Vali Nasr writes: Syria’s uprising offered the possibility of a strategic defeat of Iran. In this scenario, Iran would be weakened by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its single Arab ally and a vital link to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. Isolated, Iran would become more vulnerable to international pressure to limit its nuclear program. And as Iran’s regional influence faded, those of its rivals — U.S. allies Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — would expand.

Instead, events in Syria are spinning in Iran’s favor. Assad’s regime is winning ground, the war has made Iran more comfortable in its nuclear pursuits, and Iran’s gains have embarrassed U.S. allies that support the Syrian uprising. What’s more, Iran has strengthened its relationship with Russia, which may prove to be the most important strategic consequence of the Syrian conflict, should the U.S. continue to sit it out.

Part of the U.S. calculation in declining to intervene has been the assumption that Assad would inevitably fall. The U.S., apparently, did not consider the implications of leaving the door open to a comeback by Assad. Reinforced by Hezbollah fighters and armed with Iranian and Russian weapons, the Syrian army broke through rebel lines in the central city of al-Qusair last week. The symbolic victory has dashed hopes for a quick end to the regime or a diplomatic resolution to the fighting.

Syria is now a proxy war, the outcome of which will determine the regional pecking order. In the Mideast, aura of power decides strategic advantage. Hezbollah’s prowess in Syria is a blow to Saudi Arabia, which has supported Hezbollah’s political opponents in Lebanon. The Syrian army’s gains are a setback to the Saudis, Qataris and Turks, all of whom have backed the rebels with money and weapons.

The U.S. has withheld lethal aid, not to mention military action. The Obama administration has eschewed intervention in Syria as a slippery slope to full-scale war, a costly repeat of the Iraq fiasco. In making this case, however, the administration sends a strong signal that it also would not go to war against Iran, despite President Barack Obama’s statement that no option is off the table when it comes to stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. When U.S. officials say their options for intervention are constrained by Syria’s air defense systems, they are also saying they fear Iran’s. [Continue reading…]

Micah Zenko writes: Last week, the Daily Beast published an “exclusive” news story supported by comments from two anonymous administration officials: “Obama Asks Pentagon for Syria No-Fly Zone Plan.” The newsworthiness and hype surrounding such reporting was puzzling given that the military’s operational plans for a no-fly zone (NFZ) in Syria were completed many months ago and have been refined as new information has become available. Of course, versions of these plans have also been briefed in detail to the White House on multiple occasions. Soon after the Daily Beast story ran, Pentagon spokesperson Dave Lapan felt compelled to declare: “There is no new planning effort underway.” This failed effort to plant a story about White House interest in NFZ options for Syria is perhaps the most perfunctory effort ever to coerce a foreign leader — in this case, Bashar al-Assad, before the forthcoming diplomatic discussions in Geneva.

The Obama administration’s leaks should not be surprising — they are representative of the theatrical and half-hearted nature of America’s debate over military intervention in Syria. On March 27, 2011, just one week after a U.S.-led coalition began selectively enforcing an NFZ over Libya, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman endorsed a similar measure for Syria, in case Assad “turns his weapons on his people and begins to slaughter them, as Qaddafi did.” Over the subsequent 27 months, every plausible military tactic and mission has been exhaustively analyzed and deliberated by policymakers, active-duty and retired military officials, pundits (including myself), journalists, and others.

Civilian officials have requested a range of military options, the Pentagon’s planning process has responded, congressional committees have held multiple hearings, the media has covered the unfolding fighting in and around Syria, and interested commentators have offered their opinions.

Seven months ago, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters: “On the no-fly zone itself, you know that we’ve been saying for quite a while we continue to study whether that makes sense, how it might work.” As those “studies” have continued, the American people have been polled repeatedly to gauge their opinion — the latest two polls demonstrate that less than a quarter of Americans think the U.S. military should intervene in Syria.

At this point, it is safe to say that — short of definitive evidence of large-scale regime-directed chemical weapons use, or threats to Turkey, a U.S. treaty ally — it is highly unlikely that the United States will intervene militarily in Syria’s civil war. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies seized control of the border town of Qusair on Wednesday, dealing a major defeat to rebel fighters battling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Two weeks of heavy fighting reduced many buildings to mounds of twisted concrete, whole blocks flattened by shelling, with glass and rubble littering the streets as tired but delighted Syrian soldiers gathered at the bullet-riddled clock tower.

