The Washington Post reports: Despite months of laboratory testing and scrutiny by top U.S. scientists, the Obama administration’s case for arming Syria’s rebels rests on unverifiable claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, according to diplomats and experts.

The United States, Britain and France have supplied the United Nations with a trove of evidence, including multiple blood, tissue and soil samples, that U.S. officials say proves that Syrian troops used the nerve agent sarin on the battlefield. But the nature of the physical evidence — as well as the secrecy over how it was collected and analyzed — has opened the administration to criticism by independent experts, who say there is no reliable way to assess its authenticity.

The technical data presented by the three Western powers is of limited value to U.N. inspectors trying to determine whether
Syria’s combatants used chemical weapons during the country’s 25-month-old conflict. Under the United Nations’ terms of reference, only evidence personally collected by its inspectors can be used to fashion a final judgment.

But no inspectors have been allowed inside Syria, so Western governments have relied on physical evidence smuggled out of the country by rebels or intelligence operatives. Precisely who acquired the evidence and what methods were used to guard against tampering may be unknowable, according to experts experienced at investigating chemical weapons claims. [Continue reading…]

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Abdul Basit Haroun says he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria, which he delivers on chartered flights to neighboring countries and then smuggles over the border.

After fleeing Libya in his 20s, Haroun established himself as a property developer in Manchester. After about two decades in the British city, he returned to Libya in 2011 to fight in the revolution, where he became a prominent rebel commander.

He says he sends aid and weapons to help Syrians achieve the freedom he fought for during the Libyan revolution.

The first consignment of weapons was smuggled into Syria aboard a Libyan ship delivering aid last year, Haroun says, but now containers of arms are flown “above board” into neighboring countries on chartered flights.

In the months since Haroun began his work, arming the rebels has moved up the international agenda, with Saudi Arabia equipping them with missiles, and Washington also planning to send weapons to the men fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Haroun spoke to Reuters over coffee and homemade cake late at night at his villa on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city that began the uprising that deposed Muammar Gaddafi.

His son, a young man who spoke English with a Manchester accent, offered help with weapon prices and other details.

Haroun was upset the West had not intervened in Syria, as it did in Libya and said the opportunity to avert a larger war had been missed.

“Even when the war in Syria ends, there will be another war in region; Sunni against Shia. At the beginning, there was just Assad to bring down … now Hezbollah, Iran are involved.”

A Reuters reporter was taken to an undisclosed location in Benghazi to see a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria. It was stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons. [Continue reading…]

Al-Monitor reports: The conflict in Syria has stressed the relationship between the Palestinian Sunni Hamas movement and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah organization, transforming it from one of “intimacy” between allies to a tension-inducing “quarrel” after Hamas took a position against the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah became involved militarily in supporting the regime.

Informed Palestinian sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed to Al-Monitor that members of Hezbollah had asked Hamas members residing in Beirut’s southern suburbs to leave the area at the end of the battle for Qusair in Syria. The Party of God believed that Palestinians from Hamas had participated in the fighting against it and Syrian regime forces.

One source told Al-Monitor on June 10, “Following this tension, Hamas leaders in Lebanon contacted Hezbollah leaders and an urgent meeting was held between the two sides. Hamas strongly denied that Palestinian fighters affiliated with the movement had participated in the fighting in Syria.” In addition, the source offered, “Following these high-level contacts, which involved Lebanese politicians, the two sides agreed that Hezbollah would back down on its demand that Hamas leave Beirut’s southern suburbs, which is Hezbollah’s stronghold. Most Hamas leaders live in this area, and it is home to the movement’s main office.”

On June 11, the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to Hezbollah, published “It’s Forbidden to Criticize Hamas.” According to the story, “Hezbollah had issued an internal circular forbidding party officials from commenting on or directing any criticism at the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas].” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood blamed Shi’ites for creating religious strife throughout Islam’s history, as the movement joined a call by Sunni clerics for jihad against the Syrian government and its Shi’ite allies.

In a striking display of the religious enmity sweeping the region since Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah committed its forces behind Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Brotherhood spokesman in Cairo told Reuters on Friday: “Throughout history, Sunnis have never been involved in starting a sectarian war.”

