07/10/12

The bodies of children whom anti-government protesters say were killed by government security forces lie on the ground in Huola, near Homs May 26, 2012.
Image by: HANDOUT / REUTERS

Doctors and opposition activists have been risking their lives to save Syrian lives, resorting to smuggling from neighbouring Lebanon and Turkey to access critical medical supplies for their makeshift hospitals.

Sakr, 30, a doctor from Homs – which has been bombarded by the Syrian military – is one of the people in charge of a smuggling operation in the al-Qaa region on the Lebanese-Syrian border.

“We had to resort to this kind of smuggling mission, we have no other choice, because the medical supplies are urgently needed inside rebel-held areas, such as Homs, on the outskirts of Damascus and now Aleppo,” Sakr told dpa in the eastern Lebanese town of Arsaal.

Each such operation typically begins at midnight, and is usually aided by Lebanese smugglers more used to dealing in weapons. The supplies are taken in on foot, or sometimes on donkeys.

“The walk from al-Qaa takes almost one hour as far as a safe house inside Syrian territory. The medical supplies are loaded onto trucks and taken to Homs. Then they are distributed to other areas,” Sakr said.

It can often take four days to get materials into Syria. Doctors in restive areas under siege need anaesthetics, disinfectants and blood.

Those working in the underground medical network cannot access blood as the central blood bank is controlled by the Defence Ministry, which is the only blood supplier in the country.

“You can be detained or shot at by Syrian soldiers if spotted, because for the regime we are smugglers on the same level as gun-runners,” Sakr said.

Afraid for his family’s safety, Sakr would not reveal his real name. Fear is pervasive in dissident areas, and medical workers told Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) in northern Idlib that being “caught with a patient is worse than being caught with a weapon.”

A two-person MSF team that crossed into Idlib via Turkey in March found that even when medics had access to supplies, they were so terrorised that they refused to perform surgery for fear of reprisals, and only offered quick first aid.

MSF has for months being seeking authorization to aid the wounded in Syria. But since the uprising began in March 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has banned international humanitarian aid groups from operating in the country, except for the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose movements are constrained by the violence.

Syrians send lists of medical supplies to activists based in Lebanon, who collect them from foreign organizations - Sakr would not name them. They also come from Syrian expatriates or activists sometimes buy them from local pharmacies.

These are then smuggled across the Lebanese and Turkish borders into Syria.

“I cannot lie - we are being helped by Lebanese smugglers who know all the illegal crossings into Syria,” Sakr said. “Inside Syria, we have our secret ways to make sure the medical supplies reach the rebels and makeshift hospitals.”

He said the rising number of casualties had made “doctors like me risk their lives and make trips like this across the borders to make sure all the necessary medical supplies are transferred in good condition to areas inside Syria.”

The task, which he described as “a mission impossible,” was carried out by a team of 12 from the Lebanese side, he said.

“Activists, doctors, members of the Free Syrian Army and Lebanese smugglers protect us and guide our way.”

Lebanese smuggler Burkan told dpa: “I am doing this knowing that these supplies will help save some lives in Syria. Of course, I am being paid for this mission, but I am taking half of what I usually take, when I smuggle weapons.”

But the Syrian doctor said that despite their best efforts and dangerous trips, the smugglers cannot meet all the needs of the hundreds wounded in daily attacks.

“Medicine is being used as a weapon of persecution,” MSF president Marie-Pierre Allie said in February. “In Syria today, wounded patients and doctors are pursued and risk torture and arrest at the hands of security services.”

Doctors told MSF, which has also collected testimonies from patients, that security forces destroy mobile hospitals and arrest and torture those who treat the wounded.

The group said the possession of medicines and basic material such as gauze is considered a crime.

With the violence showing no sign of abating and an estimated death toll of 17 000 and rising, according to the opposition, doctors like Sakr have few other options.

He said: “This is one of those moments where we have to risk our lives to save innocent lives in any way we can.”

• John Densky in Idlib province
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 June 2012 18.30 BST

Free Syrian Army members prepare for an early morning attack on Idlib city. Idlib has been under the control of the Syrian army and the feared Shabiha militia for most of the uprising. Photograph: John Densky

It is hard to miss the tension in the smoke stained room of the former police station in Altima; a stone’s throw across the border into Syria from Reyhanli, Turkey.

Nervous men sit in silence as the local commander furiously tells the younger Free Syria Army fighter to ferry bags of weapons and medical supplies, piled throughout the entrance and back room, into two tired looking trucks parked out front.

Forty to 50 bags later, the reason for the hurried pace and frayed nerves appears. Five tall, well-dressed and very fit Arab men show up sporting expensive foreign weapons and little interest in the customary greetings and respect experienced throughout the ranks of the FSA. Italian shoes and immaculately pressed designer shirts stand in stark contrast to the odd mix of cheap designer knock-offs and sweat-stained fatigues worn by the fighters of the FSA.

The men move quickly, speak only to the FSA commander, known by his men as Zaza, and get the job of organising and loading of the supplies completed with military precision.

Two shackled and blindfolded men appear from a locked room at the end of the corridor and are led out of the building into the back of a white Toyota four-wheel drive accompanied by the five strangers.

“Shabiha” the man next to me whispers, in reference to the pro-Assad militia that has been at the vanguard of the regime’s crackdown. As quickly as they appeared, the men disappear into the night.

Over the coming weeks this would be a regular occurrence. The hills of northern Syria, lining the border region between neighboring Turkey and the mountain strongholds of the Free Syrian Army, in villages like Radna, Bouzghal and Kafr Arouq, are a natural gift to the smugglers funnelling weapons and supplies to the FSA. Cheap Chinese and Iraqi-made Kalashnikovs, ammunition and medical supplies pour across the 510 mile (822km) border through villages similar to Altima, keeping hopes for the uprising alive after 15 months.

