Syria economy: Sanctions loom
2011-08-19, Aug. 19 (Economist Intelligence Unit) —

The US administration has taken the lead in imposing trade sanctions on Syria, with the explicit aim of hastening the demise of the Assad regime. Owing to the limited size of US-Syrian trade, these measures on their own will have little direct impact. However, they could pave the way for similar measures from the EU and, conceivably, from the UN Security Council.

The regime would still have the resources to survive, but would face a growing risk of being brought down by interest groups within Syria that are unwilling to continue to tie their fortunes to those of the Assad family. The US president, Barack Obama, declared on August 18th that the time has come for the Syrian president to step aside. As part of the efforts being made by the international community to support the aspirations of the Syrian people for democratic government and an end to repression, Mr Obama said that he had approved measures to deepen the regime’s financial isolation. They include barring US persons from having any transactions with the Syrian government a ban on US imports of Syrian crude oil or  petroleum products and outlawing any dealings by US individuals or companies with the Syrian oil sector. All US investment in Syria will be prohibited.

Canadian concerns

The US sanctions are largely symbolic, but no less significant for all that. According to the most recent Syrian official trade figures, the US exported goods worth US$46m to Syria in 2009  (0.3% of Syria’s total imports) and purchased Syrian goods worth US$22m (0.2% of the total). US companies are not heavily involved in Syria. In the oil sector, Gulfsands Petroleum, founded in Houston, is a significant player, but it shifted its corporate base to the UK three years ago. The only other US-connected player in Syria is IPR, which, in partnership with ONGC of India started production from its Rashid field last year.

The US sanctions may have more of any impact on Canadian firms, which have more substantial investments in Syria, particularly if the Canadian government follows Mr Obama’s lead. Suncor (by virtue of its merger with Petro-Canada in 2009) has a stake in the Ebla Petroleum Company, which produces about 900m cu metres/year of natural gas from fields originally discovered in central Syria by Marathon of the US (in the early 1980s). These fields have started up relatively recently, in 2010, and Suncor clearly has a major concern to recoup its estimated US$1.2bn investment. The natural gas is entirely consumed within Syria. Suncor also has exploration blocks in Syria. A Suncor official said that the company is not violating any sanctions at present, but that the situation was under review. Another Canada-based firm, Tanganyika Petroleum, also produces oil from the Oudeh field, but has been owned by China’s Sinopec since 2008.

Syria currently produces 387,000 barrels/day of crude oil, according to the oil ministry. Just over 50% is produced by the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC), with the remainder coming from nine joint-venture firms in which SPC has 50% stakes. The largest producer among these is Al-Furat Petroleum Company, with output of about 90,000 b/d; its foreign partners are Shell, ONGC and China national Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). CNPC has a separate joint venture (Kawkab) with CNPC; the other foreign players include Tatneft of Russia, Total of  France, INA Naftaplin of Croatia, IPR, Suncor and Gulfsands (with Sinochem as an equity partner).

Destination Europe

Syria exports about 145,000 b/d of crude via its state oil marketing firm, Sytrol. Most of these sales are of heavy crude produced by SPC, and their main destinations are refineries in Germany, Italy and France. In 2009 Syria’s oil exports totalled US$2.8bn (just over one-quarter of total exports); exports to the three European countries totalled US$2.2bn. The remainder of Syria’s oil production is processed in the Homs and Banias refineries to produce fuel oil, diesel and gasoline. According to the official trade statistics, Syria in 2009 was self-sufficient in fuel oil and diesel (both of which are subsidised), but imported gasoline worth US$1.5bn, although it also exported US$712m worth of gasoline.

The IMF has a slightly different picture, putting total oil and petroleum product exports at US$3.5bn petroleum imports at US$3.3bn. The overall oil balance of payments was negative, according to the IMF, owing to the US$1.2bn paid in 2009 to oil companies as royalties. If the EU were to impose an embargo on purchases of Syrian crude, the government would probably be able to find buyers in Asia, albeit at a discount. It would also have options to secure alternative supplies of gasoline, should the EU impose a ban on sales of petroleum products to Syria. Gasoline imports totalled 3.6m tonnes in 2009, a relatively modest amount, which could be secured from Russia or Iran (which is now a net exporter, having cut consumption through scrapping subsidies and boosted refinery output).

The bulk of Syria’s imports come from countries that do not appear to be inclined to impose sanctions: the top four suppliers are Ukraine, China, Turkey and Russia, of which only Turkey is showing any real interest in pressurising the Assad regime. Syria’s largest export market by far is Iraq, which seems happy to maintain cordial relations with Mr Assad.

Syria: main trade categories; 2009 US$m Imports Exports

Food, beverages and tobacco 2,822 2,550

Crude oil 0 2,850

Gasoline 1,496 712

Plastics 832 320

Pharmaceuticals 175 240

Manufactured goods 4,399 1,180

Machinery and vehicles 2,562 392

Total 15,359 10,502

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics.

Syria, main trading partners; 2009

US$m

Imports Exports

Ukraine 1,618 Iraq 2,703

China 1,303 Germany 945

Turkey 1,167 France 670

Russia 912 Italy 585

Egypt 860 Saudi Arabia 583

South Korea 785 Egypt 360

Saudi Arabia 615 Lebanon 340

Italy 547 Spain 338

Germany 447 Turkey 312

France 223 UK 151

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics.

Ehsani on Sanctions:

As expected, the EU’s foreign policy committee has proposed adding 15 more Syrian officials and the five different Syrian oil companies to the existing sanctions lit. This would match the EU’s oil embargo to that announced by the U.S. yesterday. The formal vote will take place early next week.

What is critical is that the EU would broaden the definition of people covered by the sanctions from those “involved in the repression” to those “benefitting from the regime’s actions”. This is a much broader definition that the present time.

In addition to the ban on oil imports, technical assistance through the EIB will also be withdrawn.

In the past Europe was not in favor of restricting oil and gas exports for fear that energy shortages will place a heavy burden on the average Syrian citizen. This changed after the U.S. imposed its own sanctions on the sector. It is reported that the EU may soon add both the telecommunication as well as the banking industries to the list.

Incidentally, one recent source of refined petroleum imports to Syria has been the Ukraine. Early last year, a senior Syrian delegation led by Mohammed Hussein (ex Finance Minister) signed a free trade agreement with that country. It will be interesting to see how this relationship survives and prospers following the recent sanctions by the US and the EU.

Wisam Tarif on why the Syrian Opposition is so Divided

Activist: It’s Time For Syrian Opposition To Unify
by Kelly McEvers, NPR, August 19, 2011

President Obama has now called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to quit. But if he did, or if he is toppled, who would replace Assad?

There’s no clear answer. Assad and his late father, Hafez Assad, have ruled Syria for four decades and have not tolerated anything that resembles a genuine opposition inside the country’s borders.

“There is no opposition in Syria. There are opposition groups,” said Lebanon’s Wissam Tarif, who has been a prominent campaigner for democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

Divided Opposition

The problem, Tarif says, is that the emerging opposition groups are deeply divided, with no real plan of how the country would be run in a post-Assad era.

Tarif is currently in Beirut and has been documenting the deaths, injuries and detentions in Syria during Assad’s harsh crackdown on protesters over the past five months.

Tarif has been in touch with those leading the protests, and he used to work with anti-government groups inside Syria. Those groups made no real progress until the Arab Spring turned much of the region upside-down. And they still lack unity and direction.

By some counts, there are at least seven Syrian exile groups, each with its own leaders and its own ideas about how the country should go forward.

Then there’s the internal opposition, which has been criticized by some activists for being too close to the Assad regime.

And finally there are the young protesters who have taken to the streets. But Tarif says even they are divided and ill-equipped to provide real leadership.

“There’s millions of people taking to the streets, willing to die for freedom. And it’s a hell of a very difficult job. But it’s not enough,” he says, adding that the demonstrators “do not know how to do politics.”

Call For Unified Council

Tarif says all of these groups need to work together on a transitional council. It would be something of a shadow government, similar to what the rebels have created in Libya. However, that Libyan council has been filled with friction recently.

Still, Tarif says the important thing is to create a council and start working on how to get rid of Assad, maintain stability and run a new country.

“They have a lot of political differences, they have a lot of different political visions, and they have to overcome it,” he said.

Up to now, anti-government groups in Syria have preferred to remain decentralized. This made it more difficult for the Syrian security forces to track them down.

The Obama administration criticized the Assad regime for months, and on Thursday called for him to step down. Assad has given no indication that he’ll comply. But Tarif says it’s time for the opposition to step up, stop arguing and unify.

“Such leadership has to emerge. And it has to emerge yesterday. They don’t have time,” he says.

Syrian Opposition Names New 55 Person Transitional Parliament in Effort to Meet US Demands for a Unified Leadership. [It isn not clear how such a diverse body will be able to make decisions or hammer out decisions without an elected leader or two, but it is a beginning.

It is composed of 16 technocrats, 10 from the Antalya meeting, 7 from the Bruxselles meeting, 8 from the Salvation Meeting in Istanbul, 4 seculars, 12 Ulema, 8 youth, and an effort has been made to include members from all the religious communities.

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U.S. sanctions on Syrian gov’t not sufficient to bring down al-Assad
2011-08-19 11:35:43
by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) — The latest U.S. call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster and its new sanctions imposed on Damascus may not be sufficient to bring down Assad, U.S. experts said on Thursday.
….
Obama issued a new executive order that immediately froze all assets of the Syrian government under U.S. jurisdiction, and prohibited all U.S. citizens from engaging in any transactions involving the Syrian government.

It also “bans U.S. imports of Syrian-origin petroleum or petroleum products; prohibits U.S. persons from having any dealings in or related to Syria’s petroleum or petroleum products; and prohibits U.S. persons from operating or investing in Syria.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury announced that it barred trade with five Syrian oil and gas companies, including General Petroleum Corporation, Syrian Company For Oil Transport, Syrian Gas Company, Syrian Petroleum Company and Sytrol. Speaking on a White House conference call on Thursday, senior U.S. officials said the new sanctions, along with other measures the administration has taken against Assad, will “disrupt the Syrian regime’ s ability to finance its campaign of violence against the Syrian people.”

But there remains some questions as to whether the sanctions will have any impact at all, as the United States is no major importer of Syrian oil.

“The U.S. response alone probably will not have a substantial impact on the question of Assad stepping down,” said Wayne White, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who for decades served in various U.S. government positions in the Arab world.

David Pollock, senior fellow at the Washington Institute, echoed those thoughts.” The sanctions themselves are relatively minor,” he said. “But what’ s much more important is (U.S. President Barack Obama’s) very explicit statements that Assad should step aside.”

“So it’ s really this support (which is important for) the demonstrators in Syria, as well as other countries that are looking to see which way the wind is blowing,” he said.

U.S. Officials said they would continue to build on those actions as well as work with the international community to force Assad to step down, while insisting that the U.S. would not intervene in the domestic affairs of Syria.

Three leading European powers, Germany, Britain and France, have also called for the Syrian leader to step down, and U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Thursday said the Obama administration is now looking to more countries to take similar steps.

Markets prepared to handle Syrian oil loss, August 19, 2011
By David Sheppard, Ikuko Kurahone, Reuters

LONDON: Oil markets will quietly swallow the loss of Syrian supplies if Europe joins Washington in slapping new sanctions on the country, but prices would spike if Syria’s ally, and major oil producer Iran, becomes involved in a confrontation with the West.

Analysts and traders said it would take several weeks before the Syrian oil trade could grind to a halt, even if traders such as Vitol or Trafigura are forced to stop sending refined products for President Bashar Assad’s government and companies such as Shell are forced to stop producing and exporting oil from Syria…..

Russia opposed to call for Syria’s Assad to step down
Aug 19, 2011 13:47 Moscow Time

Russia does not see eye-to-eye with the United States and the European Union on their call for the Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down.

Moscow believes that Assad should be given time to carry out the reforms that Damascus has recently spoken of.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Syria has already made impressive progress to that end. – Relevant laws have been adopted, an amnesty has been declared for political prisoners, and Syria said it was prepared to hold general elections by the end of the year and receive an international humanitarian mission.

But the main thing is Bashar Assad’s statement that all military operations against the opposition have been brought to a halt.

The Russian Foreign Ministry feels that Syria’s problems can be settled only through dialogue between the government and the opposition.

Suncor weighs effects of Syria sanctions,  Market can absorb loss of oil supply,  By David Sheppard and Ikuko Kurahone, Reuters

EGYPT: Liberals approve cleric’s suggestion for new constitution
August 18, 2011 | 11:20 am

A document drafted by the leading cleric at Al Azhar institution, the highest seat of learning in the Sunni Muslim world, to guide the writing of a new constitution for a “modern democratic state” has been widely endorsed by Egypt’s liberal and secular politicians.

The consensus was announced during a meeting that was held under the auspices of Azhar’s top cleric Ahmed el Tayeb on Wednesday and attended by nine potential presidential candidates, representatives of 22 political parties and a number of intellectuals and religious leaders.

“Those who attended the meeting at Al Azhar, agreed that Azhar’s document is a general guiding frame for the constitutional committee,” said presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei. Presidential aspirant Ayman Nour described the document as seeking to unite “political forces over the values and principles of a modern democratic and constitutional state.”

Initially brought to light by Tayeb in June, the document consists of 11 principles, proposing that Egypt has an Islamic identity but is committed to a “civil and democratic state governed by law and the constitution.” The principles include articles calling for respect of freedom of opinion, faith and for human rights.

Azhar’s document comes in the middle of a fierce split between Islamists and liberals over the introduction of supra-constitutional principles that would be binding on the new parliament in its writing of a constitution after November elections. Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Freedom party, are expected to win a sizable percent of Parliament, raising fears among liberals that without guiding principles the constitution would lean heavily toward a religious state.

Tayeb said that the Azhar’s draft, which is more moderate that many Islamists would support, is a code of honor that all parties should commit to voluntarily: “Some people view the [draft] as an attempt to undermine parliament’s freedom in writing the new constitution,” said Tayeb. “But the need for us to overcome our differences and reach common ground on this constitution can’t be more urgent.”

The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice representative, Mohamed Morsi, said that no one disagreed over the content or the meanings of the Azhar document. But a more extreme sect of Islamists, Salafis, have previously rejected the idea of any constitutional suggestions or recommendations before electing the new parliament.

An Azhar spokesman has said that the Ministries’ Cabinet and the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which previously expressed willingness to adopt constitutional principles if agreed on by all national powers, have received drafts of the document. –Amro Hassan in Cairo

Gulfsands Runs Risk in Syria of Extra EU Sanctions: Reuters Link, 2011-08-19

LONDON (Reuters) – British oil firm Gulfsands Petroleum could face difficulties with future projects if the European Union follows the United States in toughening sanctions against Syria.

Hariri Tribunal Broadens Probe to 3 Other Attacks
2011-08-19 14:40:15.736 GMT

By MIKE CORDER
Leidschendam, Netherlands (AP) — The U.N.-backed court investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has widened its probe to cover three
other attacks they believe could be linked, the court announced Friday. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon said it has established jurisdiction over the June 2005 assassination of anti-Syria politician George Hawi. It also will investigate unsuccessful attempts to kill Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Elias Murr a month later and lawmaker  Marwan Hamadeh in October 2004. The court released few details of the decisions to widen the scope of its investigation, saying it did not want to compromise its work. It did not release details on why prosecutors believe the
three other attacks may be related to Hariri’s assassination.
The expansion of the case, however, represents a
significant escalation in the work of the court that has so far
focussed solely on the Feb. 14, 2005, suicide bombing that
killed Hariri.

Ehsani on Why Europe’s Impending Petroleum Product sanctions Will Hurt Syria

You ask how the trade embargo will affect Syria.

The answer to this will depend on the EU tomorrow. A draft circulated today that the region will ban the exports of refined petroleum products to Syria. Why is this important? Because while Syria may find buyers for its exports of crude (heavy type), what it really needs is to import refined crude. Iran also suffers from such a deficiency. This is why you see cars lined up at its gas stations in spite of the ample oil that it exports.

By placing the five different Syrian oil companies and agencies on the OFAC list, many countries and financial institutions will find it problematic to trade and do business with them. Iran will be an exception of course as it is under similar sanctions already.

By all accounts, Syrian businessmen report near 40-50% drop in general activity. The stock market is down by a similar amount largely reflecting this sentiment.

Again, what the EU does tomorrow with the export ban on refined petroleum will be key. The U.S. and the EU are likely to keep adding to the list of sanctions as this standoff continues. The pressure on the economy and the country’s finances are likely to intensify. Iran has been under similar sanctions and survived. I guess one argue that Syria can do the same. But, one must not underestimate the repercussions of these actions. When such measures are put in place, they are very hard to cancel and do away with.

The Syria Expert at the Economist Intelligence Unit responds

Ehsani, you are right to pick up on the importance of refined products imports (mainly mazout/diesel/gasoil), but it would be a mistake to rule out Iran as a potential supplier. Iran was dependent on product imports, but has turned that situation round through abolishing subsidies and upgrading its refineries, and is now in a position to export significant volumes of gasoline and diesel.

Syria’s products consumption has also been distorted by subsidies, and we can assume that if imports are curtailed consumption would fall either through rationing or increased prices.

Syria’s requirement for petroleum products has also been eased somewhat by significant increases in natural gas production over the past two years.

Assad to address Syrians on crisis
Thu Aug 18, 2011, Iranian TV

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reportedly plans to deliver a televised speech in the upcoming days to address the ongoing crisis in the country.

Informed sources say Assad plans to address the nation in the next two days about the months-long unrest in Syria that is feared to seriously harm the national unity in the country, a Press TV correspondent reported on Thursday….

Post Assad Syria will be Pro-Western Youtube

Syrian human rights activist Ammar Abdulhamid says democracy protesters are disgusted with Iran’s support of Assad regime.

Syria is disqualified from the next soccer World Cup.

Syria to allow UN investigators access
August 19, 2011 – AP

The United Nations said a humanitarian mission would go to Syria this weekend as European powers launched a campaign for UN Security Council sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos announced the much delayed mission after a Security Council briefing which was told of a shoot-to-kill policy against protesters, stadium executions and children feared killed in Syrian government custody.

The civilian death toll from protests which erupted in mid-March has now passed 2,000, UN under secretary general B. Lynn Pascoe told the 15-nation body.
Advertisement: Story continues below

Assad promised UN chief Ban Ki-moon in May that a UN humanitarian team could go to protest towns. His government had since blocked the mission. But Amos told reporters: “We have been guaranteed that we will have full access to where we want to go.”

Turkey and Syria – Economist
One problem with a neighbour: Turkey’s tough talk on Syria is unlikely to be matched by action

IN A small café outside Istanbul’s Fatih mosque, a slight bearded man lifts his shirt to reveal two deep bullet wounds. “Assad’s soldiers did this to me,” says Motee Albatee, who served as an imam at a Sunni mosque in the besieged Syrian town of Deraa until he fled the country several weeks ago. Mr Albatee is among a growing number of Syrian dissidents who have found sanctuary in Turkey, many of them in refugee camps near the border. Some are angry over the reluctance of Turkey’s government to get tougher with Bashar Assad, Syria’s president. “Turkey must set up a buffer zone [inside Syria]” to protect more refugees from the fighting, insists Yayha Bedir, a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Like many seated around the table, he believes only drastic action will force the Syrian army to defect en masse, bringing down Mr Assad’s brutal regime.

Such talk is particularly loud online, where Syrian tweeters have voiced disdain for Turkey’s attempts to get Mr Assad to end the bloodshed. Their fury grew earlier this month when Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, flew to Damascus to deliver what Turkish officials tautologically called a final ultimatum. “We are at the end of our tether,” roared Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
In this section

Mr Assad’s response was to intensify his assaults against unarmed civilians, notably in the Mediterranean port of Latakia (see article). This prompted Mr Davutoglu to issue yet another warning: Turkey would not, he said, “remain indifferent” to continuing massacres. Yet he also ruled out intervening to create a buffer zone. So what leverage does Turkey actually have over its erstwhile Ottoman dominion?

None whatsoever, say critics of Mr Davutoglu’s much-vaunted “zero problems with the neighbours” policy. That is unfair. But as Soli Ozel, a political scientist, puts it, the Syrian crisis has revealed that “Turkey isn’t as influential as it thought.”….

Turkey’s Western allies are not about to mount an invasion of Syria. But they are turning the diplomatic screws, and are eager for AK to sever political and trade links with Mr Assad. But a bigger prize would be to drive a wedge between Turkey and Iran. Turkey’s mollycoddling of the mullahs has angered America, most recently when Mr Erdogan’s government voted against imposing further sanctions on Iran at the United Nations last year. Turkey has since sought to make amends. It has agreed to NATO plans for a nuclear-defence missile shield that is clearly aimed at Iran. And after some dithering, it is co-operating with the alliance’s military operations in Libya.

Yet Turkey is understandably wary of openly confronting Iran, one of its main sources of natural gas and the primary transit route for Turkish exports to Central Asia. Iran has also helped Turkey in its battle against the PKK—though it continues to flirt with hardliners who oppose any deal with the Turkish government. Lately the PKK has been stepping up the fight—some 30 Turkish soldiers have been killed in the past month. On August 17th, in a bid to quell mounting public anger, Mr Erdogan authorised the bombing of hundreds of PKK targets inside Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. But such actions have failed in the past and the last thing Turkey needs is a hostile Iran.

Besides, many of AK’s pious constituents see the unrest in Syria as yet another America-backed Zionist plot to pit Turkey against Iran. The ultimate goal, their thinking goes, is to cut Turkey down to size. Disappointingly, the same line is parroted by the main opposition Republican People’s Party, for all its claims of change under its new leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

So what are Turkey’s options? It can withdraw its ambassador from Damascus, continue to intercept the flow of weapons to Syria and impose economic sanctions. Other than that, as Mr Ozel suggests, it should desist from promising any more than it can deliver.

Anderson Cooper Calls BS On Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja’Afari

Iraq Leader Says the Arab Spring Benefits Israel
August 18, 2011, By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — While Western leaders including President Obama called on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, warned Arab leaders in a speech on Thursday that Israel would benefit the most from the Arab Spring.

“There is no doubt that there is a country that is waiting for the Arab countries to be ripped and is waiting for internal corrosion,” he said in Baghdad. “Zionists and Israel are the first and biggest beneficiaries of this whole process.”

Mr. Maliki, the leader of Iraq’s Shiite government, rarely mentions Israel in speeches. But he warned that those Arab countries experiencing democratic revolutions should be wary of Israel’s taking advantage of the turmoil.

“We must take notice and be careful not to be the prey of the ambitions of this usurping country,” he said.

Mr. Maliki, who has maintained a far friendlier tone toward the Assad government than many Arab leaders, did not refer to Syria in the speech. He said that Arabs deserved to have more rights, but that they should gain them through the electoral process.

