Syrian rebels get first heavy weapons on the front line of Aleppo

June 19, 2013 by Richard Spencer

The First new heavy weapons have arrived on Syria’s front lines following President Barack Obama’s decision to put Western military might behind the official opposition, rebels have told The Daily Telegraph.

Rebel sources said Russian-made “Konkurs” anti-tank missiles had been supplied by America’s key Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia. They have already been used to destructive effect and may have held up a promised regime assault on Aleppo.

A handful of the missiles were already in use and in high demand after opposition forces looted them from captured regime bases.

More have now arrived, confirming reports that the White House has lifted an unofficial embargo on its Gulf allies sending heavy weapons to the rebels.

Last week, the White House said it would send military support to Syria’sopposition after concluding that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had used chemical agents against them.

Unlike rocket-propelled grenades, the Konkurs – Contest in English – can penetrate the regime’s most advanced tanks, Russian-made T72s.

“We now have supplies from Saudi Arabia,” a rebel source said. “We have been told more weapons are on their way, even higher-end missiles.”

At the G8 this week Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, condemned the West’s attempts to send arms to the opposition, even though he did not rule out fulfilling existing arms contracts with the regime.

On Syria’s front lines, rebels are already using Russian missiles to destroy the regime’s Russian tanks.

Thanks to Russian backing over the last half century, Syria’s army was the best equipped in the region, and its captured bases have handed a limited number of anti-tank and anti-aicraft missiles to the opposition.

But the number of Konkurs missiles seen in videos escalated at the beginning of this month, tangible evidence of the new Saudi supply line.

In the hills above the Syrian village of Kafra Hamra, north of Aleppo, The Daily Telegraph found rebels talking almost lovingly of the Konkurs as they kept watch on the regime’s tanks 800 yards away.

“We have one or two left but my unit has run out already,” said Abdullah Da’ass, a burly, bearded fighter with the Free Men of Syria brigade. “We were given five. We fired four, and took out four regime tanks, and one was a dud.”

Mr Assad’s regime has hundreds of T72s in northern Syria. The future of this war may depend on how many more portable missile systems the rebels are given. In the past two weeks the tanks have made a number of sallies, testing rebel lines, but have been driven back, rebels say.

After the fall of Qusayr on June 5, the regime promised an all-out attack on Aleppo, but it has not yet materialised.

Ahmed Hafash, the leader of Free Men of Syria, the non-Islamist brigade leading the defence of Kafra Hamra, said he expected the assault to drive north away from the city.

Five kilometres north-east lie two loyalist Shia towns, Nobbul and Zahra, where a regime general has raised a local militia several thousand-strong and flown in reinforcements from the Labenese militia Hizbollah.

Walky-talky intercepts suggest the regime hopes to link up with these towns and press on to relieve the Minegh air base, under rebel siege for 10 months, and then head to the Turkish border nearby. Having cut the north in two, the regime could squeeze out the rebels in their rural strongholds and surround Aleppo.

On the hill opposite the rebels sits the regime’s forward advance post, an unfinished apartment block – “full of Iranians”, said a rebel sub-commander, Abu Staif Aloush.

His unit guards the presumed path of the regime’s attack, occupying a development of half-built villas, full of Kalashnikovs and shell-holes.

The regime has 20,000 men based around the Air Force Intelligence barracks behind the front, the rebels say, but has spared 2,500 for this front. The rebels have possibly a similar number, but whether the tanks rolling over the hills can punch through them depends on their defences.

Mr Da’ass, the fighter, claimed that even without fresh supplies, the rebels would still be victorious. “If we have no weapons, we will hit them with our slippers,” he said.

But Mr Aloush said: “We need an air-fly zone, and anti-tank missiles, or if not a no-fly zone, anti-aircraft missiles too.”

The last major weapons shipment comprised rockets and other arms from the former Yugoslavia, paid for by Qatar. However, some were seen in the hands of the Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the supply dried up, apparently under American instruction, six months ago.

Mr Aloush pledged the same would not happen again. “Every missile will be recorded, where we shot and under whose supervision,” he said.

Whether that will be true for other brigades supplied by the Saudis is another matter, of course. The Saudis are now the favoured conduit, and the rebels’ new best friends.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Why Kerry Wants to Strike Syria

June 19, 2013 by Jeffrey Goldberg

Yesterday, shortly after I posted a column on Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to have the White House approve U.S. strikes on Syrian airfields — and how Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey pushed back strongly against the idea — I heard from a number of people who support Kerry’s stance and think that the Pentagon is being unnecessarily timid.

(I myself am one of the approximately three columnists in the U.S. who don’t know exactly what President Barack Obama ought to do in Syria. On the one hand, the Syrian civil war represents a humanitarian nightmare and an acute strategic challenge; on the other, I don’t think the U.S. is capable of mediating a Sunni-Shiite civil war, and so shouldn’t try).

