The New York Times reports: With the growing conviction that the Assad family’s 42-year grip on power in Syria is coming to an end, Obama administration officials worked on contingency plans Wednesday for a collapse of the Syrian government, focusing particularly on the chemical weapons that Syria is thought to possess and that President Bashir al-Assad could try to use on opposition forces and civilians.
Pentagon officials were in talks with Israeli defense officials about whether Israel might move to destroy Syrian weapons facilities, two administration official said. The administration is not advocating such an attack, the American officials said, because of the risk that it would give Mr. Assad an opportunity to rally support against Israeli interference.
President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, was in Israel over the weekend and discussed the Syrian crisis with officials there, a White House official said.
Mr. Obama called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday and urged him again to allow Mr. Assad to be pushed from power. Russia, so far, has refused. A White House statement said that Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama “noted the growing violence in Syria and agreed on the need to support a political transition as soon as possible that achieves our shared goal of ending the violence and avoiding a further deterioration of the situation.”
The statement pointedly noted the “differences our governments have had on Syria,” but said the two leaders “agreed to have their teams continue to work toward a solution.”
American diplomatic and military officials said the bombing in Damascus on Wednesday that killed several of Mr. Assad’s closest advisers was a turning point in the conflict. “Assad is a spent force in terms of history,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “He will not be a part of Syria’s future.”
Alluding to Russia’s position, Mr. Carney said the argument that Mr. Assad’s ouster would result in more violence was refuted by the bombing, and that Mr. Assad’s continued rule “will result in greater violence,” not less.
The Washington Post reports from Yabrud: The flag of the revolution flies high above this prosperous town in southwestern Syria. Each week, thousands take to the streets to demonstrate peacefully. Rebels roam freely — but without weapons.
The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost control of Yabrud. But unlike Homs, Hama and countless other places where pro-Assad forces have unleashed furious assaults to keep their grip amid a 16-month-long rebellion, Yabrud appears to have been given up to the rebels. Here, at least for the time being, the revolution has been won. And it was won without a fight.
Aside from a brief foray into town in late December, the army has yet to attempt to occupy Yabrud. “They came here for a few days, but then they simply left. There was no significant battle,” said Abu Mohammed, an anti-government activist who asked that his full name not be used.
The result is an oasis of calm amid a conflict that the International Committee of the Red Cross formally declared a civil war on Sunday, one that has claimed at least 14,000 lives. It is a place that speaks to the limits of Assad’s power to control this nationwide rebellion, as well as the hopes of activists who believe the uprising can achieve its goals without dragging the country even deeper into strife.
Yabrud’s idyllic farms and bustling urban life stand in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country, where war has become a daily reality. Sixty miles to the north, the city of Homs has been the site of some of the fiercest fighting, leaving entire neighborhoods destroyed by tank and artillery fire. The Damascus suburb of Douma, 30 miles to the south, has become a flash point in the battle to control the capital.
In areas that fall under the rebels’ sway, the pattern of pro-Assad forces has been to storm the town, expel anti-government fighters and go door to door, taking revenge. But not in Yabrud — at least not yet.
“It is simple,” said a local rebel commander, a defected artillery lieutenant from the Syrian army. “The army is fighting in Homs and in Damascus. They do not have the strength to also fight in Yabrud.”
The rebels don’t want a fight here, either, and have gone to great lengths to avoid one.
Abu Mohammed, the activist, credits Yabrud’s calm to a more restrained approach to revolution than that displayed by other Syrian cities. When a pro-government militia known as the shabiha has periodically caused trouble in Yabrud, the response has been deliberately muted.
“They broke into many houses, my father’s house, stealing and breaking things. We did not react strongly,” he said. “We did not want to bring the war here.”
When a prominent Yabrud-based activist was arrested two months ago, the rebel Free Syrian Army, known as the FSA, responded by kidnapping a general’s son and quietly negotiated a prisoner exchange.
FSA forces do not openly carry weapons within Yabrud, only at the rebel checkpoints that ring the town. “We didn’t want to upset the people in the town, make them afraid,” Abu Mohammed said. “Life here in Yabrud is normal.”
Yabrud is a wealthy town. Most families have at least one member working abroad in the Persian Gulf, often as an engineer. Porsches and Mercedeses roll through the streets. Many citizens regularly travel to Damascus for school or business.
As a result, activists and rebel army members here are cautious. Many wear masks. Others ask that their faces not be shown in photographs. “We have had less destruction here because we have been more discreet,” Abu Mohammed said. “For instance, there is still a government police station here. All of our civil records are kept there. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us.”
But there is nothing discreet about the 40-foot revolutionary flag flying from a cellphone tower atop a hill above town, or the weekly demonstrations on Fridays that draw thousands. Intricate revolutionary artwork covers the courtyard walls of most public buildings, and a sculpture of the FSA emblem sits on a pedestal in the town center. [Continue reading…]
BBC News provides profiles of the men killed in today’s bombing in Damascus: President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, Deputy Defence Minister Gen Asef Shawkat, as well as Defence Minister Gen Daoud Rajiha and former Defence Minister Hassan Turkomani. The bomb attack took place at the headquarters of the Baath Party Regional Command’s National Security Bureau (NSB) in the Rawda area of central Damascus.
