28/09/12

#Syria, Assad’s lifelong friend: ‘The

crisis has changed him’

By Mick Krever, CNN

Manaf Tlass was once one of Bashar al-Assad’s closest friends.

“He is humble. He loves people,” Tlass said when describing Assad. “But he has changed. The crisis has changed him.”

Before he defected this July, Tlass was the very image of an Assad regime insider.

His father is a former defense minister. He was a brigadier general in Syria’s republican guard. And, of course, he was a close friend of Assad’s.

But Tlass became disgusted with the regime’s brutal crackdown - and he learned about it in the exact same way the rest of the world has: by watching amateur video posted to YouTube.

“I remember very well how I defected,” Tlass told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Thursday. “I remember that video that I saw when they stepped on the head of a Syrian citizen in Baniyas,” a city on Syria’s Western coast.

“I started to feel the feelings of a citizen.”

Tlass said he went to Assad and told him that the perpetrator should be punished. When Assad refused to react, Tlass knew that was it.

“Ever since then I can no longer be a friend of Bashar’s,” Tlass said.

You can watch the full interview with Manaf Tlass tonight on CNN International’s Amanpour at 2100 and 2300 CET.

07/08/2012

A diplomatic resolution looks unlikely in Syria, but in the realm of Saudi politics, a personal invitation from the king is symbolically important

Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been invited by the Saudi king to attend a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

The visit of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Saudi Arabia comes at a crucial time for the conflict in Syria. Few observers can be optimistic about the chances for diplomacy, with the Annan plan abandoned and the quieter efforts at reaching a US-Russia deal stalled.

Most analysts predict that Syria’s uprising against dictatorship – which began as a peaceful cross-sectarian movement calling for basic freedoms – will increasingly mutate into a sectarian civil war. Much of the western policy debate is moving on to the risks of prolonged state failure in a post-Assad future.

Within the Arab world, the debate over Syria is increasingly becoming polarised along ideological and sectarian lines, as the country’s strategic importance to the region’s great powers seems to be obscuring the commonalities between the basic demands of the Syrian protesters and their counterparts in other Arab countries. Any efforts to draw back from the brink – and to stop the Syrian uprising against dictatorship being derailed by a sectarian regional proxy war – deserve attention.

Ahmadinejad’s visit, which an aide has said will go ahead, is a rare one. He last visited Saudi Arabia in 2007, at a time when the Gulf states were trying so hard to reach out to Iran that Qatar even invited him to join in the annual summit of the Gulf Co-operation Council (the regional organisation representing the six Gulf Arab monarchies, which was founded in 1981 partly in response to the perceived threat of the Iranian revolution).

Although there is a long history of rivalry and competition between the Gulf Arab countries and Iran, relations have not always been so conflicted. Back in 2008, Ahmadinejad visited Bahrain and signed an agreement for Iran to supply Bahrain with natural gas. The deal, which seems almost unthinkable today, never materialised.

By contrast, Ahmadinejad’s most recent foray to the other side of the Gulf was in April, when he toured Abu Musa, an island occupied by Iran but claimed by the UAE. This prompted fury in the Gulf monarchies, where rulers saw it as a sign of Iranian expansionist tendencies, and were frustrated by the lack of reaction from their western allies (who were preparing for talks with Iran over the nuclear issue and who are not deeply engaged on the islands issue).

It is in Syria that the Saudi-Iranian confrontation has become the most pronounced and dangerous, but the two are competing for influence in the wider region. They back rival camps in Iraq, Lebanon, and to some extent Yemen and the Palestinian territories (though Hamas has always had some support in the Gulf and is now distancing itself from both Iran and Syria). They are also at odds over the treatment of Shia protesters in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s own eastern province. Saudi officials routinely suggest that Iran is fomenting the protests in both cases.

For its part, Iran’s interests seem to be best served by giving only moral support to the protesters, so it can sit back and watch its rivals challenged from within, without the kind of direct involvement that could spark retaliation.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are effective exploiters of “soft power”, making use of their various media channels and religious networks to try to discredit the other.

