The New York Times reports: More than a year into the Syrian uprising, protesters and fighters say, disparate opposition cells inside the country still scramble on their own for money and weapons, creating a risk that different factions will form conflicting loyalties to whoever ends up financing or arming them.

Those who have taken up arms, the fighters, acknowledge that they lack a workable chain of command to coordinate operations and channel arms supplies, even as they plead for international help.

Somehow, this decentralized patchwork of opposition fighters and activists has displayed the tenacity to withstand a withering crackdown that has left thousands dead and neighborhoods reduced to rubble. But it has still not managed to coalesce into a unified force, or identify a national leader, a clear ideology or specific goals — beyond bringing down President Bashar al-Assad. That atomization, many fear, could turn the country into “divided emirates” rather than a viable new system, Abu Omar, an activist in a Damascus suburb, said in a recent interview, complaining that some groups hoard arms and the power they bring.

“Deserving people are not being funded,” he said, “and all the money goes to people who do not deserve it.”

An eclectic mix of fighters and unarmed protesters opposes Mr. Assad. There are pious clerics and people who admit they rarely pray, experienced soldiers and barely trained former conscripts, wealthy doctors and jobless youths. Some say they want Islamic law, while others insist that civil law alone should rule. Their goals are matters of intense curiosity as the United States and others debate whether and how to directly assist the opposition inside Syria. Ask their views, and the answers can be complex.

The Associated Press reports: The woman wearing a blood-red dress stood in the middle of a busy intersection outside Syria’s parliament holding up a red banner: “Stop the killing, we want to build a homeland for all Syrians.” Drivers tooted their horns and supporters clapped.

Rima Dali’s act of defiance last month — which landed the 33-year-old in prison for several days — was a call for the opposition to focus again on peaceful protests to bring down President Bashar Assad. It has inspired other activists who worry that their cause is going astray as more Syrians take up arms in the face of the regime’s withering crackdown.

They say armed resistance costs the opposition the moral high ground and boosts the regime line that it is battling terrorists, not a popular uprising. The spiraling violence has also taken on fearsome sectarian overtones, threatening to push the country into full-blown civil war. Al-Qaida-style suicide bombings have become increasingly common.

“This is what the regime wanted and we fell in the trap,” said Anas, a 28-year-old from the central city of Hama who participated in the first marches against Assad in March 2011.

“People say the regime and the inaction of the international community left us with no choice, but I still think we would have been more effective if it had remained peaceful,” he said, declining to be identified by his full name for fear of retaliation by authorities.

But those favoring nonviolence are pushing back against a very strong tide. Barrages of gunfire by regime forces on peaceful marchers, military sieges of opposition areas and the snatching of activists from their homes over the past 13 months have convinced many that brute force is the only way to topple Assad.

Jane Kinninmont writes: Middle Eastern rulers are well acquainted with the arts of cosmetic reform. But Syria’s electoral charade is only likely to anger the opposition. On Tuesday, the UN peace envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, gave a sobering press conference saying that torture in Syria was worsening, that the government still appeared to be using heavy weapons, and that there is a high risk of civil war. His spokesman added that there are credible reports that Syrians who speak to the UN observers – who number just 60 – are at risk of being arrested or even killed.

The same day, the head of the Red Cross said 1.5 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian aid; and opposition activists at the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 800 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since the internationally brokered “ceasefire” began on 25 April. The Turkish prime minister, Recip Erdogan, said there had been 10,000 deaths, 25,000 refugees in Turkey and 100,000 in Jordan, and that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is “finished”.

Meanwhile, in Damascus, officials enthused about the country’s parliamentary election, held on Monday. The ever-friendly Tehran Times described the “environment of democracy” and quoted the interior minister saying there were “no problems, except some minor things that usually occur in elections”. The Syrian government will be hoping that the election will help it to regain legitimacy and marginalise an opposition it continues to brand as terrorists and thugs. It follows a February referendum on constitutional amendments that – in theory – ended the one-party rule of the Syrian Ba’ath, and limited any holder of the presidency to a maximum of two seven-year terms (Assad has been in office for 12 years). The government also formally lifted the emergency law that had been in place in Syria for decades. But in the context of the uprising and the subsequent state-led violence, it’s clear these “reforms” are too little, too late.

