The ability to control borders is probably the most fundamental symbolic expression of state power. At least one border crossing between Syria and Turkey is no longer under government control.

C.J. Chivers reports: The lethal attack on Wednesday on President Bashar al-Assad’s senior security chiefs aligned neatly with a tactical shift that had changed the direction of Syria’s long conflict: the opposition fighters’ swift and successful adoption of makeshift bombs.

Bombs have been in rebel use since violence intensified in Syria in late 2011. But since midspring, anti-Assad fighters have become bolder and sharply more effective with their use, and not only in what is apparently their hand in the assassinations in Damascus.

Improvised bombs have steadily become the most punishing weapon in the otherwise underequipped rebels’ arsenal, repeatedly destroying Syria’s main battle tanks, halting army convoys and inflicting heavy casualties on government ground operations in areas where armed resistance is strong, Western analysts and rebel field commanders and fighters said.

In this way, even as the anti-Assad fighters have appealed for international intervention and other forms of material and military support, local fighters have created their own informal buffer zones, pockets of the Syrian countryside that are now largely free of government ground troops.

“The bomb is not only essential, it is a main part of our success,” said a former Syrian Army artillery major, who called himself Abu Akhmed and leads a fighting group in Idlib, a northern Syrian province, in a meeting in a house in this Turkish city crowded with fighters.

“When you think of why we are improving and getting stronger, it is not because more weapons are coming in from outside,” he added. “The main reason is because we are becoming more organized, and because of our bombs.”

The bombs that Abu Akhmed described, known in Western military jargon as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, have done more than kill Syrian soldiers and deny the Syrian Army access to Syrian terrain.

The weapon that has long been championed in the popular imagination and public discourse of underground fighters as a means to kill or drive off foreign occupiers — whether Russians in Chechnya or Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been turned against a standing Arab army by its own people.

The shift happened subtly. Joseph Holliday, a former American Army intelligence officer who is now an analyst covering Syria for the Institute of the Study of War, in Washington, said the changes were not in the rate of attacks, but in a rapidly evolving prowess.

One factor behind the rebels’ success in bombing that this reporter does not touch up is intelligence. Unlike an insurgency fighting an occupying army, the rebels are probably receiving an unparalleled amount of intelligence from would-be defectors who are still embedded in the Syrian army.

This points to the most fundamental problem that any state faces in trying to crush a popular uprising: the state cannot seal itself off from the people. It cannot be composed throughout by unshakable government loyalists. Just as the state gets attacked from without it will also be undermined from within.

The Telegraph reports: Initial reports emanating from state media that a suicide attacker exploding a car bomb was responsible can now be discounted. The building’s exterior was undamaged and this assault was too well-aimed. The Free Syrian Army claims it was an inside job, that up to 10 bodyguards and aides to senior figures in the security apparatus had decided to defect. They were told to stay put and plant a bomb in the meeting room where the committee coordinating the regime’s response to the uprising met.

An Islamist subgroup – the Brigade of Islam – also claimed responsibility, but the two stories are not incompatible. There are Islamist groups both inside and co-operating with the FSA, and it would have taken a number of individuals with a number of talents to make it work. That would have included sophisticated bomb-making skills.

Anyone who has read a history of the Second World War will have been reminded of the Von Stauffenberg plot, when a disaffected army officer planted a bomb under a table during a meeting with Hitler. The Syrian opposition succeeded where elite German officers failed.

[S]enior rebel officials told The Daily Telegraph that bombs hidden in a flower arrangement and a chocolate box were remotely detonated by defectors working to bring down the regime from within.

Both the Free Syrian Army and a jihadi group calling itself Liwa al-Islam claimed responsibility, although they may have been acting in collaboration.

“There were two bombs,” Louay al-Mokdad, the FSA’s logistical coordinator said. “One was hidden in a packet of chocolates and one in a big flower pot that was in the middle of the table of the conference room.” He claimed that the operation was conducted by a group of FSA members in collaboration with drivers and bodyguards working for Mr Assad’s inner circle, a version repeated by other activists.

The two devices, one made of 25lb of TNT, and the other a smaller “C4” plastic explosive, were said to have been planted in the room days before the meeting by an opposition mole working for Gen Ikhtiyar. Mr Mokdad claimed that the meeting may have been led by Mr Assad or by his brother Maher, who has been the regime’s battlefield commander in the uprising. “I have just spoken with the driver who brought the explosive package,” he said. “He is trying to understand who led the meeting; whether it was Bashar or Maher.”

