Luke Harding writes: It was 5am, and Mohamad Baree was hiding with his fighters behind a large rock. Some 300 metres away, a column of Syrian army tanks was advancing towards Aleppo through the countryside. The group of rebels were waiting for it. Baree watched. He then set off a powerful roadside bomb. It blew two of the tanks up. The others staged a panicky retreat to their base in the northern city of Idlib.

“From a military point of view the operation was successful,” Baree tells me a week later, as we bump along in the back of his unit’s battle-scarred minivan. Baree, 27, is dressed in khaki fatigues. He carries a Kalashnikov and a pistol. Despite his appearance, he explains that he is actually a pharmacist who has spent seven years living in Odessa; his brother, another fighter in Syria’s revolution, a lawyer.

Syria’s grinding 17-month war has typically been portrayed as a sectarian conflict. In this version, Bashar al-Assad’s embattled Shia Alawite sect – about 10% of the population – is pitted against the country’s Sunni majority. To an extent, this is true. But the reality is more complex. Some of Baree’s co-fighters are members of what could loosely be called the rustic poor – carpenters, decorators, farmers. Others are educated. Baree says that a professor of chemistry has been giving the rebels tips on bomb-making, helping their military effectiveness. There are army defectors, medics, video activists, even information officers.

The sectarian faultlines are blurred as well. Baree acknowledges that his own group of around 150 rebels, from the village of Korkanaya, near Idlib, is predominantly Sunni. But he says many of his friends are Alawite. “We talk over the internet. They don’t like what Bashar is doing either,” he says. Baree says he has broken off with one childhood friend, a Sunni and a local teacher; the teacher had implacably supported the regime ever since Syria’s uprising began in spring 2011.

The situation in Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolis, engulfed by fighting since July, meanwhile, is also many-layered. Aleppo is one of the most ancient cities on the planet, home to various Christian denominations, historically a large Jewish population, now all fled, as well as wealthy Sunni traders, many favourably disposed to the regime.

In the mountains just outside Aleppo you find the ghostly ruins of Byzantine churches. There are poor Kurdish hamlets. I find the frontline town of Anadan semi-wrecked and abandoned.

One Aleppo resident I speak to, an engineer living in a regime-controlled district, says he supports the revolution. But he admits many of his neighbours don’t. “If I were to generalise I would say the middle class and upper class don’t want the rebels. They want everything to be how it was,” he says. Many poorer Aleppines had welcomed the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA); others viewed it as a bunch of dangerous extremists; almost all were terrified of what the fighting would bring.

According to Baree, Syria’s revolution has little to do with external forces, or Islamist radicalism. It is, he tells me, the product of Syria’s own domestic dynamic and a logical reaction to the brutal behaviour of Assad. Assad had responded to the Arab spring and demands for political reform by arresting, torturing, and shelling his opponents, thus turning a few isolated demonstrations into a mass armed insurrection. “We tried to persuade him through peaceful means. But this didn’t work. So we took up weapons,” Baree says. Some guns from outside were arriving in Syria. But none have reached his unit, he adds. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Syria’s former prime minister, Riyad Hijab, has claimed Bashar al-Asssad’s regime is on the point of collapse, having lost control of two-thirds of the country, as he called on other top officials to follow his example and defect.

In his first public appearance since he fled Damascus with his family a week ago, Hijab told a press conference in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the Syrian army needed to “take the side of the people”.

“I assure you, from my experience and former position, that the regime is collapsing, spiritually and financially, as it escalates militarily,” Hijab said. “It no longer controls more than 30% of Syrian territory.”

Hijab said that while he was prime minister he had been unable to stop the regime’s policy of using heavy artillery against Syrian cities considered by the regime as being opposition strongholds. He said he had felt “pain in my soul” of the shelling of civilian areas.

“I was powerless to stop the injustice,” he said, urging other senior figures to defect. “Syria is full of honourable officials and military leaders who are waiting for the chance to join the revolution. I urge the army to follow the example of Egypt’s and Tunisia’s armies take the side of people.”

Sounds like Hijab stopped following the news from Egypt as soon as Mubarak stepped down. Moreover, given the level of destruction the Syrian army has already inflicted on so many cities, the idea that they might now “take the side of [the] people” and stop slaughtering them sounds less like a vision of the future than the rhetoric of a man whose first priority is to reinvent himself.

From Beirut, Mariam Karouny reports: Veteran fighters of last year’s civil war in Libya have come to the front-line in Syria, helping to train and organize rebels under conditions far more dire than those in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan-Irish fighter has told Reuters.