Many media reports have repeated Syrian state media’s claim that this was a suicide bombing, although the Free Syrian Army have claimed that the bomb was concealed in a water cooler and set off remotely. That explanation sounds more plausible to me than the idea that anyone (including a body guard) could have gained access to such a meeting without the explosives strapped to his body catching anyone’s attention.
The regime certainly has an interest in portraying this attack as the work of suicidal Islamist extremists rather than as deadly blow from their primary adversary.
Reuters reported: Two rebel groups claimed responsibility for the attack on the security meeting.
“This is the volcano we talked about, we have just started,” said Qassim Saadedine, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, a group made up of army defectors and Sunni youths.
Liwa al-Islam, an Islamist rebel group the name of which means “The Brigade of Islam”, said it had carried out the attack after weeks of planning and gave a different version of events.
“Our men managed to plant improvised explosives in the building for the meeting. We had been planning this for over a month,” a spokesman for the group, who asked to be identified as Abu Ammar, said by telephone. State television said earlier that it was a suicide bombing.
@fsa_hq_syria tweeted: “#Syria the bomb was inside a water cooler in the room which was packed with 25 top thugs and was remote detonated from a distance”
The Washington Post reports: The rebel Free Syrian Army said its loyalists planted bombs inside a room where the government’s central command unit for crisis management — a special cell comprised of about a dozen of the country’s top security chiefs — was to meet to discuss efforts to crush the uprising.
The bombs were detonated remotely from outside the building once the meeting was underway, said Col. Malik Kurdi, the rebel group’s deputy commander. “The Free Syrian Army carried out this attack in retaliation for the massacres committed by the regime and because of the international silence,” Kurdi said. “We promised that we are going to hit the regime in its most sensitive axis. This was necessary for us.”
The government said others at the meeting were injured. Some news outlets reported that Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar was badly hurt and eventually died from his wounds, but the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said he and another official identified only as Lt. Gen. Hisham were in “stable” condition. The agency was apparently referring to Hisham Bakhtiar, Assad’s national security chief.
Meanwhile, AFP reports: More than 60 soldiers were Wednesday reported killed as rebels pressed their offensive to capture Damascus, upping the stakes ahead of a Security Council vote on a resolution threatening sanctions on Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said at least 20 government soldiers died on Tuesday in Damascus clashes with the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) and that between 40 and 50 were killed the previous day.
Columns of black smoke rose over the capital on Wednesday as the Local Coordination Committees, which organises anti-regime protests on the ground, reporting fighting in several districts.
The Qaboon neighbourhood was bombarded during the night and pounded again on Wednesday morning, the LCC said, as was Barzeh neighbourhood, and sustained gunfire was heard.
It also said there was less traffic than normal in the city where fighting has raged since Sunday, with the rebels announcing a full-scale offensive dubbed “the Damascus volcano and earthquakes of Syria.”
The question that must now stalk Bashar al-Assad’s mind day and night is: who can I trust?
The metaphor of regimes being toppled is often misleading since the fatal blow is just as likely to come from the inside as the outside.
The tight inner circle dedicated to Assad’s survival just got even smaller today with the deaths of Defense Minister Dawoud Rajha and Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat who were killed in a suicide attack. But if Reuters is correct in reporting that the attacker was himself a bodyguard for the core members of the regime, the survivors have been reminded that they may have less to fear from armed rebels in the streets of Damascus than they do from those who stand at their sides.
[Update: A tweet from @fsa_hq_syria says: “the bomb was inside a water cooler in the room which was packed with 25 top thugs and was remote detonated from a distance”]
By forcing the regime to use armor and artillery in the capital, the rebels have sent a message to the regime’s key support bases that Assad has lost control of much of the country and that his promises to crush the rebellion ring hollow. “Once the fighting gets into the key cities, the advantage passes from the military to the insurgents,” says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “As long as the fighting is confined to villages and small towns, those can be surrounded and pounded into submission with artillery fire. You can’t do that in a city of 5 million people. Your heavy weapons become meaningless, because you can’t destroy Damascus — and so, the city’s Sunni neighborhoods become a sea in which the rebels can swim and multiply.”
By some accounts, the military during the past three days ordered whole neighborhoods in the capital to evacuate their homes in order to clear the rebels from Sunni areas. Not only do such actions confirm to the citizenry that the regime faces a popular insurrection rather than simply a terrorism problem, as its propagandists claim; they also build resentment against the security forces and create an even more permissive environment for the insurgents. “But if the regime can’t drive the rebels out of the capital,” Landis notes, “the regime is finished.”
Last month, Assad, providing a glimpse into his psychopathically delusional mindset, likened his relationship with Syria to that of a surgeon. With the country as his patient, it was inevitable that his hands would get covered in blood as he attempted to save its life. This is not the imagery that would be employed by anyone who ever needed to win an election.
Even if we are long familiar with military officials using the twisted euphemism of “surgical strikes”, there is I think something even more macabre about a president who claims he must slice open his nation for the good of its health.