The Associated Press reports: Bashar Assad attended the swearing-in of his new defense minister Thursday, according to footage shown on Syrian state TV, the first sign of the president since an audacious rebel attack the day before struck at the heart of his regime and killed three senior officials.

Government forces struck back against rebels with attack helicopters and shelling in a fifth straight day of clashes in Damascus. The inability of the military to control the clashes in the capital against lightly armed rebel forces and the deadly bombing of a high-level security meeting a day earlier made Assad’s hold on power look increasingly tenuous.

The whereabouts of Assad, his wife and their three young children have been a mystery since the attack that killed his brother-in-law and his defense minister. Assad does not appear in public frequently, and his absence was notable following such a serious blow his inner circle.

The state TV announcement appeared aimed at sending the message that Assad is alive and well. It said Assad, dressed in a blue suit and tie, wished the new defense minister good luck but it did not say where the swearing-in took place.

Reuters reports: Mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday, a day after a bomber killed and wounded his security chiefs and rebels closed in on the centre of Damascus, vowing to “liberate” the capital.

The Syrian leader made no public appearance and no statement after a bomber killed his powerful brother-in-law, his defense minister and a top general.

By the early hours of Thursday, residents had reported no let-up in the heaviest fighting to hit the capital in a 16-month revolt against Assad’s rule.

The fighting came within sight of the presidential palace, near the security headquarters where the bomber struck a crisis meeting of defense and security chiefs.

The New York Times reports: With the growing conviction that the Assad family’s 42-year grip on power in Syria is coming to an end, Obama administration officials worked on contingency plans Wednesday for a collapse of the Syrian government, focusing particularly on the chemical weapons that Syria is thought to possess and that President Bashir al-Assad could try to use on opposition forces and civilians.

Pentagon officials were in talks with Israeli defense officials about whether Israel might move to destroy Syrian weapons facilities, two administration official said. The administration is not advocating such an attack, the American officials said, because of the risk that it would give Mr. Assad an opportunity to rally support against Israeli interference.

President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, was in Israel over the weekend and discussed the Syrian crisis with officials there, a White House official said.

Mr. Obama called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday and urged him again to allow Mr. Assad to be pushed from power. Russia, so far, has refused. A White House statement said that Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama “noted the growing violence in Syria and agreed on the need to support a political transition as soon as possible that achieves our shared goal of ending the violence and avoiding a further deterioration of the situation.”

The statement pointedly noted the “differences our governments have had on Syria,” but said the two leaders “agreed to have their teams continue to work toward a solution.”

American diplomatic and military officials said the bombing in Damascus on Wednesday that killed several of Mr. Assad’s closest advisers was a turning point in the conflict. “Assad is a spent force in terms of history,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “He will not be a part of Syria’s future.”

Alluding to Russia’s position, Mr. Carney said the argument that Mr. Assad’s ouster would result in more violence was refuted by the bombing, and that Mr. Assad’s continued rule “will result in greater violence,” not less.

The Washington Post reports from Yabrud: The flag of the revolution flies high above this prosperous town in southwestern Syria. Each week, thousands take to the streets to demonstrate peacefully. Rebels roam freely — but without weapons.

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost control of Yabrud. But unlike Homs, Hama and countless other places where pro-Assad forces have unleashed furious assaults to keep their grip amid a 16-month-long rebellion, Yabrud appears to have been given up to the rebels. Here, at least for the time being, the revolution has been won. And it was won without a fight.

Aside from a brief foray into town in late December, the army has yet to attempt to occupy Yabrud. “They came here for a few days, but then they simply left. There was no significant battle,” said Abu Mohammed, an anti-government activist who asked that his full name not be used.

The result is an oasis of calm amid a conflict that the International Committee of the Red Cross formally declared a civil war on Sunday, one that has claimed at least 14,000 lives. It is a place that speaks to the limits of Assad’s power to control this nationwide rebellion, as well as the hopes of activists who believe the uprising can achieve its goals without dragging the country even deeper into strife.

Yabrud’s idyllic farms and bustling urban life stand in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country, where war has become a daily reality. Sixty miles to the north, the city of Homs has been the site of some of the fiercest fighting, leaving entire neighborhoods destroyed by tank and artillery fire. The Damascus suburb of Douma, 30 miles to the south, has become a flash point in the battle to control the capital.

In areas that fall under the rebels’ sway, the pattern of pro-Assad forces has been to storm the town, expel anti-government fighters and go door to door, taking revenge. But not in Yabrud — at least not yet.