Since the uprising in Syria began, Mr. Maliki has invited many Syrian officials to Baghdad to discuss stronger economic ties between the two countries. He has also said far less about the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown on dissent than he did when there was similar unrest earlier in Bahrain, where a Sunni monarchy holds sway over a predominantly Shiite population.

Many analysts have said that Mr. Maliki’s stance on Syria reflects Iraq’s increasing tilt toward Iran, a Shiite theocracy and a strong supporter of Syria. In 2010, Mr. Maliki relied heavily on Iran’s political support to gain a second term as prime minister. Others have said that Mr. Maliki is concerned that unrest in Syria could spill over the border into Iraq and further destabilize the country.

Why the WikiLeaks cable about Syrian regime is spot on
US diplomats describe the Assad government as institutionally dishonest, brutal and defiant
Thursday 18 August 2011

In the Wikileaks cable the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is described as ‘nasty’ and ‘abrasive’ by US diplomats. Photograph: SANA / HO/EPA

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s apparently disingenuous statement to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, that military operations have ended comes as no surprise to diplomats with experience of working in Damascus.

Deceit is high on the list of qualities marking Syrian diplomatic relations, according to a frank US diplomatic cable from 2009 published by WikiLeaks this month.

“SARG [Syrian government] officials lie at every level,” wrote the US charge d’affaires in Damascus, Maura Connelly, as the US was beginning to re-engage with Syria after withdrawing its ambassador in 2005. “They persist in a lie even in the face of evidence to the contrary. They are not embarrassed to be caught in a lie.”

The portrait painted here fits with the behaviour of the regime towards its own people and the international community during the last five months: brutal and defiant.

In the cable the Syrian regime is described as willing to be “nasty” and using a style “at best abrasive and, at its worst, brutal” to achieve its aims.

This could involve anything from “harsh verbal attacks to intimidate and rattle foreign diplomats” to allegations made by Syrians abroad about harrassment by their own diplomatic staff. Other undesirable rules of engagement besides deceit are provided in the guide: “vanity and self-preservation” and the use of “non-sequitur” and “antagonism” as key strategies by officials, who are described as sticklers for protocol.

“The Syrians are not troubled by discord; they seek an upper hand in any relationship by relying on foreign diplomats’ instinctive desire to resolve problems,” Connelly wrote.

The cable suggests flattery may help lubricate meetings with Assad, whose weaknesses are described as vanity and abstraction – two hallmarks of his speeches during the current crisis.

The embattled president is described as less shrewd than his father, with a self-image as “a sort of philosopher king, the Pericles of Damascus” that influences policy to a “disproportionate” degree.

According to diplomats little has changed in the two years since the cable was written. “Syrian diplomats are a source of exasperation to all,” said one non-US western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity. “The security state runs the show, officials are hard to get hold of and when you do, they repeat the latest regime line ad nauseum.”

The cable also exemplifies why the regime has been caught short by a generation of young people who use social media to disseminate information about the crackdown. At the time of writing the Syrian ministry of foreign affairs had no internal email system, relying solely on phone and fax.

The cable does note, however, that a few talented individuals allow the Syrian government to punch above its weight.

Nour Ali is a pseudonym for a journalist based in Damascus

Iranian aid boosts Syrian regime’s survival chances
Wednesday, August 17 2011, Oxford Analytica

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday urged regional powers Turkey and Saudi Arabia to call on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, while Iran continued to stand by its Syrian ally, warning that Western interference in the country would stoke public hatred in the region. The close alliance between Syria and Iran is based on shared ideological and strategic interests, including anti-US and anti-Israeli postures and support for the Lebanon-based Hizbollah. Together they form the pillars of what has been described by concerned Sunni neighbours as the ‘Shia Crescent’ of countries stretching from Iran to Lebanon. Damascus is critical to Iran’s rising regional hegemony, and represents its most valuable ally. If the Assad regime collapsed, Iran would lose its corridor for arms shipments to the Levant, as well as its strongest ideological bulwark.
Impact
• Increasing international isolation of the Syrian regime will increase its dependence on regional ally Iran.
• Iranian military aid will boost the Syrian forces’ efficiency and prolong the regime’s survival.
• Tehran will be the major economic beneficiary of new international sanctions against Damascus.
• Iran’s promise of over 5 billion dollars in aid will compensate any loss Syria suffers in trade with Turkey.
• With Riyadh leading Arab efforts against the regime, Syria is set to become the newest battleground between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
What next
Iranian penetration into Syria will become more obvious in coming months, particularly on the military and economic fronts. Its recent offer of a short-term loan and free oil deliveries will be the first of several aid measures aimed at propping up Assad’s regime. Iran’s moves will balance any threats coming from Ankara to cut trade or engage militarily. The Alawi-dominated regime’s crackdown on its largely Sunni population and its increasing isolation alongside Iran will polarise the already tense standoff between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Sectarian tensions will increase in the region as both countries corral support for their respective Sunni and Shia constituencies.
Analysis
Syria’s violent crackdown on a five month civil uprising has increasingly isolated it from its Sunni neighbours in the Middle East. Amid mounting diplomatic pressure for an end to the violence, Iran has stood firmly in support of its Syrian ally, criticising any outside interference. In contrast to mainstream Arab TV stations, Iran’s media is providing only cursory coverage of events, adopting the Syrian regime’s line that ‘gangs and terrorists’ are the primary instigators of the violence (see SYRIA: Regime to hold firm against growing pressure – August 2, 2011).
Strengthening ties

Iran is contributing arms and military personnel to the Syrian secret service, as well as increasing its economic aid to the embattled Assad regime. …..

Outlook
International isolation will bring Iran and Syria closer together, increasing economic, military and political ties. With Iran’s support, the Assad regime will be able to withstand sanctions, and continue to attack the opposition. Having so far avoided serious reforms, the Assad regime is unlikely to undertake these now. With Riyadh bolstering the Sunni majority, and Iran the Alawi minority, a stand-off can be expected for some time to come.

U.S. favors Muslim Brotherhood over pro-democracy Syrian opposition
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 World Tribune

WASHINGTON — The administration of President Barack Obama has selected the Muslim Brotherhood over the pro-democracy opposition to lead Syria after the expected ouster of President Bashar Assad, a report said.

The Hudson Institute, a leading consultant to the Defense Department, asserted that the administration has decided to work with Turkey and the Brotherhood in Syria for a post-Assad government. In a report by Herbert London, the institute said Obama has dismissed the pro-democracy opposition as an alternative.

“It would seem far more desirable to back the democratic influences — the political organizations that require cultivation and support — despite their relative weakness at this moment,” the report, titled “U.S. Betrays Syria’s Opposition,” said. “It is these religious and secular groups that represent the real hope for the future and the counterweight to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

London, president of Hudson until 2011, said the State Department has ignored non-Brotherhood opposition groups. In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited Brotherhood operatives and urged them to work with Turkey to help oust Assad.

“Missing from the invitations are Kurdish leaders, Sunni liberals, Assyrians and Christian spokesmen,” the report said. “According to various reports the State Department made a deal with Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood representatives either to share power with Assad to stabilize the government, or replace him if this effort fails.”

Hudson cited the Syrian Democracy Council, which contains a range of ethnic and religious minorities, including Alawites and Christians. SDC was not invited to the State Department.

Independent: Robert Fisk: It’s his fast-disappearing billions that will worry Assad, not words from Washington, 2011-08-18

Obama roars. World trembles. If only. Obama says Assad must “step aside”. Do we really think Damascus trembles? Or is going to? Indeed, the titan of the White House only dared to go this far after condemnation of Bashar al-Assad by Saudi Arabia, … A Swedish government agency recently concluded that Syria was largely unaffected by the world economic crisis – because it didn’t really have an economy……

UN report says brutal crackdown in Syria ‘may amount to crimes against humanity’
By FRANK JORDANS
Associated Press
18 August 2011

GENEVA (AP) – Government forces in Syria may have committed crimes against humanity by conducting summary executions, torturing prisoners and targeting children in their crackdown against opposition protesters, a high-level U.N. human rights team said Thursday.

Their report recommends that the U.N. Security Council refer Syria to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of alleged atrocities, a move that is likely to be discussed by the council at a closed-door session in New York later Thursday…..

Expert doubts Syrian leader has Swiss stash
Thelesklaf says it would be hard to prove a direct link between Assad and assets (Keystone)
by Simon Bradley, swissinfo.ch

Swiss financial crime expert Daniel Thelesklaf has told swissinfo.ch he seriously doubts Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has assets hidden in Swiss banks.

Switzerland announced on Tuesday it was extending sanctions against Syria to include travel bans and asset freezes against Assad and nine senior officials, in a move that follows the European Union and the United States.

Syria is Switzerland’s fifth major case of frozen assets this year.

So far it has frozen SFr60 million ($69 million) belonging to former Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his clan.

It has also identified about SFr400 million belonging to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his close entourage and some SFr360 ??million belonging to Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi and his clan. Switzerland has also frozen SFr70 million in assets belonging to former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and his entourage.

Thelesklaf, who is executive director of the Basel Institute on Governance, recently accompanied a Swiss delegation to Egypt and Tunisia as an independent observer to discuss the return of any illicit funds held in Swiss banks.

swissinfo.ch: Do you think Assad and his clan have a secret Swiss fortune stashed away?

Daniel Thelesklaf: I would be very surprised if Assad held assets in Switzerland. That would be a very weak signal.

I have no idea about the possible size of the assets, but I would be surprised if a direct link to Assad could be detected. His negative track record is well known.

THREE WAYS TO HELP PUSH ASAD ASIDE, By Andrew J. Tabler, August 18, 2011, WINEP

Experts Skeptical Syria’s Assad Will Resign
By Cecily Hilleary, VOA, Washington

…. Five months into the Syrian uprisings, Bashar Al-Assad may have lost credibility, but he has not lost his stranglehold over the country.  “I think the main thing that is maintaining Bashar al Assad in power is the inability to see beyond him from Western policy makers,” says Nadim Shehadi, an Associate Fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House. In other words, Shehadi explains, “Assad creates smokescreens that prevent the world from seeing beyond him, by creating the circumstances whereby people would be afraid of what comes after he falls.”What exactly are those smokescreens?  To Shehadi they are a myriad of Western worries he says the Syrian President deliberately feeds: “Iran would come in, Al Qaeda would take over, the Muslim Brotherhood, there would be civil war like Iraq…chaos in Lebanon, chaos in the whole region.”….

“The opposition is very fragmented,” says Shehadi. “There is no leadership. That’s because this regime doesn’t allow for an opposition to be united, coherent and credible.”

Stephen McInerney, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-basedProject on Middle East Democracy, agrees. “A lot of the key people that will emerge as leaders,” he says, “are keeping a low profile, and a lot of people who are being active in this protest movement don’t want to be known at this point, because if they are prominently known as leaders of the opposition and the protest movement, they are more likely to be targeted, and their work more likely to be eliminated.”

At a recent press conference in Washington, D.C, Radwan Ziadeh, who is also a Visiting Scholar at The Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, acknowledged the lack of unity among Assad’s opponents. “It’s not easy,” he said, “to come up with a united opposition after 47 years of dictatorship. But even though the Syrian opposition does not have a united leadership, they do have a united agenda: A free Syria, for all Syrians.”

Fears of Civil War

Ziadeh also addressed concerns about religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions. In a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and other diplomatic officials he stressed that the new Syria will be politically, ethnically and religiously inclusive. “We don’t want anybody to be excluded by the transition.”

Not even the Baath party, he adds.

Still, Washington has publicly stated that it is looking for clearer signs from the opposition. The State Department said this week said that U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford continues to meet with the Syrian government and the opposition on a daily basis.

“I think where we are in our discussions with the opposition,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters, “is to continue to encourage them to work together, to be unified in their message, and to come up with a clear roadmap of their own for a democratic future for Syria.”

Time: Syrian Regime Hunts Army Defectors Who Seek to Save Citizens, 2011-08-18

TIME’s reporter in Syria meets up with military defectors, even as the Assad regime rushes to find and exterminate them Syrian Regime Hunts Army Defectors Who Seek to Save Citizens…

The group of soldiers, all of whom were lieutenants from Rastan, had mainly been stationed in the southern city of Dara’a, where the antiregime uprising erupted in mid-March, as well as in the capital of Damascus. The men had each escaped from their various deployments and returned to their hometown. Two days before TIME visited them, they had donned their uniforms again to publicly announce their defection as a group in a brief, boilerplate video statement that was uploaded to YouTube and later aired on al-Jazeera. They made individual videos too, like a 48-second clip showing First Lieutenant Fadi Kism, a bearded man with dark eyes and plump lips, announcing his defection from the army’s Third Division. “I’m doing it because of the destruction that I saw in Rastan, and in Homs, in Dara’a and Hama,” the 23-year-old tells the camera. (See “A Visit to Hama, the Rebel Syrian City That Refused to Die.”)

The next day, around 1 p.m., shortly after his mother had watched the video of Rastan’s defectors on al-Jazeera, Kism was dead, killed in an ambush by loyalist soldiers who had tricked him and his colleagues into thinking they wanted to join them. A firefight broke out, the defectors say, in an account verified by several civilian witnesses interviewed independently. The official Syrian news agency SANA ran a short piece the next day saying that “an armed terrorist group” had “set an ambush, four kilometers east of Rastan city, opening fire on a convoy carrying officers to their workplaces.” An officer and two soldiers were killed, the report said, adding that three loyalists were wounded. “We only protected ourselves,” says Lieutenant Ibrahim Mohammad Ayoub, one of the remaining eight defectors. “We are not interested in attacking unless civilian lives, or our lives, are in danger.”

The defectors say they are being hunted down by a regime that won’t forgive disloyalty. They insist they are only protecting their townsfolk, but it seems like they themselves are in need of protection.

There are reports, difficult to verify, of soldiers being killed by their colleagues for refusing to shoot protesters. Low-level military defectors are breaking away in small numbers, but there have been very few high-ranking deserters, largely because the military’s upper echelon is made up of officers from the same Alawite minority sect that President Bashar Assad belongs to. TIME spoke to one of the most senior defectors, Colonel Hussein Harmoush, in northern Syria in June, just hours before he crossed into Turkey. Harmoush now claims to speak for the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA), a loose grouping of defectors that is reportedly headed by Colonel Riad al-As’ad, whose whereabouts are unclear. Still, beyond a few amateur video statements — which encourage other soldiers to desert and offer promises to protect civilians — there is precious little proof of the FSA’s existence, at least in any regimented form…..

SAC welcomes Obama’s call for Assad to ‘step aside’

Syrian American group urges Russia, China, Brazil, India to end support for Syrian dictator

(Washington, D.C., 8/18/11) – The Syrian American Council (SAC) welcomed the statement today from President Barack Obama calling for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to “step aside,” and expressed optimism about new measures introduced to further isolate the Assad regime…….

In a statement, SAC Chairman Dr. Louay Safi said:

“We applaud President Obama and his administration for finally calling for Bashar Assad’s immediate resignation. We appreciate the leadership from the United States over the past month to further isolate the Assad regime, and we welcome the Executive Order from the President with hopes that it will hasten the end of the Assad regime and stop the bloodshed of innocent men, women and children.

“We urge the United Nations to follow with an immediate resolution that holds the Assad regime accountable for its crimes against humanity that President Obama referenced, which include the ‘imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering’ of thousands of innocent Syrians.

“We specifically urge the leaders of Russia, China, Brazil, and India to immediately cease protecting the Assad regime, and to stand on the right side of history by supporting Syria’s peaceful revolution. By opposing a UN Security Council resolution, these governments are directly facilitating the massacres we have witnessed in the past month. Any government or organization that can exert pressure on the Assad regime to step aside and allow the Syrian people to take control of their destiny must do so immediately.

“Finally, we wish to commend President Obama for reminding all people that the fate of Syria is firmly in the hands of the millions of Syrians who have admirably taken to the streets ….

EU and US say Syria’s Assad must step down
Reuters, Aug 19, 2011

BRUSSELS // The European Union told Syrian President Bashar Al Assad today to step down, following a similar call by the United States, and threatened to toughen its sanctions against his regime.

“The EU has repeatedly emphasised that the brutal repression must be stopped … The Syrian leadership, however, has remained defiant,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement.

“This shows that the Syrian regime is unwilling to change… The EU notes the complete loss of Bashar Al Assad’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Syrian people and the necessity for him to step aside,” she said.

Ms Ashton said the EU’s 27 governments were preparing to extend their list of Syrian entities targeted by EU sanctions and discussing ways to broaden the bloc’s measures against Mr Assad.

“The EU is moving ahead with discussing further restrictive measures that will broaden its sanctions against the Syrian regime. By these efforts we continue to aim at assisting the Syrian people to achieve their legitimate aspirations,” she said

Obama Calls for Syrian President to Step Down, By MARK LANDLER and NADA BAKRI in the NYTimes

“The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way,” Obama said in a statement. “His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people.”

“For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

EU To Consider Ban On Refined Product Exports To Syria, 2011-08-18, Dow Jones Newswires

Fact Sheet on Syrian Sanctions By New York Times

Resistance Transforms a Once Mute Syrian City
This article was reported by an employee of The New York Times from Syria, and written by Anthony Shadid from Beirut, Lebanon. August 17, 2011

HOMS, Syria — The narrower the streets of this city, a caldron of revolt and resistance against four decades of rule by the Assad family, the blunter the graffiti becomes. It is scrawled on walls, garbage bins, phone booths, doors and even tree trunks, as a city that was long quiescent declares these days that it will no longer stay quiet.

“We won’t bow to anyone but God,” says one slogan.

The sentiments are echoed in the streets, most remarkable perhaps for the simple notion that no one — not young men filming, not fathers hoping for a glimpse of defiance and not grandmothers chanting from their balconies — seems ready to give up.

“Syria wants freedom,” goes their cry.

Syria’s uprising has entered its sixth month, as protesters defy an escalating crackdown that has killed hundreds this month in cities like Hama, Deir al-Zour and, now, Latakia. International condemnations have mounted, even as diplomats acknowledge a paucity of tools to determine the uprising’s outcome. But daily life in Homs underlines the degree to which the uprising has already transformed life in a country once remarkable for its dearth of politics.

Dissent and defiance in Homs, its residents say, have become knitted into the city’s fabric, signaling to the government that however ferocious the repression, it will face a resilient opposition for the foreseeable future.

Each night, in Homs, the battle begins anew…..

The conceptual gap between Syria and the U.S.
By David W. Lesch in Foreign Policy, Wednesday, August 17, 2011

…..For an orderly transition from dictatorship to democracy two elements are crucial: “an elite willing to hand over power, and an alternative elite organized enough to accept it.” In Syria neither exists. Will it at some point? Probably not, but it is not out of the realm of possibility, as there are stirrings that something might emerge on both sides of the equation.

Most of us watching from the outside — those making policy decisions in Washington, at the U.N. or in European capitals — are from a decidedly different world and conceptual paradigm than the Syrian leadership. To think that we could all get on the same page and collectively find a peaceful way out of this has been more fantasy than reality. The weltanschauung prisms are anchored in vastly different experiences, pre-conceptions, local politics, and ideologies, and they have a very hard time seeing and understanding each other.

Re-Examining the Arab Spring – August 15, 2011 | STRATFOR

…..Among Europeans and within the U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes all the things that we have discussed: that there is powerful discontent in oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes, and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able to work with.

The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the al Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on wishful thinking in the face of the real world.

Read more: Re-Examining the Arab Spring | STRATFOR

Syrian Bank Rejects U.S. Charges on WMD Ties
Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011

The Lebanon branch of a state-run Syrian financial institution on Wednesday rejected U.S. charges that it had carried out transactions that assisted unconventional weapons operations in North Korea and Syria, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Aug. 11).

The United States last week unveiled punitive measures against the Commercial Bank of Syria and its subsidiary, the Syrian Lebanese Commercial Bank, for doing business with Syrian and North Korean entities blacklisted previously by Washington for purportedly supporting WMD proliferation activities.

The U.S. Treasury Department also said the Syrian bank has done business with blacklisted Iranian entities such as Bank Melli, Bank Saderat and the Export Development Bank of Iran.

The Syrian Lebanese Commercial Bank described the U.S. charges as “unfounded political allegations.”

“Since the establishment of our institution, we have never had any operation with either a North Korean or an Iranian entity even before the existing sanctions,” the bank stated.

“As a result, we deny all accusation of being involved in any illegal activity with any suspected country,” the firm said in released remarks

Syria: the Cost of Crisis
Wed, Aug 17, 2011
Chaosistan, Middle East, Strategic Deterrence
By Vladislav GULEVICH (Ukraine)

Syria has entered the sixth month of anti-government riots, orchestrated from abroad. Protesters no longer seek moderate reforms, they aggressively demand Bashar Assad`s resignation. Western media accuse Damascus of ‘opposing democratic changes’. The former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Craig Roberts, had earlier explained what these changes were about: “We need to topple Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria because we want to oust China and Russia from the Mediterranean” (‘US risks war with China and Russia’).

Russia has a naval base in Syria`s Tartus, the only place in the Mediterranean where the Russian fleet has its warships stationed. In 1991 Russia reformed its Mediterranean squadron, and since then has sailed to the area only several times. Meanwhile, the US and NATO presence there is not decreasing.

The base in Tartus was established to replace one in Sevastopol if Ukraine bans Russia from having its navy there. There is an alternative port in Novorossiysk but it can`t accommodate as many ships as the one in Sevastopol. On ousting Russian sailors from Syria, Americans will fulfill their goal. That is why Washington is being so persistent in trying to topple Bashar Assad, who is Russia`s ally. The day Assad leaves, Russian sailors will be asked to quit, too. The next step for Washington will be to oust Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from Crimea to Novorossiysk. After that Russia will no longer remain in the list of countries enjoying naval presence in the west…..

To conclude, I would like to say the following:

– in case riots in Syria end in Assad`s resignation, Syria will be controlled by the US

– Turkey, Russia and Iran will have its positions in the Middle East weakened

– Russia will be ousted form the Mediterranean and locked inside the Black Sea basin, where it will have to deal with Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia – US allies and anti-Russian foreign policies

– the Kurdish issue will become even a greater threat for Turkey, especially in view of the fact that a pro-American Assad`s successor won`t be opposing what Kurdish rebels are going to implement on Syrian territories

– Al-Qaida has already voiced its support to Syrian rioters, and it appears that they are going to strengthen their position in post-Assad Syria, the fact which Ankara cannot favor; but this will allow Washington justify its military presence in the region

– If Assad steps down, Turkey will face huge economic losses (in 2010 bilateral trade between Syria and Turkey stood at $2.5bln, and the sides agreed to reach the $5bln level)

– If this all happens, Turkey will have no alternative but to abandon its ambitious plans to create a free trade zone with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar founded the Baath Party

The Baath Party has called an emergency meeting today, leading optimists to argue that the Syrian government is preparing to annul article 8 of the constitution. Article 8 establishes the Baath Party as the “leader of the state and society.” It effectively guarantees that the president and leader of the Baath will be elected President of Syria every seven years.

