The Los Angeles Times reports: A major impediment to determining who is who is that CIA officers largely have avoided entering Syria or traveling to the battle zones since February, when the U.S. Embassy in Damascus was shuttered for security reasons after threats by groups allied with the Assad government. Closing the embassy left the agency without a secure base from which to operate, and CIA personnel left the country, the [unnamed current and former] officials said.

Critics say the CIA’s absence from Syria is a missed opportunity to influence the fractured rebel movement.

“We should be on the ground with bucket loads of money renting the opposition groups that we need to steer this in the direction that benefits the United States,” said a former CIA officer who spent years in the Middle East. “We’re not, and good officers are extremely frustrated.”

The CIA declined to comment. When asked about statements that the CIA lacks a presence in Syria, U.S. officials notably do not dispute the idea, talking, instead, about other ways of finding out what is taking place.

“We know a lot more than we did about the Syrian opposition a month ago and much more than we knew six months ago. That’s because of increased contacts diplomatically and through a variety of other means that I’m not going to discuss,” an Obama administration official said.

A variety of other means? Come on, own up: CIA analysts are spending a lot of time following Twitter.

In contrast with this view that the U.S. government is still struggling to understand what is happening inside Syria, we have the Assad regime’s assertions that the war is being steered by outside forces. This view is summarized here in a report from Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency:

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.

Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.

The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.

In October, calm was eventually restored in the Arab state after President Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US and its Arab allies are seeking hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means. Tel Aviv, Washington and some Arab capitals have been staging various plots in the hope of increasing unrests in Syria.

One can either believe that the hand-wringing going on in Washington is a charade whose purpose is to disguise imperial power actively shaping events inside Syria, or, see that there is now a wide and widening gap between America’s imperial mindset and its ever shrinking imperial capabilities.

Retired CIA officers can get wheeled into Congress and repeat the catechism that money is all powerful, but if that really was true then Iraq and Afghanistan should provide gleaming examples of how American money can be relied on to shape the world in accordance with American interests.

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.

Maybe it’s just a temporary network glitch, but the fact that the state-run SANA website is currently (6.30AM US Eastern) unavailable provides yet another hint that the government is struggling to retain its grip on power. Likewise, the fact that Bashar al-Assad has not publicly uttered a word since three members of his inner circle lost their lives on Wednesday, casts further doubt on his ability to remain in power.

Today, Syrian state TV confirmed that intelligence chief Hisham Ikhtiar has died from wounds suffered in Wednesday’s bombing.

VOA reports: The United States says the United Nations Security Council has “utterly failed” after Russia and China vetoed a resolution threatening Syria with sanctions if it does not halt the violence.

Ambassador Susan Rice called the vetoes dangerous and deplorable. She said the Council’s failure to act is a recipe for more violence, terrorism, and a war that could engulf the entire region.

The resolution would have extended the U.N. monitoring mission in Syria. It also threatened sanctions against the Assad government if it did not stop using heavy weapons against rebels and civilians within 10 days. Additionally, the measure demanded that Mr. Assad implement envoy Kofi Annan’s plan for a peaceful political transition.

As the UNSC engaged in its deliberations today, those absorbed in this international show of earnestness might have paused to collectively and individually asked themselves a simple question: Is anyone in Syria holding their breath, awaiting the outcome of the vote?

I suspect that for most Syrians the words of “Omar” from the Revolution Leadership Council in Damascus resonate more clearly than anything Susan Rice or anyone else in New York might have to say.

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?”

Among those who see the fighting in Syria as the product of an externally controlled covert regime-change project, it is frequently asserted — without much concrete evidence — that the conflict is being fueled by weapons flowing from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and entering Syria through Turkey.

There’s an easy way of testing this theory without attempting to trace weapons back to their source: examine the arms trade on the Turkish border. C.J. Chivers has just been doing this and finds that demand far outstrips supply. There are clearly many more men in Syria seeking weapons and ammunition than there are guns and bullets and the money to buy them.

Rifle rounds cost $2 each or more and Kalashnikovs now cost $1,000 to more than $2,000. American-made M-16s are available and very expensive (from $5,000 to $7,000 per rifle, with scope) but they are also useless — there are virtually no bullets available.

While the most pressing concern of rebel commanders is that they don’t have enough weapons or funds to buy them, there are also looming concerns about what happens after the fall of Assad.

Last year, in Libya, arms researchers watched the swift arc from arms scarcity to oversupply among the opposition forces. From late winter into early summer, weapons were in short enough supply that many Libyan men went to battle without them, ready to pick up the weapon of a fallen fighter, while hoping to capture the weapons of slain Qaddafi troops. At that time, Kalashnikovs could cost $2,000 or more, just as they do for Syrian fighters now. By last fall, after the struggle for the country ebbed, many fighters possessed several rifles, along with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades. Prices were plummeting, with reports of Kalashnikovs for sale at less than $500. Post-Qaddafi Libya, which for months had inhaled weapons, had become a black-market exporter, with all manner of arms being reported traveling out.

With this in mind, one Syrian rebel commander from Idlib, after the meeting last Friday, drove with journalists from The New York Times to a house he and a commander from Hama share with an ever-changing collection of fighters. His name was Abu Hamza, and he was a former major in the Syrian army. Abu Hamza wanted more weapons. But he said he worried where this was headed – toward the possibility of chaos. “After the war,” he said, “we have to collect these weapons.”

Abu Hamza was confident about the prospects for the uprising; there is no question, he said, that Mr. Assad will fall. But he worried about the effects of these weapons on post-conflict Syria. “We have been watching,” he said, “and we do not want Syria to be like Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya.”

The bombs doors are open. The plans have been drawn up.

