Rami al-Jarrah, who was blogging and tweeting from Syria under the pseudonym “Alexander Page,” just fled the country after his real identity became known to the intelligence services. Upon his arrival in Qatar he almost got sent back to Syria but thanks to a swift outpouring of support on Twitter, he was allowed in.
The New York Times: Even as the government of President Bashar al-Assad intensifies its crackdown inside Syria, differences over tactics and strategy are generating serious divisions between political and armed opposition factions that are weakening the fight against him, senior activists say.
Soldiers and activists close to the rebel Free Syrian Army, which is orchestrating attacks across the border from inside a refugee camp guarded by the Turkish military, said Thursday that tensions were rising with Syria’s main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, over its insistence that the rebel army limit itself to defensive action. They said the council moved this month to take control of the rebel group’s finances.
“We don’t like their strategy,” said Abdulsatar Maksur, a Syrian who said he was helping to coordinate the Free Syrian Army’s supply network. “They just talk and are interested in politics, while the Assad regime is slaughtering our people.” Repeating a refrain echoed by other army officials interviewed, he added: “We favor more aggressive military action.”
The tensions illustrate what has emerged as one of the key dynamics in the nine-month revolt against Mr. Assad’s government: the failure of Syria’s opposition to offer a concerted front. The exiled opposition is rife with divisions over personalities and principle. The Free Syrian Army, formed by deserters from the Syrian Army, has emerged as a new force, even as some dissidents question how coordinated it really is. The opposition inside Syria has yet to fully embrace the exiles.
The Independent reports: The sharp pop of gunfire draws little reaction. The soldiers of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) point to a multi-storey house just across the wide valley from their base above the village of Ain al-Baida, about a mile from the Turkish border. “That is where the military is,” says commander Abo Mohammad, who wears a camouflage jacket over civilian clothes and cradles an AK-47.
Unlike many of the 150 fighters he claims are positioned in Ain al-Baida, Mr Mohammad has not defected from the Syrian army. Originally from a village not far from this complex of abandoned buildings that houses the FSA fighters, Mr Mohammad says he spent April and May organising peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
In June, when the Syrian military’s infamous 4th Brigade came north, leaving a path of destruction in its wake, Mr Mohammad fled to Turkey, spending two months in a refugee camp near the border. But he grew tired of waiting, and returned to Syria to fight.
“People are dying in Syria,” he said. “No one came to help us. I did not accept what is happening. I can’t be patient, I prefer to die here.”
He is one of a growing number of civilians leaving their homes and joining the military defectors who make up the bulk of the FSA, a symbol of both the powerful hatred many ordinary Syrians feel towards the Assad regime and of how far the country has slid towards civil war.
Zvi Bar’el reports: “We have agreed that the free Syrian army will not carry out any independent attacks against the Syrian regime,” Ahmed Ramadan, one of the heads of the Syrian National Council, the chief opposition group, stated with satisfaction after meeting with the commander of the Free Syrian Army. “The commander of the free army, Col. Riyad al-Asad, agreed with us that the Syrian protest movement will continue to be a civilian movement and that the free army would open fire only to defend civilians or in cases of danger to life.”
It is not clear whether this agreement – arrived at last Wednesday during a secret meeting in Turkey – will last. It was the first such meeting between the National Council and the free Syrian army, which until now have not worked together, and it seems that the leaders are trying to set up a joint opposition council so that they can close ranks and offer a unified plan of action.
The fear of the National Council – which includes 200 opposition members led by Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian intellectual living in Paris – is that wildcat attacks like the strike on the Air Force Intelligence base at Harasta near Damascus on November 17 and the attacks on Syrian army convoys, could play into the hands of the regime, which has been trying since the beginning of the uprising to prove that it is fighting a legitimate war against armed gangs.
Another concern is that the establishment of “a military arm” of the protest movement could eventually lead to an internal power struggle between different sections of the opposition and divert the struggle against the regime to the struggle between the various opposition groups.
Asad, an engineer and a member of the Syrian air force who defected to set up the free army at the end of July, now has 15,000 soldiers under his command. He is hoping for a leadership position in the new Syria.
The army he has put together has 11 battalions that are operating in large towns across Syria. Each one consists of companies that rely on local logistic assistance, plus weapons and equipment seized from Syrian army bases or imported from abroad.
According to Turkish and Syrian reports, large quantities of weapons were smuggled into Syria from Libya, via Turkey. Libyan rebels have reportedly also made the journey to Syria to partake in the uprising.
