Syrian regime loses last credible ally among the Sunni ulama
By Thomas Pierret (Lecturer in Contemporary Islam, University of Edinburgh)
For Syria Comment, March 22, 2013
With the assassination of Sheikh Muhammad Sa‘id Ramadan al-Buti (b. 1929), who was killed in Thursday’s bomb attack at the al-Iman mosque in Damascus, the Syrian regime lost its last credible ally among the Sunni religious elite. A Muslim scholar of world standing, al-Buti had conferred religious legitimacy on the Asad dynasty for more than three decades, with far more influence than discredited state creatures like Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassun.
The son of a Kurdish cleric who fled Kemalist repression and sought refuge in Damascus in the early 1930s, al-Buti earned a doctorate at al-Azhar before joining the staff of the faculty of sharia at the University of Damascus, of which he was dean from 1977 to 1983. In the meantime, he also became famous for polemical essays that were enormously popular among the religious-minded youth of the 1970s.
A staunch traditionalist, al-Buti was struggling on two fronts: on the one hand, he refuted western ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism and of course secularism; on the other hand, he relentlessly attacked the proponents of Islamic reform, from modernist Muhammad ‘Abduh to Salafi literalist Nasir al-Din al-Albani.
Al-Buti always remained a bitter enemy of non-traditionalist brands of Islam: a decade ago, he branded Islamic MP Muhammad Habash a “heretic” because he had claimed that the gates of paradise were open to Christians and Jews; a few years ago, al-Buti encouraged the regime to “cleanse” the country of Salafi zealots. His profound hostility to the central tenets of Baathist ideology did not prevent him from concluding an unlikely alliance with the Asad family.
Al-Buti made his first gestures of support for the regime during the 1979-82 insurgency: whereas most of his senior colleagues were either silent or supportive of the opposition, he vocally condemned the attacks carried out by Islamic militants. This stance was in line with his long-standing opposition to both military and political activism in the name of Islam, which had resulted in poor relations with the Muslim Brothers. Al-Buti’s quietist approach, which he fully expounded in 1993 in a book entitled Jihad in Islam, was in no way related to some secularist principles, but to the belief that Islam should be ‘the common element that unites’ all political forces rather than the preserve of one of them.
In exchange for helping the regime to defeat its Islamic opponents, al-Buti was endowed with informal leadership over Syrian Islam: although he did not occupy any prestigious position within the Ministry of Religious Endowments (awqaf) until his 2008 appointment as the preacher of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, he enjoyed a close relationship with Hafiz al-Asad, who used to grant him long personal meetings. Contrary to many pro-regime sheikhs, al-Buti did not use his political connections for personal enrichment. What he obtained in exchange for his loyalty was visibility through a weekly program on state television, as well the possibility to intercede in favour of some of his exiled colleagues who were willing to come back to the homeland. Therefore, criticisms of al-Buti’s pro-regime stance often went along with recognition that he had helped improve the situation of the religious elite after the fierce repression of the early 1980s.
Under Bashar al-Asad, al-Buti remained loyal to the regime in exchange for some concessions to the religious sector. In 2005, he branded the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri as a US-Zionist conspiracy aimed at destroying Syria and Islam. Likewise, he described the execution of Saddam Hussein in 2007 as part of a US plan aimed at dividing Sunni and Shia Muslims, whom he called to unite, thereby repelling the opposition’s denunciation of the regime’s alliance with Iran. ‘Compensation’ for these declarations included a crackdown on women rights activism, more freedom for religious activities, a faculty of sharia in Aleppo, and the establishment of a short-lived League of the Ulama.
Following his appointment as the preacher of the Umayyad Mosque in 2008, al-Buti became increasingly influential within the Ministry of Religious Endowments by being entrusted with the supervision of an ambitious reform of higher Islamic education. On the eve of the 2011 revolution, however, relations with the authorities turned sour as a result of secularist measures such as a ban on face-veil (niqab) in schools and universities, as well as because of the broadcasting of a Ramadan series he deemed offensive to Islam.
In August 2010, al-Buti suggested that attacks on religion would entail painful retribution on the part of the Almighty: in a ‘vision’ he had in a dream, he said, he had seen a ‘devastating divine wrath filling the horizon’. A few months later, the Kurdish scholar first thought that this retribution had come under the form of the winter drought which for the third year, was hitting the country’s agriculture hard.
When demonstrations started in March 2011, al-Buti declared that this was the actual fulfillment of the godly vision he had had a few months earlier. Once again, the cleric gave credence to the regime’s narrative by speaking of a ‘Zionist conspiracy’. Although during the first weeks of the uprising al-Buti obtained further concessions like the closure of Damascus’ casino, the creation of a state-run Islamic satellite channel and his appointment as the head of a newly-created Union of the Ulama of Bilad al-Sham, his support for the regime gradually became unconditional and, above all, unlimited. A few days before his assassination, that is, two years into a conflict that had witnessed mass killing and destruction at the hands of the regime’s military, al-Buti was still encouraging the faithful to wage jihad in the ranks of the ‘heroic’ Syrian Arab Army, which he once compared to the Companions of the Prophet, in order to defeat the ‘global conspiracy’ against Syria.
Al-Buti, was the only respected scholar to express such vocal support for the regime after March 2011, the other religious sycophants being obscure, third-rank clerics, like Ahmad Sadiq, who was shot dead in Damascus a year ago. Therefore, regardless of who actually committed Thursday’s bomb attack (those who accuse the regime stress the fact that the attack took place in a heavily guarded neighbourhood, the al-Iman mosque being located a few meters away from the headquarters of the Ba‘th party; they also insist on the fact that bombing a Sunni mosque is an unprecedented pattern of operation on the part of Syrian insurgents (but it has been witnessed in Iraq), the tragic demise of al-Buti means that the regime has now ceased to enjoy any meaningful source of religious legitimacy among the Sunni clergy.
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From Foreign Policy
President Bashar al-Assad issued a statement of condolences to the country promising to destroy “extremism” and cleanse the country. The main opposition armed group, the Free Syrian Army, denied responsibility for the attack, stressing its forces would never have targeted a mosque. Moaz al-Khatib, the head of the main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned the assassination. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon authorized an investigation on Thursday into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Aleppo province. The government and opposition forces have traded blame over a missile attack in Khan al-Assal, which they say contained chemical weapons.
Jihad in Syria By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi for Syria Comment, 20 March 2013
How do the jihadist rebels generally conceive of jihad in the Syrian civil war?
One useful way to look into this question is to examine the Qur’anic verses pertaining to warfare cited in propaganda statements. In this context, one recurring verse is 22:39, which runs as follows: ‘Permission [to fight] has been granted to those who are being fought, because they have been wronged. And verily is God able to grant them victory.’
For example, at the start of the final rebel offensive on Raqqah at the beginning of this month that successfully took the city out of the hands of Assad’s forces, a video emerged on Youtube entitled ‘Statement from Jabhat al-Nusrah [JAN] on the beginning of the battle to liberate Raqqah.’ In this video, one can see three fighters from JAN – the al-Qa’ida-aligned jihadist group. The speaker begins the statement with citation of 22:39.
In a similar vein, at the end of last year, a battalion calling itself ‘The Free Men of the Euphrates Battalion’ invoked 22:39 at the opening of the announcement of its formation. In January of this year, a claimed police defector in Hama highlighted 22:39 in announcing his defection to Ahrar al-Sham, which has since merged with numerous other battalions to form a broad jihadist umbrella group that played a key role in the capture of Raqqah.
To be sure, 22:39 is also cited beyond jihadist circles, for it was notably invoked by the prominent Islamic scholar Mohammed Ali al-Sabouni– head of the Association of Syrian Scholars and a member of the Syrian National Coalition (opposition coalition-in-exile)- as a justification for taking up arms against the Assad regime.
Coming back to JAN (on whom I focus since it is considered the most hardline jihadist group), another Qur’anic quotation cited in their propaganda is 9:39, which states: ‘Fight the polytheists altogether just as they fight you altogether.’ This verse appeared at the beginning of a video released through the group’s official channel, called ‘The White Minaret.’
JAN’s channel also released a video that begins with quotation from 4:75, which speaks of the need to fight in the cause of God for the oppressed who cry out for aid: a theme emphasized in the same video.
One could go on, but the point is that by citing all these verses, even JAN places an emphasis on what might be termed ‘defensive jihad’: that is, fighting in self-defense and in defense of one’s fellow Muslim brethren in the face of a regime seen as waging war on Islam.
Indeed, the doctrine contrasts with ‘offensive jihad’, which is a concept that normally relies on a verse of the Qur’an quite different from the ones cited above: namely, 9:29. Modern al-Qa’ida theorists use this verse to argue that Muslims must conquer the world for Islam. Osama bin Laden himself made this aggressive approach clear in an essay stating that non-Muslims had three choices: conversion, subjugation, or death.
This kind of grandiose vision was duly taken up by al-Qa’ida-aligned jihadists fighting in places like Iraq and Mali, where their brutality towards the local populations helped to foster alienation.
In contrast, an emphasis on portraying the struggle against Assad as ‘defensive jihad’ means that providing protection and aid for local Muslim populations (see e.g. here and here)- or, to borrow a counter-insurgency phrase, ‘winning hearts and minds’- has become a key part of jihadist strategy, whatever their wider ambitions might be.
This also means a more cautious approach to implementing strict Islamic law for fear that doing so hastily might provoke too much resentment. Thus, in JAN’s case, it is not true, pace some rumors, that the group immediately forced women’s clothing stores in Mayadeen to shut upon the announcement of a supposed ‘Shari’a Committee for the Eastern Region’ of Syria.
On the other hand, in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, where JAN and other jihadist groups have had much more time to consolidate their presence, the impact of strict application of Islamic law is far more apparent through the full force of Shari’a courts- a phenomenon well documented in a recent New York Times report.
Even so, a hint of caution remains: recently a Shari’a-court affiliated with JAN arrested Dr. Othman Haj Othman– a popular member of Aleppo’s unofficial opposition council and a doctor who devoted himself to treating injured protestors in the city. Othman’s supposed ‘crime’ was to remove a JAN flag from the hospital he was working at. Yet Othman was released only a day later, likely as a result of the outrage the arrest triggered.
In short, the jihadist groups’ approach of ‘defensive jihad’ entails a more gradualist outlook to implementing Shari’a, somewhat similar to the Muslim Brotherhood’s conception of applying Islamic law through ‘gradual action…step by step, in order to facilitate understanding, studying, acceptance and submission.’
Such an approach is also supported by prominent cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi and is clearly seen in the Egyptian government’s recent policies towards prohibition on alcohol.
Yet in the long-run, this strategy adopted by the main jihadist groups in Syria does not necessarily point to much more significant success than elsewhere. As Phillip Smyth notes, approximately 1000 militias could be operating on the ground at the moment, which speaks against the idea of any single faction or alliance of groups becoming dominant in the country, for rivalries between different rebel groups in such a situation- even among those that broadly share the same ideological outlook- are impossible to avoid.
Further, the end-result of a gradualist approach to applying strict Shari’a is the same as one of immediate implementation: namely, significant restrictions on civil and political liberties- particularly as regards minorities (especially the Alawites, frequently attacked in jihadist rhetoric as ‘Nusayri apostates’) and women- that will help to stir up at least some resentment.
To conclude, the picture is one of general chaos, with jihadist strongholds most likely to arise and endure in the north and east of Syria.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University. His website is http://www.aymennjawad.org
“Damascus could very well look like Aleppo in a year’s time.” — J. Landis
“I think when you discuss the Syrian crisis now … in terms of violence, there is a balanced playing field. The violence which is being perpetrated by the opposition groups, the rebels, is almost on the same scale. There is an element of strategic parity on the ground. I’d just like to say that Damascus is not going to turn into Aleppo … Damascus is actually relatively safe, internally speaking, there’s conflict on the outskirts but the centre of Damascus is relatively safe.” –Danny Makki, the co-founder of the Syrian Youth in Britain
The one moment of agreement between the pro-regime and pro-opposition guests was when they both attacked Dr. Landis’ analysis of the sectarian dimension of the conflict. Both sides continue to maintain either that “Syrians are united with Assad” or “Syrians are united against Assad.”
“In its bloodied mud, the struggle is on among the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Russians, Hizbollah, the Al Nusra Front, Ahrar Al Sham, Al Qaeda-linked fighters, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party … as well as the Free Syrian Army – with all its brigades and battalions – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan. And now Britain and France are about to join the fray.”
… “Unwilling to enter a third war in the Middle East, after defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has entrusted the Syrian issue and the arming of the opposition to its two allies, France and Britain, just as it did in Libya,” Atwan said.
“That allows Washington to go around talking about a peaceful resolution based on the nebulous Geneva protocol.”
The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The top U.S. military commander in Europe said Tuesday that NATO is conducting contingency planning for possible military involvement in Syria and American forces would be prepared if called upon by the United Nations and member …
As President Obama prepares to visit Israel next week, he is turning, as he often does, to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a 35-year-old deputy national security adviser with a soft voice, strong opinions and a reputation around the White House as the man who channels Mr. Obama on foreign policy.
… Drawing on personal ties and a philosophical kinship with Mr. Obama that go back to the 2008 campaign, Mr. Rhodes helped prod his boss to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Libya when those countries erupted in 2011.
Now that influence is being put to the test again on the issue of Syria, where the president has so far resisted more than modest American involvement. After two years of civil war that have left 70,000 people dead, Mr. Rhodes, his friends and colleagues said, is deeply frustrated by a policy that is not working, and has become a strong advocate for more aggressive efforts to support the Syrian opposition.
Administration officials note that Mr. Rhodes is not alone in his frustration over Syria, pointing out that Mr. Obama, too, is searching for an American response that ends the humanitarian tragedy, while not enmeshing the United States in a sectarian conflict that many in the White House say bears unsettling similarities to Iraq. Three former officials of the administration — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus — favored arming the opposition, a position Mr. Rhodes did not initially support.
… Two years ago, when protesters thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, Mr. Rhodes urged Mr. Obama to withdraw three decades of American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. A few months later, Mr. Rhodes was among those agitating for the president to back a NATO military intervention in Libya to head off a slaughter by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
… “The person behind the scenes who played the largest role in the opening to Burma and the engagement with Aung San Suu Kyi was Ben Rhodes,” said Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state who led the negotiations with the Myanmar government.
Engineering a shift in Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is probably more difficult than persuading him to reach out to Myanmar, officials said, given the complexities of Syria, the volatility of its neighborhood, the grinding nature of the conflict, and the president’s deep aversion to getting entangled in another military conflict in the Middle East.
Not only is the United States limiting its support of the Free Syrian Army to food rations and medical supplies, the White House has designated one of the main Sunni insurgent groups, al-Nusra front, as a terrorist organization — a policy that alienated many Syrians because of the group’s effectiveness in fighting President Bashar al-Assad.
Colleagues say Mr. Rhodes opposed that decision, which was pushed by intelligence advisers. He also favors equipping the rebels with more robust nonlethal gear and training that would help them in their fight against Mr. Assad’s government, a position shared by Britain and other allies…
What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like shells that crash and thud and thump into residential streets, sometimes with little warning. It looks like messy footprints in a pool of blood on a hospital floor as armed local men, many in mismatched military attire and civilian clothing, rush in their wounded colleagues, or their neighbors.
… What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like significant number of people who, for reasons of ideology or patronage or fear, believe that Assad’s regime the best option. It looks like a growing number of people, even those within the rebel ranks, who eye the increasing clout of Jihadists and other Islamists and fear what they may turn Syria into.
… What does the Syrian war sound like? It sounds like the women of an extended family, aunts and sisters, mothers and grandmothers, sitting in a room where thin mattresses line the walls, discussing what kind of a Syria they want to live in. They’re in darkness because there’s no electricity.
Mayada, a young, strong-willed, English-literature major, says that, in her heart, she wants an Islamic state, but she recognizes that in Syria, a multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian society, that is unlikely. She says an Islamic state would be “more just.” Her aunt Sarea, who is just a few years older than her, snickers at her remarks. She won’t live in an Islamic state, she says. Unless that state is modelled on Turkey, it’ll be an excuse to lock women up in their homes.
The two women debate the issue for hours, and others chime in. In the end, they agree that an Islamic state is not the best option—not because Islam doesn’t grant rights to women but because the male clerics who interpret the religion cannot be trusted.
What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like armed men with little accountability. It looks like the amateur video of a local character known as the Yellow Man of Aleppo, an eccentric older man decked out in yellow, from his ivy cap to his shoes, being humiliated by young thugs who belong to a unit of the Free Syrian Army in the northern city. They accuse him of being a government spy, a fassfoos, in the local slang.
[Aleppo’s “Yellow Man” is a mysterious celebrity, a kind of a local cultural treasure, a man who for years has gone about his business in the city wearing only yellow, even carrying yellow prayers beads. When he passes, people often stop him and ask for a picture with him.]
They spit on him, tell him to bark like a dog, make him repeat vulgarities about Assad’s female relatives. “Take a picture of me pulling his mustache,” a young, smiling, fresh-faced rebel tells the camera. They take turns plucking out hairs from his graying blond mustache. “Are you Sunni?” the cameraman asks the Yellow Man. “Do you like Alawites or do you hate them?” he asks, referring to the sect that Assad belongs to. “I hate them,” the Yellow Man replies. “Liar!” one of the young men says as he slaps the old man’s face. Some men may become what they are fighting.
What does the Syrian war look like? It looks like another amateur video, taken from the other side of this increasingly intractable divide. A man, bloodied and beaten, hands tied behind his back, is dragged along the gritty asphalt by uniformed, armed government soldiers. He’s wearing nothing but his white underwear. He cannot even lift his head, which scrapes along the street. He turns onto his back. “Where are your wife and children?” one of his tormentors asks, stepping on the man’s face with his black boot. Somebody asks for a piece of glass to cut the man’s tongue out. They curse him, mock him, and laugh as they torment him.
“For God’s sake, please, just let me say goodbye to my children,” the man says, knowing that his end is near. His face is swollen, bloodied. “Will you let me fuck your wife?” one of his tormentors asks, mockingly. “If you let me, you can see your children.” “No,” the man says, “my wife is my soul, my children are my soul. My wife is the crown on my head.”
“The crown on your head?” He kicks the man’s head. Others laugh as they continue dragging him along the street, trying to decide where to dump him.
This is what the Syrian war looks like. Every man with a gun is an authority, and for some the enemy—who was once their neighbor—is no longer a person. How can a man who has inflicted such harm, and become used to that sort of power, let it go and step back—especially if others do not?
The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.
The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number… When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.
… It was also an update of a 2011 report the Watson Institute produced ahead of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that assessed the cost in dollars and lives from the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion… That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update.
The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.
Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.
The report also examined the burden on U.S. veterans and their families, showing a deep social cost as well as an increase in spending on veterans. The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.
FEW GAINS
The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.
… “If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in,” Bucci said.
Bucci said the toppling of Saddam and the results of an unforeseen conflict between U.S.-led forces and al Qaeda militants drawn to Iraq were positive outcomes of the war. “It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”
Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have been long and costly engagements with very mixed results. Since then prudence has held the U.S. back in the case of Libya and so far in Syria.
When some rebel groups kill Syrian government soldiers, the US applauds. When others do the killing, it’s ‘terrorism.’ Why? — By Dan Murphy
War is hell, right? Soldiers do whatever they can to win and survive. Officers do whatever they can to shape engagements so that superior numbers and firepower are rained down on an outnumbered enemy. Boobytraps, killing the other guy while he sleeps in his bed, and dropping artillery on his head from a safe distance are all part of a day’s work.
So why did US State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland label the killing of 46 Syrian troops in Iraq last week an act of “terrorism” on Monday?
Aside from the fact that the word “terrorism” has been tortured beyond all semblance of its conventional meaning in the past decade, it’s a comment – deliberate or not – that illuminates the strange, dangerous, and contradictory waters the US is wading into in Syria.
… Syria has been under US sanctions for decades and President George W. Bush’s most hawkish advisers, like Dick Cheney, were eager to invade Syria on the heels of Iraq in 2003.
So the killing of Syrian soldiers by rebels is good, right? Well, not exactly. Depending on who does the killing it can be labelled as terrorism or the actions of a people striving to be free.
…In fact, killing enemy soldiers returning to the battlefield is something the US, like most militaries, has done in all of its conflicts.
… Notice that Iraq is providing at least passive assistance to Assad’s military. It has good reason to, notwithstanding that puts it at odds with US policy. The Shiite-dominated Iraq the US helped create is hated by both homegrown jihadis and their friends across the border. A defeat for Assad would lead to a Sunni-dominated neighbor, certain to be more hostile to Iraq’s interests and potentially a supporter of a reignited Sunni insurgency.
… it’s the US position that looks strange. It spent billions of dollars and the lives of nearly 4,500 soldiers in Iraq, fighting to put down a Sunni insurgency that was described as a grave threat to American interests. Today, the US government policy is assisting a Sunni insurgency in Syria that is not only similar in character to the one put down in Iraq, but has surviving Iraqi veterans of the war serving in it.
MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD – Tony Blair’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are challenged again: BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief
Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.
A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.
It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.
Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.
However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.
Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been.
Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.”…
“And if you look at what’s happening in the Arab Spring today, and you examine what’s happening in Syria — just reflect on what Bashar Assad, who is a twentieth as bad as Saddam, is doing to his people today, and the number of lives already lost, just ask yourself, ‘What would be happening in Iraq now if he had been left in power?’ ”
Mr. Blair also told the BBC, “If things continue as they are in Syria today, within a few months — proportionate to the size of the population — more people will have died in Syria than in the whole of the conflict since 2003 in Iraq.”
For the Arab Gulf states, the war that began in 2003 was the herald of a new relationship with Iraq, a country that had long been ruled by a hostile regime, threatened its neighbours and had briefly subjugated one of them – Kuwait.
But 10 years after the US-led invasion, the picture in Baghdad looks extremely bleak from this side of the Gulf. An Iraq dominated by the pro-Iranian Shia is seen as just as threatening as an Iraq led by the Sunni Saddam Hussein.The mantra in the Gulf is that Baghdad has been handed over to the Iranians on a golden plate. Some even perceive Baghdad’s special relationship with Iran as part of a US grand strategy to pit the countries of the region against each other. Such self-defeating thinking is one reason why Baghdad has been drifting towards Tehran. It is time for the Gulf states to revisit their approach to Iraq.
