Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the Pentagon had backed proposals to arm the Syrian opposition battling to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

The idea — ultimately rejected — was first floated by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who met privately with David Petraeus, CIA chief at the time, in the summer of 2012 as fighting raged in Syria.

They proposed vetting rebel groups and training fighters in a plan which they presented to the White House, according to the New York Times, quoting administration officials.

But the administration of President Barack Obama was worried about the risks of pouring more arms into the volatile conflict and rejected the idea, sticking instead to providing humanitarian assistance and non-lethal aid.

Panetta and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, admitted under questioning in the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday that they had both supported the idea.

“I would ask again, both of you, what I asked you last March when 7,500 citizens of Syria had been killed. It’s now up to 60,000. How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Senator John McCain asked them.

“And did you support the recommendation by then secretary of state Clinton and then head of CIA General Petraeus that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” replied Panetta. “We did,” added Dempsey.

McCain, who has long advocated arming the rebels, said in a statement later he “was very pleased to hear” both men say they supported the proposal.

“What this means is that the president overruled the senior leaders of his own national security team, who were in unanimous agreement that America needs to take greater action to change the military balance of power in Syria,” he said.

McCain called on Obama to heed the advice of his former and current national security leaders and “immediately take the necessary steps, along with our friends and allies, that could hasten the end of the conflict in Syria.”

“The time to act is long overdue, but it is not too late.”

02/08/2013 

Nov 25/12

Unicef is urgently mobilizing more than 100,000 children’s clothing kits and around 160,000 blankets, including baby blankets, along with other winter supplies for displaced children in Syria and surrounding countries.

Drawing on its global supply networks, Unicef is sourcing winter supplies where they are available and can be provided at speed.

“Temperatures are falling fast, down to 5 degrees Celsius this week with expected lows around freezing point. We urgently need to get clothing and other essential items to the most vulnerable children, no matter where they are,” said Ettie Higgins, deputy representative, Unicef Syria.

Many Syrian children fled their homes with only summer clothing. Now they are in temporary shelters and in desperate need of warm clothes. Unicef is worried about the impact winter will have on children’s health, including increased risk of respiratory conditions, Higgins said.

Children are already fragile from the ongoing stress associated with displacement and conflict.

Unicef is also procuring clothing kits for some 75,000 vulnerable children up to 15 years old inside Syria. Each kit includes thermal underwear, long trousers, a woolen sweater, socks, woolen gloves and hat, shoes and a winter jacket.

The blankets will be distributed to children and families displaced by the ongoing conflict, the vast majority inside Syria. They include 11,000 baby blankets for infants in Syria. Of these, more than 26,000 pre-positioned blankets, for example, will be leaving Unicef’s humanitarian hub in Dubai in the next week bound for Syria, while 41,000 further blankets are being sourced in Pakistan.

Health supplies that can meet the needs of more than 225,000 people for three months are also on their way to Syria from Unicef’s Copenhagen supply warehouse. Unicef has already readied half a million school bags, each containing stationery supplies, to boost numbers already distributed. Further supplies are being sourced within Syria where possible.

“Sourcing supplies from around the world and getting them into Syria is only half the solution,” said Higgins. “We face enormous challenges on the ground because of the security situation, but with our network of dedicated partners we will do everything we can to ensure that children get the warm clothes and blankets that they urgently need.”

It is estimated that half of the 400,000 Syrian refugees in surrounding countries are children.

In Lebanon, Unicef plans to reach more than 24,000 children with clothing kits and clothing vouchers, along with an initial 10,000 blankets. In Jordan, 78 heated winter tents for use as child friendly spaces and classrooms are to be set up over the next month. Solar panels are being installed at refugee washing centres in both Jordan and Iraq to provide hot water.

Nov 23/12

As Cold Weather Sets in, UN Agencies Deliver Winter Aid Supplies to Help Syrians Cope

New York, Nov 23 2012 12:10PM
United Nations agencies have begun delivering winter packages containing items such as blankets, thermal clothing and hygiene kits for thousands of Syrian families across the country and in neighbouring nations as temperatures begin to drop.

Inside Syria, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has now delivered vital aid packages to some 60,300 families, benefiting more than 300,000 people, spokesperson Adrian Edwards  ”http://www.unhcr.org/50af65699.html” told reporters in Geneva. “The goal is to provide such assistance to 500,000 people – or 100,000 families – by the end of this year.”