“We will not hesitate to crush with an iron fist those who attack us. … Their fate is surrender or death,” the Syrian armed forces command said in statement. “We will continue our string of victories until we regain every inch of Syrian land.”

An opposition group from the town said more than 500 rebels had died in two weeks of fighting, with a further 1,000 wounded, leaving just 400 outgunned men struggling to hold onto the town.

Facing determined Hezbollah guerrillas from neighboring Lebanon, who swung the fight Assad’s way, the survivors decided to escape in the night through a corridor that the attackers said they had deliberately left open to encourage flight.

The Associated Press reports: Samples taken from Syria and tested in France have confirmed that sarin gas has been used there multiple times, France’s foreign minister said Tuesday.

Laurent Fabius said the tests carried out by a French laboratory “prove the presence of sarin in the samples in our possession.” He said France “now is certain that sarin gas was used in Syria multiple times and in a localized way.”

The brief statement concluded: “It would be unacceptable that those guilty of these crimes benefit from impunity.”

Earlier Tuesday, a U.N. report on Syria said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that limited quantities of toxic chemicals have been used as weapons in at least four attacks in Syria’s civil war, but that more evidence is needed to determine the precise chemical agents used or who used them.

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry said conclusive findings can be reached only after testing samples taken directly from victims or the site of the alleged attacks. It called on Damascus to allow a team of experts into the country, saying lack of access continues to hamper the commission’s ability to fulfill its mandate.

AFP reports: War-torn Syria on Sunday advised its citizens to avoid travel to neighbouring Turkey, where massive protests have rocked several cities, because of “a deterioration in the security situation.”

The warning issued by the foreign ministry comes as a civil war that has killed tens of thousands ravages Syria, pitting rebels backed by Turkey and other countries against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“The foreign ministry advises Syrian citizens to avoid travel to Turkey for their own safety because of a deterioration in the security situation in a number of Turkish cities,” it said in a statement carried on Syrian state television.

Edward Dark is the pseudonym for a Syrian currently residing in Aleppo. He writes: So what went wrong? Or to be more accurate, where did we go wrong? How did a once inspirational and noble popular uprising calling for freedom and basic human rights degenerate into an orgy of bloodthirsty sectarian violence, with depravity unfit for even animals? Was it inevitable and wholly unavoidable, or did it not have to be this way?

The simple answer to the above question is the miscalculation (or was it planned?) of Syrians taking up arms against their regime, a ruthless military dictatorship held together by nepotism and clan and sectarian loyalties for 40 years of absolute power. Former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford specifically warned about this in his infamous visit to Hama in the summer of 2011 just as the city was in the grip of massive anti-regime protests and before it was stormed by the Syrian army. That warning fell on deaf ears, whether by design or accident, and we have only ourselves to blame. Western and global inaction or not, we are solely responsible for our broken nation at the end of the day.

Nietzsche once said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” That has proved to be very prophetic in the Syrian scenario. Away from all the agendas, whitewashing, propaganda, and outright lies of the global media stations, what we saw on the ground when the rebel fighters entered Aleppo was a far different reality. It hit home hard. It was a shock, especially to those of us who had supported and believed in the uprising all along. It was the ultimate betrayal.

To us, a rebel fighting against tyranny doesn’t commit the same sort of crimes as the regime he’s supposed to be fighting against. He doesn’t loot the homes, businesses and communities of the people he’s supposed to be fighting for. Yet, as the weeks went by in Aleppo, it became increasingly clear that this was exactly what was happening.

Rebels would systematically loot the neighborhoods they entered. They had very little regard for the lives and property of the people, and would even kidnap for ransom and execute anyone they pleased with little recourse to any form of judicial process. They would deliberately vandalize and destroy ancient and historical landmarks and icons of the city. They would strip factories and industrial zones bare, even down to the electrical wiring, hauling their loot of expensive industrial machinery and infrastructure off across the border to Turkey to be sold at a fraction of its price. Shopping malls were emptied, warehouses, too. They stole the grain in storage silos, creating a crisis and a sharp rise in staple food costs. They would incessantly shell residential civilian neighborhoods under regime control with mortars, rocket fire and car bombs, causing death and injury to countless innocent people, their snipers routinely killing in cold blood unsuspecting passersby. As a consequence, tens of thousands became destitute and homeless in this once bustling, thriving and rich commercial metropolis. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: The Syrian political opposition, in its current form, is a hopeless case. Members of the opposition have been holding intensive talks to expand the National Coalition for nearly a week, with little progress.

