McClatchy reports: For the first time in the two-year push to topple President Bashar Assad, the United States said Thursday that it will send food and medicine directly to armed Syrian rebels.

But the announcement fell far short of rebel calls for anti-aircraft missiles and the imposition of a no-fly zone, and it left many members of the opposition dissatisfied.

Even a European agreement to amend its arms embargo to allow rebels access to non-lethal military equipment and armored vehicles on condition that they be used only to protect civilians failed to calm their anger.

“Unfortunately, as always, the West’s promises are smaller than its actions,” said Samir Nashar, a businessman from Aleppo and a founding member of the Syrian Coalition of Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, the umbrella group set up last year at the United States’ behest.

“How will armored cars protect us from SCUD missiles and barrel bombs?” Nashar asked. “The U.S. said it would provide food and medicine to the revolutionaries by plane. We always hear words and no actions. I think it’s a policy aimed to manage the crisis, not to help the Free Syrian Army on the ground.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The United States is significantly stepping up its support for the Syrian opposition, senior administration officials said on Wednesday, helping to train rebels at a base in the region and for the first time offering armed groups nonlethal assistance and equipment that could help their military campaign.

The training mission, already under way, represents the deepest American involvement yet in the Syrian conflict, though the size and scope of the mission is not clear, nor is its host country. The offer of nonlethal assistance is expected to come from Secretary of State John Kerry at a meeting on Thursday in Rome with opposition leaders. Mr. Kerry is also expected to raise the prospect of direct financial aid, though officials cautioned that the White House still had to sign off on all the elements.

Before arriving in Rome on Wednesday, Mr. Kerry declared in Paris that the Syrian opposition needed additional assistance and indicated that the United States and its partners planned to provide some.

Under a broad definition of “nonlethal,” assistance to the opposition could include items like vehicles, communications equipment and night vision gear. The Obama administration has said it will not — at least for now — provide arms to the opposition. [Continue reading…]

Martin Chulov reports: One evening in January 2011, Mohammed Rias, a hulking taxi driver and head of a family clan, called his close male relatives to a meeting in their village home in northern Syria. There were 13 men in all, sitting on thin cushions on the floor of a cold and frugal living room. Nine were his brothers, the other three his cousins. The loyalty of the men, tested through more than a decade of underground dissent towards the Syrian government, was about to be called on again.

Rias, 37, who is known by his siblings and cousins as Sheikh Nayimi, remembers the moment well. “I told them that the Arab Spring marked a moment for us,” he says. “It was not yet time to go public, we had to then remain private. But we could sense that something was coming. Everything we had waited for might soon be upon us.”

By the time of that first gathering, revolution was rumbling through North Africa. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis had fallen and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was teetering. The stirrings of popular revolt had also begun to unsettle Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Yemen’s leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Something remarkable was happening; the incontestable strength of the region’s one-man autocracies was crumbling. The might of the street had exposed the fragility of absolute rule. Such a powerful new reality electrified societies long conditioned to think otherwise. And though it was yet to get there, the shift was fast dawning on communities throughout the most uncompromising of the Middle East’s police states, Syria.

“We talked about it among ourselves and we knew that it would also get to Syria,” Sheikh Nayimi says, two years after the fall of Cairo. Coals spark from a rusting tin drum in the centre of a row of plastic chairs on the road outside his makeshift office in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and he leans forward to warm his hands. January is frigid and powerless here this year. Keeping warm is as much of a challenge as staying alive for the Sheikh and his nine brothers near one of the many frontlines of Syria’s civil war.

“We weren’t sure what would start things,” he recalls of the tense seven weeks it took for the arc of revolution to reach from Cairo to Damascus. “We couldn’t move before then.” The brothers did not have to wait long. The spray-painting of anti-regime slogans outside a mosque in the southern city of Daraa, and the withering response from the military, was Syria’s Tahrir Square moment. On March 15, several young men and boys from the southern town of Daraa were arrested for leaving the graffiti and then tortured in prison. The increasing protests – unarmed in the early months – were met with ever-escalating violence by a regime that had never brooked dissent and wasn’t about to do so now.