The Kerry camp’s argument breaks down as follows:

1. Rwanda. The administration can’t sit idly by as the civil war claims hundreds of victims a day. The official U.S. position is that we feel very bad about what happened in Rwanda in 1994, so we shouldn’t let this sort of thing happen again (Samantha Power, Obama’s nominee for United Nations ambassador, has popularized the idea that “Never Again,” in practice, has meant only that, “Never again we will allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s.”) It is true that while Syria civil war might not yet possess the characteristics of genocide, the humanitarian imperative here is profound.

2. For negotiations to work, the regime of Bashar al-Assad must feel that its existence is threatened. This might be the most important point, or at least the most immediately relevant one. Kerry wants upcoming peace talks in Geneva to work. In order for that to happen, he believes that the playing field in Syria must be leveled; in recent days, regime forces, which now include the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, have been swatting back the rebels with comparative ease. Airstrikes, and other U.S. measures, would provide the regime with the incentive to sit down and talk. There is no reason to talk compromise with the opposition when you are winning. This is true even for people who aren’t psychopathic mass murderers.

3. Whether we like it or not, we are in a conflict with Iran, and our credibility is on the line. Obama seems eager to exit the Middle East. Most foreign policy experts, up to and including the secretary of state, believe that there is no hiding from its problems. The U.S. must play a leadership role in the Mideast or the vacuum left by its departure will be filled by radicals, of both the Shiite and Sunni varieties. It is true, as Dempsey has argued, that there is no exit strategy for Syria (in part because there’s not much of an entrance strategy, either), but the U.S. will soon face even bigger problems in the region if it doesn’t intervene now. Kerry understands the price of intervention. This is the lesson of Iraq. But he has also argued that there is a price to be paid for nonintervention.

4. We made a promise. President Obama threatened unspecified, but dire-sounding, action against Assad if he deployed chemical weapons (or even if he shifted them around). Assad has both moved chemical weapons and used them. U.S. intelligence estimates are that 150 people have been killed by them so far. When Obama made his promise, no one thought that his reaction to the use of chemical weapons would be: Let’s send the rebels a bunch of rifles and ammunition. There was a general expectation of something more serious, and Kerry believes that the serious consequence of chemical weapons use should be airstrikes against regime airfields.

5. The Israelis did it, and so can we. Kerry himself, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t made this argument to the generals — knowing, I assume, that it would, if nothing else, irritate them like nothing else. But others in the interventionist camp have raised the issue. Israel, has struck at Syrian targets three times recently, using standoff weapons fired from over the border. Israel thinks that it made its point: There will be consequences if Syria transfers weapons and delivery systems to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dempsey, in the White House situation room last week, argued that in order to launch an effective attack on regime targets, the U.S. would have to first suppress Syria’s air-defense system, which would require at least 700 sorties. Interventionists tend to believe that the Pentagon — and the White House — are using this an excuse for inaction.

6. The rebels aren’t the lunatics the Pentagon believes them to be. The State Department has been working for some time with the more moderate leaders among the fractured and disputatious rebel alliance. It believes not only that it can do business with many of these leaders, but also that by doing business with them it will strengthen them. Several months ago, when I ducked across the Jordan-Syria border and met with some of the rebels, I took note of their long beards, a sign of religious intensity. The rebels were quick to tell me that they only grew beards because the more radical Islamists among them had the best weapons, and would only supply these weapons to like-minded rebels. In other words, the beards were simply a marketing tool, not an expression of sincere radicalism. If the more moderate among the rebels suddenly began receiving heavier weapons from the Americans, they would be empowered, and the Islamists marginalized.

One through line you will notice in all of this: a belief, on the part of Kerry and others, that passivity has a price. The Pentagon and the president, however, believe that they are being prudent, not passive.

Analysis: Putin basks in isolation over Syria as Obama’s charm falls flat

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Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gestures during a media conference after a G8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland June 18, 2013. Photo: Reuters/Matt Dunham/Pool

Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, june 19, 2013 by Guy Faulconbridge and Timothy Heritage

At the end of a tense two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama - slumped over and serious - tried to lighten the mood with a joke about their favorite sports.

“And finally, we compared notes on President Putin’s expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball,” the U.S. president told reporters at the G8 summit, after the two men gave formal statements emphasizing their common ground rather than their sharp differences on how to end the Syrian crisis.

“And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover,” Obama said.

Putin - who folded his hands and glowered through most of the exchange - was having none of it. He waited for the audience to finish laughing, smiled icily and stuck in his spear.

“The president wants to relax me with his statement of age,” retorted Putin.

Few expected any diplomatic breakthroughs from the meeting in Northern Ireland, less than a week after Obama’s administration announced it would provide military support to rebels fighting Moscow’s ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But Putin - who scowled, lectured and fidgeted while resisting the forced bonhomie of the two-day summit with the leaders of world’s richest nations - seemed positively to relish his isolation.

It was a vintage display of Putin’s world view forged since the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991: the United States will inevitably overreach, and Moscow must always step forward to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power.

His position won the former KGB spy plaudits at home, where he is trying to reassert his authority after protests and in the face of a stuttering economy.

“I think he got all the bonuses domestically. He held his head high, stood tall and did what he pledged to do - to be very firm but not confrontational,” said Dmitry Trenin, a political analysts at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.

