Robert Fisk writes: ‘Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger,” Macbeth’s First Witch announces, but Shakespeare got his geography a bit wrong. Aleppo is 70 miles from the Mediterranean. It’s certainly ancient; Aleppo was mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Ebla in the third millennium BC and belonged to the Hittites and the Emperor Justinian, its 14th-century citadel walls still lowering today over the revolutionary capital of northern Syria.

And that’s the point. While the drama of last week’s assault on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus stunned the Arab world, the sudden outbreak of violence in Aleppo this weekend was in one way far more important. For Aleppo is the richest city in Syria – infinitely more so than Damascus – and if the revolution has now touched this centre of wealth, then the tacit agreement between the Alawite-controlled government and the Sunni middle classes must truly be cracking.

As the birthplace of agriculture – the Euphrates is only 70 miles to the east – Aleppo is also the headquarters of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind in the world. It increases food production in Asia and Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank – you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating in Aleppo.

Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20 miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles – to use them as “technicals” mounted with machine guns – along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully, Icarda’s gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint closer to Icarda’s property at Tel Hadya – the Syrian ministry of agriculture was always one of the more progressive offices in Damascus – but what use this will be in the coming days, we shall see.

Across all of Syria, the revolution has spread. Tragically, there now seems to be a Baathist pattern of destroying Sunni villages on the edge of the Alawite heartland, the “frontier” of Alawi-stan in the great agricultural plain of Hama province, below the mountains where the Assad home town of Qardaha stands. [Continue reading…]

Haaretz reports: Syrian army forces crossed the demilitarized zone near the border with Israel in the Golan Heights last week, a highly unusual incident, on what is considered a quiet border.

Following the incident, in which 500 soldiers and 50 vehicles crossed into the demilitarized zone, Israel filed a formal complaint to the UN secretary general and to the president of the UN’s Security Council, warning that the event may have serious ramifications.

Concern in Israel, in light of the situation in Syria, especially over Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile and land-to-land missiles, is growing every day. In a meeting on Sunday afternoon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consulted the heads of Israel’s security establishment, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and other senior cabinet members.

“We are monitoring the events in Syria closely and are prepared for any development to come,” Netanyahu said in his opening statement.

The Syrian soldiers entered the demilitarized zone last Thursday. The Syrian forces entered the area near the Syrian village of Jubata Al Khashab, a few kilometers east of the Israeli Druze village of Mas’ada in the northern part of the Golan Heights. It seems that the soldiers’ entrance to the demilitarized zone was a result of the fighting with the rebel army. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Syrian rebels have launched an offensive to “liberate” the country’s largest city of Aleppo, an opposition commander said Sunday, while in Damascus government troops backed by helicopter gunships wrested back control of rebel-held neighborhoods.

The attack on Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub and traditionally a bedrock of support for President Bashar Assad, was a sign of the rebels’ growing confidence and capabilities even as regime forces appeared close to regaining control of the capital Damascus after days of intense street battles there.

With Syria’s civil war moving from the countryside and smaller cities into the country’s two main urban centers, an activist group said the death toll had risen to more than 19,000 since the uprising began in March 2011. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said July is shaping up to be the deadliest month of the conflict so far, with 2,752 people killed in the first three weeks.

The bloodshed has escalated as the rebels have taken the fight to the government with a week of fighting in Damascus, including a bombing that struck at Assad’s inner circle and killed four senior regime officials. In a bid to seize the momentum, the opposition also has taken control of four border crossings with Iraq and Turkey, most recently the Bab al-Salamah post on the Turkish frontier.

A video posted online by activists Sunday showed about a dozen gunmen standing in front of the Bab al-Salamah crossing as they raised the Syrian opposition flag.

Gen. Qassim al-Dulaimi, commander of Iraq’s forces around the border region of al-Qaim, reported the sounds of fighting at the Bukamal crossing, suggesting Assad’s troops are trying to retake that frontier post.

The fighting in Damascus and Aleppo has shaken the government’s once seemingly iron grip on the two cities, which are both home to elites who have benefited from close ties to Assad’s regime, as well as merchant classes and minority groups who worry their status will suffer if Assad falls.