The meetings in Istanbul are meant to discuss the inclusion of more members, mostly moderates, in the coalition to make it a more representative and balanced political body. As it stands now, the political body is controlled by one group that has a tenacious monopoly over the decision-making process.

On Monday, the coalition’s general assembly announced that eight new members have been added, after they won 42 votes from existing members. But the coalition has deep structural issues that render the inclusion of new members almost meaningless.

The principle sticking point involves voting. Existing members of the coalition insist that the inclusion of new members must be based on balloting by existing members only. But this would change little in a monopoly that was made possible by interference from regional countries to begin with, rather than based on consensus among Syrian opposition. The existing members were not chosen by the people to decide whether certain opposition figures should be members or not. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: The beefy Libyan revolutionary field commander turned politician rose from the beige couch to greet his new Syrian guest, who pulled up a chair to join the two other Syrian men seated in a semicircle around the couch in the café of a hotel in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, near the Syrian border.

The Libyan had traveled from Zintan, in northwest Libya, while a fellow countryman, a former militia commander from Benghazi, had traveled from that port city to hold court in this Turkish hotel and meet some of the rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. (Both Libyans requested anonymity, because of the nature of their mission.)

The Syrians seated around the Libyans on this warm night in mid-May were all from Islamist military units that operate outside the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which claims to represent most of Syria’s rebels. The night before, the Libyans said, had been the turn of the FSA, which is generally less Islamist than the rebels now seated at the hotel: the Libyans had met a colonel in the FSA who had sat on the same beige couch. He had defected relatively early in the now more than two-year conflict, and had nominally held a senior position in the coterie of exiled FSA officers in southern Turkey who at one point claimed to speak for the armed opposition but who have since been sidelined by other, newer defectors.

It’s a common sight to see clumps of Arab men, mainly Syrian but sometimes speaking in other Arabic dialects or accents, huddled in meetings or milling about in certain Turkish hotels not only in Antakya but also in other border cities adjacent to crossings into Syria. The meetings usually don’t start until at least the late afternoon, or more commonly in the evening, and can continue well into the early hours of the morning. Some of the men are making deals to buy or sell weapons and ammunition, or are trying to secure financing to do so by meeting with wealthy financial patrons — either Syrian or foreign — who want to contribute to the war without joining the front lines. And then there are the foreign fighters, the men with the long beards and the short pants worn above the ankle in the manner of the Prophet Muhammad, who are waiting for Syrian rebels to take them into Syria. [Continue reading…]

GlobalPost: Much like downtown Beirut, the skyline in this city’s southern reaches, where the militant group Hezbollah is strong, is dotted with new apartment blocks built atop the ruins of past wars.

But with the conflict in Syria grinding next door, less than 40 miles to the east, south Beirut could again be at the epicenter of another armed conflict in Lebanon. The Western-backed leader of the Free Syrian Army, Gen. Selim Idriss, this week issued a deadline for Hezbollah to leave Syria or face attacks on its home turf.

In a televised speech Sunday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the group would fight alongside the Syrian regime, one of its primary backers, “until the end.” Hours later, two rockets crashed into the outskirts of the group’s traditional powerbase in south Beirut, injuring several people.

Hezbollah — a powerful Lebanese Shia militant and political group — has thrown its weight behind Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, putting an already fragile Lebanon in the crosshairs of a spiraling regional conflict.

Hezbollah fighters are suffering losses in battles inside Syria, sectarian rhetoric is on the rise in Lebanon, and Israel has said it is willing to carry-out more strikes on Syrian soil to keep advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah.

In a taped interview on Hezbollah’s television station Al-Manar, Assad said on Thursday that Russia had delivered the first shipment of the sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile system. Israel has previously said it would again strike targets in Syria if the regime acquires them.

“We are worried that the war in Syria is coming to Lebanon,” said Ibrahim, a resident of the Hezbollah stronghold, Dahiyeh, in Beirut’s sprawling southern reaches. Many of the young men that fill Hezbollah’s ranks come from this area.