Putin clearly calculated that he had nothing to gain by making concessions over Syria, and little to lose if Russia was further alienated in a rich nations’ club where it has looked the odd-one out since it became a fully fledged member 15 years ago.

“RESET”

U.S. officials played down the rebuff, describing the Putin-Obama meeting as “businesslike” and emphasizing the common ground over a sectarian civil war in which the two presidents are now both committed to arming the opposing sides.

“We both want to see an end to the conflict. We both want to see stability. We don’t want to see extremists gain a foothold,” said Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.

“I think both leaders went out of their way to underscore that they can work together on this issue,” Rhodes said. “If they can project a message that they have a convergence of views as it relates to a political negotiation, that keeps the possibility, the prospect of that political track alive.”

But even their one joint initiative faced a setback. One source at the summit confirmed that Syrian peace talks called last month by Moscow and Washington, initially meant to be held in June, then July - were now postponed until August at least.

The tense exchange between Putin and Obama marks full circle since the administration of the newly-elected Obama called for a “reset” in ties with Russia in 2009 after a row between the Cold War foes over Russia’s 2008 war against U.S.-ally Georgia.

Obama has touted the Russia reset - in which his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a big red “reset” button - as one of his signature foreign achievements. (Clinton’s aides notoriously mistranslated the button and labeled it “overload” in Russian.)

WE ARE GOING TO DELIVER

Putin arrived the night before the summit and made his unrelenting position clear at a press conference with his host, Britain’s David Cameron.

Putin hammered home his point that arming Syrian rebels was reckless by zeroing in on an incident from last month in which a rebel fighter was filmed biting on the entrails of an enemy.

“One does not really need to support people who not only kill their enemies but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the camera,” he said as Cameron stood by.

From the outset, Putin was isolated at the summit.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Putin of supporting “thugs” and said Syria would be discussed by the other seven powers, with Russia as a “plus one”. Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov fired back, saying the Canadian’s remarks came “from the position of an outside observer”.

After the bilateral meeting with Obama, Putin went to a dinner in a lodge on the shore of Lough Erne where the leaders discussed Syria over a dinner of crab, fillet of beef, and whisky-laced custard.

Putin refused to accept any public declaration that could imply Assad would go. He won: the final communique on Syria did not even mention Assad’s name.

He also defended Russia’s arms shipments to Syria and suggested that more might be coming: “We are supplying weapons under legal contracts to the legal government. That is the government of President Assad. And if we are going to sign such contracts, we are going to deliver,” he said.

Western officials still suggest that Moscow’s alliance with Assad is not as strong as Putin’s remarks imply. “Clearly Putin doesn’t hold back with his views,” said one Western official who tried to play down the disagreements.

“Don’t expect Vladimir Putin to pick up the phone to Damascus and say ‘the game’s over’,” he said. “The Russians have deliberately and utterly not tied themselves to him (Assad) as an individual and have always given themselves some wriggle room.”

Western officials have suggested for months that Moscow might soon drop Assad, only to find Putin as staunch as ever, even when the war was going the rebels’ way. Now, with Assad’s forces having seized battlefield momentum in recent months, there seems less reason than ever for Moscow to ditch him.

Putin has another reason to want to look tough abroad, to consolidate support at home at a time when the faltering economy is hurting his standing.

“Despite the emotions, the summit was in many respects a success for Russian diplomacy,” thebusiness daily Vedomosti wrote, suggesting Russia had made no concessions and the West had shown it was not ready to act if Moscow was not on board.

Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular daily with a reputation for catching the public mood, was more uneasy: “Putin is alone again,” it wrote. “But do we need to be sorry about it?”

Hezbollah fighters battle rebels near Syria capital

June 19th by AFP

Fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah joined Syrian troops battling rebels near Damascus on Wednesday, monitors said, as President Bashar al-Assad’s regime kept up a push to cut off the insurgents’ supply lines.

“Army troops and Hezbollah members fought rebels near the Khomeini hospital in Zayabiyeh village,” southeast of Damascus, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“Hezbollah fighters, who have a strong presence at Sayyida Zeinab [in southeastern Damascus], are trying to seize control of villages near Zayabiyeh and Babila.”

The Syrian army shelled both Zayabiyeh and Babila, said the group which relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers on the ground for its reports.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television said the army was advancing towards Zayabiyeh, just south of the confessionally mixed district of Sayyida Zeinab, named after an important Shiite Muslim shrine.

The Lebanese Shiite movement has been fighting alongside the army for months in the district, which lies in an area that rebels from southern Damascus have used as their main rear base.

Activists say the regime is trying to crush the rebellion on the outskirts of Damascus in order to cut off supply lines leading into rebel pockets inside the capital.

“There is a fierce campaign against the [rebels] south of the capital,” said Damascus-based activist Matar Ismail.

“The humanitarian situation is very critical… We believe the [regime] is trying to test the [rebels’] strength, in order to try to advance on the south of the capital,” Ismail told AFP over the Internet.

Ismail said Hezbollah and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas brigade — a mostly Syrian Shiite force that has also attracted Shiite fighters from elsewhere in the region — were playing a key role in the fight.

