Syrian Freedom

#Syria’n Opposition Response to Human Rights Watch (@HRW) “Open Letter To The Leaders of The Syrian Opposition”

Thursday, March 22,2012

We are a group of Syrian bloggers, writers, activists, and independent citizens. We would like to commend your efforts to bring to light violations of human rights whatever their nature or source may be. We have read your letter to the leaders of the Syrian opposition highlighting “increasing evidence…of kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members”, and we would like to respond with the following:

All efforts to expose criminal actions and violations of human rights are commendable. The Syrian uprising began with human rights at the forefront of its values. “Freedom” was one of the first words uttered in the chants of this uprising. It was also accompanied, at least in the beginning, with the chants of “Selmiya, Selmiya” (peaceful, peaceful). In one of the most memorable scenes of this revolution captured on video, Mohamed Abd Al Wahab from the town of Baidah (near to Banias) exclaims: “I’m a human being, not an animal!”, referring to the dehumanizing treatment of citizens by the security forces. The essence of the Syrian uprising is the people’s struggle for their human rights: the right of every Syrian citizen to freedom and dignity. The Assad regime has denied and suppressed these basic human rights for decades, employing every fear tactic imaginable: systematic murder (including but not limited to the massacre of Hama, 1982); mass imprisonment; and torture. These tactics of brutality have paralyzed the Syrian people in silence and fear, until March 2011.

Hence, we believe that the violations outlined by this report do not, and cannot, represent the entire opposition movement. We reject any implication that taints the entire opposition with these actions. This report has already been put to political use by mouthpieces and propagandists of the Syrian regime in order to bolster the notion that there are two equal sides to this crisis and that violence is more or less equal. This proposition is a gross exaggeration and utterly untrue. Criminal actions by armed opposition members, while appalling, are minuscule compared to the systematic criminal repression of the regime.

Many Syrians, understandably, have reacted to your report with anger and frustration. There is simply no mechanism in place to investigate these allegations or bring the perpetrators to justice and put them through fair trials. We can only realistically expect human rights to be ingrained and firmly upheld by state laws when Syria is free and democratic. Our struggle is not only with the Assad regime, but with a legacy of thuggery and Mukhabarat torture that infiltrated every aspect of life in Syria.

Finally, we must stress a very significant point in the HRW letter: it’s not always easy to identify armed opposition. As mentioned in the letter:

“Some reports received by Human Rights Watch indicate that in addition to armed groups with political motivations, criminal gangs, sometimes operating in the name of the opposition, may be carrying out some of these crimes.”

Indeed. This has exactly been the case of many kidnappings according to frequent reports from inside Syria, especially the city of Aleppo. When calling family members to demand ransom, the kidnappers identify themselves as members of the Free Syrian Army. While the reality suggests that there are far more likely suspects of these kidnappings: the criminals released from jail at the beginning of the uprising with a presidential pardon. These individuals have often been involved in the thuggish repression of peaceful protesters, and they would not miss the opportunity to smear the Free Syrian Army as well.

In conclusion, while we appreciate Human Rights Watch’s efforts to shed light on the current Syrian crisis and we join HRW in condemning all violations of human rights in Syria, we strongly oppose tainting the Syrian opposition as a whole with these isolated cases. We strongly oppose an attempt to equalize the country-wide spread of atrocities by the Assad regime and the isolated cases by a few anti-regime operatives. As HRW knows from its own previous reports on Syria, there no comparison between the two in the number of dead and imprisoned, and the sheer, indiscriminate brutality directed towards innocent civilians.

Guest post from Rana Kabbani #Syria

by William Hague on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 4:46am ·

It is just over a year since our Syrian people – men, women and children, young and old – burst into revolution against the world’s most macabre regime. The fuse was lit by the arrest of 11-year old boys who had written on the wall of their run-down school in Dar’aa ‘Down with the regime,’ as they had seen the Tunisian and Egyptian people do in their televised revolutions. Mukhabarat men stormed the school – tipped off by their mole there – and took the children away. They beat them savagely and ripped out their tender nails. When their anguished fathers came to try to retrieve them, they were told by an Assad cousin in command there that the boys had been killed. He had happy news, though, he said: he would round up their mothers at once and his Allawite guards would rape them, to make them pregnant with far better sons!

Syrians had been humiliated, abused and mass murdered by the Assads for 42 years, but this proved a galvanising moment. They came out onto streets made ugly by this family mafia belonging to a sectarian hardcore of a tiny minority, armed with nothing but their dignity and natural desire for justice. They defied Russian-made bullets that Assad rained down on them; Iranian missiles; Hizballah snipers; as well as his own ruthlessly sectarian killing-machine, which murdered them in cold blood by the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands. Their fields were burnt; their patient farm animals shot; their houses looted and shelled; their mosque minarets and church spires desecrated and destroyed. All basic services were cut off — water, electricity, gas — in outrageous communal punishment. Syrians found themselves besieged and starved in towns across their generous beautiful country. One image that is seared into my mind forever is this: two young men who sought to smuggle in a little baby formula and three tins of sardines to hungry Dar’aa, were shot in the head by Assad Shabbiha, who then photographed themselves on stolen iPhones, laughing and pointing at the blown-out brains splashed across their boots.

The psychopathic eye-doctor imposed by force on the Syrian people by the Stalinist junta of his father 12 years earlier, thought nothing of gouging out the eyes of protestors. National hospitals became torture centres, where doctors of his ilk drilled holes into people’s flesh and chained them to beds so that security thugs could interrogate them with pokers and pliers. Girls as young as 9 were brought to prisons to be gang-raped, so as to better persuade their tied-up brothers or fathers – by the hundreds of thousands – not to rebel. Assadist torturers had nurses on standby to remove internal organs for sale on the black market. This was the nature of the beast — a corrupt Assad police state, that had bled our country dry for 42 years, and conspired to make a dynamic, capable people impoverished, even as its own members became obscenely rich, with their fortunes sent abroad. Our own United Kingdom is peaceful home to Assad’s war criminal uncle Rifa’at — mastermind of the infamous Hama genocide of 1982, that wiped out 20,000 Syrians in a month, and disappeared 17,000 others.

For the better part of a year, we were told, and glibly, by Western democracies that Assad was a reformer — perhaps because he wore suits and ties, and did not look scarily Arab like Saddam or Qadhafi. Turkey talked a lot but quickly caved in to his terrorist blackmail — though it did take in floods of refugees, who ended up in snow-covered tents across the border, traumatised and destitute. Russia intensified arms sales to Assad. China stood by him. Israel preferred him in power, while Arab states did nothing meaningful to prise him out of it. And so we became the loneliest people on earth.

Though it is easy to be bitter at having been so utterly abandoned to Assad’s slaughter by the international community, we the Syrian people have far better things to do than to hark on such a grave moral and political failure of will. We have a horrifying police state to dismantle — alone. Millions around the world tune in on a daily basis to the Assad snuff movie of castrated children, disfigured women, destroyed neighbourhoods, and mass graves. Our eleven thousand dead, sixty thousand disappeared, two hundred thousand arrested, and many more made refugees both internally and externally, add up to one thing, and one thing alone:

Syria will be free. Syria will be free. Syria will be free!

Rana Kabbani was born in Damascus in 1958 to a political family of democrats on her mother’s side, and artists and poets on her father’s side. She was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is a writer and broadcaster, and a regular contributor to The Guardian and the BBC.

Foreign Secretary William Hague: “Last week marked the first anniversary of the uprisings in Syria. I’m grateful to Syrian writer Rana Kabbani who has written a harrowing account of her perspective on events in Syria. I don’t agree with everything that she says: for example the UK is at the forefront of diplomatic efforts to stop the bloodshed in Syria and to hold this criminal regime to account for its actions. But it is important people hear the voice and opinions of Syrian people, and I would welcome your views on what she has to say.”

#Syria Hit List Targets Thousands

EXCLUSIVE: A detailed document obtained by Mother Jones appears to identify a vast group of Syrian dissidents targeted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. —By Hamed Aleaziz

The document does not contain any identifying government markings. But the experts consulted agree that its organization and content—which they say is striking in scope—are characteristic of lists used by intelligence services in the Middle East. A link to the document, which surfaced in mid-January in discussions about Syria on Twitter, was provided to Mother Jones by a self-described hactivist who tweets frequently in Arabic and English and whose identity is unclear. A redacted sample of the document is below; Mother Jones is not publishing the full document or revealing the names of individuals in it because we cannot definitively confirm its authenticity nor predict how the document might be used if more widely disseminated.

But the experts who examined the document say it shows what many observers have strongly suspected: In addition to relentless bombing of cities such as Homs and Hama, the Assad regime is tracking down thousands of its own people for interrogation, coercion, or far worse. Joshua Landis, a scholar on Syria who has consulted for the State Department and other US government agencies, said he thinks the document merges the records of several Syrian intelligence agencies in order to better coordinate the crackdown. ”This is what a secret service does,” he said. Actions allegedly taken by individuals in the document—such as setting up a roadblock near Homs or issuing instructions about how to attack a Syrian military outpost—are “the kind of thing that people get whacked for all the time, or at least tortured for.”

