The National reports: It was some six months ago that Syrian rebel commanders met US intelligence officers in Jordan to discuss the status of the war and, the rebels hoped, to secure supplies of the sophisticated weapons they need to overthrow President Bashar Al Assad.

But according to one of the commanders present at the meeting, the Americans were more interested in talking about Jabhat Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda-affiliated group waging war on the Syrian regime than they were in helping the rebels advance on Damascus.

The commander – a moderate Sunni and an influential rebel leader from Damascus who said he has met intelligence operatives from Western and Arab states – said the US officials were especially keen to obtain information about the identities of Al Nusra insurgents and the locations of their bases.

Then, by the rebel commander’s account, the discussion took an unexpected turn.

The Americans began discussing the possibility of drone strikes on Al Nusra camps inside Syria and tried to enlist the rebels to fight their fellow insurgents.

“The US intelligence officer said, ‘We can train 30 of your fighters a month, and we want you to fight Al Nusra’,” the rebel commander recalled.

Opposition forces should be uniting against Mr Al Assad’s more powerful and better-equipped army, not waging war among themselves, the rebel commander replied. The response from a senior US intelligence officer was blunt.

“I’m not going to lie to you. We’d prefer you fight Al Nusra now, and then fight Assad’s army. You should kill these Nusra people. We’ll do it if you don’t,” the rebel leader quoted the officer as saying. [Continue reading…]

Joshua Landis writes: The likelihood of ethnic cleansing in the coastal regions is high. It will rise even higher should Assad’s troops begin to lose. The Sunni populations of the coastal cities will be the first to be targeted by Assad’s military, if it is pushed out of Damascus. Should the Alawites be compelled to fall back to the predominantly Alawite region of the mountains stretching along the western seaboard of Syria, the Sunnis of the coastal cities and eastern plan will be the first to suffer. Should Sunni militias, which are perched only kilometers from Latakia, penetrate to the city itself, Alawites may turn against the region’s Sunnis fearing that they become a fifth column. There are many precedents for this sort of defensive ethnic cleansing in the region. Zionist forces in Israel, cleared Palestinian villages of their inhabitants in 1948, rather than leave them behind Israeli lines. Armenians were driven out of Eastern Anatolia by Turks and Kurds, who claimed self-defense in their struggle against Russia in WWI. The Greek Orthodox Anatolians were driven out of Anatolia following the defeat of Greek forces which sought to conquer Anatolia in the early 1920s in an effort to resurrect the Byzantine Empire.

The Sunni cities of the Syrian coast — Latakia, Jeble, Banyas, and Tartous — had no Alawite inhabitants in the 1920s, when the French began taking censuses in Syria. Certainly, Alawite, servant girls, day laborers and peddlers may have worked in the cities, but they were alien to them. Sunnis and Alawites did not live together in any Syrian town of over 200 people, according to Jacques Weulersse, the French academic who published the most thorough and reliable study of the Alawites, Le pays des Alaouites, in 1940. Their demographic segregation was profound. The deep mistrust and hostility that separated the two communities was caused largely by religious differences. Alawites see themselves as the truest Muslims, who possess secret knowledge of God. Sunnis view Alawites to be not Muslim at all, and indeed, not even People of the Book. The many prejudices that were suppressed or attenuated during the modern national era have now reemerged and threaten to divide the two populations anew.

During the modern era, Alawites came down out of their maintain villages, migrating to the cities. Today, most of the coastal cities are only half Sunni because of the growth of Alawite neighborhoods and migration. But that population is new. Most is no older than 60 years and much of it is much newer. The same is true for Damascus, where in 1945 only 400 Alawites were recorded to be living in the capital.