One of the disadvantages of this approach is that it is never quite clear how centralised the control of foreign policy really is. Another problem is that the Middle Eastern media are becoming increasingly sectarian – a trend that is worrying many people in the ethnically and religiously diverse countries of the Gulf.

Now, with the collapse of Kofi Annan’s mission to Syria, the Gulf Arab monarchies are becoming more open about their support for the Syrian opposition, including the armed Free Syrian Army. Saudi Arabia has hosted a variety of Syrian opposition visitors, from members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to Assad’s estranged uncle, Rifaat al-Assad and Manaf Tlass, a senior Syrian military officer who defected just a few weeks ago.

The latter visitors illustrate that Saudi Arabia is not only supporting the Islamist opposition; it has its own concerns about the rising regional influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose focus on electoral politics represents a major challenge to the Saudi model of partnership between clerics and hereditary rulers.

The UAE is also pursuing a delicate balancing act, as it is home to a number of Syrian National Council activists – who recently announced the defection of the Syrian ambassador to the UAE – but is extremely wary of the role the Muslim Brotherhood could play in its own territory, and is investigating around 50 imprisoned Islamist political activists who are accused of conspiring with foreign organisations.

Even before the Annan mission collapsed, the Saudi and UAE foreign ministers were expressing extreme frustration with what they see as international inaction over Syria. Saudi Arabia has never seemed particularly convinced by western diplomatic efforts; Kofi Annan did not visit Riyadh during his Syria mediation efforts, and neither Saudi Arabia nor Iran was included in the last “Friends of Syria” meeting.

Most indications point to further conflict rather than a diplomatic resolution. But in the highly personalised realm of Saudi politics, a personal invitation from the king is symbolically important.

In Lebanon, in 2008 and 2009, the confrontation between the Saudi-backed 14 March alliance and the Iranian-backed 8 March alliance occasionally looked like it could lead to renewed civil conflict. But there, the rival factions stepped back from the brink, negotiating power-sharing agreements before and after the 2009 elections.

This would be far harder to achieve in Syria, with its daily bloodshed and its asymmetry of forces, but the cost of conflict is high enough for any remaining diplomatic options to be worth exploring.

Syrian rebels are readying themselves to battle government forces for control of Aleppo

27/07/2012

Syrian forces have renewed their assault on the northern city of Aleppo, firing from helicopter gunships on rebel-held areas.

The US state department has said it fears Syrian government forces are preparing to carry out a massacre.

The pro-government al-Watan newspaper has warned that the mother of all battles is about to start.

Rebels in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city, have been stockpiling ammunition and medical supplies in preparation.

Syrian troops fired from helicopter gunships on south-western neighbourhoods of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the AFP news agency.

A convoy of tanks from Idlib province, near the border with Turkey, arrived in Aleppo overnight and was attacked by rebels, the Observatory said.

At least 34 people were killed in the city on Thursday, activists said, as artillery and helicopter gunships attacked rebel targets.

Residents flee

The US state department said the deployment of tanks, helicopter gunships and fixed-winged aircraft around Aleppo suggested an attack was imminent.

But the US would not intervene, said state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, except by continuing to channel non-lethal assistance such as communications equipment and medical supplies to the rebels.

The BBC’s Ian Pannell, near Aleppo, says thousands of people have already left as fears grow that an intense battle looms.

Talal al-Mayhani, an activist with connections to the rebel movement in Aleppo, said the battle for the city was likely to play out in a similar way to an earlier battle in the capital Damascus.

There, rebels took control of large parts of the city before being forced to withdraw in the face of a government offensive.

Foreign journalists operate under heavy restrictions in Syria so claims made by either side are difficult to verify.

Continue reading the main story‘Lessons from Balkans conflict’

A Syrian MP from Aleppo has fled to Turkey, Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency says.

Ikhlas Badawi, a mother of six, said she was defecting in protest at the “violence against the people”.

Meanwhile, another defector, Gen Manaf Tlas, has put himself forward as a possible figure to unite the fractious opposition.

In an interview with a Saudi newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, he said: “I am discussing with… people outside Syria to reach a consensus with those inside.”