I find the notion that the Assad family will look for a soft landing hard to believe, largely because there is no soft landing for this regime. From the opening days of this uprising I have predicted that Assad and his loyalists would try to fight their way out. The arguments against Assad negotiating an end to his regime are many. Here are a few. Close to a million Syrians will lose a great deal when this regime goes down — their jobs, their privileges, and some, if not many, will lose their lives. Syria’s allies also stand to lose a lot. Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas and are deeply invested in the Assad regime. It is widely reported that Iran has begun to send substantial amounts of money to prop up the regime and soften the blow of Western sanctions. Had Bashar and his family been willing to cut their losses, they would have done so months ago, before the level of anger and the possibility of wide spread revenge among top regime figures had risen to the present levels. If they negotiate today, most top figures will be unable to avoid the hangman’s noose.

I have been wrong a number of times in the past 6 months and hope that I am wrong today. The rising level of sectarian anger in the comment section of Syria Comment suggests that there is no soft landing for this regime – especially at this late hour. But Assad could spare much bloodshed and division among Syrians if he were to try to negotiate a transition to new and free elections, rather than to try to hang on to power — a possibility that seems even more unlikely today than it did several months ago.

In other news. Imad Moustapha and embassy staff in Washington have been restricted to a 25 mile radius. Syria, in response, has restricted Ambassador Ford in Damascus to the same restrictions. The EU is weighing broad sanctions on the Syrian banking and energy sectors. Leaders will meet this Friday.

From the Comment Section

Observer:

It is the regime that we need to concentrate on. There is a genuine popular revolt against the family rule without checks and balances. There is a revolt against corruption and a system that forces corruption on the people to keep them humiliated and subdued; a revolt against monopoly and graft and the use of power to continue to exploit the majority of the people. There is a revolt against a few that are above the law and that use the organs of security and the resources of the state for their personal benefits and at the expense of both majority and minority groups. There is a revolt against a system that is meant to prevent the average Syrian from advancing his/her lot as the education/economic/opportunity system leaves them unable to advance or compete with the rest of the region and the world. This is the revolt against the insulting news from SANA and the use of the armed forces after the abolition of the state of emergency in indiscriminate killing and destruction. It is a revolt against the inability of anyone to have a real debate about their future from the scripted sermons to the forced marches.

It is a revolt against a system that for practical purposes has nothing but utter contempt for the average Syrian, treating the citizen as less than a worm or insect and against the mentality of graded citizenship that we see today.

Sheila

Dear Dr. Landis, All Syrians are fearful of the chaos that will ensue upon the fall of the current Syrian regime. It is disingenuous for the Christians to claim that they fear chaos more or that they will be affected more than anybody else. On the other hand, the Alawiis fear is very legitimate. There is a lot of bad blood between Sunnis and Alawiis thanks to the Assads and their criminals. The only reason for the Christians to be fearful is their stand with the regime against the people. The irony is that the regime is not purely Alawii, the supporters of the regime are not purely Alawiis and Christians and the opposition is not purely Sunnis.

For the Christians to claim that they will have to leave the country if this regime falls, is also disingenuous. Do we have any statistics on how many Christians left the country between 1963 and today under the wonderful rule of the Assads and its Baath party?. My husband and I went to private schools in Aleppo. Most of our friends and class mates were Christian. Of my husbands class, close to 95% are out of the country. Of my class, close to 80% are out of the country. I would venture to say that even before the uprising started, that if you offered any Syrian a chance to leave the country to the USA, Europe or the Gulf, they would be ecstatic. The only people to refuse are the elderly and those that are making millions because they are part of or benefiting from the corruption of this regime. All Syrians from all ethnicities and religions including Alawiis, have been leaving the country in droves looking for the basic opportunity to live a decent life or fleeing oppression and persecution by the Syrian regime.

Some Guy From Damascus

…When you’re confronted by sectarian language don’t reply with more sectarian language…this revolution’s legitimacy derives from our secular, national and peaceful seed. I don’t care if the next 1000 presidents of syria are alawites…what matters is their commitment to syria and all it’s people rather than a select few.

that being said, …. there is obviously no limit to their atrocities. the regime has no leash on these dogs and they are the chemotherapy of civil society. the army is failing us miserably…..

Mouris

Your reply to the reporter is a good one. I think Christians of the ME should do more to highlight to fellow Muslim citizens that the ME was their land for a long time until Islam came to the region. I think majority of Muslims think Christians are foreign to this land and I think this leads to more distrust of Christians. On a related note, opposition movement should come out and formally announce that they will guarantee minority rights, It will go a long way to change minority attitude.

Majedkhaldoun

“it is not at all in the interest of the minorities to antagonise the majority just to defend a hated regime”, What would the Christians do if the revolution appears close to winning, would they switch sides? It may be late. Christians are smart and educated.  I believe that many of them prefer democratic system, where their status is protected by the rule of law than to live under current system of despotism and sectarian rule. Are they going to sleep better seeing 20-30 sunni slaughtered daily?… the regime knows well that even if they reduce the numbers of demonstrators now, in the future the whole Syrian people will rise against them,they are buying time.the minorities better think again.

Abughassan

Increased sectarianism in Syria is mostly due to the oppression of the Syrian regime,the rise of Iran and the Saudi religious establishment. From my own observations,i assure you that most syrian sunnis are not as sectarian as Bashar’s shabeehas, and their grievances with the regime are fully justified ,but those grievances are also shared by most Syrians, not just Sunnis. I will support a Sunni president just because this may help Syrians heal,but I do not think a majority rule will provide a magical solution to Syria’s problems,the system as a whole needs to be reformed,then it will matter less who is the president.

No fair observer can equate the brutality of the regime and the thuggishness of rogue elements on the opposition side,the regime,hands down,carry most of the blame. Cool minds,not hot guns,can still save Syria . If Bashar does not stop his violent security forces and start a transitional political process that ends with free elections he will be remembered as the accidental president who destroyed syria for his lack of vision and leadership.

News Round Up follows:

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Minorities should not derail uprisings: They should be wary of being exploited by autocratic Arab regimes as a leverage or tool against the majority
By Faisal Al Qasim, Special to Gulf News
Published: August 17, 2011

There is no doubt at all that ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world or anywhere else, have the right to live peacefully, and to preserve their cultural, social and religious identities as full-fledged citizens. They should not suffer any kind of pressure, blackmail or persecution by the majority. But at the same time they should know that even democracy is always at the side of the majority.

Some shaky Arab rulers are frightening minorities these days that the Muslim majority might persecute them later if the regime fails. The rulers in question have been presenting themselves over the decades as secularists, and they claim that the new regimes might be Islamist, which is not true. Minorities should not even fear the emergence of an Islamic government, as the new regimes, unlike the toppled ones, will be really democratic, and everything will be decided at the ballot box. Therefore, minorities should be far-sighted and not allow some of the falling dictators to use them in their fight to remain in power. And had there been real wise people within the minorities and not just mercenary leaders, they would have sided with the rising majority to help the revolutions succeed, or at least they should have kept their mouths shut.

Dr Faisal Al Qasim is a Syrian journalist based in Doha.

Former regime insider says only democracy can save Syria
Phil Sands Aug 17, 2011

DAMASCUS // The safeguards of real democracy are all that can protect Syria’s minorities from Islamic extremism, a former regime insider has said.

Mohammad Suleman, who served for 13 years as a minister of state under the former president Hafez Al Assad, said a looming threat of sectarian violence could only be averted by a genuine shift to democracy, not by continuation of an authoritarian regime dominated by members of the minority Alawite sect.

“Democracy will give the guarantees, democracy will protect the minority communities,” he said on Monday. “No one sect in Syria can or should rule over the others, no sect need be afraid of democracy.”

Earlier this month Mr Suleman and 40 other former regime officials and senior Baath party figures launched a Democratic National Initiative. In it they called for an immediate halt to military operations and for representatives of street protesters to be included in a transitional coalition government….

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????? ???? As-Safir (thanks OTW)

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Syrian Enclave of Palestinians Nearly Deserted After Assault
By: Anthony Shadid | The New York Times

BEIRUT, Lebanon – United Nations officialssaid Tuesday that as many as 10,000 residents of a Palestinian refugee neighborhood in the Syrian port city of Latakia had fled during a four-day assault, as security forces carried out more arrests and intimidation in what residents said was a government attempt to rebuild a wall of fear in one of Syria’s largest cities….. “The residents in Raml will rally the same day the army pulls out,” said one, Ahmed Bogdash. “They are poor and they have nothing to lose.”….Another senior Palestinian official, Yasser Abed Rabbo, has described the attack on Raml as “a crime against humanity.” Speaking on the official Voice of Palestine Radio on Tuesday, Mr. Abed Rabbo said that the Syrian government had “lost rationality.”….

Syrian troops detain dozens, 1 dead in northwest, 17/08/2011

BEIRUT (AP) — A Syrian rights group says government troops have detained dozens of people overnight after cutting electricity in a Damascus neighborhood.

The group says the raids took place in the predominantly Kurdish neighborhood of Rukneddine early on Wednesday.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also says a bullet killed a man in the northwestern Idlib province as he stood on his balcony. Troops were carrying out raids in the area at the time.

Jerusalem Post: Report: Mubarak criticizes Assad, says he should step down
2011-08-17

Ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak criticized the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad for committing crimes against his people, advising Assad to respond to the will of his people and relinquish power, Egyptian newspaper Al Gomhouria quoted …

Muslims Attack Christian Village in Egypt — 1 Murdered, Homes Looted and Torched (AUGUST 9, 2011)

(AINA) — Muslims attacked Christians in the village of Nazlet Faragallah, in the southern Egyptian Minya province, on Sunday evening. The attack continued until the early hours of Monday morning, August 8. One Copt was murdered and homes were looted and torched when Muslims from Nazlet Faragallah together with Muslims from four neighboring villages started their violence at approximately 8 PM, after breaking their Ramadan fast.

According to eyewitnesses, thousands of Muslims entered the village from all sides, firing automatic weapons (mostly in the air), looting and throwing Molotov Cocktails at several homes. “They even destroyed our irrigation pumps,” said one witness.

The first attack was on the house of Father Youanes, pastor of St. George Church, which lies at the head of the village. He was beaten and his home was looted and torched.

Maher Nassif Tobias (50), an employee at the local council, was murdered in his home. He was found by his son. His house was completely looted, including his livestock.

Security forces arrived 4 hours after the attack began and there were too few of them. “They only had batons in their hands, and were unable to control the situation,” said a Coptic village resident. “Our village is surrounded by corn fields. The Muslims came into the village to loot and quickly disappeared in the fields, the police could not follow them. They were coming from all directions at the same time.”

Syria’s stable currency amid turmoil sparks guessing game
By Borzou Daragahi, Aug 17 (Los Angeles Times) —

A sharp discrepancy between Syria’s nose-diving economy and its relatively stable currency is fueling speculation among observers that either another country, presumably strategic oil-rich ally Iran, has injected huge amounts of cash into its economy, or Damascus is quickly draining its foreign currency reserves.

Syria’s overall economy, stock market, vital tourism industry and foreign investment have collapsed, according to economists and analysts. It appears to have hemorrhaged cash, with the bulk flowing to Lebanon, which has long served as a conduit for Syrian finances.

But its currency, the Syrian pound, has held strong, staying about the same as before an uprising against President Bashar Assad began five months ago.

The disconnect between the teetering economy and the stable currency, which remains vital for keeping the country’s urban merchant class a pillar of support for the regime, has baffled some observers and led to speculation about possible influxes of cash.

“You have the collapse of exports and the collapse of foreign direct investment,” said a Western diplomat in Beirut who closely tracks the Syrian economy and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Given the fact that the currency has not collapsed, the indications are that money is coming in. No one knows from where, or how much.”

Homs activist: I rather die than go back to Syrian prisons.
By Sean T. Serioca

“They don’t know anything about Internet, they asked me: “which is your address?” to know my name on Facebook and my email. In Arabic “address” (‘anwan) stands only for the place where you live, so I told them my address in Homs and they started again shouting to humiliate me. If it was true that they had information, why they didn’t show me something I did online? You see how humiliating it is to be controlled by such people?”….

During the interrogation, it is even more important than confessions “to break you from the inside,” maintains Wassim, who was tortured for approximately 18 hours on the whole and released without having admitted anything relevant. As a consequence of the electroshocks, Wassim suffered a form of impairment of hearing for the following two months. “During the whole interrogation I had one guy on my right side, letting me hear the rumor of an electroshock baton, which can hurl your body 3 meters away,” recalls crying Wassim, “another guy was on my left side and he kept on beating me on the head…even if had confessed, they would have done this, to scare me.” After the first round of interrogations, they took him to another room, where his naked body was sprinkled with cold water and electroshocked with a baton for nearly three hours.” ….

UN Court Completes Unsealing of Indictment in Hariri Killing
By Massoud A. Derhally, Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) —

The United Nations court investigating the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri completed the unsealing of its indictment in the case today, providing details of the allegations against four men described by local media as Hezbollah members.

Right Turn: Obama tolerates terror operations run out of Syria’s embassy, 2011-08-17

The Wall Street Journal has a stunning report on Bashar al-Assad’s use of embassies around the world to perpetuate his reign of terror: Syria is taking its war against President Bashar al-Assad’s political opponents global, using diplomats in …

Syria Threatens Dissidents Around Globe, U.S. Says, Wall Street Journal –

UN calls back support personnel from Syria, Aug 17, 2011 19:06 Moscow Time

The UN has called back its support personnel from Syria where mass protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime have been continuing for five months. Reuters reported on Wednesday that 26 foreign employees of the mission have already left the country with their families.

Tunisia withdraws its ambassador from Syria

Egypt Studying Removal of Subsidies on Diesel Fuel, Cabinet Says, 2011-08-17
By Abdel Latif Wahba

Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) — The Egyptian government is studying the removal of subsidies on diesel fuel for all manufacturing and tourism industries, the Cairo-based Cabinet said in a faxed statement today.

A seargent and three soldiers desert their unit in Rastan, and join the free Officers brigades., Homs, 15 August 2011

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The Saudi reaction to Syria
ÖMER TA?PINAR

….What is behind Saudi Arabia’s Syria policy? According to a prominent Saudi Arabia expert in the United States, Saudi Arabia is shifting from a counter-revolutionary position to one that now prioritizes the regional balance of power. According to Gregory Gause “King Abdullah was hesitant to break fully with Damascus, as demonstrations against the regime accelerated over the past five months, given the importance of Syria in regional politics. But the escalating violence of the past week, coming at the beginning of Ramadan, seemed to seal the issue. Dealing Iran a blow in regional politics trumps the risks of greater instability.”

From the Comment section:

Majedkhaldoun

Out of 220,000, the Syrian army has 140,000 Alawite soldiers. They are paid by the Syrian people to defend them against Israel, instead they are attacking and killing the Syrian people,… How could we be proud of such an army? I am ashamed of such army, whose sole job is to defend Assad not the people. Those who defend such an army are traitors.

the security of minorities in the post Assad regime must be the responsibility of the security forces. In democracy we must respect rule of law.

I am not for revenge, by killing. I am for compensation financially to the victims of Assad clan, and yes we must try the officers who participated in the killing, all of them not the high ranking one only, and those who were involved in corruptions must pay back everything they benefited from.

Tara

Majedkhaldoun, The Syrian army is sectarian army. The low ranking Sunnis do not count. It’s sole purpose is to defend one sect. It is not going to protect the people or to defend the borders. I share your contempt. In free Syria, it should be dismantled and reconstructed physically and ideologically, such that the main purpose of it is to protect the people.

Khalid Tlass

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a few Shabeeh myself. I don’t smoke, but I like the cigarette becoz it would help in burning their devilish skin. And somebody should nuke Iran. Nahj al Balagha should be banned. Al Qardaha should be leveled with cluster bombs, SyAF should do the job.

Amir in Tel Aviv,

Kindly do us a favour and take out Hassan Nasrallah and the entire Hizbullah leadership with laser-guided missiles. Don’t tell me you guys don’t know his exact location. What’s stopping you, if you could do it with such noble leaders like Sheikh Yassin, whats stopping you guys from doing the same to these dirty faggots from Jnoob ?

Haytham Khoury

We should know we are Syrians above all. Even if we disagree with the regime politically, all the citizens of that country including, Bashar and Maher, are our compatriots. Hopefully, justice will prevail with no revenge (and particularly for Bashar, because I think he still has a good element in him). Even if we disagree with the regime, all the cities and towns of Syria, including Querdaha, are our cities and towns.

A reporter sent me this question:

I’m writing an article about why (some) Syrians are still supporting Bashar al Assad despite his brutality and violations (of Ramadan, for example)?

Landis Answers:

The minorities are fearful of any Islamic tinged government that might take the place of the Assad regime. The Christians have been squeezed out of most countries in the Middle East. Anatolia used to be 20% Christian, but by 1922, Turkey have either killed or deported its Christians. Iran has few Christians left since the Islamic Republic was established. Palestine used to have a large Christian population. No more. Caught between Zionism and Islamism, most decamped for less hostile homes. In Lebanon, the Christians took a beating during the civil war and lost their commanding influence in the Lebanese state. In Saudi Arabia, Christians are forbidden from permanent residence or citizenship. Most recently, Christians in Iraq have been preyed upon, causing many to flee; in Egypt, Christians are tasting the lash of Salifist anger; yesterday another church was burned. Christians see the authoritarian regime of the Assads as a last hold out for them in the region. Many are talking about not having anywhere left to run to in the Middle East. They are planning how they might escape and where they might escape to. Alawites are thinking in a similar vein. Of course, much of this fear may be imagined, but as the bloody repression of the uprising continues, the real specter of retribution grows among the average Christian and most particularly, Alawite.

The Reporter responds:

Thank you so much indeed. I thought these sentiments had disappeared after the crackdown but here is what a Christian friend told me, after I mentioned your response to him:

“What the American expert says is 100% true, and i think of my christian and Alawite friends who support the regime. and that exactly what they think. We, as Christians, are always prosecuted in the middle east and i think most of us would rather live under this bloody regime than to throw ourselves into the fire. in addition to that (and that’s my opinion) if the regime fell, there will be chaos, anarchy and civil war. people will pick up arms to take revenge for their dead and people will pick up arms to defend them selves. civil war, like the Iraq one is not far away from us. The only difference is that in Iraq they are roughly 40 – 60% so a bit more fair. in Syria it’s 70 against 10 10 5 5 % and the Christians will flee the country because they don’t have ties in this country anymore they feel it’s not theirs. No one wants them in the region.”

“Please mark the difference when i talk as a christian and when i talk as a Syria citizen. not every reason that i gave is related to my religion. we are Syrian citizens above all, then Christians, but when our existence is in danger, we only look out for ourselves. It hurts every time I say that I don’t want the regime to fall, because, deep down, i know it should go, but survival instinct tells me to support it.”

Currency flight fears mount in Syria
By an FT reporter in Damascus

Fears over the flight of foreign currency and a collapse in investor confidence are increasingly affecting Syria’s struggling economy amid the continued uprising against president Bashar al-Assad, now entering its sixth month.

In a sign of the regime’s concern over the supply of foreign currency, Syria’s central bank this week announced further restrictions on its sale, with Syrians now allowed to buy a maximum of $1,000 no more than twice a year, unless they give an “economic justification”.

Syrians travelling abroad are able to buy currency, but this has now been limited to three trips a year, and the currency must be bought the day before travel, with plane tickets in hand.

The official exchange rate remains at S£47.5 to the dollar, but the black market rate is persistently higher, with dealers asking S£52.5 to the dollar on Tuesday. They maintain they are doing brisk business despite recent attempts by the government to shut them down.

Adib Mayyaleh, Syria’s central bank governor, last month admitted the pound had come “under pressure” as a result of the crisis, while diplomats in Damascus have been among those suggesting that the regime’s foreign currency reserves are depleting rapidly.

Analysts say that growing calls for an embargo on Syria’s oil and gas industry is only increasing the regime’s currency concerns. Oil and gas exports account for up to a third of state revenues and is its single biggest provider of foreign currency.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, has already called on European countries to consider ending its imports of Syrian oil, a call backed by advocacy group Human Rights Watch on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Syrian activists say they plan to put pressure on western oil companies still operating in Syria. The two biggest are Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell and France’s Total.

Some analysts agree that an oil embargo will put pressure on a regime that is counting the financial costs of its expanding campaign of repression against anti-government protestors.

“Crackdowns are expensive, you need fuel and you need equipment,” said one analyst in Damascus, who asked not to be named. He also said the regime needed to continue paying the irregular pro-regime gangs, known as “Shabiha”, who take part in the crackdowns, as well as the army and security forces.

“They are not coming out to beat up protesters out of loyalty alone,” he sad. “When the money disappears, so will they.”

But others worry that such measures are not sufficiently targeted, and will damage the wider economy further, harming ordinary Syrians who are already struggling.

“What you are seeing is a lack of investor and consumer confidence, and there is a fear that things can only get worse,” said one local economist. “Investment is down tremendously, spending is down, and these are the biggest contributors to GDP.”

Figures released on Tuesday by the Syrian Investment Agency suggest a dramatic slump in investor confidence in the country. Just 131 private investment projects were licenced in the first half of this year, down more than 40 per cent on the same period in 2010.

The state-run agency oversees investment in Syria’s infrastructure, transport and agriculture sectors, and is seen by local economists as a good indicator of broader investor confidence.

Meanwhile, Syria’s five largest banks saw their assets decline by nearly 17 per cent during the same period, a further sign of the deteriorating business environment. Lebanese banks operating in Syria also report that deposits in their Syrian businesses are down 20 per cent from 2010, as Syrians worried about the impact of the unrest pull their money from banks.

Omar Dahi on Chicago Public Radio today: He gives us a sense of the mood on the ground and whether Syrians will continue to risk their lives for democratic reforms. His lengthy article was published on Syria Comment this weekend.

Emboldened by uprising, Syrian clerics speak out
By Suleiman Al-Khalidi, AMMAN | Tue Aug 16, 2011 10:53am EDT

(Reuters) – Inside an old Damascus mosque, Sheikh Sariya al-Rifai departs from state-sanctioned sermons to warn President Bashar al-Assad that the whole country will rise up against him if he does not halt a bloody clampdown against protesters.

“Beware … all of Syria will erupt if you don’t stop. I hold the leadership responsible for every drop of spilled blood,” Rifai said in a sermon marking dawn prayers on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, just as tanks rolled into the Sunni Muslim bastion of Hama.

“I never imagined that the leadership of this country would give such a gift to its people and country … blood spilling into the streets of Hama and other provinces.”

Rifai’s comments earlier this month inside the Zaid bin Thabet mosque were seen on an Internet video and confirmed to Reuters by worshippers who attended the prayer service.

A pillar of a conservative religious establishment linked to the state, Rifai comes from a long line of Koran scholars who have taught generations of devout followers and refrained from challenging the iron rule of the Assad family.

