Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: According to the rebels, a month of fierce fighting and artillery bombardment in Deir el-Zour city has seen hundreds of civilians, rebel fighters and loyalist soldiers killed, and 86 tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed.

But even as the civil war has moved into Damascus, the regime’s security forces have continued to fight on this far edge of the country. In the past week government forces managed to take over two major intersections in the city, occupying them with tanks and establishing sniper positions. Many of the rebels are close to exhaustion. Food is served once a day to the fighters and supplies have dwindled to a trickle. They take four hours to travel a gruelling route through government lines.

The soldiers fare better than the civilians, however, as smuggled food comes with smuggled ammunition. The civilians are reduced to begging food from the fighters. One day during a week-long stay, a woman approached us.

“We need food. I have four kids and nothing to feed them,” she said. “I will send you some tins later,” said the fighter, sounding tired. “I have asked three units before and no one gave me anything,” the woman retorted, before walking away.

The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.

Opposition forces in Deir el-Zour are organised into around 20 battalions. The fighters consist of secularists and salafis, townspeople and tribesmen from the country, civilians and defected soldiers. They frequently bicker among themselves and accuse each other of hoarding weapons.

Some units have lost 70% of their men through casualties and desertion, and ammunition in some cases is so low that soldiers go to battle with one magazine. Others, however, hold stockpiles of brand new RPGs, Austrian-made machine guns and hand grenades, part of a shipment that the fighters say was bought with private money from Syrian donors and delivered by Turkish military intelligence over the border.

There are more weapons and men in the countryside, but many commanders prefer to protect their villages than send their men and weapons to fight in the city.

Meanwhile, the civilians who still make up most of the fighting force and who have carried the burden of fighting for the past 16 months look at officers who have defected recently with suspicion and resentment.

Khalil al-Burdany is a former English teacher who leads one of the main battalions in the town. The morning the Guardian met him, a column of pro-Assad tanks and soldiers had tried to get into the sector held by his battalion in the Umal area to the south of the city. A hundred rebels were scrambled and moved towards the front to help Khalil’s small unit, but when government soldiers started firing mortars and tank rounds, half the men retreated. Only 15 of the reinforcements reached the front, where they stood behind a corner for an hour awaiting orders and then withdrew.

Khalil said: “Some of the battalions are just sitting eating and drinking and others are fighting. I had 50 men in this sector, now I have 23. The rest are dead.

“For 30 days I fought and I lost men every day.” Khalil pointed to a burly major sitting in front of him who had defected a week earlier and continued in English: “This officer, he comes now and wants to become the supreme commander. They still have the Bashar [Assad] mentality and they only defected because they realised that we are winning.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Syrian warplanes bombed the nation’s largest city Tuesday, activists said, a dramatic escalation in the 16-month uprising and a stark sign of the government’s growing desperation as it tries to reverse the recent momentum of rebel forces.

Aleppo, like Damascus, the Syrian capital, had long been seen as a stronghold of support for President Bashar al-Assad. But the unrest has spread to the city, Syria’s commercial capital, in recent days, adding to a sense that the regime is losing control after the assassinations last week of four of its top security officials in a bombing.

Tuesday’s aerial bombing of Aleppo, the first of its kind in the conflict, was part of a coordinated assault by government forces that included heavy artillery shelling and rockets launched from military helicopters. The attacks targeted Tariq Bab, a residential area east of Aleppo, as well as the neighborhoods of Sakhour and Masaken Hanano in Aleppo, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network.

Although helicopter gunships have been used in the past, the government’s decision to deploy fixed-wing aircraft appeared to be an effort to intimidate the rebel forces by signaling that the regime had yet to use its full military arsenal. Syria has one of the largest air forces in the Middle East, and its use in battling the rebels could give the government a critical advantage over a rebel force that has struggled to acquire heavy weapons.

The BBC’s Ian Pannell, reporting from Aleppo confirms that the Syrian air force is now bombing Syria’s largest city:

Helicopter gunships spun through the skies throughout the day, firing bullets and rockets to the ground. Sustained artillery and mortar rounds pounded restive neighbourhoods.