Ethnic cleansing may turn against the Alawites, as easily as it may against Sunnis. If Sunni militias win in their struggle against the regime and penetrate into the Alawite Mountains, Alawites will flee before them, rather than be vanquished. This has already been the case in six Alawite villages north of Latakia. When rebel militias entered the towns, the Alawite families hastily grabbed their possession and fled, leaving dinners on the kitchen table. Not a soul was left in them. In all likelihood, they will run to Lebanon, which is no further than an hour’s drive, The border is open.

Western policy planners have gamed out these possibilities, making them reluctant to arm rebel militias for a total victory. Although opposition leaders plead for more and better weapons to bring them a speedy victory, Western leaders have held back. The fear that three million Alawites could flee into Lebanon, destabilizing the country for decades, undoubtedly plays a role in Western reticence. This sort of population transfer could be as disruptive to the region, as was the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. Just as the Palestinians have not been permitted to return to their ancestral land, neither, in all probability, would the Alawites. [Continue reading…]

Time magazine reports: The video starts out like so many of the dozens coming out of the war in Syria every day, with the camera hovering over the body of a dead Syrian soldier. But the next frame makes it clear why this video, smuggled out of the city of Homs and into Lebanon with a rebel fighter, and obtained by TIME in April, is particularly shocking. In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand. With his right hand he moves what appears to be the dead man’s heart onto a flat piece of wood or metal lying across the body. With his left hand he pulls what appears to be a lung across the open cavity in the man’s chest. According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body. The man believed to be Abu Sakkar then works his knife through the flesh of the dead man’s torso before he stands to face the camera, holding an organ in each hand. “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.

Two TIME reporters first saw the video in April in the presence of several of Abu Sakkar’s fighters and supporters, including his brother. They all said the video was authentic. We later obtained a copy. Since then TIME has been trying to ensure that the footage is not digitally manipulated in any way — a faked film like this would be powerful propaganda for the regime, which portrays the rebels as terrorists — and, as yet, TIME has not been able to confirm its integrity. Abu Sakkar has not commented on whether the man in the video is indeed him because he is currently fighting on the front lines in Syria, according to fighters under his command. The video became public on May 12 when it was posted online by a proregime group and is indeed now being used as propaganda by regime supporters (and has already been shared 1,115 times on Facebook and has over 46,000 views on YouTube). These 27 seconds of footage provide a glimpse at how brutal the Syrian war has become — and a startling example of how technology appears to be fueling that brutality.

Jim Muir adds: Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Abu Sakkar is the leader of a group called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, an offshoot of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Al-Farouq Brigades. He insults Alawites, the minority offshoot of Shia Islam to which Mr Assad belongs.

“The desecration and mutilation of a killed person is definitely a war crime,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. “This one particularly disturbing because of the sectarian nature of the language used by Abu Sakkar.”

HRW said those committing war crimes on either side had to know that there was no impunity and that they would be brought to account.

The human rights group said Abu Sakkar had been filmed before, firing rockets into Shia areas of Lebanon and posing with the bodies of guerrillas from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement killed fighting alongside Syrian government forces.

“Abu Sakkar is a very significant commander – he’s in charge of one of the most important battles happening in Syria right now,” said Mr Bouckaert. “The danger is that extremists on both sides will feel the need to respond in kind.”

Hassan Hassan writes: Last week, a 12-member delegation from the Syrian opposition visited Saudi Arabia, for an unprecedented two-day official meeting.

Saudi authorities had consistently declined to meet the opposition, despite repeated requests. This was partly because the kingdom has opposed Muslim Brotherhood dominance in the Syrian National Council and then the National Coalition, owing to the Brotherhood’s alliance with Qatar and Turkey and opposition to inclusivity.

But last week, surprisingly, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al Faisal, met Syrian Brotherhood deputy leader Mahmoud Farouq Tayfour, in one-to-one talks.

The Brotherhood had previously been confident in its alliance with Qatar and Turkey, and saw no need to offer concessions to engage other countries, including Saudi Arabia. So this meeting, which came after an “eager appeal” from the Brotherhood, suggests a shift in regional dynamics.