Hezbollah was also credited with an important role in the Syrian army’s recapture of the former rebel stronghold of Qusayr in central Homs province earlier this month.

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has said the Lebanese group will remain engaged in Syria’s conflict.

The Syrian army meanwhile renewed shelling of other rebel areas near the capital, including northwestern Zabadani and Qalamoun to the northeast.

Both areas are also a short distance from the Lebanese border.

Elsewhere, fierce battles broke out between rebels and troops in Idlib, in northwestern Syria, the Observatory said.

Opposition forces captured an army post on the road linking the coastal province of Latakia to Ariha in Idlib province, and two tanks were destroyed.

In regime stronghold Latakia, an explosion at an ammunition depot wounded at least 13 soldiers, said the Observatory.

State television said the blast was the result of a technical failure, and that only six had suffered light wounds.

Wednesday’s violence comes a day after at least 83 people were killed across Syria, said the Britain-based Observatory.

Source: now.mmedia.me

The Destruction Of The Syrian Air Force

June 18, 2013

The Syrian Air Force has suffered major losses in the last year, as the aircraft and helicopters were unleashed on rebels (and civilian supporters) and took a beating. Of the 370 usable fixed wing war planes the Syrian Air Force had two years, about half are now out of action because of combat losses or wear and tear. Nearly two-thirds of the 360 helicopters are gone, for the same reasons.

Part of the problem was that few Syrian air force leaders (and pilots) were prepared for this kind of war (low level bombing and lots of helicopter flights under fire). Desperate time remand desperate measures and in the last few months even the MiG-29 fighters have been seen dropping bombs. These are the most modern aircraft Syria has and their pilots were trained to fight Israeli jets, not bomb civilians. But a village or city neighborhood is hard to miss, even for a rookie.

A more costly problem is the lack of flying time in the last decade. Syria could never afford, even with Iranian subsidies, to let their combat pilots fly enough to be really good at it. For the last year, the only flying has been for combat missions. MiG-29 pilots were taught about bombing, if they had no experience in that, on the ground and practiced the weapons release procedure while the aircraft were sitting on the ground. The first actual bomb drop was for real, not practice. This lack of flight time led to operational losses, especially when it came to landing damaged (by enemy action or equipment failure) aircraft. This often led to aircraft loss rather than bringing home a repairable aircraft. A shortage of spare parts often made repairs impossible and has become a major factor in aircraft becoming inoperable after heavy use (which wears out some components).

The Syrian Air Force also suffers from an overabundance of older, well-worn and poorly maintained aircraft. The best example is their use of the MiG-21. This is a 1950s design and most of the few remaining current users are phasing them out. But because Syria is so poor, their 150 MiG-21s are still the most abundant aircraft in their air force. But only about half of these MiG-21s are flyable. There are also a hundred 1960s era MiG-23s, ten MiG-25s and 40 MiG-29s. There are also 20 Su-24 and 60 Su-22 ground attack aircraft. The 60 operational L-39 jet trainers were also able to carry some weapons (typical with trainers like this) and were used to attack rebels. There is also a large force of helicopters, the most common being over 240 Mi-8s (including some of the more modern Mi-17 model). There are 120 attack helicopters, half of them Mi-24s (a gunship variant of the Mi-8 and contemporary of the American AH-1) the rest are elderly French Gazelle scout helicopters and Polish Mi-2s. These are mostly used as aerial taxis as they only carry a few weapons and can’t handle much damage.

It wasn’t until about a year ago that the rebels (using army deserters and information collected via the Internet or Islamic radical fighters with experience in Iraq) developed effective anti-aircraft techniques. The most common and successful one was to place multiple machine-guns, including at least one heavy (12.7-23mm) machine-gun along the route used by helicopters or jets coming in for landing or low level attack. These machine-guns were fired in a coordinated manner and were very effective. This tactic is called “flak trap,” and dates back to World War II (or earlier). This tactic works if you can use surprise, and one or more concealed, preferably truck mounted, heavy machine-guns.

Syrian Air Force losses have been heavy, with some 400 aircrew dead, captured or missing. Nearly a hundred fixed wing and over a hundred helicopters have been lost. About half of these aircraft were captured or destroyed on the ground as rebels attacked, and often captured, air bases. The jets (and a few transports) were hit while landing and taking off and this threat often led to airbases being abandoned, with aircraft incapable (because of damage or lack of spare parts) of flying out being destroyed or just left behind. The rebels have about a dozen flyable helicopters and some helicopter pilots have defected but there is not really a rebel “air force” just yet.

All Syrian aircraft are showing their age, except for the MiG-29s, which are relatively new. Lack of money has meant few flying hours for air force pilots and not enough money to keep all aircraft flyable even before the revolution began two years ago. Fuel and spare parts are even more expensive now (because of sanctions) and the air force has a hard time dealing with the payroll and the expense of running (and defending) its bases.

The Syrian Air Force has a dismal record, although their primary opponent for over half a century has been Israel. The Assad family has occasionally used the air force against the Syrian people, and seemed reluctant at first to unleash hundreds of combat aircraft on civilians. But a year ago that changed and an air attack was considered successful whether it hit armed rebels or the unarmed civilians that supported him. Several air force defectors reported that pilots were often instructed to go after bakeries (bread is a key element of the Syrian diet) and apartment buildings, in order to maximize the suffering among civilians.

