Reuters reports: Rebel strikes against military bases across Syria have exposed President Bashar al-Assad’s weakening grip in the north and east of the country and left his power base in Damascus vulnerable to the increasingly potent opposition forces.

Rebel fighters, who have taken at least five army and air installations in the last 10 days, are still waging an asymmetrical war against a powerful army backed by devastating air power, and predict months of conflict still lie ahead.

Their tactics are gradually choking off Assad’s forces in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, as well as the eastern oil region of Deir al-Zor, while in Damascus “there is a sense that the flames are licking at the door”, a diplomat in the capital said.

The steady capture of military installations and arsenals is sapping the morale of Assad’s forces and also ensuring a modest supply of new weapons to relatively ill-equipped rebels whose calls for a no-fly zone — which proved crucial in the Libyan uprising — have been ignored.

Although they have yet to seize control of a single city, or translate their dominance in swathes of rural Syria into “liberated” territory free of air and artillery strikes, rebels say that their increasing prowess on the battlefield and growing armories have finally allowed them to take the initiative. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: First his parents’ home in eastern Syria was reduced to rubble, followed by his father’s pharmacy. Then Melad received a call last month informing him that his own apartment in a Damascus suburb had been obliterated by a bomb unleashed by a MiG jet.

By then, he had become inured to the sense of loss.

“I got to the point that when I would hear of another of our properties destroyed, I started laughing,” said Melad, a computer engineer who now helps with the humanitarian effort in Syria. “Just as we have gotten accustomed to the amount of blood over these last two years, we have grown accustomed to the destruction.”

Much of Syria has become a disaster zone: In September, the opposition group Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated that more than 2.9 million homes, schools, mosques, churches and hospitals had been damaged or destroyed since the uprising began in March 2011. More than half a million are a complete loss, it said.

Weeks later, the group’s founder, Sami Ibrahim, estimated that 600,000 more buildings had been shelled or bombed, as the government of President Bashar Assad escalated its campaign with daily airstrikes by helicopter and warplane. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: All that remains of Abu Mohammed’s ancestral home here in Syria’s capital are two small adobe brick rooms and a few fig, loquat and mulberry trees.

It was bulldozed as part of a government slum-clearance program that appears to have a political motive: isolate neighborhoods sympathetic to Syria’s armed insurrection, and then obliterate them, according to critics, human-rights groups and even some officials within the government itself. “We are like gypsies now,” says Mr. Mohammed, who took his wife and five children to another part of the city after sections of his neighborhood, Qaboun—one of the first to rise up against Syria’s regime—were flattened and ringed by military posts.

The campaign stands in contrast to the all-out urban warfare in the northern city of Aleppo. Here in the capital, Damascus, the strategy appears designed to cripple and disperse the rebels through the destruction and encirclement of communities where they operate.

For the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the stakes in Damascus are nothing short of retaining control of the nation itself. “If they lose Damascus, they lose the state,” says Patrick Seale, a British author and Syria expert.

Senior security officials within the Assad regime say partial demolitions of pro-rebel neighborhoods in and around Damascus are a key element of an ambitious counterinsurgency plan now unfolding. The plan also involves the expansion of regime-funded militias known as “Popular Committees” within the capital.

These officials say the strategy applies lessons learned from other offensives against the rebels since the start of the conflict more than 20 months ago, most notably in the central city of Homs.

The government’s official position is that the destruction is part of a long-discussed master plan to rid Damascus of illegal slums. City officials say illegal settlements account for nearly 20% of the capital’s 26,500 acres.

Based on several extended visits to Damascus and vicinity last month—some of which coincided with demolition by military authorities—the destruction appears to be occurring only in areas where opposition fighters have been active. In addition, much of it has been overseen by the military rather than municipal authorities, residents say.

“There’s still work to be done, we are not finished yet with cleansing operations that are in response to popular demand,” says Hussein Makhlouf, a relative of Mr. Assad and governor of Rif Damascus, the province surrounding the capital.

In his Damascus office, Mr. Makhlouf praised the government’s official slum-destruction decree, known as “presidential decree No. 66,” as a model for urban renewal. He said demolitions will soon begin in Daraya, Harasta and Yalda, all suburbs that have been at the center of the insurgency against Mr. Assad. Mr. Makhlouf was forthright about the motives behind the demolitions, saying they were essential to drive out rebels, or “terrorists” as he called them.

The Washington Post reports on the fractured relationship between Syria’s 500,000 Palestinians and the ruling Assad family: Palestinian refugees in Syria, in comparison with many countries in the region, are more integrated into society and have greater rights, such as the right to own property. As a result, the Assads have long touted themselves as regional leaders for the Palestinian cause.