But as the civilian death toll from a crackdown on five months of protests rose past 1,700, Rifai joined 19 leading clerics to sign a rare petition, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, blaming Assad for wreaking carnage on the eve of Ramadan, “the month of mercy and compassion.”

The onset of the holy month on August 1 coincided with the start of the bloodiest week in the uprising, helping drive some clerics to break their silence, clerics and analysts say.

Their new boldness could pile more pressure on Assad and give extra momentum to protests against Assad’s minority Alawite rule over the mainly Sunni Muslim country.

Clinton defends Syria policy
By Joby Warrick, Wash Post, 08/16/2011

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday strongly defended her department’s incremental response to the slayings of protesters in Syria, arguing that demands for the ouster of Syria’s president would accomplish little without the support of key allies in the region.

Clinton also sought to portray the Obama administration’s policy in both Syria and Libya as examples of “smart power,” an approach she said emphasizes collective action and international consensus over unilateral solutions that rely disproportionately on American troops and treasure.

“It’s not just brute force, it’s not just unilateralism, it’s being smart enough to say, ‘You know what? We want a bunch of people singing out of the same hymn book,” said Clinton, who appeared with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at a national security forum at National Defense University.

In some of her bluntest language to date on the administration’s relatively cautious response to the Syrian uprising, Clinton acknowledged the limited U.S. ability to directly influence Syria, a country with few economic or political ties to the United States. And she struck back at critics who have accused the United States of failing Syria’s pro-democracy movement by refusing so far to publicly call for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad. Administration officials said last week that such a call might come within days.

“It’s not going to be any news if the United States says ‘Assad needs to go.’ OK, fine, what’s next?” asked Clinton, who spoke before a room packed with service members, academics and journalists. “If Turkey says it, if [Saudi] King Abdullah says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it.”

Clinton pointed to fresh successes in building a “chorus of condemnation” against Assad, noting strong statements last week by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states as well as by Turkey, Syria’s neighbor and major trading partner.

Clinton was questioned about Syria during an hour-long discussion that focused heavily on declining U.S. influence during a time of military draw-downs and shrinking budgets. Clinton was asked by one audience member whether the more limited U.S. responses to recent Middle East unrest suggests that the United States is no longer prepared to preserve stability in troubled corners of the globe.

Clinton insisted that Americans would still lead, but she said the administration’s message to the world was that the United States would not consent to carry the burden alone.

“It’s a message that the United States stands for our values, our interests and our security, but that we have a very clear view that others need to be taking the same steps to enforce a universal set of values and interests,” Clinton said.

Both Clinton and Panetta warned of furthering shrinking of U.S. influence and weakened U.S. security if Congress enacts even deeper cuts to the budgets for defense and diplomacy. Noting that both the State and Defense departments already face billions of dollars in cuts….

Clinton says more international pressure needed on Assad
2011-08-16, From Lalit K Jha

Aug. 17 (PTI) — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today asked the international community, particularly countries having economic ties with Syria, to act against the authoritarian regime of Bashar-al Assad, though she stopped short of asking the Syrian President to leave power. Clinton said the “international chorus of condemnation” against Syria was growing and pointed out that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries had also joined in the chorus against Assad.

“I am a big believer in results over rhetoric. I think what we’re doing is putting together a very careful set of actions and statements that will make our views very clear….

US Urges Turks, Saudis To Press Assad To Step Down
2011-08-16 17:44:39.935 GMT

WASHINGTON (AFP)–A call by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others for Syrian President Bashar al Assad to step down would be more effective than one from the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.

Before canceling Article 8, the Baath Party plans to ‘purchase’ its real estate
By Sami Moubayed, in the Forward

According to media sources, an unannounced Baath Party meeting took place in early August, aimed at taking pre-emptive measures to solidify the party’s standing in the future, once it is no longer “leader of state and society.” That status, after all, is given to the Baath by Article 8 of the Syrian Constitution, which is expected to be canceled soon. Once it does, the party’s privileged status in society will also be canceled, meaning, the Baathists will have to secure land, real estate, and income for their party—whose membership will likely drop from the current 2.8 million.

One measure is to purchase all property that the party currently holds free-of-charge, which was given to it by the Syrian government since the Baathists came to power in March 1963. This would apply to the party headquarters in Mazraa in the heart of the Syrian capital, and the 14-floor building that houses the party daily al-Baath, along with the Ministry of Information on the Mezzeh Autostrade. Other buildings that would be bought by the party are the offices of its Regional Command in the posh Abu Rummaneh district, and headquarters of its National Command in Baramkeh.

Additionally, media sources said that the Baath Party recently bought a plot of land in rural Damascus, with the aim of establishing a university that would generate revenue—and help the Baathists recruit members and indoctrinate young people with their trinity of “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism.” That property cost 150 million SP ($3 million USD). Finally, the Baathists toyed with the idea of establishing a satellite channel carrying their name, al-Baath, aimed at reaching a wider Arab audience with Baathist ideology.

‘Rebels want no talks with govt in Syria’ – expert
Aug 16, 2011 16:58 Moscow Time

Information warfare in Syria has reached its peak, Mr. Oleg Fomin, deputy chief of the Russian Committee for Solidarity with Syria and Libya, said during a conference held by the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Mr. Fomin stressed that western media focus more on details rather than the roots of the crisis in Syria.

He warned against the Libyan scenario in Syria.

Many experts who took part in the conference agreed that armed gangs now active in Syria are not interested in dialogue with the authorities…..

Saudi Arabia Moves to Take Down Syria, Iran and Hezbollah
By: Bruce Riedel | The National Interest

After months of protests and regime violence, King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia, one of the last absolute monarchs in the world, has called on Syria?s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, to stop the ?killing machine? …. The Saudis sense a strategic opportunity has opened in Syria, a unique chance to deal a mortal blow to one of their enemies, the Shia terror group Hezbollah, and a serious blow to their regional adversary Iran. Since Israel’s foolish invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Syrian regime of Hafez and Bashar Assad has been Iran’s key partner in creating Hezbollah, arming it to the teeth with thousands of rockets and missiles and sending it to create terror throughout the region. For decades Damascus has allowed Tehran to use its airports and ports to transfer arms to Hezbollah, and more recently it has provided much of its own equipment directly to the Shia group. Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been based in Syria and thousands of Iranian tourists and spies have come to worship at Damascus’ Sayyidah Zaynab mosque, a traditional Shia holy site and an excellent place for extremists to get together under the protective eye of Syrian intelligence.

Iran banks all on Assad’s survival
By Mahan Abedin

The continuing unrest in Syria presents Iran with multiple challenges straddling the strategic, political and ideological spheres. While officially Iran is committed to the survival of the Syrian regime, the perceived gravity of the situation has led an increasing number of former Iranian diplomats and academics to voice concern over the Islamic Republic’s failure to hedge its bets in Syria.

The fear – expressed in its most extreme form – is that the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad may lead to the collapse of the Iranian-Syrian strategic alliance, thus undermining the “resistance axis” in the region.

While these fears are exaggerated, nonetheless there is a widespread feeling in the country that the lack of nuance in Iran’s

position – and specifically the absence of any contact with Syrian opposition groups – is not configured to protect Iran’s interests in what is by all accounts a highly significant political and strategic moment in the region.

Nevertheless, the Iranian government is confident that the Syrian regime can weather the storm, and that the situation is being deliberately exaggerated by Western media and intelligence services, who hope to extract strategic concessions from Assad further down the road.

Iran is also concerned by regional reactions to the crisis, especially by the pro-active Turkish position, which from an Iranian point of view is exploiting a putative humanitarian crisis to expand Turkish influence in the region. The real fear is not so much centered on Turkish influence (which is viewed as relatively benign) but that Turkey is working at the behest of Washington and key European states to re-align Syria away from Iran.

CFR: Cranking up Pressure on Syria
2011-08-16, Interviewee: Andrew Tabler

…He says that at this point, any gestures Assad makes toward reform are no longer credible, and the international community should invoke tough sanctions against Syria’s oil exports, 96 percent of which are purchased Europe. He also notes that the Saudis, in particular, are concerned about the potential for Iran to increase its backing of Assad against the opposition…..

Irony of Iraq: American ‘Ally’ Supports Bloody Syrian Repression

The grim realities of the Iraq war, from its multi-trillion-dollar expense to its awful cost in American and Iraqi lives, was supposed to be mitigated by progress toward democracy in the Mideast – or so the neoconservative politicians and pundits who promoted the invasion have long told us. Now the credibility of that argument, which was never very persuasive, has been decisively undermined by the latest developments in Baghdad, where President Nouri Kamal al-Maliki is lending support to the Assad regime’s bloody repression of non-violent democracy protesters in neighboring Syria. Troubling questions about the nature of the Shia parties that came to power following the fall of Saddam Hussein – and especially their relationship with the Iranian government — have long been voiced by critics of the war. Yet today, as Maliki and members of his ruling party openly attack the Syrian protesters while promoting economic deals with both Iran and Syria, those questions seem to have been answered. The Iraqi regime has at last delivered a verdict on the neoconservative justification for the war – and that verdict could scarcely be more negative. READ MORE

Slain Syrian protestors are Martyrs – Al-Obeikan
15/08/2011
By Mohamed al-Qushairi

Jeddah, Asharq Al-Awsat- Sheikh Mohamed Abdul-Mohsen al-Obeikan, a renowned Saudi scholar, has put an end to the controversy over whether or not the slain Syrians protestors who were killed during anti-government demonstrations can be generally considered as “martyrs”. He deemed that they could be considered as “martyrs” because “they were killed unjustly”. The statement was made amidst a state of controversy among sheikhs and scholars, with regards to the status of the dead Syrian protestors. Some have labeled them as martyrs, whereas others have declined this description because their demands are material and have caused internal conflicts”.

Sheikh Abdul-Mohsen al-Obeikan, a consultant at the Saudi Royal Council, told Asharq al-Awsat in a telephone interview that “judging whether someone will go to heaven or hell is impermissible, except those who have already been designated by God and his prophet (PBUH). As for those who have died as a result of what is happening in Syria, they are martyrs, God willing, because they were killed unjustly.” He added that “without a doubt, they were killed unjustly and without committing a sin; they were killed only because they demanded their rights.” Al-Obeikan believed their killers were tyrants and corrupt.

When asked about the Syrian army’s practices against its own people, tightening its security grip, and preventing them from going to mosques to perform religious rituals during Ramadan – especially the Taraweeh prayers – with the aim of preventing gatherings, al-Obeikan said, “this is one of the most dreadful crimes, because Allah said “And who is more unjust than he who forbids that in places for the worship of Allah, Allah’s name should be celebrated?-whose zeal is (in fact) to ruin them? It was not fitting that such should themselves enter them except in fear. For them there is nothing but disgrace in this world, and in the world to come, an exceeding torment”, Surat al-Baqara; Verse 114.

The incidents in Syria have indeed sparked a lively debate about whether those who protested against the Syrian regime should be called protestors, terrorists, martyrs, or any other name. The internet websites of some sheikhs and scholars have posted numerous reactions about whether or not the slain Syrian protestors should be considered martyrs, in view of some claims that the state of tension there has revolved around material demands, whereas others have said that the protestors, by taking to streets, have caused a state of sedition.

Renowned Muslim scholar Sheikh Aaidh al-Qarni had previously urged Muslim scholars everywhere to issue a statement to the entire Muslim nation, to emphasize that “Jihad and the act of deterring a tyrant are both legitimate duties”. He said that “what is happening in Syria is unprecedented; the regime is bombarding mosques, and the prayers inside supplicate assistance from God to protect them against the deeds which even Zionists would not dare commit.” Sheikh al-Qarni described what the protestors are suffering at the hands of the regime as “no less brutal than the crimes committed by the Mongolian leader Hulagu Khan.”….

IRAQ DUE TO EARN $80 BILLION IN OIL EXPORT REVENUE THIS YEAR, 2011-08-16

Christian Sci Mn: Seize the sanctions moment in Syria
2011-08-16

When the United Nations Security Council meets on Thursday to discuss Syria, it should seize the moment to impose multiple sanctions on the Assad regime and its network of support. Such measures would be consistent with past council sanctions aimed …

DJ US Urges Turks, Saudis To Press Assad To Step Down
2011-08-16 17:44:39.935 GMT

WASHINGTON (AFP)–A call by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others for Syrian President Bashar al Assad to step down would be more effective than one from the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday. U.S. officials said privately last week that the United States was preparing to explicitly urge Assad to quit power over his regime’s deadly crackdown on protests, but Clinton suggested Washington was now not ready to do so. “It’s not going to be any news if the United States says Assad needs to go. Ok, fine. What’s next?” the chief U.S. diplomat told an audience at National Defense University. ” If Turkey says it, if King Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] says it, if other people say it, there’s no way the Assad regime can ignore it,” Clinton said in a conversation with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta moderated by CNN.

Church burning deepens tumult of Egypt transition
CAIRO – The Associated Press

Egyptian Army soldiers stand guard outside the burned Virgin Mary church in the Imbaba neighborhood of Cairo. AP photo.

Relations between Egypt’s Muslims and Christians have degenerated to a new low after riots left 12 people dead and a church burned, adding to the disorder of the country’s post-revolution transition to democracy.

The attack on the church was the latest sign of assertiveness by an extreme, ultraconservative movement of Muslims known as Salafis, whose increasing hostility toward Egypt’s Coptic Christians over the past few months has met with little interference from the country’s military rulers.

Salafis have been blamed for other recent attacks on Christians and others they don’t approve of. In one attack, a Christian man had an ear cut off for renting an apartment to a Muslim woman suspected of involvement in prostitution.

The latest violence, which erupted in fresh clashes Sunday between Muslims and Christians who pelted each other with stones in another part of Cairo, also pointed to what many see as reluctance of the armed forces council to act. The council took temporary control of the country after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed on Feb. 11.

Syrian troops withdraws from E. province,
2011-08-16 21:20:52

DEIR AL-ZOUR, Syria, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) — Syrian army troops started a full withdrawal Tuesday from the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, which has become a flashpoint of the five-month protests in the country.

During a trip organized by the Syrian Information Ministry for Arab and foreign correspondents to Deir al-Zour, a Xinhua reporter witnessed the withdrawal of the troops amid cheerful mood of the residents as security and stability have been restored to the province.

“The situation in Deir al-Zour was difficult and disturbing until the army entered the city and carried out a number of missions to restore tranquility and security,” the reporter cited some local residents as saying.

Army troops entered Deir al-Zour on Aug. 8 for what the authorities said as “hunting down armed groups that terrorized people and committed atrocities in the city.”

Syria blames the five-month unrest on foreign conspiracy and armed groups.

However, opposition activists said the army was entering some restive cities nationwide to back the security apparatuses in cracking down anti-government protests.

Deir al-Zour, some 432 kilometers east of the capital Damascus, is known for its well-armed clans and tribes that have connections in neighboring Iraq. The area has been a scene of anti-government protests over the past weeks.

Iran is using the PKK to trap Turkey – Zaman

…. First, by launching an operation against PJAK, which had declared a cease-fire long before Iran’s offensive, Iran was hoping to ensure that PJAK will not be used as a destabilizing element in the coming months, because Iran calculates that if the Syrian regime falls, the next stop for the “Arab Spring” is Tehran.

Secondly, and most importantly, Turkey is distancing itself from the Assad regime, which Iran supports, and is getting closer to the West. Iran doesn’t like this because it considers Turkey a gateway to the rest of the world. By launching a military operation against PJAK and circulating the idea that it may have captured one of its leaders, Iran could be seeking to stir up the Turkish public’s anxiety against the PKK and create a political climate that would force the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government to conduct its own cross-border operations against the PKK.

If the AK Party government were to launch a cross-border operation targeting the Kandil Mountains and PKK camps in northern Iraq, Iran is well aware of the fact that the Kurdish population in Turkey would organize large public demonstrations in the streets, which in turn would force Turkey to launch a massive crackdown against Kurds and in the end have to potential to bring Turkey down to level of the Iranian regime and the Assad regime in Syria.

Unfortunately, the tone of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s government seems to suggest that Turkey may make the mistake that Iran is excitedly waiting for.

Even Former Friends Abandon Syria’s Regime, Mideastwire.com, August 16, 2011 8:45 AM

Aug. 15, 2011 (Bloomberg) — As the death toll from unrest in Syria mounts, with perhaps as many as 2,000 killed in the past five months, Mideast commentators who support the Syrian regime have become increasingly rare.

Even the publications of Syria’s traditional allies, such as the Palestinian Hamas movement, whose top leadership is based in Damascus, are giving space to harsh indictments of those loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In the pro-Hamas, Gaza-based daily Al-Resaleh last week, columnist Moumen Bseiso wrote that the Syrian regime “is extremely hostile to the aspirations and rights of its people” even though it enjoys “an honorable record at the foreign level” as a leader of resistance to Israeli and Western agendas in the region.

In an unsubtle reference to Assad’s confident pronouncement to the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of the year that Syria was immune to the uprisings in the rest of the Arab world because of its foreign policy, Bseiso concluded that coexistence between the “course of domestic tyranny and foreign dignity … cannot last forever.” The values of “freedom, dignity and justice are absolute values and strategic principles that cannot be traded.”

Some of the strongest criticism has come from Saudi owned media, especially in the wake of Saudi King Abdullah’s recent call for Assad to “stop the killing machine” followed by Saudi Arabia’s recall of its ambassador to Syria.

In the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the most widely circulated Saudi-owned dailies, 15 of the last 19 opinion pieces focused on Syria, with almost all arguing that the Syrian regime was unambiguously evil and would inevitably fall…

Syrian Navy Ships Join Attack on Coastal City
By ANTHONY SHADID, 2011-08-14

(New York Times) — BEIRUT — In yet another escalation of its crackdown on dissent, the Syrian government unleashed navy vessels, tanks and a mix of soldiers, security forces and paramilitary fighters against the port city of Latakia on Sunday, killing at least 25 people, including three children, activists and residents said….

The BBC World Service had a telephone interview with an Anglican clergyman in Latakia, Rev. Nadim Nasser who said that he was in a neighborhood far from the one under assault, and although they could hear gunfire he didn’t hear shelling and explosions. He also expressed the belief that armed groups had infiltrated the protests. Is that regime propaganda?….

Syria denies pounding district in coastal Latakia with gunboats
2011-08-15 00:23:28

DAMASCUS, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) — Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) denied Sunday media reports that Syrian gunboats pounded the impoverished al-Ramel neighborhood in Latakia with heavy machine guns.

Law-enforcement members are hunting down armed men, who responded with machine guns, grenades and explosive devices in al- Ramel neighborhood, SANA said….

The BBC World Service had a telephone interview with an Anglican clergyman in Latakia, Rev. Nadim Nasser who said that he was in a neighborhood far from the one under assault, and although they could hear gunfire he didn’t hear shelling and explosions. He also expressed the belief that armed groups had infiltrated the protests.

Syria uses gunboats for 1st time to crush uprising“>Syria uses Gunboats to Hammer Mediterranean Coastal City
ZEINA KARAM | AP

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria used gunboats for the first time Sunday to crush the uprising against Bashar Assad’s regime, hammering parts of the Mediterranean coastal city of Latakia after thousands marched there over the weekend to demand the president’s ouster. At least 25 people were killed, according to activists.

The coordinated attacks by gunboats and ground troops were the latest wave of a brutal offensive against anti-government protests launched at the beginning of the month. The assault showed Assad has no intention of scaling back the campaign even though it has brought international outrage and new U.S. and European sanctions.

“We are being targeted from the ground and the sea,” said a frightened resident of the al-Ramel district of Latakia, the hardest hit neighborhood. “The shooting is intense. We cannot go out. They are raiding and breaking into people’s homes,” he added, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

As the gunships blasted waterfront districts, ground troops backed by tanks and security forces stormed several neighborhoods including al-Ramel, sending terrified women and children fleeing, some on foot, to safer areas.

The al-Ramel resident said at least three gunboats were taking part in the offensive, and that many people have been killed and wounded. The shooting targeted several mosques in the area.

“La Syrie, terrain du bras de fer irano-saoudien”
Moyen-Orient | 13 août 2011 | Mise à jour le 14 août 2011

En Syrie, le mouvement de contestation du régime entre dans son sixième mois. S’il menace le pouvoir de Bachar Al-Assad, ses conséquences pourraient aussi rebattre les cartes diplomatiques à l’échelle du Moyen-Orient, comme l’explique Joseph Bahout, chercheur associé à l’IEP de Paris et spécialiste de la région…..

Saturday, August 13, 2011 3:37 PM
Qifa Nabki – or Elias Muhanna – has translated this most interesting “last” conversation between Mu’allim and Hariri into English:

Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries –  Youtube (good) ?????? ???? ?????? ??????? – ?????

Haaretz: WikiLeaks: France doubted Israeli role in Syrian general’s assassination
2011-08-11

The French government believed in August 2008, just weeks after the assassination of Syrian General Muhammad Suleiman, that the perpetrator behind the assassination was not Israel, as many previously assumed, but rather a rival within the Syrian …

Canada expands sanctions on Syria

Canada said Saturday it had expanded sanctions on Syria, including blacklisting a commercial bank and a mobile phone provider, to protest the government’s brutal crackdown on protests.

The new sanctions include travel bans on four officials, including Mohammed Mufleh, head of military security in the flashpoint city of Hama, and Mohammed Makhlouf, an uncle of President Bashar al-Assad.

Canada will also freeze the assets of the state-run Commercial Bank of Syria, the country’s largest commercial bank, and Syriatel, its largest mobile phone company.
The United States imposed sanctions on the two firms earlier in the week, and has joined European allies in sanctioning top officials close to Assad.
“Canada reiterates its strong condemnation of the ongoing violent military assault by the Assad regime against the Syrian people,” Foreign Minister John Baird said in a statement.

Palestinian youth stage sit-in against Syria crackdown in Ramallah
15 August 2011 | AFP

Ramallah. About 400 Palestinian youths staged a sit-in late Sunday in the West Bank city of Ramallah to protest Syria’s brutal crackdown on Syrian anti-regime protesters.

Interview with The president of the Arab Lawyers Association, Sabah Al-Mukhtar

Policy Hawks Gunning for Syrian Confrontation
Nicholas Noe | August 11, 2011

In the ideological struggle over how best to approach the five-months old crisis in Syria, a motley crew of Middle East policy hawks are on the verge of claiming a rare, but nevertheless long sought-after “mission accomplished”: a bloody confrontation with the bloody dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

Israel stockpiling crowd-control weapons
Hugh Naylor (Foreign Correspondent)
Aug 15, 2011

JERUSALEM // Israel is stockpiling crowd-control weapons and preparing security forces for Palestinian protests planned to coincide with a push for statehood at the United Nations.

Israel’s police and military have reportedly gone on a spending spree in the past month importing everything from extra tear-gas launchers to Belgian-born stallions in anticipation of the Palestinian bid to win recognition at the United Nations.

The preparations come after a string of deadly responses to pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have left Israel sensitive to international scrutiny of its tactics. Israel is also fearful of inflaming widespread Palestinian anger.