The air force is rapidly disappearing because of combat and operational (accidents and poor maintenance) losses. At this point the government has nothing to lose and simply regards the remaining aircraft as similar to diminishing ammo supplies. Use it or lose it to advancing rebels.

Source: strategypage.com

Greg Elder: Letter from a Kiwi doctor in Syria

June 19, 2013 by Greg Elder

Two years ago, at the beginning of the violence in Syria, I was asked to write a blog in the British Medical Journal on behalf of Medecins Sans Frontieres. As a medical-humanitarian organisation, we were particularly outraged by the way in which public health facilities were being infiltrated by security forces. Patients wounded in demonstrations were pulled out of hospitals and doctors treating the wounded in makeshift clinics were tortured and imprisoned. These were colleagues, pursuing our common ethical obligations in our normally privileged places of work, the hospital.

Because we were unable to obtain permission from the government in Damascus to work directly on the ground, we started to support networks of colleagues with medical supplies and training in what became known as clandestine clinics, a term that carries a certain forbidden romantic connotation.

But they were not romantic at all, they were bloody and dirty places where poorly trained medical staff did their best to save the wounded with little equipment and limited medical supplies.

Later we opened our own makeshift trauma hospitals in the north of the country in areas controlled by the opposition. Normally we work on all sides and negotiate with all parties in a conflict, but without permission from the government, this has proven impossible.

In Syria we have worked at the edge of our capacities and at the limits of our principles, crossing borders and finding a space to work in this increasingly complex and dangerous place.

When I wrote that blog there was much expectation that shuttle diplomacy by the then United Nations-League of Arab States Joint Special Envoy for the Syrian crisis, Kofi Annan, would result in a peace accord and that influential alliances of neighbouring states, global leaders in the West and in the Gulf would negotiate an end to the civil war.

Two years later, Syria is the worst place on the planet to live. We can assume this because everyone has started to leave, Syria is haemorrhaging people at the rate of 5000 to 6000 a day. The conflict has taken its toll; an estimated 100,000 people have been killed. That’s more or less 100 people a day for the last 2 years who are direct victims of the violence. There are also an unmeasurable number of indirect victims because of the collapse of the public health system: women without care in childbirth, children no longer vaccinated, adults without treatment for their chronic ailments like diabetes and hypertension. Essential medicines are in short supply, electricity is cut and there are food and fuel shortages.

This flood of people fleeing Syria is being received into refugee settlements and camps in the four neighbouring countries; Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon who are now host to 1.5 million Syrians. Nobody willingly chooses to move to another country where you don’t know anyone and where you are reliant on the support of international organisations and welfare. It’s the absolute last option to move into a refugee camp.

While Medecins Sans Frontieres continues to negotiate for access through Damascus, for now it is only possible to work in opposition-controlled areas where we run five hospitals. Our offer of care now extends beyond emergency trauma care to respond to today’s realities: obstetrics, vaccinations and chronic care. We are doing more than most other organisations but it’s simply not enough. The gap between what is needed on the ground and what we are able to provide is widening. Medecins Sans Frontieres has been critical of the humanitarian response both inside and outside Syria. It’s not sufficient. The international aid effort is failing and falling further behind each day.

Ultimately, the solution will not come from a group of foreign doctors. International and regional bodies, the UN and the Security Council are paralysed by indecision. These institutions, created and mandated to limit the madness of war, are crippled by the incalculable permutations and associated risks of any assertive action they take today. Meanwhile, the entire region begins to shake, another day, another 100 lives and another 5000 refugees … just another day in Syria.

I have worked in some pretty ugly spots, but coming away from Syria I was really disturbed, less by the conflict and what I was seeing in the clinics than by what seemed to be almost a mass psychosis in the population. You could read it in their faces, manifest in some as profound sadness and in others as intense rage and anger. I left Syria wondering what the recovery of this country will look like. The international community must take action now to put in place the conditions for that recovery to happen and the humanitarian response must be massively scaled up to cope with the enormous needs inside and outside Syria.

Source: nzherald.co.nz

Obama refuses to specify US aid to Syrian rebels

June 19, 2013 by AFP

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday refused to specify the exact nature of new US military aid to Syrian rebels, after his officials let it be known they could expect shipments of small arms.

“I cannot and will not comment on specifics on our programs related to the Syrian opposition,” Obama said, at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Obama has refused to publicly specify exactly how Washington will increase aid to the Syrian opposition, after his government said it would offer military support for the first time after determining President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons.

Previously Obama had warned against pouring more weapons into the conflict and had kept US aid limited to humanitarian and non-lethal supplies.

The US president also said in Berlin that reports in the United States that escalating American support to the rebels meant the White House was now on a slippery slope to a new Middle East entanglement were mistaken.

He said reports were “overcranked” when suggesting the US was heading into a new Middle Eastern war.

“What we want to do is end a war,” he said, calling again for a political transition in Syria that does not include Assad.