The Nayimi brothers knew their moment had arrived. “We didn’t have to hide any more,” Sheikh Nayimi says. Within days, he had been joined by his siblings and their elderly father, all of whom had left jobs in Aleppo or in their home village of Sarmada in the countryside near Idlib. Their transformation from peasant sons of the northern plains to revolutionaries at the heart of the war for Syria’s future has been honed ever since. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration is moving toward a major policy shift on Syria that could provide the rebels with equipment such as body armor, armored vehicles and possible military training and could send humanitarian assistance directly to Syria’s opposition political coalition, according to U.S. and European officials.

The administration has not provided direct aid to either the military or political side of the opposition throughout the two-year old Syrian conflict, and U.S. officials remain opposed to providing weapons to the rebels.

Elements of the proposed policy, which officials cautioned have not yet been finalized, are being discussed by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in meetings this week and next with allies in Europe and the Middle East as part of a coordinated effort to end the bloody stalemate that has claimed 70,000 lives.

The outcome of those talks, and a nearly two-hour meeting in Berlin on Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a Thursday conference with allies and leaders of the Syrian Opposition Coalition in Rome, is expected to weigh heavily in administration deliberations.

The Washington Post reports: A surge of rebel advances in Syria is being fueled at least in part by an influx of heavy weaponry in a renewed effort by outside powers to arm moderates in the Free Syrian Army, according to Arab and rebel officials.

The new armaments, including anti-tank weapons and recoilless rifles, have been sent across the Jordanian border into the province of Daraa in recent weeks to counter the growing influence of Islamist extremist groups in the north of Syria by boosting more moderate groups fighting in the south, the officials say.

The arms are the first heavy weapons known to have been supplied by outside powers to the rebels battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad and his family’s four-decade-old regime since the Syrian uprising began two years ago.

The officials declined to identify the source of the newly provided weapons, but they noted that the countries most closely involved in supporting the rebels’ campaign to oust Assad have grown increasingly alarmed at the soaring influence of Islamists over the fragmented rebel movement. They include the United States and its major European allies, along with Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two countries most directly involved in supplying the rebels. Security officials from those nations have formed a security coordination committee that consults regularly on events in Syria, they said.

Although the Obama administration continues to refuse to directly arm the rebels, the administration has provided intelligence assistance to those who are involved in the supplies, and it also helps vet opposition forces. U.S. officials declined to comment on the new armaments.

The goal of these renewed deliveries, Arab and rebel officials said, is to reverse the unintended effect of an effort last summer to supply small arms and ammunition to rebel forces in the north, which was halted after it became clear that radical Islamists were emerging as the chief beneficiaries.

“The idea was to get heavier stuff, intensify supply and make sure it goes to the good guys,” said an Arab official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation. “If you want to weaken al-Nusra, you do it not by withholding [weapons] but by boosting the other groups.”

Louay al-Mokdad, the political and media coordinator for the Free Syrian Army, confirmed that the rebels have procured new weapons donated from outside Syria, rather than bought on the black market or seized during the capture of government facilities, the source of the vast majority of the arms that are in the hands of the rebels. But he declined to say who was behind the effort. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The talk about Syria by knowledgeable friends and colleagues whose views I respect has turned increasingly pessimistic in recent weeks, with expectations ranging across a span of many bad outcomes. These range from Syria becoming a Levantine Somalia, where power is in the hands of hundreds of local warlords and tribal chieftains, to a totally fractured state defined by a combination of raging civil war and sectarianism that pulls in interested neighbors and perhaps ignites new regional wars.

Speculation about the future of Syria is a growth industry these days, for good reason: What happens in Syria will have an impact on the region, given its central role in the political geography, ideologies and security of the Levant and areas further afield. The events in recent years in Iraq and Libya remind us that developments in one state in the region can have repercussions in neighboring countries, sometimes immediately and sometimes a few years down the road.