However, some in the opposition regard Gen Tlas - who fled earlier this month - as a compromised figure too close to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said the world must apply the lessons learned from the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s.

He was speaking in Srebrenica, where a UN peacekeeping force failed to stop the killing of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in 1995.

“I do not want to see any of my successors, after 20 years, visiting Syria, apologising for what we could have done now to protect the civilians in Syria - which we are not doing now,” Mr Ban said.

The head of UN peacekeeping operations, Herve Ladsous, defended the decision to reduce the number of observers in Syria.

“We found ourselves with too many people and not enough to do,” he said.

Speaking in Damascus, he said there was “no plan B” beyond Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan.

Repeated diplomatic attempts to stop the violence have foundered, with the UN Security Council bitterly divided.

The Syrian government has said its forces are trying to dislodge the “remnants of mercenary terrorist groups”.

More than 16,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of anti-regime protests in March 2011, activists say.

The Qabun neighborhood in Damascus where Syrian rebels have clashed with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: /Reuters

Free Syria Army braced for counterattack by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad after four days of dramatic gains

The Syrian military gave residents 48 hours to leave the parts of Damascus now held by rebel forces as it prepared a counterattack aimed at retaking control of its power base and pushing back four days of dramatic rebel gains.

The rebel Free Syria Army on Thursdaycontinued to hold ground it had seized in key parts of the capital during this week’s major attack, and was bracing for a decisive battle against loyalist forces who appear to have been caught off guard by the co-ordinated assault.

Guerrilla units continued to push their gains elsewhere in the country, apparently seizing control of at least two border crossing points into Turkey and all crossings into Iraq, according to videos posted on the internet. Such crossings could prove crucial in funnelling supplies into besieged rebel areas.

Syria’s second city of Aleppo also saw fresh fighting, with rebels claiming to have routed loyalists from the Azzaz neighbourhood, and to be involved in heavy fighting in nearby Idlib city.

The clashes came a day after a bomb planted in a key security building killed three of the regime’s most senior figures, including Assef Shawkat, the intelligence chief who had overseen the 17-month crackdown.

In the wake of the assassinations, the Syrian armed forces’ chief of staff, Fahad Jassim al-Freij, was rapidly named as a replacement for killed defence minister, Dawood Rahja.

“This cowardly terrorist act will not deter our men in the armed forces from continuing their sacred mission of pursuing the remnants of these armed terrorist criminal gangs,” Freij said on state television, in a bid to douse fears of a power vacuum. “They will cut off every hand that tries to hurt the security of the nation or its citizens.”

Activists and Free Syria Army commanders continued to report a sharp increase in defections in the wake of Wednesday’s bombing, but there was nothing yet to indicate that the overall command structure of the Syrian military had been weakened.

The day before the bomb attack, an opposition figure involved in organising defections claimed there were more figures inside the regime who had secretly switched sides and stayed in place than those who had publicly defected, like Republican Guard general Manaf Tlass and the ambassador to Baghdad, Nawaf al-Fares.

“Those were symbolic defections, but we have a lot of ministers and officers working with us, who are still inside. These are far more valuable figures,” the opposition source said. “The week before Tlass defected, 50 officers in the Republican Guard were put under house arrest. They don’t know who to trust. And two days before the Tlass defection, 18 senior officers and 200 soldiers came over to our side.”

The spectacular attack at the heart of one of the regime’s key weekly military strategy meetings continued to reverberate outside of Syria, with some commentators speculating that foreign intelligence organisations may have helped rebels target the meeting.

Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, suggested Washington may have “tapped into” the Syrian military’s communications. “They [US intelligence] can listen and they can jam. They have aerial night-time capacity. The Syrian military can’t operate at night,” he said, adding that this top-secret intelligence was far more useful to the rebels than “a few guns”.

Rebel leaders have insisted, however, that the intelligence was theirs alone and had been gathered over many months in which key regime aides had been recruited and trained. Before the attack, rebel forces had shown a sharp improvement in command and control and a new ability to co-ordinate large operations.