According to Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syria expert and fellow at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the document contains the names of people wanted by the government’s military and security services. It lists many of them with specific information—the year of their birth, names of their relatives, and descriptions such as, “he leads rallies in the Sakhaneh neighborhood.” The list also includes military defectors and their units and ranks, Abdulhamid said. “This kind of info on this scale cannot be available to the general public, or faked.”

The hactivist who alerted Mother Jones to the online document said that it was posted by members of an activist organizing committee inside Syria, but declined to provide any details confirming that, citing security concerns. It’s conceivable that the document involves deception by the Syrian regime or counterintelligence operations by its adversaries; the United States, Israel, and other Western powers are known to have run sophisticated covert operations against Syria and Iran for many years.

Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agrees that the list appears to be authentic, despite that there is no way to know for sure. “The way it’s organized looks similar to other documents I’ve seen,” he said, citing a hit list he saw when he was in Syria in 2006. (That list, he said, also did not contain identifying government markings.) “It organizes people in such a way that it would allow the security services to be able to track them down.” Tabler also said the document is longer than any he’s previously seen; it allows the Syrian government to “more effectively round up these folks and choke them off as part of the crackdown.”

Here is a sample from the top of page 1 of the document, which was translated from the Arabic by Abdulhamid.

(The English above corresponds to the headers and content of line 1 below; the columns are flipped, as Arabic is read from right to left.)

A Syrian student living in Europe who actively supports the opposition movement also examined the document and said that it is “very encompassing” and includes details on “activists who make things happen on the field and military defectors.” A note above a section near the end of the document, he said, suggests that the names of the people it contains were extracted through confessions.

The infamy of Syria’s Mukhabarat intelligence service is well known. For the past year, reports of it rounding up and torturing Syrian activists have steadily trickled out of the country. “When they took me in, they put me face down on the floor, and started beating me with a cable on the soles of my feet, my legs and back,”a Syrian protester told Human Rights Watch last year. “They were asking, ‘Why did you go to the demonstration? Who paid you to go? Who made you go?’ They just wanted me to confess to something, did not matter what.”

“I have seen lists that had hundreds of names listed in the same manner,” Abdulhamid said. “Some were published on the web by activists to warn people. Others included names of people who were later arrested or killed. Activists have reported since the early days of the revolution that when loyalist security forces came to their neighborhoods, they indeed carried a list of names in their hands and were looking for specific people, in addition to making random arrests or arresting relatives of the people whose names they had.”

He added: “It is possible that some of these lists have been leaked intentionally and that they contain names of pro-Assad elements to be used as bait for catching activists. The dynamics of the revolution have become very complex—there is active cyberwar going on, intelligence and counterintelligence, propaganda and counterpropaganda, and the regime tends to have the upper hand in these fields.”

Landis, who also runs the influential blog Syria Comment, says he thinks the scale of the document highlights “how overwhelmed the security forces clearly are with this uprising. They’re trying to keep track of leadership and who’s in the opposition, and it’s reaching into the thousands upon thousands.” Even for a regime as systematically brutal as Assad’s, it’s an immense undertaking. “They have to go out and find these people’s homes and interrogate their families, and then try to track these people down.”

Landis believes that the Arab Spring and the rise of social networks have weakened the iron grip that the regime has had on the country for more than four decades. “It’s way out of control…it’s on Facebook, it’s using all these technologies they don’t understand and were not up to speed on,” he said. “All of a sudden these large networks of people who were connected through this new technology, it overwhelmed them. It wasn’t people just making phone calls on the old hard lines the government had completely wired.”

Still, ever since the uprising began last March, the regime has shown that it will go to extreme lengths to crush the opposition. The situation turned particularly grim this month: There have been reports of hundreds massacred, including women and children, the US shut down its embassy in Damascus, and Western journalists have been killed. (For more details and essential background, read our updated Syria explainer.)

Arm #Syria’s Rebels

By ROGER COHEN
Published: February 27, 2012

LONDON — Here are some home truths about Syria. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Nobody can put this genie back in a bottle. This is the mother of all proxy fights. The remorseless Assad regime is finished, when it dies being the only question.

Nations get to freedom from tyranny by different routes. When Communism fell, some glided from the Soviet empire into the West as others agonized. Yugoslavia — a beautiful idea that never worked — is one of several nations being invoked as possible exemplars of Syria’s bloody fate; others include Lebanon and Iraq.

The ingredients are familiar: Syria is a multiethnic state ruled with an iron fist by one minority — the quasi-Shiite Alawites — and including Christian, Druze and other minorities that between them compose about a quarter of the population. The majority is Sunni. When the iron fist comes off in countries like this, liberty is more readily seen as getting free of each other than uniting in the give-and-take of a new liberal order.

So it has proved for a year now in the Syria of Bashar al-Assad who, taking a leaf from his father’s book, has attempted to suppress through mass slaughter the quest of a broad uprising to be free of the family stranglehold. Assad is a doctor by training! No doctor ever trampled so brazenly on the Hippocratic Oath.

The Assads are a mafia, a minority (the family) within a minority (the Alawites) within a minority (the Mukhabarat secret police). They co-opted others — notably the Sunni merchant class — through imposed stability, but in essence, like every tyrant dislodged in the Arab Spring, they have ruled a nation as if it was their personal fiefdom, a plaything to be passed from father to son for the benefit of cousins and cronies.

Well, that’s over. Aleppo is the not the new Marrakesh after all. Those lovely tourism posters on London buses have been packed away. Arabs have had it with their Godfathers.

I said it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The Syrian compact is broken; a new compact under the Assads is inconceivable. Wider interests are in play. Iranian Shiite theocracy, increasingly isolated, is defending the regime against a Free Syrian Army funded in part by Saudi Sunni theocracy: that’s the proxy war.

Vladimir Putin, fearful of Russian Springs in his own neighborhood, has with signature cynicism opted to defend an old ally against U.S. demands that Assad go, an objective not pursued with any coherence until now by the Obama administration. Israel knows Assad, who helps arm Hezbollah but is a predictable and largely passive enemy. It does not know what may lie beyond a security state whose habits it can predict.

In short, Syria is dangerous. But that not a reason for passivity or incoherence. As the Bosnian war showed, the basis for any settlement must be a rough equality of forces. So I say step up the efforts, already quietly ongoing, to get weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Train those forces, just as the rebels were trained in Libya. Payback time has come around: The United States warned Assad about allowing Al Qaeda fighters to transit Syria to Iraq. Now matériel and special forces with the ability to train a ragtag army can transit Iraq — and other neighboring states — into Syria. This should be a joint effort of Western and Arab states.

At the same time, mount a big U.N.-coordinated humanitarian effort centered on enclaves for refugees in Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere, establishing, where possible, safe corridors to these havens.

Push hard to bring Russia and China around: They will not defend Assad beyond the point where that defense looks like a liability for other bigger interests in the United States, the Gulf and Europe.

I hear the outcry already: Arming Assad’s opponents will only exacerbate the fears of Syria’s minorities and unite them, ensure greater bloodshed, and undermine diplomatic efforts now being led by Kofi Annan, a gifted and astute peacemaker. It risks turning a proxy war into a proxy conflagration.

There is no policy for Syria at this stage that does not involve significant risk. But the only cease-fire I can see that will not amount to an ephemeral piece of paper is one based on a rough balance of forces. For that, the Free Syrian Army must be armed.

In the end, this course will support, not undermine, Annan’s diplomacy and perhaps open the way for the sort of transition outlined by the Arab League. In return, the divided Syrian opposition must provide a firm commitment to respect the rights of minorities. The treatment of minorities — like that of women — is one of the many pivotal tests of the Arab Spring.

If Assad falls, Iran is critically weakened. Tehran’s established conduit to Hezbollah disappears. Choosing between engineering the downfall of Assad and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is really a no-brainer: The former is smart and doable, the latter is folly. Assad’s wife has been buying property in London: Make her use it and make the Syrian people free.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

22/02/12 #Syria: The horror of Homs, a city at war.

Dreaming of a #Syria beyond Assad

By Derek Henry Flood

ISTANBUL - In 1980, at the age of 15, a Syrian teenager named Khaled Khoja was detained by Syria’s mukhabarat (internal security services) and held in a Damascus prison for two years. [1] His alleged misdeed … That his father had provided financial support to al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, better known in the West as the Muslim Brotherhood, which began agitating against the Ba’athist regime of Hafez al-Assad in the late 1970s.

After his release in 1982, he fled north to neighboring Turkey, where he has lived and flourished in exiled ever since. Khoja is a key member of the Syrian National Council (SNC) led by political scientist Burhan Ghalioun, a fellow exile ensconced at the lauded Sorbonne in Paris.

The SNC was formed in Istanbul in late August of last year in opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. As the violence has shown no sign of easing in cities across Syria, activists like Khoja have become increasingly vocal. In his capacity as part of the SNC’s foreign relations committee, Khoja publicly announced that his SNC and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had decided it was in their mutual interest to unify their disparate agendas after the SNC’s Ghalioun traveled to southern Turkey’s Hatay province to meet the nominal head of the FSA, Riad al-Asaad and other high ranking Syrian military defectors.

Khoja told Asia Times Online in an interview that Ghalioun made a second visit to the FSA’s leadership to reiterate the new-found solidarity between the two very different groups.

