Category Archives: Syria

Fighting among pro-Assad groups points to factional future

The Daily Star reports: Fierce clashes erupted between pro-Assad militias from the National Defense Forces and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party in Homs this week in an unusually public confrontation between allies.

The skirmish, which left one person dead according to activists, came in the wake of a landmark deal that saw the last remaining anti-Assad fighters surrender the city last week. The deal was seen as an important victory for Bashar Assad, crowning a string of recent gains and as he campaigns for re-election in a presidential vote to be held on June 3, on a platform of restoring security and stability.

In the days following the deal, Homs residents have flooded back to their battered and abandoned homes in the Old City, where the rebels had been penned in under an intense government siege for over two years. But the city remains deeply divided, and the days following the deal have also seen intense looting and vandalism by vengeful elements of NDF paramilitaries and others, according to dozens of reports circulated on social media and residents’ testimony.

While it remains unclear what triggered the firefight in the Hamadieh neighborhood of Homs, the incident has served to highlight the chaotic and acrimonious conditions in the city, and the challenges that factionalism and rivalry present to any lasting settlement.

Some reports suggested the battle broke out after NDF troops looted Christian homes. [Continue reading…]

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Why Syria matters

Nader Hashemi writes: On March 15, 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria. Like the other Arab revolts, it occurred spontaneously and proceeded nonviolently. The core political grievances and aspirations were the same as elsewhere: karama (dignity), hurriya (freedom) and adala ijtima’iyya (social justice). The House of Al-Assad, in power forty-one years at the time and arguably the most repressive regime in the Arab world, faced a legitimacy crisis of unprecedented scale and proportion.

What is interesting about this particular revolt is that at the time many experts predicted that the Arab Spring would stop at Syria’s borders. Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident and former fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, argued that “Syria is not ready for an uprising” because the preparatory organizing at the grassroots that led to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt was absent in the Syrian case. Similarly, Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma suggested an “important factor is that [Al-Assad] is popular among young people.” He explained: “I’m always astounded how the average guy in the street, the taxi driver, the person you talk to in a restaurant or wherever, they don’t talk about democracy. They complain about corruption, they want justice and equality, but they’ll look at elections in Lebanon and laugh, saying, ‘who needs that kind of democracy?’”

Unsurprisingly, Bashar Al-Assad, Syria’s president since 2000, held the same view. As the Arab Spring unfolded, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he rejected the idea that Syria was ripe for revolution. Criticizing his fellow Arab rulers, he observed that if “you didn’t see the need for reform before what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, it’s too late to do any reform.” He assured his interviewer, however, that “Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.” But six weeks later, a revolution did begin in Syria, and three years on—notwithstanding its attempted eradication by the Al-Assad regime, its abandonment by the international community and its predictable militarization and radicalization — it staggers on, and resistance to the House of Al-Assad continues.

Hoping that the conflict in Syria will simply go away seems to have been the unstated policy of the Obama administration for much of the last three years. This view is widely shared by the American public. Tired of a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, this sentiment is certainly understandable. The United States has effectively lost these wars and the cost to America’s self-image and its economy has been enormous. Yet the conflict nonetheless continues to haunt our collective consciousness and to hold our attention. For three distinct but interrelated reasons — rooted in basic ethics, global security and normative political values — the conflict in Syria profoundly matters for our world today. In the absence of global leadership that prioritizes this crisis, the conflict will continue to destabilize the broader Middle East and its ramifications will be felt far and wide for years to come. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s drone war in Syria

The Daily Beast reports: Iran has been providing Syria’s regime with drones—some of them inspired by American technology—and they’re already playing a significant role in keeping Bashar Assad in power. On Sunday, Tehran announced it had replicated a top-of-the-line U.S. drone it claimed it captured in 2011, raising the possibility it will send still more sophisticated aerial robots into the skies over Damascus.

In some respects, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Iran’s robust drone program dates back to the early 1980s, and it first tried to weaponize the birds some 30 years ago, long before American Predators and Reapers first soared aloft.

