Tony Karon writes: News reports typically characterize the Syrian rebellion as being 16 or 17 months old. It is one of those descriptions delivered en passant while relating the news of the day: the battle for Aleppo grinds on into its sixth day threatening a massive humanitarian crisis; new video shows rebels executing unarmed prisoners; President Bashar Assad urges his troops on through written messages but declines to make public appearances, and so on. But the International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected organization of analysts, mediators and former diplomats, on Wednesday issued a report urging opponents of the Assad regime, both Syrian and international, to pay closer attention to the implications of that 17-month time span.

Not only has the Assad regime survived an unprecedented assault, the ICG argues, but it also is no longer the Assad regime of February 2011 — and the rebellion challenging it also may have morphed into something quite different from the uprising that began last year. As a result, stakeholders looking to end the crisis are in urgent need of some thinking that goes beyond speculating whether Assad will go the way of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, or any other autocrat felled during the past year’s Arab rebellion. Syria’s trajectory will be very different. Says the ICG report:

Perhaps the most significant and least appreciated is what, over time, has become of the regime. The one that existed at the outset of the conflict almost certainly could not have survived the spectacular killing of top officials in the heart of its traditional stronghold; street combat in Damascus, Aleppo and a string of other towns; the loss of important border crossings with Turkey and Iraq; all amid near-total economic devastation and diplomatic opprobrium. That, a year and a half later, its new incarnation not only withstood those blows but vigorously counterpunched sends a message worthy of reflection.

Assad’s regime, it warns, is morphing into something less like a government and more akin to factional militia locked into an increasingly brutal fight for its collective survival, relying on an Alawite community that sees a rebel triumph as nothing less than a mortal threat. [Continue reading…]

Christian Science Monitor reports: For those challenging the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the list of villains has always included the regime’s closest allies: Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

But as the death toll rises and Syria marks 17 months and counting of revolt, many in the embattled city of Aleppo say they have added another, perhaps surprising, villain: the United States.

The US is an arch-foe of the Syrian regime. US officials have stated plainly and repeatedly that Assad “must” go. And President Barack Obama earlier this year signed a secret order authorizing clandestine aid to rebel forces, it was reported today.

IN PICTURES – Inside Aleppo

But in the rebel-held enclave of Salaheddin, guerrilla gunmen and ordinary Syrians alike wonder why the US has not acted to stop the killing by at least ending the Syrian Army’s artillery bombardment and imposing a no-fly zone on the helicopters and planes that menace them from the skies.

“We all believe the US and all Western countries want Assad to stay in power,” says the coordinator for the Revolutionary Council in Aleppo, who gave his name as Abu Thaier.

“I believe that Syrian intelligence up to this moment is cooperating with the CIA,” the wizened revolutionary told the Monitor. “The Westerners are afraid of the destiny of Israel; this is what stops them. Assad takes advantage of that, and says, ‘These terrorists [rebels] will go to Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan and we must crush them.’… Western countries gave up on the Syrian people because they believe most demonstrators are Islamists,” he says.
‘Petroleum is worth more than Syrian blood’

Syrians under fire from government troops often bring up Washington’s perceived neglect when they see an American journalist.

“We look on Americans as the most important people to look after democracy,” says Abu Thaier. “We consider the torch of freedom in New York a torch for all humanity, not just America. We hope that the Statue of Liberty did not yet lose its real meaning.”

He brings up Libya and the US-orchestrated NATO intervention last year that was instrumental in ensuring that rag-tag rebels were able to bring down Muammar Qaddafi. The only difference, he asserts, is that Libya has oil, and Syria does not.

“They think petroleum is worth more than Syrian blood,” asserts Abu Thaier. “Now if you are living in Western countries, if someone kills 50 or 100 [pet] animals, the response would be more than for Syrians.” [Continue reading…]

Rania Abouzeid writes: The three little girls crouched in their starting positions, each placing one leg in front of the other, ready to pounce on the count of three: “One, two, three!” their aunt said as the sisters, all under 10, raced some 20 meters to the top of their narrow lane, giggling, before turning around and sprinting back toward their aunt, seated outside their front door. It was a stiflingly warm night, near pitch black. The electricity was out and the family had moved outside, the pleasant breeze providing a little respite from the heat.