When discussing how much longer Assad will continue to stay in power, Khoja loosely speculated that he would be deposed perhaps by the end of 2012. “Syria is heading toward a military solution,” Khoja tells Asia Times Online.

“Armed clashes are spreading [throughout different parts of Syria] while “more [army] defections are inevitable”. In previous discussions with Asia Times Online by commanders of the FSA in the northwestern Idlib governorate that they had wrested from regime control, their primary hope was for the creation of a cordon sanitaire to contain the Syrian army, intelligence services and the tens of thousands of irregular shabiha militiamen so that refugees could safely exit to neighboring states while simultaneously enabling further defections from regime forces to the rebel cause.

In the somewhat awkward convergence of the SNC’s and the FSA’s formerly divergent agendas, the two have joined up on this specific strategic concept.

Though the FSA’s leaders based in Turkish refugee camps are largely figureheads meant to give the active rebels in Syria the appearance of structure, the SNC’s position is that the FSA must manifest some form of genuine hierarchy in Syria to avoid mass civilian participation in armed conflict, thereby widening the war.

“We must try to avoid a militarization of the street,” Khoja said. The SNC’s position on such issues has evolved considerably in recent months, borne out of Syrian realpolitik. Though the council was strictly advocating mass civil disobedience from its perch in Turkey, Europe and elsewhere, it has heeded the desires of the indigenous, diffuse street movement from Homs to Hama, from Deir ez-Zor to Dera’a, who see the FSA has a “protective force”.

“The United Nation’s General Assembly Resolution 377 A states that a buffer zone can be created if there is a two-thirds majority vote. This action could legitimate a buffer zone for the FSA,” Khoja said.

Under the terms of this resolution adopted on November 3, 1950, during the early period of the Korean War, known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, member states can circumvent the decisions of the Security Council’s five permanent members, the “P5”. The resolution was created to work around Soviet obstructionism and abstinence on the Security Council while the UN was intervening on the Korean Peninsula.

The Soviet Union insisted on vetoing any such action in its role on the Security Council at the time with its raison d’etre being that China was rightfully politically embodied by the revolutionary communist Maoist mainland People’s Republic of China rather than the exiled, Taiwan-based Republic of China in the name of fomenting solidarity within the rivalrous echelons of world communism.

The Chiang Kai-shek government was recognized as the Chinese seat on the Security Council until 1971. The Soviets showed their dissatisfaction with the arrangement throughout the Korean crisis in 1950 by being obstinate with their veto power and thus a mechanism was created for broad-based interventionist policies.

Though separated for decades by the Sino-Soviet split before the Soviet implosion, Moscow’s and Beijing’s stance is once again aligned in the context of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The Kremlin views the concept of internal affairs and internecine violence as an inherent right of the state after being admonished for its military adventures in Chechnya and the wider insurgency in the North Caucasus.

Beijing’s politburo, hungry for oil to keep China’s unprecedented economic boom perpetuating and seeking to silence criticism for its repression in Xinjiang and Tibet, has sided with Russia, its traditional Eurasian political rival followed by an array of far lesser powers decrying neo-imperialism like Iran and Venezuela.

Khoja told Asia Times Online that he sees no reason why the UN resolution cannot be implemented in his homeland to protect civilians, though his SNC does not seem to have outlined an exacting plan on just how to do so in the face of increasing wariness to armed humanitarian intervention in any form both among a war-fatigued Western public as well as staunch anti-interventionists in the US and the European Union.

The SNC seems to have thus far failed to precisely articulate its outline for a post-Assad, post-Ba’athist Syria. It is primarily focused on coalescing its own internal agenda and making various announcements pleading for involvement sans boots-on-the-ground style military intervention. This has been directed toward the international community from its Turkish safe haven.

Though far short of recognizing the exiles in any formal fashion, Turkey’s activist Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has allowed the SNC to open an official office near Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport. This decision reflects Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing enmity toward Bashar al-Assad.

It also may indicate a little spoken of sectarian feeling among Turkey’s ruling Islamist AK Parti (Justice and Development Party). At the risk of appearing to create an oversimplification of the situation, Syria’s uprising is at its core a Sunni revolt against minority Alawite Shi’ite rule.

Turkey has both a small Alawite minority of Arabic extraction in Hatay province that was once a part of French Mandate Syria and a much more substantial Alevi minority. The Alevis, whose precise percentage of Turkey’s population remains unknown, have been traditionally characterized as a mysterious heterodox sect by Western Orientalists and apostates by orthodox Sunnis.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founding father, stressed “Turkishness” over any form of religious identity after the republic’s 1923 founding and post-Ottoman political evolution in an effort to consolidate the integrity of the nascent Turkish polity.

Erdogan’s AK Parti, though Islamist in outlook, needs Alevi support while making little effort to recognize the Alevis as a legitimate religious group beyond the veneer of reforms aimed more at appeasing the European Union than appeasing Alevi demands.

But Erdogan’s party is a Sunni one in character and through this lens the position of Turkey’s political rulers is likely to differ sharply from the country’s traditional military elites, whose more nationalist concerns lead them toward the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Cyprus - making them hesitant to involve Turkey in the Syrian conflict in any manner.

Erdogan may drag Turkey towards some level of confrontation, whether political or clandestine, as his rhetoric against Assad has continually escalated. Though it is unclear which direction Turkey will take toward Syria, Erdogan publicly calling for Assad to step down has set Ankara on a hostile path that may be irrevocable.

A retired Turkish general told Asia Times Online that the ruling party’s allowing of the SNC to maintain such an office was “a mistake”. The general’s view sounds emblematic of the divide between Turkey’s military establishment that sees itself as a vanguard of republican secularism at any cost versus the conservative political religiosity of AK Parti voters.

On Thursday, despite an implacable Russian stance with regard to the sovereignty of Syria’s much-cherished “internal affairs” which the Kremlin puts far above the human security of the Syrian people, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for an Arab League framework enabling the end of Assad’s rule with 137 voting for, 12 against and 17 abstentions. Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN, was quoted by Reuters as saying, “Bashar al-Assad has never been more isolated.”

Khoja said that a mediator involved in secret negotiations between the Muslim Brotherhood and the government of Hafez al-Assad in the late 1990s painted a picture of a much younger Bashar - then being integrated into the Syrian security apparatus by his father after the death of his heir-apparent brother Basil in a 1994 vehicular accident - as “less clever yet more spiteful than his father”.

Though Bashar may not have been the elder Assad’s first choice, he ranked above his two younger brothers, the late Majid who died in 2009 and Maher who commands the Fourth Armored Division as well as leads the Republican Guard. Majid led a reportedly troubled life, living and dying in obscure circumstances.

Khoja described Maher as being viewed as “too crazy” by Hafez to inherit the supreme Ba’athist mantle eventually bestowed on Bashar. Maher, thought of as a corrupt and detestable figure by several Syrian oppositionists interviewed by Asia Times Online, has been Bashar’s right-hand man since the uprising began 11 months ago.

As ruthlessly as Hafez had put down the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama over a period of weeks in February 1982, many in the West were under the false assumption that Bashar, with his brief period cutting his teeth as an ophthalmologist in London, might therefore possibly be more lenient than the Assad patriarch who answered dissent with scorched-earth tactics.

A mediator then approached Bashar early on in his inherited presidency about the possibility of a political accommodation with the Sunni Islamists his father had either killed or sent into exile. Bashar stated that his mind was closed to any such idea and implied that he would not hesitate to employ violence to keep his father’s Ba’athist legacy intact with their Alawite clique firmly in power for the foreseeable future.

One of the most talked about external players in the Syrian crisis is that of the Russian Federation, which is reportedly keeping the regime afloat with arms shipments while providing diplomatic cover for Assad within the UN Security Council.

Khoja said the SNC, too, was in dealings with Moscow, though he did not go into great detail regarding specifics. “The Russians recognize him [Assad] as a dictator,” according to Khoja, while describing back-channel talks between the SNC and various Kremlin diplomats.

He emphasized that the Russians were genuinely worried about the fate of the Assad regime, a Russian and Soviet military client since the mid-Cold War period. Khoja stated, “The Russians would prefer to see a GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council]-style compromise as in Yemen where the leader steps down but key military and security elements remain in place.” The Russians for their part insist they are simply fulfilling an arms agreement with Damascus made well before the revolt began in March of 2011.

When asked what he sees as the biggest challenges for a post-Assad Syria, Khoja feared for the future of the Alawite sect, which would very likely face violent inter-communal reprisals which he believes are a certainty after the immense bloodshed and further entrenching of sectarian identities. Khoja suggested it may be necessary to form a protective force for the Alawites after the regime’s downfall.

His other principal concern is the stoking of separatist sentiments among Syria’s Kurdish minority. The danger would be if Syria’s Kurds made any attempt to emulate Iraq’s largely successful, secure and highly autonomous Kurdistan region. Unlike Iraq’s now powerful Kurds who were able to consolidate their northern enclave into a fairly homogenous ethno-geographic arc that stretches from the Syrian to Iranian borders, Khoja said the Kurdish heartland in Syrian is in fact bifurcated in two distinct, non contiguous regions with the city of Afrin in the far northwest and Qamishle in the far northeast. In that respect, Syria’s Kurdish question is very unlike that of Iraq.

