05/08/12
#Syria rebels smuggle supplies from Jordan
While the conflict plays out inside Syria, the materials that sustain the opposition trickle in over the borders.
They include guns and medical supplies. And the people who smuggle them in are taking huge risks.
Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker reports from the Jordan-Syria border
Jonathon Birch Reuters
ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) - Syrian rebels resting and recovering from wounds in Turkey say that far from receiving a host of heavy weapons to take the fight to government forces, they feel forgotten by their Western and Arab backers.
Some rebels and opposition figures inside and outside Syria say there has been an upsurge in recent weeks of heavier weaponry being smuggled into Syria via Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq from suppliers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The weapons, which according to the rebels are being supplied by private sponsors, include thousands of shells, hundreds of sniper rifles, as well as anti-armor missiles.
But in the verdant hills, wooded mountainsides and languid refugee camps of Turkey’s southern Hatay province, Free Syrian Army rebels returning from the fight to rest and tend their wounds, said they had seen no sign of any new weapons.
One rebel said less than half the fighters in his unit even had a gun. What weapons they did have, the rebels said, came from inside Syria.
“This is an absolute lie. We have not seen anything. If they are coming through Lebanon, maybe, but if they were, we would see these weapons. We don’t see them, where are they?” said one rebel who gave his name only as Ahmad.
“Every household has had one person killed or wounded. If we had weapons we could defend ourselves,” said Ahmad, clean-shaven and dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, not fitting the typical image of a rebel fighter.
The conflicting accounts from fighters in the Free Syrian Army, a loose alliance of army deserters and civilians fighting President Bashar al-Assad, suggest the number of weapons flowing in are limited and that they are only reaching certain areas.
“THE WORLD HAS FORGOTTEN US”
Ahmad arrived in Hatay this week after smuggling wounded comrades out of the western town of Haffeh, where rebels say government helicopters and tanks have launched a large-scale assault on the area.
After the tanks push their way through the town and surrounding villages, Ahmad said, Assad’s soldiers, move from house to house rounding up young men and looting their homes. What they leave behind, they destroy, he said.
From a hospital ward in Hatay’s main city Antakya, Ahmad becomes frustrated when speaking about weapons. He motions his hands emphatically to drive home his point.
“By God, we don’t trust anyone. We don’t believe anyone anymore. The world has forgotten us,” he said.
Like most of the Syrians in Turkey, Ahmad would only give one name for fear of reprisals against his relatives at home.
As Ahmad spoke, the newest wounded arrival, 31-year-old Lutfi, was wheeled into the emergency department below. Lutfi, a Free Army fighter was shot in the leg during a clash with government troops in Jabal al-Krad near the western city of Latakia.
Lutfi said he and some 150 rebel fighters ambushed around 200-250 of Assad’s men who were on their way to occupy one of the surrounding villages. Two rebels were killed in the clash and another four were wounded.
The right leg of his camouflage military trousers has been ripped off, revealing a bandage covering his bullet wound. Lutfi laughed when asked whether new weapons had reached his men.
“There are no new weapons. All we can do is attack and retreat. They are nothing against their weapons,” he said.
ONLY 40 PERCENT HAVE WEAPONS
Some 45 km (30 miles) south of Antakya only minutes from the Syrian border, Nasim, another rebel stands outside the Yayladagi refugee camp - tents erected inside an old, derelict tobacco factory that now serves as his temporary home.
Like at the others camps scattered around Hatay and further to the east, here fighters come to recoup with comrades or family members. Syrians are free to enter and leave the camp but access to the media is restricted.
Nasim says he regularly crosses back into Syria to smuggle food and blankets to fighters stationed inside but said he had not seen any new weapons cross from Turkey into Syria and that all the weapons he had seen had been acquired in the country.
“Three months ago I heard that Arab countries were going to send us money or weapons but I have not seen anything. Not one country has sent us money or weapons,” said Nasim, a short, stocky, scruffily dressed man in his 30s with a full black beard.
“The only weapons we get are by pooling our money together and buying them in Syria, or someone who supports us will come and give us their hunting rifle or something. Sometimes soldiers from the army sell us weapons,” he said.
Only around 40 percent of his unit even had a weapon, Nasim said, “and these are light weapons. Assad is hitting us with tanks.”
Some 40 rebels and activists who spoke to Reuters this week all said that apart from a small number of light weapons which had been bought on the black market, they had not seen any weapons smuggled to Syria through Turkey.
While Turkey has thrown its support behind Assad’s opposition, has called for the Syrian leader to step down and given sanctuary to senior defected Syrian army officers, it has opposed any outside military intervention in its neighbor.