But it was what happened late in the afternoon that underlined the grave risk to the government of losing ground in what is Syria’s largest city and its economic capital.

First came an unmistakeable sound that has so far been absent in this conflict – the roar of fighter jets.

What appeared to be Russian-made MiG planes arced through the sky. We watched as they dropped in, bombing and strafing rebel positions.

Dead and wounded civilians and fighters were taken to hospitals and makeshift clinics as the human cost of this conflict continues to grow.

The stakes for both sides here could not be higher and it is now clear that neither side is prepared to give way.

The Los Angeles Times reports: A major impediment to determining who is who is that CIA officers largely have avoided entering Syria or traveling to the battle zones since February, when the U.S. Embassy in Damascus was shuttered for security reasons after threats by groups allied with the Assad government. Closing the embassy left the agency without a secure base from which to operate, and CIA personnel left the country, the [unnamed current and former] officials said.

Critics say the CIA’s absence from Syria is a missed opportunity to influence the fractured rebel movement.

“We should be on the ground with bucket loads of money renting the opposition groups that we need to steer this in the direction that benefits the United States,” said a former CIA officer who spent years in the Middle East. “We’re not, and good officers are extremely frustrated.”

The CIA declined to comment. When asked about statements that the CIA lacks a presence in Syria, U.S. officials notably do not dispute the idea, talking, instead, about other ways of finding out what is taking place.

“We know a lot more than we did about the Syrian opposition a month ago and much more than we knew six months ago. That’s because of increased contacts diplomatically and through a variety of other means that I’m not going to discuss,” an Obama administration official said.

A variety of other means? Come on, own up: CIA analysts are spending a lot of time following Twitter.

In contrast with this view that the U.S. government is still struggling to understand what is happening inside Syria, we have the Assad regime’s assertions that the war is being steered by outside forces. This view is summarized here in a report from Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency:

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.

Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.

The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.

In October, calm was eventually restored in the Arab state after President Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US and its Arab allies are seeking hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means. Tel Aviv, Washington and some Arab capitals have been staging various plots in the hope of increasing unrests in Syria.

One can either believe that the hand-wringing going on in Washington is a charade whose purpose is to disguise imperial power actively shaping events inside Syria, or, see that there is now a wide and widening gap between America’s imperial mindset and its ever shrinking imperial capabilities.

Retired CIA officers can get wheeled into Congress and repeat the catechism that money is all powerful, but if that really was true then Iraq and Afghanistan should provide gleaming examples of how American money can be relied on to shape the world in accordance with American interests.

Budour Hassan writes: On July 14, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched in a funeral procession for 11 unarmed protesters shot dead by Syrian security forces in the al-Yarmouk refugee camp. Raucous and seething with rage, mourners chanted for Syria and Palestine, called for the downfall of Bashar Assad’s regime, and sang for freedom.

Whether this burgeoning civil disobedience movement will grow into an open, durable rebellion remains to be seen, but the significance and the potential influence of the latest wave of protests that has swept Syria’s largest Palestinian camp cannot be overlooked.

As the Syrian uprising gathered momentum and the Syrian regime escalated its repression against what started out as a peaceful revolt, concerns have emerged about the impact of the uprising on Palestinian refugees in Syria, who make up just over 2 percent of Syria’s total population.

The Palestinian political elite in Syria have been divided. Some factions have desperately attempted to appear neutral, distancing themselves from the unrest. Others, such as Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-GC, Fatah al-Intifada, and the Palestinian-Baathist militia al-Sa’iqa, have actively supported the regime, bolstering its propaganda campaigns and crushing civil dissent inside the camps.

In stark contrast to the moribund, aging political leadership, Palestinian-Syrian youth activists, who prior to the eruption of the uprising had focused their activism on Palestine, have participated in the uprising since the very beginning as demonstrators; organizers of aid and relief work for wounded and internally-displaced Syrians; or as citizen journalists, photographers and media activists. The hub of their activism, however, remained outside the camps for most of the uprising.