Now, as Assad’s inner circle gets even smaller, his ability to make rational decisions will almost certainly be lost.
As fighting rages in Damascus, and the Assad family that has ruled Syria for four decades struggles for its life against a growing rebellion, a picture is emerging of a tight inner group determined to fight its way out of the crisis, even as support for the government falls away.
At its head is President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000 and who friend and opponent alike say appears increasingly detached from reality, convinced he is fighting a conspiracy against him and Syria.
Around him is a tight circle of family and clan members, and a security establishment staffed mainly by adherents of the Alawite minority to which the Assads belong, a branch of Shi’ite Islam in a country that is three quarters Sunni.
“Even those who love him feel he can no longer provide security,” said Ayman Abdel-Nour, an adviser to Assad until 2007 and now an opposition figure. “They think he is useless and living in a cocoon.”
“He thinks of himself as God’s messenger to rule Syria. He listens to the sycophants around him who tell him ‘you are a gift from God’. He believes that he is right and that whoever contradicts him is a traitor. Many of his close friends and advisers have either left him or distanced themselves from him.”
In response, Assad has taken charge of a military crisis unit and takes all the daily decisions, from the deployment of army units to tasks assigned to the security services, as well as mobilization of the Alawite Shabbiha, the feared militia accused of a series of massacres in the past two months.
“Bashar remains the centre. He is involved in the day-to-day details of managing the crisis,” said a Lebanese politician close to the Syrian rulers. “He set up an elite unit led by him to manage the crisis daily.”
In this unit, intelligence chief Hisham Bekhtyar is responsible for security coordination, Dawoud Rajha is minister of defense, Assef Shawkat, the president’s powerful brother-in-law, is deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. Alongside them are Ali Mamlouk, special adviser on security, Abdel-Fattah Qudsiyeh, head of military intelligence, and Mohammad Nassif Kheyrbek, a veteran operator from the era of Assad’s father.
Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and Syria’s second most powerful man, commands the main loyalist strike forces.
“Maher is directly involved in the confrontation on the ground and is in direct contact with every one of them. He has direct military responsibilities,” the Lebanese politician said.
While there has been no shake-up in the leadership, its inner circle is beginning to realize it faces a serious crisis. “In the hierarchy of the authorities you don’t see a noticeable change”, he said. But “you hear more realistic language. The prestige and standing of the regime has been scratched”.
Abdel-Nour, the former Assad adviser, paints a darker picture of the inner circle. He stresses that there is nothing autonomous about the way government units operate, whether the shelling of opposition neighborhoods by Maher’s armored columns or the killing of villagers by the Shabbiha militia. All units are under Bashar’s command and many have family ties.
Each region has its own Shabbiha leader and many of the central cities are led by Shabbiha men related to Assad.
The 46-year-old Assad said last month that Syria was at war and ordered his government to spare no effort in pursuit of victory against rebels he has described as terrorists.
Drawing parallels with his earlier profession as an eye surgeon, he said: “When a surgeon performs an operation to treat a wound do we say to him: ‘Your hands are covered in blood’?”
Simon Assaf speaking at Marxism 2012, hosted by the Socialist Workers Party in London earlier this month: Syria has been under emergency law since 1963 — three months before I was born… But Syrian society before that was extraordinarily vibrant: politically — you talk about the development of Arab nationalism, communist ideas, all these kinds of things, you’re looking to Syria — this is where it came from [in the Arab world]. Understand that Syria was so important for that and you begin to see this re-develop.
So this idea that without Bashar al Assad or without the West or without someone else, Syria will simply degenerate into a sectarian war because really, at the end of the day, the ordinary people of Syria and Lebanon, all they think about — they wake up in the morning, they have their eggs, eat their hummus, and then they go kill their neighbor.
It doesn’t actually work that way. Sectarianism is something that comes from the outside to divide us, and you really see the way in which they are also using sectarianism inside the revolution itself.
At the moment we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation. So in places like Homs, in Idlib, in Hama, and Dara and all these places are under extraordinary levels of bombardment.
Yesterday[, July 4, the Syrian army] retook one of the suburbs in Damascus. The daily toll of deaths is really quite horrific. A hundred, a hundred and fifty people dying every day. They are talking of about 65,000 people who are missing, presumed dead — who knows. There’s 200,000 people who are being held hostage by the regime, rounded up and so on, and an unknown number of soldiers who have been executed for refusing to fire on the demonstrations.
And so we are, if you like, in a very difficult situation. You can see the dangers that are now inside of Syria. The dangers are this: If the revolution does not succeed relatively soon then you can see that point at which outside forces begin to have bigger influence.
But at the moment the revolution feels like it is moving forward. So you think about what’s happening around Idlib, around the north, around Homs and all these areas, there is a huge rebel offensive. Town after town is now falling in front of them.
The state is retreating more and more into the urban areas which they are finding extraordinarily difficult to control.
I got a message from a friend of a friend in Damascus which said: Damascus is full of the Free Syrian Army. That is, young demonstrators who have now joined the armed rebels. All we need is a few more weapons and it will be over.