Each UNHCR family aid package weighs 42 kilograms and contains blankets, kitchen sets, jerry cans and hygiene materials. Deliveries so far this month have been made to the cities of Hassakeh, Aleppo, Homs, and in and around Damascus, the capital, Mr. Edwards said.

Syria has been wracked by violence, with at least 20,000 people, mostly civilians, killed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began over 20 months ago. The violence has spawned more than 440,000 refugees, while more than 4 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to UN estimates.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is mobilizing more than 100,000 children’s clothing kits and around 160,000 blankets, including baby blankets, for displaced children in Syria and surrounding countries. Each clothing kit includes thermal underwear, long trousers, a woolen sweater, socks, woolen gloves and hat, shoes and a winter jacket.

“Temperatures are falling fast, down to 5 degrees Celsius this week with expected lows around freezing point,” said the agency’s Deputy Representative in Syria, Ettie Higgins. “We urgently need to get clothing and other essential items to the most vulnerable children, no matter where they are.”

UNICEF is particularly concerned about the impact winter will have on children’s health, including increased risk of respiratory conditions. Many of them fled their homes with only summer clothing and are already fragile from the ongoing stress associated with displacement and conflict.

Health supplies that will benefit more than 225,000 children for the next three months are also on their way from UNICEF’s warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark, the agency said in a news release. These include half a million school bags, each containing stationery supplies. Further supplies are being sourced within Syria where possible.

“Sourcing supplies from around the world and getting them into Syria is only half the solution,” said Ms. Higgins, adding that UNICEF urgently needs an additional $79 million to support its emergency response in Syria and the four surrounding countries – Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

“We face enormous challenges on the ground because of the security situation, but with our network of dedicated partners we will do everything we can to ensure that children get the warm clothes and blankets that they urgently need.”

UNHCR had previously warned that delivering aid throughout Syria has become increasingly hazardous, and Mr. Edwards noted that there had already been a number of security incidents, including the hijacking of three trucks during the last week of October, which were carrying some 1,500 mattresses, and a fire in an Aleppo warehouse reportedly caused by shelling that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of aid items.

Both agencies are delivering supplies to Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries. In Lebanon, UNICEF plans to reach more than 24,000 children with clothing kits and clothing vouchers. In Jordan, 78 heated winter tents for use as child friendly spaces and classrooms will be set up over the next month. Solar panels are also being installed at refugee washing centres in both Jordan and Iraq to provide hot water. 

05/08/12

#Syria rebels smuggle supplies from Jordan

While the conflict plays out inside Syria, the materials that sustain the opposition trickle in over the borders.

They include guns and medical supplies. And the people who smuggle them in are taking huge risks.

Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker reports from the Jordan-Syria border

• 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.

Jonathon Birch Reuters

ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) - Syrian rebels resting and recovering from wounds in Turkey say that far from receiving a host of heavy weapons to take the fight to government forces, they feel forgotten by their Western and Arab backers.

Some rebels and opposition figures inside and outside Syria say there has been an upsurge in recent weeks of heavier weaponry being smuggled into Syria via Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq from suppliers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The weapons, which according to the rebels are being supplied by private sponsors, include thousands of shells, hundreds of sniper rifles, as well as anti-armor missiles.

But in the verdant hills, wooded mountainsides and languid refugee camps of Turkey’s southern Hatay province, Free Syrian Army rebels returning from the fight to rest and tend their wounds, said they had seen no sign of any new weapons.

One rebel said less than half the fighters in his unit even had a gun. What weapons they did have, the rebels said, came from inside Syria.

“This is an absolute lie. We have not seen anything. If they are coming through Lebanon, maybe, but if they were, we would see these weapons. We don’t see them, where are they?” said one rebel who gave his name only as Ahmad.

“Every household has had one person killed or wounded. If we had weapons we could defend ourselves,” said Ahmad, clean-shaven and dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, not fitting the typical image of a rebel fighter.

The conflicting accounts from fighters in the Free Syrian Army, a loose alliance of army deserters and civilians fighting President Bashar al-Assad, suggest the number of weapons flowing in are limited and that they are only reaching certain areas.