Two nights earlier, another family — the Breks — had done the same thing. They lived in another neighborhood in this town of some 40,000 in central Idlib province. The young children were playing outside. Their mother Sakina had just finished boiling tea and was bringing it outside when the rocket landed in their street. She was killed along with three other women from their family. Her young son, no more than eight or nine, was already dead when he reached the Hassan Hospital. His bright red t-shirt was stained a deeper shade by his blood. His baby sister Suheila, dressed in a blue t-shirt and white shorts, her pudgy toddler legs covered in patches of blood, no longer had a face. Her head was an indiscernible mashed up pink blob of flesh and blood.

The Brek family tragedy wasn’t lost on the aunt as she watched her young nieces playing, but faith and fatalism were like soothing balms. “They were sitting here just like us,” she said. “It’s frightening what we have gotten used to. Death will find us if it wants to, if God wills it, but we are changing, becoming harder as human beings.”

The once-peaceful 17-month Syrian conflict quickly morphed into a vastly asymmetrical war, fueled by the iron-fisted response of a regime that tolerates no dissent. War has its own cadence, its own logic. It’s a mix of the mundane, the everyday, experienced through heightened, sometimes supercharged emotions. It’s the thrill and fear of a fighter approaching the frontline, or a person heading out to demonstrate, the prayers of their family, the concerns of a mother, the tears of a child. “Normal” becomes relative. The daily rhythm of life goes on seemingly unaffected, but there is always an undercurrent of tension, the knowledge that a single, sudden event can upend everything. Even death and its rituals have changed. Mourning periods, usually weeks and even months long, are abbreviated — otherwise, as one woman said, the town and others like it would perpetually be in mourning.

Families have been physically divided. Some men have ferried their wives and children to Turkey and returned to fight or protect their homes from looting. In other cases, it’s the rebel fighters who have traversed the border, to organize supplies and support for their men.

“Why have you come back?” a fighter’s mother, a heavyset woman in a beige scarf asked her 40-year-old son as he knelt before her and kissed her cheeks. An FSA commander, the man had fled to Turkey two months ago after an assassination attempt, a hail of bullets that targeted his vehicle, wounding him and killing one of his best friends.

“Is that any way to greet your son?” he asked.

“I”m happy to see you, but I’m afraid for you,” his mother said. “You should leave.”

The commander, like so many other rebels, keeps a grenade with him at all times — even during dinner or when he’s playing with his children. It’s a last resort to avoid capture. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths,” he said, “than be captured by them.” It’s a phrase often repeated by other rebels, here and elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Syrians hoping for a swift rebel victory in their homeland are growing impatient with top army defectors who are staying in Turkey even after fighters on the ground have gained territory across the border in northern Syria.

Turkey has emerged as a haven not only for tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, but for some of the most high-level defectors from President Bashar Assad’s regime. The Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel fighters, uses Turkey as a headquarters and staging ground, in part because the rebels have not been able to secure a safe haven inside the country.

But now rebel fighters have carved out some ground for themselves along the border inside Syria, and some rebels and refugees say it’s time for the most elite defectors – including dozens of officers and more than 25 generals – to go home and fight.

“Why does an officer defect? He defects in order to protect the nation,” Baraa, a Syrian refugee in Turkey, told The Associated Press. He asked that only his first name be published, fearing for the safety of his family in Syria. “They should go into Syria and let the revolution benefit from their long years of experience.”

Commanders of the FSA in Turkey say they are hardly sitting idle and have been directing the fight inside Syria – and that Turkey is a secure place to do it from. Unfair or not, the criticism reflects a tension over who has real credibility to claim the revolt’s leadership among the Syrian opposition, which includes multiple militias on the ground, politicians who live in exile and now defectors from some of the upper levels of Assad’s military. If the revolt ever succeeds in ousting Assad, those tensions could fuel a divisive power struggle among the winners.