From the cafes in the Turkish cities of Antakya and Reyhanli, filled with a curious mix of tourists, journalists and Syrian money men, a web of routes, people, material and weapons begins to grow with the end goal of supplying the Free Syrian Army factions fighting to topple the Assad regime. A young man in the Syrian village of Quorqania explains it with impressive simplicity. Abu Haidr says quietly, like he is guarding a secret: “Without these supply routes across the border the FSA is finished in the north.”

The Assad regime is all too aware of the vital nature of controlling the porous borders. On the lowlands, between the cities of regime-controlled Idlib and Aleppo, and the mountainous border, the Syrian army has amassed hundreds of tanks and pieces of artillery. Daily they attack villages and cities thought to be sympathetic to the FSA with deadly combinations of tanks, artillery and helicopters. On 5 June, the Syrian army attacked the city of Al Atarib, about 15 miles (25km) southwest of Aleppo, with a ferocity rarely witnessed in the north. After two solid days of bombardment and more than 100 dead, Al Atarib became a shell of the city it once was with weary survivors fleeing to the FSA protected hills to the west.

Helicopters are regularly seen flying high over the region to rain Russian-made rockets packed with high explosives down on villages protected from direct armour attack by the narrow and heavily defended mountain passes. On the road from Altima to the plains surrounding Aleppo, the charred hulks of tanks litter the way, quiet testament to the ageless advantage of solid, natural fighting positions.

For months the defence of this region by the FSA has been thin. However in May, as the peace plan brokered by Kofi Annan appeared to be all but an abject failure, a renewed effort to arm the FSA in the north began in earnest.

The FSA leadership meets almost daily now in the refugee camps of Yeladaki, Bonuynogun and the Syrian army defectors’ camp south of Demirkopru in Turkey, to organise the crossing of medicine, arms, refugees, fighters and journalists into Syria. With monetary support pledged form Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the smuggling routes in the north could become a deciding factor in the uprising.

The village of Quorqania is abuzz late into the evening as revellers from a wedding between an FSA commander and a local woman pour out into the cool mountain air. Drummers pound out a throbbing beat and a local man sings anti-regime songs through a PA system with the volume set to maximum. The mood is high and many of the revelers appear relaxed and confident as they dance, in small circles of men, to the cadence of the drums.

What is different about this evening is that the men in the streets are armed to the teeth.

To one side is a man with an American M4 equipped with laser sighting in one arm and a shiny Colt 45 strapped to his shoulder. He is filming the celebration on his iPhone while other men empty clips from their Kalashnikovs into the deep violet sky, in salute to the newly married man. Rocket-propelled grenade launchers, PKC heavy machine guns and enough Kalashnikovs to supply each man have all come to the party.

Only two months earlier these same men were counting each round and would only return fire if the situation was grave. Weapons and the ammunition to feed them were strictkly conserved. Many men shared a single rifle.

The fighting in the north continues to intensify. Many here expect a big fight to defend the vital smuggling routes in the coming months. What is different, at the tail end of the second spring of revolution, is that the FSA appears well armed and prepared to meet anything the Assad regime sends their way.

By Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand

LATTAKIA, Syria and BEIRUT, Lebanon — As Syria descends into civil war, Abu Jaafar said he is ready to kill women and children to defend his friends, family and president.

“Sunni women are giving birth to babies who will fight us in years to come, so we have the right to fight anyone who can hurt us in the future,” said the Allawite militiaman, a member of the ancient offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the powerbase of his regime belong.

With his massive, tattooed muscles, shaved head, bushy black beard and trademark white trainers, Abu Jaafar, 38, looks every bit the figure of terror that is now imprinted on the international conscience. It is militiamen like Jaafar that are believed responsible for recent massacres in Houla and Qbeir, in which nearly 200 Sunni civilians were killed, many of them women and children who were stabbed to death.

Though he has a wife and children at home, after a day lifting weights at the gym and having drunk some local Arak to get in the mood, Jaafar spends most evenings in the nightclubs of Lattakia, the port city on Syria’s Mediterranean coast where regime forces this week attacked a rebellious village.

As a member of the mafia militia who grew up smuggling commodities, appliances, drugs and guns between Syria and Lebanon at the behest of Assad’s extended family, Abu Jaafar has no problem getting past the nightclub bouncers.

Except when the “mualem,” his master, calls.

“If I get a call from my boss then my whole day is changed,” he said. “When I leave the house, I don’t know when I will be back.”

Packing up the Kalashnikovs, pistols, machine guns and grenades he said were given to him “by the government,” Jaafar joins his gang of 100 shabiha — the Allawite militia named either after the Arabic word for ghosts or the old Mercedes shahab popular for its smuggling-sized trunk — and sets off to crush the Sunni Muslim protesters who dared rise up against his president.

In an interview with a GlobalPost reporter in Lattakia, Jaafar gave a frank and unique insight into the violent, disturbed world of the shabiha, a group that suffers from a dangerous cocktail of religious indoctrination, minority paranoia and mafia roots.

The massacres in northern Syria, which UN officials, eyewitnesses and Human Rights Watch all concluded were perpetrated mainly by shabiha from neighboring villages, triggered a wave of international revulsion.

US officials raised the prospect of military action even as analysts described the marauding shabiha as a “Frankenstein” now beyond the control of the president. The regime blamed both massacres on foreign terrorists.

Like many of Syria’s estimated 2.5 million Allawites, a small mystic off-shoot of Shiite Islam which forms just 12 percent of the country’s population, compared to Sunni Muslims who represent 75 percent, Jaafar said he grew up struggling with poverty.

“My story is similar to all shabiha: I was born in a small village and didn’t finish school. Instead I went to work with my father in our lemon farm,” he said.

It was during his military service that Jaafar first got recruited into the murky world of Syria’s security services, where uniformed officers worked with plain-clothed thugs in regime-sanctioned smuggling.

“I was bigger than the others so I got picked to be the bodyguard of a senior officer,” he said. “After military service he asked me to be his man in dealing with some Allawite smugglers.”

Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jaafar lived the gangster high life, plying his trade in well-organized smuggling networks, anchored on its control of Lattakia’s port.

Food, cigarettes and commodities subsidized by the Syrian state would be smuggled from Syria into Lebanon, then in the midst of a civil war, and sold for massive profit. Luxury cars, guns and drugs, meanwhile, would flow from Lebanon up the Bekaa Valley and into Syria’s tightly restricted, Soviet-style economy established under Hafez al-Assad, the country’s former dictator.

“They were noted for their brutality and cruelty and their blind devotion to their leaders,” writes Yassein Haj Saleh, a historian and dissident. “The shabiha were untouchable and operated with impunity. If there were ever a conflict between the shabiha and the local authorities, the authorities would not dare defend themselves.”

The impunity stemmed from a single, but all powerful source: The direct links between the shabiha and the Assad family.

Reportedly established by Namir al-Assad, President Hafez al-Assad’s cousin, and Rifaat al-Assad, the late president’s brother, each shabiha gang grew up owing allegiance to a particular member of the extended Assad family.

In May 2011, the European Union imposed sanctions on Assad’s first cousins, Fawwaz and Munzir, for their involvement in “the repression against the civilian population as members of the shabiha.”

Syria experts say members of the shabiha would be carefully selected for their physical strength, lack of education and blind loyalty to the Allawite sect and the Assad family in particular.

“The loyalty of the shabiha for the regime is far greater than the loyalty of the other security forces because, if the regime is toppled, they will be the first to be wiped out,” a former Syrian army officer, now defected to the rebels, told GlobalPost.

By the mid 1990s, however, the shabiha were beginning to get out of control and Hafez al-Assad ordered his elder son and heir apparent Basel, famed for horsemanship and a furious temper, to bring the militias to heel. He did so, but soon after died in a car crash, catapulting his awkward younger brother Bashar, then an eye doctor with no military credentials, into the presidency.

Following Basel al-Assad’s crackdown, Jaafar said he left his gang and opened a liquor store in Lattakia. He continued to exercise his biceps, which are now emblazoned with a tattoo of the zulfiqar, the sword of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, who Shiites follow as the rightful inheritor of Islam — the root of the the great divide with Sunnis.

“Last June, friends from the shabiha asked me to return to work with them,” Jaafar said. “They said we must defend President Assad and his family and keep the power for the Allawite sect.”

Soon, Jaafar’s pay of about $20 for a day’s thuggery had risen to a steady monthly salary of about six times the average state wage.

“We started by facing the protesters, but when the opposition became armed we attacked them in their villages,” Jaafar said. “In addition to our salaries we take whatever we can get during the attacks: TVs, video players, electronics.”

But the shabiha don’t just attack and steal. Eyewitness accounts speak of dead children, some with hideously deformed faces, where the machetes split their skulls. Such extreme violence triggered an international outcry earlier this month.

“Whole families were slaughtered,” Abu Ahmed, a resident of Houla who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack, told a GlobalPost reporter in the area. “Women and children were shot from close range or slaughtered with knives. The shabiha did all of that.”

Jaafar defends the government’s crackdown by repeating the regime’s long-held claims — which are now increasingly becoming true — that the armed opposition is receiving support from religiously conservative Sunni Muslim states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“We got money and arms from our government to fight those Wahhabi radicals who will force my wife and daughters to wear the veil and will close all wine shops,” Jaafar said.

In addition to fears of rising conservatism is a lethal strain of religious hatred and a sense of persecution. Jaafar argues that the Sunni have held power wrongly for more than 1,400 years, since the death of the Prophet Mohammed, and that the right balance in Syria was only restored after Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970, when he stacked his massively expanded army and security services with an almost exclusively Allawite power structure.

Leading analysts on Syria now see the escalating violence perpetrated by the shabiha as beyond the control of the president, blunting any hopes for implementation of the UN-Arab League ceasefire plan, let alone a negotiated solution to Syria’s crisis.

“The regime has been spawning militias, as deep down it is a militia pretending to be a state,” said a leading Syria analyst based in Damascus, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “The Frankenstein is now completely out of control.”

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, said President Assad, who took power in 2000, had presided over “a state that has become a kind of mafia extortion network” in which militias and the businessmen who pay them have grown beyond his control.

“Bashar is the president but he does not command. In Syria it is not about constitutional authority but about kill or be killed, and Bashar is not the top killer. He’s a prisoner of the presidential palace,” Salem said.

Yet the shabiha who killed women and children in Houla arrived by military escort. The defected former army officer said that during his service in the military it was known that Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s much feared hardline younger brother, had established networks of shabiha “to do the regime’s dirty work.”

“Each group of shabiha is linked to a security officer who takes direct orders from Maher,” he said, suggesting also that the gangs were becoming self-financed from looting and extortion.

The way Jaafar tells it, however, money is not the prime motivator for the violence that follows the call from mualem.

“I know the Sunnis will take revenge for what we have done. I am fighting to guarantee a good future for my sons and grandsons. So this is the final battle: Win, or die. There’s no third choice.”

The Associated Press

Date: Thursday May. 24, 2012 1:16 PM ET

Northern Jordan - As violence has intensified in Syria, the smuggling business has boomed. A recent trip to northern Jordan near the Syrian border showed how the dangerous practice of dissidents smuggling food and medicine to injured and famished people in Syria is thriving.

Overlooking Syria’s southern border from Jordan, Ahmed Al-Masri is making plans to cross it. He leads a group of Syrian smugglers who risk everything on a daily basis to bring supplies into the country. From an undisclosed safe house on the Jordanian side of the border, Ahmed explains why they take the risk.

“Everybody inside Syria needs everything from outside. They need food. They need medication. They need some communication machine like a satellite phone,” he said.

Clothing, food, medicine needed

This storage facility is filled with donated clothing. Some will be sent across the border to Deraa, just a few kilometers away.

In another safe house, rooms are full of medical supplies. This doctor, who chose not to show his face, fled from Syria two months ago. Now he works with smugglers to supply doctors inside the country with life-saving tools and medicines.