“THE WORLD HAS FORGOTTEN US”

Ahmad arrived in Hatay this week after smuggling wounded comrades out of the western town of Haffeh, where rebels say government helicopters and tanks have launched a large-scale assault on the area.

After the tanks push their way through the town and surrounding villages, Ahmad said, Assad’s soldiers, move from house to house rounding up young men and looting their homes. What they leave behind, they destroy, he said.

From a hospital ward in Hatay’s main city Antakya, Ahmad becomes frustrated when speaking about weapons. He motions his hands emphatically to drive home his point.

“By God, we don’t trust anyone. We don’t believe anyone anymore. The world has forgotten us,” he said.

Like most of the Syrians in Turkey, Ahmad would only give one name for fear of reprisals against his relatives at home.

As Ahmad spoke, the newest wounded arrival, 31-year-old Lutfi, was wheeled into the emergency department below. Lutfi, a Free Army fighter was shot in the leg during a clash with government troops in Jabal al-Krad near the western city of Latakia.

Lutfi said he and some 150 rebel fighters ambushed around 200-250 of Assad’s men who were on their way to occupy one of the surrounding villages. Two rebels were killed in the clash and another four were wounded.

The right leg of his camouflage military trousers has been ripped off, revealing a bandage covering his bullet wound. Lutfi laughed when asked whether new weapons had reached his men.

“There are no new weapons. All we can do is attack and retreat. They are nothing against their weapons,” he said.

ONLY 40 PERCENT HAVE WEAPONS

Some 45 km (30 miles) south of Antakya only minutes from the Syrian border, Nasim, another rebel stands outside the Yayladagi refugee camp - tents erected inside an old, derelict tobacco factory that now serves as his temporary home.

Like at the others camps scattered around Hatay and further to the east, here fighters come to recoup with comrades or family members. Syrians are free to enter and leave the camp but access to the media is restricted.

Nasim says he regularly crosses back into Syria to smuggle food and blankets to fighters stationed inside but said he had not seen any new weapons cross from Turkey into Syria and that all the weapons he had seen had been acquired in the country.

“Three months ago I heard that Arab countries were going to send us money or weapons but I have not seen anything. Not one country has sent us money or weapons,” said Nasim, a short, stocky, scruffily dressed man in his 30s with a full black beard.

“The only weapons we get are by pooling our money together and buying them in Syria, or someone who supports us will come and give us their hunting rifle or something. Sometimes soldiers from the army sell us weapons,” he said.

Only around 40 percent of his unit even had a weapon, Nasim said, “and these are light weapons. Assad is hitting us with tanks.”

Some 40 rebels and activists who spoke to Reuters this week all said that apart from a small number of light weapons which had been bought on the black market, they had not seen any weapons smuggled to Syria through Turkey.

While Turkey has thrown its support behind Assad’s opposition, has called for the Syrian leader to step down and given sanctuary to senior defected Syrian army officers, it has opposed any outside military intervention in its neighbor.

Turkish officials say Ankara is not arming the rebels and have denied reports that weapons from other countries are being smuggled over Turkish territory.

Corroborating accounts of what is happening inside Syria is difficult because the government tightly restricts foreign media access. Most rebels also cross into Syria during darkness and Turkish security forces do not allow media near informal border crossings.

But for the rebels it does not matter where the weapons originate or how they get there, as long as they come.

“Wherever they come from it does not matter. We want weapons. We want to be able to defend our women and our families. We don’t want money, just weapons,” said Omar, another rebel smuggler at Yayladagi.

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.”

AFP/Getty Images

A wounded Syrian undergoes treatment at a makeshift hospital in a house in the Baba Amr district of the central city of Homs.

At a cafe in Turkey, near the border with Syria, Dr. Monzer Yazji steps out of his car in the parking lot and encounters a man with a bandaged left hand.

Yazji, a Syrian who now works in the U.S., examines Abu Hamad, a fellow Syrian who has fled the fighting in his homeland.

The doctor, a tall man with glasses and a trim graying beard, is becoming well-known among Syrian activists. Yazji has been periodically leaving his thriving practice in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas to coordinate emergency medical aid for Syria.

