The Guardian reports: Syrian air force planes have launched dozens of attacks from Damascus to Aleppo as the truce declared for the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday ended as it began – in violence.

Opposition activists reported 48 air strikes in a few hours while the UN and Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, admitted that the four-day ceasefire had failed. “The situation is bad and getting worse,” he told reporters in Moscow after talks with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Russia is Syria’s closest and most supportive ally at the UN.

Air raids were reported overnight from the Damascus suburbs of Qaboun, Zamalka and Irbin and described by residents as the heaviest since planes and helicopters first bombarded pro-opposition parts of the Syrian capital in August.

In Jermana, near Damascus, a car bomb killed 11 people, including women and children, and injured 50 others, Syrian state media reported, blaming “terrorists” for deliberately breaching the truce.

Fighting was also reported from Homs, Idlib and Deir al-Zour on the Iraqi border.

The truce, for Eid al-Adha, the Muslim feast of the sacrifice which marks the end of the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, began on Friday morning. An estimated 400 people have died during it. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 110 people were killed on Sunday alone. Of those, 39 were civilians, 34 armed opposition fighters and 35 members of the state security forces, said the UK-based group. [Continue reading…]

Joshua Landis writes: Many Western journalists are based in Lebanon, few in Iraq. This explains why relatively small events in Lebanon get dramatic reporting and much larger increases of violence in Iraq, are largely overlooked or elicit little concern.

Already in response to the growing civil war in Syria, Iraqi violence has spiked and al-Qaida is resurgent there. Some days as many as 100 Iraqi Shiites are killed by al-Qaida bombings in Iraq.

The threat of spillover in Lebanon is minor compared to Iraq because the sects in Lebanon all acknowledge that none can rule the country without the others. Even the most powerful, the Shiites, readily confess that they have no chance of turning Lebanon into an Islamic republic because Lebanon has a form of democracy and the majority is against it. Not only do all the sects buy into the notion of power-sharing, they also know that in Lebanon it is impossible for one group to dominate on the others. They learned these simple truths from decades of barbaric fighting.

In Iraq, the sects have found no peace and little acceptance of the balance of power now being hammered out. Prime Minister Maliki is busy building a Shiite dictatorship and pushing out the remaining centers of Sunni power left behind by the Americans in their doomed attempt to promote power-sharing.

Al-Qaida is rebuilding in Iraq to contest Shiite power. It probably has the backing of a larger segment of the Sunni community that still chafes from its loss of fortune following the US destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Unlike Lebanon, the various sects of Iraq have not found a modus-vivendi. Relations between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq are becoming more vexed as Kurdistan takes ever more steps to assert its independence from Arab Iraq.

The Sunni-led attempt to depose Assad’s regime is sure to give a big boost to Al-Qaida in Iraq as arms and men flow across the border and find a refuge in Syria. Saudi, Turkish and Qatari support for Syria’s Sunnis is also likely to turbo-charge passions in Iraq, as Sunnis feel empowered to push back against Iranian influence and the Shiite hold on power.

These are the reasons why Iraq is seeing much more spillover from Syria than Lebanon. Of course, there will be pushing and shoving between the sects in Lebanon, especially as the Sunnis grow in confidence and feel that they can tip the scales on the Shiite assertiveness of the last several years. But they have few delusions of being able to rule Lebanon on their own.

I leave you with this plum from today’s New York Times: An Iraqi Shiite who just returned from years in Damascus says:

“I can tell that things are going to be crazy in Syria,” he said. “It’s a sectarian war, and it’s even worse than the one we had here, which was between the militias and the political parties. In Syria, all of the people are involved. You can feel the hatred between the Sunnis and the Alawites. They will do anything to get rid of each other.”

The Associated Press reports: Syrian warplanes bombed a building in a Damascus suburb on Saturday, killing at least eight people in the first airstrike since an internationally mediated cease-fire went into effect, activists said.

The attack came a day after car bombs and clashes left 151 dead, according to activist tallies, leaving the four-day truce that began Friday at the start of a major Muslim holiday in tatters.