Merkel said Berlin agreed that “Assad has lost his legitimacy” but reiterated the stance that “Germany has very clear legal rules that we do not send weapons into civil wars”, saying this was universal and “has nothing to do with the question of Syria specifically.”

But she added: “This doesn’t mean that we can’t play a constructive role, in the political process, humanitarian aid and the question about the right way” to help the moderate opposition and the people of Syria.

Source: now.mmedia.me

Lebanese minister accuses Syria of ‘ethnic cleansing’

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Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour speaks during a press conference at the ministry in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012. Photo: Hasan Shaaban/The Daily Star

June 18, 2013 by Erika Soloman/Reuters

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces have begun ethnically cleansing Sunni Muslims and deliberately pushing refugees across the border into Lebanon, the Lebanese caretaker minister for social affairs said on Tuesday.

Assad is battling a Sunni-led revolt in Syria, which he and his father before him have ruled for four decades. He belongs to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Wael Abu Faour told Reuters that during the 27-month-old conflict Syrian forces had committed what was “tantamount to ethnic cleansing next to the Syrian-Lebanese border”.

“(Assad) is trying to displace all the Sunnis to Lebanon and this is why I expect to have more displaced people,” he said.

The Syrian revolt turned into a civil war after a crackdown on anti-Assad protesters. It has taken on a sectarian hue, with Shiite Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah backing Assad, while Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia support the rebels. The conflict has sharpened sectarian rifts in Lebanon.

The United Nations says 93,000 people have been killed in Syria and 1.6 million Syrians have fled abroad. Lebanon, the smallest of Syria’s neighbours with 4 million people, has taken in more than half a million Syrian refugees.

“What began was a wave of people fleeing from violence to Lebanon, but what is happening now is a completely different matter. What is happening now is organised displacement of the Syrian people - organised based on sectarian and political motives,” said Abu Faour, a frequent critic of Assad.

He made his comments after meeting U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, who said that refugees in Lebanon and their local hosts needed direct support from world powers.

“My very strong appeal is for massive support not only to refugees, not only to local communities, but to Lebanon itself in order to be able to respond to this challenge,” Guterres said, adding that the Lebanese education, health, and social affairs ministries needed financial aid.

The United Nations has asked for some $5 billion in humanitarian aid for Syrians and for Syria’s neighbours before the end of the year, its biggest emergency appeal to date. Of that, $1.7 billion will be required for aid work in Lebanon, including $450 million for the Beirut government, the U.N. says.

Diplomats say that foreign donors are unwilling to give money to Lebanon’s sectarian-based government which they see as deeply divided over Syria’s war and dysfunctional on domestic issues. Some ministers, such as Abu Faour, have been fiercely critical of Assad, while others strongly support him.

“Lebanon needs to formulate a mechanism to create confidence and trust in the government so that donors can increase their funding,” said the Swedish ambassador to Beirut, Niklas Kebbon.

Canadian ambassador Hilary Childs-Adams said her country was seeking reassurances that there was “a mechanism to send aid to Lebanon”. She said it was easier to send aid to Jordan, which hosts 470,000 Syrian refugees. On Sunday Canada pledged 100 million Canadian dollars to help Jordan cope with the burden.

During a visit to a UNHCR registration centre in the southern city of Tyre — where employees say Syrians start queuing at 3:30 a.m. every morning due to the huge influx — municipality workers told Guterres about issues they had dealing with the new refugees and a lack of support from Beirut.

Guterres said he would try to implement some of their suggestions into UNHCR’s work in Lebanon. He drew laughter from attendees when he added, with a chuckle: “As for the Lebanese state, there is not much we can do to fix that.”

Highlighting the difficulty of tackling the refugee crisis in Lebanon, Guterres’s trip was cut short by clashes in the coastal city of Sidon which he had been due to visit later on Tuesday.

Source: dailystar.com.lb

In Syria These Days, Just Getting Along Is Top Priority

June 18, 2013 by Sam Dagher

As the Syrian conflict has entered its third year, staying alive is the priority of most Syrians remaining in the country.

In rebel-controlled areas, residents do everything possible to camouflage any affiliation to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which could be something as simple as collecting a meager pension or monthly government salary.

In regime strongholds, on the other hand, procuring the right kind of hawiya, or identity card, can mean the difference between coasting through the endless checkpoints within and between cities or being subjected to interrogation and possible detention. Nearly two dozen government checkpoints dot the road between the capital Damascus and the city of Homs about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the north.

For Alia Abbir, a 40-year-old single woman living in Homs with her brothers and their families, survival has required honing the age-old art of flattery.

Ms. Abbir and her siblings are among the very few people who have stayed in the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr through its many transformations and tribulations.

The neighborhood fell in rebel hands in late 2011. It quickly became a symbol of resistance in the face of a devastating siege and relentless bombardment by regime forces in Feb 2012. The regime captured it a month later but rebels returned briefly in March of this year before they were routed once more.

The regime is now building a wall around the battle-scarred streets of Baba Amrto keep rebels out. The Abbir home is located on the northern edge of the neighborhood in a section known as Jouret al-Arayees, meaning brides’ pit in Arabic.