Until recently, Egypt’s new Islamist president, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi, was promoting rapprochement with Iran, the bastion of Shi’ite political power and in February he hosted the first visit by an Iranian president in over 30 years.

But spokesman Ahmed Aref said Hezbollah had launched a new “sectarian war” last month by joining Tehran’s other key ally Assad in a fight that pits mainly Sunni rebels against a Syrian elite drawn from Assad’s Alawite minority, a Shi’ite offshoot.

For that reason, Aref said, the Brotherhood, which emerged from oppression after the fall of military rule two years ago to run by far the most populous Arab state, had joined a call made on Thursday by leading Sunni clerics for holy war in Syria.

The Washington Post reports: A mild-mannered ­Syrian general who taught at a military academy before he defected last year is poised to play a key role in shaping the outcome of Syria’s war now that the United States has said it will provide direct military assistance to the rebels.

Gen. Salim Idriss, 56, heads the Supreme Military Council of the fragmented Free Syrian Army, and the Obama administration has anointed him as the sole conduit of weapons to the rebels, whether supplied by the United States or by allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have already been sending arms.

The United States still has not committed to providing any weaponry, Idriss said Sunday in a phone interview from the Turkish capital, Ankara, after two days of talks with U.S. officials over what form the unspecified military assistance announced last week would take.

He urged the United States to move swiftly on the arms deliveries before opposition fighters suffer further setbacks on the battlefield.

“We need help. I can tell you very clearly, very urgently, we need it as soon as possible,” he said in the interview before heading back to his headquarters in the northern Syrian province of Idlib.

Recent advances by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have been facilitated by his allies Iran and Russia, which are providing vast quantities of arms and ammunition to prop up Syrian government forces, Idriss said. Fighters from the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement are bolstering the ranks of Assad’s conventional army, which is weary from more than two years of battling the rebellion. [Continue reading…]

Ali Hashem writes: In the center of the city, I stood in the middle of the main road as a huge, black four-wheel-drive came my way.

I stared at the man sitting beside the driver: The face was familiar, but something was missing. It was clear I was face to face with Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, without a turban, wearing a military uniform. He smiled and nodded to me, and while I was still in shock, the car was out of sight. There was no convoy, only one car, but as I said before, there were security measures taken in the city and around.

It took me some time to confirm that whom I saw was Nasrallah. When I returned to Beirut, I started my investigations to confirm it, and I did.

While investigating, I came across another piece of information: this visit wasn’t the first for Nasrallah to Qusair during this very crisis. “Sayyed Nasrallah went to Qusair a day before the start of the battle: he met the commanders, visited some injured fighters and gave a speech,” a source close to Hezbollah told me, “He spoke for around half an hour with his main commanders exchanging ideas on the battle and the expectations and how many days it’ll take them to finish it.”

As for the latest visit, the one day after the offensive, our source said that Nasrallah visited the city of Qusair and the towns around it in the country side. He added, “Sayyed Nasrallah wanted to thank the fighters personally, he met them, met the injured, and went around the area.”

Marc Lynch writes: Many of the advocates of aggressive intervention define the Syrian conflict primarily as a front in the cold war against Iran. From this perspective, Hezbollah’s entry into the fray and the fall of Qusayr are not necessarily a bad thing — Washington now has an opportunity to strike directly at one of Iran’s most valuable assets in the Middle East. The enemy’s queen, to use a chess metaphor, has now moved out from behind its wall of pawns and is open to attack. Fear of a rebel defeat — and of a victory for Hezbollah and Iran — should squeeze more cash and military support out of the Arab Gulf, Europe, and the United States.

If Washington endorses the goal of bleeding Iran and its allies through proxy warfare, a whole range of more interventionist policies logically follow. The model here would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighboring countries, fueled by Gulf money, and popularized by Islamist and sectarian propaganda.