The longer Syria’s domestic war goes on, the more fragmented the country becomes, alongside three other dangerous trends: Sectarianism increasingly becomes the option of choice for Syrian citizens who seek security but cannot get it from the state; revenge killings will become a more likely occurrence after Bashar Assad’s downfall; and militant Salafists may increasingly take root in local communities across the country as they prove to be well organized and funded adversaries of the Assad regime.

Next month we will mark two years since the outbreak of protests against the regime, as the domestic battle continues to rage. Syrians have paid a very heavy price for their desire to remove the Assad regime and replace it with a more democratic and accountable system of governance, but there are no signs that either side is tiring of this fight. Despite the destruction of the economy and urban infrastructure, Syrians seem determined to keep fighting until one side defeats the other. The chances of a negotiation or dialogue to end the fighting and usher in a peaceful transition of power seem slim, given the wide gap between Assad and the opposition groups. [Continue reading…]

Goran Tomasevic reports: Rebel fighters in Damascus are disciplined, skilled and brave.

In a month on the frontline, I saw them defend a swathe of suburbs in the Syrian capital, mount complex mass attacks, manage logistics, treat their wounded – and die before my eyes.

But as constant, punishingly accurate, mortar, tank and sniper fire attested, President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers on the other side, often just a room or a grenade toss away, are also well drilled, courageous – and much better armed.

So while the troops were unable to dislodge brigades of the Free Syrian Army from devastated and depopulated neighborhoods just east of the city centre – and indeed made little effort to do so – there seems little immediate prospect of the rebels overrunning Assad’s stronghold. The result is bloody stalemate.

I watched both sides mount assaults, some trying to gain just a house or two, others for bigger prizes, only to be forced back by sharpshooters, mortars or sprays of machinegun fire.

As in the ruins of Beirut, Sarajevo or Stalingrad, it is a sniper’s war; men stalk their fellow man down telescopic sights, hunting a glimpse of flesh, an eyeball peering from a crack, use lures and decoys to draw their prey into giving themselves away. [Continue reading…]

David Rohde writes: The Obama administration’s policy toward Syria is a failure. Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are funneling more aid, armaments and diplomatic cover to Bashar al-Assad. And Syrian rebels who once hailed the United States now loathe it.

Across the country, pro-Assad forces use airplanes, Scud ballistic missiles and artillery to level rebel controlled neighborhoods. While Syrian insurgents fight with the tragi-comic “D.I.Y. weapons” displayed in this Atlantic slide show.

In an incisive essay published this week in the London Review of Books, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist with the Guardian, described the continued atomization of the Syrian opposition. Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who covered the dissolution of his own nation, freely admits that “we in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism.” But then he delivers a damning description of how prevarication in Washington creates deepening anti-Americanism among the rebels.

“Why are the Americans doing this to us?” one rebel commander demands. “They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse?”

In the meantime, hard-line jihadists and their funders in the Persian Gulf are filling the void.

“Maybe we should all become jihadis,” the exasperated commander declares. “Maybe then we’ll get money and support.”

The time has come for the Obama administration to mount a new policy in Syria. But don’t expect one anytime soon.

In an interview on Thursday, a senior administration official played down a report in the The New York Times Monday that President Barack Obama might reconsider arming Syria’s opposition. The official confirmed that Obama rejected a proposal last year from four of his top national security advisers that the U.S. arm the rebels.

But he said a subsequent review by American intelligence officials had concluded that only a large infusion of sophisticated weaponry would tip the military balance against the Assad regime.

“We have to assess what it would take to change the calculus,” the official said, “and hasten the transition.”

Repeating prior arguments, the official said the administration opposed supplying the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles out of concern that the weapons could fall into the hands of jihadists.