Khoja believes that Kurdish separatism in Syria would be disastrous, leading to state fracture with deadly results. He postulates the solution to this problem is a democratic one whereby all groups - be they defined by religion, sect, ethnicity or language - be included in a pluralistic Syria.

The SNC, initially quite wary of the FSA, came to the realization that the rebels “are a reality” on the ground inside Syria - in Khoja’s words - and that an accommodation between the two movements had to be made to marry the dreams of the exiled activists with the wish of ordinary Syrians who continue to rise up against Assadist rule.

Note
1. Khoja was born in Damascus in 1965 and moved to Libya. He graduated from Obari High School after being arrested in Damascus between1980-1982. He studied at the Political Science Faculty, Istanbul University from 1985-1986 and then at the Medical Faculty, 9th of September University from 1987 to 1994. In 2001, he founded and still manages Mertip Healthcare Group. He has been heading the Damascus Declaration Turkey branch since March 2011 and is member of the Syrian National Council (SNC). (Source: the Syrian National Council website.)

Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle East and South and Central Asia and has covered many of the world’s conflicts since 9/11 as a frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on Twiiter @DerekHenryFlood

Syria’s slide towards civil war #Syria

The Free Syrian Army is now waging an escalating guerrilla war 112/02/12

The BBC’s Paul Wood has spent harrowing days under fire in the Baba Amr area of Homs, which has been subjected to a relentless artillery barrage by government troops.

He has seen evidence of vicious sectarian hatreds and killings by both government militias and the armed opposition.

Most of the people in the makeshift field hospital in Baba Amr did not want to be filmed.

They were too afraid of being arrested to show their faces. But not Abdel Nasr Zayed.

Of the 11 members of his extended family who had been killed - by shells or sniper fire - five were children under 14.

“I have lost 11 already and now I am willing to sacrifice everything for God,” he told me, a large, bearded man, his voice booming down the hospital corridor.

It was a typical story. Often people would tell you they had lost not one but many of their relatives

Abu Suleiman’s job at the hospital was to wrap bodies in their burial shrouds.

He had performed this service for his son, his son-in-law, his nephew, his neighbour and many of his friends.

Abu Sufyan, our host the last time we stayed in Baba Amr, had lost a brother, a nephew, an uncle and, most recently, his mother.

“Is this a civil war?” I was asked from London.

In Baba Amr, it certainly felt like one. But we were seeing a battle over one city. And Homs is not Syria. Not yet, perhaps.

Sectarian abductions

In Homs, the Sunni areas, such as Baba Amr, largely support the uprising. They were being shelled by the Syrian army, from the Alawite and Christian areas, which largely support the regime.

There are Sunnis in the security forces; Christians and Alawites have joined the revolution. It is not yet a purely sectarian conflict. But the pressures for it to become one are enormous.

Yousseff Hannah was a prisoner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - the rebel fighters who have defected from government forces.

He was on a mattress, his thigh bandaged, in the basement of a house near the town of Qusayr, about 25 miles (40km) from Homs.

“Law and order,” he told me, groaning from his wound, in reply to my question about his job.

One of his captors angrily interrupted: “No. You are mukhabarat (secret police). Tell them you are mukhabarat.”

The FSA had snatched him a few days before from his home. He had been recovering there from the leg wound, received in Homs.

Aged 45, he was only a corporal, hardly a big fish. The rebels said they had taken him because his family had their own checkpoint in Qusayr that was harassing people.

They wanted it to stop. For too long, they said, people like him - protected by the regime - had felt they were untouchable, able to act with impunity.

Cpl Yousseff was a Christian. After he was taken, his relatives kidnapped six Sunnis, killing one in the process. In return, around 20 Christians were abducted.

“Some hotheads have been kidnapping Christians,” one of the senior FSA commanders in the area told me. “We have got to calm this down.”

After several days of stalemate, everyone was released, unharmed, including Corporal Yousseff. This was done as part of a deal for him and his family to leave Qusayr permanently.

Failed attack

Discussing the past tense few days, one of the Christian residents told me that Qusayr still had Christians who supported the uprising.

About a dozen attended the big Friday protest. In solidarity with them, the entire demonstration walked off when some at the front grabbed the microphone and started shouting Salafi (Islamist) slogans.

The official doctrine of the FSA is that it is there only to protect the unarmed demonstrators. In practice, the FSA is waging an escalating guerrilla war.

We followed Maj Yaya’s group of fighters as they attacked an army base near the town.

The attack was big, more than 60 men. In contrast to the fighters in Libya, they were trained, disciplined and followed a plan.

One man said his brother was still serving in the area.

“What if he was in the base? What if he was killed?” I asked.

“I feel very bitter about my brother but what happens is in God’s hands now. May God help me,” he replied.

Inevitably, they failed. After an hour of firing on the base they had to flee when the government troops started using heavy weapons, dropping mortar shells on the hill.

The official doctrine of the FSA is that it is there only to protect the unarmed demonstrators. In practice, the FSA is waging an escalating guerrilla war.

We followed Maj Yaya’s group of fighters as they attacked an army base near the town.

The attack was big, more than 60 men. In contrast to the fighters in Libya, they were trained, disciplined and followed a plan.

One man said his brother was still serving in the area.

“What if he was in the base? What if he was killed?” I asked.

“I feel very bitter about my brother but what happens is in God’s hands now. May God help me,” he replied.

Inevitably, they failed. After an hour of firing on the base they had to flee when the government troops started using heavy weapons, dropping mortar shells on the hill.

Shabiha executions

Afterwards, one of the FSA fighters showed me a video he had filmed in December.

They had ambushed a convoy of armoured vehicles. Eight of the security forces were killed, 11 captured. The video showed the prisoners, in camouflage uniform, lined up facing a wall.

Some were still bleeding after the battle. Their arms were raised.

One turned to the camera, looking petrified. The man who’d taken the pictures said that despite their army uniforms, their ID cards showed they were Shabiha (or ghosts) - the hated government paramilitary force.

“We killed them,” he told me.

“You killed your prisoners?”

“Yes, of course. They were executed later. That is the policy for Shabiha.”

These were Sunni Shabiha, he added; the only Alawite had escaped.

I checked with an officer. While soldiers were released, he said, members of the Shabiha were “executed” after a hearing before a panel of FSA military judges.

To explain, they showed me a film taken from the mobile phone of a captured Shabiha. Prisoners lay face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs. One-by-one, their heads were cut off.

The man wielding the knife said, tauntingly, to the first: “This is for freedom.”

As his victim’s neck opened, he went on: “This is for our martyrs. And this is for collaborating with Israel.”

Western dilemma

In Homs, after we left, there were reports from human rights activists that the Shabiha, going house-to-house, had murdered three families, men, women and children.

To most FSA fighters, “executing” the Shabiha seems only just.

Such things will give Western governments pause as they decide whether, or, increasingly, how to help the FSA.

Washington and London say they will not arm the rebels but they are thinking about how to assist in other ways. That might include giving advice and sending supplies, perhaps including flak jackets.

If they help the rebels, will they fuel a civil war, or worse, a sectarian civil war? If they do not, how can the killings in Homs, and elsewhere, be stopped?

The longer this continues, the more bodies pile up, the greater the desire for revenge on both sides. Civil war is not inevitable. But Homs today could be Syria tomorrow.

Soldier Says Syrian Atrocities Forced Him to Defect #Syria

Daniel Etter for The New York Times

Ammar Cheikh Omar, center, a defector from the Syrian army to the opposition, played cards with other Syrian refugees at an apartment in Antakya, Turkey

By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: February 1, 2012

HATAY, Turkey — Ammar Cheikh Omar recalled the first time he was ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters in Syria. He aimed his AK-47 just above their heads, prayed to God not to make him a killer and pulled the trigger.

Mr. Omar, 29, the soft-spoken and wiry son of Syrian parents who had emigrated to Germany in the 1950s, grew up in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, a prosperous village of half-timbered 16th-century houses, where he listened to Mariah Carey and daydreamed about one day returning to Syria.

Today, he is still trying to make sense of his unlikely transformation from a dutiful German student to a killer for the brutal Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad and, ultimately, a defector. “I was proud to be Syrian, but instead became a soldier for a regime that was intent on killing its own people,” Mr. Omar said on a recent day, chain-smoking at a café in this Turkish border town. “I thank God every day that I am still alive.”

Human rights groups and Syrian activists said he was one of thousands of Syrians who had inadvertently found themselves deployed as foot soldiers for a regime that the United Nations estimates has killed more than 5,000 since the crackdown on demonstrators began in March.

Soldiers are typically conscripted at age 18, with members of Syria’s Sunni majority making up the bulk of the army ranks and minority Alawis, who come from the same religious group as Mr. Assad, often serving as high-ranking officers or in the state security apparatus. Mr. Omar, a highly educated Sunni with flawless Arabic, gained entry to a security unit attached to the Interior Ministry.

Human rights groups estimate that there are at least 5,000 defectors; an exact number is difficult to confirm because many remain in hiding. “Mr. Omar’s harrowing tale fits an all-too-familiar pattern in which soldiers are deployed away from their hometowns to help ensure that they will be less likely to refuse an order to kill,” said Ole Solvang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has interviewed dozens of Syrian defectors, including Mr. Omar. “He was one of the lucky ones, as he managed to escape.”

