The New York Times reports: The foreign minister of Russia, which is among Syria’s most reliable allies, said Saturday that several countries were offering asylum to President Bashar al-Assad to get him to leave Syria, but that Moscow would not mediate on their behalf, according to Russian news services.

“Some countries in the region have turned to us and suggested, ‘Tell Assad we are ready to fix him up,’ ” the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters who accompanied him on a flight home from the Russia-European Union summit meeting in Brussels, in comments carried by the Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies. “And we answered, ‘What do we have to do with it? If you have such plans, approach him directly.’ ”

“If there are people wishing to give him some kind of guarantees, be our guest,” he said. “We will be the first to cross ourselves and say, ‘Thank God, the carnage is over.’ Whether this will end the carnage — that is far from obvious. It is not obvious at all.”

He also said that Syria’s government had brought together its chemical weapons from a large number of locations throughout the country to one or two central storage places to keep them out of rebel hands.

Mr. Lavrov’s comments follow recent signals from Russia that it sees the military balance shifting, though Moscow has not changed its strong opposition to international intervention in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The identity of al-Nusra’s leadership is not clear. A shadowy figure known as Abu Muhammad al-Golani – whose nationality is not known – has been named by some as the head.

But an Islamist opposition campaigner who toured northern and central Syria a few days ago and met Nusra commanders said the group operates more like an umbrella organisation with little coordination between units in different regions.

“They are not a monolithic group. The nature of Nusra in Damascus is more tolerant than Idlib. They have a real popular base in Idlib, where most Nusra members are Syrians, as opposed to Aleppo and Damascus.”

He said it did not appear to be seeking to impose Taliban-style control. “Many rebels I have met say they joined al-Nusra because the group has weapons, mostly seized from raids, and that they will go back home after the revolt,” he added.

But many centrist opposition campaigners fear that al-Nusra will turn its guns on any non-Islamist order that could come if Assad was deposed. “The big question is how to contain Nusra in a post-Assad Syria,” said an opposition figure linked to jihadist groups, who did not want to be identified.

“Al-Nusra is the type of group that could declare the most pious cleric a heretic and kill him in the middle of a mosque just because he does not share its view,” he said.

Nusra members are estimated to number in the thousands and are particularly strong in the northern region of Aleppo and Idlib, where they have joined or carried out joint operations with Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Liwa al-Tawhid unit.

In and around Damascus they are fewer in number but remain potent, and are only 20 kilometers (12 miles) at some points from the Golan Heights front with Israel.

Abu Munther, an engineer turned rebel who operates on the southern edge of Damascus and goes to Jordan to meet other rebels, said in Amman that al-Nusra numbered hundreds of people in Damascus, as opposed to thousands in the north.

But those numbers could grow. Al-Mujahideen brigade in the southern Tadamun neighborhood of Damascus declared its allegiance to al-Nusra after dissatisfaction with Arab-backed military groups headed by defector officers.

Another opposition figure, who did not want to be named, said international intelligence agencies were trying to curb Nusra’s influence in Damascus and the southern Hauran Plain, where they are near Israel and close to the Jordanian border.

“Western intelligence agencies are realising that the Nusra is the biggest threat in a post-Assad Syria and are devoting more resources to deal with the threat,” he said.

“For the first time al Qaeda is within striking distance of Israel,” he said. “Many are realising that the best that could be done for now is to contain them in north Syria – even if the area risks becoming an Islamist emirate of sorts – while trying to build a civic form of government in and around Damascus.”

Hassan Hassan writes: The noose is tightening around Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and he’s beginning to realize it. After a week that saw the opposition’s National Coalition win widespread international recognition and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sign orders to dispatch Patriot missiles to the Turkey-Syria border, the regime in Damascus gave the first sign that it was looking for a way out.

On Dec. 17, the Lebanese paper al-Akhbar published an interview with Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa, where he said that neither the regime nor the rebels could win militarily and called for a “historic settlement” between the warring parties. Iran, Assad’s staunchest ally, also released a six-point plan that it said would promote national reconciliation.