“God forbid a U.S. weapon be used to strike an Israeli passenger plane or land in Israel,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Jonathan Steele reports: Sheikh Habib sits with the smartly dressed mayor of Talkalakh and other officials of this small Syrian city, drinking coffee and eating chocolates beneath a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad.

Five minutes later, we have climbed into the sheikh’s white 4×4, crossed a railway line, been waved past an army checkpoint, driven 300 yards up a street of badly ruined shops and houses, and are shaking hands with a swarthy, bearded figure in a woolly hat and black leather jacket who emerges from behind a wall. Our new host is Abu Oday, the commander of the armed opposition in this town in the western corner of Syria, and what we are witnessing is one of the most extraordinary facets of the country’s catastrophic civil war: the birth pangs of a truce that has restored calm to one small area after almost two years of violence.

Abu Oday carries no gun, nor do any of the dozen men who stand around us curiously as plastic chairs are drawn up. By agreement they no longer show their weapons while, for its part, the Syrian army has ended the regular hail of mortar fire that terrorised this side of Talkalakh.

The architect of the change is Sheikh Habib or, to give him his full name, Mohammed Habib Fendi. Barely mentioned in Syria’s official media, he prefers to keep a low profile even though he seems a rare hero in the country’s brutal conflict. He heads a Sunni tribe in al-Raqqa, a city on the Euphrates in north-eastern Syria, and is a regular preacher at Friday prayers. But his political work began after he took part in one of many delegations of local people whom Assad started inviting to Damascus soon after the uprising began in 2011.

The aim was to discuss their grievances and see whether “reconciliation” could be used by tribal and community leaders as a way to end the mounting street protests. The policy was an implicit admission that the ruling Ba’ath party had become an empty shell, more associated with corruption and security control than with providing services, let alone justice, fairly.

As protesters moved from peaceful demonstrations to armed resistance following the government’s mass arrests in 2011 and the heavy use of force last year, reconciliation made little headway. The arrival of foreign jihadis, the Islamisation of large parts of the opposition, and the onset of sectarian clashes created new tensions and made compromise harder.

But now, as the war’s death toll mounts with no prospect of an early end, reconciliation is making a hesitant comeback. The bleakness of the nation’s outlook, indeed of the country’s very survival, makes it seem a better alternative than permanent war. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: Not only is the Obama administration no longer convinced that Syria’s armed rebellion is about to topple President Bashar Al Assad, a rebel military victory does not even appear to be Washington’s preferred outcome.

A little over a year ago, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the Assad regime as “a dead man walking”, and President Barack Obama expressed confidence, in his 2012 State of the Union address, that “the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change can’t be reversed”.

This year, by contrast, Syria barely rated a mention in the same speech, with Mr Obama vowing only to “keep the pressure on the Syrian regime … and support opposition leaders that respect the rights of every Syrian”.

The rebels clearly can’t win the war with the current level of support being offered by outside powers. Moreover, Mr Obama has reportedly dismissed proposals from within in his administration for arming insurgents, and Monday’s European Union rebuff of efforts by the UK, France and Italy to lift an embargo on arming the rebels reinforced the sense of western reluctance to invest in a rebel military victory. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: The first detailed survey of the humanitarian crisis in northern Syria suggests that the United Nations has grossly underestimated the number of civilians in dire need of assistance, a situation that experts say plays down the scope of the catastrophe.

“Syria is the largest IDP crisis in the world,” said Clare Spurrell of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, the leading body monitoring internally displaced people worldwide. “The longer we underestimate the reality of what is happening on the ground, the further we are getting from an appropriate response.”

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees released new figures Monday showing 2.08 million people in urgent need in six provinces of northern Syria. That’s way below a partial survey of the same provinces that the Syrian opposition and 10 international aid agencies conducted over four weeks in January.

That survey, undertaken by teams of researchers who met with local relief committees, religious leaders and local police, among others, estimated that the number of people in urgent need totaled at least 3.2 million in those provinces: Idlib, rural Aleppo, Latakia, Raqqa, Hasaka and Deir el Zour. That’s nearly three-quarters of the 4.3 million people thought to be living now in the surveyed areas of those provinces. [Continue reading…]

Syria’s peace: what, how, when? A conference on London’s South Bank, February 12, 2013.