Thousands of Syrian soldiers, most of them low-level conscripts, have deserted and joined the rebels since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011. The higher echelons of Assad’s military have stayed largely intact, which makes those generals and senior officers who did break away and are now in Turkey important sources of information and expertise for the rebellion.

Even if they are active in planning and direction, there is a perception among refugees and even some in the FSA that those who were in the military’s officer corps – and used to its perks – are happy to stay in Turkey, while the former conscripts and Syrian civilians who took up weapons and joined FSA-linked militias do the fighting. Most of those based in Turkey are mid-level officers ranging from lieutenants to colonels, staying in a camp separate from those housing the refugees.

Al Jazeera has an interactive chart tracking Syrian defections of senior military officials, members of parliament and diplomats who quit Assad’s regime

The Associated Press reports: Syrian President Bashar Assad urged his military Wednesday to boost its fight against rebels, but his written call to arms only deepened a mystery over his whereabouts two weeks after a bomb penetrated his inner circle.

Assad has not spoken publicly since the July 18 bombing killed four of his top security officials — including his brother-in-law — during a rebel assault on the capital, Damascus. The president’s low profile has raised questions about whether he fears for his personal safety as the civil war escalates dramatically.

The United States called the Syrian president a coward for marshaling his forces from the pages of the army’s official magazine.

“We think it’s cowardly, quite frankly, to have a man hiding out of sight, exhorting his armed forces to continue to slaughter the civilians of his own country,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell.

Sausan Ghosheh, the spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Syria, said Wednesday that international observers witnessed warplanes firing in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where intense fighting has been raging for 12 days.

Speaking to reporters in Damascus, Ghosheh said the situation in Aleppo was dire.

“Yesterday, for the first time, our observers saw firing from a fighter aircraft. We also now have confirmation that the opposition is in a position of having heavy weapons, including tanks,” she said, adding that for civilians, there “is a shortage of food, fuel, water and gas.”

The U.N.’s World Food Program said it was sending enough emergency food aid for 28,000 people in the city of 3 million. The U.N. has estimated that some 200,000 residents have fled Aleppo.

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Reuters reports: Rebels fighting to depose Syrian president Bashar al Assad have for the first time acquired a small supply of surface-to-air missiles, according to a news report that a Western official did not dispute.

NBC News reported Tuesday night that the rebel Free Syrian Army had obtained nearly two dozen of the weapons, which were delivered to them via neighboring Turkey, whose moderate Islamist government has been demanding Assad’s departure with increasing vehemence.

Indications are that the U.S. government, which has said it opposes arming the rebels, is not responsible for the delivery of the missiles.

But some U.S. government sources have been saying for weeks that Arab governments seeking to oust Assad, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been pressing for such missiles, also known as MANPADs, for man-portable air-defense systems, to be supplied to the rebels.

In recent days, air operations against the rebels by Syrian government forces appear to have been stepped up, particularly around the contested city of Aleppo, making the rebels’ need for MANPADs more urgent.

Precisely what kind of MANPADs have been delivered to Syrian rebels is unclear and NBC News did not provide details. Such weapons range from the primitive to highly sophisticated.

And even if the rebels do have the weapons, it is unclear whether they have the training to operate them effectively against Assad’s air forces in the immediate future.

Some conservative U.S. lawmakers, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have criticized the administration of President Barack Obama for moving too slowly to assist the rebels and have suggested the U.S. government become directly involved in arming Assad’s opponents.

The White House, at least until now, has taken a considerably more cautious approach.

As of last month, U.S. officials warned that if any Middle Eastern nation was “even considering giving arms to the Syrian opposition,” it ought to “take a measured approach and think twice about providing arms that could have unintended consequences.”

Nonetheless, even at that time, U.S. and allied officials acknowledged that officials of Saudi Arabia and Qatar were discussing whether surface-to-air missiles might help Syrian rebels bring down Russian-made helicopters and other aircraft the Syrian army was using to move troops between trouble spots.

Following the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, some intelligence experts estimated that as many as 10,000-15,000 MANPADs sets were looted from Libyan government stockpiles. The whereabouts of most of these are unknown.

