07/12/12

Source: Agence France-Presse
Country: Lebanon, Syrian Arab Republic (the)

12/07/2012 17:45 GMT

TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Dec 7, 2012 (AFP) - Snipers in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli on Friday fired across a street-turned-frontline that divides two districts wracked by deadly sectarian clashes, an AFP correspondent said.

On Tuesday, intermittent clashes erupted in between the city’s Bab al-Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen districts, pitting Sunnis against Alawites belonging to the same religious community as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A total of 13 people — including a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old — were shot dead by snipers across Syria Street dividing the neighbourhoods.

The majority of Tripoli’s residents are Sunni Muslim and support the anti-Assad revolt in neighbouring Syria. A minority of Alawites support the regime, and fear potential sectarian violence should Assad fall.

Tensions in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city, remained high on Friday as snipers held their positions, occasionally opening fire.

The death toll reached 11 by Thursday evening, while two other civilians were killed overnight, a security official[…]

15/10/12

If hard evidence emerges of the Shiite militant

group’s involvement, it would increase tensions in

Lebanon where armed partisans on opposite sides

live in close proximity.

By Nicholas Blanford | Christian Science Monitor

A member of the Free Syrian Army inspects damaged houses in Bustan al Basha in Aleppo city in northern Syria October 12, 2012. REUTERS/Zain Karam (SYRIA - Tags: CIVIL UNREST POLITICS)

Beside the arrow-straight road between the northern Lebanon town of Qaa and the border with Syria stands a small, bland mosque decorated with the yellow flags of the militant Shiite group Hezbollah.

The mosque is the lone Hezbollah bastion amid a flat agricultural landscape populated mainly by Sunni Lebanese and used as a safe haven by Lebanese and Syrian members of the Free Syrian Army. But parked discreetly – and incongruously – in the shade of a tree beside the mosque is an ambulance waiting to transport wounded Hezbollah fighters returning from fighting against the FSA over the border, says Syrian fighter Hussein, a former irrigation engineer who today heads a small unit of the FSA’s Jusiyah Martyrs’ Brigade, named after the nearby Syrian border village.

Accusations of Hezbollah involvement in Syria have strengthened in recent weeks amid reports of fighters killed in combat being returned to Lebanon for quiet burial. Hezbollah, along with its patron Iran, are key allies of the Assad regime, together forming an “axis of resistance” to confront Israel and Western ambitions for the Middle East that spans the region.

RELATED – Hezbollah 101: Who is the militant group, and what does it want?

If hard confirmation arises that Hezbollah is playing a role in Syria it will increase tensions in Lebanon, which is already attempting to distance itself as much as possible from the reverberations of the bloody conflict roiling its larger neighbor. The Lebanese government – which is dominated by allies of Hezbollah – formally follows a policy of disassociation from the Syria crisis, although it has merely averted its eyes as Syrian rebel fighters turn parts of the territory along the border into a de facto safe haven from the fighting.

GROWING EVIDENCE

In response to intensifying speculation over Hezbollah’s alleged activities in Syria, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s leader, said last week that the Assad regime had not asked him for military assistance.

He acknowledged, however, that the were more than two dozen villages and farms located just inside Syria, north of the border with Lebanon, that are home to around 30,000 Lebanese, many of whom are Shiites and members of Hezbollah. Mr. Nasrallah said that they had been coming under threat from “armed groups” and had chosen to defend themselves.

“Some of them decided to flee the area, but most of them stayed in their towns and started to arm themselves,” he said. “The residents of these towns took the decision to stay and defend themselves against armed groups and did not engage in battle between the regime and the opposition,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

Nearly two weeks ago, Hezbollah held a prominent funeral for Ali Nassif, a senior commander who died “while performing his jihadi duties”, a standard phrase used by the group when announcing deaths of fighters in circumstances other than direct combat with Israel, such as training accidents. The Jusiyah Martyrs’ Brigade militants claim that Nassif was killed in the border village of Rableh and was deliberately targeted for assassination.

“We waited for him to emerge from a school which they use as a command post. When we saw a black Grand Cherokee with tinted windows leave the school, we guessed it was him and hit it with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade],” says Hussein.

Sunni and Shiite Islam: Do you know the difference? Take our quiz.

He and other members of the Jusiyah Martyrs’ Brigade interviewed over a 24-hour period while resting in Masharih al-Qaa claim that their most formidable foes across the border in Syria are not Syrian Army soldiers, but battle-hardened veteran Hezbollah fighters. They say the Hezbollah men are helping the Assad regime regain control of a cluster of villages and towns in the vicinity of the Syrian town of Qusayr, five miles north of the border.

“The regime’s soldiers are cowards against us. But we fear the Hezbollah men,” says Hussein.

He added that he had encountered some Hezbollah fighters on the road beside the border in Jusiyah and had approached them with bottles of water, pretending to be a supportive civilian.

“None of them were under 35 years old. They were very professional and tough fighters. You can tell they are superior fighters from the way they move in battle and how they fight,” he says.

SELF-DEFENSE

Accusations of Hezbollah involvement in Syria have been aired by opponents of the Assad regime since protests erupted in March last year. Many of the early accounts were less than convincing. Similarly, YouTube videos purporting to show Hezbollah fighters in Syria were inconclusive and often posted by people politically opposed to the party.