Yazji is a big part of the U.S. branch of the newly formed Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations, which includes doctors from France, Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

In this case, his encounter with a patient was accidental. Abu Hamad, who is from a restive suburb of Damascus, describes how his 18-year-old son was killed during a protest. Two days after his name was published in the state media, men came to Abu Hamad’s door and demanded his ID card.

A worried Abu Hamad moved his wife and younger son to a neighbor’s house and watched as men with rocket-propelled grenades destroyed his home.

EnlargeGianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

A Syrian man stands in a makeshift surgery room at a private house being used as a hospital in Qusayr, nine miles from Homs.

Now, Abu Hamad says, he has constant pain in his left shoulder and down his side, and he thinks something went wrong with his heart after his son was killed. As medical explanations go, this one sounds a bit odd.

Yazji assures the patient that the pain is more likely a herniated disc.

“He has most likely a cervical … herniated disc impinging on his left side of his spine,” Yazji says. “Now, he feels better that at least he knows it’s not his heart.”

Helping Syrians From The Outside

Inside Syria, doctors, nurses and other medical workers have been trying to keep people alive in desperate conditions. Yazji says sometimes they succeed because a doctor from the union is on the other end of a phone or Internet connection talking them through a procedure.

In hard-hit districts of Homs and other cities, field hospitals have been either targeted or hit by random shelling, activists say. Yazji says his group is working to address that problem, too, with an innovation used in other remote locations.

“We started building mobile hospitals, and now we are spread all over Syria,” he says. Yazji says they have 30 to 36 of the mobile hospitals, which are equipped to do surgical procedures.

“They do the surgery while we are watching, and we give them directions,” says the doctor. He notes that in Baba Amr, a neighborhood in the hard-hit city of Homs, dentists have been doing surgery on the wounded with the help of Yazji’s organization. “They are doing a great job; they’re doing [an] unbelievable job.”

Even now, some doctors do manage to get out of Syria and receive training and supplies, which they take back into Syria.

A doctor named Nour, from the central city of Hama, says her career suffered after she began to treat patients from the opposition. She doesn’t want her last name used because she fears her family would be punished.

She is comparatively lucky, however. She remembers a colleague, Dr. Ibrahim Othman, who was forced to flee from a Hama hospital by the security forces. They followed Othman while he tried to get out of Syria, but he was killed by a sniper as he approached the Turkish border.

Yazji says the medical professionals working today in Syria are his heroes, as are the volunteers who carry supplies in, some of whom have paid the ultimate price. He says the medical union is expanding so that a doctor can be on call 24 hours a day to support Syrian medics as they undergo a crash course in combat medicine.

Getting supplies in, hurt out of #Syria

CNN’s Arwa Damon reports on how Syrian opposition activists get supplies into the country and transport the wounded out.

The only British newspaper journalists inside the besieged Syrian enclave of Baba Amr reports on the terrible cost of the uprising against president Assad; Loyalties of ‘desert rose’ tested

Marie Colvin and Paul Conroy in Homs
20 February 2012
Sundaytimes.co.uk

They call it the widows’ basement. Crammed amid makeshift beds and scattered
belongings are frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs, the
Syrian city shaken by two weeks of relentless bombardment.
Among the 300 huddling in this wood factory cellar in the besieged district of Baba
Amr is 20-year-old Noor, who lost her husband and her home to the shells and
rockets.
“Our house was hit by a rocket so 17 of us were staying in one room,” she recalls as
Mimi, her three-year-old daughter, and Mohamed, her five-year-old son, cling to her
abaya.
“We had had nothing but sugar and water for two days and my husband went to try to
find food.” It was the last time she saw Maziad, 30, who had worked in a mobile
phone repair shop. “He was torn to pieces by a mortar shell.”
For Noor, it was a double tragedy. Adnan, her 27-year-old brother, was killed at
Maziad’s side.
Everyone in the cellar has a similar story of hardship or death. The refuge was chosen
because it is one of the few basements in Baba Amr. Foam mattresses are piled
against the walls and the children have not seen the light of day since the siege began
on February 4. Most families fled their homes with only the clothes on their backs.
The city is running perilously short of supplies and the only food here is rice, tea and
some tins of tuna delivered by a local sheikh who looted them from a bombed-out
supermarket.
A baby born in the basement last week looked as shellshocked as her mother, Fatima,
19, who fled there when her family’s single-storey house was obliterated. “We
survived by a miracle,” she whispers. Fatima is so traumatised that she cannot
breastfeed, so the baby has been fed only sugar and water; there is no formula milk.
Fatima may or may not be a widow. Her husband, a shepherd, was in the countryside
when the siege started with a ferocious barrage and she has heard no word of him
since.
The widows’ basement reflects the ordeal of 28,000 men, women and children
clinging to existence in Baba Amr, a district of low concrete-block homes surrounded
on all sides by Syrian forces. The army is launching Katyusha rockets, mortar shells
and tank rounds at random.
Snipers on the rooftops of al-Ba’ath University and other high buildings surrounding
Baba Amr shoot any civilian who comes into their sights. Residents were felled in
droves in the first days of the siege but have now learnt where the snipers are and run
across junctions where they know they can be seen. Few cars are left on the streets.
Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete
walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors. The building I was staying in
lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets whole buildings have
collapsed — all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots and the shattered
furniture of families destroyed.
It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire.