Never were the tensions among Syria’s Palestinians as discernible as during the aftermath of last year’s Naksa Day protests on June 5, when dozens of unarmed Palestinians were killed by the Israeli occupation army in the occupied Golan Heights border area. Yarmouk inhabitants and martyrs’ families set the PFLP-GC building ablaze in a strong denunciation of the faction’s role in mobilizing to instigate the youths to march back home without any protection despite the anticipated deadly reaction by the Israeli army.

The faction engaged in a pathetically naked attempt to deflect attention from the regime’s crackdown. Several Palestinians were killed in the clashes that ensued between Yarmouk residents and armed PFLP-GC gunmen following the funeral. However, with the exception of the Syrian navy’s attack on the al-Raml refugee camp last summer and the occasional Syrian army shelling on refugee camps in Daraa, Hama and Homs, the situation in the refugee camps remained cautiously quiet.

Since February, the al-Yarmouk camp has regularly held protests in solidarity with the besieged Syrian cities and towns. It participated in the Damascus general strike on May 29, 2012. The protests would normally pass quietly without being attacked by Syrian security forces.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the abduction and then killing of 13 Palestinian Liberation Army fighters from the Nayrab refugee camp in Aleppo. Though the identity of the killers is unknown, the killings sparked a large protest in Yarmouk on July 12, and an even larger protest the next day. Buoyant chants of “God bless the Free Syrian Army”, “From Syria to Palestine, one people not two”, and “Long live Syria and down with Assad” echoed in the camp’s streets. The Syrian army opened fire at protesters and for the first time, clashes between the regime army and the FSA broke out inside the camp, marking a significant tipping point. The Local Coordination Committee of Yarmouk camp called for mass protests and a general strike to protest the killings. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: Nobody’s expecting a happy ending any time soon to Syria’s civil war. Here are just five things that could go badly wrong when the Assad regime falls.

1. The Sectarian Bloodbath Continues, or Intensifies

Renewed Arab offers of safe passage for President Bashar al-Assad if he agrees to abdicate miss the point: His isn’t simply a personality-cult regime; it survives because many thousands of Syrians remain willing to kill for Assad — or, at least, to hold the rebellion at bay. Assad runs a system of minority rule that has empowered the Alawite minority, supported by Christians, Druze and other minorities, and an elite from within the Sunni majority. And the reason the regime’s core forces remain intact, able and willing to fight on despite the defection of many thousands of Sunni conscripts and even senior officers, is fear of their fate if the rebellion triumphs. The 18 months of violence that has killed as many as 19,000 Syrians, and seen many thousands more wounded, tortured, raped and displaced may have helped make protracted violent retribution a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s why even if Assad were willing to go — and there’s no sign that he is — those who have fought for his regime and now feel their backs to the wall are likely to remain armed, organized and willing to defend their turf at all costs. But a triumphant Sunni rebellion that has buried many thousands of “martyrs” would not tolerate armed enclaves of regime supporters in its midst. It’s quite conceivable that a messy sectarian war rages long after Assad loses meaningful control of Syria as a nation state.

The obvious solution, in the minds of the U.S. officials, is for the opposition to reach out and reassure Alawites, Christians and other minorities of their place in a post-Assad future. Far easier said than done. For one thing, there is no single credible political leadership center that speaks for the rebellion — and the fact that this condition persists some 18 months into the uprising is a disturbing signal of prospects for stability after Assad goes.

Western and Arab powers have spent more than a year trying to turn the exile-based Syrian National Council into a legitimate alternative national leadership, to no avail. It remains divided and ineffectual, and lacking legitimacy among popular local opposition organizations on the ground. Nor does the SNC have any authority over the Free Syrian Army — itself a catch-all term for a wide array of localized military structures — or other insurgent groups, many of them openly sectarian.