The Middle East was the first great proving ground for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as they’re called. During the 1980s, Israel flew drones over Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to spot Syrian artillery and anti-aircraft positions, allowing the Israeli Air Force to knock out the Syrian air defenses with minimal risks to its pilots. At about the same time, Iran began using drones to spy on Iraqi positions in its epic war against Saddam Hussein. It was during that bitter conflict that Iranian engineers crudely mounted Soviet rocket-propelled grenades on their drones and fired them at Iraqi troops. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry told Syrian rebels ‘we wasted a year’ in fight against Assad

The Daily Beast reports: In a private meeting with Syrian opposition leaders, Secretary of State John Kerry said he believed the international community “wasted a year” by not working together to help topple strongman Bashar al-Assad.

The various countries trying to help the Free Syrian Army had failed to coordinate their efforts effectively for a long time, Kerry said inside the private meeting last Thursday with Syrian Opposition Coalition president Ahmad Jarba, according to three participants in the meeting. And that lack of coordination had dramatically set back the drive to stop Assad’s rampage and counter the growing terrorism threat.

All three participants in the meeting requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the gathering, which was held at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Several State Department officials, at least one National Security Council staffer, and several representatives of the Syrian Opposition Coalition and the Supreme Military Council were in attendance. [Continue reading…]

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With Brahimi’s exit, what becomes of the Syria peace process?

Syria Deeply spoke to Steven Heydemann and Ayham Kamel: On Tuesday, Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.’s special envoy to Syria and mediator of the Geneva I and Geneva II peace talks, officially resigned his post, citing frustration with the country’s ongoing stalemate and the international community’s inability to make a difference.

“It’s not very pleasant for me. It’s very sad that I leave this position and leave Syria behind in such a bad state,” he said, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced the departure. “Everybody who has responsibility and an influence in the situation has to remember that the question is, How many more dead? How much more destruction is there going to be before Syria becomes again the Syria we have known?”

Brahimi is the second diplomat to resign the post since the start of the conflict; Kofi Annan left in 2012 after just six months on the job. The announcement has led to questions about the future of an internationally negotiated peace process, as laid out by the Geneva plan, and as to who, if anyone, will replace Brahimi.

“It’s a pretty damning indictment of the U.N. Security Council that the prospects for a political settlement look worse after three years of U.N. effort than they did earlier,” says Steven Heydemann, vice president of Applied Research on Conflict at Washington’s U.S. Institute of Peace.

We asked Heydemann and Ayham Kamel, Middle East analyst at the Eurasia Group, to weigh in. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s dirty secret is that Assad could win in a fair election

Faisal Al Yafai writes: There is a presidential election in Syria and Bashar Al Assad is going to win. The only question is by how much.

As a presidential candidate, Mr Al Assad has done quite well. He has overseen a truce that has seen one of the country’s largest cities return to government control. He has maintained his relationships with his allies in Iran and Hizbollah. He still cuts a man of the people stance, in marked contrast to the extremists who seek to run the country.

He is, above all, a known quantity, a man who has led the country through difficult times, promises stability and is backed by an army that can deliver it. All in all, Mr Al Assad looks like a credible candidate.

Though only, of course, if you overlook the fact that he caused the civil war that rages today.

But there is a serious reason to understand why Mr Al Assad is seen by many within and without Syria as a credible candidate. Because many will vote for him.

Certainly, that is because there is no real alternative, because the only places in which voting will take place are under government control, because 40 years of propaganda have removed any alternative – and because the Assad regime has spent three years demonstrating what it means by the slogan “Assad or we burn the country”.

But the dirty secret in Syria today is that, if the presidential election were free and fair, Bashar Al Assad would still win. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s new bomb: Syrian regime hasn’t abandoned chemical weapons

Christoph Reuter reports: Despite its pledge to eliminate chemical weapons, the Assad regime is attacking towns and villages with chlorine gas bombs. SPIEGEL visited the communities hit by the most recent bombings to interview victims, doctors and eyewitnesses.

The green wheat fields shimmer in the late afternoon light as the wind slowly starts to pick up. A cloud of dust drifts by. This is good, says Abu Abdu, a farmer from the village of Telminnes, located deep in the south of Syria’s Idlib province. Prior to the war, the evening wind had been an annoyance for the dust it kicked up. But these days, it is windless nights that people in the area despise. That’s when air force helicopters come and the gas attacks take place. Often, they circle over the city before dropping their cargo.

Usually, there is no big bang, just the sound of a minor detonation, sometimes even just the thud of an impact. Death comes quietly, as it did on the evening of April 21 in Telminnes.