Hussam Najjar hails from Dublin, has a Libyan father and Irish mother and goes by the name of Sam. A trained sniper, he was part of the rebel unit that stormed Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli a year ago, led by Mahdi al-Harati, a powerful militia chief from Libya’s western mountains.

Harati now leads a unit in Syria, made up mainly of Syrians but also including some foreign fighters, including 20 senior members of his own Libyan rebel unit. He asked Najjar to join him from Dublin a few months ago, Najjar said.

The Libyans aiding the Syrian rebels include specialists in communications, logistics, humanitarian issues and heavy weapons, he said. They operate training bases, teaching fitness and battlefield tactics.

Najjar said he was surprised to find how poorly armed and disorganized the Syrian rebels were, describing Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority as far more repressed and downtrodden under Assad than Libyans were under Gaddafi.

“I was shocked. There is nothing you are told that can prepare you for what you see. The state of the Sunni Muslims there – their state of mind, their fate – all of those things have been slowly corroded over time by the regime.”

“I nearly cried for them when I saw the weapons. The guns are absolutely useless. We are being sold leftovers from the Iraqi war, leftovers from this and that,” he said. “Luckily these are things that we can do for them: we know how to fix weapons, how to maintain them, find problems and fix them.”

Strangely, Reuters bills this as an “exclusive” report. It would more accurately be described as a footnote for a much more detailed report that Mary Fitzgerald did for Foreign Policy and the Irish Times a few days ago. It would appear that Karouny didn’t bother asking how it was that Najjar came to be invited to travel from Dublin to Libya to fight under Mahdi al-Harati’s command. Apparently she doesn’t know that Harati himself also comes from Dublin and that Najjar is Harati’s brother-in-law. (If on the other hand she did establish these details, it seems strange to have left them out of her report.)

The Wall Street Journal reports: Lebanon’s Military Tribunal charged a prominent politician close to Syria and Hezbollah of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks in Lebanon and plotting to assassinate politicians and religious figures in the country.

The charges are a blow to the image and influence of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Iran and Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite political party. They also mark the first time in the 17-month uprising that the Syrian regime has been publicly named in a judicial indictment for inciting violence in another country.

The charges, according to Lebanese state media, named former Lebanese Information Minister Michel Samaha, who is considered a close ally of Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, as well as two Syrians: Chief of the Syrian National Security Bureau Gen. Ali Mamlouk and a Syrian army officer, Brig. Gen. Adnan, whose full name wasn’t stated.

The charges allege that Mr. Samaha, working with Syrian officers, set up an armed group in Lebanon to distribute and plant bombs aimed at inciting sectarian unrest and targeting “the authority of the state and its civil and military institutions,” according to Lebanese state media.

Rami G. Khouri writes: For months now, speculation by analysts, diplomats, scholars and journalists about the nature of the post-Bashar Assad transition in Syria has been as dynamic as the events on the ground. But with one big difference: Most analyses of events on the ground rely on facts; but discussion of how events will unfold in post-Assad Syria has been riddled with wildly unsubstantiated speculation and pessimism, often tarnished by doses of Orientalism, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism, and plain old-fashioned amateurism and ignorance.

The prevalent perceptions I refer to include that Syria will long remain locked in domestic strife; the Alawites will face eternal hostility and revenge; sectarian civil war is likely to break out; the post-Assad struggle for power will be chaotic and perhaps violent; Syria could easily break up into several smaller ethnic statelets linked to neighboring states or compatriots; Syria’s collapse will trigger warfare across the region, and a few other such scenarios. While some or all of this might happen, I suggest that we must keep open the possibility that Syria’s post-Assad transition will be much less chaotic or violent than many fear, for several reasons:

The evidence from other Arab transitions offers no support for the expectation that Syria’s transition will be a sectarian free-for-all. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya’s self-ignited regime changes (unlike Iraq’s Anglo-American initiated mess) have not only avoided major sectarian troubles or violence, but in fact the re-legitimized constitutional processes have included a serious and deliberate attempt to make sure that all population groups are given equal opportunity to partake in public life and governance – not on the basis of sectarian quotas, but on the basis of equal citizenship.

The Syrian people are too intelligent, sophisticated and cosmopolitan to allow themselves to sink into a dark pit of sectarian warfare, even if their sick Baathist-led, Alawite-run power elite uses sectarianism and the specter of post-Assad chaos as tools of intimidation – tools that have failed miserably, in any case.

Syrians of all identities will be so pleased to start a new life of normalcy, freedom, dignity and citizenship the day after Assad is toppled that they will be too busy re-creating their own country in their own image to be sidetracked into domestic warfare. The last thing Syrians want after 42 years of police-state rule and many months of violence since March 2011 is to keep fighting each other.

