BBC News reports: Just a few months ago, Thwaiba Kanafani was leading a normal life with her husband, six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter in Canada.

An engineer by training, she had been working in the oil industry.

But now she has left all that behind.

When we met up in the city of Adana in southern Turkey, she had just fled across the border from the Syrian city of Aleppo after a mission with rebel forces that went wrong.

Two male colleagues who were acting as her minders, were killed.

At the end of June she joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and was given a particularly dangerous role to fulfil.

As a woman she has able to move more easily around the streets of Aleppo than the men.

“Lots of women are working with me and we do a lot of spying work,” she says.

“We usually check the locations of regime people [military forces] and check where would be the best points to locate the Free Syrian Army.

“We also spy on high-ranking people in the government so we can help the FSA arrest and capture them.”

In the midst of all this, she speaks on the phone with her family every day to reassure them she is fine.

“I wonder why I am not afraid of being shot through the head,” she says pointing to her forehead.

“But sometimes when you face death, you lose your fear.”

Thwaiba Kanafani is one of a growing number of Syrians without any previous military experience who have joined the rebels.

There is a special training programme based in Turkey at secret camps run by the Turkish military, she says.

“The Turkish people are really helping us. Lots of people are getting training in those camps.”

“The training is really professional. You can only sleep four hours a day.

“You have to climb mountains, you get weapons training. It’s hard work.”

Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also reported to be providing assistance for what has been described as a secret nerve centre for military aid and communications for the Syrian rebels.

This is reported to have been set up in Adana.

None of these countries has confirmed the existence of the base.

The Times adds: A video put on the internet last month shows Mrs Kalafani, a petite figure in camouflage and carrying a belt of machine-gun bullets, delivering a clarion call to Syria’s revolutionaries. “I am engineer Thwaiba Kanafani, a lady from Syria,” she shouts, with 30 or more armed men around her. “I came from Canada to answer the call of my country.”

Her arrival has not been universally welcomed. Neither does she have kind words for all her allies. Dressed in Western clothes when we meet, Mrs Kanafani has little praise for some of the figures, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, jockeying for power within the revolution.

“I was watching the revolution. We felt very bad. The Syrian political opposition had no strategy. They were totally useless,” she says. “We need structure . . . that is what I was working on.” But she says she is being thwarted. “When we launched a steering committee the Muslim Brotherhood were, like, they had to own it. They are destroying the revolution to control it later on.”

Mrs Kanafani, the daughter of a middle-class Syrian family in Hama, says she was always an independent spirit. She has powerful memories of President Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, his notorious police state and its repression of the Brotherhood.

In 1995, she left Syria as a civil engineer and in 2002 moved to Canada. She has two children, Omar, 6, and Ghazal, 3. Her husband is less than enthused by her departure, she admits.

Now she is one of a small number of women deployed undercover in Syria for the rebels. “My role is to navigate, to see where the Syrian army is located, to help capture high-ranking people,” she says. Last week she was involved in a mission in Aleppo to identify the whereabouts of a senior figure from the Shabiha militia. “There was a lot of killing, which I hate,” she says, “but also a lot of victories for the FSA.”

She insists Syria is not, as some fear, doomed to a sectarian bloodbath between a Sunni majority and the Alawite sect of the ruling elite. “We are not here to kill Alawi people. We love them as brothers and sisters. There are Sunnis in the [regime] army. The FSA kills them. This is not sectarian. When we capture soldiers, we investigate them. If they are innocent of killing anyone, we release them.”

And if not? “If they are guilty, they are executed,” she says evenly. “We don’t have prisons to watch them.”

Her presence has aroused mixed feelings. Some Syrians praise her courage, others question her motives. “For me it is good to have a woman with no hijab representing the revolution,” says a comrade. “I respect her, but this is not a children’s game.”

Reuters reports: Abu Bakr, a Syrian rebel commander on the outskirts of Aleppo, is a devoted Islamist determined to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. But the radical allies that have joined the rebels in recent months alarm even him.

“Let me be clear. I am an Islamist, my fighters are Islamists. But there is more than one type of Islamist,” he told Reuters. “These men coming fought in insurgencies like Iraq. They are too extreme, they want to blow up any symbol of the state, even schools.”

Seventeen months into the uprising against Assad, Syria’s rebels are grateful for the support of Islamist fighters from around the region. They bring weapons, money, expertise and determination to the fight.

But some worry that when the battle against Assad is over they may discover their allies – including fighters from the Gulf, Libya, Eastern Europe or as far as the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area – have different aims than most Syrians.

“Our goal is to make a new future, not destroy everything,” Abu Bakr said, sighing as he rattled his prayer beads. “As bloody as it is now, this stage is simple. We all have the same cause: topple the regime. When Bashar falls, we may find a new battlefront against our former allies.”