“So in this, three small packages, we put in one big package, and we smuggle it through the border,” he said.

The group supplies three field hospitals inside Deraa and a few others elsewhere in Syria. They send items ranging from gloves and  bandages to tools for surgery.

“Everything for three small surgeries and about 20 patients is found in this package, and it is not heavy, and it’s easy to carry,” said the doctor.

High stakes, dangerous conditions

In one of the safe houses, Ahmed’s boss, who asked to remain anonymous, is arranging to smuggle more supplies north, and people south. If they are caught in Syria, he said, they will be arrested and maybe killed immediately.

In the few kilometers from the Jordanian border, they face snipers and land mines placed by Syrian forces.

“We have so many friends killed in his job, and so many arrested - maybe 35 or 36 now,” said Ahmed.

Ahmed was in Deraa when recent uprisings took place. His activism got him arrested, and his family has been threatened, but he continues the work.

“If I were scared, and my friends were scared, nobody would do this thing. We must do it,” he said.

Syrian regime thugs, more commonly know as ‘shabiha’ mirror the structure and goals of the Assad regime which relies on raw force to accumulate personal wealth and ensure its own survival at all costs. In this article, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, dissects the functioning, motivations, funding and ideology of the shabiha, from their appearance in the 1970s until their reemmergence during the revolution. Saleh shows their central role in maintaining a regime in power that has long lost touch with people’s interests, morality and reality.

Read rest of article here

30/03/12 Rania Abouzeid

ANTAKYA, Turkey — “Fouad,” a rail-thin Syrian in tight jeans who looks at least a decade older than his 25 years, leans forward in a black faux leather armchair in an unheated, sparsely furnished room in this southern Turkish city.

“I need ammunition,” he tells Abu Mohammad, a stocky Turkish weapons dealer sitting impossibly upright on the stiff couch. “I’ll pay five and a half.” He quotes the price in Turkish liras — about $3 per bullet.

Fouad shakes his head, takes another draw from his cigarette, and slowly capitulates on the price, but not before complaining that a bullet cost three lira about a month ago. “Just get them,” he finally says. “And what about weapons? I heard there’s a stockpile of 4,000 bullets and lots of guns, but it’s near an Alawite village [in southern Turkey].”

Abu Mohammad smirks. He carefully places his white, half-moon Turkish coffee cup on the small square table in front of him. “They’re seven each,” he says. “If you can get them for five and a half, I’ll buy them from you.”

Abu Mohammad confirms the information, but says that it will be difficult to clandestinely buy any of the Turkish military supplies, and harder still to discretely ferry them out of the village, inhabited by Turkish co-religionists and assumed sympathizers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“You know, I don’t want anything from you,” Abu Mohammad says. “I’m Sunni too, I just want to help.” It’s Fouad’s turn to smirk.

The Turkish dealer pulls his phone out of his dark leather jacket and calls an associate called Qadir, switching from Arabic to Turkish. After a few minutes, his phone is back in his pocket. “I’ll get you the goods,” he tells Fouad. “But you know, this is a lot of work.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be paid for your trouble,” Fouad says, turning to a gray-haired Syrian also in the room. “These Turks,” he says dismissively, “they talk a lot don’t they? From [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan down, they talk, talk, talk, but so far, it’s only talk. God willing, this one is different.”

Abu Mohammad brushes off the slight. It’s a seller’s market, and professional smugglers like Fouad, a civilian who supplies arms to some of the ragtag bands of Syrian rebels in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) operating just across the border in the governorate of Idlib, have few options. “It’s like the black market has dried up,” Fouad says later, after the brief meeting. “Can you believe it? In the Middle East!”

It’s a view widely shared by defectors, arms dealers, and refugees alike here along the Turkish-Syrian border. For months, Assad’s opponents have been buying black-market weapons from the countries bordering their volatile state — from Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan — as well as from within Syria, primarily from members of the corrupt regime or military sympathizers who remain embedded with loyalists. But it’s getting harder. Money doesn’t seem to be the main problem. Securing supplies is.

The international community has grappled for months with the issue of whether or not to arm the Free Syrian Army, a loose band of defectors and civilian thuwar (revolutionaries). Ahead of an April 1 meeting of the  ”Friends of Syria,” a group of countries that support the anti-Assad forces, Turkey and the United States agreed to establish a framework for shipping non-lethal aid to the rebels. But the provision of this aid — much like the conversation with the Turkish arms dealer — has been more talk than action.

Nor have Assad’s staunchest enemies — the Arab Gulf kingdoms — opened their armories to the rebels. In late February, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal raised the FSA’s hopes when he said that arming Assad’s opponents was “an excellent idea.” Yet, more than a month later, Saudi supplies have not made their way to the front, according to the FSA leadership as well as numerous rebel commanders inside Syria.

The international discord is a reflection of the deep fragmentation of the Syrian opposition. The Syrian National Council (SNC), the anti-Assad forces’ de facto political representative, had long offered only timid, belated support for the armed rebels, but it has recently changed its tune and openly called for weapons. Most FSA units operate with little oversight and direction from the nominal military rebel leader, Col. Riad al-Asaad, and his officers, who are all sequestered in a refugee camp in southern Turkey that is off limits to journalists.

Still, the ire and resentment of many activists and fighters on the ground is directed primarily toward the so-called leaders of the opposition, all of whom are in exile. The depth of anger was perhaps best expressed in a short video in which a small group of men in civilian garb stand in two neat rows in front of an olive tree, scarves concealing their identities. The clip is not unlike countless others purporting to show members of the FSA, except that none of the nine men featured in it holds any weapons. Some carry lemons instead of grenades; others hold sticks as if they were rifles. One wields a hammer.

“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate … We, the free men of Idlib, announce the formation of the ‘We Hope to Be Armed’ brigade,” the speaker says. “We do not have any weapons. We ask the National Council and the commander of the Free Army to fulfill their lying promises and to stop serenading the revolutionaries on the ground without sending weapons, because your serenades are killing us.”