Turkish officials say Ankara is not arming the rebels and have denied reports that weapons from other countries are being smuggled over Turkish territory.
Corroborating accounts of what is happening inside Syria is difficult because the government tightly restricts foreign media access. Most rebels also cross into Syria during darkness and Turkish security forces do not allow media near informal border crossings.
But for the rebels it does not matter where the weapons originate or how they get there, as long as they come.
“Wherever they come from it does not matter. We want weapons. We want to be able to defend our women and our families. We don’t want money, just weapons,” said Omar, another rebel smuggler at Yayladagi.
February 20, 2012 09:09 PM
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s interior ministry said on Monday its forces had fended off “smugglers and infiltrators” trying to cross the border from Syria. “Border guards were able to fend off groups of smugglers and infiltrators who were trying to cross the border from Syria into Iraq,” a statement on the ministry’s website said, without specifying when this occurred. The guards forced the groups to retreat into Syria, the statement said, adding that the incidents took place in areas of Nineveh province. A statement released on Saturday by the Iraqi premier’s office said Iraq is taking measures to secure its border with Syria against weapons smuggling and the unauthorised movement of people. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been carrying out a bloody crackdown on an uprising against his rule, in which activists say more than 6,000 people have been killed since March 2011. While there are still regular civilian protests that turn deadly in Syria, the focus has now also shifted to armed conflict with regime forces. Iraq’s interior minister said in an interview with AFP that jihadists were moving from Iraq to Syria and arms are also being smuggled across the border to opponents of Assad’s regime.
Homs Governor Ghassan abdul-Al said a military presence is necessary in Homs to ensure public safety. (Photo: Abdullah Bozkurt)
This writer joined some 30 foreign reporters from Turkey, Japan, Germany, Austria and Algeria. The trip was carefully choreographed by the Ministry of Information, and it was obvious that the places visited were selected to project the government’s version of events that have unfolded since mid-March. Nevertheless, it gave some clues as to what is happening on the ground as the Syrian government has long denied the entry of foreign journalists into the country.
On the 100-mile stretch from Damascus to Homs, there were no visible tanks or heavy artillery munitions located on either side of the highway. Yet, the voyage was interrupted several times by army checkpoints. There were some sandbagged army posts with soldiers carrying machine guns positioned at the entry to Homs. Homs governor Ghassan abdul-Al defended the army presence as “being there to ensure public safety.”
But in the city, traffic was hectic as usual, garbage was piled up in the middle of roads and people seemed to be attending to their business. There was nothing out of ordinary on the path we were taken along to visit places, though intelligence officials were quick to disperse crowds gathering around the reporters and TV crewmen.
Reporters were taken to inspect what the guides said was an indication of the volume of destruction and sabotage of public places by people whom they described as “insurgents and terrorists.”In the Homs National Hospital, called Vatan and located in a rundown district of the city, Gassan Tannusi, the hospital manager, showed a triage room on the first floor that had bullet marks in the walls and ceilings. “The shot came from outside,” he said, pointing to a window’s broken glass and showing the trajectory of a bullet.
He said the insurgents fired at the hospital to put pressure on personnel to evacuate the building, thus cutting off medical supplies. Though he did not say anything, there were visible bullet marks in the empty first floor of another building across from the hospital, indicating there had been an exchange of fire between the two buildings. It was difficult to verify what the hospital manager said without accounts from witnesses.
It was interesting to note that no patients were seen in the hospital even though an emergency stretcher with fresh bloodstains was parked in a corner of the hospital. The hospital was in very poor shape. The rusty window grills blocked the sunlight from the rooms. Paintings on the wall had peeled away here and there, the dirt was visible everywhere. Soldiers in full-armed gear were hauled away as the reporters were about to enter the hospital.
In contrast, the Homs Military Hospital was in better shape, and reporters were given access to wounded soldiers receiving treatment there. All of the patients were delivering the same scripted stories and labeling insurgents foreign agents who want to destabilize the country. Amin Baddul, a 27-year-old private, got shot when his patrol came under attack from insurgent groups crossing from the Lebanese border. “It was a shooting by masked men in blue jeans. I got a bullet in my leg, and my two friends got killed in the shootout,” he said. Teysir Sheadi Tariff was standing by the bed of his 27-year-old son, wounded by gunshots to both legs. He told a similar nationalistic tale.
The group was later taken to an Alawi neighborhood in the Akrame district, where it met with a cheering crowd of some 100 people, who were chanting pro-Assad slogans and holding pro-army placards. People with pictures of loved ones who got kidnapped, murdered or wounded were asking reporters to convey their stories to an international audience. It was obvious the meeting was well-planned by government officials, with video-footage of what officials describe as the brutal murders of Alawis by Sunni insurgents.