While acknowledging the potential for violent confrontations, Palestinian officials, who have called for peaceful rallies in September, say the Israeli preparations are overblown.

“I haven’t seen any Palestinian individual or group planning at all for violent unrest,” said Ghassan Khatib, a spokesperson for the West Bank’s governing Palestinian Authority.

WSJ Editorials & Contributors: The Arab World Condemns Syria’s ‘Killing Machine’
2011-08-15 00:43:47.557 GMT

BY FOUAD AJAMI In the manner of all momentous rebellions, the Syrian upheaval has been rich in iconography and lyrics and political language. A people long repressed have come out to give voice to what has been on their minds for four decades of …

No Horse to Back in Syria
As al-Assad runs out of allies, no clear opposition has stepped forward
By Aron Lamm
Epoch Times Staff Created: Aug 11, 2011

A picture taken on a guided government tour, shows Syrian soldiers shouting pro-Syrian President slogans, as they return from the city of Hama following a crackdown on anti-government demonstrators. (AFP/Getty Images)

The United Nations Security Council met Wednesday to further discuss the deteriorating situation in Syria, after last week’s statement condemning the al-Assad regime for attacking peaceful demonstrators.

In a statement to the press after the meeting, Syrian U.N. representative Dr. Bashar Ja’afari said that the other representatives are “misleading” the public regarding the “so-called situation in Syria.”

Omar S Dahi

[The News Round Up for Saturday, Aug. 13, follows this article]

A Syrian Drama
by Omar S. Dahi, Assistant Professor of Economics, Hampshire College
for Syria Comment
August 13, 2011

The Syrian regime is in big trouble. Absent an economic collapse, its downfall may not be imminent, but Most indicators lead to the conclusion that the regime is effectively done, and the only remaining questions are how bloody the transition will be and what type of Syria will emerge. On the domestic front, the social base of the regime is stagnant or shrinking. The regime immediately mobilized its entire social support structure to ‘million-man’ marches. Though many attending are government workers made to go (pro-regime marches are always on workdays), many of those attending do so willingly. However that mobilization has reached its limit: the regime has no new social base to draw on and mobilize. Most of those who willingly attend the “mnhibak” (literally: we love you) pro-regime rallies know very well that there will not be any violence otherwise they would stay home. On the other hand, the anti-regime demonstrations are steadily increasing, both in numbers and in geographic size. Three weeks ago roughly 1.2 million or 5.5% of the population demonstrated all over the country. Economically, the country is in dire straits. The tourist industry has been decimated. The increased deficit spending, from raised salaries, support for fuels, lower import tariffs are large enough, without taking into account the spending on Army mobilization, and military and security personnel. Externally, the regime is getting more, not less isolated. Just yesterday, the Russian President warned his Syrian counterpart of a ‘sad fate’, unless reforms are implemented. It was given a long leash by the West to deal with the protests, but its main asset as a guarantor of ‘stability’ is now turning into a liability.

I traveled to Syria in July to observe first-hand what is taking place inside the country. Most of my time was spent in Damascus and its suburbs, with a brief trips elsewhere, in particular a two day stint in Hama just days before the government’s massacre. What follows is a series of vignettes, hastily put together, of life inside Syria this past month. These stories represent my own understanding and readers should take all stories emerging from the country as a partial truth, but will hopefully help give a clearer picture of Syria in the midst of the revolution. I have left out the names and identifying details of many wonderful people who have helped me shape my views for obvious reasons. I am solely responsible for this article’s content.

Everyday life in Damascus

The first thing that strikes a traveler when entering Syria straight into Damascus in the past month is that life appears to be normal. This false sense of normalcy have allowed certain sectors of Damascenes to live in a fairy tale of ‘everything’s fine, it’ll be over soon’, something I heard repeatedly during my stay. There are signs of course that things are not quite as they seem: there is increased security presence everywhere, especially the now infamous security buses which are used to herd arrested protestors to unknown destinations. From time to time cars or trucks full of pro-regime supporters tour the city carrying flags and shouting pro-Bashar slogans. The tourist industry has declined as mentioned earlier which means that many hotels, restaurants, and cafes which had become an important source of income and employment are almost empty. If Damascus had been relatively subdued in terms of protests, politics is on everyone’s minds and all taboo subjects, including what five months ago seemed unspeakable topics such as the regime’s downfall and direct criticism of the President are now commonplace. When entering an ongoing conversation one is immediately asked if s/he is pro- (muwalat) or anti-regime (mu’arada) (or in the derogatory terms booq (trumpet) or mundass (infiltrator).

When discussing the ongoing events with someone against the demonstrations (incidentally, very few people I spoke with identified as ‘pro-regime’, they preferred to say they are ‘with reform’ I will identify them in this article as against the revolts, the most neutral term I could find to describe their position). Conversations with those against the revolts can quickly descend into farce. Many I spoke with maintained that everyone who supports the revolution from outside the country is either a coward, a traitor, or does not genuinely care about Syria’s fate (this third category is where some people placed me, thankfully). As for those opposing the regime on the inside: Dar’a are a bunch of no-good smugglers, Hama is vindictive and full of hate, Homs are all extremist Salafis, the Northwest are separatist Kurds, and the Northeast are drug dealers, etc. The discussion then turns into a description of the atrocities committed by the protestors.

One typical story: “a women went to her neighbor’s house and asked them to stop protesting. When she turned around to leave, they shot her in the back. Somehow she didn’t die and was taken to the hospital. The neighbors then followed her to the hospital, kidnapped her, and cut her to pieces.” Depending on the source this story took place in ‘Arbin, Qatana, Dar’a, or Hama. The punch line was “and this is her own neighbors who did this. You see, these people are monsters, they don’t know what freedom means.” Regime violence is either denied or taken as a given (‘what do you expect, to insult them and be rewarded with flowers?’ or ‘this regime hasn’t done anything yet, if they really wanted to kill, they can do a lot more’). One reason that’s given for not opposing the regime is that this regime is lunatic and capable of mass murder and therefore it should not be pressured.

The more I talked with people who hold these views the more I realized that they genuinely believe them, with one slight caveat: many of these did not decide on their stand against the revolt based on the stories of criminal gangs, and Muslim extremists, and so forth. Just the opposite: most of those I spoke with who held this view clearly had made up their minds from day one of the revolts and then decided to believe the government’s stories. On the other hand, there were many who changed their beliefs when they clearly saw the government had chosen the violent approach, and many who were literally traumatized by the President’s first speech.

Contrary to what many have claimed, demonstrations have been taking place well within the center of a month before Ramadan. Demonstrations have taken place in Qaboon, Rukn al-Deen, Barzeh, Duma, Harasta, Daraya, ‘Arbeen, Zamalka, Hajar al Aswad, (Zabadani), Qatana, Kiswe, , Qadam, Jdeida, as well as the Midan district: all well inside Damascus. If these were lights on a map they would form a circle around city. Since the government’s main concern now is Damascus and Aleppo, it is concentrating a huge security presence in those two cities. Hot spots such as Rukn al-Din, al-Qaboon, Harasta, and Duma are cordoned off entirely starting Thursday night. I walked through those areas on several occasions on a Friday and traffic was completely blocked with checkpoints on each major street entrance.

In the last few days before Ramadan there was a particularly heavy security presence in Damascus. In Khalid bin Walid street two days before Ramadan three flatbed military vehicles passed by pedestrian traffic, each with about 30 soldiers carrying machine guns and chanting pro-Maher (President’s brother) slogans. This seemed to be a warning to Damascenes not to dare protest during Ramadan. Like most regime actions you could see in the faces of passers by that this only increased people’s hostility. As I left the scene an old lady whispered to me ‘dear, do you think they are going to the Golan?’. A few days later in the exact same spot, a silent funeral march for a protestor who had been shot the day before was attacked by police, only for the police themselves to be beaten up by the people in the neighborhood.

Who Are the Protestors? What are their tactics?

Syria’s internal opposition movement is not unified and one should not speak about it in the singular. One can identify five distinct opposition groups. Burhan Ghaliun has stated they are unified by the three “No’s”: no to violence, no to sectarianism, and no to outside intervention (although I would exclude from this what I identify as the fifth group).

1. The first group consists of traditional oppositional parties: the socialist, Nasserist, and communist parties.
2. Second are the dissident intellectuals (such as Michel Kilo, Tayeb Tizini, Fayez Sara, Aref Dalila, and Burhan Ghalioun (on the outside). In my view the writings and words of these dissident intellectuals carry much greater weight among the revolutionary youth than the traditional oppositional parties, although, neither of the first two categories has a large ‘social base.
3. Third is the youth movement itself (youth here is used liberally, including teenagers to people in their 40s) which is the moving force of the revolution. The leaders of the Local Coordination Committees are in this group. While the uprising started off with demonstrations of marginalized and lower class youth, it has expanded to include youth from all sectors of society.
4. The fourth category is the social base of the youth movement that is an unorganized civil society composed of socially conservative Muslims but which is mistakenly referred to as Islamist. These are the people who bore the brunt of regime repression for decades. These are the primary carriers of the social revolt — that is the Syrian society itself and the reason in my view why the regime cannot survive.
5. The fifth category, which the regime claims is the main obstacle, but which is in fact a very small fraction, is the armed Salafi groups. Some may have traveled to Iraq to fight the US invasion. (They do not fit into Ghalioun’s three “no’s”, because they espouse violent revolution, are overtly sectarian, and welcome intervention by fellow Salafists, whether Syrian or not.)

These groups do not neatly fit into either class or regional categories. Most of those who have taken to the streets are from lower economic classes and rural or middle sized-cities. However, there is still a much larger group which has not taken to the streets and does not fall into the categories I have outlined above, but which is just as resentful of the regime: this is the upper-class and middle-class youth of Syria’s two major cities.

It has been conventional wisdom to assume that well-to-do Syrians are pro-regime. This is not accurate. Many who have brushed up against the regime and have experienced its humiliations and observed its brutality first hand. They may not take to the streets, but may contribute in other ways that are not obvious to the casual observer. Given the forbidding security environment, the protestors are organizing at the neighborhood level. Paranoia and fear of secret police make establishing ties between local organizations difficult, although organization is improving at all levels slowly but surely.

Since the start of the revolt, the government’s actions have been arbitrary and improvised. The government was caught flat footed by the protests and has had to change tactics over time. Its response has been to employ two main tracks: the first a campaign of psychological and physical terror against the demonstrators, the second, a series of political liberalization measures meant to both absorb or appease a section of the protestors as well as present to the outside world a semblance of change. Both of these tracks have one main common denominator: they are meant to preserve as much of the political status quo as possible. They are also designed to insist on complete governmental control over events and government reforms. Five months into the uprising, the government still acts as if it holds all the cards; all ‘reform’ measures are issued as decrees by the government. In other words, it has recognized –in its own words- legitimate grievances, but has yet to recognize a legitimate opposition to be negotiated with.

Thus, the “democratic transition,” such as the crafting of new political reform legislation, such as new ‘parties’ and ‘media’ laws, has been handed down by government fiat. Even the call for ‘dialogue’ which manifested itself in a two day summit in early July ended with a pre-fabricated statement which ignored the discussion that had taken place. Since then, the government’s response to opposition demands has been largely one of violence.

The protests themselves have not been uniform. Given the terror and live ammunition used by the regime, the protest movement’s tactics have been varied and creative. Resistance by the opposition ranges from political satire, rumors and gossip, guerrilla demonstrations, mass demonstrations, in-house demonstrations later broadcast on the internet, sit-ins, as well as acts of sabotage and violence. Since some quarters of Damascus and other areas are under Army siege or lock-down, demonstrators come out in rapid demonstrations and withdraw before the security forces can gather. When I visited Hama, days before the massacre (more on this below) each day over 100,000 people gathered in the main square (Sahet al-‘Asi) to discuss the day’s events and exchange information about events taking place elsewhere in Syria. One of the more creative tactics has been the ‘white demonstrations’ on Hamra street. A group ranging from 500 to 2000 all wearing white shirts or hats in groups of no more than three, but usually one or two walk back and forth on Hamra street without saying a word or even acknowledging each other. The security forces see them and know something is up but simply don’t know on what pretext to arrest them. As to the question of violence, it undoubtedly exists among the protest movement, though to a very small degree, as opposed to the regime’s actions which have been overwhelmingly violent, and increasingly so. It is quite amazing that the protest movement has not been as violent as one would expect given the brutality and sectarianism of the regime.

I attended several pro-regime rallies (masira) because I was curious to see who attends and what exactly takes place there. During my stay there were two large demonstrations, one in Omayyad (capped by the wildly popular singer George Wassouf) and the other in Hijaz Square. I attended the latter, but went twice to a rally in Bab Touma, the traditionally Christian part of town. As I approached the main square, which had several hundred people in white shirts all carrying or wearing Syrian flags, with loud pro-Bashar music blaring from loudspeakers, I finally realized what fascism really looks like.

The belief or claim by some opposition members outside the country that pro-regime demonstrations are entirely forced is not accurate. Many state (and private sector) employees are made to go, but many show up on their own and do not fit neatly into categories such as ‘regime beneficiary’ which some members of the opposition like to throw around. These were people, on their own will, coming to support a regime’s brutal crackdown by security forces that they themselves have long dreaded and despised. I saw and spoke with several people in attendance, all of whom insisted the events were necessary to ‘confront the conspiracy,’ to ‘preserve national unity’, and to ‘oppose extremists.’ The event was emceed skillfully by a man who alternated between leading chants and reading gut-wrenching accounts of the last moments and words of brave soldiers and military officers. In one such case, the commanding officer of a security post that had been ambushed called his superior and said: “the ammunition is done, I ask you to continue the fight. The homeland is a trust under your hands. Defend it and defend the leader.” The last words of all dying soldiers always involved: a) happiness in their sacrifice, b) devotion to the homeland and the president, c) request that those left behind take up the cause/fight.

Of course, no one has been hurt in a pro-regime rally and the ‘roving criminal gangs’ and ‘terrorist groups’ are absent. The rallies are guarded and streets are blocked. My own impression is that a large number of those attending would not take to the streets if there were any chance of violence.

Homage to Hama

I will describe my trip to Hama in a bit more detail because what I experienced there and what took place in the days after I left sums up what is beautiful about the revolution, just as it underscores the dark side of the regime. We left Damascus around 7.30am heading on a Pullman towards Hama. I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to get into the city. I had heard horrendous stories about violence in and around the city. There were only 12 passengers on the bus and some were to continue to Aleppo. From the capital until Homs there were very few signs of any disturbances or security presence, however after passing Homs in the environs of Talbeesa and Rastan there were about 20 tanks or so. Upon reaching Hama we were stopped by a new security unit I had not seen or heard of before. They wore black and dark green uniforms and had “counter terrorism unit” (C.T.U.) written on their back. They boarded the bus and to my surprise asked if there were any soldiers on board. They did not ask for our IDs. We had heard of soldier defections taking place and I can only speculate that they were looking for them. I should note that there have not been any high ranking defections in the Syrian Army that I know of, though there are numerous conscripts that have been fleeing military service. (The Army has not released any soldier from service, including those whose normal service term has expired). That checkpoint was the last symbol of government control and from then on we were in a liberated city, with no army or security presence whatsoever and no traffic police either.

After the mass demonstrations the security had withdrawn and left the town to its own affairs although everyone was anticipating an attack at any moment (which would later come the day before Ramadan). To try and slow down an attack the Hamwis had set up makeshift barriers throughout the city made of trash cans, cinder blocks, metal bars, even overturned buses and a huge caterpillar truck meant to deter or slow down an attack by security services. These were manned by boys and men ranging from teenagers to men in their forties, two or three at a time directing traffic. They were not armed, very friendly and allowed me to freely take pictures (on a slightly depressing note, some thought I was a foreigner and greeted me with “hello mr. welcome to hama.”). The teenagers and young men in particular were taking their traffic policing job quite seriously (‘better than the actual traffic cops’ I heard time and again), despite spending the day under a blistering sun. At night during the daily demonstrations, and when there was a strike, all the checkpoints would be closed. The barriers could not really deter any attack, and the Hamwis knew this of course. At best they were hoping to slow it down so that the city would not be caught unprepared. I was told that some villagers bringing down milk and yogurt were turned back due to the strike and did not return since their products had spoiled and were afraid this would occur again.

I was also informed that some Alawi civil servants and employees had not come to work from the villages out of fear, although I was assured their fear was unfounded and that no sectarian attack had taken place (Incidentally, I did not hear any sectarian chants during my stay and there was only one anti-Shiite sectarian slogan painted way outside on the periphery of the city. All other slogans around it had been painted over except this one perhaps left to show evidence of sectarianism).

The city itself was full of life and the markets were busy, after several days of a general strike; the markets and shops stayed open until well past 1am. We walked through the city passing by the world famous Norias, the Old souq and the many markets. Life did not stop in Hama, there were no armed gangs or armed presence within the city. We passed by several liquor stores that were open for business. I made sure to take a picture and show my Christian friends back in Damascus who thought that Hama was under some sort of Salafi rule.! Passing through a park near the center of the city, we heard a few men murmur ‘the people want to topple the regime’ as we passed people in a park. Anti-regime graffiti could be seen on some walls, although some of it was painted over. There was no sign of vandalism and damage of public property, and many pro-regime banners set up at the start of the uprisings in Syria had been left intact. I heard many stories throughout the day of the corruption and theft of the regime, particularly illegal land acquisition by people in the upper circles of power, including partners of the presidents infamous cousin. There is a ‘takbeer’ (chant of God is Great) when a checkpoint is attacked or neighborhood is attacked and the entire block or passersby rush to help. Things of course were a bit more complex than they appeared on the surface.

A source told us of an ambush of demonstrators which took place in front of his house. A masked informant led the demonstrators into the security officers waiting around a street corner who opened fire and immediately killed at least 10 people. Our host told us that the informant was later killed and his body dumped into the Orontes. This has been done a few times with people identified as informants, their names have been posted on the Mosque’s door, although inevitably were some mistakes and one person had to plead with his friends to come out in his defense and clear his name.

The nightly demonstrations were the fullest expression of the city’s freedom. They also acted as a social space for different sectors of Hamwis to gather. It became the location in which the day’s events were planned, grievances are aired, and news of events taking place in Syria discussed. I headed to the demonstration from the neighborhood of the Hama Castle, passing by the café of Apamea hotel. The café is located on a beautiful view, right on the Orontes river overlooking the Sohoniya, Qadriyya, and Sultaniyya Norias (water-wheels). However it has a tragic history. It was built on the ruins of the former Kaylaniyya district, which was beautiful. This entire historic district was razed to the ground during the 1982 massacres after being one of the most architecturally beautiful sites in Syria. The insurgents had taken refuge there believing — mistakenly as it turned out — that the government would not shell the district because of its historic value.

I approached the main square right around the end of the evening prayers. Along the way I passed on the left the only two buildings left in town which prominently displayed the pictures of the President, the first was the police HQ and the second was the Ba’ath party HQ. The Ba’ath Party HQ had been burned down after the massacre which took place on 6/6. A group of people took flowers and headed in that direction. When they approached, gunmen on top of the building had opened fire. The protestors tried to escape through another street only to find that it had been blocked the night before by the security. My informant said that several dozen people were killed that day. The next day Hama started demonstrating en masse and had not stopped since.

As we approached Sahet al-‘Asi (Orontes square) we saw several dozen people finishing the evening prayers in the square itself. The young men at the checkpoints had increased and were rerouting traffic. I first decided to hang out at the edge of the square, in front of the park through which Orontes river ran. The number of people arriving began to pick up. Whether by foot, taxi, or micro-bus, loads of men and women, young and old started arriving. It seemed like the whole town was arriving to take part. Even as the square was getting full I saw a huge crowd marching down from the South of the city. Groups of kids were clapping and chanting anti-regime slogans. Cafes and markets which opened the day before were still open and there was a hustle and bustle in the streets all night long. By the time about 100,000 gathered in the square all checkpoints leading to the square were closed to all but pedestrians, and the demonstration started in full force.

With chants blaring from loudspeakers, the event was more than just an anti-regime demonstration, it was an event were people gathered to talk about the day’s news, exchange information and make requests. One such request was that the checkpoints were becoming a burden on the population, especially the kids wanting to take the dreaded baccalaureate exam. Others asked that the villagers be allowed to bring down their food. A lawyer was recently released from custody and said he was one of the last remaining detainees. Solidarity with other cities as well as individuals who had spoken out against the regime’s violence (such as actress May Skaff) was a particular theme that night. Most chants mentioned unity among Christians, Alawis, Sunnis, Kurds, (more on the tricky sectarian issue below)and many Christians were in attendance and were saluted by the crowd. Outside the square, markets were still open and people were going about their business as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

Hama has always been a conservative city. All but a few women on the streets were wearing headscarves (there were almost no niqabs -which is mostly a phenomenon in other cities such as Damascus). But I saw absolutely no signs of fundamentalism inside the city. It is a mistake to think Hama’s intifada can simply be reduced to the 1982 massacre. They have shared grievances with every other city in Syria. In my opinion it’s more accurate to say that this is a city with a history of collective mobilization against injustice and defiance since before the Ba’ath regime came to power, and because of their defiance they have repeatedly paid a heavy price. And they were willing to do so again. This was not a vindictive or hateful city as I kept hearing from people in Damascus. The genuine happiness of achieving freedom far outweighed the supposed desire for revenge against the regime. The chant I heard most frequently throughout the day and night was ya mahlaha al hurriya (freedom is beautiful).

A few days after I left, the government attacked the city. It killed over 100 people in the first two days of its assault. Syrian television reports on the days of the attack repeated stories of armed criminals terrorizing the population and destroying daily life in the city. They claimed that the Hamwis had called for government intervention. I saw first-hand that all those stories were a blatant lie. Hamwis knew what the regime was capable of and what it was planning. They nevertheless showed unbending courage and defiance in the face of terrible odds. The regime will not emerge triumphant from this bloodbath as it did in the past. Rather than turning their backs on Hama, as they did in the past, Syria’s other cities are championing it. Hama’s cause with neither sectarian nor violent. This time around, Hama expressed the sentiments of the Syrian people in a peaceful way.

The Issue of Minorities

Most of my time in Syria was spent in the Christian quarters of Damascus. Despite personal familiarity with the inhabitants of these quarters, nothing in my upbringing prepared me for the level of vitriol and hatred I heard there toward the protestors. The most depressing aspect of my trip to Syria was to see many (and I fear most) of its Christians rallying in support of the regime.

I heard the same language used to describe my fellow Syrians and the brave protestors as I have so often heard used by Israelis to describe the struggles of Palestinian people:  They are monsters, if they get their rights they will kill us’, ‘why are they sending their children to die?’, ‘they don’t want democracy, they are Islamic extremists who will kill us or oppress all us’, ‘no country can tolerate armed groups seeking to overthrow it’ etc. I was infuriated to consistently hear my heroes slandered and despised in their own country. And this by people who know only too well how brutal the regime is.