This has been brewing for a time. The sheer energy and meticulous planning that’s gone into this change of regime – it’s breathtaking.

At least it takes Charlie Skelton’s breath away.

He’s been busy trawling the archives of the websites of Washington and London’s leading think tanks and out of his research has compiled a damning dossier revealing the deep connections between leading figures in Syria’s exiled opposition and policymakers who are being steered in the direction of military intervention.

Central to Skelton’s account is Syrian academic Bassma Kodmani, an Ahmed Chalabi-type figure who was seen attending this year’s Bilderberg conference. Bilderberg! Say no more!

If the revelation of a network of associations between Syrian activists and the U.S./U.K. foreign policy establishment amounts to a smoking gun, then Skelton has certainly succeeded in exposing a nefarious plot.

But there are other ways of measuring the power of this regime-change lobby.

“The plans have been drawn up,” Skelton says. So — we can deduce — the Syrian opposition is united in its goal. It’s just a matter of keeping up the pressure in their push for foreign military intervention.

Somehow that picture doesn’t quite jive with this — an AFP report from just over a week ago:

Syria’s fractured opposition groups on Wednesday wound up talks in the Egyptian capital that descended into chaos and even fist fights as they tried to forge a common vision for a transition in their country.

More than 200 participants from 30 different movements as well as independent figures, civil society groups and activists had gathered in Cairo to form a unified front against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

After two days of meetings hosted by the Arab League, the groups agreed broadly that any transition must exclude Assad and agreed to support the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).

But they failed to present a united bloc as disagreements led to heated arguments, walkouts and even fist fights, participants said.

And then there is the stream of weapons flowing from the Gulf — absent that supply, some observers repeatedly insist, there would be no armed uprising.

C.J. Chivers reports from Antakya in Turkey, the spigot out of which guns and ammunition are spreading chaos in Syria.

Abu Moayed, a commander in an armed Syrian opposition brigade, stood and waved his arms emphatically at the fellow rebel commanders who filled the sweltering room.

His fighters, he said, needed money and weapons. But they were not getting the support promised from the donors and opposition leaders outside Syria.

“We are borrowing money to feed our wounded!” Abu Moayed shouted. “There is no distribution of the weapons,” he added. “All of our weapons, we are paying for them ourselves.”

The meeting of the rebel commanders, held after Friday Prayer in this Turkish city near Syria’s northern border, said much about the priorities of the Syrian opposition fighting groups at this stage of the conflict, now 17 months old. There was limited discussion of the mass killings in the village of Tremseh the day before — even though the commanders had heard about it and at least one had lost relatives. There was no talk about United Nations cease-fire monitors, the peace envoy Kofi Annan, or endless Security Council debates to halt the conflict. These commanders were focused on the basics of waging war against President Bashar al-Assad.

Abu Moayed, from Idlib, was one of dozens of commanders who converged on the meeting, called by the Idlib Revolutionary Command Council. Held high above the street in a pair of large rooms in an apartment building, the gathering framed both a degree of expanding coordination among anti-Assad fighting groups inside Syria and their frustrations with the opposition’s political leadership outside.

One complaint throughout was that the Syrian National Council, the coalition of exile opposition groups based in Istanbul, was disconnected from the battles fought on the ground. Another was contained in the field commanders’ suspicion that unnamed members of the Syrian political opposition in Turkey were either diverting funds or playing favorites in funneling weapons and money across the border.

“Yesterday we were supposed to receive mortars and cartridges,” said another commander, Issam Afara, addressing his peers. “But we didn’t receive them. I called and demanded: Where are they? Where?”

Where indeed! I thought there was a plan?

“The plans have been drawn up,” Skelton wrote and with these words linked to a 2009 Brookings report whose authors include Iraq-war hawk, Kenneth Pollack.

And what is this plan? Peel Syria away from its alliance with Iran by facilitating a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement.

In 2009 that looked like an objective that was not completely out of reach. After all, in spite of an Israeli attack on an under-construction nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007, in 2008 Turkey had been able to serve as a mediator, laying the foundation for peace talks between Israel and Syria.

So what was the plan? Get Assad to sign a peace treaty with Israel and then foment an uprising to topple Assad?

That sounds like a farcical plan. Then again, Charlie Skelton is a comedy writer.

How can Assad’s useful idiots be characterized?

Firstly, they will offer a perfunctory declaration that they oppose tyranny and tyrants everywhere and have no sympathy for Syria’s president or its government. They will nevertheless refrain from using the term Syrian/Assad “regime” since they are unwilling to pass judgement on the legitimacy of Assad’s rule and have a visceral distaste for the language of Assad’s Western opponents.

Secondly, the idea that an armed uprising could be a legitimate way of challenging authoritarian rule will swiftly be dismissed. Anyone in Syria who carries a gun and does not represent the state must have been provided their weapon by a foreign power — most likely Qatar or Saudi Arabia — and is either simply acting as an agent of Western/Gulf interests or is a Salafist fighting a holy war or is both.

Thirdly, the idea that the Syrian uprising should be seen in the context of the Arab Spring will be ignored and the Arab Spring itself viewed with deep suspicion on the grounds that it bears strong similarities with the Western-supported “color revolutions” which accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union.

Fourthly, it is axiomatic that the driving force behind the conflict in Syria is the hegemonic designs of the United States and Israel in their effort to put a stranglehold on Iran.

Lastly, the idea that what is happening in Syria can primarily be understood as the outcome of five decades of Ba’ath Party rule, will be excluded from the discourse.

In a nutshell, for Assad’s useful idiots Syria can be understood by listening to reports from figures like Deputy Foreign Minister Abdulfattah Ammura and without paying much or any attention to the views of ordinary Syrians, least of all to those identify themselves as belonging to the opposition.