There is reason to believe that the United States would look sympathetically on a negotiated transition. Washington faces a problem: It is looking to prevent extremists from filling the power vacuum in Syria — it designated the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusrah as a terrorist organization last week — and a political settlement could be a step in that direction. But a deal cut in Damascus is no cure-all for Syria’s ills: Even if an agreement is reached, most rebels groups are not about to let the Syrian army roll back into their towns.

The sprawling eastern province of Deir Ezzor, a larger rural region bordering Iraq, provides a case study in how armed groups — even extremist ones — work to establish a foothold in an area. In the case of jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusra, it also provides some hints for how they could be forced out. Jabhat al-Nusra’s cadres currently coexist with local tribal leaders, who have taken up responsibility for maintaining law and order in the absence of the state. In the long run, however, there is no guarantee that these groups share the same ideology or long-term interests.

Even as fighting rages elsewhere in Syria, the war against Assad has already been won in much of Deir Ezzor, where I grew up. On Nov. 17, the regime’s forces were squeezed out of the district of Abu Kamal, near the Iraqi border, after the rebels successfully attacked Hamdan Air Base, the last bastion of the regime there. Rebels from various villages and towns then joined forces and overran an army base in the city of al-Mayadeen, seizing stockpiles of artillery. People are now going about the hard work of laying the groundwork for future governance.

Jabhat al-Nusra currently controls most of the vital sectors in Deir Ezzor, including oil, gas, sugar, and flour. Its source of funding is unclear, although I was told by residents that Gulf nationals with tribal links to the region support most of the fighting groups in the province. According to residents, the group’s local emirs are typically foreigners, while the majority of the rank-and-file are Syrians from the region. Many people are drawn to the group by virtue of its effectiveness in fighting the regime and delivering public services. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: A psychiatric hospital on the front line in Syria’s war-ravaged second city of Aleppo, home to some 60 patients, has suffered from chronic shortages since fighting first broke out in July.

“They’ve had no medication for months, and it gets worse each day. There’s no light, no heating, not even running water — and the patients have hardly anything to eat,” said nurse Abu Abdo, who helps to run Dar al-Ajaza hospital.

“If residents of the area hadn’t given them food they would have died of starvation ages ago,” he added.

During the summer, Aleppo became the focus of the battle between the army and rebels opposing President Bashar al-Assad, in a conflict that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says has killed more than 44,000 people.

“Most staff stopped coming to work when the battle for Aleppo began, abandoning their patients. I’ve been working here for five years: this is my family, and I couldn’t leave them and let them die of cold and hunger,” Abu Abdo said.

“I fight for them each day.”

He offered a cigarette to Omar Sattut, an elderly patient dressed in military fatigues, who believed himself to be an army officer and said he wanted to go and fight against Israel.

Abu Abdo then introduced the youngest patient, Mohammed Matar, bare-footed and wearing a polo shirt, teeth chattering from the cold.

“Eight patients have died in the last few months,” Abu Abdo said. “We try to look after them as best we can. It’s a wonder they’re still alive.”

He and two other staff still come to the asylum every day, despite no longer receiving their salaries.

The imposing hospital, built in Aleppo’s once bustling historic old town, contains around 30 rooms overlooking the splendid mediaeval city centre.

It has been hit by artillery fire from Assad’s army since the uprising to bring down the regime, initially a peaceful protest movement in March 2011, descended rapidly into civil war.

“When the bombs hit, we put all the patients in the same room to try and calm them down,” said Abu Abdo, pointing to a massive shell hole in the wall.

He said that medical staff are now too afraid to come because of the bombardments. Even the hospital’s director only passes by at most two or three times a week.

Patient Walid Assiad ambled in the courtyard, walking without shoes in puddles of ice-cold water. In one bedroom, Matar huddled up under a thin blanket, shivering against the biting cold.

“The worst of winter is yet to come,” said Abu Abdo. “When there’s snow and ice it’ll be terrible. I’m scared that many of them won’t survive. Without heating they’ll die of cold.”

