Talking to Syrian Major-General Adnan Silou

Destruction in Homs. In line with the regime’s slash-and-burn policy, it may use chemical weapons against its own people. (AFP photo)

09/08/2012

One of the gravest concerns in the West about Syria is whether or not the Assad regime will deploy chemical weapons either against the civilian population and armed rebels or against a neighboring country. While accurate data is hard to come by in Syria, Western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies reckon that the regime has as many as 1,000 tons of chemical weapons disbursed in stockpiles throughout 50 cities. And not that it would matter if Syria had signed or ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which outlaws the manufacture or storage of these arsenals, though the fact that it hasn’t only amplifies fears of just how catastrophic Assad’s end-game might be.
 
Major General Adnan Silou is the former head of Syria’s chemical weapons program. He left that post three years ago and defected from the Assad regime in June. Silou now resides in the officers’ refugee camp in Antakya, Turkey, which doubles as the Free Syrian Army headquarters. Here’s his defection video.

NOW Lebanon was able to speak briefly with Major-General Silou recently about the worst of all outcomes for Syria.

Will the regime ever use chemical weapons?

Silou: If Assad feels restricted, he may use them. As long as conventional weapons—tanks, artillery, the Air Force—are successful in damaging things from afar, he won’t need to deploy them.

Under what conditions could you see Assad ordering them used?

Silou: If Aleppo falls to the Free Syrian Army, he’ll deploy them because he’s insane.

Deploy them against whom? The rebels or civilians?

Silou: He’d use them against everyone, rebels and civilians. This would be total destruction. These weapons hurt everyone.

Why would Aleppo be the decisive factor?

Silou: Because it’s the industrial and economic city of Syria.

Describe how this would work. How would the orders be delivered to deploy chemical weapons?

Silou: The chain of command is Bashar al-Assad, Ali Mamluk [who, following last month’s assassination of key regime insiders, now oversees the entire security apparatus], Jamil Hassan, the head of Air Force intelligence. But only Bashar only can give the order.

If Assad were killed or if he left the country, who could then take such a decision?

Silou: Constitutionally, it would be Farouq Al-Sharaf, the current Vice President of Syria.  But if Assad was still alive but overthrown, he could delegate authority to any other Syrian general.

Would Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and the commander of the Fourth Division, not assume that role?

Silou: He could. The constitution in Syria doesn’t matter, so it’s whatever Bashar decides.

Where are the chemical weapons being kept now? Is it true that they’re scattered throughout 50 cities in Syria?

Silou: I only know of two storage facilities: “417”, which is northeast of Damascus, and “418”, which is in eastern Homs.

What kinds of weapons are kept there?

Silou: Sarin [gas], VX [nerve agent] and mustard agents.

How would these be delivered or fired?

Silou: Through tanks, missiles and aircraft.

You left your position as head of the chemical weapons division three years ago. How sure can you be that the chemical arsenal is the same today as it was then?

Silou: Everything’s the same as I left it. I did everything and managed everything — I was the chief administrator.

Who’s the head of chemical weapons now?

Silou: Brigadier General Talib Salameh is in charge of training the Syrian troops on how to avoid being affected by chemical weapons. But the responsibility for deploying them belongs to Jamil Hassan.

Were chemical weapons ever used while you were the head of the program?

Silou: No.

There have been reports from other defectors that chemical weapons have already been used in Syria since the uprising began a year and a half ago. Is this true?

Silou: In Rastan, the regime sprayed pesticides. This was done to make the people fear the regime and to disperse the protests.

He is a Republican Guard brigadier and son of Syria’s longest-serving defence minister. But most of all Manaf Tlas is a friend of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of his inner circle and a prominent figure in the Damascus “young guard.”

Reuters / Handout

Syrian Brigadier-General Manaf Tlas in Damascus in April 2011.

Or he was. Rebels and a news website with links to the Syrian security apparatus said Thursday Brig. Tlas had fled to Turkey. If confirmed, he would be the first real insider to defect from the embattled elite fighting off a revolt against the Assad clan.

Tlas has long been a rare Sunni name within a ruling clique dominated by Mr. Assad’s fellow Alawites; the brigadier’s flight may reflect a growing sectarian divide and eroding support for the dynasty among richer Sunnis, who have been slow to join a revolt launched by poorer sections of the majority population.

A handsome man in his 40s with a beautiful wife, Brig. Tlas cut a dashing figure on the Damascus social scene, entertaining diplomats, artists and journalists, and rooting for what he saw as reformist policies of his president friend.

An enthusiast of fancy cars, he smokes cigars and his favourite holiday spot is the French Riviera.

But he grew increasingly disillusioned with the system that awarded his family rank and privilege.

His playboy father, Mustafa Tlas, attended military academy with Hafez al-Assad and remained his friend, confidant — and defence minister — through his three decades in power.

When Hafez died in 2000, Mustafa Tlas helped arrange a smooth transition for his son Bashar; at the same Baath party congress that anointed the younger Assad, Mr. Tlas’s son Manaf was elevated to the Central Committee of Syria’s ruling party.

The elder Tlas and another son have both left Syria since the revolt against Mr. Assad began last year. Mustafa Tlas left for France for what he described as medical treatment some months ago. Opposition sources say he is still there, though his whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. His son Firas, a business tycoon, left for Egypt; he is now thought to be in Dubai.

Like their fathers, Manaf Tlas and Bashar al-Assad are old friends and underwent military training together. Brig. Tlas helped introduce Bashar, now 46, to the Sunni Damascus social scene when he was being groomed for power in the 1990s.

In the decade that followed, Brig. Tlas spoke of reform but defended its cautious, some said glacial, pace under the Assads: “You need time. You need years,” he told The Washington Post in 2005. “There’s a generation you have to push forward.”