Reja Hayek, an OB/GYN specialist, said the situation is very tense in the Homs neighborhood where Alawis live in fear from Sunni insurgents. “Both groups have started to arm themselves. The army is here to protect us from the terrorists. All the terrorists are Sunnis,” she claimed. Describing herself as an Alawi and an atheist at the same time, Hayek, educated in Turkey in late 70s, is thinking of going back to Turkey for safety and security. Although organizers of this meeting said the reporters were welcome to knock on the door of any house in this Alawi neighborhood, the request to have access to a Sunni neighborhood was denied. It seems the seeds of a potential civil war along sectarian lines are growing in Homs, which is made up primarily of Sunni Muslims but has Alawi Muslim, Greek Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox Christian minorities.
If anything useful came out of the trip, it was during the question-and-answer session with Homs governor Ghassan abdul-Al. Even though he was evasive and denied most things in his responses to reporters’ questions, the Homs governor gave indications of what is happening in this province. He said there is no dialogue taking place with insurgents because they want to topple the government. “No government anywhere in the world would accept that,” he said, stressing that insurgents’ demands have nothing to do with reforms.
He said government forces have seized cars full of arms and ammunition coming from over the Lebanese and Turkish borders. “I do not claim that the governments of Lebanon or Turkey are involved in these shipments. Smugglers and arms dealers are exploiting this situation,” he said, adding that without financial resources, insurgents cannot buy these weapons.
The Homs governor acknowledged that government forces may have shot at civilians but said this has happened in high-density areas while fighting is taking place between army soldiers and insurgents. “Civilians may have been caught in the middle,” he argued. Ghassan said the government set up a judicial committee to investigate deliberate or accidental killings of civilians by security personnel. He declined to give the number of convictions or investigations into these killings.
The Homs governor said 415 soldiers and 503 civilians have been killed in the province by insurgents, while 324 kidnappings have been reported. Asked about the reports of kidnappings by security forces, Ghassan said, “We call them political prisoners, not kidnappings.” According to him, 3,707 causalities have been recorded across Syria since the unrest began in March. “Since then, 2,100 police and army soldiers have been killed,” he added.
Exclusive: With Syrian rebels desperate for arms, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad finds smugglers doing a roaring trade selling guns and bullets
The route across the Syrian border was marked by a single shining piece of string. It stretched from the road on the Turkish side for a few hundred metres to the steel and razor-wire fence that ran along the boundary.
The smugglers followed it silently and quickly, jumping from one stone to another in the moonlight. Each man carried a thick, plastic-wrapped load on his back. The plastic bundles rattled and clinked as they ran along.
Beyond the fence the shadows of men and animals moved. “Do you have money?” asked a Turkish voice.
“Next shipment,” the Syrian replied.
A man with a scarf wrapped around his face held the coils of barbed wire flat while the cargo was passed across and loaded on to the backs of the waiting mules. Then the men hurried the animals away from the border and up into the mountains of northern Syria.
The smugglers paused on a cliff to examine the cargo. Inside the plastic packages were small boxes filled with pistols and bullets of different calibres.
One of the men broke off to answer his mobile phone. It was one of several lookouts keeping watch for Syrian security forces. There was a government patrol on the mountain: the men had to split up and move quickly.
“Grab the mule’s reins and run along next to it,” a smuggler hissed. In this fashion we climbed further into the mountains, playing cat and mouse with the Syrian patrol.
At the edge of a small village we lay in a ditch and waited. A man whistled and a white truck appeared. It had come to collect the cargo.
After eight months of vicious crackdowns by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s revolution is sliding towards civil war. Many in the opposition who have seen their friends and family members disappeared, tortured or shot by the Syrian security forces are looking for ways to fight back.
The smugglers, sensing a business opportunity, have been quick to respond. In the south the weapons come from Lebanon. Here in the north, they are flowing in from Turkey and Iraq.
“We used to smuggle cigarettes coming from Lebanon via Syria,” a portly man told me the night before in Turkey as he channel-hopped between Egyptian chatshows. Since the Syrian uprising began new business opportunities had opened up. “Now we only do weapons,” he said. “Three shipments per day.”
After crossing the border into the north Syrian province of Idlib, we travelled to meet the revolutionary command council with Muhyo, a fighter, and Abu Salim. Abu Salim had made it his job to find weapons and ammunition for the rebels after running out of bullets during a firefight with the regime. .