However if one is patient and overlooks the provocative slurs, one can detect a common theme among those who criticize the uprising: a genuine fear of the unknown. I believe that many who claim that the regime ‘protects minorities’ in fact fear retribution. Minorities which believe that they have benefited from the regime’s brutality and corruption over the past forty years believe that they are implicated in the eyes of the Sunni majority in its crimes. This is true not only of the Christians but even more so of the Isma’ilis and Alawis. I fear that the longer the regime clings to power and the more brutal it gets, the more sectarian feelings will intensify. Many feel the cross-sectarian chants (such as “Christians and Muslims are brothers” etc.) are disingenuous. This may be true, but I believe the criticism is a too harsh. At the start of the protests the demonstrators were viciously attacked by some as hiding a radical Islamist agenda. they responded in the best way they could: we have no such intentions, in fact we are all one, we love our Christian, Kurdish, and Alawi brothers etc. They were then attacked for saying this as well. In other words, it’s a no-win situation for these demonstrators who, apparently, like their Palestinian brethren, must prove the purity of their intentions.  All they are doing, after all, is insist that they they be granted their elemental civil rights.

The regime has in fact been the biggest enemy of minorities, including most Alawis. Alawis must navigate a treacherous and difficult political path. The opposition needs to pay special attention to the sectarian issue and the social wounds after the fall of the regime. National reconciliation will be so important if Syria is to find unity and social peace. It is not enough to make the claim that most Alawis (or other minorities) are not with the regime, and that being a Alawi or Christian or Isma’ili has nothing to do with this regime. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, what seems to be on the table in Syria is a genuine revolutionary change and radical societal transformation that inevitably leaves many people fearful of the unknown. The gradualism, peacefulness, and decentralization of the Syrian revolution have been a major asset, although many I spoke with see the lack of an organized opposition they trust (and the Muslim Brotherhood definitely does not fall into this category for the people I am referring to) as potentially disastrous for the country.

Leaving Damascus

I left Damascus three days into Ramadan with the general feeling that it was on the verge of a major escalation. The pro- and anti- regime demonstrations are headed in opposite directions numbers wise. After starting off as a militant movement to demand basic civil rights, the protests seem to have reached a zero-sum game, but this has still emboldened even more people to take to the streets.

The high death toll of the attack on Hama carried out on the day before Ramadan demonstrates that the regime has more or less given up the call for dialogue. Syria’s rulers believe that they can still crush the protest movement. At the same time, they have issued several political reform measures meant to placate foreign countries, who hope that Syria might emerge as a ‘liberal autocracy’ on the model of Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s. The opposition will not accept such thin gruel now that it has sacrificed so much and mobilized so many. Neither side is likely to back down.

Syria might very well descend into fighting and repression that becomes quite bloody. But even if it does, the revolution must be driven completely from the inside for moral as well as practical reasons. So far, despite government claims, it has been overwhelmingly non-violent, internally driven, and de-centralized, which explains its success. However this can only continue for so long. I fear that increased regime terror will lead to an increasingly armed response. After priding itself on maintaining stability, the regime will have to accept the responsibility for the destruction of Syria for the sake of maintaining power.

* Omar S. Dahi is Assistant Professor of Economics at Hampshire College. His email address is odahi at hampshire dot edu. His cell phone number is 413-313-2492.

Syria must complete reform within next two weeks – Turkish presidential adviser,
Al-Sharq al-Awsat – 12/08/2011

Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat – Turkish diplomatic sources have expressed their hope that the events that are taking place close to their border with Syria do not represent “a Syrian response to the advice issued by Turkey” earlier this week. Senior Turkish presidential adviser Ersat Hurmuzlu informed Asharq Al-Awsat that Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s letter to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – delivered by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu during his latest visit to Damascus – informed Damascus that Ankara “does not want to see anybody in the Syrian administration regretting what happened after it is too late.”

Turkish diplomatic sources also informed Asharq Al-Awsat that Ankara is closely monitoring the situation in Syria, including the ongoing Syrian security operation, particularly after the Syrian security apparatus most recently stormed the town of Bdama, close to the Turkish border. The sources stressed that “if this is the Syrian response, then the forthcoming days will be extremely difficult.” However the Turkish diplomatic source refused to “anticipate events, because the Syrians promised to take certain steps, and we are waiting to see this.”

Turkish presidential adviser Ersat Hurmuzlu also denied that Ankara had given Damascus a “time limit of 15 days” to implement reform adding that “Turkey expects Syria to take action within the next few days, if they are sincere in their intentions, for reform must be completed within the next two weeks.”

Hurmuzlu also told Asharq Al-Awsat that “a letter [by Turkish President Abdullah Gul] addressed to al-Assad and delivered by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stressed the necessity of Syria putting an end to the bloodshed, releasing all the detainees, and immediately implementing reform that meets the aspirations of the Syrian people.”

The Turkish presidential adviser added that Turkish President Abdullah Gul – in this letter – stressed that “he does not want to see anybody in the Syrian administration regretting what happened after it is too late.” Hurmuzlu added that the Turkish Foreign Minister also informed al-Assad of the viewpoint of Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressing “his clear message regarding the necessity of Syria immediately putting an end to the bloodshed, and not utilizing violence to suppress the peaceful protests.”

Hurmuzlu added the Syrians “listened to the Turkish advice, and they expressed an understanding of the necessity of withdrawing their military forces and apparatus from [Syrian] cities, and allowing Turkish press correspondents to enter the afore-mentioned cities.” He also revealed to Asharq Al-Awsat that a group of Turkish journalists had visited the effected Syrian areas, adding that “Turkey wants this [Turkish media presence] to become a permanent state of affairs, not merely part of an organized visit.” Hurmuzlu stressed that Ankara wants to ensure that Turkish journalists are allowed access to Syrian cities in order to provide the world with accurate information regarding what is happening on the ground in Syria.

In response to questions about the “two week time limit” that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke of, Hurmuzlu stressed that Ankara expects “Syrian movement [towards reform] in days rather than weeks; if they are sincere in their intentions to implement reforms then this must be implemented before the end of Ramadan.” He added that Turkey hopes that these reforms will represent “a shock” and include “a change in the form and image of the regime which meets the demands of the Syrian people.”

In the event of Syria failing to respond to the Turkish calls and implement reform, and continuing its policy of violence and suppression, Hurmuzlu stressed that Turkey “would expect what it warned against previously to take place, namely Syria finding itself confronting the international community, with strong international resolutions being issued against Damascus, as well as foreign intervention in Syria.”

Turkey threatens to join international military action in Syria
Turkey has lost patience with Syria, according to Turkish officials quoted in the Hurriyet newspaper, and has issued an ultimatum to Assad.
By Zvi Bar’el, Aug. 9, 2011

Turkey may consider cooperating with international powers in the event they decide to intervene militarily in Syria, according to a report in the Turkish “Hurriyet” newspaper on Saturday

Turkey has lost its patience with Syria, according to Turkish officials, and Turkish President Abdullah Gul has issued an ultimatum to Syrian President Bashar Assad via Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who visited Syria on Tuesday.

According to officials, the Turkish foreign minister made it clear to Assad that in the event that Syrian forces continue to act aggressively against demonstrators Syria will no longer be able to rely on friendship from Turkey.

The Turkish officials told the Hurriyet that “Turkey had initially tried to convince its Western allies to grant Assad time to implement reforms eight months ago. We have been as friendly toward Syria as we could, but a regime that doesn’t listen to advice from its friend and neighbor cannot be a friend of Turkey’s.”

The letter from Turkish President Gul and the leaking of its content to the Turkish media is testimony to Turkey’s strategic decision to deem Assad’s regime as illegitimate, thereby allowing it to move toward an operative stage against Syria.

Arshet Hormozlo, an adviser to the Turkish president, made clear in an interview with the Iraqi newspaper “Zaman” that Turkey will not intervene militarily in Syria and will not allow international forces to enter Syria from Turkish territory.

However, Turkey’s consent to join an international coalition that may launch a military offensive against Syria is a dramatic turning point in Turkey’s stance. Hormozlo’s statement is proof that talks on military involvement have already reached the decision-making stage.

At the first stage, Turkey is expected to withdraw its ambassador from Damascus, following the example of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. The next step Turkey would take is freezing its projects and investments in Syria. Turkey will only take military action against Assad in the event that an international decision to intervene is made.

Turkey is furious with Iran for its criticism of Turkey for its stance toward Syria. Iran called Turkey a “subcontractor of U.S. policy”.

In the event that military action is taken against Syria, other fronts may be opened if Iran decides to protect Assad’s rule beyond sending monetary aid and equipment by way of Iraq. In such a scenario, Iran could open a tactical front in the Gulf, send forces to Bahrain or start large-scale military maneuvers in the Gulf.

Turkish and foreign journalists enter Syria for Hama
Thursday, August 11th, 2011 | Posted by Editor

A group of journalists including an A.A cameraman and a reporter who would follow the recent situation in Syrian city of Hama entered from Turkey to Syria from Bab al-Hawa border crossing on Thursday.

The journalists left for Syria following the statement that Syrian army withdrew tanks and heavy weapons.

Turkish police escorted the journalists till Cilvegozu border pass and later officials of Syrian Consulate General in Hatay welcomed the journalists after they passed the buffer zone.

The team of journalists are on their way to Hama.

A.A cameraman Vural Elibol and A.A reporter Mustafa Keles are among the 10 journalists of Turkish and foreign press organizations who would follow the situation in Hama.

“The United States Is Not Qualified to Intervene on Behalf of Democracy in the Region”: Al-Jazeera Interview with Jadaliyya Co-Editor

3 Reasons Assad is Here to Stay
Bilal Y. Saab, June 30, 2011, National Interest

Syrian President Bashar Assad will not listen—not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow—to the U.S. government. If you can’t manipulate the decision-making of an authoritarian government during peacetime, imagine how difficult or almost impossible that task would be during times of existential crisis when that government is fighting a brutal war against its own people for survival.

President Obama’s policy on Syria is haphazard. It is also pragmatic. Crises and wars usually present opportunities for policymakers to overhaul policy and make necessary changes. Unfortunately, the Syrian case is an exception to the rule. One would think that the ongoing popular uprising in Syria, which is making the Syrian regime more vulnerable at home and less cocky in its dealings with the West, would make the job of breaking the policy logjam easier for the American president. But it is not. In a carefully worded op-ed for the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threw the kitchen sink at Assad but fell short of asking him to leave. Why?

Three reasons, as enumerated to me by a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, explain why Obama and his foreign policy team are not likely to go all the way and ask Assad to step down.

One, war weariness: The American people are dead set against another war in the Middle East. Polls show that even the Afghanistan war Americans no longer support. And that is a war that most Americans tie to 9/11 and in which the American national interest is supposedly clear and well defined. A forceful policy toward Syria that is backed by the credible threat of military intervention will not be supported by the American people simply because Syria does not undermine the national interest and does not threaten the homeland. These are election times and Obama is running next year with the promise of drawing down in Afghanistan and focusing on economic problems at home, not waging more wars abroad. Furthermore, Libya killed all chances of more aggressive US action in Syria. Had the crisis in Libya not happened, the United States and NATO may have thought about making a move in Syria to teach it a lesson. Unless a major breakthrough happens in Libya (Qaddafi dies or the rebels win), the United States and NATO will not lift a finger on Syria.

Two, no regional consensus: The one truly remarkable aspect about NATO’s intervention in Libya is that the crushing majority of Arabs, governments and publics alike, supported it. On Syria, there is no regional consensus whatsoever and that complicates matters for Obama significantly. The Saudis may not like Assad and co. due to his regime’s awful treatment of their allies in Lebanon and partnership with Iran and Hezbollah, but they still see strategic value in the survival of the regime because they can do business with it. The Turks have issued some harsh statements against Syria lately, but in reality, their preference is a reformed regime not a new regime in Damascus because their priorities are security along the borders and control of the Kurds, two matters which Assad has delivered on. And then there is Israel, which can say all it wants about supporting the course of democracy in Syria but in reality is more than fine with Assad in power largely because he is predictable and keeps the Syrian-Israeli borders calm.

Three, no critical mass: It might have been easier for Obama to ask Assad to step down had the Syrian protestors reached a critical mass. Unfortunately and for several reasons primarily related to organizational weaknesses and division among the ranks, the Syrian popular uprising is viewed in Washington as a “rural phenomenon” and until it becomes more “urban” serious attention and more forceful action by Americans and the international community will remain elusive. The images of thousands of Egyptians demonstrating in Tahrir Square signaled the end of the Mubarak regime, making it relatively easy for Washington to pick up the pieces and call for Mubarak to leave. No such images have appeared in Damascus.

The fact is this: Assad is here for now.

Support for Assad Government Shows Signs of Weakening
by Anthony Shadid

Cracks have begun to emerge in a tight-knit leadership that has until now managed to rally its base of support and maintain a unified front, officials, dissidents and analysts say.

Though there are no signs of an imminent collapse, flagging support of the business elite in Damascus, divisions among senior officials and even moves by former government stalwarts to distance themselves from the leadership come at a time when Syria also faces what may be its greatest isolation in more than four decades of rule by the Assad family…..

“They’re starting to be divided, and you have people in the government who are really getting frustrated with Assad and his security circles,” an Obama administration official in Washington said, referring to President Bashar al-Assad.

“It’s almost like watching a dysfunctional marriage,” the official said…..

In Damascus this week, 41 former Baathists and government officials took a step that would have been unthinkable for party stalwarts not long ago: They announced an initiative for a political transition. Led by Mohammed Salman, a former information minister with deep connections to the leadership closest to Mr. Assad, the group urged an end to the crackdown, the deployment of the military and the relentless arrest campaign…

But officials and analysts say more and more businessmen have reached out to the opposition, including a leading figure from the Alawite minority, from which Mr. Assad’s leadership disproportionately draws its support. Others seem to be trying to keep channels open to both sides, as they wait to see which party gains a decisive edge, analysts said.

“They’re starting to turn to us, to the United States, and say, ‘What can we do? How can we help?’ ” the American official said. “The domino effect is going to go even faster for the Sunni business elite, and that’s when you’ll see Damascus go up in flames.”…

Arab autocrats get hit by legitimacy
August 13, 2011, By Rami G. Khouri, The Daily Star

…. If domestic challenges do not change or sufficiently modify an Arab regime, what then is the appropriate role for external intervention?

This question has again come to the fore with several international calls for the Syrian regime headed by President Bashar Assad to leave office or make a serious transition to democracy….

Iraqi Leader Backs Syria, With a Nudge From Iran
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and YASIR GHAZI

BAGHDAD — As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

“The unrest in Syria has exacerbated the old sectarian divides in Iraq because the Shiite leaders have grown close to Assad and the Sunnis identify with the people,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East.

Syria: Clinton urges states to cut ties over crackdown
BBC, 12 August 2011

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged all countries to cut their political and economic ties with Syria.

She said buying oil and gas from Syria and exporting arms there were giving President Bashar al-Assad “comfort in his brutality”.

Mrs Clinton’s comments came as large anti-government protests continued despite a harsh army crackdown.

Activists said at least 16 people died on Friday as protesters came under fire in towns and cities across the country.

More than 1,700 people have died and tens of thousands have reportedly been arrested since the uprising against the 41-year rule of Mr Assad’s family began in March.

Correspondents say there is little the US can do to directly pressure the Syrian regime, with which it has few ties or shared interests.

So Washington has been stepping up the pressure on Europe, Russia and China, to use the leverage that they do have, and on Friday Mrs Clinton extended the pressure to all those with ties to Damascus.

“We urge those countries still buying Syrian oil and gas, those countries still sending Assad weapons, those countries whose political and economic support give him comfort in his brutality, to get on the right side of history,” she said.

Washington has stopped short of calling for Mr Assad to stand down, instead seeking unity in the international community so Mr Assad cannot say it is only the US or the West that is against him,

But Mrs Clinton reiterated the view that he has “lost the legitimacy to lead and it is clear that Syria would be better off without him”.

The US has imposed sanctions against Damascus and has said these could be increased, while calling on other countries to follow.

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait have all recalled their ambassadors from Damascus while Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has described the methods used by the Syrian security forces as “unacceptable”.
‘Worshippers shot’

Activists say thousands of people took to the streets again on Friday to demand an end to Mr Assad’s rule. Protesters came under fire in the central city of Homs, Hama, the capital Damascus, Deir al-Zour in the east and Aleppo and Idlib near Turkey’s border.

Syrian state television admitted there had been small demonstrations after Friday prayers, but activists said they were far bigger and more widespread.

The highest reported casualties were in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, where a woman and a 16-year-old were named among those who died. Syrian state TV said two security men had been shot dead in the capital.

Thousands of people came out to protest in Deir al-Zour, said activists. Soldiers reportedly fired live ammunition as people left two mosques, sending worshippers running for cover in alleyways.

“Assad wants to finish off the uprising before international pressure becomes too much for him. But people have gone out of almost every major mosque in Deir al-Zor, metres away from tanks that occupy every main square and roundabout,” one resident told Reuters news agency.

Abdel Rahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said there had been a major army assault with tanks and troop carriers on Kahn Sheikhun, in north-western Idlib province, killing at least one woman.

In Hama, which came under heavy bombardment last week, activists said mosques were surrounded by soldiers and people were being stopped and searched at checkpoints “every 200m”.

Witnesses say the number of people being killed has risen during the current fasting month of Ramadan, as opponents of the regime stage protests after evening and early-morning prayers.

“We used to have 20 killed every Friday but now this number is being killed almost on a daily basis,” one man told the BBC.

Meanwhile, rights groups accuse the regime of targeting hospitals and arresting doctors for treating injured protesters.

“Any doctor who is discovered giving help to the injured is targeted and arrested,” one Syrian doctor – who did not want to be named – told the BBC.

There are reports of troops preventing the wounded from reaching hospitals in some areas, and even of removing the bodies of dead protesters from hospitals. Activists say this is to make it harder to calculate the number of people killed in the regime’s campaign to quash dissent….

SYRIA: Chaos erupts on streets of Aleppo [Video]
August 12, 2011 |

Chaos was reported on the streets of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, during another day of intense confrontations between security forces and anti-government protesters.

Some have speculated that the city’s residents have been reluctant to take to the streets because they’ve developed too cozy a relationship with the regime of President Bashar Assad.

But new video posted to the Internet suggests another possible rationale: that unlike in Hama, Dair Alzour or Homs — where the regime allowed protesters to congregate before moving in and opening fire, killing many — security forces are brooking no dissent in Aleppo.

In the videos above and below, young men can be seen running through a poor district of the city as gunfire is heard in the distance.

First legal political party established in syria under the new law..

A reassertion of Mr. Al-Assad’s power may be seen as the lesser evil
There’s no happy ending to Syria’s power struggle
MICHAEL BELL
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 12, 2011

Syrians who value freedom and are willing to die for it are going to be bitterly disappointed. Even if the Alawite-dominated Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapses and the opposition takes power, the challenges will be overwhelming.

Syria is no Egypt or Tunisia, with their relatively homogeneous societies and militaries able to act independently. Nor is it the tribal wasteland of Yemen. The considerable obstacles to political reform in Cairo and Tunis pale beside the dilemmas that would confront new and contending Syrian leaderships, however progressive many might be.

There are three possible outcomes to the current struggle for power, none of them comforting: The regime may suppress the rebellion; the “opposition” may take over; or Syria may break into a series of contesting micro-states. All possibilities have profound implications not only for Syrians but for the Arab revolt writ large, for the region’s fragile state system and for the international community, including Western interests.

Most likely, the Assad regime will survive, despite sanctions, diplomatic isolation and economic dislocation. Syria has been through this before, with the Americans alternating between labelling the regime a pariah and making overtures aimed at drawing Damascus into dialogue. Neither has worked.

Syria’s leadership is now subject to intense worldwide scrutiny and criticism, from Washington to Riyadh to Moscow. The language of human rights, however defined, may be pervasive, but the reality is different. It’s quite possible that many in the international community view a reassertion of Mr. al-Assad’s power, as distasteful as it is, as the lesser of evils, in a situation where chaos seems the most likely alternative.

In Syria, the existing elite, the military command and the intelligence services are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. While there are differences at the top, these focus on the tactics of repression, not its substance – in 1982, between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed during the Sunni-dominated Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the city of Hama. And Mr. al-Assad can’t move against corruption, because he’s now dependent for his own survival on members of the decadent elite, which his long-ruling father had empowered.

Syria’s population is highly fragmented along ethno-religious lines. Sunnis represent the traditionally privileged majority. Alawis and Druze, breakaway sects of Shia Islam, as well as Christians, constitute significant minorities that, during the interwar French mandate, were recruited into the security services to contain Sunni nationalism. It’s these groups that supported the now ruling Baath Party, which put heavy emphasis on secular values. And it’s these groups that fear majority Sunni rule will put them at risk.

If the current opposition took power, its greatest challenges would be its own heterogeneity, even among Sunnis, its lack of cohesiveness and leadership and its consequent inability to assert itself in any concerted manner. The resulting internecine impasse, in the absence of any institutional base or developed civil society, would result in a fierce internal struggle. The demise of the current Baathist regime in Syria would be a severe blow to Iran and Hezbollah, Israel’s bêtes noires. A Sunni-based Islamist takeover, however, would be a real possibility. Think Hama, 1982.

The third scenario might be the most unstable: a division of the country into sovereign ethnic enclaves with the Alawis grabbing their demographic littoral (as rumoured in the Lebanese press). While it would be simplistic to argue that ethnicity rules all and that the quest for freedom has little resonance beyond tribe, the power of identity and narrative should never be underestimated in the Middle East.

Michael Bell, a former Canadian ambassador to Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, is the Paul Martin (Sr.) Scholar in International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor.

BBC World interviews Sheikh Sayyid Yaqoubi of Syria.

Turkey buys more time for Damascus
Friday, August 12, 2011
SEV?L KÜÇÜKKO?UM

Turkey has convinced the US to wait for two weeks before pressing against Syria, but so far sees little sign that President Assad will end the bloodshed
As Turkey urges the international community to wait more before launching tougher measures on Syria, the U.S. has postponed its call for Assad to step down.

“Assad promised us to take some steps in short span of time. We told Assad there was not much time to give. So that it seems there is nearly two weeks of time,” a senior official from Turkish Foreign Ministry told the Hürriyet Daily News on Friday.

The U.S. was not willing but “they accepted to give some more time by means of us,” the official said.

In a phone conversation late Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an “agreed to monitor closely the steps taken by the Syrian government and to continue consultations,” the Prime Ministry’s press office said. Both agreed on the need for a transition to democracy in Syria, a statement from White House said.

Following his talks with Assad in Damascus on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu has held several phone conversations with his counterparts from around the world. Ankara is playing a coordination role, the senior official told the Daily News, since Turkey is the “sole actor that can talk to Assad.”

It would be better not to confront Assad at the moment, the official said, adding that if he did not fulfill his promises then international actors would increase the pressure. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt,” he said, describing Turkey’s position. ….