Gulf states do not welcome the fact that Baghdad will probably always be dominated by Shia politicians. For them, the question is how to subdue Iraq, rather than how to work with it. They also tend to view Iraq’s relationship with Iran through a zero-sum mindset: Baghdad can either be an ally against Iran, or it can be an enemy.
Riyadh does not have meaningful diplomatic representation in Baghdad, despite repeated Iraqi attempts to improve relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf at large. For example, at the beginning of trouble in Syria, Iraq supported almost all Gulf-led Arab resolutions against the Syrian regime; it began to show opposition after the Arab Summit in Baghdad in March of last year, to which few Gulf states sent high-level representation. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have not tried hard enough to resolve outstanding disputes with Iraq, involving borders and prisoners. The Arar border crossing between Saudi Arabia and Iraq is still closed, although Riyadh promised last year to open it for trade.
The key to better relationships is, counterintuitively, a stronger and more stable Iraq. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has long sought to weaken Iraq to ensure its own regional standing. Since the Iraq war, Riyadh’s policy has evolved into attempts to contain Baghdad and push it away from Tehran.
Salafi Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir tested his supporters on the night of 13 March by sending out messages that the army was about to breach his mosque, prompting hundreds of Salafis to block roads in Tripoli, Beirut, and Saida.
It all started when soldiers at an army checkpoint in east Saida stopped one Ahmad al-Assir’s supporters, Sheikh Assem al-Arifi, after discovering that his car papers were forged.
Arifi’s driver refused to abide by the army’s orders and fled to Assir’s mosque nearby. In what may have been an attempt to test the readiness of his supporters, Assir fired off text messages and posts on his Facebook page claiming that the army was preparing to assault the mosque.
Despite the small number of people who took to the streets, the incident nevertheless rattled the uneasy peace prevalent in a number of cities, particularly in Saida and Tripoli, where Assir’s supporters and allies tend to be concentrated.
According to army sources, several hundred young men responded to Assir’s call, blocking roads in Saida, Beirut, and Tripoli for a short period of time before being reopened by security forces.
… It is worth noting that the army had begun to implement a security plan at noon the same day, which included establishing permanent checkpoints around the mosque to search all vehicles exiting and entering the area under Assir’s control.
In the northern city of Tripoli, the response to Assir’s call was surprisingly fast as Salafis and groups of armed men descended on Nour Square, threatening to declare jihad against the army if Assir’s mosque was breached.
Notably, the protesters ripped down pictures of Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz and replaced them with al-Qaeda banners.
… It is clear that Assir is ratcheting up the pressure on the army as it tightens security measures around his mosque by resorting to panicked text and Internet messages, one of which called on Muslims around the world to picket Lebanese embassies in their respective countries.
On Sunday night, Mazen Hariri and Ahmad Fekhran, two Sunni Muslim sheikhs at Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Sunni religious authority, were attacked by a group of Shiite men shortly after leaving a mosque in downtown Beirut. They were beaten up by Shiites in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Khandak al-Ghamik. Two other Sunni sheikhs were assaulted in another Shiite neighborhood of Beirut in a separate incident. As news of the incidents spread, dozens of people took to the streets, blocking roads in the capital and in the predominantly Sunni cities of Sidon and Tripoli in southern and northern Lebanon.
Trying to contain the fallout, Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said those responsible for the attacks were not affiliated with any party. But many Sunnis quickly direct their anger at Hezbollah and Amal, the two main Shiite groups in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Grand Mufti, Mohammed Rashid Kabbani said the attacks were “not a coincidence.” “I’m not accusing any specific faction, but Shiite leaderships in Hezbollah and Amal … must lift the cover on the perpetrators,” he said Monday.
Hezbollah was quick to condemn the attacks and assisted in handing over the suspects to security forces.
Demonstrations had a clearly sectarian tone. “The turban of the Sunnis is stronger than attempts at sedition,” read a poster held up by protesters at a rally in the mainly Sunni Tarik al-Jdideh district in Beirut.
On Monday, Syrian warplanes hit targets along Syria’s border with Lebanon. The state-run National News Agency said the attack hit a remote area near the town of Arsal. The shelling came just days after Damascus warned Beirut to stop militants from crossing the border to fight with rebels. A senior Lebanese official confirmed the fighter jets’ activity along the frontier, but said it was not clear if targets inside Lebanese territory were hit.
Seven suspects were detained Tuesday over the recent attacks on four Muslim scholars, the state prosecutor told The Daily Star, as Shiite and Sunni religious leaders met to avert further tensions in the country over the affair.
A recent Syrian threat to target rebels in Lebanon came in response to a French decision to arm those seeking to topple President Bashar Assad, the media coordinator for the Free Syrian Army said in remarks published Sunday. Damascus, in a letter sent to Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry Thursday, warned Beirut it would attack Syrian rebels in Lebanon, reiterating its claims that arms and gunmen were being smuggled from the poorly delineated border. The FSA official also told An-Nahar that Syrian rebels would withdraw from border towns in Lebanon and return to Syria if the Lebanese Army could ensure proper control of the shared border.
The Phalange Party called on the cabinet on Monday to reach out to the international community for help in responding to Syria’s threats, following the bombing of Lebanese territories by the Syrian air force. … The warplanes entered 1 kilometer into Lebanese airspace and struck the town of Kerbet Younan in the Wadi al-Khayl region of Arsal, where the majority of Sunni Muslim residents support Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad, and fired four rockets at a remote section of the border with Lebanon, according to Reuters.
Many in Lebanon who oppose Bashar Assad at first welcomed the influx, but now say the newcomers are taking their jobs and driving up prices. … Each day, as many as 1,000 Syrians enter Lebanon, a nation of 4.5 million people wedged between Syria, Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Lebanon, about a quarter the size of Switzerland, sits astride some of the Middle East’s most volatile sectarian and ethnic fault lines.
… Gangs of frustrated Lebanese sometimes curse at Syrian street vendors, accusing them of taking away jobs, says Abu Mohammad, who asked to be identified by his nickname, fearing retribution. Abu Mohammad, who arrived two months ago from war-ravaged Idlib province in northern Syria, hawks oranges along Maarad Street, in a well-off area of Tripoli. He earns about $12 a day, he says, hardly enough to feed his family…
Lebanon’s tourist industry declined by as much as 15 percent in 2012. … Visitors from the Persian Gulf states, who makeup approximately a third of Lebanon’s tourists, but account for about 60 percent of the tourism spending, have stopped coming. Some are worried about the security situation, others are boycotting Lebanon for political reasons.
… France seems to have made up its mind. “Lifting the embargo is one of the only means left to make things move politically,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared last week.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague reiterated that call on Sunday, arguing that there was “a strong case” for lifting the embargo when it comes under review in May.
Germany, on the other hand, is digging in its heels on this issue, but the BBC doesn’t seem to mention that… If you want to know about “Germany’s host of reservations,” you have to read the Der Spiegel article:
…The EU has banned all weapons exports to Syria, whether to the rebels or government forces. The embargo is up for renewal in May, giving EU leaders a swiftly-approaching chance to let it expire. One EU diplomat told news agency Reuters that “nobody really is interested” in ending the embargo, and that “there is no prospect of change any time soon.” Non-lethal military assistance is still permitted.
…German Chanceller Angela Merkel said she had “a whole host of reservations” over ending the arms embargo, adding that her “opinion-making process is not yet complete.” Her foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, sounded slightly more receptive to the idea on Thursday…
Austria, whose troops make up part of the UN peacekeeping force in the disputed Golan Heights, has come out against any weapons deliveries to Syrian rebels. Last week rebels briefly kidnapped 21 Filipino members of the UN force, raising concerns about the safety of the 1,000 troops in the region. “One can never rule out whose hands more weapons will end up in, and that’s why I am against this suggestion,” Austrian Defense Minister Gerald Klug told public broadcaster ORF.
The Obama administration lent its support Monday to British and French plans to arm Syria’s rebels, saying it wouldn’t stand in the way of any country seeking to rebalance the fight against an Assad regime supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
… No Western governments or international organisations confirmed a chemical attack in Syria, but Russia, an ally of Damascus, accused rebels of carrying out such a strike. The United States said it had no evidence to substantiate charges that the rebels had used chemical weapons.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said Syrian forces have dropped at least 156 cluster bombs in 119 locations across the country in the past six months, causing mounting civilian casualties.
Dozens of Coptic Christians were tortured inside a detention center run by a powerful militia in eastern Libya, two of the recently released detainees told The Associated Press on Friday amid a wave of assaults targeting Christians in Benghazi and the latest instance of alleged abuse by Libyan security forces. … “They first checked our wrists searching for the crosses and if they found them, we (had to) get into their cars,” said 26-year-old Amgad Zaki… Zaki said a group of men – some in uniform and some in civilian clothes – rounded up Egyptians selling clothes in a market called el-Jareed in Benghazi on February 26. He and other Christians climbed into SUVs that he said carried the sign of Libya Shield One, one of the most powerful militias in Benghazi that is under the command of Islamist and ex-rebel Wassam Bin Hemad.
“They shaved our heads. They threatened to sever our heads in implementation of Islamic Shariah (law) while showing us swords,” said Zaki, who was interviewed on the telephone from his home after returning to Egypt earlier this month. “They dealt with us in a very brutal way, including forcing us to insult our Pope Shenouda,” Zaki said, referring to the former Coptic pontiff who died last year.
He said that during four days of detention they were flogged, forced to take off their clothes in cold weather and stand at 3 a.m. outdoors on floor covered with stones. “I was taken to clean a bathroom, and the man pushed my head inside the toilet and sat on me,” he said. “I was dying every day, and at one point I thought death is better than this.”
Militias have been targeting Christians, women, journalists, refugees and those considered former loyalists of Moammar Gadhafi, who was toppled and killed in Libya’s 2011 civil war. The state relies on the militias to serve as security forces since Libya’s police and military remain in shambles.
The Maspero Youth Union (MYU) confirmed on Saturday that four Egyptian Copts were detained at a checkpoint on Friday in the Libyan city of Misrata. MYU claims that those detained are being held because they are Christians.
… The Libyan embassy in Cairo, meanwhile, has announced it is suspending all services indefinitely but has not provided a reason.
“It’s not the first time. This is happening every day,” said Adel Guindy, president of Coptic Solidarity and a member of Egypt’s Coptic community who travels between Paris and Cairo. “This one incident caught the attention of the news agencies, but there are worse things happening to the Christians every day in Egypt,” he said.
Christians have felt increasingly at risk since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, which resulted in the rise of President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
“It has definitely worsened under the revolution. Once the worst part of the society surfaced — the Islamists — the Copts are paying a heavy price. The West doesn’t really feel our pain. It’s a war of attrition,” Guindy said.
… Extremists over the weekend set fire to a Christian Church in the Province of Fayoum, the second such assault against the town’s Coptic population in a month. The attackers ripped down the church’s cross and hurled rocks at church members, injuring four people including the priest…
A mother and her seven children have been jailed for 15 years for converting back to Christianity from Islam in Egypt. Nadia Mohamed Ali was raised a Christian but converted to Islam 23 years ago when she married Mohamed Abdel-Wahhab Mustafa. Following his death, she planned to convert back to her original faith, along with the rest of her family.
But a criminal court in Beni Suef, in central Egypt, sentenced them to jail for 15 years last week, according to reports. Seven other people, who were involved in the case, were also sentenced to five years in jail.
A scared Egyptian Christian friendwrites [3/17]: “We know at least one Egyptian minister who got martyred there [Libya] this week. It’s coming to Egypt too. The Muslim Government here has released a new law that enables regular people (that mean Muslim Brotherhood) to form Militias, carry guns, apply law and arresting others on streets. Attached Photo is from an incident that happened in Egypt TODAY. We have been told that people caught two thieves and killed them that way. It’s chaos. A Failed State. Anyone can do anything.
Another incident also took place today here where they applied hand-cut on street on another place in Cairo. [A large demonstration] is happening RIGHT NOW, here in Mokatam (my neighborhood), 1 mile from my place, where the headquarter of the MB is. Demonstration is very big here now after some young men & women (and even journalists) have been beaten by MB guards. Police alongside with MB Militia are harshly firing tear gas in our area now and also using gun machine. Our office secretary could not make it to office this week due to some sort of civil disobedience on streets. We expect that streets will get to be totally dysfunctional soon.”
The next day (3/18) he wrote: “S. Medhat is 18 years old boy from the Presbyterian church that is located two blocks after where I live, has been taken yesterday along with hundreds protests who were on last night demonstration on my neighborhood, close to MB headquarter. This boy had nothing to do with the demonstration, as well as many others, I believe. He was just coming back home. His family knows nothing about him till now. It’s very common that people disappear in such hot locations and they never return back alive.
American-imported tear gas bombs & gun shooting kept horribly running until 15 minutes to 6 am this morning. Our neighborhood entered the war zone. Children are terrified. We are expecting a climax of this here next Friday.” Video of the vigilantism in this area
The next day (3/19) he wrote: “Last night a flame of a street war has begun in Shoubra, the 5 million populated district. hundreds of people with guns & swords started killing each other and destroying shops. Do not ask why this is happening. It happens everyday, but media are not allowed to cover the truth. I believe that the west is not really aware of the reality of the situation here, because the US & England want to carry on with supporting the MB regime. I’m so mad with this evil and can not understand why Obama is supporting this. It seems like a plan to destroy the whole area and make other Iraqs. This what already happened in Lybia, Syria and here so far. Personally, between Mokatam (my neighborhood that exploded 2 days ago) and Shoubra, I feel the box is getting squeezed more and more.”
al-Raqqa
What kind of new structures of authority are developing in Raqqa? According to the following article, the rebels who took the town are implementing security measures and services for the local population, as well as an Islamist justice framework.
On March 4, 2013, rebel groups overran government forces in al-Raqqa city, the first provincial capital and only urban center to fall to rebel hands since the start of the uprising. Spearheaded by powerful Salafist groups, including Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya and Ahrar al-Sham, the offensive illustrates the growing strength of Islamists within the rebels’ ranks. The fall of al-Raqqa has reduced regime positions in eastern Syria to the military airbase outside Deir ez-Zour city and a handful of isolated outposts in northeastern Kurdish areas. As the regime’s reach continues to contract, al-Raqqa serves as an important test case for how the opposition will administer territory that they seize from Assad.
As the first Syrian city to fall under rebel control, al-Raqqa poses a major test for opposition governance. Since the rebels seized the city, they have posted guards at state buildings to prevent looting and destruction, returned bread prices to pre-war levels, and opened a hotline that residents can phone to report security issues. Rebel groups are working closely with the local civilian councils to ensure the provision of basics such as food, water, and oil and are working with tribal authorities to maintain electricity and trash collection. They have also established sharia courts to mete out justice and provide a framework for transitional authority.
Loyalists will watch these sharia courts closely and with apprehension to see how the opposition treats former pro-regime elements and minority populations in the city. A video posted after the rebels gained control showed al-Raqqa’s governor and the local Baath party leader praising Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya, the rebel group responsible for al-Raqqa’s capture. Governor Hassan Saleh Jalali stated, “They are fair to those that seek their protection and they safeguard properties and defend civilians.”…On the other hand, several videos posted on YouTube show rebel groups capturing security forces, executing them in public squares, and dragging their dead bodies through the streets in images reminiscent of Qaddafi’s bloody demise. Rebel groups have also attacked several Shi‘a holy sites, including the bombing of the important Shi‘a shrine of Ammar ibn Yassir in northern al-Raqqa city.
These conflicting accounts demonstrate the divisions that continue to hamper the development of the armed opposition and reveal the difficulties rebels face in attempting to govern…the rebel capture of al-Raqqa is largely due to the shifting loyalty of tribal leaders and minimal Syrian military presence, rather than a rebel military victory per se….
Amidst the developing system following the rebel victory, it appears that at least some rebels are leaving. Here’s an interview with Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyye, the group that an earlier video showed holding the muhafiz and Ba’ath party leader. In this video, the leader mentions meeting with the city council to collaborate on “civil life.” But he also claims that they are about to move on to fight elsewhere ?????? ?? ???? ???? ?????? ???????? ?????????:
This raises another question: If the rebels themselves are implementing “Islamic courts,” how do they decide who stays and who goes on to the next front? Even if this group is leaving for the next battle, another source says that there are over 30 different rebel groups operating just within Raqqa.
In addition to discussing the vulnerability of the dam, the following article claims that tribal approval was not a factor in the takeover of al-Raqqa:
Raqqa was completely absent from the news concerning the demonstrations and subsequent daily battles that raged in Syria beginning in the spring of 2011. The city lived in a relative state of calm even as neighboring cities Hasaka and Deir al-Zour became engaged in the popular movement…
Raqqa’s calm may have been what brought hundreds of thousands of people fleeing battle zones to take refuge in the city. Many came from Homs and Deir al-Zour. The influx constituted an enormous humanitarian and economic drain on this city in the poorest of Syrian provinces.
Raqqa, the hometown of the late short-story writer Abd al-Salam al-Ujaily, had suffered from years of extreme drought. This was exacerbated by the economic policies of the government, and resulted in an unprecedented migration from the countryside around Raqqa to slum neighborhoods on the fringes of major cities. The severity of the crisis in Syria’s Upper Mesopotamia region grew to a point that it drew the attention of the United Nations, while the regime turned a blind eye to events and revoked previously adopted subsidies on fuel prices.
Raqqa, with a pre-conflict estimated population of 220,000, underwent large-scale growth half a century ago; this growth was further enhanced by the 1968-1873 building of the Euphrates Dam 50 kilometers northwest of the city. Lake Assad was thus created behind the dam, close to the ancient Jaabar Castle…
…many of its rural inhabitants and youth migrated elsewhere before it fell under the control of armed opposition groups, specifically Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, who had previously stated that they would not enter the city for fear that doing so would endanger the lives of its inhabitants and displaced people living there. But the groups later changed their minds and entered Raqqa, declaring it under their control … They also announced that Islamic brigades would patrol the city streets in order to protect property from gangs of looters.
It was very interesting to see many of the city’s inhabitants cleaning its streets, and reopening their shops, while adamantly maintaining that no public institutions were ransacked. This came at a time when all activity ceased at governmental institutions which had become the target of regime airstrikes.
The issue of clans and the Euphrates
Raqqa is perhaps one the main areas in which the regime wagered on tribes and clan alliances for protection, while the opposition bet on provoking tribal sensitivities and driving clans into taking part in the armed conflict to overthrow the regime. But both sides failed to realize that the reality on the ground was far different than what they expected. All information coming out of Raqqa points to tribal authority being completely absent and ineffective; this appears to be an effect of there being a large number of clan members and divisions between different clans either supporting or opposing the regime.
Clans therefore did not play any role at all in the opposition takeover. On the contrary, the armed opposition’s military operations to take control of Raqqa began in Aleppo and its eastern countryside, passed through the Tel Abyad border crossing with Turkey, and reached the Tishrin Dam and then the Euphrates Dam. They quickly and easily took control of these sites, until the central prison was encircled and they entered the city.
Throughout these events, tribalism was nonexistent or severely muted when compared with what took place in Hasakeh in the north or in Deir al-Zour. The lack of tribalism occurred despite a series of meetings held by the regime with clansmen aimed at mobilizing them in its favor, and despite early opposition efforts to drum up tribal grievances.
In addition to the tribal issue, Raqqa’s importance lies in its location along the course of the Euphrates River. The region is also home to three dams: the Baath Dam, the Tishrin Dam and the Euphrates Dam. The latter was considered one of the most important state-run projects of the 1970s, when it was erected using Soviet expertise in order to regulate water flow and generate electricity for the surrounding area, all the way to Aleppo. Its electricity-generating capacity is 824 megawatts. The dam is the largest of its kind in the country, measuring 60 meters in height and extending for 4.5 kilometers. Its artificial lake, Lake Assad, contains 11.7 billion cubic meters of water.
The real problem lies in the dam’s weak internal structure; as a result, any missile launched by either belligerent party could destroy or damage it, if the Baath or Tishrin dams were also hit. Such an eventuality would lead to a flood that would drown a large portion of the surrounding countryside, in addition to an electricity shortage that no one in the area wishes.
Opposition
A Syrian Opposition Voice Says Country is Victim of a Global Proxy War – Watch video here: Democracy Now speaks with Rim Turkmani, an astrophysicist and member of the Syrian Civil Democratic Alliance who is meeting with Security Council members about possible political solutions to the conflict.
“There is a systematic effort to marginalize people like us inside Syria and focus only on the armed rebels — they are the ones stealing all the headlines,” Turkmani says. “There are certain actors, regional and international, who see this as proxy wars … It’s a struggle over Syria, over power, and the Syrians are falling victims to that.”
We continue our discussion with Turkmani and are also joined by Reese Erlich, freelance foreign correspondent who discusses Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Syrian conflict. The Saudi monarchy is involved in arming “the most ultra-conservative, ultra religious” Syrian rebel groups, Erlich says.
This “shift” would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. This change in position will do nothing to accomplish the original goal for which the Friends of Syria group was formed: hasten the end of the Syria conflict. Rather, it will only serve to maintain the horrible, bloody stalemate already established across the country.
Moaz al-Khatib, head of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), is once again in the spotlight. It appears that the Syrian cleric turned opposition leader has become a bigger annoyance to his allies than his foes.
… the Syrian opposition coalition, as an heir to the Syrian National Council, seems to be carrying the same problems as its forerunner: an excess of divergent attitudes and expectations.
…In Istanbul, Gen. Salim Idris, head of the rebels’ Supreme Military Council, told reporters that the rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army will work under the umbrella of an interim government and protect its members.
“We recognize the coalition as our political umbrella and we hope this government can be formed unanimously and that this government will exercise its powers in all of Syria,” he said. “We consider it the only legal government in the country.”
…Idris’ comments also sought to portray his group, the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Free Syrian Army, as the most widespread, powerful and organized rebel formation in Syria. It remains unclear, however, how many of the hundreds of rebel brigades fighting Assad’s forces follow Idris’ commands or receive support from his group.