“When the army came to [the town of] Benish last time, we ambushed a bus filled with security people,” he said. “I had a pistol and eight bullets, but after a few minutes of shooting I had run out. I stood there watching those dogs but had no ammunition. That’s when I decided I would arm every man in my town.”
Now he spends his days driving through villages and deserts, meeting smugglers and weapon dealers, scavenging bullets and old rifles. Each day he comes back with a gun or two and few bags of ammunition. “The last time the army attacked Benish there were 30 Kalashnikovs in the town,” he said. “Now we have more than 600.”
In this part of Syria, the young men tell how they have sold their wives’ jewellery, their cars and even their furniture to buy weapons and ammunition. “A man would rather sleep with his Kalashnikov than his wife,” they say in Idlib.
Were they getting any support from outside Syria? Abu Salim laughed. “There is no outside support,” he said. “You have seen how hard it is to get ammunition: the price of a bullet is $2, and an old Kalashnikov is $2,000.”
To avoid the checkpoints around Benish, we left the road just before reaching a roadblock of four Syrian army tanks and drove on muddy dirt roads. In the villages, we passed children chanting revolutionary songs. Graffiti that read “the people want to topple the regime” and “Freedom” was painted over Ba’ath party slogans on school walls.
We climbed into hills covered in stubby olive trees. The army was unable to reach the fighters’ hideouts on the mountain, so they harassed the people in the lower-lying villages to try to stop them helping fighters with food and assistance.
Driving up a narrow street in one village, Abu Salim stopped the car and froze. Ahead of us, less than 100 metres away, was a long army and security convoy: three green army trucks, two military jeeps, six civilian SUVs, two buses and a couple of armoured vehicles.
Abu Salim swerved and entered the backyard of a house. Women were sitting outside sifting wheat and rice, but they moved their chairs to the entrance of the yard to cover for us, strangers avoiding a military convoy. Minutes later they gave us the signal to leave.
We followed the convoy from a distance. The commander of the village, a veteran jihadi from the Iraq war, drove ahead on a motorbike, his Kalashnikov slung on his back. He and a few of his gunmen escorted us to the safe house where members of the revolutionary command council would convene later in the day.
From the window, the mountains folded away towards the horizon. Around 20 fighters sat in the different rooms, chatting, eating, praying or sleeping. The walls of each room were piled with blankets, mattresses and gym bags. Towels and jackets hung from nails on the walls. Muhyo sat with an older fighter, in his late 50s, exchanging stories of torture. The man had been detained by the security forces in President Assad’s father’s era, when Muslim Brotherhood fighters roamed the mountains and the countryside in Edlib.”Each day they would leave the food for us in the middle of the prison yard where one of us had to fetch it. They would beat him on the way out and on the way back.”
A teenager in a black tracksuit sat listening and cleaning guns. He dismantled each weapon and then with a towel dipped in petrol cleaned every joint and bolt.
Late that night, the revolutionary leadership gathered in a small room. A dozen men sat around a kerosene heater whose fumes mingled with cigarette smoke to make a stuffy atmosphere. They were an eclectic mix of tribesmen, farmers and city people, Islamists and nationalists, young and old, bearded and clean-shaven.
“We started the revolution because we wanted to be treated like humans, we are looking for our humanity,” said Amar, a commander with a short beard and thick arms. “All my life I have been treated like an inferior, a human being of the 10th class, while Assad and his people controlled this country. We also have a right in this country.”
One of the council members seemed to carry more authority than the others. He was thin and angry, his face creased like an old leather chair. “This revolution was led by the kids, the children,” he said. “It’s their revolution. This is the generation that didn’t see the horrors of the 80s. If it was up to us we would have never started the revolution. We have been burned once. But they are brave. They led and we followed.”
Who was in charge of it? The people inside Syria or the Syrian National Council based in Turkey? “We don’t have a Benghazi so the revolution has two arms. The people outside, who have no weight on the ground, and the people inside, who are actively leading. But the people inside are scared. They can’t talk in public. No one knows who they are because they are afraid and we don’t have a safe haven.
“Look at all these men in this room,” he said, gesturing towards them. “I didn’t know any of them before March and they didn’t know me. I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me. I know one of us is a spy and this is why we take all these precautions. This is an evil regime. It has converted Syria into a big prison where everyone is a spy.
“I don’t count on major defections in the army because all the big commanders are Allawite. But if there was a safe haven, a protected zone or a no-fly zone, people would defect. Low-ranking officers and NCOs, the backbone of the army, would defect.”