That’s the evening a bomb landed near Abu Abdu’s garden. The farmer says the explosion was a quiet one. “I thought the point of impact was far away,” he recalls. The bomb, which carried a small amount of explosives and a gas cylinder, fell close by — so close that Abu Abdu could already see the cloud before he had the chance to flee. “Yellow vapor rose, it smelled strongly of chlorine and it burned like fire. I could no longer speak or breathe,” he says. Neighbors took him to a makeshift hospital where he was treated with oxygen and an anticonvulsant. “Hours later, I could still barely move my arms, I was coughing up blood and every breath I took was hellish.” [Continue reading…]

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War-weariness key to ending fight over Homs

Paul Wood reports: Who is winning in Syria? It is a simple question with no simple answer.

You may think it is President Bashar al-Assad, with the rebels abandoning Homs. But further north, in Idlib and in Aleppo, government forces are under pressure.

The confusion arises because Syria is not one battlefield but several.

The rebels seem incapable of acting as anything other than a series of local or, at best, regional militias.

That was the anguished complaint of the rebels in Homs – no-one else came to help them break the siege; no-one came to their rescue.

In Homs, the rebels were beaten by the Syrian army’s “surrender or starve” tactics. Fighters lost a third or even half of their body weight, they told us, as they hung on for two years.

They had no weapons to break the siege. The al-Nusra Front made a last attempt to break out with a series of suicide bombings against government checkpoints. They failed, and the jihadists joined the buses out with the rest of the fighters.

Further north, the rebels are, somehow, getting US-made anti-tank weapons. That has had a hand in their recent successes. It might account for the government’s apparent, desperate use of chlorine bombs. [Continue reading…]

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Jihadis burn their passports before heading where?

The act of publicly destroying ones passport is a powerful political statement, but one thing I deduce from the spectacle of a throng of young men burning their passports — it’s reasonable to assume they did so while in Syria — is that these are young men who are not making travel plans. At least that’s what I deduce.

Patrick Cockburn thinks otherwise:

It is only a matter of time before jihadis in al-Qa’ida-type groups that have taken over much of eastern Syria and western Iraq have a violent impact on the world outside these two countries. The road is open wide to new attacks along the lines of 9/11 and 7/7, and it may be too late to close it.

Those who doubt that these are the jihadis’ long-term intentions should have a look at a chilling but fascinating video posted recently by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), formerly al-Qa’ida in Iraq. It shows a group of foreign fighters burning their passports to emphasise their permanent commitment to jihad. Many of the passports thrown into the flames have grass-green covers and are Saudi; others are dark blue and must be Jordanian. Some of the fighters show their faces while others are masked. As each one destroys his passport, sometimes tearing it in half before throwing it into the fire, he makes a declaration of faith and a promise to fight against the ruler of the country from which he comes.

A Canadian makes a short speech in English before switching to Arabic, saying: “It is a message to Canada, to all American powers. We are coming and we will destroy you.” A Jordanian says: “I say to the tyrant of Jordan: we are the descendants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [the Jordanian founder of al-Qa’ida in Iraq killed by US aircraft in 2006] and we are coming to kill you.” A Saudi, an Egyptian and a Chechen make similar threats.

These can’t be dismissed as idle threats, but neither can they be treated as imminent threats.

I would surmise that whoever burns their passport in Syria probably expects to die in Syria.

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Persistent Saudi-U.S. differences hurt Syria strategy

Reuters reports: Differences between the United States and Saudi Arabia over Middle East policy persist, despite attempts to shore up their old alliance, and may prove calamitous for Syrian rebels.

Although there is evidence that some American weapons are starting to find their way to more moderate groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, disagreements over what to supply, and to whom, have hindered the fight.

Rebels lament a lack of anti-aircraft missiles to help counter Assad’s air force.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been funding the rebels for years now, arguing that the war in Syria is a battle for the future of the Middle East, pitting pro-Western forces against Riyadh’s main enemy Iran and Islamist militants.

However, while the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama also blames Assad for the violence and wants him to leave power, it sees the conflict very differently.

American officials fear involvement in a messy civil war for which they see no clear military solution and which threatens to radicalize a new generation of Islamists who hate the West.