The U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to call on Assad to step down Thursday, but postponed. “The U.S. is looking to explicitly call for Assad to step down. The timing of that is still in question,” a U.S. official told AFP. The official did not rule out the possibility that the announcement could come next week.

Asked why the U.S. had not called on Assad to step down, the official said Washington had been “very clear” in its statements about Assad’s loss of legitimacy and wanted other nations to add their voices.

Gül’s letter to Assad

President Abdullah Gül also has called on Assad to implement reforms before it is too late, in a letter handed over to Assad by Turkey’s foreign minister.

“I would not want you to look back some day and regret that you acted too little, too late,” Gül said in his letter. “It is time to show your leadership and courage and lead the way for change instead of getting caught up in the winds of change.

“People’s legitimate demands for democracy must be fulfilled sincerely and rapidly, which I believe would improve the current negative circumstances in Syria at an equally rapid pace,” he said.

‘Turkey must adopt wise policy on Syria’
Fri Aug 12, 2011, Interview with Youssef Rahma , Professor of University of Michigan

A political analyst says that Turkish government must adopt a wise and careful policy towards the ongoing unrest in Syria.

Why the Syrian regime won’t fall
By Pepe Escobar

Suppose this was a Hollywood script conference and you have to pitch your story idea in 10 words or less. It’s a movie about Syria. As much as the currently in-research Kathryn Hurt Locker Bigelow film about the Osama bin Laden raid was pitched as “good guys take out Osama in Pakistan”, the Syrian epic could be branded “Sunnis and Shi’ites battle for Arab republic”.

Yes, once again this is all about that fiction, the “Shi’ite crescent”, about isolating Iran and about Sunni prejudice against Shi’ites.

The hardcore Sunni Wahhabi House of Saud – in yet another towering show of hypocrisy, and faithful to its hatred of secular

Arab republics – has branded the Bashar al-Assad-controlled Ba’ath regime in Syria “a killing machine”.

True, Assad’s ferocious security apparatus does not help – having killed over 2,400 people since unrest erupted in March. That is much more, incidentally, than Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces had killed in Libya when United Nations Resolution 1973 was rushed in to allow foreign interventions. The Diogenes the Cynic response to this “where’s the UN” discrepancy would be that Syria, unlike Libya, is not sitting on immense oil and gas wealth. more………

Turkish President Calls on Assad to Make Political Reforms

Turkish President Abdullah Gul has reiterated a call on his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad to make democratic reforms rapidly in a letter Turkish foreign minister relayed to Assad.

“People’s legitimate demands toward democracy must be fulfilled sincerely and rapidly, which I believe would improve the current negative circumstances in Syria with an equal rapid pace,” Gul told Assad in his letter conveyed by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to the Syrian leader last Tuesday during a visit to Damascus.
“I would not want to see you in a position where you look back and regret that what you have done was late and not enough,” Gul said in his letter.

Gul said Syria was passing through critical and historic times, telling Assad, “it is time to show your leadership courageously and lead the way for change instead of getting caught up in the winds of change.”
(?MB-MS)

Strike on Syria is technically feasible, former French general says
10.08.11 EU Observer By Andrew Rettman

A Nato strike to disable the Syrian army is technically feasible according to experts, such as former French air chief Jean Rannou. But it could make the country’s internal situation worse.

Nato member countries would begin by using satellite technology to spot Syrian air defences. A few days later, warplanes, in larger numbers than Libya, would take off from the UK base in Cyprus and spend some 48 hours destroying Syrian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and jets. Alliance aircraft would then start an open-ended bombardment of Syrian tanks and ground troops.

The scenario is based on analysts in the French military, from the specialist British publication Jane’s Defence Weekly and from Israel’s Channel 10 TV station.

The Syrian air force is said to pose little threat. It has around 60 Russian-made MiG-29s. But the rest – some 160 MiG-21s, 80 MiG-23s, 60 MiG-23BNs, 50 Su-22s and 20 Su-24MKs – is out of date.

Its latest SAMs could shoot down a handful of Nato pilots. In the past three years, Syria deployed hundreds of Russian-made SA-17s, which come up on radars for a very short time before firing. Israel in 2007 bombed a suspected nuclear site in Syria using a cyber attack to cut electricity to air defences. The SA-17s are believed to be cyber-insulated and Israel might not share its secrets with Nato, however.

Syria in 2006 bought around 30 Russian-made Pantsyr-S1 anti-aircaft cannon. But these are said to be in Iran. It has stocked up on modern SA-18 missiles from Belarus and Russia. But these are short-range weapons that would only pose a danger to Nato helicopters in a later stage of the operation.

There are also assymetric threats – Nato countries have troops in Unifil, the UN mission in neighbouring Lebanon which could become targets.

Syria is said to have two Scud missile brigades armed with conventional and chemical warheads (VX, Sarin and Mustard gas), as well as M600 chemical-ready missiles, which it could fire at Israel in retaliation.

“I don’t see any purely military problems. Syria has no defence against Western systems … [But] it would be more risky than Libya. It would be a heavy military operation,” Jean Rannou, the former chief of the French air force, told EUobserver.

Assad allies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, could also attack Israel. But experts say Hezbollah would not start an Israel-Lebanon war to save Syrian President Bashar Assad. And Hamas needs international support for the Palestinian bid to seek UN membership.

Guardian (GB): How youth-led revolts shook elites around the world
2011-08-12, Jack Shenker guardian.co.uk

Protests against austerity measures in Athens were just some of the examples of youth-led protest in the first half of 2011. Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Of all the millions of words …

Saudis, in effort to aid Syrian rebels, open airwaves to Sunni clerics

WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia has increased its support for Islamic rebels in their revolt against Syrian President Bashar Assad, a report said. The Institute for Gulf Affairs Policy asserted that the Saudi leadership has been working to destabilize the Assad regime. The institute, which represents the Saudi opposition, said Saudi television stations have given Syrian Sunni clerics a forum to mobilize against Assad and his Alawite minority.

BBC Ex-USSR: Paper views Russia’s change of attitude to Syrian president
2011-08-12

Text of report by the website of Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, often critical of the government on 12 August

[Aleksandr Shumilin report: “‘Russia, You Are Defending Bashar the Killer’: Why the Russian Leadership Is Turning its Back on Our Friend Asad”]

It seemed in the first days of August even that Russia would under no circumstances permit in Syria a “Libyan scenario ” and, as the Russian Federation Foreign Ministry said, would emphatically counter” international interference in the internal affairs of a friendly country” experiencing a crisis. But in the second week of August first
President Dmitriy Medvedev, and hot on his heels, Sergey Lavrov, head of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, also began to speak in strong terms about the violence being perpetrated by the Syrian leadership.

Something is beginning to change in Moscow’s rhetoric: instead of the phrase “our friend Asad,” another – “Syrian leadership” – is being heard, in an increasingly less positive context, what is more. We recently observed this reverse (in the explanatory dictionary – “change of a mechanism’s motion backward, opposite”) in relations
between Italian Premier Berlusconi and the Libyan Colonel Al- Qadhafi.

Now, by all accounts, the same reverse between Moscow and Damascus is possible. And it is not at all a matter of “our friend Asad” having since March already dispatched more than 2,000 of his peaceful citizens. Friendship Is Strong, but Not Eternal….

Time: Dissent in Damascus’ Shadows: Driving Around Syria’s Capital 2011-08-12

It was 9.30 p.m. on Friday last week, and the Syrian capital Damascus was a ghost town. There were few cars on the streets, and even fewer families enjoying the warm Ramadan evening. Still, the streets were not completely deserted; Groups of men, …

Israel army plants new mines along Syria border

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli army magazine says the military is planting new land mines along the border with Syria to dissuade protesters from rushing
into the Golan Heights.

The army decided to go ahead with the move after older mines failed to detonate when Syrian demonstrators rushed into the border area in June during a protest against Israel’s occupation. Israeli forces opened fire, killing some 20 protesters in efforts to push the crowd back.

The mines are also part of beefed-up measures Israel is taking ahead of rallies that Palestinians are planning to hold in September.

Syria:the hot month of Ramadan
Anisimov Sergey, Fedoruk Vladimir
Aug 13, 2011 15:42 Moscow Time

Anti-government protests rage on Syria with protesters demanding the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad and the release of all political prisoners, including those detained in the course of the recent protests. Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV Channel reports dozens of deaths daily.

No one can see the end of the conflict for now and few can say what President Bashar al-Assad’s so-called “deafness” will lead to. President of the Middle East Institute Yevgeny Satanovsky has this to say.

“The opposition wants Christians out and Alawis dead. President Assad is an Alawite leader, which leaves him no chances, so he will fight to the end. Fleeing the country makes no sense for him because as Iran’s only ally in the Arab world, he will be unable to find a safe refuge in a foreign country, say Saudi Arabia, and will soon be traced down and killed. It’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf countries that are sponsoring the riots in Syria as part of undeclared war against Iran. President Assad could sit it all out in Iran but he is unlikely to. His reforms are fairly weak and they promise little in terms of easing his grip on power. He has few chances of retaining power.”

The West has been trying to force Assad to leave. The US has introduced new sanctions against Syria and urged Russia, China and India to follow suit. For the first time in five months of riots, Washington has called on the Syrian leader to resign. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain have recalled their ambassadors from Damascus in protest against the continuing bloodshed. A number of analysts say that Washington is behind it. Vladimir Sotnikov, from the Oriental Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, comments.

“Washington is acting through Arab countries. As the conflict in Syria drags on, no one can say when the opposition will run out of steam or how long President Assad will be able to keep the situation under control. The US is too bogged down in Libya to let itself being drawn into yet another conflict. The Arab countries are too divided on Syria to work out a consolidated approach towards the Syrian crisis. For this reason, Washington has few chances of getting Middle East and Gulf countries to form a united front against Assad.”

Given the situation, the stakes of Riyadh as Washington’s ally are fairly high, the more so since Saudi Arabia is interested in shattering the government in Damascus. Georgy Mirsky, an Oriental expert from the Institute of Global Economy and International Relations, has this opinion.

“Saudi’s number one foe is Shiite Iran, and Syria is Tehran’s main ally. Saudis would be pleased to have Assad replaced by a Sunni leader. Saudi Arabia is populated by Sunnis. 75 percent of Syrians are Sunni too but have Alawite rulers. For Saudis, Alawites are like infidels. But they are allied to Iran. Saudi Arabia would certainly welcome the departure of Assad on condition the reins of power go to groups other than the Muslim Brotherhood, its deadly enemy.”

Turkey is America’s other helping hand in handling the Syrian crisis. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu sounded harsh as he told Damascus in an ultimatum-like statement dictated by Washington that it ought to end violence and call parliamentary elections. Ankara will have to declare the Syrian president illegitimate if Damascus doesn’t heed its recommendations, the statement said. The tone of President Abdullah Gul’s statement was equally harsh as he said that Ankara was prepared to assume the role of a regional leader and as such, it would inevitably affect the interests of Tehran, a traditionally influential player in the region.

Iran has agreed to fund a new multi-million-dollar military base on the Syrian coast
to make it easier to ship weapons and other military hardware between the two countries, according to Western intelligence reports.
By Con Coughlin, 12 Aug 2011

Under the terms of the deal, which was concluded after a high-level Syrian delegation visited Tehran, Iran is to assist with the development of a new military compound at Latakia airport which will be completed by the end of next year. The aim of the agreement is to open a supply route that will enable Iran to transfer military hardware directly to Syria.

Western security officials say the deal was agreed following a visit to Tehran in June by Muhammad Nasif Kheirbek,
Syria’s deputy vice-president for security affairs and an ally of President Bashar al-Assad.

more….

Syria sees fresh wave of anti-gov’t protests
2011-08-12

DAMASCUS, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) — Hundreds of people took to the streets across Syria on Friday for a fresh wave of anti-government protests.

Syria’s state television said limited gatherings were seen in the northern province of Idlib, central province of Homs and some suburbs of the capital Damascus.

About 200 people staged a protest in the eastern town of al- Boukmal near Iraq’s border and dispersed within a short time, said the TV.

In al-Qadam neighborhood, a district of the capital, the TV said around 100 people took to the streets, adding that other 20 people protested in Damascus’ central Midan neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the TV denied as baseless what the Doha-based al- Jazeera TV described as large protests in the southern province of Daraa, a main square in Homs and some areas of northern Idlib.

It cited a local resident in the Damascus suburb of Harasta, denying what al-Jazeera said that intense crackles of gunfire were reverberating in Harasta.

In a separate incident, the TV said one law-enforcement member was gunned down by armed thugs in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

In the northern province of Aleppo, the second largest city after Damascus, armed groups took advantage of some gatherings and opened fire randomly, injuring one civilian, who was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, the TV said.

Syria regime blunders toward self-destruction
By Christopher Phillips, Special to CNN
August 12, 2011 — Updated 1308 GMT (2108 HKT)

Editor’s note: Christopher Phillips is Syria analyst in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Middle East team. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics specializing in identity politics in Syria and Jordan and has lived for several years in Syria. His first book, “Contemporary Arab Identity: The daily reproduction of the Arab World,” will be published by Routledge in early 2012.

(CNN) — The harsh criticism leveled at the Syrian regime by Saudi Arabia and Turkey last week could prove a turning point in the popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Until now Western sanctions have been ineffective in preventing Assad’s violent crackdown on protestors in the last six months. However, the influence of neighboring Turkey and Saudi Arabia is greater than the West, and opens the possibility of damaging diplomatic, economic and even military action.
Yet Assad’s increasing international and regional isolation was far from inevitable, and is one of a growing list of miscalculations by his regime that is bringing about its own destruction.

For months Syria’s security forces, under the command of Assad’s relentless brother, Maher has cracked down with relative impunity while the Arab states and Turkey have said little or remained silent. Assad’s strategy appeared to be to suppress demonstrations while cynically keeping casualties to a “manageable” level, rarely crossing 100 deaths on the worst days.

This has limited Western calls for the kind of urgent intervention seen in Libya, itself becoming a quagmire that few wished to replicate in Syria, and was grudgingly accepted by Syria’s neighbors, who feared sectarian instability were Assad to fall. Assad, however, miscalculated and his heavy assault on the rebellious cities of Hama and Deir Ezzor at the beginning of Ramadan has proven too much to bear.

Such miscalculations have characterized Assad’s response to a crisis that looks increasingly likely to end his decade-long rule over Syria. It need not have been. When the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, Syria appeared well placed to avoid unrest. Yet ever since demonstrations eventually broke out Assad has shown poor judgment and a lack of political skill, perhaps becoming someone who inherited power. One by one he and his regime have undone nearly all of their initial advantages.

Arguably the regime’s greatest asset when unrest first broke out was Assad’s personal popularity. Despite the security apparatus, the ruling Baath party and corrupt regime cronies being widely disliked, many Syrians placed their faith in Assad as a modernizing reformer. Yet his response to the unrest has shattered this carefully constructed image. He rambled in speeches about external conspiracies rather than delivering real change, and the few reforms he belatedly offered have been undermined by continuing regime violence.

Although some core supporters still hope he will deliver, most accept that in reality he is either too weak, being overawed by hardliners such as Maher, or is himself actually as ruthless a dictator as his father, Hafez. A second factor in the regime’s favor was the weakness of its opponents……

BC Ex-USSR: Iranian expert sees “rescuing” Syria as main purpose of minister’s Russia visit
2011-08-12, Text of report by Russian political commentary website Politkom.ru on 11 August

[Article written “specially for Politkom.ru” by political observer and orientalist Yelena Suponina: “Rescuing Syria and Bushehr’s Reputation”]

Iran is attempting to rescue friendly Syria from a civil war scenario and disintegration into tiny puppet entities. “This is the main objective of the visit to Moscow by our Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi. It is necessary to jointly restore the balance of forces in the region with Russia’s assistance,” Mohammed Sadiq al- Husseini, the well-known Iranian political analyst and a member of the World Islamic Resistance Association leadership, told the author of these lines by telephone from Tehran today [12 August]. He has good connections with the Iranian foreign policy department and so his information can be trusted. In his words, “it is not so much about the fate of Bashir al-Asad’s regime as about the survival of that country in general.” “Iran will not allow Syria to be destroyed and handed to the Americans in pieces,” our interlocutor said…..

“It is necessary to jointly restore stability in Syria and preserve it as a unified state. But the fact that reforms are needed there is something that the Iranian authorities have been talking about for a long time. Syria today is like an old car on a modern highway. But it can still be repaired and modernized,” our nterlocutor feels. He complained that people in neighbouring Turkey “have adopted a pro-American stance on this issue” and hopes that “there is still an
understanding in Russia of the need to preserve the balance of forces in a key region of the world; otherwise the situation will become even more dangerous.”

Originally published by Politkom.ru website, Moscow, in Russian 11 Aug 11.

Secretary Of State interview on CBS

CBS Talking Head Scott Pelley wants to declare war on Syria

Brooke Anderson on Syrian refugees in Lebanon – the Daily Star

I will be on vacation for 4 days and not on email or the blog – hurray!

Middle Eastern vultures circle over a wounded Syria
August 10, 2011
By Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star

The sudden heightened rhetoric on the events in Syria by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League is unlikely to change how the situation in the country unfolds. However, it marks an important shift in the place and wider role of Syria and other states in the wider Middle East.

The most significant of trends is probably the more aggressive or assertive role of regional actors, as international players find that they have very limited means of influencing Syrian government actions. This is linked to the slow transformation of Syria from a leading actor that often defined key political realities around the Middle East, into a more passive player whose domestic troubles have suddenly clipped its regional wings.

The third big change is Syria’s sudden vulnerability at home, causing other regional powers to start working more diligently to either protect their interests or to make sure they are well positioned to take advantage of any forthcoming changes in Syria.

All of this has happened in just over four months. However, it is in fact the delayed and inevitable consequence of four decades of autocratic rule where the extended Assad family, security services and business interests badly gutted and corrupted Syria’s governance institutions. This helped expose the hollowness and weaknesses of the ruling edifice once a domestic challenge erupted. Syria’s ruling establishment remains strong and broadly unified for now, but its end is certain if it uses no other means than military force to respond to the populist national uprising that challenges it.

Three major regional players – Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran – are now actively working in different ways to secure their strategic interests by trying to influence events in Syria. Israel presumably also is keeping an eye on things there, but its capacity to intervene is much smaller for now. This extraordinary spectacle of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran focusing on Syria is not yet a bevy of vultures hovering over the wounded Syrian body – but it is the first step toward that. All the countries see trends signaling change, and for different reasons they want to influence these to suit their preferences.

Iran wants to keep the Syrian system in place, because its close relationship with Syria (as well as Iran’s links to Hezbollah in Lebanon) represents the one and only foreign policy achievement of the Iranian Islamic revolution. This is presumably why Saudi Arabia and the GCC, who fear more Iranian influence in the Arab world, have spoken out against Syrian government policy and asked President Bashar Assad to pursue political reforms – however lacking in credibility or sincerity is such a message from Gulf monarchies.

Saudi Arabia has been leading the Arab official tide to hold back the wave of populist democratization propelling the street revolts across the Middle East. It must calculate that it has more to lose from continued Iranian influence in the Arab world than it has to lose from Arab democratic reforms; so it works diplomatically (and presumably behind the scenes by assisting some Islamist anti-Assad forces) to weaken both Syria and Iran’s regional conduit via Damascus.

Last summer, Saudi Arabia was working closely with Syria on several issues, including stabilizing conditions inside Lebanon. Today, Saudi Arabia seems to have decided to pressure the Damascus regime, if not also to actively change it. Arab politics, like politics everywhere, can be a fickle and tempestuous beast.

Turkey’s involvement in Syria is the most intriguing. Turkey has several direct economic, security, humanitarian and diplomatic interests in its bilateral ties with Syria, and has proved willing in the past to throw its weight around in the region, including militarily, to secure its national interests. Turkey’s economic and political development in the past several decades has been one of the few regional success stories, and now Ankara is being tested on its diplomatic prowess. It says it has not ruled out joining the Western, and now increasingly Arab, trend toward imposing greater sanctions on Syria to push it to use political rather than military tools to respond to its domestic challenges. The trouble with everyone’s approach is that Syria, like Iran, has proved to be stubbornly resistant to external diplomatic or economic pressures ever since the U.S. unilaterally initiated sanctions almost a decade ago.

For now, the most interesting and historically important aspect of the situation in Syria is less the behavior of the top-heavy, security-based Assad regime – an endangered global species – and more the continued awakening of regional powers intervening in Syrian affairs more openly, as major global powers watch the people and regimes of the Middle East (still two different phenomena in most countries) retake control of their destinies.

Amal Hanano’s latest article at Jadaliyya

Syria and Turkey: The farewell meeting
10/08/2011, By Tariq Alhomayed

It was as important as the famous meeting between [then Iraqi Foreign Minister] Tariq Aziz and [then US Secretary of State] James Baker in Geneva prior to the war to liberate Kuwait. It was also no less important than the meeting between former Turkish Foreign Minister Bulent Ecevit and [then Iraqi Vice-President] Taha Yassin Ramadan prior to the war to occupy Iraq. I am, of course, talking about the meeting between [Turkish Foreign Minister] Ahmet Davutoglu and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

Nikolaos van Dam: The Syrian regime is rapidly running out of options
Independent, Wednesday, 10 August 2011

So long down the road, what options does the regime have to bring this crisis to an end? For almost five months now, there have been protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. First, they were asking for nothing more than peace, freedom and unity. It was only afterwards that they demanded the downfall of the regime.The truth is there are not many options, both for the regime, and for their opponents. The regime could try to talk to the opposition, but the problem is that its proposed reform measures regarding multi party democracy and changes to media law simply haven’t gone far enough.

The most significant thing it could do is to stop violence and suppression and see what happens. If demonstrations continue, which they probably will, the regime might lose control over cities – but it would at least provide a better climate for a resolution to the crisis. The dilemma for the regime is if it really does reform, it will lead to its own downfall.

One resolution would be for elements from within the military to move against the regime. Several times we have seen officers break away, but without units they are powerless. And any move against the regime would be extremely difficult, and those behind it would likely be uncovered and killed. Another possibility is civil war, which nobody wants and would bring even more destruction. I have the impression that there are armed groups which have tried to exploit the situation and to jump onto the bandwagon; like Syrian Salafists who have been fighting in Iraq. These groups want to re-establish Sunni dominance in Syria, a country where they are the majority. The present Alawite-dominated regime is considered by many Sunnis as heretic. So it’s also important that countries take Syria more seriously when it says it is fighting terrorists.

So what options are there for the international community to force Assad’s hand? There have already been mis-steps. The US is powerless and is not really communicating directly with the regime; their ambassador visited Hama and has lost his position as a neutral. The Turks announced in advance that they were going to convey a tough message. But if you want to influence the Syrians, the dialogue has to be confidential to at least have a chance.

Military intervention is not going to work. Libya is relatively speaking, an easy – albeit thus far not really successful – operation, but in Syria where and who would they attack? Sanctions don’t work, and may even worsen the situation. So we are back to dialogue. And here the voice of Saudi Arabia may prove to be very important.