Frederic C. Hof writes: In March 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a fateful and catastrophic choice. In Deraa, regime thugs had pulled the fingernails off of teenagers guilty of the high crime of spray-painting anti-regime graffiti. Instead of going there to console and compensate families, he ordered the same thugs to open fire on demonstrators. With that decision, he signed his political death warrant — and perhaps that of Syria as well. What began in Deraa spread rapidly and (at first) peacefully. Now it consumes Syria entirely in a vicious and increasingly sectarian civil war.

Americans are now mourning the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut. Syrian children are terrorized, traumatized, injured, and killed daily. Americans wonder how to regulate the ownership of combat weaponry in the hands of private individuals. Syrians contemplate the horror of a regime that knows no limits in the methods it employs to stay in power, and an armed opposition no doubt tempted at times to mimic the behavior of those who do the unspeakable without regret or remorse.

What will be next? Chemical warheads mounted on Scud missiles launched in the general direction of rebel-held areas? Alawite villagers slaughtered by armed men seeking to avenge atrocities by a regime that has cynically and shamelessly put at risk the Alawite community?

In these circumstances, time is the enemy of humanity. The longer the regime has to break the Syrian people into combustible categories of sect and ethnicity, the greater the chance that Syria will become a stateless, chaotic and expanding black hole in a region where stability is a challenge in the best of circumstances. Lebanese, Turks and Jordanians already feel Syria’s agony — and share in it. Time, in this case, is not the great healer. Time is the deadliest of enemies. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Any solution to the conflict in Syria must ensure President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his opponents do not simply swap roles and fight on forever, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

In what appeared to be his first direct comments on the possibility of a post-Assad Syria, Putin said he did not believe that a military solution could hold.

“We are not concerned about the fate of Assad’s regime. We understand what is going on there and that the family has held power for 40 years,” Putin told a news conference.

“We are worried about a different thing – what next? We simply don’t want the current opposition, having become the authorities, to start fighting the people who are the current authorities … and (we don’t want) this to go on forever.”

Reuters reports: Fighters from around the world have filtered into Syria to join a civil war that has split along sectarian lines, increasingly pitting the ruling Alawite community against the majority Sunni Muslims, U.N. human rights investigators said on Thursday.

The deepened sectarian divisions in Syria may diminish prospects for any post-conflict reconciliation even if President Bashar al-Assad is toppled. And the influx of foreign fighters raises the risk of the war spilling into neighboring countries, riven by the same sectarian fault lines that cut through Syria.

“As battles between government forces and anti-government armed groups approach the end of their second year, the conflict has become overtly sectarian in nature,” the investigators led by Brazilian expert Paulo Pinheiro said in an updated report.

As a result, they said, more civilians were seeking to arm themselves in the conflict, which began 21 months ago with street demonstrations demanding democratic reform and evolved into an armed insurgency bent on toppling Assad.

“What we found in the last few months is that the minorities that tried to stay away from the conflict have begun arming themselves to protect themselves,” Karen Abuzayd, a member of the group, told a news conference in Brussels.

C.J. Chivers reports: Inside the classrooms where they once studied, the boys darted like a pack. Their banging and clanking could be heard for a city block.

The playground outside had been hit by a Syrian Air Force airstrike, which fractured the school’s walls. Now the children were smashing the furniture, prying off wooden desktops and bench seats, rushing away with what they could.

The Isam al-Nadri School for Boys was being dismantled for the firewood it contained. One sixth grader, Ahmed, clutching the kindling he had made by ransacking a room, offered an irreducible argument for looting his own school. “I want heat,” he said.

Winter is descending on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the bloodied stage for an urban battle, now running into its sixth month, between rebels and the military of President Bashar al-Assad.

As temperatures drop and the weakened government’s artillery thunders on, Aleppo is administered by no one and slipping into disaster. Front-line neighborhoods are rubble. Most of the city’s districts have had no electricity and little water for weeks. All of Aleppo suffers from shortages of oil, food, medicine, doctors and gas.

Diseases are spreading. Parks and courtyards are being defoliated for firewood, turning streets once lined with trees into avenues bordered by stumps. Months’ worth of trash is piled high, often beside bread lines where hundreds of people wait for a meager stack of loaves.