Among the rebels, the failure of the Saudis and the Americans to cooperate better stirs disillusion. Two hours of talks between Obama and Saudi King Abdullah in March appear to have done little to alter that sentiment. [Continue reading…]

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Humanitarian aid situation in Syria deteriorating, United Nations warns

The Washington Post reports: A U.N. Security Council resolution that passed with great fanfare nearly two months ago has done little to facilitate the shipment of humanitarian aid to a quarter of a million Syrians under siege in their country’s civil war, the top U.N. aid official said Wednesday.

“Far from getting better, the situation is getting worse,” Valerie Amos, the undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, said after briefing the council. “All parties” in Syria are guilty of violating “the most fundamental human rights” of civilians and disregarding “the basic tenets of international law,” she said.

The situation is particularly severe in Aleppo, where a U.N. team was unable over the past week to get aid to civilians cut off from assistance since the government began a military campaign in the fall to retake rebel-held areas. [Continue reading…]

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War-ravaged Syria may face worst wheat harvest in 40 years

Reuters reports: War and drought have crippled Syria’s wheat crop, with some experts now forecasting output of the staple food could fall to around a third of pre-war levels, and possibly even below 1 million metric tons ( 1 metric ton = 1.1023 tons) for the first time in 40 years.

Agricultural experts, traders and Syrian farmers who talked to Reuters gave crop estimates ranging from one million metric tons to 1.7 million at best, a more pessimistic range than that given by the United Nations earlier this month.

Before the war, Syria produced around 3.5 million metric tons of wheat on average, enough to satisfy local demand and usually permit substantial exports, thanks in part to irrigation from the Euphrates river that waters its vast eastern desert.

The last time its wheat harvest failed to exceed 1 million metric tons was 1973, although catastrophic droughts have pushed the crop close to that level in 1989 and 2008. [Continue reading…]

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Western intel suggests Syria can still produce chemical arms

Reuters reports: Syria maintains an ability to deploy chemical weapons, diplomats say, citing intelligence from Britain, France and the United States that could strengthen allegations Syria’s military recently used chlorine gas in its bloody civil war.

The comments reflect a growing conviction among Western capitals that President Bashar al-Assad has failed to come clean about Syria’s chemical weapons program despite his promises to end it, and they insist the United States and its allies will resist calls by Assad to shut down a special international chemical disarmament mission set up to deal with Syria.

Syria denies it maintains the capacity to deploy chemical weapons, calling the allegation a U.S. and European attempt to use their “childish” policies to blackmail Assad’s government.

But in a tacit acknowledgement of the original declaration’s incompleteness, Syria earlier this month submitted a more specific list of its chemical weapons to the international disarmament mission after discrepancies were reported by inspectors on the ground, officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Death chases the residents of Aleppo wherever they go

The Wall Street Journal reports: Months before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, Aleppo entrepreneur Abdul-Latif Kudsi opened a state-of-the-art denim factory in his native city in partnership with an Italian businessman.

They sunk the equivalent of $5 million into the venture and production was exclusively for leading European designers, says the 69-year-old Mr. Kudsi, a member of a prominent Aleppan family that counts Ottoman pashas in its lineage.

At the time Aleppo, Syria’s largest city with about three million people and its economic hub, was undergoing rapid transformation and a true coming of age. Several industrial zones housing mainly garment and textile factories had sprung up all around this northern Syrian city, located a mere 40 miles from the Turkish border. In the eyes of the European Union, it was a gateway for greater economic cooperation with Syria.

But those hopes—along with a boom that brought a face-lift to Aleppo’s historic center as well as some new luxury boutique hotels—have gradually turned into a nightmare. The initial shift was when the impoverished and less developed countryside, which supplied much of the labor for the factories, rose up in solidarity with other parts of Syria against Mr. Assad. Peaceful protests, including in some working class sections of the city and at universities, were brutally suppressed by hired thugs on the payroll of some businessmen, say residents.

The descent into the abyss for many Aleppans, including Mr. Kudsi, came when rebels mainly from the countryside mounted a coordinated assault in July 2012 on military and security positions across the city in an attempt to capture Aleppo. At the time, some Western supporters thought that taking the city could allow the Syrian opposition to establish a northern safe haven akin to the one set up in eastern Libya around Benghazi before the fall of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in the summer of 2011.