There is no way to corroborate much of Mr. Omar’s account of his journey to becoming an enforcer for the Assad regime. Though human rights groups and activists operating in Syria say it fits the pattern of hundreds of defectors who have fled the country, it is simply one man’s tale. It began in 2004 when he left Germany for Aleppo, with the aim of getting in touch with his roots, studying law, improving his Arabic and finding a wife.

He managed to do all that, entering law school, marrying a doctor and, eventually, having a child. His parents, meanwhile, had moved back to Aleppo because his father wanted to live out his final years in the old country.

In late 2010, Mr. Omar was conscripted into the Syrian military, just weeks before a Tunisian fruit seller immolated himself and set off the wave of regional protests that eventually buffeted Syria, whose authoritarian president is determined to keep his family’s grip on power.

At first, said Mr. Omar, who had always felt like an outsider in Germany, he was proud to be serving the government. Soldiers were initially told that their main task was to defend the country against Israel, he said. But when demonstrations erupted, they were told that the protesters were “terrorists” or “armed gangs” sponsored by foreign forces. Access to cell phones, non-state television or the Internet was strictly prohibited; breaching that rule was punishable by up to two months in jail.

Mr. Omar’s first deployment was in the southern city of Dara’a, near Jordan, where, he said, he and his 350-strong unit were dispatched in March to help crack down on intensifying demonstrations. He said he had been ordered to arrest and shoot at dozens of protesters, including many young students, who had scrawled antigovernment graffiti on the walls of the town
.

“The army needed everyone. It was very brutal,” he said. “But if there’s an officer of the Mukhabarat next to you,” he added, referring to the country’s feared security services, “you don’t have a choice but to shoot.”

Every soldier was armed with 60 bullets and given new ammunition each night, Mr. Omar said, and he said he had watched with incredulity as security forces fired live rounds at protesters assembling near the central Omari mosque, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more. He said his unit had shot at the protesters from above a roof overlooking the mosque. One of his fellow soldiers began to scream uncontrollably when he realized that his 18-year-old brother, demonstrating below on the street, had been shot. The soldier buried him two days later.

Shaken by what he had seen, Mr. Omar said, he was determined to defect. But before he could act, he was sent to Duma, northeast of Damascus, the capital, to work in a security unit interrogating detainees.

Mr. Omar said he had been asked to take notes during the interrogation of prisoners, some as young as 15 years old. He said demonstrators had been blindfolded and forced to strip to their underwear before their hands were tied behind their backs. Interrogations were conducted by four or five soldiers and officers in a dark, windowless room. He said the interrogating officer had ordered him to write down confessions naming protest leaders, confessions that detainees were then asked to finger stamp rather than sign, since their hands were bound.

To force confessions, Mr. Omar said, the soldiers tortured the detainees with electrified cattle prods, beat them or urinated on them. Some passed out. Others bled heavily. Many disappeared.

“The soldiers demanded to know why they had gone to the streets and who had paid them,” he recalled. “It was painful to watch. At the beginning I couldn’t sleep, but after a while, I got used to it. But I could not live with myself if I had remained.”

As the protests gathered pace over the summer, Mr. Omar was sent to Hama, where he was relieved of his AK-47 and instead given a shield and a stun gun, he said. With tens of thousands of people on the streets in Hama, he said, he hoped he could disappear into the crowd. At noon on July 26, he said, he and two fellow officers decided to defect from their army base, changing into civilian clothes and jumping over the wall.

They found refuge in the homes of people opposed to the regime, Mr. Omar said, and wrapped scarves around their heads to conceal their faces. Fearing that he would be kidnapped or “disappeared” in Syria under some false pretext, Mr. Omar made a video, which he posted on YouTube, to establish that he had defected.

The defectors were driven toward the Turkish border in broad daylight, eventually abandoning their car and walking through woods to avoid detection. At 7 a.m. on July 30, he said, they crossed illegally into Hatay, where they met up with members of the rebel Free Syrian Army, settling in a refugee camp.

At the camp, a gaunt and pale Mr. Omar produced another video to post on YouTube, in which he said he was ashamed that he had been part of Mr. Assad’s forces. “I will never forget the dead bodies of young and old men, but also women and children on the streets,” he said, dressed in a uniform of the Free Syrian Army and appearing with a Syrian flag.

Appealing directly to Germany, he added: “Hitler died in Germany, but awoke in Syria.” Germany eventually helped get him out of the camp so he could get a stamp in his passport to remain in Turkey.

Mr. Omar joined the rebel army, a scruffy group numbering around 10,000 soldiers, whose mandate is to protect civilians from the regime. He is now an officer, helping to smuggle wounded rebels into Turkey, some of whom he houses in his home. He said he supported the political demonstrations against the government but warned, “We cannot afford to meet guns with only talk and slogans.”

He fears for his family, including his wife, their 1-year old-daughter and his parents. After his escape, he said, his brother-in-law was fired from his architecture job, and the family’s house in Aleppo was vandalized.

But he said he had no regrets. “My family knows I made the right choice.”

The view from Damascus: Assad regime is ‘weak’ and ‘robbing banks’ to finance repression #Syria

By Michael Weiss Last updated: January 26th, 2012

Syrian army defectors gather at the mountain resort town of Zabadani (Photo: AP)

While the Syrian regime pummels away at long-restive cities such as Deraa and Hama, the new focal point for the revolution is none other than Damascus itself. Rebels, composed now of both army defectors and armed civilians, claim to be operating openly in Harasta, Hamowriya, Su’ban, Madaya and Ghouta, kidnapping regime personnel and taking the fight directly to Assad’s most elite (and loyal) army divisions and intelligence bureaus. There’s now even an all-women Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade.

Rebel gains have been impressive enough to percolate into the international news cycle. The “liberated” city of Zabadani, some 20 miles from Damascus, is already being spoken of as Syria’s “Benghazi”. Kareem Fahim reported recently in the New York Times that three neighborhoods in Douma are similarly under FSA command, albeit with regime security forces still present. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen was in Douma this morning and talked to several FSA soldiers who are in control of the centre of the city – at least for now.

Because the revolution has crept right up to Assad’s doorstep, I spoke the other day via Skype to an anti-regime activist from Midan, the site of a police bus explosion in early January which the regime termed a “suicide bombing” but was more likely a piece of theatre staged by the mukhabarat, which had cordoned off the site beforehand and even invited a state-TV camera crew to watch a supposedly spontaneous event. The Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya aired some very dodgy footage of the aftermath.

Have you heard about the Free Syrian Army (FSA) closing in on the capital?

Now, in Midan, there is a heavy security presence everywhere, and many arbitrary arrests. A few days ago, security forces started attacking the demonstrators and shooting them. Suddenly several FSA units appeared and started shooting back.

Do you believe the regime will be able to survive much longer?

The regime is so weak, it is even robbing banks and artefacts from museums to later sell them as it has no liquidity. The FSA ranks are increasing as there are defectors daily. We believe the regime could last for two more months. Damascus suburbs are filled with the FSA units which control many areas.

The regime is robbing banks?

Rebels saw security forces in Deraa and Hama surround a bank and rob it. It happened twice. In Deraa, security forces robbed a museum.

Is foreign military intervention is a good idea?

We in Midan call for an immediate foreign military intervention as the regime is killing dozens in all the provinces daily. And it is shooting the demonstrators in Damascus directly. Three or four demonstrations are taken out in Midan daily at different times. There is heavy security presence.

By “we,” whom do you mean? What grassroots group do you belong to?

I’m from the Syrian Revolution Coordination Committee in Midan.

And does the Committee support the Syrian National Council [the aspiring government-in-exile based in Istanbul]?

Yes, we support it and we call on it to increase its support to the FSA with finance, logistics, and media.

What did you make of the Arab League’s plan for a peaceful transition of power?

I absolutely reject it. Its sole purpose is to provide the regime with more time to kill more Syrians. We demand that the Arab League immediately transfer the Syrian file to the UN Security Council.

What do you want the Security Council to deliver?

We want a buffer zone and a no-fly zone. The regime bombed the Damascus suburb of Daraya yesterday with a helicopter. Therefore, we demand a no-fly zone.

They’re using armed helicopters in the Damascus suburbs now?

Helicopter gunfire on the positions of the FSA. At least two [helicopters] were seen.

Foreign journalists who were allowed into Syria recently haven’t reported seeing any helicopters in that area.

The regime is careful around Western journalists, as it hides all tanks, soldiers and army units when they are around. The regime also prohibits the take-off of any military warplanes when there are journalists present. The helicopters fly at night for only 5 to 10 minutes, then they fly away. Two people saw them in [the Damascus suburb of] Daraya.

[Note: There are several videos of helicopters flying overhead in restive areas of Syria. In June, as the UN report on the crisis stated, there were eyewitness accounts of helicopters shooting at demonstrators in Idleb province, particularly in the then-besieged city of Jisr al-Shughour. More recently, some grassroots groups have sent out press releases suggesting that the regime is using low altitude-flying military planes in Deraa and elsewhere. However, to date, the only hard evidence of any kind of aerial campaign is this video, ostensibly leaked, showing soldiers firing out the back of a transport aircraft. It was said to have been recorded in Rastan (Homs) last October.]