Col. Abdul-Jabbar Mohammed Aqidi, the commander of rebel forces in Aleppo province, said “we gave the orders for the march into Aleppo with the aim of liberating it.”

“We urge the residents of Aleppo to stay in their homes until the city is liberated,” he said in a video posted by activists on YouTube. He added that rebels were fighting inside the city while others were moving in from the outskirts.

Joshua Landis posted these remarks from an unnamed Syrian:

My friend who just arrived back from Turkey, recounted to me the story of a Syrian man he met there. This 30 year old, a volunteer from Jisr Alshughour, was helping the refugees to Turkey from Syria. My friend was shocked that this young man did not have a single tooth in his mouth. After a brief inquiry, he found out that this man was arrested in Syria for participating in a demonstration and while in custody, he was tortured by pulling out all his teeth. Needless to say, they were not pulled out properly, so the man needs a lot of surgery that he can not afford.

This is one of many stories of arrest and torture that many of our young and old recount. I say: God damn us all. Each and every one of us, who for years accepted this as part of normal life. Our collective silence allowed this to happen and continue to happen for years in Syria. While we were going to school, our friends were in Tadmor being treated with the utmost cruelty and some tortured to death, yet we kept our mouths shut. God damn each one who is still supporting these murderous criminals for whatever reason.

The Telegraph reports: Despite mounting fury from the Syrian rebels, who are seeking assistance for their efforts to overthrow the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the White House has refused all requests for heavy weapons and intelligence support.

Syrian lobby groups in Washington, who only a few weeks ago were expressing hope that the Obama administration might give a green light to the supply of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, said they had now been forced to “take a reality pill” by the US government.

The Telegraph understands that the Syrian Support Group (SSG), the political wing of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), recently presented American officials with a document requesting 1,000 RPG-29 anti-tank missiles, 500 SAM-7 rockets, 750 23mm machine guns as well as body armour and secure satellite phones. They also asked for $6m to pay rebel fighters as they battle the regime. All their requests were rejected.

“Basically the message is very clear; nothing is going to happen until after the election, in fact nothing will happen until after inauguration [Jan 2013]. And that is the same message coming from everyone, including the Turks and the Qataris,” said a Washington lobbyist for the group.

The Obama administration has also made clear to its allies that it will not intervene, a message that was carried to London last week by Tom Donilon, the White House National Security Adviser, who made a low-profile stop en route to Israel.

Sources in Washington who were familiar with the matter said Mr Donilon had made it “abundantly clear” that there was no room for increased US involvement in Syria.

Syrian lobby groups in Washington have thus far been reluctant to speak publicly about their frustrations with the Obama government for fear of alienating White House officials, but also giving succor to the Assad regime.

However, a third lobby group contacted by The Telegraph, but who asked to remain anonymous, said that they too had come up against a White House ‘red line’, despite some earlier receptiveness from the State Department.

“No-one wants to touch this,” the group’s representative said, “Not the White House, not the Congressional committee on foreign affairs. It is clear we will have to play a longer game.”

Fears that the disparate rebel groups are being infiltrated by Al Qa’eda have also reduced appetite in the US for better arming the rebels, either directly or with the help of third-party countries such as Libya, Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

Foreign Policy published the results of a poll indicating what kind of actions American would support in Syria. Although a majority (58 percent) said they would support a no-fly zone, an even larger majority (72 percent) oppose bombing Syrian air defenses — an action that would be required in order to create a no-fly zone. Like many polls, one wonders whether the questions were posed in such a way that respondents could answer them intelligently. No doubt most people who said they support a no-fly zone didn’t understand that a no-fly zone can’t be put in place without first disabling air defense systems.

The Chicago Council Survey, fielded May 25 through June 8, asked over 1,800 Americans about a series of diplomatic and military options the United States could pursue along with its allies to stem the fighting in Syria. It found that the American public was generally ready to support limited measures, even before the fighting extended toward Damascus, but had little appetite for more direct actions. Six out of ten said they supported increasing economic and diplomatic sanctions against the Syrian regime (63 percent), and nearly as many said they would support enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria (58 percent). Beyond these options, there is limited support for sending arms and supplies to anti-government groups in Syria (27 percent; 67 percent oppose), bombing Syrian air defenses (22 percent; 72 percent oppose), or sending troops into Syria (14 percent; 81 percent oppose).

