Aron Lund from Sweden writes: (See his excellent Syrian Jihadism)
Dear Joshua,
I saw your latest post on Aleppo. Big things going on, but the situation in Kurdish Ashrafiye may have been misreported. The PYD/PKK is insistent that it remains in control of Ashrafiye, with no FSA or government presence at all. They blame the regime for indiscriminate artillery fire on the area which killed 15 people, and have put out a harsh statement on this.
But PYD also says that its YPG militia had previously stopped the FSA from entering. According to them, a 60-man FSA force moved into a part of the neighborhood and opened fire on government forces from there. This threatened to draw counter-fire on Ashrafiye, and PYD would have none of it. So YPG put up roadblocks and pushed the FSA out, “with no significant fighting”. It now claims to have Ashrafiye under total control, as before, and urges citizens to remain calm and not flee the neighborhood.
How that squares with FSA claims to have negotiated passage through Ashrafiye to attack gov posts is another story. The army’s shelling of the area was almost certainly intended as punishment for FSA activity in Ashrafiye, and it does seem likely that the FSA group would have had to secure YPG permission before going through, if that’s indeed what happened.
PYD statements seem to be playing to both sides. On the one hand, they blame the regime for the killings (which also included Arab and Turkmen casualties). On the other hand, they clarify that the PYD ban on rebel fighters in Kurdish neighborhoods remains in force, and that the YPG is prepared to fight any intruders. This is presumably a way to save the de facto non-belligerence pact they’ve had with the army, and avoid Kurdish casualties if and when the situation in Aleppo unravels. So in political terms, they’re restating Kurdish neutrality, and telling everyone involved to take their war elsewhere.
“The Syrian civil war is a sectarian conflict – among other things. It is also a conflict along socio-economic and urban-rural lines, a classic countryside jacquerie against an exploitative central government, albeit internally divided by the country’s religious divisions, which cut across other patterns of identity and loyalty. Then there is a political dimension to the struggle, with Bashar el-Assad’s loyalists battling to preserve the current power structure against demands for democratization and economic redistribution. And, last but not least, the conflict has transformed into a proxy war for influence among several regional and international powers, adding another layer of complexity. ” Aron Lund
My cousin in Syrian al-Jadide (????? ???????) posted 7 hours ago that the FSA entered the neighborhood. An hour later she posted that the Syrian Army intervened and the FSA left.
Here is video from Syrian satellite TV showing some Christians from al-Syriaan al-Jadide welcoming the Syrian Army back into the area. They tell the story of how rebel sharpshooters took up positions on top of buildings during the day, but retreated when the army arrived. (sent by Brian Souter)
Reports from friends inside suggest that Aleppo is falling to rebel troops. Both major Christian areas – al-Syriaan al-Jadide and al-Syriaan al-Qadime have fallen. The regime’s largest Mukhabarat station is in the second area. FSA sharpshooters have gone to the tops of all buildings in these areas with no government opposition. The major Kurdish neighborhood – Ashrafiya – gave no resistance. The government had been counting on the Kurds to hold back the FSA fighters. If opposition troops can hold these neighborhoods in the center of town, it is bad news for the government. Regime seems to have cut it loose. (Correction at 3:oo SET – Syrian Army tanks appeared on al-Faisal street, the main thoroughfare of Aleppo that runs along al-Syiriyaan al-Jadide, causing the rebels to make a “tactical” retreat back into the Ashrafiyya neighborhood. This is what I am being told by Aleppine friends who are on the phone with relatives inside both these areas. They put sharpshooters on top of their buildings. One said the family’s Filipino maid fainted due to the loud shooting earlier in the day. People are terrified that the regime may try to strike with airplanes. For now (7:00 Eastern S. Time), an eerie silence has settled over the city. Where will the government try to hold the line?
Addendum: (3:30 pm EST)Government tanks were moved into Faisal street, the main thurowfair running the length of al-Syriaan al-Jadide and Qadime. Rebel troops made a tactical retreat back into the Kurdish neighborhood of Ashrafiyya.
It seems that the Kurds of Ashrafiyya changed their attitude toward the rebels, taking a neutral stand and allowing them through to temporarily spread into the Christian neighborhoods mentioned above. The superiority of Gov tanks means that the rebels remain diffident about taking on the Government troops directly.
Here is an email from one friend: (6:00 am EST) “I just got a frantic call from sister in Aleppo. The city of aleppo has largely fallen into rebel hands. They took over syrian jdide overnight. They are minutes from our house. As i have been for a while, this appears over”
Good reports estimate that rebel troops number (correction: 40,000 in city. Regime cannot devote troops in that number. They are trying to impress as many young men into the army as they can. But most young men are staying home and hiding from conscription.
Addendum: (11:00 am EST) A high rebel commander claims that the government troops in Aleppo do not exceed 6,000. The Shabiha are 2,000 and rebel troops are close to 40,000. He says the 70,000 number I had published earlier was an exaggeration. This commander is close to the top of the FSA command and planning.
Aleppine friend writes:
I predict that the city of Aleppo will fall decisevely and completely in the next 10 days. As I have been saying, the scales have tipped in favor of the rebels. The regular army has massive difficulty sending reinforcement into Aleppo to help the limited numbers it has on the ground. The ones remaining in Aleppo are stuck. Does the regime use its planes and long distance shelling to attack the rebels in these areas now? This is what the citizens fear. Or does the regime see the writing on the wall and cut Aleppo loose and look to defend Damascus and the coast?
My bet is that it will resist the decision to pull the trigger as of yet. But, over the next 10 days the facts on the ground will make this a fact.
Obviously all possibility for a cease fire seems off.
Some say the Syrian government is coming back to contest these areas. It is not clear.
The two Christian neighborhoods are here (thanks citizenGeo)
After more than two months of near stalemate, rebel groups have advanced into three regime-held areas of central Aleppo, edging them closer to a tightly-defended security district. While the day-long skirmishes mark the first time that swathes of …
A rebel fighter in Aleppo, Anu Yousef, said: “Brigades of the FSA were able to progress from al-Ashrafiyeh district where the Criminal Security branch is. There was also progress in al-Midan and Sulaiman al-Halabi districts.
“In Khan al-Assal district, there is a police school which was under siege by the FSA for 10 days now. The Syrian army were sending reienfocrements every day to ease the siege on it. Today a convoy was heading towards the school and was faced by fire from the FSA and could not get there.”
Intelligence and security bases, such as the Air Force Intelligence headquarters, are a prime target for rebel groups, partly because they represent pillars of regime power, but also because they are known to house thousands of detainees rounded up since the uprising began 19 months ago “The FSA had to take al-Ashrafiyeh district to be able to reach the Criminal branch – and they did,” said Abu Yousef. “The advance now is just around the Criminal Security and it is not easy to get control.”
“There are spots of power for the Syrian army like the Criminal Security in al-Ashrafiyeh, Political Security in al-Azziziyeh and Air Force security and intelligence in New Aleppo. If the FSA can liberate all these branches, we can say at that time that Aleppo has been liberated entirely.”
Rebels calimed that Kurdish groups, headed by the PKK, had facilitated their entry to the Ashrafiyeh district after a deal was struck for neither side to attack the other. The Free Syria Army has previously accused members of the PKK of siding with the Assad regime.
“The PKK had agreed not to interfere and not to support any side of the conflict,” said Abu Yousef. “We did not attack any members of the PKK [today], in fact they pulled out to clear the way for us. It was a deal that they would pull out before the arrival of the FSA. The clashes were with the Syrian army only. Since the beginning of the revolution the regime has been trying to keep the PKK on its side but I think now it is going to lose them.”
I received many responses to my post on Sunday evening recommending that the US play a larger role by insisting that Assad carry out talks with the opposition. The threat would be to supply anti-aircraft missiles to the opposition. Here are a few replies.
Nir Rosen writes
Lets leave aside issues of right and wrong, right to intervene, all that moral and political stuff for now and focus on the practical issue. Your proposal does not make much of a difference, removing the ability of the air-force to operate in one part of the country alone does not solve the problem. It only creates more space for the groups in the north, it would do nothing to stop regime infantry, tanks and artillery in the north let alone in the rest of the country.
The security forces are not all Alawite, nor are their leaders, and they are not all fighting as alawites (though some are), many are fighting as the army, or as the state (in their view), they have a strong esprit de corps now since they feel like they have had some victories, their brothers in arms have been killed, and also the regime media has been embedding journalists with them and focusing on the war instead of denying it like it used to the problem is western journalists are only operating in northern Syria, parts of Aleppo and idlib, where the regime is using its airforce because it cant use its ground elements as easily, so it creates the impression that the airforce is more important to the regime than it actually is. Only a fraction of civilians killed by the regime have been killed by its airforce anyway your proposal does not force assad into the alawite mountains, that would take ethnic cleansing, sunni militias would have to decide to attack alawite neighborhoods in Damascus and homs, which they have not yet decided to do and which they might not even have the strength to do. Regardless, they would need a lot more than anti aircraft missiles, they would even need more manpower and of course a lot of anti armor rockets.
The regime has those areas under pretty tight control these days and while you are correct that in the short term the regime lacks the troops to retake much of the country, the opposition also lacks the troops to hold much of the places where it operates, hence the stalemate. It would take a lot more than anti aircraft rockets to change the balance one way or the other (incidentally, the media being mostly limited to Aleppo and some villages in idlib is a problem in many other ways because its difficult to extrapolate lessons from one part of the country and apply them to the Syrian conflict as a whole, or even to Aleppo as a whole. for example most journalists have access only to rural Aleppo, the most conservative poor salafi part of the country, so the groups there might not resemble the groups in daraa or hama or elsewhere.
Few conflicts in recent years have taken place in a greater media blackout and with so much rumor and so little fact as Syria’s uprising. With almost no independent journalists on the ground, no NGOs and with little freedom of movement for foreign diplomats, policy makers have little information about what is actually happening inside Syria. On the other hand there is a flood of “information” coming out of Syria. Knowledge is being produced but it explains nothing and only obfuscates. This is because journalists reporting from Syria often rely on local activists who have an agenda that is not accurate reporting but the overthrow of the regime with international assistance. Those journalists who do go in stay for very little time and see very little (its not their fault of course) or they have to embed with the regime and provide an even more skewed and silly version of events (one particular british journalist comes to mind here). They either receive a one week visa from the regime, in which case their movement is limited, or they go in for a similarly short time with the opposition armed groups in a remote town either in Idlib, Halab or in the Homs countryside close to the Turkish or Lebanese border (thats where they all go). As a result all we see is villagers fighting an invisible an enemy and we dont really know whats going on
A Syrian friend writes to my wife
Do you think this is the best way to have a better Syria? We all supported Josh during the past few years, and we believed in him and his thoughts. It hurts me and […..] and many people to Syria. Josh is spreading hatred and he is tolerant towards terrorists and Jihadists. I feel ashamed to have known him wallahi. I am sorry to say that, but he should have uncovered his face looooong time ago. Did Prof. Landis think for a second how many jihadists and salafists are NOW slaughtering and raping our Alawite and christian daughters? or he supports this too? I lost 14 relatives during this nasty war, while Prof. Landis is agitating for more killings and hatred. Shame!
The man is the biggest two-faced hypocrite I know. Clearly the man doesn’t want to be on the losing side. Clearly he doesn’t [want] him and his wife to be banned from entering Syria for being a proponent of Bashar through out the revolution…..
Congrats Landis if you’re trying to establish a reputation as a chameleon that shape shifts based on the winning side you’ve done that or at best a professor with a high level of cognitive dissonance.
Don’t be happy if a few disconnected individuals praise you for your article. The majority have already seen through what you stand for and where your support lies. So you can go back to whitewashing for the Assads and go back to glamorizing they’re so called “resistance to Israel.
No true Syrian revolutionary wants your counsel, and if they do don’t expect theirs to be wanted by democratic citizens in Syria. No Syrian that has read your comments and seeks democracy is going to be ok with your justification of continuing the status qou due to the lack of sophistication and maturity of the Syrian people. “You’re unsophisticated, sectarian, and too young therefore Bashar is good for you” was your dogma/identity. Or did you forget?
You think intelligent people are going to buy that new garbage???
Written to a friend and passed to me
Joshua’s criticizers’ logic is warped. Who sent the tanks immediately to crush peaceful demonstrators chanting silmiyyeh silmiyyeh? Was it not the regime who drove the demonstrators to bear arms, small arms at that?
Then, the Qaeda and other thugs infiltrated. Even if terrorists hide in a building, is it right to demolish buildings over the heads of their inhabitants? The country is ruined mainly because of the pig pigheadedness of the Assad mafia.
From an expat Aleppine
I still think Aleppo is a stalemate. I conclude from reading various reports that the Free Syrian Army does not control more than one third of the neighborhoods. I read that one third of Aleppo is contested with changes here and there. And, there is little support for the FSA among the population even in the areas they have “liberated”. Aleppo neighborhoods have few barricades and stops and thus small armed bands
can still infiltrate everywhere giving the impression of control. Control is a different matter. Aleppo is critical for the Syrian State and the Syrian Regime. Losing Aleppo is not fatal to the Syrian regime. To the Syrian Regime and the Free Syrian Army, the fight for Aleppo is the fight for the support of or control of the 25 percent moderate Sunni block, a huge block needed for any one wanting to control Syria. Also, Aleppo is too close for comfort to the mountains along the Syrian coast.
The Syrian Army can still control parts of Hasakeh, Raqqa, and Deir Azzor using the direct road between Damascus and Deir Azzor. The Syrian regime is fighting intensely to control Deir Azzor and will fight hard for Raqqa. The fight for Jezzera is for agriculture and oil revenues. Deir Azzor is closer to Iraq (60 percent Shiite) and the Kurds and farther away from Turkey and thus I think the Syrian Army have a fair chance of holding up there. The nearby Sunni of Iraq are pre-occupied by their own enemies to the east, north, and south and thus have not been able to assist the FSA.
I think that Damascus will not be taken from the Syrian Regime due to its special ethnic mix, its proximity to Lebanon where half the population supports it, and its backing to Israel. Damascus is critical
for the Syrian State and the Syrian Regime. Losing Damascus is fatal to the Syrian Regime for prestige and also due to the stretch between Damascus and Homs is where the north-south Sunni line (the old hajj road to Mecca) intersects the east-west Shiite line (the road to Kharasan). These are the two major land routes of Islam. The Syrian Army is firmly in control of the road between Damascus and Homs.