Some of the most effective rebel groups are Islamic extremists who have developed their own support networks. One of them, Jabhat al-Nusra, has been designated a terrorist group by the United States and is said to be linked to al-Qaida…
Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ezz al-Din Khalouf announced his defection from Assad’s regime in a video aired Saturday on the Al-Arabiya satellite channel. It showed him sitting next to his son, Capt. Ezz al-Din Khalouf, who defected with him.
The elder Khalouf said that many of those with Assad’s regime have lost faith in it, yet continue to do their jobs, allowing Assad to demonstrate broad support. “It’s not an issue of belief or practicing one’s role,” he said. “It’s for appearance’s sake, for the regime to present an image to the international community that it pulls together all parts of Syrian society under this regime.”
Rebels
Attempted estimate of boundaries of control (NYT):
NYT – It is impossible to determine precisely where the boundaries of control lie in Syria. But an analysis of news reports and videos posted online indicates that rebels are stronger in the north and northeast, while the government holds the center of most of Syria’s largest cities and the west.
Click on the map to expand for detail and description
…On Sunday battles broke out in the southern Damascus suburb of Sbeineh, a residential area on the main road leading south into Hauran after opposition fighters stormed a compound housing shabbiha militia, activists in the capital said.
Dozens of people were killed and wounded in the fighting and in ensuing army shelling in the town, they added. Rebel brigades overran last week a missile squadron in Khan Sheihoun, a town southwest of Damascus on the road to the Golan, and seized an army barracks.
Further south, in the old centre of Deraa, Hauran’s main city, situated at the border with Jordan, rebels were trying to take the Omari mosque, scene of killings at a pro-democracy demonstration on March 18, 2011 that sparked the national revolt, but security forces positioned at a nearby post office were fighting back, activist Thaer al-Abdallah said from Deraa.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague interview with Sky News, said on Sunday that Britain has “taken no decision at the moment to send arms to anybody in Syria”. He said sending arms to the opposition had to be weighed against the risks of “international terrorism and extremism taking root in Syria, the risks of Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan being destabilised, and the risks of extreme humanitarian distress.”
For nearly three months, a rumor has been spreading through Aleppo: whoever faces hardship, however small, can go to a hearing of the “Committee for the promotion of good deeds and support of the oppressed.”
There, in this northern neighborhood of the country’s largest city, members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are “enforcing justice” and “asserting the rights” of the ever growing number of people who are deeply distressed… It’s not quite a courthouse, but almost. It’s not quite social services either. It’s not even a political space – the only thing it is is religious. … In this administrative desert, it takes pragmatism, improvisation and incredible willpower to launch initiatives. The day after the Bab Salama customs office was taken over by the FSA in Aug. 2012, a new customs stamp was already in effect, stamping documents with “Syrian Arab Democracy.” You would think a brand new regime – even temporary – would choose a truly symbolic name, the fruit of much debating, brawling or even quick brainstorming. Think again. “The group who had the stamp made in Turkey came up with it,” says an official at the border’s press office.
A member of the committee announces that the candidates have to go through a selection process. “You mean we need connections, just like before?” shouts a barber. The committee member adds that there are
criteria and a test. “What kind of test?” asks the pastry seller. “You will be questioned on religion: what are alms, what is purification,” the man answers. Silence.
…It is the turn of a woman. She stands, smiles cheekily. She doesn’t overdo it, because just like everyone else, she has come to ask something. “Look at you, you can’t even wear your veil right, your hair is showing,” says the president of the committee. Abu Souleyman, 50, is one of the people who became famous during the revolution. Here, everyone knows Souleyman, an educated man from a poor but charitable family. In the 1980s, his father and brother were arrested and tortured – they were accused of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood party… The sheik sighs and says what really peeves him are the Western journalists who ask the same questions over again: “Will you be cutting hands off? Will you be stoning women?” He says he is for a softer Islam.
In… “A message of victory to the people of China from the Mujahidin Brigade Front,”a Chinese man talks about his conversion to Islam. He introduces himself as Yusuf (the subtitles say Bo Wang) and says that he studied in Libya and helped the Libyans fight their “revolutionary” war. “Now I’m in Syria,” he says, as a song that imagines global Islamic dominion plays in the background.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Assad’s regime recruited around 3,000 religious Sunnis to organize jihadi militias and take their fight to the embattled country. When they returned, many were imprisoned in the suburban Damascus Sednaya Prison.
It was in these jail cells, where the regime violently put down a summer 2008 rebellion, that five groups combined under the name of the Syrian Liberation Front.
The front included: Fajr al-Islam, led by a doctor who fought in Iraq; Kataeb al-Haq, headed by a blind fighter named Abu al-Farouq; Suqour al-Sham, commanded by a man known as Abu Issa; Ahrar al-Sham, whose leadership is unknown; and Al-Tawhid Battalion, the military arm of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Abdel-Qader Saleh.
Assad ordered the release of the Islamist prisoners some two years ago, shortly after the uprising in Deraa, and the Syrian Liberation Front took to the battlefield, believing peaceful demonstrations would not be enough.
… The Nusra Front, with its much discussed ties to Al-Qaeda, was formed from the Syrian Liberation Front’s Ahrar al-Sham, as well as the Al-Ouma Brigades and the Ahrar Deir al-Zor Battalions. It is led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who some have said is a Jordanian related to the slain senior Al-Qaeda figure Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Others claim he is a Syrian Salafist from Damascus.
(Reuters) – The United States has a less clear understanding of Syria’s opposition than it did last year, the top U.S. military officer said on Monday, in comments likely to disappoint rebels hoping that America might be inching toward a decision to arm them.
“About six months ago, we had a very opaque understanding of the opposition and now I would say it’s even more opaque,” said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dempsey, who is President Barack Obama’s top uniformed military adviser, said he would also advise extreme caution when deliberating any military options in Syria – saying the conflict posed “the most complex set of issues that anyone could ever conceive, literally.”
“I don’t think at this point I can see a military option that would create an understandable outcome,” Dempsey told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “And until I do, it would be my advice to proceed cautiously.”
Tabler (WINEP)
More assertive action is needed to cultivate influence with armed groups. There is still time to provide lethal and nonlethal U.S. assistance directly to the rebels — the sooner this happens, the better Washington’s chances of containing the crisis and shaping a better future for the Syrian people.
Jeffery White (WINEP)
There is no visible indication that the Supreme Military Council exercises any command on the ground.”…one analyst studying funeral data for regime soldiers calculated that an average of forty are killed per day, with two to three times that number wounded and unable to return to duty. In short, the regime is slowly exhausting itself, while the rebels, like rising water, are gradually shrinking its islands of control.
It is a bitterly personal war, in which Islamic and more secular fighters share an immediate goal: to protect their own families, an ambition they accuse the West of not adequately supporting….In all, 50 rebels have been wounded and 20 killed in the contest for this tiny place in the past six weeks, according to Fadi Yasin, a spokesman for one of Soqour al-Sham’s battalions….“Out of my experience in 18 months of constant battles and fighting, I have seen that bravery arrives at a specific point in some fighters, for those who are well connected to God,” he said. “They believe in their fates, and that everything comes from God.”
Islamic law comes to rebel-held Syria – Washington Post – The Washington Post’s Liz Sly and David Ignatius look back at bloody war in Syria. As the conflict rages on, in the rebel-held areas of Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra is widely identified as the leading force behind Islamic laws.
The evidence was incontrovertible, captured on video and posted on YouTube for all the world to see. During a demonstration against the Syrian regime, Wael Ibrahim, a veteran activist, had tossed aside a banner inscribed with the Muslim declaration of faith.
And that, decreed the officers of the newly established Sharia Authority set up to administer rebel-held Aleppo, constitutes a crime under Islamic law, punishable in this instance by 10 strokes of a metal pipe.
The beating administered last month offered a vivid illustration of the extent to which the Syrian revolution has strayed from its roots as a largely spontaneous uprising against four decades of Assad family rule. After mutating last year into a full-scale war, it is moving toward what appears to be an organized effort to institute Islamic law in areas that have fallen under rebel control.
Building on the reputation they have earned in recent months as the rebellion’s most accomplished fighters, Islamist units are seeking to assert their authority over civilian life, imposing Islamic codes and punishments and administering day-to-day matters such as divorce, marriage and vehicle licensing.
Numerous Islamist groups are involved, representing a wide spectrum of views. But, increasingly, the dominant role is falling to Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as the al-Nusra Front. The group has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States for suspected ties to al-Qaeda but is widely respected by many ordinary Syrians for its battlefield prowess and the assistance it has provided to needy civilians.
Across the northeastern provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqah, where the rebels have been making rapid advances in recent weeks, Jabhat al-Nusra has taken the lead both in the fighting and in setting out to replace toppled administrations. It has assumed control of bakeries and the distribution of flour and fuel, and in some instances it has sparked tensions with local fighters by trying to stop people from smoking in the streets.
… Islamic administration
These days, the bomb-scarred former hospital has taken on the semblance of a wartime city hall, with people milling in and out seeking permits to carry a gun or transport fuel through checkpoints, complaining about neighbors, reporting thefts and informing on people suspected to be regime loyalists.
At the gate, a guard dressed in a black shalwar kameez, the tunic-and-pants outfit traditionally worn in Pakistan but alien to Syria, refuses admittance to women unless they are clad in an abaya, a full-length cloak, something that is common in conservative Syrian communities but is far from ubiquitous.
Inside, in a sparse, dingy office, a burly man who identified himself as the head of the authority and gave his name as Abu Hafs, received what he said was the first journalist to be admitted to the facility. Seated beside him was a slight, heavily bearded man with a scholarly air who did most of the talking but who refused to give his name because, he said, he was speaking on behalf of Abu Hafs.
…The codes applied are “derived from the Islamic religion,” the spokesman said, but the most extreme Islamic punishments, such as cutting off the hands of thieves, are not imposed because Islamic law requires that they be suspended during war.
Instead, he said, sentences of five to 40 lashes for offenses such as drug abuse, adultery and theft are handed down, so that wrongdoers can return to their families, which otherwise might be deprived of wage earners if they were kept in prison. “It is not a big punishment, and we don’t use heavy pipes — they are small pipes — to tell him off,” the spokesman said.
… Rival activists vexed
Inevitably, however, the assertion of Islamic laws is sparking tensions with the more secular opposition activists, who look askance at the creeping Islamization of the revolution that they say they started…
Israel, apparently following notification to the Obama administration, bombed a shipment of “game-changing” missiles earlier this year before they could cross the Syrian-Lebanese border. The Soviet-made advanced missiles could cripple Israel’s ability to carry our surveillance flights over Lebanon to spot terrorist activity. Worse, the Israel Air Force would be at a serious disadvantage if Hizbullah were to start bombing northern Israel again, as it did in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
… “These missiles are not just a problem for Israel,” a senior Israeli official told the London newspaper. “They include [anti-ship] missiles, and who has the biggest navy in the Mediterranean?” – a reference to the US. Israeli military…
“Nusra is being funded by Sunni Muslim millionaires in the Gulf states that want to hijack our struggle for democracy and turn it into a Sunni-Shia battle for power” one Syrian pro-secular advocate explains. The lack of secular support is so evident that “secular militias will pretend to be extremists just to gain funding from a Gulf backer. They will post YouTube videos saying and doing jihadist actions even if they don’t hold these beliefs.”
In the town of Kfar Nabul, the battle of ideology is particularly evident. The al-Nusra Front is attempting to wrest control from the newly established civilian councils, however they are meeting resistance. Pro-secular activists held an anti-Nusra rally in the town square, with one banner reading:
“WORLD! YOUR CARELESSNESS PRODUCED EXTREMISTS LIKE ASSAD. NOW WE NEED EXTREMISTS TO GET RID OF YOUR PRODUCTS.”
Where do Jews stand in all of this? Since the birth of Israel, Syria has been the most virulent enemy and detractor of the Jewish state. The Syrian people have been indoctrinated by an intensive anti-Israel propaganda campaign leading them to hugely distrust Israeli government and to a lesser extent the Jewish People. But now is an extremely important time in the Syrian mindset. For Syrians, everything they have been taught by the Assad regime is in question. In essence they are in a state of limbo. Consequently, the secularism that Assad’s Ba’ath party instilled is also in question.
The Jewish and Israeli people must show that they support the Syrian people; that they are not alone and that even in the supposed “Little Satan,” we hear their cries and feel their pain.
Major General Aviv Kochavi said Iran intended to double the size of this Syrian “people’s army”, which he claimed was being trained by Hezbollah fighters and funded by Tehran,…He said the Syrian regular army was crumbling, claiming that several successive recruitment drives had failed, realising only 20% of their targets as young men had fled rather than join up. The International Institute of Strategic Studies yesterday reported that from a notional strength of 220,000, the army had withered to a core of about 50,000 the regime could rely on. The Institute for the Study of War in Washington estimated the loyal core at 65,000.
Israel has warned the UK and France against arming Syrian rebels, arguing there will be no guarantees that sophisticated weapons such as portable anti-aircraft missiles will not ultimately find their way to al-Qaida affiliates and other extremist groups, and be turned against Israel.
Israeli military intelligence chief says Iran hopes to prolong life of Assad regime and maintain influence after his fall
The event was a fundraiser for mothers of “martyrs,” or government soldiers, killed in the two-year war… “The regime is trying to telegraph that it’s business as usual and she is a way to do that,” said Andrew Tabler, an American expert on Syria who once lived in the country and interacted with the first family.
“Not only is this a sign that she’s standing by her man, but that the core of the regime is not cracking.” “This stunt shouldn’t disguise the fact that the regime is firing missiles in Damascus at their own population,” Tabler added. “The photos are a gesture of confidence that the international community will not crush them and that (the Assads) will be able to keep hold of some level of control of the country.”
Jordan’s official position towards the revolution in Syria used to be more daring in the beginning, leaning more to the opposition and declaring support for the Syrians’ legitimate demands of freedom and
democracy but, though no official statements have been made that say otherwise, the kingdom insistently advocates a political solution to the crisis.
Jordan, a home for thousands of jihadists Salafis with open borders with Syria extending to more than 400 kilometers, is concerned mostly about Syria fundamentalist groups growing into a large and highly trained fighting and ideological force, fearing that Jordanian Salafis, Syrians and Arabs with past jihadists leanings may extend the Islamist militants’ so-called “holy war” to other countries.
News reports carried by local and international news agencies have cited Syrian jihadist Salafi groups as pushing to carry out military acts in Jordan and other countries and this, coupled with the belief that the Jordanian jihadist Salafi movement is now the largest foreign contributor of militants to Syria, stands behind the kingdom’s concerns about the Syrian revolution and its neutral position.
President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt has “no depth,” … Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is an authoritarian who views democracy as a “bus ride,” as in, “Once I get to my stop, I am getting off,” … And he said President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is so provincial that at a social dinner he once asked the monarchs of Jordan and Morocco to explain jet lag. “He never heard of jet lag,” King Abdullah said…
The era of Arab monarchies is passing, King Abdullah said. “Where are monarchies in 50 years?” he asked. … Stopping the Islamists from winning power was now “our major fight” across the region, he said. …
And he accused American diplomats of naïveté about their intentions. “When you go to the State Department and talk about this, they’re like, ‘This is just the liberals talking, this is the monarch saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is deep-rooted and sinister,’ ” King Abdullah said. His job, he said, is to dissuade Westerners from the view that “the only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The war in Syria: Can Jordan keep out of it for ever? The civil war is hotting up on Syria’s southern front Mar 16th 2013 | RAMTHA |Economist
….They say the fighting in the south is becoming more intense because of the acquisition of captured weapons and an increase of military defections from the regime. But outside backing, though still limited, is helping, too. Jordan and Israel, wary of turmoil spreading into their countries, have sought to prevent their borders from becoming conduits for weapons and fighters, as has happened with Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. But it is being whispered that late last year Saudi Arabia, one of the Gulf states that backs the rebels, moved its operations from Turkey to Jordan, annoyed with Qatar’s and Turkey’s enthusiasm for Muslim Brotherhood-minded groups. Since then, say the rebels, Jordan has covertly let through the occasional limited but well-directed shipment of weapons, including anti-tank missiles. There are reports of training on Jordanian soil. Jordanian officials deny any such involvement.
By funnelling aid—including $60m from America and clothes, phones and food from Britain—directly through the Supreme Military Council, which liaises with local military councils, the rebels’ backers hope to keep their favoured groups under control. Deraa’s rebels are banded into numerous battalions but are less fractious than their peers in the north. The rebel leadership was able to secure the release of the UN hostages within a week. “The fight has been more contained,” explains Ahmed Naama, who heads Deraa’s rebel military council. The southern rebels are generally more moderate, too. Though some Jordanian extremists have travelled north to fight, Jabhat al-Nusra, the most devout and fiercest Islamist group, which may have as many as 10,000 men in the north, still has only a small presence in the south…..
…My friend explained what had happened. His ID card had the name of his home village, a community in Sweida province inhabited exclusively by members of the Druze minority.
The army officer, an Alawite – another of Syria’s minority groups, from which the regime’s ruling clique is drawn – liked the Druze and saw them as allies in a battle against Sunni Muslim rebels, who in his view are terrorists. That interpretation of wartime alliances in Syria saved us.
“We were lucky. We got through because I’m Druze,” my friend said. “Everything is sectarian now. If I were Sunni, I’d be in jail and you’d be in trouble.”
The sectarian divisions that are ubiquitous in Syria now extend even to the roads. The road into Damascus is partitioned by concrete blast barriers, with the right-hand lane officially designated for civilian traffic and the left-hand lane for military and government traffic. But Alawites always travel on the left, regardless of their job, and so it has been universally dubbed the “Alawite lane” by locals. It’s a sadly tidy metaphor for an evolving conflict that has destroyed so many lives, and that will destroy so many more.
“The Prophet of Aleppo” – a profile and interview with novelist Nihad Sirees, on his recent English translation of The Silence and the Roar, Aleppo, and his view of literature and the revolution – from Newsweek
…Why, then, is Washington hesitating? One reason is that the options are all bad. But at the very least, the United States could lean on other countries to match US economic assistance and ensure more gets to rebel-held areas where suffering is greatest. France and Britain want to arm moderate rebel groups to accelerate Assad’s departure and gain influence with the people most likely to replace him. This will force the Obama team to think again about the wisdom of staying on the sidelines and failing to lead on a major international crisis. And, if Washington does not join Europe, Turkey, and the Arabs in supplying more decisive military aid to the rebels, it will leave us with the unpalatable option of trying once again to negotiate with a cynical Russian government for a political deal that might end up favoring Assad.
The failure of the United States to move resolutely down either path is striking. Sometime soon, the United States will have to choose, especially as the death toll mounts and the moral imperative of action overwhelms our caution….
Shahad, a teenager from Zabadani, a battered Damascus suburb that witnesses daily shelling, recalled that she used to memorize the Qashoush songs and eagerly await the town’s protests, where up to 5,000 people would take part every Friday. “They were nice days,” she said, declining to give her full name for security reasons. “Now there are no protests and no school, just shelling.”
Four British charities have publicly admitted for the first time that they are operating inside Syria on the eve of a major appeal for the stricken Middle Eastern nation which is being launched tomorrow by the Disaster Emergency Committee.
Sources in the Syrian opposition claim that a defecting former Syrian intelligence officer is seeking to auction the intelligence archives of the former Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat, according to a report published Saturday …
The conflict in Syria transitioned from an insurgency to a civil war during the summer of 2012. For the first year of the conflict, Bashar al-Assad relied on his father’s counterinsurgency approach; however, Bashar al-Assad’s campaign failed to put down the 2011 revolution and accelerated the descent into civil war. This report seeks to explain how the Assad regime lost its counterinsurgency campaign, but remains well situated to fight a protracted civil war against Syria’s opposition.
Short paper by Professor Edith Szanto (American University of Iraq) on sectarianism in Syria and the Twelver shi’a community at the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab
Under the Ba’ath, post 1963, Hafez al-Asad promoted both ethnic and religious minorities. For instance, he instituted Ahmad Kuftaro, a Kurd, as the grand mufti of Syria… This alliance between Kuftaro and Asad complicates the presumption of simplistic Alawi-Sunni cleavages.
In 1974, the Lebanese Shi‘i cleric Musa al-Sadr gave a fatwa which declared Alawis Shi‘is. This fatwa marked the beginning of the alliance between Twelver Shi‘is and Alawis. At the same time, it positioned Isma‘ilis in opposition to Alawis and aligned Isma‘ilis with Sunnis. Again,this complicates the assumption that all minorities back the Alawi Syrian regime.
…In 1973, the exiled Iraqi Ayatollah Hasan Shirazi built the first Shi‘i seminary roughly 200 meters north of the shrine. When the Syrian Uprising intensified in Sayyida Zaynab in 2012, the first cleric who was shot and killed was the representative of Hasan Shirazi’s seminary…
The Free Syrian Army Does Exist and is Growing Stronger by the Day
by *Koert Debeuf
for Syria Comment, March 19, 2013
When I read the piece of Aron Lund, ‘the FSA doesn’t exist’, I was utterly surprised. Of course the FSA does exist. And it is changing rapidly.Over the last few months, the FSA has transformed itself from a loose structure into a functioning organization. In fact, what Lund describes is an era of the FSA that no longer exists. It ignores the developments of the last several months and the present reality on the ground.
Last month, I visited Northern Syria three times with the Free Syrian ?Army (FSA). I spoke to many generals who had defected from the Syrian Army, to commanders on? the ground,to people in the headquarters of the FSA and? to military-civilian organizers of humanitarian aid of all parts of? Syria. I also spent many hours with Dr. Brigadier General Salim ?Idriss, Chief of Staff of the FSA; I was in the middle of a battle ?at Quweris airport, then one of the main front lines.
Many points Lund is making, were correct three months ago. But not now. Col. Riaad Assad for example is completely out of the picture, whatever he himself might say. Another example is Qasem Saadeddin. He did indeed try to create some unity in Homs and had difficulties in doing so. But that too is history. Today he is a Commander of one of the five fronts under the umbrella of the FSA and he is working very closely with Chief of Staff Salim Idriss. It is also not true that Idriss would not use the ‘brand’ FSA. One example is the fact that he recently started his own twitter and Facebook account as well as one for the headquarters, using @FSAHQ.