If you predict that the regime will fall in two months as things now stand, how long do you give it with the imposition of a no-fly zone and buffer zone?

It will definitely fall quicker. Brigades will defect from the regime completely if a no-fly zone is declared. They just fear that now as they know they will be bombed with airplanes. That is why they are waiting for a buffer zone and a no-fly zone to announce their defection.

Syrian regime ‘importing snipers’ for protests #Syria

Nate Wright and James Hider
From: The Times
January 26, 2012 1:50PM

SYRIA is deploying large numbers of Hezbollah and Iranian snipers as “military consultants” to murder anti-regime protesters, a senior government defector has told The Times.

The salaries of the marksmen are paid through a slush fund replenished with US dollars flown in from Iran, according to Mahmoud Haj Hamad, who was the treasury’s top auditor at the Defence Ministry until he fled Syria last month.

The same fund is used to pay the Shabiha, the gangs of thugs who have joined the state security services in torturing and killing protesters.

Mr Hamad, appalled at the destruction of cities by the armed forces, fled Syria with his family last month. His account is the first by a senior insider to confirm the presence of foreign forces in Syria to help to prop up the regime.

Even as the government was blaming the uprising on plots by its Arab neighbours and “foreign elements”, it was turning to its regional allies to help to suppress the protests.

“The Syrian intelligence weren’t qualified, they didn’t have decent snipers or equipment,” he said in an interview. “They needed qualified snipers from Hezbollah and Iran.”

Both have tight military ties with the regime of President Assad, a member of the Alawite sect, a sub-group of the Shia branch of Islam.

Mr Hamad said: “At the beginning there were hundreds, then when things started to get worse they started to bring in more outsiders. The numbers were huge - in the thousands.”

The foreign reinforcements are prized by the regime for their street-fighting abilities, having crushed dissent in Iran and Lebanon.

Mr Hamad said that he could see the men living in compounds around his office on the 12th floor of a Ministry of Defence building in the Damascus neighbourhood of Kafar Souseh, a facility shared by military intelligence.

He said the regime appeared to have started preparing for its bloody crackdown, which the UN estimates has cost 5400 lives since March, even as the first revolts of the Arab Spring were threatening to topple Mr Assad’s fellow dictators a year ago.

Ministry colleagues told him that two Iranian warships that passed through the Suez Canal during the Egyptian uprising were loaded with weapons for use against dissidents, and offloaded at the seaport of Latakia.

“Some who saw these things being unloaded said they had incinerators, so they wouldn’t need mass graves.”

He said he had seen accounts showing that the Shabiha thugs were paid $US100 a day and were put up in military facilities and trained in communications and infiltration of demonstrations.

That operation was overseen by General Rustum Ghazali, who once headed Syrian military intelligence inside Lebanon, and who was questioned by the UN in connection with the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Mr Hamad said that Syrian intelligence had extensive experience of using undercover militants from its days of covertly attacking US forces after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it collaborated with a radical Syrian Muslim cleric, Abu Qaqaa, to recruit suicide bombers and fighters to attack US targets inside Iraq.

They would give them training and facilitate their border crossings; a charge long leveled by Iraqi politicians and the US military but always denied by the Assad regime.

Syria’s military budget has doubled in the past year to cope with the constant deployment of forces across the country, Mr Hamad said.

In July, “they started to take 30 per cent of the money set aside for other ministries and transferred this to the Ministry of Defence budget”.

The Health Ministry’s funding was cut accordingly.

Today, with international sanctions, an overstretched army and the loss of tax revenues from rebel centres such as Homs, Hama and Deraa, the regime is running short of money.

“The Syrian economy has collapsed - it won’t last another month. In February, I believe it will fall apart. Iran can’t keep giving them money, because their own finances are not that good.”

The financial situation has become so desperate that, on December 20, two days before he fled with his family for Egypt - after telling the authorities that his son was enrolling on a university course in Cairo - the regime started abducting the sons of senior businessmen and holding them for ransom.

“They all paid,” Mr Hamed said. “There is no government, no state in Syria - it is run by a mafia.”

Al-Arabiya television quoted a top Iranian Revolutionary Guard official this week as saying that Hezbollah forces took part in recent fighting in Zabadani near Damascus, which had been taken over by the Free Syrian Army.

THE TIMES

In #Syria, many caught ‘in the middle’

Editor’s note: CNN’s Nic Robertson and crew recently returned from a rare look inside Syria, where the government has been placing restrictions on international journalists and refusing many of them entry at all. While there, Robertson followed Arab League monitors already in the country and talked to the residents.

(CNN) — It wasn’t until I left Syria that I found the voice I’d been looking for.

I was only hours out of the capital, and it came by surprise, a chance meeting at an airport on my way back to London.

He was a Syrian Christian, a member of one of the country’s larger minorities. They make up about 10% of the population. Many are businessmen; many have benefited from President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

His message was clear: We want change, but we don’t want uncertainty. “The opposition need to reach out to us, tell us their vision of Syria.” Then, he said, they’d have 60% to 70% support: “everyone in the middle ground, enough to overthrow the president.”

He was speaking out because he could, with no need to fear that al-Assad’s secret police would come knocking on his door. In Damascus and the rest of Syria, it had been different. None of the intellectuals, the businessmen, the others “in the middle” wanting al-Assad’s corrupt regime replaced dared raise the conversation beyond the mildest hint at change of some sort; “but not, of course, the president” is required.

Just one day of covering pro- and anti-government rallies convinced me of how polarized the country has become. People are metaphorically retreating to their confessional bunkers.

Al-Assad’s rallying cry is that only he can protect the country’s minorities: Christians like the man I met at the airport, Alawite like himself, about 15% of the population. He keeps the ethnic Kurds, a little less than 10%, on his side by courting their biggest tribes.

It’s a tactic that’s working. The Kurds don’t back him, but they haven’t turned against him as they did against his father. The Alawites who make up most of the officer corps in the army are still loyal, as are the Christians. But not without reservation.

A source close to the Saudi ruling circle told me Alawite generals threaten to abandon al-Assad if he makes them turn their guns on civilians in the streets of Damascus.

Several Westerners with detailed knowledge of the country expressed their frustration with the opposition, too. Why don’t they reassure the minorities they won’t face retribution once al-Assad is gone? they ask.

One opposition figure had threatened to wipe the Alawites off the map; another group said they would try al-Assad’s top 100 generals for war crimes. So far, according to these Westerners, leading opposition groups have not distanced themselves from the calls that serve only to reinforce al-Assad’s claims.

Al-Assad’s track record charts a far different course. He and his father before him have assiduously sold their secular brand of socialism as the panacea for internal conflict. The truth is different, according to the Westerners: Al-Assad has been fermenting sectarian tensions. It is a lie that he is the defender of the minorities, they say.

It’s hard to escape the feeling in Damascus that the moment to reach out is being lost. But it’s easy to see why.

Al-Assad is utterly committed to a security crackdown, and the opposition is getting armed and fighting back. Blood is being spilled on both sides; more families are being affected and attitudes hardened.

It’s rapidly getting to the point where even if opposition leaders did want to reach out to the man or woman in the middle or an army general or two, the base supporters will have no stomach for compromise.

At anti-government rallies, time and again, we saw anger and frustration boiling over, people literally screaming in our faces for fear we didn’t get the desperation of their plight. Al-Assad’s strong-arm tactics denying free speech have ensured that the street voice for reform has metastasized into something far more malevolent.

In places like Homs, the cradle of the uprising, the writing is on the wall for the rest of the country. Some neighborhoods have thrown out the government completely, such as in the Baba Amr district, where the Free Syrian Army has control. Communities have divided on sectarian lines. Many Christians have fled to Damascus. Garbage is piled high in the streets, electricity is cut, civilian causalities mount, and on the other side of the impromptu front-line barricades, the death toll of government soldiers creeps up as well.

A drive around Homs reveals a medieval-style siege, multiple checkpoints to move between neighborhoods, even a deep new ditch in places rings the city. But the uprising continues.

The opposition in Homs is better organized. A new council has been formed, it has a budget — money, some say, is coming from the Gulf — and runs medical and humanitarian supplies.

But the council is not the only show in town. Salafists are moving in too, Islamic radicals, many with terror tactics honed in neighboring Iraq. Reports abound of infighting both inside and outside Syria, the hard-liners already jockeying for post-al-Assad power.

If war escalates, as it surely seems it will, expect a long and bloody campaign. As the man in the middle I met on my way back to London told me: “We are afraid of the men with guns, afraid the radicals will impose their backwards views on us.”

Syrian Activist ‘Wants Change Without Disasters’ #Syria

Tim Marshall January 19, 2012 6:43 PM

Walking through a sunlit square in the old quarter of the port city of Tartus, Mahmoud Issa cut a lonely figure.

Mr Issa, once a lawyer, now unemployed, is an opposition activist in a regime stronghold. He has served three terms in prison totalling 12 years.

There were no checkpoints, no sandbagged army bunkers here.

No need, the ever present Mukhabarat, the secret police, are enough to keep this Mediterranean town under control, and besides, much of the population appear to back the government.