The New York Times reports: The seemingly routine flow of life in central Damascus could leave the impression that there is no crisis, or that the security approach is effective. Yet beneath the mundane, unease grips this capital as fear of civil war supplants hopes for a peaceful transition to democracy. Damascus residents describe the restive suburbs as severed from the city by government checkpoints, and while the security forces control those areas by day, the night belongs to the rebels. A request to visit the suburbs was denied “for your own safety” by a Syrian government official.
Protesters hold “flying demonstrations” inside the city, trying to subvert the control of security forces with a few people gathering briefly to be filmed shouting antigovernment slogans. Damascenes say that they have become so accustomed to hearing slogans chanted in the background, given the almost daily progovernment rallies organized by the government, that it takes a couple minutes to register that people are cursing President Assad. By the time they seek the source, the protesters have faded away.
Yet security forces seem omnipresent, usually materializing in minutes. Government critics say myriad supporters have been recruited into the shabiha, or ghosts, as the loyalist forces are known.
A recent flash demonstration near the central Cham Palace Hotel was dispersed by a group of waiters who flew out of a nearby cafe with truncheons, said an eyewitness. Many university campuses remain tense because student members of the ruling Baath Party have been reporting antigovernment classmates to the secret police.
The Daily Telegraph reports: A human rights group monitoring events in Syria claims it had evidence of the worst massacre yet by the regime of President Bashir al-Assad.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has chronicled deaths on both sides during the nine month-long uprising, said a witness had seen the bodies of 34 people dumped in a public square in the restive city of Homs.
It said the 34 had all been seized from anti-Assad neighbourhoods in the city by the shabiha – unofficial militias loyal to and armed by the regime.
The bodies had been left in the pro-regime district of Al-Zahra, it said.
More than 4,000 people have been killed in the uprising, with an increasing number of regime soldiers being killed by armed insurgents as the country drifts towards civil war.
The Washington Post reports: Turkey announced wide-ranging sanctions against Syria on Wednesday in response to the Syrian government’s continuing military crackdown on protests.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu outlined measures including a freeze on Syrian assets in Turkey and a ban on transactions with the Syrian central bank, capping an eight-day stretch in which Turkish rhetoric against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned increasingly critical.
The sanctions by Turkey, one of Syria’s top trading partners, come as the Arab League and the European Union are enacting their own punitive measures — a triple blow that highlights the growing isolation of the Damascus government and that could significantly hurt Syria’s economy.
In Washington, the White House commended the Turkish government for imposing the sanctions, which it said will “undoubtedly increase the pressure on the Syrian regime.”
Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The Syrian regime’s blanket ban on journalist access has some carefully selected exceptions. Robert Fisk, for instance, who seems to be compensating for the naive anti-Syrian and pro-March 14th line in his reporting of Lebanon over the last years by treating the statements of Syrian regime figures – professional liar Boutheina Shaaban is one – with great naivety. At least he didn’t apply the ‘glorious’ epithet to her which he used to describe Walid Jumblatt’s wife. Fisk’s book on Lebanon “Pity the Nation” is a classic, his account of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila remain fresh in the mind (the blood-footed flies clambering over his notebook), and for many years he was one of the very few English-language journalists with some real knowledge of the Middle East. Sadly, his knowledge doesn’t extend to a working familiarity with Arabic. In several recent articles he has informed us that that the slogan of the Ba‘ath Party – umma arabiya wahda zat risala khalida – means ‘the mother of the Arab nation.’ In fact it means ‘one Arab nation with an eternal message’. Fisk is confusing ‘um’ – mother – with ‘umma’ – nation. It’s a rather disastrous mistake. Someone ought to tell him about it.