Nevertheless, I must admit that at first sight, the structure of the FSA is utterly confusing. Whomever ?you talk to on the ground will pretend he is the most important ?commander in Syria. He will denounce formal structures and glorify his ?own past as a freedom fighter. I learned that the? best strategy is smiling. And waiting. After an hour of ranting, the real story comes out. Every time. Then it appears that the FSA does?have a structure, that these commanders do operate within this structure, but that it is not fully established.? The FSA is not just a brand. It does exist. The FSA building has been framed in, but remains under construction.
The French Resistance
Aron Lund compares the FSA to the French Resistance in the Second World War. Spot on, I would say. But again while his piece fits with the beginning of the French Resistance, the reality is that the FSA can be compared with the Free French Forces in a later, more organized stage.
The Free French Forces, established by Charles De Gaulle in London in 1940, was nothing more ?than a name and a few officers. In 1941, one year later, little groups ?started to unite. However, it was still impossible to talk about a ?“Free French Army”. There was not only a fragmentation in structure? and command, but also in ideology. Call it the Riad Al-Assad era of the Free French Army.
It was only in May 1943?that (thanks to the work of Jean Moulin) the resistance forces were? unified, militarily and politically in the Conseil National de la? Résistance (CNR) under the leadership of Charles De Gaulle. It took the Free French Forces three years to unite. After the unification not all difficulties were gone. After the unification it took again some time to become fully operative on the ground. Call it the Salim Idriss era.
The FSA Aron Lund is describing is the FSA of the Riad Al Assad era, not the current one of the Salim Idriss era. At best one could say his description lies somewhere in between the two, but it is certainly not describing today’s reality.
The Riad Al Assad era or the former structure of the FSA
Up until a year ago, there was no structure at all in the Syrian armed rebellion.??Every little group was called a battalion, whether it consisted of 20 ?or 200 fighters. The creation of the FSA by Col. Riad Al Assad in July? 2011 was just as symbolic (but also as important) as the creation of the Free French Forces? by De Gaulle in 1940. On 23 October, the FSA merged with the Free?Officers Movement, becoming the main organization for military ?defectors. Pure branding or not, it deserved the credit of at least? trying to do something about the fragmentation. It gave the signal to? the many battalion commanders that co-operation is the only way to go.
That is exactly what happened the next year. From July 2011 until ?September 2012, there were many initiatives in order to create larger? entities.??We saw the birth of brigades like Liwa Al Tawheed and Farouk. We saw ?the creation of military councils, administrative councils,? revolutionary councils and civilian councils. Some initiatives were? pushed by the Friends of Syria or by individual countries. Aid, money ?or weapons were promised if the resistance would only get organized.
Unfortunately, these international actions lacked co-ordination as? well. The result was that the Syrian opposition on the ground created? several parallel structures.?? Another problem was the split between defected soldiers on the one? hand, and civilians who took up arms on the other. Defected officers? from the Syrian army organized themselves in military councils, while ?the civilians created revolutionary councils. In some places, like in? Homs, there were even two military councils. Although these councils ?often co-operated in battles on the ground, the lack of unity created ?a clear disadvantage when it came drawing up a military strategy.
This lack of unity and strategy not only meant a disadvantage in the ?field, it also helped Assad’s propaganda. Even as the FSA had no communication strategy at all, the Assad machine knew very well what ?to do: discredit the FSA.??There are three lines of attack:
The FSA is chaos. So it’s Assad or chaos in Syria and the region;
The FSA is a danger to minorities. Assad is the only guarantee for? the security of minorities in Syria;
The FSA is extremist. Assad is the only one who can keep out Al Qaeda.
I have been surprised to see how well-organized the Assad? communication machine is.
In every country in the West, media groups are working on spreading ?these three messages. Meanwhile, the FSA, which has too many? self-appointed spokespersons (as Aron Lund correctly spells out) and lacks a clear message on what it? wants and who it is, is slowly loosing the communication war.? One could say the FSA was in this position from July 2011 until ?December 2012. It is the same situation in which the Free French Army ?found itself from 1940 to 1942.
The Salim Idriss era or the new structure of the FSA
On 7 December 2012, 260 officers of the FSA gathered in Antalya in? Turkey. They elected a Higher Council of Revolutionary and Military ?Forces and a Chief of Staff, Dr. Brigadier General Salim Idriss.? General Idriss defected in June 2012. The main reason why he was ?elected is his talent for persuading people in a softly-spoken way. He ?is more a Montgomery than a Patton. Col. Riad Al Assad wasn’t present? at the meeting. They decided he would keep the title of General? Commander of the FSA, but this would be a symbolic, rather than an? operational title.?? His era is over now.
In Antalya, the revolutionary and military components were merged. So? instead of military councils and revolutionary councils, there are now ?civilian-military councils. They also organized the FSA into five? fronts: the Northern Front (Aleppo and Idlib), the Eastern Front? (Raqqa-Deir Ezzor and Al Hassakah), the Western Front ?(Hama-Latakia-Tartus), the Central Front (Homs-Rastan) and the? Southern Front (Damascus-Dar’a-Suwayda).
Each front has its ?civilian-military council and its commander. Each region/city within ?the front has its deputy commander, with, again, its own? civilian-military council.?? I met with two front commanders: Qasem Saad Eddin, commander of the? Central Front and Abdelbasset Tawil, commander of the Northern Front, ?and with his deputy commanders.?? They showed me detailed, strategic military plans. They also showed me? lists of who received which weapons. It was clear that they were in? close contact with Salim Idriss. Because of the strategic importance? of Homs, Qasem Saad Eddin has an office next to the one of Salim ?Idriss in the headquarters of the FSA.? So Saadeddin is not a loose canon (anymore) as Lund is writing.
The Higher Council of Revolutionary and Military Forces consists of 30 ?people. Every front has six representatives in the Council, three ?military and three civilian ones. They are mainly responsible for the? search for and the distribution of ammunition. Contrary to what has?been promised, very few weapons are coming in. I have seen how the FSA?had to fight cluster bombs in Quweris with self-made arms.
Just like the Free French Forces in 1943, Salim Idriss has now also started creating a political line for the FSA.??Until recently, we only knew what they were fighting against: Assad.? Now they are trying to formulate what they are fighting for and get their spokesmen on the same line. This ?message in English and Arabic of Salim Idriss on the second ?anniversary of the Syrian revolution is an example of how they are? moving forward on this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEBHVCjxYQ0
FSA is a bottom-up unification, still in construction
No-one will deny that, while the FSA has made big steps forward, there ?is still a long way to go in order to become a well-functioning,? united force like the French resistance in 1943. Idriss has to unify battalions that are used to work independently. It takes a huge effort to convince them to walk in the same direction. What are the main ?problems?
1. There is hardly any communication infrastructure. Today commanders ?have to communicate through Skype. In many places there is no Internet? connection. That is why many officers have to travel to the? headquarters in order to exchange information. It is very difficult to ?organize and unify an army in these conditions. That is why we should ?not be surprised if at a certain moment one of the battalions is ?acting on its own or is making a strategic mistake.
2. There are hardly any arms coming in. I was present during two days? at the headquarters of the FSA. I saw officers coming from Homs, Deir? Ezzor and many other places who wanted to meet with Chief of Staff,? Salim Idriss, in order to get weapons. They were all pretty desperate.? I heard many times: “How can we win the war, if we don’t have arms against these planes or tanks?” A Chief of Staff only gets recognition and authority if he can arm his own soldiers. This is basic.? De Gaulle didn’t unify because of his charisma either.
3. Getting totally fragmented forces onto the same page takes a lot of ?time. Quite some battalions, certainly the revolutionary ones, have no ?experience in fighting in a hierarchy. So, although they might? recognize the authority of the Higher Military Council, they still? don’t always understand what that exactly means in the day-to-day battle. Give them some time.
4. The growing importance of extremist battalions like Jabhat Al? Nusra is a problem for the image and the organization of the FSA.? Lund writes they do not use the brand of the FSA. Of course they don’t and they will never do. They are no part of the FSA and will never be. The fact that the other groups do use the name of the FSA means they distance themselves from Nusra and its Jihadist ideology.
The FSA deserves our support
It is fair to say that the FSA is not the well-oiled force some are? dreaming of.?? But it is unfair and incorrect to say that the FSA does not exist and? that it is not more than a brand. The reality is that the piece of Lund describes an era of FSA that doesn’t exist anymore.
Just like in France during the Second World War we can’t expect a? bottom-up resistance to become a unified front in a few months.? Becoming cynical now or even giving up on the FSA would be one of the? biggest strategic mistakes the West could make.
Last month’s work is done and a lot ?of progress has been made. If the international community decides to ?support the FSA, it will help them even more to unify, strategize and avoid ?mistakes.?? There is a structure of command. The headquarters will only provide arms to those battalions that follow their instructions. But they are still waiting for those arms. What is coming in is peanuts compared with what they need in order to win this war against one of the most brutal dictators of the world. What are we waiting for?
* Koert Debeuf lives in Cairo where he represents the Liberals and Democrats of the European Parliament in the Arab world.
Aron Lund Responds
Koert Debeuf seems to have read my post a little carelessly. I did not deny the existence of (many) factions using the FSA name. Rather, I discussed the media’s use of the FSA term, and stated that “the FSA” does not exist, if understood as a single organization. The wording might have been a little provocative, but the fact itself should be uncontroversial, for anyone who is following events in Syria.
There are undoubtedly many groups calling themselves FSA in Syria today, and indeed outside of Syria. They include both purported leaders and spokespersons, and fighting units on the ground. Some are closely linked to each other, and some work on their own. This reflects the way that the term is used as a synonym for “the resistance” by many Syrians, and not necessarily to refer to a cohesive organization.
The problem I tried to address in my post is that different media organizations have been relying on several different “FSA” spokespersons and leaders, few of whom represent any significant segment of fighters on the ground. They are routinely allowed to speak on behalf the FSA (generally understood to make up most of the armed insurgency) without reporters making any attempt to define their real (and most often marginal) role within the insurgency. This has created an extreme lack of clarity in reporting, and it continues to confuse both regular newspaper readers and top officials.
When Debeuf complains that I haven’t understood that Col. Riad el-Asaad “is completely out of the picture, whatever he himself might say” – then to the contrary, that was exactly my point. Despite his complete lack of control over the armed insurgency, Col. Asaad is still routinely being interviewed by major news organizations as a commander of the FSA, misleading the general public into believing that his statements represent some significant portion of the armed movement in Syria. They do not.
Mea culpa
I will gladly admit that Debeuf makes some interesting arguments, and that he corrects a couple of faults of mine. His travels in northern Syria have put him in contact with a few of the most well-known rebel representatives and commanders. As an outside observer of events in Syria, I can’t claim to have this kind of experience – I work with what I’ve got, and I’m always eager to hear from people who bring new facts to the table.
For example, I wasn’t aware that Col. Qasem Saadeddine collaborates so closely with Salem Idriss, and I humbly stand corrected on that count.
Debeuf is also right that Salim Idriss and his General Staff now use the FSA term – despite the fact that the organization did not emerge under that name, and many of its member units have previously renounced the FSA label. In my defense, the Twitter Account and other statements that Debeuf refers to had just been made when I wrote my post, and I wasn’t aware of them at the time. But bottom line, he’s right, and I was wrong.
Tua culpa
Even so, I believe Debeuf is far too optimistic in his view of the Salim Idriss network as a functioning nation-wide leadership, and that he has accepted too uncritically the explanations provided by his contacts in Syria. I’ve read Debeuf’s original reports from Syria for the ALDE political group in the European Parliament. I note that he then presented the FSA as a neatly two-pronged structure of defected military and civilian revolutionary commanders. This seems wildly implausible, and contradicts most reporting from reporters and opposition members on the ground in Syria.
In his reports, Debeuf also claimed, on the subject of FSA organization, that one “Ahmed Abeit” has been “elected the general commander of all revolutionary structures for the whole of Syria”. That was certainly news to me, and I imagine that it will be news to most Syrian revolutionaries as well. While I can’t know for sure, it seems to be a reference to Ahmed Abeid, a rebel leader in Azaz. He might be a big guy around those parts, and among the rebels Debeuf traveled with, but he is certainly not the main internal commander of the Syrian insurgency.
What the Homsi said
Returning to Col. Qasem Saadeddine, Debeuf also notes that he is the General Staff’s commander of the “Central Sector”. That’s certainly the official line, but how can such a claim be taken at face value?
The General Staff’s Central Sector sector mainly includes Homs, formerly the main front of the uprising, which has been devastated by Assad’s bombardment. The insurgency in this area is notoriously divided, not only due to the crippling government siege of Homs City, but also because of internal disagreements among the rebels.
Below is a list I recently compiled of factions currently active in Homs City and the surrounding countryside. It is far from exhaustive, and runs in no particular order. Note also that many if not most of these groups are themselves composed of semi-independent subfactions:
Liwa Talbisa, Liwa Rijal Allah, Liwa Fajr al-Islam, Kataeb Ahl al-Athar (part of the Jabhat al-Asala wal-Tanmiya, a salafi alliance), Katibat Shuhada Tal-Kalakh, Katibat Mouawiya lil-Maham al-Khassa, Liwa al-Quseir, several subunits of Kataeb al-Farouq, several other small Syria Liberation Front factions which are allied to Kataeb al-Farouq, al-Murabitoun (the armed wing of the Homs Revolutionaries’ Union), Firqat al-Farouq al-Mustaqilla, Liwa al-Nasr, Katibat Thuwwar Baba Amr, Harakat al-Tahrir al-Wataniya, Jund al-Sham (Lebanese jihadis), armed groups affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood (like Liwa Dar’ Ahrar Homs, Liwa Dar’ al-Haqq, and Liwa Dar’ al-Hudoud), Jabhat al-Nosra, the Syrian Islamic Front (including the five Ahrar al-Sham factions Katibat Junoud al-Rahman, Katibat al-Hamra, Katibat Ansar al-Sunna wal-Sharia, Katibat Adnan Oqla, and Katibat Ibad Allah; and Liwa al-Haqq and its subfactions, such as Katibat al-Ansar, Katibat al-Furati, etc) … and many others.
How does the FSA come into the picture? Sure, some of these groups use the FSA label to refer to themselves and their allies, but most do not. Some clearly receive arms through the Salim Idriss network, and some clearly do not. Some of the commanders in the Homs region have publicly declared their support for Salim Idriss, or allowed their representatives to be appointed to the General Staff’s on-paper hierarchy – but others consider him a foreign-based usurper of revolutionary legitimacy.
We can quibble about how to classify these Homs factions, and what percentage could legitimately be subsumed under the “FSA” label. But to imagine that Col. Qasem Saadeddine – or anyone else – exerts any real control over this sprawling mass of rebel factions is, frankly, delusional.
What this means for policy-makers
The fact of the matter is that the Syrian insurgency was always and remains deeply disorganized, despite persistent (and commendable) attempts by many Syrian opposition politicians and rebel commanders to form a joint leadership.
This is a tragedy, both for the opposition, and for Syria as a nation, but to recognize this fact is not, as Debeuf implies, a way to support the Syrian government. In fact, one can draw very different policy conclusions from the divided nature of the rebel movement.
One could argue that the lack of opposition unity speaks against arming the revolutionary movement, since there’s no guarantee that weapons will be used effectively or stay in “approved” rebel hands. But one could also legitimately argue that the only way to help midwife a central rebel leadership is by sponsoring a core network from abroad – to turn it into a “magnetic pole” which will attract other factions. (This is what’s now being done with Salim Idriss and the General Staff.) Both these positions are valid, in their own way, and merit careful consideration.
At the end of the day, however, I do believe that whatever side you’re on in the Syrian conflict, and whatever political strategy you prefer to see implemented, good policy must be based on a careful examination of the available facts – not on political spin, rumors, or emotional arguments. Clearing up the extreme confusion surrounding the FSA term is only one of many steps to take, if a sensible Syria policy is ever to emerge.
Ghassan Hitto was elected to be Prime Minister of an interim opposition government by a vote of 35 Syrian Opposition Coalition executives out of 45 who voted in Istanbul. There are 63 active members of which 48 voted and of which 4 cast blank ballots. Hitto received 35 of the remaining votes.
Hitto is a Texas based Syrian, married to an American school teacher, Suzanne. They have four children, all born in the United States, where Mr. Hitto advocated for Muslim Americans after 9/11 as a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR. Born into a Kurdish family in Damascus, Mr. Hitto left Syria in the early 1980s and received an M.B.A. at Indiana Wesleyan University.
He was pushed forward for the position of interim Prime Minister of the opposition by Mustafa Sabbagh, who is Secretary General of the Opposition Coalition. Sabbagh is an Erdogan style Islamist, known to be close to the Qataris. He lives in Jeddah and was originally from Latakia, Syria. He was an important voice in the original construction of the Opposition Coalition back in December of 2012.
According to Amr al-`Azm, Sabbagh made a deal with the Muslim brotherhood delegates in the SOC to back Hitto. The MB had been advocating Osama Kadi as interim PM, but they agreed to drop him and back Hitto in a move to sideline Moaz al-Khatib. Other than the question of who would run day to day affairs in the interim government, one of the larger disputes between the Moaz al-Khatib and Sabbagh factions was the question over talking to the Assad regime. Khatib had pleased the Americans by agreeing to the Geneva parameters, which call for forming a joint government with Assad remnants. Mustafa Sabbagh, Yasser Tabbara, Wael Mirza, and George Sabra wanted an end to this initiative, which some in the opposition view a tantamount to treason, as well as to outflank Khatib. To this end, Hitto’s first words were that he would not negotiate with the Assad regime.
The Saudis are evidently upset that Hitto was elected. Al-Arabia hardly reported on the news and only after some delay. The Turks, according to Azm, did not want an interim “government” to be formed at all, but only some sort of leadership. In short, the maneuvering has been intense. The process will leave some with a queasy feeling. Sabbagh and Qatar outmaneuvered their competitors for influence in the interim government.
One can defend the process by claiming that this is the way politics works. Qatar is putting up the money so why shouldn’t they get an important voice in the process? Anyway, if you head a government like this, you need money. Where are they going to get it? Only the Qataris are willing to put up some money. The US is not laying out cash. If Hitto can spend 100 million in Aleppo and the East, he can show the local population that the opposition coalition can bring good news and real benefits. They must bring money into the liberated area in order to build some credibility. Most importantly, no one seems to have a better plan. The opposition needs to get the ball rolling. Hitto seems like someone who has a can-do mentality and some experience as an executive.
A special word from Ghassan Hitto .. Walk for the Children of Syria
This is a New York Times story about Hitto’s son, Obaida.
Westerners With Roots in Syria Trickle In to Help Rebels
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
Published: October 8, 2012
The night before leaving his parents’ home in Wayne, Tex., to join the rebels trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Obaida Hitto left a bouquet of white roses for his mother, with a sterling silver locket and a note: “You’ve made me what I am. But now I need to go and do what I need to do.” Courtesy Obaida Hitto
Obaida Hitto of Texas went to Deir al-Zour in Syria to help in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Hitto, 25, a former high school football player, deferred his plans for law school to sneak into Syria to assist the rebels by making videos and spreading information on the Internet to help their cause. “I’m one of them,” Mr. Hitto said proudly during a recent telephone interview. …Ghassan Hitto, 50, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently, the Syrian opposition coalition concluded months of contentious efforts to unite behind a leader, under pressure from the United States and its allies, which demanded that the opposition set up clear chains of command as a condition of increasing aid to the rebels.
Mr. Hitto, a relative unknown in opposition politics who rose to prominence recently through efforts to improve the delivery of humanitarian aid, was far from a unanimous choice. After a day of maneuvering and voting on Monday that lasted into early Tuesday, he won 35 votes, just three more than Assad Mustafa, a former agricultural minister under Mr. Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad…. Even opposition leaders outside Syria are divided on whether an interim government makes sense. Fahed al-Masri, a spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army’s unified command, questioned how a government could function when it controlled little territory or money yet would be held responsible for the fate of more than one million Syrian refugees and several times that number displaced inside the country.
“Welcome, government,” Mr. Masri said sardonically.
Mr. Hitto — who ruled out negotiations with Mr. Assad, another blow to wavering efforts to find a political solution — has argued that forming a government would help keep Syria from slipping further into chaos.
“There is always a possibility that this regime might fall suddenly,” he said, in a video posted on YouTube to announce his candidacy. “And we can’t avoid a political vacuum in the country and the ensuing chaos unless there is a transitional government.”
He called for “a government of institutions and law” that would be accountable and transparent.
The stakes are high. Many nations have recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, meaning that if Mr. Hitto is able to form a cabinet, which is far from certain given the group’s fractiousness, his government could try to claim Syria’s frozen state assets and other levers of power.
With his many years in Texas, Mr. Hitto may seem like an unusual selection to lead a government struggling to establish street credibility with rebels — or an uprising facing allegations from Mr. Assad’s supporters that it is an American creation.
But he said he could not resist getting involved, especially after his son Obaida, 25, sneaked off to Syria and joined rebel fighters to shoot videos, deliver humanitarian aid and spread word of their struggle.
Mr. Hitto and his wife, Suzanne, an American schoolteacher, have four children, all born in the United States, where Mr. Hitto advocated for Muslim Americans after 9/11 as a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He traveled to the Middle East last fall to learn more and never went back. “I have a career back home that I’m in the process of destroying,” he said jovially over lunch recently in Istanbul.
In his role heading the humanitarian aid arm of the coalition under Suhair Atassi, a coalition vice president and respected activist from Damascus, Mr. Hitto quickly came into close contact with American and other foreign officials. Frustrated with what he saw as anemic and disorganized international efforts to aid displaced Syrians, he hired internationally known aid consultants to do a survey that found that the number of needy people in six Syrian provinces was more than 50 percent higher than United Nations estimates. …. Born in Damascus, Mr. Hitto left Syria in the early 1980s and received an M.B.A. at Indiana Wesleyan University. He is of Kurdish descent, which the council may have seen as a plus since it has been criticized for not reaching out more to Syria’s minorities.