The absence of a coherent political leadership over the rebel militias raises the specter of chaos after Assad goes goes — exacerbated by the likelihood that the pro-regime shabiha militias, whose thugs have most to fear, would fight on, independent of central political leadership of their own. And the fact that unemployment among fighting-age Syrians stands at 58% doesn’t bode well for the prospects of demobilizing the armed formations that have waged the civil war. Foreign troops may be needed on the ground not to bring down Assad, but to stop the violence after he’d gone. But there are unlikely to be many takers for such a thankless mission

U.S. officials claim progress had been made recently in getting exiles to agree broadly on terms of a transition. Given the status of the exile groups, that may not be especially reassuring. “The connections between the opposition and the Free Syrian Army are still tenuous, but they’re getting better,” a State Department official told McClatchy. ”If we can get Assad and his cronies out, that will at least create an atmosphere to have a dialogue. That can’t happen now.”

The problem, of course, is that the “dialogue” that begins after Assad goes could be conducted with bombs and bullets. [Continue reading…]

Marc Lynch writes: The stunning assassinations of several key Syrian leaders and the outbreak of serious combat in Damascus last week momentarily held out the possibility that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime will rapidly fall. Many hoped for a cascade of defections, a rise in popular demonstrations and a rebel surge to bring down the government.

Those hopes were exaggerated, fueled by a feverish rumor mill, psychological warfare and notoriously unreliable information coming out of Syria. While the regime has been shaken, its military capability stands as demonstrated by its bloody reassertion of control over Damascus. Along with the support of Russia, its determination to survive at any price could draw out the endgame.

The assassinations struck at the heart of the security machine that sustains the regime, and they highlight the extent to which political and military tide has long since turned against al-Assad. The assassinations were more of an inflection than a turning point.

Diplomatically isolated, financially strapped and increasingly constrained by a wide range of international sanctions, al-Assad’s regime has been left with little room to maneuver. It resorts to indiscriminate military force and uses shabiha gangs and propaganda to inflict terror.

The government’s violence against peaceful protestors and innocent civilians has been manifestly self-defeating. Al-Assad has failed to kill his way to victory. Day by day, through accumulating mistakes, the regime is losing legitimacy and control of Syria and its people.

Nonetheless, it’s premature to think the end is close. [Continue reading…]

Ammar Abdulhamid describes being interrogated by Assef Shawkat, Syria’s deputy defence minister and former military intelligence chief who was killed in a suicide bomb attack on July 18: “The country is not ready for revolutions and civil disobedience,” he told me.

“That’s your opinion,” I replied.

“We won’t imprison you and let your friends in America turn you into a hero.”

“Do whatever you want.”

“This country is ours,” he said, “and we will burn it down rather than give it up.”

“Those who built it in the first place will rebuild it,” I replied.

He yelled at me, I yelled at him. He cursed me, I cursed him. He stood up, I stood up. He sat down, I sat down. He pondered, I pondered, as silence reigned.

Then I said: “What if I left Syria?”

He smiled.

“But I will not stop what I am doing and I will not change.”

His smile grew larger. Then he embraced me and sent me on my way.

The man was Assef Shawkat, brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad. His family relationship, coupled with his role as head of military intelligence, made him the second most powerful man in Syria and – until his assassination last week – probably the most widely feared.

That meeting in July 2005 was the last time I saw him; I left Syria with my family a couple of months later.

I had not wanted to leave, but I wanted to keep doing what I was doing – to keep agitating and tackling issues that very few wanted to tackle at the time, like minority rights, youth empowerment and citizen journalism – and I knew that distances would not matter much in the internet age.

My first encounter with Shawkat came in March 2005, two months after my return from a six-month fellowship at the Brookings Institution in Washington. I had been slapped with a travel ban on my return, and was interrogated – but not detained – by three different security branches until Shawkat finally decided to interrogate me personally.

His reasons for taking a special interest in my case were not entirely connected with politics. I am, after all, the son of Muna Wassef, Syria’s most celebrated actress, and Shawkat claimed to be “her biggest fan”.