But in recent months there have been persistent reports of Hezbollah assisting the Assad regime with combat advice and passing on the group’s formidable guerrilla skills to the pro-regime Shabiha militia, with the goal of turning them into an effective paramilitary force.

Hezbollah views the conflict in Syria as a confrontation with strategic consequences for the region. The collapse of the Assad regime and its replacement with a Sunni-dominated regime moderate in its foreign policy and more closely aligned with Turkey and Saudi Arabia would tear out the geo-strategic heart of the “axis of resistance.”

“Hezbollah has no choice but to be there,” says a prominent member of a Shiite clan in the Bekaa Valley who is close to Hezbollah. “The opposition has fighters from Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia helping them, so why shouldn’t the Assad regime receive the help of Hezbollah?”

Furthermore, Hezbollah is not the only Lebanese entity accused of partisan involvement in Syria. Several hundred Lebanese Sunnis have volunteered for the Free Syrian Army, joining other Arab nationals drawn to the conflict, according to Lebanese supporters of the Syrian opposition. Others provide shelter for the FSA in north Lebanon, allowing militants to rest, regroup, and plan. There have been several media reports – the latest in yesterday’s edition of the British newspaper The Guardian – that Okab Saqr, a Lebanese parliamentarian allied to former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, is in Turkey organizing the transfer of Saudi-funded arms to the Syrian opposition. A Washington-based analyst who recently visited the Turkish border area with Syria said that Saqr’s name “is all over the place.”

Nowhere is the divergence between Hezbollah support for the Assad regime and Lebanese Sunni backing for the Syrian opposition more starkly illustrated than in the northern Bekaa Valley. The western flank of the valley is a Hezbollah stronghold and allows access for fighters to the Shiite-populated villages just over the border in Syria.

The eastern flank, including Masharih al-Qaa, contains a sizeable Sunni population – some of whom are FSA volunteers and almost all of whom are sympathetic to the Syrian opposition. That has created an unusual situation: Just north of the border, Hezbollah fighters and Syrian troops battle Lebanese and Syrian FSA militants, while just south of the frontier, the two foes eye each other warily, but peacefully, from their respective corners of the northern Bekaa.

Even the lone Hezbollah mosque, despite being surrounded by hostile FSA elements, has been left untouched. Similarly, Hezbollah has made no effort to engage the FSA in Masharih al-Qaa.

“If Hezbollah decided to come after us here, it would start a civil war,” says Ismael, a Lebanese resident of Masharih al-Qaa who serves with the Jusiyah Martyrs’ Brigade. “And nobody wants that.”

21/09/12

By Diana Moukalled

Her body was still intact… Her short blue dress was covered with some dust and the knot perfectly tied at the waist… Her socks were still white covering her skinny legs, while her tiny palms seemed a little clenched. The body of the eight-year-old girl seemed so perfect that one would think she was still alive… but decapitated.

I tried in vain to escape the terrifying image of the beheaded little Syrian girl and erase the scene from my head. I learned later that she was named “Fatima”, that she was from “Idlib” and that she was killed when the Syrian regime dropped booby-trapped barrels that decapitated her and killed many others.

I have been trying to curb my reactions and resentment from the “angry” scenes of killings and destructions taking place in the streets of Egypt, Libya and other parts of the world before getting shocked by the photo of the beheaded little girl that was spreading on Facebook.

I wonder why those fanatics in the streets were not filled with anger upon seeing the image of this little girl and who actually lost his head? Did the little girl lose her head or do we all carry useless heads?

There is no doubt that the director of the “Innocence of Muslims” despises Muslims and means to offend them, but what is new here? Do we really believe that in this era we can control all the meaningless provocations and stop them?

Aren’t we living in an open-space world? Can’t we, in few minutes, surf hundreds of websites and watch scenes and photos that offend Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and all other beliefs? Why did a trivial film shake our world while we didn’t move a muscle upon watching actual scenes of horror and films from real life showing bloodshed and murdered people broadcasted around the clock?

An “artist” accused of bank forgery in California was able to gather a bunch of people for $75 a day in his house to film these silly scenes before having recourse to voice-overs in order to put dialogues that were not actually said by actors and then collecting all of this in a production that does not even deserve to be called a film. He placed ads for the show but no one came. Indeed, no one came.

The catastrophe took place when Egyptian activists came across some scenes on YouTube and broadcasted them on a TV program. Politicians and Religious figures were offended and acted as if they had found a treasure, aiming at covering political, religious and moral failures by inciting naïve and ignorant people.

Some immediately started with the burning and killing and escalating tensions, while others are still trying to catch up by considering the situation open and ongoing; indeed, didn’t Hassan Nasrallah threaten of dangerous consequences?

The problem does not lie in the film itself, but in those who are trying to take advantage of the film to cover for a huge moral failure. Here, we should also be thankful to the film because it made the Muslim Sunnis and Shiites equal in their miserable way of handling this unsuccessful production so-called “film”.

Those people have accepted the killing of innocents and kept mum. They even supported the murderers; however, they protest against a film.
Oh little girl of Idlib, do not forgive our silence… May you rest in peace wherever you are, and may your beautiful head float away, far from us.