Some council members said Mr. Hitto was the choice of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has long been banned and persecuted under the Assad family’s government and that plays a powerful role in the coalition. That could give him credibility among some in the Sunni Muslim-dominated uprising, but it also concerns some opposition members who feel the Brotherhood already wields disproportionate sway. Brotherhood leaders say they seek a civil, not an Islamic, state, but some in the opposition worry that it will impose a religious agenda.
One activist from Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect said the Brotherhood was “trying to stab the revolution once more.”
Another, Yamen Hseen, said that an interim government running northern Syria smacked of dividing the country.
“A government formed abroad, consisting of people we don’t know, nor the mechanism by which they were picked, it just makes me worry,” he said. “I think it is a result of other countries’ demands and not the demands and needs of the people and the revolution.”
There has been a rise in the number of foreign fighters, many of them Islamist extremists. But there has also been a small, though noticeable, number of men like Mr. Hitto, of Syrian descent and with Western passports, who have made the journey to join the Free Syrian Army. Experts estimate they number roughly a hundred and come from the United States, Britain, France and Canada.
Their presence is not enough to shift the tide of the battle, but they add another element of determination and complexity to a bloody landscape where loyalties and ambitions are often unclear.
“Even though he’s not fighting on the front lines, I would consider him a foreign fighter,” Aaron Y. Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said of Mr. Hitto. Mr. Zelin keeps a rough tally of foreign fighters in Syria based on news reports and Islamist postings and said the two groups together number in the thousands.
Mr. Hitto, who has extended family in Damascus, has spent five months posting videos and photographs from Deir al-Zour, sometimes very near the fighting, many marked by billowing plumes of thick smoke, the clack of gunfire and narrations that shake with an activist’s conviction and anger, delivered in an American accent. “All around us there is shooting,” he said in an Aug. 1 clip of a burning building. “The world seems to not care.”
Few in Mr. Hitto’s position have made the decision to stay as long as he has, especially as residents have fled areas of fighting.
“Eighty-five percent of the civilian population has left the city,” Mr. Hitto said in a Skype interview last month from Deir al-Zour. “If people only saw what was really happening to the people here they might do the same thing I did.”….
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s main exile opposition coalition elected a naturalized Syrian-born American citizen early Tuesday to be the first prime minister of an interim Syrian government, charged with funneling aid to rebels inside Syria and offering an alternative to the government of President Bashar al-Assad…. Born in Damascus, Mr. Hitto left Syria in the early 1980s and received an M.B.A. at Indiana Wesleyan University. He is of Kurdish descent, which the council may have seen as a plus since it has been criticized for not reaching out more to Syria’s minorities…..
By choosing Ghassan Hitto, 50, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently, the Syrian opposition coalition concluded months of contentious efforts to unite behind a leader, under pressure from the United States and its allies, which demanded that the opposition set up clear chains of command as a condition of increasing aid to the rebels.
Mr. Hitto, a relative unknown in opposition politics who rose to prominence recently through efforts to improve the delivery of humanitarian aid, was far from a unanimous choice. After a day of maneuvering and voting on Monday that lasted into early Tuesday, he won 35 votes, just three more than Assad Mustafa, a former agricultural minister under Mr. Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad.
Mr. Hitto faces formidable challenges in his quest to to establish administrative authority over areas of northern Syria that have been secured by the rebels….
Even opposition leaders outside Syria are divided on whether an interim government makes sense. Fahed al-Masri, a spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army’s unified command, questioned how a government could function when it controlled little territory or money yet would be held responsible for the fate of more than one million Syrian refugees and several times that number displaced inside the country.
“Welcome, government,” Mr. Masri said sardonically.
Mr. Hitto — who ruled out negotiations with Mr. Assad, another blow to wavering efforts to find a political solution — has argued that forming a government would help keep Syria from slipping further into chaos.
“There is always a possibility that this regime might fall suddenly,” he said, in a video posted on YouTube to announce his candidacy. “And we can’t avoid a political vacuum in the country and the ensuing chaos unless there is a transitional government.”
He called for “a government of institutions and law” that would be accountable and transparent.
The stakes are high. Many nations have recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, meaning that if Mr. Hitto is able to form a cabinet, which is far from certain given the group’s fractiousness, his government could try to claim Syria’s frozen state assets and other levers of power.
With his many years in Texas, Mr. Hitto may seem like an unusual selection to lead a government struggling to establish street credibility with rebels — or an uprising facing allegations from Mr. Assad’s supporters that it is an American creation.
But he said he could not resist getting involved, especially after his son Obaida, 25, sneaked off to Syria and joined rebel fighters to shoot videos, deliver humanitarian aid and spread word of their struggle.
Mr. Hitto and his wife, Suzanne, an American schoolteacher, have four children, all born in the United States, where Mr. Hitto advocated for Muslim Americans after 9/11 as a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He traveled to the Middle East last fall to learn more and never went back. “I have a career back home that I’m in the process of destroying,” he said jovially over lunch recently in Istanbul.
In his role heading the humanitarian aid arm of the coalition under Suhair Atassi, a coalition vice president and respected activist from Damascus, Mr. Hitto quickly came into close contact with American and other foreign officials. Frustrated with what he saw as anemic and disorganized international efforts to aid displaced Syrians, he hired internationally known aid consultants to do a survey that found that the number of needy people in six Syrian provinces was more than 50 percent higher than United Nations estimates.
Some council members said Mr. Hitto was the choice of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has long been banned and persecuted under the Assad family’s government and that plays a powerful role in the coalition. That could give him credibility among some in the Sunni Muslim-dominated uprising, but it also concerns some opposition members who feel the Brotherhood already wields disproportionate sway. Brotherhood leaders say they seek a civil, not an Islamic, state, but some in the opposition worry that it will impose a religious agenda.
One activist from Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect said the Brotherhood was “trying to stab the revolution once more.”
Another, Yamen Hseen, said that an interim government running northern Syria smacked of dividing the country.
“A government formed abroad, consisting of people we don’t know, nor the mechanism by which they were picked, it just makes me worry,” he said. “I think it is a result of other countries’ demands and not the demands and needs of the people and the revolution.”
The Swedish Institute of International Affairs just published a 51-page report I’ve written about the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF), one of the main salafi alliances fighting in Syria. The SIF is an interesting group – not quite as radical as Syria’s de facto al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nosra, but still very clearly part of the hardline religious camp. Its creation in December 2012 further strengthens the Islamist bloc, on the expense of more moderate revolutionary factions, but depending on how this plays out, it could also represent something of a challenge to Jabhat al-Nosra.
I’m posting some segments from the introduction below, followed by a a link to the full report. — Aron Lund
Syria’s Salafi Insurgents: the Rise of the Syrian Islamic Front
As the Syrian revolution descends further into sectarian civil war, radical Islamist groups gain in influence. The world’s attention has so far been focused on Jabhat al-Nosra, a salafi-jihadi organization with links to the Iraqi wing of al-Qaida, but there are several other hardline Islamist groups in Syria.
Unlike the salafi-jihadi radicals, many Syrian Islamist groups are primarily interested in establishing an Islamic state in Syria – not in a global holy war. They lack the strong ideological and personal links that bind Jabhat al-Nosra to the international salafi-jihadi community and al-Qaida, and they are in some ways more moderate in their political outlook. Some are intellectually disciplined salafis, but others have opportunistically adopted elements of the salafi discourse, without much ideological sophistication. Fighters are drawn to the black-and-white moral scheme and Sunni-sectarian chauvinism of contemporary salafism, and, not least, to the possibility of financial support from Islamic charities in the Persian Gulf.
In December 2012, eleven of Syria’s Islamist rebel factions gathered to form the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF), a salafi coalition that has since emerged as one of Syria’s most important insurgent groups. The SIF presents its creation a step towards the complete unification of Syria’s Islamic movement, but it may also have been a way for its dominant faction, Ahrar al-Sham, to gather ideological allies under its own wings. Ahrar al-Sham and the SIF have now emerged as a wedge, or a link, between two rival flanks of the Islamist movement in Syria: the soft-Islamist rebel mainstream, which is backed by the West, and the salafi-jihadi radicals of Jabhat al-Nosra, which have been designated a terrorist movement by the USA.
Part one of this paper discusses the rise of salafism in Syria during the current conflict, and the role of religious alliances in the disorganized insurgency. Part two focuses on the SIF and its emergence as a salafi ”third way” between Jabhat al-Nosra and more moderate Islamist groups. The third and final part takes a brief look at each of the eleven founding factions of the SIF.
Is the FSA losing influence in Syria? How many people are in the FSA? Is the FSA receiving enough guns from the West, or too many? Will the FSA participate in elections after the fall of Bahar el-Assad? What is the ideology of the FSA? What’s the FSA’s view of Israel? Is Jabhat el-Nosra now bigger than the FSA? What does the FSA think about the Kurds? Who is the leader of the FSA? How much control does the central command of the FSA really have over their fighters?
All these and similar questions keep popping up in news articles and op-ed chinstrokers in the Western media, and in much of the Arabic media too.
They all deal with important issues, but they disregard an important fact: the FSA doesn’t really exist.
The original FSA: a branding operation
The FSA was created by Col. Riad el-Asaad and a few other Syrian military defectors in July 2011, in what may or may not have been a Turkish intelligence operation. To be clear, there’s no doubting the sincerity of the first batch of fighters, or suggest that they would have acted otherwise without foreign support. But these original FSA commanders were confined to the closely guarded Apayd?n camp in Turkey, and kept separate from civilian Syrian refugees. Turkish authorities are known to have screened visitors and journalists before deciding whether they could talk to the officers. While this is not in itself evidence of a Turkish intelligence connection, it does suggest that this original FSA faction could not, how shall we say, operate with full autonomy from its political environment.
From summer onwards, new rebel factions started popping up in hundreds of little villages and city neighborhoods inside Syria, as an ever-growing number of local demonstrators were provoked into self-defense. The most important recruiting tool for this nascent insurgency was not the FSA and its trickle of videotaped communiqués on YouTube. Rather, it was Bashar el-Assad’s decision to send his army on a psychotic rampage through the Syrian Sunni Arab countryside. As the corpses piled up, more and more civilians started looking for guns and ammo, and the rebel movement took off with a vengeance.
While the new groups almost invariably grew out of a local context, and organized entirely on their own, most of them also declared themselves to be part of the FSA. They adopted its logotype, and would often publicly pledge allegiance to Col. Riad el-Asaad. As a branding operation, the FSA was a extraordinary success – but in most cases, the new “FSA brigades” had no connection whatsoever to their purported supreme commander in Turkey. In reality, what was emerging was a sprawling leaderless resistance of local fighters who shared only some common goals and an assemblage of FSA-inspired symbols.
The heyday of the FSA was in early/mid 2012, when new factions were being declared at a rate of several per week. But by mid-2012, the brand seemed to have run its course, as people soured on Col. Asaad and his exiles. The FSA term slowly began to slip out of use. By the end of the year, most of the big armed groups in Syria had stopped using it altogether, and one by one, they dropped or redesigned the old FSA symbols from their websites, logotypes, shoulder patches and letterheads. Their symbolic connection to the FSA leaders in Turkey was broken – and since no connection at all had existed outside the world of symbols, that was the end of that story.
The FSA brand name today
Today, the FSA brand name remains in use within the Syrian opposition, but mostly as a term for the armed uprising in general. It’s quite similar to how a French person would have employed the term “La Résistance” during WW2 – not in reference to a specific organization fighting against Hitler, but as an umbrella term for them all. With time, many people inside and outside Syria have started to use the FSA term to distinguish mainstream non-ideological or soft-Islamist groups from salafi factions. The salafis themselves used to be divided on the issue, but they aren’t anymore. The more ideological ones (like Jabhat el-nosra and Ahrar el-Sham) never used it, but at the start of the uprising, others did (like Liwa el-Islam and Suqour el-Sham).
One can’t disregard the fact that many Syrian opposition fighters will casually refer to themselves as FSA members, or that some armed factions actually self-designate as “a brigade of the FSA”. But that does not mean that they belong to some Syria-wide FSA command hierarchy: it’s still just a label, typically intended to market these groups as part of the opposition mainstream.
With time, then, the generally understood definition of the FSA term has gradually narrowed from its original scope, which encompassed almost the entire insurgency. Today, it is understood to apply mostly to army defectors (ex-Baathists), non-ideological fighters, and more moderate Islamists. But the dividing line is not really a question of ideology or organization, it is political. The FSA label is increasingly being used in the media as shorthand for those factions which receive Gulf/Western support and are open to collaboration with the USA and other Western nations.
That still doesn’t describe an actual organization, but at least it’s closer to a working definition of what the “FSA” would mean in a Syrian opposition context – a definition that can’t really decide what it includes, but which clearly excludes most of the anti-Western salafis, all of the hardcore salafi-jihadis, and, for example, the Kurdish YPG militia.
Free Syrian Armies
But is there no FSA organization at all? Oh, of course: there are many. Syria and Turkey currently host a whole bunch of defected officers who claim to be leaders of the FSA, or who are described as such by the media. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
– First, there’s Col. Riad el-Asaad and his associates (such as Malik el-Kurdi, Ahmed el-Hejazi, and others) from the original FSA faction. This was the original FSA leadership, with a clearly defined command structure at the top. It just never got around to having any fighters. Nowadays, Col. Asaad has left the army camp in Turkey, moving back and forth across the border, but he seems to have been confined to the margins of rebel politics. He wasn’t even invited to the most recent rebel unity conferences. Never a quitter, though, he continues to give interviews as top FSA leader.
– Second, there’s his old rival, Brig. Gen. Mostafa el-Sheikh, who heads the FSA Military Council. After US, Qatari, Turkish and other pressure, Sheikh went into a joint FSA structure with Riad el-Asaad in March 2012, but that didn’t work out. After celebrating their newfound unity, both men continued to do their own thing. Sheikh remains active as a minor player in rebel politics, and an associate of his, Louai Meqdad, is frequently quoted in the media as “the FSA spokesperson”.
– Third, there’s Col. Qasem Saadeddine, who is the leader of a military council in the Homs Governorate (there are at least two such councils, and neither of them seems to function). In early 2012, he declared the creation of a unified internal command for the FSA, supposedly backed by five regional military councils, which would snatch command from the hands of Riad al-Asaad and the exiles. The whole thing almost instantly collapsed back into just representing Saadeddine and his sidekicks, but he’s still using the title.
– Fourth, there’s a Turkey-based guy called Bassam al-Dada, who is nowadays often quoted in the media as “the political advisor of the FSA”. No one seems to be quite sure which commander or group it is that Dada is advising, but he’s getting a lot of media attention anyway.
– Fifth, do you remember that thing about a “new name for the FSA”? In September 2012, the Syrian National Army was declared by Gen. Mohammed Hussein el-Hajj Ali, on the premise that it would absorb the FSA and all other armed groups into a single command structure. This was a huge project which actually got a lot of commanders to sign on, but it imploded just days after its creation, partly because Col. Riad el-Asaad and various Islamists sabotaged it by withholding support. It hasn’t been heard from since.
– Sixth, there’s also Gen. Adnan Selou, who defected in June 2012. A month later, he declared himself “Supreme Commander of the Joint Military Leadership”.
– Seventh, there’s a slightly mysterious American NGO called the Syrian Support Group (SSG). Many Syrians seem to believe that this is a CIA front, which is certainly possible, but I’ve seen no evidence either way. Since 2012, the SSG has been marketing a select set of pro-Western commanders in the so-called Military Council structure, by presenting them as the “real FSA” to the Western media. Most well-known among these commanders is Abdeljabbar el-Ogeidi, a mid-size leader in the Aleppo region.
– Eighth, in September 2012, a group of Military Council commanders and assorted rebel leaders gathered to create a Joint Command of the Revolutionary Military Councils. This was set up by the salafi sheikh Adnan el-Arour and a couple of his sidekicks, including people associated with Mostafa el-Sheikh (see above). Sponsorship also probably came from Qatar, and there were at the very least some quiet nods of support from the USA. This group didn’t use the FSA name, but the media still decided it was the FSA. It quickly ran into internal problems, and has now been succeeded by:
– Ninth, in December 2012, a Saudi-backed conference in Antalya, Turkey, set up a General Staff of the Supreme Joint Military Command Council, led by Brig. Gen. Salim Idriss. This group doesn’t formally use the FSA name, but the media has invariably described Idriss as “the newly appointed leader of the FSA”, thereby giving the term another lease on life. The General Staff got the support of most of the factions that had already been receiving Western and Gulf State support in some way.
So, what do all of these groups have in common? Two things: all of them keep appearing in the media as representatives and leaders of the FSA, and none of them have any boots on the ground.
Well, to be fair: some of these commanders may enjoy the formal allegiance of a few tiny factions inside Syria, either paid for by foreign sponsors, or adopted through political alliances. For example, Riad el-Asaad has belatedly attached himself to the Muslim Brotherhood, and is now showing up at their conferences to grant an FSA stamp of approval to Ikhwani armed units. But that doesn’t really make him a significant rebel commander.
Salim Idriss and the General Staff
A semi-exception to the rule is the General Staff of Brig. Gen. Salim Idriss, which is the most recent attempt to create a mainstream Western/Gulf-backed military leadership. Call it FSA if you want to.
The General Staff has received a formal pledge of allegiance from many commanders who themselves have a substantial personal following. Examples include Ahmed el-Sheikh of the Suqour el-Sham salafi group in Idleb, and his local partner-cum-rival Jamal Maarouf of the Shuhada Souriya faction. If all the factions which have declared in favor of Idriss were added up, they’d count at least 50,000 men, perhaps many more. But in reality, of course, they only follow their own leaders, and won’t take orders from Idriss. The elaborate command structure which has been released by the General Staff is a figment of the imagination, intended to create the impression of a unified organization that isn’t there.
Still, no matter how shallow and ephemeral their allegiance to Brig. Gen. Idriss may be, no other opposition figure can point to a similar show of support from the armed movement inside Syria. The reason for this widespread endorsement of Brig. Gen. Idriss isn’t his personal charm, good looks or presumed brilliance as a military strategist – it’s a lot simpler than that. See, there was an immediate payoff for attending the Antalya conference and pledging allegiance to Brig. Gen. Idriss and his General Staff: You got guns.
Just when the Antalya conference to create the General Staff was held, in December 2012, fresh shipments of weapons & ammo started pouring into northern Syria, secretly shipped in from Croatia and other sources (this has been well covered by bloggers like Brown Moses and correspondents like C. J. Chivers). And what do you know, both the General Staff’s Antalya conference and these Croatian guns seem to have been paid for by Saudi Arabia. Coincidence? Not likely. Judging from who’s been seen firing the weapons, they seem to have been distributed more or less among the commanders who endorsed the General Staff. And that was always the idea: The General Staff was set up as a flag to rally the Western/Gulf-backed factions around, and probably also a funding channel and an arms distribution network, rather than as an actual command hierarchy. Idriss’s foreign sponsors do of course hope that it will eventually solidify into the latter, but we haven’t seen it happen yet.
What we talk about when we talk about the FSA
So, to conclude: The FSA term is now used by the media in mostly four ways:
Many lazy reporters use the FSA name to describe Syria’s leading, secular guerrilla group. That group doesn’t exist, so please stop making it up.
Other (non-lazy) reporters will often feel compelled to use the FSA term when referring to certain self-designated FSA leaders and spokespersons (like Riad el-Asaad, Bassam el-Dada, Qasem Saadeddine, etc). This is fine – in fact, it’s even a journalistic necessity, since quotes should of course be properly attributed. But one should also make an attempt to clarify to readers/viewers what this purported “FSA” representative actually represents. It’s not likely to be a calculable percentage of the rebel force inside Syria. (If you want that, it’s better to talk to commanders or press officials of the rebel groups who do the actual fighting on the ground. Many of them have posted phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Skype IDs to their websites and Facebook pages, and they’re generally eager to communicate with reporters.)
Some will also use the FSA term to mean Syria’s armed opposition in general, or perhaps specifically the Western/Gulf-funded segments of it. That’s OK, but then you should also make note of the fact that you’re not talking about a real organization, or even an alliance with a joint leadership or common ideology. The lack of clarity on this point has misinformed public opinion for about a year now, and that needs to stop.
And finally, many reporters will use the FSA term to refer to those rebels inside Syria that do in fact themselves use the FSA label. This is technically correct, I suppose, but it would be a lot more helpful to identify such factions by their full names or by the names of their commanders. That they also happen to use the FSA label tells us virtually nothing about who they are or what they’re fighting for, but it does create the false impression that FSA faction X in Aleppo is somehow linked to FSA faction Y in Deraa, and to FSA spokesperson Z in Istanbul. In 95 percent of cases, that’s not true.
Shorter version of the above: Let’s say it again, the FSA doesn’t exist – at least not as commonly perceived. Global Syria coverage would be a lot less confusing if journalists didn’t persist in pretending that it does.
There are of course insurgent alliances that actually do exist. For example, we’ve recently seen the creation of the Syrian Islamic Front (homegrown Syrian salafis, who don’t take Western money, and don’t call themselves FSA), and there’s the Syrian Liberation Front (a loose collection of Western/Gulf-funded salafis and more moderate Islamists. Before creating the SLF, these groups used to call themselves FSA, and they still tend to be lumped in with the FSA by many news reporters), the Shields of the Revolution (Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, who themselves occasionally use the FSA term), or the locally based Ansar el-Islam Gathering (an Islamist coalition in Damascus, members of which used to call themselves FSA, but don’t anymore).
But these groups have so far received near-zero coverage in the Western media. All we ever hear about is the FSA and Jabhat al-Nosra, as if these two organizations represented two rival wings of the insurgency. Since only one of them actually exists, it would be one wing at best, and that doesn’t fly.
My modest proposal
So here’s my suggestion to journalists and editors who, like me, are writing about the Syrian war from a distance:
Instead of saying that the “FSA” has conquered this or that village, just report the names of the groups involved. If they say that they’re the “Fulan ibn Fulan Battalion of the FSA”, then write the full name, not just “the FSA”. The distinguishing “Fulan ibn Fulan” part is more likely to be operationally relevant than the semi-fictional alliance name they’ve tagged to the end of their name.