“Success” in this strategy would be defined by the damage inflicted on Iran and its allies — and not by reducing the civilian body count, producing a more stable and peaceful Syria, or marginalizing the more extreme jihadists. Ending the war would not be a particular priority, unless it involved Assad’s total military defeat. The increased violence, refugee flows, and regionalization of conflict would likely increase the pressure on neighboring states such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. It would also likely increase sectarianism, as harping on Sunni-Shiite divisions is a key part of the Arab Gulf’s political effort to mobilize support for the Syrian opposition (and to intimidate local Shiite populations, naturally). And the war zone would continue to be fertile ground for al Qaeda’s jihad, no matter how many arms were sent to its “moderate” rivals in the opposition.

What follows if the conflict were understood instead as a Syrian civil war and humanitarian catastrophe? Resolving these twin crises has long been the focus of international and U.S. diplomatic efforts and is again at the fore of the proposed (but probably stillborn) Geneva II conference, which aims to bring the Syrian regime and opposition together to reach a negotiated deal. Such a settlement could in theory reduce the killing, allow the return of refugees, reduce pressure on Syria’s neighbors, marginalize the jihadists, and assuage the region’s spiraling sectarian hatreds. But it would not mark a defeat of Iran and its allies. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The CIA is preparing to deliver arms to rebel groups in Syria through clandestine bases in Turkey and Jordan that were expanded over the past year in an effort to establish reliable supply routes into the country for nonlethal material, U.S. officials said.

The bases are expected to begin conveying limited shipments of weapons and ammunition within weeks, officials said, serving as critical nodes for an escalation of U.S. involvement in a civil war that has lately seen a shift in momentum toward the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria experts cautioned that the opposition to Assad remains a chaotic mix of secular and Islamist elements, highlighting the risk that some American-provided munitions may be diverted from their intended recipients.

But U.S. officials involved in the planning of the new policy of increased military support announced by the Obama administration Thursday said that the CIA has developed a clearer understanding of the composition of rebel forces, which have begun to coalesce in recent months. Within the past year, the CIA also created a new office at its headquarters in Langley to oversee its expanding operational role in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Politico: “Arming the rebels … I don’t think it will really matter a whole lot,” said Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution. “That, by itself, is not enough to tip the balance decisively one way or the other. … It’s taken the administration a year and a half to get to the point I think that they should have been at a year and a half ago, so it’s hard for me to imagine them doing a 180.”

“The tendency so far by the administration has been to escalate slowly — and perhaps too slowly,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I would be surprised if the administration escalated suddenly to the highest level.”

Cordesman said the White House may have missed the moment when the rebels had enough momentum that modest increases in U.S. military aid might have helped rout the regime.

“A year ago, mortar, light artillery, RPG-type systems, enough ammunition and overcoming the lack of training, that might have made a decisive difference,” said the analyst. Now, “it can only buy time.”

“We have to all admit the rebels are losing now,” Hamid added. “Just providing some more advanced weapons, even if does have an impact, that will be many months before we see tangible results of that. I just think the ground that has to be gained by the rebels at this point is so much that I don’t see how weapons are enough.”

Notably, White House officials did not claim that the new assistance would fundamentally alter the military balance between the regime and the rebels.

The New York Times reports: American intelligence analysts now believe that President Bashar al-Assad’s troops have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in the civil war in Syria, an assessment that will put added pressure on a deeply divided Obama administration to develop a response to a provocation that the president himself has declared a “red line.”

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” the deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said in a statement released by the White House on Thursday afternoon. “Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information”

President Obama said in April that the United States had physiological evidence that the nerve gas sarin had been used in Syria but lacked proof of who used it and under what circumstances. Mr. Rhodes said that American intelligence officials now believed that 100 to 150 people had died from the attacks, and he said that the number “is likely incomplete.”

In his statement, Mr. Rhodes alluded to Mr. Obama’s position that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line for the United States. “The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal reports: A U.S. military proposal for arming Syrian rebels also calls for a limited no-fly zone inside Syria that would be enforced from Jordanian territory to protect Syrian refugees and rebels who would train there, according to U.S. officials.

Asked by the White House to develop options for Syria, military planners have said that creating an area to train and equip rebel forces would require keeping Syrian aircraft well away from the Jordanian border.

