have set Mr Erdogan on this course – from which he at least once before pulled back – is the accelerating disintegration of Syria in the chaotic uprising next door against Bashar al-Assad…..
Syria’s archaeological heritage, which has yet to be fully studied, is imperiled by threats ranging from outright destruction to opportunistic treasure hunters.
by Aron Lund for Syria Comment
Is Syria Like Iraq?
By Matthew Barber and the Syria Video team
Due to necessity or incentive or both, Syrians are already processing oil in outdoor, homemade refineries: 
Many other towns have been attacked by the regime in the period since these events, but we mention these incidents to highlight the situation facing the Dera’a muhafiza, contributing to the mounting problem of refugees fleeing southern Syria for Jordan. Fighting is continuing in locations around the Dera’a muhafiza, with daily skirmishes in 
by Matthew Barber