“But more than that,” Ibrahim, a staunch Hezbollah supporter, said, “the young people around here are angry and want to fight.” [Continue reading…]

At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes: Israel’s long search for impregnable security in the region has in its own view been aided by the stability of neighbouring autocracie. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, Jordan under King Hussein and now King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud, and even Syria under Hafez and now Bashar Assad – all recognised the power of Israel and were all too aware of Israel’s ultimate nuclear capability.

Israel was the regional superpower, even if that could never be acknowledged.

True, uncertainty in Lebanon (and to a degree over Gaza) remained an exception to the pattern, with Syria’s support for Hizbollah a continuing irritation and Israel’s failures against that movement in the conflict of 2006 a source of real concern. At the same time, the Assad regime’s acceptance of the status quo over the strategically vital Golan heights was a reassurance, and overall – southern Lebanon and Gaza excepted – Israel’s immediate position was secure.

In the two years since the Arab awakening, such certainty has eroded: notably with Egypt (and particularly Sinai) but now much more with Syria. There is an acute concern with the United Nations peacekeepers on the Golan heights, especially as Austria’s government has warned that it might withdraw its significant contingent. Austrian units make up barely a third of the total UN force, but their commitment has been substantial and a pullout could encourage others to follow suit in a way that leads to the collapse of the operation. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria displayed a new level of defiance on Thursday, warning Israel that he could permit attacks on the Golan Heights and suggesting that he had secured plenty of weapons from Russia — possibly including an advanced missile system — as his opponents faltered politically and Hezbollah fighters infused force into his military campaign to crush the Syrian insurgency.

Mr. Assad spoke in an interview broadcast on Al-Manar television, which is owned by his ally Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group, further punctuating his message of growing confidence that he could prevail over an insurgency that is now more than two years old and has claimed more than 80,000 lives.

Asked about Russian weapons deliveries, Mr. Assad said: “Russia is committed with Syria in implementing these contracts. What we agreed upon with Russia will be implemented, and part of it has been implemented over the recent period, and we are continuing to implement it.”

He was vague on whether Russia’s deliveries had included a sophisticated S-300 air missile system — of particular concern to Israel because it could compromise its ability to strike Syria from the air and because those missiles can hit deep inside Israeli territory. The Israelis have said they would not abide a Syrian deployment of S-300s, suggesting they would use force to destroy them. [Continue reading…]

Hannah Allam reports: With Russia pledging missiles to Syrian President Bashar Assad, the civilian opposition unable to agree on much of anything, and regime loyalists pushing rebels out of strategic areas, the United States finds itself with no clear policy path to its oft-stated goal of Assad’s ouster.

Unclear from the beginning, U.S. policy on Syria has grown only more contradictory and ad hoc since the popular uprising that the Obama administration was quick to support transformed into a brutal civil war with a death toll now beyond 70,000. Both tracks of the State Department’s latest “dual-track” approach have led to dead ends, with neither a strong political opposition nor a trusted, viable rebel force ready to take charge in the increasingly unlikely event that the Assad regime should collapse.

Wednesday dealt fresh setbacks to U.S. and international plans to build the political and military capabilities of the anti-Assad movement. Weeklong opposition talks in Istanbul ended without meeting the goals of expanding membership of the Islamist-dominated group or naming an interim government – failures that could cost leaders crucial international support. Also Wednesday, Hezbollah-backed regime forces claimed victory in the vicious battle for control of Qusayr, a strategically important town near the Lebanese border.

Analysts who’ve closely monitored the conflict for the past two years blame a series of miscalculations and half-measures for the lack of a strong U.S. position on Syria. While the White House and its supporters in the foreign policy community defend the current approach as “cautious,” other analysts see it as frozen and out of touch with events on the ground. [Continue reading…]

Patrick Cockburn writes: The Syrian civil war is spreading. This, not well-publicised advances or withdrawals on the battlefield, is the most important new development. Political leaders in the region see the dangers more intensely than the rest of the world. ‘Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish the other off,’ Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said earlier this year. ‘If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.’ Of these countries, the most vulnerable is Lebanon, given the division between Sunni and Shia, a weak state, porous borders and proximity to heavily populated areas of Syria. A country of four million people has already taken in half a million Syrian refugees, most of them Sunnis.