There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off. Few homes have diesel
for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in the coldest winter that anyone can remember.
Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No
shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbours.
Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food.
Fearing the snipers’ merciless eyes, families resorted last week to throwing bread
across rooftops, or breaking through communal walls to pass unseen.
The Syrians have dug a huge trench around most of the district, and let virtually
nobody in or out. The army is pursuing a brutal campaign to quell the resistance of
Homs, Hama and other cities that have risen up against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian
president, whose family has been in power for 42 years.
In Baba Amr, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the armed face of opposition to Assad,
has virtually unanimous support from civilians who see them as their defenders. It is
an unequal battle: the tanks and heavy weaponry of Assad’s troops against the
Kalashnikovs of the FSA.
About 5,000 Syrian soldiers are believed to be on the outskirts of Baba Amr, and the
FSA received reports yesterday that they were preparing a ground assault. The
residents dread the outcome.
“We live in fear the FSA will leave the city,” said Hamida, 43, hiding with her
children and her sister’s family in an empty ground-floor apartment after their house
was bombed. “There will be a massacre.”
On the lips of everyone was the question: “Why have we been abandoned by the
world?”
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, said last week: “We see
neighbourhoods shelled indiscriminately, hospitals used as torture centres, children as
young as 10 years old killed and abused. We see almost certainly crimes against
humanity.” Yet the international community has not come to the aid of the innocent
caught in this hell.
Abdel Majid, 20, who was helping to rescue the wounded from bombed buildings,
made a simple plea. “Please tell the world they must help us,” he said, shaking, with
haunted eyes. “Just stop the bombing. Please, just stop the shelling.”
The journey across the countryside from the Lebanese border to Homs would be
idyllic in better times. The villages are nondescript clusters of concrete buildings on
dirt tracks but the lanes are lined with cypresses and poplar trees and wind through
orchards of apricot and apple trees.
These days, however, there is an edge of fear on any journey through this area. Most
of this land is essentially what its residents call “Syria hurra”, or free Syria, patrolled
by the FSA.
Nevertheless, Assad’s army has checkpoints on the main roads and troops stationed in
schools, hospitals and factories. They are heavily armed and backed by tanks and
artillery.
So a drive to Homs is a bone-rattling struggle down dirt roads, criss-crossing fields.
Men cluster by fires at unofficial FSA checkpoints, eyeing any vehicle suspiciously.
As night falls, flashlights waved by unseen figures signal that the way ahead is clear.
Each travelling FSA car has a local shepherd or farmer aboard to help navigate the
countryside; the Syrian army may have the power, but the locals know every track of
their fields.
I entered Homs on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over
walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches. Arriving in the darkened city in
the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the city’s plight to the world. So desperate were they that they bundled me into an
open truck and drove at speed with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back
shouting “Allahu akbar” — God is the greatest. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened
fire.
When everyone had calmed down I was driven in a small car, its lights off, along dark
empty streets, the danger palpable. As we passed an open stretch of road, a Syrian
army unit fired on the car again with machineguns and launched a rocket-propelled
grenade. We sped into a row of abandoned buildings for cover.
The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in
terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.
Khaled Abu Salah, an activist who took part in the first demonstrations against Assad
in Homs last March, sat on the floor of an office, his hand broken and bandages
covering shrapnel wounds to his leg and shoulder.
A 25-year-old university student, who risked his life filming videos of the slaughter of
Baba Amr residents, he narrowly escaped when he tried to get two men wounded by
mortar fire to a makeshift clinic.
He and three friends had just taken the wounded to the clinic, which was staffed by a
doctor and a dentist, and stepped away from the door when “a shell landed right at the
entrance”, he recalled last week.