The rapid unraveling of the effort to achieve even a temporary peace marked the latest setback to ending Syria‘s civil war through diplomacy after months of failed efforts.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said eight people were killed and many others wounded in the airstrike in Arbeen, a suburb of the capital. The area also has witnessed heavy clashes and intense shelling.

Human Rights Watch: President Bashar al-Assad should release all peaceful activists, media professionals, and humanitarian assistance providers as part of an amnesty announced on October 23, 2012, Human Rights Watch, Alkarama, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, Index on Censorship, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Reporters Without Borders, and Samir Kassir Foundation – Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom said today. These persons have been detained purely for exercising their basic rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, or for assisting others and therefore should not have been detained or prosecuted in the first place, the groups said.

The president’s Legislative Decree No. 71 grants a general amnesty, reducing or eliminating prison terms for most crimes, but it excludes those who have been charged or convicted of terrorism offenses under the Anti-Terrorism Law enacted on July 2. Although Assad issued four amnesty decrees in 2011 and two others in January and May, security forces have kept many peaceful activists in detention. To ensure that the amnesty does not exclude them, the government should allow independent United Nations monitors inside Syria’s detention facilities, the groups said.

“If President Assad is serious about his amnesty, he should open the doors of all his prisons to independent monitors to check who is actually detained and why,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Otherwise, this amnesty will be yet another false promise, with released detainees soon replaced by other activists, humanitarians, and journalists locked up for peacefully doing their jobs.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Syrian opposition activists reported a return to heavy government bombardment in major cities on Saturday, further undermining a truce intended to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha religious holiday.

Activists in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, the suburbs of Damascus and in Aleppo, where rebels hold roughly half of Syria’s most populous city, said that mortar bombs were being fired into residential areas on Saturday morning.

The bombardment came on the second day of a truce called by international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who had hoped to use it to build broader moves towards ending the 19-month-old conflict which has killed an estimated 32,000 people.

“The army began firing mortars at 7 a.m. I have counted 15 explosions in one hour and we already have two civilians killed,” said Mohammed Doumany, an activist from the Damascus suburb of Douma, where pockets of rebels are based. “I can’t see any difference from before the truce and now,” he added.

The Syrian military has said it responded to attacks by insurgents on army positions on Friday, in line with its announcement on Thursday that it would cease military activity during the holiday but reserved the right to react to rebel actions.

Reuters reports: Lakhdar Brahimi’s holiday truce may have saved Syrian lives on Friday, as government troops and rebels drew breath on several fronts – though dozens still shed blood on Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice.

The U.N. envoy, discreetly downbeat since he succeeded a disillusioned Kofi Annan two months ago, could scarcely be surprised at ceasefire breaches that included tank fire and a car bombing; two previous attempts to end the conflict over the past year both quickly descended into ever more bitter fighting.

But more troubling for Brahimi, the Algerian troubleshooter called on to mediate in a civil war that has divided the United Nations, may be that when compared to the ceasefire attempts in January and April, each side seems even less ready now to talk.

“Brahimi faces an impossible task because both sides are still convinced that they can win and are determined to press every advantage,” said Syria expert Joshua Landis, associate professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Veteran dissident Fawaz Tello, now in exile in Germany, put it bluntly – mediation focused on forming a transitional unity government might have been possible a year ago, he said: “But after all this blood, all this sectarian conflict, it has become impossible. So now it’s a battle – and one side must win.”

Noah Shachtman reports: The regime of embattled Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is actively working to enlarge its arsenal of chemical weapons, U.S. officials tell Danger Room. Assad’s operatives have tried repeatedly in recent months to buy up the precursor chemicals for deadly nerve agents like sarin, even as his country plunges further and further into a civil war. The U.S. and its allies have been able to block many of these sales. But that still leaves Assad’s scientists with hundreds of metric tons of dangerous chemicals that could be turned into some of the world’s most gruesome weapons.

“Assad is weathering everything the rebels throw at him. Business is continuing as usual,” one U.S. official privy to intelligence on Syria says. “They’ve been busy little bees.”