The day after Assad will not necessarily be a moment of chaos. A reasonably orderly transition could occur, because a credible, indigenous structure for governance already exists. The dozens, perhaps hundreds, of local committees across Syria that have been organizing the revolt against Assad family rule will emerge the day after with immense legitimacy, authority and logistical capability in governing at the local level. [Continue reading…]

Martin Chulov reports: First Lieutenant Darid Barakat sat on a foam mattress on the floor of a schoolhouse, men he once commanded alongside him, and his captors standing in a murky corridor outside.

There were 30 or so men held in the room – in what passes for a prisoner of war facility in a rebel-controlled part of Syria. Barakat and two others, both officers like him, were members of the Alawite sect. Another officer was a Shia, and the rest were all soldiers – and Sunnis – like the rebels now holding them.

The prisoners had been there since late July, not long after a plan by the Free Syrian Army to bring its uprising to the heart of the country’s second city, Aleppo, was put into action by the rebel force in the city of al-Bab. Until that point, the local guerrillas had not fired a shot in 18 months of uprising.

Barakat and some others had worked at the military security office in the heart of al-Bab, 30km north-east of Aleppo. With him in the makeshift jail were captives from the nearby political security building and from all other corners of the regime’s extensive police state.

The battle to take al-Bab had been a rout; the once formidable stretch of state buildings were destroyed and the defeated men who once worked inside were now at the mercy of an enemy whom they had dreaded.

“Of course, I know what happens in these situations,” said Barakat, as he sat cross-legged in the garden of the schoolhouse early last week. “Prisoners were beaten, dissenters were chased and jailed. I thought we were going to get the same treatment.”

The reputation for brutality in Syria’s civil war is growing. While captured soldiers generally are treated better than intelligence officers – or the loathed Shabiha militias – allegations of prisoner abuse are rife on both the regime and rebel side. The execution of the three men who controlled the Shabiha in Aleppo has drawn the same sort of outrage levelled at regime abuses throughout the revolt. At the main rebel base in Aleppo, screams of prisoners being beaten could be heard throughout the night early last week.

“We’ve heard about it,” said one of the al-Bab rebels. “That’s not us.”

Sitting next to Barakat, 35, was his jailer, a local Sunni sheikh, Omar Othman, who commanded the rebel unit in the area, named Katiba al-Ansar. Dressed in an exquisitely embroidered dishdasha and wearing a cast on his lower left leg, Omar asked Barakat whether he and the other men were fearful as the battle drew to a close.

“I swear, sheikh, that the guys were scared for a while,” he replied. “They were scared from all the fighting and they were worried about what would happen.”

The sheikh and his captive – the Sunni rebel leader and the Alawite officer – were getting deeper into conversation. Barakat agreed to let The Observer listen in and asked that his name be used.

“I didn’t expect you to treat us this way,” said Barakat. “You give us food three times a day, Qu’rans, and even cigarettes.”

“You would not have done the same for us,” Omar replied.

“That’s true,” said Barakat. “There was a culture there.”

“It was more than a culture,” Omar replied. “It had become a way of life. Cruelty and oppression were what you guys did by instinct.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Barakat. “It was the system. All I did is order guys to go out and beat people with sticks whenever there was a demonstration. I am not so connected to the regime, it was just a job to me.”

Omar lifted his dishdasha and pointed at his cast. “You guys shot me,” he said, pointing to the top of his left foot, which had been hit by a bullet during the fight for the military security building. “If you were not a big supporter of the regime, why did you work for military security [one of the most feared of Syria’s intelligence agencies]?”

“Sheikh, I had no choice. This was our reality.”

As the battle grinds towards a conclusion in Aleppo, Syria’s warring parties are increasingly being forced to confront some uncomfortable truths. Themes now being openly discussed in scenes like this, as well as in meetings between elders, and even during moments of introspection on the battlefield, include: how did the society slide this far towards the abyss, and can anything be done to rescue it now?

Whether it likes it or not, Syria’s Alawite minority was at the vanguard of the crackdown that followed the first stirrings of popular uprising in March last year, and which has now evolved into civil war. Also undeniable is that the opposition movement and guerrilla force is almost exclusively comprised of Sunnis, some of whom hold a grudge against the Alawites, whom they see as agents of a regime of persecution.

The spectre of of sectarian bloodletting looms as violence escalates nationwide and hopes for resolution continue to appear out of reach.