Al Jazeera reports: Kofi Annan, the international envoy, has said his six-point peace plan for Syria is a “possible last chance to avoid civil war”.

Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy entrusted with bringing an end to the violence, said on Tuesday that world powers shared a “profound concern” that Syria’s violence was escalating into civil war.

He said they had pledged to deploy 300 truce monitors to Syria by the end of the month.

Addressing the UN Security Council from the Swiss city of Geneva via video-link, Annan said there had been “a spate of bombings that are really worrying” and that the UN mission, mandated with monitoring a April 12 ceasefire in the country, “is the only remaining chance to stabilise the country”.

The peace bid was not an “open-ended” opportunity for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Annan said.

“There is a profound concern that the country could otherwise descend into full civil war, and the implications of that are frightening,” he said.

Annan said failure to prevent a civil war “will not only affect Syria, it will have an impact on the whole region”.

The New York Times reports: Emad ad-Din al-Rashid, a former assistant dean at the Islamic law college of Damascus University, opened his MacBook Air laptop and flipped through spreadsheets detailing the unmet needs of seemingly every besieged neighborhood across Syria.

From his spare office in a fifth-floor walk-up on a drab Istanbul street, Mr. Rashid spends eight hours a day calling into Syria, mostly to lobby hundreds of his former theology students to join his new Syria National Movement, patiently building a network that he hopes will one day become the Islamist movement’s power base.

While opposition groups are mostly concentrating on ending the brutish rule of President Bashar al-Assad, they are also positioning themselves for the longer-term question of who will rule in a post-Assad era. For that, they know from watching what happened in other Arab countries like Tunisia and Egypt that they need a good ground game.

“The Syrian people don’t want to hear about politics right now, they want to focus on toppling the regime,” said Mr. Rashid, 47, an amiable man with a neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard. “But you have to be present politically before the system falls.”

A broad spectrum of political organizations outside the country are jockeying for position, anticipating a new, democratic government in Syria for the first time since a 1963 military coup established the supremacy of the Baath Party and emasculated the rest.

The jockeying has alienated many Syrians, particularly those inside, who complain that members of the fractious opposition exile group, the Syrian National Council, are fixated more on grabbing appointments that they can leverage into domestic influence later than on forging the unity needed to defeat the government. The wrestling continues nonetheless. It remains unclear which group, if any, will emerge the dominant player.

Given the triumphant sweep of Islamist parties across North Africa, Syria’s Islamist leaders itch with anticipation that this is their moment, too. The Muslim Brotherhood is the dominant actor, but two other Islamist organizations, the National Action Group and Mr. Rashid’s Syria National Movement, are vying for influence. All are based abroad.

Brian Whitaker writes: The Assad regime issued an emphatic denial this morning that it is planning to invite the Dalai Lama for an official visit to Syria.

On the face of it, the idea of Assad hobnobbing with the Tibetan Buddhist leader is preposterous – not least because it would infuriate the Chinese government which up to now has been one of the Syrian regime’s key supporters in the diplomatic arena. For that reason, the story sounds like disinformation cooked up by Assad’s opponents – which is certainly how the official news agency is presenting it. It quotes a foreign ministry spokesman as saying:

“These reports are baseless. The timing and content indicate that the purpose of these reports is damaging the Syrian-Chinese relations … Syria highly appreciates the Chinese stance and undoubtedly supports the One-China policy.”

It will be interesting, though, to see what steps the authorities take to track down and punish the source of this baseless story – since the source appears to be none other than President Assad himself. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Rebel fighter Mustafa and his trio of burly men look out of place at a trendy Turkish cafe near the Syrian border, dressed in tattered jeans and silently puffing on cigarettes as they scoop into tall ice-cream sundaes.

Their battleground is across the frontier in Syria, where they are fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad. But like many rebels in northern Syria, they are so desperate for weapons and money, they are searching for new donors in Turkey.