Back in July, the Assad regime publicly warned that it might just use chemical weapons to stop “external” forces from interfering in its bloody civil war. American policy-makers became deeply concerned that Damascus just might follow through on the threats. Since the July announcement, however, the world community — including Assad’s allies — have made it clear to Damascus that unleashing weapons of mass destruction was unacceptable. The message appears to have gotten through to Assad’s cadre, at least for now. Talk of direct U.S. intervention in Syria has largely subsided.

“There was a moment we thought they were going to use it — especially back in July,” says the U.S. official, referring to Syria’s chemical arsenal. “But we took a second look at the intelligence, and it was less urgent than we thought.”

That hardly means the danger surrounding Syria’s chemical weapons program has passed. More than 500 metric tons of nerve agent precursors, stored in binary form, are kept at upward of 25 locations scattered around the country. If any one of those sites falls into the wrong hands, it could become a massively lethal event. And in the meantime, Assad is looking to add to his already substantial stockpile. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: Few expect that the four-day truce in Syria‘s civil war scheduled to take effect Friday will hold, much less serve as the prelude to a more sustained peace process (activists have already reported that fighting was occuring near a military base in Syria’s north). But the cease-fire proposed by U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, to coincide with this weekend’s Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, is likely an attempt to lay down a marker for a future mechanism to end a war that neither side is currently ready to stop. The veteran Algerian diplomat could take some small consolation in the fact that even if they have no intention of implementing the agreement, both sides felt obliged to agree to his plan rather than be seen to be saying no to the U.N. Instead, each side will seek to blame the other for thwarting Brahimi’s mission.

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad and some of the major rebel commanders on Thursday signed on to Brahimi’s plan, but each side set conditions that leave it plenty of room to keep fighting. The Syrian military announced it would “cease military operations” from Friday until Monday, but reserves the right to respond if attacked — and also to take action to prevent rebels reinforcing their current positions. It’s harder to pin down a rebel position because there are literally hundreds of insurgent groups fighting the regime. There is no single military chain of command, much less clear political leadership. Many rebel commanders have reportedly questioned the value of the truce, and a number of the Islamist battalions made clear they will fight on — which, of course, is what Assad is assuming. Still, a number of officials speaking for the Free Syrian Army, a loose umbrella of rebel forces headquartered in Turkey, indicated that they, too, would observe the Eid al-Adha truce, but set unlikely conditions of their own, including a demand for the release of prisoners on Friday, and withdrawal of government forces from key cities. “We will observe it as long as the regime does,” Col. Qassim Saad Eddine of the FSA told the LA Times, but “we don’t expect them to observe it for even one minute.”

Previous cease-fire agreements have been violated by both sides, and neither appears ready to stop a fight both believe is their best way forward. The absence of any external monitoring personnel or established protocols for disengagement, much less any enforcement mechanism, is a clear sign that the Eid al-Adha truce plan is largely an effort to have the combatants make a symbolic commitment to the idea of a future political settlement. Having honed his reputation in decades of mediating such intractable conflicts as the civil wars Lebanon and Afghanistan, Brahimi is not so naive as to believe Syria’s can be ended any time soon; instead, he’s establishing lines of communication with all sides, making sure that the Syrian combatants and their foreign sponsors will know where to turn when one or the other is ready to sue for peace. That moment, though, will likely be some time in coming. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Lakhdar Brahimi, the international envoy trying to broker a peace deal in Syria, announced on Wednesday a tentative cease-fire between the two sides to mark the main Muslim holiday of the year, but numerous do-it-yourself aspects of the plan immediately called into question whether it would quiet any fighting.

Open uncertainties included the time frame of what was designed to be a temporary cease-fire for the Id al-Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, expected to start Friday for much of the Muslim world. Different nations and different sects can observe the holiday for anywhere from one to five days, however, so it was not clear exactly how long any truce should last.

On a more basic level, it was not quite clear who would respect it among the warring parties. Syrian state television announced that Damascus was studying the proposal and would make an announcement on Thursday, according to wire service reports. Various leaders among the fractious rebels issued their own statements saying they doubted it would hold.

It was also unclear that there would be anyone around to police it — the United Nations withdrew its observers last summer and would probably not be able to deploy new ones in 48 hours.