“My three friends died immediately.” The two men they had helped were also killed.
Abu Ammar, 48, a taxi driver, went out to look for bread at 8am one day last week.
He, his wife and their adopted daughter had taken refuge with two elderly sisters after
their home was hit by shells.
“When I returned the house was obliterated,” he said, looking at all that remained of
the one-storey building. Only a few pieces of wall still stood. In the ruins a woman’s
red blouse was visible; bottles of home-made pickled vegetables were somehow
unscathed. “Dr Ali”, a dentist working as a doctor, said one of the women from the
house had arrived at the clinic alive, but both legs had been amputated and she died.
The clinic is merely a first-floor apartment donated by the kindly owner. It still has
out-of-place domestic touches: plasma pouches hang from a wooden coat hanger and
above the patients a colourful children’s mobile hangs from the ceiling.
The shelling last Friday was the most intense yet and the wounded were rushed to the
clinic in the backs of cars by family members.
Ali the dentist was cutting the clothes off 24-year-old Ahmed al-Irini on one of the
clinic’s two operating tables. Shrapnel had gashed huge bloody chunks out of Irini’s
thighs. Blood poured out as Ali used tweezers to draw a piece of metal from beneath
his left eye.
Irini’s legs spasmed and he died on the table. His brother-in-law, who had brought
him in, began weeping. “We were playing cards when a missile hit our house,” he
said through his tears. Irini was taken out to the makeshift mortuary in a former back
bedroom, naked but for a black plastic bag covering his genitals.
There was no let-up. Khaled Abu Kamali died before the doctor could get his clothes
off. He had been hit by shrapnel in the chest while at home.
Salah, 26, was peppered with shrapnel in his chest and the left of his back. There was
no anaesthetic, but he talked as Ali inserted a metal pipe into his back to release the
pressure of the blood building up in his chest.
Helping tend the wounded was Um Ammar, a 45-year-old mother of seven, who had
offered to be a nurse after a neighbour’s house was shelled. She wore filthy plastic
gloves and was crying. “I’m obliged to endure this, because all children brought here
are my children,” she said. “But it is so hard.” Akhmed Mohammed, a military doctor who defected from Assad’s army, shouted:
“Where are the human rights? Do we have none? Where are the United Nations?”
There were only two beds in the clinic for convalescing. One was taken by Akhmed
Khaled, who had been injured, he said, when a shell hit a mosque as he was about to
leave prayers. His right testicle had had to be removed with only paracetamol to dull
the pain.
He denounced the Assad regime’s claim that the rebels were Islamic extremists and
said: “We ask all people who believe in God — Christians, Jews, Muslims to help
us!”
If the injured try to flee Baba Amr, they first have to be carried on foot. Then they are
transferred to motorbikes and the lucky ones are smuggled to safety. The worst
injured do not make it.
Though Syrian officials prohibit anyone from leaving, some escapees manage to bribe
their way out. I met refugees in villages around Homs. Newlywed Miriam, 32, said
she and her husband had decided to leave when they heard that three families had
been killed and the women raped by the Shabiha militia, a brutal force led by Assad’s
younger brother, Maher.
“We were practically walking on body parts as we walked under shelling overhead,”
she said. Somehow they made it unscathed. She had given an official her wedding
ring in order to be smuggled out to safety.
Abdul Majid, a computer science student at university, was still shaking hours after
arriving in a village outside Homs. He had stayed behind alone in Baba Amr. “I had
to help the old people because only the young can get out,” said Majid, 20, wearing a
leather jacket and jeans. He left when his entire street fled after every house was hit.
“I went to an army checkpoint that I was told was not too bad. I gave them a packet of
cigarettes, two bags of tea and 500 Syrian pounds. They told me to run.”
Blasts of Kalashnikov fire rang out above his head until he reached the tree line. He
said the soldiers were only pretending to try to shoot him to protect themselves, but
his haunted eyes showed he was not entirely sure.
If the Syrian military rolls into Baba Amr, the FSA will have little chance against its
tanks, superior weaponry and numbers. They will, however, fight ferociously to
defend their families because they know a massacre is likely to follow any failure, if
the past actions of the Assad regime are anything to go by.
The FSA partly relies on defections from Assad’s army because it does not accept
civilians into its ranks, though they perform roles such as monitoring troop
movements and transporting supplies. But it has become harder for soldiers to defect