Col. Ahmad Hijazi, the FSA’s chief of staff, says he can understand the resentment. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “The people are angry and they are taking out their frustrations on us. But what can we do? They are asking us for more than what we can do. Governments must support the Free Army.”

In the absence of such aid, Syria’s military defectors just wait. The camp housing the FSA officers looks just like the others Turkey has established for the thousands of civilians who have fled across its border — rows of white tents are neatly pitched along lanes of uneven loose white gravel. But unlike most of the others, the officers’ camp is isolated from nearby towns and villages. It’s in the middle of a lush agricultural plain in Apaydin, about 12 miles from Antakya, where verdant fields abut plowed, upturned earth, and snow-capped hills rim the horizon.

Turkish soldiers man the entrance of the camp, as they do in other refugee camps, checking the identity cards of anyone hoping to get in. Power outages are common here, cutting off Internet communications for hours on end. The FSA may claim to be operating a “command and control center” for the anti-Assad military effort from the camp, but it’s unclear whether they can control much of anything from a base with regular power cuts. Its critics, like the “We Hope to Be Armed Brigade,” say it has offered little to the men fighting and dying inside Syria in its name. How do the FSA’s commanders account for their seeming lack of impact on the ground?

Hijazi shifts uncomfortably in his plastic chair inside one of the many identical tents in the officers’ camp. He doesn’t like the question. Nor does his fellow officer, Major Maher Nuami, who is seated on a single bed (the only one) in the tent. “It’s sensitive,” Hijazi finally says. They won’t say if the FSA has sent emissaries to Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Libya — which recently pledged $100 million to the Syrian opposition — but insist that they have received no help on the ground from these states.

There are many reasons for Arab and Western reticence. Syria sits on just about every fault line running through the Middle East — it’s a multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic cauldron bordering similar tinderbox Arab states, as well as Israel.

The officers understand the geopolitical sensitivities and concerns about what may follow Assad, and have a few chilling predictions of their own. If the international community doesn’t arm them and provide logistical support, “everything” the world fears from the fall of Assad will come to pass, Nuami argues. “We know what they’re afraid of,” he says, “they are worried about the Israeli border and a massacre of Alawites.”

“The people will get weapons, one way or another, so help us,” Nuami continues. “If you give us weapons, we can control them. We want the fall of the regime, not the fall of the state. If the international community helps us, we’ll help them. If it doesn’t, our people offer no guarantees.”

Hijazi says the FSA is receiving donations — mainly from private citizens — and distributing them to officers in the field, but that it’s nowhere near enough. “It’s like you’re thirsty and we’re giving you a capful of water,” he says. “What’s it going to do?”

The money is going to men like Captain Alaaeddine, commander of the Salaheddine al-Ayoubi Brigade, operating in the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour, which borders Turkey. The captain, a soft-spoken 30-year-old, defected almost a year ago, making his way home from the Syrian capital of Damascus, where he was based, to defend his friends and family.The FSA leadership recently gave him and three other officers from different units $22,000 to divide among themselves.

The money went part of the way toward a $90,000 order of weapons and ammunition a Turkish intermediary, “Mehmet,” was trying to secure for the captain. Alaa would not reveal the source of the rest of the funds. “We have our ways,” was all he would say. He also said that he didn’t know the origins of the weapons he was purchasing. It was by no means a done deal, even after weeks of negotiations involving several suppliers, but it was tantalizingly close.

On a cool evening in mid-March, Alaa, his deputy Sergeant Ahmad Mokbat, and Mehmet, a professional smuggler, gathered at a safe house in Antakya over a dinner of beans and rice to discuss last-minute details, before Mehmet set off on his mission. The two Syrian defectors had crossed the border days earlier to finalize the deal, the first of this magnitude that they had attempted. “We are like a well without water,” Mokbat said sullenly as the men sat around a tablecloth spread out on the floor. “It’s tiring. It’s hard to see our men without ammunition. It’s very hard.”

“There are always slingshots,” Mehmet joked, a flat attempt to lighten the tension. His phone rang shortly after dinner. It was time for him to go. Mokbat pulled a fat wad of cash — the last of a down payment — out of the inner pocket of his black leather jacket, and a handgun out of the back of his pants. Mehmet took the money, but declined the gun.

“Imwafak Inshallah,” Alaa said as Mehmet closed the door behind him. May you be successful, God willing.

The need for supplies was pressing. That morning, at 5 a.m., troops loyal to the Syrian regime had engaged Alaa’s men in the northern Syrian hamlet of Jannoudiye, his hometown, which is just north of Jisr al-Shughour and roughly six miles from the Turkish border. The captain said that he’d called the commanders of other larger rebel units nearby, in Idlib and Jabal al-Zawiya to “start something” and divert the security forces’ attention in a desperate bid to relieve pressure on his small band of poorly supplied men.

It hadn’t even slowed the loyalists down. Alaa spent most of the evening on the phone, receiving updates from his men. The news wasn’t good: By 9 p.m., the rebels had retreated and were perilously close to running out of ammunition. Civilians were being used by soldiers loyal to Assad as human shields, marched in front of tanks, he said (a finding corroborated by Human Rights Watch). Entire families, including some of the captain’s relatives, had fled into the hills, where they were spending a chilly night. “Jannoudiye has fallen,” Alaa said, fingering his red prayer beads. 

“Don’t lose hope brother,” Mokbat said, but he too was becoming increasingly gloomy. Two calls to Mehmet went unanswered. “I don’t understand. Where are the mujahideen [holy warriors]? This surprises me a lot. Why are our Arab brothers, Christian and Muslim, still silent?” Mokbat asks.