You really get that sense, and their was a tweet this morning [July 5] from one of the few journalists who is embedded with the rebels who said they had just driven from Homs to Damascus and not seen one soldier along the route.
And you really feel that if the end is going to come, it’s going to come extraordinarily quickly. And that’s what we hope is going to happen.
However, if this fails. If it goes longer then you can see the dangers, the real dangers emerging inside of it. The West, the outside forces will take more control and that sectarian frustration starting to develop. There is always the danger there and its always a danger that we have to be weary of…
This is a real revolution. It’s not as simple as Egypt — I don’t think Egypt is that simple to be honest with you anyway. It’s not as simple as Egypt or Tunisia, but it is a real revolution.
We as revolutionaries have a duty to engage with those inside the revolution to talk about the dangers of foreign intervention — why we don’t call for it — and all these kinds of things. But also to talk about a strategy of how to win the revolution.
You begin to see the development of strikes, popular strikes, mass demonstrations, mutinies and so on and actually see, this is the way forward. To do this, we have to go much much further than simply see it as replacing one group at the top with another group at the top, and actually unleashing the full potential of the revolution means unleashing a struggle beyond simply the change of the people at the top — a fundamental change inside of Syrian society as well.
EAWorldView: EA’s in-depth assessment of the Free Syrian Army, posted last Wednesday, assessed that the regime is now weak enough that it is vulnerable to a sudden takeover of the capital, for example through a series of surprise insurgent attacks. So is this the Battle for Damascus?
Probably not, at least not yet. What we are not seeing is heavy casualties on either side. We are not seeing large swings in control territory. We are not seeing extremely heavy firefights. This does not look like an epic battle to the finish.
What we are seeing are widespread skirmishes that have shut down most of the capital.The Guardian, asking the same question as us, has spoken to two activists. One man, a resident of Barzeh, says:
These clashes in the capital mark a new stage in the Syrian revolution. It is close now.
The regime has tried hard in the last year and half to make Damascus [isolated] from what’s going on outside – to make Damascus quiet. They succeeded in the past, but yesterday there was shelling here, and [today] there was shelling on al-Qaboon and shelling on the south. Suddenly Damascus is in the centre of the action.
Inside Barzeh there is no sign of government presence. I think they don’t dare to fight here. They are stuck in Midan and Qaboon. They are too busy to come here. They used to storm my neighbourhood three times a week
Another man, reportedly the head of the Revolution Leadership Council in Damascus, shares our assessment that, while important, these fights will not likely result in the fall of Damascus. But, he adds, the fighting could spread.
Among those who see the fighting in Syria as the product of an externally controlled covert regime-change project, it is frequently asserted — without much concrete evidence — that the conflict is being fueled by weapons flowing from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and entering Syria through Turkey.
There’s an easy way of testing this theory without attempting to trace weapons back to their source: examine the arms trade on the Turkish border. C.J. Chivers has just been doing this and finds that demand far outstrips supply. There are clearly many more men in Syria seeking weapons and ammunition than there are guns and bullets and the money to buy them.
Rifle rounds cost $2 each or more and Kalashnikovs now cost $1,000 to more than $2,000. American-made M-16s are available and very expensive (from $5,000 to $7,000 per rifle, with scope) but they are also useless — there are virtually no bullets available.
While the most pressing concern of rebel commanders is that they don’t have enough weapons or funds to buy them, there are also looming concerns about what happens after the fall of Assad.
Last year, in Libya, arms researchers watched the swift arc from arms scarcity to oversupply among the opposition forces. From late winter into early summer, weapons were in short enough supply that many Libyan men went to battle without them, ready to pick up the weapon of a fallen fighter, while hoping to capture the weapons of slain Qaddafi troops. At that time, Kalashnikovs could cost $2,000 or more, just as they do for Syrian fighters now. By last fall, after the struggle for the country ebbed, many fighters possessed several rifles, along with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades. Prices were plummeting, with reports of Kalashnikovs for sale at less than $500. Post-Qaddafi Libya, which for months had inhaled weapons, had become a black-market exporter, with all manner of arms being reported traveling out.
With this in mind, one Syrian rebel commander from Idlib, after the meeting last Friday, drove with journalists from The New York Times to a house he and a commander from Hama share with an ever-changing collection of fighters. His name was Abu Hamza, and he was a former major in the Syrian army. Abu Hamza wanted more weapons. But he said he worried where this was headed – toward the possibility of chaos. “After the war,” he said, “we have to collect these weapons.”
Abu Hamza was confident about the prospects for the uprising; there is no question, he said, that Mr. Assad will fall. But he worried about the effects of these weapons on post-conflict Syria. “We have been watching,” he said, “and we do not want Syria to be like Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya.”