Yet both the sheikh and the Alawite lieutenant are anxious to dispel talk of longstanding enmity between their sects. The same case for cooperation is being made in political circles, although hardly with a booming voice. [Continue reading…]

Irish-Libyan military commander Mahdi Al-Harati now leads the Liwa al-Ummah brigade in Syria.

Mary Fitzgerald, foreign affairs correspondent for the Irish Times, writes: In a dusty schoolyard somewhere in Idlib province, several hundred men form neat rows before standing to attention. “Who are we?” bellows one man at the front. “Liwa al-Ummah!” the men reply in unison, pumping their guns in the air. They look different from your average Syrian rebel fighter, typically dressed in a scruffy mismatch of military fatigues and civilian clothes. Most of these men are decked out in identical fatigues, boots, and khaki-colored T-shirts. A handful sport dazzling white T-shirts emblazoned with the Liwa al-Ummah crest: a raised fist set against the tri-starred green, white, and black flag adopted by the Syrian rebels. “Revolutionaries of Sham,” it reads, using the Arabic term for historical greater Syria, above the name Liwa al-Ummah.

Sitting in an empty classroom flanked by several Syrian and Libyan fighters, a soft-spoken Libyan-born Irish citizen named Mahdi al-Harati explains how he came to be the leader of Liwa al-Ummah. The brigade emerged, he says, after several Syrians, aware of his experience as commander of the Tripoli Brigade during the Libyan revolution, approached him about founding a similar outfit in Syria.

The Tripoli Brigade was one of the first rebel units into the Libyan capital in August 2011. Its fighters, who included many Libyan expatriates, had received training from Qatari special forces in Nalut, a town in Libya’s western mountains. After the fall of Tripoli, during which he participated in the battle for Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound, Harati was appointed deputy head of the Tripoli Military Council (TMC), serving under Abdel Hakim Belhaj, former leader of the now-defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Last autumn Harati stepped down as commander of the brigade and as TMC deputy. He made his first trip to Syria shortly afterward for what he says was initially humanitarian work in the country’s northern borderlands. The idea for Liwa al-Ummah came this year.

“There was a sense of increasing frustration among the Syrian thuwar [revolutionaries] over their lack of coordination,” he says. “They asked me if I could help them train and organize, and I agreed.”

According to Harati, more than 6,000 men across Syria have joined Liwa al-Ummah since its establishment three months ago. Most are members of existing rebel battalions or groups who decided to come under the Liwa al-Ummah umbrella; others signed up as individuals.

He says the brigade is separate from the Free Syrian Army, the loosely organized grouping of military defectors and civilian volunteers whose nominal leadership is based just over the border in Turkey. Liwa al-Ummah is also in the process of developing a Syrian-led political wing, as are an increasing number of other brigades.

Recently posted YouTube videos show a number of Syrian rebel factions announcing they have joined Liwa al-Ummah. Harati stresses that Syrians make up over 90 percent of the brigade. The rest are Libyans, most of them former members of the Tripoli Brigade, along with a smattering of other Arabs. Almost all use the honorific title “Sheikh Mahdi” when referring to Harati.

“We’re here to facilitate and train civilian rebels in Syria — many of whom are doctors, engineers, and teachers — using our experience during the Libyan revolution,” Harati says. “We are a group of civilians brought together for a cause. When the Syrians have achieved their revolution, our job will be done.”

With Harati are some of his closest confidants from Ireland and Libya. Back home in Dublin, where he lives with his Irish-born wife and four children, Harati teaches Arabic and is known as an activist who is heavily involved in the Palestinian cause. He took part in the 2010 Gaza-bound flotilla, which was intercepted by Israeli commandos, resulting in the deaths of nine people. [Continue reading…]

The Telegraph reports: During a visit to Syria’s neighbour, Turkey, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that America and Turkey were creating a formal working group to provide “very intensive operational planning” for the Syria crisis.

The group will coordinate military, intelligence and political responses to the potential fallout in the case of a chemical attack, which could result in huge numbers of casualties and a further influx of refugees into Turkey.

“We have been closely coordinating over the course of this conflict, but now we need to get into the real details of such operational planning. It needs to be across both of our governments,” Mrs Clinton told a news conference on Saturday after a meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu.

Asked by a reporter if such discussions included imposing a no-fly zone to protect territory controlled by rebels, Mrs Clinton indicated that it was a possible option. “The issues you posed within your question are exactly the ones the minister and I agreed need greater in-depth analysis,” she said, although she said no decisions were imminent.

McClatchy reports: Like many of the approximately half a million Palestinians who live in Syria, Abu Abed tried to avoid taking sides when the uprising against the Syrian government began last year.

“You can’t take a position against the revolution, and you can’t take a position against the regime,” he said.