According to the FSA officers, the claims of foreign fighters in Syria — eagerly touted by the Assad regime — are wildly overblown. A lone Libyan had reportedly volunteered to fight with their FSA unit recently, but left after a few days. “He said, ‘You guys are crazy, this is suicide, you don’t have weapons’,” Mokbat said. “He was right. I wish the revolution would go back, it was better before. We used to shoot into the air, we didn’t worry about ammunition. Now we think twice about using each bullet.”

Five hours later and Mehmet had yet to return. In fact, he would not come back until a week later — and empty handed. The problem was trying to secure a road to ferry the supplies without being intercepted by Turkish security. Although Turkey houses the FSA, it “does not allow any weapon to be transferred to Syria in [an] illegal way,” a Turkish government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. Anyone caught trying will be arrested and the weapons confiscated, he added.

Still, Mehmet was hopeful. “It’s dangerous,” he told the defectors, “but God willing, the goods will move. Be patient.”

“I’m sitting on fire over here!” the captain says. “We must be with our men!”

Some of his men, like Mazin, a 20-something defector with a wispy beard, weren’t in Jannoudiye anymore. Mazin said he walked through the hills for three days, helping guide families to the safety of the Turkish border. He was now in the officers’ camp, where his mother tended to him. “I thought he was injured when I saw him,” his mother says, fussing over her youngest son who has stretched his bare swollen feet out in front of him. “He was limping and walking oddly.” Still, Mazin is determined to go back into Syria, even without fresh ammunition. “We’ll plant bombs,” he says. “We can’t just sit here.”

That’s exactly what many Syrian refugees, defectors and civilian revolutionaries accuse the high-level defectors in the camp of doing — just sitting there. In the absence of an organized military effort, the burden of securing weapons and funding has fallen to lower-level officers like Alaa, as well as ordinary Syrians like Abdel-Salim, a taxi driver turned thuwar who commands the “Free Syrians,” a ragtag bunch of farmers, taxi drivers and other civilians from a string of villages abutting the Turkish border. Abdel-Salim, a 40-year-old with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and high cheekbones, had crossed the border into southern Turkey to try and secure supplies for his group: 3,000 bullets, to be precise.

The “Free Syrians” are under the FSA banner, he explains, and are in regular communication with its leadership via a few defectors in his group. “We ask the defectors to go to the officers’ camp to ask for help but we haven’t got anything from the Free Army yet,” Abdel-Salim says. “But to be fair, I don’t think the Free Army has anything itself.” 

Many of his men, most of whom have secured their families in the Turkish refugee camps, don’t have weapons. Assad’s Syria was not a militarized society — unlike Iraq, for example — where gun ownership was common. “It’s OK,” Abdel-Salim says. “Look at Gaza: They used stones against tanks, and if we have to, we will do the same.”

Abdel-Salim recalls that he participated in peaceful protests for months, and only picked up a weapon four months ago, when he “lost hope” in protests. He was shot about a month before that, in his stomach and his right leg, and spent 10 days recuperating in a Turkish hospital. He walks with a limp, but that didn’t deter him from crossing back into Syria to fight Assad’s army. “I didn’t want to pick up a weapon,” he says, “but I think Israel is more honorable than the Syrian regime.”

The longer Abdel-Salim speaks, the angrier he gets. “Where is the money the Syrian opposition got from the Libyans?” he seethes. “We haven’t seen any of the [Syrian] National Council members down here. … What is Riad al-Assad doing in Turkey anyway? Army commander? He should cross the border, lift people’s morale. What is he scared of — dying?”

After three days in Turkey, Abdel-Salim is tired of waiting. He doesn’t have his bullets, but he also doesn’t leave empty-handed. Instead, he takes 20 Kalashnikovs with him, courtesy of Fouad, the rail-thin Syrian trying to negotiate an ammunitions sale with the Turkish dealer Abu Mohammad. 

Abdel-Salim’s new guns, however, haven’t come from Turkey — they were secured inside Syria. “It took 10 days to get 20 Russians,” Fouad says, referring to Kalashnikovs. The small amount didn’t even come from the same source, and all the guns had empty magazines. “I had to go to four or five villages to get these 20 Russians,” Fouad says. In several dangerous dashes into Syria over the past few months, he says he’s secured “less than 50 weapons.” 

It’s hardly a way to win what has become a vastly asymmetrical war, but Fouad and others like him say they have few options. After weeks of waiting, Captain Alaa and his deputy were preparing to cross back into Syria, with or without their $90,000 order. 

Fouad was also readying to reenter his homeland. Despite the danger of crossing what human rights organizations report is a freshly mined border, as well as the high probability of encountering loyalist troops, Fouad says there were also dangers lurking on the Turkish side. “We are having difficulty trusting people here, finding men we can trust,” he says. “Most of the weapons dealers in these parts are Alawites.”

And what about the Sunni Turkish dealer who promised to help? “He was full of talk,” Fouad says. “Talk, talk, talk. That won’t do us any good. We need guns.”

Gulf Kingdom Is Pressing Jordan for a Route to Border, Officials Say; Iraq Warns of ‘Regional and Global Proxy Wars’

By MARIA ABI-HABIB

Saudi Arabia has pressed Jordan to open its border with Syria to allow weapons to reach rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, officials from both countries say, a move that could buoy Syria’s opposition and harden the conflict in the country and across the region.

In a March 12 meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah asked his Jordanian counterpart to permit weapons shipments into Syria in exchange for economic assistance to Jordan, these officials say. Jordan hasn’t yet agreed, they said.

The U.S. has opposed furnishing arms to the rebels, fearing that weapons could end up in the hands of al Qaeda or other extremist groups. But late Thursday, a top U.S. defense official suggested such a policy could potentially shift. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Syrian opposition appeared to be taking steps to unite as a group, a development he said could help clear the way for international aid including arms.

Such international support, he said, may hinge on assurances from a “coherent, credible” opposition that it would form an inclusive government and not fan sectarian flames. But some fear arming the opposition could escalate prospects for a broader regional conflict. Syria’s fighting has already added to the rancor between Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies, who support the country’s largely Sunni opposition, and Shiite Iran, whose government backs Mr. Assad.