Many U.S. officials have been wary of the notion of arming Syrian rebels with MANPADs, noting that they could be easily turned on targets other than the Syrian government, including civilian airliners.

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the CIA, with Saudi backing, provided sophisticated shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to Islamic militants seeking to oust Soviet troops.

The missiles proved deadly against Soviet helicopter gunships, but subsequently became a major headache for U.S. and western counter-terrorism agencies when anti-Soviet militants morphed into anti-Western militants.

Recent intelligence and news reporting has suggested a growing number of militants, including some affiliated with al Qaeda, have traveled to Syria to try to join anti-Assad forces. U.S. officials have said, however, that they do not believe the militants yet play a dominant role in the Syrian opposition.

Reuters reports: Syrian rebels aim to push towards central Aleppo, capturing the country’s biggest city within days despite being outgunned by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, a local rebel commander said.

Colonel Abdel-Jabbar al-Oqaidi, who defected from the Syrian army six months ago, told Reuters government troops had tried for three days to capture the south-western Aleppo neighbourhood of Salaheddine, and Assad’s soldiers were increasingly demoralised.

The fight for Syria’s second city has become the focus of the 16-month-old rebellion against Assad, with rebel fighters confronting government forces backed by artillery and helicopter gunships.

“We don’t have goals for the coming months. We have goals for the coming days. Within days, God willing, Aleppo will be liberated,” said Oqaidi, dressed in green camouflage uniform at an Aleppo school which has been turned into a rebel base.

Describing the growing conflict which has engulfed Aleppo in the last few days as “street war”, he said the rebel aim was to capture districts one by one and establish control over them, before taking more territory from the army.

“We secure our areas and then move to other neighbourhoods, pushing towards the city centre,” he said, speaking in an interview late on Monday. “God willing, we will liberate Aleppo and its military and security sites.”

“The regime’s capabilities are also being weakened. They can shell us from afar with tanks and helicopters. But inside their morale is zero,” said Oqaidi, head of the Joint Military Council, one of several rebel groups in Aleppo.

An unidentified Syrian army officer told state television on Sunday that his forces had recaptured Salaheddine, which lies on the south-western entrance to Aleppo, and the rest of the city would be under government control within days.

But on Tuesday Syrian television said the army was still chasing what it called “armed terrorists” in Salaheddine.

“The regime has tried for three days to recapture Salaheddine but its attempts have failed and it has suffered heavy losses in human life, weapons and tanks. It has been forced to withdraw,” Oqaidi said.

AFP reports: Syrian rebels attacked key military targets and overran two police stations in Aleppo, killing 40 officers, a watchdog said, as the pivotal battle for the commercial capital raged on Tuesday.

Clashes between the rebels and loyalists of President Bashar al-Assad were also reported in the capital Damascus, the eastern city of Deir Ezzor and Daraa in the south, cradle of the more than 16-month uprising.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Aleppo was on Tuesday rocked by the fiercest fighting of a military offensive on rebels in the city, which came after the government had warned of a looming “mother of all battles.”

Rebels used rocket-propelled grenades in pre-dawn attacks on a military court, an air force intelligence headquarters and a branch of the ruling Baath Party in Aleppo, said the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman.

Later, “hundreds of rebels attacked the police stations in Salhin and Bab al-Nayrab (neighbourhoods) and at least 40 policemen were killed during the fighting, which lasted for hours,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The police chief was among those killed at the Salhin station in the south of the city, while three vehicles were destroyed, he added.

The attacks came as the UN observer mission said government forces were using helicopters, tanks and artillery to fight the rebels, while appealing for both sides to protect civilians in the city of 2.7 million people.

Through the night, government troops had shelled the neighbourhoods of Salaheddin, Marjeh, Firdoss, Al-Mashhad, Sakhur, Al-Shaar and Ansari, before the army and rebels clashed at dawn in Al-Meesr and Al-Adaa.