Two separate sources close to the opposition say Mr Tayfour assured the Saudi minister that “Syria’s Brotherhood will definitely not be like Egypt’s Brotherhood”.

He also “harshly” criticised Qatar’s role, even though Qatar had helped revive the Brotherhood in Syria after the Baathists massacred it out of existence in 1982. [Continue reading…]

John Kampfner writes: As Turkey threatens reprisals for bombings that have left up to 50 dead, Syria’s war is already sucking in the wider Middle East. But the one country on which all sides would previously rely for leadership is paralysed with indecision.

The most striking aspect of the Syrian imbroglio, as I have discovered on a visit to neighbouring Lebanon, is that this may be the first conflict of the post-superpower era. The United States does not know what it wants. And even if it did, it seems fearful to use the means at its disposal to engineer it.

A year ago, when I was last in Beirut, people said Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had, perhaps, three months to hang on; now he looks much more entrenched. Militarily, the regime has consolidated its precarious hold on Damascus and other key cities. Rebel forces are increasingly desperate and disparate – and fears are growing that the al-Qaida-inspired al-Nusra Front is the only organised element. Some diplomats say that the Assad regime deliberately stokes these fears, but admit that they add to a sense that Syria is a lose-lose for everyone involved.

In his re-election inaugural address in January, President Obama insisted that a decade of war was coming to an end. Afghanistan and, particularly, Iraq have set back the cause of humanitarian intervention for at least a generation. Libya was seen as a modest operation, with modest success, but even that has been undermined by the murder in Tripoli by jihadists of the US ambassador to Libya, which has been ruthlessly and opportunistically taken up by the American right.

For Obama, therefore, the option of cutting his losses and keeping his distance from Syria has proved attractive. The problem is that his government will not admit this to be strategy, providing false hope to the self-proclaimed moderate opposition and its Sunni supporters in Turkey, Qatar and the region. [Continue reading…]

Haaretz reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relayed a message to Syrian President Bashar Assad in January 2011, saying that he would be ready discuss Syria’s demand for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, to June 4 1967 lines, on the condition that Syria agree to abandon its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah.

The indirect talks that were undertaken with American mediation did not yield results, however, and were abandoned by Israel in March 2011 after the extent of the rebellion against the Assad regime became clear.

Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot revealed for the first time on Friday morning the existence of secret contacts between Israel and Syria, that went on from December 2010 through March 2011. Indirect talks were undertaken by American envoys Dennis Ross and Fred Hoff, who passed messages between the two sides.

According to the report in Yediot Aharanot, Netanayhu agreed to withdraw from the entire Golan Heights, and return to June 4 1967 lines. According to a source who was intimately involved in the talks, however, in practice the prime minister’s proposal was slightly different. Netanyahu expressed willingness to discuss the Syrian demand for a full Israeli withdrawal, but only on the condition that Assad accept a series of Israeli demands regarding the military alliance between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, as well as Syrian support for Palestinian terror organizations.

Reuters reports: Syria’s rebels are fragmented into hundreds of armed groups who control swathes of the north, while government forces appear to have consolidated their hold on the capital, a senior Red Cross official said on Monday.

Marianne Gasser, who left Syria 10 days ago after completing a term as head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team there, said there had been signs of “more assertiveness” by the government around Damascus since April.

Attempts to take aid to rebel and government-held parts of the country were also being held up by roadblocks and stone blockades set up by a wide array of armed groups, she told reporters in Geneva.

Independent accounts of the balance of power on the ground in Syria’s two-year-old civil war have been hard to come by, due to restrictions on the movements of many aid workers and independent journalists. [Continue reading…]

A report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, by Aron Lund, makes these findings:

The Syrian Brotherhood is not as strong as commonly believed. The incessant focus on the Brotherhood by the Assad regime, Western nations, and rival opposition groups has helped it build a fearsome reputation. Its actual political and organizational capability appears to be far more modest.