I like to refer to Ghaith Abdul-Ahad as the intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad — he goes places few other reporters would dare tread. But his courage is really just an ancillary to his greater quality as a journalist: his truthfulness. Add to that his fine prose and the result is a George Orwell of Middle East reporting.

His latest piece begins:

In the cramped living room of a run-down flat near the Aleppo frontline, two Syrian rebels sat opposite each other. The one on the left was stout, broad-shouldered, with a neat beard that looked as though it had been outlined in sharp pencil around his throat and cheeks. His shirt and trousers were immaculately pressed and he wore brand-new military webbing – the expensive Turkish kind, not the Syrian knock-off. The rebel sitting opposite him was younger, gaunt and tired-looking. His hands were filthy and his trousers caked in mud and diesel.

The flat had once belonged to an old lady. Traces of a domestic life that had long ceased to exist were scattered around the room and mingled with the possessions of the new occupiers. A mother of pearl ashtray sat next to a pile of walkie-talkies. Small china figurines stood on top of the TV next to a box of cartridges. Guns and ammunition lay on the rickety wooden chairs and a calendar showing faded landscapes hung on the wall. In the bedroom next door clothes were piled on the bed next to crates of ammunition. The stout rebel was shifty, on edge and keen to finish what he came to say and leave quickly. The other looked like a man waiting for a disaster to unfold.

But like a couple trying to conduct the business of their divorce with civility they spent a long time on pleasantries: each asked the other about his village and praised the courage and strength of his people. Outside a machine gun fired relentlessly down the street, interrupted only by the occasional thud of a mortar shell.

‘I am taking my cousins away from the front,’ the stout man finally said.

‘Why?’ the young rebel whined, as if one of the mortar shells had smacked him in the head. ‘Did we do anything wrong? Didn’t we feed them properly? Didn’t they get their daily rations? Whatever ammunition we get we divide equally: tell me what we did wrong.’

‘No, no, nothing wrong – but you seem not to have any work here.’

‘But this is an important defensive position,’ the young rebel pleaded. ‘All of Aleppo depends on this hill. If you go, two frontline posts will be left empty. They’ll be able to skirt around us.’

‘I’m sure you’ll take care of it. Allah bless your men, they’re very good.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘A very good man, a seeker of good deeds – he is from our town but he lives in the Gulf – told me he would fund my new battalion. He says he will pay for our ammunition and we get to keep all the spoils of the fighting. We just have to supply him with videos.’

‘But why would he do that? What’s he getting in return?’

‘He wants to appease God, and he wants us to give him videos of all our operations. That’s all – just YouTube videos.’

‘So he can get more money.’

‘Well, that’s up to him.’

They spent some more time on pleasantries but the divorce was done. The stout man walked out. Waiting for him in the cold were half a dozen men, young, earnest, country boys with four guns between them. Their cigarettes glowed in the dark as they walked behind their cousin, their new commander, in his pressed trousers and shirt, who promised them better food, plentiful ammunition and victory. So a new battalion is formed, one more among the many hundreds of other battalions fighting a war of insurgency and revolution against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

*

We in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism. Some attribute it to individualism, others blame the nature of our political development or our tribalism. Some even blame the weather. We call it tasharthum and we loathe it: we hold it as the main reason for all our losses and defeats, from al-Andalus to Palestine. Yet we love it and bask in it and excel at it, and if there is one thing we appreciate it is a faction that splinters into smaller factions. Yet even by the measure of previous civil wars in the Middle East, the Syrians seem to have reached new heights. After all, the Palestinians in their heyday had only a dozen or so factions, and the Lebanese, God bless them, pretending it was ideology that divided them, never exceeded thirty different factions.