And, if the recent video statement on “a glorious battle of conquest” from the “Joint Command of the Super Power Islamic Hawks Battalion of the Free Syrian Army (Idleb Wing)” seems a little over the top, you could just stick to reality. Better write: “According to photographic evidence seen by this reporter, it seems like ten guys from a tiny village outside Idleb have recently been lobbing mortar shells at a blurry target in the distance while shouting ’Allahu Akbar’.”
Or, if information’s missing, as is often the case, just attribute the action by using a non-specific identifier – e.g. rebels, revolutionaries, insurgents, terrorists, paramilitary opposition factions, armed groups, freedom fighters, anti-Assad guerrillas, or whatever you think they really are.
This kind of calibration might take a little bit more research than simply slapping the FSA label on every opposition member with a gun in Syria. But at least your articles won’t be, you know – wrong.
Truth be told
All this said, I wish that the FSA did exist.
A unified rebel leadership would spare Syria much of the bloodshed that lies ahead. Not just because an organized rebel army would pack more of a punch in the struggle against Bashar el-Assad’s fascist dictatorship, and could put a leash on the most unpleasant salafi extremist factions. But also – and this matters a lot more than the fate of either Assad or al-Qaida – because only a functioning opposition leadership will be able to minimize the period of Lebanon-style armed anarchy and sectarian bloodshed that lies ahead for Syria, and help reestablish a central government when Assad’s is gone for good.
Unfortunately, my mere wishing won’t make it so. But neither will sloppy and distorted news reporting.
Activists take to streets of rebel-held Mayadeen in eastern Syria for third straight day to demand that Al-Nusra Front fighters leave town.
Protests erupted after the Islamist Al-Nusra Front… set up a religious council in
the east of Deir Ezzor province, where Mayadeen is situated, to administer
affairs in the area.
Jabhat Al-Nusra’s Goals Extend Beyond Syria – As the Syrian war intensifies, Hussein Jemmo examines the reasons behind the rise of al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, and argues that the battle for Syria is only one step in a wider regional strategy for this group.
…The speech suggested that the militant front has become the main force in the fight against the Syrian regime, with no mention of the Free Syrian Army… The speech indicates that the FSA is being subsumed. After having been the leading military entity in the Syrian revolution, the FSA has been pushed to the sidelines compared to Jabhat al-Nusra… In Aleppo’s countryside, a member of Jabhat al-Nusra showed me a booklet entitled “Regional War Strategy in Syria.” The booklet represents a serious vision by an al-Qaeda analyst. It is available on the internet and helps explain the carefully planned beginnings of jihadism in Syria. According to the study, “The title of the next battle of Damascus will be ‘survival of the smartest,'” and explains how the jihadist environment began to emerge in Syria.
al-Raqqa
Events surrounding the takeover of Raqqa are still hazy. A number of reports refer to Jabhat al-Nusra as having taken over the city, or even to other groups such as Harakat Ahrar al-Sham and the Brigade of Huthaya bin al-Yaman. But these reports don’t mention the group Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya who identified themselves as such in the video in which they are holding the muhafiz and head of Raqqa’s Ba’ath party. Consistent with the observation that the “emir” of this group may be from Deir ez-Zor is the alleged participation of refugees who had previously fled Deir ez-Zor for al-Raqqa in the city’s takeover (still unconfirmed). Also unclear is who among / how much of the local population wanted this shift of support (from regime to opposition) to occur, and who was opposed to it. The battle of narratives (“Raqqa is liberated” vs. “Raqqa has been seized by outsiders”) is in full swing. –MTB
On March 4 2013 the city of ar-Raqqa was conquered by Syrian rebels. What is remarkable about this conquest is that the city fell to Jihadist troops. The (secular) Free Syrian Army hardly had any role in the battle for and conquest of the al-Assad stronghold.
Although this news is widely spread amongst specialists inquiring and reporting on Jihadism in Syria, the traditional media seem to be ignoring this fact. In this blogpost I will try to point out the significance of the Jihadist groups in conquering this city.
The above blogger believes that:
[The] significance of Al-Raqqah’s fall to Ahrar al-Sham & Jabhat al-Nusra cannot be emphasised enough. Its position on Highway 4 between Aleppo to the W and Deir ez Zour to the SE makes it of critical strategic value. Deir ez Zour already dominated by Islamist rebel groups, especially members of Syrian Islamic Front’s Jaish al-Tawhid and of Jabhat al-Nusra. Linking Deir ez Zour & Al-Raqqah – with Iraqi border to the east, unites two Islamist rebel fronts and puts them in a very strong position to converge on Aleppo if necessary
…how important is Raqqa in the broader fight against the Assad regime? The answer: not much. The taking of Raqqa, a city of about 250,000 people and now home to hundreds of thousands more internally displaced persons, and with little economic or military value, is just the latest in a wave of rebel victories across the north… The Syria conflict will be won or lost around a small patch of real estate in western Damascus – the areas that host several presidential palaces, the military’s fourth division and Republican Guard, not Raqqa or anywhere else… In the halls of regime power in Damascus few tears will be shed for, what it sees, a backwater desert outpost.
Videos posted online from Raqqa have shown government workers and troops lying dead in the streets, gun shot wounds in their heads. One video shows three bodies who it is claimed were executed for being “dogs of military intelligence”.
Rights groups have reported summary executions of regime officials and troops following the capture of other areas.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Sunday that at least 14 people have been killed in government airstrikes on the northern Syria city of Raqqa.
The armed opposition has dragged the Syrian army into yet another battle that will lead to yet more destruction and bloodshed. With this, Raqqa city, where the situation had been calm for two years, has joined the tragic flow of incidents in Syria.
Contrary to expectations, Raqqa — controversially — did not initially join the “Syrian revolution.” When the incidents first broke out, diffident protesters took to the streets, but they soon stopped. The city’s movements remained peaceful until the end of last year. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad even prayed in one of Raqqa’s mosques during Eid al-Adha last June.
The agreement with the Free Syrian Army leaders in the Kurdish regions, and the heavy blow that was dealt to the militants and Jabhat al-Nusra in Aleppo triggered quick action to achieve another victory. There was also news about militants coming from Iraq, and they paved the way for the battle of Raqqa city by taking over its suburbs without any real resistance. They then tightened their grip on al-Tabqa city and its areas of strategic importance, such as the Euphrates Dam. All of these steps were leading up to a large-scale offensive on the city, which started with a blockade on its central prison and ended with frequent incursions from different entrances to the city.
Abu Ibrahim says he and his family are the only Christians left in Syria’s devastated city of Deir Ezzor, and he is terrified Muslim extremists could make their already difficult life hell. Yet every Sunday, he and the family peacefully hold prayers…
Mortar bombs struck a Christian neighborhood and a football stadium at game time in Damascus Monday, killing six civilians and wounding at least 24 in what appeared to be an escalating campaign by rebels to sow fear in the Syrian capital…
In the latest attacks, four mortars bombs hit Bab Sharqi, a predominantly Christian area known for its old churches. One fell in a park, two near an ice cream shop and a fourth hit a house nearby.
The Muslim commander of the local rebel garrison appears to be trying to allay any fears among the roughly 2,500 Christian residents who have stayed in the village since the fighting in January, saying he won’t impinge on anyone’s rights…
“I am not convinced that these people want freedom and democracy,” said Fadi, a Christian civil engineer from Damascus, voicing a common view that the rebels are led by extremists. “I sympathized with them at the start, but after all the destruction, killing and kidnapping, I prefer Bashar Assad.”
One child was killed and 9 others wounded when a bomb shell hit their school bus in Damascus.
Syrian Jihad and Jihad for Syria
Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun’s jihad against the jihadists: Syria’s top Sunni cleric appeals to Syrian youth to join the military. The feelings of Syria’s Sunnis are divided regarding this regime-linked figure; he has some influence but many Sunnis view him as a tool of the establishment.
One of the pillars of President Bashar Assad’s leadership is secularism, but nearly two years into a fight which it says is spearheaded by hardline Islamist terrorists, Damascus has decided to employ its enemy’s tactic: jihad. The highest official Sunni Muslim body in Syria, closely linked to the government, issued a religious decree on Sunday calling on Syrians to join the military, which it called both “a national and a religious duty”.
Rais Suleimanov, head of the Kazan-based Volga Center for Regional and Ethno-Religious Studies, said he got this number from Russian militants themselves, who he said have “no interest in exaggerating it.” He said the militants come from CIS countries including Ukraine and from different regions of Russia, among them Tatarstan and the volatile North Caucasus, where Russian law enforcement is battling an intractable insurgency of separatist Islamist militants.
In one documented case, a Saudi judge encouraged young anti-government protesters to fight in Syria rather than face punishment at home. Mohammed al-Talq, 22, was arrested and found guilty of participating in a demonstration in the north-central Saudi city of Buraidah.
After giving 19 young men suspended sentences, the judge called the defendants into his private chambers and gave them a long lecture about the need to fight Shiite Muslims in Syria, according to Mohammed’s father, Abdurrahman al-Talq.
“You should save all your energy and fight against the real enemy, the Shia, and not fight inside Saudi Arabia,” said the father, quoting the judge. “The judge gave them a reason to go to Syria.”
Within weeks, 11 of the 19 protesters left to join the rebels…
Saudi authorities have a strategic goal in Syria, he said. “Their ultimate policy is to have a regime change similar to what happened in Yemen, where they lose the head of state and substitute it with one more friendly to the Saudis,” al-Qahtani said.
West training Syrian rebels in Jordan Exclusive: UK and French instructors involved in US-led effort to strengthen secular elements in Syria’s opposition, say sources Julian Borger and Nick Hopkins, guardian, Friday 8 March 2013
Western training of Syrian rebels is under way in Jordan in an effort to strengthen secular elements in the opposition as a bulwark against Islamic extremism, and to begin building security forces to maintain order in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
Jordanian security sources say the training effort is led by the US, but involves British and French instructors.
The UK Ministry of Defence denied any British soldiers were providing direct military training to the rebels, though a small number of personnel, including special forces teams, have been in the country training the Jordanian military.
But the Guardian has been told that UK intelligence teams are giving the rebels logistical and other advice in some form.
British officials have made it clear that they believe new EU rules have now given the UK the green light to start providing military training for rebel fighters with the aim of containing the spread of chaos and extremism in areas outside the Syrian regime’s control.
According to European and Jordanian sources the western training in Jordan has been going on since last year and is focused on senior Syrian army officers who defected….
“What has happened of late is that there has been a tactical shift,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, a Middle East expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank. “Islamist forces have been gaining steam in the north and Jordan is keen to avoid that in the south. Having been very hands-off, they now see that they have to do something in the south.”
He added: “There is a feeling that Jordan simply can’t handle a huge new influx of refugees so the idea would be to create a safe zone inside Syria. For them it’s a no-win scenario. Everything they had been seeking to avoid has come to pass.”
For western and Saudi backers of the opposition, Jordan has become a preferable option through which to channel aid than Turkey. Ankara has been criticised for allowing extremist groups, such as the al-Nusra Front, become dominant on the northern front while it focused on what it sees as the growing threat of Kurdish secessionism.
“The Americans now trust us more than the Turks, because with the Turks everything is about gaining leverage for action against the Kurds,” said a Jordanian source familiar with official thinking in Amman….
Syrian rebels have said that in the past few months there had been a relaxation of the previously strict US rules on what kinds of weapons were allowed across the border, and that portable anti-aircraft missiles had been released from Turkish warehouses where they had been impounded.
Matt Schroeder, who tracks the spread of such weapons for the Federation of American Scientists, said the recent appearance of modern, sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles in the hands of such fragmented rebel groups was deeply troubling in view of their capacity to bring down civilian airlines…
Foreign Policy
The Islamic State of Iraq, a militant jihadist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for a massacre of nine Iraqi guards and 48 Syrian soldiers who sought respite in Iraq from Syria’s civil war. The massacre is considered one the conflict’s most deadly episodes of cross-border fighting. The U.S. has condemned this attack as an act of “terrorism” because it claims some of the Syrian troops sought medical treatment in Iraq. Meanwhile, Syria’s grand mufti, Sheik Ahmad Badr al-Deen Hassoun, has issued a religious degree urging Syrian parents to enlist their children in the Syrian Army. The grand mufti is a Sunni and also closely linked to the Assad regime. His degree is significant for two reasons: it appeared to call for jihad; and it suggests the Assad regime lacks a sufficient supply of soldiers, prompting concerns that Assad may enforce compulsory service into the armed forces. This speculation is corroborated by reports that the Syrian government is recruiting and training Syrian women to become soldiers in a force named the “Lionesses for National Defense.” A video posted to Russia Today’s Arabic channel shows women marching in army fatigues, carrying Kalashnikov rifles, chanting slogans in support of the Syrian regime. Their duties consist largely of checkpoint control.
River of Death
The regime tries to outdo itself in the production of horror
Why did the bodies of 110 men suddenly wash up in the river running through Aleppo city six weeks ago? A Guardian investigation found out.
It is already one of the defining images of the Syrian civil war: a line of bodies at neatly spaced intervals lying on a river bed in the heart of Syria’s second city Aleppo. All 110 victims have been shot in the head, their hands bound with plastic ties behind their back.
It’s a picture that raises so many questions: who were these men? How did they die? Why? What does their story tell us about the wretched disintegration of Syria? A Guardian investigation has established a grisly narrative behind the worst – and most visible – massacre to have taken place here…
There are no women on the grisly slideshow of dead men that is replayed in melancholy slow motion every time a relative arrives. Nor are there more than a handful of males aged over 30. Most of the dead dragged from Aleppo’s Queiq River were men of working age.
Another thread strongly unites the fate of the river massacre victims; each of them had either been in the west of the city, or had been trying to get there. They had to pass though checkpoints run by the Syrian army, or their proxy militia, the Shabiha. The process involved handing over identification papers that detailed in which area of the city the holder of the papers lived…
Two other men who had been arrested at regime checkpoints and later freed were also interviewed. Both alleged that mass killings had taken place in the security prisons in which they had been held. They identified the prisons as Air Force intelligence and Military Security — two of the most infamous state security facilities in Syria.
“If they took you to the park, you were finished,” said one of the men, who had been freed in mid-January. “We all knew that. It is a miracle that I am standing here talking to you.”
The man, in his early 20s, refused to be identified even back in the relative safety of the east of the city. Nowadays, he spends his mornings on the banks of the river, waiting for more bodies to float down.
The concrete ledge from where the bodies were recovered is now covered by waters which, on 29 January, had receded leaving the sodden remains exposed, blood oozing from single bullet wounds to each of their shattered skulls…
“Before I left the prison, they took 30 people from isolation cells and killed them.”
Abdel Rezzaq said he was being held in Block 4, within earshot of the solitary confinement cells and the area where he alleges the prisoners were taken, then executed. “They handcuffed them and blindfolded them and they were torturing them till they died.”
“They poured acid on them. The smell was very strong and we were suffocating from it. Then we heard gunshots. The next day they put me and some of the others in front of men with guns, but they didn’t shoot at us. They freed me later that day.”
“I heard women screaming. They were pouring alcohol on us and cursing us. Only God got us out of there, no-one gets out alive. And only god knows what happened to the rest of the people who were in there. I will fight for this cause because I want the whole world to see what is happening.”
“I was there for a month,” he said. “Then one night they took us to an area outside, it was near a park and I thought that was it. I was preparing for death by praying and they started shooting along a wall where they had lined people up. There were about four guys next to me, to my right, and they stopped shooting. I heard one officer say ‘let them go’. And here I am. I will stay waiting for these bodies for the rest of the war. I cannot believe I am here.”
Aleppo’s Kweik river, keeps washing up the bodies of men and boys who have been shot in the head at close range. Some have their hands tied behind their backs, some have marks suggesting torture. Virtually every day this past week I have been getting early morning phone calls informing me of more bodies in the river – two on Sunday, four on Monday, seven on Tuesday, three on Wednesday… All eventually float to the same spot in the Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, under the control of opposition forces but just a few hundred meters downstream from an area held by government troops. It is too dangerous to try to recover the bodies at the point where they first appear – it’s too close to the government-controlled zone and right in the line of their sniper fire. Instead, local volunteers wait for the bodies to float another 300 meters or so downstream where they can be retrieved more safely. On March 3, I arrived just as two corpses had been recovered from the river. On the face of one, something had been written with a blue marker. I had to look closely because the writing was pale and partially erased by the water and mud – the body was floating face-down when it was found. On the forehead was written “al-Assad ” and on the left cheek “Surya;” the writing on the right check and the chin could not be deciphered. People thought the two illegible words might have been “u bas” – as in the pro-regime refrain: “al-Assad, Surya, u bas” ([President] al-Assad, Syria and that’s it).
Women
Syrian Women’s Day, March 8, 2013 by Aida Dalati
Between the years 1174 to 1260AD Ayyubid royal women banned together with Damascene daughters of the local Ulamaa (scholars) and built learning centers Madrassas for the Damascus and Aleppo youth, and Zawiahs-hospices for the terminal ill.
Some of the women’s work includes, Safwat-al-Mulk’s Peacock cupola (Qubbat al-Tawawis) built by the Seljuk widow of Taj al Dawleh, a spacious mosque and Sufi hospice located near the entrance of the Straight Street which I pass by every time I go to see my upholsterer. Also Princess Zummurud Khatoun’s Madrasat Khatuniyya the fifth madrassa-school built in Damascus and Princess Dayfa Khatoun’s Madrasat al Firdouse in Aleppo.
The title of “Khatoun” in Ayyubid Seljuk refers to Queen, princess, lady or noble woman.
In a span of these 85 years before Hulako the Mongol occupied Damascus, studies have found that out of the 147 persons who participated in building, 21 were women. Out of 69 Madrassas 15 were by built by women, (23% of the total) as were 6 (21%) out of the 29 Sufi hospices. In Aleppo 5 out of the 20 (25%) Khanqahs-Ribats (hospices) were also built by women. I find this to be a most delightful and empowering piece of history.
Chapter 19 Ayyubid Royalty in Damascus, Damascus Renaissance, Aida Dalati By Aida Dalati, to be published by Amazon, Photos available upon request
“Though women across the Middle East participated actively in the Arab Spring protests that began in late 2010, they remain second-class citizens, even where popular uprisings managed to topple autocratic regimes. Indeed, the Islamist governments now in power in several countries seem more determined than the despots that they replaced to keep women out of politics. In conducting interviews with women in the region, I am struck by their pessimism. They fear the loss of their rights. They see economic disintegration all around them, raising the possibility of a further increase in violence. As social bonds fray, they feel increasingly vulnerable. More than once, I heard them express the view that things were better before the revolutions.
Female representation in parliaments and Cabinets after the Arab Spring has been either absent or meager, and women activists fear Islamist parties will implement reactionary policies that discriminate on the basis of gender. In Egypt, for example, the Freedom and Justice Party, which dominates parliament, claims that a woman cannot become president. Egyptian women were heavily represented in the protests that brought down President Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011, but they have been largely excluded from any official decision-making role ever since.”
While the Iraq-Syria border was witnessing the first armed confrontation pitting Sunni jihadists against Iraqi and Syrian soldiers, leaving scores of people dead, a wide stretch of border between Lebanon and Syria was the scene of direct and unprecedented contact between Shiite Hezbollah militants and Sunni jihadists belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra. This new and serious development is likely to have serious repercussions in the coming weeks. There are several theories about how this situation came to pass.
…As Lebanon moves towards planned Parliamentary elections in June, the question of Lebanon’s role in the Syrian crisis will present a difficult political choice for certain communities, particularly the Christians. Lebanon’s Christian community is generally split between support for pro and anti-Assad political parties, but in an environment where the fear of a rising militant Salafist presence amongst Christians is growing, tenuous political allegiances may be switched to support parties, particularly the Free Patriotic Movement, that are aligned with what is widely seen in Lebanon as the greatest guarantee against Sunni militancy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
On Thursday, the leader of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, Mohammed Raad, said Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour was right to call for an end to the suspension observed by all Arab states.
“His statements accurately reflect Lebanon’s official stance on Syria.” Raad told Beirut news media of the call to reinstate Syria, which was suspended from the Cairo-based league in 2011.
The Syrian National Coalition, the coalition of opposition forces which is supported by a number of countries including the US, UK and France, has also postponed a meeting to form a provisional government until March 20.
FSA fighters being instructed in the use of the ex-Yugoslav M79 anti-tank rocket launcher (YouTube)
The New York Times reported last week that “Saudi Arabia has financed a large purchase of infantry weapons from Croatia and quietly funneled them to antigovernment fighters in Syria.” The effort was reportedly known to the US, but nothing was said for or against it so that it might proceed under the radar of a European Union arms embargo on Syria….
Iraq-Syria Overland Supply Routes: Syria By Joseph Holliday – ISW
…Assad’s withdrawal from northeastern Syria, combined with rebel gains along the Euphrates River, has reduced possible overland supply routes between Baghdad and Damascus to the Al Walid-At Tanf border crossing point. The recent ambush also demonstrates the capacity and willingness of militants on the Iraqi side of the border to disrupt this route. The Iraqi and Syrian governments appear well situated to maintain control of this last overland supply route, but if this route closes, the Assad regime will have to rely on air and sea resupply routes in order to continue its campaign against the opposition in Syria.
Assad’s withdrawal from northeastern Syria, combined with rebel gains along the Euphrates River, has reduced possible overland supply routes between Baghdad and Damascus to the Al Walid-At Tanf border crossing point. The recent ambush also demonstrates the capacity and willingness of militants on the Iraqi side of the border to disrupt this route. The Iraqi and Syrian governments appear well situated to maintain control of this last overland supply route, but if this route closes, the Assad regime will have to rely on air and sea resupply routes in order to continue its campaign against the opposition in Syria.
The Istanbul meeting – to be held on March 12 and 13 – was called after former Prime Minister Riad Hijab, the highest-ranking civilian defector from Assad’s government, withdrew his candidacy, several coalition members said on Thursday. Hijab had run into opposition from Islamists and liberals in the coalition for his past ties with Syria’s ruling hierarchy…
Coalition sources said the Syrian National Council, a large Muslim Brotherhood-influenced bloc within the 71-member coalition, had chosen three candidates for prime minister.