“It is simple,” said a local rebel commander, a defected artillery lieutenant from the Syrian army. “The army is fighting in Homs and in Damascus. They do not have the strength to also fight in Yabrud.”

The rebels don’t want a fight here, either, and have gone to great lengths to avoid one.

Abu Mohammed, the activist, credits Yabrud’s calm to a more restrained approach to revolution than that displayed by other Syrian cities. When a pro-government militia known as the shabiha has periodically caused trouble in Yabrud, the response has been deliberately muted.

“They broke into many houses, my father’s house, stealing and breaking things. We did not react strongly,” he said. “We did not want to bring the war here.”

When a prominent Yabrud-based activist was arrested two months ago, the rebel Free Syrian Army, known as the FSA, responded by kidnapping a general’s son and quietly negotiated a prisoner exchange.

FSA forces do not openly carry weapons within Yabrud, only at the rebel checkpoints that ring the town. “We didn’t want to upset the people in the town, make them afraid,” Abu Mohammed said. “Life here in Yabrud is normal.”

Yabrud is a wealthy town. Most families have at least one member working abroad in the Persian Gulf, often as an engineer. Porsches and Mercedeses roll through the streets. Many citizens regularly travel to Damascus for school or business.

As a result, activists and rebel army members here are cautious. Many wear masks. Others ask that their faces not be shown in photographs. “We have had less destruction here because we have been more discreet,” Abu Mohammed said. “For instance, there is still a government police station here. All of our civil records are kept there. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us.”

But there is nothing discreet about the 40-foot revolutionary flag flying from a cellphone tower atop a hill above town, or the weekly demonstrations on Fridays that draw thousands. Intricate revolutionary artwork covers the courtyard walls of most public buildings, and a sculpture of the FSA emblem sits on a pedestal in the town center. [Continue reading…]

BBC News provides profiles of the men killed in today’s bombing in Damascus: President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, Deputy Defence Minister Gen Asef Shawkat, as well as Defence Minister Gen Daoud Rajiha and former Defence Minister Hassan Turkomani. The bomb attack took place at the headquarters of the Baath Party Regional Command’s National Security Bureau (NSB) in the Rawda area of central Damascus.

Many media reports have repeated Syrian state media’s claim that this was a suicide bombing, although the Free Syrian Army have claimed that the bomb was concealed in a water cooler and set off remotely. That explanation sounds more plausible to me than the idea that anyone (including a body guard) could have gained access to such a meeting without the explosives strapped to his body catching anyone’s attention.

The regime certainly has an interest in portraying this attack as the work of suicidal Islamist extremists rather than as deadly blow from their primary adversary.

Reuters reported: Two rebel groups claimed responsibility for the attack on the security meeting.

“This is the volcano we talked about, we have just started,” said Qassim Saadedine, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, a group made up of army defectors and Sunni youths.

Liwa al-Islam, an Islamist rebel group the name of which means “The Brigade of Islam”, said it had carried out the attack after weeks of planning and gave a different version of events.

“Our men managed to plant improvised explosives in the building for the meeting. We had been planning this for over a month,” a spokesman for the group, who asked to be identified as Abu Ammar, said by telephone. State television said earlier that it was a suicide bombing.

@fsa_hq_syria tweeted: “#Syria‬ the bomb was inside a water cooler in the room which was packed with 25 top thugs and was remote detonated from a distance”

The Washington Post reports: The rebel Free Syrian Army said its loyalists planted bombs inside a room where the government’s central command unit for crisis management — a special cell comprised of about a dozen of the country’s top security chiefs — was to meet to discuss efforts to crush the uprising.

The bombs were detonated remotely from outside the building once the meeting was underway, said Col. Malik Kurdi, the rebel group’s deputy commander. “The Free Syrian Army carried out this attack in retaliation for the massacres committed by the regime and because of the international silence,” Kurdi said. “We promised that we are going to hit the regime in its most sensitive axis. This was necessary for us.”

The government said others at the meeting were injured. Some news outlets reported that Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar was badly hurt and eventually died from his wounds, but the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said he and another official identified only as Lt. Gen. Hisham were in “stable” condition. The agency was apparently referring to Hisham Bakhtiar, Assad’s national security chief.

Meanwhile, AFP reports: More than 60 soldiers were Wednesday reported killed as rebels pressed their offensive to capture Damascus, upping the stakes ahead of a Security Council vote on a resolution threatening sanctions on Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said at least 20 government soldiers died on Tuesday in Damascus clashes with the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) and that between 40 and 50 were killed the previous day.