Backing to Israel and Lebanon compared to backing to Turkey makes all the difference in the world for the Syrian Army and also for the Free Syrian Army.
Syrian artillery gunners shelled a bread bakery full of workers and customers on Tuesday in an insurgent-held neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 30 in what activists and videographers described as a sudden and devastating attack.
The shelling at Al Zura Bakery was among the more graphic episodes of violence to hit Aleppo and the capital, Damascus, on Tuesday, casting further doubts on the already dim prospects of a nationwide cease-fire for the coming Id al-Adha holiday, which the newly appointed peace envoy from the United Nations and Arab League, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been trying to negotiate for the past week.
Disturbing video uploaded to the Internet, which appeared genuine but could not be corroborated independently, showed what was described as the aftermath of the bakery shelling in Aleppo’s Hanano district, with mangled bodies interspersed with upended loaves of freshly baked pita on the bakery’s bloodied floor, as screaming rescue workers hauled the dead and wounded to waiting pickup trucks and taxicabs. Some of the victims were children, including a girl who was decapitated.
Abu al-Hasan, an activist from the Aleppo suburb of Maree, said in a Skype interview that most of the dead were bakery workers. He said it was unclear whether the attackers had been aiming for the bakery, located in a large warehouse. “The problem is those kinds of missiles are not guided to their intended targets,” he said. “They’re not precise. They fall on random buildings.”
He said the shelling came as residents of the neighborhood, who had been too afraid to venture outside for the past few days, finally took the risk in order to buy food for Id al-Adha, a widely celebrated Muslim holiday that starts on Friday.
Aleppo, near Syria’s northern border with Turkey, has been under siege for three months and has become a focal point of the insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad. Rebels have frustrated attempts by Syrian forces to retake the entire city and have threatened to cut off the military’s supply lines there.
At the same time, bakeries in rebel-held areas of Aleppo have emerged as vitally important resources that are clearly potential targets for Syrian forces seeking to starve insurgents and their sympathizers into submission. Many of the bakeries are run by the insurgents, who have learned how to bake bread as part of the war effort…..
Recent events around Qardaha, however, suggest to some observers, including Western diplomats, that clan rivalries, thousands of deaths among Alawite fighters and economic crisis could break the loyalty of leading Alawite commanders, even as the community finds itself increasingly a target of rebel anger.
With the government severely restricting media access, there is a lack of independent information within Syria but several residents of Latakia region gave similar accounts of events.
One Alawite who has joined the opposition to Assad, Majd Arafat, said there was growing resentment at the suffering of the local population while elite families remained aloof: “The talk all over the mountains is that Alawites are being killed in droves, but none of them are called Assad, Makhlouf or Shalish.”
The latter two families are closely related to the Assads.
A Western diplomat, noting the failure of defections by Sunni generals to sap the strength of Assad’s forces, speculated that were even a less senior Alawite to break ranks, it might raise expectations of a more damaging split: “The defection of one, even a colonel, would be significant,” he said.
Estimates of casualties are hard to establish in Syria. One activist group which compiles reports has said some 7,300 Assad loyalists have been killed, out of a total of 30,000 war dead.
But many believe the overall toll is higher. One who thinks so is a Syrian businessman, not himself an Alawite, who says he funds units of the mostly Alawite “shabbiha” militia, partly to protect his businesses in the area. Speaking to Reuters anonymously, he reckoned the Alawite community in the coastal mountains alone might have lost 15,000 fighters since last year.
In the immediate area of Qardaha, residents estimated that as many as 300 men may have died in the past year, either in battles with rebels or in sectarian ambushes and assassinations.
UNEQUAL DIVISIONS
But the burden, as the riches of the past 40 years, has not been shared equally among the Alawite clans.
The likes of the Makhlouf and Shalish families are cousins of the Assads, and rose from humble beginnings to make fortunes by virtue of winning government tenders – much to the chagrin of more established Alawites sidelined by Assad and his father.
Now those divisions seem to be resurfacing in an environment where the wealth some Alawite mountain leaders have built up through officially sanctioned smuggling and other illicit trades is being threatened by the anti-Assad uprising – and now that many Alawites fear collective retribution from Assad’s enemies.
“Qardaha and its mountains used to be an incubator for regime support. But Assad’s relatives may now have to think twice before walking in the streets,” said the Alawite opposition activist Arafat. “The Alawites are starting to ask themselves ‘why we should back the Assads?’.”
The non-Alawite businessman who funds some loyalist militia said abuses in the clandestine economy run by shabbiha chiefs was turning other Alawites against their rulers: “The regime has been turning a blind eye to the criminality of the shabbiha,” the businessman said. “And it is beginning to hurt it.”
Nonetheless, many Alawites, whose religion is an offshoot of the Shi’ite Islam practiced in Assad’s ally Iran, still support the armed forces and the militia units blamed for sectarian atrocities. Many see them as a bulwark for self-preservation:
“They are afraid of the other side, which has also proved capable of massacres,” Arafat said. “They still see the Assad regime as providing them with a sort of immunity.”
Details of the cafe shootout at Qardaha on September 29, show internal strains are surfacing as the community suffers losses.
The man killed in the gunfight was Sakher Othman. Among prominent members of his family was Isper Othman, a cleric killed in a crackdown by the elder Assad in the 1970s. At Sakher Othman’s funeral, a mourner shouted a demand that Assad quit, prompting loyalist gunmen to open fire, killing four people.
Alawite opposition activists said several pro-Assad fighters were also killed and wounded as fighting spread.
Since then thousands of shabbiha loyal to the president and commanded by Assad relatives have imposed their order on Qardaha and surrounding villages, but anger and disputes have continued.
Activists list members of a number of prominent families which now oppose Assad, including from the Othman, Qouzi, Muhalla, Iskandar, Issa, Khayyer and al-Jadid clans. Homes have been ransacked and several shops owned by anti-Assad Alawites in Qardaha were torched this month, local residents said.
Among notable clan hostilities is that opposing the Khayyers to the Assads. Abdelaziz al-Khayyer, a doctor from Qardaha, spent 12 years as a political prisoner under Hafez al-Assad. He was detained again in September and has not been heard of since.
A delegation arrived from Damascus to try calm passions. It was headed by another prominent Alawite, Walid Othman, father-in-law of Assad’s cousin and Syria’s richest man Rami Makhlouf.
Yet within days there was further trouble, with local people saying youths from rival Alawite families clashed in Qardaha.
RECRUITMENT PROBLEMS?
These tensions may spell problems ahead for the unity of the Alawite officer corps. And Assad’s forces may also be finding difficulties recruiting in their Alawite heartland – opposition activists say more young Alawites are evading conscription.
“They are seeing that the rebels are getting stronger and that their friends are getting killed,” said activist Lubna Merei, from the coastal town of Jableh, south of Latakia.
However, for all that Alawite communal cohesion may face problems, some believe that the way the civil war has taken on such a bitter sectarian dimension – helped in part by the way Assad himself treated his opponents – may mean the moment has passed when many Alawites might side with the rebels.
Munther Bakhos, a veteran Alawite member of the exile Syrian opposition in France, said the rebels lost an opportunity to make allies in the Alawite heartlands in the early stages of the conflict and he believed that it would now be harder for the mainly Sunni opposition to benefit from the in-fighting there.
“It is naive to think the regime is protecting the Alawites. They are hostage. The regime is using them to defend itself,” Bakhos said. But the sectarian bitterness of the war had made it harder to persuade Alawites to ditch Assad:
“There was an opportunity to pull the rug from under its feet in the first few months of the revolution,” he said. “But now the picture has gotten complicated.”
In light of the Syrian regime’s continued campaign of violence on its own people and the opposition’s inability to unify its ranks, is the collapse of Syrian society approaching a point of no return? Is there a way to hold Syria and its people together and, in doing so, prevent the spread of sectarianism across the Middle East?
In a new paper from the Brookings Doha Center, Losing Syria (And How to Avoid It), Salman Shaikh proposes a path forward for addressing Syria’s spiraling crisis.
Based on months of first-hand interviews with opposition leaders, activists, and rebel commanders, Shaikh provides new insights into the current state of fragmentation within Syria’s opposition. He offers a set of five policy principles for the international community – with the leadership of the United States – to help unify the political opposition, reassure minority communities, and coordinate the flow of arms. Shaikh argues that the actions – or inaction – of Syria’s international partners will have critical consequences for the viability of the post-Assad order, and urges immediate planning for the “day after.”
Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.
Determining the suitability of armed opposition elements as potential recipients of military assistance is complex and challenging. In Syria, such groups are numerous, rapidly evolving, and highly varied in ideology. Nevertheless, they do not pose an impenetrable mystery. Some are longstanding actors in the rebellion and currently hold or are contesting important areas of the country; a number of Free Syrian Army commanders are public personalities and can be contacted with relative ease. Vetting such actors is a critical prerequisite to providing military assistance, based on the recognition that not all armed elements should receive aid, and that some units are more worthy of aid than others.
Moreover, vetting must not be done just in terms of outcomes on the battlefield — equal consideration must be given to the roles that armed units will play after the regime falls. Given the fragmented nature of the Syrian opposition to date, and the lack of Western intervention to support the protest movement, those who are taking literal shots at Bashar al-Assad now are almost certain to be calling the shots as the regime gives way.
The US government should tell Assad that he must launch serious negotiations for a transition government. If he does not, Western governments should supply opposition militias with ground to air missiles in sufficient numbers to bring down the Syrian air-force. Circumstantial evidence suggests that US officials in Libya may already have been working to facilitate the transfer of portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—from Libya to Syria.
As soon as the elections are over in the US, Washington should redouble its efforts at changing the balance of power in Syria, if Assad does not begin to form a transitional government in earnest. He must come to terms with the most powerful rebel leaders or see his air force neutralized.
Lakhdar Brahimi of the UN should be empowered to monitor and report on these negotiations, judging if they are sincere.
Assad should be encouraged to work toward some sort of agreement comparable to the Taif Agreement — or National Reconciliation Accord — that ended the Lebanese civil war. It may be impossible to get the Sunni militias to accept such a solution, particularly as they remain so divided. All the same it is worth trying.
It is unclear whether Assad will chose to fall back to the Alawite Mountains, where he can may struggle to protect Alawites from uncontrolled retribution, but where his capacity to damage to the rest of Syria is severely limited.
Assad has no possibility of regaining control of Syria. He does not have soldiers enough to retake lost cities. But he insists on using his air force to destroy what remains of rebel held towns. This is senseless destruction. He has no hope of recapturing them. It should be stopped. He has been carrying out a scorched earth policy that is killing thousands, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and destroying Syria’s precious architectural heritage.
I have long resisted supporting US intervention, believing that the US should refuse to get sucked into Syria. It cannot determine what is fair. No one truly understands the “real” Syria today, as Syrians are only beginning to emerge from 40 years of sever authoritarianism that stopped politics in its tracks. What new social forces will emerge in the coming years is impossible to determine. Most importantly, the opposition has been too fragmented to replace the Syrian Army as a source of stability and security. Syrians need to find their own way forward and to create a new balance among the sects and regions. Decapitating the regime too suddenly, I believe, would likely result in a number of unhappy endings: a massacre of the Alawites, a civil war among militias that could bring even greater suffering, or a melt-down of security as happened in Iraq.
The various Syrian factions have to find a new equilibrium, which would not happen with an overpowering US intervention. Even one limited to the use of American air power, such as that carried out in Libya, could be too much force, used too quickly.
The supply of portable heat-seeking missiles, however, seems to be increasingly justified. US politicians fear that elements of the Syrian opposition may misuse ground to air missiles, but surely they cannot be misused more than are Assad’s jets and helicopters. Assad’s air superiority combined with his inability to rule Syria, is causing endless misery. Air power is so destructive that it should be denied to both sides. Fewer people would be killed and a new balance would emerge as an expression of regional forces.
Assad and his increasingly Alawite manned army can no longer control Aleppo and Damascus, which are overwhelmingly Sunni. Assad may not even be able to defend the Alawite Mountains from the growing strength of Sunni militias. The fate of the Alawite region is likely to depend on whether Sunni forces can unify — an eventuality that is not assured. The US should stay out of the struggle to define the internal arrangement of Syrian factions. Who knows how Syria will look when the fighting is over? Will the Kurds gain independence or a large measure of autonomy? How will the Alawite Territory be connected to Syria? Will the city of Latakia become an Alawite or Sunni dominated city? Will the government in Damascus hold central power as firmly in its hands as it has over the last 50 years? Or will Syria find unity in a larger measure of federalism? One can change views on these questions every day — the outcome depends on decisions yet to be made by Syria’s many leaders — but it seems clear that the Syrian air force has simply become an instrument of destruction. The day of reckoning for Alawites and for Syrians at large is only being put off by the lopsided use of air power. The US has already played a decisive role in tipping the balance of power in Syria against the Assad regime. It is time to help the Syrian opposition stop the government use of air-power.
_____
Aleppo May Be Soon to Fall into Rebel Hands — Notes from an Aleppine friend
One of My wife’s sisters lives in Abu Dhabi. Her apartment in the Sabeel area of Aleppo was taken over this morning. Homeless people found out it was empty. They broke the lock and made it their home.
I sent Zaki the driver I use to the house. An elderly woman and a child were inside the house. He said if I offer you money would you leave? How much the lady asked, while the driver had the apartment owner in Abu Dhabi on the line. The offer came at 10 k Syrian pounds [$150]. Shockingly the lady took the offer and left the house. Man oh man. This just happened 5 minutes ago.
The driver just called me. He went with three armed men he rang the bell. He said this is my house. He paid the three armed men 5k too. He said when free Syrian army moved into his neighborhood in Bustan al Basha he called authorities and pleaded with them to come and clean the area up from the Free Syrian Army. They kept saying, “Yes, we know.” After a few weeks they came with planes. He had to leave the house with his kids. He called me to ask if he could stay in an empty office I have. He has been living there for the past two months.
After speaking to contacts in Aleppo, I think that the regime will have a very difficult time taking back the city now. The battle lines have tipped in favor of the rebels if you look at the map of the city. There are only one or two key regime holdouts before the city falls totally under their control….