Abu Bakr and his comrades say they envision Syria as a conservative version of Turkey’s moderate Islamist rule, not an autocratic theocracy. They are unnerved by a recent kidnapping of foreign journalists and attacks on state infrastructure.

Western powers have warily watched the signs of an increasing presence of foreign Sunni Islamist fighters in Syria.

They fear a repeat of the mass sectarian slaughter that followed the American invasion of Iraq. Sunni Islamist suicide bombers affiliated with al Qaeda there are still targeting security forces and Shi’ites in large-scale bomb attacks.

Some fighters who have come to Syria are idealists who believe in jihad, or holy war, for oppressed Muslims, and would probably return home in a post-Assad era. But others are al Qaeda-linked fighters who may want a base in Syria.

Their numbers are still low, but enough to worry countries fearing Iraq-style bloodshed in Syria, a country straddling the lines of most ethnic and regional conflicts in the Middle East.

This is a rough translation of ‘La crise syrienne déchire la gauche arabe,’ by Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, an article written in French and appearing in August’s Le Monde Diplomatique. Thanks to Sophie at Les Politiques.

In August 2011, the Lebanese leftist nationalist daily, Al-Akhbar, went through its first crisis since its inception. Its deputy editor, Khaled Saghieh, left the paper he helped found, while denouncing the newspaper’s lack of support for the popular uprising in Syria which began in March 2011. Al-Akhbar has never concealed its political proximity with Hezbollah, one of Bashar Al-Assad’s key regional allies, nor that it favored dialogue between the Syrian government and opposition rather than the outright collapse of the regime. At the same time, the newspaper made room for the voices of several members of the Syrian opposition, including Kaïleh Salamah, a Marxist intellectual, Syro-Palestinian, arrested in late April 2012 by the security services. In June, dissent appeared in the online English edition of the newspaper, with an article Amal Saad-Ghorayeb. Explicitly supporting the Assad regime, the Lebanese columnist attacked the proponents of the “third way” — those who denounce the Syrian authoritarian regime while warning against any foreign intervention, including one modeled on Libya. The same month, another contributor to Al-Akhbar English, Max Blumenthal, announced his departure in an article criticizing others at the newspaper who had become “Al-Assad’s apologists.”

The divisions inside Al-Akhbar are symptomatic of debates that both strategically and intellectually, divide the left in the Arab world. Some continue to support the Syrian regime in the name of the struggle against Israel and “resistance to imperialism.” Others are placed firmly alongside the insurgency in the name of “revolutionary” logic and the defence of “democratic rights”. Finally, there are those who support a middle ground, expressing from a distance solidarity with the demonstrators’ demand for freedom, rejecting “foreign interference”, while also advocate a form of “national reconciliation”. Sensibilities vary widely — some staunchly Marxist or communist, with others in the orbit of a certain nationalist left, some radical, and others more moderate. In reaction to the Syrian crisis, the Arab left has become a fractured mosaic.

Anti-imperialism as the analytical framework

Of course, there are few in the Arab left who fully support Assad and few are calling for a continuation of the existing system in Syria. But neither are the majority of leftists unconditional supporters of the popular revolt. Such support tends to be found at the far left of the political spectrum, among Trotskyists, the Socialist Forum in Lebanon, revolutionary socialists in Egypt, Maoists, and the Democratic Way in Morocco. Such groups have relations with some factions of the Syrian opposition, such as the Revolutionary Left of Gayath Naisse. They have participated, since the Spring 2011, with selective mobilizations at Syrian embassies and consulates in their respective countries.

Some intellectuals on the left, such as the Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi, also support the logic of insurgency. They demand the fall of the regime and oppose dialogue. While promoting the need for peaceful popular protest, they do not deny the right of rebels to take up arms. At the extreme left, supporters of the revolution nevertheless disavow the Syrian National Council’s alliance with states such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They firmly denounce this because it could undermine the independence of the popular movement in Syria.

Denouncing the regime and calling for its downfall, some among the radical left remain wary of support provided by the Gulf monarchies to the Syrian revolution, even while affirming the anti-Assad rhetoric coming from that part of the ‘international community’ led by the U.S.. However, their anti-imperialist reflex does not take precedence over their support for the insurgency. Priority is given to the internal situation in Syria: the logic of a people’s uprising against their rulers comes first, as was the case in Tunisia and Egypt.

As for those who constitute the majority of the Arab left, they have maintained a cautious distance from the Syrian revolt. They denounced first the militarization of the uprising, which would only benefit the radical Islamist groups and foreign fighters flowing into Syria. They emphasize the confessionalisation of the conflict, placing progressives, Christian and Alawite minorities in opposition to a Sunni majority radicalized by repression, and see the threat of a protracted civil war. Finally, they worry about the regional and global balance of power — Iran and Syria against the Gulf monarchies, Russia and China against the United States. In the large regional and international war game that places Syria in the front line between several state actors, the Arab left is inclined to sustain its long-standing alliances with Iran and Syria, Russia and China.