One of the Middle East’s beautiful and historic cities is being forced by scarcity and violence into a bitter new shape. Overlaying it all is a mix of fatigue and distrust, the sentiments of a population divided in multiple ways. [Continue reading…]

The Cable: The American people are weary of war and aren’t up for another military adventure in either Syria or Iran, former Nebraska senator and potential defense secretary Chuck Hagel told The Cable.

Hagel sat down for a 90-minute exclusive interview in his Georgetown office in May, well before President Barack Obama began vetting him for a top national security position in his second-term cabinet, perhaps to replace Leon Panetta at the Pentagon.

In previously unreleased portions of that interview, Hagel commented on how the United States should move forward in Syria and Iran, urging caution, patience, and a focus on multilateral diplomacy.

“I think we’ve got to be very wise and careful on this and continue to work with the multilateral institutions in the lead in Syria. I don’t think America wants to be in the lead on this,” he said. “What you have to do is manage the problem. You manage it to a higher ground of possible solutions, ultimately to try to get to a resolution. You don’t have control over what’s going on in Syria.”

“You’ve got to be patient, smart, wise, manage the problem,” he said.

The Obama administration has resisted intervention in Syria based on the risk that arming the opposition directly could fuel the fire and out of concern that establishing a no-fly zone would require a major U.S. commitment with uncertain results.

Hagel said he agreed with that policy, and urged caution and patience when dealing with the Syrian crisis — though it’s worth reiterating that these remarks were made in May.

“I don’t think I’d do anything different from what the Obama administration is doing. I think they are handling this responsibly and working with everybody. It’s frustrating; it’s maddening. I get all that. But we’re still in the longest war in American history and our standing in that part of the world is not that good,” he said.

Hagel believes that the world is moving toward more diffused power structure where the United States no longer remains the single unchallenged superpower. That, combined with America’s internal problems and the desire for Americans to end over a decade of war, points to the need for a diplomatic solution in Syria, he said.

“We’ve got to understand great-power limitations. There are so many uncontrollable variables at play in Syria and the Middle East,” Hagel said. “You work through the multilateral institutions that are available, the U.N., the Arab league. The last thing you want is an American-led or Western-led invasion into Syria.” [Continue reading…]

NBC News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and members of his network production team were freed from captors in Syria after a firefight at a checkpoint on Monday, five days after they were taken prisoner, NBC News said early Tuesday.

“After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country,” the network said in a statement.

The captors were unidentified and were not believed to be loyal to the Assad regime.

Engel, 39, along with other employees the network did not identify, disappeared shortly after crossing into northwest Syria from Turkey on Thursday. The network had not been able to contact them until learning that they had been freed on Monday.

The network said there was no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing.

After entering Syria, Engel and his team were abducted, tossed into the back of a truck and blindfolded before being transported to an unknown location believed to be near the small town of Ma’arrat Misrin. During their captivity, they were blindfolded and bound, but otherwise not physically harmed, the network said.

Early Monday evening local time, the prisoners were being moved to a new location in a vehicle when their captors ran into a checkpoint manned by members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group. There was a confrontation and a firefight ensued. Two of the captors were killed, while an unknown number of others escaped, the network said.

The NBC News crew was unharmed in the incident. They remained in Syria until Tuesday morning when they made their way to the border and re-entered Turkey, the network said. They were to be evaluated and debriefed, but had communicated that everyone was in good health.

Luke Harding writes: I had come in search of families displaced by Syria’s war. But when I entered Qabbasin secondary school I was surprised to discover lessons were going on. Two months ago head Nasar Mamar decided to reopen.

There was fighting going on down the road in Aleppo. But Qabbasin, some 40km away, was comparatively safe – safe, if you ignored the regime jets flying overhead. “We need Syria to be an educated country. We should not be afraid,” Mamar explained, taking me on a tour of his classrooms.

Downstairs I found 30 boys in the middle of an English lesson. Written on the blackboard was some useful vocabulary: “library” and “explorer”, and examples of the present continuous tense – “I am eating. I am reading” – with a neat translation in Arabic. Their teacher was 30-year-old Abu Hassan. Hassan said he had fled from Aleppo. He was now working as an unsalaried volunteer. “I want to teach. It’s my job,” he said.