According to a groundbreaking new scientific study released Tuesday by Harvard University, the U.S. population could very well have discovered a new and unprecedented level of not caring about Syria. “Our research indicates that Americans may have stumbled upon an extreme degree of ignorance and disregard for the plight of dying Syrians that we never before thought humanly possible,” said lead researcher Dr. Henry Mason, noting that recent images of the Syrian government openly killing citizens in the nation’s streets appeared to have no measurable effect on American psyches. “At some point—possibly after the mass murder of more than 100 men, women, and children in Houla, or when photos of mass graves began appearing across the Internet—the U.S. citizenry must have found previously untapped reserves of callousness, indifference, and self-absorption that were simply beyond the capacity of our research tools to quantify.” Mason confirmed that scientists expect apathy levels to rise sharply in further trial studies, primarily because 95 percent of Americans still don’t know the president of Syria’s name. (Onion)
In Yarmouk camp in Damascus on Saturday, July 14, Palestinians denounced Bashar al Assad and Kofi Annan.
Robin Yassin-Kassab has written an important piece that deserves to be widely read — especially by those who struggle to understand why anyone who is pro-Palestinian should also be pro-Syrian or for anyone who is confused about what being pro-Syrian actually means. PW
Blanket thinkers
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
One of my infantile leftist ex-friends recently referred to the Free Syrian Army as a ‘sectarian gang’. The phrase may well come from Asa’ad Abu Khalil, who seems to have a depressingly large audience, but it could come from any of a large number of blanket thinkers in the ranks of the Western left. I admit that I sometimes indulged in such blanket thinking in the past. For instance, I used to refer to Qatar and Saudi Arabia as ‘US client states’, as if this was all to be said about them. I did so in angry response to the mainstream Western media which referred to pro-Western Arab tyrannies as ‘moderate’; but of course Qatar and Saudi Arabia have their own, competing agendas, and do not always behave as the Americans want them to. This is more true now, in a multipolar world and in the midst of a crippling economic crisis in the West, than it was ten years ago. Chinese workers undertaking oil and engineering projects in the Gulf are one visible sign of this shifting order.
(My talk of ‘infantile leftists’ does not include the entire left of course. Simon Assaf of the Socialist Workers, for instance, understands what’s happening. So does Max Blumenthal. And many others.)
The problem with blanket thinkers is that they are unable to adapt to a rapidly shifting reality. Instead of evidence, principles and analytical tools, they are armed only with ideological blinkers. Many of the current crop became politicised by Palestine and the invasion of Iraq, two cases in which the imperialist baddy is very obviously American. As a result, they read every other situation through the US-imperialist lens.
Qaddafi had opened up Libyan oilfields to Western exploitation, he bought Western weapons, and he tortured rendered suspects for the CIA. Inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the Libyans rose against the tyranny with incredible courage. When Britain and France, for their own reasons, helped to hasten the end by degrading Qaddafi’s mercenary forces (important but not decisive help – Qaddafi’s fall was effected by a rising in Tripoli and an influx of fighters from the Jebel Nafusa), blanket thinkers very insultingly painted the popular revolution as a foreign plot. Some even retrospectively raised Qaddafi to the rank of anti-imperialist hero. And since the fall of the old regime they’ve done everything they can to paint Libya as a failed state, a site of genocide, a new Iraq. It’s pretty insulting to Iraq as well as to Libya.
The fact that politics and civil society were effectively banned for decades, and the fact that Qaddafi imposed a civil war on his people, traumatising them and causing thousands of young men to take up arms, means that the new Libya faces imense problems. This is not news. Whenever a dictatorship ends violently, all the problems which have been repressed will burst forth. It’s like taking the lid off a steam cooker: all the good and evil in the society, all the intelligence and stupidity that was previously hidden, will spill out. This is not an argument for keeping the dictatorship. Several hundred have been killed in Libya since the fall of Qaddafi, mainly in battles between rival militias. Sometimes this has had a tribal or revenge aspect, but there has been no Iraq-style ethnic cleansing. There is a small separatist movement in the east. Fringe Islamist extremist groups have made a lot of noise. Many of the armed young men are reluctant to give up their arms. But there has been a very successful election. If the new government is able to absorb the militias into a national army and to resolve tribal, regional and other disputes within an accepted political process, Libya can look forward to a much better future. Opinion polls and conversations with Libyans show that an overwhelmingly large majority are happy that Qaddafi has gone and are optimistic about the future. But what does Libyan opinion matter to blanket thinkers?
After 17 months of slaughter in Syria, there is no no-fly zone. The extent of Western and ‘client’ intervention is this: Saudi Arabia and Qatar may be providing a small amount of light weaponry. The Turks may be helping to coordinate the weapons deliveries. The CIA appears to have a few men on the ground watching where the weapons are going and hoping (vainly) to ensure that they’ll never end up in the hands of anti-Zionist militants. On the other side stands a nakedly sectarian regime which considers its people slaves and murders them and destroys their cities with Russian weapons. Imperialist Russia, which has oppressed Muslims in the Caucuses and central Asia, and which bears half the blame for all the Cold War hot wars in Africa, is resupplying the regime with attack helicopters, tank parts and ammunition as the death toll surpasses seventeen thousand. Russia also protects the regime from condemnation at the UN security council. It plays the same role with regards to Syria that the United States plays with Israel. But how do the blanket thinkers see the situation? For them it’s yet another clear cut case of American imperialist aggression against a noble resistance regime, and once again the people are passive tools.