But the 2011 uprising rocked his cosy world. His father’s home town Rastan, about 160 kilometres north of Damascus, was among the first to rise up against Mr. Assad — and get hammered by the army for its defiance.

Peaceful demonstrations were silenced by the gun, prompting Rastan’s residents, many of whom served in the army and had the patronage of the Tlas family, to take up arms.

Brig. Tlas was privy to the inner working of the military crackdown by the core Alawite forces. As a senior officer in the Republican Guard, he would have been in regular contact with its commander, Bashar’s feared younger brother Maher, an architect of repression.

AFP PHOTO/LOLO/AFP/Getty Images

A destroyed Syrian army tank is abandoned after fighting with rebels on the side of a highway between Aleppo and Damascus Wednesday.

He did not like what he saw, and tried to do something to ease the crackdown, friends and opposition sources say. They credit him with intervening to negotiate local ceasefires.

“Manaf has been growing increasingly frustrated for months,” one friend said. “Being from Rastan, he felt increasing dishonour as his hometown was being leveled and hundreds of his relatives fell dead or injured.

“He started to tell people he trusted that he wanted out, and that he has respect among the Free Syrian Army,” the friend said, referring to the rebel force that has attracted many Sunni officers and soldiers from Rastan.

A Western diplomat who served in Damascus said Brig. Tlas, with his boyish good looks and fluent English and French, a taste for paintings and concerts, stood out among an officer corps drawn largely from the historically disadvantaged Alawite minority and often poorly educated.

He and his wife Tala regularly spent weekends in Paris, where his sister Nahed, widow of billionaire Saudi arms dealer Akram Ojjeh, is a prominent socialite.

“Manaf does not give the impression that he is a thug,” the diplomat said.

“But he mattered in the military. His defection is big news because it shows that the inner circle is disintegrating.”

Others take a different view.

“If his defection is confirmed I do not think it will have any impact. The Tlas family has distanced itself for some time from what is happening,” said a Lebanese official close to the Damascus government.

“It will not change anything in the balance of power inside the country. They do not have any influence on the ground. They have made promises that they did not deliver.

“The main goal for this defection will be to cause a moral shock. The Americans will try to use it to the maximum.”

Syriasteps, the website with Syrian security links that reported Brig. Tlas’s defection, quoted a security official for Assad’s administration saying, “His desertion means nothing.”

With files from Agence France-Presse

As Syrian army defections multiply, the backbone of the regime remains grounded on a loyal core of officers motivated either by conviction or fear of a post-revolt purge of their ranks.

The most prominent desertions have been the June 22 defection of a pilot who landed his fighter in Jordan and that of 85 soldiers who escaped to Turkey on Monday.

Such events offer inspiration for the increasingly organised rebels which, according to activists and monitors, have inflicted heavy losses on government troops in past weeks.

“These defections hurt the morale of the army,” Riad Kahwaji, who heads the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA), told AFP.

But “you don’t have the kind of scale of defections that would make an impact,” said Aram Nerguizian, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The scale of defections in the Syrian army, one of the largest in the Arab world, is hard to quantify, despite widespread videos and news reports of dissent.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, “tens of thousands” of soldiers have fled since the anti-regime revolt broke out in March 2011, but not all have joined the armed rebellion.

British military analyst Paul Smyth points out that “the number of people who have deserted is still quite low considering the size of the Syrian military, which is quite large.”

“Any army which has been fighting in various parts of a country for over a year has obviously maintained a certain degree of cohesion,” said Smyth, founder of defense consulting firm R3IConsulting.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that in 2010, a year before the revolt, the Syrian army could count 325,000 troops under its command.

This number does not include an additional 300,000 reservists.

Either “people are not leaving the army because they are genuinely still loyal to the regime, or they are frightened of reprisals that may happen to their families,” said Smyth, a retired British officer.

“Probably both are true,” he added.

Testimonies from deserters often cite disobeying orders to shoot civilians as the prime cause of defections.

Kassem Saadeddine, spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, said that soldiers who were reluctant to defect for fear of reprisals were supporting the rebels with weapons, intelligence and logistics.

But in elite units, the backbone of the army, numbering approximately 100,000 men, there have been no visible cracks.

“In Syria, there are two armies: the military itself and the army defending the regime,” Kahwaji said.

These include the dreaded fourth division of the First Army Corps, led by the younger brother of President Bashar al-Assad, Maher, which Kahwaji said “is the best equipped and better paid.”

The special forces, the Republican Guard and some of the fifth and ninth divisions are also “darlings of the regime”.

But in a majority Sunni country led by the Assad clan, hailing from the minority Alawite faith, loyalty to community has become more pronounced as the conflict takes an increasingly sectarian bent.

“Every major unit within the Syrian armed forces that has the ability to shape the security outcome is either directly or indirectly controled by Alawite officers,” Nerguizian told AFP.

“While these defections are not insignificant, they are still mainly Sunni soldiers who don’t have the kind of access to command and control” needed to cause “shifts within the Alawite command structure.”

Even many Sunni officers are hesitant to take the plunge.

“Many now believe that even if Assad were to go, the country will be embroiled in instability for years,” Nerguizian said. “There are still far too many within the military who prefer some kind of continuity over years of instability.

“Even if they support the opposition, they fear the prospect of an Iraq-style ‘de-Baathification’,” the analyst said, referring to the dissolution of the Baath — the ruling party in Syria — after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

“They are going to hang in there with the hope of some political settlement.”

According to experts, the status quo is likely to drag on, especially given NATO’s reluctance to intervene in the conflict.

“The regime cannot decapitate the opposition by force and vice versa. It is a real war of attrition,” said Nerguizian.

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