“When it comes to getting weapons, every group knows they are on their own,” says the 25-year-old with a patchy beard. “It’s a fight for resources.”

Nominally Mustafa’s rebels fight for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but the FSA, lacking international recognition or direct state funding, is a often just a convenient label for a host of local armed groups competing fiercely for scarce financing.

So fiercely, they sometimes turn their guns on each other.

“Everyone needs weapons. There is tension. There is anger and yes, sometimes there is fighting if rebels in one town seem to have an unfair share of weapons,” said Mustafa, who comes from Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, which borders Turkey and has been a hotbed of resistance to Assad.

Such mistrust is compounded by the competing agendas of outside parties who are further fragmenting the rebel movement.

Finding a donor usually means using personal connections, rebels say. They get relatives or expatriate friends to put them in touch with businessmen or Syrian groups abroad.

But once fighters go to private donors for weapons, they have to negotiate, and the price may be ideological.

Many say Islamist groups, from hard-line Salafists to the exiled Muslim Brotherhood, bankroll many battalions that share their religious outlook. The Brotherhood has representatives in Antakya ready to meet interested rebels, fighters say.

Leftist politicians and other opponents of Islamists are trying to counter that influence by funding rival armed bands.

“These groups are all making their own militias, like they are some kind of warlords. This is dividing people,” said one activist who asked not to be named. “They aren’t thinking about military strategies, they are thinking about politics.”

Matthieu Aikins writes: Last fall, “Kardokh,” a 25-year-old dissident and computer expert in the Syrian capital of Damascus, met with British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister. (Kardokh is his online pseudonym, used at his request.) McAllister, who’s made award-winning films in conflict zones like Yemen and Iraq, explained that he was shooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about underground activists in Syria, and asked if Kardokh would help him.

At the time, the situation in Syria was deteriorating rapidly, as protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime turned violent following a vicious crackdown by security forces. The Syrian government had drastically curtailed visits by foreign journalists, but McAllister had managed to get in undercover. Kardokh was grateful for a chance to tell his story. “Any journalist who was making the effort to show the world what was happening, that was a very important thing for us,” he told me in February.

At the time, Kardokh was providing computer expertise and secure communications to the resistance. He agreed to be interviewed about his work on camera by McAllister, who filmed his face, telling Kardokh that he would blur it out before publishing the footage. McAllister also asked Kardokh to put him in touch with other activists.

But some of McAllister’s practices made him uneasy, Kardokh said. He worried that the filmmaker didn’t realize how aggressive and pervasive the regime’s surveillance was. Kardokh and his fellow activists took elaborate measures with their digital security, encrypting their communications and using special software to hide their identities online. “I started to feel that Sean was careless,” Kardokh told me. He said he had urged McAllister to take more precautions in his communications and to encrypt his footage. “He was using his mobile and SMS, without any protections.”

Then, in October, McAllister was arrested by Syrian security agents. He wasn’t harmed, but was held for five days and said that he could hear the cries of prisoners being tortured in nearby rooms. Eventually, he was released and returned to the UK. “I didn’t realize exactly what they were risking until I went into that experience,” McAllister said in an interview on Channel 4 after his release.

The Syrians had interrogated McAllister about his activities, and seized his laptop, mobile phone, camera, and footage. All of McAllister’s research was now at the disposal of Syrian intelligence. When Kardokh heard that McAllister had been arrested, he didn’t hesitate—he turned off his mobile phone, packed his bag, and fled Damascus, staying with relatives in a nearby town before escaping to Lebanon. He said that other activists who had been in touch with McAllister fled the country as well, and several of those who didn’t were arrested. “I was happy that I hadn’t put him in contact with more people,” Kardokh said.

Rami Jarah, a Syrian activist based in Cairo, said that he tried to help another activist, known as Omar al-Baroudi, get out of the country after McAllister’s arrest. “He was terrified,” Jarrah said. “His face was in those videos. He said that his number was on Sean’s phone.” The next day, Baroudi disappeared, and Jarah said that he has not been heard from since.