Saudi Arabia has argued strongly for weapons supplies to Syrian rebels despite U.S. concerns. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was traveling Thursday to Saudi Arabia to meet with the king and other senior Saudi officials, was expected to raise any Saudi plans to arm the Syrian rebels, U.S. officials said. The officials said the Obama administration remains opposed to introducing more arms into the conflict.

Gen. Dempsey’s comments suggested the rebels could change that. “They’ve been listening to what we’ve been saying—not only us but the international community—that there has to be some coherence to their effort,” he told reporters with him aboard a military aircraft after a four-day trip to Latin America. But he said he wasn’t currently recommending that the rebels have come far enough to support giving them weapons.

The Saudi request to Jordan adds to sentiment that Arab leaders have hit the wall in their efforts to resolve Syria’s impasse diplomatically. Top officials from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations were notably absent from Thursday’s Arab League summit in Baghdad, where leaders called on Damascus to adopt a United Nations plan to stop fighting and begin political dialogue. The plan doesn’t call for Mr. Assad to step aside, as the Arab nations had sought. Mr. Assad said Thursday he would support the U.N. plan, but only once foreign countries stopped aiding rebels.

Many Middle East officials view Saudi Arabia’s arming of Afghan jihadis in the 1980s, through official and unofficial channels, as a prime contributor to the Afghan civil war and the rise of violent Islamic jihad. That has led to worries in many countries over the prospect of Saudi Arabia arming Syrian rebels now.

In Baghdad, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned that arming the Syrian opposition could invite a repeat of the insurgency and sectarian strife that consumed Iraq for years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. “It will lead to regional and global proxy wars in the Syrian arena,” he said.

Jordanian officials said they are unlikely to resist Saudi pressure for long. “We are a non-interventionist country. But if it becomes force majeure, you have to join—this is the story of Jordan,” said a top Jordanian official.

An arrangement between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, even if informal, would mark the first attempt to send in large quantities of weapons to Syria’s rebels. Limited, individual smuggling efforts have so far supplied Assad opponents with light arms, say rebels and locals near the Syrian borders with Lebanon and Iraq.

Rebel fighters fleeing escalating regime attacks on anti-Assad strongholds, including Idlib and the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, have said they are running out of ammunition, arms and supplies of medicine and other aid. They have said that the Syrian government has blocked traditional smuggling routes.

The officials didn’t say what sort of arms Saudi Arabia would propose sending.

The United States has long been Saudi Arabia’s leading weapons supplier, and the kingdom has high-end U.S. weaponry such as F-15 fighter jets, Patriot air-defense systems and Abrams main battle tanks. Such weapons are unlikely to end up in the hands of Syrian rebels; even smaller U.S.-made weapons, such as anti-tank missiles, are typically covered by strict terms that prevent re-export. Saudi Arabia’s arsenal also includes rocket and missile systems, grenades and field artillery.

Syria’s government—led by Alawites, whose faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam—has been at odds with the Sunni kingdom for a decade. Saudi leaders believe Mr. Assad is repressing his majority Sunni population.

During last month’s Friends of Syria meeting in Tunisia, which brought together opposition supporters including Saudi Arabia and the U.S., Saudi’s Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal said arming the rebels was “an excellent idea.”

Jordanian officials point to Iraq as a precedent, saying they would expect to support the rebels at the last minute, when sentiment to arm them peaks.

Jordan at first denounced the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq but later aided the war effort, despite the lucrative oil deals it held with Iraq. “We have to have both feet on the ground. Do you think we could have turned the tide against the U.S. [Iraq] invasion? Why would Syria be different?” another Jordanian official said.

Jordan bought Iraqi oil at well below market values for over a decade before 2003, receiving much of it free in exchange for keeping diplomatic relations strong. Now, Jordan is incurring big budget losses as it buys increasingly expensive oil that it subsidizes at home. These expenditures are contributing to a budget deficit that by international estimates will run 7.5 percent to 10 percent of gross domestic product this year.

Jordan remains nervous about arming the rebels, worried that a larger conflict in Syria could engulf the region. Adding to these concerns are beliefs by several governments that extremist groups such as al Qaeda are now actively fighting against Mr. Assad’s government, and that they may have been behind bombings in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s two largest cities. In 2005, Amman was hit by three bombings in one day, seen as retaliation for its support to the U.S. in the Iraq war.

“You have to be very careful who you arm and don’t arm. We don’t quite know who this opposition is,” said a third Jordanian official.

The Syrian crisis is already affecting Jordan’s economy. Before the conflict, about 70% of Jordan’s imports and about 25% of its exports were routed through Syria, according to the country’s Transport Ministry, which didn’t provide dollar figures. Now those imports and exports have fallen to virtually zero, the ministry says.

To help alleviate economic woes, the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, have pumped billions of dollars into Jordan’s coffers. Saudi Arabia alone gave nearly $1.5 billion in grants to help Jordan manage its deficit last year, while the U.S. government says it earmarked $660 million in assistance to Jordan in 2012.

Jordan, which abuts Saudi Arabia and shares a border of nearly 250 miles with Syria, would be the most direct conduit for Saudi arms to the rebels.

Lebanon and Iraq also border Syria, but influential blocs of these countries’ governments are sympathetic to Mr. Assad. Turkey supports Syria’s opposition, but any Saudi arms delivered through Turkey would have to cross land, seas or airspace of countries that support Mr. Assad’s government.

Jordan may argue it needs additional aid to help it support the influx of Syrians since the bloodshed began a year ago. More than 90,000 Syrians have crossed into Jordan since then, the government says, more than to any other country. More than 6,000 Syrians have registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to receive aid, while the rest live in cramped apartments, with several families sharing a few rooms.

Earlier this month, according to refugees and a Jordanian border police officer, a pregnant Syrian woman was fleeing across the rolling green hills of the border with her husband and eight-year-old son when Syrian snipers fired on the family.