A recent opposition demonstration attracted about 200 people, a pro-government rally was attended by thousands.

Our government minders wanted to come with us to our interview with Mr Issa.

After a robust exchange of views they agreed not to come into the square.

The Mukhabarat would know soon enough who we had come to see, besides, our interview would be on television, but it was a matter of principle that we had the right to speak to someone without supervision.

Mr Issa arrived and we sat a small cafe, the weak sun only slightly relieving the bitter cold of a Syrian winter. There was no tea to be had, the cafe was closed for midday prayers at the mosque across the road.

Throughout our meeting Mr Issa glanced nervously about him.

It seemed to be force of habit. He knew someone in the square would tell the Mukhabarat that he had been talking to foreigners but he couldn’t help himself from periodically checking who was who and what was what.

Why, I asked him, was he risking talking to us. ‘Because I am an activist’ he replied. ‘this is what I do, this is what I believe. I want democracy, I want freedom, I want change, but without disasters’.

There was the regime’s trump card…. Change without disasters. President Assad promises reform, but tells the public that the current upheaval is the work of terrorists who risk plunging Syria into civil war.

Millions fear what might follow the violent overthrow of the President and his family.

Dissidents such as Mr Issa are trying to ensure that the protests do not degenerate into sectarian fighting. There are signs that the fractures are beginning to appear.

All Syrians know who is what religion, or ethnicity, by their names and or where they live. They also insist it does not matter and most become embarrassed if the subject comes up in conversation.

Most insist the uprising has nothing to do sectarianism. That was partially true when the protests first broke out last March, but a clear pattern has subsequently emerged.

The most vociferous protests are in majority Sunni neighbourhoods and cities, the calmest areas in the country are in the majority Allawite areas and it is no co-incidence that the ruling Assad family are Allawites.

Senior opposition activists are concerned that, because there has been so much killing, more and more protesters will arm themselves.

That is what has happened in Homs and there the battle ground is in Sunni districts.

Many Allawites and Christians, who lived in those districts, have gone to live with friends and relatives in predominately Allawi/Christian neighbourhoods. Suspicion is growing between the communities.

This is Mahmoud Issa’s greatest fear. Once the cement starts to crack, it is very, very difficult to put it back together.

#Syria: beyond the wall of fear, a state in slow-motion collapse

Despite the superficial calm in Damascus, everyone knows change is coming. The only question is, how much will it cost?

Ian Black in Damascus

guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 January 2012 17.30 GMT

Members of the Free Syrian Army demonstrate against Bashar al-Assad near Idlib. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

Sipping tea in a smoky Damascus café, Adnan and his wife, Rima, look ordinary enough: an unobtrusive, thirtysomething couple winding down at the end of the working day in one of the tensest cities in the world.

But like much else in the Syrian capital, they are not what they first seem: in normal times, he is a software engineer and she is a lawyer; now, they are underground activists helping organise the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

It is dangerous work. Over the past 10 months, many thousands of Syrians have been killed – perhaps twice the 5,000 figure given by the UN – as Assad has pursued a ruthless crackdown that shows no sign of ending. But his opponents are equally determined to carry on.

Adnan and Rima are unable to work or contact their families. They live under false identities. Adnan changes his appearance regularly. He has just shaved off his beard and is wearing a big woolly hat. It clearly works: a friend at a nearby table fails to recognise him.

Most of their friends are on the run from the feared Syrian mukhabarat secret police. But where they used to be scared of fighting the regime, now they have become used to it.

“The revolution destroyed the wall of fear,” he explained. “At school, we were taught to love the president – Hafez first. And it didn’t get any better when Bashar took over. Now, everything has changed. Assad’s picture is defaced everywhere, we can talk openly, and we are certain that at some point we will topple the regime.”

On the face of it, Damascus is calm. The bloodiest frontlines of the revolution may be in Homs, Hama, Idlib and Deraa, but the appearance of normality in the capital is deceptive. Intrigue, fear and anger are never far beneath the surface.

“Damascus is crucial to the survival of the Assad regime,” a leading opposition figure told the Guardian. “They will never allow a Tahrir Square here. If Damascus falls, it’s all over.”

Large protests organised by the tansiqiyat, local co-ordination committees, are held almost nightly in many suburbs, and always on Fridays. But even in the centre, daytime “flash” demonstrations last for a few minutes and melt away before they are pounced on by the security forces, the worst of whom are the shabiha, louts in army trousers and leather jackets who loiter menacingly at junctions and squares.

The demonstrators are ingenious: in one case, volunteer drivers created traffic jams all around the old Hijaz railway station to create a space in which a brief but eyecatching protest could be held.

Creativity and secrecy are crucial. On the first day of Ramadan, loudspeakers concealed in the busy shopping area of Arnous Square blared out the stirring song “Irhal ya Bashar” (“Leave, Bashar”). This is the signature work of Ibrahim Qashoush, who was murdered in July after performing in Hama. His killers cut his throat and carved out his vocal chords.

“At first, people were frightened,” said one Damascus resident who had heard the song. But when it was played for a second time, they relaxed. “By the third time, they were laughing,” he said.

The speakers were positioned on a roof and the area around them was smeared with oil to make it harder to silence them.

The tactics are effective but risky: one activist accidentally started playing a tape of the song in a taxi but the driver turned out to be a mukhabarat agent, who handed him in. Jawad, a computer scientist involved in one of these groups, was held for two months and beaten repeatedly to try to make him betray the names of his friends.

Other nonviolent acts have been stunningly symbolic: in August someone poured blood-red dye into the fountain outside the central bank in Saba’a Bahrat square, the scene of raucous pro-Assad rallies. Black-ribboned candles have been distributed to commemorate Ghayath Matar, famous for handing out roses to soldiers, who was tortured and killed last September.

“People are taking risks here,” said Salma, a human rights worker. “But in Idlib and Homs, it’s a matter of life and death; that’s not true in Damascus.”

Still, some cannot quite believe what they are daring to do. “Look at us,” laughed Bassam, a podgy manufacturer in his twenties, “using false names and driving around to avoid police checkpoints. The first time I went to a demonstration, it was frightening. Now it’s exhilarating.”

Yet no one thinks the revolution will have a happy end any time soon. Last week’s speech by Assad, his first public appearance for months, was seen as a declaration of war designed to rally his supporters.

In the live broadcast on state TV, the crowd looked enormous; in fact, a leaked unofficial shot suggested there were probably no more than a few thousand people in Umayyad Square.

Damascus is surrounded by the army’s fourth division, commanded by the president’s brother Maher. Government buildings are protected by anti-blast barriers. Roads near the presidential palace and defence ministry are closed. Outside the state security HQ, in Kafr Sousseh, machingun-toting guards look out warily from sandbagged emplacements.

It was there, two days before a cheerless Christmas, that twin suicide bombings killed 44 people and were blamed (20 minutes after the blasts) on al-Qaida – a reminder of the unrelenting official narrative that Syria faces only “armed terrorist gangs”, not the mass popular protests that have become an emblematic event of the Arab spring.

On 6 January, terrorists struck again. In nearby al-Midan, an opposition stronghold, there was what looked, at least at first glance, like another suicide attack, which reportedly killed 26 people. But as in the previous bombings, key details remain confused.

Locals spoke of the area being mysteriously cordoned off by police the night before. Many noted the remarkably swift response by the Syrian media and emergency services. And a rapidly assembled crowd of demonstrators, who were not from the neighbourhood, chanted pro-Assad slogans for journalists bussed in by the ministry of information. Suspicions that the event was somehow staged look reasonable, rather than the product of a febrile conspiracy theory.

Abu Muhammad, a chatty Sunni taxi driver, had no doubt about it. “It was pure theatre, all fabricated,” he said. “The idea is to frighten people in Damascus.” Nader, a shopkeeper, was even blunter: “The government knows Syrians don’t believe them. But they count on people being too afraid to break the silence.”

Hassan Abdel-Azim, leader of the opposition National Co-ordination Committee, who is often criticised for being too close to the regime, admitted that he too had “serious doubts” about the official version.

On 11 January, the killing of the French TV correspondent Gilles Jacquier by mortar fire during a government-escorted trip to Homs left more troubling questions unanswered. Was it a warning message to the international media? Official involvement will inevitably be difficult to prove.

What is extraordinary about all these incidents is the automatic assumption of so many Syrians that the regime would act with such murderous duplicity.

“No one has any illusions,” said another anti-Assad figure. “People think [the regime] is capable of anything. There are no red lines.”

The president’s supporters see things very differently. The regime’s grand conspiracy narrative, in which the US, the west, Israel and reactionary Arab “agents”, led by Qatar, plot against Syria, is pumped out daily by state media. Its most aggressive exponent is Addounia TV, a satellite channel owned by the wealthy brother-in-law of Maher al-Assad. Above all Addounia loathes al-Jazeera, the Qatari-owned cheerleader for the Arab revolutions, which it has accused of staging fake demonstrations in studio mock-ups of Syrian cities. In his speech the president referred to 60 TV channels as part of this vast “plot”.

Big lies seem to work. “The emir of Qatar is a Jew, worse than the Jews,” an Alawite taxi driver raged. “There are no demonstrations in Syria, or only by people who have been paid, and the terrorist gangs.” No wonder so many Syrians berate the few foreign journalists who are allowed into the country and urge them to “tell the truth like it really is”.