Officials at Channel 4 say they took action to help McAllister’s sources after his arrest. “We have been in contact with everyone who felt at risk because they spoke to Sean,” said Amy Lawson, the channel’s head of communications. “He is an experienced filmmaker and took steps to protect his material. Syria is an extremely difficult environment to work in, so we continue to look for ways to minimize that risk whilst ensuring we tell this important story.”

It’s easy to argue that McAllister should have taken stronger precautions, but what, exactly? How many reporters are familiar enough with the technical aspects of digital security that they could protect their computers and phones from the Syrian intelligence service? The fact that McAllister, an experienced and committed journalist, jeopardized his sources with inadequate digital precautions is indicative of a broader problem in journalism today: We haven’t kept pace with technological advancements that have revolutionized both information-gathering and surveillance. [Continue reading…]

Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser, was in Syria for 10 days during the second half of April. Rovera has worked at Amnesty International for 20 years and has extensive experience of working in conflict zones, including Libya, South Sudan, Ivory Coast and Gaza. Here she reports some of the first-hand accounts of the brutal crackdown by the Syrian regime against its people.

“Soldiers came to our home and took my son. Later, as I was peering out of the window I saw soldiers line up eight young men standing facing the wall with their hands tied at the back and shoot them. Then they put the bodies in the back of a pick-up truck and left. I don’t know if the men were all dead or injured. At that point I did not know that one of the men was my son. His body was found with other bodies at a school not too far from our home.”

A relative of another man, who was also killed that day told me: “Members of the military security came to the house of our relatives, where we were staying and asked for our ID and did not find any problem; we were not wanted. Then one of the soldiers looked at my relative’s cell phone and found a pro-revolution song. They took him outside … A neighbour told me the soldiers had shot him and then taken him to a nearby house; I went there and found him injured. He had been shot in the ear and neck but was still breathing. Some neighbours helped to carry him to the car and three of them took him to a field hospital (normal hospitals have long been out of bounds to people injured by the army/security forces) but on the way there they were stopped by soldiers and were killed. Their bodies were later found at a school, except the body of my relative who had been taken back to the house where he had previously been left for dead. They had finished him off with an additional shot to the head.”

These are the accounts of relatives of victims and witnesses of extrajudicial executions carried out by the Syrian government’s security forces in the city of Idlib on 16 April. They only agreed to meet me and speak on condition that their names and any details that could identify them would not be published. Others, whom I was able to reach after much chasing, said they could not speak as the danger of retaliation against them and their families is too great.

To say that families of victims and eyewitnesses are scared is an understatement. Those I met were literally terrified.

The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to feed their families in the parts of Syria hardest hit by violence, activists and aid workers say, with access to food cut off by ruined infrastructure, rocketing prices and, say some, security forces who steal and spoil food supplies.

Last month, the World Food Programme dramatically stepped up its operations in Syria, in response to a request from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent society and an assessment that showed worrying levels of hunger in the country.

“We are deeply concerned that as many as half a million people are finding it difficult to get enough to eat, especially in areas most affected by violence,” said Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme. Etefa said that after an assessment by several U.N. agencies, the Syrian government and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the group scaled up assistance to reach a quarter-million people last month. The organization is planning to increase that to 500,000 by the end of this month.

In Homs and Hama, the opposition-dominated cities where some neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble by months of shelling, residents say that they stand in line for hours to buy bread, while meat and vegetables are rarely available and are anyway unaffordable.

In addition, about 200,000 people have been displaced inside the country since the unrest began, according to a recent study by the Norwegian Refugees Council and the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, and many of them cannot provide food for themselves, activists say. With much of the influx now in Damascus or its troubled outskirts, volunteers said that they have difficulty feeding the people, many of whom left their homes with few possessions and little money.

The New York Times reports: A large number of Syrian civilians died in a poor neighborhood of Hama after their houses crashed down on them, but the government and the opposition offered widely different accounts on Thursday of the cause of the episode.