In Iraq, the Syrian civil war has reignited a sectarian conflict that never entirely ended. The destabilising of his country that Maliki predicted in the event of an opposition victory has already begun. The overthrow of Saddam brought to power a Shia-Kurdish government that displaced Sunni rule dating back to the foundation of the Iraqi state in 1921. It is this recently established status quo that is now under threat. The revolt of the Sunni majority in Syria is making the Sunni minority in Iraq feel that the regional balance is swinging in their favour. They started to demonstrate in December, modelling their protests on the Arab Spring. They wanted reform rather than revolution, but to the Shia majority the demonstrations appeared to be part of a frighteningly powerful Sunni counter-offensive across the Middle East. The Baghdad government equivocated until 23 April, when a military force backed by tanks crushed a sit-in protest in the main square of Hawijah, a Sunni town south-west of Kirkuk, killing at least 50 people including eight children. Since then local Sunni leaders who had previously backed the Iraqi army against the Kurds have been demanding that it leave their provinces. Iraq may be disintegrating.

The feeling that the future of whole states is in doubt is growing across the Middle East – for the first time since Britain and France carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. ‘It is the end of Sykes-Picot,’ I was told repeatedly in Iraq; the reference was to the agreement of 1916 which divided up the spoils between Britain and France and was the basis for later treaties. Some are jubilant at the collapse of the old order, notably the thirty million Kurds who were left without a state of their own after the Ottoman collapse and are now spread across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. They feel their moment has come: they are close to independence in Iraq and are striking a deal with the Turkish government for political rights and civil equality. In March, the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK declared an end to their thirty-year war with the Turkish government and started withdrawing into the mountains of northern Iraq. The 2.5 million Kurds in northern Syria, 10 per cent of the population, have assumed control of their towns and villages and are likely to demand a high degree of autonomy from any postwar Syrian government.

What will the new order in the Middle East look like? This should be Turkey’s great moment in the region: it has a powerful military, a prospering economy and a well-established government. It is allied to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in supporting the Syrian opposition and is on good terms with the US. But these are dangerous waters to fish in. Three years ago, Ankara was able to deal peaceably with Syria, Iraq and Iran, but now it has poisonous relations with all three. Engagement in Syria on the side of the rebels isn’t popular at home and the government is clearly surprised that the conflict hasn’t yet ended. There are signs that the violence is spilling over Turkey’s 510-mile frontier with Syria, across which insurgent groups advance and retreat at will. On 11 May, two bombs in a Turkish border town killed 49 people, almost all Turkish. An angry crowd of Turks marched down the main street chanting ‘kill the Syrians’ as they assaulted Syrian shopkeepers. Arab politicians wonder whether the Turks know what they are getting into and how they will handle it. ‘The Turks are big on rhetoric but often disappointing when it comes to operational ability,’ one Arab leader says. ‘The Iranians are just the opposite.’ The recent deal between the government and Turkey’s Kurds could easily unravel. A long war in Syria could open up divisions in Turkey just as it is doing elsewhere.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it changed the overall balance of power and destabilised every country in the region. The same thing is happening again, except that the impact of the Syrian war is likely to be less easily contained. [Continue reading…]

(This video appeared at GlobalPost last month, but it’s still worth watching.)

The New York Times reports: Fighting a pre-emptive war against foreign jihadists is not the usual mission for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group best known for confronting Israel. So when its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, explained why he was sending fighters into Syria, he took care to remind his followers that they were not “living in Djibouti” but on the border of a country whose two-year uprising Hezbollah sees as a threat to its existence.

With its plunge into the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah is taking its followers in an unaccustomed direction, in a gamble that could help rescue it from that threat, bringing it new power and confidence, or end in a defeat with wide repercussions. Hezbollah is betting its prestige and security on the effort to crush a Syrian rebellion that is detested by Hezbollah’s Shiite Muslim base, but popular with the group’s Lebanese rivals and with much of the Sunni majority in the wider Arab world.

Hezbollah’s biggest stake in the conflict is the same as that of its ally, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad: survival. The group relies on Syria to provide a conduit for arms from its main patron, Iran. Preserving that flow is a matter of life or death for Hezbollah, as its leaders have made clear.

Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, which it long played down, has gradually come out into the open as the casualties mount. In the past month, as the group began helping the Syrian Army sweep villages surrounding the strategic town of Qusayr in an effort to connect Damascus with government strongholds on the coast, 141 fighters have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that tracks the violence through contacts in Syria. Of those, it said, 79 have died in the past 10 days, a number in accord with counts by researchers tracking Hezbollah Web sites.