But after running afoul of the government as a result of a job working with internal refugees from the fighting – he prefers that the event not be described too specifically, as it would make him easy to identify – Abu Abed fled to Beirut, the capital of next-door Lebanon, where he’s lived in ambiguous circumstances since the beginning of the year.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do. He fears that the fall of the Syrian government, which he expects to take place in the next six months, will only lead to a wider civil war as various militias vie for power in the vacuum. Lacking a Syrian passport, he’s applied for a Palestinian one, but few countries recognize the document. He tried to register for assistance or protection with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but because he’s Palestinian, he was referred to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid programs for Palestinians in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

“They said there was nothing they could do for me,” said Abu Abed, who used a pseudonym that means “father of Abed” to shield his identity.

So now he’s an illegal immigrant to Lebanon, which has been granting Palestinians no more than two-week stays. According to Syrians in Lebanon, a number of Palestinians from Syria were arrested last month and face deportation to Syria.

Syrian activists in Lebanon say that at least 200 Palestinian families have fled here. Others have attempted to flee illegally to Jordan, only to find that they’re separated from other Syrian refugees and sent to a different camp. Human Rights Watch has reported that some Palestinians attempting to flee to Jordan have been turned back.

Before the rebellion against the government of President Bashar Assad began, Palestinians in Syria enjoyed a better quality of life than Palestinians did in any other place in the Middle East. They were given most of the same rights as Syrian citizens. They couldn’t get Syrian passports, but travel documents from the government were easily obtained.

But after the unrest started last year, it wasn’t long before Palestinians were involved. Abu Abed blames Assad for encouraging Palestinians to demonstrate in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in May 2011.

“It was to make Israelis and the international community understand that if the regime goes, the situation will be bad for Israel,” Abu Abed said. “The regime for the first time in 60 years opened the borders.”

In June 2011, Israeli soldiers fired on Palestinian demonstrators in Golan, killing more than 30. The event turned some against the Syrian government.

“Palestinians began to feel used,” Abu Abed said.

As fighting against the Syrian government moved to Damascus last month for the first time, Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian camp in the country, became a haven for refugees as the areas around it saw heavy combat between rebel militias and government forces.

As the Syrian military pursued the militias into Yarmouk from the adjacent Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon, tensions flared. Some residents of Yarmouk said that some of the fighting was now being done by a Palestinian unit of the Syrian army that had defected last week from its deployment in southern Syria and returned to Yarmouk to protect the area.

The numbers also suggest that Palestinians are becoming increasingly involved. Activists in Yarmouk said that of the more than 200 Palestinians who’d been killed in Syria since the uprising began 17 months ago, more than half had died in the past month. Other activists put the death toll at twice that number. [Continue reading…]

Piotr Zalewski reports: Imam Mohammed Drbal had just received a call from his wife. She was panicking and wanted him to come home, he explained. With shells beginning to rain down again, Drbal figured the day’s caseload would be a light one. “People didn’t sleep well because of last night’s shelling,” he said. “Because of today’s, they’ll be afraid to leave their homes.” The artillery barrage was coming from a nearby airbase, the only regime stronghold between Aleppo and the Turkish border not to be overrun by the rebel Free Syrian Army. The bombardment was unlikely to reach this part of town, according to Drbal. And if it did, he deadpanned, “We’re all here together, and in this together.” His fellow imams jiggled inside their beige thobes, struggling to contain their laughter.

Drbal and his fellow clerics comprise the tribunal that has replace the Assad regime as the law in Tal Rifaat, 20 miles north of Aleppo. Two months ago, after the authorities fled, a pair of imams who had led the town’s anti-regime protests founded a council to resolve local disputes and fill the growing security vacuum, and set up shop in a local school. “We couldn’t have double standards and competing interpretations of Islamic law,” said Drbal. “So scholars, locally respected people, decided to meet in a single council.”

Drbal and his colleagues made no bones about the fact that the post-Assad justice dispensed by their court was based on Islamic sharia law. “We are ruling on the basis of sharia,” explained Seraj al-Halabi, one of the men. “We have lawyers, judges and former army officers,” said al-Halabi, himself a veterinarian, “but all of us are Islamic scholars.” Everyone has the right to have his or her case heard by the council, he added. “We are ruling in every area of the law.”

Still, claimed al-Halabi, theirs was not an ordinary Islamic tribunal; the imams were focused as much on delivering justice as on promoting political reconciliation. “We are not here to practice Islamic law like in Saudi Arabia, cutting off heads and hands, but to help run the city and to restore order,” he said. “Sharia seeks solving problems, not creating them. And we are trying to figure out the best solution, the solution that will be most moderate and merciful.” [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Opposition fighters locked in battle for Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, have a new resource: Rebels now control a swath of territory to their north, including two border crossings with Turkey.