18/09/12

(AGI) - Rome, 18 Sep - Italy-Syria Observatory sources claim Syria’s Assad is preparing to purge Sunnis from the armed forces. With ties to Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, the Iraqi sources quoted by the Observatory say that in efforts to rein in revolts Syrian president has set up an elite Alawi force.
  Planning to remove top Sunni armed forces officials from their posts by close of year, Assad is also claimed to have already pressed ahead with the purge within the air force and missiles departments…

17/09/12

A Syrian man who fled his home in Aleppo 32 days ago due to government shelling, carries his sleeping son, who’s face is covered with mosquito bites, back to a classroom of a school where they take refuge, in Suran, on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

BEIRUT (AP) — Missiles fired by Syrian warplanes hit Lebanese territory Monday in one of the most serious cross-border violations since Syria’s crisis began 18 months ago, security officials in Beirut and Lebanese state media said.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said four missiles fired by two Syrian jets hit a rugged and remote area on the edge of the Lebanese border town of Arsal. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that the warplanes fired three missiles that fell on the outskirts of Arsal about 500 meters (yards) from the border between the two countries.

“I heard several explosions and saw four clouds of dust billowing from the area,” Arsal resident Nayeh Izzedine said by telephone referring to the border. “I don’t know if it was an air raid but there was a plane in the sky.”

He added that the town had been quiet two hours after the 10 a.m. attack.

The Syrian forces were believed to be chasing rebels in the area, which has been the site of clashes in the past between opposition fighters battling Syrian troops just on the other side of the frontier. Lebanese armed forces have in the past detained people in the region caught trying to smuggle weapons into Syria from Lebanon.

Arsal is a predominantly Sunni Muslim town, like the majority of Syria’s opposition that is trying to oust President Bashar Assad from power. Assad belongs to the minority Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam.

Syrian shells have hit Lebanese territory in the past but the air raid appears to be the most serious violation. Several Lebanese, including a journalist, have been killed and dozens wounded by fire coming from the Syrian side.

Also Monday, inside Syria, troops shelled rebel-held areas around the country including the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and the Damascus neighborhood of Hajar Aswad, activists said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees also reported clashes between troops and rebels.

In Geneva, an independent U.N. panel confirmed that an increasing number of “foreign elements,” including jihadis, are now operating in Syria, in its first report to say that outsiders have joined a war spiraling out of control.

The investigative panel appointed by the Human Rights Council says some of these forces are joining armed anti-government groups while others are operating on their own.

“Such elements tend to push anti-government fighters toward more radical positions,” the head of the panel, Brazilian diplomat and professor Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, told diplomats.

The Syrian uprising, which began with largely peaceful protests, has since morphed into a deadly armed insurgency. Hundreds of people are killed every week as the government increasingly relies on air power to try and crush the rebels.

Activists say more than 23,000 have been killed in the conflict.

The government denies that there is any popular will behind the revolt, saying it is driven by foreigners and terrorists. The regime could use the U.N. panel’s report to bolster its claims.

Rebels deny that foreigners had any role starting the revolt, saying Syrians were seeking increased freedom from the regime. But as the conflict dragged on, some rebels acknowledged the presence of small numbers of foreigners among their ranks.

The U.N. panel also accused government forces and pro-regime militiamen known as “shabiha” of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, summary executions, torture, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence and abuse of children. It also accused anti-government armed groups of war crimes including murder, extrajudicial execution and torture.

In Iran, the foreign minister said he is “hopeful” about a meeting of foreign ministers from a four-nation dialogue group on Syria.

Ali Akbar Salehi was speaking to Iran’s state television ahead of a meeting with his counterparts from Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia later Monday in Cairo, Egypt’s capital.

He said the meeting, the first since the group was proposed by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi last month, was a “very positive” move. He did not elaborate.

Shiite Iran supports Assad. Mostly Sunni Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia support the 18-month uprising against his rule. The meeting in Cairo comes a day after the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said the elite unit has advisers in Lebanon and Syria, the clearest indication of Iran’s direct assistance to Assad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

In a report Monday, Human Rights Watch said it documented more than a dozen extrajudicial and summary executions by opposition forces.

It said three opposition leaders who were confronted with evidence of extrajudicial executions said those who killed deserved to be killed, and that only the “worst criminals were being executed.”

The New York-based group said torture and extrajudicial or summary executions of detainees in the context of an armed conflict are war crimes, and may constitute crimes against humanity if they are widespread and systematic.

by Herve Bar (AFP)

QALBLOZEH, Syria — The Druze of Idlib province have not yet taken up arms in the war to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but have declared their support for Sunni Muslims at the heart of the rebellion.

“We are and will forever remain brothers,” says Ayham, an elder of the Druze community in the northwestern province where the two communities live side by side.

Among mountains covered with olive groves and criss-crossed by rocky paths that wind among magnificent Byzantine ruins, 14 villages inhabited by the Druze religious minority live in harmony with their Sunni neighbours.

Locals give Jabal al-Aala, near the Turkish border, the name “little Druze mountain,” a reference to an eponymous and historic region in southern Syria that is also Druze-dominated.

“For years everyone here, Druze and Sunni, has wanted the end of Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” says Abu Ahmad, an elder of the Druze village of Qalblozeh, home to a fourth-century Byzantine church.

“When the protests began 18 months ago we wanted to take part and send delegations next door to Kafar Takharim, where the revolution was flourishing,” recalls the thick-moustached man in his fifties.

“The local rebels told us not to move in order to keep our villages as a safe haven for populations fleeing army intervention,” he continues.

“No one here supports Bashar. He may have a few on his side, but they do not make this known,” says Ayham. Some Druze defectors from the Syrian army now live in the village having gained permission to stay and not return to their barracks, he adds.