In Istanbul I asked a Syrian journalist and activist why there were so many battalions. He laughed and said, ‘Because we are Syrians,’ and went on to tell me a story I have heard many times before. ‘When the Syrian president, head of the military junta at the time, signed the unification agreement with Nasser, basically handing the country to the Egyptians and stripping himself of his presidential title, he passed the document to Nasser and said I give up my role as president but I hand you a country of four million presidents.’

For decades, the dictatorship in Syria worked to stamp the people into submission: every pulpit, every media outlet, every schoolbook sent out the same message, that people should be subservient to the ruler. In Syria (as in a different way in Iraq, Egypt and the rest), those in authority – from the president to the policeman, from the top party apparatchik to the lowliest government functionary – exercised power over every aspect of people’s lives. You spent your life trying to avoid being humiliated – let alone detained and tortured or disappeared – by those in authority while somehow also sucking up to them, bribing them, begging them to give you what you needed: a telephone line, a passport, a university place for your son. So when these systems of control collapsed, something exploded inside people, a sense of individualism long suppressed. Why would I succumb to your authority as a commander when I can be my own commander and fight my own insurgency? Many of the battalions dotted across the Syrian countryside consist only of a man with a connection to a financier, along with a few of his cousins and clansmen. They become itinerant fighting groups, moving from one battle to another, desperate for more funds and a fight and all the spoils that follow. [Continue reading…]

Syria Deeply: Many Syrians have been tethered to Facebook for almost two years to check on the state of the conflict in their country, scouring through feeds for the latest images and videos of protests and war crimes. But a new kind of message was tucked into these streams over the past two weeks which added a novel function for the platform: diplomacy.

Moaz Al Khatib, the president of the National Coalition (NC), the largest opposition umbrella group in Syria, surprised many observers and even coalition members when he posted on his Facebook page a proposal to sit with representatives from the Assad regime. The preconditions for such talks were the release of 160,000 prisoners held by the government and the renewal of passports for Syrians in exile.

This initiative gave some potency to the exiled opponents of the Assad regime who have struggled to build an international consensus to end the conflict in Syria due to the sharp division in the U.N. Security Council. Almost two months had passed since more than 100 countries recognized the NC as the legitimate representative of Syrians, but the coalition wasn’t able to attract the funds needed to govern rebel controlled territories or provide advanced weapons to fighters.

As the prospect of a longer and more destructive war set in, Al Khatib used his social media platform to directly address Syrians who have grown weary of the conflict, circumventing the nascent groupings in the coalition that might have debated the proposal for weeks or months. Many activists and rebels disagreed with Al Khatib’s vision, and debates were held inside Syria to discuss the issue, but eventually an uneasy consensus was reached to allow the moderate Sunni cleric to proceed. [Continue reading…]

The Telegraph reports: Aleppo has been plunged into despair. Riven with war, life in Syria’s most populous city has become a dog-eat-dog existence: a battle for survival in a place where the strong devour the weak.

Its luxuriant history is lost beneath uncollected litter on its pavements and streets. Feral children play beside buildings shattered by shelling and air strikes. There is no electricity, no heating; gunmen prowl the streets as night falls. Some are rebels searching for government loyalists; others are criminals looking to kidnap for ransom. Looting is rife.

It is here, behind the front lines of the war against Bashar al-Assad that a new struggle is emerging. It is a clash of ideologies: a competition where rebel brigades vie to determine the shape of post-Assad Syria.

And in recent weeks it is Jabhat al-Nusra, a radical jihadist group blacklisted by the US as terrorists and a group that wants Syria to be an uncompromising Islamic state governed by sharia, that is holding sway.

The group is well funded – probably through established global jihadist networks – in comparison to moderates. Meanwhile pro-democracy rebel group commanders say money from foreign governments has all but dried up because of fears over radical Islamists.

The effect is changing the face of the Syrian revolution.