At best they are passive tools. They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut. The blanket thinkers search for evidence of crimes committed by the popular resistance, and when they find them (usually on very flimsy evidence) they use them to smear the entire movement. They demand the resistance negotiate with a regime which has proved again and again that its only strategy is slaughter. They demand that the people remain peaceful as their children are tortured, their women raped, their neighbourhoods levelled. Leftist blanket thinkers do not apply the same criteria to the popular resistance of the Palestinians. It’s Zionists who do that.
To call the Free Syrian Army a sectarian gang is tantamount to calling the Syrian people a sectarian gang. It betrays a willed ignorance of reality. The FSA was formed in response to the sickening violence perpetrated by the Syrian regime, which at this stage is certainly a sectarian gang. Its Alawi military units work with armed Alawi civilians to slaughter Sunnis. This is a disaster for the Alawis and everyone else; it sows the seeds of a potential war which would destroy the country for generations, and it’s one of the first reasons why the regime must go as soon as possible. But the FSA is in reality hundreds of local militias which sometimes cooperate. It consists of defected soldiers (these people are heroes – they fled the army at huge personal risk because they were unable to stomach murdering their people; most soldiers who try to defect are killed before they leave base) and local men who have taken up arms to defend their neighbourhoods. Because the FSA is made of ordinary men, it covers an enormous range of political opinion. Some fighters are disillusioned Baathists, some are secularists, some leftists, some support the Muslim Brotherhood and some are attracted by extremist Wahhabi rhetoric. Some, I’m sure, are criminals, because some of the Syrian people are criminal. Some will be in it in the hopes of financial or sexual profit, because that’s the way people are.
Most are apolitical people, except for the fact that they want to bring down the tyranny. They fight because they have no choice. Of course, there is a huge danger that apolitical people will be easily manipulated by sectarian rhetoric, especially given that their enemy instrumentalises sectarianism. This is certainly a difficult period for revolutions in the Muslim world and internationally. The collapse of leftist thinking and reach, and the shrinking of public debate by dictatorships and consumerism, has left the way open to retrograde forms of religious or nationalist politics. Some of the battle videos labelled ‘Free Syrian Army’ look and sound depressingly similar to jihadist videos from Iraq. But for now it’s mainly a problem of style and ignorance, and it can easily be misinterpreted by an orientalist eye. Most Syrian people are religious, whether we like it or not. But most Syrian people are also aware that a sectarian war would produce no winners. The Allahu Akbar chant expresses a faith which is necessary to overcome the fear of being shot. It doesn’t autmomatically mean ‘Kill the Kuffar’. (But who am I talking to? The Palestinians use religious rhetoric and talk about ‘the Jews’ rather than ‘the Zionists’, and it doesn’t bother the blanket thinkers for a moment).
The longer the necessary fight goes on the more brutalised the people will become, and the more likely that vengeful sectarian voices will dominate. It is the duty of any right-thinking person, leftist or otherwise, to support the oppressed people in their struggle. Anyone who does so, and who respects the Syrians enough to base their comments on knowledge rather than assumption, will have earned the right to offer political advice to the Syrians.
The FSA is inevitably disorganised and outgunned. But it’s a lot more organised than it was a few months ago, and it is liberating territory. It fights with commitment and incredible resilience. Today the battle is in inner Damascus.
And a few days ago it was in the Yarmouk and Palestine refugee camps, which brings me finally to the strange fact that blanket thinkers persist in thinking of the Syrian regime as in some way a threat to Israel. It’s true that Syria helped Hizbullah stand firm, and this is not a small thing. It’s also true that the Syrian regime has massacred Palestinians in Tel Zaatar and other Lebanese camps, that since 1973 the border with the occupied Golan has been quieter than borders with states enjoying peace agreements with Israel, and that Syria has never even tried to shoot at the Israeli planes which have bombed its territory since Bashaar inherited power. But things have become clearer since the uprising began. Rami Makhlouf told the New York Times that Israeli security depended on the Syrian regime’s security.
Paul Woodward at War in Context quotes Reuters on the regime’s recent transportation of chemical weapons: An Israeli official said however the movements reflected an attempt by President Bashar al-Assad to make “arrangements to ensure the weapons do not fall into irresponsible hands”.
“That would support the thinking that this matter has been managed responsibly so far.”
Woodward then comments: So, while the word from Damascus is that “terrorists” armed with “Israeli-made machine guns” conducted the massacre in Tremseh yesterday, the word from Tel Aviv is that Syria’s chemical weapons are nothing to worry about so long as they remain in the responsible hands of the government.
There might be a certain amount of truth in that statement. Still, it’s not exactly the rhetoric one might expect from a representative of an alliance that is supposedly gunning for Assad’s downfall. On the contrary, it reflects the fact that Israel would be much happier to see Assad remain in power.
Here’s a simpler proposition for the blanket thinkers: Hizbullah won victories because it respects its people, because it is of its people. A regime which murders its people and destroys the national infrastructure, which plays with the dynamite of sectarian conflict and puts the whole people’s future in question, would be incapable of winning a victory even if it wanted to.