Jabal al-Aala is populated by farmers, who tend to their olive groves and tobacco plants.

It is a semi-autonomous place, isolated from regime-controlled urban centres and suffering the consequence of having no electricity.

Ayham proudly honours his guests with a generous meal cooked over a wood fire, asserting that “everything is harvested (locally) here.”

A portrait of Lebanon’s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, adorned with multicoloured plastic flowers, watches over proceedings.

Public services have ceased to function in Qalblozeh. Elders arbitrate local disputes and lead the community.

But this fiercely independent spirit does not undermine good relations and solidarity with Sunni neighbours.

Druze villages have welcomed with open arms numerous refugees fleeing the army’s bombardment of rebel-controlled areas in Idlib, who are housed in homes, schools and other public buildings.

The Sunni-Druze solidarity is confirmed on visits to surrounding Sunni villages.

“Our relations are very good, as before the revolution,” says a resident of Qorqania, a hamlet very close to regular scenes of helicopter bombardments.

The Druze villages of Jabal al-Aala are not spared the threat of bombardment either. The Syrian army keeps two garrisons stationed 20 kilometres (13 miles) away, at Harem and Salqin.

Rebel Free Syrian Army convoys also rumble through the region, sometimes with boisterous cheering after returning from an operation.

Several rooms at a clinic in one village are reserved for injured FSA fighters, on the orders of local commander Abu Saeed.

But so far, no Druze number among the rebel ranks.

“Firstly, we have no weapons,” says Ayham. “Second, we are loath to spill the blood of our countrymen.”

He clarifies: “All the Syrian Druze support the revolution and have solidarity with refugees… (but) we fear the spectre of civil war.”

“The regime wishes to divide the Syrian people, and we will not fall into that trap,” says Abu Ahmad. “If the revolution were against foreign aggression, we would be the first to battle.”

“The army has not attempted to penetrate here. Our Sunni neighbours have promised to protect us. And if the army comes, we will fight,” affirms Ayham. “You will see our reputation as a warrior people is deserved.”

Syrian children at a playground last week at a refugee camp in Zaatari, Jordan. Many speak of exacting revenge on the Alawites when they get back home. More Photos »

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: September 3, 2012

ZAATARI, Jordan — Like all the small children in the desert refugee camp here, Ibtisam, 11, is eager to go home to the toys, bicycles, books, cartoons and classmates she left behind in Syria.

But not if that means living with Alawites, members of the same minority offshoot of Shiite Islam as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. “I hate the Alawites and the Shiites,” Ibtisam said as a crowd of children and adults nodded in agreement. “We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they killed us.”

If the fighters seeking to oust Mr. Assad sometimes portray their battle as a struggle for democracy, the Sunni Muslim children of the Zaatari camp tell a much uglier story of sectarian revenge. Asked for their own views of the grown-up battle that drove them from their homes, child after child brought up their hatred of the Alawites and a thirst for revenge. Children as young as 10 or 11 vowed never to play with Syrian Alawite children or even pledged to kill them.

Parroting older relatives — some of whom openly egged them on — the youngsters offered a disturbing premonition of the road ahead for Syria.

Their unvarnished hatred helps explain why so many Alawites, who make up more than 10 percent of the Syrian population, have stood by Mr. Assad even as the world has written him off. They see him as their best protection against sectarian annihilation.

The children’s refusal to share a playground or a classroom with Alawites dramatizes the challenge of ever putting together a political solution to the conflict. And the easy talk of blood and killing from such young children illustrates the psychic toll that the revolt and repression are taking on the next generation of Syrians.

“We hear it all the time from the kids, but also from the parents — that this is not political at all, and not a call for democracy, but is about people fed up and angry at rule by a minority, the Alawites,” said Saba al-Mobaslat, director for Jordan of the nonprofit group Save the Children, which provides toys to refugee children and tries to teach them understanding. “There is a concern that this is a whole generation that is being brought up to hate, that can’t see the other’s side.”

The roots of the animosity toward the Alawites from members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, who make up about 75 percent of the population, run deep into history. During the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, the two groups lived in separate communities, and the Sunni majority so thoroughly marginalized Alawites that they were not even allowed to testify in court until after World War I.

Then, in a pattern repeated across the region, said Joshua Landis, a Syria scholar at the University of Oklahoma, French colonialists collaborated with the Alawite minority to control the conquered Syrian population — as colonialists did with Christians in Lebanon, Jews in Palestine and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. The French brought Alawites into the colony’s military to help control the Sunnis. And after Syria’s independence from France, the military eventually took control of the country, putting Alawites in top government positions, much to the resentment of the Sunni majority.

“Now the Alawites believe — possibly correctly — that the Sunnis are going to try to kill them, and that is why the Alawite Army now is killing Sunnis in this beastly way,” Professor Landis said. “The Alawites feel justified in brutality because they fear what may be in store for them if they lay down their guns.”

“I don’t see any way out of that,” he said, “except to say that we are in for a long, difficult ride, and you pray that the Syrians are going to get over this somehow.”

At the Zaatari camp, a desolate tent city where nearly half of the 25,000 residents are younger than 12 and desperately bored, many of the children retain a disarming innocence. “Who will rule Syria next? Another president, but we will choose him,” Rahaf, 11, said confidently. “I don’t know who yet, because we have not seen the names.”