Mr. Brahimi seemed to be relying on the fact that both sides in the civil war, which grew out of a peaceful protest movement that started in March 2011, would respect it all on their own.

Hassan Hassan writes: Forty-six per cent of Syria’s buildings are illegally constructed, according to a government study in 2007 – and this includes the homes in which more than half the population live. The problem was mostly seen around the large cities but, amid a widening gap between rich and poor, the authorities generally turned a blind eye to it.

Particularly since this summer, though, they have been bulldozing illegal buildings – but only in restive areas. In other areas, the authorities have been selective in their demolition orders. The campaign against illegal construction is thus being used to send a message: if you rebel against the regime, you will no longer enjoy the favours bestowed by it.

A further complication is that officials also accept hefty bribes from internally displaced people to allow them to use abandoned or partly demolished buildings. Additionally, the regime’s militias and rank-and-file officers are raiding houses, ransacking and then fraudulently selling or leasing them.

Besides adding to people’s suffering amid the current conflict, these practices are reshaping neighbourhoods across the country, from large cities to small villages – which is a recipe for future clashes between the old and new owners. Many will feel their properties have been usurped by other people or bought cheaply and at some point may try to retake them. [Continue reading…]

By John Robertson, War in Context, October 23, 2012

For centuries, the region that we have come to refer to (with unduly homogenizing overgeneralization) as the “Arab world” was dominated, and energized, by three great and ancient cities: Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. Cairo (Arabic “al-Kahira,” or “victorious”) was founded officially by the new Shi’i conquerors of Egypt during the 10th century (although the area roundabout had been a heartland of great cities for millennia, going back to Memphis, the capital of the earliest pharaohs). Founded a couple of centuries earlier by the Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Baghdad too lay in the original heartland of cities (to borrow the phrase of the great American anthropologist/archaeologist Robert M. Adams); Babylon lies close by. Damascus is the most ancient city of them all, its roots extending into the Early Bronze Age, but its fame is most associated with the first truly imperial Muslim Arab dynasty, the Umayyads, who in 661 made Damascus the capital of their already vast, yet still-expanding empire.

Today, all three cities are pale reflections of what they were at their respective apogees. Cairo’s impoverished population are awash in trash, even as the new Islamist-led government likewise tries to dig itself out from under a long-depressed national economy and decades of corrupt authoritarianism under Egypt’s preceding military-based rulers.

Anyone who’s paid attention over the last few decades knows of the devastation the people of Baghdad have endured, beginning with Saddam Hussein’s war launched against Iran in 1980. Those horrors culminated in the Anglo-American conquest of the city in 2003, which touched off a massive breakdown of political and social order that led to Baghdad’s self-cannibalization. With the demons of Iraq’s sectarianism resurrected, the city’s Sunni and Shi’i populations turned against each other – and against the American occupiers of the city. The evidence of the carnage looms everywhere across the city, which has lost a huge portion of its Sunni Arab – and Christian – population.

As this New York Times report today indicates, Damascus is now poised at the brink of its own self-cannibalization. The civil war that has been tearing at what was an already loosely woven Syria national fabric is now beyond Damascus’ lintel and making its way into the city’s ancient interior. Like Baghdad, Damascus has been the abode of a plethora of sectarian groups, all of whom had been living in relative harmony. That harmony is fraying:

The reality of war has crept into daily life, and there is a sense of inevitability. Even supporters of the government talk about what comes next, and rebels speak of tightening the noose around this city, their ultimate goal.

Damascus was once known for its all-night party scene. Now, few people venture out after dark, and kidnappings are rampant. Gasoline is increasingly scarce, and as winter approaches, people are worried about shortages of food and heating oil. Streets are closed at a moment’s notice, traffic diverted, bridges shut down. Even longtime residents and taxi drivers get lost and have to weave in and out of parking lots to avoid barriers and dead-end streets. Shelling and machine-gun fire are so commonplace, children no longer react. Continue reading →

Joshua Landis writes: The US government should tell Assad that he must launch serious negotiations for a transition government. If he does not, Western governments should supply opposition militias with ground to air missiles in sufficient numbers to bring down the Syrian air-force. Circumstantial evidence suggests that US officials in Libya may already have been working to facilitate the transfer of portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—from Libya to Syria.