Regime loyalists who speak to the international media claim to support political reform and dialogue with the peaceful opposition: these are people like the Assad adviser Buthaina Shaaban and Jihad Makdissi, director of information at the foreign ministry, who engages in Twitter debates with supporters of the uprising. Overthrowing the president, warns Makdissi, “will open a Pandora’s box”.

But Syria’s powerful security chiefs, who are unavailable for briefings or interviews, emphasise the grave danger posed by Salafi extremists or al-Qaida – the same “foreign fighters” the mukhabarat used to help cross into Iraq to fight the Americans. Stomach-churning pictures showing decapitated bodies or corpses with their eyes gouged out are produced as evidence of the savagery of these terrorists. Opposition supporters do not claim such horrors are faked but insist the regime bears overwhelming responsibility for the current violence.

“For the Syrian security people, the solution now is to kill until it’s all over and wait until there is some change in the position of the west,” said a well connected but despairing businessman.

Assad supporters also accuse the opposition of naivety and of forgetting the early 1980s, when a wave of assassinations and bombings by the Muslim Brotherhood culminated in the Hama uprising, in which government forces killed at least 20,000 people. But that was 30 years ago: such a draconian “security solution” would be hard to repeat in the age of YouTube – and unlikely to end the uprising.

Sectarianism is also rearing its ugly head, with the opposition blaming the regime for fomenting tensions between Alawites, who dominate the security forces, and the Sunni majority.

In the current climate, it is easily done. Mudar, a young Alawite with close establishment links, tells of a soldier cousin who was killed and mutilated, and then clicks on a high-quality video clip of a bushy-bearded man sawing off the head of his screaming victim.

In an area near the Umayyad mosque, an Alawite woman visiting a Sunni friend said she dare not take a taxi home because a Sunni driver might kidnap her and sell her on to be killed.

Rumblings of concern are audible. Last spring, a group of influential Alawites urged Assad to apologise for the repression and pursue genuine rather than cosmetic reforms. “Alawites feel their fate is connected to the Assads,” warned a veteran opposition leader, “and that is very dangerous.”

Pressure is clearly mounting. Alawite businessmen are reported to have been bribing the mukhabarat to avoid releasing their employees to attend pro-regime rallies. Fadwa Suleiman, an Alawite actress, won huge admiration when she came out in support of the uprising, but she was ostracised and denounced on TV by her brother.

Christians, traditionally loyalists, are worried, too, especially about the Salafi element of the uprising, and the churches keenly demonstrate public support for Assad. To some, though, it seemed a very mixed blessing when Daoud Rajha, a Greek Orthodox Christian, was appointed army chief of staff, perhaps in an attempt to guarantee the community’s support.

Another sign of Syria’s deepening crisis is that the state is no longer functioning properly. It is “collapsing in slow motion”, in the words of one expert. Security chiefs are concerned about bribes being demanded to release detainees. Half the weapons acquired by rebels are estimated to have been sold by army personnel while customs agents look the other way as shipments come in from Lebanon. Rumours persist of different branches of the secret police shooting at each other on clandestine operations. And officials are said to have been destroying documents recording off-the-book payments authorised by a phone call from the president’s palace.

Syria’s economic plight has also deepened in the last few weeks. Power cuts for several hours are day are now routine. Shops in the priciest streets of Damascus depend on generators on the pavement. Petrol is in short supply, in part because of massive use by the security forces, and the prices of heating and cooking oil have risen steeply.

This joke illustrates the impact: Abu Fulan – everyman – buys a chicken for dinner. He asks his wife to roast it but she says, ‘Sorry, there’s no gas.’ Maaleish (never mind), he replies: let’s pluck it and put it in the microwave. ‘Sorry,’ his wife answers, ‘there’s no electricity either.’ At this point, the chicken miraculously comes to life and squawks: Allah, Souriya, Bashar! (“and that’s all you need!”)

The punchline slogan is borrowed from Libya, where the propaganda line was that the only thing people needed apart from God and country was Muammar Gaddafi – until his overthrow and murder. It can hardly be a good omen for Assad.

The president was ridiculed for praising the quality of the country’s olive oil and wheat – an allusion to self-reliance. Yet even if ordinary people grumble and make do, the macroeconomic outlook is bleak. Foreign investment and tourism have collapsed. Hotels are empty. US sanctions block most international financial transactions. The EU has stopped oil purchases. Credit cards can no longer be used. And the value of the Syrian pound has been falling steeply.

The regime understands the dangers but its room for manoeuvre is diminishing: when it banned luxury imports, in November, Sunni businessmen protested. The measure was rescinded a few days later.

It is hardly surprising, then, that all this is taking its toll: doctors report an increase in heart attacks, high blood pressure and other stress-related symptoms. Pharmacists are doing a brisk trade in anti-depressants. Two years ago the government introduced a smoking ban, but government offices, cafes and restaurants are still wreathed in clouds of smoke. People are also drinking more. “Doctors tell you to go and watch some silly Egyptian films – anything except the news,” a friend laughed.

Many now have first-hand experience of the apparatus of state repression, and describe details of underground cells, beatings and torture. It is common knowledge that Iranian security advisers are on hand with their sinister expertise in communications monitoring and riot policing. Damascus feels, and looks, like Tehran in 2009 during protests over the rigging of the presidential election.

“The people who are being arrested now don’t have Facebook pages,” the economist Raja Abdel-Karim said wryly. “They don’t care about actors, journalists and writers. The effect of the footage of the demonstrations and the killings is far greater than any quote someone like me can come up with.”

Abu Ahmad, a middle-aged man who was sacked from his government job, wept as he described being at a funeral in Midan, scene of the last dubious suicide bombing, with his wife and children when the shabiha started shooting.

State media reports only on martyrs among security personnel or regime supporters. Bodies are returned to families bearing unmistakable signs of torture.

“Perhaps the worst human rights violation committed by the regime against the Syrian people is no time to mourn each martyr, no time to grieve,” tweeted the blogger Razan Ghazzawi.

Elements of the anti-Assad opposition are uncomfortable with the “militarisation” of what began as a peaceful uprising inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The expectation is that violence will intensify as the Free Syrian Army, composed largely of defectors, continues to grow. “If you shoot at people for months, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start shooting back,” observed one western diplomat.

Overall, Syria’s divisions appear to be deepening. “For the last 10 months, millions of people have occupied the middle ground,” says Badr, a university lecturer. “But Assad is leaving us with no choice.”

Another joke makes the point well: citizens are being told they must no longer wear grey clothes – only black or white are allowed.

No one can accurately predict how long the uprising will continue. On the opposition side, optimism of the will is tempered by a sober realisation that in the short term the balance of forces is not in their favour and is unlikely to change quickly – barring a Libyan-style foreign military intervention, which few want and fewer expect. “Our tomorrow is in our hands,” tweeted one supporter of the revolution, “or we will have no tomorrow.”

Louay Hussein, an independent, Alawite writer and intellectual, said only a political solution could bring down the regime. “The crisis is in deadlock,” he argued. “All the signs are that we are heading for open-ended civil war. Assad still has quite a lot of support. It’s not just a question of repression.”

The economist Abdel-Karim takes the long view. “I have no doubt the regime will be toppled. The problem is that the longer it takes, the more powerful the Islamists will become, and those who advocate violence will gain ground. It’s a question of time and cost: time is getting shorter but the price is getting higher.”

Mouna Ghanem, of the Syrian State-Building Movement, one of very few independent nongovernmental organisations, agrees fully with this gloomy analysis. “We are happy that there is change,” she says. “We thought change would never come to Syria. But we fear what is it going to cost.”

Some names in this article have been changed

Thank you BBC #Syria

The Arabic BBC withdrew its reporter from Syria after receiving many complaints from activists that he is being biased, especially because he is a member of the Syrian Nationalist Party in Lebanon that supports the Syrian regime.

News that was published today: Journalist Khaled Semsom exposes the Lebanese journalist thug “Mohamad Balout” who works as a reporter for the BBC in Damascus so all activists in side Syria please be aware.
This thug has gave up the activist names in Daraa-Bibasra to the intelligences department in the State’s Security branch when he conducted a report for the BBC four days ago. In addition to that he, was… trying to get the activist names in Damascus in order to reveal it to the Intelligence branch. Balout have broken the ethics of journalism when he gave the activists names from Bisra and by revealing information about them for the security forces. Also to be noted, this journalist have attacked the Syrian opposition meeting in France in an article for Al Safeer, which made the earlier newspaper to issue an apology after his article was published. Dima Naseef, Balout’s wife, is on the same footsteps as her husband. She works as a reporter for the Russian TV station and she is as dangerous as her husband. She was involved in giving misleading and provocative information for the revolutionary in Kafar Ouide in Jabal Al Zawyiah where the Syrian regime conducted a true brutal massacre.
An activist sent us confirmed information that Balout is dangerous and that he is being assigned to do his dirty job by the Brigadier Ghassan Khalil, the head of the Intelligences branch, to pass the information and news from the activists in Damascus and blow the cover of the members who work in secret for the Local Coordination Committee