The opposition activists called it a massacre, saying intensive government shelling collapsed a row of cinder-block shanties, killing around 70 people. State media, however, said 16 people died when a bomb-making operation by government opponents went awry, with a series of blasts leveling the houses in the Mashaa al-Tayar neighborhood.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, had a similar lower toll, but said the cause of the deaths was as yet undetermined.

The episode was certain to deepen the skepticism that a shaky cease-fire negotiated by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, would hold.

A new pattern has also developed in recent days of the government rushing to blame the opposition, which it uniformly labels “terrorists,” for deaths in episodes of violence. On Tuesday, Mohamed Khadra, a volunteer for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, was killed in a hail of gunfire that hit an ambulance ferrying the wounded from the Damascus suburb of Douma. The opposition has accused government forces of repeatedly preventing the evacuation of wounded from neighborhoods that staged antigovernment protests, while the state-run media blamed an “armed terrorist group” for the attack.

In Istanbul on Thursday, the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, issued a statement describing the deaths in embattled Hama as a blatant violation of the cease-fire. It called on the United Nations Security Council to meet to do something more to protect Syrian civilians. The government of President Bashar al-Assad had committed a series of “crimes” against Hama residents, including heavy shelling, summary executions, raids and arrests, it said.

McClatchy reports: After more than six months of fighting, Syria’s largest rebel group appears to have developed into a resilient guerrilla force, unable perhaps to hold large swaths of territory for very long but still capable of inflicting heavy casualties on the Syrian military and operating fluidly within supportive populations.

The story of the Katiba Farouq, or the Farouq Brigade, has been eclipsed over the past year by news coverage that’s remained focused on the Syrian government’s shelling of urban neighborhoods. But in the months since they took up arms in August, Farouq fighters have discovered the Syrian military’s weaknesses, and despite some reversals, still appear capable of inflicting heavy casualties whenever the Syrian army attempts to enter rebel-held areas.

The rebels plan only to gain strength. “Now we are reorganizing ourselves and creating a military council,” said Mohamed Idris, who was the leader of Farouq’s branch in Baba Amr, the Homs neighborhood that was heavily damaged by Syrian rockets and heavy artillery before the rebels there finally withdrew at the end of February as they ran short of ammunition.

Idris said he and Farouq’s overall commander, Abdel Rizaq Tlass, were wounded in the Homs shelling and escaped together by swimming the Orontes River. Tlass stayed in Homs, while Idris moved south with his men to this all but abandoned city that once was home to 35,000 people near the border with Lebanon.

Tlass appeared in a short video posted on YouTube by Syrian anti-government activists on Sunday, offering to protect U.N. observers if they would stay in rebel-held areas of Homs.

There are many rebel factions fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but Farouq now is considered the largest of the groups claiming to fight under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the name adopted by the loosely organized army of defectors and volunteers who make up the armed wing of the anti-Assad uprising. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Syria is trying to sell gold reserves to raise revenue as Western and Arab sanctions targeting its central bank and oil exports begin to bite, diplomats and traders said.

Western sanctions have halved Syria’s foreign exchange reserves from about $17 billion, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday after a meeting with about 60 nations aimed at coordinating measures against President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“Syria is selling its gold at rock bottom prices,” said a Western diplomatic source, declining to say where it was being sold.

A second diplomatic source confirmed the information, adding that Damascus was looking to offload everything it could to raise cash, including currency reserves.

On Feb. 27, the European Union agreed more sanctions including prohibiting trade in gold and other precious metals with Syrian state institutions, including the central bank.

Two gold traders in the United Arab Emirates said the Syrian government had been offering gold at a discount, with one saying it was making offers at about 15 percent below the market price.

The trader said Damascus was selling small volumes of around 20-30 kilos which were easier to offload, with offers being made through private accounts set up with free email providers.

Michael Provence is the director of the Middle East Studies Programs at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the colonial and post-colonial Arab world, particularly popular insurgency and nationalism, and he has travelled and lived in many countries in the region including Lebanon and Syria. In this two-part interview, Ed Sweed of Alternate Focus asks Michael about the current situation in Syria and its implications for the wider region.