When two short, delicate Bedouin tribesmen entered the room, the fighters sprang to their feet. Abu Ali and his companion were two smugglers from the Iraqi border. Their tribe, the Shamar, stretches from eastern Syria to Mosul in northern Iraq and south to Saudi Arabia, and they move freely between these countries in pick-up trucks, ferrying goods and sheep and smuggling weapons and fuel. They laid out their wares on the floor: 10 old Kalashnikovs, two rusty RPGs, six rockets for the RPG and one medium machine gun.
The revolutionaries fell on the rusty old weapons and carried them to the boys sitting behind the commanders. The boys stripped each gun to its bolts and springs in a few minutes, cleaned them and put them back together. They cocked them and pulled the triggers. The weapons gave a metallic click.
Abu Ali, who spoke in a thick Bedouin accent, began. “I swear by Allah, I told our Iraqi brothers that these weapons are going to help our brothers in their fight and they should help us because we are fighting for the sake of god.”
“How much?” asked Ammar.
Abu Ali told Ammar he knew him and had worked with him before and trusted him: “Wallah for your eyes each one of the Kalashnikovs is $1,600. The RPGs are $5,000 with two rockets. The machine-gun is $5,000.”
There were gasps. “Abu Ali, you are a charity,” said one of the commanders sarcastically. “The Syrians have mined the border,” said Abu Ali. “We have to walk for miles each way carrying them on our backs.”
“We have emptied Mosul; no more guns there,” said his companion.
The bargaining proved irrelevant; the men had snatched their guns and were now counting out thick slabs of money.
“What about ammunition,” said an old man. “We need bullets. I can’t send them to fight with one magazine each.”
“Tomorrow, inshallah,” said Abu Ali.
The fighters packed the guns and left, each taking a different route, leaving nothing to chance.
Hussam is a soldier in the Syrian army. His brother and two cousins are fighting for the rebels.
“I would defect tomorrow if you could protect my family,” Hussam said. “But if I defected they would arrest my father and my brothers and the whole family would have no income. The regime is still in control.
“I am as low as I can be, my morale is below zero. I don’t know what to do, my family and people are getting killed – yet still there are no defections in the army.
“When they say the Syrian army is an ideological army they are right. The political officers and the Ba’ath party and the Assad family control the army. Even if a general did defect, he wouldn’t defect with his tanks and soldiers, he would defect on his own. So arming of the revolution is a mistake, it will not be strong enough to stand against the army and resist properly.
“With my artillery unit I could sweep through Benish in one hour. When the officers and the regime tell the soldiers that the villagers are armed, they will come in scared and shoot at everything.
“But when soldiers know that they are facing unarmed civilians, they are human beings after all. How many bullets were fired when they toppled Mubarak? Zero. Now everyone is armed, fine. But what’s next?
“If you want officers to defect give them a no-fly zone, give them a safe haven, where they can take their families.”
Hameed defected from the Syrian army three months ago.
“We were fighting in Rastan. They gave us the order to shoot and I could see we were shooting at civilians. Then the demonstrators started shooting back. There was chaos and I ran away down an alleyway heading towards the edge of town, but I saw the town was surrounded so I turned back. I walked through the dark streets knocking at doors, but no one would let me in. They saw me in my military uniform carrying a gun and they must have thought I was there to search or detain people. Then Allah sent me one man who opened his door. I told him I had run away and he took me in gave me fresh clothes and kept me inside.”
Three days later Hameed arrived back in his village. From there he was smuggled over the mountains into Turkey where he claimed asylum and was hosted in a refugee camp for defected officers. He later joined the Free Syrian Army under the command of Colonel Reyadh Assad.
“We did nothing there [in Turkey], just sat in our tents and watched TV and sometimes gave press interviews. I told them I hadn’t defected to sit in a tent, I wanted to fight. They kept telling me to wait, that they had a plan, but nothing happened.”
After three months in Turkey Hameed ran away again; this time he arranged for the rebels to smuggle him back into Syria.
“There is no such thing as a Free Syria Army,” he said. “It’s a joke. The real revolutionaries are here in Syria in the mountains.”
On Zawiya mountain, I met another defected officer. He had taken leave from the army to see his family, and when he reached his village he joined the fighters in the mountains.
“The regime can’t reach my family,” he said. “That’s why I could run away.” Most soldiers couldn’t defect because they feared for their families if they did. “The army is under the strict control of the political officers, who ensure we live in cocoon where we can’t see what’s happening outside.” Soldiers were not allowed to watch the Arabic news channels, just the propaganda served up by state TV, he said. “The political officers tell us every day that we are fighting armed gangs paid by the Americans and the Saudis.
“If only they would impose a no fly zone,” he said, “then the whole army would split.”
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