[An update sent 24 hours later] One of my relatives was kidnapped this morning from Syrian Jdide area (super safe untill now). Five armed guys took him away while his driver was waiting for him outside. They scared the driver away and snatched him. He is on medications. They called his son, a doctor, and told him that they had bought him the proper medications and that he was taking them. An hour later they called demanding SYP 15 million.
The whole family is crying.
This video explains to what level Syria has arrived. Syrian soldiers threaten to beat a young man as they make him chant that he loves Bashar and accepts him as God. They smile among themselves in self affirmation and mirth, as they terrify the teenager. He is cowering blindfolded against a wall. Bashar al-Assad claims his soldiers are fighting “fundamentalists” even as they impose their religion of al-Assad on terrified Syrians. The Salafis cannot be worse. This sort of video has become a trope. They have popped up with terrifying regularity since the first months of the revolution and express the ideological endgame of the regime. Assad is God
The official position is that the US has refused to allow heavy weapons into Syria. But there’s growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.
In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.
In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.
Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi’s stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.
The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support,” which was presumably established by the new government.
That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.
Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them “Libyans” when he explained that the FSA doesn’t “want these extremist people here.”
And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.
Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as “a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles” … and that its security features “were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died.”
And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.
In any case, the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.
IN the Syrian city of Aleppo, there are neighborhoods that are almost entirely abandoned; blocks of buildings with their facades blown off, apartments open to the street; and other buildings, intact but empty, their curtains billowing out the windows. Broken water pipes have turned roads into debris-clogged rivers. And tribes of cats stalk around like predators; every now and then you pass one lying dead on the ground, its body torn apart by sniper fire.
The snipers, both rebel and regime, are everywhere. The MIG jets are always overhead, and shelling continues day and night. You cannot escape the smell of dead bodies, and it feels as if it is only a matter of time before you are hit, too.
This is life on the ground for the remaining residents of Aleppo. With only this in mind, it is easy to argue that the West should intervene — arm the rebels, help them overthrow the vicious rule of the Assads, and try to create something good from the chaos. After all, the rebels are outgunned, outsupplied and outfinanced. They are battling a force that is aligned with Iran and Hezbollah, and one that commits daily atrocities.
And yet, all things considered, I can’t argue for intervention in Aleppo, or in the wider Syrian conflict.
For a few days in September, I was embedded with the Ahrar al-Sham, or Free Men, rebel faction in the city. These men are fierce and battle-hardened. They sit chatting or sleeping while shells fall all around, and seem nonchalant while lobbing homemade bombs into government compounds. Some taunt the enemy. Others seem almost excited to fire their guns — for them the conflict is jihad, a badge of honor. We sat with one rebel marksman as he followed government soldiers through his scope and laughed as he shot at them. “My throat is full of victims,” he said.
But every couple of streets in Aleppo is under the watch of a different brigade, and while they sometimes work together, they are just as often at odds. I have seen one brigade lay down covering fire to allow another group to retrieve the dead body of one of its fighters, only to see the same two factions scream at each other later in the day and refuse to cooperate in a battle that did not benefit them both. I have met some members of the Free Syria Army who prefer to enter Aleppo illegally rather than go through the gate held by the Northern Storm Brigade, a strict Islamist group under the umbrella of the F.S.A. “They’re not our guys,” one explained.
In addition to great mistrust, there is a general lack of leadership. The opposition coalition in exile, the National Syrian Council, debates from Istanbul but gets no respect from the fighters on the ground. Last month, the leader of the F.S.A., Riad al-Assad, announced that he was moving his headquarters to Syria in an attempt to unify the different battalions under his watch, but rumors abound that he remains in Turkey. Other leaders who have tried to command respect are defectors from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and they are not often trusted.
Many of the rebels are fighting for a noble cause, and have no motive beyond protecting their homes and families. But it is hard to pick them apart from those who seek to take advantage of the chaos to transform Syria into a Shariah-based fundamentalist state. In Aleppo, I heard Salafi jihadists talk of slaying the minority Alawites, and call for both the immediate support of America, and its immediate demise. These extremist groups are getting weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar already; they are not groups that the West would choose to arm. Compared with them, it is not clear that Mr. Assad is the bigger foe.
It would be an error for the United States and the European Union to supply arms to the rebels or intervene on the ground. No one would be happier to see America mired in the country than Iran, which sees a chaotic Syria as the next best thing to an allied Syria.
The most the West can do is impose a no-fly zone under the auspices of NATO to ground the government’s air force. This would level the playing field, giving the rebels space to try to form a more unified leadership near the Turkish border, while preventing the slaughter of civilians and the destruction of more cities like Aleppo. Since the rebels took over an air defense base near the city last week, this seems to be an ever more feasible option. But it won’t be easy: no-fly zones are hugely expensive, and Syria is no Libya; its air defense system is far more sophisticated.
And even with a no-fly zone, it’s hard to see a way out of this quagmire. Turkey has been in discussions with the rebels and the government about the possibility of beginning a peace process, but it seems unlikely at this point that the rebels will stop until they have taken Damascus.
So for all the horrors on the ground, it seems almost impossible that the United States and Europe can do much to help while the future is so blurred and so bleak. As President Bill Clinton once said, “Where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must act.”
Despite what I have witnessed, I am not convinced we can in Syria.
Benjamin Hall is a freelance journalist who writes on conflict and the Middle East.
Military intervention in Syria: Time to act
OUR foreign editor explains why, despite the huge risks involved, the time has come for the West and the Arabs to intervene in Syria
Oct 20th 2012 | Economist
Turkey has called on the US, Britain and other leading countries to take immediate action to intervene in Syria to prevent a looming humanitarian “disaster” that it says threatens the lives of millions of internally displaced people and refugees as winter approaches and could soon ignite a region-wide conflagration. Appealing to the […]
NOT so long ago, Sheikh Adnan al-Arour seemed like a gift to the Syrian regime. Keen to discredit the peaceful protesters who came out in March 2011, state media portrayed the grey-bearded preacher, an exiled dissident whose fiery blasts beam across two Saudi-owned Salafist satellite channels, as a bigoted ghoul.
Especially damning was footage in which the sheikh rose, shook a warning finger at the camera and vowed to “grind the flesh” of pro-regime Alawites and “feed it to the dogs”. The government gleefully dubbed its foes “Araeer”, a taunting plural form of Mr Arour’s name, insinuating they were just nasty Sunni chauvinists out to destroy Syria’s multi-sectarian harmony.
But as Syria’s misery has ground on, sectarian fault lines have inexorably widened. Mr Arour’s views, once widely dismissed as extreme, now look closer to the mainstream, at least among the three-quarters of Syrians who are Sunni Muslims.The sheikh’s recent return to the rebel-held swathe of northern Syria, where he starred at a rare gathering of commanders from rebel military councils, showed how popular he is among the fighters. Yet it is not just the surge in religiosity among Syrian Sunnis that gives him his cachet. Mr Arour has been a vociferous and effective fund-raiser in the Gulf.
Rather than back the most extreme of the groups, Mr Arour has now paired up with Mustafa Sheikh, a secular-leaning leader of the Free Syrian Army, and has spoken of a need to channel funding through military councils in order to reduce rivalry among the myriad rebel groups. Criticising the involvement of foreign jihadists, he has also denounced suicide-bombings as criminal. And it has been claimed that his blood-curdling video threat to Alawites, who comprise the core of the Assad regime’s support, is often taken out of context, since he directed his meat-grinder rant only at those Alawites who were actively suppressing the revolt; any of them who stayed neutral, he insisted, should be protected as equal citizens. Reassuring?
Syria’s Salafists: Getting stronger?
Salafists are on the rise but have not dominated the opposition—so far
Oct 20th 2012 | ANTAKYA AND BEIRUT – Economist
….Salafists have been on the rise in Syria since the start of the year, when Jabhat al-Nusra (The Support Front) presented itself. The group, which sees Syria’s struggle as part of a global jihad, is the only one explicitly recognised by al-Qaeda. It marks itself out with suicide-bombings that often cause civilian casualties and has a slick media operation. With its forces on the front line in the raging battle for Aleppo, Syria’s second city, its impact is getting stronger.
Ahrar al-Sham (Freemen of Greater Syria) is another slightly more moderate Salafist network, operating mainly in the north-west province of Idleb. Like Jabhat al-Nusra, it wants to impose a strict Islamist state and sees the fight in Syria as a sectarian battle of Sunni Muslims versus Alawites, the esoteric Shia offshoot to which the Assads belong. The two groups’ numbers are probably relatively small. Whereas Mr Assad’s regime encouraged the flow of jihadists into Iraq to kill Americans after the invasion in 2003, it has generally stamped on extremists. But jihadists are a minority within the Salafist trend; most Salafists are of a milder bent.
“Rebel ranks are drawn disproportionately from poor, conservative areas where Salafism has resonance,” says Noah Bonsey, an author of a recent report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based lobby, on jihadists in Syria. He thinks the regime’s reliance on Alawite soldiers and on thugs known as the shabiha, as well as the support of Shia powers, including Iran and Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia party-cum-militia, has helped to spread the Salafist idea that the uprising is really a struggle for Sunni dominance…..
Two cousins of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the slain leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, were arrested by Jordanian security forces as they returned from waging jihad in Syria.
The two cousins, Zayed Sweiti and Firas Khalailah, were detained by Jordanian border guards after spending five months in Syria, Mohammad Shalabi, a Salafist who is also known as Abu Sayyaf, told AFP.
“A third jihadist, Mohammad Najmi, was also arrested with Sweiti and Khalailah. The three men decided to return to Jordan because there was no fighting against Syrian regime troops in the area the were in,” Shalabi told the news agency. “The intelligence department is currently interrogating them.”
The report of the capture of the three jihadists takes place as the US has stepped up support for the Jordanian government as the situation in neighboring Syria deteriorates…..
Al Nusrah backed by radical Jordanian cleric
The Al Nusrah Front has been backed by known radical Islamist clerics with ties to al Qaeda. In May, Abu Muhammad al Tahawi, a Salafist Jordanian cleric who has encouraged jihadists to fight in Iraq and elsewhere and who is close to Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, Zarqawi’s mentor, released a statement backing Al Nusrah.
Al Tahawi’s lengthy statement, which is titled “Supporting the Victory of the Al Nusrah Front,” was posted on jihadist forums and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group. In the statement, al Tahawi said that it was an obligation for Muslims to fight in Syria, and accused NATO, the UN, Arab regimes, and the media of backing Assad. He also praised suicide attacks, and said jihadists will expel the West, Israel, and Arab regimes from “Muslim lands.”
“The people who wrapped explosive belts around themselves, on their bellies, and
tore apart the idol of the era America and put its nose in the dirt of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and very soon in the Levant, will put down the nose of the Nusayris [Alawhites], the daughter of Zionism, and extirpate them from the heart of Muslim land,” al Tahawi said….
As Syria’s civil war spirals into mounting violence, the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile is generating increased anxiety throughout the Middle East and beyond. Taking precautionary measures, the United States has reportedly placed 150 “planners and other specialists” in Jordan to work on contingencies — including the chemical weapons threat.
As odd as it may seem, however, we are lucky that Syria’s chemical stockpile marks Damascus’s most serious weapons of mass destruction risk. Had Israel not bombed the country’s weapons reactor in 2007, the embattled nation — and the rest of us – could have been staring at the globe’s first civil war with a nuclear dimension.
Consider the domestic and international panic that could ensue if rebel factions, terrorists, government insiders or looters in civil war got control of nu
Understanding the Situation in Syria
By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi & Oskar Svadkovskyon 7.19.12
Minority numbers aren’t adding up for Bashar Assad’s defenses.
It’s become an article of faith among policy makers and analysts in the West that Syria is a nation of minorities. Various sources put the share of non-Sunni Muslim minorities at around one quarter of the population. These minorities are believed to constitute the bulk of the support base of the Syrian regime. Some ventured as far as to suggest that the regime was deliberately stoking sectarian tensions with the massacres in Houla and Qubeir in order to consolidate its minority support base.
The commonly accepted percentages of Syrian minorities are: Alawites and Shia — 13%, Christians — 10%, and Druze — 3%. Syria, however, does not collect or publish data related to the sectarian composition of its population and trying to track the origin of common estimates usually leads nowhere.
For example, all observers commenting on Syria believe that Syrian Druze live primarily in Jabal al Druze and constitute 3% of the Syrian population. This claim, however, does not square with the results of Syria’s last population census. According to the census, in 2004 the population of the province of Sweida, where Jabal al Druze is located, had only 313,231 inhabitants against 17,920,844 of the total population of Syria. This makes for 1.7% and not 3% of the population. On top of this,…
Syrian government airstrikes hit the opposition controlled town of Maaret al-Numan in Idlib province killing at least 44 people and leaving massive destruction on Thursday. The opposition secured the town last week after intense fighting, and had begun providing basic services for residents. Maaret al-Numan is located on a strategic highway and supply route connecting Damascus and Aleppo. A missile hit a residential area, damaging four buildings, four homes, and a mosque. Over 20 children were reported to have been killed in the attack. The strike on Maaret al-Numan signals a shift of government tactics according to some analysts. Rather than trying to win back territory gained by the opposition and the “hearts of the people,” the regime is merely destroying and abandoning towns so that the population will resent the opposition.
Turkey and Egypt Seek Alliance Amid Upheaval of Arab Spring
By Tim Arango | The New York Times
ALEPPO, Syria Most of the rebels fighting government forces in the city of Aleppo fit a specific mold: They’re poor, religiously conservative and usually come from the underdeveloped countryside nearby.
They bring to the battle their fury over years of economic marginalization, fired by a pious fervor, and they say their fight in the civil war is not only against President Bashar Assad but also the elite merchants and industrialists who dominate the city and have stuck by the regime. The rebels regard this support for the government to be an act of betrayal.
The blend of poverty, religious piety and anger could define the future of Aleppo, and perhaps the rest of Syria, if the rebels take over the country’s largest city, which is also its economic engine. They may be tempted to push their own version of Islam, which is more fundamentalist than what is found in the city. Their bitterness at the business class may prompt them to seek ways of redistributing the wealth.