Columns of black smoke rose over the capital on Wednesday as the Local Coordination Committees, which organises anti-regime protests on the ground, reporting fighting in several districts.

The Qaboon neighbourhood was bombarded during the night and pounded again on Wednesday morning, the LCC said, as was Barzeh neighbourhood, and sustained gunfire was heard.

It also said there was less traffic than normal in the city where fighting has raged since Sunday, with the rebels announcing a full-scale offensive dubbed “the Damascus volcano and earthquakes of Syria.”

The question that must now stalk Bashar al-Assad’s mind day and night is: who can I trust?

The metaphor of regimes being toppled is often misleading since the fatal blow is just as likely to come from the inside as the outside.

The tight inner circle dedicated to Assad’s survival just got even smaller today with the deaths of Defense Minister Dawoud Rajha and Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat who were killed in a suicide attack. But if Reuters is correct in reporting that the attacker was himself a bodyguard for the core members of the regime, the survivors have been reminded that they may have less to fear from armed rebels in the streets of Damascus than they do from those who stand at their sides.

[Update: A tweet from @fsa_hq_syria says: “the bomb was inside a water cooler in the room which was packed with 25 top thugs and was remote detonated from a distance”]

As fighting continues in the Syrian capital, Tony Karon writes:

By forcing the regime to use armor and artillery in the capital, the rebels have sent a message to the regime’s key support bases that Assad has lost control of much of the country and that his promises to crush the rebellion ring hollow. “Once the fighting gets into the key cities, the advantage passes from the military to the insurgents,” says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “As long as the fighting is confined to villages and small towns, those can be surrounded and pounded into submission with artillery fire. You can’t do that in a city of 5 million people. Your heavy weapons become meaningless, because you can’t destroy Damascus — and so, the city’s Sunni neighborhoods become a sea in which the rebels can swim and multiply.”

By some accounts, the military during the past three days ordered whole neighborhoods in the capital to evacuate their homes in order to clear the rebels from Sunni areas. Not only do such actions confirm to the citizenry that the regime faces a popular insurrection rather than simply a terrorism problem, as its propagandists claim; they also build resentment against the security forces and create an even more permissive environment for the insurgents. “But if the regime can’t drive the rebels out of the capital,” Landis notes, “the regime is finished.”

Last month, Assad, providing a glimpse into his psychopathically delusional mindset, likened his relationship with Syria to that of a surgeon. With the country as his patient, it was inevitable that his hands would get covered in blood as he attempted to save its life. This is not the imagery that would be employed by anyone who ever needed to win an election.

Even if we are long familiar with military officials using the twisted euphemism of “surgical strikes”, there is I think something even more macabre about a president who claims he must slice open his nation for the good of its health.

Now, as Assad’s inner circle gets even smaller, his ability to make rational decisions will almost certainly be lost.

Reuters reports:

As fighting rages in Damascus, and the Assad family that has ruled Syria for four decades struggles for its life against a growing rebellion, a picture is emerging of a tight inner group determined to fight its way out of the crisis, even as support for the government falls away.

At its head is President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000 and who friend and opponent alike say appears increasingly detached from reality, convinced he is fighting a conspiracy against him and Syria.

Around him is a tight circle of family and clan members, and a security establishment staffed mainly by adherents of the Alawite minority to which the Assads belong, a branch of Shi’ite Islam in a country that is three quarters Sunni.

“Even those who love him feel he can no longer provide security,” said Ayman Abdel-Nour, an adviser to Assad until 2007 and now an opposition figure. “They think he is useless and living in a cocoon.”

“He thinks of himself as God’s messenger to rule Syria. He listens to the sycophants around him who tell him ‘you are a gift from God’. He believes that he is right and that whoever contradicts him is a traitor. Many of his close friends and advisers have either left him or distanced themselves from him.”

In response, Assad has taken charge of a military crisis unit and takes all the daily decisions, from the deployment of army units to tasks assigned to the security services, as well as mobilization of the Alawite Shabbiha, the feared militia accused of a series of massacres in the past two months.

“Bashar remains the centre. He is involved in the day-to-day details of managing the crisis,” said a Lebanese politician close to the Syrian rulers. “He set up an elite unit led by him to manage the crisis daily.”

In this unit, intelligence chief Hisham Bekhtyar is responsible for security coordination, Dawoud Rajha is minister of defense, Assef Shawkat, the president’s powerful brother-in-law, is deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. Alongside them are Ali Mamlouk, special adviser on security, Abdel-Fattah Qudsiyeh, head of military intelligence, and Mohammad Nassif Kheyrbek, a veteran operator from the era of Assad’s father.

Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and Syria’s second most powerful man, commands the main loyalist strike forces.

“Maher is directly involved in the confrontation on the ground and is in direct contact with every one of them. He has direct military responsibilities,” the Lebanese politician said.

While there has been no shake-up in the leadership, its inner circle is beginning to realize it faces a serious crisis. “In the hierarchy of the authorities you don’t see a noticeable change”, he said. But “you hear more realistic language. The prestige and standing of the regime has been scratched”.

Abdel-Nour, the former Assad adviser, paints a darker picture of the inner circle. He stresses that there is nothing autonomous about the way government units operate, whether the shelling of opposition neighborhoods by Maher’s armored columns or the killing of villagers by the Shabbiha militia. All units are under Bashar’s command and many have family ties.

Each region has its own Shabbiha leader and many of the central cities are led by Shabbiha men related to Assad.

The 46-year-old Assad said last month that Syria was at war and ordered his government to spare no effort in pursuit of victory against rebels he has described as terrorists.

Drawing parallels with his earlier profession as an eye surgeon, he said: “When a surgeon performs an operation to treat a wound do we say to him: ‘Your hands are covered in blood’?”

“Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”

Simon Assaf speaking at Marxism 2012, hosted by the Socialist Workers Party in London earlier this month: Syria has been under emergency law since 1963 — three months before I was born… But Syrian society before that was extraordinarily vibrant: politically — you talk about the development of Arab nationalism, communist ideas, all these kinds of things, you’re looking to Syria — this is where it came from [in the Arab world]. Understand that Syria was so important for that and you begin to see this re-develop.

So this idea that without Bashar al Assad or without the West or without someone else, Syria will simply degenerate into a sectarian war because really, at the end of the day, the ordinary people of Syria and Lebanon, all they think about — they wake up in the morning, they have their eggs, eat their hummus, and then they go kill their neighbor.

It doesn’t actually work that way. Sectarianism is something that comes from the outside to divide us, and you really see the way in which they are also using sectarianism inside the revolution itself.

At the moment we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation. So in places like Homs, in Idlib, in Hama, and Dara and all these places are under extraordinary levels of bombardment.

Yesterday[, July 4, the Syrian army] retook one of the suburbs in Damascus. The daily toll of deaths is really quite horrific. A hundred, a hundred and fifty people dying every day. They are talking of about 65,000 people who are missing, presumed dead — who knows. There’s 200,000 people who are being held hostage by the regime, rounded up and so on, and an unknown number of soldiers who have been executed for refusing to fire on the demonstrations.

And so we are, if you like, in a very difficult situation. You can see the dangers that are now inside of Syria. The dangers are this: If the revolution does not succeed relatively soon then you can see that point at which outside forces begin to have bigger influence.

But at the moment the revolution feels like it is moving forward. So you think about what’s happening around Idlib, around the north, around Homs and all these areas, there is a huge rebel offensive. Town after town is now falling in front of them.

The state is retreating more and more into the urban areas which they are finding extraordinarily difficult to control.

I got a message from a friend of a friend in Damascus which said: Damascus is full of the Free Syrian Army. That is, young demonstrators who have now joined the armed rebels. All we need is a few more weapons and it will be over.

You really get that sense, and their was a tweet this morning [July 5] from one of the few journalists who is embedded with the rebels who said they had just driven from Homs to Damascus and not seen one soldier along the route.

And you really feel that if the end is going to come, it’s going to come extraordinarily quickly. And that’s what we hope is going to happen.

However, if this fails. If it goes longer then you can see the dangers, the real dangers emerging inside of it. The West, the outside forces will take more control and that sectarian frustration starting to develop. There is always the danger there and its always a danger that we have to be weary of…

This is a real revolution. It’s not as simple as Egypt — I don’t think Egypt is that simple to be honest with you anyway. It’s not as simple as Egypt or Tunisia, but it is a real revolution.

We as revolutionaries have a duty to engage with those inside the revolution to talk about the dangers of foreign intervention — why we don’t call for it — and all these kinds of things. But also to talk about a strategy of how to win the revolution.

You begin to see the development of strikes, popular strikes, mass demonstrations, mutinies and so on and actually see, this is the way forward. To do this, we have to go much much further than simply see it as replacing one group at the top with another group at the top, and actually unleashing the full potential of the revolution means unleashing a struggle beyond simply the change of the people at the top — a fundamental change inside of Syrian society as well.