On Friday tens of thousands protested against regime barbarism in the Palestinian camps of Damascus. Regime forces opened fire, murdering eleven. Many more were dragged from their homes to be tortured in detention. Professional liar and regime spokesman Jihad Maqdisi then described Palestinians as ‘impolite guests,’ outraging Syrians and Palestinians, who are the same people, now more than ever.
BBC News reports: Armoured personnel carriers have been deployed in areas of Damascus, Syrian activists say, with clashes spreading on a second day of fighting.
The activists said troops backed by armoured vehicles had entered the Midan district to try to dislodge rebels.
Witnesses say this appears to be the biggest military deployment in the capital in the 16-month uprising.
Meanwhile, Russia said Western attempts to get Moscow to discuss sanctions contained “elements of blackmail”.
The two days of clashes appeared to be the heaviest fighting in Damascus in the uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.
The BBC’s Jim Muir says it is not clear whether the battle for Damascus has begun, but the violence seems to be creeping ever closer to the heart of the capital and the centre of the government’s power.
The armoured troop carriers took up positions on the main roads in Midan, which is a mainly Sunni district.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said armour had not previously been deployed in Midan.
Its director, Rami Abdel Rahman, told Agence France-Presse: “Before, the security forces were deployed to suppress protests. Now, we have army troops engaged in combat.”
He added: “[It has] never been this intense.”
One resident, who lives in the south of the city, told the BBC’s Newshour there was a lot of tension, with people scared and nervous, and it was becoming difficult to travel.
He said: “It’s mainly in the southern parts of the city which are effectively besieged at the moment. There were very few people on the streets, just totally different from how the city is normally.
“The feeling, among people around me, is that it’s our turn now. We are really feeling this. That this is the final fight, building up to who wins control of the regime.”
C.J.Chivers reports: To escape the government he served until it gave him an order he could not obey, Capt. Akhmed Trad, a pilot in Syria’s air force, needed a plan: how to spirit himself over a border quickly, and leave no family behind.
In hurried meetings between the pilot and his parents, and indirect conversations over cellphones, evading what they worried were monitored calls, the Trad family set a time and place for everyone to meet, and fled.
Now safely in Turkey, where he is providing information to the rebels and helping them plan attacks, Captain Trad represents one of the great challenges to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and his military.
The Syrian government hails from the Alawite minority. But much of its administration and its military ability depend on Sunni bureaucrats, soldiers and officers like Captain Trad, whose alienation has been growing and whose defections risk increasing as Syria’s internal war takes on deepening sectarian tones.
Defected Sunni army officers have played a large role in the armed opposition since the war began last year, and they lead many of the field units of the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella antigovernment force. While the skills of defected air force pilots have less direct application for the rebels (who have no aircraft), the pilots’ decisions to join the uprising amount to both a moral and public relations victory for the rebels, and undermine the Assad military’s strength.
Captain Trad, interviewed with several family members in a village near this city by the Turkish-Syrian border, said he decided last year to defect, and he waited for his chance. When violence against Sunni citizens escalated this spring, he decided he could serve no more.
Captain Trad is a Mi-17 helicopter pilot; he said his aircraft was equipped to fire rockets. Pro-Assad forces were accused of ethnically motivated killings of Sunni Muslims in Houla, and as the primarily Sunni opposition forces were gaining strength, his commanders ordered his helicopter squadron to attack cities where the resistance was strong, including Idlib. This is where the Trads were born.
“We were told to bomb them, and for us, we did not accept it,” he said. “Bomb what? My town and my friends?” [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Opposition fighters battled Syrian government forces in Damascus into the early hours of Monday in what residents described as the fiercest fighting yet inside the capital.
Activists said the fighting spread from the south of the city to a second area as night fell. At least five people were killed and dozens wounded, locals said.
The spread of fighting came as U.N. peace mediator Kofi Annan was due to fly to Moscow for a two-day visit in which he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin who has resisted Western calls to increase pressure on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Numerous Damascus residents contacted by Reuters said they could hear loud explosions, persistent gunfire and sirens wailing overnight, and described the fighting as the worst so far of the 17-month uprising against Assad.
Thick black smoke was visible above the Damascus skyline in live Internet video links. Government troops closed the airport road, activists said.
“I can’t believe it, it sounds incredibly close. I hear shooting and other stuff, like blasts. I can hear the sounds of ambulances rushing past. I am so afraid. People may die tonight,” said a resident contacted by telephone in a district close to the fighting.
Activist Samir al-Shami, who spoke to Reuters by Skype from Damascus, said the fighting was under way in the al-Tadamon district in the capital’s south, after sustained battles began at nightfall on Saturday in the nearby Hajar al-Aswad district.
“There is the sound of heavy gunfire. And there is smoke rising from the area. There are already some wounded and residents are trying to flee the area,” he said, using Skype to show live video images of smoke visible over the skyline.
“There are also armored vehicles heading towards the southern part of the neighborhood,” he said.