The failures of others have benefited the Brotherhood. The real reason for the group’s success in the exile community is the extreme disorganization of the rest of the opposition. As long as rival actors cannot get their act together, the Brotherhood will win by default.

The Brotherhood tries to distance itself from extremism. Despite its theocratic ambitions and a past history of sectarian violence, the Brotherhood now promotes a moderate Islamist approach and seeks to accommodate concerns about its ideology. Since 2011, it has consistently cooperated with secular groups, spoken in favor of multiparty democracy, and worked through mainstream opposition frameworks such as the Syrian National Council, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, and the Free Syrian Army.

Several armed groups linked to the Brotherhood fight in Syria. The leadership refuses to admit to having an armed branch, but Brotherhood exiles have been funding armed groups since late 2011. The organization now controls or sponsors dozens of small paramilitary units inside Syria.

The Los Angeles Times reports: At least 42 people were reported dead Saturday in a pair of car bombings in the southern Turkish town of Reyhanli, the latest apparent example of spillover violence from the conflict in nearby Syria.

More than 140 people were injured, with at least 20 in critical condition, according to Turkish officials and news reports.

The blasts reportedly caused panic in the town, where tension has arisen between Syrian refugees and Turkish residents. Reyhanli, in Hatay province, is just a few miles from the Syrian border and has been a magnet for Syrian refugees and rebels.

After the bombings, outraged Turks attacked Syrians and cars with Syrian license plates, according to reports from a resident and the BBC, which quoted local news reports.

Some Turks have objected to the influx of Syrian refugees and express fear that the region is being dragged into the Syrian conflict.

“I never witnessed any explosions when I was in Syria so they brought them here so I wouldn’t miss out,” said a Syrian woman, Fairouz, reached in her home in Reyhanli. “Today they are giving us many surprises.”

Efraim Halevy, the former chief of Mossad, writes: In October 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to inform him that peace was at hand between Israel and Syria. Two weeks later, Rabin was dead, killed by a reactionary Jewish Israeli fanatic; the peace agreement that Rabin referenced died not long thereafter. But Israeli hopes for an eventual agreement with the Assad regime managed to survive. There have been four subsequent attempts by Israeli prime ministers — one by Ehud Barak, one by Ehud Olmert, and two by Benjamin Netanyahu — to forge a peace with Syria.

This shared history with the Assad regime is relevant when considering Israel’s strategy toward the ongoing civil war in Syria. Israel’s most significant strategic goal with respect to Syria has always been a stable peace, and that is not something that the current civil war has changed. Israel will intervene in Syria when it deems it necessary; last week’s attacks testify to that resolve. But it is no accident that those strikes were focused solely on the destruction of weapons depots, and that Israel has given no indication of wanting to intervene any further. Jerusalem, ultimately, has little interest in actively hastening the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Israel knows one important thing about the Assads: for the past 40 years, they have managed to preserve some form of calm along the border. Technically, the two countries have always been at war — Syria has yet to officially recognize Israel — but Israel has been able to count on the governments of Hafez and Bashar Assad to enforce the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974, in which both sides agreed to a cease-fire in the Golan Heights, the disputed vantage point along their shared border. Indeed, even when Israeli and Syrian forces were briefly locked in fierce fighting in 1982 during Lebanon’s civil war, the border remained quiet. [Continue reading…]

Nicholas Blanford writes: A dangerous game of brinkmanship is unfolding in the Middle East pitting Israel against Syria and its militant Shi‘ite ally Hizballah in what threatens to expand the two-year Syrian civil war into a full-blown regional conflict. On three separate occasions since January — two of them within 48 hours of each other last Friday and Sunday — Israeli jets have attacked Syrian military bases, targeting consignments of advanced weaponry supplied allegedly by Iran that were pending transfer to Hizballah across the nearby border with Lebanon. The air raids were unprecedented. Israel has never before risked striking at Hizballah’s Iranian-supplied weapons inside Syria.