“Those who have money in Aleppo only worry about their wealth and interests when we have long lived in poverty,” said Osama Abu Mohammed, a rebel commander who was a car mechanic in the nearby town of Beyanon before he joined the fight.
“They have been breast-fed cowardice and their hearts are filled with fear. With their money, we could buy weapons that enable us to liberate the entire city in a week,” he said……
The ancient Souk Madina, a World Heritage Site, is divided between rebels and President Bashar Assad’s forces. Caught in the middle are residents and merchants….
“It’s our livelihood,” he explained, abruptly bursting into tears, a man of 60 weeping amid the desolation.
Abu Taher found little sympathy, however, from a group of armed rebels camped out in front of a trashed pistachio emporium, 50 yards from the front lines and the current range of government marksmen. The rebels have seen many of their comrades killed as they battle the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Why are you crying about a shop [when] people are dying?” one combatant with a Kalashnikov rifle dismissively asked the grieving merchant, who, like others, requested that he be identified with a nickname for security reasons. “Go back home, uncle.”
BEIRUT — Rumblings of discontent within Syria’s Alawite minority are presenting a new challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to retain power in the face of an expanding armed rebellion, calling into question the loyalties even of his own sect in the conflict ravaging the country…..
If anyone wants to advocate intervention in Syria he should first explain to us Henri Barkey’s concerns and that air defense system.
Syria’s sophisticated air defenses are the first of several good reasons why Turkey should not contemplate unilateral military action against the Damascus regime, writes Eyup Can….
We have been debating Syria for months. Are you pro-war or pro-Assad? Shall we enter or not? Shall we set up a buffer zone with the United States or go to Damascus by ourselves in three hours?
Talking is free of charge. Everybody talks. But look what Barkey [a Turkey analyst at Lehigh University], was telling [Radikal journalist] Ezgi Basaran in their interview yesterday: “The Turkish army doesn’t have enough experience to set up a buffer zone.”
And then he lists the bitter truths.
To those who might ask who Henri Barkey is, let me remind them: He speaks Turkish better than most Turks, has worked in the US State Department and is a highly respected academic close to the Democratic Party. What does he say?
“Turkey cannot enter Syria unilaterally even if it wants to.”
Why not?
“Turkey’s aim to create a kind of buffer zone coupled with a no-fly zone in Syria. This is why it is pressing on the US [to get involved] because it can’t do this by itself. So why aren’t Americans doing it? The Syrian air defense system is highly sophisticated. America has to put hundreds of planes in the air to suppress that system. Since that air defense system was designed for use against Israel, it is developed far more than you may think. Yes, we can create a buffer zone in Syria but they will definitely shoot down some of our planes. This is not a game.”
Mind you, Barkey is not anti-war or pro-Assad. In the interview he accused the Turkish main opposition of being pro-Assad. He partially absolved the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, saying: “They didn’t have too many options.”
But his words are distinctly different from the politicians and those who are put on TV screens as experts.
“I have been in Turkey for a week. Thousands of experts appear on TV to debate Syria but nobody mentions the points I have raised with you, because they don’t know,” Barkey said. “In 1983, Hezbollah attacked a US Marine base [in Beirut] and killed [241] marines. The US decided to retaliate and the Syrian anti-aircraft system shot down two US planes. One of the pilots died and the other was captured by Syrians.
“What I am saying is that the US knows by its own experience how difficult it will be to set up a buffer zone between Turkey and Syria. To implement a buffer zone you will have to keep combat air patrols flying nonstop. As I was working with the US State Department I know how difficult a mission like that can be. Iraqi radars were locking on to US planes and we were firing missiles at those radars. We were firing at Iraqi air defense systems every day and missing them most of the time,” he said.
“The buffer zone is not easy. You will have lots of nasty incidents. If they put an anti-aircraft system next to a mosque, the plane can hit the mosque and kill the civilians in it. We saw this in Iraq. Can Turkey do all this? It can’t.”
Why not?
“Most importantly, Turkey lacks the experience. When was the last time Turkey fought another country? The Turkish army can be the second largest in NATO but it is not experienced,” Barkey said.
“There is a humorous side to this: In 1998-99, Cyprus was thinking of buying the S-300 anti-aircraft systems that Syria is using today. At that time, the Turkish air force practiced, in Israel, suppressing S-300’s because they didn’t know how to deal with that weapon.”
All day yesterday, I wanted to double-check what Barkey had said in the interview. We contacted the Foreign Ministry and the Chief of General Staff offices. They had all read the interview carefully. What they basically said was: “Yes, Barkey had some correct points but it is not really all that difficult [to overcome Syria’s missile shield].”
This is why if anyone insists on intervention in Syria or the establishment of a buffer zone, he should first explain to us Henri Barkley’s concerns and that air defense system.
The number of air defense missiles are striking. Yes, Turkey is far stronger than Syria in terms of its number of troops — including naval and ground forces — but Syria is far ahead in air defense missiles that it has set up to confront Israel.
Compared to the 178 missiles Turkey has, Syria has 4,707 air defense missiles. Barkey did not give the figures but drew attention to this reality.
CAIRO — Syria’s wealthy, long cultivated by President Bashar Assad as a support for his regime, are seeing their businesses pummeled by the bloody civil war. Factories have been burned down or damaged in fighting. International sanctions restrict their finances. Some warn that their companies are in danger of going under, worsening the country’s buckling economy.
Assad may not have lost the backing of Syria’s business elite, but some are losing faith. Many of those who can have fled abroad, hoping to ride out the turmoil, which is now in its 19th month and is only getting worse as rebels and regime forces tear apart the country in their fight for power.
Several businessmen interviewed by The Associated Press say resentment is growing against Assad over the crisis – but they also aren’t throwing their lot in with the rebellion. They are hunkering down, trying to salvage their companies.
One young businessman said his family factory in the suburbs of Damascus was damaged Wednesday, with windows blown out and part of the ceiling was destroyed when warplanes hit rebels in a neighboring building. Its several hundred employees had to hide in the basement until fighting eased enough that they could be bused out to safety.
“I feel that they are both just as bad as each other,” he said of the rebels and the government. “I could have died today because they (the rebels) were across the street from us and they (the planes) could have bombed us.”
EU blacklists all Syrian ministers in new round of sanctions
2012-10-16
Brussels (DPA) — All of Syria’s government ministers were banned on Tuesday from traveling to the Europen Union and had any assets they hold in the bloc frozen, as a new round of EU sanctions on the conflict-torn country came into effect. EU foreign ministers had approved the sanctions on Monday, but the targets were not immediately identified. The EU also agreed that “restrictive measures … be maintained against former ministers of the Syrian government since they may still be considered to be associated with the regime and its violent repression against the civilian population.” The people hit with travel bans and asset freezes also included Suleiman Maarouf, a businessman with a British passport who the EU said is “close to President (Bashar) al-Assad’s family” and “supports the Syrian regime.”
Aron Lund writes: Eighteen months into the Syrian uprising, the country’s Sunni Arab insurgency is now fighting a largely sectarian war against a regime dominated by religious minorities, most notably the Alawite sect to which the Assad family belongs. While the exiled opposition movement in Turkey and elsewhere remains reasonably pluralistic, the armed insurgency that […]
Aron Lund – Syrian jihadi and Islamist movements at ForeignPolicy.com: For a longer report of mine on the same topic, from August 2012, see: http://www.ui.se/Files.aspx?f_id=77409 (PDF)
Reuters reports: Scores of Iraqi Shi’ite militants are fighting in Syria, often alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s troops, and pledging loyalty to Iran’s supreme Shi’ite religious leader, according to militia fighters and politicians in Iraq. Iraqi Shi’ite militia involvement in Syria’s conflict exposes how rapidly the crisis has spiraled into a proxy war between Assad’s main […]
Netanyahu Mulls Action to Stop Syrian Weapons, Channel 2 says
2012-10-16 By Jonathan Ferziger
Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) — Israel contends that weapons from Syria are being sent to Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. * Netanyahu will consider strike if Israel finds proof chemical weapons are being sent to Hezbollah, according to people close to the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because a decision hasn’t been made yet. * Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the U.S.
Syrian human rights groups say that at least 28,000 people have “disappeared” in Syria since the beginning of the 19-month long uprising, and some estimate the number of missing to be as high as 80,000. According to a director at the online activist group Avazza, “Syrians are being plucked off the street by Syrian security forces and paramilitaries and being ?disappeared’ into torture cells. Whether it is women buying groceries or farmers going for fuel, nobody is safe.”
….He then called a guard, whom he ordered to “take good care” of me.
Both men spoke with the distinctive accent of the Alawites; in fact, every single person in the prison did. The Alawite minority has effectively ruled Syria since 1963, and especially since President Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. So when you hear this accent, you pay attention. Ever since I can remember, this has been the way that the people with real power in our country speak.
They did not keep me for a few minutes. They threw me into a cell they called “the Suite.” Measuring five feet by one and a half feet, it had no windows. There was a hole in the floor for a toilet and a hose attached to a faucet in the wall. The hose had two purposes: to keep the toilet clean and to provide me with drinking water. They told me I’d be staying for two years……
MASRIYEH, Syria: The bearded man eagerly showed his Lebanese identity card and property deeds issued by Syrian authorities. As he crossed the narrow bridge into Lebanon, he explained that although Lebanon was his country of origin he considered Syria his real home, describing it as the “mother of all the poor.”
“We will not leave the land where we were born and where we work,” said Ali Mohammad al-Jamal, a resident of Farouqieh, a Syrian border village inhabited by Shiite Lebanese. “We will defend our village no matter what.” “We have been living on this land for decades, before Hezbollah even existed,” the farmer continued, boasting an AK-47 he said he bought for $2,700. “I have four others like this one,” he added.
Only the men remain in Farouqieh and Masriyeh, some 300 meters away from the Hermel village of Al-Qasr. The women and children have all headed west into Lebanon.
Jamal, 40, who sent his family and parents to the safer Al-Qasr, decided to stay behind to guard his home and land.
Though a staunch supporter of Hezbollah, the man criticized what he dubbed as the party’s “cautious behavior” with regard to the unrest in Syria.
“Although attacks against us have become intolerable, the party still asks its supporters to exercise self-restraint and not be dragged into big fights,” said Jamal, whose home has been attacked by Syrian rebel forces.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah dismissed Thursday as “inaccurate” media reports saying members of his group were fighting alongside the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
He also said 23 border villages located inside Syrian territories but inhabited by Lebanese were forced to take up arms following attacks by the Free Syrian Army, stressing that the population were fighting by themselves and no one was fighting on their behalf.
Located a few kilometers away from the Syrian region of Qusayr in Homs, the villages of Matrabeh, Zeita, Hawik, Aqrabieh, Semaqieh, Jermash, Akoum, Nahrieh, Sqarja, Fadlieh, Gawgaran, Hantalieh, Sefsafeh, Farouqieh, Masriyeh, Wadi Hanna, Hamameh, Sugmanieh and Hawsh al-Sayyed lie on Syrian lands but are all inhabited by Lebanese.
Nasrallah did acknowledge that the commander of Hezbollah’s infantry unit in the Bekaa Valley died while performing his “jihadist duty” in one of those villages.
Ali Hussein Nassif, who went by Abu Abbas, was buried week. He was among those who died defending Shiite villages on the other side of the border, according to Hezbollah’s leader.
Sources close to the party in the northern region of Hermel said reports about Hezbollah sending fighters to war-torn Syria were meant to cover up for a highly probable attack by Syrian rebel forces on the string of border Shiite villages inside Syria…..
In a worrying sign that Lebanon is getting drawn further into the Syrian conflict, the Iran-backed Shia militant group is accused of using its military bases in the Bekaa valley to shell rebel positions in Syria.
“They are concentrating on hitting the villages where the Free Syrian Army are, to weaken them before launching a ground attack,” said Abu Obeida, a Lebanese resident of the border town of al-Qaa. “I have seen the rockets firing; they pass over your head.”
Driving across the Hermel plains of the northern Bekaa, 10 miles from the frontier with Syria, The Daily Telegraph could hear the sound of rocket fire. The salvoes came in waves – the dull thuds of the launchers shattering the stillness of the night air as they released their loads. Half an hour later, the tempo quickened to a near constant onslaught, filling the valley with the sounds of warfare until the early hours of the morning.
Hermel is Hizbollah’s most loyal heartland. It is the territory of Shia villages, agriculture and the group’s closed-off military zones.
“You are deep in Hizbollah’s country here,” said Mr Obeida, driving down a dusty track that had been cheerfully signposted as leading to a canoeing centre, but that quickly brought us up against the fence of a Hizbollah fighters’ camp…..
Left on its current course, America’s sensibly cautious policy toward Syria is unfortunately going to come to an unhappy end: The jihadist wing of the opposition will just get stronger and gain more power to shape Syria’s future. But what’s …
Sources inside the Iraqi government say that extremist Sunni Muslim groups like al-Qaeda are regrouping inside the country. A government paper says they’re returning to former strongholds on Baghdad’s outskirts to hold meetings and train in orchards there. By Haider Najm / Baghdad
Militant jihadists’ rise in Arab world imperils region’s stability
By Ernesto Londoño and Liz Sly, Monday, October 15
Fethi Belaid/AFP/GETTY IMAGES – An Islamist waves a Salafist flag reading ‘there is only one God’ during a rally in Kairouan, Tunisia. Hundreds of Salafist Muslims were gathered in Kairouan for “the second national congress of Ansar al-Sharia,” one of the most radical movements of the Salafist movement in Tunisia.
The proliferation of militant jihadi groups across the Arab world is posing a new threat to the region’s stability, presenting fresh challenges to emerging democracies and undermining prospects for a smooth transition in Syria should the regime fall.
From Egypt’s Sinai desert to eastern Libya and the battlegrounds of Syria’s civil war, the push for greater democracy made possible by revolts in the Middle East and North Africa has also unleashed new freedoms that militants are using to preach, practice and recruit.
The rise of militant jihadists in the region is one of the reasons that Western policymakers have been reluctant to arm the opposition in Syria as the country’s 19-month-old conflict intensifies.
U.S. involvement in Syria’s increasingly messy conflict just got messier. A classified report uncovered by theNew York Times reveals that many of the weapons sent to arm Syrian rebels in their fight to overthrow the Assad regime are ending up in the hands of hardline Islamic Jihadists.