The opposition hopes its first substantial enclave of the 17-month uprising, seized from the government in the past few weeks, will transform a fight that for months has seen no clear victor. A similar enclave allowed Libyan rebels to sustain their fight in Libya last year.

Already, the Syrian enclave has made it easier for rebels to bring fighters, weapons, food, fuel and other logistic needs to Aleppo.

The battle for Syria’s commercial capital could be pivotal. A rebel victory there would deal an unprecedented blow to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule; regime dominance there could free Mr. Assad’s troops to try to regain the north.

Thursday’s fighting in Aleppo brought the latest shift in the unresolved battle: A government offensive drove rebel militias from the southern neighborhood of Salaheddin, amid heavy army shelling of several other neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city of 2.2 million, according to rebel fighters and residents.

Rebels, who had held Salaheddin for more than a week, gave conflicting reports of whether they staged a strategic retreat or were overrun by the ferocity of the government attack.

Mr. Assad’s security forces lost control of the sweep of countryside north of Aleppo in late July, fleeing an offensive by rebel groups from across the rural north. Since then, local village committees that steered the uprising have shifted gears, transforming themselves into interim village governments. Rebel checkpoints now dot the winding single-lane roads between the region’s farming villages and towns.

Except for a lone air base where loyalist soldiers are hunkered down and mostly surrounded by rebel fighters, the countryside stretching from Aleppo to the Turkish border about 30 miles away has been cleared of government forces.

The Syrian border town of Azzaz, to Aleppo’s north, fell to rebel fighters on July 21, and much of the rest of the countryside north of Aleppo fell within days, rebels said. About a week ago, rebel fighters-turned-bureaucrats took up posts at a pair of border crossings with Turkey, one near Azzaz and the other west of Aleppo. Crisply dressed rebels check passports of new arrivals, enter names into computers and extend a welcome hand to “Free Syria.”

Samir Haj Omar, an economist who now heads the local 30-member political council in Azzaz, said Turkish officials have been more willing to deal with him and other rebel leaders now that they are de facto governors.

He has used that newfound heft to convince Turkey to allow cargo trucks to cross the border. On Wednesday, the first new shipments of rice, flour and gasoline arrived in rebel-controlled northern Syria, according to local officials here.

Throughout the north, a region where many civilians had fled or remained locked in their houses to avoid the regime’s crackdown on protests, people now fill village streets. Shops have reopened in recent days for the first time in four months. In the village of Maraa, children flocked to a reopened public swimming pool to cool off on Thursday. Abandoned Syrian Army tanks have been converted to makeshift playgrounds.

For fighters desperately trying to keep up supplies of food, fuel and weapons, the ability to freely cross the Turkish border and move between villages without fear of encountering regime forces is a dramatic change.

Earlier in the conflict, supplies were ferried across the Turkish border by horse, or on foot, by smugglers traversing muddy trails while dodging Turkish and Syrian border guards. A local fighter in Azzaz who said he helped smuggle in local rebels’ first rocket propelled grenades earlier this year said it took them weeks to negotiate the treacherous route through regime-controlled territory for just two RPGs.

Now, such supply shipments can make the run from the Turkish border to the front line in Aleppo in about 90 minutes.

The Daily Star reports: Hezbollah will not remain silent over the arrest of former Information Minister Michel Samaha on terrorist suspicions, Hezbollah MP Mohammad Raad said Thursday, accusing members of the judiciary of collaborating with “suspicious” security forces against the pro-Syrian ex-official.

“We have long experienced these security fabrications and some judges are connected to suspicious security services,” said Raad, in the party’s first response to the arrest of Samaha.

A pro-Syrian regime official, Samaha was arrested by the Internal Security Forces Information Branch Thursday on suspicion of being involved in a plot to carry out terrorist attacks in Lebanon in collaboration with the Syrian regime.

Samaha – a longtime ally of the Syrian regime, two-time minister and former MP – was taken from his summer residence in Metn’s Khanshara-Juwar Thursday morning to ISF headquarters in Beirut for questioning.

Another police unit stormed his residence in Beirut’s Ashrafieh.

The operations were carried out upon the orders of acting-State Prosecutor Samir Hammoud.

Hammoud told The Daily Star Samaha’s case was part of a wider probe into security threats facing the country.

“There is an ongoing security investigation that has not finished yet and I am personally overseeing it,” said Hammoud, who met with Samaha later Thursday.Samaha’s personal staff, including his driver Fares Barakat, his secretary Gladys Awada and his personal bodyguard Ali Mallah, were also detained and taken in for questioning.