Salem said that the bombers had struck a “crushing blow” against the Assad regime: “The panic level inside Assad’s inner circle must be enormous. They [the Free Syrian Army] have just blown up his entire command,” he said, adding: “The sense that this ship is going down must be high.” He predicted further defections from Assad’s team, including possible “soft defections”, with commanders opening lines of communication with the Russians and Chinese.

“They can’t recover from this, is my reading. The slide is on. It’s rapid,” he said, adding that Assad may have already left his crumbling power-base in Damascus, or would have to leave soon.

Salem suggested that Assad an, his key advisors, and army units still loyal to him, could eventually abandon the Syrian capital and retreat to the traditional Alawite heartland in the country’s mountainous north west and Mediterranean coast, which would act as a stronghold.

Here, they would continue resistance, while possibly carving out a land corridor to Iraq and to Iran, Assad’s key regional backer. Central to this strategy would be the loyalist port cities of Latakia and the important naval base of Tartus. “They will take their guns, money, the sea lanes,” Salem suggested. “They will build a completely secure Alawite zone. The regime has planned for this day for 40 years,’ he said, observing: “The Sunnis can’t beat them there.”

On Thursday, residents of Damascus, Homs and Hama reported intense shelling from regime positions in each city as well as rocket fire from helicopters. The barrage came ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which is due to begin on Friday. Ramadan is traditionally a time of fasting and reflection and had been thought likely to mark a lull in the fighting now ravaging the country.

However, the regime’s warning to Damascus residents clearly suggests that this Ramadan will be different and could instead herald a decisive phase in the uprising in Syria that the International Committee for the Red Cross now designates as a civil war.

Rebels declared the battle to “liberate” Damascus has begun as heavy fighting raged across the city yesterday and Russia said an agreement is possible for a UN resolution on the Syria crisis. 
The proclamation by the Free Syrian Army, which also claimed it had shot down a helicopter in the capital, came as peace envoy Kofi Annan said the 16-month crisis increasingly described as a civil war was at a “critical time”. 
Heavy machinegun fire was reported in Damascus’s Sabaa Bahrat Square, where President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has staged rallies to counter anti-regime protests that erupted in March 2011. 
At least 19 people were killed as tanks and helicopter gunships were deployed in Qaboon district and battles were fought in Al Midan and Al Hajar Al Aswad, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 
As the fighting inched closer to the regime’s nerve centre, FSA spokesman Colonel Kassem Saadeddine said “victory is nigh” and the struggle would go on until the city was conquered. 
“We have transferred the battle from Damascus province to the capital. We have a clear plan to control the whole of Damascus. We only have light weapons, but it’s enough.” 
“Expect surprises,” Saadeddine added, before adding later that rebels had downed a helicopter over Qaboon, although an activist in the district said there was “no foundation” to the report. 
Fighting in the city has raged since Sunday, with the rebels announcing a full-scale offensive dubbed “the Damascus volcano and earthquakes of Syria”. 
An activist who said he was in Al Midan neighbourhood said the army was shelling the neighbourhood “hysterically”. 
“The collapsing regime has gone mad,” the man calling himself Abu Musab said via Skype. 
“The army has tried to storm the district, but the Free Syrian Army has stopped them. So they have intensified their shelling. They are shelling everything,” he said. 
AFP could not independently verify the account. 
Witnesses also reported heavy machinegun fire in Sabaa Bahrat Square in central Damascus and in nearby Baghdad Street. 
But an army officer in Damascus said troops have “the situation under control” and were “chasing the terrorists seeking refuge in apartments and mosques”. 
The source said “battles raged” in Qaboon, “where the majority of rebels were”, adding that “33 terrorists were killed, 15 were wounded and 145 were arrested,” referring to rebels. 
The regime has vowed not to surrender the capital. 
In that context, the Israeli army’s intelligence chief said Syrian troops had been moved from the Golan Heights towards conflict zones including Damascus. 
“Assad has removed many of his forces that were in the Golan Heights to the areas of conflict,” Major General Aviv Kochavi told MPs. 
“Radical Islam” was gaining ground, he warned, adding that Syria was undergoing a process of “Iraqisation”, with militant and tribal factions controlling different zones. 
In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Annan that he would “do everything” to support the UN-Arab League peace envoy’s plan to end the conflict. 
Annan told Putin “the Syrian crisis is at a critical time.” 
Later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he saw “no reason why we cannot also agree at the UN Security Council. We are ready for this.” 
Annan added: “The Council, I expect, will be sending out a message that the killings must stop and that the situation on the ground is unacceptable.” 
Annan’s Moscow meetings came one day before Western powers plan to hold a vote on a UN resolution that threatens sanctions against Damascus. 
The council must also vote to decide on renewing the 300-strong UN Supervision Mission in Syria, deployed to monitor an April 12 ceasefire Assad agreed with Annan. 
UN leader Ban Ki-moon “called on Russia to use its influence to ensure the full and immediate implementation” of Annan’s plan in a telephone call with Lavrov, a spokesman said. 
Ban was due in Beijing yesterday, also on a mission to get support for tougher action on Syria. 
Russia and China have twice blocked resolutions against Syria at the Security Council, which remains divided over Western calls to impose new sanctions. 
On a visit to Syria’s neighbour Jordan, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the crisis is too unpredictable to rule out “any option”. 
Stepping up the pressure, French President Francois Hollande said “the Russians must understand that they cannot be seen as the only ones or almost the only ones hindering the search for a solution.” 
As wrangling continued over rival resolution drafts, the Security Council expressed concern about fallout from the conflict in Lebanon, UN diplomats said. 
UN envoy to Lebanon Derek Plumbly said there was “concern about the pressures on the Lebanese border in recent weeks, incursions and shooting across the border”. 
The Observatory said at least 35 people were killed across Syria yesterday, 16 of them civilians, adding to its toll of more than 17,000 people dead since the uprising began. 
Meanwhile, Nawaf Fares, who became the most prominent figure to abandon Assad when he defected as Syria’s ambassador to Iraq, warned the regime will use chemical weapons against opposition forces and may have already deployed them. 
Another key defector, General Manaf Tlass, a childhood friend of Assad, said in a statement sent to AFP that he was in Paris and called for a “constructive transition” in the country.