Nikolaos van Dam is a former Dutch ambassador to various Middle Eastern countries. The fourth edition of his book ‘The Struggle for Power in Syria’ was released recently

Syria pledges to go on with national dialogue, reforms: FM
2011-08-10 20:19:58

DAMASCUS, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) — Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al- Moallem said Wednesday his country was determined to go on with the national dialogue and accomplish the package of reforms announced by the president, stressing Syria would emerge from the crisis “stronger and more powerful.”

Moallem made the remarks during a meeting with a delegation of diplomats from Brazil, India and South Africa.

According to Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), Moallem briefed the delegation on the slaughtering and vandalism by “armed groups” some Syrian cities had witnessed, adding that the army units had restored security and stability to those cities.

The delegation members voiced solidarity with the Syrian leadership, stressing that their countries would keep supporting Syria to restore security and stability and against any intervention in its internal affairs, SANA said.

They said they were confident that reforms currently underway in Syria could “create a new status quo in Syria that would meet the aspirations of its people,” urging the international community to give Syria more time so that those reforms might yield fruits.

Syrians in the Golan, speaking for the revolution A well produced video.

The Syrian people’s new weapon against Assad: boycotts

Syrian protesters are calling on citizens to boycott products made or imported by friends of the regime, and are hoping foreign governments freeze investment in the country.

By Zvi Bar’el

In Syria we need a revolution in our heads

It’s not just the regime; Syrians need to change the intellectual culture that bolsters tyranny
Imad al-Rasheed, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 June 2011

Syrians must win the revolution on their own
by Joshua Landis in Foreign Policy, Mid East Channel

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (right) meets with Syrian President Bashar al- Assad Photo: AP

A growing chorus of policy experts in Washington are calling for the United States to get serious about Syria. They want Washington to take charge of regime change, hastening the downfall of the Assad government. This is bad advice. The U.S. should not try to hit the fast-forward button on the proce…

Obama Administration to Call for Syria’s Assad to Step Down
August 09, 2011| FoxNews.comSyrian President Bashar Assad

The Obama administration is planning to explicitly call for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down in coming days, two administration officials told FoxNews.

The State Department signaled for the first time that American efforts to engage the Syrian government are finally over. The White House is expected to lay out the tougher line by the end of this week, possibly on Thursday.

The administration will first consult with the United Nations Security Council as the Treasury Department prepares a new set of sanctions aimed at Assad’s family and his government, the officials told FoxNews.

The unilateral U.S. sanctions being prepared within the Treasury Department will be important to pay attention to, the officials said…..

Earlier in the day a spokesman for the State Department conceded that Washington had abandoned it bid to engage Damascus.

“In the case of Syria, the message from 2009 was if you are prepared to be a reformer, if you are prepared to work with us on Middle East peace and other issues we share, we can have a new and different kind of partnership,” said Victoria Nuland. But “that is not the path that Assad chose,” she added.

Turkey, Syria discuss steps to end violence
Associated Press | August 9, 2011

Turkey’s foreign minister says he and Syrian leader Bashar Assad have discussed “concrete steps” Syria should take to stop the bloodshed there.

But Ahmet Davutoglu did not say what those steps would be and whether Assad had agreed to consider taking them.

Speaking to reporters on his return from Damascus on Tuesday, Davutoglu said Turkey would continue talking with Assad in a bid to halt the violence.

Syria’s army has defied international criticism of the regime’s deadly crackdown on a 5-month-old uprising, and the soldiers continued their raids on restive areas Tuesday.

Davutoglu said: “We discussed ways to prevent confrontation between the army and the people in the most open and clear way.”

Davutoglu said the atmosphere was cordial when he met with Assad for more than six hours in Damascus on Tuesday, including a two-hour tete-a-tete.

Ali Mahmood Habib, Syria’s Defense Minister who stepped down two days ago, was on Syrian TV refuting all claims of his death and disagreements with the leadership.

The situation in Syria: a first hand account

Emeritus Professor Brian Stoddart, former Vice-Chancellor at La Trobe University, returned recently from an extended assignment working with universities in Syria. Below is his account of his time in a country now racked by anti-government protests and simmering sectarian tension.

Iran’s Irreversible Path in Syria
By: Dr. Ali Bigdeli, University Professor and International Affairs Analyst 08/09/11, Pevand Press

Since the Islamic revolution and especially after the Iran-Iraq war, Iran approached Iraq’s enemy Syria. Syria and Iraq had hostile relations due to their different interpretations of the Baath political philosophy. This relationship led to Iran’s generous assistance, particularly in oil sales, to Syria. During those years Parliament had passed a bill that guaranteed four million dollars of oil be sold to Syria at lower than the global price; we also gave one million tons of oil to Syria for free. The Syrian debt to us was about 5 billion dollars. Therefore, our regional policy during the 8-year war with Iraq was tied to Syria.

Nevertheless, then President Hafiz Al-Assad confronted us opportunistically. I wrote a book at that time on Iraq’s political history and I came upon a document which indicated that Hafiz Al-Assad annually received about 250 thousand dollars from the US.

In addition Al-Assad voted with the Emirates on many occasions over the ownership of the three disputed Persian Gulf islands, after the establishment of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council. In an interview he had said that he could not separate Arabism from his country. This proves that Arabism had priority over Islamism in Syria.

However, since we were at war during Al-Assad’s time, we had no other choice but to expand our relations with Syria. After the Resistance movement in Lebanon this relationship became even closer. Mr. Mousavi, the former Resistance leader, had close relations with Hafiz Al-Assad. This relationship continued until Hafiz passed away and his son Bashar came to power, but the relationship did not change much even then. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s first foreign meeting after his (first) election to the Iranian presidency was with Bashar Al-Assad, who had come to Tehran to congratulate him. With the Gaza issue our relations became even closer and we invested in Syria’s infrastructures.

After the “Arab Spring” developments started to spread to Syria, we preferred to keep quiet and even support Syria on international levels based on our strategic relations and friendship. Our behavior with Syria differed from that of Turkey.

The interesting point is that Turkey had the most investment in Syria. Turkey has the greatest political and economic relations with Syria. But we witnessed how cleverly Mr. Erdogan reacted to Syria’s situation. He used the same policy toward Lebanon and Libya as well. The escape of the Syrian opposition to Turkey gave the upper hand to the Turks. …Turkey’s clever policy toward Syria is a sign of its leadership in the Muslim world. It seems that Turkey has snatched that leadership from Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s hands. ….

Currently, we assume that if Syria faces any insecurity leading to Bashar Al-Assad’s removal, we will lose our link to the most powerful military potential in the region, Hezbollah. Therefore, Iran is putting all its strength into stabilizing the situation in Syria.

The truth is that we have entered an irreversible path. …We will continue this path until we see what will become of our strategic friend.

Regarding the reforms Bashar has announced,… After the killing of more than two thousand people, reform does not make sense. The Syrian people had limited demands in the first days of the protests, but now they demand is that Bashar Al-Assad, his family and all the Alawis should leave power.

In a situation like this reform will not do any good, and the continuation of resistance by Asad’s opponents shows that they have learnt from the experience of other Arab countries. The resistance of people in Arab countries is very interesting. In none of the revolutions worldwide had we witnessed people resisting continuously for months. Protesters are killed every day, but they continue their uprising. We cover the resistance of people in Yemen and Libya, but we say nothing about Syria. However, the future of all three will be the same, since the time for reform has passed in Syria. Therefore we should be skeptical about the continuation of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

Iran discovers new gas field
Press TV – August 8, 2011

Managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Ahmad Qalebani says a new gas field has been discovered in eastern Asalouyeh.

“The gas field, named Madar and located 15 kilometers east of Asalouyeh, has reserves of about 495 billion cubic meters of gas,” Qalebani said on Monday.

Qalebani estimated the value of the gas field at USD 133 billion, Fars News Agency reported.

In June, Iran discovered Khayyam gas field with in-place reserves of 277 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the southeastern port city of Asalouyeh in Hormozgan Province.

The Islamic Republic discovered 13 new oil and gas fields with in-place reserves of 14 billion barrels of oil and 45 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from August 2009 to August 2010, Iran’s Oil Ministry reported.

Iran has 137.6 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and 29.61 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves. It has the world’s third largest oil reserves and second largest gas reserves.

Former Syrian politicians condemn regime authorities
Phil Sands Aug 10, 2011

Damascus //In a sign that dissent is growing within elite Syrian circles, 41 former government ministers and former senior Baath party officials have called for the regime to stop violence against demonstrators and urgently implement sweeping political reforms.

The group of well-connected public figures, led by Mohammad Suleman, a former minister of information, condemned the authorities’ handling of a five-month-old national uprising and urged a change of course, saying the current policy of violent suppression had put Syria on the road to “catastrophe” and would result either in civil war or foreign intervention.

“Continuation of the security solution is not a choice and use of the armed forces, arresting thousands of people, is not acceptable, it puts a stick in the wheel of political change,” they said. “Military operations block the democratic opening.”

…. Criticism of the regime from inside the country escalated on Monday, in the wealthy Mezzeh Villas neighbourhood of Damascus, when the former officials launched a Democratic National Initiative, detailing a transitional programme to establish a full parliamentary democracy within a year….
“To see regime figures talking like this shows its support base is weakening even at a high level, the regime is getting smaller and smaller,” said one independent analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The crisis is getting closer to the president, each week the fire burns nearer to the palace gates.”

In their manifesto, the former regime officials said the autocratic system of government had been appropriate during the Cold War but that now a “democratic civil nation state” must be built, with a multi-party system guaranteeing media and cultural freedoms.

Mr Suleman said Syria’s “political leadership” had failed to create a fair society.

“We are seeing the farmers living around rural Damascus demonstrating against the Baath party, these are the very people who made the party and who once supported it,” he said. “The leaders of the Baath party do not deserve their positions.”

The group rejected foreign intervention of all kinds, insisting that change must be brought about by Syrians, not under international pressure. It also stressed that any future Syrian government must continue its struggle to regain the occupied Golan Heights from Israel. more….

Saudi Arabia’s message to Syria, decoded www.guardian
Brian Whitaker:

It is Iranian influence, not the killing of civilians, that Saudi Arabia is concerned about as it recalls its ambassador in Syria

Turkey presses Syrian President Assad to end crackdown on protests in 6 hours of talks
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY and SUZAN FRASER
9 August 2011

BEIRUT (AP) – President Bashar Assad discussed “concrete steps” to end the violent crackdown on protesters during six hours of talks Tuesday with Turkey’s foreign minister, even as the Syrian military unleashed a fresh assault on dissent that activists said killed more than 20 people.

Speaking to reporters on his return to Turkey, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the talks were cordial but did not say what specific steps they had discussed or whether Assad had agreed to consider them.

“We discussed ways to prevent confrontation between the army and the people and tensions like those in Hama in the most open and clear way,” Davutoglu said, referring to the Syrian city that has become a flashpoint in the 5-month-old uprising against Assad’s autocratic rule.
“The coming days will be important to see if the expectations are being met. We hope that internal peace and calm is achieved and steps for reform are taken,” Davutoglu added.

Syria not Turkish domestic issue, Turkish opposition says:

WSJ Editorials & Contributors: Joe Lieberman: Engage With Syria—the People, Not the Regime, 2011-08-09

Our ambassador’s visit to the city of Hama was a gutsy move. He should be confirmed to continue his mission.

This can only end with the Assads’ fall
By David Gardner for Financial Times

The debris of destruction Bashar al-Assad’s armour and artillery have left across the insurgent cities of Hama and Deir Ezzor in recent days now mixes with the smoke and splinters of the bridges towards his few remaining putative allies – all burnt by a regime whose narrow foundations are crumbling.

It may not look like it, especially to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians confronting the Assads’ “killing machine” with little more than their raw courage, but this regime is entering its twilight. The phrase was used by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in which he said Riyadh “demands a stop to the killing machine … and calls for an act of wisdom before it is too late”.

But it is – as the king and rulers across the Middle East surely know – already too late. The Assad clan embarked on a road of no return in April, when it first sent the tanks into Deraa in the south, where the rebellion ignited in mid-March.

The clamour for change first heard in Deraa has now been thundering across Syria for five blood-drenched months. Neither tanks nor snipers, shelling or sieges, the vilest torture, mass round-ups and thousands of disappearances have silenced it.

The very savagery of the regime’s response means the rebels cannot stop – better to carry on and brave repression than to risk certain reprisals: death or the dungeon.

The youth-led, plural and, as in other Arab revolutions, initially peaceful movement can now only settle for real change: an end to the police state and the power monopoly of the Ba’ath party; free elections and an independent judiciary under the rule of law; and an end to corruption and the impunity of the business clique clustered around the ruling family….

A shareholders’ meeting last month of Cham Holding, his company and Syria’s largest, was, according to an investor present, unable to elect a new board after Nabil al-Kuzbari, the outgoing chairman, was put on the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist. The business elites are starting to peel away from a toxic regime. Some are now funding its opponents.

The regime’s repressive capacity is looking finite too. Its two praetorian units, the Fourth Armoured Division and Republican Guard, staffed with loyalists from the Assads’ minority Alawite community and led by Maher al-Assad, the president’s volatile younger brother, are overstretched, unable to go in hard at more than three or four locations at once, as dozens of others erupt.

The struggle will still be prolonged and bloody. There will be no Libya-style deus ex machina to help the opposition; nor does it want one. That would enable what the world now recognises is a gangster regime to posture once again as the beating heart of Arabism. Arguably though, international action in Libya has already helped. Had Muammer Gaddafi triumphed there, that would have broken the wave of revolution that days later roared into Syria.

CFR.org: Breakdown in Damascus?
2011-08-09

Posted on Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by Elliott Abrams The use of deadly force against peaceful demonstrators has been the hallmark of the Assad reaction to protests, and yesterday the King of Saudi Arabia referred to this practice as Assad’s …

Turkey should stay out of military action in Syria, says CHP chief
Monday, August 8, 2011
ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News

Main opposition party leader Kemal K?l?çdaro?lu called on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an to not push Turkey into a possible military operation against Syria.

“We should take lessons from history. It [Turkey] shouldn’t repeat its mistakes. Let’s take democracy, freedoms to Syria and contribute to Syria to make it a more contemporary country. But we shouldn’t be the pawn of Western sovereign powers,” K?l?çdaro?lu, leader of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, told the daily Hürriyet in an interview published Monday.

“We shouldn’t get involved in possible military action in Syria,“ he said.

“[Western powers] will force Turkey to actively participate in action toward Syria. If a prime minister [Erdo?an] says that our patience with the situation is running out, the next step is a military operation,” K?l?çdaro?lu said.

Mr. Qandil argues: (a pro-Syrian politician in Lebanon. In Arabic)

“The orchestrated warnings to Damascus from all US allies in the region is ” just bluff to cover their failure. it has become evident that The Syrian army is swiftly and successfully neutralising the chaos and terror hotspots setup by armed gangs supported and financed by king abdullah himself and other US allies .

The Turkish leaders have to calculate well the costs of their involvement in any military adventures. The Syrian army and people will stand up under the leadership of president Assad and and protect their sovereignty against any Nato /turkish military adventures .

Stratfor

Saudi Arabia is still weighing its options, but it knows that this opportunity to turn back Iran’s growing power in the heart of the Arab world may not come again soon. Should the Saudis decide to actively seek the fall of the Syrian regime, they too will throw a massive amount of resources at the goal, turning Syria into a key geopolitical and sectarian battleground.”

The situation in Syria: a first hand account

Syria conflict descends into ‘war of attrition’
AP By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY – Associated Press | AP – 8 Aug 2011

BEIRUT (AP) — Despite five months of blistering attacks on dissent, the Syrian regime has yet to score a decisive victory against a pro-democracy uprising determined to bring down the country’s brutal dictatorship.

President Bashar Assad still has the military muscle to level pockets of resistance, but the conflict has robbed him of almost all international support.

Even Saudi Arabia this week called for an end to the bloodshed in Syria, the first of several Arab nations to join the growing chorus against Assad.

The Syrian leader is being watched carefully at home and abroad to see how long his iron regime — which is still strong but wobbling — will continue to use tanks, snipers and security forces on hundreds of thousands of fervent, overwhelmingly young protesters who keep coming back for more.

“Syria is not burying the revolution,” said Nabil Bou Monsef, a senior analyst at the Arabic-language An-Nahar newspaper. “Protests are resuming everywhere, even in areas that were subject to crackdowns.”

He added: “It is difficult for one of the sides to win. Syria has entered a war of attrition between the regime and the opposition.”

India, SAfrica, Brazil envoys head to Syria
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
2011-08-09

Envoys from India, Brazil and South Africa are heading to Syria to appeal for an end to the violent crackdown against civilians and to promote democratic reforms.

India’s U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri said his country’s representative is scheduled to arrive in Damascus on Tuesday and will join representatives from Brazil and South Africa for a meeting with Syria’s foreign minister to deliver the appeal.

Puri told reporters Monday the three countries will be “calling for restraint, abjuring violence, (and) promoting reform, taking into account the democratic aspirations of the people.”

Syrian troops start withdrawing from Hama
By FT reporter in Damascus and agencies

The Syrian army has begun to withdraw from Hama after more than a week of military operations in the city as Turkey’s foreign minister ratcheted up the diplomatic pressure on the regime by pressing it to end its violent crackdown on protests. … Hama activist Abo Ghazi, who is now outside the city, confirmed that tanks had started to leave, but said they had been seen moving on other villages around Hama where anti-regime protests are continuing. Communications to the city were partially restored on Tuesday morning. They had been down for much of last week, making it difficult to confirm details of events in the city…..

WSJ [Reg]: Isolation of Syria Gains Momentum, 2011-08-08

Gulf Arab nations joined in a reprimand of violence by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces, sharpening the international consensus against the regime, though the military continued its crackdown to stifle antigovernment protests. …

The pressure is mounting and the scholars of Aleppo have finally spoken and placed the blame where it belongs.

It’s also interesting that “Shaykh Yaqoubi of the Ummayad Mosque” is coming in support of the revolution. This is very significant. My understanding is that he is a Sufi master and a highly regarded scholar. ‘arour won’t be happy.

Syrian troops gradually withdraw from Hama, as normalcy restored: official
Source: XINHUA | 2011-8-8

DAMASCUS, Aug. 8 (Xinhua) — An official military source said Monday army troops are withdrawing from the central city of Hama after accomplishing their mission in restoring normalcy to the city.

Quoted by the official SANA news agency, the source said the army had conducted a “qualitative” operation in Hama, which helped confront the armed groups that terrorizing people and cut off city streets as well as sabotaging public and private properties.

Army unites arrested a number of the armed men and life is gradually returning to normalcy, the source concluded as saying.

Meanwhile, army troops exhumed the bodies of 14 police personnel and three civilians killed by armed groups, and dumped in Hama’s Orontes River, according to a Xinhua reporter who accompanied Sunday a government-organized trip to the scene.

Syria’s state-run television aired last week an amateur video footage, showing armed men in Hama shooting at government forces and dumping their bodies in the Orontes River.

bloggingheads with Michael Young and Elias Muhanna about Syria
Monday, August 08, 2011 11:09 AM

Syrian refugees in Turkey drop to 7,292
2011-08-08

Why Turkey’s Alawite Community Thinks Assad Is the Victim
The New Republic

In a bustling park in the Turkish city of Antakya, Metin, a local merchant, is having a picnic with his family. His hazel eyes fixated on a large, turquoise pool by a grove of pines, he takes a sip from his raki and whispers as if he’s revealing a secret. “It breaks my heart to hear about it in the news,” he says, referring to the brutal government crackdown taking place across the border in Syria’s predominantly Sunni districts. “But, how can an Alawite be cruel like that?”

Like the ruling Assad family in Damascus, Metin is an Alawite of Arab origin. He holds a Turkish passport, yet he has relatives who live in Syria. Torn between devotion to his sect and disgust over what he calls the “alleged reports of violence,” he has a hard time making up his mind about the Assad regime. Indeed, having maintained a strong bond with the Syrian Alawite heartland of Latakia ever since Antakya’s annexation to Turkey in 1939, most Arab Alawites living in Turkey are distrustful of the news coming out of Syria, and they believe that President Assad is falling victim to an international smear campaign.

A sect with ties to Shia Islam, Alawites constitute about 12 percent of Syria’s 22 million people but hold a vastly outsized portion of the high-ranking positions in the government and the military. Due to their syncretic religion that blends Islam with other local traditions, the Alawites have long been considered heretics and were historically persecuted as such by Sunni Muslims. When Syria fell under French rule in the early 20th century, the Alawites were granted their own state, based in the port city of Latakia, and enjoyed relative autonomy until Syria gained its independence in 1946. Many religious minorities, including the Alawites, were split over the issue of union with the newly-established Sunni-dominated country. In the 1930s, a group of activists including Sulayman Al Assad, one of the prominent patriarchs of the country’s ruling clan, appealed the union with Syria to French officials. But the French rejected the Alawites’ demand to maintain their autonomy and, since then, the Assad family has been involved in the Alawite political movement in Syria, gradually assuming a guardianship role for the group and securing their loyal support in return. When Hafez Al Assad seized power in an intra-party coup in 1970, most of the Alawite community lined up behind him.

Since the outbreak of protests earlier this year, Syria’s burgeoning opposition has been striving to win the loyalties of the Alawite community, which constitutes the backbone of the regime in Damascus. Sondos Soleiman, one of the few Alawite opposition members, told me that her people have “also suffered from the suppression of the regime,” and, likewise, also aspire for a “democratic state and freedom of expression.” Last month, anti-regime protestors dedicated a Friday demonstration to Saleh Al Ali, a prominent Syrian Alawite who rose up against the French occupation in Syria in 1918. And the Change in Syria conference, which brought together a diverse group of Syrian dissidents in the Turkish city of Antalya in June, also emphasized that the opposition aimed to embrace all of Syria’s ethnic and religious groups. Molham Al Drobi, a member of the Islamic Brotherhood and an executive committee member at the conference, told me that Alawites “will lose a historic opportunity” if they don’t side with the Syrian revolution.

But in Antakya’s Alawite neighborhoods, I found that most residents were still more likely to take their cues from Syria’s embattled dictator Bashar Al Assad, who in a June televised address blamed the unrest on “saboteurs” and urged his nation to ruminate on the motivations driving the protests. “What is happening to our country, and why?” he asked. “It doesn’t require much analysis, based on what we heard from others and witnessed in the media, to prove that there is indeed a conspiracy.”…

With the gap between Syria’s two critical religious groups widening, it seems unlikely in the near future for President Assad to lose support of his fellow Alawite clansmen in the region. Despite his stained record, many continue to see him as the most reliable anchor for their safety, and they ascribe symbolic importance to his leadership. So far, at least, the Alawites in Antakya appear unwilling to think otherwise, even it if means suspending their disbelief.

Afsin Yurdakul writes about Turkish politics. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy and The Daily Beast, among others.