As soon as the elections are over in the US, Washington should redouble its efforts at changing the balance of power in Syria, if Assad does not begin to form a transitional government in earnest. He must come to terms with the most powerful rebel leaders or see his air force neutralized.

Lakhdar Brahimi of the UN should be empowered to monitor and report on these negotiations, judging if they are sincere.

Assad should be encouraged to work toward some sort of agreement comparable to the Taif Agreement — or National Reconciliation Accord — that ended the Lebanese civil war. It may be impossible to get the Sunni militias to accept such a solution, particularly as they remain so divided. All the same it is worth trying.

It is unclear whether Assad will chose to fall back to the Alawite Mountains, where he can may struggle to protect Alawites from uncontrolled retribution, but where his capacity to damage to the rest of Syria is severely limited.

Assad has no possibility of regaining control of Syria. He does not have soldiers enough to retake lost cities. But he insists on using his air force to destroy what remains of rebel held towns. This is senseless destruction. He has no hope of recapturing them. It should be stopped. He has been carrying out a scorched earth policy that is killing thousands, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, and destroying Syria’s precious architectural heritage.

I have long resisted supporting US intervention, believing that the US should refuse to get sucked into Syria. It cannot determine what is fair. No one truly understands the “real” Syria today, as Syrians are only beginning to emerge from 40 years of sever authoritarianism that stopped politics in its tracks. What new social forces will emerge in the coming years is impossible to determine. Most importantly, the opposition has been too fragmented to replace the Syrian Army as a source of stability and security. Syrians need to find their own way forward and to create a new balance among the sects and regions. Decapitating the regime too suddenly, I believe, would likely result in a number of unhappy endings: a massacre of the Alawites, a civil war among militias that could bring even greater suffering, or a melt-down of security as happened in Iraq.

The various Syrian factions have to find a new equilibrium, which would not happen with an overpowering US intervention. Even one limited to the use of American air power, such as that carried out in Libya, could be too much force, used too quickly.

The supply of portable heat-seeking missiles, however, seems to be increasingly justified. US politicians fear that elements of the Syrian opposition may misuse ground to air missiles, but surely they cannot be misused more than are Assad’s jets and helicopters. Assad’s air superiority combined with his inability to rule Syria, is causing endless misery. Air power is so destructive that it should be denied to both sides. Fewer people would be killed and a new balance would emerge as an expression of regional forces.

Assad and his increasingly Alawite manned army can no longer control Aleppo and Damascus, which are overwhelmingly Sunni. Assad may not even be able to defend the Alawite Mountains from the growing strength of Sunni militias. The fate of the Alawite region is likely to depend on whether Sunni forces can unify — an eventuality that is not assured. The US should stay out of the struggle to define the internal arrangement of Syrian factions. Who knows how Syria will look when the fighting is over? Will the Kurds gain independence or a large measure of autonomy? How will the Alawite Territory be connected to Syria? Will the city of Latakia become an Alawite or Sunni dominated city? Will the government in Damascus hold central power as firmly in its hands as it has over the last 50 years? Or will Syria find unity in a larger measure of federalism? One can change views on these questions every day — the outcome depends on decisions yet to be made by Syria’s many leaders — but it seems clear that the Syrian air force has simply become an instrument of destruction. The day of reckoning for Alawites and for Syrians at large is only being put off by the lopsided use of air power. The US has already played a decisive role in tipping the balance of power in Syria against the Assad regime. It is time to help the Syrian opposition stop the government use of air-power.

Reuters reports: The Lebanese army promised decisive action to quell unrest linked to the Syria conflict as gunbattles flared in the capital Beirut and elsewhere on Monday after the assassination of a senior intelligence officer last week.

The army command urged political leaders to be cautious in their public statements so as not to inflame passions further.

It issued the warning after troops and gunmen exchanged fire in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Monday morning, wounding five people, while protesters blocked roads with burning tires.

In the northern city of Tripoli, four people were killed, including a 9-year-old girl, and 12 wounded in clashes overnight and in the morning, security and medical sources said.