One of the curious features of the reporting on the issue of the Assad regime’s stockpile of chemical weapons has been ongoing speculation about whether these weapons are being moved to safer locations or readied for use, along with assessments about the dangers of them falling into the “wrong hands.” Sorry to have to state the obvious: they are already in the wrong hands — the regime’s.

The opposition Free Syrian Army is creating a special unit of men trained to secure Syria’s chemical weapons sites, a former general in the country’s chemical and biological weapons administration has told the Daily Telegraph.

“We have a group just to deal with chemical weapons. They are already trained to secure sites,” said Gen Adnan Silou, the most senior ranking member of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to defect and join the FSA.

Until 2008 Gen Silou was charged with the task of drafting emergency response plans should any of Syria’s terrifying array of weapons fall out of the government’s control.

Working around Damascus and Latakia he trained thousands of troops in how to secure what analysts believe are the largest chemical weapons stores in the world, consisting principally of sarin, mustard gas and cyanide.

“We trained them in securing stores, in reconnaissance of possible threats, in how to purge supplies and in treatment should Syria come under attack a chemical or biological attack,” said Silou.

“There were two main stores — warehouse 417 in east Damascus, and another, number 419 in Homs area. We had 1,500 soldiers and two or three generals stationed at each base,” he said.

As the Syrian regime’s iron-fist rule begins to unravel the question of how to maintain the security of these sites has become of central concern to Syrians and foreign governments alike.

The Daily Telegraph was told that British military intelligence chiefs believe that the Assad regime could yet deploy some of the stores in a desperate attempt to regain power.

Gen Silou agrees with the disturbing assessment. In his decades of service to the regime Silou said that he met President Bashar al-Assad and members of his inner circle ‘countless times’.

“I know Bashar al-Assad’s character. It is very possible that he will use the chemical weapons against his own people,” said Gen Silou. “They can deploy them from tanks, from rockets, and from helicopters”.

Gen Silou decided to come out of his retirement and join the FSA leadership in Turkey when the government attacked Homs in February. In addition to the barrages of artillery fired from tanks, the attack increased his concern that Mr Assad could deploy chemical weapons in the future. He is convinced that the regime sprayed pesticides from planes on population areas in Rastan, a hub for the rebel Free Syrian Army close to Homs.

The claims cannot be independently confirmed, but in February and March patients seen by the Daily Telegraph who had led Rasatn and Homs for Lebanon showed signs of hair loss, skin irritation, chronic muscle pain and sickness. Doctors in Lebanon treating Syrian patients from Rastan and Homs who had fled the country reported seeing unusual symptoms.

There are also serious fears that as the security structure in the country unravels these lethal weapons could fall out of government control and into the hands of militia groups, including radical Islamic units that might try to deploy them.

“We are now scanning all Syrian military defectors for people with training on chemical weapons,” said Louay al-Mokdad, an oppositoni activist. “We are putting them in one unit that can work to secure the sites.”

“The weapons used to be to protect Syria. Now they are just to protect Bashar,” said Gen Silou.

The Los Angeles Times reports: As Syrian opposition leaders threw punches at one another early this month in a five-star Cairo hotel, rebel fighters in Idlib province spent hours trying to fight off tanks, armored vehicles and attack helicopters with little more than Kalashnikov rifles.

By nightfall, as the rebels fled shelling that reportedly killed dozens, conference members continued to fight over post-revolution plans.

The conference scuffle laid bare power struggles among Syrians seeking the overthrow of President Bashar Assad, despite a conflict that has moved ever closer to the Syrian leader. On Wednesday, three of his senior military officials were killed in a bombing that struck at the center of the regime’s power.

But even as some rebel fighters say they are pushing for a “final battle” — and some reports said the Syrian leader had fled to the coastal city of Latakia — others say victory is far off, especially with the opposition still struggling to agree on exactly how to oust Assad and who should lead the way.

Perhaps most significant for the future of the uprising is the growing animosity between the exiled dissidents who have monopolized the narrative of the revolution internationally and the activists who have risked their lives to remain in Syria.