To justify the unexpected new sacrifices it is asking from its followers, Hezbollah has framed the risky intervention in Syria as crucial to safeguarding its avowed core missions: challenging Israel, empowering its Shiite community and protecting Lebanon. But if it fails, by Hezbollah’s own assessment the fallout could jeopardize all three of those missions. That would leave the group weakened, with bridges burned at home and abroad, amid growing fears of a regional war between Sunnis and Shiites. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Iran has opened two lines of credit totalling $4 billion to Damascus and expects to open up a third to counter the effects of an international embargo, Syria’s central bank said on Monday.

“Iran continues to support Syria, by opening one line of credit worth a billion dollars to finance the import of different items and another line of credit worth three billion dollars to finance the purchase of petrol and associated products,” central bank governor Adib Mayale said, quoted in the government daily Tishreen.

He said Iran was considering an additional loan totalling another $3 billion to bolster the struggling Syrian economy, which is dealing with the economic impact of a war and international sanctions.

In January, Syrian state news agency SANA said Iran and Syria had signed a deal that would see Tehran extend a billion-dollar line of credit to Damascus.

Reuters reports: Heavy fighting raged around the strategic Syrian border town of Qusair and the capital Damascus on Monday and further reports surfaced of chemical weapons attacks by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on rebel areas.

Intensified government offensives are widely seen as a bid to strengthen Assad’s position before a peace conference proposed by the United States and Russia for next month.

In Brussels, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who was pushing his European Union colleagues to allow member states to arm the rebels, said the expiry of existing EU sanctions this week meant countries could now choose to send weapons to opposition fighters if they wanted to.

While Britain and France say such a move could strengthen the rebels ahead of the peace talks, other countries oppose sending arms and EU diplomats said there was an agreement not to send weapons for now.

The Telegraph reports: The Syrian government has been unleashing a barrage of chemical weapons against its own people, according to two French journalists who spent two months undercover in the country.

Embedded with anti-government forces on the outskirts of Syria’s capital Damascus, Jean-Philippe Remy and photographer Laurent van der Stockt from Le Monde witnessed a series of attacks.

“No odour, no smoke, not even a whistle to indicate the release of a toxic gas,” wrote Mr Remy, from the front line in the suburb of Jobar.

“And then the symptoms appear. The men cough violently. Their eyes burn, their pupils shrink, their vision blurs. Soon they experience difficulty breathing, sometimes in the extreme; they begin to vomit or lose consciousness. The fighters worst affected need to be evacuated before they suffocate.”

Mr van der Stockt was beside the rebel fighters when they were targetted by the gas, leaving him suffering from blurred vision and respiratory difficulties for four days.

The Washington Post reports: A day after halting the European Union’s weapons embargo on Syria, Britain and France are facing criticism from Russia, and pressure at home and abroad, to show restraint before acting to arm the rebels who are trying to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Britain, along with France, scored a diplomatic victory in Paris on Monday, effectively blocking an attempt by other European nations to extend the regional embargo that has prevented them from sending weapons to help the Syrian opposition. Britain said it has no immediate intention to ship arms, and in Paris and London, Monday’s move was portrayed as a precautionary tool aimed at pressuring Assad to negotiate an end to the conflict.

But the dropping of the embargo nevertheless opened a possible route for Britain and France, which have been leading the charge in the West for more support to the Syrian opposition, to act unilaterally should they choose to.

On the heels of French intervention in Mali, the move once again underscored the inability of the E.U. to forge a united front on major foreign policy issues. It was bitterly opposed by a number of European countries, including Austria, that fear any arms sent to the rebels could fall into the hands Islamist extremists within the Syrian opposition and lead to more regional spillover of the conflict.

“We are a peace community, and we would like to stay as a peace community,” Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger told journalists in Paris. Spindelegger said Britain and France have agreed not to deliver any weapons until at least August, to give more time to attempts at brokering a peace deal.

Russia denounced the E.U. action, saying it placed Europeans on the brink of supplying arms to a murky rebel force. “You cannot declare the wish to stop the bloodshed, on one hand, and continue to pump armaments into Syria on the other hand,” Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, said at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday.

At the same time, Russia defended its decision to continue supplying air defense and anti-ship missiles to the Syrian government in accordance with previously signed contracts. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Sen. John McCain Monday became the highest-ranking U.S. official to enter Syria since the bloody civil war there began more than two years ago, The Daily Beast has learned.

McCain, one of the fiercest critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, made the unannounced visit across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.