The violence heightened fears that the civil war in Syria next door was spreading into Lebanon, upsetting its delicate political balance and threatening to usher in a new era of bloodshed between Lebanese allies and opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.

Lebanon has been boiling since Friday after Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan, an intelligence chief opposed to the Syrian leadership, was assassinated in a car bombing.

Many politicians have accused Syria of being behind the killing and angry protesters tried to storm the government palace after Hassan’s funeral on Sunday.

Opposition leaders want Prime Minister Najib Mikati to resign, saying he is too close to Assad and his Lebanese militant ally Hezbollah, which is part of Mikati’s government.

“The last few hours have proven without doubt that the country is going through a decisive and critical time and the level of tension in some regions is rising to unprecedented levels,” the army said in a statement.

“We will take decisive measures, especially in areas with rising religious and sectarian tensions, to prevent Lebanon being transformed again into a place for regional settling of scores, and to prevent the assassination of the martyr Wissam al-Hassan being used to assassinate a whole country.” [Continue reading…]

The Daily Star reports: The assassination of a high-ranking Lebanese security official opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad in a car bomb in Beirut signals that the Syrian crisis has begun to explode in Lebanon, political analysts said Friday. The powerful blast that killed Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan, the head of the police’s Information Branch, and at least four others Friday in the Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh, has also revived memories of the wave of car bombings that engulfed Lebanon during the devastating 1975-90 Civil War.

“The Ashrafieh blast sets the beginning for the Syrian crisis to explode in Lebanon. Lebanon has entered the Syrian melee,” Simon Haddad, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told The Daily Star. “The regime in Syria has entered a dangerous stage. Therefore, it will use all means in order to prolong its life.”

Blaming the Assad regime for the explosion, Haddad said: “The Syrian regime is sending messages to the March 14 parties as well as to America and Europe to stop their support for the Syrian opposition.

“The Syrian regime is trying to send a clear message to the international community saying: ‘Supporting the rebels [in Syria] will threaten security and stability in Lebanon,’” he added.

A similar view was echoed by Samir Franjieh, a former Maronite MP, who said that the Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s killing were clearly linked to the 19-month-old bloody conflict in Syria.

“The Syrian regime has begun playing with Lebanon’s stability as a card to negotiate with the international community over the future of Syria, including reducing the international sanctions on it,” Franjieh, a member of the opposition March 14 Secretariat General, told The Daily Star.

“The explosion was a clear attempt by Syria to undermine stability in Lebanon in order to exert pressure on the international community. Syria wants to tell the international community: ‘If you want to maintain stability in Lebanon, you must talk to us.’”

Friday’s explosion, the most serious blast the Lebanese capital has seen in more than four years, comes at a time when Lebanon has increasingly felt the repercussions of the crisis in neighboring Syria with the country’s March 8 and March 14 parties sharply split over the conflict next door.

Arab and Western countries have repeatedly voiced concerns over Lebanon’s stability, warning against the reverberations of the turmoil in Syria on the country’s security.

Politicians and analysts have long held the view that Lebanon’s security and stability are intertwined with that of Syria.

Violence in Syria has often spilled over into Lebanon, jolting the country’s already fragile security situation, with cross-border shootings, shelling by the Syrian army, tit-for-tat kidnappings, sectarian clashes and fighting between armed supporters and opponents of Assad in the northern city of Tripoli. Several Lebanese have been killed and wounded by Syrian gunfire in a series of deadly incidents on the Lebanese-Syrian border in recent months.

The split between the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance and the opposition March 14 coalition over the Syrian crisis has raised fears of the turmoil in Syria spilling over to Lebanon.

Ahmad Moussali, professor of Islamic studies at AUB, also said Hasan’s assassination signaled the beginning of grave repercussions of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon.

“The Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s assassination sent political messages both at home and abroad. But the most important message is that the situation in Syria will not remain confined to Syrian territory and will plunge Lebanon into conflicts of high-level tension,” Moussali told The Daily Star.

“No doubt, the crisis in Syria will reflect on the political conflict in Lebanon because the Lebanese have joined the conflict in Syria by financing, arming and training the Syrian opposition,” he said.