Another activist reached by Skype said the fighting later spread to al-Lawan, a neighborhood on the southwestern outskirts of the capital.
A third activist, who also asked not to be identified, said: “We’ve been expecting things to worsen in Damascus after the army crushed the rebellions in some of the suburbs, like Douma outside the capital. There were thousands of fighters in some of those suburbs. Some of them were killed but a lot of them fled and they’ve been heading to the capital itself.”
Nawaf Fares, the former Syrian ambassador to Iraq, gave an interview with The Sunday Telegraph: Mr Fares’s most damaging allegation is that the Syrian government itself has a hand in the nationwide wave of suicide bombings on government buildings, which have killed hundreds of people and maimed thousands more. By way of example, he cited the twin blasts outside a military intelligence building in the al-Qazzaz suburb of Damascus in May, which killed 55 people and injured another 370.
“I know for certain that not a single serving intelligence official was harmed during that explosion, as the whole office had been evacuated 15 minutes beforehand,” he said. “All the victims were passers by instead. All these major explosions have been have been perpetrated by al-Qaeda through cooperation with the security forces.”
Such allegations have been aired in general terms by the Syrian opposition before, and Mr Fares would not be drawn on what exact proof he had. He is, however, better placed than many to make such claims. One of the reasons for his rise in President Assad’s regime was that he is a senior member of the Oqaydat tribe, a highly powerful clan whose population straddles the Syrian-Iraq border. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, their territory became part of the conduit used by Syria to smuggle jihadi volunteers into Iraq, with Mr Fares playing an important role.
“After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the regime in Syria began to feel danger, and began planning to disrupt the US forces inside Iraq, so it formed an alliance with al-Qaeda,” he said. “All Arabs and other foreigners were encouraged to go to Iraq via Syria, and their movements were facilitated by the Syrian government. As a governor at the time, I was given verbal commandments that any civil servant that wanted to go would have his trip facilitated, and that his absence would not be noted. I believe the Syrian regime has blood on its hands, it should bare responsibility for many of the deaths in Iraq.”
He himself, he added, knew personally of several Syrian government “liaison officers” who still dealt with al-Qaeda. “Al-Qaeda would not carry out activities without knowledge of the regime,” he said. “The Syrian government would like to use al-Qaeda as a bargaining chip with the West – to say: ‘it is either them or us’.” [Continue reading…]
Suha Maayeh reports: For Aysha, a 28-year-old Syrian refugee in Jordan, her small Nokia cell phone is a lifeline to a loved one on the front lines of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It’s the only way she can contact her husband, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Layla. They talk almost every day. He has joined the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), leaving her with their three children and making her one of many “rebel wives” keeping the faith on the other side of the border. It has been two weeks since she last saw him.
Aysha often rode on the back of her husband’s motorcycle before he went off to war, her black niqab flowing behind her as he drove. Now her world is a lot less glamorous. She spends most of her day at home — a box-like three-bedroom rented apartment, dotted with mattresses and featuring only one small window — taking care of her three daughters, mopping floors, and hand-washing the laundry. The apartment was paid for with money scrounged together from local charities, sympathizers, and their Jordanian neighbors, and their daily survival is dependent on this private aid.
The stresses of refugee life, which include hosting her in-laws, have taken their toll on Aysha. She has lost weight since her husband rejoined the front lines — partly due to worry, partly because she doesn’t have enough money to buy food. Sitting on a mattress in her sparsely furnished apartment in this dusty Jordanian border town, she admits she doesn’t know when she’ll see her husband again.
“My fate is with the Free Syrian Army,” she says with resignation.
Aysha is the eldest of her five sisters — one of three who fled to Jordan due to their husbands’ revolutionary activities, while the other two reside in Syria and send money when they can. She lived in the southern Syrian city of Daraa and arrived in Jordan in May 2011, a month after her husband escaped from Syria. Abu Layla, who was a leader of an anti-Assad group in Daraa and distributed machine guns to the rebels, was arrested for two weeks last year for his involvement in the revolt. He bribed an official at the Syrian border to ensure his wife and daughters safe passage into Jordan.
It’s a painful story, shared by thousands of other Syrian women who fled the violence. The escalating violence in Syria — opposition groups place the death toll at over 17,000 — has resulted in a swelling wave of refugees to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, estimates that it has assisted almost 100,000 Syrian refugees in these countries since the revolution kicked off in March 2011 — more than double the number it had assisted just three months ago. In Syria itself, at least 500,000 people have been internally displaced, according to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Many of these refugees inside and outside Syria live in dire conditions, and aid organizations have struggled to bring in badly needed relief.
Jordan may have opened its doors to Syrians — accommodating 140,000 since the revolt broke out, by its own figures — but that doesn’t mean life is easy for the refugees there. In recent months, hundreds have crossed the border illegally on a daily basis. Once they arrive, they are taken to an overcrowded, run-down shelter in Ramtha known as the “Bashabsheh” — named after the family that owns it — before they are sent onward to three other transit facilities. Security and military defectors stay at a different shelter in the northern city of Mafraq, for their own safety. They are only allowed a few days’ freedom to see their families. [Continue reading…]
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