Nir Rosen is an excellent journalist who clearly does speak Arabic and who makes the effort to talk to ordinary people rather than just politicians and PR people. His book “Aftermath” is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the American occupation of Iraq catalysed an outbreak of Sunni-Shia sectarian hatred across the Arab world. His recent visit to Syria (see here and here and here and here) seems to have been both above and below regime radar. While he appears to have been smuggled in to certain locations he also interviews such regime figures as the state Mufti Hassoun – someone once known for his touchy-feely liberalism and his campaign against honour killing now making absurd threats about armies of pro-Asad suicide bombers lying low in Western countries. Unfortunately, Rosen sees Syria through the prism of Iraq’s sectarian war. He expects to find expressions of sectarian hatred, and he finds them aplenty. He can’t be blamed for making it up, because sectarian hatred certainly does exist in Syria, and because he honestly reports what people say to him. The danger of this method, however, is twofold. First, his selection of informants necessarily reinforces his bias. He does interview some pro-regime Sunni figures (like Hassoun) but chooses not to interview Alawi, Christian, Ismaili or secularist figures who support the revolution. He doesn’t consider such people to be representative of the revolution because he’s decided that the dynamic must be sectarian, even if the Ismaili town of Selemiyeh has been demonstrating for months and secularists like Suhair Atassi are very prominent in the revolution’s Coordination Committees. (Indeed, Burhan Ghalyoun, the head of the umbrella Syrian National Council, to which many demonstrations have proclaimed allegiance, is fiercely anti-clerical).
Zvi Bar’el reports: Jordan’s King Abdullah is not an innovative leader. But last week he surprised Arab leaders and the whole world by becoming the first Arab ruler to call on Syrian President Bashar Assad to resign. “If I were in his shoes, I’d step down,” he told the BBC.
This declaration set off a storm. The king’s advisers warned him that the statement was likely to damage Jordan’s interests – and the kingdom’s relations with Syria even more. Right after the interview, representatives of the Jordanian royal court called Fahad Khitan, the editor of the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab Al-Yawm, to ask him to delay the next edition so they could insert a few corrections.
So when the paper came out, the king said “Jordan holds that removing Assad would not change the situation and would not solve the problem.” According to an editorial, “the king has not officially adopted the position that Assad should step down; his answer in the BBC interview was made to a hypothetical question, and Jordan does not have an official stance on the question of Assad’s removal.”
But the correction arrived too late. In Damascus enraged supporters of the regime attacked the Jordanian Embassy, though Syria apologized the next day. Within a few days British newspaper The Guardian published a report saying the Jordanian king had offered his services as a mediator between the West’s position on Syria and the Arab League’s, because Abdullah believed that Europe could help reach a solution faster than the Americans.
It’s doubtful whether the Jordanian initiative could change the stance of the Arab League, which is dominated by the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They threatened that if a Syrian was invited to the foreign ministers conference in Rabat, Morocco, they wouldn’t attend.
A political and legal error
Despite his change of nuance, King Abdullah has not been able to escape his troubles at home. Two weeks after new Prime Minister Awn al-Khasawneh was appointed to calm Jordan’s streets, which had begun to show signs of rebellion, Khasawneh made a startling announcement: “The expulsion of Hamas from Jordan in 1999 was a political and legal error. I will tell you openly, when the expulsion took place, I opposed it.”
The statement was made – not by accident – after a phone call to Khasawneh from Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, congratulating him on his appointment as prime minister. According to reports from Jordan, Meshal is expected to make an official visit to Jordan after meeting in Cairo with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to conclude a rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas to establish a unity government.
Khasawneh, a 61-year-old judge who has served on the International Court of Justice, has been absent from the Jordanian political scene for 12 years and did not forge the new approach to Hamas on his own. There have been whispers in Jordan for several weeks now about the forthcoming reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.
A no less important question is the thinking of Khasawneh, who was once part of a team negotiating with Israel and took part in the reconciliation with Jordan’s Islamic bloc, to which the Muslim Brotherhood belongs. This is part of the change in atmosphere required for the regime to prove its intention to “bridge between the public and the government.”
The thinking in Jordan is that when Assad’s regime falls, Hamas will need a new home – this is likely to be an excellent chance for Jordan to return to the center of Palestinian politics, from which it has been excluded for a decade. In recent years Egypt held a virtual monopoly; only Syria managed to place obstacles in its path and manipulate Hamas.
Wild card Qatar
The factor apparently stirring the cauldron between Jordan and Hamas is Qatar, which recently held intensive talks with Abdullah in a bid to advance Hamas’ return to Jordan. Jordanian sources say Meshal was to visit Jordan last week, accompanied by Qatar’s crown prince, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, but the visit was postponed without explanation.
It appears that Hamas, which has been silent about the brutal repression in Syria, has still not decided which way to go. If Assad falls, and even if Hamas is not asked to leave Syria, the new regime is likely to stop giving it the generous services supplied by Assad.