The NYT with the analysis:
“That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.”….
Another Middle Eastern diplomat whose government has supported the Syrian rebels said his country’s political leadership was discouraged by the lack of organization and the ineffectiveness of the disjointed Syrian opposition movement, and had raised its concerns with American officials. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing delicate intelligence issues, said the various rebel groups had failed to assemble a clear military plan, lacked a coherent blueprint for governing Syria afterward if the Assad government fell, and quarreled too often among themselves, undercutting their military and political effectiveness.
“We haven’t seen anyone step up to take a leadership role for what happens after Assad,” the diplomat said. “There’s not much of anything that’s encouraging. We should have lowered our expectations.”….
American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received such a large share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition. “The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one unidentified American official….
International Crisis Group‘s Peter Harling is always important. His new report – TENTATIVE JIHAD: SYRIA’S FUNDAMENTALIST OPPOSITION – is particularly timely because it serves as a counter-weight to Sanger’s New York Times article that sounds the alarm about the radicalization of Syria’s fighting groups.
Rebel groups in Syria are playing up their Islamist credentials, including growing Salafi beards, as a ruse to secure arms from conservative Gulf-based donors, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.
“Groups with no ideological affiliation whatsoever began to adopt the symbols, rhetoric and facial hair associated with Salafism for that purpose,” it said.
It said the increasing presence of jihadi fighters was irrefutable but added that groups with very different motives were being confusingly bracketed together. It said:
In some cases, adoption of Salafi nomenclature, rhetoric and symbols reflects a sincere commitment to religious ideals; in others, it expresses an essentially pragmatic attempt to curry favour with wealthy, conservative Gulf-based donors
The report said “not all Salafis are alike; the concept covers a gamut ranging from mainstream to extreme”.
Peter adds:
The money flow from conservative donors did more than strengthen Salafi factions relative to their mainstream counterparts. It also pushed non-Salafi combatants toward joining Salafi units capable of providing them with the requisite weapons and ammunition. Groups with no ideological affiliation whatsoever began to adopt the symbols, rhetoric and facial hair associated with Salafism for that purpose.
It cited the example of Abdul Razzaq Tlass, a popular mid-level leader of Katibat al-Farouq in Homs who grew a Salafi beard to please Gulf financiers of his brigade.
It added that last June a small group of militants released a YouTube video officially naming their unit after a Kuwaiti cleric who had provided support.
The rebel faction, based outside Abu Kamal on the Iraqi border, called themselves Katibat al-Sheikh Hajaj al-Ajami – a Salafi Kuwaiti cleric who was prominent in raising money for the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front.
Rebel fighters pragmatically shift from one group to another based on the availability of funds and weapons, the report said.
It argued that western reluctance to arm the opposition was encouraging rebels to turn to the jihadi rhetoric favoured by private Gulf donors. It cited a Homs-based activist group who claimed that donations from Syrian expatriates and other Arabs in Gulf countries helped fuel a growing Islamist trend among militants.
Peter warns:
While such forms of behaviour typically might start as a largely opportunistic phenomenon and thus lead to exaggerated assessments of a rising Islamist tide, over time they could well turn into more genuine feelings, as the experience of a religiously inspired struggle permeates a generation of fighters. It is also is liable to provoke a backlash, should these superficial Salafis engage in conduct that tarnishes the broader brand … It is, in other words, far too early to predict whether the Salafi trend is temporary or destined to persist.
Umayyad Mosque Aleppo – See this video made by the same Aleppine who made the “duck” (batta) video of Bashar al-Assad, which became famous. He argues that the regime damaged the mosque and not the rebels, as has been widely reported.
Le Monde video of Syrian Army retaking the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo. L’armée syrienne a repris dimanche le contrôle total de la mosquée historique des Omeyyades dans le centre-ville d’Alep.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced a ban on all Syrian aircraft entering his country’s airspace on Sunday, a day after Syria’s foreign ministry prohibited Turkish civilian planes from flying over its territory.
….If Syria’s and Iran’s strategy is to play the PKK card to make the Turks to think twice about intervention, it may be working, at least partially. Despite their government’s increasingly tough rhetoric — punctuated by artillery volleys against Syrian targets after a shell killed five people in a Turkish border town earlier this month — most Turks oppose military action in Syria. The PKK certainly factors into Ankara’s thinking, says Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish ex-diplomat and head of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, a think tank. “There is a fear that the government has not yet addressed the situation in the southeast before engaging in a set of actions that may end up threatening its security,” says Ulgen. There is a flip side, however. A Turkish government that suspects Assad of arming the Kurdish militants may be keener than ever to see his regime toppled.
Rather than trying to pin the blame for the new wave of PKK violence on Syria, many Kurds say, the Turkish leadership should take a long, hard look in the mirror. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has passed a string of bold reforms over the past decade, cracking down on torture, launching a Kurdish TV station and, most recently, introducing elective courses in Kurdish. But despite secret negotiations with the PKK, which unraveled only last year, Ankara has not met the Kurds’ main demands, which include greater autonomy, political representation, full language rights and Ocalan’s transfer to house arrest…..
The number of Syrian refugees pouring into in Turkey has exceeded the “psychological limit” of 100,000, underscoring concerns that the country may not be able to cope with the flow of people that shows no sign of abating.
TurkeyHuman-rights groups allege that Ankara is preventing thousands of Syrian refugees from entering Turkey, despite their vulnerability to attacks by pro-Assad forces. Human Rights Watch on Sunday urged Turkey to immediately reopen border crossings where Turkish officials say more than 15,000 Syrians have been stranded for weeks.
….”I don’t think you can underscore enough what a dramatic game changer social media has been,” said Landis. “A whole generation of youth in Syria had been completely depoliticized before the Arab Spring. Assad had managed to turn Syria into a bunch of sheep.”…
Iran said it would seek to cut imports of non-essential goods and urged its citizens to reduce their use of foreign-made mobile telephones and cars, as the country struggles to cope with Western economic sanctions….
“…it looks as if … the Turkish government, they do want to go to war.”
– Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies
“Turkey is trapped between national honour and national interest, the national honour required that Erdogan responded in some way that shows toughness and resolve and would intimidate the Syrians from further action across the border. On the other hand, the national interest is to stay out of Syria. Syria is a potential Vietnam for Turkey, it’s a swamp. It could suck Turkey in and cost Erdogan a great deal.”
Inside Syria, with presenter Mike Hanna, discusses the situation with guests: Yasar Yakis, a former foreign minister of Turkey; Haldun Solmazturk, a retired brigadier-general; and Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies and an associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
“This one-sided policy, aiming to remove Bashar al-Assad by intervention in the domestic affairs of our neighbour, really intensified the conflict, sharpened the conflict, and probably resulted in more deaths than would have [occurred] otherwise.”
Faruk Logoglu, the head of Foreign Relations of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP)
Artillery fire between Syria and Turkey has further raised the stakes, and NATO has pledged to defend its Turkish ally. NPR’s Peter Kenyon, Joshua Landis, and Soner Cagaptay of The Washington Institute discuss the broader implications. listen
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Powerful Syrian Islamist brigades, frustrated at the growing divisions among rebels, have joined forces in what they say is a “liberation front” to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Mistrust and miscommunication have been a feature of the rebel campaign against Assad. Differences over leadership, tactics and sources of funding have widened the rifts between largely autonomous brigades scattered across Syria.
After more than a month of secret meetings, leaders of Islamist brigades – including the Farooq Brigade that operates mainly in Homs province and the heavyweight Sukour al-Sham brigade of Idlib – formed the “Front to Liberate Syria”.
The agreement is not the first which seeks to bring together disparate fighting groups and its Islamist emphasis has already alienated some other fighters.
The growing role of the Islamist fighters and their battlefield prowess has also caused concern among Western powers as they weigh up how best to support the opposition forces arrayed against Assad.
The new front does not include some groups which Western officials consider the most radical such as the Nusra Front, an affiliate of al Qaeda which has claimed responsibility for a series of devastating bombs in Damascus and Aleppo.
Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist group which includes a large contingent of foreign fighters, withdrew, objecting to the killing of a Salafist leader killed by a rival rebel force.
But rebel sources said talks were continuing to bring Ahrar al-Sham back, and leader of the new front, Ahmad al-Sheikh, said it was continuing to attract members.
“We have more than 40,000 fighters now and the numbers are growing because more brigades are expressing interest in joining,” said Sheikh, known to his men as Abu Eissa.
Accurate figures for the total rebel numbers are hard to establish but such a force could represent around half of Assad’s armed opponents.
Originally the group was called the Islamic Front to Liberate Syria. Brigade leaders voted to drop the word ‘Islamic’ but Islam remains a central element, Sheikh told Reuters.
“We are proud of our Islamism and we are Islamists. But we do not want to show it in a slogan because we might not live up to the responsibility of Islam,” said Sheikh, who is also the head of the Sukour al-Sham Brigades. “But we want a state with Islamic reference and we are calling for it.”
Brigades in Damascus, Deir al-Zor, Aleppo, Idlib and Homs provinces have joined the front and logistical offices have been opened across Syria to facilitate coordination, Sheikh said.
CHECKPOINT ATTACKS
Since its formation, the front’s fighters have been focused on attacking checkpoints as part of their attempt to push Assad’s forces out of towns.
On Tuesday fighters from the Sukour al-Sham (Hawks of Syria) seized the town of Maarat al Nuaman in Idlib province from government forces….
But the move which is supposed to unite the rebels has also widened the rifts. Some in the FSA denounced the front and said that the emphasis on Islamic identity would worry minorities in the religiously mixed country.
Some fighters also said the group receives funding from Gulf states which promote the same Islamist ideology – a reference to Saudi Arabia and Qatar – and also has better access to weapons coming through Turkey.
They accused them of denying some of those arms to rebels from smaller groups fighting alongside them.
“We are fighting and getting killed but some do not even bother helping us. They just watch us as if we are not on the same front,” said a fighter in a brigade composed of less than 500 insurgents.
Sheikh said his front would maintain “brotherly relations” with all groups but fell short of offering support.
“Whoever wants to work with us is a brother and a son of the front and whoever wants to work under other wings in the interest of the revolution is also a brother for us. But the others who are in the camps (in Turkey), they do not have any acceptance among us.”
BEIRUT — Fighters from a shadowy militant group with suspected links to al-Qaeda joined Syrian rebels in seizing a government missile-defense base in northern Syria on Friday, according to activists and amateur video.
It was unclear whether the rebels were able to hold the base after the attack, and analysts questioned whether they would be able to make use of any of the missiles they might have taken.
Nevertheless, the assault underscored fears of advanced weaponry falling into the hands of extremists, whose role in Syria’s civil war appears to be increasing.
Videos purportedly shot inside the base and posted online stated that the extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra participated in the overnight battle near the village of al-Taaneh, three miles east of the country’s largest city, Aleppo. The videos show dozens of fighters inside the base near a radar tower, along with rows of large missiles, some on the backs of trucks.
A report by a correspondent with the Arabic satellite network al-Jazeera who visited the base Friday said Jabhat al-Nusra led the attack, killing three guards and taking others prisoner before seizing the base….
The Sunday Telegraph accompanied the head of the Free Syrian Army Supreme Military Council, General Mustafa al-Sheikh as he moved the FSA’s command centre from Turkey to inside Syria. They travelled nervously through Idlib’s countryside, in cars with blacked out windows, heavily armed, and with their rifles locked and loaded.
“It’s not because of the regime that we are carrying weapons. It’s because we are afraid of being attacked by the jihadists,” an FSA rebel later admitted. ..
Even before President Bashar al-Assad has been defeated, a war within the civil war is brewing in Syria. It is a battle of ideas, a struggle for the overall direction of the insurgency that is pitting moderate-Muslims against Salafists, jihadists and other Islamist groups.
Syria’s most powerful Islamist brigades have united under a new “liberation front” to wage jihad against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and turn the country into an Islamic state….
Secular rebel commanders also revealed that they are working to cut the supply lines of jihadist groups, and limit the influx of foreign fighters to their ranks.
“We watch the borders. If we find supplies entering for [jihadist groups] we will take them,” said one secular FSA fighter. “We have also caught 25 foreign fighters trying to cross from Turkey. We gave them to the Turkish intelligence.”
But moderates aligned with Gen al-Shiekh’s men are suffering from a lack of credibility. Rebel commanders on the front lines have praised the battlefield prowess of Islamists – many of who learnt to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan – and are angered that the head of the Free Syrian Army was based in Turkey for so long, saying it stripped him of any legitimacy among fighters who were dying inside the country.
“We are tired of paper tigers outside the country who have no link to the battlefield,” said Abu Eissa, whose 16-year-old eldest son was killed in fighting in Idlib six months ago.
For the first time since the Syrian rebellion began, the leadership of the opposition Free Syrian Army is making a concerted effort to unify the dozens of armed factions fighting under its name. The announcement by Colonel Riad al-Asaad, leader of the Free Syrian Army, that the FSA will be relocating its staff headquarters inside of Syrian territory is widely seen as a step in the right direction. Whether the move will make any practical difference in the fight, however, remains to be seen.
Al-Asaad was once a mid-level commander in the Syrian military, but his defection last year, and his attempt to form a band of former soldiers willing to fight against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, steadily changed the nature of the conflict. He is often considered by Syrian activists and deserters to be the first really high-ranking commander to flee the Syrian army in protest over the crackdown, and his actions appear to have inspired thousands of conscripts to follow in his footsteps: the FSA now includes more than two dozen former Syrian generals……It seems highly doubtful that moving its headquarters from Turkey to Syria will resolve any of these dilemmas for the FSA.
Yamin (A Christian whose family is originally from Raqqa) writes:
” The Baath took some land from us too and we were not big landholders. We however forgave. Old landowners are starting to feel that they now have a chance to recover their confiscated land, which they describe as “stolen land”. (See an article by Rania Abouzeid in Raqqa Province in Time Magazine dated October 10, 2012, titled “Who will the Tribes Back in Syria’s Civil War?”.)
This is why most of the people of Raqqa Province and other provinces in Syria, who acquired land in the 1960s, have been concerned about the aftermath of the Syrian Revolution. Tribal heads lost the most, as they claimed wide uncontested areas without documentation or title deeds. It was like claiming land in the desert or in the ocean, when it should have been communal tribal land. Large areas in Syria were claimed that way by powerful chieftains, and Nasser and the Baath took the land from feudal groups and gave it to the peasants and tribesmen.