Moussali added that Hasan’s assassination deep in the Lebanese capital showed that the repercussions of the Syrian crisis directly struck the heart of Lebanon. “The assassination of Hasan, who is linked to the U.N. investigation [into former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s killing], has sent a strong message to all parties in Lebanon.”

“The one who assassinated Hasan wants to turn the conflict in Syria into an inter-Lebanese conflict. Hasan’s assassination is a trap to play the Lebanese against each other,” Moussali said. “The assassination could be the beginning to justify an exchange of assassinations between the feuding parties in Lebanon.” [Continue reading…]

Ahed Al-Hendi writes: They came for me on December 14, 2006. Plainclothes police carrying automatic weapons stormed into an Internet café in Damascus and grabbed me and a friend. They brought us in a car to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. Around midnight they dragged me from my holding cell to the man I would come to know only as “Captain Wissam.” He was a tall, dark-skinned officer. He looked at me and smiled. “We will release you in just a few minutes,” he said. “You should be a good citizen.” He then called a guard, whom he ordered to “take good care” of me.

Both men spoke with the distinctive accent of the Alawites; in fact, every single person in the prison did. The Alawite minority has effectively ruled Syria since 1963, and especially since President Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. So when you hear this accent, you pay attention. Ever since I can remember, this has been the way that the people with real power in our country speak.

They did not keep me for a few minutes. They threw me into a cell they called “the Suite.” Measuring five feet by one and a half feet, it had no windows. There was a hole in the floor for a toilet and a hose attached to a faucet in the wall. The hose had two purposes: to keep the toilet clean and to provide me with drinking water. They told me I’d be staying for two years.

As it turned out, they let me go in 40 days. But that was more than enough. During that period, which I spent entirely in solitary confinement, I was interrogated constantly. I was tortured repeatedly, both psychologically and physically. (Forgive me, but I would prefer not to go into the details.) Every single day I feared death. When they released me, I staggered out onto the street, bearded and unkempt, wearing the same clothing I had on at the time of my arrest (though now everything was in tatters). Outside, everything seemed to be normal. People in the streets were walking around and enjoying their lives, smiling and laughing.

This was Syria under the Assads. I had drawn the attention of the secret police because of my membership in a student group that set out to publicize the human rights abuses of the regime. To engage in opposition meant questioning not only the government, but the entire version of reality that it had imposed upon us for decades. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Wissam al-Hassan knew he was a marked man. Last week, as he briefed Lebanon’s opposition leaders on the case on which he had staked his career, the spy chief told them that assassins were again stalking the country.

Virtually besieged in their homes since the early summer, his hosts hardly needed the warning.

Hassan brought with him evidence that he said strengthened the case against his highest profile target, Lebanon’s former information minister, Michel Samaha, who he alleged had collaborated with Syrian officials to plot bombings – like the very one that killed the veteran major general on Friday.

He died when a bomb in east Beirut blew up the car he was in during the rush hour, killing at least seven others and injuring scores more.

A feared spillover of the violence in Syria into deeply fragile and sectarian Lebanon had been edging ever closer to inevitable. The melting pot of the region has barely been holding together as Syria boiled, its fragmented sects increasingly drawn into a conflict that the Lebanese had dreaded but could do little to stop.

The case Hassan had built against Samaha was highly unusual in Lebanon, where bigwigs are rarely taken on. Those such as Samaha with powerful connections are virtually untouchable.

This case was different, Hassan said. Not just because of the weight of evidence against the accused, who had allegedly been taped by an aide acknowledging that he had been given explosives by the Syrian national intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk.

Added to that were the former minister’s allegedly incriminating phone calls: he had apparently recorded his key conversations, then downloaded them to his computer. Prosecution briefs rarely come stronger.

Syrian officials made no secret of their demand for Samaha to be freed and the case against him dropped. But Hassan defied them, a move deemed crazy by his detractors and seen as an act of nation-building by his supporters, who saw the crumbling of power in Syria as an overdue chance for Lebanon to assert its sovereignty against its interfering neighbour. [Continue reading…]