Just as the Syrian uprising began as a peaceful protest movement inspired by calls for democracy around the Arab world, some children at the Zaatari camp sought to describe the struggle in ideological terms.

“Why are they bombing us?” Ahmed, 12, from the Hauran region near the border with Jordan, asked rhetorically. “Because we are asking for our freedom.”

His father interrupted to explain what freedom might mean. “The biggest general in Hauran, a young Alawite soldier can step his foot on the general’s head,” his father said. “A young Alawite soldier can humiliate the biggest officer.”

His son picked up the theme. “The Alawites say, ‘Kneel in front of my shoe,’ ” Ahmed said before looping the subject back to the revolt. “We can’t be free with Assad because he kills us.”

The convictions of Heza, 13, were blunt. “We will never live together,” he said. “All the Alawites are security agents. After the revolution, we want to kill them.”

Even if it might mean killing a Syrian child his own age? “I will kill him,” Heza said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Ms. Mobaslat, of Save the Children, said aid workers with her group avoided bringing up sectarian feelings directly because they tried not to start conversations they could not resolve. She also said she believed that some children at the camp were Alawites, Shiites or other minorities who were pretending to be Sunni Muslims for their own safety, so raising the issue in a group could create trouble.

She said her group’s workers tried to talk about children accepting one another, making their own decisions and deciding for themselves whom to trust, to hate or to love. The goal is to encourage children to see others as individuals rather than part of a group, she said, “but that doesn’t happen overnight, just because of an uprising.”

“Sunnis are Muslims, and Shiites and Alawites are the ones who kill us,” Salem, 12, explained matter-of-factly.

Ranya, 13, insisted that “there will always be a problem between Sunnis and Alawites, because they are the ones who are doing this to us.”

She hates the Alawites, she said, but not exclusively. She also hates Hassan Nasrallah — the leader of the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which supports the Assad government — as well China and Russia, Mr. Assad’s other foreign backers.

A few yards away, a 41-year-old mother was swaying with her 2-year-old daughter, Malek, in her arms so the baby could sing for a visitor to the family’s dusty tent: “Heaven, heaven, heaven, Syria is heaven.”

There was destruction everywhere and bodies under the rubble, witness says

Beirut: The villagers in Tremseh spent the first hours of the attack in darkness, listening to a massive artillery bombardment, then emerged after dawn to find the streets littered with corpses, reporters were told.

“It began at 4.30am when the first shells landed. I was sleeping and I woke up to the sounds of explosions,” said one resident, Abu Fares.

Power to the village had been cut the day before; all lights were out, mobile phone batteries had drained and landlines were cut. There was no calling for help. Abu Fares and the other residents stayed inside, crouching behind the most solid walls of their homes, and prayed.

“The shelling was too strong to go outside, we did not know what was happening there,” he said. “After some hours everything fell silent. I went outside. There was destruction everywhere and bodies under the rubble. Most of the houses were damaged or destroyed.” One of the video clips that emerged of Thursday morning’s events showed a young man wailing over the body of an elderly man wrapped in a blanket and lying in the street. “Come on, father. For the sake of God, get up,” the man sobs.

An explosion is heard in the background. There was no way to verify the provenance of the video, but by Friday morning activists, residents and Free Syrian Army fighters were claiming death tolls more than 220, most of them young men.

Another video purporting to be of one of the burials showed a shallow trench at least 20 metres long, wide enough for three bodies and lined with breeze blocks.

There are conflicting reports of what happened in Tremseh, a farming village about 35km north-west of the city of Hama. It has a population of about 10,000 people, predominantly Sunnis.Villages mostly inhabited by Alawites, the ruling minority Shiite heterodox sect, surround the town. As well as those killed by shelling, reports have emerged of men killed by gunshots fired at close range.

There were unconfirmed rumours that others had been hacked to death with knives; the government and opposition activists accused each other of summary executions following the initial shell attack. Whilst state television said that “armed terrorists” carried out the killings, referring to the rebel FSA, activists blamed the killings on paid government paramilitaries from the surrounding villages.

“The army surrounded the village with tanks and armoured personnel carriers from four sides and brought in busloads of soldiers,” said Ebrahim Al Hamwi, a member of the Hama Revolutionary Council, speaking from inside Tremseh. “I saw the Shabiha enter the city, they were entering houses and killed some men. They shot others in the street.” Mousab Al Azzawi, director of the London based Syrian Network for Human Rights, said people tried to flee along farm tracks.

“To the west, groups of Shabiha from the nearby village of Khafr Hod were waiting for them there. They had been expecting them to try and escape,” he added. “They dumped them in the dried banks of the Orontes River that runs through the farmland.”

he opposition movement inside and outside the country must walk a fine line between independence and intervention.

Clashes between rebel fighters and government forces have wrought great destruction [Reuters]

Deciding whether or not to oppose Syria’s rulers has been the recent dominant preoccupation of many anti-imperialist and left-leaning movements. This hesitant attitude towards the Syrian struggle for freedom is nurtured by many anti-regime actions that were recently taken by many Western and Middle-Eastern countries, whose main interest lies in isolating Syria from Iran. However, I believe a better question to ask with respect to Syria is whether the leftist movement should support, or not support, the struggle of the Syrian people.

What I find lacking in many of the analyses relating to the Syrian crisis, which I find oftentimes biased and politically motivated, is how well the interests of the Syrian people who are living inside are taken into account. Dry and unnecessarily sophisticated in nature, these analyses ignore simple facts about why the Syrian people rebelled against the regime in the first place.