This is why the peasants and tribesmen backed Hafiz Assad in the early 1980s when he crushed the Moslem Brotherhood rebellion. They considered the Moslem Brotherhood the army of the landholders. To the many who benefited from Baathist land reforms, Hafiz Assad was a savior. But that was in the past and today they have rebelled against his son. If this matter escalates it may split the Syrian Revolution…..
I forgot to mention that the people of Raqqa Province always treated the Christians well. They trusted us Christians, almost like brothers, and we reciprocated.
The industrialist Christians of the Jazirah, who hailed from Turkey before Ataturk expelled them and fled to Qamishli, Hassakeh, Derbassieh, Amuda, Ras Al-Ain, were among the first to open the Jezzera land to wheat and barley farming in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Bedouins who had settled in Raqqa some 30 years earlier paid in land for the services of the Christians who knew about mechanized farming and who were importing the pumps, piping, and tractors to the region. The Christians still own thousands of acres in the Raqqa province.
My father had a head-on collision accident at midnight near Dyar Al-Zor in 1965. Four people were killed and many blamed my father. By coincidence the three dead from the other car were from our Syriac Catholic Church in Qamishli. One of our Raqqa neighbors was in the passenger seat next to my father. He died. My father was never the same. He spent months in the hospital being repaired, but emotionally, his convalescence took years. My father cared for the neighbor’s family for years, and they appreciated it. They never sued or threatened to sue. The family of the other three sued and it was settled through our Church years afterward.
Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek was born into a wealthy Alawite family, but became ‘a traitor to her kind’ to fight the Assad regime. Her latest work is a visceral, nightmarish account of the revolution that drove her into exile…
She says that Syrian women have the best conditions in the Middle East after Tunisia. But “it seemed that when Hafez al-Assad was president he was accomplishing reforms, but in reality, in profound ways, it was getting worse, going backward.” And things did not improve under his son, Bashar.
“The real revolution will begin after the fall of Assad,” she says. “Then we will have a feminist revolution to construct a new life, a new education, build a new society.” But aren’t you afraid of unintended consequences? Of the influx of Islamists, or of mirroring Egypt and Libya? “If we are afraid of the religious impact, we need to work from now to help in the revolution, to be able, after, to rebuild.”…
John Howard Wilhelm writes:
The Israelis would be wise as they pause for thought on bombing Iran to go after the Syrian air force instead. Surely the Israelis have the capacity to destroy that air force and bring about a swifter outcome to the fighting in Syria to the advantage of the Syrian people, of regional stability, and of undermining Iranian influence in the region to the benefit of all. Regime change in Damascus might even hasten regime change in Tehran which, with the exception of the current leaders there, would be the best outcome for others.
Nick Blanford in Hezbollah role in Syria grows more evident– describes how Shiites and Sunnis in the Bekaa support different sides of the Syrian revolution and eye each other warily.
The latest slide in the value of the rial has surprised many in its severity and speed. There is now a growing concern that it will have severe ramifications for Iran’s regional allies, including Syria.
Winter is coming, and with it the near certainty that the lot of millions of suffering Syrians will get substantially worse. Some 335,000 and counting find themselves in refugee camps in neighboring Turkey and Jordan, the lucky among them in pre …
On October 3, 2012 the Turkish military launched repeated mortar shellings inside Syrian territory. The military action, which was used by the Turkish military, conveniently, to establish a ten-kilometer wide no-man’s land “buffer zone” inside Syria, was in response to the alleged killing by Syrian armed forces of several Turkish civilians along the border.
There is widespread speculation that the one Syrian mortar that killed five Turkish civilians well might have been fired by Turkish-backed opposition forces intent on giving Turkey a pretext to move militarily, in military intelligence jargon, a ‘false flag’ operation.[1]
Turkey’s Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Foreign Minister, the inscrutable Ahmet Davutoglu, is the government’s main architect of Turkey’s self-defeating strategy of toppling its former ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria.[2]….
The geopolitical dimension
The significant question to be asked at this point is what could bind Israel, Turkey, Qatar in a form of unholy alliance on the one side, and Assad’s Syria, Iran, Russia and China on the other side, in such deadly confrontation over the political future of Syria? One answer is energy geopolitics.
What has yet to be fully appreciated in geopolitical assessments of the Middle East is the dramatically rising importance of the control of natural gas to the future of not only Middle East gas producing countries, but also of the EU and Eurasia including Russia as producer and China as consumer…..
ALAWITES AND ALEVIS: WHAT’S IN A NAME? [JL. They suggest that Ankara does not have to be too worried about internal sectarian dissent if it intervenes in Syria. Alevis will not object even it Alawites do.]
By Khairi Abaza and Soner Cagaptay
Tensions are rising on the Turkish-Syrian border, as Turkey recently became the first country to take direct military action against the al-Assad regime since Syria’s uprising began in spring 2011. In response to the Syrian shelling of the Turkish town of Akcakale on October 3rd, an incident which killed 5 people, Ankara began shelling Syrian military targets. What is more, Turkey has issued a number of escalation threats — on October 7th, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that “although Turkey does not want war, it is close to war,” suggesting that Ankara is concerned with the spillover effect of the Syrian conflict in Turkey.
One major concern in this regard is the sectarian dimension of the Syrian conflict…..Problems between the Arab Alawites in Hatay and the government in Ankara are leading some to surmise a broader cleavage between Turkey’s Alevis — a community that represents 10-15 percent of Turkey’s 74 million citizens — and the Ankara government. Partly due to their similar names (Alevi vs. Alawite), many commentators appear to be confusing the groups, leading them to the erroneous conclusion that Alevis are close kin to the religious sect that controls Damascus. Alawites and Alevis alike represent non-Orthodox Islam, and the two groups have similar-sounding names because of their shared reverence for Ali, son-in-law of Mohamed. Nevertheless, Alawites and Alevis are in fact different groups ethnically and theologically, and confusing the two would be akin to saying that all Protestants are protestors. Just to name a few, here is a list of five ethnic and theological differences between the Alawites and the Alevis, detailed in length in a recent article published in Turkish daily Zaman:……
Confusing the two distinct groups would only serve to stoke sectarian tensions and further divide the Turkish public on the issue of involvement in Syria. Some Alevis, like many other staunchly secular-minded Turks, take issue with the rise of Sunni Muslim Brotherhood-led regimes in Damascus, which they fear might discriminate against or even persecute “non-orthodox” sects. Others, but also many Sunni Turks, are concerned over the security risks for Turkey of becoming more deeply involved on one side of the Syrian civil war. But Turkey’s Alevis as a whole, unlike Syria’s Alawites as a whole, are not predominantly supporters of Assad’s regime…..
At least 100 bodies found near Damascus, say activists
2012-10-14
Damascus (dpa)- At least 100 bodies were found Sunday near Damascus, reported opposition activists. The victims appear to have been executed, in the town of Darya on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, they added.
The videos leave little room for doubt: they show cluster bombs lying on dusty ground next to buildings, or stuck nose first in the earth. All around are dozens of the unexploded bomblets that they released in mid-air and scattered over areas larger …
Arms supplies to Syrian rebels drying up: No sign of heavy weapons to fight tanks and aircraft Regional rivalries hamper struggle against Assad
Martin Chulov and Ian Black – Guardian, 11 October 2012
In the battle for northern Syria the most important front is far from Aleppo. It is across the border in the southern Turkish town of Antakya. Here rebels, who now move around with increasing ease, are engaged in daily bids for patronage with those who keep the insurgency running….
The men with the money and influence in Antakya are envoys sent by the Sunni world’s political elite or business leaders. One name comes up more than any other – a Lebanese MP named Okab Sakr.
“Every time Okab is in town the weapons start to move across the border,” said a rebel colonel from the Jebel al-Zawiya region, who calls himself Abu Wael. “The problem is he is very particular about where those weapons go.”…Sakr is a member of the Future movement of the Lebanese opposition leader, Saad Hariri. According to colleagues in Beirut he has been given the role of gun runner-in-chief…..The US, always jittery about backing the uprising, is opposed to calls by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply rebel groups with equipment needed to combat aircraft and tanks – an issue raised by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday. Jordan and Turkey appear to share Washington’s concerns. Confirmation on Wednesday that the US had sent a military mission to Jordan to help build a headquarters on the border with Syria and to improve Jordan’s military capabilities underlines worries about possible spillover.
“It’s about indirect intervention,” said Mustafa Alani of the Saudi-financed Gulf Research Centre in Abu Dhabi. “The money is there, arms can be supplied. But the Jordanians and the Turks are hesitant. Turkey is allowing some weapons in but there are a lot of restrictions. People are waiting for a shift after the US election.”
Another growing problem is a lack of co-ordination between Qatar and the Saudis – the likely subject of Wednesday’s talks in Doha between the Emir and the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar. King Abdullah is said to be growing impatient with the difficulties of the Syrian crisis. According to Syrian opposition activists, the Saudis now sponsor only rebel groups which are at odds with those backed by Qatar and Turkey, which are often linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The Qataris are much more proactive than the Saudis,” said one well-placed Arab source. “The Saudis are not interested in democracy, they just want to be rid of Bashar. They would be happy with a Yemeni solution that gets rid of the president and leaves the regime intact.”
Intelligence chiefs from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and France reportedly met in Turkey in early September along with the CIA director general, David Petraeus. But they apparently failed to reach agreement on a co-ordinated strategy….The Americans are especially against handing out anti-aircraft missiles. They will not accept these things falling into the hands of jihadis. Imagine having to do a Stinger buy-back programme like Afghanistan all over again.”
Now the Saudis are signalling that they are reaching the limits of what they will do in the face of US objections, concern about the resilience of the Assad regime, fears that extremists will dominate the opposition – as well as the risks of “blowback” from jihadis returning home…..Now the Saudis are pushing the armed Syrian opposition to form a “salvation front” with unified command and control on the ground and, crucially, an ability to collect weapons once fighting has ended – a lesson learned the hard way from Libya. The Saudis are backing brigadier-general Manaf Tlass,…
But there is little optimism about prospects for any immediate improvement. “It’s all a bit of a mess,” said analyst Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution in Doha. “Everyone is waiting for someone else to do a better job. It can’t be the Saudis or the Qataris or the Turks. It’s got to be the Americans…..
The U.S. military has sent a task force of over 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to assist in dealing with the Syrian crisis. The planners’ tasks will primarily involve handling refugee flows, already estimated at 180,000; securing the border to prevent spillover from Syria; and preparing for scenarios including the loss of government control of chemical weapons. The U.S. government has avoided intervening in Syria other than providing nonlethal assistance, including communications equipment. However, the deployment to the outpost near Amman, less than 35 miles from the Syrian border, could play a critical role if U.S. policy were to shift. U.S. Pentagon and Central Command officials have declined to comment on the mission, in addition to a spokesman from the Jordanian embassy in Washington. Meanwhile, Turkey has warned Syria that it will respond with greater force if cross border shelling continues. The statement came about a week after Turkey retaliated after fire from Syrian forces hit the Turkish town of Akcakale, killing five civilians. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the military alliance has plans to defend Turkey if requested. In Syria, opposition forces reportedly took control over Maaret al-Numan in Idlib province, a strategic town on the main highway connecting Damascus with Aleppo. If the Syrian army does lose Maaret al-Numan, it will hinder its ability to send reinforcements to aid in the longstanding battle in Aleppo. The jihadist militant group, al-Nasra Front, has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing targeting the Air force Intelligence complex in the Damascus suburb of Harasta. The facility is notorious for its detention and torture of opposition members. Fierce fighting also continued in the city of Homs.
Russia has negotiated a $4.2 billion arms sale to Iraq becoming the country’s second biggest arms supplier after the United States.
‘Syrian massacre is veiled in silence‘ (Michael Peel, The Financial Times)
“Daraya’s continuing anguish says much about the evolution – or regression – of Syria’s 18-month-old conflict and the world’s attitudes to it. More than a month after what local people say was the massacre of at least 500 people, the town is in a ghastly limbo, still surrounded by regime forces and aware that another blow could fall at any time with hardly anyone watching. When 108 people were slaughtered in the central Syrian district of Houla in May, it was widely talked of as a possible turning point in international attitudes to what has now become a war; when several times that number were reported dead in Daraya over several days in late August, it triggered a brief round of condemnation – and then near-silence. As a diplomat who covers Syria put it: “It’s like the Syrian conflict has become something with which the international community can live.””
….Recent visitors say the 47-year-old president has taken over day-to-day leadership. They speak of a self-confident, combative president convinced he will ultimately win the conflict through military means.
“He is no longer a president who depends on his team and directs through his aides. This is a fundamental change in Assad’s thinking,” said a pro-Syrian Lebanese politician with close ties to Assad. “Now he is involved in directing the battle.”
The endgame may have changed too. “Nobody is now talking about the control of the regime over all of Syria, they talk about the ability of the regime to continue.”
Until recently, the Lebanese politician said, people asked daily who would defect next. But for some time now there had been no significant military defections.
“The fighting nerve is steady. The Iranians and the Russians may have helped them. Their ability to manage daily and control the situation has improved.”
The government has decided to focus its effort on essential areas – the capital Damascus, the second largest city of Aleppo, and the main highways and roads.
Other close observers of the conflict say Assad is deluded if he believes he can prevail.
“The problem is the regime lives in its own world. It is clear the people are rejecting this idea – the regime’s narrative – that it is a secular regime set upon by extremists, a battle between good and evil and Bashar will one day be vindicated. Bashar is not the victim. He is the cause of the violence,” said a Western diplomat.
Turkey sharply escalated its confrontation with Syria on Wednesday, forcing a Syrian passenger plane to land in Ankara on suspicion of carrying military cargo, ordering Turkish civilian airplanes to avoid Syria’s airspace and warning of increasingly forceful responses if Syrian artillery gunners keep lobbing shells across the border. ….
Syria’s main opposition bloc will restructure itself in Qatar next week to seek fresh impetus, Syrian National Council leader Abdulbaset Sieda said on Wednesday, after months of criticism that it is too fractious and influenced by Islamists….Sieda, who is due to resign from his position next week, said the first step would be a general assembly of the Syrian National Council in Doha from October 15-17 to elect a new leadership and increase the numbers of women and young members.