In fact, he had met my mother a few days before our encounter to ask her permission to interrogate me. Such was his subtlety. She gave him her permission while reminding him that I was her only son, and should anything happen … [Continue reading…]

Faisal Al Yafai writes: Perched on a hilltop in the far west of Syria is the stunning Krak des Chevaliers, the best-preserved Crusader castle in the world. From the 11th century, it served as the base for raids by European Crusaders into Syria – a place from which to launch attacks, and a place that kept the Mediterranean coast safe from the Arab empires that sought to reclaim it.

Could something similar happen in the west of Syria soon? As the uprising enters a decisive phase, another “Plan B” is being discussed – if the Assad regime cannot destroy the rebels outright – that would see Alawites retreat to a stronghold in the mountainous far west, centred on the coastal city of Latakia, where an Alawite state could be created. With the Russian base at Tartus, and with millions stashed away in foreign banks, the Assads theoretically could hold out long enough to build a state.

Could this really happen? It may be happening already. Recent attacks, such as the massacre on July 12 in the village of Tremseh, appeared calculated to push Sunnis in western Syria out of their traditional homes and east, away from potential Alawite strongholds. The theory runs that the Assad regime plans to push fearful Sunnis out of the areas west of Homs and Hama, which both remain Sunni-majority cities.

It is certainly the case that once President Bashar Al Assad falls, there will be reprisal attacks against Alawites, who make up a minority in an offshoot of Shia Islam, whereas Syria is a Sunni-majority country.

Syria is not fiercely sectarian, but whatever rebel leaders say now, it is all but certain that members of the shabbiha – the regime thugs who have carried out some of the worst massacres and rapes, and who are overwhelmingly Alawite – will be hunted down. In the face of that reality, and after Alawite domination of a Sunni country for four decades, it is natural for many Alawites to fear for their safety after the Assads fall.

And yet there are strong reasons to believe such an Alawite state would not be welcomed by ordinary Alawites, and would not succeed in any event.

The Assad regime, although composed mainly of Alawites, is not about one sect – it is about one family. Many Alawites have remained poor, even though they have received preferential treatment in the armed forces. If they could be persuaded that a Sunni-led Damascus would not threaten them, they would be unlikely to side with this brutal regime that, once secure in its own state in the west, would certainly continue its systematic repression. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Sixteen months into the uprising in Syria, the United States is struggling to develop a clear understanding of opposition forces inside the country, according to U.S. officials who said that intelligence gaps have impeded efforts to support the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. spy agencies have expanded their efforts to gather intelligence on rebel forces and Assad’s regime in recent months, but they are still largely confined to monitoring intercepted communications and observing the conflict from a distance, officials said.

Interviews with U.S. and foreign intelligence officials revealed that the CIA has been unable to establish a presence in Syria, in contrast with the agency’s prominent role gathering intelligence from inside Egypt and Libya during revolts in those countries.

With no CIA operatives on the ground in Syria and only a handful stationed at key border posts, the agency has been heavily dependent on its counterparts in Jordan and Turkey and on other regional allies.

The lack of intelligence has complicated the Obama administration’s ability to navigate a crisis that presents an opportunity to remove a longtime U.S. adversary but carries the risk of bolstering insurgents sympathetic to al-Qaeda or militant Islam.

The administration is exploring ways to expand non-lethal support, officials said.

“But we’ve got to figure out who is over there first, and we don’t really know that,” said a U.S. official who expressed concern over persistent gaps and who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters. “It’s not like this is a new war. It’s been going on for 16 months.”

The lack of clarity has also fueled anxiety among U.S. allies in the region over who will control Syria if Assad falls. Even among Arab intelligence services eager to help rebels overthrow Assad, “the vetting process is still in the early stages,” said a Middle Eastern intelligence official, insisting on anonymity to discuss his country’s involvement in the Syrian crisis.

The foreign official cited concern that the opposition is at risk of becoming dominated by Islamists pushing for a Muslim Brotherhood government after Assad.

“We think this is a majority view, at least among those who are fighting in the streets,” the official said. [Continue reading…]