For months, opposition leaders who were at the forefront of the uprising when it began have been trying to parlay their activism into more prominent roles on the political front and in groups such as the Syrian National Council, the leading opposition bloc.

But even as they have led the early protest movements, helped form armed militias and become local leaders, they have been overshadowed by exiles in Egypt and Turkey who, many activists say, are out of touch with the revolution and country they claim to speak for. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: As darkness descended over Damascus last Saturday, few of its 1.7 million residents could have had any inkling that a decisive battle to wrest the city from the grasp of President Bashar al-Assad was about to begin.

Insurgents gave the operation a name that reflected their hopes of a successful surprise attack on a city long regarded as an impregnable fortress for the Assad family: “Damascus Volcano and Syrian Earthquake”.

“There is no going back,” Colonel Qassem Saadeddine, a spokesman for the joint command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), told Reuters after the fighting had broken out. “We have started the operation to liberate Damascus.”

The operation, still under way, has come closer to toppling Assad than anything else in the 16-month uprising against his rule. By nightfall on Friday, six days after it began, rebels had seized control of border crossings and were battling loyalist troops on the streets of Damascus.

The attempt to seize the lair of a man whose father was known as “The Lion of Damascus” had been long in the planning, Saadeddine said. It involved 2,500 fighters who had infiltrated the ancient city’s suburbs a week earlier, he said.

Insurgents were especially redeployed from other parts of the country for the task, another FSA officer said separately.

The rebels struck first in the city’s southern Hajar al-Aswad district, engaging in sustained battles with government troops who must have wondered what had hit them.

The following day, July 15, the scale of the rebels’ ambition became clear. That day, a Sunday, a powerful blast tore through a bus in Damascus carrying security forces personnel, wounding many, and fighting spread to three other city districts.

Residents sympathetic to the insurgents burned tires to distract government troops. Government armored vehicles poured into southern Damascus amid reports that the road to the airport had been closed.

Residents of one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities corroborated those accounts described the fighting as the fiercest to touch the capital yet since the uprising began in provincial towns 16 months ago.

Assad had – until then – largely succeeded in shielding his capital and its residents from the extreme violence that has convulsed the rest of the country while he battled to maintain his family’s 42-year grip on power.

Even as his tanks and artillery laid waste to parts of other cities, traffic in Damascus circulated, shops and markets kept open, and students continued to study.

But as black smoke rose above Damascus last Sunday and the clatter of machinegun fire rang out – interspersed with the sound of explosions – that illusion of normality was shattered. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has amassed up to $1.5bn (£950m) for his family and his close associates, according to analysts, despite moves in London, Switzerland and the US to freeze the assets of his regime.

Many of Assad’s assets are held in Russia, Hong Kong and a range of offshore tax havens to spread the risk of seizure, according to London-based business intelligence firm Alaco.

A myriad of companies and trusts are understood to have been deployed to disguise assets that ultimately belong to members of the Syrian regime.

Iain Willis, the head of research at Alaco, said the millions of pounds frozen in UK bank accounts make up just a fraction of the regime’s estimated global wealth.

In peacetime, the Assads and their close friends owned around 60% to 70% of the country’s assets, from land and factories to energy plants and licences to sell foreign goods. But Assad would find it difficult to liquidate such assets in the event of his regime’s collapse.

“In terms of realisable assets, it’s likely to be in the region of $1bn to $1.5bn (£636m to £950m),” said Willis. “This would be in line with Egypt’s Mubarak and the Marcoses of the Philippines.

“These are held, not just by Assad himself, but by extended family members, by second cousins, uncles, business partners and their advisers.

“Those funds are likely to be held in places like Russia, maybe Dubai, Lebanon, Morocco, even Hong Kong, but the assets themselves are likely to be worldwide.”

For those convinced that the United States and Israel are the driving force behind a regime-change project which is intent on toppling Bashar al Assad, no piece of evidence will seem more conclusive in supporting this theory than the existence of a project called “The day after: Supporting a democratic transition in Syria.” Look out for reports on this at Press TV and Russia Today — I have no doubt they are being drafted right now.

In a post for The Cable blog, Foreign Policy has the scoop: “Inside the secret effort to plan for a post-Assad Syria.” That’s the teaser on the home page, but the post itself replaces “secret” with “quiet”. If it really was secret we wouldn’t be reading about it, would we.