It will also incorporate some 20 new groups into the organization, including local coordination committees, business groups and smaller Kurdish, Turkmen and Syriac Christian representatives.
Sieda, who described himself as secular, reiterated that the SNC favors a secular, democratic Syria that respects minority rights and where power is to given local authorities, away from the centre in Damascus.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan has been coordinating Saudi Arabia’s policies towards the Syrian uprising since being appointed intelligence chief by King Abdullah in July. Bandar’s reputation as an inveterate networker and hawk have fuelled anticipation …
Bandar took over the Syria “file” from the king’s son Abdelaziz, a deputy foreign minister. The move also followed rumours of inefficiency at the intelligence agency. Bandar organized the visit of Manaf Tlass, the Sunni general and Assad associate who defected from Syria in July. Shortly after his appointment it was rumoured – evidently falsely – that he had been killed in an explosion in Riyadh. Iranian and pro-Assad media suggested it was retaliation for the assassination of four of Assad’s senior security chiefs in a bomb attack in Damascus a few days earlier.
Veteran Saudi-watchers say that decision-making in Riyadh, where government is highly personalised and the senior royals ageing, is currently in poor shape. The king is 88 and frail, Crown Prince Salman, 76, abroad and the foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, 72, convalescing.
In a rare public glimpse of his movements, Bandar was reported to be in the Qatari capital Doha on Wednesday, holding talks with the Emir, Sheikh Hamad. It would be surprising if the Syrian crisis was not on their agenda. “We need to wait and see what Bandar will do with the Syria file,” said one Saudi source. “People will be watching carefully.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said this week that Syria is becoming the “worst-case scenario that we’ve all been dreading.”
The shelling across the Turkish-Syrian border, now entering its seventh day, gives further testimony, as if any were needed, that Turkey’s Syria policies have failed and that the civil war in Syria is also a regional, sectarian war, with no end in sight…..
from March 2011 until today. And that, at a time when a large majority of people in the U.S. (and ‘western’) political class had a very different analytical bottom line than my own. Their bottom line was, basically, that the Asad regime was weak, hollow, deeply unpopular, and would crumble “any day now.” And since people holding to this belief– which was nearly always, much more of a belief than an analysis– have been extremely strong inside the Obama administration as well as in the western chattering classes (including among many self-professed “progressives” or liberals), their belief in the imminent collapse of the Asad regime has driven Washington’s policy all along…..
If the U.S. wants the rebels to coordinate better on the ground, it should lead the way by coordinating outside help. The shower of cash and weapons coming from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Arab nations is helping extremist fighters and undercutting any orderly chain of command through the Free Syrian Army.
An exiled Syrian author and journalist whose inside account of the revolution drew such ire from Syria’s government that she was forced to flee the country has won a literary award from PEN for her courage. Samar Yazbek was named by poet laureate …
With a 48-member council, a city manager and a criminal court, civic government is reasserting itself in Al Bab, a northern Syrian city of about 180,000 people, after rebel fighters pushed government forces out at the end of July. Al Bab is far from peaceful: Government jets bombard it almost every day, and up to two-thirds of the population has fled. But a measure of normalcy has been re-established…..
As the civil war in Syria becomes more acute, the United States must reassess its strategy toward that key Middle Eastern state, in particular, its stance on the role that Saudi Arabia has been playing in the Syrian conflict. Continued Saudi influence in Syria will only further destabilize the situation on the ground, undermine U.S. interests in the region and dim the prospects for a future democratic Syria…..
ALEPPO, Syria Leading the fight in Sakhour on the eastern side of this embattled city is the Tawafuk Battalion of the Free Syrian Army. It reports to a new coordinating body known as the Military Council, according to Mustafa Shabaan, the acting …
Syria’s Up-and-Coming Rebels: Who Are the Farouq Brigades?
Amid the hodgepodge of groups that make up the armed opposition to Bashar Assad, one organization is coming dramatically to the fore
By Rania Abouzeid / Raqqa province | October 5, 2012 | TIME
Addendum (October 10, 2012): This is a correction sent to me by my friend Thomas Pierret, who follows the sheikhs of Syria closely.
Dear Joshua,
In your last post on Syria Comment, you write that Adnan al-‘Ar’ur has become a hero for cursing Alawites. I tend to disagree with that for two reasons:
1. The way al-‘Ar’ur is perceived by many, especially among minorities, has little to do with reality. In reality, al-‘Ar’ur does not speak much of the Alawites in his weekly TV programme, and he never “cursed” the community as a whole. His famous reference to “meat grinders” was very specific, it targeted “those who violated sanctities”, a reference to rapists. He made a very limited number of problematic statements regarding the Alawites but he’s never been “cursing” them. Accusations that he authorised the rape of Alawite girls a totally groundless.
2. Since Alawites do not feature very prominently in his weekly TV programme, focusing on al-‘Ar’ur sectarianism doesn’t help understanding why he has become a hero to many in Syria. The main reason is that none else has devoted a two-hour long weekly TV show to the support of the Syrian revolution (his programme is called “With Syria until victory”). None else (either among the political opposition or other anti-regime clerics) has bothered directly addressing the Syrians on such a regular basis and in such an accessible (populist, if you prefer) way. Al-‘Ar’ur is not only talking about politics in his show, he also (and mostly) addresses daily problems Syrians are faced with, from ritual issues to death and rape at the hand of the regime’s forces.
Best, Thomas, Lecturer in Contemporary Islam, University of Edinburgh
Here is the video of the “Meat Grinder” speech for anyone who is interested. He divides Syrians into three categories: those who support the revolution, those who ignore it, and those who oppose it. He insists the judgement against those who are against us will be great. He speaks of the Alawites in particular at the end, saying that any Alawites who stand with “us” will be protected, but “those that stand against us will have their flesh ground in meat grinders and fed to the dogs.”
The Islamic doctrine being championed by so many groups within the opposition has a major flaw: it condones interference into the beliefs and actions of any Syria to mend any wrong! This doctrine contradicts the constitutional rights and individual freedoms cherished by the civilized world. What is more, it is particularly intimidating to many non-Sunni communities of the Syrian mosaic. In my opinion. it is the key reason why the opposition has failed to unite. The Islamist groups represent a new tyranny. Rather than measuring a citizen’s rights by his devotion to al-Assad, they will measure his rights by his devotion to God and Muhammad. This is the same mentality that we hoped to overcome. It is undermining opposition unity and plunging us into a civil war without end. Both sides preaching faith in their God and nothing else.
The opposition is mostly Islamist and they have adopted as their pope the corrupt Sheikh Adnan Al Arour. He twists the Koran to fit the its most radical interpretation. He feeds the anger and instinct for revenge among Syrians with God’s consent and blessing. No other accepted religious leadership exists or has been proffered by the opposition. Many Islamists have been awarded scholarships to the United States, the UK, and France to study (or be studied), there should be a better figure than Ar’our!
Adnan Ar’our, the controversial sheikh, has returned to Syria. `Ar`ur who became a hero to many in the revolution for cursing Alawites and regime supporters on Saudi TV. He has returned to Syria from Saudi Arabia. In this video he is the keynote speaker and honored Sheikh at a joint leadership meeting of the Revolutionary Military Councils. al-jazeerah video
The Revolutionary Military Councils claim that they represent 80% of the opposition. Their leaders hope that the other 20% will join them soon.
Syrian rebels announced Saturday that they have captured Hussam Assad, the cousin of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The arrest was announced on the Twitter page of Sheikh Adnan Al Arour, who is considered one of the Salafi leaders in Syria. Al Arour claimed that his men successfully captured Hussam Assad, who is one of the men at the center of Assad’s security establishment.
….More than one FSA battalion has named itself after Ibn Taymiyya, the 14th century Sunni Muslim scholar who urged the extermination of Alawites as heretics.
This kind of act cancels out any favorable rhetoric or actions by other elements of the FSA, some of whose spokesmen often promise to establish a Syria that is pluralist and civil, and not religious in character.
The latest misstep by the opposition was a video issued last week, in which FSA figures announced the unification of Revolutionary Military Councils in a number of major towns.
While the rhetoric of the event was primarily nationalistic, the guest of honor at the long dais, flanked by a dozen officers, was Sheikh Adnan Arur, the regime’s favorite target of spite – a hard-line Sunni cleric who has been vicious in his rants against the Alawites.
For middle-of-the-roaders, the bloody crackdown by the regime against the population is a red line that has been crossed, and means the authorities do not deserve support.
But Arur is another red line, meaning that the FSA and the hard-core opposition should not be supported either.
Like other Syrians, Alawites have also been moving in different directions depending on their personal experiences with the violence.
Many have friends or relatives who have been killed in the battles, or kidnapped and murdered by either FSA groups or criminal elements. Others have known people who were kidnapped and then released safely, which can color the way a person views the rebel cause.
But as the conflict drags on, people are becoming steadily traumatized by all of the murder and destruction around them, and simply want an end to it all.
The fear that sect-based ethnic cleansing will break out should the rebels win remains dominant – but this fear, and the talk that Alawites are being targeted for liquidation, has been present since the beginning of the uprising.
Every week in which it fails to erupt as a widespread phenomenon is a boon for the sect, and for the country.
In exhibiting three significant orientations – pro-regime, pro-opposition and pro-solution – the Alawites would appear to mirror the rest of society more than people think.
…Syrian activist holding sign reading “There are two sects in Syria – the sect of freedom and the sect of the regime” The Nabd movement is trying to promote unity among sects working to bring down the Syrian regime
While the Syrian conflict has been characterised by fighting between the Sunni majority and ruling Alawite minority, it has also given birth to some movements which aim to bridge the sectarian divide, as Samer Mohajer and Ellie Violet Bramley report from Beirut.
Nabeel, a 24-year-old Alawite doctor from Homs, describes how he and other Syrian activists first decided to start campaigning against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the summer of 2011.
“A bunch of us were having coffee in Homs,” he said. “We wanted to have some influence on our revolution, so we tried to do something to express ourselves, to express our opinions.”
The result was the creation of the Nabd (or Pulse) Gathering for Syrian Civil Youth – one of the many cross-sectarian movements that have emerged from Syria’s 18-month-long revolt.
They are designed to campaign against the regime, but also to promote unity among Syria’s religious sects in the face of the increasing role of foreign and jihadi fighters and the characterisation of the struggle along sectarian lines.
Syrian rebels celebrate in Idlib As violence has escalated in Syria, relations between sects have been tested
“We started our work in Homs, addressing the dangerous subject of sectarianism,” explained Nabeel. “We organised some protests involving guys and girls from all sects, distributed flyers and put posters up. We campaigned against violence and distributed flowers.”
Next came a sit-in, in the Khaldiyeh neighbourhood of Homs attacked by security forces, and a week of national unity.
Quickly, “things escalated until we had cells in every city – Damascus, Salamiyah [an Ismaili Muslim town], and Latakia [an Alawite centre],” said Nabeel.
The movement now boasts a Facebook membership of nearly 8,000. Events are designed to be inclusive, combating sectarian divisions in Syria through civil action.
Another founding member of Nabd, Sunni journalist Rafi, describes the movement as civil and secular. ….
Many Alawites and Christians are supportive of the uprising, but are unable to protest in their neighbourhoods. This failure to protest is read, often wrongly, as the result of pro-regime sentiment. …
Nabeel argues that the international media is partly to blame for failing to convey the complexity of the conflict, characterising it simply as an Islamic revolution or a Sunni revolution.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the collection of defected army units and armed civilians fighting the Assad regime, are often referred to as wholly Sunni, but Nabeel says he knows of many FSA members from minority groups and even some Alawites.
“The true activists in the FSA and in the non-violent movement know that there are lots of Alawites working for this.” Nabeel is quick to point out that, while he respects the decision of those who join the FSA, Nabd is “100% against violence”.
“The Alawite activists are doing us a big favour. Lots of communication devices, medical supplies and relief materials wouldn’t pass to the FSA without their help and that of other minorities,” he said.
Syria/Turkey- Syria’s Regime clarified that it condoled the deaths of innocent civilians in Wednesday’s cross-border mortar fire incident but had not apologized to Turkey as it “applied investigations to ascertain the identity of those who had carried out the attack.”, according to Syria`s Information Minister statement earlier.
Syria’s permanent representative to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Bashar Al-Jafari announced on Thursday that the Syrian government had not send any apology letter to the Turkish government. He added that Damascus was not seeking an escalation in tensions with Turkey or other countries.
“The Syrian government has a key interest in maintaining good neighborly relations with Turkey,” ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari told reporters in NY.
“In case of border incidents between any two neighboring countries, governments should act wisely, rationally and reasonably.” al-Jaafari declared.
But he called on the Turkish government to cooperate with Syria on controls to “prevent armed groups from infiltrating through this border” to stage attacks in Syria.
Al-Jafari asserted that “the Syrian government is working on investigating the accident and not on apologizing”. He alluded to the official statement issued by the Syrian information minister Omran Al- Zoabi, which did not include any apology.
Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat- The Syrian military is forming a new elite force of made up of 60,000 fighters, according to a report from the “tar-Tass news agency. The agency cited an expert at the London-based International Strategic Research Institute as saying that “western intelligence has obtained information that the armed security regiments (the shabbihah) that are made up of the Alawite community would be integrated in a division similar to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
The expert pointed out that the preparation and training of this elite division is being done by Iranian experts in Syria who number around 2,000 and added, “We are expecting the number of government forces to double in the coming months which portends a prolongation of the conflict in Syria and provides Al-Assad’s regime with new prospects.” According to British analysts’ conclusions, this division that is being set up will when necessary provide protection for the Alawite areas on the Mediterranean coast.
Commenting on this information, the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) deputy chief of staff, Colonel Arif al-Hamud, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the regime resorted from the beginning of the revolution to forming divisions it called “popular committees” in the Alawite areas that are made up of the community’s members. It armed and subjected them to military crash courses by Syrian intelligence services.
“But the regime is today resorting to turning these popular committees into military regiments that are sent to the hot areas and the best evidence is what happened in Darat Izzah in Aleppo countryside when the FSA succeeded in killing around 40 shabbihah elements from one village, Wadi al-Uyun,” Al-Hamud told Asharq Al-Awsat.