So it was no small snub when some Palestinians supported the uprising and took up arms against the government. Opposition activists say there are units within the rebel Free Syrian Army made up entirely of Palestinian fighters.

There is also a sectarian dimension. Sunni Palestinians sympathize with the predominantly Sunni opposition in its fight against a Syrian government led by Alawites, who are an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.

Within the Palestinian community, the group that best embodies the conflicting views is Hamas. This year, Hamas’s political leader, Khaled Meshal, expressed support for the Syrian opposition and moved his base to Qatar, a dramatic step for a group that had been receiving Syrian support for more than a decade.

“The regime supported us — that’s true. But the Syrian people have also supported us,” said the head of international relations for Hamas, Osama Hamdan, who is based in Beirut.

He added: “We as the Palestinian people are seeking to have our freedom, our right of self-determination. So we will not stand in a position which may be against the will of any nation or any people.”

But the leaders of Hamas’s military wing, which is largely based in the Gaza Strip, have taken a different stance, analysts say. In recent years they have received financial and military assistance as well as training from Iran, one of President Bashar al-Assad’s closest allies, and have remained supportive of the Syrian government.

The group’s difficult position on the Syrian uprising was evident in comments Meshal made at a news conference in Cairo on Wednesday. He thanked Iran for its support during the recent Israeli military operation targeting Gaza but noted that his praise came despite “disagreements on the situation in Syria.”

Syrian security services raided Meshal’s office in Damascus this month, according to a Hamas statement. But the fallout between Hamas and the Syrian government had surfaced earlier this year; in late June, Hamas official Kamal Ghanaja was assassinated in Damascus, and his body reportedly showed signs of torture.

Many activists say the killing was carried out by Syrian security services in retaliation for the group’s shifting allegiances.

EA Worldview‘s James Miller writes: [A]t several points in this conflict there have been collections of bad data that suggested that EA, and the media at large, was missing a trend. For several weeks there has been a growing number of rumors, low-quality Youtube videos, and eyewitness reports that suggested that not only was the FSA winning in Deir Ez Zor, Lattakia, and Aleppo, but it was on the brink of major victories in all three provinces. Similarly, there is a growing body of inconclusive evidence that the FSA is surging in Daraa province, and was increasingly effective in and around Damascus. While individual reports of this nature may or may not each be true, the trend lines were beginning to look clear.

For more than a week, however, that body of evidence has been harder and harder to dismiss as noise and rumor. With well documented victories yesterday, the FSA has encouraged us to post headlines that we have been sitting on for a long time.

Two trends are clear – The Assad regime is retreating, pulling many units towards the capital and leaving its garrisons to fend for themselves – and they are fending poorly. Meanwhile, the FSA continues to ratchet up pressure on the capital, and despite the fact that Damascus is now the highest priority of the Assad military, those advances are accelerating.

Is it a state of collapse? Perhaps it’s too early to say, and we’re not predicting a sudden collapse even if that were true. Regardless, it is my conclusion that we have been too cautious in estimating the strengths of the insurgency, and this is saying something because we have been consistently more hawkish (and I would argue more accurate) than many media outlets who assess the strength of the Syrian insurgents. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Activists say Syrian rebels have captured a hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates river in the country’s north in a strategic victory that followed days of fighting.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the Tishrin Dam, near the town of Manbij, fell to the rebels before dawn on Monday.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory, says the dam supplies several areas of Syria with electricity.

The rebels have been making strategic advances recently. On Sunday, they briefly captured a regime helicopter base outside Damascus.

Earlier, Al Jazeera reported: Opposition commanders in the Syrian city of Aleppo have voiced their support to the Syrian National Coalition, a day after a video emerged showing fighters from at least 14 brigades announcing their rejection of the opposition bloc.

The powerful Liwaa al-Tawhid Brigade, along with the Aleppo Military Council and Transitional Military Council, in a video uploaded on YouTube on Tuesday, said they would co-operate with the newly formed opposition body, but called for greater representation in it.

They also said that the earlier statement by some local commanders rejecting the coalition was due to “the marginalisation of the revolutionary forces on the ground”.

“We call on [the coalition] to increase the representation of the revolutionary forces and to activate their role in the coalition’s offices and apparatus,” Tuesday’s statement, read by Abdel Qader Saleh, the head the Liwaa al-Tawhid Brigade, said.

The brigade, formed in July, is said to have at least 10,000 fighters. It has been credited for the opposition’s control of vast areas in Aleppo province.

In the earlier video posted online on Monday, a fighter could be seen reading out a statement that said: “We, the groups in the city of Aleppo and its suburbs, completely reject the conspiratory project which was named the National Coalition.”