The Nusra Front is known for some of the bravest fighters on the front lines. But the fundamentalist movement is now focusing on highly effective humanitarian programs that are quickly winning the loyalty of Aleppo’s residents.

Imbued with discipline borne of religious dogmatism it is catering to basic needs in a city that lacks everything from working factories to courts.

Chief among hardships was the languishing supply of bread. It is a staple in Syria – without it tens of thousands of the poor would starve.

When rebel fighters seized control of the grain stores around the city, the supply of flour all but ceased. Locals accused rebels of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) of raiding the stores and stealing the grain to sell. Spontaneous pro-government protests erupted outside bakeries where families queued for bread, sometimes for days.

One started within seconds of the Daily Telegraph’s arrival at a bread queue: “Allah, Syria, Bashar! Everyone here loves Bashar al-Assad!” they screamed.

Then, in the past weeks, Jabhat al-Nusra – which is outside the FSA – pushed other rebel groups out of the stores and established a system to distribute bread throughout rebel areas.

In a small office attached to a bakery in the Miesseh district of Aleppo, Abu Yayha studied a map pinned on the wall. Numbers were scrawled in pencil against streets.

“We counted the population of every street to assess the need for the area,” explained Mr Yahya. “We provide 23,593 bags of bread every two days for this area. This is just in one district. We are calculating the population in other districts and doing the same there.

“In shops the cost is now 125 Syrian pounds (£1.12) for one pack. Here we sell it at 50 Syrian pounds (45p) for two bags. We distribute some for free for those who cannot pay.” [Continue reading…]

Omar Hossino writes: In the town of Azaz, in northern Syria, a trail of destroyed houses, mass graves, tank tracks, and shell casings provides a glimpse of the daily reality for millions of Syrians. At the nearby Bab al-Salameh border crossing with Turkey, children tell of fleeing their homes after being shelled by regime forces and attacked by pro-government militias.

“Why did Bashar have to send his community against us to kill our innocent people?” one man asks, framing the conflict as a war between the Alawite sect, a community to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs, and Syria’s Sunni majority. Another man praises “the true righteous Muslims” of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group known for its vitriol toward Alawites and support for fundamentalist Islamic rule.

Such scenes, which I saw on my recent trip to war-torn northern Syria, point to the worrying growth of jihadi and Salafi groups — but these forces are not the only players emerging in the new Syria. The secular and nationalist spirit that initially sparked the Syrian revolution is also still alive and well. Many grassroots activists and religious leaders are working to forge a country that is built on secular principles, against sectarian revenge, and supportive of equal rights for all its citizens. Even some of the sharia courts that have sprung up to administer justice in areas the Syrian government has abandoned contain surprising, nonsectarian trends.

Whether such a movement can survive as the uprising drags on is not yet clear. For the time being, however, these figures embody the sliver of hope that Syria may avoid an all-out sectarian war.

Among the best-known nonviolent protest movements on the ground is Tajammu’ Nabd, or the Pulse Gathering for Civil Youth, which defines its purpose as to “fight the regime and fight sectarianism.” It is led by Yamen Hussein, an Alawite originally from Homs, who joined the revolution in its earliest days. The relatively small, youth-led movement has served as a vehicle to empower minorities — especially Alawites, the bulk of whom have been hostile to the revolution.

With bases in secular strongholds like Yabrud, Salamiyah, Zabadani, and Homs, Nabd activists have taken on small but unique projects. On Christmas, its activists dressed up as Santa Clauses and gave gifts to the Christians of Homs. In protests throughout the country, Nabd sends minority and secular activists to hold up signs that read: “In Syria there are two sects: the sect of freedom and the sect of the oppressors,” and “Before you call for sectarian revenge, remember that you trembled when you witnessed the massacre.”

“A small proportion of the signs and chants in protests in parts of Syria are growing more radical and sectarian, so we want to be the counterforce and present our movement on the ground,” Hussein told me. “But the hardest work will come after we overthrow the regime, where we will try to keep our country from being torn apart.” [Continue reading…]