But 21 months since the July campaign, that initial goal is as elusive as ever for the fractious rebels. Once a vibrant mercantile and cultural center, Aleppo today is a city physically partitioned and traumatized by war. It stands as exhibit A in what Syria’s civil war has become: A ghastly, grinding stalemate in which noncombatants are paying the highest price. [Continue reading…]

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It’s clear that Turkey was not involved in the chemical attack on Syria

Eliot Higgins and Dan Kaszeta write: Last week the London Review of Books published an article by the respected Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, The Red Line and the Rat Line, in which he details the alleged involvement of the Turkish government with the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra in last August’s sarin attack in Damascus. Between 1,000 and 1,400 people are estimated to have died.

The US, Britain and other western governments have pinned the blame on the Syrian government; Russia has accused the rebels. Hersh describes this as part of a “false flag” operation designed to draw the US into a conflict with Syria.

In his 6,000-word article Hersh relies heavily on single, unnamed sources for each of his claims, and constructs a narrative in which the Turkish government was responsible for the largest chemical attack since the one carried out by Saddam Hussein on Halabja in 1988. But Hersh’s story is full of holes, and it brings the reliability of his sources and conclusions into question.

Hersh makes no mention of the munitions used on 21 August, something that is key to understanding the attacks. In an interview for Democracy Now! he states that the weapons were both homemade and not in Syria’s arsenal. Both these claims are wrong.

Two types of munitions were used on 21 August and are linked to the dispersal of sarin gas. Both were recorded in a report by the UN and the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and tested positive for signs of sarin. One was a Soviet-era M14 140mm artillery rocket, certainly not a “homemade” munition, and the second was a munition that was widely unknown. [Continue reading…]

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U.N. docs expose Assad’s starvation campaign in Syria

Foreign Policy reports: Internal United Nations documents show modest improvements in the delivery of desperately needed food inside rebel-controlled areas of Syria. But the documents also point to a mass exodus of Syrians into areas controlled by President Bashar al-Assad in part because the dictator is the only reliable source of life-sustaining food.

The documents obtained by Foreign Policy track the success of the U.N.’s World Food Program in the two months since the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Assad provide immediate access for relief workers. The new data shows that the years-old U.N. effort has made some recent progress, with food supplies reaching a total of almost 415,000 people in hard-to-reach areas since the resolution was approved in February. In the country as a whole, WFP was able to reach 4.1 million persons in need in March, up from 3.7 million in February. However, in a country where 9.3 million people are in need of steady humanitarian assistance, that means that many more remain outside the U.N.’s reach.

More distressingly, the documents show that Assad’s campaign to bring rebels to heel by cutting off food supplies in opposition-controlled areas is succeeding. [Continue reading…]

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Collapsed health care system may be biggest threat to Syrians

Barbara Slavin writes: More Syrians have died from lack of adequate medical care than from actual combat as the war grinds on into its fourth year, according to Kristalina Georgieva, the European Union’s commissioner for international cooperation, humanitarian aid and crisis response.

In an interview with Al-Monitor on April 11 in Washington, where she attended a coordination meeting at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with other groups struggling to keep up with the spreading humanitarian consequences of the Syrian crisis, Georgieva said that “over 200,000 people have died because treatment is not available anymore in the collapsed health system of Syria.”

While Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has consolidated control over a significant part of territory, the country’s economy has fallen apart, the European commissioner said, and nearly half the population — almost 10 million people — need assistance.

Increasingly, aid workers are reporting cases of malnutrition and starvation, which make weakened populations even more vulnerable to diseases such as measles, Georgieva said. She said she recently visited the northern Kurdish section of Iraq, which is now home to some 230,000 Syrian refugees.

“A large proportion of them flee not because of the fighting,” she said, “but because their children are starving and they cannot access very basic necessities.” [Continue reading…]

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British jihadists in Syria are playing into Assad’s hands

David Wearing writes: The results of new research reported by the Guardian this week on young westerners who have travelled to Syria to fight in the civil war provide some fascinating insights into their motivations, their interactions with pro-jihadi communities online, and the groups they join when they arrive in the war zone.

According to researchers at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London, many of these young men are driven by what, in their minds, are humanitarian concerns for their co-religionists and the Syrian people. An article by George Monbiot comparing them to volunteers in the Spanish civil war was apparently very popular among these foreign fighters. But the fact that most volunteers (among whom the British are the largest contingent) appear to be joining the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), or Jabhat al-Nusra to a lesser extent, shows that far from helping the anti-Assad cause, they are probably helping him to stay in power, and imposing yet more suffering on the Syrian population. [Continue reading…]

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