Graffiti bears testimony to the struggle over the area.

“God wants Bashar al-Assad,” is scrawled on one wall. “Osama bin Laden: the martyr of Jabhat al-Nusra,” says a competing slogan on another, touting the militant leanings of some of the rebel fighters who were once in control of the neighborhood.

The area was crucial to securing rebel supply lines from Lebanon via the former rebel bastion of Qusayr to the south. Qusayr was captured by the regime and its ally, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah earlier this month.

On a recent morning Ms. Abbir hosted Abu Ibrahim, the regime security official in charge of the neighborhood. He is the de facto ruler here.

Dressed in a bright orange headscarf and a flowing black cloak ornamented with colorful trimmings, Ms. Abbir instructed her brothers to bring out dishes laden with fruit from the kitchen.

She peeled and sliced bananas, apples and oranges offering them to Abu Ibrahim and his assistant.

Teasing Abu Ibrahim, Ms. Abbir recalls how regime security forces fled the neighborhood when rebels came back this March.

“The gunmen were in control of the whole area, not a single security force member dared enter,” she says with a smile. “I kept calling [the security forces] but nobody answered.”

She said when rebels came back she was roused from bed at dawn by knocking at the front door.

“It was my neighbor Ali, the bear, telling me that they have come to liberate us,” says Ms. Abbir mockingly referring to one of the neighborhood’s opposition fighters by his nickname.

She said Ali politely requested that she remove the government flag she had hung from her balcony after regime forces captured Baba Amr in March of last year. She obliged and says she was never again bothered by the rebels, until they were driven out by government bombardment.

Ms. Abbir says rebels treated her well because she became briefly engaged to one of their commanders, a school friend two years her junior. This, she says, was another survival tactic.

“It was a trick to protect myself and my family,” she explains. “I kept coming up with excuses to delay the marriage.”

Ms. Abbir says she was rescued by circumstances from what she says would have been an unavoidable but unhappy and “loveless” marriage: her rebel fiancée was killed in the regime offensive on Baba Amr last year.

“Of course I (cheered) when I saw you and the army,” she says turning to Abu Ibrahim.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Pentagon Shoots Down Kerry’s Syria Airstrike Plan

June 18, 2013 by Jeffrey Goldberg

Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.

Military Wariness

Officials with knowledge of the meeting say that Kerry gave as good as he got, and that the discussion didn’t reach aneurysm-producing levels. But it was, in diplomatic parlance, a full and frank vetting of the profound differences between State and Defense on Syria. Dempsey was adamant: Without much of an entrance strategy, without anything resembling an exit strategy, and without even a clear-eyed understanding of the consequences of an American airstrike, the Pentagon would be extremely reluctant to get behind Kerry’s plan.

As we know now, the Pentagon’s position is in sync with the President Barack Obama’s. The outcome of the meeting last week was to formalize a decision made weeks ago to supply the more moderate elements of the Syrian opposition with small arms and ammunition. The assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies that Assad had used chemical weapons against small pockets of rebels — confirming those made several months earlier by the intelligence agencies of U.S. friends in Europe and the Middle East — forced the administration to make a gesture of support for the opposition.

Members of the White House national security team, who tend to be more hawkish than Obama or Dempsey (though not as quite as militant as Kerry), had been arguing that, in the words of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security adviser, that “superpowers don’t bluff.” Once Obama had drawn a red line around chemical weapons, the White House had no choice but to take some sort of action.

Blinken was clever to use the word “bluff” in his arguments to the president, implicitly linking his posture on Syria to his position on Iran’s nuclear program. Last year, in an interview with me on the subject of Iran, Obama said, “As president of the United States, I don’t bluff.” On Iran, he has lived up to his words, but he was in danger — and remains in danger — of being seen as a bluffer on Syria.

No Bluffing

What is so odd about Dempsey’s adamant opposition to Kerry’s aggressive proposals is that it hasn’t previously been made public. Obama told Charlie Rose this week that he is worried about sliding down the slippery slope toward greater intervention in Syria. Having Dempsey openly in his corner would be useful to him, but the administration hasn’t made hay over the Pentagon’s opposition to airstrikes. (When I asked the Pentagon for official comment, Dempsey’s spokesman would only say that he would not “discuss classified internal deliberations,” though he went on to say that the National Security Council principals “routinely debate a wide range of options to include how the military can and should support a comprehensive, regional approach to this conflict.”)

One senior administration official explained it this way: The White House doesn’t want Dempsey to make an enthusiastic case on “Meet the Press” against intervention, just in case Obama one day decides to follow Kerry’s advice and get more deeply involved. At that point, Dempsey arguments against greater involvement could come back to haunt the administration.

The decision to provide small arms to the Syrian opposition has made no one happy — not the rebels, who understand that these quite-possibly ineffective weapons will take many months to reach them; not Kerry, who, while arguing that these shipments may become a “force multiplier” in the conflict, thinks that only a show of American air power will convince Assad and his Hezbollah allies that the U.S. is making a serious attempt to level a playing field that has been tilting their way for some time; and not the Pentagon, which thinks that Obama, despite saying that he is wary of the slippery slope, might be pushed down that slope anyway, by interventionists on his team or by events on the ground.