For the last six months, 40 senior representatives of various Syrian opposition groups have been meeting quietly in Germany under the tutelage of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) to plan for how to set up a post-Assad Syrian government.

The project, which has not directly involved U.S. government officials but was partially funded by the State Department, is gaining increased relevance this month as the violence in Syria spirals out of control and hopes for a peaceful transition of power fade away. The leader of the project, USIP’s Steven Heydemann, an academic expert on Syria, has briefed administration officials on the plan, as well as foreign officials, including on the sidelines of the Friends of Syria meeting in Istanbul last month.

The project is called “The day after: Supporting a democratic transition in Syria.” Heydemann spoke about the project in depth for the first time in an interview with The Cable. He described USIP’s efforts as “working in a support role with a large group of opposition groups to define a transition process for a post-Assad Syria.”

The opposition leaders involved in the USIP project have been meeting since January and providing updates on their work to the Arab League, the Friends of Syria group, the team of U.N. Special Envoy Kofi Annan, and the opposition Syrian National Council.

The focus of the group’s effort is to develop concrete plans for the immediate aftermath of a regime collapse, to mitigate the risks of bureaucratic, security, and economic chaos. The project has also identified a few things can be done in advance to prepare for a post-Assad Syria.

“We organized this project along systematic lines, including security-sector reform,” Heydemann said. “We have provided technical support for Syrian opposition participants in our project, and the Syrians have identified priorities for things that need to be implemented now.”

He emphasized that USIP’s involvement is primarily in a facilitation and coordination role. “The Syrians are very much in the lead on this,” he said.

In line with the claim that this is not a U.S.-directed project, Heydemann underlines the fact Obama administration officials have neither participated in nor observed any of the Berlin meetings. But to say “the Syrians” are in the lead begs the obvious question: which Syrians? How many, if any, have been directly engaged in the uprising?

Beyond the implications for the Syrian population and for the region, President Obama has a political interest during the presidential campaign in not being portrayed as a disengaged observer who stood by and simply watched Syria fall apart.

While foreign policy is still unlikely to feature strongly in the campaign, Mitt Romney is bound to make full use of the narrative that the Middle East has been reduced to anarchy under Obama’s watch.

One of the ironies of the anti-interventionist perspective is that it focuses on the dangers of the U.S. being too actively engaged in the Middle East at a moment when the administration is more afraid of those critics who say it is disengaged. For that reason, the administration actually wants to play up its level of engagement rather than mask it.

Thus we get the theatrics at the United Nations where supposedly the noble efforts of the U.S. and its allies are repeatedly being thwarted by Russia and China. Don’t expect anyone to openly acknowledge this, but Washington may secretly welcome these diplomatic shackles. If let loose, it would probably have a much harder time explaining why it is so reluctant to become more deeply involved in the crisis.

The idea that Syria is a pawn in a new Great Game, is an idea that shapes the perceptions of many observers, but what seems closer to the truth is that ultimately Syria will demonstrate how diminished the influence of the great powers has become.

Steven Heydemann’s Day After project no doubt represents the Obama administration’s desire to be able to mitigate the chaos that will likely ensue with the collapse of the Assad regime, but desires and capabilities are very different things.

Heydemann writes:

Competition to define a post-Assad transition will only accelerate as the fall of the regime grows nearer. Whether these efforts will pay off for the United States or for Russia, however, is uncertain. The scale of Russian support for the regime poses severe obstacles to Moscow’s future influence in a post-Assad Damascus, while the limits of U.S. support for the opposition will likely constrain Washington’s future influence, as well. Moreover, there are regional players in the game and they enjoy significant advantages. For the United States to maximize its leverage it would need to overcome its reluctance to support the armed opposition, yet this remains a large step further than Washington is willing to go. Not least, there are revolutionary forces on the ground, that have no intention of permitting Syria’s future to be dictated by outsiders, who, together with the external opposition, have little confidence in Kofi Annan and are appropriately cynical about efforts to force them into negotiations with elements of the Assad regime. In this critical period, the Syrian opposition remains a diffuse and elusive target in Washington’s efforts to manage the end game in Syria.

Devising a plan is very different from determining an outcome.