Thus, when on April 4, 2012, a newly-formed union of nationalists and leftists in Jordan, a coalition of six political parties, from communists to Arab nationalists, organized a meeting in Amman for the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was less the memory of the fall of Saddam Hussein than the Syrian crisis which took center stage. “Foreign intervention” in Syria was strongly denounced with some speakers making the parallel between the March 2003 military operation against Iraq and support by major Western powers for the CNS and the armed opposition.

In Tunisia, in a statement dated May 17, 2012, the powerful trade union of General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) — in which part of the executive comes from the far left — while reiterating its support for the democratic demands of the Syrian people, warned against a “conspiracy” fomented by the U.S., “colonial and Arab reactionaries.” Two months earlier, the Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party (Poct) called, along with Arab nationalist groups, in a demonstration to denounce the holding in Tunis a conference of Friends of Syria, uniting around the CNS nearly sixty international delegations.

The Lebanese Communist Party, meanwhile, has adopted very careful positioning. While publishing in its press, articles by Syrian opposition members such as Michel Kilo (who is not in the CNS), it has nevertheless refrained from participating in some events that were held for a year in front of the Syrian embassy in Beirut. Moreover, it finds itself under fire from some critics in the far left in Lebanon, since part of the leadership of the party remains close to Qadri Jamil, head of the Popular Will Party in Syria and a member of the “legal” opposition. Jamil joined the new government of Riyad Hijab, appointed by Assad in June 2012, as vice premier for economic affairs.

It is usually a reformist logic that finds favor in some quarters of the Arab left: a solution to the conflict in Syria must be political, not military. The final communiqué of the Arab Nationalist Conference, which gathered last June in Hammamet, Tunisia, with some two hundred members drawn from the Arab nationalist left and to a lesser extent, Islamists, reflected this position. The document was intended to be as consensual as possible. While recognizing the right of the Syrian people “to freedom, democracy and peaceful transfer of power”, it condemns “violence from whatever source,” referring both to the regime and the opposition army, calling on both to be part of a process of dialogue, based on the plan to restore peace in March 2012 proposed by the envoy of the United Nations (UN) Kofi Annan.

If, for part of the Arab radical left, the revolutionary perspective must head the agenda in Syria, another fraction, substantially larger, has rejected this view. They do not want a sudden fall of the regime. For them, the heart of the contradiction lies in a cold war that dare not speak its name. Their greater fear is of a post-Assad Syria simultaneously reconciled with the United States and allied with the Gulf states, more than their fear of the survival of the regime.

In addition, Syria remains a kind of Janus in the eyes of Arab leftists. Few would deny its authoritarian and repressive nature, but even today the defensive discourse of the regime subjected to international sanctions, echoes one of the deepest ideological underpinnings of the Arab Left: the paradigm of the Third Worldist and anti-imperalism. For some, this feeling is tempered by their commitment to the popular character of the revolt, in others it is first multiplied by the increasing internationalization of the conflict.

Moreover, the Islamist dynamic of the Arab Spring in which forces from the Muslim Brotherhood have arrived at the gates of power in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, has undoubtedly caused, in part of the left, a backlash: the Arab revolts are now feared as they may lead to Islamist hegemony across the region.

While the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, and the Tunisia Ennahda movement have supported the Syrian opposition, the position of a large part of the Arab left on Syria reflects its own confrontation with the forces of political Islam. Thus parties usually committed to ‘revolution’ and ‘progressism’, and for some, to ‘Marxism’, paradoxically now prefer a negotiated and gradual transition in Syria, because they fear the outcome of this revolution.

The Washington Post reports: As the Arab world’s bloodiest revolt continues to maim, kill and ravage lives on an ever-escalating scale, anti-American sentiments are hardening among those struggling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, in ways that could have profound consequences for the country and the region in a post-Assad era.

America, once regarded by the Syrian opposition as a natural friend in its struggle for greater freedoms against a regime long at odds with the West, increasingly is being viewed with suspicion and resentment for its failure to offer little more than verbal encouragement to the revolutionaries.

In the nearly 17 months since Syrians joined the clamor for change that swept the Middle East last year, Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans have voted in elections, chosen new leaders and embarked, however messily, on democratic transitions.

Syria, by contrast, is hurtling ever deeper into an all-out conflict with no end in sight, “and all we get is words,” said Yasser Abu Ali, a spokesman for one of the Free Syrian Army battalions in the town of al-Bab, which lies 30 miles northeast of Aleppo.

The rebels say they don’t want direct military intervention in the form of troops on the ground. But they have repeatedly appealed for a no-fly zone similar to the effort that helped Libyan rebels topple Moammar Gaddafi last year and for supplies of heavy weapons to counter the regime’s vastly superior firepower, say rebels and opposition figures.