(CBS/AP) BEIRUT - Syrian activists reported a new massacre late Thursday in the central Hama province, saying regime forces killed more than 100 people in shelling and other attacks.

There were few details on the attack, which was reported by the Local Coordination Committees activist group and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Some activists say the death toll is as high as 200 victims, Reuters reports.

The Observatory said it was aware of up to 100 killed from sources on the ground, but the group had only confirmed the names of 30 people so far.

Death tolls are nearly impossible to independently verify in Syria, where the government restricts journalists and where more than a year of violence has convulsed much of the country.

There were few details of the violence in Hama’s Tremseh area.

Activists say more than 17,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011, and he is coming under growing international pressure to stop the violence. But as the bloodshed continues, and the conflict morphs into an armed insurgency, hopes for a peaceful transition are dimming.

The latest report of violence came in the wake of the highest-level defector yet from President Bashar Assad’s regime - his ambassador to Iraq.

Defections from the Syrian regime have stirred hopes in the West Assad’s inner circle will start abandoning him in greater numbers, hastening his downfall.

But the tightly protected regime has largely held together over the course of the 16-month-old uprising, driven by a mixture of fear and loyalty.

The latest official to flee, Ambassador Nawaf Fares, announced that he was joining the revolution, asserting Thursday that only force will drive Assad from power.

“There is no road map ever with Bashar Assad, because any plan, any statement that is agreed on internationally he delays on and ignores,” Fares told the Al-Jazeera satellite channel. “There is no way that he can be pushed from power without force, and the Syrian people realize this.”

Syria’s Foreign Ministry denounced Fares, saying he should face “legal and disciplinary accountability.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell hailed what he called the “first major diplomatic defection,” adding: “We think this a wider sign that the regime is feeling the pressure. The pressure is up and the regime is really starting to fall apart.”

Fares is the second prominent Syrian to break with the regime in less than a week. Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, an Assad confidant and son of a former defense minister, defected last week, but has not spoken publicly.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tlass has been in contact with the Syrian opposition. He would not comment on reports that Tlass was in Paris.