Hassan was melancholic when I asked him about the destruction of Aleppo – “my lovely city”, as he put it. Much of it is now a smouldering ruin: the medieval souks dating back to the 14th century part-destroyed; the old citadel the frontline between embattled government troops, the Free Syrian Army and jihadist militias.

Syria’s war reached Aleppo nearly six months ago. Since then the city’s cosmopolitan charm has been snuffed out; it is a place of hunger, cold, misery and death from the sky, he said.

I asked Hassan whom he thought was responsible for his Syria’s collapse, moral and social. He thought for a moment, then replied: “For me, all of us. All of us have wrong actions. I wish everything would be back how it was.” Hassan said he was an English graduate from Aleppo University. He declined to give me his full family name. “I’d rather not,” he said. I left Hassan’s classroom – lit only by a weak winter sun – urging the boys to study hard.

Many of the pupils now back at school had fled with their families from Aleppo. Syria’s uprising began in March 2011; since then the town’s population has swollen from 18,000 to 30,000.

It’s a similar story across rebel-controlled northern Syria: millions are displaced, staying with relatives, renting private rooms, or crammed into dismal border camps. Qabbasin has a mixed population of Arabs and Kurds, and despite tensions elsewhere is a model of inter-ethnic co-operation. Mamar, the head, is a Kurd; most of his staff are Arabs; the headteacher at the girls’ school next door is a Turkman. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said that neither the forces of President Bashar al-Assad nor rebels seeking to overthrow him can win the war which is now being fought on the outskirts of Assad’s powerbase in Damascus.

Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim in a power structure dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, has rarely been seen since the Syrian revolt erupted in March 2011 and is not part of the president’s inner circle directing the fight against Sunni rebels.

But he is the most prominent figure to say in public that Assad will not win. He was speaking to the pro-Assad al-Akhbar paper in an interview from Damascus which is now hemmed in by rebel fighters to the south.

Assad’s forces have used jets and artillery to try to dislodge the fighters from around Damascus but the violence has crept into the heart of the capital and rebels announced on Sunday a new offensive in the central province of Hama.

Sharaa said the situation in Syria, where more than 40,000 people have been killed, was deteriorating and a “historic settlement” was needed to end the conflict, involving regional powers and the U.N. Security Council and the formation of a national unity government “with broad powers”.

Reuters reports: The Syrian people no longer need the intervention of international forces as rebels push towards the heart of the capital of Damascus to topple President Bashar al-Assad, the new leader of Syria’s opposition told Reuters.

Mouaz al-Khatib, the scion of a Damascene Muslim religious dynasty, said the opposition would consider proposals from Assad to surrender power and leave the country, but would not give any assurances until it saw a firm proposal.

Flanked by bodyguards, al-Khatib was speaking to Reuters on Wednesday night after a meeting of Western and Arab nations with the Syrian opposition in the Moroccan city of Marrakech.

“The horrific conditions which the Syrian people endured prompted them to call on the international community for military intervention at various times”, al-Khatib said.

“Now the Syrian people have nothing to lose. They handled their problems by themselves. They no longer need international forces to protect them. The international community has been in a slumber, silent and late (to react) as it saw the Syrian people bleeding and their children killed for the past 20 months,” the eloquent, soft-spoken opposition leader said.

On Assad, he said: “I only hope that he knows that he has no role in Syria or in the lives of the Syrian people. The best thing is that he steps down and stops drinking the blood of the Syrian people.”

Al-Khatib blamed world and regional powers for the rise of radical Islam in Syria, which has long prided itself on being a tolerant mosaic of ethnic groups. He said the world’s failure to stop Assad’s forces from killing peaceful protesters at the beginning of Syria’s revolt in March 2011 was the root cause.

“The international community is partly responsible for the emergence of some disturbing phenomena because of its negligence towards peoples and nations,” said al-Khatib, who was elected as president of the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces last month.

“When a whole people endure killing for 20 months, then groups emerge with radical or extremist views.”