Qatar could be a comfortable base, but it’s far from the territories, while Jordan is conveniently near the West Bank and Gaza, even if it isn’t offering patronage on the order of Syria or Qatar. On the other hand, Hamas has had no guarantee that Jordan will agree to the opening of Hamas offices, including a communications network and perhaps logistics bases. Hamas also has a problem with Jordanian public opinion; the Jordanian elite, for example, doesn’t understand why Jordan has to reconcile with Hamas after its leadership joined the Syrian-Iranian axis.
A return of the Hamas leadership to Jordan would mark a significant political change in the organization’s position. The establishment of a base in a country that has signed a peace agreement with Israel and is committed to Israel’s security is not something even Israel can object to.
Anthony Shadid reports: A harrowing sectarian war has spread across the Syrian city of Homs this month, with supporters and opponents of the government blamed for beheadings, rival gangs carrying out tit-for-tat kidnappings, minorities fleeing for their native villages, and taxi drivers too fearful of drive-by shootings to ply the streets.
As it descends into sectarian hatred, Homs has emerged as a chilling window on what civil war in Syria could look like, just as some of Syria’s closest allies say the country appears to be heading in that direction. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition last week called the killings and kidnappings on both sides “a perilous threat to the revolution.” An American official called the strife in Homs “reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia,” where the very term “ethnic cleansing” originated in the 1990s.
“Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen sectarian attacks on the rise, and really ugly sectarian attacks,” the Obama administration official said in Washington. The longer President Bashar al-Assad “stays in power, what you see in Homs, you’ll see across Syria.”
Since the start of the uprising eight months ago, Homs has emerged as a pivot in the greatest challenge to the 11-year rule of Mr. Assad. Some of the earliest protests erupted there, and defectors soon sought refuge in rebellious neighborhoods. This month, government security forces tried to retake the city, in a bloody crackdown that continues.
Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, has a sectarian mix that mirrors the nation. The majority is Sunni Muslim, with sizable minorities of Christians and Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which Mr. Assad draws much of his top leadership. Though some Alawites support the uprising, and some Sunnis still back the government, both communities have overwhelmingly gathered on opposite sides in the revolt.
Here it is not so much a fight between armed defectors and government security forces, or protesters defying a crackdown. Rather, the struggle in Homs has dragged the communities themselves into a battle that residents fear, even as they accuse the government of trying to incite it as a way to divide and rule the diverse country.
Fear has become so pronounced that, residents say, Alawites wear Christian crosses to avoid being abducted or killed when passing through the most restive Sunni neighborhoods, where garbage has piled up in a sign of the city’s dysfunction.
The Guardian reports: Insurgents in Syria have launched the most brazen attack yet on the seat of power in the capital Damascus, targeting the offices of the ruling Ba’ath party.
In an attack that tilted the country closer to all-out civil war, insurgents fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the building. The Free Syrian Army, a collection of defectors fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, claimed it had carried out the attack.
Although the grenades appeared to have done little damage, they were a symbolic blow against Assad’s embattled regime – and appeared to demonstrate a new tactical capacity on the part of anti-government forces. It was the second strike on a major target in a week. It followed a bloody Free Syrian Army assault three days ago on an air force intelligence complex in a Damascus suburb.
James Harkin reports: On Thursday morning, I woke up in Homs, the city labelled by the international media as the “capital of the Syrian revolution”.
Homs has been in more or less open revolt since at least April, but in recent weeks what is going on here has acquired ominous new significance. Facing the full force of a crackdown on their demonstrations by the Syrian army and police, at least some of the city’s residents have taken up arms, either to defend themselves and their communities or to go on the attack.
Outside Syria and in the international media, the siege has become a cause célèbre. But events here show not only the courage and the forbearance of its citizens, but also the traps that lie in wait for an unhappy people suppressed by a brutal military crackdown.
I was lucky to get here. It’s not quite true that all foreign journalists are banned from Syria, but it was extremely difficult to get in, even before the uprising, and those who succeed are carefully shepherded around. It took me two journeys back and forth from Beirut even to get across the border into Damascus.
After a few days there, I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Homs. A policeman was on hand to check foreign passports, but fortunately he didn’t bother to check mine carefully – it clearly indicates, by means of a Syrian government stamp, that I am a journalist.
My second stroke of luck was to have been befriended by an 18-year-old boy as we boarded the bus. An engineering student on his way back home to Homs, he was concerned that here was an idiotic tourist about to get himself into trouble. “There are no tourists in Homs,” he told me, looking serious. “My mother and father are afraid to go out. Yesterday my sister saw a body in the street, and she’s been crying ever since.”