“I know that there is some closeness between the opposition and the general… Contact has been made,” Fabius told journalists in Paris.

Assad’s regime has suffered a steady stream of low-level army defectors, who have joined a group of dissidents known as the Free Syrian Army, now numbering in the tens of thousands. There have been several high-level defections in the past - including a Syrian fighter pilot who flew his plane to neighboring Jordan during a training mission in June in a brazen move.

Although the defections are notable, Assad’s regime has remained remarkably airtight, particularly compared with the hemorrhaging of Moammar Gadhafi’s inner circle in Libya in 2011.

Within weeks of the Libyan revolt, a number of Libyan ambassadors and other high-ranking officials quit the government, and many joined the opposition leadership. The early defection of huge sections of the army in eastern Libya gave the rebel movement a safe zone where they could freely organize their political and military strategies.

Syria has seen nothing similar. Part of the reason is the loyalty of the armed forces.

Unlike the armies of Tunisia and Egypt, Syria’s military has stood fiercely by the country’s leader as Assad faces down an extraordinary protest movement.

Assad, and his father who ruled before him, stacked key military posts with members of their minority Alawite sect over the past 40 years, ensuring the loyalty of the armed forces by melding the fate of the army and the regime.

The army has a clear interest in protecting the regime because they fear revenge attacks and persecution should the country’s Sunni majority gain the upper hand.

But besides the military’s loyalty, another factor that constrains a flood of defections is fear. Open dissent is dangerous in Syria, a country that crushed any rumblings of defiance even before the popular revolt started to threaten the Assad family’s 40-year dynasty. The security forces, which are the backbone of the regime and drive the culture of fear and paranoia, will protect the leadership at all costs.

Defectors fear not only for their own lives, but for those of any family members left behind. When deputy oil minister Abdo Husameddine defected in March, he said in a video statement that he fully expected government forces to “burn my home” and “persecute my family.”

Already, the conflict is believed to have killed more than 17,000 people since the crisis began in March 2011, according to activists’ estimates. Although the revolt began with protests, it has morphed into an armed insurgency with scores of rebel groups across the country clashing with government troops and attacking their bases and convoys.

On Thursday, Syrian forces shelled the suburbs of the capital, Damascus, to flush the rebels out from areas where they have established a foothold. Troops pounded Mezzeh and Kafr Souseh in eastern Damascus with mortars, sending residents streaming out, activists said. They also targeted the Liwan, Qadam and Daraya neighborhoods from a nearby military airport.

Explosions could be heard though much of the capital and amateur videos posted online showed huge clouds of smoke rising from the targeted areas. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported three dead in the area, among more than 45 people killed across Syria on Thursday. At least 11 were government soldiers, it said.

The reports and videos could not be independently verified.

Also Thursday, Human Rights Watch said it had found evidence the Syrian government had fired cluster bombs in an area near the central city of Hama. The New York-based group said the munitions are clearly identifiable in amateur videos posted online, and that local activists said the area has been under government bombardment for weeks.

Cluster bombs explode in the air and drop dozens of “bomblets” over a large area, but these often do not explode on impact. They remain explosive, increasing the threat of later injury to civilians.

As the conflict grinds on, U.N. officials are growing more pessimistic over prospects for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, even though Assad’s main backers, Russia and China, have signed on to the idea of a transition to democracy in Syria.

Despite incremental progress, a senior U.N. official said the U.N. Security Council is deeply divided on Syria policy, with Western diplomats still uncertain whether Moscow is any closer to cutting its ties with the Syrian government or using its considerable leverage with Damascus to end the conflict on terms unfavorable to Assad.

With diplomacy near a standstill, the U.N. observer mission in Syria is serving as little more than a bridge between the United Nations and the Assad government, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss diplomatic maneuvering with media.

Watch video here.

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

He is right and its heartbreaking: Manaf Tlas: Syrian regime ‘taking country to Hell’ bbc.co.uk/news/world-mid…

— abuhatem (@abuhatem) July 7, 2012

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL

Published: July 5, 2012