A security official in Damascus told AFP on Monday that the army had regained some of Salaheddin but it was facing “a very strong resistance.” The rebels, however, denied that the army had advanced even “one metre” (yard).

“The fierce fighting in Aleppo shows how crucial this city is for a regime that does not want a Benghazi in Syria,” said Abdel Rahman, referring to the coastal city secured by Libyan rebels as a base in their fight to bring down strongman Moamer Kadhafi.

AFP reports: Syrian opposition figure Haytham al-Maleh told reporters on Tuesday that he has been tasked with forming a government in exile based in Cairo.

“I have been tasked with leading a transitional government,” Maleh said, adding that he will begin consultations “with the opposition inside and outside” the country.

Maleh, a conservative Muslim, said he was named by a Syrian coalition of “independents with no political affiliation”.

More than 20,000 people have been killed in Syria since a revolt against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule began in March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. There is no way to independently verify the figure, while the UN has stopped keeping count.

There have been repeated calls on Assad to step down.

When that happens, “we don’t want to find ourselves in a political or administrative vacuum,” Maleh said.

“This phase calls for cooperation from all sides,” he said.

Maleh, 81, is a Syrian laywer and human rights activist who has spent several years in prison in his homeland.

He was jailed in October 2009 and released in March 2011 by presidential pardon, just days before the revolt against Assad erupted.

Maleh has worked for Amnesty International since 1989 and helped found the Syrian Association for Human Rights.

He was also imprisoned in 1980 for six years along with a number of trade unionists and political dissidents.

There have been other attempts by the Syrian opposition to prepare for a post-Assad future.

On Monday, Syrian rebels distributed what they called a “national salvation draft” proposal for a political transition, bringing together military and civilian figures.

The draft by the joint command of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) proposes the establishment of a higher defence council charged with creating a presidential council, which in turn would bring together six military and civilian figures to lead a future transition.

The proposal “meets all the revolution’s demands,” said the umbrella Military Council Joint Command, based in the central province of Homs.

When Syria’s uprising first turned into an armed insurgency, rebel factions had little or no coordination with each other as they separately battled Assad’s forces.

Over time, the Joint Command, headed by Colonel Kassem Saadeddine, has emerged as an increasingly influential coordinating body among rebel commanders inside Syria.

Joshua Landis writes: A friend flew into Aleppo’s airport 3 days ago from Germany where he had been on business. On his drive into the city, he was shocked to run into a FSA roadblock. The militiamen who greeted him were polite. After asking him where he had been and where he was going, they sent him on his way. A kilometer down the road, he passed through a government check point run by Air-force Intelligence.

Such reports remind me of Lebanon, where I lived for a few years during the civil war. A simple trip could send one through a series of roadblocks run by competing forces. As an American in Lebanon before the Israeli invasion of 1982, I was not a person of interest to any of the warring factions and thus could pass through them unmolested. My Lebanon memories make me wonder whether the expectation of an imminent victory in Syria by one side is realistic.

Militias may well impose control in their areas but find themselves unable to dislodge or overcome competing militias. Some may simply find it more convenient to make deals with rivals than to fight them. Syria could well become a “deeply penetrated society,” as political scientists named Lebanon: a society in which competing factions are largely dependent on external support.

We are all so accustomed to thinking of Syria as DAMASCUS. The capital has been favored by successive governments since independence that it is natural for Syrians to expect the capital to be the axis about which all Syria revolves. That expectation may be misleading. Whomever owns Damascus may no longer own Syria. I have told many journalists that once Damascus falls to rebels, the Assad regime will be effectively dead. That may be true, but the remaining body of the Syrian Army, which is rapidly turning into an Alawite militia, could live on for some time. Various regions of Syria are re-establishing a degree of autonomy and self governance now that Syria is being overrun by militias of many different stripes.

Assad and his men will work for a fragmented Syria. It may be their only path to survival. If the Free Syrian Army can conquer all of Syria, most regime principals will be executed.

I don’t expect Syria to break up as some do, but it may be a long while before one militia or a unified political organization is able to impose its control over the country. Road-blocks were a common feature of Lebanon’s political landscape for fifteen long years.