A brief historical context is probably the best way to bring about some insight with respect to the events that are unfolding in front of our eyes today. Before doing so, it is important to highlight that, unlike many other Arab countries, Syria is not a religiously homogenous Middle-Eastern country. I am mentioning this because it is through religion that the majority of Arabs identified themselves for centuries. As it stands today, Syria’s population is composed 74 per cent of Sunnis (including Kurds and others), 12 per cent Alawites (including Arab Shia), ten per cent Christians (including Armenians) and three per cent Druze.

Syria earned its independence from the French in 1946. As has always been the case with any occupying and imperial force, France worked diligently to ensure that Syrian minorities were placed in top government and military positions.  The Alawites’ share of the pie was the military. By the time France left Syria, Alawites became well entrenched in this crucial government institution.

After two decades of military coups and counter-coups, it was no surprise that Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite and minister of defence at the time, seized power in a bloodless coup in 1970. Within a few years he was relatively able to bring about economic and social stability - which made him a hero in the eyes of the majority of Syrians, regardless of their religion or ethnicity.

Bolstering power

A cunning politician and an experienced military officer, Assad knew that unless he solidified his rule, the time would soon come when other military officers would mount a coup against him. Over the span of few years, he made sure the top brass of the military and intelligence was filled with fellow Alawite officers who, thanks to France’s pro-minorities policy, were available in abundance.

These Alawite officers were also less likely to mount a coup against a fellow countryman. To deprive the mukhabarat[“intelligence service”] of the opportunity to be able to mount a serious coup against him, Assad created 13 different intelligence agencies - completely independent of each other.

When I was detained at the Sednaya prison in 2003, a 60-year-old man told me of a conversation between him and a general in the political security directorate. The old man was trying to have a rational dialogue with the general during the interrogation, by advising the him that the regime must treat people like human beings if it wanted to rightly earn the respect of the Syrian people.

“To deprive the mukhabarat of the opportunity to be able to mount a serious coup against him, Assad created 13 different intelligence agencies - completely independent of each other.”

The general responded: “We want to rule people by our shoes.” This is a famous Syrian expression akin to: “We want to rule people with an iron fist, humiliating them.” This example sheds some light on the type of mentality that dominates the inner circles of the Assad regime even today. Understanding this point in particular is crucial to understanding the violent response that the regime showed towards the protesters since day one.

Crushing dissent

Those who still buy Assad’s anti-imperial rhetoric should know that the old man whose story is mentioned above was imprisoned simply because he and other fellow citizens organised a small rally to denounce the illegal US invasion of Iraq.

In fact, it is not uncommon to find prisoners - including some of those I met in Sednaya prison - whose only “crime” was to help Palestinian groups. How could a regime that claims to be anti-Israel not even dare to protect itself against the frequent Israeli air incursions throughout the past decade?

I remember vividly the day I was released, when Israeli warplanes bombarded a site inside Syria under the pretext that it was being used to train Palestinian fighters. Syria’s response on that day was mute - as had always been the case.  Finally, it is no secret that Syria, like many other Arab countries, cooperated closely with the US in the so-called “war on terror”. I am only one of few living examples of this covert cooperation.

I hope this brief historical context and the few stories mentioned above contain enough information which can now help us analyse the current situation. Contrary to the conspiracy theory type of analysis, which accuses the US and its allies of starting the unrest in Syria, it is now an established fact that spontaneous and peaceful demonstrations erupted after the government refused to hold to account those who tortured those teenagers who sprayed anti-regime graffiti on school walls.

In fact, the initial demands of the protesters were very simple, and did not contain a single slogan which demanded the downfall of the regime.

As peaceful demonstrations widened, and spread from one city to the next, Assad’s security forces naively thought that by using lethal force to crush these growing protests, the barrier of fear that was starting to collapse would be immediately restored. Contrary to their wishes, however, the more lethal the force they used, the more Syrians became determined to overthrow the regime - by then most had lost hope that their simple demands were going to be met.

When it became clear that there was no genuine commitment that security forces and affiliated shabiha gangs were going to refrain from using force to crush the demonstrations, people felt the need to defend themselves against the excessive aggression and atrocities committed by state agents - some of whom had reportedly gone totally rogue.

Emergence of the opposition

It is amid this atmosphere that political and armed opposition groups started to galvanise, resulting in the emergence of opposition coalitions - the largest of which was the Syrian National Council (SNC), mainly comprised of Syrians living abroad. The composition of the SNC came back to haunt it later, as dissidents living inside Syria accused the SNC of being detached from the true demands of the people on the ground. 

For instance, the main point of contention between a newly spun group led by longtime dissident Haitham al-Maleh and the SNC was the issue of how best to respond to the regime’s growing brutality. Al-Maleh believed that the priority was to arm what is called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group that was mostly formed, reportedly, from army defectors. It seems that al-Maleh was responding to the popular will of the people inside Syria who had lost hope in peaceful means to bring down the regime. It also seems that revolutionaries inside Syria had also lost hope that sanctions, which the SNC heavily lobbied Western countries for, would have any meaningful effect on the regime.

People also came to realise that outside military intervention would never happen. It is worth highlighting that, despite its name, the FSA is composed of hundreds of independent groups. Their emergence is a miracle, considering that the regime has become known for taking revenge upon the families of deserters. It is also worth highlighting that Syrian conscripts are usually assigned to detachments that are hundreds of miles away from their home town (another regime tactic which makes it more likely that soldiers will obey orders to kill.)