“We have confirmed testimonies by officers working in military intelligence and special forces who defected recently confirming that Iranian experts and from the Lebanese Hezbollah have started to run courses for trainees from the special forces and military intelligence, the majority of them Alawites in addition to some Sunni officers. These started in February and are continuing to this day with the course running between three and four weeks in (Al-Durayj) area that is near Damascus which was before then a training center for the Special Forces before the storm troopers and paratroopers’ school was built.” Al-Hamud added.
The FSA’s deputy chief of staff asserted that these officers who have defected had also taken these courses which focused on sniper and individual killing by forming small units capable of carrying out lightning and quick operations.
Al-Hamud went on to say that these divisions being professionally trained might form the nucleus of a special army that the regime is establishing for the purpose of suppressing the revolution, confronting the FSA and protecting the Alawite state, adding that a large quantity of military equipment and heavy weapons were recently transferred to the Alawite areas.
A House in Damascus recounts Brian Stoddart’s experience of living in an old house in the Old City of Damascus near the Umayyad Mosque, immediately prior to the 2011-12 upheavals. The stories come from his daily interactions with “ordinary” Shamis, his observations of life in the city, and his reading of its history and culture. Given what has happened since, the hints at the desire for more “democracy”, the need for change and the wish for more interaction with the world take on strong resonance, a glimpse of daily life in Damascus on the eve of yet another great change.
Brian Stoddart is an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Australia where he served as Vice-Chancellor and President. He trained and is widely published as a social historian, is a regular media and social media commentator on a range of issues, and now works as an educational higher education consultant, which is what took him to Damascus where he became fascinated by the city and the country.
Syria might be getting all the blame for firing the first shot in the sudden eruption of hostilities on the Turko-Syrian border, but Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, can hardly claim to be an innocent party when it comes to stoking the fires of a conflict that retains the potential to ignite a regional conflagration. …. Like Mr Morsi, the Turkish leader would be happy to see the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria emerge as the eventual victors of the crisis in that country, a development which would lead to the establishment of a network of Islamist governments – a “Sunni arc” from the shores of North Africa to those of the eastern Mediterranean.
It is highly questionable whether such an outcome would benefit Western interests. And with the Turkish parliament yesterday approving a measure that effectively gives Mr Erdogan a “green light” to invade Syria, Nato leaders should take care not to involve themselves in a conflict that only helps to further the Turkish leader’s Islamist agenda.
With Turkey’s decision to shell targets in Syria in retaliation for a mortar attack that killed five civilians inside the Turkish border, there are new signs that Syria’s civil war could escalate into a broader conflict…..
While the desire to act to prevent Syria’s conflict from spilling over borders and provide safe haven for the tens of thousands who continue to flee the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad is understandable, the scale of such an operation is bound to be much larger than its proponents have suggested.
I conducted an open-source analysis to estimate the requirements for establishing command of the air over Syria. The study shows that the effort could require about 200 strike aircraft and more than 100 support aircraft for only the first waves of strikes, making a Syrian intervention many times larger than the opening phase of NATO’s recent air war over Libya. …..A U.S.-backed intervention along these lines, most recently advocated by Qatar and NATO allies France and Turkey, would unfold in two major phases. The first, establishing a no-fly zone, would require a sustained effort to degrade Syrian air defenses in order to achieve command of the air.
While dense and overlapping, Syria’s strategic air defenses present few serious challenges for Western air power. Most of the equipment consists of aging Soviet-designed surface-to-air missile systems that NATO either destroyed or countered with relative ease in previous interventions over Kosovo and Libya. Because many of these older systems are relatively immobile, it is likely they could be eliminated quickly using an initial barrage of cruise missiles launched from naval vessels in the Mediterranean, in combination with an early wave of air strikes.
But the Syrian systems have recently been augmented with more advanced and capable Russian designs, including the Buk-M2E and Pantsyr-S1. These and other mobile air defenses pose a larger threat. Should Syria’s mobile air defenses survive initial strikes, they could quickly complicate efforts to use air power to defend a safe zone from attacks by Assad’s ground forces. ….
Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — Syrian concierge Jameel Abdul-Razzak says he can no longer afford to buy cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce for the daily salad his family is used to.
The price of some vegetables in Damascus has jumped fivefold since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March last year, according to official figures….The economy alone probably won’t bring down the Assad government, said Ayesha Sabavala, an economist at the EIU.
“They’ve managed to go along with low foreign exchange reserves by reducing their imports and by getting only essential imports,” she said in a phone interview.
The EIU estimates that Syria’s currency reserves will shrink to $3 billion, equivalent to 4.2 months of imports, by the end of next year, from $19.5 billion at the end of 2010. The country is getting financial support from allies Russia and Iran, Sabavala said. ….The retreat from economic activity extends from big-ticket items down to basic groceries.
Auto dealer Samir Tarbeen said by phone from Damascus that he hasn’t made a sale in more than four months. “Banks have stopped lending and this made things worse for us,” he said.
About 30,000 cars were sold in the first half of this year, a drop from 103,000 a year earlier, according to the pro- government Al-Watan newspaper. ….
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When King Abdullah announced a national fundraising drive to aid Syrian refugees in late July, Saudis quickly donated nearly $150 million.
Saudi national television hosted a telethon, with banks of men in traditional robes manning phone lines and computers. Donations came by text, by direct deposit into special bank accounts, or from families stuffing crumpled Riyal notes into collection boxes or donating their cars and even their watches.
Abdullah, normally a discreet behind-the-scenes conciliator, has denounced the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with rare royal rage, and his people have joined in with gusto.
Beyond humanitarian concerns, Abdullah sees an opportunity to strike a key strategic blow against Iran, Syria’s key ally and Saudi Arabia’s main rival for power in the Middle East, analysts and government officials said in interviews across this oil-rich kingdom.
Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran each claim to be the world’s true center of Islam. Both nations are struggling to expand their influence in a region upended by popular revolts that are shifting governments and long-standing alliances.
Assad’s government serves as Tehran’s key pipeline for transferring money and arms to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon. Abdullah sees Assad’s potential ouster as a way to choke off that flow and diminish the influence of an increasingly belligerent Iran, officials and analysts said.
“Syria is Iran’s entry into the Arab world,” said one Saudi official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Take down Assad and you inflict a strategic blow on Iran.”
The official said Iran is “really on the ropes” because of international sanctions over its nuclear program. He said removing an ally as pivotal as Assad would make Iran “more vulnerable to sanctions.”
Saudi officials have been circumspect about their direct support to Syrian rebels, although government officials privately said Riyadh is buying arms and ammunition, as well as paying salaries for soldiers who defected from the Syrian military to join the rebels.
Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, general manager of Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television and an influential political analyst, said Saudi officials have paid for Kalashnikov rifles and other Russian-made weapons for defected Syrian soldiers who have been trained on Russian arms. Saudi officials have also financed shipments of millions of rounds of ammunition for the rebels, he said, echoing a common assessment among Saudi analysts.
Some analysts here said Abdullah wants to do more for the Syrian opposition, but he is being restrained by Washington. They said U.S. officials have discouraged Riyadh from sending heavier weapons, particularly shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, known as MANPADS, to combat Syrian government air attacks. They said U.S. officials are worried about such weapons ending up in the hands of extremist elements among the opposition forces, a concern reported over the weekend in the New York Times.
“They wanted to send MANPADS to the Syrians, but the Americans are worried — the Americans are blocking that,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist and media executive with close ties to the Saudi elite.
Abdullah has resisted calls for more military action, including a recent proposal from Qatar for a coordinated Arab diplomatic and military response to Syria’s violence.
Government officials insist that Saudi Arabia has not sent armed fighters to Syria. Analysts here said a few Saudi militants may be fighting in Syria, but they are not sanctioned by the government.
Abdullah has cracked down on clerics who have called for young men to travel to Syria, and Saudi Arabia’s official clerics have issued warnings telling young people not to join the fight.
The Saudi government fears kindling another generation of Saudi religious warriors like those who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. Those fighters, including Osama bin Laden, eventually became a radicalized fighting force that turned on the Saudi royal family and gave rise to al-Qaeda.
“Saudis don’t want their youth going there. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of Afghanistan,” Khashoggi said. “Saudis in Syria are a recipe for terrorism.”
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Simon Henderson, a Saudi Arabia specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said “exporting jihadis is what the Saudis have always done — to Afghanistan, to Bosnia, to Chechnya.”
“Of course, the Saudis, both in public and private, say that they are not sending jihadis to Syria,” he said. “Do I believe them? No, although I have yet to see evidence to confirm my suspicions. .?.?. If, as I suspect, we have allowed another generation of Saudi extremist youth to receive battle training, then it is easy to predict the probable consequences — a new al-Qaeda-type of terrorism, threatening us all.”
Abdullah became the first Arab leader to publicly rebuke Assad in August 2011, when he said the crackdown in Syria was “not acceptable to Saudi Arabia” and called for Assad’s government to make “comprehensive reforms” before it is “too late.”
“Either it chooses wisdom on its own, or it will be pulled down into the depths of turmoil and loss, God forbid,” Abdullah said.
Saud Kabli, political and foreign affairs columnist for the al-Watan newspaper, said the Saudi public was growing increasingly angry about the situation in Syria, which has put pressure on Abdullah to take a tougher stance. “This is the first time that the Saudi government bends to the will of the people on foreign policy,” Kabli said.
Abdullah’s relations with Assad have been strained at least since the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon. The Syrian government is widely be
“Abdullah was extremely close to Hariri,” said Robert Lacey, a British author who has written extensively on Saudi Arabia. “Hariri became a Saudi citizen, he was Saudi’s man in Lebanon. His death was very painful for Abdullah, and he holds a personal grudge against Assad.”
Many here have argued for the government to help overthrow Assad by force, either by more aggressively arming the Free Syrian Army or intervening as part of an international military force.
“I think we should be doing more,” said Sondus Al-Aidrous, 23, a therapist at a private hospital. Like almost all Saudi women, she was fully veiled in black, with only her eyes visible, as she shopped for makeup at the chic Kingdom Mall in Riyadh. “I know we send money, but we should have stopped the violence.”
The Saudi public’s connection to Syria is strengthened by the fact that more than a million Syrians live in Saudi Arabia. Jameel Daghestani, a Syrian community leader in Riyadh, said many are long-time residents, but he estimated that up to 90,000 have come to the kingdom to stay with family or friends since the violence in Syria began. Many of them are benefiting from a recent decree by Abdullah that Syrians visiting Saudi Arabia may indefinitely renew their visas.
Bashir al-Azem, a Syrian who runs a construction company and has lived in Saudi Arabia since 1966, said the Syrian community has raised millions of dollars — mainly for humanitarian relief, but also to support the rebels. He said he personally has donated more than $530,000, and his company contributed an additional $266,000 during the national telethon.
“For the first six or seven months after the revolution, I said whatever money I send, I do not want it to buy any weapons,” he said. “But after seeing all the killing, I don’t mind. I tell them, if you need bullets, buy them.”
Reem Fuad Mohammed, 46, a wealthy Saudi from Jiddah whose family is in the construction machinery business, said she was so saddened by televised images of the Syria violence that she collected $500,000 in cash and goods and shipped them to Syrian refugees in Lebanon in May.
She spent an additional $100,000 of her own money to equip a small health clinic in Lebanon and pay for medical treatment.
During an interview in her elegant Jiddah home, she picked up her iPhone and dialed Hasna Hassoun, a Syrian woman she met in Lebanon who lost her husband, two children and both legs in a Syrian government attack.
Hassoun spoke on the phone as she was lying in a hospital bed while a doctor measured her for prosthetic legs. “I was so happy that the people of Saudi Arabia were helping,” she said. “I felt like a whole family was taking care of me.”
Syria’s suffering opens a door for Washington
Patrick Cockburn, Sunday 7 October 2012, Independent
World View: As sanctions bite in Iran and Turkish shells fall, US is well placed to broker regional peace talks
….After the US presidential election, Washington could well decide that it is in its interests to go along with Turkish urgings and give more military support to the Syrian opposition. The US might calculate that a prolonged and indecisive civil war in Syria, during which central government authority collapses, gives too many chances to al-Qa’ida or even Iran. It has had a recent example of how a political vacuum can produce nasty surprises when the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed in Benghazi last month.
An ideal outcome from the American point of view is to seek to organise a military coup against the Syrian government in Damascus. Zilmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote recently in Foreign Policy magazine that the US should take steps “empowering the moderates in the opposition, shifting the balance of power through arms and other lethal assistance, encouraging a coup leading to a power-sharing arrangement, and accommodating Russia in exchange for its co-operation”.
By becoming the opposition’s main weapons’ suppliers, the US could gain influence over the rebel leadership, encourage moderation and a willingness to share power. Mr Khalilzad envisages that these moves will prepare the ground for a peace conference similar to that held at Taif in Saudi Arabia in 1989 that ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. It is also what the US would have liked to have happened in Iraq after 1991.
More direct military involvement in Syria could be dangerous for the US in that it could be sucked into the conflict, but outsourcing support for the rebels to Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf may be even riskier. Arms and money dispensed by them are most likely to flow to extreme Sunni groups in Syria, as happened when Pakistani military intelligence was the conduit for US military aid to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.
Instead of a fight to the finish – and that finish would probably be a long way off – a peace conference with all the players may be the only way to bring an end to the Syrian war. But it is also probably a long way off, because hatred and fear is too deep and neither side is convinced it cannot win. . [Continue reading…]
Majed al-Muhammad, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, slammed his hand on his desk. “Doesn’t America have satellites?” he asked, almost shouting. “Can’t it see what is happening?”
A retired Syrian Army medic, Mr. Muhammad had reached the rank of sergeant major in the military he now fights against. He said he had never been a member of a party, and loathed jihadists and terrorists.
But he offered a warning to the West now commonly heard among fighters seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad: The Syrian people are being radicalized by a combination of a grinding conflict and their belief that they have been abandoned by a watching world.
If the West continues to turn its back on Syria’s suffering, he said, Syrians will turn their backs in return, and this may imperil Western interests and security at one of the crossroads of the Middle East…..
From Sunni friend who lives in Aleppo
Brian Stoddard, “