The officer said he opened fire on the snipers to provide cover for the family. “This was for humanity. It came from the heart, not orders from above,” the officer said.

The officer said he took the family to the hospital. Some refugees staying in homes near the border say she died during labor.

Several of these refugees said the Jordanian border police have helped them return to Syria with medical supplies, informing them when Syrian snipers are stationed in their towers or when troops are on patrol.

The government of Jordan—which, like Syria’s opposition, is largely Sunni—hasn’t cracked down on such actions.

“You’ll see it’s quiet now,” the police officer said, gesturing to the open field dotted with dandelions and Syrian guard towers. “But they’ll start running over the border once its dark.”

—Adam Entous, Summer Said, Suha Ma’ayeh, Nour Malas, Nathan Hodge and Jay Solomon contributed to this article.

03-29-12

Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr on Thursday accused 21 people of smuggling arms to Syria, the National News Agency reported.

The UN says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the crackdown on Syrian protesters who have been demonstrating against the Baath regime since March 2011. Thousands have fled into Lebanon in recent months.

Damascus blames the unrest on “armed terrorist groups” and has unleashed military operations against border towns and protest hubs.

-NOW Lebanon

72 hours under fire: Part 1 #Syria

A CNN crew smuggled into the Syrian city of Homs finds indiscriminate killing and danger everywhere.

CNN senior photojournalist Neil Hallsworth films an oil fire in Homs, Syria.

Editor’s note: Watch the full documentary “72 Hours Under Fire” on CNN International on Saturday at 4 a.m., 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Sunday at 6 a.m., and on CNN U.S. on Sunday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. and Monday at 2 a.m. (All times Eastern)

(CNN) — Intense black smoke billowing from the flames of an oil fire blocks out the sun. A teenage mom with a one-day-old baby seeks shelter in a dimly-lit basement from a barrage of missiles and shells.

Incoming fire smashes through the wall of a house being used as an unofficial media center in Homs, the city that is the focus of anti-regime protests and Syrian efforts to silence them.

The horror of enduring the all-out assault by the Syrian military is brought vividly to life in a CNN documentary airing this weekend.

With the help of local activists, a CNN crew was smuggled into Homs, moving from house to house as the Syrian army fired missiles and tank shells.

For more than a year President Bashar al-Assad’s military had used brutal force to put down the uprising.

Across Syria, protesters demanded change — chanting “down with the regime” but it was Homs — and especially the neighborhood of Baba Amr — that became the epicenter.

Even CNN correspondent Arwa Damon, with her vast experience of reporting from war zones, had reservations about the high-risk job. She said: “I actually wrote a letter home the first time, to my family. And I went to see some very close friends as well, just in case.”

She was joined by Neil Hallsworth, a veteran cameraman who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, and Tim Crockett, a former special forces officer to handle security and who would also become an unofficial stills photographer.

Just getting into Homs was an ordeal that took five days for what would normally be a two-hour drive.

Damon said: “It involves a fairly elaborate process of being moved through farmlands, back roads, trying to avoid the government, ending up in various safe houses. And at every single leg, every single stop, you have a different person who’s responsible to move you on to the next one, someone who knows the details of the lay of the land around you to ensure that they can actually get you through from one point to another.”

For the thousands trapped in Baba Amr, the route was their only lifeline and CNN agreed to keep it secret.

In Homs, there was no frontline meaning there was also nowhere that could be called safe.

Damon said: “It [seems] mostly deserted, most of the buildings have sustained some sort of damage. And then you’ll see a kid peek their head out from a doorway, or you’ll see a man walking in the street carrying an A.K.”

Some of the most constant fire has been on Baba Amr where people are killed or wounded daily, and where two doctors — and one of those was a dentist — are fighting against the odds to help the casualties.

In a makeshift clinic there was a man with head injuries from shrapnel, another whose leg injury was most likely going to lead to an amputation.

The medics say the Syrian military regards the clinic as a target so they have set up in numerous temporary houses around Baba Amr, each with patients and with the doctors moving between them.

But snipers posted on rooftops above the rubble-littered streets made even the shortest of trips treacherous.

Mosques put out messages before the bombardment started, telling people to not live on the upper floors, to try to stay away from windows, and to try to find protective rooms, inside their homes.

In basements used as bunkers, civilians pray the next bomb will miss their home and their loved ones. In one of these bunkers, the CNN crew met a teenager who had given birth the day before.

Her daughter Fatimah was the face of innocence amid the hell of Homs. Her father does not know she’s been born. He left the shelter to get supplies a month ago and has not made it back. And her gran trembled as she explained how two other relatives died.

Virtually everyone in the shelter — about 300 people — had similar horrific stories of violent death.

And it was easy to learn how death could come arbitrarily and suddenly in Homs and how survival was as much luck as anything else.

Working in a home that had become an unofficial media center for the few Western journalists that have made it into Homs, a rocket slammed into the building just two floors up.

Also in Baba Amr was Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin who would be killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik just a few days later.

Throughout Baba Amr, word was spreading that a ground offensive by the Syrian military was imminent.

And for CNN it was becoming too dangerous to let Damon, Hallsworth and Crockett stay.

Damon said: “It is fundamentally unfair that we live in a world where we can go film this, report on it, and leave, knowing that the people we’ve left behind’s suffering is going to continue. Feeling as if we should’ve done more, we could’ve done more.”

Hundreds of civilians are believed to have died in the siege of Baba Amr. At least three activists involved in getting video out of Baba Amr have been killed.

At the end of February, the Syrian military broke the resistance of Baba Amr. Opposition activists claim the military carried out summary executions.

Regime forces continue to bombard other areas that oppose Assad’s rule.

Last week, U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper said a series of bombings against the Syrian regime in recent months in Damascus and Aleppo bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida. Iraqi and U.S. officials believe some of the terror fighters may be coming to Syria from Iraq.

In a statement, al-Maliki identified weapons smuggling as a top problem.

11/02/12

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2106648,00.html?xid=tweetbut