To do that, the military envisages creating a no-fly zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to U.S. officials.

The Daily Beast reports: In sharp remarks directed against his Democratic successor and his wife’s former boss, President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama risks looking like a “wuss,” a “fool,” and “lame” for not doing more to influence events in Syria.

Clinton, speaking with Sen. John McCain Tuesday night in a closed press event sponsored by the McCain Institute, contrasted Obama’s inaction in Syria to his own action in the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, which included the bombing of the forces of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton said a president must look beyond public and congressional reluctance to military intervention for the sake of national security and to save lives.

Hassan Hassan writes: As US officials deliberate this week on whether to arm the Syrian rebels, they should remember one point: It will be easier to impose a solution on the regime than on the people.

Leaks from meetings in Geneva last week suggested that representatives from Russia and western countries were focusing on handpicking opposition figures to lead the planned negotiations with the regime. Critical issues such as the future of the security forces, whose brutality sparked the revolt in the first place, were hardly discussed. The world’s great powers appear to think that if some opposition groups agree with the regime on a formula, they can then impose the solution on the rest of Syria. But the time for such thinking is long gone.

Neither those in charge of the regime nor the rebels across Syria are interested in compromise. And “victory” by one side or the other will not end the violence.

Consider the context. The government controls hardly any of the country’s eastern region. The north, from Idlib to the countryside around Aleppo, is in the hands of the rebels. The regime is either weak or embattled everywhere else, except in Damascus and Suwaida in the south and in the coastal region in the west. Even in those areas, especially the coastal region where there is a strong rebel presence, the regime is not secure.

The point is that extending the reach of state agencies back across the entire country will require major, sustainable military ground operations – in effect an invasion.

Any solution or process that can end the violence must be acceptable to the people. Contrary to some media reports, the rebels on the ground have the resilience and determination to continue fighting. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Sunni rebels tore through a Shiite village in eastern Syria, killing dozens while documenting the rampage with videos broadcast Wednesday, and a Syrian military helicopter struck a pro-rebel Sunni town in Lebanon, in incidents that sharpened the sectarian divisions across Syria and beyond.

Mortars and rockets from Syria have landed across the Lebanese border before, but the air attack on Wednesday appeared to be the first in which a Syrian aircraft struck from within Lebanese airspace.

Both incidents bore repercussions from the victory last week by Syrian forces and fighters from the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah over the strategic town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border.

Hezbollah’s pivotal role in Qusayr drew condemnation from Sunni governments and Sunni religious leaders across the region, as the Syrian civil war becomes a focal point for the centuries-old feud between the two rival sects of Islam.

After the battle, some Hezbollah fighters patrolled Qusayr brandishing Shiite banners and blaring Shiite chants from vehicles, underscoring sectarian motivations driving the conflict.

BBC News reports: At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict, according to latest United Nations figures.

This represents a rise of more than 30,000 since the UN last issued figures covering the period to November 2012.

At least 5,000 people have been dying in Syria every month since last July, the UN’s human rights body says.

But it says these statistics are an underestimate as it believes many deaths have not been reported.

The National Interest: In the days after the joint Syrian Army–Lebanese Hezbollah victory over the rebels in the strategic town of Qusayr, the Assad regime has been positively giddy, announcing plans for a major offensive to retake the northern city of Aleppo. Assad’s key backer, Iran, has also been gloating. A victory speech of sorts, reported by hardline outlet Fars News and translated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker, offers a broad insight into how one of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s closest advisers sees the Islamic Republic’s standing in the region, and how the Syrian conflict figures in Iranian strategy. It’s a vision that sharply conflicts with how we’d expect Tehran to see itself — and accordingly, one that should be closely examined as the United States attempts to compel Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program.

The speaker, general Yahya Rahim-Safavi, is Khamenei’s top military aide, a role that he took up after a decade heading the politically powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He’s an influential player — notably, he backed the infamous head of the IRGC’s covert Quds Force, general Qassim Suleimani, whom the New York Times branded “Iran’s Master of Chaos.” And if his position and background didn’t already give it away, Rahim-Safavi is known as a resolute hardliner.