On arrival, he ushered me past any prying eyes and directly into a taxi, going out of his way to take me straight to a hotel in the city centre. The city centre is the only safe place, he said.
Homs is a city of more than half a million people in the heart of the country. It’s where Syrians go to escape the hustle of Damascus, to let their hair down in its cafes and restaurants, or watch football: Homs boasts two football teams, as well as a museum where tourists can read about the famous battles that were fought here.
Nowadays it’s fighting another battle: the city is under total military lockdown. The hotel I’ve been taken to overlooks the main square and its now infamous clock tower, where the Syrian army apparently ran amok and gunned down peaceful demonstrators in April.
Since then, the violence has moved into the residential areas, and into the shadows. In the weeks before my arrival the death rate rose, making it the most violent place in the country.
Al Jazeera reports: William Hague, the British foreign minister, has announced that he would meet with Syrian opposition representatives in London next week in an intensification of contact with opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian opposition members would also meet senior aides of David Cameron, the UK prime minister, at his Downing Street office, the foreign ministry said on Friday.
It said that Frances Guy, the former British ambassador to Lebanon, had been appointed to co-ordinate relations with the Syrian opposition.
The delegation would include members of the opposition Syrian National Council and the National Co-ordination Committee for Democratic Change, in meetings expected to take place on Monday, a Foreign Office source said.
“We have been having regular contacts with a variety of figures in the Syrian opposition for several months. We are now intensifying these,” the Foreign Office said.
The announcement came as the Arab league said that Syria had agreed “in principle” to allow an Arab League observer mission into the country.
Jonathan Steele writes: Syria is on the verge of civil war and the Arab League foolishly appears to have decided to egg it on. The spectre is ugly, as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the hawks of the Gulf, are joined by the normally restrained King Abdullah of Jordan in taking sides with opponents of Syria’s Assad regime.
Where common sense dictates that Arab governments should seek to mediate between the regime and its opponents, they have chosen instead to humiliate Syria’s rulers by suspending them from the Arab League.
It is no accident that the minority of Arab League members who declined to go along with that decision includes Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq. They are the three Arab countries that have experienced massive sectarian violence and the horrors of civil war themselves. Lebanon and Iraq, in particular, have a direct interest in preventing all-out bloodshed in Syria. They rightly fear the huge influx of refugees that would pour across their borders if their neighbour collapses into civil war.
That war has already begun. The image of a regime shooting down unarmed protesters, which was true in March and April this year, has become out of date. The so-called Free Syrian Army no longer hides the fact that it is fighting and killing government forces and police, and operating from safe havens outside Syria’s borders. If it gathers strength, the incipient civil war would take on an even more overt sectarian turn with the danger of pogroms against rival communities.
Moderate Sunnis in Syria are worried by the increasing militancy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis who have taken the upper hand in opposition ranks. The large pro-regime demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo over the past week cannot simply be written off as crowds who were intimidated or threatened with loss of jobs if they did not turn out.
Meanwhile, Syria’s large Christian minority cowers in alarm, fearing to share the fate of Iraqi Christians who were forced to flee when sectarian killing heightened the significance of every citizen’s religious identity and began to overwhelm non-Muslims too. In northern Syria the Kurds are also nervous about the future. In spite of the regime’s long-standing refusal to accept their national rights, most fear the Muslim Brotherhood more.
The Assad regime has made mistake after mistake. Stunned by the first protests this spring, it turned too quickly to force. It blocked international media access and censored its own press and TV, thereby leaving the field free for rumour, exaggeration and the distortions of random footage uploaded on to YouTube. Its offers of dialogue with the opposition were hesitant and seemed insincere. The attacks on Arab embassies in Damascus in recent days were stupid.
As a result, the situation has become increasingly polarised. The regime denounces the externally based opposition, the Syrian National Council which came into existence last month, as a puppet of foreign governments. For its part the council refuses to talk to the regime, insisting that Assad must go. It has started to call for a no-fly zone and foreign intervention on the Libyan model, both of which are a further incitement to civil war. The internal opposition has not gone so far but may be pushed in that direction if the situation continues to sharpen.
The need now is for international mediation before it is too late, with an agenda for a democratic transition that would include guarantees of status and protection for all minorities, including the Alawites from whom the ruling elite comes. The risk of a vengeful takeover by the Sunni majority is too great.