in the past month.
Abu Sayeed, 46, a major- general who defected six months ago, said every Syrian
military unit was now assigned a member of the Mukhabarat, the feared intelligence
service, who have orders to execute any soldier refusing an order to shoot or who tries
to defect.
The army, like the country, may well be about to divide along sectarian lines. Most of
the officers are members of the Alawite sect, the minority Shi’ite clan to which the
Assad family belongs, while foot soldiers are Sunni.
The coming test for the army will be if its ranks hold if ordered to kill increasing
numbers of their brethren.
The swathe of the country that stretches east from the Lebanon border and includes
Homs is Sunni; in the villages there they say that officers ordering attacks are
Alawites fighting for the Assad family, not their country.
The morale of Assad’s army, despite its superiority, is said to be low as it is poorly paid and supplied, although this information comes mostly from defectors. “The first
thing we did when we attacked the house was race to the refrigerator,” said a defector.
Thousands of soldiers would be needed to retake the southern countryside. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and former president, crushed his problems with Islamic
fundamentalists in 1982 by shelling the city of Hama into ruins and killing at least
10,000 men, women and children. So far his son appears to have calculated that a
similar act would be a step too far for his remaining allies of Russia, China and Iran.
For now it is a violent and deadly standoff. The FSA is not about to win and its
supplies of ammunition are dwindling.
The only real hope of success for Assad’s opponents is if the international community
comes to their aid, as Nato did against Muammar Gadaffi in Libya. So far this seems
unlikely to happen in Syria.
Observers see a negotiated solution as perhaps a long shot, but the best way out of this
impasse. Though neither side appears ready to negotiate, there are serious efforts
behind the scenes to persuade Russia to pull Assad into talks.
As international diplomats dither, the desperation in Baba Amr grows. The despair
was expressed by Hamida, 30, hiding in a downstairs flat with her sister and their 13 
children after two missiles hit their home. Three little girls, aged 16 months to six
years, sleep on one thin, torn mattress on the floor; three others share a second.
Ahmed, 16, her sister’s eldest child, was killed by a missile when he went to try to
find bread.
“The kids are screaming all the time,” Hamida said. “I feel so helpless.” She began
weeping. “We feel so abandoned. They’ve given Bashar al-Assad the green light to
kill us.”
Asma, the British-born wife of President Bashar al-Assad, may well be feeling a sense
of divided loyalty as the violence continues in the Syrian city of Homs. Her family are
from the area, which has been a focal point for many of the recent protests against her
husband’s regime and the Syrian army’s brutal response.
Despite growing up in Acton, west London, Asma visited her family’s home in Homs
every year throughout her childhood. She is also a Sunni Muslim, unlike her husband,
who comes from the country’s minority Shi’ite community.
Asma, 36, has been criticised for displaying an “ostrich attitude”, keeping a low
profile as the conflict has intensified. She has refused to comment on the way her
husband’s regime has used tanks and other lethal means to crush protesters. In an
email sent earlier this month, her office merely said: “The first lady’s very busy
agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she has long been involved
with as well as rural development and supporting the President as needed.”
The daughter of a consultant cardiologist and a retired diplomat, Asma was born in
London. She attended a Church of England state school in Acton and gained a BSc in
computer science and a diploma in French literature from King’s College London.
She went on to work for Deutsche Bank and married Assad in Syria in 2000. Now a
mother of three, she was once described by Vogue as a “rose in the desert”. In Homs,
the beleaguered people may now take a different view.

Activists began to bake bread for local residents because of the tight siege on Rifai in Homs, #Syria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sectarian abductions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failed attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabiha executions

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

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

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

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

“We killed them,” he told me.

“You killed your prisoners?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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