It is possible, even for those of us who have been inclined toward intervention, to have a great deal of sympathy for Dempsey’s position. There are those in the Pentagon who think that the State Department has romanticized the Syrian opposition. What diplomats see as a civil war featuring bands of poorly armed moderates struggling to free themselves from the grip of an evil dictator, the generals see as a religious war between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Why would the U.S. risk taking sides in a battle between two loathed terror organizations? Memories of Iraq, too, are fresh in the minds of Dempsey and his colleagues.

On the other hand, a Kerry partisan told me, U.S. intervention in Syria would not necessarily have to look like U.S. intervention in Iraq. When I mentioned the Albright-Powell exchange of 20 years ago, he pointed out something obvious: President Bill Clinton eventually decided to use air power in the Balkans. And it brought the Serbian government to its knees.

Source: bloomberg.com

Syria is not Iraq

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Syrian troops take control over the village of Dumayna, located close to Qusayr in the strategic Homs province. Photo: AFP

 June 18, 2013 by Hussein Ibish

With the United States announcing it will finally begin to provide direct support to some Syrians, many Americans across the political spectrum are deeply worried about the prospect of another Middle Eastern quagmire. It’s hard to overstate how traumatized the American public was by the catastrophic miscalculation in Iraq.

But Syria is not Iraq. The American involvement will not be a repetition of the Iraq fiasco, it will be a completely different kind of engagement and in a totally different context. Here’s why:

1) The situation on the ground is completely different. There is an ongoing, major civil war between the government and opposition, and also battles between rival opposition groups (generally pitting patriotic resistance forces against Salafist-Jihadist extremists). There was no ongoing war in Iraq before the American invasion. This is not a situation we have created. It is one we can either deal with or ignore at our peril.

2) The regional atmosphere is completely different. There was a virtual unanimity in the Arab world in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Now, to the contrary, virtually the entire Sunni Arab world, along with Turkey and others, are desperately looking for American leadership on the Syria question. Outrage at any proactive American backing of Syrian rebels will be restricted almost entirely to Shiite and other sectarian minority groups. The overwhelming regional majority will either welcome or tolerate it.

3) The international strategic context is completely different. The United States had virtually no support for the invasion of Iraq, which was inexplicable, indefensible, and eminently avoidable. Not only will a significant intervention in Syria be largely welcomed by many of those that opposed the invasion of Iraq, it has a clear strategic imperative, goals and context. The survival of the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship is crucial to the future of Iran’s hope for regional hegemony, and essential for the survival of Hezbollah as a highly effective subnational fighting force.

Should the Damascus regime survive in the long run, Iran’s regional sphere of influence also will survive. And the next stage would then be to attempt to expand it, probably in the direction of the Persian Gulf. This is also a proxy confrontation with a newly-assertive Russian international posture which, again, the United States can ill-afford to lose. So while the aims of the Iraq war were always mysterious, the policy imperative in insuring that, at a minimum, the Assad regime does not reestablish its authority throughout the country are very clear.

4) The nature of the intervention will be completely different. What is being considered now, as implied by Obama administration officials, will be insufficient but the likelihood and desirability of “mission creep” is clear. Once the United States gets involved directly in the Syrian conflict, it will have a much stronger stake in its outcome and a greater ability to shape the nature of the groups defining the opposition. The Iraq war was about unilaterally engineered American regime change. The intervention in Syria will be about helping Syrians themselves ensure regime change on their own or come to the point where they can actually negotiate a new post-dictatorship modus vivendi.

Rather than a long-term occupation, as in Iraq, this will involve major aid to specific rebel groups, including arms and other materiel intelligence, command-and-control assistance, no-fly zones, and possibly a real confrontation with the Syrian Air Force and air defenses. But what it will not mean is American “boots on the ground.” As in Libya, the ‘Pottery Barn’ rules (“you break it, you own it”) will and should not apply in Syria. We can help Syrians get out of the mess they are in, but we cannot and should not dictate their future.

5) There will, therefore, be no quagmire, no massive Arab world backlash, and no new battleground for al-Qaeda to fight Americans (though our own inactivity has already allowed them to use Syria as a new battleground anyway, so our intervention on behalf of other groups is likely to only undermine, rather than promote that threat).

6) There are risks, but nothing like the obvious disaster - indeed trap - that awaited us in Iraq. The Syrian Air Force and air defenses, though probably overrated, are not as impotent as Libya’s, and there’s a real possibility of losing some aircraft and personnel. The Syrian regime, Hezbollah, Iran, and others might try to retaliate. Tensions will flare with Russia. But the idea that a limited, arm’s-length, Libya-style intervention in the Syrian calamity will be the Iraq fiasco revisited fails to take into consideration the obvious distinctions between the two circumstances.

Sometimes avoiding what’s necessary with insufficient and risk-averse measures can be almost as damaging as foolish, overweening hubris. American inaction on Syria has become totally untenable. The new policy, for all its flaws, is no “Iraq War, Part II.” 

Source: now.mmedia.me