Security sources said Samaha admitted that he was involved in a plot to carry out bomb attacks in Lebanon and that he had personally transferred a number of explosives from Syria into Lebanon.

James Folley reports for Global Post.

BBC News reports: Veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi is expected to be appointed as the new UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, according to diplomats.

If confirmed, he would succeed former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who resigned last week saying he could no longer carry out the role.

A six-point peace plan proposed by Mr Annan failed to come into effect, and violence has escalated.

Rebels lost of a key area of Aleppo on Thursday after weeks of fighting.

The rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) confirmed it had retreated from the strategic Salah al-Din district in the face of a large-scale government offensive launched the previous day.

Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, writes: We humans often make the mistake of not learning from history, even when it is recent. Civil war in the Levant is not a thing of the distant past. With Syria descending into worsening violence, the 15-year Lebanese civil war should provide frightening lessons of what happens when the fabric of a society unravels.

When the Islamic Awakening — also known as the Arab Spring — began in December 2010, we all saw people rising up to claim their rights. We have witnessed the emergence of civic movements demanding freedom, democracy, dignity and self-determination.

We in Tehran have watched these developments with delight. After all, a civic movement demanding the same things that many Arabs want today is what led to the emergence of…

… the Green Movement and mass protests across Iran following presidential elections in June 2009 whose outcome appeared to have been rigged.

Even if the protests were eventually crushed, most of the movement’s leaders imprisoned and many tortured, the popular uprising which drew support from all quarters of Iranian society was at that time one of the most impressive demonstrations of people power that the region had ever experienced. While it’s influence might not often be cited in what has been labelled an ‘Arab’ spring, ordinary Iranians surely served as inspiring role models who made it clear that democracy is never a gift from enlightened or benign rulers — it is a demand which eventually cannot be refused.

Oh, and just to make it clear to readers who didn’t follow the link to the rest of Salehi’s commentary: he was not doing the political unthinkable for someone in his position — praising the 2009 protests; he was presenting the 1979 Islamic revolution as a precursor to the Arab Spring. That, in and of itself, does not reveal Iranian hypocrisy. It is in the following three sentences that Assad-backing Iran loses any credibility:

During the past three decades, Iran has consistently underlined that it is the duty of all governments to respect their people’s demands. We have maintained this position as the Islamic Awakening has unfolded, without any lopsided shifts depending on the location of these civic movements. We have been in favor of change to meet people’s demands, whether in Syria or Egypt or anywhere else.

Really? So has the only mistake made by Syrians been that they failed to rely on the appropriate channels for pressing their demands? Any what of the Iranian government’s duty to respect their own people’s demands?

What the last 30 years reveal is how easy it is for revolutionaries to turn into counter-revolutionaries.

Ian Black writes: Kofi Annan has just three weeks left to serve out his time as the UN envoy for Syria. Understandably disappointed at the failure of what others had called “mission impossible” – a description he came to agree with – he lamented two aspects of the crisis: its increasing militarisation and the disunity of the security council. Earlier, in a Guardian interview, he had deplored the “destructive competition” of the five big powers who still sit round the world’s “top table” on New York’s East river.

It bears repeating that Syria is first of all a human tragedy, with thousands of dead and many thousands more lives ruined in the bloodiest chapter of what in happier or more naive times and circumstances was called the Arab spring. Feelings are running high. For some, however, principled objections to western policy clearly weigh more heavily than the suffering of the Syrian people at the hands of a government that used deadly force from the moment protests erupted in Deraa in March 2011.

It is a moot point whether diplomacy could ever have succeeded in ending the carnage. Syria, it has been wisely observed, is where the Arab uprisings met the cold war and the Sunni-Shia divide. Regional and international rivalries worsened by the Libyan crisis last year, sectarian incitement and a fight to the death for regime survival all make for a toxic mixture.

For most elements of Syria’s fractured opposition, Assad’s acceptance of Annan’s six-point peace plan was only ever a way to buy time, exploit divisions and carry on killing. The regime barely observed a ceasefire that notionally began in April or implemented any of the plan’s other five conditions. The armed opposition accepted it but carried on fighting even as mass peaceful protests continued.

Yet the cartoon book claim that “the west” (conspiring with compliant Arabs) has malevolently blocked an agreement that a principled Russia tirelessly supported does not stand up to scrutiny. (Nor does the closely related and deeply patronising notion that Syrians who are prepared to risk all for freedoms others take for granted are mere puppets in the hands of others.) [Continue reading…]

To focus on Black’s last point, it’s worth underlining the blatant hypocrisy of those who acknowledge the legitimacy of armed resistance when the injustice being challenged is Zionism, yet view armed resistance to the Assad regime as inherently suspect.