The FSA’s disorganised nature, in the sense that it does not have a single command structure, is - in my opinion - a strength and not a weakness, at least given the circumstances with respect to the excessive brutality of the regime, and the fact that the regime has a huge network of informants. Because of a lack of any other viable alternative, many Syrians see the “FSA” as their last hope.

Exaggeration of ‘outside influence’

Now to claim that there is no outside, foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs is to deny the obvious. But in my opinion this “interference” has been exaggerated (the analyses I’ve read with respect to this issue are based on speculations that are not supported by facts on the ground). Yes, there are countries who have always had a strong desire to see the Syrian-Iranian marriage fall apart. But to what extent these countries are influencing events on the ground is far from certain. For instance, the efforts reportedly led by Qatar and Saudi Arabia to equip the rebels with heavy arms have not yet borne fruits, and it seems the FSA is mostly using light to medium weapons.

Most of these weapons have either ben bought from corrupt army officers, or are acquired by raiding weapons caches. Qatar and Saudi Arabia reportedly would want to make sure that weaponry would only be distributed to those groups that would pledge allegiance to them. While some groups may accept the deal, it is far from certain that all groups would accept any preconditions - as recently reported by Time magazine.

While the CIA may be present near the Syrian-Turkish border, all evidence points to the fact that the US is not very keen to arm the rebels, out of fear the arms would eventually fall in the hands of al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. In fact, Washington, despite the anti-Assad rhetoric we read about in media headlines, is not very keen on replacing the Assad regime with one whose allegiance to the US would be uncertain.

This explains why the US has so far reportedly refused to supply weapons to Syria’s armed opposition. The latest discussions that took place in Geneva demonstrate that the US still prefers “a political solution” (whatever that means).
The fact that Syrian revolutionaries are not receiving the help they need to win the battle against the Syrian regime will certainly prolong the conflict. While many Syrians are disappointed by this indifference, I believe it is better for the future of Syria and its independence.

Syrians have already demonstrated mind-boggling courage and determination. They have made sizeable gains over the past year and they will certainly continue to make more. The signs are clear: the murderous Assad army, the regime’s iron first, is disintegrating, albeit slowly. While it is no reason to celebrate, it is the Syrians’ last hope, and if I were living inside Syria, I would hope the same.

Maher Arar is a human rights activist, and the publisher of Prism Magazine, who first came to public attention after he was rendered by US authorities to Syria, his native country. A public inquiry in Canada later cleared his name. His commentary has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post among others.

Follow him on Twitter: @ArarMaher

#Syria - Assad Bombs Houses in

Bayada with Artillery - Homs City

3-23-12 Ethnic Cleansing of Sunnis

The regime in Damascus is using snipers to hunt down its own people. Rebels on the ground in besieged Homs, the site of some of the most extreme brutality, say the international community is hesitating to help Syrians out of fear that it will trigger a civil war. But the threat is merely propaganda from ruler Bashar Assad, they claim.

When the haze dissipates in the late afternoon light, and when the last unfortunate souls hurry across the open space, running in a zigzag pattern, hunting season begins on Cairo Street. There is random shooting all day long at this spot, but from this moment on the shooting becomes targeted. A few people make it to the other side on this day, but one does not. He screams and falls to the ground as he is hit. He was carrying a loaf of bread, something that was no longer available on his side of Cairo Street.

Pedestrians are rarely targeted in the morning. But beginning in the afternoon and continuing throughout the night, the wide, straight street that separates the Khalidiya and Bayada neighborhoods becomes a death zone. That’s when they — the snipers working for Syrian intelligence, who are nothing more than death squads, and the Shabiha killers, known as “the ghosts,” mercenaries who are paid daily wages and often earn a little extra income by robbing their victims — shoot at anything that moves.

The map of Homs is a topography of terror these days. Entire sections of Syria’s third-largest city are besieged. Hundreds of thousands have become the hostages of a regime whose president, Bashar Assad, insisted with a chuckle in an interview with America’s ABC News, that only a madman would order his forces to shoot at his own people.

What began nine months ago as a peaceful protest against the dictatorship of the Assad dynasty has since become a campaign against the people by the regime — a regime that, for 41 years, was accustomed to using brutality to enforce submission. Since it realized that this brutality was no longer sufficient, it decided to use even more — and then even more when the resistance continued to grow. There are no negotiations. In the heavily guarded downtown section of Homs, where the regime feigns an eerie mood of normality for foreign visitors, it has put up signs that read: “The continuation of dialogue guarantees stability.”

Random Targets

On Monday, the regime officially yielded to demands by the Arab League, announcing that it would now allow independent observers into the country. But Assad had already promised an end to the violence months ago, and nothing changed. On Tuesday, his forces bombarded Homs with rockets.

Many cities in Syria have become combat zones, and now the uprising has even reached the suburbs of Damascus. But, in Homs, anywhere from five to 15 people die every day, most as the victims of snipers. The insurgents have counted more than 200 sniper positions in Homs, from which people are being shot arbitrarily and without warning — not because they are protesting, but merely because they are there.

One was the man who crossed the street to buy bread, who a few courageous bystanders pulled out of the line of fire and took to a field hospital the insurgents had set up in Khalidiya. But the victim was removed from the hospital within minutes. “He was shot in the head,” a pale doctor says tersely. “We could do nothing for him and we need the space.” A young teacher, now filling in as a nurse, says: “Help us! We need medication, weapons, everything!”