They are Salem al-Muslet, a tribal figure from northeastern Syria who worked at think-tanks in the Gulf; Osama al-Qadi, a US-educated economist who heads an opposition taskforce drawing up plans for post-conflict economic recovery; and veteran opposition campaigner Burhan Ghalioun, a professor from Homs and previous president of the Syrian National Council.
Asaad Mustafa, a former agriculture minister during the 30-year rule of Assad’s father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, is also in the running, the sources said. Muslet and Ghalioun, however, are members of the coalition, whose rules state that only non-members can join the provisional government.
The Syrian opposition has cancelled a meeting to elect an interim government for the second time in less than two weeks amid continuing internal divisions.
The meeting, scheduled for this week after an earlier cancellation on March 2, is now scheduled to take place in Istanbul on March 20…
The main task of the interim government would be to improve everyday life in areas of Syria where the insurgents have driven out government troops, the SNC source said. The interim government would also be based in “liberated” regions of the country…
During her three-day visit to India, senior Syrian minister Bouthaina Shaaban asked New Delhi to take the lead in drafting a strong statement in support of Syria, when the five nations — comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — meet at a conference later this month.
“We want India, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa to make a very strong decision to support a political solution in Syria, to support the right of the Syrian people to decide a future for themselves,” Shaaban, the political and media advisor to Assad, told reporters in New Delhi on Friday. Last year, the BRICS nations called for an end to the rhetoric of military action against Syria.
India has until now walked the tightrope between the United States and Syria. It voted in favor of sanctions, but later abstained from another vote in the United Nations General Assembly, saying it opposed acts that aimed at change of regime in Syria.
On Wednesday, India’s foreign office expressed its “deep concern on the security situation in Syria” and said that the Geneva Communique, which had called for respecting Syria’s sovereignty, must form the basis for a solution.
On Friday, Shaaban also urged reporters to use the term “international community” with caution.
“The BRICS is also a big part of the international community, so please stop using the term when you are referring to Western forces,” Shaaban said. Then she added, “It is very difficult to counter Western narrative.”
The shadowy Islamist group that was all but destroyed in the 1980s is ruining the uprising against Bashar al-Assad.
No one in Syria expected the anti-regime uprising to last this long or be this deadly, but after around 70,000 dead, 1 million refugees, and two years of unrest, there is still no end in sight. While President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal response is mostly to blame, the opposition’s chronic failure to form a viable front against the regime has also allowed the conflict to drag on. And there’s one anti-Assad group that is largely responsible for this dismal state of affairs: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.
“Yesterday I did not make anything to eat as there was no electricity for the entire day,” says Umm Fadi, a resident of Artuz district near Damascus that has been caught up in the fighting between rebels and regime forces.
Like most Syrians, the mother of four faces a shortage of oil and gas and has to resort to cooking on a wood fire or, when there is power, an electric stove.
“A gas cylinder costs 3,500 (Syrian) pounds (49 dollars) and there is no oil… we have to wait for two or three hours patiently just to buy bread,” she says with a sigh. — Fear is palpable —
But when it comes to violence near the capital, her fear is palpable. “The worst is yet to come,” she says.
From the balcony of her home near Abbasid square on the edge of Damascus, she can see clouds of black smoke.
“The rebels are at Jobar, two kilometres (just over a mile) away,” she says.
“We hear gunfire and explosions all through the day and they are coming closer. People are hiding in their homes.”
Says Syrian Opposition Leader.” Cengiz Çandar talks with Sheikh Moaz al-Khatib, leader of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, about the roles and interests of the United States, Russia and Iran in Syria and his efforts to arrive at a solution to the crisis.
Syria’s descent into state failure now seems unchecked and inevitable….As the bodies pile higher while terrified, traumatized children go homeless and flee for safety with their parents, one must ask how long the United States can stay on its present policy course. Those who argue that you can’t lose a proxy war you don’t fight will, in the fullness of time, be proven wrong. Yet even if they are right, is there nothing to be said for using some of the tools at our disposal to neutralize those whose sense of invulnerability emboldens their savagery? Syria can be saved when self-doubt in the West gives way to something more worthy.
BEIRUT: Economic devastation is tearing Syria apart, perhaps irreparably, if fighting rages for another two years, according to a former minister now working on a U.N.-backed reconstruction plan.
Abdullah al-Dardari said the damage wrought by the violence would already cost up to $80 billion, an impossible bill for a government which would soon be unable to pay state wages, let alone fund a nationwide program of rebuilding.
As millions of Syrians are driven deeper into poverty and the ability of President Bashar Assad’s regime to provide basic services erodes, the forces pushing Syria toward disintegration will grow stronger, he said.
“Economics alone can fragment Syria if we go on like this,” said Dardari, who served as Assad’s deputy premier for economic affairs for six years until shortly after the uprising against the president erupted in March 2011.
Now working as an economist at the United Nations in Beirut, he heads a team devising a post-conflict plan – trying to bring Syrians from all sides of the crisis together to chart an inclusive political, economic and social reconstruction agenda.
…20 peacekeepers were detained near an observation post that had been evacuated over the past weekend after what she called “heavy combat in proximity” in the southern part of the area they control. The peacekeepers, in a convoy of trucks, had returned to investigate damage to the post when they were taken by about 30 armed rebels.
Ms. Guerrero said that the peacekeeping mission was “dispatching a team to assess the situation and attempt a resolution,” and that the Syrian authorities had been asked to help. ….A video uploaded on YouTube by a group that identified itself as the Martyrs of Yarmouk claimed responsibility on Wednesday and said the peacekeepers would be held until Syrian government forces withdrew from the area around Al Jamlah, the site of the weekend clashes. The video does not show any of the captives, but United Nations vehicles are visible.
A speaker in the video warns in Arabic: “If the withdrawal does not take place within 24 hours, we will deal with those guys like war prisoners. And praise to God.”
The threat underscored the widening risk that the Syria conflict is destabilizing the Middle East, and raised new concerns about the agendas of some Syrian insurgent groups, just as Western nations, including the United States, were grappling over whether to arm them…
Koert Debeuf, a Belgian who works in Cairo as a representative of centrist parties in the European Parliament, says he was smuggled from Turkey into Syria by rebel commanders in January to study conditions in the rebel-held territories. But when he asked the commanders to show him the Azaz refugee camp in northern Aleppo Province, he said he had the impression that they felt ashamed.
“We need to take a leap of faith,” Mr. Debeuf said. “Of course things will go wrong, but what we are doing now, is going very, very wrong, and we are only making two people stronger: Assad and Jabhat al-Nusra.”
SAWRAN, Syria — The United States and other international donors are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid for Syrians afflicted by the civil war. But here in the rebel-controlled north, where the deprivation is most acute, that money has bought mostly anger and resentment: the vast majority of aid is going to territory controlled by President Bashar al-Assad, and the small amount reaching opposition-held areas is all but invisible.
Rebels argue that the humanitarian assistance is in effect helping Mr. Assad survive the war of attrition. “Aid is a weapon,” said Omar Baylasani, a rebel commander from Idlib, speaking during a visit to a Turkish border town. “Food supply is the winning card in the hands of the regime.” …
The article of the last post contained a video depicting the destruction of a shrine, referred to as an “Alawite Mazaar.” Alawis, Shi’ites, and Sunnis with a Sufi orientation all visit shrines built on or containing the tombs of reputedly holy individuals. In actuality, this could be a shrine frequented by Sunni Sufis or Sunnis influenced by Sufism, similar in appearance to the Alawi shrines. Sufi tendencies are often conflated with Shi’i practices by fundamentalist Sunnis and together opposed as “innovation,” “paganism,” or “associating something not-God with God”—in other words, directing devotion toward someone other than God. In Syria, various Muslims sects (as well as Christians) will often frequent the same holy sites together. The title of the video refers to the structure as a “pagan shrine,” an accusation that could be levied against a Shi’ite or Alawi shrine, but may just as easily be directed at any Saint-venerating Sufi-oriented sacred place. It is not specifically indicated that it is an Alawi shrine, as noted by readers. –MTB
Posted by Matthew Barber on Sunday, March 10th, 2013
The Uprising and the New Syria: Islamists Rise in Raqqa while Damascene Christians Dodge Fire
By Matthew Barber, for Syria Comment
March 11, 2013
Readers of Syria Comment were less than thrilled by the posting of the video of the capture of Raqqa by Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya. Some felt that the forenamed Islamists deserved greater criticism, and that the quip that “the Ba’athists look unhappy” was trite.
Syria Comment is a blog that attempts to maintain pace with rapidly developing current events; it should be obvious that it’s not always possible to provide an op-ed with each significant incident as it breaks. But in addition to this, a sentiment of frustration seems to be surfacing due to the perception that the blog’s bias is gradually trending toward the mainstream media’s simplistic regime-vilification and opposition-advocacy, the myopic narrative of “good guys and bad guys.”
In this article, I will try to complicate the “good guys versus bad guys” narrative.
According to most sources, only one military site in the entire muhafiza (governorate) of Raqqa remains under regime control. This means that the first muhafiza in Syria to be effectively “liberated” has been achieved by Islamist resistance. That only passing mention was made in the last post about the fact that other Islamists have in the same week kidnapped UN personnel in the Golan has contributed to the perception that Syria Comment is somehow becoming soft on the opposition and unconcerned with the issue of Islamism in the conflict. The capture of Raqqa is much more than the “changing of the guard;” it represents a change in the kind of power exercised. It is a visible shift to Islamism, something that many Syrians as well as outsiders linked to Syria find troubling.
These events are significant, and do deserve greater attention. Raqqa, the first muhafiza to be (nearly) independent of the Syrian regime, is now controlled by Islamists—though with or without the approval of its inhabitants? Many questions remain unanswered about this incident. If the rumor is true that tribal authorities were ready for a change and facilitated the smooth nature of this takeover, one can’t help but wonder why local tribal leaders supported something like “Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya” as the new authority of their city, and install this “emir.” (“Emir” is a title of authority preferred by certain groups who believe in implementing an “Islamic state.”)
This narrative is suspicious. The first striking oddity is the falling statue after take-over. It seemed quite normal at first—after all, we’ve seen countless such videos. But that was the funny part: we saw them during the opening months of the uprising. When have we seen them recently? In most cities that the rebels take over, the statues of regime figures tend to have disappear far in advance of the final takeover. Opposition activity precedes the takeover, when symbols of the regime are usually the first target and destroyed. How does a city where a statue of Hafez al-Assad has remained standing for two years suddenly fall without a fight? Furthermore, why does a tribal, predominantly Sunni city still have a standing statue of Hafez after two years?
To those who know the city, al-Raqqa is an unusual. In Syria it is considered a social space characterized by open-mindedness. Syria’s most important folklore dance troop comes from Raqqa, and men and women dance together in the city’s dance festival. It is a city that produces many cultivated intellectuals, sports champions, and artists. Something is different about al-Raqqa: its muhafiza was one of the few that has remained calm during the last two years (on par with Sweida—yet it is Sunni). The tribal configuration of Raqqa have long been regime supporters. According to local lore, the particular relationship between the Sunni tribes of Raqqa and the regime can be explained by virtue of the held tradition that these tribes were Shi’i in origin. I don’t have the part of the story that explains how tribes originally Shi’i became Sunni, but the belief is that when the Alawi came to power, the Raqqan tribes “remembered their roots,” and a “natural” affinity has existed ever since. Whether or not this traditional knowledge can provide a satisfactory understanding for the close ties with the regime, the question remains: Why would tribes with a long history of being in the regime’s confidence now suddenly abandon it, especially considering that the retaliatory air strikes would be anticipated?
If my Raqqan contact (a professional living in the city who belongs to one of the tribal bodies itself) is correct, they haven’t. Evidently, the tribes have NOT altered their position of support for the regime. Local citizens were taken by surprise and shocked by the abrupt takeover of the city. In other words, if this is true, then the Islamist rebels are a foreign, uninvited presence whose agenda runs contrary to the will of the residents. Furthermore, the city and tribes are apparently not capable of doing anything about it.
No one seems to know anything about the mysterious “emir” heading this Islamist force. In the conquest video, did he really have trouble asserting that he was with the FSA and therefore switched to “Jabhat,” or were “FSA” the first words spontaneously out of his mouth, before coming back to the title of his Islamist group? Upon further viewing, it almost seems that FSA is what comes most naturally to him, and it takes effort to pronounce the Islamist affiliation. It’s hard to read and seems a bit suspicious. Ultimately, he distances himself from the FSA and identifies with Islam.
Slightly more can be gleaned from Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya’s debut video, which can be seen here:
In it they state that they are comprised of a number of small groups that have banded together to form the larger body of “Jabhat al-Wahdet al-Tahrir al-Islamiyya.” They state that their agenda is to attack the regime’s forces, protect public places, and support the Free Syrian Army. They also announce that they are establishing shari’a courts to mete out justice to those who err. They also make the vague statement: “we are going to judge others before they judge us.”
The “emir” doesn’t seem readily visible in this video. The man seated to the right of the table, behind the row of crouched men, seems to resemble the mustached fighter seated with the row of men to the right of the couch with the emir and his two conquered officials in the post-takeover video.
Some have wondered if the “emir” is not Syrian. This is unlikely, based on the accent. There are many Syrian “ethnicities” spread throughout Syria, and it is hard to place origin by mere appearance. He certainly does seem quite different from everyone else in the room, and it gives him the appearance of being “foreign,” at least to the rest of the bunch. He also doesn’t seem particularly charismatic, and one wonders how he was chosen to lead this front as “emir.” He and two other fighters with him (one by the door, one on the couch) have beards and mustaches, but not all the men in the room have beards. It’s not possible to say which of the men in the room were with the Jabhat group, and which were with the Muhafiz. The man introducing the clip seems eager to please.
To the left of the “emir” is Suleiman Suleiman, the Head of the Ba’ath Party in Raqqa, claimed to be an Alawi. On the right is the Muhafiz of Raqqa, Hasan Jalali (Abu Wa’el). According to sources claiming to have known his history, he was a mulaazim in the army (lieutenant), later became the Mudiir Naahiya al-Nabak (Director of the District of Nabak), later a qiad ash-shurta (police chief), then the Mu’awin Wazir al-Dakhaliya (Assistant to the Minister of the Interior), before finally becoming the Muhafiz (Governor) of al-Raqqa. While Mudiir of the Naahiya of Nabak, he lived in Deir Atiyah, and according to local residents, he took a lot of money from people in the area. Regime personnel have always had their strategies to extract bribes from the citizenry, and he had his. Most people depend on motorcycles rather than cars in those communities, and these generally lack license plates. Supposedly he used this as a pretense to confiscate motorbikes, requiring the owner to pay rishwe before being able to take back the vehicle. Of course, stories abound among people excited to see the capture of an enemy about his former depravity, and none of this is confirmed.
Still to be answered is how many men Jabhat al-Wahde has on the ground, and how they were physically able to pull off the rapid takeover. Also unclear is the exact extent of regime presence still in the muhafiza; the one regime base left should have around 3,000 men since it is classified as a liwa (brigade), but there may be less due to recent needs to deploy troops elsewhere. Additionally a military airport is still under regime control; unknown are the extent of its fortifications.
Amidst all the questions, one thing is certain: The Ba’athists do look unhappy.
Two Years Ago
These events represent great change in Syria. A faction of the readership is saddened by the movement in this direction, and also feels that Syria Comment is not confronting this reality openly enough. To consider the orientation of Syria Comment toward these events, let’s return for a moment to the beginning of the conflict.
While inside Syria at the beginning of the uprising, I wrote an article for Syria Comment called “Syria in Fragments: Divided Minds, Divided Lives,” detailing new phenomena that I noticed, namely rifts of opinion that were forming between different groups of Syrians with whom I had daily contact. I was struck by how quickly this divide formed and how unable Syrians were to hear each other’s concerns across this divide. What became obvious was that sentiments regarding the regime and the uprising began to visibly polarize along confessional lines.
The reader’s responses to this article were telling. Despite substantial praise, some readers attacked the article for “being sectarian” or for “promoting sectarianism.” One comment judged it as participating in “…Western Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist tendencies to divide people along ethnic and religious lines. Such an approach is profoundly racist.” Another reader invoked Edward Said to suggest that I was following an Orientalist penchant for superimposing artificial sectarian categories onto other societies—to define identity, I suppose, as I saw fit: “I am either a person of a sect that fights with other sects or I am nobody.”
Rather than concealing such a strategic agenda, the article’s account of personal encounters was primarily edited material that I had extracted from my own journaling, as I tried to make sense of what was happening for myself in a Syria that was suddenly transforming remarkably from the one I had known. The motivation was to understand an undeniable pattern that became clearer each day with every individual, family, and community I visited: that though a number of Sunnis supported the regime, and a tiny sliver of Christians (and one or two Alawis) supported the opposition, most of those participating in the uprising were Sunni, and most members of religious minorities stood with the regime.
The idea of my critics seemed to be that I would create sectarianism just by talking about it—that I could conjure up rifts where previously there was unity. And though the article had the aim of creating empathy for the minority communities that opposed the uprising, it was often members of those communities who found it so offensive. For anyone infused with Ba’athist ideology, vocally commenting on Syria’s milieu of diversity was a breach of sacrosanct convention (unless to affirm peaceful coexistence). “There are no Alawis or Sunnis in Syria—just Muslims,” Alawi young people would tell me in the first months of the uprising. Lovely thought, but the Sunnis didn’t agree. Those participating in the uprising also challenged my premise, claiming that Syria would be “one” against the regime. They consistently mentioned the few Christians (and the one Alawi they’d heard rumor of) who were participating in the dissent, and maintained that it was a struggle for the freedom and rights of all Syrians. They disliked any suggestion that the uprising would be “Sunni” in character, and the article—and others of its kind—became targets of abuse from those on both sides of the conflict.
These reader’s reactions mirrored the very division inside Syria that the article was highlighting. As both sides tried to convince us that neither Syria nor the uprising were sectarian, several problems became apparent. While maintaining that there was no sectarianism in Syria, regime supporters ironically explained the uprising as an insidious sectarian current of hateful Salafism. Being simultaneously terrified of both Islamism and the regime, many members of minority communities were content to not understand the uprising, and to instead chorus Ba’thist clichés, trying to reinforce the groupthink of obedience, adopting the identity required of them, and waiting and hoping that the regime would quickly quell the “Islamist” disturbance that was not only fearsome for what it might have stood for, but which unsettled all by disturbing the balance of conformity and submission.
As the terrified child of an abusive parent or the fearful member of an authoritarian cult who says, “Let’s all just do as Father wants,” many minority Syrians were distressed and angered when others broke with conformity to rock the boat. Their unquestioning devotion to the national figure of adulation has earned them the moniker minhebakjiin (those who participate in the cult surrounding government-placed billboards with the slogan “we love you” printed next to the president’s picture). (Some, with the clarity of age, would slow down and acknowledge their years of abhorring the regime. Their reason for the drastic shift to support it was: “We are not ready for democracy. We don’t even know what it means. This is not the right way or moment to create change in Syria.”)
Since the unity of Syria was the religious mantra, any dissent had to be explained as a sectarian anomaly, a form of terrorism that must be propelled by religious extremism. This was a narrative of denial regarding the participation of ordinary Syrians in the uprising. To this day, the regime cannot simply acknowledge that there are Syrians unhappy with it. (This makes the regime’s recent overtures for dialogue perplexing; how can you dialogue with a party you don’t believe exists? What solution can you seek when you won’t admit that much of the population you ruled is fighting you?)
On the other side, Sunni activists and rebels responded to concerns that a Syria without Bashar would resemble an Iraq without Saddam by singing such platitudes as: “Syria is not Iraq; Syrian culture is different from Iraqi culture; Syria is used to everyone living together in peace; the Christians are the original Syrians, no one will attack them or their churches.”
Both sides of this argument have been proven wrong: those who maintained that Syria was not a sectarian place have had to admit that it is, often by observing rebel attacks on the civilians of their own communities; and those with the opposition who assured us that the uprising would not inflict harm on minority communities have had a unpleasant wake-up call as to the character of a good segment of the rebel fighting force. Two years later, the verbal violence among readers of this blog runs parallel to the killing on the ground in Syria. The frequent use of “rat” to describe one’s perceived opponent is reminiscent of the Hutu use of “cockroach” to describe Tutsis prior to the genocide. Let’s just say the comments section of Syria Comment isn’t a place I’d want my (imaginary) children to spend time.
The Early Warnings of Sectarianism
In the initial days of the Syrian uprising, during the adrenaline of the (at that point still inspiring) “Arab Spring,” many were searching (from the comfort of their own homes) for their next rush, and Syria seemed to hold a lot of promise. Amidst the stampede of appeals for “intervention,” Dr. Landis belonged to a minority of voices urging caution regarding the danger of a “sectarian conflict.” Though it was an unpopular position, Syria Comment remained one of the few entities opposing intervention (back when we wondered if intervention might truly be on the table), not out of any love for a corrupt, selfish, tyrannical regime, but out of a concern that without the proper kind of transition, the future could be worse.
The original position of those in this camp was to point-out the obvious faults of the rebels and by demonstrating that they also had a dangerous capacity to do harm, to advocate leaving the regime alone, while still recognizing its abuses and not defending its actions. The fear was that the security vacuum in removing Assad would replay the events that ensued when Saddam was deposed, and the statements of Iraqis longing for the days when he provided security were a constant echo.
Trying to provide a critical understanding of the conflict has often not engendered appreciation. Since the beginning, Syria Comment has been attacked by readers on both sides of this civil war, and accusations of “pro-Alawi supremacy” and “pro-intolerant Islamists” can be found together in response to the same post. The dilemma was predicting which of the two contenders would be the lesser evil in the long run, and it was felt that security in the now would be better than uncontrolled sectarian chaos. Looking back at the tremendous loss of life, many would maintain that this was the right position, but that the regime’s violence has surpassed even our worst expectations helps to explain why the discussion of Islamism’s problematic character has lately become muted.
Even the staunchest critic of the opposition, who holds that rising Islamism will pose the gravest threat to the long term health of the country, is so dismayed by the tremendous loss of life in the short-term as regime brutality pounds countless towns into gravel, that he or she now sits counting the days until the regime falls. Over time, it has become more difficult to follow this line of criticizing the opposition and holding that the regime should be left in power, due to the extreme proportions of violence it uses. After two years, maintaining that “the alternative could be worse” began to frustrate the public, since: “what could be worse than pulverized towns?”