Syrians supposedly have the right to peacefully demonstrate yet anyone who picks up a gun suddenly becomes an instrument of imperialism. Indeed, few with this twisted perspective will even acknowledge that it is possible for an individual to make the transition from marching to fighting without having been corrupted in the process. Moreover, protesters and fighters are very often referred to as though they are mutually exclusive categories. Most perplexing is when these anti-resistance voices are raised in the United States.

It makes me wonder: would the proponents of this anti-revolutionary view, had they been alive at that time, have raised similar objections to the American Revolution — that it lost its legitimacy when the revolutionaries took up arms and accepted support from imperial powers?

Martin Chulov reports from Aleppo: All the might that the forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad can muster is now camped just over a large bank of land to the east of Salahedin, the suburb of Aleppo that has become the focal point of the conflict. All the men the guerrilla force can assemble are holed up in crumbling buildings, the closest of them only 200m from the nearest regime tank.

Yet the decisive battle that most in Aleppo seemed to have feared is slowly giving way to another – even more dreaded – reality. Stalemate, with neither side willing or able to advance. A new sense is beginning to settle in that neither Salahedin, nor the rest of Syria’s second city, will see an end to the fighting any time soon.

Despite its superior numbers and weaponry, the army appears in no hurry to bring the uprising here to an end. The siege that has crippled the city is likely to get far worse.

“This will be a second Baba Amr,” said Sheikh Salim al-Hoss, as he rested under a mulberry tree in a commandeered schoolyard just outside Aleppo. “They are going to wear us down. They think they have time on their side.”

Hoss was sitting with members of a military council, who were all breaking their daily Ramadan fast on Tuesday night, largely in silence. Snipers had killed two young rebels from their unit in the late afternoon and the rush to bury them before sunset seemed to have numbed the men.

The effect on one of the dead men’s fathers was more profound. He stood trembling and bewildered later in the evening as he received condolences in a hastily erected mourning tent. A tear ran down his face as lines of wellwishers reached for his hand.

Just before noon he had spoken to his 24-year-old son, Ala’a Tamur, by phone in between battles on Salahedin’s main frontline. Just before dinner he buried him.

“Be proud you have a martyr, uncle,” one of the men’s colleagues told the boy’s bereft father. The 73-year-old stared and nodded.

Street 15 in Salahedin now resembles Leningrad in its darkest days, and the suburb itself is in far worse shape than when the Guardian last visited on Saturday. Most streets on the eastern side are now impassable by car. Broken sewage and water pipes and food leftovers have formed a festering stew over the few surfaces that aren’t littered with the flotsam and jetsam of war. And Salahedin has a new arrival – flies, which swarm around anything organic. They are so thick in some parts that rebels look for detours to avoid them. As they do they need to avoid trampling on the only other thing that seems to be living at ground zero of the battle for Syria – kittens.

Rebels have taken in many of them, and it’s not uncommon to find a gnarled, sweaty guerrilla sleeping on the floor of a commandeered flat with an abandoned kitten asleep on his chest.

Two men sleeping in what passes for a first aid clinic in one part of Salahedin had to throw their new pets aside late on Wednesday, when a wounded rebel appeared like a ghost in their darkened doorway. He fell on a foam mattress clutching his left side. “A sniper, haram,” he said. “I was going to meet the defector.”

“Press hard [on the wound], press until it hurts,” one bystander said. The men instead offered caresses and comforting words, then bundled him into the back of a 4×4, which rushed him away.

Snipers continue to filter into Salahedin despite the almost impossible journey to get here. “We had four in this quarter alone today,” said a rebel from Damascus, who himself defected three months ago. “There would be many more if they could find a way.”

Recent senior defectors, among them two colonels from Aleppo who made their way to a nearby town on Tuesday, claimed that the fear of large numbers of defections if a ground attack was launched was shaping regime tactics.

“If they send the army in, they will throw off their clothes and leave,” one of the men said. They want to sit back and bomb, just like they did in Homs.”

The defectors also claimed that jets would bomb Aleppo and the eastern hinterland between 3am and 5am. On cue, the jets arrived. The fulfilled prediction means the two officers will now be asked to help devise tactics to repel the assault.

Whoever can prevail in a war of attrition will prevail in Aleppo and likely in the overall uprising. Though battle-weary and at times despairing, and still underprepared, the rebel forces appear to have the stamina to see the fight to a conclusion.