In Rahim-Safavi’s eyes, Iran’s strategic position is strong and getting stronger, and two men are responsible — Ali Khamenei and George W. Bush. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Lebanese have long viewed the Hezbollah guerrilla army as a state-within-a-state. But having watched it launch a military adventure in Syria and brutality on the streets of Beirut, they feel ever more hostage to the Islamist group’s regional agenda.

Within minutes of a busload of unarmed demonstrators arriving on Sunday at the Iranian embassy in Beirut to protest against Iran and Hezbollah’s military involvement in Syria, Hezbollah enforcers surrounded the building and scattered the crowd with batons and gunfire, leaving one dead.

The small demonstration by an anti-Hezbollah crowd showed that the “Party of God”, armed and financed by Iran, is not prepared to contemplate even the smallest level of threat.

Such visibly frayed nerves in Lebanon’s capital follow the Shi’ite group’s dramatically increased involvement in the two-year-old Syrian civil war, helping troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retake the border town of Qusair.

The Guardian reports: The British National party leader, Nick Griffin, has paid a surprise visit to Syria after being invited by the regime of the president, Bashar al-Assad, to take part in a fact-finding visit to the war-torn country.

Writing on Twitter, Griffin said he wanted to highlight the risk that the UK government’s support for opposition fighters seeking to oust Assad could plunge the Middle Eastern state into an “Iraq-style hell of sectarian hate“.

He linked the kind of Islamist militancy espoused by some of the rebels with the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich last month.

The BNP spokesman Simon Darby said Griffin, who is an MEP for North-West England, was invited to Damascus as part of a delegation of European politicians, including MEPs and MPs from Belgium, Russia and Poland. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: Hezbollah can finally claim a victory in Syria. The town of Qusayr, adjacent to the Lebanese border, has fallen to the Lebanese militia after nearly a month of fierce battles with Syrian rebels. Dozens of Hezbollah’s fighters have been killed, despite air cover and ground support from Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The Qusayr battle has been constantly, and wrongly, described as a turning point in the Syrian war. Why has this small town of some 30,000 residents become “strategic,” as it is constantly described in the press, all of a sudden? The town had previously been run by its Sunni residents for more than a year, with little mention of its strategic benefits.

Hezbollah’s open military intervention in Syria partly explains the publicity the Qusayr battle has received. As a result, the “Party of God” has lost much of its political and ideological capital in the region — a capital the militia had painstakingly acquired from its three-decade career of “resisting” Israel.

But beyond the supposed military benefits of Qusayr, the battle for the town carried important consequences for the balance of power within the Syrian opposition. Qusayr is arguably the first battle in Syria to be completely sponsored by Saudi Arabia, marking the kingdom’s first foray outside its sphere of influence along the Jordanian border. Riyadh has now taken over Qatar’s role as the rebels’ primary patron: In one sense, the Saudis can also claim a victory in Qusayr, as they have successfully put various rebel forces under the command of their ally in the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Chief of Staff Gen. Salim Idriss. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Rebels fighting the Syrian government on Thursday seized control of the only border crossing operated by United Nations peacekeeping forces along the Israeli-Syrian cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, according to the Israeli military and rebel forces. Israeli forces were placed on alert in the sensitive and disputed area as the violence of the civil war threatened to spill over into Israeli-held territory.

A few hours later the situation remained confused. Israeli media reports said that the Syrian government forces appeared to have retaken the Quneitra crossing and the Syrian state news agency SANA said that a unit of the government forces had “repelled terrorist groups” that had “tried” to take over Quneitra border crossing.

But Ahmad al-Basheer, a member of the local revolutionary committee in the Quneitra area who was reached by Skype, insisted that the crossing was still under the rebels’ control and that the entire province of Quneitra had been “liberated.”

“The regime won’t recapture this crossing even if we all have to die to thwart it,” he added.

As the fighting raged, the Israeli military declared the Israeli side of the crossing a closed military zone and ordered farmers to stay out of fields near the cease-fire line, apparently anticipating more conflict between Syrian government forces and the rebels.