When the regime falls, as the rebel battalion spokesman assumes it eventually will, Syrians will not forget that their pleas for help went unanswered, he said.

“America will pay a price for this,” he said. “America is going to lose the friendship of Syrians, and no one will trust them anymore. Already we don’t trust them at all.”

It is not entirely accurate that the United States is doing nothing to help the Syrian opposition, nor is it clear what more it usefully could or should be doing, analysts say. A debate is raging within the Obama administration over whether it is prudent to step up support for the rebels now that the effort to promote a diplomatic solution through the United Nations has failed.

President Obama has already authorized the provision of non­lethal aid to the opposition, including communications and satellite equipment. The State Department has been reaching out to Assad opponents inside Syria with a view to identifying potential allies and recipients of assistance.

Syrian opposition figures say they have received some financial help to buy arms from U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. NATO member Turkey is also facilitating rebel movements across its 550-mile border with Syria, including, some Syrians say, the transfer of arms.

But the assistance has been small-scale, intermittent, and dwarfed by the demands of an expanding battlefield that now covers all corners of the country and has escalated to include the use of air power by the government. If some of the weaponry deployed against Assad’s forces has been provided with outside help, most rebel commanders seem unaware of its provenance. [Continue reading…]

At Syria Comment, Ehsani, a Syrian-American banker, writes: Like nearly 25 million other Syrians, one cannot help but feel stunned and exasperated by the events engulfing our country. How did we get here? How can a country long associated with “stability” suddenly unravel and enter what seems to most like a black hole?

Things could not look more differently back in November 2000. Barely few months into his Presidency, the 34 year-old new leader declared the closing of the Mezze prison and the release of hundreds of political prisoners. Those hoping for the birth of a new Syria felt vindicated. Surely, the past thirty years of the heavy handedness of the much feared Moukhabarat agencies would soon give way to a new atmosphere of political, legal and economic reform.

Michele Kilo, Burhan Ghalioun, Riad Seif, Aref Dalila, Anwar al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani , Mamoun al-Homsi, Omar Amiralay, Suhair al-Atassi, Hussein al-Awdat, Antoun al-Makdisi, Fawaz Tillo, Habib Salih, Haitham al-Maleh and Radwan Ziadeh certainly all thought so as they made up the major figures of what later became known as the “Damascus Spring”.

Groups of like-minded people were suddenly meeting in private houses and discussing political matters and social questions. Such locations were soon referred to as “mundatat” or “salons”. Naturally, political demands soon grew into what was later referred to as the “Manifesto of the 99”. The principal demand consisted of the cancellation of the state of emergency and abolition of martial law and special courts; the release of all political prisoners; the return without fear of prosecution of political exiles; and the right to form political parties and civil organization. To these was often added the more precisely political demand that Article 8 of the Syrian constitution be repealed. The movement never called for regime change nor challenged the legitimacy of Bashar al-Assad’s succession to the presidency.

Participants of The Damascus Spring were ahead of their time. The Arab world was yet to experience a spring of any kind. It is worth noting that the salons debated not only Article 8 but many political and social questions from the position of women to the nature of education methods and the Arab Israeli conflict.

How long did reforms last?

By February 2001, the security heads had seen enough. The young President must have been warned of the slippery slope nature that his promised reforms were likely to morph into.

A sudden change of heart caused such Political forums to be forcibly closed. Seif, Riad al-Turk, Mamoun Al-Homsi, Aref Dalila, and others were arrested and charged with “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means” and “inciting racial and sectarian strife” and were sentenced by the Damascus Criminal Court to five years in jail. The other eight activists including Walid al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani, and Fawwaz Tello were referred to the Supreme State Security Court which issued prison sentences between two to 10 years.

Only one salon, the Jamal al-Atassi National Dialogue Forum, was still permitted to function. The Atassi forum was finally also shut down in 2005 after a member had read a statement from the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The final red line was crossed. [Continue reading…]

Noam Sheizaf writes: Dr. Avner Cohen, the unofficial historian of the Israeli nuclear program, noticed today that a paragraph that appeared in the Hebrew print edition of a Haaretz op-ed by Sefi Rachlevski revealed for the first time a few details of a little-known incident from 1998.

While arguing against “the gamble” of going to war with Iran, Rachlevski writes:

In 1998, Saddam Hussein, weakened by the American no-flight zone, made one hollow threat. In response, [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu ordered to consider the arming of Jericho missiles. An order that wasn’t issued even during the [1973] Yom Kippur War, under a fear of destruction. Three people went to Netanyahu: Ariel Sharon, [former chief of staff and minister] Rafael Eitan, and [Chief of Staff] Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. They told him to relax, take a pill, and forget about it. Some things even a prime minister shouldn’t do. Will [Ehud] Barak be one of the three this time around? I don’t know.