In the next room, a doctor is using a thin, folded prayer rug to teach five women how to suture deep wounds. In another room, a man is doubled over in pain as doctors amputate part of his foot after a gunshot wound became infected there. According to an announcement coming from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque, the pedestrian with the bread has just died.

Outside, in the bluish light of dusk, a vegetable truck drives by loaded with his corpse and the body of another person who was shot earlier in the day. A couple stands in front of their house, shaking in anger and despair, watching the truck disappear down the street. The woman, who is veiled, says: “Why can we simply be killed like this? Why is no one helping us? Where is the Arab League, and where are France, Germany, America?” She screams in exasperation. She tells us about an old man around 70 years old who was hit by two bullets in front of her house. “We couldn’t get him out for an entire hour. When we had finally moved him into the house, we were so afraid that we tried to rinse away the blood, so that the Shabiha wouldn’t attack us. Under these conditions, what does it matter whether we live or die? I’m going to the checkpoint! I’m going to put on an explosive belt, so that at least I can take them with me!”

Homs is a complicated city, a microcosm of the country. More than half of its 1.5 million inhabitants are Sunnis, a little more than 10 percent, respectively, are Christians and Alawites, and the rest of the population is distributed among smaller minorities. The protests against the regime have inevitably developed their own dynamic. President Assad, the highest-ranking generals and the heads of the intelligence agencies are Alawites, as are most of the men in the death squads and the Shabiha militias. Their victims are almost exclusively Sunnis. Soldiers and members of the intelligence agencies who have defected say that the regime has also deployed forces dressed in civilian clothes to attack Alawites in the name of the Sunnis and Sunnis in the name of the Alawites. Peaceful protesters are being painted as Islamist fanatics who have come to rape Christian women.

‘They Kill Everyone’

There have been unsolved kidnappings and murders in Homs, and there are reports of beheadings. And even though life is still relatively normal in the Alawite neighborhoods, the tension is building. “The fear of a civil war is prompting other countries to hesitate before helping us,” says one of the young coordinators of the Revolutionary Committee in Homs, who says we should call him Ahmed. “But the longer it takes, the greater the risk of civil war.”

Ahmed guides us to a meeting of Alawite activists in the Bayada neighborhood. He wants to show us how they are trying to prevent the tension from escalating. The route takes us across Cairo Street, which is still quiet on this morning. It passes through houses where walls have been broken down to create new paths out of the snipers’ range of fire. And it leads past knee-high piles of garbage and families fleeing with their suitcases, hoping to make it to other cities, where the situation is hardly any better. We finally arrive on Wadi-al-Arab Street in Bayada.

Different rules apply here than only a few blocks away. The shooting is constant. People gather on both sides of the street, where bullets whip across the asphalt every few minutes on this morning. To get food and medication into the neighborhood, a few brave souls summon up their strength and throw bread, noodles, cigarettes and diapers across the street. Then, using wire snares, ropes and hooks, they try to pull to safety whatever has been left lying in the street.

An old woman stands weeping in front of a building wall. “It’s been like this for two months now. This is a prison. Even worse. I live over there (on the other side of the street). But I can’t run so fast anymore. They’ll kill me if I try to go home. They kill everyone. Katl, katl,” she says, repeating the Arabic word for “kill.” As the tears run down her cheeks, she sobs for a moment, then rubs her eyes with the back of her hand and says: “Excuse me.”

Waiting for an Attack

After half an hour, a small, white delivery van arrives — the taxi of madness. Those who wish to ride in the makeshift taxi say goodbye to the others and whisper quiet prayers. A man shouts: “And if we die, we die — for a piece of bread!” Then they get in, first the old woman, her eyes shut, mumbling her prayers. An old man, carrying heavy bags, follows suit, then a few boys who try to lie down between the others, making themselves as small as possible.

The people standing around the van step back. The driver puts it into reverse, gets a 30-meter (98-foot) running start, floors the accelerator and rushes across the street. He almost hits a parked car on the other side before coming to a stop amid cheers from the crowd. No shots were fired this time. Three other cars perform the same daring stunt, and everyone makes it.

Prominent Alawites and a Christian from different cities have gathered in the house of a Sunni sheikh on the other side. They are planning demonstrations in relatively safe neighborhoods to protest the government’s attempts to incite religious violence. “The world should know that the civil war is Assad’s propaganda,” one man says to murmured assent from the others.

The problem, Ahmed explains, is that both of the sniper positions at the two ends of Wadi-al-Arab Street are in Alawite neighborhoods and are flanked by militias from the neighborhood. “The Alawites are the last bastion of the regime,” he says. “The Sunnis are the victims, no matter what we say.”

But this, he adds, is a rather theoretical debate, since it is questionable whether they will even be alive in a few days. Some 200 to 300 tanks of the “Assad army” have been posted outside Homs for weeks. Residents anticipate an attack any day now. Everyone wonders what is making Assad hesitate, hoping that it is the mistrust of generals in his own army. The highest-ranking officers may be Alawites, but most of the soldiers, non-commissioned officers and lower-ranking officers are Sunnis. If they are forced to attack, men from the militias and the intelligence services will be standing at their backs to force them to shoot — by threatening to shoot anyone who refuses to kill.