For now, though, Israel’s gamble seems to have paid off. Other than some initial huffing and puffing from Damascus, no immediate retaliation was forthcoming. But rather than acting as a deterrence, the air strikes appear to have galvanized Syria to promise even greater amounts of sophisticated weaponry to Hizballah and also to announce the launch of a popular resistance campaign to liberate the Golan Heights, the strategic volcanic plateau in the southwest corner of the country that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Israel’s intervention into the grueling Syrian civil war comes amid faint glimmers of a diplomatic breakthrough with the U.S. and Russia agreeing to an international conference to help end a conflict that has left more than 70,000 people dead. But the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has gained some tactical military successes of late, launching mini-offensives to retake territory previously lost to opposition rebels. The rebel setbacks may have strengthened the Assad regime’s grim resolve to win the conflict, especially given its confidence in the continued support of regional allies, Iran and Hizballah. [Continue reading…]

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: As you contemplate the ongoing violence in Syria, here are the three things to keep in mind.

First, the United States undoubtedly possesses the wherewithal to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. On this score, the hawks are surely right. Whether acting alone, with allies, or through proxies, Washington over the past decade or so has demonstrated an impressive capacity to overthrow governments. Skeptical? Consider the fate of various evil-doers on whom we trained our gun-sights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

Second, once Washington has removed Assad as it did Saddam Hussein, the likelihood of the United States being able to put things right — creating a “new” Syria that is stable, humane, and grateful for American assistance — is approximately nil. Here the evidence supports the doves. Skeptical? Again, consider the course of events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya once the evil-doers departed the scene.

These two points define the poles around which the policy debate in Washington incessantly revolves. In one camp are those who are fired by humanitarian concerns or persuaded that Assad threatens US (or Israeli) security. They are keen to put American muscle once more to work, and chastise President Obama for his reluctance to act. In the second camp are those wary of the United States once again stumbling into a quagmire. They commend Obama for (thus far) exercising restraint, fearing that American meddling will create more problems than it will solve.

This debate overlooks the third point, which obviates the first two: Whatever Obama does or doesn’t do about Syria won’t affect the larger trajectory of events. Except to Syrians, the fate of Syria per se doesn’t matter any more than the fate of Latvia or Laos. The context within which the upheaval there is occurring — what preceded it and what it portends — matters a great deal. Yet on this score, Washington is manifestly clueless and powerless. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: The details of the human carnage in western Syria over the weekend, in which hundreds of civilians were slaughtered apparently by pro-regime militias, remain shrouded in mystery. But sufficient testimonies, pictures and videos point to a deliberate act of sectarian cleansing in the Alawites’ heartland.

It is remarkable that the regime’s media, unlike in previous massacres, has neither condemned the killing nor blamed the rebels. Pro-regime Facebook pages even posted pictures of slaughtered children, claiming they were militants.

The carnage is meant to teach a lesson. But to understand what the lesson is, we must first understand the dynamics of the conflict in the country’s middle and coastal regions, often referred to as “tamas ta’ifi” – the sectarian dividing lines. [Continue reading…]

Jim Lobe reports: Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.

While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.

“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”

The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.

Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: The internet in Syria appears to have returned after a nationwide blackout knocked the country offline for more than 19 hours.

Monitoring company Renesys noted signs of activity at around 14:30 GMT (17:30 local time) on Wednesday.

Local state-run media had reported earlier that a “fault in optical fibre cables” was to blame for the blackout.

However, experts dismissed this explanation as “unlikely”.

David Belson, of Akamai, said: “Our monitoring shows that Syria’s international internet connectivity is through at least four providers, and published submarine cable maps show connectivity through three active cables.

“As such, the failure of a single optical cable is unlikely to cause a complete internet outage for the country.

New York Times: Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet — three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement. [Continue reading…]