And yet, all the predictions of sectarian hatred are coming to fruition: the Islamist presence is rising (in Raqqa’s case apparently against the popular will) and in many places it is demonstrating incredible intolerance for non-Sunnis. While the Islamist role in the immediacy of the conflict might not be grinding towns into rubble, when war-time ends, will it be better than the severe rule of militant nationalism?
The Sectarian Reality Now
A reader recently provided this video showing mujahidiin in Syria blowing up an Alawite Maz?r (Arabic ????) which is a Saint’s tomb, mausoleum or shrine. The Alawites traditionally do not build mosques, but visit saint’s shrines or “maz?rs.” Watching it is almost more painful than the many videos of wounded people, because more than a physical attack on the body of a political rival, it represents a spiritual attack on the soul of what others consider most sacred.
Here is another video, showing Syrian rebels forcing a Shi’ite man to destroy a Shi’ite mosque—his own mosque: http://youtu.be/aX8KUUKSWgc
The Christian District of Damascus
The Christian districts of Damascus now come under daily fire from Syrian rebels. Mortars are fired from Jobar, Qabun, and the area east of Zabladani. The targets are Qasaa’ and Bab Tuma. Within the past few weeks, multiple churches have been attakced. The Chaldean Orthodox church-building was hit by one such projectile, and another nearly-hit the Latin Catholic church. Also in February, two mortars were fired into the French hospital in Qasaa’. Christian-owned businesses in Qasaa’ and Christian homes around George Khuri park have all been hit by various projectiles. One homemade mortar damaged three houses in one shot, terrorizing the entire neighborhood. These attacks are not new; they’ve been occurring for some time. They are now increasing in frequency, however, and currently around two mortars per day are hitting Qassa’. This is in addition to bombings that have targeted Christian areas, such as the October 21st bombing in Bab Tuma that killed 20 people. In the provinces of Homs, Idlib, and Aleppo—regions lacking effective regime protection—numerous churches have already been destroyed.
Rebels have attacked Christian villages, with broad-daylight killings in streets. Monasteries and places of pilgrimage have been bombed and hit with rockets. Each day al-Jazeera airs images of rebels in Jobar pushing toward ‘Abbassiyiin Square, depicted with heroic sensationalism, as if to boost morale and drive them on. On the other side of that front, Christians tremble like peasants behind a crumbling castle wall, hoping that Syrian troops will manage to keep out the advance. Considering recent vigilante justice on the part of rebels in Yarmouk (hanging Palestinians accused of collusion with the regime and executing police at point-blank range), their fear seems warranted.
The Damascene Christians have formed some local militias to try to protect their areas, though they mostly do not carry weapons and are reluctant to display a public presence. They are trying to learn the lesson of the traditionally Druze suburb of Jeremana, where six local Druze patrolmen were attacked and killed. Jeremana was hit several times by car bombs, rockets, etc. When locals erected checkpoints, they effectively created visible targets, something that the Christians are now trying to avoid. The Christian ability to protect themselves is quite limited, however, especially in Qasaa’ which is most vulnerable, having no walls and being surrounded by streets on all sides. The places for launching the attacks are so obviously nearby that the opposition’s tired argument that “the regime is attacking its own supporters to keep them loyal through fear” is no longer convincing.
Many people are terrified of the rise of Islamist power in Syria, and with regular assaults on minority civilian communities, it should not be difficult to understand why they side with the regime, even though many of them have despised the regime their entire lives. When I recently brought up the regime violence in Idlib and Aleppo with one of my Christian friends in Qasaa’, pressing him about the fact that the majority of the FSA are ordinary Syrians from ordinary families, he said, “Look, I know that. But we’re worried about the minority of extremists. 2% of the FSA can kill all the Christians in Syria.”
The idea that sectarian tensions didn’t simmer from the beginning of the conflict—or even before—is absurd. A Christian friend climbed into a taxi in Jobar in the first few weeks of the uprising. The driver asked him what sect he belonged to. He replied, “I’m Syrian” (a typical Ba’thist response, favored by minorities who would prefer to be “Arab” or “Syrian” than feature their vulnerable label—but then that’s what the Ba’ath party is all about…). The driver replied, “Well, at least you’re not one of these Alawi who are oppressing us,” a typical attitude in the uprising’s moments of birth among—not all—but many. And while yes, in general the oft-touted statement that “all groups live together in peace in Syria” was true, anti-Christian sentiment is not new. Aleppine Armenians remember a time prior to Hafez al-Assad (and the brutal suppression of sectarianism so characteristic of Assad rule) when men in trucks with La ilah illa Allah painted on the sides terrorized Armenian neighborhoods with threats that they would kill the inhabitants, shouting the taunt “Ya Arman maskiin, tahat as-skiin!” (Poor Armenians, under the knife-blade!).
When still in Syria, I remember asking a friend who lived in Harasta why he hadn’t brought his car when he came to meet me for lunch in Damascus. “Well, you know I am from Tartus,” he explained. “I can’t drive my car anymore. If people in my neighborhood see my Tartus license-plates, they will think I am Alawi and attack me.” (He was Isma’ili, not Alawi, but opposition fighters tend not to view Shi’i sects with much nuance; all have become subsumed under the label of “Shi’ism,” the detested villain.) A young Alawi man on the outskirts of Damascus had his throat cut by men posing as soldiers while he was walking home in his neighborhood one night. Such acts of sectarian animosity characterized even the earliest days of the uprising, prior to the regime’s large-scale assaults on communities of rebellion. They have continued up to recent attacks, such as the combination car-bombing/mortar assault on the lower middle-class Alawi neighborhood of Jebel Mezze last November. These attacks are often poorly covered by the media; while 11 were reported dead in the Jebel Mezze attack, locals allege that the death toll was closer to 60 with around 100 injured.
The Trajectory of Opinion
Due to his ability to humanize the community holding power in Syria, Dr. Landis has been attacked for “maintaining a pro-regime position.” The irony is that while the mainstream media is perhaps finally catching up to the sectarian problem, and just starting to talk about Islamism and violence against minorities, this is coinciding with greater reader complaints that Syria Comment is now ignoring Islamism and focusing primarily on regime abuses.
The threat of sectarian violence and instability was high enough (for those who perceived it) to warrant maintaining a position against arming the opposition during the heavy assault on Homs in early 2012. At that time, when such an assault was still something new, those in favor of intervention would ask Dr. Landis with incredulity how he could still feel hesitant about supplying weapons or full-scale external intervention. In that period, thousands of Alawi, Christian, and neutral or pro-regime Sunni refugees fled the Hama and Homs areas for the Christian enclave of Al-Waadi. (Some were forcefully evicted by Syrian rebels; some friends in Homs reported that their neighbors, three elderly people living in the old city, were unable to travel due to their health. Rebels showed up, told them they needed their house for a military base, and expelled them onto the street in their pajamas, without allowing them to take any money or valuables from their home.)
While the rebels and regime battled in Homs, armed militants from outlying Sunni villages invaded a mixed Sunni-Christian area at the southern end of al-Waadi. These self-proclaimed holy warriors erected makeshift checkpoints and began stopping vehicles (as the mukhabaraat were doing in Homs) as part of an ethnic hunt; the targets were any Alawi families who might be passing by. The insurgents were unsuccessful in their quest for Alawi blood because government forces came to the area and restored order. Several Christians were killed in the streets before the government could contain the renegade gang, however, and fear incited a second surge of refugees (who had already fled Homs) from the southern part of al-Waadi northward and deeper into its mountainous territory.
Also during the Homs assault, Alawi civilians in the city became targets. I spoke in that period with one Alawi family whose home was in an Alawi area of Homs; in just a single day they counted 17 bombs launched into their neighborhood by rebels. This illustrated the uncomfortable paradox of Syria at that point: the forces of the regime cracked down violently on dissent, yet conversely they were the only source of protection and stability for most of the country. While the government was cracking down on Homs to crush resistance that threatened its sovereignty, it simultaneously intervened in areas like al-Waadi to maintain security. Countries spearheading the regime-change agenda, often as authoritarian as Syria’s dictatorship, called on Syria to cease its crackdown. (When Saudi Arabia voted to suspend Syria’s Arab League membership, it killed several of its own protestors at peaceful demonstrations in the same few-week period.) The regime knew that if it withdrew from Homs, the city would never again be under the authority of the Syrian state, and the country would fracture. Those on the outside again wondered which was the lesser evil: a desperate government willing to employ every measure against armed elements wanting to secede, or a vacuum of security in which sectarian violence could proliferate.
As the war has expanded however, the regime as a source of security has shrunk in proportion to it as a source of threat. It does still provide security to minority communities in Damascus and other areas where it has control, but it is also a source of danger from which most Syrians have no security.
Yesterday I spoke to a Sunni Syrian friend who recently found out that her fiancé (though not having participated in any demonstrations or resistance activity) was arrested by Syrian mukhabaraat while at his job teaching in a university. He was tortured to death in a detention center. Would the sectarian terrorism against minority civilians in the regime’s absence be worse than the current terrorism on the part of the regime against Syrians in oppositional territory? This is the enduring question, and will continue to be hotly debated. The answer depends on gaining an accurate sense of regime violence vs. violence of extremists within the opposition—something that we do not have and about which there is no consensus.
In light of recent events, the positions of Dr. Landis and others who warned of sectarianism and fragmentation have proved durable. The rise of Islamist power, as well as the plentiful evidence of increasing anti-Shi’i/anti-Alawi violence have demonstrated that their original predictions have come to pass. But even though this camp has rightfully maintained that forcibly deposing the regime would spell a sectarian bloodbath, many who belong to it secretly want to see Assad fall, because we know how corrupt and cruel his faction is, we’re tired of the torture and violence, and we long to see things resolve and begin to move on, toward some kind of new reality. The takeover of Raqqa seems to confirm that Islamism will be a big part, if not the definition, of that new reality. That many are so ready for a change can explain why Syria Comment has seemed to lately focus primarily on regime abuses (they are abundant) and to have neglected sectarian violence and critical discussion of the opposition, including the new power in Raqqa, which for many readers represents the heartbreaking loss of “their” Syria, a Syria where religion did not figure into the foreground and where tolerance was strictly enforced.
* Matthew Barber is a graduate student at the University of Chicago who was living in Syria during the first 6 months of the uprising and who has written for Syria Comment in the past.
This video of the heads of the Baath Party in Raqqa sitting next to the leader of the Islamic Front forces that conquered the city and governor’s house, or “palace” as it is called, is instructive. Both describe how the city was conquered. The Islamic Front leader has trouble saying that he is part of the Free Syrian Army and quickly credits the conquest of Raqqa to the Islamic Front. He is given the title of “Amir” or Prince, which is a Jihadi term. The Baathists sitting in their blue blazers, look very old-school and unhappy. The difference in style and dress between the new revolutionary forces and the old authoritarian Baathists is readily apparent. The Baathists are older, well groomed, and white haired. They have all the hallmarks of functionaries who are used to authority. The fighters are young, sport beards and confident. The leader wears a turban – some believe his accent gives him away as a foreigner – but one friend writes: “the guy is Deiry [from Deir az-Zor] & everything about him is Deiry, except no mustache. ” There can be little doubt that we are witnessing a changing of the guard. The group the Emir mentions is Jabhat al-wahdet al-tahrir al-islamiyya. The Islamic Front of Unity and Liberation. I am told the militia was made up largely of local tribes and they used their connections to take the city with little fighting.
About 400,000 people have left the country since January 1 writes Antonio Guterres for the Internatinoal Herald Tribune. He said, “Syria is spiraling towards full-scale disaster.” Additionally, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a report Tuesday depicting the collapse of Syria’s education system. About one-fifth of the country’s schools have been damaged from fighting, while others are being used as shelters for civilians who have been displaced by the conflict. About 2 million people are estimated to be internally displaced. Schools holding classes are severely overcrowded, and many teachers have not been reporting to work.
According to a 2010 paper sponsored by Stanford University, nearly 40 percent of Syrian youth ages 15 to 24 dropped out of school before the ninth grade. And many Syrian youth, particularly women, faced crippling unemployment rates.
Major offensive in Daraa Governorate and area near Golan
The area around Daraa near the Golan Heights is being conquered by Free Syria Forces. While most attention is being paid to the north of Syria, a major push by militias in the south is unfolding. Videos by this same guy depicting conquests in the governorate of Deraa and interviews with fighters have been posted.
Syria Rebel Group Says It’s Holding UN Observer Troops Hostage
2013-03-06 By Donna Abu-Nasr
* Rebel fighters demand withdrawal of Syrian army from
outskirts of village of Jamla:
Yesterday we posted video, reportedly taken in Daraa province, that showed the Islamist “Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade” executing a group of prisoners of war. Today, the group has released a video of fighters standing in front of a convoy of UN trucks. They say they have captured the UN workers and they are demanding that Bashar al Assad’s forces leave the area.
DOHA, Qatar — Qatar, which is widely believed to be providing weapons to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, gently lectured visiting Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Tuesday about American reluctance to get more involved in the two-year civil war that has killed more than 70,000.
After two years, 1 million refugees, and more than 70,000 dead, some Syrians — and one American president — are still looking to protect their own interests rather than save a country…. Burn the cards. It’s time to go all in.
(New York Times) — DOHA, Qatar — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that the Obama administration supports efforts by Middle Eastern nations to send arms to the opposition in Syria, and had had discussions with foreign officials to make sure those arms go to moderate forces rather than extremists.
Mr. Kerry’s comments were the most direct public affirmation to date that the Obama administration was supporting efforts to arm the Syrian resistance, provided that the arms are sent by other nations and that care is taken to direct them to factions the United States supports.
His comments also signal a more transparent effort to coordinate military assistance for the opponents of President Bashar al-Assad. …. “There is a change in the international position and the American position,” Sheik Hamad said. “They are talking about weapons. We hope that this had happened some time ago because this would have maybe lessened the death and destruction that took place in Syria.”
A major question is whether these efforts will be enough to turn the tide against Mr. Assad.
The spread of makeshift aluminum shelters erected by Syrians now outpaces new rows of U.N. canvas tents here in chilly northern Jordan, home to one of the world’s fastest-growing refugee camps. A vast black-market bazaar has sprouted from the desert sand, where enterprising refugees hawk bottled water and other basic necessities that most fellow camp residents can’t afford.
WASHINGTON — In a pair of speeches at the annual gathering of a major pro-Israel group, top U.S. and Israeli leaders expressed deep concerns about the civil war in Syria and indicated they worried as much about the situation that might emerge after the removal of the current regime as they have about the regime itself.
“The United States and Israel have a shared interest in Syria,” said Vice President Joe Biden, during a generally warm speech before some 13,000 attendees at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). “[President Bashar] Assad has been engaging in the brutal murder of his own citizens, and our position in that regard cannot be clearer: Assad must go.”
But Biden continued, “We are not signing up for one murderous gang replacing another in Damascus.”…
“The danger of these weapons falling into the hands of these terrorist groups is very real,” Netanyahu warned. “Terrorist groups like Hezbollah and al Qaeda are trying to seize these weapons as we speak — they’re like a pack of hyenas trying to feed off a carcass, and the carcass isn’t dead yet.”
IDLIB, Syria — It’s a vital distinction that, as evidenced by US reluctance to intervene in Syria, could influence the outcome of the conflict. So which is it? Are they really terrorists? In exclusive interviews inside Syria with several senior Islamist rebel commanders, a complicated picture emerged.
…“International backing gets messy if you can’t identify an opposition you can trust to carry on international interests,” Wagner said. “Yes, Assad is not a good guy, but the alternative may be worse. Better to watch what you ask for.”Western counterterrorism agencies also worry about the training men like Yousef Topprakaya — an Australian bricklayer who joined the Syrian uprising — may be receiving on Syria’s front lines.
“Like a pack of hyenas feeding off a carcass and that carcass is not finished yet. ”
After 27 days of pleading, the “valve was opened,” Idris told TIME in an interview at a hotel in Antakya, southern Turkey. (The command is based inside Syria, albeit close to the Turkish border.) He remains at the mercy of suppliers he declined to name but who are widely known — mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the blessing of Turkey and Western states. “Our brothers in the field make demands as if I have any influence over our suppliers,” Idris said. “I can’t force them to give us ammunition. If they say ‘I don’t want to give you anything,’ what can I do?”
The men on the ground aren’t necessarily waiting for Idris’s supplies — they have become adept at scrounging for weapons and ammunition, buying them from the regional black market or from corrupt regime soldiers, capturing war booty and making their own armaments, rockets and improvised explosives devices. Almost two years of a grinding civil war have necessitated such skills.
But if the Military Command is to successfully stitch together the patchwork of factions and militias that make up the rebellion, it needs some form of leverage — and the funneling of weapons and ammunition into Syria is supposed to be its modus operandi. Although there are reports of new batches of armaments being shuttled mainly via Syria’s southern border with Jordan, as well as its northern one with Turkey, Idris says it’s all not enough: “We need between 500-600 tons of ammunition a week. We get between 30-40 tons. So you do the calculations.”
So how will the Military Command succeed in imposing its authority when all of its various predecessors largely failed, and Islamist groups outside the Free Syrian Army (which itself is just a loose umbrella term) are growing in stature and influence?
It’s not just about providing material support—the promise of prestige plays a part too. Although there are Islamist Jihadi units of various shades within the Free Syrian Army, other large independent groups like the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham brigades and Jabhat al-Nusra offer the strongest Islamist units within rebel ranks. The U.S considers Jabhat a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda although the group denies this and is widely respected by other rebels for its fighting prowess. Some FSA units are joining the Ahrar and Jabhat, not just because their networks of support seem to be more consistent, but because it has come to be perceived as a kind of graduation or a promotion, an acknowledgement that a particular FSA unit or an individual fighter is good enough to become a part of the most respected, most disciplined rank of fighters. It doesn’t hurt that the Ahrar and Jabhat turn fighters away, often because they aren’t considered pious enough, making acceptance into the groups a form of achievement…..
The U.S. is reluctant to offer direct military aid to the rebels because it fears weapons might fall into the hands of groups the United States does not like, especially Islamist groups such as the Nusra Front or smaller groups with alleged affinities to Al-Qaeda that have grown rapidly in the past year and now spearhead military advances in parts of Syria. Presumably, that is because the U.S. does not want to arm Islamist or other unfriendly groups who might agitate against the U.S. or its allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia or Jordan.
That sounds like a reasonable policy, but in reality it is a total failure. In fact it brings about precisely that outcome that Washington says it wishes to avoid – the rise to prominence, or even dominance, of those Islamist groups the U.S. dislikes. So as the U.S. speaks boldly about bringing down the Assad regime, but does little on the critical military front to help bring this about, Islamist and other rebel groups whom the U.S. dislikes have received plenty of arms and made sustained gains militarily. They have therefore won the confidence of ordinary people across the land, enhancing the likelihood that these groups will dominate the post-Assad system of power.
The wiser policy for the U.S. and other foreign states that oppose the Assad regime is simply to provide plenty of arms and other forms of military assistance (such as satellite intelligence) to groups it is already dealing with, such as the Syrian National Coalition, the Syrian National Council or the Free Syrian Army. If some weapons slip through to other groups, so be it – because withholding U.S. arms is not slowing down the acquisition of weapons by the Islamist and other groups the U.S. dislikes. American aid to the mainstream rebels, in turn, will enhance the likelihood of these groups dominating the post-Assad governance system, and of cordial ties between the U.S. and the new government that will arise in Damascus.
American officials have been naive in withholding arms and criticizing rising Syrian Islamists, while expecting everything to work out for the best in the end. In reality, Washington may wake up to a situation in a post-Assad Syria in which it is ignored, criticized and marginalized for not helping the rebels when they urgently needed military help. This may facilitate the dominance over Syria of Islamists and other “bad guys” in American eyes. It is hard to think of a more simplistic, ineffective and counterproductive policy than the one the U.S. is now pursuing.
After violence that shattered hundreds of thousands of lives and left nearly everyone with a tragic story to tell, life in Iraq has settled into a strange normality — with no discernible direction or clear future. “How do you make sense of the last ten years?” said a novelist, who is trying […]
“Iraq or Maliki! Iraq or Maliki!” shout Sunni Arab demonstrators as they block roads in western Iraq in protest against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and discrimination against their community. Demonstrations by Sunni, in their tens of …
Kurdish and Arab militias waged a bittkilled nearly 300 people. It took a diverse group of men and women, Kurds and Arabs, Alawites, Sunnis, Christians, tribal leaders and urbanites to broker Feb. 17’s tenuous peace.
“We tried to have all sects represented,” said Ata Kaml Ata, a member of the Committee for the Protection of the Civil Peace and Revolution, a new group formed by Kilo…..“Our next priority is in Houran [as the southern plains of Daraa are known], regarding the kidnapped people between Houran and Swaida,” said committee member Ata.er battle for three months in the northern city of Ras Al Ayn, in Hassakeh province. Now, they’ve reached a truce that has managed to last into a third week, marking an early success for a nascent group of peacekeepers led by famed Christian dissident Michel Kilo.
Syria’s northern towns and villages, with their complex ethnic and religious divisions, are a tinderbox for internecine fighting. They contain fault lines between ethnic groups, Kurds and Arabs, and among competing forces within each group — battle lines that could trigger a disintegration of the Syrian state. Ras Al Ayn is a microcosm of them, arguably the most complex town in the region. The months of fighting in Ras Al Ayn
Barack Obama, Parochial Leader for Parochial Nation: Fouad Ajami
2013-03-04
By Fouad Ajami
March 5 (Bloomberg) — It wasn’t Barack Obama’s doing — at least not fully. The crowds in Paris and Berlin, and the Muslims in Cairo and Karachi, eager to be done with President George W. Bush, took the new standard-bearer of American power as one of their own, a cosmopolitan man keen to break with the embattled certitude of the Bush years.
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Syrian regime loses last credible ally among the Sunni ulama
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The Free Syrian Army Does Exist and is Growing Stronger by the Day
Paul Mutter
